Carly's "time of the month" has lasted for years then. I can assure you that the venerable Bill Hewlett and David Packard are turning over in their graves right now over what she's done to their company. HP used to be a hallmark of quality, especially in the instrumentation field (which is what they started making in their garage to begin with). I have a much harder time associating the rock-solid HP image with instruments that say "Agilent" on the front (come on, people, that's not even a word!!!). Plus, she shut down the Australian calculator research division, which was the other sector where they were the very top quality supplier. Yes, you can still buy HP calculators, but who knows for how long, and future innovation has been shut down completely. So, basically, HP has castrated itself (pun intended) by slicing off the two most solid and respected sectors of its business and has degenerated into merely a supplier of a mediocre product in a highly competitive and volatile market. I swear it's like Carly Fiorina gave the whole company a sex change (and as burly as she is, and with a name like Carlton, I have to wonder if this is something she has personal experience in). Now, instead of being the supplier of big, bad, solid manly instrumentation, they make cute little computers in pretty cases that you buy for your mother. Now excuse me while I continue hoarding calculators.
take a few hundred random people from hick towns who are dumb enough so no one will believe them, capture their DNA, take their DNA and make alien human hybrids, and slowly mix in with the human race over the course of hundreds of years.
The problem was obviously the choice of human subjects. Now all their clones are living in trailer parks, driving beat up old Chevys, and since they discovered beer, have forgotten all about their mission to take over the place.
Perhaps Michael Eisner is actually the lead alien, and Sen. Fritz Hollings is his gay martian lover. They discuss legislation in their seedy love shack orbitting high above the Earth while watching Keanau Reaves movies.
Which is exactly why none of them will bother to complain about the fake crop circles. They already get paid to destroy surplus crops, so Disney is actually just saving them the trouble. Puts a new spin on the supposed problem of world food shortages...
I personally believe that the __property keyword should be adopted by the ANSI C++ standard. There were so many times before I discovered Borland that I thought, for example, "I wish C++ had something like read-only members." Suddenly, I discover this nifty __property keyword that lets me do exactly that, or even better, to cause a read or assignment to execute code. It may not be ideologically pure (a purist will say an assignment will assign and do nothing more), but it is so useful and so in line with the C++ philosophy of hiding complexity, I just think it belongs. AnsiString would be a nice addition to ANSI C++ too.
Knowing how cavalier many companies still are about ignoring good security practices, I wonder if it might be better for them to be paranoid than blissfully ignorant.
If they implement security as well as Microsoft has done with their "Trustworthy Computing" (tm) initiative (or whatever they called that BS), it won't amount to a hill of beans of difference.
but most MS people I know hail win2k as the best microsoft OS ever.
I use UNIX and its clones when I can, but I have to say that when I am forced to use a Microsoft OS, Win2K is refreshingly good. It's still Windows, so there are some design aspects that really bug me still, but it is quite stable and usable otherwise. It's also probably the only decent OS they ever will make, since XP is crap from the UI down and now they are into all of this.NET subscription services and Palladium crap. Win2k just happened to fall into that tiny slot between when MS finally figured out how to make a semi-functional OS and when they got beyond paranoid with their IP. Still, given a choice, I'd much rather use UNIX or Linux.
My company does lots of things, but almost no manufacturing (our local office provides engineering services to the government and military). We also got hit with the Six Sigma marketing buzz, and our stupid (now departed) CEO decided that they needed to initiate the garbage company wide. I've managed to avoid it so far, but I've passed by the conference room occasionally while sessions have been going on, and I would have to say that it would score real close to 10 on the Wank-o-meter. All of the engineers who have been subjected to it have said it's nothing more than good engineering practice that they should have learned in school. But maybe it's good for the administrative/marketing types.
ok lets face it teachers are stuipid, i mean they are teachers, i.e. they couldn't get a real job
Please, please, please tell me that this is a troll. If not, has it ever occurred to you that perhaps the root of your poor educational experience is not that you have had bad teachers, but simply that you are stupid?
a problem of dumb illiterate fucks
Perhaps you feel that being able to spell "31337 h4X0r" constitutes literacy? Whatever your definition is, it obviously does not include a firm grasp of the English language. For all of your ridicule of educators, I certainly hope that you are literate in some other language, because if you are not, I'm afraid I'll have to repeat my assertion that you are stupid.
also proves that GRADES don't mean shit
Despite your stunningly well-constructed argument, I'm not quite sure what it is you believe "proves" this. At face value, it would appear to be simply a convenient argument for someone who is accustomed to receiving poor grades, but still likes to imagine he is somehow intellectually superior. Do you realize that while you sit and whine about how your report cards do not accurately reflect your intelligence, the content of your whining removes all doubt? You are, indeed, a perfect example of the sad, degraded state the world would be in without good teachers. Next time you feel inclined to post, perhaps you could keep your "$.02" to yourself and put it in a piggy bank. You can get a good used grammar book for around $10. I'd leave calculating how many posts you would need to keep to yourself before you could afford a grammar book as an exercise for you to complete on your own, but I don't want to strain your intellect, so I'll offer you this hint: The answer is 500. I'll be looking forward to an intelligent comment from you sometime after your 501st inclination to post.
Yes, but you take my analogy too far. Even when I use RedHat with KDE, I have a console window open and do most of my work there. And I'm not even an old timer (maybe 2.5 - 3 years). The true extent of the analogy is simply that Linux has not been around long enough to be a common heritage to computer systems, just as the latest flash-in-the-pan pop star has not been around long enough to be a common heritage to the music industry.
In completely unrelated news, CD prices went up last year, while disposable income went down. RIAA is considering petitioning certain congressmen to propose a Constitutional ammendment that would require all US Citizens to purchase a certain number of RIAA-sponsored CDs at full retail price every year to address this evil.
Honestly, I don't think that everybody has a God-given right to free music off of the internet, but the reason I personally have not bought many CDs lately is simply that they are so stinkin' expensive, and in most cases, there are only a couple of songs on each CD that I really want. I wuold love to see these $0.99/ea. downloadable music schemes take off. These guys would get lots more of my money if I could selectively download the few songs I want for cheap and then burn a mix CD that I could pop in. Surely that would be better for them than $0, which is what they get from me now -- and I am not a P2P user. Their precious lost revenue is a direct result of their price gouging. If they offer an inexpensive, reliable means of obtaining high-quality legally licensed music on the internet, I think they would see the popularity of P2P decline rapidly. Sure, it wouldn't disappear completely, but true music lovers will stick with the legitimate copies, especially if there is some added value like complete metadata tags or something.
You are, of course, right. I meant UNIX. Saying most software has roots in Linux, which is all of 10 years old, is like saying the music industry has deep roots in the music of N'Sync and Brittney Spears:-)
I can tell you that Elizabeth's younger sister has told two different stories of what happened the night that Elizabeth disappeared.
Not to nitpick, but the spokesman for the police asserted clearly that the younger sister has been consistent in her story from the beginning. The source of the two different stories is most likely the result of the media's tendancy to substitute conjecture when facts are not readily available and they need to get something to press. This is probably more of an indication of bad journalism than an indication that the sister is caught up in some kind of conspiracy or something.
If you've seen any of their "One Degree of Separation" ads in trade magazines recently, a new one features "One degree of separation between your Windows Server Hardcores and your UNIX Zealots," and is a plug for their UNIX integration services. My guess would be that this is exactly why they're there. They don't always like to admit it or make it too overly public, but MS has roots in Linux, just like almost every other software shop that's still alive.
So what's all the fuss about? She looks like a well-groomed, attractive middle-aged woman, but I'm not exactly thinking "babe." Maybe you have to be some lonely, teen-aged 31337 h4X0r to get it or something. Now, if you're looking for a truly HOT older woman, Reba McEntire is much better. Of course, my wife looks a lot like her (except much younger), so maybe I'm just prejudiced. I'm not so particular about women who are nerds. With all of the other good qualities about my wife (including being amazingly hot), I find that it doesn't particularly bother me that she doesn't know the difference between PCI and ISA.
Obviously, he is a previous Windows 9x user, so uptimes of 32 minutes were impressive. In that light, 32 days seems like an eternity. Although, honestly, I don't see what the big deal is about uptime for non-server boxes. I have no problem turning off my computer at work every evening. It's just burning power needlessly. I set my BIOS to start up every morning before I come to work, so when I get here it's already booted. (Sorry, I know this is offtopic, but I'm an engineer, not a mathemetician, so I have only a fundamental grasp of what all these mathematicians are talking about).
Actually, the site itself never actually calls it a laptop. They seem to be pushing it as a "portable workstation." Their tag line is something like "a workstation that you can fold up and take with you" (I'd go look again, but, of course, it's/.'ed now). They seem to be more aware of the fact that this thing is not a laptop than the./ geeks. They even have a shot where they compare it in size, not to a laptop, but to an LCD and full-size keyboard, showing that it takes up less space. Also, the tour says that if you rotate the right screen around, a second person can log in and use it at the same time (I guess you'd have to attach an external KB/mouse or something), which makes it almost more like a portable server or something. Probably a little bit of overkill for your average guy who's taking the old laptop on travel so he can listen to some CDs on the airplane and look important while he taps away at some Word document.
True story: I was taking a Calculus test in college, and one of the problems was to prove the formula for the area of a cone. I made some really silly mistake at the beginning, like using the wrong equation for the line that gets rotated around the axis or something like that, so when I got to the end, I had some shadow of what I was supposed to, but there were some extra terms and garbage. I knew what the correct answer was of course, and since I was about out of time, I just wrote "And then a miracle occurs, and..." then I wrote the correct equation for the area of a cone. Much to my astonishment, I got the test back with a big, fat 100%. I went and looked at the last problem. The teacher had just ticked it off with a check mark. No comment or anything. From then on, I claimed rights to the Miracle Theorem in that class.
I had a beast of one of these in a program I was writing with C++ Builder. It was supposed to parse an output stream from an old computer that describes a waveform and then draw the waveform. I had the code working one day, but then our @#$#@!@ Visual Source Safe (another reason to hate MS) killed all my changes and overwrote the original on my hard drive. I coded it again the next day, and it would display the waveform all tiny and skewed at the bottom of the form. However, if I put in a break point and stepped slowly through the code, it worked beautifully. I spent all day messing with this, then vaguely remembered something from the day before. The string I was parsing was nested kind of deep within the object that contained it, so to save some trouble, I had copied it to a temporary string and just manipulated that instead. The second day I had just done some cutting and pasting and used the original nested pointer in every case. So, I tried copying it to a temp string again. It worked flawlessly after that. Go figure.
Go back and read the guy's comments. They are filled with charged rhetoric (Gestapo, tyrrany...) and a general contempt for the entire political process. It is not a bold and courageous speech laying bare the flaws of the institution. That would make it worthwhile. It's mostly random, spiteful flames. Apparently, his biggest complaint is that he does not have the disproportionately large influence on the direction of the conuntry he feels others have (he only gets one vote, as if he deserves more than one). Certainly, he has a right to flame and complain as a citizen, but I was offering him an alternative that might make all of us happier. If America sucks so bad, he basically has three options. He can try to do something to make a difference (voting is the very bare minimum for a responsible citizen), he can sit and brood about it or he can leave. Poorly spelled rants on Slashdot basically amount to brooding. That, apparently, has not made him any happier and he hasn't responded to the suggestions that he could do something about it, so I invited him to leave. I'm not saying that we should force him out of the country, just that if he thinks America sucks so bad, he might be happier somewhere else, and I would definitely be happy to show him the door.
All I can say is, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Seriously, if you hate America that much, one of the precious freedoms you enjoy that many others in the world do not is the freedom to leave. I for one won't mourn your departure or that of others like you. Now, if only Alec Baldwin would make good on his promise to leave the country if Bush were elected...
So when my only two choices are two guys whom only got into that place becuase of the influence and permission of extreme wealth
You've got lots of choices when you vote. There are more than two political parties in this country, and there are lots of independent candidates.
I get one tiny little input in the form of a punch card
You mean they only gave you one vote? Those conspiring jerks, how dare they?!?! See your later point about Florida, which was decided by a margin numerically smaller than some high school elections. Yes, your vote can and does make a difference. Even the largest landslide is only the culmination of many individual votes. If the politicians did not need the individual votes of the citizens, they wouldn't waste their time and money campaigning and bombarding you with bad commercials.
There is a reason the majority of americans no longer vote
Yeah, it's called laziness.
Not to mention flushing their electoral votes down the toilet when the a republic dominated Supreme court appoints our president.
Get over yourself. First, the Supreme Court is not exactly the John Birch Society. If you take the time to look at some cases, you will find that the Justices do not vote in blocks along party lines. Their appointed term is until they get tired of it or do something really bad, so they can afford to vote their consciences. In this case, they did exactly what the court is supposed to do: they brought final resolution to a divisive issue to ensure the continued and uninterrupted operation of American business. Furthermore, every re-count of the votes, including an independent one performed by a media-sponsored group (hint: the media tends to lean a little liberal--see Slashdot) confirmed that Bush had indeed legitimately won Florida's electoral votes. As for the issue if more people intended to vote for Gore, all I can say is that if you're too stupid to read the directions, you're vote probably shouldn't count anyway. Some Republicans had a gripe that some voters in the more conservative panhandle may have been dissuaded from voting by the media's premature awarding of Florida to Gore, to which I say the same thing. If you're too lazy to get up and vote, and if you're stupid enough to believe everything you see on the news, you're vote shouldn't count anyway. If you're really that bothered by the system, run for office or do something productive about it. Complaining on Slashdot that "nobody asked me" will get you exactly as far as the Slashdot database.
Those fingerprint cards are given to the parents, not retained by the school or the police.
You naive fool! Don't you know the mothership scans ALL of those fingerprints from orbit even as they're taken and then beams them to the underground storage servers 10 miles beneath Virginia for backup? That way, the individual "handlers" who give the President and the congress their instructions always have it available via their telepathic workstations.
Slashdot Mirror
Carly's "time of the month" has lasted for years then. I can assure you that the venerable Bill Hewlett and David Packard are turning over in their graves right now over what she's done to their company. HP used to be a hallmark of quality, especially in the instrumentation field (which is what they started making in their garage to begin with). I have a much harder time associating the rock-solid HP image with instruments that say "Agilent" on the front (come on, people, that's not even a word!!!). Plus, she shut down the Australian calculator research division, which was the other sector where they were the very top quality supplier. Yes, you can still buy HP calculators, but who knows for how long, and future innovation has been shut down completely. So, basically, HP has castrated itself (pun intended) by slicing off the two most solid and respected sectors of its business and has degenerated into merely a supplier of a mediocre product in a highly competitive and volatile market. I swear it's like Carly Fiorina gave the whole company a sex change (and as burly as she is, and with a name like Carlton, I have to wonder if this is something she has personal experience in). Now, instead of being the supplier of big, bad, solid manly instrumentation, they make cute little computers in pretty cases that you buy for your mother. Now excuse me while I continue hoarding calculators.
Perhaps Michael Eisner is actually the lead alien, and Sen. Fritz Hollings is his gay martian lover. They discuss legislation in their seedy love shack orbitting high above the Earth while watching Keanau Reaves movies.
Which is exactly why none of them will bother to complain about the fake crop circles. They already get paid to destroy surplus crops, so Disney is actually just saving them the trouble. Puts a new spin on the supposed problem of world food shortages...
I personally believe that the __property keyword should be adopted by the ANSI C++ standard. There were so many times before I discovered Borland that I thought, for example, "I wish C++ had something like read-only members." Suddenly, I discover this nifty __property keyword that lets me do exactly that, or even better, to cause a read or assignment to execute code. It may not be ideologically pure (a purist will say an assignment will assign and do nothing more), but it is so useful and so in line with the C++ philosophy of hiding complexity, I just think it belongs. AnsiString would be a nice addition to ANSI C++ too.
My company does lots of things, but almost no manufacturing (our local office provides engineering services to the government and military). We also got hit with the Six Sigma marketing buzz, and our stupid (now departed) CEO decided that they needed to initiate the garbage company wide. I've managed to avoid it so far, but I've passed by the conference room occasionally while sessions have been going on, and I would have to say that it would score real close to 10 on the Wank-o-meter. All of the engineers who have been subjected to it have said it's nothing more than good engineering practice that they should have learned in school. But maybe it's good for the administrative/marketing types.
And still, I get moderated as a "troll." I suppose the illiterate must band together if they are to accomplish anything.
Yes, but you take my analogy too far. Even when I use RedHat with KDE, I have a console window open and do most of my work there. And I'm not even an old timer (maybe 2.5 - 3 years). The true extent of the analogy is simply that Linux has not been around long enough to be a common heritage to computer systems, just as the latest flash-in-the-pan pop star has not been around long enough to be a common heritage to the music industry.
Honestly, I don't think that everybody has a God-given right to free music off of the internet, but the reason I personally have not bought many CDs lately is simply that they are so stinkin' expensive, and in most cases, there are only a couple of songs on each CD that I really want. I wuold love to see these $0.99/ea. downloadable music schemes take off. These guys would get lots more of my money if I could selectively download the few songs I want for cheap and then burn a mix CD that I could pop in. Surely that would be better for them than $0, which is what they get from me now -- and I am not a P2P user. Their precious lost revenue is a direct result of their price gouging. If they offer an inexpensive, reliable means of obtaining high-quality legally licensed music on the internet, I think they would see the popularity of P2P decline rapidly. Sure, it wouldn't disappear completely, but true music lovers will stick with the legitimate copies, especially if there is some added value like complete metadata tags or something.
You are, of course, right. I meant UNIX. Saying most software has roots in Linux, which is all of 10 years old, is like saying the music industry has deep roots in the music of N'Sync and Brittney Spears :-)
If you've seen any of their "One Degree of Separation" ads in trade magazines recently, a new one features "One degree of separation between your Windows Server Hardcores and your UNIX Zealots," and is a plug for their UNIX integration services. My guess would be that this is exactly why they're there. They don't always like to admit it or make it too overly public, but MS has roots in Linux, just like almost every other software shop that's still alive.
So what's all the fuss about? She looks like a well-groomed, attractive middle-aged woman, but I'm not exactly thinking "babe." Maybe you have to be some lonely, teen-aged 31337 h4X0r to get it or something. Now, if you're looking for a truly HOT older woman, Reba McEntire is much better. Of course, my wife looks a lot like her (except much younger), so maybe I'm just prejudiced. I'm not so particular about women who are nerds. With all of the other good qualities about my wife (including being amazingly hot), I find that it doesn't particularly bother me that she doesn't know the difference between PCI and ISA.
Obviously, he is a previous Windows 9x user, so uptimes of 32 minutes were impressive. In that light, 32 days seems like an eternity. Although, honestly, I don't see what the big deal is about uptime for non-server boxes. I have no problem turning off my computer at work every evening. It's just burning power needlessly. I set my BIOS to start up every morning before I come to work, so when I get here it's already booted. (Sorry, I know this is offtopic, but I'm an engineer, not a mathemetician, so I have only a fundamental grasp of what all these mathematicians are talking about).
Actually, the site itself never actually calls it a laptop. They seem to be pushing it as a "portable workstation." Their tag line is something like "a workstation that you can fold up and take with you" (I'd go look again, but, of course, it's /.'ed now). They seem to be more aware of the fact that this thing is not a laptop than the ./ geeks. They even have a shot where they compare it in size, not to a laptop, but to an LCD and full-size keyboard, showing that it takes up less space. Also, the tour says that if you rotate the right screen around, a second person can log in and use it at the same time (I guess you'd have to attach an external KB/mouse or something), which makes it almost more like a portable server or something. Probably a little bit of overkill for your average guy who's taking the old laptop on travel so he can listen to some CDs on the airplane and look important while he taps away at some Word document.
I had a beast of one of these in a program I was writing with C++ Builder. It was supposed to parse an output stream from an old computer that describes a waveform and then draw the waveform. I had the code working one day, but then our @#$#@!@ Visual Source Safe (another reason to hate MS) killed all my changes and overwrote the original on my hard drive. I coded it again the next day, and it would display the waveform all tiny and skewed at the bottom of the form. However, if I put in a break point and stepped slowly through the code, it worked beautifully. I spent all day messing with this, then vaguely remembered something from the day before. The string I was parsing was nested kind of deep within the object that contained it, so to save some trouble, I had copied it to a temporary string and just manipulated that instead. The second day I had just done some cutting and pasting and used the original nested pointer in every case. So, I tried copying it to a temp string again. It worked flawlessly after that. Go figure.
Go back and read the guy's comments. They are filled with charged rhetoric (Gestapo, tyrrany...) and a general contempt for the entire political process. It is not a bold and courageous speech laying bare the flaws of the institution. That would make it worthwhile. It's mostly random, spiteful flames. Apparently, his biggest complaint is that he does not have the disproportionately large influence on the direction of the conuntry he feels others have (he only gets one vote, as if he deserves more than one). Certainly, he has a right to flame and complain as a citizen, but I was offering him an alternative that might make all of us happier. If America sucks so bad, he basically has three options. He can try to do something to make a difference (voting is the very bare minimum for a responsible citizen), he can sit and brood about it or he can leave. Poorly spelled rants on Slashdot basically amount to brooding. That, apparently, has not made him any happier and he hasn't responded to the suggestions that he could do something about it, so I invited him to leave. I'm not saying that we should force him out of the country, just that if he thinks America sucks so bad, he might be happier somewhere else, and I would definitely be happy to show him the door.
All I can say is, don't let the door hit you on the way out. Seriously, if you hate America that much, one of the precious freedoms you enjoy that many others in the world do not is the freedom to leave. I for one won't mourn your departure or that of others like you. Now, if only Alec Baldwin would make good on his promise to leave the country if Bush were elected...