Terrible headline aside, I can only hope this time NASA doesn't dub in canned laughter and slapstick noises as it crashes through the front lawn. The soundtrack during the rover touchdown was just terrible, and the reward for watching a bunch of dudes in starch-white shirts with ties and unkept hair was a crappy over-pixelated image of a leg. I mean, hey, if that's what puts the lotion on all the power to you, but I've been underwhelmed so far.
I know a lot of people disagree, but I loved the finale.
THROW THIS MAN IN THE PIT OF DESPAIR!
Everything started out beautifully choreographed -- tight plot linkage, excellent character development, and then a horror unmatched since Whedon introduced season 5 of Buffy was unleashed. It's tenacles slithered out and devoured all that was good and wonderful about the series. Many drinks were had. Friends consoled each other in unlit basements, warmed only by the glow of an LCD monitor. It was dark times. People like you make me sick.
True, but note that in fact there are many many "recalls" for critical problems with autos every year. Yet there is a difference between an auto traveling on a surface road with 2 or 6 passengers, and a jet at 30,000 with 200 passengers. When one catches fire, it's going to be a little more catistropic than the other...
An apples to oranges comparison. I'm referring to the efficiency of the manufacturing process. You're referring to problems with the engineering and design process. Airplanes like this are built one part, one section, one plane, at a time. There's numerous qualifications and tests done at each stage of assembly. And the models don't change year over year, unlike cars. The 787 is being produced with interchangeable parts and have the same general appearance, function, and specifications, as the ones 5 or 10 years from now will.
Possibly. But a lot of cars are built that way too, and while a process change for a business invariably has kinks to work out, that doesn't mean the move was the wrong one. Boeing was hemmoraging cash up until recently, and this switchover may save them a lot of money at the cost of some run-up problems.
A proper analysis would be putting in perspective, not just giving you the numbers. They say smoking takes an average of 6 minutes off your life for each cigarette you smoke. If that's the case, living in the United States is as bad as being a pack a day smoker for 12 years. Now rather than an abstract number, people have something they can relate to: Living here is worse than smoking for your health.
I believe I speak for most of the fan base when I say simply: You better not have a writer's strike in season 3, followed by management going full retard as dollar signs flash before their eyes. One series has already paid the price for that. If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
I suppose because on some level, we identify with the hacker. Our way of life is under constant assault by well-financed interests. The collective geek culture rejects the notion that ideas can be owned. Knowledge is power, and because of that, it should be shared freely and widely. Our culture rejects the limitations of online freedom that everyone wants -- whether it's bloggers in Iran being disappeared for providing updates on what their government is up to, to China's appetite for supressing western influences, to our own government's desire for internet kill switches and pervasive monitoring. All of this gets in the way of free and unfettered access to information, something geeks believe is a cultural heritage and the right to access granted to all human beings. Geeks... are idealists and creatives.
And when we see our creations turned against us, used to corrupt the ideals that gave birth to them, there is a certain artistic desire to destroy it because its beauty has been tarnished. It's something that you can find historical and literary examples of dating back to pre-greek times. So on some level, we identify with the so-called "bad guys", because they're hurting the people who are hurting us.
Sure, morally, ethically, we can recognize that its wrong and destructive. We know that it only emboldens the destroyers and usurpers of our lifestyle to pass even more restrictive edicts and arrest more people, but psychologically it doesn't matter. We ourselves are powerless so when we see others in the same boat doing powerful things against powerful people, it's very enticing to support them no matter their motivations.
By refusing to compromise on anything at all, they really invite criticism.
How exactly do you compromise with people being driven entirely by fear and anger? That's what every gun control debate erupts from: Someone gets a case of the stupids, and people are all like "It's a tragedy! Someone must be made responsible for this!" And then off we go on a whirlwind adventure of accusations, witch hunting, and finger pointing, and the end result is some horrific soul-crushing attack on our civil liberties.
Maybe the NRA is simply tired of having to respond to these mindless lemmings chanting "What do we want? Someone to pay! When do we want it? Right focking now!" You can't compromise with someone in the thrall of group think; The herd must be obeyed. I know I sure as hell am tired of the endless "for the children" arguments; They're always emotionally motivated and no matter how inceptid the ideas that flow out of that emotional reaction is, you'll find people vigorously defending it.
Nothing anyone says can convince them they are not the righteous and chosen few. There's no evidence they'll accept. It's like trying to convince a christian God doesn't exist... it'll never happen.
Personally I don't see the problem with disposable hardware... it's like the serpentine belt on a car. Nobody should be going without regular backups anyway.
It would be imprudent to discard all that work for the sake of a license which will close off many vendors' platforms.
When has prudence had anything to do with the indelible need of geeks to create Nifty Cool Things? When Linux was first created, it was viewed as one of the stupidest things someone could do with their time. Richard Stallman dwelled in bearded obscurity, and Hypercard was considered a good introduction to programming. And yet, here we are.
There's no reason we couldn't switch over to BSD... I mean, look at MacOS X. It didn't need the GPL to flourish.
While it's nice to see SSD capacities increasing, the real metric is the cost per gigabyte, which is still nowhere near conventional harddrives. A good number of us have massive multimedia collections; It's still cost-prohibitive to store all of it on SSDs. And at least for the short-term, a primary drive over 200GB isn't really something most users need. A select few, perhaps, but not many. This may be something more useful in the enterprise, but then... looking at the specs, it seems it wouldn't survive very long in a database server.
At this point there is no reason for most home user systems to have Java on them at all. Just uninstall it and remove this never ending hole from your life.
It's used on a lot of websites to launch various games and applets to do things like search a database of parts. The same argument could be used for ActiveX controls and yet, you can't go online for very long without running into someone's website that uses it.
But for home users? Just remove it and make your life easier.
It'd be better to use something like NoScript to control access to it. I pair it with other plugins that prevent cross-site scripting, as most of these exploits take advantage of advertising link-ins to popular websites.
If I had written this I would have been modded down to troll. All of my very similar rants have been. But this guy gets a +4 Insightful ?
It's not so much what you say as who you say it to, and when. Also, with an alias like yours, you shouldn't be surprised if you get whacked with the troll shovel. Try a less angsty teen name and you might find people take you a bit more seriously.
Rome is still there. If you are speaking of the Roman empire, it existed for over a thousand years. A feat yet to be achieved.
The Caliphates that lived next door would dispute that. But I can understand ignoring Islamic achievements like that since Rome was the quintessential western empire and the Caliphates only spanned three continents and had a far greater population. It also lasted nearly twice as long as the Roman empire, which actually didn't last over a thousand years... since the empire kept fracturing and falling into chaos over that timeframe while the Caliphates remained largely stable... and existed until the last century (1924, if you need a year).
This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."
Rome died due to lead poisoning and excessive military expenditures. If we're going to become Rome, I suggest BSD instead -- their mascots are a bit more menacing than a penguin. Also, the licensing terms are less restrictive.
Please stop producing useless garbage in fancy plastic and metal coverings and give us high speed internet. And when I say high speed, I don't mean that watered down swill your ISP sells you. I mean "set my harddrive on fire downloading torrents" speed. I mean multiple 1080p streams of video over one pipe. I do not need an iWhatever, or a remote-controlled lamp... I need a network connection that doesn't suck so hard it's in danger of forming its own event horizon.
I don't care if it's wireless, or runs over copper or fiber, or if you have to shoot lasers through the sky. Get it done, people. We're about ten years late to the party as it is right now -- our infrastructure is rotten. Shannon's Law is kicking our butts, and we can only re-arrange bits of metal and plastic and input devices in clever new ways for so long before it's just old and busted.
You sit there in the lap of luxury completely ignorant of your own past, and don't even realize that you are complaining about others being able to browse the web at all because they still do not sit in the lam of luxury like you do.
Listen kiddo, I was on the internet before it was the internet, and I had a computer before the original Nintendo you grew up with was even a gleam in an electrical engineer's eye, so don't tell me I'm ignorant of my own past. I've forgotten more about IT than you're likely to ever know. Don't make me get my old IBM XT keyboard out of storage and beat you with it.
That said, it's in storage for a reason. The world moved on. So did cell phones, which were originally the size of bricks and had an LED readout and the signal washed out whenever you revved your engine. What Nokia has here may have been relevant back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, but today I can buy an SOC chip at retail price for under $30 that'll render 1080p video at 30 FPS and has several gigs of ram on it and a helluva lot more storage. There's no reason for this technology to still be in use on a modern cell phone network. And frankly, if your cell phone is really so old that it needs it, go to the effing Walmart down the road and pickup a "go phone". They give them away there and can run a proper web browser.
...and the guy who should be expelled because he prefers a notebook and pen.
Yeah, well they still work when the power goes out and there's nowhere to recharge. I actually tried a thought experiment with my sister (age 16) who lives on her ipad: I faked a power outage at the house and then asked if she wanted anything to eat. When she emphatically replied "yes", I told her to call the pizza place for takeout. Hilarity ensued, reducing her to tears. She didn't know any other way to get pizza than ordering it online. The idea of using her cell phone was foreign to her, as was the concept of calling Information with the city, state, and name of business. She literally couldn't even feed herself without an internet connection.
This is the future generation people: Just like the Robo-warrior creatures in Avengers, the moment you cut the connection they go limp and/or explode. So laugh at the problems of tech compatibility and point out the obvious utility and simplicity of a pen and paper, but it's no laughing matter for the next generation. We've raised a generation incapable of functioning any other way.
To me, the most obvious counter to this assertion is the notebook. Students have had notebooks en masse for 10-15 years now, and THOSE didn't really revolutionize the classroom. And if notebooks, which are way more powerful and open than tablets, didn't really change things all that much--then what makes him think that tablets will?
Because tablets are new and notebooks aren't. With each evolution of personal computing, the same ideas are put forth by marketing and management types who see dollar signs. For example, "thin clients" can trace their heritage all the way back to the first timesharing computers and mainframes. But every few years, someone comes long and says "thin clients are the future!" The latest example is with cloud computing, where people predict gaming platforms will be replaced with thin client devices that do all the graphics processing, etc., "in the cloud". Before the cloud, there was the cluster, and before the cluster was the server farm, and before the server farm was the virtual machines, and before the virtual machines was the mainframes, and so on and so forth. With every iteration, everything old becomes new again.
This guy knows just enough to be annoying, but not truly worldly and experienced enough to recognize that if the previous dozen attempts all fell flat on their face, this one probably will too. Then again, this lack of deeper understanding might explain his current vocational aspirations...
Slashdot Mirror
Terrible headline aside, I can only hope this time NASA doesn't dub in canned laughter and slapstick noises as it crashes through the front lawn. The soundtrack during the rover touchdown was just terrible, and the reward for watching a bunch of dudes in starch-white shirts with ties and unkept hair was a crappy over-pixelated image of a leg. I mean, hey, if that's what puts the lotion on all the power to you, but I've been underwhelmed so far.
I know a lot of people disagree, but I loved the finale.
THROW THIS MAN IN THE PIT OF DESPAIR!
Everything started out beautifully choreographed -- tight plot linkage, excellent character development, and then a horror unmatched since Whedon introduced season 5 of Buffy was unleashed. It's tenacles slithered out and devoured all that was good and wonderful about the series. Many drinks were had. Friends consoled each other in unlit basements, warmed only by the glow of an LCD monitor. It was dark times. People like you make me sick.
True, but note that in fact there are many many "recalls" for critical problems with autos every year. Yet there is a difference between an auto traveling on a surface road with 2 or 6 passengers, and a jet at 30,000 with 200 passengers. When one catches fire, it's going to be a little more catistropic than the other...
An apples to oranges comparison. I'm referring to the efficiency of the manufacturing process. You're referring to problems with the engineering and design process. Airplanes like this are built one part, one section, one plane, at a time. There's numerous qualifications and tests done at each stage of assembly. And the models don't change year over year, unlike cars. The 787 is being produced with interchangeable parts and have the same general appearance, function, and specifications, as the ones 5 or 10 years from now will.
Possibly. But a lot of cars are built that way too, and while a process change for a business invariably has kinks to work out, that doesn't mean the move was the wrong one. Boeing was hemmoraging cash up until recently, and this switchover may save them a lot of money at the cost of some run-up problems.
A proper analysis would be putting in perspective, not just giving you the numbers. They say smoking takes an average of 6 minutes off your life for each cigarette you smoke. If that's the case, living in the United States is as bad as being a pack a day smoker for 12 years. Now rather than an abstract number, people have something they can relate to: Living here is worse than smoking for your health.
I believe I speak for most of the fan base when I say simply: You better not have a writer's strike in season 3, followed by management going full retard as dollar signs flash before their eyes. One series has already paid the price for that. If you ruin another geek culture icon, there'll be hell to pay.
I think I can see a license plate in one of the pictures. It's a martian rover. Where's the link to report it so it gets blurred out? :D
Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.
I'd rather believe that the velociraptors are redundantly linked because making them faster is an even scarier proposition.
Before FBI raids the museum and seizes the server.
It's more likely they'll just stick a camera outside the museum and photograph anyone entering and then add them to a terror watchlist.
I suppose because on some level, we identify with the hacker. Our way of life is under constant assault by well-financed interests. The collective geek culture rejects the notion that ideas can be owned. Knowledge is power, and because of that, it should be shared freely and widely. Our culture rejects the limitations of online freedom that everyone wants -- whether it's bloggers in Iran being disappeared for providing updates on what their government is up to, to China's appetite for supressing western influences, to our own government's desire for internet kill switches and pervasive monitoring. All of this gets in the way of free and unfettered access to information, something geeks believe is a cultural heritage and the right to access granted to all human beings. Geeks... are idealists and creatives.
And when we see our creations turned against us, used to corrupt the ideals that gave birth to them, there is a certain artistic desire to destroy it because its beauty has been tarnished. It's something that you can find historical and literary examples of dating back to pre-greek times. So on some level, we identify with the so-called "bad guys", because they're hurting the people who are hurting us.
Sure, morally, ethically, we can recognize that its wrong and destructive. We know that it only emboldens the destroyers and usurpers of our lifestyle to pass even more restrictive edicts and arrest more people, but psychologically it doesn't matter. We ourselves are powerless so when we see others in the same boat doing powerful things against powerful people, it's very enticing to support them no matter their motivations.
By refusing to compromise on anything at all, they really invite criticism.
How exactly do you compromise with people being driven entirely by fear and anger? That's what every gun control debate erupts from: Someone gets a case of the stupids, and people are all like "It's a tragedy! Someone must be made responsible for this!" And then off we go on a whirlwind adventure of accusations, witch hunting, and finger pointing, and the end result is some horrific soul-crushing attack on our civil liberties.
Maybe the NRA is simply tired of having to respond to these mindless lemmings chanting "What do we want? Someone to pay! When do we want it? Right focking now!" You can't compromise with someone in the thrall of group think; The herd must be obeyed. I know I sure as hell am tired of the endless "for the children" arguments; They're always emotionally motivated and no matter how inceptid the ideas that flow out of that emotional reaction is, you'll find people vigorously defending it.
Nothing anyone says can convince them they are not the righteous and chosen few. There's no evidence they'll accept. It's like trying to convince a christian God doesn't exist... it'll never happen.
...due to consumerism.
Damn you free market! Daaaamn yooooouuu!
Personally I don't see the problem with disposable hardware... it's like the serpentine belt on a car. Nobody should be going without regular backups anyway.
It would be imprudent to discard all that work for the sake of a license which will close off many vendors' platforms.
When has prudence had anything to do with the indelible need of geeks to create Nifty Cool Things? When Linux was first created, it was viewed as one of the stupidest things someone could do with their time. Richard Stallman dwelled in bearded obscurity, and Hypercard was considered a good introduction to programming. And yet, here we are.
There's no reason we couldn't switch over to BSD... I mean, look at MacOS X. It didn't need the GPL to flourish.
(still regretting the purchasing of two velociraptors for RAID-0)
I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.
While it's nice to see SSD capacities increasing, the real metric is the cost per gigabyte, which is still nowhere near conventional harddrives. A good number of us have massive multimedia collections; It's still cost-prohibitive to store all of it on SSDs. And at least for the short-term, a primary drive over 200GB isn't really something most users need. A select few, perhaps, but not many. This may be something more useful in the enterprise, but then... looking at the specs, it seems it wouldn't survive very long in a database server.
Their empire did not last longer than Rome
O RLY?
Where else am I going to get $25 for my copy of Duke Nukem Forever?
Sell it to the Museum of Hype. It's pretty much the centerpiece of the collection.
At this point there is no reason for most home user systems to have Java on them at all. Just uninstall it and remove this never ending hole from your life.
It's used on a lot of websites to launch various games and applets to do things like search a database of parts. The same argument could be used for ActiveX controls and yet, you can't go online for very long without running into someone's website that uses it.
But for home users? Just remove it and make your life easier.
It'd be better to use something like NoScript to control access to it. I pair it with other plugins that prevent cross-site scripting, as most of these exploits take advantage of advertising link-ins to popular websites.
If I had written this I would have been modded down to troll. All of my very similar rants have been. But this guy gets a +4 Insightful ?
It's not so much what you say as who you say it to, and when. Also, with an alias like yours, you shouldn't be surprised if you get whacked with the troll shovel. Try a less angsty teen name and you might find people take you a bit more seriously.
Rome is still there. If you are speaking of the Roman empire, it existed for over a thousand years. A feat yet to be achieved.
The Caliphates that lived next door would dispute that. But I can understand ignoring Islamic achievements like that since Rome was the quintessential western empire and the Caliphates only spanned three continents and had a far greater population. It also lasted nearly twice as long as the Roman empire, which actually didn't last over a thousand years... since the empire kept fracturing and falling into chaos over that timeframe while the Caliphates remained largely stable... and existed until the last century (1924, if you need a year).
This is our Rome, which will not be built in a day, but which can become something significant in the world if we keep our heads and follow through."
Rome died due to lead poisoning and excessive military expenditures. If we're going to become Rome, I suggest BSD instead -- their mascots are a bit more menacing than a penguin. Also, the licensing terms are less restrictive.
Please stop producing useless garbage in fancy plastic and metal coverings and give us high speed internet. And when I say high speed, I don't mean that watered down swill your ISP sells you. I mean "set my harddrive on fire downloading torrents" speed. I mean multiple 1080p streams of video over one pipe. I do not need an iWhatever, or a remote-controlled lamp... I need a network connection that doesn't suck so hard it's in danger of forming its own event horizon.
I don't care if it's wireless, or runs over copper or fiber, or if you have to shoot lasers through the sky. Get it done, people. We're about ten years late to the party as it is right now -- our infrastructure is rotten. Shannon's Law is kicking our butts, and we can only re-arrange bits of metal and plastic and input devices in clever new ways for so long before it's just old and busted.
The future is bandwidth. Get on it.
You sit there in the lap of luxury completely ignorant of your own past, and don't even realize that you are complaining about others being able to browse the web at all because they still do not sit in the lam of luxury like you do.
Listen kiddo, I was on the internet before it was the internet, and I had a computer before the original Nintendo you grew up with was even a gleam in an electrical engineer's eye, so don't tell me I'm ignorant of my own past. I've forgotten more about IT than you're likely to ever know. Don't make me get my old IBM XT keyboard out of storage and beat you with it.
That said, it's in storage for a reason. The world moved on. So did cell phones, which were originally the size of bricks and had an LED readout and the signal washed out whenever you revved your engine. What Nokia has here may have been relevant back when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, but today I can buy an SOC chip at retail price for under $30 that'll render 1080p video at 30 FPS and has several gigs of ram on it and a helluva lot more storage. There's no reason for this technology to still be in use on a modern cell phone network. And frankly, if your cell phone is really so old that it needs it, go to the effing Walmart down the road and pickup a "go phone". They give them away there and can run a proper web browser.
...and the guy who should be expelled because he prefers a notebook and pen.
Yeah, well they still work when the power goes out and there's nowhere to recharge. I actually tried a thought experiment with my sister (age 16) who lives on her ipad: I faked a power outage at the house and then asked if she wanted anything to eat. When she emphatically replied "yes", I told her to call the pizza place for takeout. Hilarity ensued, reducing her to tears. She didn't know any other way to get pizza than ordering it online. The idea of using her cell phone was foreign to her, as was the concept of calling Information with the city, state, and name of business. She literally couldn't even feed herself without an internet connection.
This is the future generation people: Just like the Robo-warrior creatures in Avengers, the moment you cut the connection they go limp and/or explode. So laugh at the problems of tech compatibility and point out the obvious utility and simplicity of a pen and paper, but it's no laughing matter for the next generation. We've raised a generation incapable of functioning any other way.
To me, the most obvious counter to this assertion is the notebook. Students have had notebooks en masse for 10-15 years now, and THOSE didn't really revolutionize the classroom. And if notebooks, which are way more powerful and open than tablets, didn't really change things all that much--then what makes him think that tablets will?
Because tablets are new and notebooks aren't. With each evolution of personal computing, the same ideas are put forth by marketing and management types who see dollar signs. For example, "thin clients" can trace their heritage all the way back to the first timesharing computers and mainframes. But every few years, someone comes long and says "thin clients are the future!" The latest example is with cloud computing, where people predict gaming platforms will be replaced with thin client devices that do all the graphics processing, etc., "in the cloud". Before the cloud, there was the cluster, and before the cluster was the server farm, and before the server farm was the virtual machines, and before the virtual machines was the mainframes, and so on and so forth. With every iteration, everything old becomes new again.
This guy knows just enough to be annoying, but not truly worldly and experienced enough to recognize that if the previous dozen attempts all fell flat on their face, this one probably will too. Then again, this lack of deeper understanding might explain his current vocational aspirations...