I thought it was a reference to the fact that a shows popularity peaks and then plummets, producing a graph with respect to time that looks like a shark's fin.
I guess it's a whole lot cooler if it's a double entendre...
It's a well known Wallism (as in Larry Wall) that there's Real Hubris and fake hubris. Even Linus is possessed of the real variety; despite all the humbleness we usually attribute to him, you have to remember that he famously told off a well-respected professor in operating systems design! Whether this counts as frankness or arrogance depends largely on which side of the micro/monolithic kernel debate you fall on, but nonetheless, there's a certain kind of geeky "arrogance" that comes from knowing what the hell you're talking about, and Wall's advice is to use it productively.
By the way, ESR seems to have a rather thriving social life, as he's constantly reminding his readership of how much poon he's getting. So it's not just arrogance.:)
The typical nerd who is considered "deficient in social skills" is usually only such when put in the context of your average marketroid, who got where he was largely on the strength of his social skills and his cunningness to use them in acts of unbridled manipulation.
Get a few "cloistered, asocial nerds" together in a context of mutual interest, and they develop social behavior on their own. I've seen it happen many times: in roleplaying, computer, martial arts, and other contexts. However, if their idea of social interaction is yiffing with a 40-something hermfoxie they met at Anthrocon, it may be wise to redirect them to other interesting contexts.
I went to the Fed bank in New York City. Before taking us down to see all the gold, the tour guide pretty much spelled it out, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation -- a business. It's no secret... just one of those things people choose to ignore, or deny.
Read some of Neal Stephenson's work. Start with In the Beginning was the Command Line (which is available free online) and go on to Snow Crash. I'm worming my way through Cryptonomicon right now.
Stephenson describes technology -- real and fictional -- in a very detailed, precise, knowledgeable, and methodical manner. But he does it in a way that is in a literary sense engaging and fascinating. He can put into words the kind of beauty that hackers and engineers see in technological systems all the time, which is generally seen as dull and boring by the non-technical crowd, in such a way as to make it understandable to non-techs, and let them see the beauty too.
IMNSHO something like FORTH would perhaps be more suited to this. It's an interesting concept, though probably one that won't be implemented in a world where performance is crucial (for things like video cards) or vendors cut corners and tax the CPU (for things like modems).
Building longhorn from scratch would require re-hiring Dave Cutler, the VMS architect who developed the first NT codebase.
Word is that Cutler and MS had something of a falling out due to the marketroids getting hold of his little OS project and turning it into the shining example of security and reliability that it is today.
Don't expect Microsoft to rebuild anything from scratch. The best they could come up with without someone like Cutler is probably Windows Me.
Countries and corporations are both run by people whose primary job is politics. It is extremely difficult to go up against these people without becoming one of them.
Not many engineers want to become politicians, even if it means fighting for something they value. They want to do their job, which is designing stuff.
Dana plugs his brother's invention in the movies, too. There's a scene where you see Garth wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt.
Blew everybody's minds at the time. In high school, I was a geek who hung out with music and A/V geeks. Not only were we all Wayne's World fanatics... but we did much of our postproduction work on a Toaster.
RTFA. They used braille displays. Whether alone or in conjunction with voice recognition, I can't say, but for things like source listings and such, a braille display would probably be a boon to the hacker who lacks the convenience of sight.
I'm to understand that in the initial simulations, the North Koreans totally overran the United States and emerged victorious -- not through the use of nukes but through millions of zerglings. The Prime Minister of North Korea had this to say: "ZERG RUSH kekekekeke ^______^"
The name takes on new meaning when you realize that "moji" is a Japanese word for a character or ideograph. So "Mojira" could theoretically be the Japanese name of a "text-monster", which is somehow fitting for the Mozilla browser.
When it comes to desktop applications, Microsoft has more pull in the business world than even IBM these days. If you want to speak the language of business, you will use Microsoft software.
If IBM were to give up Microsoft products entirely, it would seriously jeopardize their valuable business relationships by making them look bad in front of their business customers. The reason why is because they will be perceived as "incompatible". It doesn't matter of OpenOffice can perfectly open and save Microsoft Office files. If the rest of business uses Microsoft office and IBM uses something different, that creates a risk of incompatibility that could make the customer think they won't be able to communicate with IBM, and threaten IBM's business relationship with them.
Microsoft software remains firmly entrenched, and will continue to do so, largely out of fear.
So while IBM may be internally moving to open source desktop software in some areas they will a) softpedal it like crazy and b) try to exercise PR damage control in this regard, to protect those valuable business relationships.
Since there is no right or wrong in pomo, your success in the field is entirely dependent on whether the prevailing authorities like you or not. If they do like you, it's very easy to defend your ideas; if they don't, it's very easy to cut them down. The procedure for each is the same: make stuff up.
In order to be liked by literary critics, it helps to be well-heeled and have leftist politics (which closes the circle since leftism is ultimately defensible only in postmodern terms). Is/was your wife a Republican?
Apple has Mail.app, a juiced-up version of the NeXTstep mail program. It even has Bayesian filtering (love it!).
AFAIK Microsoft does not release Outlook for Macs. It has a new mail client called "Entourage" for the Mac world. It's probably compatible with Exchange, but I cannot tell you much about it.
If you need Office compatibility, then OpenOffice.org is available for OS X (this was, in fact, the first platform I ever tried OO on). Two things: it requires X11 still, and it looks kind of iffy, especially compared to the nice clean Aqua interface. But it handled any Word or Excel document I threw at it.
What many companies are doing (and Dell, I think, is among them) is bringing the Indians here, training the accents out of them, then sending them back to India to work the phones, instructing them to use Western-sounding names (Jimmy, Alex, etc.). That way you get the dirt-cheapness of outsourcing without the obvious foreignness that turns your customers immediately off.
Pretty deceptive if you ask me, but hey, sometimes you gotta sacrifice your scruples if you want to increase shareholder value.
Slashdot Mirror
All I know is, if you manage to pick up the phrase "eludium pew-36 explosive space modulator" coming from one of those martians, RUN.
I wonder if they'll sell me a Holomax!
I thought it was a reference to the fact that a shows popularity peaks and then plummets, producing a graph with respect to time that looks like a shark's fin.
I guess it's a whole lot cooler if it's a double entendre...
Gives new meaning to the immortal phrase:
VISUALSHOCK! SPEEDSHOCK! SOUNDSHOCK! NOW IS TIME TO THE 68000 HEART ON FIRE!
(as found in the Alien Soldier opening screen)
It's a well known Wallism (as in Larry Wall) that there's Real Hubris and fake hubris. Even Linus is possessed of the real variety; despite all the humbleness we usually attribute to him, you have to remember that he famously told off a well-respected professor in operating systems design! Whether this counts as frankness or arrogance depends largely on which side of the micro/monolithic kernel debate you fall on, but nonetheless, there's a certain kind of geeky "arrogance" that comes from knowing what the hell you're talking about, and Wall's advice is to use it productively.
:)
By the way, ESR seems to have a rather thriving social life, as he's constantly reminding his readership of how much poon he's getting. So it's not just arrogance.
The typical nerd who is considered "deficient in social skills" is usually only such when put in the context of your average marketroid, who got where he was largely on the strength of his social skills and his cunningness to use them in acts of unbridled manipulation.
Get a few "cloistered, asocial nerds" together in a context of mutual interest, and they develop social behavior on their own. I've seen it happen many times: in roleplaying, computer, martial arts, and other contexts. However, if their idea of social interaction is yiffing with a 40-something hermfoxie they met at Anthrocon, it may be wise to redirect them to other interesting contexts.
If you're a Rocky Horror, Wayne's World, or Princess Bride fan, you've probably done this many many times.
Of course, the publishers are going after those commie libraries, for allowing free and unfettered access to information they own.
We know we've really reached the future when we can build a tank with a hot chick inside.
Try going to the Fed sometime.
I went to the Fed bank in New York City. Before taking us down to see all the gold, the tour guide pretty much spelled it out, the Federal Reserve is a private corporation -- a business. It's no secret... just one of those things people choose to ignore, or deny.
Infinium's law firm is called MoFo. That just about sums everything up nicely.
Read some of Neal Stephenson's work. Start with In the Beginning was the Command Line (which is available free online) and go on to Snow Crash. I'm worming my way through Cryptonomicon right now.
Stephenson describes technology -- real and fictional -- in a very detailed, precise, knowledgeable, and methodical manner. But he does it in a way that is in a literary sense engaging and fascinating. He can put into words the kind of beauty that hackers and engineers see in technological systems all the time, which is generally seen as dull and boring by the non-technical crowd, in such a way as to make it understandable to non-techs, and let them see the beauty too.
Gibson? Feh. He's for candy ravers.
IMNSHO something like FORTH would perhaps be more suited to this. It's an interesting concept, though probably one that won't be implemented in a world where performance is crucial (for things like video cards) or vendors cut corners and tax the CPU (for things like modems).
Building longhorn from scratch would require re-hiring Dave Cutler, the VMS architect who developed the first NT codebase.
Word is that Cutler and MS had something of a falling out due to the marketroids getting hold of his little OS project and turning it into the shining example of security and reliability that it is today.
Don't expect Microsoft to rebuild anything from scratch. The best they could come up with without someone like Cutler is probably Windows Me.
Countries and corporations are both run by people whose primary job is politics. It is extremely difficult to go up against these people without becoming one of them.
Not many engineers want to become politicians, even if it means fighting for something they value. They want to do their job, which is designing stuff.
Am I the only one who is reminded of United Aerospace Corporation (UAC)? You know, from Doom?
I'm afraid those balloons will end up taking pictures of cacodemons or something...
Dana plugs his brother's invention in the movies, too. There's a scene where you see Garth wearing a Video Toaster T-shirt.
Blew everybody's minds at the time. In high school, I was a geek who hung out with music and A/V geeks. Not only were we all Wayne's World fanatics... but we did much of our postproduction work on a Toaster.
RTFA. They used braille displays. Whether alone or in conjunction with voice recognition, I can't say, but for things like source listings and such, a braille display would probably be a boon to the hacker who lacks the convenience of sight.
Whoa, Safari. Cool.
I'm to understand that in the initial simulations, the North Koreans totally overran the United States and emerged victorious -- not through the use of nukes but through millions of zerglings. The Prime Minister of North Korea had this to say:
"ZERG RUSH kekekekeke ^______^"
The name takes on new meaning when you realize that "moji" is a Japanese word for a character or ideograph. So "Mojira" could theoretically be the Japanese name of a "text-monster", which is somehow fitting for the Mozilla browser.
When it comes to desktop applications, Microsoft has more pull in the business world than even IBM these days. If you want to speak the language of business, you will use Microsoft software.
If IBM were to give up Microsoft products entirely, it would seriously jeopardize their valuable business relationships by making them look bad in front of their business customers. The reason why is because they will be perceived as "incompatible". It doesn't matter of OpenOffice can perfectly open and save Microsoft Office files. If the rest of business uses Microsoft office and IBM uses something different, that creates a risk of incompatibility that could make the customer think they won't be able to communicate with IBM, and threaten IBM's business relationship with them.
Microsoft software remains firmly entrenched, and will continue to do so, largely out of fear.
So while IBM may be internally moving to open source desktop software in some areas they will a) softpedal it like crazy and b) try to exercise PR damage control in this regard, to protect those valuable business relationships.
Since there is no right or wrong in pomo, your success in the field is entirely dependent on whether the prevailing authorities like you or not. If they do like you, it's very easy to defend your ideas; if they don't, it's very easy to cut them down. The procedure for each is the same: make stuff up.
In order to be liked by literary critics, it helps to be well-heeled and have leftist politics (which closes the circle since leftism is ultimately defensible only in postmodern terms). Is/was your wife a Republican?
Apple has Mail.app, a juiced-up version of the NeXTstep mail program. It even has Bayesian filtering (love it!).
AFAIK Microsoft does not release Outlook for Macs. It has a new mail client called "Entourage" for the Mac world. It's probably compatible with Exchange, but I cannot tell you much about it.
If you need Office compatibility, then OpenOffice.org is available for OS X (this was, in fact, the first platform I ever tried OO on). Two things: it requires X11 still, and it looks kind of iffy, especially compared to the nice clean Aqua interface. But it handled any Word or Excel document I threw at it.
What many companies are doing (and Dell, I think, is among them) is bringing the Indians here, training the accents out of them, then sending them back to India to work the phones, instructing them to use Western-sounding names (Jimmy, Alex, etc.). That way you get the dirt-cheapness of outsourcing without the obvious foreignness that turns your customers immediately off.
Pretty deceptive if you ask me, but hey, sometimes you gotta sacrifice your scruples if you want to increase shareholder value.