Seriously though, once they force everybody to use DRM, you're not going to find streams that easy to crack. DVDs would still be unrippable if the design of CSS hadn't been botched. That's not a mistake the industry is likely to repeat.
Actually, the big problem with Radio Shack is that nobody who works there knows as much as they think they do. For example, my sister recently got her first cell phone. She emailed me asking if it was true that you had to run down the cell batteries on a regular basis or they'd stop working. I immediately asked, "You got that phone at Radio Shack, didn't you?" Sure enough, she had. I then explained to her electronic gadgets no longer come with ni-cad batteries, and that lithium batteries don't have "memory" issues.
My all time favorite is from many years ago, when TV sets still had mono earphone jacks. I wanted to plug in my Walkman headphones to the TV, so I went to the local mall to buy a signal splitter at Radio Shack. When I tried to explain what I wanted, the clerk kept insisting that it was impossible to convert a mono signal into a stereo signal. I kept trying to explain that wasn't what I was trying to do, but he was so sure of his "facts" that it was a waste of time. So I finally went next door to the record store where the clerk has no technogeek pretentions, and immediately got sold what I wanted.
Though now I hear that if you go into a record store, you have to be careful not to use the word "record". If you do, the clerks sneer at you and tell you they don't sell records, only CDs — even if the store has the word "record" in the name.
Bottom line: when you work in retail, your job is to help your customers, not show off how much you know — or don't know.
Your retail experience must be at Radio Shack. That's the only chain where the clerks throw around terms like "data transmission standard" and expect the customers to know what they're talking about.
I don't, of course, not with the kind of certainly I have over what I
had for breakfast. (Oatmeal, melon pieces.) But a reputable publisher
can safely be assumed to require a certain level of fact checking of
its authors, since they have a reputation to maintain. By contrast,
anybody can add a "fact" to Wikipedia, and unless somebody else who's
skeptical about the assertion makes an issue about it, that fact will
remain in place without ever being checked.
It's often claimed that Wikipedia actually has a lower percentage of
factual errors than other references. And that may actually be true.
But because you don't know which articles have been fact checked and
which haven't, you really can't rely on Wikipedia as a reliable source
for specific facts. Like who actually co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Now, I've always had a problem with the fact that people accept
information from sources like Encylopedia Britannica and The New York
Times (or, if you're a right-winger, the Wall Street Journal) as
unassailable. The authors of these sources can make mistakes, or be
bamboozled, or fall victim to their own prejudices, just like anybody
else. Information from such sources is more reliable than
something you hear on the street, because they have fact checkers and editors, but it's not absolutely
reliable. So when I first heard about Wikipedia, I was actually very
positive about it. I knew people would contribute a lot of nonsense
that was "common knowledge", but I assumed that dialogue between
contributers would gradually reduce the nonsense factor.
When I started contributing to myself (mostly doing things like copy
editing — the subjects I'm interested in already have
way more content writers than they need), I was soon disabused of this
notion. If you really make an issue out of it, you can get people to
remove opinions and non-verifiable "facts" from articles on popular
topics. But forget about serious fact checking on all the obscure
topics that form the meat of any real reference work.
I actually have high hopes for Wikipedia. Not that I think that its
current model will ever work. But I'm sure that someday somebody will
realize how fucked up the current model is and invent mechanisms for
mandatory fact checking, source attribution, and editorial review.
Since the content of Wikipedia is "open source", this doesn't even
have to be Jimbo and his Wikipedia foundation — anybody can make
a copy and start enforcing these rules on the copy.
But in the meantime, anybody who cites Wikipedia as a way of settling
a factual argument is an idiot.
You're being sarcastic, of course, but basing a shell on object passing is actually a pretty smart idea. It's just a form of serialization, which is what any other form of interprocess communication uses. I'm not sure the old Unix concept of building a complex commands out of simple commands and pipes is still viable. But if it is, you really need commands that can handle data more complex than are supported by sort or join. The need for such complexity is why so little scripting is done by bash or csh these days, even on Unix.
The downside with Monad is that you have to have a thorough understanding of the whole.NET object hierarchy before you can even get started. Unfortunately,.NET's designers don't understand something that ActiveX's designers understood very well: that most users of an object framework need to be able to use the framework without becoming experts in the whole shebang.
I guess you're right, unfortunately. It would seem that the secret of success in punditry is not saying something useful or interesting, but simply being obnoxious enough to generate buzz.
I made my previous response to your post without checking to see who Andrew Orlwoski was. If I had done that, I would have pointed out that you obviously don't understand the difference between trolling and satire.
Basically, your theory seems to be "If Dvorak were an idiot, people have stopped listening to him by now. Therefore he must be a smart persion who deliberately pretends to be an idiot." That's really not very logical.
Opinions that differ from yours aren't "Trolling".
Totally wrong. If people that disagree with me aren't trolls, then I have to actually think about what they have to say. That's a lot of work, and I have better things to do. So people who disagree with me must be trolls. It's only logical!
Cairo wasn't a blunder. A blunder is "A usually serious mistake typically caused by ignorance or confusion," accorting to American Heritage dictionary. Inventing an advanced filesystem is not a mistake — it's actually a good idea. But like many of Microsoft's good ideas (and they do have them) it was ineptly executed.
Sure, lots of outlets hire assholes to make stupid pronouncement sbecause they know those pronouncments will generate buzz. Doesn't mean the assholes don't believe their own bullshit. I've watched Dvorak spout crap for over 25 years, and he's consistently gotten his facts wrong and his logic from never-never land — even when he wasn't trying to be provocative.
The word "troll" has always bugged me. Of course there are pranksters who say stuff like "Mother Teresa was actually a Satanist" just to get a response. But 90% of the time I see the word "troll" used, it's by some mentally lazy person who finds it easier to dismiss other people's opinions as malicious dishonesty.
I have never indulged in trolling. But everytime I say something that people don't want to hear, that's what they assume I'm doing.
Dvorak has been the classical asshole industry columnist for a long time — and he is that stupid. This isn't even the stupidest thing he's said. I first realized how stupid he was back in 1983, when he made some silly pronouncements about the secret plans of a company I was working for. It was painfully obvious that he hadn't the slightest understanding of the technology we sold. Why he continues to get published is one of the great mysteries of our time.
...Dvorak is an idiot. He does not rate a headline at Slashdot. I mean, Jeez, what's his definition of "blunder"? Something that creates huge lockin for Windows? Every time I cry about lack of standards support in web browsers, somebody says, "IE is the standard". And I hate to admit it, but they're right. There are zillions of Intranet applications that you need IE to use, and that means that there are zillions of companies that can't consider running anything but Windows on the desktop. Not the biggest reason nobody will look at alternatives to Windows, but it's up there.
My source is this book. As for Wikipedia, it isn't any more authoritative than a random article on Slashdot. In neither case should you assume that the material has been fact-checked or comes from a reliable source. I'll leave updates of Wikipedia to somebody who doesn't think that the idea of a "open encylopedia" is laughable.
McNealy does have badge number 3 — but that doesn't prove he's the third employee, since he's the one who hands out the badges. It's my understanding that he was originally hired to manage production, which hardly sounds like a "co-founder" position.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, once they force everybody to use DRM, you're not going to find streams that easy to crack. DVDs would still be unrippable if the design of CSS hadn't been botched. That's not a mistake the industry is likely to repeat.
My all time favorite is from many years ago, when TV sets still had mono earphone jacks. I wanted to plug in my Walkman headphones to the TV, so I went to the local mall to buy a signal splitter at Radio Shack. When I tried to explain what I wanted, the clerk kept insisting that it was impossible to convert a mono signal into a stereo signal. I kept trying to explain that wasn't what I was trying to do, but he was so sure of his "facts" that it was a waste of time. So I finally went next door to the record store where the clerk has no technogeek pretentions, and immediately got sold what I wanted.
Though now I hear that if you go into a record store, you have to be careful not to use the word "record". If you do, the clerks sneer at you and tell you they don't sell records, only CDs — even if the store has the word "record" in the name.
Bottom line: when you work in retail, your job is to help your customers, not show off how much you know — or don't know.
"You're under arrest!"
Your retail experience must be at Radio Shack. That's the only chain where the clerks throw around terms like "data transmission standard" and expect the customers to know what they're talking about.
Whu kaars?
Wii not?!
I'm Hungary just thinking about it....
It's often claimed that Wikipedia actually has a lower percentage of factual errors than other references. And that may actually be true. But because you don't know which articles have been fact checked and which haven't, you really can't rely on Wikipedia as a reliable source for specific facts. Like who actually co-founded Sun Microsystems.
Now, I've always had a problem with the fact that people accept information from sources like Encylopedia Britannica and The New York Times (or, if you're a right-winger, the Wall Street Journal) as unassailable. The authors of these sources can make mistakes, or be bamboozled, or fall victim to their own prejudices, just like anybody else. Information from such sources is more reliable than something you hear on the street, because they have fact checkers and editors, but it's not absolutely reliable. So when I first heard about Wikipedia, I was actually very positive about it. I knew people would contribute a lot of nonsense that was "common knowledge", but I assumed that dialogue between contributers would gradually reduce the nonsense factor.
When I started contributing to myself (mostly doing things like copy editing — the subjects I'm interested in already have way more content writers than they need), I was soon disabused of this notion. If you really make an issue out of it, you can get people to remove opinions and non-verifiable "facts" from articles on popular topics. But forget about serious fact checking on all the obscure topics that form the meat of any real reference work.
I actually have high hopes for Wikipedia. Not that I think that its current model will ever work. But I'm sure that someday somebody will realize how fucked up the current model is and invent mechanisms for mandatory fact checking, source attribution, and editorial review. Since the content of Wikipedia is "open source", this doesn't even have to be Jimbo and his Wikipedia foundation — anybody can make a copy and start enforcing these rules on the copy.
But in the meantime, anybody who cites Wikipedia as a way of settling a factual argument is an idiot.
"Authentic" in this context means original work that came out of the brain of human being. Time Cube is certainly that!
The downside with Monad is that you have to have a thorough understanding of the whole .NET object hierarchy before you can even get started. Unfortunately, .NET's designers don't understand something that ActiveX's designers understood very well: that most users of an object framework need to be able to use the framework without becoming experts in the whole shebang.
I guess you're right, unfortunately. It would seem that the secret of success in punditry is not saying something useful or interesting, but simply being obnoxious enough to generate buzz.
I made my previous response to your post without checking to see who Andrew Orlwoski was. If I had done that, I would have pointed out that you obviously don't understand the difference between trolling and satire.
Has anybody fed Dvorak's latest column to this program? I've often wondered if he actually writes his columns, or just generate verbiage at random.
Basically, your theory seems to be "If Dvorak were an idiot, people have stopped listening to him by now. Therefore he must be a smart persion who deliberately pretends to be an idiot." That's really not very logical.
Cairo wasn't a blunder. A blunder is "A usually serious mistake typically caused by ignorance or confusion," accorting to American Heritage dictionary. Inventing an advanced filesystem is not a mistake — it's actually a good idea. But like many of Microsoft's good ideas (and they do have them) it was ineptly executed.
The word "troll" has always bugged me. Of course there are pranksters who say stuff like "Mother Teresa was actually a Satanist" just to get a response. But 90% of the time I see the word "troll" used, it's by some mentally lazy person who finds it easier to dismiss other people's opinions as malicious dishonesty.
I have never indulged in trolling. But everytime I say something that people don't want to hear, that's what they assume I'm doing.
Dvorak has been the classical asshole industry columnist for a long time — and he is that stupid. This isn't even the stupidest thing he's said. I first realized how stupid he was back in 1983, when he made some silly pronouncements about the secret plans of a company I was working for. It was painfully obvious that he hadn't the slightest understanding of the technology we sold. Why he continues to get published is one of the great mysteries of our time.
...Dvorak is an idiot. He does not rate a headline at Slashdot. I mean, Jeez, what's his definition of "blunder"? Something that creates huge lockin for Windows? Every time I cry about lack of standards support in web browsers, somebody says, "IE is the standard". And I hate to admit it, but they're right. There are zillions of Intranet applications that you need IE to use, and that means that there are zillions of companies that can't consider running anything but Windows on the desktop. Not the biggest reason nobody will look at alternatives to Windows, but it's up there.
Jesus, this is your mother. Treat your father with respect!
My source is this book. As for Wikipedia, it isn't any more authoritative than a random article on Slashdot. In neither case should you assume that the material has been fact-checked or comes from a reliable source. I'll leave updates of Wikipedia to somebody who doesn't think that the idea of a "open encylopedia" is laughable.
McNealy does have badge number 3 — but that doesn't prove he's the third employee, since he's the one who hands out the badges. It's my understanding that he was originally hired to manage production, which hardly sounds like a "co-founder" position.