File under "Possibly Apocryphal", but...
on
Cube House
·
· Score: 1
During the 60s and 70s, my father worked as a low-level data processing guy at the then-in-NJ headquarters of a very prominent non-profit organization. If you're male, you may have scouted them out as a channel for interesting after-school activities during your youth.
Anyhow, the last manager he had (before the organization packed its bags and moved to Texas) had been left without a proper office because of lack of seniority and a space crunch. His response to this situation was to cordon off part of the cube floor and build, with year-end budget pork, a house. Complete with a fancy front door, a mailbox, siding (not sure about the material), windows and flower boxes.
My father told me it was still there the day that they all packed up their desks and left the building for good.
I think it's pathetic that you can post a high and mighty message like that without knowing the difference between populous, an adjective, and populace, a noun.
I mean, being high and mighty is OK sometimes, but at least make sure you've got your fly zipped...
I don't know Japanese, so I thought it was pretty cool. Certainly cooler (and less common) than yet another grumpy hater who's got to have the last word...why couldn't you just take your Funny mod and call it a night?
You want real damn baseball, you go to your hometown minor league club.
Preach it.
I've been a New York Mets fan for 20 years, but I've sworn off consciously giving any money to MLB in the wake of 1) the threatened strike and 2) the abusive strongarm bullshit that the Mets pulled on their most prominent fan site last summer.
The New Jersey Jackals play in a stadium 10 minutes from my house. Parking is $2 (Mets: $10). Box seats four rows off the third base line are $8 (Mets: N/A. Those seats aren't available for public purchase, i.e. "you gotta know someone"). A hot dog is $1.75 (Mets: $4.50. And the last one I had was cold, for God's sake).
Tired of overpaid, prima donna athletes? The Jackals' best pitcher last year recently informed them that he won't be available to pitch at the start of this season...because he took a job teaching high school science in upstate NY, and he has to finish the school year. You can't help but cheer for these guys.
Last, but not least, the concessions sell good beer at normal bar prices. What's not to like? I'm getting myself all worked up for the Northeast League season just by typing this.
Mets fandom is a hard habit to break, and I'll probably still listen to some games on the radio or catch some of the relatively few still available on free TV. But I'm not buying any MLB tickets this year...ditto merchandise. And I cancelled Fox Sports NY from my cable company.
If you're a MLB fan and you live near a minor league team, do yourself (and the minor league players) a favor and check them out. It's a whole different scene, and you don't know what you're missing.
Really, who wants to watch...(snip)... a game with zero strategy and zero excitement?
I was right there with you in your criticism of MLB (the organization) until you demonstrated a total lack of understanding of MLB (the game).
Excitement is a subjective thing and difficult to debate, but baseball is the most strategy-oriented of any of the four major sports, and you can take that to the bank.
There are a dozen variables that can change on every single pitch. There's a reason why the "excitement" comes in short spurts between long moments of seeming inactivity -- there's a chess match going on during those pauses.
How many outs? Who's up next? Who's on the bench? Who's on base? Who's available in the bullpen? Are they warmed up? What was the last pitch? Have the team's play signals (those funny arm motions) been compromised? How well does the guy in left field throw? Could he nail the second base runner at the plate on a hit to left? Will the runners go with the pitch? I could go on.
How you could be a sports photographer of any description and not see that is beyond me. Or maybe you do get it, and don't see fit to refer to any of it as strategy...in which case you're just wrong. But it's OK to be wrong; this is America.
Fair enough. It doesn't specifically spell out that he only became aware of it a year ago. But given the journalistic tone, the fact that his entrepreneurial gears started cranking after he installed the software, and not after some hypothetical earlier encounter with the concept, it's not an unreasonable inference to make.
"About a year ago, Burnett downloaded a couple of software programs onto his personal computers that seek to tap surplus computing power: SETI@Home and the United Devices Cancer Research Project."
Let me get this straight. This guy is the CTO of a major PC manufacturer, and he only became aware of SETI@Home (i.e. distributed computing) in late 2001? What's wrong with this picture?
"It will have autonomic software, allowing it to monitor itself for hardware breakdowns or lack of capacity. Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration."
I'd like to announce to the U.S. Government (and any other interested parties) that my completed, functioning human brain is available immediately to begin work on these tasks for the relatively low price of $200M. Software not included; serious inquiries only.
I've got machines all over the place, and have long fantasized about setting up a cluster for the fun of it. I've read a little about Beowulf and one or two other open source clustering technologies, but have never had the gumption to crack the books and set one up. Mostly, I think, because I'm not sure what I'd do with it when it was ready.
Would anyone care to post a 2-3 paragraph summary of what Joe PC Hobbyist (e.g. someone like me, with many semi-obsolete PCs lying around the house) might be able to do with the CLIC software? Would it only be able to run applications written for CLIC (oh.), or would the cluster behave like one giant, amalgamated Mandrake box (cool!) ?
"Your" right! How typically arrogant and imperialist of us. As Americans, we must be especially conscious of our status as the lone superpower and make efforts to avoid imposing announcements about our TV schedule on other cultures.
MLB.com is a cheez-whiz site. The news stories and other features are all written by staff writers who are paid by MLB.com, and it shows in the quality of the journalism. Everything is sugarcoated and refined, with any nasty pieces of controversy neatly filtered from the final product. You can read the columns, but don't bother looking for any opinion pieces, because the only opinions expressed on the site (outside of the heavily moderated fan forums) are those approved by MLB, Inc.
Are you wondering why those two players from the same team appeared to be shouting/shoving at each other in the dugout? Don't expect to find the answer in MLB.com's coverage of the game -- if you rely on that, you won't even know that it happened. Same with the Canseco/Caminiti steroid allegations that made a huge splash earlier this year. On planet MLB.com, those things didn't take place.
"A supper site that meets all baseball fan needs"? Maybe if you're, like, 6 years old. At my age, though, I'd like to see the whole story.
MetsOnline.net provided that if you were a Mets fan, like I was. The operator, Bryan Hoch, founded the site as a 14-year-old high school student in 1996. In 1996, MLB was ignorant of technology, never mind the Internet. A friend who worked for a satellite TV provider tells me while the NFL would send over a database, MLB submitted their annual game schedule information on handwritten spreadsheets. MLB.com, meanwhile, belonged to a law firm. Mets.com was a porn site. No, I'm not kidding. It really was -- I know, because I went there while trying to find a Mets site in 1996.
MetsOnline.net was a beautiful thing. Hoch administered the site and, over the course of the next 6 years, developed into a competent sports journalist. The Mets gave him a press pass, for crying out loud. He was part of the team's press corps, and the stories he ran on his site were straight, hard reporting. The site grew to be very popular.
Consquently, though, it was becoming a very expensive hobby. The hosting charges were $hundreds per month, and Hoch began attempting to defray the cost by accepting PayPal donations and selling MetsOnline.net t-shirts and caps. Was he in violation of trademark law? Yeah, probably.
MLB's response to this violation, however, was completely out of proportion. Rather than contact him through the team (with which he already had a working relationship) or ask him to stop selling merchandise, they instead whipped out the big lawyer guns and ordered him to shut down the site and transfer the domain name to them within 5 calendar days. There was no room for discussion or negotiation; Hoch's only recourse was to secure legal counsel and fight (a tall financial order for a 20-year-old college student).
MLB was absolutely within its legal rights. They were also a bunch of bullying shitheads about the way they safeguarded those rights. This is not a black and white issue, as the NFL rep's quote illustrated. MLB chose to make it a black and white issue, though, and took a premeditated, hostile action against over 15,000 of its fans (and one especially hardworking one, in particular).
They do not deserve your understanding or favorable legal interpretation. They deserve only your scorn, and if you're still supporting MLB or any of its teams with your money (by attending games, buying merchandise or subscribing to pay sports channels for the sake of watching their games), you are a sucker.
What about the Oort Cloud? Shouldn't that count as part of the solar system? It's held in place by the Sun's gravity, if only barely, so I would think it should. If memory serves, Voy1 won't reach that for another 100,000 years.
There's something a little subversive about clusters of technophiles, scattered across the planet, having synchronized gatherings in chain restaurants and bars. Maybe next time, we should ask to have them in their basements.
"Welcome to Nerd Club. The first rule of Nerd Club is, you do not talk about Nerd Club."
His name is Robert Malda... His name is Robert Malda... His name is Robert Malda... His name is Robert Malda...
>And what are you going to do in a RECORD STORE? >At least pick a restaurant, bar, or book store >where people can talk casually without weird >looks by the owner.
One of our choices was a bowling alley, for chrissakes.
The "Newark-Jersey City" meetup wound up being located in Parsippany, a suburban enclave about 20 miles west of either of those cities. And, I might add, smack in the middle of an adjacent Meetup territory, namely "Northern New Jersey".
I don't have much to add to jcr's comment, but I wanted to voice some solidarity before the unreasoning, relativist "anything can be art" crowd starts piling on.
Slashdot Mirror
Lame tinkerers with way too much time
I'll bet someone once characterized a young Leonardo daVinci in that manner...
This season was easily the best Trek since DS9,
:)
Faint praise, there.
and possibly one of the best Trek seasons of any of the series.
Whoa! Let's not get crazy. It's been good. But I'd still take any of the later TNG/DS9 seasons over this one.
he should have his own fucking topic!
It would be cool to see a little "Kenhead" icon at the top of the page.
"Ooh! Ken story!" *scroll scroll scroll*
Re-Volt was always a lot of fun.
During the 60s and 70s, my father worked as a low-level data processing guy at the then-in-NJ headquarters of a very prominent non-profit organization. If you're male, you may have scouted them out as a channel for interesting after-school activities during your youth.
Anyhow, the last manager he had (before the organization packed its bags and moved to Texas) had been left without a proper office because of lack of seniority and a space crunch. His response to this situation was to cordon off part of the cube floor and build, with year-end budget pork, a house. Complete with a fancy front door, a mailbox, siding (not sure about the material), windows and flower boxes.
My father told me it was still there the day that they all packed up their desks and left the building for good.
You must be a serious hoot at parties. Ever thought about going into entertainment?
I think it's pathetic that you can post a high and mighty message like that without knowing the difference between populous, an adjective, and populace, a noun.
I mean, being high and mighty is OK sometimes, but at least make sure you've got your fly zipped...
You're so cool.
I don't know Japanese, so I thought it was pretty cool. Certainly cooler (and less common) than yet another grumpy hater who's got to have the last word...why couldn't you just take your Funny mod and call it a night?
You want real damn baseball, you go to your hometown minor league club.
Preach it.
I've been a New York Mets fan for 20 years, but I've sworn off consciously giving any money to MLB in the wake of 1) the threatened strike and 2) the abusive strongarm bullshit that the Mets pulled on their most prominent fan site last summer.
The New Jersey Jackals play in a stadium 10 minutes from my house. Parking is $2 (Mets: $10). Box seats four rows off the third base line are $8 (Mets: N/A. Those seats aren't available for public purchase, i.e. "you gotta know someone"). A hot dog is $1.75 (Mets: $4.50. And the last one I had was cold, for God's sake).
Tired of overpaid, prima donna athletes? The Jackals' best pitcher last year recently informed them that he won't be available to pitch at the start of this season...because he took a job teaching high school science in upstate NY, and he has to finish the school year. You can't help but cheer for these guys.
Last, but not least, the concessions sell good beer at normal bar prices. What's not to like? I'm getting myself all worked up for the Northeast League season just by typing this.
Mets fandom is a hard habit to break, and I'll probably still listen to some games on the radio or catch some of the relatively few still available on free TV. But I'm not buying any MLB tickets this year...ditto merchandise. And I cancelled Fox Sports NY from my cable company.
If you're a MLB fan and you live near a minor league team, do yourself (and the minor league players) a favor and check them out. It's a whole different scene, and you don't know what you're missing.
Really, who wants to watch ...(snip)... a game with zero strategy and zero excitement?
I was right there with you in your criticism of MLB (the organization) until you demonstrated a total lack of understanding of MLB (the game).
Excitement is a subjective thing and difficult to debate, but baseball is the most strategy-oriented of any of the four major sports, and you can take that to the bank.
There are a dozen variables that can change on every single pitch. There's a reason why the "excitement" comes in short spurts between long moments of seeming inactivity -- there's a chess match going on during those pauses.
How many outs? Who's up next? Who's on the bench? Who's on base? Who's available in the bullpen? Are they warmed up? What was the last pitch? Have the team's play signals (those funny arm motions) been compromised? How well does the guy in left field throw? Could he nail the second base runner at the plate on a hit to left? Will the runners go with the pitch? I could go on.
How you could be a sports photographer of any description and not see that is beyond me. Or maybe you do get it, and don't see fit to refer to any of it as strategy...in which case you're just wrong. But it's OK to be wrong; this is America.
Fair enough. It doesn't specifically spell out that he only became aware of it a year ago. But given the journalistic tone, the fact that his entrepreneurial gears started cranking after he installed the software, and not after some hypothetical earlier encounter with the concept, it's not an unreasonable inference to make.
"About a year ago, Burnett downloaded a couple of software programs onto his personal computers that seek to tap surplus computing power: SETI@Home and the United Devices Cancer Research Project."
Let me get this straight. This guy is the CTO of a major PC manufacturer, and he only became aware of SETI@Home (i.e. distributed computing) in late 2001? What's wrong with this picture?
"It will have autonomic software, allowing it to monitor itself for hardware breakdowns or lack of capacity. Blue Gene/L will be able to map stars in three dimensions, analyse earthquakes, and help in oil exploration."
I'd like to announce to the U.S. Government (and any other interested parties) that my completed, functioning human brain is available immediately to begin work on these tasks for the relatively low price of $200M. Software not included; serious inquiries only.
I've got machines all over the place, and have long fantasized about setting up a cluster for the fun of it. I've read a little about Beowulf and one or two other open source clustering technologies, but have never had the gumption to crack the books and set one up. Mostly, I think, because I'm not sure what I'd do with it when it was ready.
Would anyone care to post a 2-3 paragraph summary of what Joe PC Hobbyist (e.g. someone like me, with many semi-obsolete PCs lying around the house) might be able to do with the CLIC software? Would it only be able to run applications written for CLIC (oh.), or would the cluster behave like one giant, amalgamated Mandrake box (cool!) ?
...if you can back it up. Besides, the other guy called him out on it.
"Your" right! How typically arrogant and imperialist of us. As Americans, we must be especially conscious of our status as the lone superpower and make efforts to avoid imposing announcements about our TV schedule on other cultures.
MLB.com is a cheez-whiz site. The news stories and other features are all written by staff writers who are paid by MLB.com, and it shows in the quality of the journalism. Everything is sugarcoated and refined, with any nasty pieces of controversy neatly filtered from the final product. You can read the columns, but don't bother looking for any opinion pieces, because the only opinions expressed on the site (outside of the heavily moderated fan forums) are those approved by MLB, Inc.
Are you wondering why those two players from the same team appeared to be shouting/shoving at each other in the dugout? Don't expect to find the answer in MLB.com's coverage of the game -- if you rely on that, you won't even know that it happened. Same with the Canseco/Caminiti steroid allegations that made a huge splash earlier this year. On planet MLB.com, those things didn't take place.
"A supper site that meets all baseball fan needs"? Maybe if you're, like, 6 years old. At my age, though, I'd like to see the whole story.
MetsOnline.net provided that if you were a Mets fan, like I was. The operator, Bryan Hoch, founded the site as a 14-year-old high school student in 1996. In 1996, MLB was ignorant of technology, never mind the Internet. A friend who worked for a satellite TV provider tells me while the NFL would send over a database, MLB submitted their annual game schedule information on handwritten spreadsheets. MLB.com, meanwhile, belonged to a law firm. Mets.com was a porn site. No, I'm not kidding. It really was -- I know, because I went there while trying to find a Mets site in 1996.
MetsOnline.net was a beautiful thing. Hoch administered the site and, over the course of the next 6 years, developed into a competent sports journalist. The Mets gave him a press pass, for crying out loud. He was part of the team's press corps, and the stories he ran on his site were straight, hard reporting. The site grew to be very popular.
Consquently, though, it was becoming a very expensive hobby. The hosting charges were $hundreds per month, and Hoch began attempting to defray the cost by accepting PayPal donations and selling MetsOnline.net t-shirts and caps. Was he in violation of trademark law? Yeah, probably.
MLB's response to this violation, however, was completely out of proportion. Rather than contact him through the team (with which he already had a working relationship) or ask him to stop selling merchandise, they instead whipped out the big lawyer guns and ordered him to shut down the site and transfer the domain name to them within 5 calendar days. There was no room for discussion or negotiation; Hoch's only recourse was to secure legal counsel and fight (a tall financial order for a 20-year-old college student).
MLB was absolutely within its legal rights. They were also a bunch of bullying shitheads about the way they safeguarded those rights. This is not a black and white issue, as the NFL rep's quote illustrated. MLB chose to make it a black and white issue, though, and took a premeditated, hostile action against over 15,000 of its fans (and one especially hardworking one, in particular).
They do not deserve your understanding or favorable legal interpretation. They deserve only your scorn, and if you're still supporting MLB or any of its teams with your money (by attending games, buying merchandise or subscribing to pay sports channels for the sake of watching their games), you are a sucker.
What about the Oort Cloud? Shouldn't that count as part of the solar system? It's held in place by the Sun's gravity, if only barely, so I would think it should. If memory serves, Voy1 won't reach that for another 100,000 years.
Agent Smith (staring out the window): Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at its beauty... its genius?
Images and light narrative can be found here.
There's something a little subversive about clusters of technophiles, scattered across the planet, having synchronized gatherings in chain restaurants and bars. Maybe next time, we should ask to have them in their basements.
"Welcome to Nerd Club. The first rule of Nerd Club is, you do not talk about Nerd Club."
His name is Robert Malda...
His name is Robert Malda...
His name is Robert Malda...
His name is Robert Malda...
>And what are you going to do in a RECORD STORE?
>At least pick a restaurant, bar, or book store
>where people can talk casually without weird
>looks by the owner.
One of our choices was a bowling alley, for chrissakes.
The "Newark-Jersey City" meetup wound up being located in Parsippany, a suburban enclave about 20 miles west of either of those cities. And, I might add, smack in the middle of an adjacent Meetup territory, namely "Northern New Jersey".
...are Linux users.
"Nathaniel, I've just received a subpeona!"
"Oh, jolly good, Robert! I was hoping most fervently that you'd receive it today!"
"Why, yes, I have! I must compliment you on your undulled wit, old chap! A lawsuit! What a hoot!"
"You're too kind!"
Hear, hear.
I don't have much to add to jcr's comment, but I wanted to voice some solidarity before the unreasoning, relativist "anything can be art" crowd starts piling on.
Maybe my current one isn't terribly appropriate for a social gathering.