Whatever. I simply don't care. I'm simply tired of having Teddy's escapades injected in every political conversation, regardless of relevance. All it proves is that you have nothing to contribute to the conversation, except your own mindless self-righteousness.
Every time I had to fiddle with the keyboard config on early versions of Netscape for Unix/Linux, I had to sort through Jamie Zawinski's angry (and rather misinformed) rants about keyboard technology in the resource files. Very frustrating, and not designed to convince people that Netscape was ready for prime time. But they weren't, so I guess that's OK.
Remember, boys and girls, whatever you put in a source code base is on the record. Forever. Emulate Joe Friday.
You must have a really ancient video card. Even my sister's old eMachine (1996!) can do better than that.
Nowadays, 800x600 is the base resolution you get if you don't bother to configure your system. (XP won't do 640x480 without hacking the registry.) Are you sure you haven't just forgetten to specify the right driver?
Case mods are a kind of hardware hacking, and hacking is something you do just because you enjoy doing it. It's the geek equivalent of those blue-collar guys on King of the Hill, who will move into a house and knock down and put up walls for no particular reason.
Which is plenty of pixels for a PowerPoint presentation. Of course, what you want is to play Doom on a really big monitor. Not the target market, alas.
I'm sure you're right. But the people you need to convince are those who generate and rely on the bogus numbers that are so popular. I mean, we're still mostly pretending that stock options don't cost the company anything. How that for a bad metametric?!
Sure every penny counts. But sometimes you can waste more effort counting pennies than you save in unlost pennies.
A lot of companies are on a permanent cost-cutting binge simply because it helps upper management look good with investors. Now, it's often true that these policies get started when a company's wasting money. But they will often continue long after the waste has been dealt with, or even when there was no provable waste to begin with. It's just another example of how corporate policy is set by numbers dweebs, you justify their jobs by the fallacy that every reduction in cost is an increase in profits. It does work because (a) you do have to spend money to make money and (b) as often as not, the apparent cost reduction exists only because of some accounting silliness.
A couple years ago, I had a workstation on my desk that wasn't quite up to what I was asking it to do. A lot of my time (and thus the company's money) was being wasted while I waited for the system to stop thrashing. The standard solution is to request a new workstation. But I thought that was just a little too much to spend. (I'd like to say I wanted to help control costs. But the truth is that I'm fundamentally a tightwad, even when it's not my money being spent.) Instead, I decided to request a RAM and disk drive upgrade which I calculated would make the system much more usable. Here's how it went:
I put in a request for the purchase. It's only about $300, but as a cost control measure, even $300 purchases have to approved at the VP level. I wait.
Weeks pass. I threaten to buy the hardware with my own money. For some reason, this threat, though often employed, is usually effective, and I'm told that approval is emmient.
The purchase is approved. But then my boss tells me that I'm in violation of a new cost control measure, because my workstation has been amortized and now makes the numbers look bad, because of IT costs. I agree to withdraw my previous request and put in a request for a new workstation.
Weeks pass. A date is set for the replacement of my workstation. But then upper management decides it doesn't like our numbers (we're solidly in the black, but costs are too high. So they impose a spending freeze. No workstation, no RAM upgrade.
Weeks pass. Freeze continues.
This goes only for something like six months. Finally, another issue causes me to leave the company.
Is the company making every penny count? No, they're actually wasting money by working inefficiently. They wasted a lot of my time, then tried to buy a workstation I didn't need. But the numbers look good.
So loosely bound typing suits you. Fine. A lot of programmers would agree with you that its the best way to program. A lot of others strongly disagree. Are they mentally deficient? No, they just have a different approach to programming.
Cygwin has its uses, but it's just not a substitute for Linux. You don't switch to Linux because you want to run a particular Linux-only program -- those are actually pretty rare. You switch to Linux because you're tired of the flakiness, lack of security, and nonconfigurability of Windows.
Enough with the standard Teddy-bashing quips. I've been listening to them for a couple of decades, and I don't recall them ever adding anything to a real discussion. All they prove is that the speaker is a smartass with nothing to say.
You consider NASA's PR arm to be an object description of the state of the space program? You actually believe somebody is working on a replacement for the shuttle, when they can barely find the money to keep the lights on at NASA? Whatever.
It isn't "blind hatred" to point out that Bush had made a lot of noise about plans that he won't be around to implement. If you have more trust in his honesty than I do, fine. But don't dismiss people who disagree with you with BS about their motives.
Internet Explorer 4 didn't blow away Netscape because Microsoft is a big, evil, monopolistic corporation... it blew Netscape away because Netscape 4 sucked, and was broken beyond repair. Internet Explorer was (then) a shiny, lean, brand-new application with a squeaky-clean codebase.
I don't agree that IE was ever "squeaky clean". It always had problems that really bothered me. Remember, Microsoft didn't write it from scratch. They didn't realize how important the web was until pretty late in the game, at which time they rushed out and licensed the commercial version of Mosaic from Spyglass. What with their hasty entry into the market, and their usually compulsive feature-tweaking, IE has always been something of a mess.
Still, I have to agree with you as to the basic situation in 1997. Netscape had become such a total mess that IE, with all its flaws, had passed Netscape by in terms of features and reliability.
But that really has very little to do with Microsoft's near elimination of Netscape. Whether or not you consider Microsoft an "evil monopoly," you can't ignore their ability to dominate a market. Never mind the browser wars, look at all the other desktop software they've run out of town: WordPerfect, Ami Word, Lotus 123, Quatro, Freelance, dBase, and others. These were all programs with big followings, and many of them had the backing of big, successful companies. But Microsoft owns the OS that that almost every PC runs. That gives their products a prominence that's hard to beat. And (most importantly) it gives them a huge revenue stream that makes it a lot easier for them to dominate any market they enter.
I think this last factor had more to do with their victories in the browser wars than anything else. Any time Netscape tried to sell somebody an Intranet solution, Microsoft would jump in with a monster sales blitzkrieg and an price tag too low to be ignored. All subsidized by their profits from Windows. Even if Netscape had been a lot less flaky, they couldn't have competed with that.
Now, Mozilla/Firefox is the new, shiny app written from scratch.
Your memory is faulty. Mozilla is anything buy shiny and new. They did abandon most of the baggage of the old Netscape codebase and start from scratch. But that was back in 1998, and they wasted years on bloated, buggy releases that had a lot of people (including me) convinced that Mozilla was a zombie project that didn't know it was dead.
We owe a lot to the current Mozilla and Firefox crews who modularized out the crap, and managed to come up with a browser that people can actually use. And that's proof that good software engineering is more important than having a fresh new code base.
I wouldn't say "typeless", but I know what you mean, and you're absolutely correct. The thing is, that feature of Perl makes the kind of type checking you see in (for example) Java impossible. Which is just fine with the Perl community. They tend to like a creative and subtle programming style, and don't want the language to protect them from themselves.
As I said, some good software has been written in Perl. But it's my opinion that this software was written by programmers who are very, very comfortable with Perl's informal conventions. Programmers who don't have this kind of skill should think things through before they do a big project in a language like Perl or Lua. They either need to use programming conventions that compensate for the limitations of the language, or switch to a language that's better suited to their programming style. I think that's an important lesson of the R&J post mortem.
Since the whole "back to the moon" thing is pure political flimflam, Bush has to say 15 years. If he said, 7 years, he'd have to make real progress while he's still President. This way he can just order a few bogus studies and projects, and claim to be the new JFK.
Well, it never occurred to me that anybody would say, "Hey, he makes that book sound very interesting, but he must be full of shit because he's stands to make a buck if I buy that book." But now that I do think about it, so what? I'm not trying to convert the whole world to my point of view. (Impossible, and a probably not a worthwhile goal.) I'm just trying to share my ideas. If I'm talking to someone who's nitpicking secondary issues like this, they're probably not interested in my ideas anyway.
However, I am a bit annoyed at your statement of how you routinely put referral links on Slashdot, yet you don't think you are link spamming. A bit contradictory eh?
No, because I only do it when I honestly have something to say about the book.
I hate spam -- a word I define very broadly. To me, it includes telemarketing, bogus listings on eBay, all those lame crosspostings that have pretty much destroyed USENET, and any other attempt to maximize your exposure while wasting the time and resources of people who have no interest in what you're selling.
But my referral links are just not spam. They're cross references to information on books that are part of the conversation. I don't put post them unless I truely think they're of interest to people. As a matter of fact, I was posting links to Amazon long before I became an Amazon associate. And if Slashdot started enforcing a policy against referrer links, I'd post just as many links, only without the referrer tag. Making money (and I've made only a few dollars so far) is a secondary concern. Sharing books I've found interesting is what's important.
There are lots of assholes out there trying to sell you stuff. But not everybody who tries to sell you stuff is an asshole.
I wish. I routinely put referrer links on Slashdot. (Why not, as long as I point to books I've can honestly recommend. I don't stoop to link spam, though.) I tend to generate many hits, but very rarely a purchase. Probably my favorite books are too far off the mainstream.
I'll probably get a ton of hits this time -- but I can't picture a lot of Slashdotters wanting their own copy of Cybernetics or Forbidden Planet. Most will read the reviews on Amazon, then go to Netflix and/or their public library. If past experience is any judge, I'm more likely to make money from people who follow my links to Amazon, and then decide to pick up a video game while they're there!
I'll post results on my Slashdot journal in a couple days, in case anybody's interested.
You're right. I was under the impression that the Theramin was a recent invention, though quick glance at the Wikipedia tells me otherwise. I think the Barrons still deserve credit as pioneers in applying cybernetic circuitry to music composition, but I shouldn't have described them as the first electronic musicians.
I should have known better than to play "the first" game. Usually comes down to some trivial detail only of interest to Guiness dweebs.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever. I simply don't care. I'm simply tired of having Teddy's escapades injected in every political conversation, regardless of relevance. All it proves is that you have nothing to contribute to the conversation, except your own mindless self-righteousness.
Remember, boys and girls, whatever you put in a source code base is on the record. Forever. Emulate Joe Friday.
As I said, I didn't care to waste the company's money. But of course the company's numbers-driven management did not reward me for my parsimony.
I didn't read your post carefully. I didn't get that you can only run Doom at SVGA.
Nowadays, 800x600 is the base resolution you get if you don't bother to configure your system. (XP won't do 640x480 without hacking the registry.) Are you sure you haven't just forgetten to specify the right driver?
Case mods are a kind of hardware hacking, and hacking is something you do just because you enjoy doing it. It's the geek equivalent of those blue-collar guys on King of the Hill, who will move into a house and knock down and put up walls for no particular reason.
I'm sure you're right. But the people you need to convince are those who generate and rely on the bogus numbers that are so popular. I mean, we're still mostly pretending that stock options don't cost the company anything. How that for a bad metametric?!
A lot of companies are on a permanent cost-cutting binge simply because it helps upper management look good with investors. Now, it's often true that these policies get started when a company's wasting money. But they will often continue long after the waste has been dealt with, or even when there was no provable waste to begin with. It's just another example of how corporate policy is set by numbers dweebs, you justify their jobs by the fallacy that every reduction in cost is an increase in profits. It does work because (a) you do have to spend money to make money and (b) as often as not, the apparent cost reduction exists only because of some accounting silliness.
A couple years ago, I had a workstation on my desk that wasn't quite up to what I was asking it to do. A lot of my time (and thus the company's money) was being wasted while I waited for the system to stop thrashing. The standard solution is to request a new workstation. But I thought that was just a little too much to spend. (I'd like to say I wanted to help control costs. But the truth is that I'm fundamentally a tightwad, even when it's not my money being spent.) Instead, I decided to request a RAM and disk drive upgrade which I calculated would make the system much more usable. Here's how it went:
- I put in a request for the purchase. It's only about $300, but as a cost control measure, even $300 purchases have to approved at the VP level. I wait.
- Weeks pass. I threaten to buy the hardware with my own money. For some reason, this threat, though often employed, is usually effective, and I'm told that approval is emmient.
- The purchase is approved. But then my boss tells me that I'm in violation of a new cost control measure, because my workstation has been amortized and now makes the numbers look bad, because of IT costs. I agree to withdraw my previous request and put in a request for a new workstation.
- Weeks pass. A date is set for the replacement of my workstation. But then upper management decides it doesn't like our numbers (we're solidly in the black, but costs are too high. So they impose a spending freeze. No workstation, no RAM upgrade.
- Weeks pass. Freeze continues.
- This goes only for something like six months. Finally, another issue causes me to leave the company.
Is the company making every penny count? No, they're actually wasting money by working inefficiently. They wasted a lot of my time, then tried to buy a workstation I didn't need. But the numbers look good.So loosely bound typing suits you. Fine. A lot of programmers would agree with you that its the best way to program. A lot of others strongly disagree. Are they mentally deficient? No, they just have a different approach to programming.
Cygwin has its uses, but it's just not a substitute for Linux. You don't switch to Linux because you want to run a particular Linux-only program -- those are actually pretty rare. You switch to Linux because you're tired of the flakiness, lack of security, and nonconfigurability of Windows.
NAKity NAK. (Don't talk back.)
Enough with the standard Teddy-bashing quips. I've been listening to them for a couple of decades, and I don't recall them ever adding anything to a real discussion. All they prove is that the speaker is a smartass with nothing to say.
It isn't "blind hatred" to point out that Bush had made a lot of noise about plans that he won't be around to implement. If you have more trust in his honesty than I do, fine. But don't dismiss people who disagree with you with BS about their motives.
Still, I have to agree with you as to the basic situation in 1997. Netscape had become such a total mess that IE, with all its flaws, had passed Netscape by in terms of features and reliability.
But that really has very little to do with Microsoft's near elimination of Netscape. Whether or not you consider Microsoft an "evil monopoly," you can't ignore their ability to dominate a market. Never mind the browser wars, look at all the other desktop software they've run out of town: WordPerfect, Ami Word, Lotus 123, Quatro, Freelance, dBase, and others. These were all programs with big followings, and many of them had the backing of big, successful companies. But Microsoft owns the OS that that almost every PC runs. That gives their products a prominence that's hard to beat. And (most importantly) it gives them a huge revenue stream that makes it a lot easier for them to dominate any market they enter.
I think this last factor had more to do with their victories in the browser wars than anything else. Any time Netscape tried to sell somebody an Intranet solution, Microsoft would jump in with a monster sales blitzkrieg and an price tag too low to be ignored. All subsidized by their profits from Windows. Even if Netscape had been a lot less flaky, they couldn't have competed with that.
Your memory is faulty. Mozilla is anything buy shiny and new. They did abandon most of the baggage of the old Netscape codebase and start from scratch. But that was back in 1998, and they wasted years on bloated, buggy releases that had a lot of people (including me) convinced that Mozilla was a zombie project that didn't know it was dead.We owe a lot to the current Mozilla and Firefox crews who modularized out the crap, and managed to come up with a browser that people can actually use. And that's proof that good software engineering is more important than having a fresh new code base.
As I said, some good software has been written in Perl. But it's my opinion that this software was written by programmers who are very, very comfortable with Perl's informal conventions. Programmers who don't have this kind of skill should think things through before they do a big project in a language like Perl or Lua. They either need to use programming conventions that compensate for the limitations of the language, or switch to a language that's better suited to their programming style. I think that's an important lesson of the R&J post mortem.
Since the whole "back to the moon" thing is pure political flimflam, Bush has to say 15 years. If he said, 7 years, he'd have to make real progress while he's still President. This way he can just order a few bogus studies and projects, and claim to be the new JFK.
Well, it never occurred to me that anybody would say, "Hey, he makes that book sound very interesting, but he must be full of shit because he's stands to make a buck if I buy that book." But now that I do think about it, so what? I'm not trying to convert the whole world to my point of view. (Impossible, and a probably not a worthwhile goal.) I'm just trying to share my ideas. If I'm talking to someone who's nitpicking secondary issues like this, they're probably not interested in my ideas anyway.
You really need to get a life. I appreciate having a full-time Dumbass, but there's no future in it.
Are we ourselves real, or are we just characters in a computer game?
I hate spam -- a word I define very broadly. To me, it includes telemarketing, bogus listings on eBay, all those lame crosspostings that have pretty much destroyed USENET, and any other attempt to maximize your exposure while wasting the time and resources of people who have no interest in what you're selling.
But my referral links are just not spam. They're cross references to information on books that are part of the conversation. I don't put post them unless I truely think they're of interest to people. As a matter of fact, I was posting links to Amazon long before I became an Amazon associate. And if Slashdot started enforcing a policy against referrer links, I'd post just as many links, only without the referrer tag. Making money (and I've made only a few dollars so far) is a secondary concern. Sharing books I've found interesting is what's important.
There are lots of assholes out there trying to sell you stuff. But not everybody who tries to sell you stuff is an asshole.
Of course, they're still a bunch of softheaded, bleedingheart liberal elitests, so you continue to be pissed at them, if you choose!
I'll probably get a ton of hits this time -- but I can't picture a lot of Slashdotters wanting their own copy of Cybernetics or Forbidden Planet. Most will read the reviews on Amazon, then go to Netflix and/or their public library. If past experience is any judge, I'm more likely to make money from people who follow my links to Amazon, and then decide to pick up a video game while they're there!
I'll post results on my Slashdot journal in a couple days, in case anybody's interested.
I should have known better than to play "the first" game. Usually comes down to some trivial detail only of interest to Guiness dweebs.