And yet does not address the simple fact that some people write the way they speak. Sometimes you (rhetorical) may plan the sentence correctly, or sometimes you real-time correct the clumsiness, with the case in question being with the phrase "no pun intended."
You're essentially enforcing formal writing in an informal forum.
You would do well consider what's wrong with that. Or at least recognize that you've elevated beyond Spelling, Grammar and Metaphor Nazi up to Structure Nazi. (No ad hominem, no Godwin. As a self-confessed Metaphor Nazi, I can call you that - accurately.)
PS - this comment regresses back to those being separate attributes rather than indicative mindsets, but allowing that, and then cherry-picking your mindset descriptions, there's one show that embodies all three: Babylon 5.
Tell me the part where the players of BSG are motivated by national glory... I'm not seeing it. In fact, the entire mythos is that the colonies were the result of getting off of their rock, Kobol (thank gods I can at least watch the new BSG and stomach that - it was all I could do to say that word in print! (I think in the original they didn't even try - it was Cobol...)) Further, their plight - scarce planetary resources (say, air and water free of radionuclide poisoning) causing an ensuing evacuation was very non-Von Braunian.
So, BSG is bowing to Von Braunian economics but living quite the ONeillian lifestyle. In your mythologies, the show you're looking for in that category isn't BSG at all - it's Farscape.
Many thanks. I was trying to think in terms of mindsets, but decided I was at the point where I would believe anything I told myself. The clarifications were MOST helpful.
Hey, that's a little harsh, I think. Many of us write the way we speak and that particular parenthetical isn't so uncommon. By the time I do that sort of thing, I've looked for another way to state what I'm saying, and when all else fails, the no-pun or pardon-me parenthetical occurs.
I did follow the link cited, considered the viewpoint given, and respectfully disagree.
Interesting points. I'd like to add that they aren't strictly exclusive - the Saganite example speaks to motivation and behavior and the Von Braunian one speaks to how to accomplish building the vehicles.
Therefore, I don't see that they fracture so cleanly into the various groups described.
1. How to get off the rock - Von Braunian. 2. How to behave once off the rock - Saganite 3. Why get off of the rock in the first place - O'Neillian
These attributes or their counterparts form very descriptive tuples.
However, we're all still in the Von Braunian stage of knowledge for the first point (with many deep bows to Space Ship One as I say that) - light up explosives/propellents under/behind your seat and use bulky chemicals to reach escape velocity.
We all kick at that, but there it is.
(More deep bows to the deep space probe that used ion drive rather recently (within last decade). But still - that wasn't for escape.)
Convincing people to let the government/power agency to bury "nuclear" ANYTHING near a town is like a huge red flag to conservationsists and the 'anti-establishement' people. Remember, there are still people out there that think powerlines cause cancer, and that vaccinations cause autism, despite scientific evidence.
And remember, there are people out here who know a hell of a lot more about WIPP and the 10,000 things seriously fucking wrong about it than you do.
It's where big science money meets ultra low tech - dig a hole in the ground. The WIPP site was chosen because the salt beds were supposed to be stable. After we learned that they weren't (they flow, just slowly) we had a new round of BS shoved at us as to why migrating radionuclides to eventual exposure to our groundwater is just AOK.
And I'm sure that someone who made money and got accolades on WIPP is ready to help you - perhaps you'd like THEIR help burying this stuff in your backyard, but it didn't work out so well for ours, thanks.
I'm all for nuclear power - I've been following Hyperion's efforts for a great many weeks already.
But we are FAR from solving the waste disposal problems. As stated earlier today, the correct solution would be to launch it all into the sun, but a launch failure causing poisonous scatter is the problem with that utopia.
Took me a second, but I get your question, and it's a good one.
Personally, if the entire TV-iverse were to go to the hulu.com model, I'd be pretty happy. I have occasions where I want to watch something, like an old ST:TOS or Bab5 or whatever - and I don't want - nor see the sense - in either renting it or buying the DVD set, because it will eventually come around again on broadcast TV.
When a good show comes around via broadcast, I buffer it and skip commercials. They're too many of them, and they're just too annoying. But the hulu.com model for commercials is livable for me. I could install XXX and filter them out, but I want the service to be successful, so I allow them.
Advertising actually reaches me via my hulu/streaming viewing than by broadcast/cable/satellite, thanks to DVRs. And I'd very much enjoy more of my viewing on-demand, appliance-delivered, at minimal cost provided the business model includes a reasonable entertainment model.
I'm prolly coming across as socialist or something else I don't intend, so I'll stop.
When you turn 50, you'll insist that all tools you use are either of your own making, or resemble those you used at a formative stage in your life.
Or you'll have days where you simply buy them and not want to discuss anything with anyone - much like the old dog with lesser hearing, lesser eyesight, and sore bones who doesn't want his ears pulled when he'd rather be napping.
More likely, "MacHeads is another cheap 'find a subculture and mock it' film that will pander to Apple haters, and bore or irritate Apple fans. It will broaden the minds of neither, and pass unnoticed by everyone else."
Right on and then some. From TFA:
At just under an hour in length, this unbiased, unnarrated documentary takes a balanced approach to peeling the onion of Apple fanboyism.
As fanboyism is in and of itself biased by definition, I find the claim that anyone can make an unbiased documentary of fanatic behavior to be quite specious.
Fanboys have be about 2.5 or 3 sigma types of users. I find many comments to this article treating it all as +/- 1 sigma - and it's just not.
I only wish they had mods for Incisive, because your post truly is that - many thanks!
I was ok with what he said, until the last sentence about why he used OS X. And then I laughed my butt off.
Sorry you missed the humor in that remark. I think that it takes a mature view of things to arrive at his POV, and that mature POV strongly correlates to a mature sense of humor.
And that's why I, too, use OS X. -- Ok, see that's humor, informative, insight, support, sarcasm and trolling all in one line. Bet me in advance which one the mods will choose.:)
Here's my experience doing software and system project mgmt for engineering-related stuff (DoD, DOE, NASA). It's very anecdotal, very notional and works out to be usually very valid, provided sufficient peer review and/or experience.
First, for any component or decision characterize a risk value of (complexity/maturity). So something highly complex not done before is high risk. Something simple with many precedents for success is low risk.
Next, map risk in terms of susceptibility to sustainability (USAF OT&E terms), or IOW - probability of (a bad thing's) occurrence to its impact on the system or the user to be able to do the job via a work-around or some other "operate-through" procedure. Stated another way, if something is susceptible to some risk, will it be able to sustain operations in the event of a failure?
So, just because something had a high risk value doesn't mean to NOT go that way - because it might have a low probability of occurrence (a feature very seldom used for example (based on use cases)) and a work-around with high confidence (or whose impact is too low to care about).
On the other hand, something with a low risk value might need re-assessment or re-work under the conditions that it has a high chance of use (therefore a high chance of occurring) and no acceptable work-around (and it impacts the user so that he can't do his job).
So. I guess I can safely say that I'm glad I'm not in economics because I can't for the life of me take the above life experience - that is that risk assessments and decisions are multi-dimensional - and then say that it CAN make sense to reduce risk to a scalar value - for any system, be it technical, economic or social or what-have-you.
Well, we have the continental divide here, Microsoft was started here, the atomic bomb was invented here (and all of the country's nukes were managed from here) and the ancestral petroglyphs date from near-Sumerian times.
Suppose you're an alien from outer space. Whether you're interested in the planet's geology, multiple cultures, sociology or advanced technology - you'd come to New Mexico. Hell - we've even got cattle! (Although a study that I participated in at a prestigious national laboratory did finally show that aliens weren't directly mutilating cattle - the mutilations were a by-product of the energy vortex being spacetime displaced from the saucer launches to return home. (Only idiots don't spacetime project the destructive launch vortex from saucer takeoff. Hell - how did you think the Roswell "crashes" happened? They weren't crashes - they were scattered wreckage from a launch with the Vortex Projector in Park. Never give a teenager whiskey and the keys to the saucer, that's all I can say.) We've gotten them to at least project the launch vortices to the opposite side of the earth's orbit. Actually, we were trying to have the vortices projected into the paths of incoming comets and asteroids and negotiations were going pretty well for that, but alien tourist traffic is down because it hurts their feelings when no one believes in them.)
In fact, I'm typing this on a Mac G4 copied by the aliens and gifted to me. Want to know how advanced the alien technologies are? Despite the most advanced testing we have, this machine is completely indistinguishable from those produced on earth. That's how advanced they are, so there!
Oh and PS - crop circles are simply advertisements for alien breakfast cereals. We were actually trying to figure out a way to export Extra Crunchy Wheat Circles (kinda like a gourmet Cheerios for them) but could never get through all of their red tape.
And PPS - There have never been abductions or anal probes, except for that one time at a little town in Colorado. Everyone else is a liar.
However, today's opportunity for you to show your filthy ignorance is to eschew the idea that the earth is old enough for the comet to have happened in the first place.
PS - He did not predate the Scopes Monkey Trial with his Model T antics - he had several, and drove them until he passed away a decade or so ago. And where he was from, they called them T Models. (Thanks for the bandwidth for this clarification.)
Great post, funny indeed! I'm not sure which subthread this comment goes in (it fits many), so.... my 2 cents.
The sad thing that I see about young-earth creationists in my age group (let's just call it +50) is that they all (speaking of the ones I've known and spoken to about this - and that's a lot) exhibit the following attributes: 1. They all once believed in evolution. 2. They got poor grades in science and math as kids. 3. They now believe in creation. 4. They no longer whine about not being as smart as those of us who did better in math and science as kids. 5. They propagate the meme as wisdom to the youth. 6. They are suddenly hip again, having the belief in common with the youngsters - and can brag about how schools have improved for kids now that they're adults.
My second father-in-law, a Baptist muckity-muck in his Baptist church deep in the Bible Belt, years ago wrote letters to correct a local school board from including creation in the curriculum - and succeeded - because there was a time that it was fairly common knowledge that Bible legends and book-learning weren't supposed to reconcile. The biblical story of creation was perfectly fine for shepherds in fields thousands of years ago, he would often say. And for those in his flock that insisted the Bible contained all knowledge, he'd walk over to his Model T and ask them where in the Bible it explained how to fix the brakes. And then asked them to take the owner's manual out of whatever they were driving and show him where it said how to be a good person. Back then, he said it worked every time.
There was a time when separation of church and state was SUPPORTED by the religious in this country (USA) - because they had the most to lose by the state encroaching on religion.
Attacking creationism and ID is not ever an attack on religion - it's an attack on stupidity.
The stupid people are using religion to encroach on the state. And it's no longer difficult. With voter malaise, all it takes is enough stupid people banding together - the religious right is proof enough of that.
Here's what this comes to, unchecked: One never expects the American Inquisition!
Become active and support the suppression in your state and local school district of stupidity in classrooms. Visit http://www.nmsr.org/ and may you be blessed by His Noodly Appendage for fighting for what's right^H^H^H^H^Htrue.
The only "Clippy" jokes I remember were those posted - endlessly - to Slashdot. It left me wondering - and not for the first time - whether the geek lived in a little world of his own. How many users simply accepted - even welcomed - a touch of humor, color and animation on their office desktop.
Oh, really?
Just Googled for "clippy jokes" - sure does seem to extend beyond/. and way beyond the little world, the geek's own.
I agree with enjoying tutorials that include video and so forth.
But the implementation didn't fail because animated characters are retarded. The implementation was retarded because Clippy, Bob and the Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy(*) just launched by themselves as an annoyance, not in response to a request for help. Further, as another poster suggested, the so-called help guessed very poorly what it was that was being worked on. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1078567&cid=26299781
Given that it's completely retarded and evil to have software work that way, it's actually internally self-consistent that these components are displayed in the most retarded fashion possible.
If they had done "a proper, professional, and serious implentation" as you suggest, then this dung would have never infected our minds.
I find the very same can be said of the company's commercials and several of their products (Access, anyone? That now-missing member of the Office Suite?)
I just woke up and realized that you've reminded me that many people may not know where Gibson got the title for "Burning Chrome" - AFAIR, the opening line of the story - I've not read it in years - was, "It was the night we burned Chrome." F-ingA hilarious.
Nichrome (nickel chromium) was used in PROMs - one literally burned through nichrome wire junctions to set logic paths (to open). After that, we all said we burned EPROMs and EEPROMs - just like we burn CD-RWs.
One of my co-workers got the first EPROM burning setup I'd ever seen, for his Apple. We'd spent weeks going over what and how were going to do things with it in anticipation of its budgeting, purchase and arrival. So, I'm off for a few days when the thing arrived. I get back to work, he's beaming from ear to ear - holding his first, newly-burned EPROM. Like an idiot he handed it to me. Why do I say, like an idiot? Because like a supreme idiot, the first thing I did was to remove that little paper-tape cover - obviously, you don't want some jerk's serial label or whatever that was on your motherboard, right? And you could see inside! Especially if you put it under a nice, bright light!
After I got up from the floor, I learned why those beasties were EPROMs as opposed to PROMs. Good times!
And speaking of tight coding - when you mentioned that, I was reminded of this quote:
Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
No sweat on the FORTRAN - anyone who burned ERPOMs is a Real Programmer. Remember:
If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Your corrected comment is much less awkward.
And yet does not address the simple fact that some people write the way they speak. Sometimes you (rhetorical) may plan the sentence correctly, or sometimes you real-time correct the clumsiness, with the case in question being with the phrase "no pun intended."
You're essentially enforcing formal writing in an informal forum.
You would do well consider what's wrong with that. Or at least recognize that you've elevated beyond Spelling, Grammar and Metaphor Nazi up to Structure Nazi. (No ad hominem, no Godwin. As a self-confessed Metaphor Nazi, I can call you that - accurately.)
PS - this comment regresses back to those being separate attributes rather than indicative mindsets, but allowing that, and then cherry-picking your mindset descriptions, there's one show that embodies all three: Babylon 5.
Transcendence - as it is and should be.
Tell me the part where the players of BSG are motivated by national glory... I'm not seeing it. In fact, the entire mythos is that the colonies were the result of getting off of their rock, Kobol (thank gods I can at least watch the new BSG and stomach that - it was all I could do to say that word in print! (I think in the original they didn't even try - it was Cobol...)) Further, their plight - scarce planetary resources (say, air and water free of radionuclide poisoning) causing an ensuing evacuation was very non-Von Braunian.
So, BSG is bowing to Von Braunian economics but living quite the ONeillian lifestyle. In your mythologies, the show you're looking for in that category isn't BSG at all - it's Farscape.
Many thanks. I was trying to think in terms of mindsets, but decided I was at the point where I would believe anything I told myself. The clarifications were MOST helpful.
Hey, that's a little harsh, I think. Many of us write the way we speak and that particular parenthetical isn't so uncommon. By the time I do that sort of thing, I've looked for another way to state what I'm saying, and when all else fails, the no-pun or pardon-me parenthetical occurs.
I did follow the link cited, considered the viewpoint given, and respectfully disagree.
Interesting points. I'd like to add that they aren't strictly exclusive - the Saganite example speaks to motivation and behavior and the Von Braunian one speaks to how to accomplish building the vehicles.
Therefore, I don't see that they fracture so cleanly into the various groups described.
1. How to get off the rock - Von Braunian.
2. How to behave once off the rock - Saganite
3. Why get off of the rock in the first place - O'Neillian
These attributes or their counterparts form very descriptive tuples.
However, we're all still in the Von Braunian stage of knowledge for the first point (with many deep bows to Space Ship One as I say that) - light up explosives/propellents under/behind your seat and use bulky chemicals to reach escape velocity.
We all kick at that, but there it is.
(More deep bows to the deep space probe that used ion drive rather recently (within last decade). But still - that wasn't for escape.)
Sorry to be a metaphor Nazi, but I think you meant first chink in the armor.
You seem to have embraced the problem.
Convincing people to let the government/power agency to bury "nuclear" ANYTHING near a town is like a huge red flag to conservationsists and the 'anti-establishement' people.
Remember, there are still people out there that think powerlines cause cancer, and that vaccinations cause autism, despite scientific evidence.
And remember, there are people out here who know a hell of a lot more about WIPP and the 10,000 things seriously fucking wrong about it than you do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant
http://www.wipp.energy.gov/
It's where big science money meets ultra low tech - dig a hole in the ground. The WIPP site was chosen because the salt beds were supposed to be stable. After we learned that they weren't (they flow, just slowly) we had a new round of BS shoved at us as to why migrating radionuclides to eventual exposure to our groundwater is just AOK.
And I'm sure that someone who made money and got accolades on WIPP is ready to help you - perhaps you'd like THEIR help burying this stuff in your backyard, but it didn't work out so well for ours, thanks.
I'm all for nuclear power - I've been following Hyperion's efforts for a great many weeks already.
But we are FAR from solving the waste disposal problems. As stated earlier today, the correct solution would be to launch it all into the sun, but a launch failure causing poisonous scatter is the problem with that utopia.
HTH - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenderloin,_San_Francisco,_California
Funny, as a Linux user, I tend not to sleep with unshaven, unwashed, dirty hippy Mac girls.
Say, that is funny.
Took me a second, but I get your question, and it's a good one.
Personally, if the entire TV-iverse were to go to the hulu.com model, I'd be pretty happy. I have occasions where I want to watch something, like an old ST:TOS or Bab5 or whatever - and I don't want - nor see the sense - in either renting it or buying the DVD set, because it will eventually come around again on broadcast TV.
When a good show comes around via broadcast, I buffer it and skip commercials. They're too many of them, and they're just too annoying. But the hulu.com model for commercials is livable for me. I could install XXX and filter them out, but I want the service to be successful, so I allow them.
Advertising actually reaches me via my hulu/streaming viewing than by broadcast/cable/satellite, thanks to DVRs. And I'd very much enjoy more of my viewing on-demand, appliance-delivered, at minimal cost provided the business model includes a reasonable entertainment model.
I'm prolly coming across as socialist or something else I don't intend, so I'll stop.
When you turn 50, you'll insist that all tools you use are either of your own making, or resemble those you used at a formative stage in your life.
Or you'll have days where you simply buy them and not want to discuss anything with anyone - much like the old dog with lesser hearing, lesser eyesight, and sore bones who doesn't want his ears pulled when he'd rather be napping.
More likely, "MacHeads is another cheap 'find a subculture and mock it' film that will pander to Apple haters, and bore or irritate Apple fans. It will broaden the minds of neither, and pass unnoticed by everyone else."
Right on and then some. From TFA:
At just under an hour in length, this unbiased, unnarrated documentary takes a balanced approach to peeling the onion of Apple fanboyism.
As fanboyism is in and of itself biased by definition, I find the claim that anyone can make an unbiased documentary of fanatic behavior to be quite specious.
Fanboys have be about 2.5 or 3 sigma types of users. I find many comments to this article treating it all as +/- 1 sigma - and it's just not.
I only wish they had mods for Incisive, because your post truly is that - many thanks!
This is an amplification of yttrstein's comment:
I was ok with what he said, until the last sentence about why he used OS X. And then I laughed my butt off.
Sorry you missed the humor in that remark. I think that it takes a mature view of things to arrive at his POV, and that mature POV strongly correlates to a mature sense of humor.
And that's why I, too, use OS X. -- Ok, see that's humor, informative, insight, support, sarcasm and trolling all in one line. Bet me in advance which one the mods will choose. :)
Here's my experience doing software and system project mgmt for engineering-related stuff (DoD, DOE, NASA). It's very anecdotal, very notional and works out to be usually very valid, provided sufficient peer review and/or experience.
First, for any component or decision characterize a risk value of (complexity/maturity). So something highly complex not done before is high risk. Something simple with many precedents for success is low risk.
Next, map risk in terms of susceptibility to sustainability (USAF OT&E terms), or IOW - probability of (a bad thing's) occurrence to its impact on the system or the user to be able to do the job via a work-around or some other "operate-through" procedure. Stated another way, if something is susceptible to some risk, will it be able to sustain operations in the event of a failure?
So, just because something had a high risk value doesn't mean to NOT go that way - because it might have a low probability of occurrence (a feature very seldom used for example (based on use cases)) and a work-around with high confidence (or whose impact is too low to care about).
On the other hand, something with a low risk value might need re-assessment or re-work under the conditions that it has a high chance of use (therefore a high chance of occurring) and no acceptable work-around (and it impacts the user so that he can't do his job).
So. I guess I can safely say that I'm glad I'm not in economics because I can't for the life of me take the above life experience - that is that risk assessments and decisions are multi-dimensional - and then say that it CAN make sense to reduce risk to a scalar value - for any system, be it technical, economic or social or what-have-you.
Some days are better than others, my friend. I was trying to be funny - in this case, by telling the truth. :)
Well, we have the continental divide here, Microsoft was started here, the atomic bomb was invented here (and all of the country's nukes were managed from here) and the ancestral petroglyphs date from near-Sumerian times.
Suppose you're an alien from outer space. Whether you're interested in the planet's geology, multiple cultures, sociology or advanced technology - you'd come to New Mexico. Hell - we've even got cattle! (Although a study that I participated in at a prestigious national laboratory did finally show that aliens weren't directly mutilating cattle - the mutilations were a by-product of the energy vortex being spacetime displaced from the saucer launches to return home. (Only idiots don't spacetime project the destructive launch vortex from saucer takeoff. Hell - how did you think the Roswell "crashes" happened? They weren't crashes - they were scattered wreckage from a launch with the Vortex Projector in Park. Never give a teenager whiskey and the keys to the saucer, that's all I can say.) We've gotten them to at least project the launch vortices to the opposite side of the earth's orbit. Actually, we were trying to have the vortices projected into the paths of incoming comets and asteroids and negotiations were going pretty well for that, but alien tourist traffic is down because it hurts their feelings when no one believes in them.)
In fact, I'm typing this on a Mac G4 copied by the aliens and gifted to me. Want to know how advanced the alien technologies are? Despite the most advanced testing we have, this machine is completely indistinguishable from those produced on earth. That's how advanced they are, so there!
Oh and PS - crop circles are simply advertisements for alien breakfast cereals. We were actually trying to figure out a way to export Extra Crunchy Wheat Circles (kinda like a gourmet Cheerios for them) but could never get through all of their red tape.
And PPS - There have never been abductions or anal probes, except for that one time at a little town in Colorado. Everyone else is a liar.
Come again soon, and try the chile.
Thank you for your thoughtful comment.
However, today's opportunity for you to show your filthy ignorance is to eschew the idea that the earth is old enough for the comet to have happened in the first place.
Should be right up your alley.
PS - He did not predate the Scopes Monkey Trial with his Model T antics - he had several, and drove them until he passed away a decade or so ago. And where he was from, they called them T Models. (Thanks for the bandwidth for this clarification.)
Great post, funny indeed! I'm not sure which subthread this comment goes in (it fits many), so.... my 2 cents.
The sad thing that I see about young-earth creationists in my age group (let's just call it +50) is that they all (speaking of the ones I've known and spoken to about this - and that's a lot) exhibit the following attributes:
1. They all once believed in evolution.
2. They got poor grades in science and math as kids.
3. They now believe in creation.
4. They no longer whine about not being as smart as those of us who did better in math and science as kids.
5. They propagate the meme as wisdom to the youth.
6. They are suddenly hip again, having the belief in common with the youngsters - and can brag about how schools have improved for kids now that they're adults.
My second father-in-law, a Baptist muckity-muck in his Baptist church deep in the Bible Belt, years ago wrote letters to correct a local school board from including creation in the curriculum - and succeeded - because there was a time that it was fairly common knowledge that Bible legends and book-learning weren't supposed to reconcile. The biblical story of creation was perfectly fine for shepherds in fields thousands of years ago, he would often say. And for those in his flock that insisted the Bible contained all knowledge, he'd walk over to his Model T and ask them where in the Bible it explained how to fix the brakes. And then asked them to take the owner's manual out of whatever they were driving and show him where it said how to be a good person. Back then, he said it worked every time.
There was a time when separation of church and state was SUPPORTED by the religious in this country (USA) - because they had the most to lose by the state encroaching on religion.
Attacking creationism and ID is not ever an attack on religion - it's an attack on stupidity.
The stupid people are using religion to encroach on the state. And it's no longer difficult. With voter malaise, all it takes is enough stupid people banding together - the religious right is proof enough of that.
Here's what this comes to, unchecked: One never expects the American Inquisition!
Become active and support the suppression in your state and local school district of stupidity in classrooms. Visit http://www.nmsr.org/ and may you be blessed by His Noodly Appendage for fighting for what's right^H^H^H^H^Htrue.
The only "Clippy" jokes I remember were those posted - endlessly - to Slashdot. It left me wondering - and not for the first time - whether the geek lived in a little world of his own. How many users simply accepted - even welcomed - a touch of humor, color and animation on their office desktop.
Oh, really?
Just Googled for "clippy jokes" - sure does seem to extend beyond /. and way beyond the little world, the geek's own.
So. How's the weather in Redmond today?
I agree with enjoying tutorials that include video and so forth.
But the implementation didn't fail because animated characters are retarded. The implementation was retarded because Clippy, Bob and the Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy(*) just launched by themselves as an annoyance, not in response to a request for help. Further, as another poster suggested, the so-called help guessed very poorly what it was that was being worked on. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1078567&cid=26299781
Given that it's completely retarded and evil to have software work that way, it's actually internally self-consistent that these components are displayed in the most retarded fashion possible.
If they had done "a proper, professional, and serious implentation" as you suggest, then this dung would have never infected our minds.
I find the very same can be said of the company's commercials and several of their products (Access, anyone? That now-missing member of the Office Suite?)
The avatars were born in Bob, noted as the 7th worst product of all time, an open joke as the MS campus, and unfortunately not the dumbest idea ever at Microsoft. Links, in their respective order:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
http://www.pcworld.com/article/125772-3/the_25_worst_tech_products_of_all_time.html
http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/04/clippy_update_now_with_organiz.php
http://blog.tomevslin.com/2007/05/microsoft_memor.html
(yeah, I know how to inline the refs in html, but I prefer to let people clearly see where they're linking to)
(* Pathetic Fucking Search Puppy - Ask for it by name!)
Here's your solution to the $ drain for AV: http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
An earlier poster already mentioned that Avast! did very well with the problem at hand.
I just woke up and realized that you've reminded me that many people may not know where Gibson got the title for "Burning Chrome" - AFAIR, the opening line of the story - I've not read it in years - was, "It was the night we burned Chrome." F-ingA hilarious.
Nichrome (nickel chromium) was used in PROMs - one literally burned through nichrome wire junctions to set logic paths (to open). After that, we all said we burned EPROMs and EEPROMs - just like we burn CD-RWs.
One of my co-workers got the first EPROM burning setup I'd ever seen, for his Apple. We'd spent weeks going over what and how were going to do things with it in anticipation of its budgeting, purchase and arrival. So, I'm off for a few days when the thing arrived. I get back to work, he's beaming from ear to ear - holding his first, newly-burned EPROM. Like an idiot he handed it to me. Why do I say, like an idiot? Because like a supreme idiot, the first thing I did was to remove that little paper-tape cover - obviously, you don't want some jerk's serial label or whatever that was on your motherboard, right? And you could see inside! Especially if you put it under a nice, bright light!
After I got up from the floor, I learned why those beasties were EPROMs as opposed to PROMs. Good times!
And speaking of tight coding - when you mentioned that, I was reminded of this quote:
Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
No sweat on the FORTRAN - anyone who burned ERPOMs is a Real Programmer. Remember:
If you can't do it in FORTRAN, do it in assembly language. If you can't do it in assembly language, it isn't worth doing.
I'll bet these gems are ringing bells.... The rest is here - Enjoy!! :D http://practical-tech.com/entertainment/real-men-dont-use-pascal/