...is that the Chinese government does respond when people make noise about human rights abuses. It's just that companies like Yahoo are bottom-line oriented, and thus afraid to risk antagonizing the officials they have to work with.
That name has always bothered me. It dates back to the time when coding an event loop was the first step in writing any Mac program. It always seemed to me that the event loop should be in the libraries, or even the OS.
Lots of companies get to name the streets in front of their campuses. The Sun campus in Santa Clara has "Network Circle" and "Sun Fire Way". Oracle is on "Oracle Parkway."
Streets built in the last century or so tend to be named by whoever developed the property.
I agree with your attitude. But I think the simpler techniques they teach in women's self defense classes are more effective, and easier to learn. If I had a daughter, she'd be enrolled in such a class the moment — the nanosecond — she was old enough.
Your principal did have a point. I quit fighting after I started taking martial arts. I learned enough joint locks, pressure points and defensive maneuvers that I don't strike people, I just disable them if I have to.
Dude, those moves count as fighting. They're more efficient, and less aggressive than return punch for punch, but it's still fighting.
What my principal meant was, "If you just put up with being bullyed, it won't escalate into a fight." Which is perfectly true. But what 10-year-old is zen enough to implement such a strategy? And should they have to?
MSFT is the biggest kid on the block, so of course they're going to catch flak from a certain segment - that goes with the territory.
That's an interesting analogy. By "biggest kid" you would seem to mean "biggest bully". People tend to tolerate bullying. (My elementary school principal used to tell me, "It takes two to make a fight!" What bullshit.) But bullying is still evil.
Did I mention I've had six or seven managers in five years? I've only changed jobs twice -- the others were "churn" caused by reorganizations or managers otherwise being reassigned. In fact, in the month between when I was hired and when I started, the person who was going to be my manager (we'd already had several phone/email conversations) changed! It's seven if you count that, six if you don't.
Yeah. I had a MS manager call me out of the blue, asking if I was available. Major shock, since I didn't think I was the kind of person they looked for. Our conversations went well, and he had set up phone interviews with his higher-ups, hopefully moving towards bringing me to Redmond for some on-site talks. Then he called and told me that there had been a sudden management reshuffle, and I should contact him in a month. By then I was in a contract...
I sometimes joke that the day Microsoft stops providing free soft drinks, I'll quit. At least, everyone else thinks I'm joking.
The company I'm contracting at now used to have (last time I contracted here) a nice collection of sodas, juices, and waters, all free. Times are tough, so of course that's no more. But what bugs me now is that the cafeteria doesn't even have a decent collection of juices for sale. And the vending machines just carry sodas, no juices. Stupid.
Companies (countries, races, etc.) are not "evil" or "good", and they do not have "intentions." Star Trek is science fiction -- there is no Borg mind. Companies, countries, races, and other groups are made up of individuals like you and me, who make individual decisions that determine the group's direction. People who speak of companies (or countries, or races, or other groups) as being good or evil are at best ignorant, and at worst bigots.
I think that's a nasty oversimplification. True, a company doesn't have a Borg-like collective will — but it does have policies and goals, stated and unstated. If that weren't true, antitrust laws and other laws that hold corporations responsible for their actions wouldn't exist.
What's absurd about people's attitude towards Microsoft is that people see a dark agenda behind everything they do, usually in defiance of all logic. Microsoft is like the Borgias, that Italian family that did a lot a lot of unacceptable things (how many Popes move their children into the Vatican, or even admit to having children?) but not half the evil things "everybody knows" they did (Lucrecia Borgia, contrary to myth, never poisoned anybody).
Microsoft is really not as evil as people think. But they are a nasty monopoly, and should be broken up. Not just for the rest of us, but for their own good — the pieces would work much better than the whole.
Of course! Anybody who has anything positive to say about Microsoft must be a "trojan horse".</sarcasm> I mean jeez, did you even notice his comments about middle management? Where he uses words like "cult"?
Scheme is an important language. But it has never been widely used and never will be. Why? No state variables. That is, you can never assign a new value to an existing variable, you can only create new variables.
Of course, that's by design, and there are good reasons to write programs that way. There are all kinds of errors you avoid by not having state variables, especially in concurrent programming. But to most programmers the concept is profoundly counterintuitive.
Groovy does not claim to be a finished product. Does anyone suggest otherwise? Why do so many people need to make long winded disections of exactly how it is unfinished?
Because the product has been around long enough to be a lot less unfinished.
You cite one writer I don't care for, and two whose work I don't know. In any case, their work is all I really want to know about any writer. Let their private lives be private. I wouldn't care about HE's assholedness if it didn't taint everything he did: his editing, his TV ventures, and most especially his writing.
One of my favorite SF writers is Robert Heinlein, who was arguably the greatest writer of the genre in his era, and who did a lot to define the conventions of modern SF. I never met the dude — even though we actually had a few acquaintences in common, and patronized the same bookstores. I'm rather glad I never met him, because everything I know about him says we wouldn't have gotten along. That would have spoiled all his writing for me, which would have been a shame. I still enjoy re-reading some of his stuff now and then.
If I had the same distance from HE, I'd certainly enjoy his work more. Unfortunately, his gigantic ego doesn't allow that!
Many SF writers are opinionated. None have quite as nasty a reputation as Ellison. I don't know why you got along with him, but you're definitely in the minority. And many SF writers who were screwed over by his mishandling of Finally, Dangerous Visions (and worse, by his inability to admit that he was doing anything wrong) utterly loath him.
Since SF is something I read, rather than write, I could forgive his immaturity — except that it leaks over into his fiction. He's spoiled many promising stories by ladling on the melodrama and schmaltz. I guess lots of people like his M&S. Not least Michael Straczynski, Ellisonesque M&S being the main reason I can't abide Babylon 5.
I've known a lot of writers, and you can't judge the writing by the person. Some of the greatest jerks are very good writers, many very nice people are terrible writers.
Perfectly true, and not just for writers. And indeed, Ellison is basically a good writer. Unfortunately he abuses melodrama in his writing much as he does in real life. That spoils a lot of fiction that could have been very good.
So we went to this thing, and I didn't know what to expect. And we watched him sit in on a couple panels, and knew immediately that he was exactly sort of like us, in that he was an a**hole. [laughs] It's just that we're assholes in the comic, and not in real life. He maintained that shtick even to his fans, which I thought was sort of weird. A lot of times people will come to meet us at a show, and ask me to flip them off or something, and it feels weird. I try to be nice to people when I meet them. But Harlan, that's not his gig. And I told Jerry, I said, "You know, we're going to have to be onstage with this guy here in a little bit." Because we were co-guests of honor, I guess, if you can have that. And just having watched him for a couple minutes, I knew that he would not like that. I knew that once we got onstage, he would try to do something to belittle us. Somehow he would just have to take the spotlight; that's just the kind of guy he was.
If these guys had known anything about Ellison, they'd know his assholedom is not a schtick. Everything he says or does is a melodrama, with him as the long-suffering hero. That's why I find his work unreadable, even though he's basically a talented and imaginative writer. And it's why the SF community is full of people who avoid his company at any cost. It's amazing that he has any fans.
That's a separate argument. Stop and take a look at the post I was responding to. He wasn't claiming that GW was a myth. He was trotting out a very tired and stupid argument that GW is beneficial.
BillMonk is nothing like that. It's a complicated system with umpteen features that only a compulsive geek will ever use. And it doesn't even do actual transfers!
What we are talking about here (and what most people need) is a system that makes transferring small amounts of money as simple as it is with old-fashioned paper and metal currency. That's what the defunct PayPal program did.
Most of the nabbed wrongdoers have been victims of their own hubris, like the two boys who uploaded video of themselves firebombing an abandoned airplane hangar.
"Hubris" is kind of pretentious for this kind of fuckup. The Bush White House thinking it can architect the political future of the Middle East is "hubris". Distributing evidence of your own criminal activity on the web is just plain stupid.
As a matter of fact, Paypal used to offer a PalmOS program that did exactly what you describe. But they withdrew it — there was no way for them to make money off it.
The ironic thing is that this domain squating wasn't really possible until until a lot of people got all bent out of shape because Network Solutions was charging $50/year to register domains, and they had no competition. They helped force NS to share the business with other companies that were free to charge as little as they wanted. One result of this was bulk registration services, that let squatters grab every name in the phone book and every word in the dictionary for just pennies a domain.
So now a domain name worth having costs thousands of bucks. Of course, you can renew for only $10/year...
Note that I continue to insist this person's aims were political...
Let's focus here. We're not talking about all her rhetoric after she got warned. We're talking about the simple act of forming a guild for gays — which management eventually agreed she had every right to do. If you want to object to the "homosexual agenda" fine, but it isn't logical for you to insist that everything gay people do that doesn't involve hiding in a closet is "activist".
In fact, it's the anti-gay element here who's being activist.
Slashdot Mirror
...is that the Chinese government does respond when people make noise about human rights abuses. It's just that companies like Yahoo are bottom-line oriented, and thus afraid to risk antagonizing the officials they have to work with.
That name has always bothered me. It dates back to the time when coding an event loop was the first step in writing any Mac program. It always seemed to me that the event loop should be in the libraries, or even the OS.
Lots of companies get to name the streets in front of their campuses. The Sun campus in Santa Clara has "Network Circle" and "Sun Fire Way". Oracle is on "Oracle Parkway." Streets built in the last century or so tend to be named by whoever developed the property.
I agree with your attitude. But I think the simpler techniques they teach in women's self defense classes are more effective, and easier to learn. If I had a daughter, she'd be enrolled in such a class the moment — the nanosecond — she was old enough.
What my principal meant was, "If you just put up with being bullyed, it won't escalate into a fight." Which is perfectly true. But what 10-year-old is zen enough to implement such a strategy? And should they have to?
Sorry, doesn't work. When a student hits a student, it's a fight. But when a principal hits a student, it's "discipline".
Brainwashing? That's nothing. At Intel, they put this very creepy "inspirational message" on the badge holders.
What's absurd about people's attitude towards Microsoft is that people see a dark agenda behind everything they do, usually in defiance of all logic. Microsoft is like the Borgias, that Italian family that did a lot a lot of unacceptable things (how many Popes move their children into the Vatican, or even admit to having children?) but not half the evil things "everybody knows" they did (Lucrecia Borgia, contrary to myth, never poisoned anybody).
Microsoft is really not as evil as people think. But they are a nasty monopoly, and should be broken up. Not just for the rest of us, but for their own good — the pieces would work much better than the whole.
Of course! Anybody who has anything positive to say about Microsoft must be a "trojan horse".</sarcasm> I mean jeez, did you even notice his comments about middle management? Where he uses words like "cult"?
Of course, that's by design, and there are good reasons to write programs that way. There are all kinds of errors you avoid by not having state variables, especially in concurrent programming. But to most programmers the concept is profoundly counterintuitive.
Yeah, well, a Scotsman wouldn't talk like James Doohan either!
One of my favorite SF writers is Robert Heinlein, who was arguably the greatest writer of the genre in his era, and who did a lot to define the conventions of modern SF. I never met the dude — even though we actually had a few acquaintences in common, and patronized the same bookstores. I'm rather glad I never met him, because everything I know about him says we wouldn't have gotten along. That would have spoiled all his writing for me, which would have been a shame. I still enjoy re-reading some of his stuff now and then.
If I had the same distance from HE, I'd certainly enjoy his work more. Unfortunately, his gigantic ego doesn't allow that!
Since SF is something I read, rather than write, I could forgive his immaturity — except that it leaks over into his fiction. He's spoiled many promising stories by ladling on the melodrama and schmaltz. I guess lots of people like his M&S. Not least Michael Straczynski, Ellisonesque M&S being the main reason I can't abide Babylon 5.
TMGDA!
That's a separate argument. Stop and take a look at the post I was responding to. He wasn't claiming that GW was a myth. He was trotting out a very tired and stupid argument that GW is beneficial.
It takes a real idiot to make that kind of inference only a few months after the worst hurricane season on record.
What we are talking about here (and what most people need) is a system that makes transferring small amounts of money as simple as it is with old-fashioned paper and metal currency. That's what the defunct PayPal program did.
As a matter of fact, Paypal used to offer a PalmOS program that did exactly what you describe. But they withdrew it — there was no way for them to make money off it.
So now a domain name worth having costs thousands of bucks. Of course, you can renew for only $10/year...
Ain't the free market great?
In fact, it's the anti-gay element here who's being activist.