That's odd... I've had an account there for over a year. No spam yet...
Re: "jobs fer hard werkin 'Mericans"
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 1
I agree with almost everything you say but I have to take issue with one of your statements:
"Americans are lazier than most cultures"
I don't know about that. I rather thought we were workaholics. From what I understand, Americans work more hours per year than just about anyone else in the world. Americans often work to the detriment of other aspects in their lives (caring for their children, vacation time, etc). If anything, Americans probably need to work less.
Then again, I've never lived anyplace besides America. Can anyone with a broader perspective shed some light on this?
PS: Good point about getting another job within hours if you decide your monitor isn't big enough... I forwarded it to all my friends. True, true.
I know that SOF isn't very realistic, but it just *feels* real because they do a very detailed job of animating the carnage. Sure, Mortal Kombat is bloodier, but it's too cartoony to take seriously. SOF just feels real. I dunno, all I can say is that I've seen a LOT of ppl cringe while seeing Soldier of Fortune for the first time....it's nasty!
(It's also a GREAT game BTW... that fact is probably getting lost in all this discussion...
I think that, in the interests of research, I'll have to eat me one of them rare steaks.:)
I'm trying to become a vegetarian, but I can't because I've just been eating meat too long and I like the taste too much. So I only eat meat about once a month now... oh well, no one's perfect.
"I don't know how often I've known veg.* who were eventually reviled by their peers."
I don't think "everyone else is doing it" is a good reason to do something. I won't dredge up the tired old cliches about nazis, jumping off bridges, etc. Having said that, I do agree that vegetarians can be pretty annoying when they're "in your face" about it. But then again, don't you think an "in your face" meat-eater is just as annoying to them?
Furthermore, per volume, meat contains more nutritional stuff than plants
Yes, but it takes at least 5 pounds of grain (plus a lot of water) to fatten up a livestock by one pound. This was told to me directly by a farmer, so I'm assuming its true. If you used all that land and water growing food for PEOPLE instead of cows, you could feed a lot more people.
Factory farming has gotten to be cruel, although still not as cruel as sport hunting.
I dunno. Factory farming involves the animal living in a cage for its entire lifespan. If you go out and kill an animal in the wild, at least the animal has a chance for a normal life, not to mention a chance to outwit you and survive.... I always thought hunting was actually less cruel!
Well, I do love sushi. But the only raw beef I've heard of people eating is ground or pureed (like steak tartar). I don't think human teeth are really well equipped to eat a lot of raw beef.
Also, how good does raw beef taste? (Without seasoning, mixing with other ingredients, etc) If raw meat was healthy, wouldn't evolution have taught us to like it? Animals that like to eat healthy foods are more likely to survive and therefore pass that trait on to offspring, right?
Then again, brussels sprouts are healthy, and you couldn't pay me to eat one of those bastards- I'd prefer a plate full of meat from the Stinkymeat Project.:-)
But raw meat's another story. It will generally just make you ill- although I know that people DO eat raw beef, it's not real healthy. And I don't know of any people that eat raw chicken. Raw meat, on the other hand, IS really healthy for "real" meat-eating animals like wolves, pirahnnas, sharks, etc.:)
"Seriously, I don't think that this piece of editorial tripe belongs in this story"
Let's see... it's an article criticizing a legal decision. Jaime pointed out one aspect of the hypocrisy in the legal decision- how does that not belong in the story? If you disagree with him, fine- but the point certain;y wasn't out of place.
Then again, if a province that slaughters thousands of animals a day but bans images of animal slaughter ISN'T being hypocritical, then I really don't understand the meaning of the word.
One final note- just because you feel evolution has made you an omnivore (which is a very debatable point- have you ever tried eating raw meat, the way every other omnivore/carnivore eats meat in the wild?) doesn't mean you SHOULD eat meat- aside from the fact that animals are tasty (I'll agree with you there), there aren't really any other arguments FOR eating meat, biologically, ethically, or environmentally speaking.
"I've never played 'Soldier of Fortune,' but the screenshots are roughly as bloody as Q3A's giblets of flesh when a rocket hits a dead body"
For those of you who haven't seen the game in action... SOF is probably the most violent game I've ever played, because they went to great lengths to simulate the effects of weapons on various areas of the body. In Quake, a bullet hit is a bullet hit. In SOF, the enemy will react according to the part of his body you shot... grabbing his throat, losing an arm, grabbing his crotch and moaning in pain, etc.
There's probably more blood in other games, but trust me- SOF has brought a wince to the face of many a jaded gamer who wouldn't bat an eye at a Quake3 gibfest as they see an SOF enemy have both his arms blown off with a shotgun and then sink to the ground with a knife in his groin.
Still though, it's not much more BLOODY than other games, it's just a little more realistic-feeling...
Also, I really liked Jaime's point about the animal violence... if they're REALLY concerned about the animals, why do they kill so darn many of them up there?:)
"One of the biggest problems I see with the tech industry is that way too many employees don't know how to interview their employer to see if it's a place they want to work. "
This is absolute wisdom! I've learned this the hard way. I've had some bad jobs in the last couple of years because I was too eager to impress the people who were interviewing me, and didn't ask enough critical questions of my prospective employers.:-)
Take notice, guys. Especially in today's economy where skilled/experienced tech workers can be somewhat choosy when it comes to choosing an employer... you need to interview THEM as much as they interview YOU!!
Perhaps you are right about the good geek guys hiding, but I can't find any:(
If you had your email address listed, your mailbox probably would have been Slashdotted with 20,000 volunteers. Whether or not that's a good thing is an excercise left to the reader's imagination.:)
Oh sure, I can handle it, whether I want/need it or not is another question. I don't think geek girlfriends are bad (they rock!) but I do think that limiting your significant-other search to geeks is bad, and that geek missionaries are extremely bad.
I also think that all relationships need common ground. And hey, what better common ground is there than Q2DM1, or perhaps Q2DM6 if you're handy with a railgun?:)
Maybe one thing that turns girls off is that a lot of male geeks make the mistake of becoming geek missionaries and sort of try to ram geekish things down everyone else's throats.
I think it's because deep down inside a lot of geeks just want to be accepted, but without giving up their geekish ideals. So they wish and hope for a girl that they can shape and mold into uber-geek-girl-love-slave who will of course worship them, their Geek Daddy and mentor.
Having a geek girlfriend really sounds like a good idea. I always wanted a girl who was into the things I was into. Finally, I found one! She wasn't a coder, but she was into lots of other geekish things like science fiction, anime, video games, owning swords, etc that I was also into.
I dunno, it was fun, but wasn't really all that great. I mean, after staring at code for 12 hours a day, do you really want to come home and discuss it while you and your similarly-obsessed significant other make dinner/go to bed/etc?
I have a much better relationship with my current girlfriend, who's hardly into any of the stuff I'm into. But we really dig eachother and like eachother so it's fun! I think I'd rather date someone a lot different than me who digs me and has an open mind.
OK, I kind of went off on a tangent there. But I think "geek missionaries" are one turn-off for women when they think of technology...
That's a good point. The easier it is to get a Java app up and running, the better for Java.
Still, even if Microsoft included Java support with their OS, you'd still have to download updates from Microsoft. If Micrsoft bundles Java 1.1 with the OS, we're all gonna be firing up our modems when we need a Java 1.2 JVM anyway. Just like when M$ updates MDAC or ADO or the VB runtime libraries...
Also, you're thinking of casual home users here- the issue won't apply to people using Java for actual work because IT departments will take care of it-- the end user won't have a choice anyway.:-)
Consider this situation, though. Suppose you link to file ABC.ZIP on my site. ABC.ZIP is a perfectly legal file.
Now, suppose I want to screw you over for some reason so I take 300 megs of Metallica MP3's, ZIP them up, and replace the original (legal) ABC.ZIP with the Metallica zip file which I just happened to name ABC.ZIP, and report you to Lars and the RIAA.
Now you're linking to a real motherlode of illegal material and you're potentially screwed pretty hard. Did you do anything wrong? No. Could you have prevented it? Not unless you verify the contents of your links every single second of the freaking day. That is neither practical nor possible.
I don't think your anology with Bob and the stolen watch is appropriate, because links are persistant, while the Bob/watch incident is a one-time event.
Potentially, I'd be screwing myself, too, since I'm the one who's now hosting the highly illegal file. However, perhaps I'm in a country where copyright laws are rarely enforced (like many East European countries) or suppose I do it because I don't know any better- maybe you're linked to "mp3_of_the_week.mp3" on my page, and I change it every week, and one week I put something illegal there...
<SARCASM>Suuuuuure! Just like your web browser is in hardware, since it's running on your CPU, which is a piece of silicon. </SARCASM>
Annnnnnnyway, for those of you that have some sort of interest and/or clue, I'm still trying to dig up some specs on the N64 to see if it decompresses in hardware or not... I just think it's neat when companies make some multi-million dollar announcment about some technology that was pioneered in video games.:-)
I think that Nintendo64 might do this too, as funny as that sounds. The data on the ROM cartridges is compressed, I know that much for sure. I'm pretty sure it's decompressed at real-time when it's accessed, but I don't remember if it's done by hardware or by software routines.
Can anyone verify this- whether the N64 does it hardware or software?
"What is to become of Java now that Microsoft has its own version? Certainly other operating systems will continue to support it, particularly Solaris and Mac OS X, but will Java support be dropped from later versions of Windows and how badly will this hurt the language"
If Microsoft stops supporting Java on Windows, that would actually strengthen Java's position on windows. Because instead of Microsoft's FUD-soaked Java implementations giving Java a bad name, the only Windows Java implementations (JVM's) would be made by people who actually want Java to succeed like IBM and Sun.
Just because Microsoft stops supporting Java... it's not like MS can STOP you from running CompanyX's JVM on your Windows box.
C is basically a big ol' delimitated text file. The only things seperating it from a 60-year assembly program is the fact that it's expressive, easier to learn and there are compilers that let you write programs faster.
No, C is a big old COMPILED text file that's transformed into something utterly different than a text file when you run it. Of *course* all code starts out as a text file, how else would a human write it, aside from coding in machine language?
If you were to use that logic (C==text file), then UNIX is a big old text file, since it's written in C. Does that make sense? Not really.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.
Perhaps I should have phrased that statement slightly differently. I'm not saying that XML isn't good, I'm saying it's not real new and it's not real revolutionary. XML can be great in the same way a text file can be great, only slightly better due to its hierarchical structure. But to call it revolutionary (as that marketers at Microsoft and elsewhere do) is a joke.
Do I sound bitter? It's because I'm working on a project right now that involves heavy use of XML FOR NO GOOD REASON. It's screwing the project up because it's totally misused... some pointy-haired manager thought that XML was a cool buzzword so he insisted that XML be the basic for this application. Has this ever happened to you?:-)
This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer. "
I've been working with XML for about six months now. I would have to say it's one of the stupidest bizzword-fads I've ever seen
XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology. Also, XML is not fast... nor was it designed to be.
95 has just trashed two motherboards for me so I'm in a very anti-Windows mood atm
Let me get this straight... Windows trashed your *motherboards*? WTF? I'd like to hear how this happened....
It's pretty hard for software to trash hardware, unless you overclock your videocard to 800MHZ or try to run your crappy old CGA monitor at 200HZ or yank the power cord during a BIOS update or something...
I don't think that either you or the moderator who moderated you up bother to read the story this article links to!
WARNING! Spoilers ahead for those who actaully bother to read a story before commenting on or bitching about it!!!
In the article, they said they're working on a system that will let you enter commands with just a couple of taps, instead of having to type everything. There, feel better now?:-)
Slashdot Mirror
That's odd... I've had an account there for over a year. No spam yet...
I agree with almost everything you say but I have to take issue with one of your statements:
"Americans are lazier than most cultures"
I don't know about that. I rather thought we were workaholics. From what I understand, Americans work more hours per year than just about anyone else in the world. Americans often work to the detriment of other aspects in their lives (caring for their children, vacation time, etc). If anything, Americans probably need to work less.
Then again, I've never lived anyplace besides America. Can anyone with a broader perspective shed some light on this?
PS: Good point about getting another job within hours if you decide your monitor isn't big enough... I forwarded it to all my friends. True, true.
I know that SOF isn't very realistic, but it just *feels* real because they do a very detailed job of animating the carnage. Sure, Mortal Kombat is bloodier, but it's too cartoony to take seriously. SOF just feels real. I dunno, all I can say is that I've seen a LOT of ppl cringe while seeing Soldier of Fortune for the first time....it's nasty!
(It's also a GREAT game BTW... that fact is probably getting lost in all this discussion...
I think that, in the interests of research, I'll have to eat me one of them rare steaks. :)
I'm trying to become a vegetarian, but I can't because I've just been eating meat too long and I like the taste too much. So I only eat meat about once a month now... oh well, no one's perfect.
"I don't know how often I've known veg.* who were eventually reviled by their peers."
I don't think "everyone else is doing it" is a good reason to do something. I won't dredge up the tired old cliches about nazis, jumping off bridges, etc. Having said that, I do agree that vegetarians can be pretty annoying when they're "in your face" about it. But then again, don't you think an "in your face" meat-eater is just as annoying to them?
Furthermore, per volume, meat contains more nutritional stuff than plants
Yes, but it takes at least 5 pounds of grain (plus a lot of water) to fatten up a livestock by one pound. This was told to me directly by a farmer, so I'm assuming its true. If you used all that land and water growing food for PEOPLE instead of cows, you could feed a lot more people.
Factory farming has gotten to be cruel, although still not as cruel as sport hunting.
I dunno. Factory farming involves the animal living in a cage for its entire lifespan. If you go out and kill an animal in the wild, at least the animal has a chance for a normal life, not to mention a chance to outwit you and survive.... I always thought hunting was actually less cruel!
Well, I do love sushi. But the only raw beef I've heard of people eating is ground or pureed (like steak tartar). I don't think human teeth are really well equipped to eat a lot of raw beef.
Also, how good does raw beef taste? (Without seasoning, mixing with other ingredients, etc) If raw meat was healthy, wouldn't evolution have taught us to like it? Animals that like to eat healthy foods are more likely to survive and therefore pass that trait on to offspring, right?
Then again, brussels sprouts are healthy, and you couldn't pay me to eat one of those bastards- I'd prefer a plate full of meat from the Stinkymeat Project. :-)
Hmmmm, that's a good point. Maybe I should have added IANAB (I Am Not A Biologist) to my post. :P
OK, OK, ya got me there. I love sushi too. :-)
But raw meat's another story. It will generally just make you ill- although I know that people DO eat raw beef, it's not real healthy. And I don't know of any people that eat raw chicken. Raw meat, on the other hand, IS really healthy for "real" meat-eating animals like wolves, pirahnnas, sharks, etc. :)
"Seriously, I don't think that this piece of editorial tripe belongs in this story"
Let's see... it's an article criticizing a legal decision. Jaime pointed out one aspect of the hypocrisy in the legal decision- how does that not belong in the story? If you disagree with him, fine- but the point certain;y wasn't out of place.
Then again, if a province that slaughters thousands of animals a day but bans images of animal slaughter ISN'T being hypocritical, then I really don't understand the meaning of the word.
One final note- just because you feel evolution has made you an omnivore (which is a very debatable point- have you ever tried eating raw meat, the way every other omnivore/carnivore eats meat in the wild?) doesn't mean you SHOULD eat meat- aside from the fact that animals are tasty (I'll agree with you there), there aren't really any other arguments FOR eating meat, biologically, ethically, or environmentally speaking.
"I've never played 'Soldier of Fortune,' but the screenshots are roughly as bloody as Q3A's giblets of flesh when a rocket hits a dead body"
For those of you who haven't seen the game in action... SOF is probably the most violent game I've ever played, because they went to great lengths to simulate the effects of weapons on various areas of the body. In Quake, a bullet hit is a bullet hit. In SOF, the enemy will react according to the part of his body you shot... grabbing his throat, losing an arm, grabbing his crotch and moaning in pain, etc.
There's probably more blood in other games, but trust me- SOF has brought a wince to the face of many a jaded gamer who wouldn't bat an eye at a Quake3 gibfest as they see an SOF enemy have both his arms blown off with a shotgun and then sink to the ground with a knife in his groin.
Still though, it's not much more BLOODY than other games, it's just a little more realistic-feeling...
Also, I really liked Jaime's point about the animal violence... if they're REALLY concerned about the animals, why do they kill so darn many of them up there? :)
"One of the biggest problems I see with the tech industry is that way too many employees don't know how to interview their employer to see if it's a place they want to work. "
This is absolute wisdom! I've learned this the hard way. I've had some bad jobs in the last couple of years because I was too eager to impress the people who were interviewing me, and didn't ask enough critical questions of my prospective employers. :-)
Take notice, guys. Especially in today's economy where skilled/experienced tech workers can be somewhat choosy when it comes to choosing an employer... you need to interview THEM as much as they interview YOU!!
Perhaps you are right about the good geek guys hiding, but I can't find any :(
If you had your email address listed, your mailbox probably would have been Slashdotted with 20,000 volunteers. Whether or not that's a good thing is an excercise left to the reader's imagination. :)
Good response!
Most chicas can handle it, how about you?
Oh sure, I can handle it, whether I want/need it or not is another question. I don't think geek girlfriends are bad (they rock!) but I do think that limiting your significant-other search to geeks is bad, and that geek missionaries are extremely bad.
I also think that all relationships need common ground. And hey, what better common ground is there than Q2DM1, or perhaps Q2DM6 if you're handy with a railgun? :)
Maybe one thing that turns girls off is that a lot of male geeks make the mistake of becoming geek missionaries and sort of try to ram geekish things down everyone else's throats.
I think it's because deep down inside a lot of geeks just want to be accepted, but without giving up their geekish ideals. So they wish and hope for a girl that they can shape and mold into uber-geek-girl-love-slave who will of course worship them, their Geek Daddy and mentor.
Having a geek girlfriend really sounds like a good idea. I always wanted a girl who was into the things I was into. Finally, I found one! She wasn't a coder, but she was into lots of other geekish things like science fiction, anime, video games, owning swords, etc that I was also into.
I dunno, it was fun, but wasn't really all that great. I mean, after staring at code for 12 hours a day, do you really want to come home and discuss it while you and your similarly-obsessed significant other make dinner/go to bed/etc?
I have a much better relationship with my current girlfriend, who's hardly into any of the stuff I'm into. But we really dig eachother and like eachother so it's fun! I think I'd rather date someone a lot different than me who digs me and has an open mind.
OK, I kind of went off on a tangent there. But I think "geek missionaries" are one turn-off for women when they think of technology...
That's a good point. The easier it is to get a Java app up and running, the better for Java.
Still, even if Microsoft included Java support with their OS, you'd still have to download updates from Microsoft. If Micrsoft bundles Java 1.1 with the OS, we're all gonna be firing up our modems when we need a Java 1.2 JVM anyway. Just like when M$ updates MDAC or ADO or the VB runtime libraries...
Also, you're thinking of casual home users here- the issue won't apply to people using Java for actual work because IT departments will take care of it-- the end user won't have a choice anyway. :-)
Consider this situation, though. Suppose you link to file ABC.ZIP on my site. ABC.ZIP is a perfectly legal file.
Now, suppose I want to screw you over for some reason so I take 300 megs of Metallica MP3's, ZIP them up, and replace the original (legal) ABC.ZIP with the Metallica zip file which I just happened to name ABC.ZIP, and report you to Lars and the RIAA.
Now you're linking to a real motherlode of illegal material and you're potentially screwed pretty hard. Did you do anything wrong? No. Could you have prevented it? Not unless you verify the contents of your links every single second of the freaking day. That is neither practical nor possible.
I don't think your anology with Bob and the stolen watch is appropriate, because links are persistant, while the Bob/watch incident is a one-time event.
Potentially, I'd be screwing myself, too, since I'm the one who's now hosting the highly illegal file. However, perhaps I'm in a country where copyright laws are rarely enforced (like many East European countries) or suppose I do it because I don't know any better- maybe you're linked to "mp3_of_the_week.mp3" on my page, and I change it every week, and one week I put something illegal there...
<SARCASM>Suuuuuure! Just like your web browser is in hardware, since it's running on your CPU, which is a piece of silicon. </SARCASM>
Annnnnnnyway, for those of you that have some sort of interest and/or clue, I'm still trying to dig up some specs on the N64 to see if it decompresses in hardware or not... I just think it's neat when companies make some multi-million dollar announcment about some technology that was pioneered in video games. :-)
This is so cool!
I think that Nintendo64 might do this too, as funny as that sounds. The data on the ROM cartridges is compressed, I know that much for sure. I'm pretty sure it's decompressed at real-time when it's accessed, but I don't remember if it's done by hardware or by software routines.
Can anyone verify this- whether the N64 does it hardware or software?
"What is to become of Java now that Microsoft has its own version? Certainly other operating systems will continue to support it, particularly Solaris and Mac OS X, but will Java support be dropped from later versions of Windows and how badly will this hurt the language"
If Microsoft stops supporting Java on Windows, that would actually strengthen Java's position on windows. Because instead of Microsoft's FUD-soaked Java implementations giving Java a bad name, the only Windows Java implementations (JVM's) would be made by people who actually want Java to succeed like IBM and Sun.
Just because Microsoft stops supporting Java... it's not like MS can STOP you from running CompanyX's JVM on your Windows box.
Thank you! You stated my point better than I did. :-)
C is basically a big ol' delimitated text file. The only things seperating it from a 60-year assembly program is the fact that it's expressive, easier to learn and there are compilers that let you write programs faster.
No, C is a big old COMPILED text file that's transformed into something utterly different than a text file when you run it. Of *course* all code starts out as a text file, how else would a human write it, aside from coding in machine language?
If you were to use that logic (C==text file), then UNIX is a big old text file, since it's written in C. Does that make sense? Not really.
XML is a big old text file, period.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is.
Perhaps I should have phrased that statement slightly differently. I'm not saying that XML isn't good, I'm saying it's not real new and it's not real revolutionary. XML can be great in the same way a text file can be great, only slightly better due to its hierarchical structure. But to call it revolutionary (as that marketers at Microsoft and elsewhere do) is a joke.
Do I sound bitter? It's because I'm working on a project right now that involves heavy use of XML FOR NO GOOD REASON. It's screwing the project up because it's totally misused... some pointy-haired manager thought that XML was a cool buzzword so he insisted that XML be the basic for this application. Has this ever happened to you? :-)
This is a product that integrates with windows using XML to store all of your information on Microsoft servers, so any computer in the world can be used as "your" computer. "
I've been working with XML for about six months now. I would have to say it's one of the stupidest bizzword-fads I've ever seen
XML is basically a big ol' delimited text file. The only things separating it from a 30-year old text file is the fact that it's hierarchical and the fact that there are parsers that let you navigate the tree structure easily.
People are advocating XML is this great new technology for universal data exchange. Well, it's NOT... no more than a standard text file is. Both parties still have to agree and understand the format and structure of the data before it becomes useful, so that's definitely not a progression over any existing technology. Also, XML is not fast... nor was it designed to be.
95 has just trashed two motherboards for me so I'm in a very anti-Windows mood atm
Let me get this straight... Windows trashed your *motherboards*? WTF? I'd like to hear how this happened....
It's pretty hard for software to trash hardware, unless you overclock your videocard to 800MHZ or try to run your crappy old CGA monitor at 200HZ or yank the power cord during a BIOS update or something...
I don't think that either you or the moderator who moderated you up bother to read the story this article links to!
WARNING! Spoilers ahead for those who actaully bother to read a story before commenting on or bitching about it!!!
In the article, they said they're working on a system that will let you enter commands with just a couple of taps, instead of having to type everything. There, feel better now? :-)