Slashdot Mirror

And to riff off an old tech support joke, they're called foot pedals, not mice.

If you've never heard that one, here it is with a few others. I literally got the "Press Any Key" one working tech support, so yes I believe them. Compaq offered free tech support in the early days and people would call them for all kinds of reasons without actually trying anything, so that doesn't surprise me at all. Note I didn't work for Compaq, I did tech support contracting work for Bell Atlantic and we had a business relationship with Compaq. Specifically what that was is something I signed a form not to disclose.

So the representation of dates must either handle negative values or have some other method of representing dates as far back as 14,000,000,006 years.

Reminds me of this joke:

Some tourists in the Museum of Natural History are marveling at some dinosaur bones. One of them asks the guard, "Can you tell me how old the dinosaur bones are?"

The guard replies, "They are 3 million, four years, and six months old."

"That's an awfully exact number," says the tourist. "How do you know their age so precisely?"

The guard answers, "Well, the dinosaur bones were three million years old when I started working here, and that was four and a half years ago."

You will get new versions of a car :
- Home basic car : will only start 10 times, until you get an upgrade. Can only take a single passenger
- Home premium car : start always, but there are no brakes
- Profesionnal car : has brakes, but they break often
- Enterprise car : has reliable brakes, but lacks a radio
- Ultimate car : you get the radio for 5000 Euro extra.

I have to put the obligatory GM-Microsoft :
http://mistupid.com/jokes/msvg...

Yeah, I forgot to mention C. That makes absolutely no difference to the conclusion, though, and I don't know why you think it does. You might have heard about how air contains CO2 at 0.033% by volume. That's a C right there, and that is the C used in photo-synthesis, which I hear is a process used somewhere - The other component is water, H20. So if you have enough energy you can turn air into oil, if you have enough energy you don't even need any air. In fact air + energy is where the oil we use today comes from in the first place! Photo-synthesis to create biological material that then gets changed into oil through heat and pressure (=energy). Is that facts enough for you?

Here is my source for the 0.033% CO2:
http://mistupid.com/chemistry/aircomp.htm

PS. If you had enough energy, maybe oil isn't the substance you would choose to make, and if you did maybe you wouldn't choose to start from air. That may or may not be true, but it does not change the fact that you can make oil from air if you have enough energy, and the deeper fact that if you have enough energy, then oil and water is no longer a problem.

why don't they just use a generator like this one:

http://mistupid.com/math/primes.htm

Yes, it's not a pun

http://mistupid.com/holidays/weekdays.htm

Why do people have this double-standard about the Xbox 360? If it's broken on you twice, it is a piece of junk.

It's not limited to the Xbox; you can see similar low expectations with lots of computer or electronic devices. There is a general laziness/stupidity (it can be hard to tell the difference) that average users display due to basic computing that they do not display for things at least as complex, such as their finances, politics, religion, job skills, love lives, etc. This is why there arose the saying "an expert is someone who can read the manual". It's why you hear about users who use their mouse as a foot pedal, or users who answer "Uh, Google!" when asked over the telephone which Web browser they are using, or really forget to turn the machine on (and/or connect the power cord) often enough that it's the first thing a tech asks about. It's why you don't hear about drivers who try to use the accelerator as a hand pedal or car dealers who say "Uh, the road!" when asked what model car they're selling today or televisions declared defective that were never plugged in. There's just something about computers that makes people go into a "dummy mode" where they assume that everything they thought they knew needs to go out the window, except that they take this too far and throw out basic reasoning, the laws of physics, logic, and notions like cause-and-effect as well. With this seems to go their self-confidence and the willingness to try and take a risk of making a mistake, even though the price of failure is much lower in computing than in personal finances, job performance, relationships, etc.

As with most things in life, this situation did not arise from a vacuum and has a deeper cause. The fact that most people do not notice this because $TV_SHOW, $CELEBRITY'S personal drama, or latest $BE_AFRAID_OF_THIS news presentation are more important is part of the problem. That cause might be laziness, in the sense of being too lazy to increase your skill level even though doing so is possible; maybe it's also the whole instant gratification culture that fails to do a cost-benefit evaluation of self-education (on computing or anything else where mediocrity is widely tolerated). It could also be that the rote memorization and the following of procedures that dominates everything else that most people do really has made them so stupid (muscles and wits both entropy if not used) that they clam up when faced with a new and more dynamic environment. In either case, the process by which we have become this way and who really benefits from this situation -- that is, a nice and docile and complacent populace who have a hard time thinking critically -- is something that should be considered carefully.

Apply the same standard of quality to it as you do to anything else.

I wish we would start doing this with all commercial software, on the grounds that since you are paying for it, it's something like fraud if it does not work as advertised or frequently malfunctions. Perhaps ideally it would be understood that with free-as-in-beer software (both GPL and closed-source freeware), if I did not pay for it then I have no reasonable expectation that it will be of any value to me at all, but if I did pay for i.e. a commercial Linux distribution, then this should apply to that vendor as well. This idea of holding the manufacturer liable should not apply to "pirates" who did not pay and should be to the same degree that product liability would apply to a vendor of any tangible retail goods, where there may also be such concepts as contributory negligence.

And why not? The software companies (along with the *IAA's) talk about "intellectual property" when they benefit from what amounts to artificial scarcity, so why not give them both sides of the coin when it comes to treating 0s and 1s like tangible property? Other industries don't get to pick-and-choose the advan

Huh? I thought that was a feature of my new, Windows Powered Luxury Sedan?

If I walk to the hardware store, they are gonna sell me a 2"x4" piece of wood

If you are building anything more precise than a tree fort, you might want to stick to metric. At least there you won't be off a half inch or so. As for slipping a decimal point, there's a fairly noticeable difference between a man 2m tall and one 20m tall. Finally, I would argue that it is easier to calculate 0.8+1.9 than (5/16)+(3/4). Of course, I grew up using both systems so maybe I am biased.

goan

I thought tigers were at the top of the food chain?

Not since 1984.

Bill Gates is a known Lexus driver. In 1999 he auctioned one for charity.

So maybe this thing is running Windows? In this case, we already have a solution.

And shouldn't vehicle have a read-only section just for the essentials? So that even the main system is down, the car will detach the OS and still function like a, like a, car?

My '96 dodge caravan (I'm a musician, it's my gear-hauler) will do in excess of 95 (actually got a speeding ticket once at 95) but won't set the cruise control above that. The engine's not speed-regulated (like some BMW's and such, electronically limited to 130mph or something), but the cruise control is.

I've also had problems similar to the Civic owner above, only my CC is not aftermarket - it's standard factory. But it will still accelerate wildly sometimes for no apparent reason. Disengaging the CC fixes the problem.

As an aside, I sometimes have trouble with my transmission getting out of 2nd, requiring - get this - a rolling restart (shift to neutral and turn the engine off and on). Which leaves me wondering - did Microsoft somehow get into Chrysler vehicles??