This will only serve to reinforce the end-users' complacency with crappy software.
Here's an "imagined" scenario:
Joe Jackass: Damnit, my computer just froze.
Jill Jackass: Ha, just like Dave says, just reboot it. Shucks, that Microsoft, them's full of beans!
Joe Jackass: Heck, don't that beat all. Git me another beer, woman. (reboots)
I agree. It wasn't that great. In my case, maybe it was the genre thing... I have no interest in fantasy, make-believe worlds, and find it hard to care about any of their inhabitants. Also, there was very little character development. The Bilbo guy was much more likeable than Frodo (who reminded me of Arnold Horshack). It wasn't terribly interesting, I found myself checking my watch a few times. Maybe if you really, really enjoyed the books, then it would be GREAT. My wife thought the hobbits seemed very gay. I honestly considered taking a nap about a third of the way into this.
Besides not giving a rat's ass about silly gnomes and such, the movie itself just wasn't that great. It wasn't bad, really, but I wish I had seen something that I'd probably like more, like Mulholland Drive, or Amelie.
Say if the mail carrier demands a quarter from you for each piece of mail you get, without letting you see what it is first.
Imagined scenario:
Mail Carrier: "Doh! You chose not to recieve your paycheck! But you did choose to receive item #4, a lovely Harry and David catalog! Loser!"
You: "Damn you!"
Shrek blew monkeys. Sure, the CGI was good, but the script really wasn't original or remarkable. I found the characters down-right annoying. Toy Story 2 was much better. However, the thing is, it doesn't have to be good, just appealing to the masses. The masses apparently have a collective intellect of an 8-year old who really likes fart jokes. So much the better with cool animation.
A about a week ago, I got an email kicked back to me that I had tried to send to someone I know with a Qwest account. The email said that they're address was now xxxxx@msn.com.
It seems that Qwest migrated them to MSN, now their service is even worse (hard to imagine, I know!). They were assimilated!
A company wants a program that draws a triangle. Microsoft(tm) Triangle(tm) draws a triangle. You can specify what color you want it to be.
An open source program draws a triangle. In addition to allowing you to choose the color, you can specify whether or not it's a right triangle, and if not, the various degrees.
Company purchaser looks at options and says "Well, the open source one is way better, but who knows if they'll be around in a year or two. Hell, let's go with the company we know will be there."
The root of all evil is accountability. With the Microsoft(tm) product, there will be a corporate entity to blame for any problems. With the open-source solutions, there's no guarantee that the producer will exist in the future.
So they'll always choose the Microsoft(tm) option. That's just the way it is in the real business world. Even if there's no possibility of recovering losses from the vendor, at least there will always (?) be that vendor to blame/approach. And in the off (heh) chance that there are others with the same problems, the likelihood of finding a solution will be greater.
Look at the computer predecessor, the typewriter. Sure, there have always been cheaper, and probably better-feature-laden typewriters, but the IBM sold so well because the suits always knew there would always be a big corporation behind them.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
Re:In response to others... ... sky color.
on
Flying on Mars
·
· Score: 1
You can see the color of the sky on Mars by looking at photographs taken from the various crafts that have landed there. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you might find some on space.com.
Scientific principles and religon are not contradictory.
Except maybe the scientific proof that this world and universe has existed for billions of years, not the <10,000 the xian bible says. Or countless other examples...
Anyway, there shouldn't have to be tolerance, because you shouldn't bring your religion to work with you. In other words, people shouldn't have to tolerate your religion, or my lack thereof. It has nothing to do with work, unless your work is in a religious role. I think that when you create this issue, you're asking for trouble. Imagine if you were interviewing for a job, and said "Hey, my love of gay porn isn't going to be a hindrance, is it? I really love gay porn! You better not hold that against me!" Chances are, you might be viewed as a freak. If you didn't raise the issue, they wouldn't care if you liked gay porn or not. I suspect that the vast majority of employers really don't care about your religion, or love of gay porn, or whether or not you hang your toilet paper over-the-top or under-the-roll. As for religion, and other sensitive matters, Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be a good policy.
There's a difference between fundamental grammar problems, and the obscure, possible error I made. If you nit pick, you'll find problems everywhere. Like your lack of correct puctuation.
Really. Read what I wrote out loud. Then read the following out loud:
1. I put you are shoes in the closet.
(misuse of you're, where your should be used)
2. The men beat they are wives.
(misuse of they're, where their should be used)
Really, when someone uses such shitty, basic grammer, they're (not their) pretty much announcing to the world, "Hi, I'm a moron." And, in real life you don't have the luxury of hiding behind the veil of Anonymous Coward!
I work at a semi-religious place... a Catholic hospital. But I'm a devout (heh) atheist. Fortunately, I'm not preached to, am not required to be Catholic, or even Christian. And I don't walk around trying to convert people to Atheism either. It just doesn't belong at the workplace. If I'm asked, I won't deny my beliefs, but I don't put it on a resume.
Any religious activities (like Mass) are entirely voluntary. The truth is, they're more interested in having good, hard working employees than Catholic employees. The head of one of the other departments is actually a very prominent member of another religious community, and he seems to be doing fine. My boss is a different variety of Christian, and doesn't seem to have any problems either.
Maybe it's because my company is officially affiliated with a specific religion, that they don't make an issue of it?
But, when I think about what it would be like at a non-religious place, I can see how religious activity on a resume would cause trouble. Especially in the techno-world, where most of the work is based on scientific principles.
You should avoid putting religious activities on a resume unless your employer would see that as a good thing. For example, if you're a Mormon, and you're going for a job at a Mormon company, it would probably help. But, not for a non-Mormon company. I say you have to judge it on a case-by-case basis.
Being a youth minister for 7 years though, I guess would be hard to hide. Not that you should have to really. You should be judged on your qualifications. Then again, it could all come down to the mood/orientation of whoever screens the resume. Maybe they were molested by a youth minister when they were young? In general, I don't think there's really much religious discrimination in real companies. Maybe in smaller ones. But really, the best employers are above that.
I suspect that people who use such poor grammar are treated poorly because they come across as morons. Maybe it's not age. Maybe it's that this person's grammar is so shitty. The way one presents one's self has a lot to do with how they're treated in the workplace. A moron with good grammar will go a lot farther than a genius with shitty grammar, IMHO.
Uh, that would be grammar. But, good call on the then/than.
Here are some more examples of then and than in sentences. Please use as a guide in understanding the difference. If anyone switched then and than in spoken conversation, I would immediately consider them a moron. Why should written communications differ?
1. After you eat your meat, then you eat your pudding.
2. My cheeks are rosier than yours.
3. Back then, we were beaten for speaking up.
4. More often than not, stupid people practice poor grammar.
This article turned me on to icewm, and I've been dl'ing themes, customize, etc. for the last several hours. This is very nice. I like being able to customize everything in a script file rather than through the bloat of kde.
Hi
In reply to your reply...
1. Good fonts, anti-aliasing, etc., should be trouble-free, like Windows. Install Windows, and you have pretty fonts. You may need to check the box that says "smooth edges of screen fonts", but that's not very hard. Installing a ttf font server and setting it up to run in your favorite run-level is way beyond what Joe and Jane Asswipe care to do (I added Jane here to be politically correct). I use KDE, and yes, I have made it pretty, but what I was required to do to make it pretty is way, way beyond what Joe and Jane Asswipe should or want to be concerned with.
2. I'm not familiar with Mandrake. Can you click through the installation of cups too? Joe and Jane Asswipe don't want to know or care about a printing subsystem. They just want to plug in their printer, add the driver through their silly wizard, and go. The distributions that I have used quite a bit, SuSE, RH, Slackware, certainly don't offer any easy, windows-esque method of printer installation (at least as of the last versions of each I've used).
3. First, I suspect you're a salesman for Mandrake! Again, I haven't tried that, so who knows. In the distros I have used, installing anything often results in error messages saying you need X version of X library package, please download, etc. These in turn often say you need Y version of Y library package, ad nauseum. With windows, when you install something with any modern install tool, your system is checked for any dll's you need, and if you don't have them, they're installed and registered. When you uninstall, you're prompted to remove left-over files you no longer need. In the distribustions of Linux I've used, often installing results in various versions of libraries, various symbolic links, etc. A solution to this, would be to create a registry-like thing for Linux. I have a hunch such exists, but is distro-specific... like RH and their rpms. But if you don't install with rpm (which you may need to update for various installs), say if you install from a tarball, it doesn't go in there. So, what's the use?
4. By retail apps, I mean retail apps that Joe and Jane Asswipe require, like MS Office, etc. One major hurdle related to this is the inconsistancy of the appearance of X apps in Linux. In Windows, everything looks nice... buttons are trim and pretty, menus are consistant throughout, the fonts are pretty, and consistant. I have used Star Office, and am impressed by it's features. But, the UI is very foreign, and I don't see Windows users flocking to it. I have used.
Additionally, hardware drivers really should be standardized. Every time I've used a video card that's not in the xf86config list, it's been a royal pain in the ass to get X up and running. Various vendors have their own drivers, the installation of which can be a royal pain in the ass (see nvidia). There's got to be a standard way to do this. Same with sound. I have a very standard SB16, and compiled support for it into my kernel. However, I had to add a parameter to lilo to get it to work. What's up with that?
I've also never bothered to go through the hassle of getting my mouse wheel to work. And I can't count the times I've had to turn off gpm to get a mouse to work at all.
Summary: Linux is fine and good, but realistically nowhere near where it needs to be to become a real option for the masses...
First, there has to be a pretty GUI with nice looking fonts.
Second, printing needs to be made as easy as Win.
Third, installing programs should never mean having to edit a script file, or tracking down all libraries needed. There should be a registry-like means of keeping track of what's on a linux box. Installing needs to be as mind-numbingly simple as on Windows. Uninstalling needs to be clean too.
Fourth, full-retail apps must exist, which install and uninstall just fine without requiring various library installations.
I don't see any of this happening any time soon, so I don't see any of these predictions of Linux being embraced by the masses coming true. It's just silliness. Yes, we can say "I'm an elite geek and it's great!" But Joe Asswipe doesn't care. Joe Asswipe doesn't even know how to really use Windows, much less anything like Linux.
I wish the Linux community would be less elitist and more realistic.
Slashdot Mirror
This will only serve to reinforce the end-users' complacency with crappy software.
Here's an "imagined" scenario:
Joe Jackass: Damnit, my computer just froze.
Jill Jackass: Ha, just like Dave says, just reboot it. Shucks, that Microsoft, them's full of beans!
Joe Jackass: Heck, don't that beat all. Git me another beer, woman. (reboots)
As we were walking out of the theater, I said to my wife, "You know, I kept expecting them to start giving eachother hand jobs."
I agree. It wasn't that great. In my case, maybe it was the genre thing... I have no interest in fantasy, make-believe worlds, and find it hard to care about any of their inhabitants. Also, there was very little character development. The Bilbo guy was much more likeable than Frodo (who reminded me of Arnold Horshack). It wasn't terribly interesting, I found myself checking my watch a few times. Maybe if you really, really enjoyed the books, then it would be GREAT. My wife thought the hobbits seemed very gay. I honestly considered taking a nap about a third of the way into this.
Besides not giving a rat's ass about silly gnomes and such, the movie itself just wasn't that great. It wasn't bad, really, but I wish I had seen something that I'd probably like more, like Mulholland Drive, or Amelie.
Someone needs to convert pound-test to bandwidth, and there you go.
Perhaps the mother's name was Emma. Emma Barass. Heh ho ha ha heeee...
Sure, but how about Plenum Barbed Wire (PBW)?
Say if the mail carrier demands a quarter from you for each piece of mail you get, without letting you see what it is first.
Imagined scenario:
Mail Carrier: "Doh! You chose not to recieve your paycheck! But you did choose to receive item #4, a lovely Harry and David catalog! Loser!"
You: "Damn you!"
Maybe the idea is to get everyone around the world to play on their PS2 rather than blow us up?
I disliked Shrek as well. The only good part was the Gingerbread man.
Shrek blew monkeys. Sure, the CGI was good, but the script really wasn't original or remarkable. I found the characters down-right annoying. Toy Story 2 was much better. However, the thing is, it doesn't have to be good, just appealing to the masses. The masses apparently have a collective intellect of an 8-year old who really likes fart jokes. So much the better with cool animation.
... new TSP role-based database ...
I don't know about Windows, but TSP is good for cleaning walls.
Mmmm... TSP.
Canaries. You'll have to carry around a canary, and if he drops dead, roll down the window on your SUV.
A about a week ago, I got an email kicked back to me that I had tried to send to someone I know with a Qwest account. The email said that they're address was now xxxxx@msn.com.
It seems that Qwest migrated them to MSN, now their service is even worse (hard to imagine, I know!). They were assimilated!
A company wants a program that draws a triangle. Microsoft(tm) Triangle(tm) draws a triangle. You can specify what color you want it to be.
An open source program draws a triangle. In addition to allowing you to choose the color, you can specify whether or not it's a right triangle, and if not, the various degrees.
Company purchaser looks at options and says "Well, the open source one is way better, but who knows if they'll be around in a year or two. Hell, let's go with the company we know will be there."
The root of all evil is accountability. With the Microsoft(tm) product, there will be a corporate entity to blame for any problems. With the open-source solutions, there's no guarantee that the producer will exist in the future.
So they'll always choose the Microsoft(tm) option. That's just the way it is in the real business world. Even if there's no possibility of recovering losses from the vendor, at least there will always (?) be that vendor to blame/approach. And in the off (heh) chance that there are others with the same problems, the likelihood of finding a solution will be greater.
Look at the computer predecessor, the typewriter. Sure, there have always been cheaper, and probably better-feature-laden typewriters, but the IBM sold so well because the suits always knew there would always be a big corporation behind them.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
2 words: Siamese Twins.
You can see the color of the sky on Mars by looking at photographs taken from the various crafts that have landed there. I'm not 100% sure, but I think you might find some on space.com.
Except maybe the scientific proof that this world and universe has existed for billions of years, not the <10,000 the xian bible says. Or countless other examples...
Anyway, there shouldn't have to be tolerance, because you shouldn't bring your religion to work with you. In other words, people shouldn't have to tolerate your religion, or my lack thereof. It has nothing to do with work, unless your work is in a religious role. I think that when you create this issue, you're asking for trouble. Imagine if you were interviewing for a job, and said "Hey, my love of gay porn isn't going to be a hindrance, is it? I really love gay porn! You better not hold that against me!" Chances are, you might be viewed as a freak. If you didn't raise the issue, they wouldn't care if you liked gay porn or not. I suspect that the vast majority of employers really don't care about your religion, or love of gay porn, or whether or not you hang your toilet paper over-the-top or under-the-roll. As for religion, and other sensitive matters, Don't Ask, Don't Tell should be a good policy.
Really. Read what I wrote out loud. Then read the following out loud:
1. I put you are shoes in the closet.
(misuse of you're, where your should be used)
2. The men beat they are wives.
(misuse of they're, where their should be used)
Really, when someone uses such shitty, basic grammer, they're (not their) pretty much announcing to the world, "Hi, I'm a moron." And, in real life you don't have the luxury of hiding behind the veil of Anonymous Coward!
Any religious activities (like Mass) are entirely voluntary. The truth is, they're more interested in having good, hard working employees than Catholic employees. The head of one of the other departments is actually a very prominent member of another religious community, and he seems to be doing fine. My boss is a different variety of Christian, and doesn't seem to have any problems either.
Maybe it's because my company is officially affiliated with a specific religion, that they don't make an issue of it?
But, when I think about what it would be like at a non-religious place, I can see how religious activity on a resume would cause trouble. Especially in the techno-world, where most of the work is based on scientific principles.
You should avoid putting religious activities on a resume unless your employer would see that as a good thing. For example, if you're a Mormon, and you're going for a job at a Mormon company, it would probably help. But, not for a non-Mormon company. I say you have to judge it on a case-by-case basis.
Being a youth minister for 7 years though, I guess would be hard to hide. Not that you should have to really. You should be judged on your qualifications. Then again, it could all come down to the mood/orientation of whoever screens the resume. Maybe they were molested by a youth minister when they were young? In general, I don't think there's really much religious discrimination in real companies. Maybe in smaller ones. But really, the best employers are above that.
My 2 cents...
I suspect that people who use such poor grammar are treated poorly because they come across as morons. Maybe it's not age. Maybe it's that this person's grammar is so shitty. The way one presents one's self has a lot to do with how they're treated in the workplace. A moron with good grammar will go a lot farther than a genius with shitty grammar, IMHO.
Here are some more examples of then and than in sentences. Please use as a guide in understanding the difference. If anyone switched then and than in spoken conversation, I would immediately consider them a moron. Why should written communications differ?
1. After you eat your meat, then you eat your pudding.
2. My cheeks are rosier than yours.
3. Back then, we were beaten for speaking up.
4. More often than not, stupid people practice poor grammar.
Thanks.
This article turned me on to icewm, and I've been dl'ing themes, customize, etc. for the last several hours. This is very nice. I like being able to customize everything in a script file rather than through the bloat of kde.
Does anyone have links? This icewm looks pretty cool. KDE is nice and pretty, but it's a hog.
Thanks
Hi
In reply to your reply...
1. Good fonts, anti-aliasing, etc., should be trouble-free, like Windows. Install Windows, and you have pretty fonts. You may need to check the box that says "smooth edges of screen fonts", but that's not very hard. Installing a ttf font server and setting it up to run in your favorite run-level is way beyond what Joe and Jane Asswipe care to do (I added Jane here to be politically correct). I use KDE, and yes, I have made it pretty, but what I was required to do to make it pretty is way, way beyond what Joe and Jane Asswipe should or want to be concerned with.
2. I'm not familiar with Mandrake. Can you click through the installation of cups too? Joe and Jane Asswipe don't want to know or care about a printing subsystem. They just want to plug in their printer, add the driver through their silly wizard, and go. The distributions that I have used quite a bit, SuSE, RH, Slackware, certainly don't offer any easy, windows-esque method of printer installation (at least as of the last versions of each I've used).
3. First, I suspect you're a salesman for Mandrake! Again, I haven't tried that, so who knows. In the distros I have used, installing anything often results in error messages saying you need X version of X library package, please download, etc. These in turn often say you need Y version of Y library package, ad nauseum. With windows, when you install something with any modern install tool, your system is checked for any dll's you need, and if you don't have them, they're installed and registered. When you uninstall, you're prompted to remove left-over files you no longer need. In the distribustions of Linux I've used, often installing results in various versions of libraries, various symbolic links, etc. A solution to this, would be to create a registry-like thing for Linux. I have a hunch such exists, but is distro-specific... like RH and their rpms. But if you don't install with rpm (which you may need to update for various installs), say if you install from a tarball, it doesn't go in there. So, what's the use?
4. By retail apps, I mean retail apps that Joe and Jane Asswipe require, like MS Office, etc. One major hurdle related to this is the inconsistancy of the appearance of X apps in Linux. In Windows, everything looks nice... buttons are trim and pretty, menus are consistant throughout, the fonts are pretty, and consistant. I have used Star Office, and am impressed by it's features. But, the UI is very foreign, and I don't see Windows users flocking to it. I have used.
Additionally, hardware drivers really should be standardized. Every time I've used a video card that's not in the xf86config list, it's been a royal pain in the ass to get X up and running. Various vendors have their own drivers, the installation of which can be a royal pain in the ass (see nvidia). There's got to be a standard way to do this. Same with sound. I have a very standard SB16, and compiled support for it into my kernel. However, I had to add a parameter to lilo to get it to work. What's up with that?
I've also never bothered to go through the hassle of getting my mouse wheel to work. And I can't count the times I've had to turn off gpm to get a mouse to work at all.
Summary: Linux is fine and good, but realistically nowhere near where it needs to be to become a real option for the masses...
First, there has to be a pretty GUI with nice looking fonts.
Second, printing needs to be made as easy as Win.
Third, installing programs should never mean having to edit a script file, or tracking down all libraries needed. There should be a registry-like means of keeping track of what's on a linux box. Installing needs to be as mind-numbingly simple as on Windows. Uninstalling needs to be clean too.
Fourth, full-retail apps must exist, which install and uninstall just fine without requiring various library installations.
I don't see any of this happening any time soon, so I don't see any of these predictions of Linux being embraced by the masses coming true. It's just silliness. Yes, we can say "I'm an elite geek and it's great!" But Joe Asswipe doesn't care. Joe Asswipe doesn't even know how to really use Windows, much less anything like Linux.
I wish the Linux community would be less elitist and more realistic.