... even though I have a 0.9GHz T-bird. A generation behind the times, maybe, but still a snappier box than I'll need for a while yet. I can actually get shorty (my little 266MHz laptop) running with about the same configuration as gas-o (my big machine), and run much the same apps: emacs, moz, GIMP, LaTeX sometimes if I need to write something for human consumption. How, you ask? Two words: Window Maker.:)
Even though Carl Sagan probably intended it to throw a monkey wrench into Arroway's atheism, it has been proven that the number pi has every possible sequence of numbers contained somewhere within it. So yes, the bitmap of the circle is in there, and so is the 34-byte combinator, the ASCII encoding of this message, your social security number, the precise number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, etc. Pi truly has all the answers. The tricky part is finding them in that morasse of digits.
Your computer system and your CPU are your property. They are physical, tangible objects that you paid money for.
Companies using your property for reasons that you didn't authorize, through subterfuge, are clearly in violation of your property rights. And "By clicking here, you agree to yadda yadda" is BS, particularly concerning software components you aren't told about.
They do to press conferences and such like. Do they every day? Anyway, we all know Gates never coded anything, so he doesn't count;)
Gates wrote code, just not for a long while. And his public appearances in "smart" suits (ever notice the implied lack of intelligence attached to all other forms of attire?) is a recent phenomenon. Back in the early nineties, he was notorious for "bucking the trend" by wearing cardigans and such.
That's hilarious, both because LoudCloud doesn't actually do any application development (they are strictly about monitoring and admin'ing), and because they claim to support Apache. I mean, they have stuff like ColdFusion on their list and they're looking down their noses at a rocket like mod_perl? Sad.
They're not like us. They don't think as we do. We are interested in working software; they are interested in expensive designer-label software that they can add to a checklist. I remember hearing similar things when I met two guys from a l33t design firm. They were switching away from Zope and to Cold Fusion: "The problem with Zope is, it's open source." Hello! That's a feature, not a bug. I don't think I'd use Zope, though, for other reasons.
He really is the next Bill Gates: take somebody else's code, slap your name on it, and market it as a Revolutionary Innovation sure to rock the computing world to the very core. Old Bill himself couldn't have planned it better.
some LCD VAIOs I saw in CompUSA a few years back. Very nice sleek case design, with the CPU and such built into the back of the display, kinda like this Gateway unit, only cooler.:)
It reminded me of the Poqet PC, actually. Now that's old-school. A PC that run on AA batteries, it was an 8086 compatible with a CGA display. Not a real speed demon, but you could get Lotus going in the palm of your hand, an amazing feat for the day (late '80's or '90).
No, this is a case of free software and cheap hardware making technologies available now to many people for whom it wasn't available (i.e., outside the realm of affordability because it was only sold by expensive proprietary vendors) just a short time ago. That is a more significant change than the endless treadmill of Moore's Law to which we had become accustomed.
At the beginning of the N64's life, it was the console that was getting frickin insanely high bids on eBay, much as PS2 did some years later. So it wasn't doomed to fail from the get-go.
What turned it around, I'm certain, was Final Fantasy. That was a milestone in gaming for the PlayStation, and for a while, the definitive PlayStation game.
... was a sort of MMORPG that simulated a legislative body of some kind, with players acting out the roles of legislators, and receiving feedback from the game on how their actions affect the "populace". Kind of like Boys' State but IN TEH CYB4RSPAECE.
Game consoles will never appreciably see a trong Linux contingent for exactly the same reasons that the desktop won't: there's too much money to be made continuing with the same old proprietary business model.
Linux successfully invaded the server space precisely because nobody saw any money in turning commodity x86 boxen into production-quality servers at first.
They've broken up now, but the techno-pop band "Aqua" (famous here for "Barbie Girl") was one of my faves. They had some of the most incredibly vapid lyrics imaginable, but it was almost like a self-conscious parody of pop music, kinda like how Beavis and Butt-head, a show about two idiots, had quite intelligent subtexts running through it.
Aqua also takes potshots at other aspects of our culture: their track "Halloween" condenses the entire plot of "Scream"-style teen horror flicks into a three minute song; "Freaky Friday" is ostensibly a send-up of the sad lyrics of country music, and has more disasters than Alanis's "Ironic", etc.
80's New Wave kitsch (e.g., Devo) sort of falls into the same category for me.
On the more serious side, I tend to like Meat Loaf (and any music by Jim Steinman), Queen, Styx, Darude, Chicane, Paul Oakenfold, even Mozart.:)
In general, I tend to like music with texture to it. Today's pop music really is like soda pop: too sugary, goes flat and stale quickly.
That guy is what we call a "troll". In reality, I bet he's probably better as a boss than the hoary-bearded middle manager who spent his college years in an internship writing COBOL (and liked it!) and asks things like "Linux? Perl? What are those things? Are they anything like Visual Basic?"
I've started taking things like history, lit, and Japanese to pad my schedule because this bassackwards school ran out of good CS stuff to teach me. (And most of it I learned from the school I transferred out of, Stevens, anyway.) These things are academically valuable.
When HR sees your resume with your BS on it, even if it's from Podunk U, it means something. It means you have a diverse background, and are capable of inductive as well as deductive reasoning. These skills are important, especially in CS, if you want to ascend beyond code monkey status and evolve into a higher lifeform.:)
Forward-looking schools often use Scheme, or maybe even something gnarly like Ada, as a teaching language. However, a great many of the CS programs that I've seen/heard of are essentially mills for churning out code grinders to put to work writing payroll and billing code for insurance companies and their ilk. They will start you out on Java as a nice safe toy language to learn in, then migrate you to the suite of languages supported by Microsoft Visual Studio, and really that's about it unless you opt to take something exotic like programming languages, logic programming, or AI.
Me, I learn about two or three new languages a year, on my own time. Scheme and LISP are, however, very dear to my heart.
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... even though I have a 0.9GHz T-bird. A generation behind the times, maybe, but still a snappier box than I'll need for a while yet. I can actually get shorty (my little 266MHz laptop) running with about the same configuration as gas-o (my big machine), and run much the same apps: emacs, moz, GIMP, LaTeX sometimes if I need to write something for human consumption. How, you ask? Two words: Window Maker. :)
Sounds a bit like Dilbert when the boss decided he had to go around with a collar and leash: "It's not that bad..."
"Dude, why do you even want that Linux stuff anyway, when you can get the SWEET new Windows XP on your Dell Dimension?"
Even though Carl Sagan probably intended it to throw a monkey wrench into Arroway's atheism, it has been proven that the number pi has every possible sequence of numbers contained somewhere within it. So yes, the bitmap of the circle is in there, and so is the 34-byte combinator, the ASCII encoding of this message, your social security number, the precise number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, etc. Pi truly has all the answers. The tricky part is finding them in that morasse of digits.
Your computer system and your CPU are your property. They are physical, tangible objects that you paid money for.
Companies using your property for reasons that you didn't authorize, through subterfuge, are clearly in violation of your property rights. And "By clicking here, you agree to yadda yadda" is BS, particularly concerning software components you aren't told about.
GNUsaders! Open Source crusaders for justice!
Pretty insightful! It sounds like Otacon may have been the designer for these...
Gates wrote code, just not for a long while. And his public appearances in "smart" suits (ever notice the implied lack of intelligence attached to all other forms of attire?) is a recent phenomenon. Back in the early nineties, he was notorious for "bucking the trend" by wearing cardigans and such.
They're not like us. They don't think as we do. We are interested in working software; they are interested in expensive designer-label software that they can add to a checklist. I remember hearing similar things when I met two guys from a l33t design firm. They were switching away from Zope and to Cold Fusion: "The problem with Zope is, it's open source." Hello! That's a feature, not a bug. I don't think I'd use Zope, though, for other reasons.
He really is the next Bill Gates: take somebody else's code, slap your name on it, and market it as a Revolutionary Innovation sure to rock the computing world to the very core. Old Bill himself couldn't have planned it better.
some LCD VAIOs I saw in CompUSA a few years back. Very nice sleek case design, with the CPU and such built into the back of the display, kinda like this Gateway unit, only cooler. :)
It reminded me of the Poqet PC, actually. Now that's old-school. A PC that run on AA batteries, it was an 8086 compatible with a CGA display. Not a real speed demon, but you could get Lotus going in the palm of your hand, an amazing feat for the day (late '80's or '90).
No, this is a case of free software and cheap hardware making technologies available now to many people for whom it wasn't available (i.e., outside the realm of affordability because it was only sold by expensive proprietary vendors) just a short time ago. That is a more significant change than the endless treadmill of Moore's Law to which we had become accustomed.
At the beginning of the N64's life, it was the console that was getting frickin insanely high bids on eBay, much as PS2 did some years later. So it wasn't doomed to fail from the get-go.
What turned it around, I'm certain, was Final Fantasy. That was a milestone in gaming for the PlayStation, and for a while, the definitive PlayStation game.
So, I guess that explains how the Mighty Thor joined the Avengers. :)
Why yes, Mr. Beast, I'd be glad to accept your mark! What? You say you want me to bow down before your graven image? Oh, 'tis not a problem at all!
Hackers the book != Hackers the movie.
The former describes the life and times of talented programmers from the earliest days at MIT up through the eighties or so when it was written.
The latter is a steaming pile of ignorant trendoidism from 1995 featuring Angelina Jolie and her 28.8 BPS pentium.
It is important to distinguish the two.
... was a sort of MMORPG that simulated a legislative body of some kind, with players acting out the roles of legislators, and receiving feedback from the game on how their actions affect the "populace". Kind of like Boys' State but IN TEH CYB4RSPAECE.
Game consoles will never appreciably see a trong Linux contingent for exactly the same reasons that the desktop won't: there's too much money to be made continuing with the same old proprietary business model.
Linux successfully invaded the server space precisely because nobody saw any money in turning commodity x86 boxen into production-quality servers at first.
They've broken up now, but the techno-pop band "Aqua" (famous here for "Barbie Girl") was one of my faves. They had some of the most incredibly vapid lyrics imaginable, but it was almost like a self-conscious parody of pop music, kinda like how Beavis and Butt-head, a show about two idiots, had quite intelligent subtexts running through it.
:)
Aqua also takes potshots at other aspects of our culture: their track "Halloween" condenses the entire plot of "Scream"-style teen horror flicks into a three minute song; "Freaky Friday" is ostensibly a send-up of the sad lyrics of country music, and has more disasters than Alanis's "Ironic", etc.
80's New Wave kitsch (e.g., Devo) sort of falls into the same category for me.
On the more serious side, I tend to like Meat Loaf (and any music by Jim Steinman), Queen, Styx, Darude, Chicane, Paul Oakenfold, even Mozart.
In general, I tend to like music with texture to it. Today's pop music really is like soda pop: too sugary, goes flat and stale quickly.
I dunno... when I'm in a mall, I usually swing by Waldenbooks.
A while back I referred to that period in our history as "just the introduction to the Opposites". Funny, nobody linked to the rant on my comic...
That guy is what we call a "troll". In reality, I bet he's probably better as a boss than the hoary-bearded middle manager who spent his college years in an internship writing COBOL (and liked it!) and asks things like "Linux? Perl? What are those things? Are they anything like Visual Basic?"
I've started taking things like history, lit, and Japanese to pad my schedule because this bassackwards school ran out of good CS stuff to teach me. (And most of it I learned from the school I transferred out of, Stevens, anyway.) These things are academically valuable.
:)
When HR sees your resume with your BS on it, even if it's from Podunk U, it means something. It means you have a diverse background, and are capable of inductive as well as deductive reasoning. These skills are important, especially in CS, if you want to ascend beyond code monkey status and evolve into a higher lifeform.
Forward-looking schools often use Scheme, or maybe even something gnarly like Ada, as a teaching language. However, a great many of the CS programs that I've seen/heard of are essentially mills for churning out code grinders to put to work writing payroll and billing code for insurance companies and their ilk. They will start you out on Java as a nice safe toy language to learn in, then migrate you to the suite of languages supported by Microsoft Visual Studio, and really that's about it unless you opt to take something exotic like programming languages, logic programming, or AI.
Me, I learn about two or three new languages a year, on my own time. Scheme and LISP are, however, very dear to my heart.