Maybe I've inhabited this orb a bit too long, but I've relunctantly come to the conclusion that 'coolness' is an onerous burden that any thoughtful person should avoid at all costs.
Think about it. Coolness requires surrender of your individuality. It requires conformance to a norm, however 'cool' that norm might be.
I'm old enough to remember when 'hippies' were 'cool'; in practice, they were mostly a bunch of pretentious, self involved pricks. I stayed away in droves:)
True Cool is simply knowing who you are, and just being That, without the crutch of other's appraisals of you as an external reference.
Hard to do, yes, but well worth it once you get there.
even considering that she's a world class poseur herself.
I mean.. Tolkein couldn't write his way out of a paper bag! Any work that requires maps and notetaking to get around in is way overwrought and overblown!
His buddy, C.S. Lewis, I think, was just being kind in complimenting his work. Lewis was by *far* the superior writer. Reading his stuff was a luxurious experience.
Tolkein, on the other hand, doesn't even qualify as the Mickey Spillane of fantasy. His prose is coarse. His sentiments callow and obvious...
BLECCCH!
And no, this is NOT a troll...
Oops..
Anticipating the obvious question "what about all the Peeks an Pokes..?"
I had to massage this guy's basic by hand and recompile.
Major pain in the ass. That compiler was SLOOOWWW.
Yup. one word: Abacus
Their books contained complete, annotated ROM listings of the kernel, basic, and 1541 drive code.
Nab Commodore's official book (with schematics! holy shit!), plunk down another hundred or so for the Abacus publications, and a copy of Glenn Bredon's MOST excellent Merlin assembler, and Voila! Joo are in bidness!
Oh. As an aside, I have to mention that C64 basic and Applesoft were almost identical under the hood.
For a desperate game port of code written in basic (no, not mine. I'm an assembler kind of guy) I was placed in a position that required that I get Blitz's (a C64 Pcode type compiler) runtime to run on Apple II.
Merlin for the apple provided a utility that would disassemble and comment the Applesoft Roms for you.
Going back and forth between the resulting listing, and Abacus' own, I got that sucker running like a champ on the apple. Almost all of the major routines were the same; I had to patch a bit here and there, and redefine a BUNCH of memory locations, but in the end, it all Just Worked(tm).
Man.. I miss those days.. (sob!)
Oh, man! Where do I start?
How about all the hardware features that went virtually unused by practically everyone, Commodore, included?
There was that REALLY neat synchronous serial port built into the VIA chip that was pulled out the back IO connector.
I was doing C64<>Apple II game ports at the time, and needed to transfer files back and forth. I cobbled together a cable that linked the C64 and the apple game connector and wrote assembly routines that shook hands at either end.
I got transfer speeds of about 50kbaud both ways over that sucker. Not too shabby for 1mhz processors
And how about running fastloader code *in the disk drive*? And diddling the interleave factor when formatting to speed things up even further? Or storing data in unused directory sectors to save space?
Whoa. Getting a woody just thinking about it!
Then there's all the neat things you can do with a vertical blank or scanline interrupt!
Of course, there's the SID chip also..
Oh, gawd! Somebody stop me!
Alton Brown simply r3w1z, d00dz.
I've learned more about the nasty details of food science from that one show than from all of the countless others I've seen over the years.
After seeing how he uses that Polder digital thermometer fir temp monitoring, I went out and bought one.
Best 30 bucks I've ever spent.
Now, If I can just put together the scratch for a Wusthoff Trident Chef's knife...
This post is ohso bang on.
To be able to teach a subject -- ANY subject requires that one knows it COLD.
Moving towards that state actually DEMANDS teaching. You can't know what you don't know unless someone has asked you a question about a mentally vacuous place that you've forgotten about.
I've learned a great deal just supporting family and extended family members' computers. You rapidly realize that you're not quite the guru you thought you were.
It's humbling. Humble is good.
Anyone here remember the hubbub about the hijacking of dna from unwilling contributors?
Here's your next step, pal.
The remote analysis of hundreds of thousands of heart patterns, all channeled into a single, PROPRIETARY database?
Haven't we been here before?
I would have no problem with any correlatory results being made public, were this a publicly funded effort, but..
There is severe profit available here if the info generated was legally allowed to be incorporated into a proprietary database.
All of the crap associated with dotbomb and our economy of recent years is about EGO!
The above was a distillation of Bhuddist attitude (it is an attitude.. sort of:)
If you do Tech (ohmy.. I'm noticing my capitalisation) I would suggest you reread the above, and roll it around in your mind much like you were tasting a wine, or a great cola (me, I'm a CocaCola man)
A Bhuddist stance works, and you get an understanding of the spiritual universe free in the ?? Sorry. I forgot.
There is no bargain or deal to be made with anyone. You choose to see. That's it.
Re:This is why I drive a 4 door 4 cylinder family
on
Hi-Tech Repo Man
·
· Score: 3
Zillions of studies have been done on WHY millionaires are rich.
THE single largest factor has been a general disdain for extravagance.
Use less than you get, and you accumulate wealth. Simple. Why is this so hard for so many people to understand?
Extravagance doesn't inform the soul. It doesn't please your partner. It might get you laid, but that's all. Laid. NOT loved, which is infinitely more valuable.
It does only one thing really well..
The attractance of Jackals. Land Sharks. Sycophants.
Millionaires are generally rich because they possess and excercise something approximating a value system.
Dot Com bozo's were generally into status, and the getting of STUFF. Illusion.
THAT idea is the germ of self-inflicted brain death.
Excuse me, but Shadenfreude is a (DUH!) German term, tangentially related to enjoyment at seeing the self-inflated succumb to their own hubris.
There's nothing 'only in America' about it.
These people *knew* they were in a speculative bubble, and just chose not to recognize it. They gambled that they'd cash out some tasty stock options befor the souffle' fell, and they lost.
I have ZERO pity for these people. None. Nada.
Having known some leeter than thou yuppie wannabe scum personally, I feel that these folks are getting off far too easily.
Eventually, the greedy have to pay.
The dotbomb debacle was swift, sure justice, and I've enjoyed every second of it.
They don't realise that the 'microsoft interview' employs a tragically familiar cult indoctrination tactic: getting you to think *in* their box right out of the gate.
It works like this.
You want in. They're hip. They're cool. You want it.
They seem distant but vaguely knowable. They challenge your intellect to *think like them*.
You do so, successfully, probably damaging your neural pathways in the effort.
You are congratulated. Now you're in! WHEE!
You are now expected to 'hive think' like M$ does.
M$ has a campus. They make it feel like college, where everybody has Status, to be taken or surrendered.
M$ is a battlezone, much like college.
Bill is the guy in the mask asking you to bend over for a whack to enter a fraternity.
It's his revenge.
It's also pathetic.
One thing all who 'get' zen early on understand is that everything about them is always public, all the time, so long as other humans are about.
The human nervous system wires us in a manner that we understand each other, whether we want to or not. It's utterly impossible to turn off. We ALWAYS know what others about us are thinking, and if we choose not to see it, we cripple ourselves.
I'm talking brain stem stuff here.. Body language, limbic system..
What I'm trying to say here, is that by simply leaving your house at a particular time you reveal an incredible amount of info about you, even in that simple act.
Scoping people out electronically is actually kinda cool, and could be used for lots of GOOD things!
Paranoia has its' place however, and for good reason.
Oh, man!
I was totally unaware that there's an actual MIR only 100 miles from lil ol me, here in Illinois!
Laugh if you want, but MIR outlasted its' design spec by a factor of over 300%.
Russian launch vehicles are the most reliable in the world IIRC.. based on an old but elegant and by now highly refined design (thanks to one guy, profiled on Nova, whose name I cannot remember at the moment)
Sukhoi (sp?) aircraft are among the most advanced and robust around, as well.
Please note that I'm no commie-lover, but even in that oppressive society, some folks got to do cool things, and do them well. The paucity of resources forced a level of inventiveness, also, that we don't see much here.
Geeks are geeks the world over.
Just because a geek is Russian is no reason to denigrate his skills. Working with bad materials, a sucky environment, and an intractable bureacracy (sp?) Might just hone his geek skills to a higher level than yours.
A side benefit of MIR is that we now know that you can actually *break* a spacecraft in orbit, have its' occupants survive the ordeal, and fix it *in place* ala star trek.
Not too shabby, IMNSHO.
Wow!
Are WB total morons?
They hammered at my browser like they were a fucking porn site!
Do NOT, EVER, resize my window, throw endless flash in my face, and expect me to take you seriously!
I'm on cable.. and it was STILL too busy! Whatabout if I was on a 14.4?
Geez! And I REALLY want to see this film!
Great way to drive people off!
I'm SURE no australians were involved with the design of that crappy site!
That point is the one I make to all my linux lusting colleagues.
Slack is *THE ONLY* linux distro that actually looks and acts like a commercial distribution.
Commercial distros are user hostile for an excellent reason: USERS SHOULDN'T BE USING THEM!
LUSERS FSCK THINGS UP!
Slack is the *ONLY* linux distro that actually trains you for the larger *nix world.
And it does so well!
Learn slack, and you can easily hop over to any commercial *nix distro whatsoever.
Slack=Clue, my friends.
Never forget that.
I'll have to wait for validation on this, but if true, I will definitely contribute.
Slack means more to me than PBS.
Hey! How about pledge drives?!
Oh! We could have Celtic Kitsch and...
(slaps self) OW!
Never mind.
I will, however, give gladly to the cause.
Shit, man.. I've never really HAD a cause before!
Guess I do now..
Wow.
I've attempted both debian and (blecch!) Redhat, and I always come back to slack.
Clean, raw, basic *nix.
I cannot stand the endless wait for RH to boot. I can't stand how arcane the text file configurations get. Linux conf? PLEASE! No Way.
I compile *everything* from tarballs, with no probs whatsoever; even generic stuff not targeted for linux. My/usr/local is HUGE.
If slack goes away, I'll have but one honorable alternative: FreeBSD.
THAT was a news item?
For whom? For Ferrets?
Only semi-brain-compromised individuals could actually utilise the pointed to page to inform themselves.
Furrfu!
I'm gonna sue, I swear!
I extensively discussed the idea of soft micro/nanoinstructions and purely combinatorial context reconfigurable cpu's with my buddies at a bazillion cocktail (there was weed there, too. of course.) parties in the mid 70's. We had a lot of it specced out, too, including hypermultiplexed optical bussing, tagged packet payloads, the whole nine yards.
If we weren't all so busy getting wasted at the time, we might have actually built something!
Does a bunch of tekkie wastoids babbling in the kitchen count as prior art?
Hmmm...
I have to admit one thing about the M$ link provided:
It would seem that someone with a semblance of Clue(tm) wrote it.
The Q&A format is one that I've never seen before. An actual admittance of responsibility for, and meager explanation of, their role in the propagation of these sort of virii.
In Court, this could prove dangerous, liability wise, and doubtlessly was vetted endlessly by their lawyers.
The very fact that it appears at *all* is truly amazing to me.
Just an addendum...
I did a Betterwhois on themoscowtimes, and they are indeed registered from RU.
Pretty slick site given the culture and location.
Good writing, too. Better mastery of english than is usually seen here:)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I've inhabited this orb a bit too long, but I've relunctantly come to the conclusion that 'coolness' is an onerous burden that any thoughtful person should avoid at all costs. :)
Think about it. Coolness requires surrender of your individuality. It requires conformance to a norm, however 'cool' that norm might be.
I'm old enough to remember when 'hippies' were 'cool'; in practice, they were mostly a bunch of pretentious, self involved pricks. I stayed away in droves
True Cool is simply knowing who you are, and just being That, without the crutch of other's appraisals of you as an external reference.
Hard to do, yes, but well worth it once you get there.
even considering that she's a world class poseur herself.
I mean.. Tolkein couldn't write his way out of a paper bag! Any work that requires maps and notetaking to get around in is way overwrought and overblown!
His buddy, C.S. Lewis, I think, was just being kind in complimenting his work. Lewis was by *far* the superior writer. Reading his stuff was a luxurious experience.
Tolkein, on the other hand, doesn't even qualify as the Mickey Spillane of fantasy. His prose is coarse. His sentiments callow and obvious...
BLECCCH!
And no, this is NOT a troll...
Oops..
Anticipating the obvious question "what about all the Peeks an Pokes..?"
I had to massage this guy's basic by hand and recompile.
Major pain in the ass. That compiler was SLOOOWWW.
Yup. one word: Abacus
Their books contained complete, annotated ROM listings of the kernel, basic, and 1541 drive code.
Nab Commodore's official book (with schematics! holy shit!), plunk down another hundred or so for the Abacus publications, and a copy of Glenn Bredon's MOST excellent Merlin assembler, and Voila! Joo are in bidness!
Oh. As an aside, I have to mention that C64 basic and Applesoft were almost identical under the hood.
For a desperate game port of code written in basic (no, not mine. I'm an assembler kind of guy) I was placed in a position that required that I get Blitz's (a C64 Pcode type compiler) runtime to run on Apple II.
Merlin for the apple provided a utility that would disassemble and comment the Applesoft Roms for you.
Going back and forth between the resulting listing, and Abacus' own, I got that sucker running like a champ on the apple. Almost all of the major routines were the same; I had to patch a bit here and there, and redefine a BUNCH of memory locations, but in the end, it all Just Worked(tm).
Man.. I miss those days.. (sob!)
Oh, man! Where do I start?
How about all the hardware features that went virtually unused by practically everyone, Commodore, included?
There was that REALLY neat synchronous serial port built into the VIA chip that was pulled out the back IO connector.
I was doing C64<>Apple II game ports at the time, and needed to transfer files back and forth. I cobbled together a cable that linked the C64 and the apple game connector and wrote assembly routines that shook hands at either end.
I got transfer speeds of about 50kbaud both ways over that sucker. Not too shabby for 1mhz processors
And how about running fastloader code *in the disk drive*? And diddling the interleave factor when formatting to speed things up even further? Or storing data in unused directory sectors to save space?
Whoa. Getting a woody just thinking about it!
Then there's all the neat things you can do with a vertical blank or scanline interrupt!
Of course, there's the SID chip also..
Oh, gawd! Somebody stop me!
Alton Brown simply r3w1z, d00dz.
I've learned more about the nasty details of food science from that one show than from all of the countless others I've seen over the years.
After seeing how he uses that Polder digital thermometer fir temp monitoring, I went out and bought one.
Best 30 bucks I've ever spent.
Now, If I can just put together the scratch for a Wusthoff Trident Chef's knife...
This post is ohso bang on.
To be able to teach a subject -- ANY subject requires that one knows it COLD.
Moving towards that state actually DEMANDS teaching. You can't know what you don't know unless someone has asked you a question about a mentally vacuous place that you've forgotten about.
I've learned a great deal just supporting family and extended family members' computers. You rapidly realize that you're not quite the guru you thought you were.
It's humbling. Humble is good.
Anyone here remember the hubbub about the hijacking of dna from unwilling contributors?
Here's your next step, pal.
The remote analysis of hundreds of thousands of heart patterns, all channeled into a single, PROPRIETARY database?
Haven't we been here before?
I would have no problem with any correlatory results being made public, were this a publicly funded effort, but..
There is severe profit available here if the info generated was legally allowed to be incorporated into a proprietary database.
All of the crap associated with dotbomb and our economy of recent years is about EGO! :)
The above was a distillation of Bhuddist attitude (it is an attitude.. sort of
If you do Tech (ohmy.. I'm noticing my capitalisation) I would suggest you reread the above, and roll it around in your mind much like you were tasting a wine, or a great cola (me, I'm a CocaCola man)
A Bhuddist stance works, and you get an understanding of the spiritual universe free in the ?? Sorry. I forgot.
There is no bargain or deal to be made with anyone. You choose to see. That's it.
Zillions of studies have been done on WHY millionaires are rich.
THE single largest factor has been a general disdain for extravagance.
Use less than you get, and you accumulate wealth. Simple. Why is this so hard for so many people to understand?
Extravagance doesn't inform the soul. It doesn't please your partner. It might get you laid, but that's all. Laid. NOT loved, which is infinitely more valuable.
It does only one thing really well..
The attractance of Jackals. Land Sharks. Sycophants.
Millionaires are generally rich because they possess and excercise something approximating a value system.
Dot Com bozo's were generally into status, and the getting of STUFF. Illusion.
THAT idea is the germ of self-inflicted brain death.
Excuse me, but Shadenfreude is a (DUH!) German term, tangentially related to enjoyment at seeing the self-inflated succumb to their own hubris.
There's nothing 'only in America' about it.
These people *knew* they were in a speculative bubble, and just chose not to recognize it. They gambled that they'd cash out some tasty stock options befor the souffle' fell, and they lost.
I have ZERO pity for these people. None. Nada.
Having known some leeter than thou yuppie wannabe scum personally, I feel that these folks are getting off far too easily.
Eventually, the greedy have to pay.
The dotbomb debacle was swift, sure justice, and I've enjoyed every second of it.
They don't realise that the 'microsoft interview' employs a tragically familiar cult indoctrination tactic: getting you to think *in* their box right out of the gate.
It works like this.
You want in. They're hip. They're cool. You want it.
They seem distant but vaguely knowable. They challenge your intellect to *think like them*.
You do so, successfully, probably damaging your neural pathways in the effort.
You are congratulated. Now you're in! WHEE!
You are now expected to 'hive think' like M$ does.
M$ has a campus. They make it feel like college, where everybody has Status, to be taken or surrendered.
M$ is a battlezone, much like college.
Bill is the guy in the mask asking you to bend over for a whack to enter a fraternity.
It's his revenge.
It's also pathetic.
One thing all who 'get' zen early on understand is that everything about them is always public, all the time, so long as other humans are about.
The human nervous system wires us in a manner that we understand each other, whether we want to or not. It's utterly impossible to turn off. We ALWAYS know what others about us are thinking, and if we choose not to see it, we cripple ourselves.
I'm talking brain stem stuff here.. Body language, limbic system..
What I'm trying to say here, is that by simply leaving your house at a particular time you reveal an incredible amount of info about you, even in that simple act.
Scoping people out electronically is actually kinda cool, and could be used for lots of GOOD things!
Paranoia has its' place however, and for good reason.
Oh, man!
I was totally unaware that there's an actual MIR only 100 miles from lil ol me, here in Illinois!
Laugh if you want, but MIR outlasted its' design spec by a factor of over 300%.
Russian launch vehicles are the most reliable in the world IIRC.. based on an old but elegant and by now highly refined design (thanks to one guy, profiled on Nova, whose name I cannot remember at the moment)
Sukhoi (sp?) aircraft are among the most advanced and robust around, as well.
Please note that I'm no commie-lover, but even in that oppressive society, some folks got to do cool things, and do them well. The paucity of resources forced a level of inventiveness, also, that we don't see much here.
Geeks are geeks the world over.
Just because a geek is Russian is no reason to denigrate his skills. Working with bad materials, a sucky environment, and an intractable bureacracy (sp?) Might just hone his geek skills to a higher level than yours.
A side benefit of MIR is that we now know that you can actually *break* a spacecraft in orbit, have its' occupants survive the ordeal, and fix it *in place* ala star trek.
Not too shabby, IMNSHO.
Wow!
Are WB total morons?
They hammered at my browser like they were a fucking porn site!
Do NOT, EVER, resize my window, throw endless flash in my face, and expect me to take you seriously!
I'm on cable.. and it was STILL too busy! Whatabout if I was on a 14.4?
Geez! And I REALLY want to see this film!
Great way to drive people off!
I'm SURE no australians were involved with the design of that crappy site!
That point is the one I make to all my linux lusting colleagues.
Slack is *THE ONLY* linux distro that actually looks and acts like a commercial distribution.
Commercial distros are user hostile for an excellent reason: USERS SHOULDN'T BE USING THEM!
LUSERS FSCK THINGS UP!
Slack is the *ONLY* linux distro that actually trains you for the larger *nix world.
And it does so well!
Learn slack, and you can easily hop over to any commercial *nix distro whatsoever.
Slack=Clue, my friends.
Never forget that.
I'll have to wait for validation on this, but if true, I will definitely contribute.
Slack means more to me than PBS.
Hey! How about pledge drives?!
Oh! We could have Celtic Kitsch and...
(slaps self) OW!
Never mind.
I will, however, give gladly to the cause.
Shit, man.. I've never really HAD a cause before!
Guess I do now..
Wow.
Beautiful links, man.
The first one, especially.
(sniff!)
I've attempted both debian and (blecch!) Redhat, and I always come back to slack. /usr/local is HUGE.
Clean, raw, basic *nix.
I cannot stand the endless wait for RH to boot. I can't stand how arcane the text file configurations get. Linux conf? PLEASE! No Way.
I compile *everything* from tarballs, with no probs whatsoever; even generic stuff not targeted for linux. My
If slack goes away, I'll have but one honorable alternative: FreeBSD.
THAT was a news item?
For whom? For Ferrets?
Only semi-brain-compromised individuals could actually utilise the pointed to page to inform themselves.
Furrfu!
I'm gonna sue, I swear!
I extensively discussed the idea of soft micro/nanoinstructions and purely combinatorial context reconfigurable cpu's with my buddies at a bazillion cocktail (there was weed there, too. of course.) parties in the mid 70's. We had a lot of it specced out, too, including hypermultiplexed optical bussing, tagged packet payloads, the whole nine yards.
If we weren't all so busy getting wasted at the time, we might have actually built something!
Does a bunch of tekkie wastoids babbling in the kitchen count as prior art?
Hmmm...
In fact, that is the precise reason tubes were used. Those suckers could still fly even in the aftermath of a thermonuclear strike!
I have to admit one thing about the M$ link provided:
It would seem that someone with a semblance of Clue(tm) wrote it.
The Q&A format is one that I've never seen before. An actual admittance of responsibility for, and meager explanation of, their role in the propagation of these sort of virii.
In Court, this could prove dangerous, liability wise, and doubtlessly was vetted endlessly by their lawyers.
The very fact that it appears at *all* is truly amazing to me.
At least they're running *nix, so there's hope.
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 04:59:18 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix)
Location: http://www.nbci.com
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Just an addendum... :)
I did a Betterwhois on themoscowtimes, and they are indeed registered from RU.
Pretty slick site given the culture and location.
Good writing, too. Better mastery of english than is usually seen here