It's time for a redesign, anyway.
on
XFree86 4.4 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The average person is greatly confused by the myriad issues involved with X, such as fonts, the third mouse wheel, TV-Out, printing, and the jillion interfaces available via desktop shells (for which there is no analogue in the Windows world).
Maybe a simpler and GPLed implementation is in order. There's got to be a bunch of tweaks for speed available for the X86 platform that would be possible in something not intended to run in safe mode all the time.
...that he uses in his CS classes to explain the impact of these cases on the average student, their family, their friends, and society in general.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S./.ers) there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down,
ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many
others. Basically,
while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed
to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property
damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come
wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's
trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself
in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the
edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take
pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy
mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave
the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't
working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks.
I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another
drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night
and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well,
you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose
I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the
spittoon and hefted it off of the floor. Before the bartender could stop him,
the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container
up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismay, the
guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had
finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground,
wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the
first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You
only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
This is why the law should embrace both free enterprise and fair use; the average person will draw from both, the average business can profit from both, and the content creators are encouraged financially to continue to create without becoming discouraged financially by 90-year royalties.
The secret is to read the instructions and only update when you really need to. A lot of people seem to feel that they should keep firmware up to date for the same reasons they keep updating their software, but in truth very few firmware updates are necessary because they fix problems most people don't experience.
I don't know why anybody would seek a non-upgradable piece of hardware over an upgradable piece of hardware. New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
If you release software under the GPL and somebody you fundamentally disagree with (like SCO) starts to use it within the confines of the GPL, can you pull their right to use it?
Somehow, I doubt you can, and this may be something to address in the next iteration of the GPL. Too late for the pool of software out there, perhaps, but not for new versions.
I've heard a rather convincing argument that the successes of Free Software have been where it is best able to conform to business mentality and shed that which people tend to misinterpret as 'elitism'. Companies get confused when they see a license that says they must share, and many no doubt have misconceptions about the degree of sharing that must occur (will employee files end up on the net?)
To truly compete, perhaps it should arrive in binary-only form in 'commercial' style packing material, and mention the option for interested users to download the source in some obscure portion of the manual. Otherwise it's just too strange a concept to get a handle on for the average person (manager/boss) whose computing experience has been shaped by commercial software and practices.
Although I can think of a good reason for not bringing the original team back: if they're working on something else right now, EA can count on the solid reputation of GoldenEye N64 to sell the new GoldenEye, and on the reputation of the original Rare team to sell the title they're working on.
Not that this is necessarily the case, but that's how I'd play it.
BTW: Does anybody else find using a joystick to aim really difficult, or am I just getting old?
I write a novel. It's not a particularly good novel, but I'm proud of it. I have a copyright on the novel which I do not relinquish or alter, and I publish and sell copies of the novel.
A reader somewhere thinks it's the best novel he's ever read, or at least in his top 100. He scans the book to HTML and uploads it to a filesharing network. He has stolen my right to distribute my work on my terms.
A user of the filesharing network downloads the scanned copy of my novel. He too has stolen my right to choose the means and scope of my distribution.
My novel is still there, but I have lost something. See also the Merriam-Webster definition, transitive senses 1b-1d.
Please put this "it's not stealing, it's infringement" argument to rest, folks. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers, and eclipses the better points that could be made (such as that we should reduce the copyright term in order to promote competition and innovation in content).
It's not the RFID that unnerves me about this.
on
RFID Tags For The Rich
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
We've got a few good shops in town where the employees are friendly and the owners have a shift behind the counter with everybody else. They don't need loyalty cards, because they know most of their customers by name and the working environment and pay are good enough that they aren't rotating workers every couple of weeks.
The connection there is real. Now people aim to replace that with a wire in a piece of plastic, just as they're replacing living wage jobs with permatemp spots or part time people working close to full time schedules. If you think the negative part of this story is RFID, which is just brand new fuel for the paranoid that'll in actual practice do more to save money than invade privacy, think again; it's about subjugating another fulfilling business practice to a cookie-cutter scheme that anybody who can fog a mirror can perform.
Why are we in the U.S. always the last to get new cellular toys?
There is a certain reliability factor we expect in U.S. equipment. Keep in mind that these fancy Linux phones are bleeding-edge and likely quite unstable compared to your standard PCS or analog phone. Additionally, with the amount of geography we've got to cover, the support for newer technologies just isn't there in our cell towers.
Canada's in an even worse situation, technically speaking. Even though it's easier to deploy wireless than it used to be to get phone service out to rural areas, the towers still require service.
Who knows what Firefox is? Chrome? Phoenix? Camino? Thunderbird?
Internet Explorer is commonly known and integrated in the great majority of computers. It's a standard anybody in the web business programs to. Mozilla could be a contender, but it's split into a million projects and still chokes on a number of websites. Most people I know have never heard of it, and to my knowledge even AOL is still using Internet Explorer. There is no tide; IE's the ocean.
I write a novel. It's not a particularly good novel, but I'm proud of it. I have a copyright on the novel which I do not relinquish or alter, and I publish and sell copies of the novel.
A reader somewhere thinks it's the best novel he's ever read, or at least in his top 100. He scans the book to HTML and uploads it to a filesharing network. He has stolen my right to distribute my work on my terms.
A user of the filesharing network downloads the scanned copy of my novel. He too has stolen my right to choose the means and scope of my distribution.
Please put this argument to rest. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers, and eclipses the better points that could be made (such as that we should reduce the copyright term in order to promote competition and innovation in content).
The first is that the linear game model is or should be a thing of the past. When the player has multiple story branches and solutions to choose from a game becomes more fulfilling and replay value is enhanced. It also makes multiplayability easier to accomplish.
The second is that stories and backgrounds are less important than the gameplay. Which I think is hogwash; granted, there are some games where story really didn't matter all that much (Quake, SimCity, Klax), but would people be as obsessed with GTA3/Vice City if they had no story to speak of?
I've played some fairly mediocre games for their storylines. A good story greatly enhances the quality of a game.
If you get the phone with all the fancy gadgets, you're leaving yourself open to stuff like this. Maybe it's smarter to get a cellphone and a PDA rather than a miniaturized supercomputer?
Although most people would be better off without cellphones entirely.
Are there any special fees or complications in buying stocks from Sweden, or is this something that's completely unavailable to people out of the country?
I'm sure there are quite a few people that'd like to get in on this, but not if it's prohibitively expensive.
Very crisp. Despite the double memory/instruction access time created by accessing words twice the size of the 32-bit chips, I think they're using the new chaining instruction set to double or triple most of their refresh operations. And it's still got Solitare.
It's clear that sender-pays is the only technological scheme that is effective and can be guaranteed effective in the long term.
Other proposed solutions involve lengthy computations on a sender's machine, which can be trivially verified on the receiver's machine. These will be overcome with faster machines, and spammers can afford better hardware than the rest of us anyway. Legislation is no solution, as the only sort that respects the First Admendment rights of emailers provides the same rights to unsolicited email.
As the saying goes at our local Mensa chapter: wise thoughts may go into your mind, but pultem calidus invado pantorum. At the end of the day postage is the cheapest option, given the cost of enforcement or technology updates.
There isn't much point in maintaining what (at best) will become two parallel projects trailing Microsoft Office development.
OpenOffice is in the lead as far as the feature set goes, and a lot of effort and energy has to go into a project like this. Optimally both teams should pool their resources and work on OpenOffice, given that it's a true cross-platform solution, and turn KOffice into an OpenOffice integration with KDE.
Glowing fish are neat, but this is the type of breakthrough that should convince holdout countries that genetically modified plants are a good thing.
Granted, whatever this plant is it isn't likely it'll grow everywhere, but this is so innovative that I wonder if it can be applied to the detection of other materials in the soil.
It's even self-limiting, so despite being a weed it won't choke out the local flora.
SCO appears to have the upper hand, at least with regards to this new MyDoom thing.
Well, and in the financial sector, which seems to cling to the stubborn belief that there might be something to their tactics and/or allegations.
It's quite likely that "truth will out", as they say, but if public opinion has any bearing on the outcome of this struggle IBM and Linus need to get better visibility in the more widely consumed (and moronic) news channels. I haven't seen anything but negativeish stuff there, but it's what gets out to the masses.
Actually, there is a good possibility that plasma is not a new state of matter per se, but rather a transference state between gas and Bose-Einstienian condensate... much as water at boiling point. Although as we push to further thermal extremes, it's possible that we'll discover more energy states or methods of creating different forms of matter without relying solely on temperature.
Practically speaking, I don't think it makes a great deal of difference to the story. But it's the tangents that make science fun.
The Oekokrim trials were clearly about establishing precedent for Norway on an important matter, not about punishing him directly. Living in a litigious society, I can tell you only one group seems to come out the consistent winner when everybody feels the need for compensation when they've been offended in some manner.
He didn't have to pay lawyer's fees, and from the sounds of it outside of having something like this looming over his head for years it's probably been a boon to him overall (he won't have to worry about finding work, for one thing.) It's probably a better time to count blessings than demand renumeration.
The most disconcerting thing will probably be having the game frequently save (after every turn), such that you can't simply reset it if a major character dies never to return.
I think it's somewhat refreshing. One can focus entirely on the strategy instead of constantly rebooting because they think they lost a character that'll be critical later on. But I can see others being upset about this.
Another thing that'd be nice would be to get rid of the concept of burying obscure items and characters and 'easter egg' style content in RPGs where you've got to play through them a couple of times with the aid of a FAQ/walkthough to collect stuff. Sometimes the concept is rewarding, but when you miss the 16th step of a 24 step process and have it change the ending of the (40 hour) game it does less to increase the replay value than it does the level of irritation.
I can throw together a Perl script to do just about any small menial task in a half-hour, but anything more than that seems to get lost in the quagmire of lists, arrays, scalars, references, etc.
That, and Python is really easy to learn. I'd recommend it (and this book) to anybody who wants to add some sort of scripting tool to their belt. Cross-platform never hurts.
Vaporware necessary to a thriving industry?
on
2003 Vaporware Awards
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Although in computing it's most visible, most fields have their own share of vaporware. It's an inevitable reaction of skyhigh expectations getting grounded in reality. There's an anecdote/analogy I've heard about the phenomenon from an economist that seems oddly appropriate.
Think back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S./.ers), where there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down,
ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many
others. I think it was California, but it could have been Oregon or someplace
similar -- well, the location isn't really relevant to the story but if you're
interested you may be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically,
while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed
to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property
damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come
wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's
trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself
in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the
edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take
pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy
mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave
the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't
working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks.
I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another
drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night
and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well,
you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose
I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the
spitoon and hefted it off of the flooy. Before the bartender could stop him,
the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container
up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismayal, the
guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had
finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground,
wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the
first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You
only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe a simpler and GPLed implementation is in order. There's got to be a bunch of tweaks for speed available for the X86 platform that would be possible in something not intended to run in safe mode all the time.
It seems that back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S. /.ers) there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down,
ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many
others. Basically,
while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed
to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property
damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the spittoon and hefted it off of the floor. Before the bartender could stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismay, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground, wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."
This is why the law should embrace both free enterprise and fair use; the average person will draw from both, the average business can profit from both, and the content creators are encouraged financially to continue to create without becoming discouraged financially by 90-year royalties.
I don't know why anybody would seek a non-upgradable piece of hardware over an upgradable piece of hardware. New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Somehow, I doubt you can, and this may be something to address in the next iteration of the GPL. Too late for the pool of software out there, perhaps, but not for new versions.
To truly compete, perhaps it should arrive in binary-only form in 'commercial' style packing material, and mention the option for interested users to download the source in some obscure portion of the manual. Otherwise it's just too strange a concept to get a handle on for the average person (manager/boss) whose computing experience has been shaped by commercial software and practices.
Not that this is necessarily the case, but that's how I'd play it.
BTW: Does anybody else find using a joystick to aim really difficult, or am I just getting old?
I write a novel. It's not a particularly good novel, but I'm proud of it. I have a copyright on the novel which I do not relinquish or alter, and I publish and sell copies of the novel.
A reader somewhere thinks it's the best novel he's ever read, or at least in his top 100. He scans the book to HTML and uploads it to a filesharing network. He has stolen my right to distribute my work on my terms.
A user of the filesharing network downloads the scanned copy of my novel. He too has stolen my right to choose the means and scope of my distribution.
My novel is still there, but I have lost something. See also the Merriam-Webster definition, transitive senses 1b-1d.
Please put this "it's not stealing, it's infringement" argument to rest, folks. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers, and eclipses the better points that could be made (such as that we should reduce the copyright term in order to promote competition and innovation in content).
The connection there is real. Now people aim to replace that with a wire in a piece of plastic, just as they're replacing living wage jobs with permatemp spots or part time people working close to full time schedules. If you think the negative part of this story is RFID, which is just brand new fuel for the paranoid that'll in actual practice do more to save money than invade privacy, think again; it's about subjugating another fulfilling business practice to a cookie-cutter scheme that anybody who can fog a mirror can perform.
There is a certain reliability factor we expect in U.S. equipment. Keep in mind that these fancy Linux phones are bleeding-edge and likely quite unstable compared to your standard PCS or analog phone. Additionally, with the amount of geography we've got to cover, the support for newer technologies just isn't there in our cell towers.
Canada's in an even worse situation, technically speaking. Even though it's easier to deploy wireless than it used to be to get phone service out to rural areas, the towers still require service.
Internet Explorer is commonly known and integrated in the great majority of computers. It's a standard anybody in the web business programs to. Mozilla could be a contender, but it's split into a million projects and still chokes on a number of websites. Most people I know have never heard of it, and to my knowledge even AOL is still using Internet Explorer. There is no tide; IE's the ocean.
I write a novel. It's not a particularly good novel, but I'm proud of it. I have a copyright on the novel which I do not relinquish or alter, and I publish and sell copies of the novel.
A reader somewhere thinks it's the best novel he's ever read, or at least in his top 100. He scans the book to HTML and uploads it to a filesharing network. He has stolen my right to distribute my work on my terms.
A user of the filesharing network downloads the scanned copy of my novel. He too has stolen my right to choose the means and scope of my distribution.
My novel is still there, but I have lost something. See also the Merriam-Webster definition, transitive senses 1b-1d.
Please put this argument to rest. It's used as a particularly moronic crutch by some avid P2P fileswappers, and eclipses the better points that could be made (such as that we should reduce the copyright term in order to promote competition and innovation in content).
The second is that stories and backgrounds are less important than the gameplay. Which I think is hogwash; granted, there are some games where story really didn't matter all that much (Quake, SimCity, Klax), but would people be as obsessed with GTA3/Vice City if they had no story to speak of?
I've played some fairly mediocre games for their storylines. A good story greatly enhances the quality of a game.
Although most people would be better off without cellphones entirely.
I'm sure there are quite a few people that'd like to get in on this, but not if it's prohibitively expensive.
I was wondering where my damn saws went.
Very crisp. Despite the double memory/instruction access time created by accessing words twice the size of the 32-bit chips, I think they're using the new chaining instruction set to double or triple most of their refresh operations. And it's still got Solitare.
Other proposed solutions involve lengthy computations on a sender's machine, which can be trivially verified on the receiver's machine. These will be overcome with faster machines, and spammers can afford better hardware than the rest of us anyway. Legislation is no solution, as the only sort that respects the First Admendment rights of emailers provides the same rights to unsolicited email.
As the saying goes at our local Mensa chapter: wise thoughts may go into your mind, but pultem calidus invado pantorum. At the end of the day postage is the cheapest option, given the cost of enforcement or technology updates.
OpenOffice is in the lead as far as the feature set goes, and a lot of effort and energy has to go into a project like this. Optimally both teams should pool their resources and work on OpenOffice, given that it's a true cross-platform solution, and turn KOffice into an OpenOffice integration with KDE.
It's even self-limiting, so despite being a weed it won't choke out the local flora.
Well, and in the financial sector, which seems to cling to the stubborn belief that there might be something to their tactics and/or allegations.
It's quite likely that "truth will out", as they say, but if public opinion has any bearing on the outcome of this struggle IBM and Linus need to get better visibility in the more widely consumed (and moronic) news channels. I haven't seen anything but negativeish stuff there, but it's what gets out to the masses.
Practically speaking, I don't think it makes a great deal of difference to the story. But it's the tangents that make science fun.
He didn't have to pay lawyer's fees, and from the sounds of it outside of having something like this looming over his head for years it's probably been a boon to him overall (he won't have to worry about finding work, for one thing.) It's probably a better time to count blessings than demand renumeration.
The most disconcerting thing will probably be having the game frequently save (after every turn), such that you can't simply reset it if a major character dies never to return.
I think it's somewhat refreshing. One can focus entirely on the strategy instead of constantly rebooting because they think they lost a character that'll be critical later on. But I can see others being upset about this.
Another thing that'd be nice would be to get rid of the concept of burying obscure items and characters and 'easter egg' style content in RPGs where you've got to play through them a couple of times with the aid of a FAQ/walkthough to collect stuff. Sometimes the concept is rewarding, but when you miss the 16th step of a 24 step process and have it change the ending of the (40 hour) game it does less to increase the replay value than it does the level of irritation.
I can throw together a Perl script to do just about any small menial task in a half-hour, but anything more than that seems to get lost in the quagmire of lists, arrays, scalars, references, etc.
That, and Python is really easy to learn. I'd recommend it (and this book) to anybody who wants to add some sort of scripting tool to their belt. Cross-platform never hurts.
Think back in the late 1800's in America (mentioning this for non-U.S. /.ers), where there was this saloon in the West that was kind of a run-down,
ramshackle joint that was frequented by a few loyal patrons and not too many
others. I think it was California, but it could have been Oregon or someplace
similar -- well, the location isn't really relevant to the story but if you're
interested you may be able to dig a bit on Google to find out. Basically,
while the saloon didn't go out of its way to publicize itself to
out-of-towners (not much point given that it was in a remote area) it managed
to do a fairly steady trade despite the occasional brawl that caused property
damage and the persistent requests from a particular fellow for free drinks.
More nights than not, the proprietor of the saloon would watch this drunk come wandering in through the doors, sit down, and lay a line on him about how he's trying to pull things together and how he'd just make enough to keep himself in beans and couldn't the bartender just pour him a shot or two to fuzz the edges and whatnot. And again, more nights than not, the bartender would take pity on the poor guy and pull out the whiskey.
Now, mind you, this went on for some time, and while the bartender was an easy mark even he had his limit. So one night, after the bartender already gave the fellow three shots on the house, he decides to cut the guy off.
"Look," he says, "while I'm really sorry to hear that things still aren't working out for you I don't think that I can keep giving you free drinks. I've got to make ends meet too, you know."
So the drunk says, "I don't suppose you've got anything I can do to get another drink tonight?"
The proprietor, not particularly wanting this fellow to hang around all night and certainly not expecting him to take him up on his proposition, says "Well, you see that spittoon over there? If you take a swig out of that I suppose I could give you a drink to wash it down."
No sooner did he finish his last sentence than the drunk walked over to the spitoon and hefted it off of the flooy. Before the bartender could stop him, the fellow put the rim to his lips, tipped the bottom of the metal container up into the air, and began to swallow. To the bartender's dismayal, the guy continued to slowly chug the thick contents of the spittoon. When he had finally gulped the final remnants of the container, he threw it to the ground, wiped off his lips with his shirt cuff, and gagged, "So, do I get the drink?"
"You can have the bottle!" exclaimed the bartender, immediately pouring the first shot. "But tell me, why did you swallow the whole damn thing? You only needed to swig it to earn the drink."
And the drunk replies: "It was all one long string."