I kicked and screamed when I was forced to accept Windows 8 on my new laptop by Best Buy, and it was all for nothing. I, too, see Windows 8 as a major improvement over Windows 7.
Anyways, mark my calendar... April 8th, 2014 -- Windows Streamline Day. I'm going to streamline XP Home and XP Pro, use the "windows update downloader" to grab every update I don't have already, etc. Maybe there'll spring up some cottage industry surrounding the continued use of XP as a "hobby". Laff!
In one of the very few moments when my bosses have actually listened to and heeded my words, we've maintained policy for the last year that any used computers sold have to be able to migrate to Windows Vista, 7, or 8. So I've made sure all machines are over 1GHz (shrug) and can carry at least 512MB of RAM. In general most of the used machines we re-sell range between 1.5 - 3.0GHz and 1-4GB of RAM. That's fine for our customers but in a year we're not going to be able to activate fresh XP installs and we still haven't "migrated" ourselves to an OEM copy of Vista, 7, or 8. It's a non-profit company -- does anybody know how we can get ahold of a multi-license or multi-seat license and copy of any of the newer windows for dirt cheap or next to nothing? Oh, yeah. And the "Christian-oriented" non-profit business discriminates against sexual orientation, so Microsoft's direct charity will refuse to help.
Try re-imagining the headline more properly as: "Filthy Rich People Robbing Some Other Filthy Rich People Using a Stupid Fucking Game of Chance and Lax Security" and you will finally feel just how stupid and irrelevant the story is.
FUCK YOU! Your stupid fucking theories are fucking STUPID! Anybody who lets god damned TROLLS direct the traffic in their little fucking teeny-tiny brains is a fucking MORON. And YOU'RE a moron for writing this stupid, fucking, DRIVEL.... There!
Now, the effects described in the article will be effectively canceled out by the direction of my negative comments against the theory. People will no longer be swayed by trolls. Talk about short-cuts! You fucking idiot!
I wasn't aware of all that. So Holmes wasn't just blazing mad with his guns in the theatre? I figured they would have picked him up based on some kind of witness testimony. Now I think I understand why some people are harping on and on about "two shooters". I simply dismissed it as confusion on behalf of the addled victims. But now it seems to be an important detail, especially considering this guy is actually in court on what sounds like dubious "evidence". And, yeah, the guy was super-drugged the first time we saw him in court. I dunno what they changed it to but he's pretty much not-there this time around, either.
The difference between you and the first Independence Day is that PEOPLE ALREADY EXPECT YOU TO KILL EVERYONE. You have no element of surprise!
You *ARE*, the frigging... Red Coats, in the war -- the imaginary war, going on in entirely inside of your delusional mind!
Your "enemy", the government that "PRotectz you", is *already* a guerilla trained paramilitary contingent that considers this their home that they're protecting!
You're just a sack of shit sitting in a fucking Lay-Z-Boy, with, a fucking, out-of-this-century, Tri-cornered fucking Hat on, of plus-three insular and self-indulgent ass-hattery, whining about :
1.) Your ponies
2.) Your cartoons and comics
3.) Your vampires, dragons, and I would say unicorns BUT YOUR PONIES ARE ALREADY UNICORNS, NOT 4-H PONIES -- PREPARATION-H PONIES
My parents didn't teach me programming until I was eight, and I didn't even begin to do anything really useful with it until I was a teenager. I used it to hack ATARI games (for the ATARI home computer), sure, but that's at eight years old.
The girl in the story is three years old. So you aren't even really setting a fair standard.
What's worse, you're completely ignoring the gender-politics and DIY lessons learned. If you think there's no difference between Shigeru Miyamoto getting the job done and "Dad" getting the job done, then maybe Shigeru Miyamoto's your dad. Well, aside from you, most children (since they learn from their parents' example) would realize the connection: the game doesn't have to be made by a toy maker, it can be modified by "Dad" -- and that means it can eventually be modified by the child.
We're all supposed to be geeks, here, especially computer geeks.
Computer geeks are supposed to be the ones who have to repeat ad nauseum and hammer home the fact that no, email is not secure (or private).
Shouldn't the story just be "shrug [link]"?
Shouldn't the comments just be all speculation about how the fact that this made "news" could possibly mean we face further uninformed and draconian measures in legislation?
During the 1990's, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization stated fish catches were increasing yearly. In 2001, two researchers revealed catches actually declined since the 80s. Chinese officials had overstated their national statistic, their operations of government subverted beneath operations of industry: the officials were promoted only if statistics reflected increased production. The Chinese officials had recorded "by-catch" (a term for unsalable fish) as productive (Clover; Cousteau, 149). As a direct result of their inventiveness, fishing was not done as if a scarcity were underway, which it was. Jacque Cousteau (page 94) explains the cause of overfishing between 1950 and 1985, "by including vast tonnages of 'trash fish', authorities camouflaged collapses of the major commercial fish stock."...
Cousteau gasps that "such lapses by those who lead nations bewilder explorers who have led a team", and illuminates that the world catch statistics are misleading in another way: they did not reflect that the number of fishermen needed to catch each next year's harvest have had to grow significantly (between 1971-83, growing from 136,500 to 223,000 fishermen in America alone, aboard over 8,000 more vessels managing to catch statistically less fish than were caught in the 1950's), nor did they account for increasing technological prowess.
I usually welcome hearing Tyson's latest addition to lay science understanding.
I sort of like character-celebrity-scientists. Mister Wizard, Bill Nye, and local college instructor / news-show scientist "Chemical Kim" are just a few of the scientists I applaud for their work in bringing science to the masses as a fun and interesting subject.
I don't like the stand-in experts like Michiu Kaku or Tyson, who take a different tack of bringing science to just a large audience, not really packaged for the masses at all, often with their own opinions added, and typically very pompously presented.
Tyson manages to keep my respect by being relatively sane and mainstream, basing his conclusions and projections on "establishment" science.
I can't say the same for Kaku, who I haven't heard from in awhile because I purposefully stop visiting web sites and stop listening to radio shows that give him a podium (no, this is not a viable way to get me to stop visiting/.)
But Tyson also manages to capture my interest by doing the same thing Bill Nye does: making comments about human affairs and human nature. They both humanize science.
But Tyson's pomposity sort of makes it hard for me to "like" him. And I just read something about him recently, so now it's like a second serving of buttered scallops when I clearly had trouble finishing the first serving.
I don't know if I would restrict your use to a single-task desktop. That seems counter-productive.
I think I might enjoy planning or coding something to this end, though, because I've felt the need for the exact same thing.
You would have to dedicate yourself to it somehow. Either going to the app and opening your "target / focus" app through the anti-distractor, or else have it load at login and then monitor what applications you are opening. As you open each app, it will take focus and come to the front of the desktop, and ask you to prioritize what you're working on.
Once it has a top-priority app, it could bother you to keep working on that.
You could attach opened apps to a node tree under other opened apps when it queries you. Or just maybe have it do that for you based on the assumption that whatever you're using (in the foreground) when you open another app is the priority-parent of that app.
When you close an app, it should put that app's prioritized parent in the focus and foreground immediately, and give you a reminder "this is what you were working on when you had the inkling to open the other app that you just closed, so you must be back to this again."
Something like that? What operating system or environment are you working in?
> Does it mean that when the telephone was invented, people > started to lament that telephones were "emasculating"
Yes. Many people referred to telephones as "the devil's instrument" and refused to use it for anything but emergencies. One direct reason for this was simply that things had gone on naturally for so long, why intervene with something un-natural? It was like suggesting that a person couldn't rely on their usual means, that they had had something physically removed from their body.
Phone calls were seen as an interruption to otherwise normal-world and pleasant goings-on, and it was considered extremely rude and insulting to everyone present if one was to carry on a phone conversation with other people waiting in the room.
People would simply not answer the phone, or just take the phone off the hook (it used to be an actual hook did you know that) when dining or when guests were over. Unless the guests were active participants in the reason for making the call, you wouldn't call somebody with guests over, either.
Now compare that to today. You have to admit there's a huge difference. And you can't pretend there isn't, people are still bitching today about how rude people are by going to a cell phone call in the middle of a conversation.
I remember when cell phones first started getting miniature, and the complaints were raised about how rude it is simply to have a private phone conversation in the midst of numerous strangers.
That's funny. I never considered using one of those "teaching devices" for the purpose of forcing boring meeting attendees to actually have to listen to the boring meeting. But I bet today's young urban professionals are hard-wired to withdraw and insulate even through something like that.
Isn't it just as valid to ask "what kind of person takes that sort of a job?"
I mean, what kind of person sees that work environment as crucial or workable? You could say "they do it for the money" but how hard would it be to stand up and talk to someone face to face, and start a sea change? I think Google's employees enjoy their insular, secluded little womb-states.
And to suggest that Brin "instigates this culture" is a stretch. Brin is only how old and how powerful? Certainly not old and powerful enough to have instigated two historic periods of "Isolationism" in the United States. Certainly not old enough to blame for successive generations of lala-land-loving "young prodigies".
All Brin did was take a look and notice that the more intellectual children of the more intellectual parents are secluded, sheltered, insular, and improperly socialized. Then he took advantage of that by providing them a little pretend tree fort lala-land for the lala-land-lovers to work in.
If you don't believe there are such things as lala-land-lovers, explain to me the phenomenon of these "Collegiates" I attend with who spend all day long sitting in one spot playing "Magic Cards" and who have trouble looking you in the eye when you talk with them. Explain the phenomenon of grown adults who cherish the imaginary worlds of Harry Potter or J.R.R. Tolkien. Explain fools like Tolkien who waste their lives writing about places that don't exist and whose long sagas resembling phone books and cultural essays aren't even slightly appealing to anyone whose imagination isn't being squashed by an overgrown analytical brain.
America IS lost, actually, in lala-land. Explain to me how all of this money can continue to be spent on entertainment by all of these people who bitch and complain about government waste, in the middle of "the Great Recession"?
Explain to me the phenomenon of hoards of people receiving money for not being able to socialize properly as if it's a "disability", sitting around in their demi-man-caves, playing video games literally all day long.
To say Brin "instigated and fostered this culture" reveals some sort of overwhelming admiration of Brin on your part. Probably because you ultimately recognize that all Brin is doing is catering to the majority demographic in the United States, the pretend-world dwelling adult-child.
Keshe's gravity-manipulation claims are not scientifically supported or backed by anyone else. It all seems like some kind of Iranian government-backed propaganda that they are intent on using to convince Iranians that they're living under a super-amazing wonderful beyond-science leadership. Sort of like the propaganda the North Korean government pushes on its people.
I can't find the article, but it seems to me that Linus was just in slashdot news not too long ago for ripping some other developer a new one. And looking back I find he's the subject of an article where he rips some politician a new one on a web page. Is this what Linus Torvalds is all about, screaming at people? I get the whole "you gotta have a thick skin" argument, sure, but is Linus the one making that argument a reality? How about some shit like some fucking P.R., or some fucking H.R. sensitivity, and some bullshit? What's his fucking huge dickheaded problem?
a.) A solitary person sitting around alone, nothing to do, fires up the PC and gets online to blast stuff with dozens of other people.
b.) A group of people get together in the same place at the same time, and when the question comes up "what should we do" the answer is "let's pull out the gaming console."
Maybe (a) could be forgone in favor of "getting out more" and "meeting new people", but if you're going to arrive at point (b) and wish you were at (a) anyways, what's your real point?
Slashdot Mirror
I kicked and screamed when I was forced to accept Windows 8 on my new laptop by Best Buy, and it was all for nothing. I, too, see Windows 8 as a major improvement over Windows 7.
Anyways, mark my calendar... April 8th, 2014 -- Windows Streamline Day. I'm going to streamline XP Home and XP Pro, use the "windows update downloader" to grab every update I don't have already, etc. Maybe there'll spring up some cottage industry surrounding the continued use of XP as a "hobby". Laff!
In one of the very few moments when my bosses have actually listened to and heeded my words, we've maintained policy for the last year that any used computers sold have to be able to migrate to Windows Vista, 7, or 8. So I've made sure all machines are over 1GHz (shrug) and can carry at least 512MB of RAM. In general most of the used machines we re-sell range between 1.5 - 3.0GHz and 1-4GB of RAM. That's fine for our customers but in a year we're not going to be able to activate fresh XP installs and we still haven't "migrated" ourselves to an OEM copy of Vista, 7, or 8. It's a non-profit company -- does anybody know how we can get ahold of a multi-license or multi-seat license and copy of any of the newer windows for dirt cheap or next to nothing? Oh, yeah. And the "Christian-oriented" non-profit business discriminates against sexual orientation, so Microsoft's direct charity will refuse to help.
You sound like you're giving too much of a fuck.
Try re-imagining the headline more properly as: "Filthy Rich People Robbing Some Other Filthy Rich People Using a Stupid Fucking Game of Chance and Lax Security" and you will finally feel just how stupid and irrelevant the story is.
FUCK YOU! Your stupid fucking theories are fucking STUPID! Anybody who lets god damned TROLLS direct the traffic in their little fucking teeny-tiny brains is a fucking MORON. And YOU'RE a moron for writing this stupid, fucking, DRIVEL. ... There!
Now, the effects described in the article will be effectively canceled out by the direction of my negative comments against the theory. People will no longer be swayed by trolls. Talk about short-cuts! You fucking idiot!
Their name /is/ "Google".
I believe AC's point was that an interrogator can also lead the questioning. This is actually endemic in the U.S. justice system.
I wasn't aware of all that. So Holmes wasn't just blazing mad with his guns in the theatre? I figured they would have picked him up based on some kind of witness testimony. Now I think I understand why some people are harping on and on about "two shooters". I simply dismissed it as confusion on behalf of the addled victims. But now it seems to be an important detail, especially considering this guy is actually in court on what sounds like dubious "evidence". And, yeah, the guy was super-drugged the first time we saw him in court. I dunno what they changed it to but he's pretty much not-there this time around, either.
The difference between you and the first Independence Day is that PEOPLE ALREADY EXPECT YOU TO KILL EVERYONE. You have no element of surprise!
You *ARE*, the frigging... Red Coats, in the war -- the imaginary war, going on in entirely inside of your delusional mind!
Your "enemy", the government that "PRotectz you", is *already* a guerilla trained paramilitary contingent that considers this their home that they're protecting!
You're just a sack of shit sitting in a fucking Lay-Z-Boy, with, a fucking, out-of-this-century, Tri-cornered fucking Hat on, of plus-three insular and self-indulgent ass-hattery, whining about :
1.) Your ponies
2.) Your cartoons and comics
3.) Your vampires, dragons, and I would say unicorns BUT YOUR PONIES ARE ALREADY UNICORNS, NOT 4-H PONIES -- PREPARATION-H PONIES
4.) Your fucking video games
5.) Your mom
Nobody cares! Fuck your mother!
[GAMER (MODE="ON")]
Durrrrrrr huhhhhhhh? Uhhhhhhhh. I gotta right! ...
To, uhhhhhhhhhh. Tooooooo. Uhhhhhhhhhh. ...
I GOTTA RIGHT MAN! I GOTTA RIGHT TOO YOU KNOW! UNGH! UNGH! *pounding you in the top of the head* *dangerously close to having a heart attack*
[/GAMER]
My parents didn't teach me programming until I was eight, and I didn't even begin to do anything really useful with it until I was a teenager. I used it to hack ATARI games (for the ATARI home computer), sure, but that's at eight years old.
The girl in the story is three years old. So you aren't even really setting a fair standard.
What's worse, you're completely ignoring the gender-politics and DIY lessons learned. If you think there's no difference between Shigeru Miyamoto getting the job done and "Dad" getting the job done, then maybe Shigeru Miyamoto's your dad. Well, aside from you, most children (since they learn from their parents' example) would realize the connection: the game doesn't have to be made by a toy maker, it can be modified by "Dad" -- and that means it can eventually be modified by the child.
We're all supposed to be geeks, here, especially computer geeks.
Computer geeks are supposed to be the ones who have to repeat ad nauseum and hammer home the fact that no, email is not secure (or private).
Shouldn't the story just be "shrug [link]"?
Shouldn't the comments just be all speculation about how the fact that this made "news" could possibly mean we face further uninformed and draconian measures in legislation?
oops, sorry:
Clover, Charles. "The End of the Line." New York: The New Press. 2006. Print.
Cousteau, Jacques and Susan Schiefelbein. "The Human, the Orchid, and the Octopus." New York: Bloomsbury. 2007. Print.
[from an academic paper I wrote in 2010]
During the 1990's, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization stated fish catches were increasing yearly. In 2001, two researchers revealed catches actually declined since the 80s. Chinese officials had overstated their national statistic, their operations of government subverted beneath operations of industry: the officials were promoted only if statistics reflected increased production. The Chinese officials had recorded "by-catch" (a term for unsalable fish) as productive (Clover; Cousteau, 149). As a direct result of their inventiveness, fishing was not done as if a scarcity were underway, which it was. Jacque Cousteau (page 94) explains the cause of overfishing between 1950 and 1985, "by including vast tonnages of 'trash fish', authorities camouflaged collapses of the major commercial fish stock." ...
Cousteau gasps that "such lapses by those who lead nations bewilder explorers who have led a team", and illuminates that the world catch statistics are misleading in another way: they did not reflect that the number of fishermen needed to catch each next year's harvest have had to grow significantly (between 1971-83, growing from 136,500 to 223,000 fishermen in America alone, aboard over 8,000 more vessels managing to catch statistically less fish than were caught in the 1950's), nor did they account for increasing technological prowess.
[/paper]
I'm not saying Brin can't control his company. I'm saying Brin didn't create the cultural/behavioural phenomenon that he's catering to.
I usually welcome hearing Tyson's latest addition to lay science understanding.
I sort of like character-celebrity-scientists. Mister Wizard, Bill Nye, and local college instructor / news-show scientist "Chemical Kim" are just a few of the scientists I applaud for their work in bringing science to the masses as a fun and interesting subject.
I don't like the stand-in experts like Michiu Kaku or Tyson, who take a different tack of bringing science to just a large audience, not really packaged for the masses at all, often with their own opinions added, and typically very pompously presented.
Tyson manages to keep my respect by being relatively sane and mainstream, basing his conclusions and projections on "establishment" science.
I can't say the same for Kaku, who I haven't heard from in awhile because I purposefully stop visiting web sites and stop listening to radio shows that give him a podium (no, this is not a viable way to get me to stop visiting /.)
But Tyson also manages to capture my interest by doing the same thing Bill Nye does: making comments about human affairs and human nature. They both humanize science.
But Tyson's pomposity sort of makes it hard for me to "like" him. And I just read something about him recently, so now it's like a second serving of buttered scallops when I clearly had trouble finishing the first serving.
I don't know if I would restrict your use to a single-task desktop. That seems counter-productive.
I think I might enjoy planning or coding something to this end, though, because I've felt the need for the exact same thing.
You would have to dedicate yourself to it somehow. Either going to the app and opening your "target / focus" app through the anti-distractor, or else have it load at login and then monitor what applications you are opening. As you open each app, it will take focus and come to the front of the desktop, and ask you to prioritize what you're working on.
Once it has a top-priority app, it could bother you to keep working on that.
You could attach opened apps to a node tree under other opened apps when it queries you. Or just maybe have it do that for you based on the assumption that whatever you're using (in the foreground) when you open another app is the priority-parent of that app.
When you close an app, it should put that app's prioritized parent in the focus and foreground immediately, and give you a reminder "this is what you were working on when you had the inkling to open the other app that you just closed, so you must be back to this again."
Something like that? What operating system or environment are you working in?
I resemble those remarks you made about (*ahem!*) "cavemen". Cavemen are people, too. In fact, we were people before you were.
> Does it mean that when the telephone was invented, people
> started to lament that telephones were "emasculating"
Yes. Many people referred to telephones as "the devil's instrument" and refused to use it for anything but emergencies. One direct reason for this was simply that things had gone on naturally for so long, why intervene with something un-natural? It was like suggesting that a person couldn't rely on their usual means, that they had had something physically removed from their body.
Phone calls were seen as an interruption to otherwise normal-world and pleasant goings-on, and it was considered extremely rude and insulting to everyone present if one was to carry on a phone conversation with other people waiting in the room.
People would simply not answer the phone, or just take the phone off the hook (it used to be an actual hook did you know that) when dining or when guests were over. Unless the guests were active participants in the reason for making the call, you wouldn't call somebody with guests over, either.
Now compare that to today. You have to admit there's a huge difference. And you can't pretend there isn't, people are still bitching today about how rude people are by going to a cell phone call in the middle of a conversation.
I remember when cell phones first started getting miniature, and the complaints were raised about how rude it is simply to have a private phone conversation in the midst of numerous strangers.
That's funny. I never considered using one of those "teaching devices" for the purpose of forcing boring meeting attendees to actually have to listen to the boring meeting. But I bet today's young urban professionals are hard-wired to withdraw and insulate even through something like that.
Oh did they put that on? Or are you putting me on.
I should change my channel to Google and "put something on".
Isn't it just as valid to ask "what kind of person takes that sort of a job?"
I mean, what kind of person sees that work environment as crucial or workable? You could say "they do it for the money" but how hard would it be to stand up and talk to someone face to face, and start a sea change? I think Google's employees enjoy their insular, secluded little womb-states.
And to suggest that Brin "instigates this culture" is a stretch. Brin is only how old and how powerful? Certainly not old and powerful enough to have instigated two historic periods of "Isolationism" in the United States. Certainly not old enough to blame for successive generations of lala-land-loving "young prodigies".
All Brin did was take a look and notice that the more intellectual children of the more intellectual parents are secluded, sheltered, insular, and improperly socialized. Then he took advantage of that by providing them a little pretend tree fort lala-land for the lala-land-lovers to work in.
If you don't believe there are such things as lala-land-lovers, explain to me the phenomenon of these "Collegiates" I attend with who spend all day long sitting in one spot playing "Magic Cards" and who have trouble looking you in the eye when you talk with them. Explain the phenomenon of grown adults who cherish the imaginary worlds of Harry Potter or J.R.R. Tolkien. Explain fools like Tolkien who waste their lives writing about places that don't exist and whose long sagas resembling phone books and cultural essays aren't even slightly appealing to anyone whose imagination isn't being squashed by an overgrown analytical brain.
America IS lost, actually, in lala-land. Explain to me how all of this money can continue to be spent on entertainment by all of these people who bitch and complain about government waste, in the middle of "the Great Recession"?
Explain to me the phenomenon of hoards of people receiving money for not being able to socialize properly as if it's a "disability", sitting around in their demi-man-caves, playing video games literally all day long.
To say Brin "instigated and fostered this culture" reveals some sort of overwhelming admiration of Brin on your part. Probably because you ultimately recognize that all Brin is doing is catering to the majority demographic in the United States, the pretend-world dwelling adult-child.
Keshe's gravity-manipulation claims are not scientifically supported or backed by anyone else. It all seems like some kind of Iranian government-backed propaganda that they are intent on using to convince Iranians that they're living under a super-amazing wonderful beyond-science leadership. Sort of like the propaganda the North Korean government pushes on its people.
I can't find the article, but it seems to me that Linus was just in slashdot news not too long ago for ripping some other developer a new one. And looking back I find he's the subject of an article where he rips some politician a new one on a web page. Is this what Linus Torvalds is all about, screaming at people? I get the whole "you gotta have a thick skin" argument, sure, but is Linus the one making that argument a reality? How about some shit like some fucking P.R., or some fucking H.R. sensitivity, and some bullshit? What's his fucking huge dickheaded problem?
Hmm... which seems more like a "win"?
a.) A solitary person sitting around alone, nothing to do, fires up the PC and gets online to blast stuff with dozens of other people.
b.) A group of people get together in the same place at the same time, and when the question comes up "what should we do" the answer is "let's pull out the gaming console."
Maybe (a) could be forgone in favor of "getting out more" and "meeting new people", but if you're going to arrive at point (b) and wish you were at (a) anyways, what's your real point?