I'm neither an Apple nor a Be user (well, I use Macs at school, and they piss me off), but I think that Jobs is excellent for the company. Sure, he's a prick with a giant ego. That's a given. But he's also a guy with technological vision. He's not very good at business decisions, as far as I can tell (e.g. the thing with licencing Mac OS), but he's got cool ideas. He realizes that having a computer in pretty colors with an OS that's only marginally less shitty than Windows will sell absurdly well. It's true that Mac hardware is better than x86, at least in the CPU, but nobody really cares about that except nerdy types like us. No, what people care about is nifty-looking Pyrite and Tangelo and Puce and Cherimoya and whatever other weirdo colors they have, wrapping up non-rectilinear computers with optical mouse that are one big button. And nobody thought of doing that, or at least didn't do it right, until the iMac. Even the original Mac had kinda cool design, considering it was the 80s. So grandmas the world over are now deciding they can use a computer because it looks cute as a button, even though in fact Mac OS is no longer particularly easy to use or stable, and the computers are not especially well-priced. And us nerds all want them Cinema Displays.
My IBM typewriter crashes. I'm not kidding. This is a $900 Selectric which I just got fixed up so I could fill out college apps. I like it, but the Return key broke, so it goes to the end of the line instead of the beginning.
Because they want to protect freedom of speech. They didn't become librarians because they wanted to hit people with rulers. Librarians probably mostly love knowledge and freedom of thought. Not because they wanted to sit behind desks and peer over their half-rims.
That's ridiculous. A monopoly on a product is totally different from originating an idea. Nobody's saying the Wachowskis aren't allowed to make an action movie. However, they owe a big debt to the Hong Kong action movie genre, and they should acknowledge it. And using Hong Kong movie actors is one way (Michelle Yeoh's Malaysian actually, but she's been in plenty of Hong Kong movies).
Re:Slight (critical) correction
on
E=MC
·
· Score: 2
Sorry, you're wrong. There is no 2. The guy was right. This equation comes from the fact that e^(i) = cos() + isin(). Therefore, since cos() = -1 and sin() = 0, e^(i) = -1, or restated, e^(i) + 1 = 0.
Re:how a terrorist could deliver a nuke
on
'Thirteen Days'
·
· Score: 2
Yes, you're right. Also (I just got back from seeing Traffic), think about the ease with which drugs are smuggled into the country. If somebody put a nuke in a truck, the way Timothy McVeigh did with fertilizer, think how big the explosion could be. Sure, it wouldn't have the altitude necessary for a really wide blast radius, but it would still be plenty potent. Bring in a couple of these, and you could blow up D.C. and New York, if you felt like it.
Oh my god, Becky, look at her butt.
It is so big!
She looks like one of those rap guys' girlfriends.
Who understands those rap guys?
They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute.
I mean, her butt! It's just so big!
I can't believe it; it's so round.
It's just out there.
I mean, it's gross.
Look, she's just so -- black.
I like big butts and I cannot lie
You other brothas can't deny...
In fact, we voted for the idea (it was a state ballot initiative, sponsored by, you guessed it, the power companies). Well, not we, because I'm a minor, so I can't vote. And even if I could vote, I would have voted against it. But the fact remains, Californians have themselves to blame for the fiasco, and I'm too weak to refrain from pointing out that I called it. Lessee, there's an oligopoly on power. Power is a necessity. Even my retarded Econ teacher would be able to tell you that that's an inelastic market, and that people will more or less pay whatever they have to. That means that the corporations (Hey! Guess what? They're int he business of making money!) will do whatever they feel like if they think it'll make them some bucks. They're not nice guys. They're businessmen. They really couldn't care less if your Linux box was about to break the record for uptime. They want some money, and they wanna do what they wanna do to get it.
No, Microsoft bought Spyglass Mosaic and turned it into IE, incorporating version numbers. Sort of similar to how Word jumped from, I think, version 2 to version 5, because that's what WordPerfect was on.
OK, here's an example. Darwin's finches. They're birds that live in the Galapagos Islands, and there are several varieties, and they evolve visibly over the course of small numbers of years. You can go there, and then return ten years later, and they will be different. Not enough for ya? OK then, here are whole new species: Oenothera gigas, a variant of the evening primrose. Here's what the talk.origins FAQ has to say about it (http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-speciation.ht ml):
While studying the genetics of the evening primrose, Oenothera lamarckiana, de Vries (1905) found an unusual variant among his plants. O. lamarckiana has a chromosome number of 2N = 14. The variant had a chromosome number of 2N = 28. He found that he was unable to breed this variant with O. lamarckiana. He named this new species O. gigas.
Still not enough? Then how come you still believe in gravity? After all,
And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.
Joshua 10:13
Even if you accept the circumlocutory explanation that the Bible isn't saying that the sun orbits the earth, but that its position is just relative to the earth, the fact still remains that the Bible claims that the sun stopped. This is not possible. If that were true, then without the centripetal force acting on the sun (or on Earth), they would have crashed into each other. Clearly, they did not. If your faith in the absolute literal truth in the Bible is insufficient to make you not believe in gravity, then how come evolution is different? Both are theories, with a whole lot of supporting evidence. Note that "theory" does not mean "guess" or "hypothesis." A theory is a hypothesis with tons of backup.
To digress a little, I noticed that your accusation of an ad hominem argument was directly preceded by an ad hominem argument. Slick there, buddy.
I didn't say it was a Danish company. How do you know there aren't any Swedes working there? Are you saying Danes are racist? No, seriously, I'm sorry I confused the Swedes and Norwegians. Sorry. I couldn't resist that one. I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings. Anyway, if you noticed, that part of my post was meant to be a little humorous.
OK, you're right about the BEEP. I'm sorry. But I don't think that peope would care. Star Wars never pretended to be hard science fiction. They didn't try to explain anything else; they ust magicked it away by saying it happened in a galaxy far, far away.
Because in the language we speak, lego is a noun, not a trademark. Do you say, "I need a Kleenex® facial tissue?" No, you say, "I need a kleenex." Certain trademarked words have become part of the language, and that's just too damn bad for the cmpanies that used to own them. I ain't havin' no Swedish executive tellin' me how t' talk. (Disclaimer: I got nothing against Swedes.)
BEEP! You're wrong! The right thing to do would have been to ignore the issue and leave it to the viewer's imagination. When you read Ender's Game, did you care how the ansible worked? No, because it's not relevant. Magic is much cooler that obviously-false pseudoscience.
That's not true. I'm 17 now, so I wasn't even born then. In my opinion, the first two were good, and Jedi sucked. Naturally, Episode 1 sucked, too. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. The first two, and especially the first one, were successful retellings of hero myths. The third one had those goddamn Ewoks, and the rest was stupid too. Phantom Menace did have cool effects at least, which my spoiled ass thinks the first three did not (although they made it much worse in the Special Editions), but that didn't make up for crappy acting and writing. (And what was up with that retarded pseudoscientific explanation for the Force?)
At first when I saw this headline I thought the article was about whether to call Compuserve CS (CompuServe) or CIS (Compuserve Information System), which is what it used to be called.
Only if you have a tech degree. If you have a liberal arts degree, your thinking skills are never out of date. You can always learn a new programming language, but you can't always learn how to think and work well.
But...but...BBSpot isn't funny! I mean, I guess it's mildly amusing, but it's shoddily-produced and sophomoric, whereas The Onion is sophisticatedly-produced and sophomoric. But the reason The Onion is great is that at the same time it is immature, it is also intelligent. And its writers have a fine ability to imitate the style of a newspaper article, and they know about current and past events. BBSpot, on the other hand, suffers from poor editing and uninspired humor.
OK, in that case I agree with you. Those are smart ideas, and the executable-directory one is easily accomplished by just building it into RPM and/or DEB.
I disagree that mainstrem distros shouldn't have devel tools. Although this is a shame, at least right now, even Joe Sixpack sometimes needs to compile a tarball. So at the least he needs gcc, make, and the various necessary libraries. I don't see this changing too soon, either, because there's no standard binary package format, and even though RPMs and DEBs are commonly available, they aren't always.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm neither an Apple nor a Be user (well, I use Macs at school, and they piss me off), but I think that Jobs is excellent for the company. Sure, he's a prick with a giant ego. That's a given. But he's also a guy with technological vision. He's not very good at business decisions, as far as I can tell (e.g. the thing with licencing Mac OS), but he's got cool ideas. He realizes that having a computer in pretty colors with an OS that's only marginally less shitty than Windows will sell absurdly well. It's true that Mac hardware is better than x86, at least in the CPU, but nobody really cares about that except nerdy types like us. No, what people care about is nifty-looking Pyrite and Tangelo and Puce and Cherimoya and whatever other weirdo colors they have, wrapping up non-rectilinear computers with optical mouse that are one big button. And nobody thought of doing that, or at least didn't do it right, until the iMac. Even the original Mac had kinda cool design, considering it was the 80s. So grandmas the world over are now deciding they can use a computer because it looks cute as a button, even though in fact Mac OS is no longer particularly easy to use or stable, and the computers are not especially well-priced. And us nerds all want them Cinema Displays.
My IBM typewriter crashes. I'm not kidding. This is a $900 Selectric which I just got fixed up so I could fill out college apps. I like it, but the Return key broke, so it goes to the end of the line instead of the beginning.
Because they want to protect freedom of speech. They didn't become librarians because they wanted to hit people with rulers. Librarians probably mostly love knowledge and freedom of thought. Not because they wanted to sit behind desks and peer over their half-rims.
I'll ignore the anti-Semitic remark and agree with you by pointing out that Casanova was a librarian.
That's ridiculous. A monopoly on a product is totally different from originating an idea. Nobody's saying the Wachowskis aren't allowed to make an action movie. However, they owe a big debt to the Hong Kong action movie genre, and they should acknowledge it. And using Hong Kong movie actors is one way (Michelle Yeoh's Malaysian actually, but she's been in plenty of Hong Kong movies).
Sorry, you're wrong. There is no 2. The guy was right. This equation comes from the fact that e^(i) = cos() + isin(). Therefore, since cos() = -1 and sin() = 0, e^(i) = -1, or restated, e^(i) + 1 = 0.
Yes, you're right. Also (I just got back from seeing Traffic), think about the ease with which drugs are smuggled into the country. If somebody put a nuke in a truck, the way Timothy McVeigh did with fertilizer, think how big the explosion could be. Sure, it wouldn't have the altitude necessary for a really wide blast radius, but it would still be plenty potent. Bring in a couple of these, and you could blow up D.C. and New York, if you felt like it.
They changed it now. Interestingly, they did this by replacing it, not by adding an UPDATED: thingy on the end.
Or was it...
Oh my god, Becky, look at her butt.
It is so big!
She looks like one of those rap guys' girlfriends.
Who understands those rap guys?
They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute.
I mean, her butt! It's just so big!
I can't believe it; it's so round.
It's just out there.
I mean, it's gross.
Look, she's just so -- black.
I like big butts and I cannot lie
You other brothas can't deny...
("Baby Got Back," by Sir Mix-A-Lot
In fact, we voted for the idea (it was a state ballot initiative, sponsored by, you guessed it, the power companies). Well, not we, because I'm a minor, so I can't vote. And even if I could vote, I would have voted against it. But the fact remains, Californians have themselves to blame for the fiasco, and I'm too weak to refrain from pointing out that I called it. Lessee, there's an oligopoly on power. Power is a necessity. Even my retarded Econ teacher would be able to tell you that that's an inelastic market, and that people will more or less pay whatever they have to. That means that the corporations (Hey! Guess what? They're int he business of making money!) will do whatever they feel like if they think it'll make them some bucks. They're not nice guys. They're businessmen. They really couldn't care less if your Linux box was about to break the record for uptime. They want some money, and they wanna do what they wanna do to get it.
No, Microsoft bought Spyglass Mosaic and turned it into IE, incorporating version numbers. Sort of similar to how Word jumped from, I think, version 2 to version 5, because that's what WordPerfect was on.
Yeah, that's because kernel.org has a fat-ass pipe. Most sites don't have 100Mbit line. And even still, kernel.org is a little slow to respond.
Still not enough? Then how come you still believe in gravity? After all,
Even if you accept the circumlocutory explanation that the Bible isn't saying that the sun orbits the earth, but that its position is just relative to the earth, the fact still remains that the Bible claims that the sun stopped. This is not possible. If that were true, then without the centripetal force acting on the sun (or on Earth), they would have crashed into each other. Clearly, they did not. If your faith in the absolute literal truth in the Bible is insufficient to make you not believe in gravity, then how come evolution is different? Both are theories, with a whole lot of supporting evidence. Note that "theory" does not mean "guess" or "hypothesis." A theory is a hypothesis with tons of backup.To digress a little, I noticed that your accusation of an ad hominem argument was directly preceded by an ad hominem argument. Slick there, buddy.
Colonel Sandurz: Out of order? Fuck!
Dark Helmet: Even in the future nothing works!
I didn't say it was a Danish company. How do you know there aren't any Swedes working there? Are you saying Danes are racist? No, seriously, I'm sorry I confused the Swedes and Norwegians. Sorry. I couldn't resist that one. I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings. Anyway, if you noticed, that part of my post was meant to be a little humorous.
OK, you're right about the BEEP. I'm sorry. But I don't think that peope would care. Star Wars never pretended to be hard science fiction. They didn't try to explain anything else; they ust magicked it away by saying it happened in a galaxy far, far away.
Because in the language we speak, lego is a noun, not a trademark. Do you say, "I need a Kleenex® facial tissue?" No, you say, "I need a kleenex." Certain trademarked words have become part of the language, and that's just too damn bad for the cmpanies that used to own them. I ain't havin' no Swedish executive tellin' me how t' talk. (Disclaimer: I got nothing against Swedes.)
BEEP! You're wrong! The right thing to do would have been to ignore the issue and leave it to the viewer's imagination. When you read Ender's Game, did you care how the ansible worked? No, because it's not relevant. Magic is much cooler that obviously-false pseudoscience.
That's not true. I'm 17 now, so I wasn't even born then. In my opinion, the first two were good, and Jedi sucked. Naturally, Episode 1 sucked, too. It has nothing to do with nostalgia. The first two, and especially the first one, were successful retellings of hero myths. The third one had those goddamn Ewoks, and the rest was stupid too. Phantom Menace did have cool effects at least, which my spoiled ass thinks the first three did not (although they made it much worse in the Special Editions), but that didn't make up for crappy acting and writing. (And what was up with that retarded pseudoscientific explanation for the Force?)
At first when I saw this headline I thought the article was about whether to call Compuserve CS (CompuServe) or CIS (Compuserve Information System), which is what it used to be called.
Only if you have a tech degree. If you have a liberal arts degree, your thinking skills are never out of date. You can always learn a new programming language, but you can't always learn how to think and work well.
Um, yes. Why?
But...but...BBSpot isn't funny! I mean, I guess it's mildly amusing, but it's shoddily-produced and sophomoric, whereas The Onion is sophisticatedly-produced and sophomoric. But the reason The Onion is great is that at the same time it is immature, it is also intelligent. And its writers have a fine ability to imitate the style of a newspaper article, and they know about current and past events. BBSpot, on the other hand, suffers from poor editing and uninspired humor.
OK, in that case I agree with you. Those are smart ideas, and the executable-directory one is easily accomplished by just building it into RPM and/or DEB.
I disagree that mainstrem distros shouldn't have devel tools. Although this is a shame, at least right now, even Joe Sixpack sometimes needs to compile a tarball. So at the least he needs gcc, make, and the various necessary libraries. I don't see this changing too soon, either, because there's no standard binary package format, and even though RPMs and DEBs are commonly available, they aren't always.