Don't get me wrong - I don't love Microsoft and I don't even use IE. But aren't the browser wars pretty much dead? If you think that MS has an unfair monopoly in the OS world, is this really the most effective way to end that?
Actually, myself and a bunch of old friends re-watched almost the entire thing recently, all the way up through 6th season. I'd say that it mostly aged well. However, the one aspect of the show that *didn't* age well was The Cat. I think I found him mildly amusing back in the day, but now when I see him, I think "racist stereotype" at best, and "minstrelsy" at worst. Doesn't ruin the show, but does detract from it.
'[the] extent of the community [...] poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion. The exception accounts for rituals of religious faith, for example.'
Could you imagine what would happen if these people came together to form a religion, or some sort of NGO? I'd imagine that a lot of random people would get phonecalls like this :
"Hello?"
"Hi, is this Steve Smith?"
"Speaking. Who is this?"
"You know who this is, because you've been watching us. We know, because we've been watching you."
"Is this a prank call?"
"No it's not, but you already knew that. Listen, I'm calling on behalf of Citizens Against Gang Stalking, and we want you to leave Terry Johnson alone."
"Who's Terry Johnson?"
"He was wearing a brown suit in Starbucks today, right around 8:30 when you usually get your coffee. He noticed that you reached for the napkin dispenser right before he did. What, you thought you'd get away with that?"
"I have no idea who you're talking about. What am I trying to get away with?"
"Implanting a tiny microphone into the next napkin, so that he'd take it with him, allowing you to listen to his conversations wherever he went. I bet you never thought we'd catch you!"
"uhm, I'm going to hang up now."
Learn how to read a graph, dude.
Although the increase in deficit occurs during a period that is labeled "Clinton," I would like to draw your attention to the X axis of the graph. You will notice that the national debt doesn't begin to increase until 2001, which is, quite clearly, a Bush datapoint.
Ok, so this means that the next time a mission-critical Linux-based app goes kaput, I'll see a headline on slashdot that reads, "Linux-based system goes kaput." Right?
Oh, I forgot, nothing ever goes wrong in Linux world. All Linux programmers are creme de la creme, all Linux administrators are top-notch engineers, and nobody ever botches an upgrade or releases a sour version. In fact, every IT mishap of the last 30 years can be directly traced to pointy-eyebrowed, mustache-twirling marketing villains who convince hapless stakeholders to install Microsoft products.
And then they tie the hero to the railroad tracks, foreclose on the family farm, and steal sweet little Lulabelle away from her fiancee.
All the reviews I've read about Spore have said the same thing - great toy, boring game. I'd think that would be far more likely to repel potential buyers than some scuffle over DRM.
I'll accept a few of these bounties as soon as I have the chance. However, right now I'm too busy porting OpenMUMPS to the Atari ST. I'll get back to you in a year or so.
From what I gather, the real difference between ivy and state schools is the quality of instructors. At the land-grant state megaversity I attended, the professors were kinda useless, but I still got a lot out of my education because I worked hard and did my homework. At better-funded schools, you have professors who are better at teaching, and often have some notoriety outside of academia.
Re:Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
on
Batman Discussion
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· Score: 1
My point about killing thousands of patients was this - say you have to evacuate every hospital in a city of 30 million. Assuming this can be done, think of how many of those patients are on life support. Think of how many are in critical condition, and could die at any moment. Think of how many are awaiting life-saving surgery, without which they will die within a couple hours. Hell, think of the ER alone! Now, say you have to empty the hospital (every hospital), and move those patients somewhere else. Many will die in transit, and that's assuming that there's even someplace to move them to.
I mean, I get the point about "not giving in to terrorists," but you cannot deny that this would be anything but a clear-cut decision.
Re:Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
Well, I guess it doesn't help that the lawyer was kind of a scummy fellow anyway. I would think that any decent person in his situation would offer to commit suicide to save thousands of people.
Re:Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 1
I don't agree. 1 person VS hospital is a different tradeoff than 10 people VS hospital or 1000 people VS hospital.
Still wondering what happened to the lawyer guy at the end of the movie.
Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
on
Batman Discussion
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Here's the only plot point I didn't get -
You know the part where the sleezeball lawyer wants to reveal Batman's identity, and the Joker threatens to blow up a hospital if nobody kills him? Why didn't they just kill the lawyer?
You have to figure that evacuating every hospital in Gotham would kill untold numbers of people who were on life support or otherwise in critical condition. I'd imagine definitely in the thousands. All for what, to save the life of this one guy? Call me Spock, but I think this would definitely be a situation of "the good of the many versus the good of the one."
Plus, that was one loose end that was never tied up. What happens to the lawyer at the end of the movie? Surely people will remember him, and remember that he knows Batman's identity. "So hey, remember that guy we sacrificed thousands of patients in order to save? Didn't he know the identity of Batman or something? Gee, that would come in handy now that we hate Batman. Where is that guy, anyway?"
That's because Firefox is the only software that I've encountered that has somehow managed to solve the update problem correctly. Firefox updates are quick, painless, require no rebooting, and don't even require you to restart the browser right away. It's almost an invisible process. And as an added bonus, updates for most plugins are equally painless.
If all software was this good about updating, our computers would be far more secure and would work better. You'd probably see tech support calls decline drastically across the board.
The thing about Win 3.1 is that it just wasn't incredibly useful. I think that for most users, it was just a launchpad for MS Word. If you didn't have a need for a WYSIWYG text editor, then there wasn't much of a point to Windows. At that time, most of the apps you were running were DOS apps, anyway.
And if it was multitasking you were after, Desqview 386 was a FAR better option. It came with QEMM, which remained THE best memory manager for the PC until such things became antiquated. I remember using DV386/QEMM to run my WWIV BBS in the background while playing games like Lemmings and doing other various things. This was on a 386DX40, with I believe 2MB of RAM. This, quite plainly, could have never happened on Win 3.1. The graphics overhead alone would have totally killed performance.
If you are answering this question, then obviously you never had to deal with one of the early touchscreen systems.
We had a touchscreen "card catalog" system at the Philly public library back in the 80s. It didn't work too well. It didn't always know when you were touching it, and sometimes it would register the touch in the wrong place entirely. Also, it forced you to spend long periods of time standing with your arm in front of you poking at the screen. This caused an uncomfortable soreness in your arm, known as Gorilla Arm. In fact, this is typically seen as an example of failed usability design.
Plus, you have to remember that interfaces at the time weren't particularly graphical. So you were using a touch-screen interface to actuate an all-text system. A keyboard would have made a lot more sense. Instead, you were forced to learn a completely new metaphor, with no actual improvement to the user experience.
Touchscreens didn't really make any sense until you had things that you could click on and drag around.
Just wait until someone writes a script to search for every possible domain name on Network Solutions's website, in effect tying up millions upon millions of domain names. Watch hilarity ensue as all of the other registrars decry NS's "blatantly anti-competitive practices."
This is kinda ironic, because I just got hit by this today. I used Network Solutions lookup tool to search for a domain - simply out of habit - and then when I went to buy the domain at my usual discount registrar, I was told that the domain name was already taken. Then I went back to Network Solutions, did the lookup, and lo and behold, it's still available! Confused, I did a whois lookup, and saw that the site was apparently registered to Network Solutions. So I called up the customer service line for NS, and I was like, "hey, do you know what's going on?" And here's the kicker - the guy tried to make it sound like NS was doing me a favor!
The logic went something like this - some "unethical third party" could be snooping on my connection, and, seeing that I was looking into a domain purchase, they could snap up the domain and then try to sell it to me at an inflated rate. Of course, if they were to buy the domain from Network Solutions, nothing would stop them. But if they tried to buy it somewhere else, good old NS has my back. Isn't that swell of them?
Fortunately, the guy was reasonable, and released the hold on the domain. He then tried to upsell me on some stupid hosting service, and I'm like, "Umm, no, I do my own development. And I'm going to buy this domain someplace that doesn't charge $30 a freakin' domain."
What this guy is saying is basically the party line. Find someone who's a "geek's geek." Find someone who's obsessed with technology. Find someone who doesn't have anything compelling in their spare time to do besides write code.
Here's one for you - how about just showing me someone who can deliver the goods? I've known so many people who fit the description in this article, yet who cannot deliver the goods because they're too obsessed with making "the neatest thing possible," or who succumb to scope creep because they don't know how to say "no."
I mean, yes, we all want to make our bosses happy and give everyone what they want. And yes, it is instinctual to want to fit the latest, neatest widget into whatever it is that we're doing. But what about actually delivering code? To do so requires strength and discipline. It requires the ability to properly estimate projects and not over-commit. It requires the ability to say "no" to your boss when he's asking for something impractical. It requires the ability to decide which features must go and which must stay in order to make for a stable, timely release.
Another thing that wasn't mentioned in the article is a sense of elegance, which I think is the key determining factor in what makes someone a good programmer. If someone doesn't have a sense of elegance, they're lost and there's no way to help them. They have to know the difference between a solution and a work-around. They have to know how much complexity is necessary, and how much is too much. They have to know how to write readable, clear code that isn't filled with a bunch of hacks or show-off tricks. Sure, it's impressive when someone loves writing code so much that they taught themselves Ruby or Lisp or Haskell. But I'm more impressed by the guy who, when given a problem, thinks, "there's got to be an elegant way to solve this," and then goes out and learns a new technology not because it's fun, but because it's the cleanest, most logical, most modular way of solving that problem.
Oh, just wait for the next generation of malware.
You think identity theft is a problem now?
Wait until the spambots are good enough to interpret the whole carbon trail of data we leave behind us. We'll all wish that we'd been less.... descriptive in our social networking profiles and our blog comments.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe these will be funnier than the (mostly-disappointing) movies.
Don't get me wrong - I don't love Microsoft and I don't even use IE. But aren't the browser wars pretty much dead? If you think that MS has an unfair monopoly in the OS world, is this really the most effective way to end that?
Actually, myself and a bunch of old friends re-watched almost the entire thing recently, all the way up through 6th season. I'd say that it mostly aged well. However, the one aspect of the show that *didn't* age well was The Cat. I think I found him mildly amusing back in the day, but now when I see him, I think "racist stereotype" at best, and "minstrelsy" at worst. Doesn't ruin the show, but does detract from it.
it still beats driving!
'[the] extent of the community [...] poses a paradox to the traditional way delusion is defined under the diagnostic guidelines of the American Psychiatric Association, which says that if a belief is held by a person's "culture or subculture," it is not a delusion. The exception accounts for rituals of religious faith, for example.' Could you imagine what would happen if these people came together to form a religion, or some sort of NGO? I'd imagine that a lot of random people would get phonecalls like this : "Hello?" "Hi, is this Steve Smith?" "Speaking. Who is this?" "You know who this is, because you've been watching us. We know, because we've been watching you." "Is this a prank call?" "No it's not, but you already knew that. Listen, I'm calling on behalf of Citizens Against Gang Stalking, and we want you to leave Terry Johnson alone." "Who's Terry Johnson?" "He was wearing a brown suit in Starbucks today, right around 8:30 when you usually get your coffee. He noticed that you reached for the napkin dispenser right before he did. What, you thought you'd get away with that?" "I have no idea who you're talking about. What am I trying to get away with?" "Implanting a tiny microphone into the next napkin, so that he'd take it with him, allowing you to listen to his conversations wherever he went. I bet you never thought we'd catch you!" "uhm, I'm going to hang up now."
Learn how to read a graph, dude. Although the increase in deficit occurs during a period that is labeled "Clinton," I would like to draw your attention to the X axis of the graph. You will notice that the national debt doesn't begin to increase until 2001, which is, quite clearly, a Bush datapoint.
Merril Lynch reports that 70 percent of its business runs on Cobol apps.
That explains a lot.
Ok, so this means that the next time a mission-critical Linux-based app goes kaput, I'll see a headline on slashdot that reads, "Linux-based system goes kaput." Right? Oh, I forgot, nothing ever goes wrong in Linux world. All Linux programmers are creme de la creme, all Linux administrators are top-notch engineers, and nobody ever botches an upgrade or releases a sour version. In fact, every IT mishap of the last 30 years can be directly traced to pointy-eyebrowed, mustache-twirling marketing villains who convince hapless stakeholders to install Microsoft products. And then they tie the hero to the railroad tracks, foreclose on the family farm, and steal sweet little Lulabelle away from her fiancee.
All the reviews I've read about Spore have said the same thing - great toy, boring game. I'd think that would be far more likely to repel potential buyers than some scuffle over DRM.
I'll accept a few of these bounties as soon as I have the chance. However, right now I'm too busy porting OpenMUMPS to the Atari ST. I'll get back to you in a year or so.
From what I gather, the real difference between ivy and state schools is the quality of instructors. At the land-grant state megaversity I attended, the professors were kinda useless, but I still got a lot out of my education because I worked hard and did my homework. At better-funded schools, you have professors who are better at teaching, and often have some notoriety outside of academia.
My point about killing thousands of patients was this - say you have to evacuate every hospital in a city of 30 million. Assuming this can be done, think of how many of those patients are on life support. Think of how many are in critical condition, and could die at any moment. Think of how many are awaiting life-saving surgery, without which they will die within a couple hours. Hell, think of the ER alone! Now, say you have to empty the hospital (every hospital), and move those patients somewhere else. Many will die in transit, and that's assuming that there's even someplace to move them to.
I mean, I get the point about "not giving in to terrorists," but you cannot deny that this would be anything but a clear-cut decision.
Well, I guess it doesn't help that the lawyer was kind of a scummy fellow anyway. I would think that any decent person in his situation would offer to commit suicide to save thousands of people.
I don't agree. 1 person VS hospital is a different tradeoff than 10 people VS hospital or 1000 people VS hospital.
Still wondering what happened to the lawyer guy at the end of the movie.
Here's the only plot point I didn't get - You know the part where the sleezeball lawyer wants to reveal Batman's identity, and the Joker threatens to blow up a hospital if nobody kills him? Why didn't they just kill the lawyer? You have to figure that evacuating every hospital in Gotham would kill untold numbers of people who were on life support or otherwise in critical condition. I'd imagine definitely in the thousands. All for what, to save the life of this one guy? Call me Spock, but I think this would definitely be a situation of "the good of the many versus the good of the one." Plus, that was one loose end that was never tied up. What happens to the lawyer at the end of the movie? Surely people will remember him, and remember that he knows Batman's identity. "So hey, remember that guy we sacrificed thousands of patients in order to save? Didn't he know the identity of Batman or something? Gee, that would come in handy now that we hate Batman. Where is that guy, anyway?"
That's because Firefox is the only software that I've encountered that has somehow managed to solve the update problem correctly. Firefox updates are quick, painless, require no rebooting, and don't even require you to restart the browser right away. It's almost an invisible process. And as an added bonus, updates for most plugins are equally painless.
If all software was this good about updating, our computers would be far more secure and would work better. You'd probably see tech support calls decline drastically across the board.
The thing about Win 3.1 is that it just wasn't incredibly useful. I think that for most users, it was just a launchpad for MS Word. If you didn't have a need for a WYSIWYG text editor, then there wasn't much of a point to Windows. At that time, most of the apps you were running were DOS apps, anyway. And if it was multitasking you were after, Desqview 386 was a FAR better option. It came with QEMM, which remained THE best memory manager for the PC until such things became antiquated. I remember using DV386/QEMM to run my WWIV BBS in the background while playing games like Lemmings and doing other various things. This was on a 386DX40, with I believe 2MB of RAM. This, quite plainly, could have never happened on Win 3.1. The graphics overhead alone would have totally killed performance.
Anybody who doubts the veracity of this claim obviously isn't old enough to remember Windows 3.1.
Should have said "If you are asking this question" not "If you are answering this question." Sorry.
If you are answering this question, then obviously you never had to deal with one of the early touchscreen systems.
We had a touchscreen "card catalog" system at the Philly public library back in the 80s. It didn't work too well. It didn't always know when you were touching it, and sometimes it would register the touch in the wrong place entirely. Also, it forced you to spend long periods of time standing with your arm in front of you poking at the screen. This caused an uncomfortable soreness in your arm, known as Gorilla Arm. In fact, this is typically seen as an example of failed usability design.
Plus, you have to remember that interfaces at the time weren't particularly graphical. So you were using a touch-screen interface to actuate an all-text system. A keyboard would have made a lot more sense. Instead, you were forced to learn a completely new metaphor, with no actual improvement to the user experience.
Touchscreens didn't really make any sense until you had things that you could click on and drag around.
Just wait until someone writes a script to search for every possible domain name on Network Solutions's website, in effect tying up millions upon millions of domain names. Watch hilarity ensue as all of the other registrars decry NS's "blatantly anti-competitive practices."
This is kinda ironic, because I just got hit by this today. I used Network Solutions lookup tool to search for a domain - simply out of habit - and then when I went to buy the domain at my usual discount registrar, I was told that the domain name was already taken. Then I went back to Network Solutions, did the lookup, and lo and behold, it's still available! Confused, I did a whois lookup, and saw that the site was apparently registered to Network Solutions. So I called up the customer service line for NS, and I was like, "hey, do you know what's going on?" And here's the kicker - the guy tried to make it sound like NS was doing me a favor!
The logic went something like this - some "unethical third party" could be snooping on my connection, and, seeing that I was looking into a domain purchase, they could snap up the domain and then try to sell it to me at an inflated rate. Of course, if they were to buy the domain from Network Solutions, nothing would stop them. But if they tried to buy it somewhere else, good old NS has my back. Isn't that swell of them?
Fortunately, the guy was reasonable, and released the hold on the domain. He then tried to upsell me on some stupid hosting service, and I'm like, "Umm, no, I do my own development. And I'm going to buy this domain someplace that doesn't charge $30 a freakin' domain."
What this guy is saying is basically the party line. Find someone who's a "geek's geek." Find someone who's obsessed with technology. Find someone who doesn't have anything compelling in their spare time to do besides write code.
Here's one for you - how about just showing me someone who can deliver the goods? I've known so many people who fit the description in this article, yet who cannot deliver the goods because they're too obsessed with making "the neatest thing possible," or who succumb to scope creep because they don't know how to say "no."
I mean, yes, we all want to make our bosses happy and give everyone what they want. And yes, it is instinctual to want to fit the latest, neatest widget into whatever it is that we're doing. But what about actually delivering code? To do so requires strength and discipline. It requires the ability to properly estimate projects and not over-commit. It requires the ability to say "no" to your boss when he's asking for something impractical. It requires the ability to decide which features must go and which must stay in order to make for a stable, timely release.
Another thing that wasn't mentioned in the article is a sense of elegance, which I think is the key determining factor in what makes someone a good programmer. If someone doesn't have a sense of elegance, they're lost and there's no way to help them. They have to know the difference between a solution and a work-around. They have to know how much complexity is necessary, and how much is too much. They have to know how to write readable, clear code that isn't filled with a bunch of hacks or show-off tricks. Sure, it's impressive when someone loves writing code so much that they taught themselves Ruby or Lisp or Haskell. But I'm more impressed by the guy who, when given a problem, thinks, "there's got to be an elegant way to solve this," and then goes out and learns a new technology not because it's fun, but because it's the cleanest, most logical, most modular way of solving that problem.
Oh, just wait for the next generation of malware. You think identity theft is a problem now? Wait until the spambots are good enough to interpret the whole carbon trail of data we leave behind us. We'll all wish that we'd been less.... descriptive in our social networking profiles and our blog comments.
And, as an added bonus, the soundtrack for Duke Nukem Forever will be Guns n' Roses new album, Chinese Democracy!