i'd like to see someone develop a comic strip whose sole purpose was to mock other "artists" with absolutely no artistic talent and a very weak grasp of humour.
"i just had illiad on the phone - he's doing a really bad drawing, and he was asking me for ideas for really poor linux gags." 'WHAT DISTRO!?!?!?!!!!!'
my god. when is someone significant going to have the bollocks to stand up and say how truly dreadful user friendly is? come on, this isn't even subjective. i can prove it with a fucking slide rule.
it's poorly drawn. every single joke is of the "let's use microsoft windoze"/"no it sux let's use linux!"/"BUT WHICH DISTRIBUTION!!!!!!" variety and it gets incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly. why anyone would want a book of this rubbish is beyond me.
i'm absolutely dumbfounded by the quotes on the site from various high-profile open source types. have none of these people read a good comic? do none of them know how a good joke works? for christ's sake, if you're genuinely amused by endless repetition of anti-microsoft/pro-linux sentiment combined with that low-level cup-holder-anecdote tech support humour, why fucking bother reading a comic at all? i'm sure a quick browse over the mindless shite that gets moderated up as "funny" on slashdot will be enough to hospitalise you for a week. ----
I was reeding the news on the internet and i was looking at cnn.com and i saw a story about a boy beeing in jale for writing a story about GUNS in school and boom i new that john cats was going to rite about it boom DING DONG john cats in my head and then I thought it might be safe but boom no becaus the next day in the morning as i was eating my Breakfast i went to read slashdot in a very slowly scared way and BOOM Ding dong john cats in my face and i saw columbine and it was about the boy being in JALE for riting a story about killing his teacher and guns BOOM and freon bustin out his 9mm so i was reeding the article and this bloody body droped down in front of me and scared me half to death and ismael did some freon with me Then we saw these piles of rocks and some twigs hanging from a tree and now we are dead. I wish that john cats would rite a halloween storie and get put in jale BOOM because ding dong no more stupid john cats in my face and grate i wish john cats didnt have any heads ----
...is that, finally, someone's found a use for him:
Jonathan Katz, an astronomer at Washington University in St. Louis, thinks he's worked out where the rest of the push is coming from. The probes rely on small plutonium-powered nuclear reactors called RTGs for their electricity. Katz calculates that some of the excess heat given off by the RTGs would bounce off the back of the probes' radio antennas, providing enough of a shove toward the sun to explain the deceleration.
and you thought he was just a clueless media whore!
tune in for the next article on this subject, where our hero postulates that the effect is due to a new era of Internet-Based Geek Astronomy that will change the whole paradigm of human existence. and also his book on the subject will now be available. on slashdot. ----
i think maybe they were making a clever joke about the abnormal number of links in this interview, hence 'taking advantage of the online interview format'. href/herf. do you see?
but then again, maybe i'm just reading too much into things, and it's just another crazy foo who can't spell. ----
hey, say what you want about World of Wonder, but don't judge them solely on what you think the programme titles sound like. have you seen any of those shows? The Adam And Joe Show in particular is a superbly above-par piece of television - yes, it's cheap, but it's a mistake to think that you can't make a decent tv show without a six-figure budget.
World of Wonder's shows are typically concerned with giving cameras to talented people and seeing what happens. Adam & Joe was perhaps the best result of this formula (it was smart, funny and incisive, and often used its 'cheapness' to a humourous advantage) and it would be a shame to see this sort of thing die out. i suppose it's akin to the 'public broadcast' television that exists in the US and Canada, from whence several good shows have sprung (MST3K, Tom Green, etc).
maybe it's just me, but most of the time i find it much more entertaining to watch genuinely interesting people do genuinely interesting things than to watch some smarmy overpaid talking head delivering a vacuous script in a shiny studio. and guess which is more expensive? ----
depending on how you want your point-of-sale stuff to work, CCVS might be appropriate for you.
afaik it's oriented towards web transactions etc but i can't see any reason (barring a complete refusal on your part to do any software tinking) that it couldn't be used in conjunction with a vanilla magnetic card reader to make a 'real' POS machine. ----
that's a pretty strange about-face. one moment i rule, the next i suck? hmph. even i'm confused.
firstly, i'm not bragging about causing trouble on slashdot. it's a good site, but people here can be stupid. if i can bring a few smiles to a few faces by taking advantage of that, then who really loses?
secondly, i'm not really that anti-army. i was being inflammatory, and of course it worked. i do, however, think that lots of people are lured into joining for the wrong reasons (have you heard the "join the army and get twelve thousand dollars!" commercials?), and i do grow increasingly weary of people who insist upon tacking "when i was in the army..." onto every tedious anecdote. the reason you and 'other people' deeply resent my attitude is that you apparently feel that any random person deserves awe and respect just for having served in the military. in reality there are many other more worthwhile things people can do to help each other, so i'm sorry for not dropping to my knees. i'm terrible with orders!
i'm disappointed that you're disappointed in me. i strive only to make the world a more interesting place. i do try my best. i'm sorry if you don't get it.
how wonderful to see some of that glorious christian hatred shining like a golden heavenly light through the murky blackness of rationality.
you're completely entitled to abandon all desire to examine and discuss the nature of our existence, but there's absolutely no excuse for being so rude just because other people aren't as quick to give up. keep "we will never understand", "there can be no explaining it all", and your vague supernatural gesticulations to yourself and let the rest of us get down to some real thinking.
actually, mp3.com notified all their members (ie. people with music up on the site, i think) about this offering a good few weeks ago, possibly a month, including the information on how to register for purchase of however many shares.
i'm not a member myself, but i know a few friends who got the offer.
this article really stinks. i sent the following email to 'jp' and his editors.
Mr Morgenthal,
This is a truly terrible, awful, embarassing and ignorant article [1] (Application Logic, Internet Week Online, 6/14/99). I'm sure you've already received many emails from people registering their dismay at your complete lack of research and experience with this topic, but I just couldn't help myself from adding to the top of the pile.
It may be convenient for you to classify all Linux advocates as mindless zealots trained unwaveringly on a lost cause, but we are all intelligent people with valid reasons for our choices. If you haven't already seen the discussion of your article on Slashdot [2], I suggest you go check it out.
Naturally there are a lot of people there who are angry at your base ignorance of the issues surrounding Linux, but if you look closer you will see the valid and factual rebuttals of virtually every "point" you try to make. These are all so desperately obvious that it's just embarassing to try to point them out: Linux *has* SMP support, Linux distributions virtually all ship with all the 'enterprise' applications you describe (and firewalling is supported by the kernel), and the kernel and supporting applications are much more robust and patches for potential security problems appear degrees of magnitude faster than those for Windows NT.
I don't even know what to make of your assertion that any company adding features to the OS is going to be in trouble when a new version comes out. At least the facility is *there* - have you ever tried to get your own custom features added to shrink-wrapped NT? - and kernel compatibility is retained over minor revisions (ie. bugfixes rather than major feature overhauls). And, unlike with NT, there's no pressure or need for a particular company to continually upgrade to the newest version of the kernel; if it works for them, they can just stick with the one they have (or the latest compatible minor revision).
Of course, this is all obvious to anyone who's ever used Linux, and possibly to anyone who's only gone so far as to read up on it or even just check a feature list, so it's certainly disappointing to see a mainstream article go out and dismiss all logic with regard to this matter (which is fairly ironic considering the title of your column). Your article is akin to simply writing "But Linux only works for people from Mars! Only the Martians can use it!" and should be treated as such.
This is all the more disheartening since you have actually picked up on a genuine issue - why switch to Linux? What are the pros and cons? Who is Linux suitable for, and who would be sensible to stay away? Unfortunately, you've entirely failed to cover these issues in any depth, choosing instead to head down the road of uninformed sensationalism and baseless disparagement.
It's some truly dreadful journalism, and genuinely shocking considering your apparent credentials and status in the industry. Linux has many disadvantages for many people, and it's important that people understand that before jumping straight in. However, it's probably best that they are correctly informed rather than scared off by vague hand-waving and blatant disinformation. You're committing an awful injustice on many fronts and it's incredible that you manage to get paid for it. Do you even *have* a technical editor? I can't believe that Internet Week Online can be so willing to tarnish their reputation by running a piece like this.
Please don't write about Linux any more. Or, if you must continue, please read some relevant materials before you start - even better, just take a quick trip down to Best Buy tonight and pick up Red Hat. Try installing it when you get home - I think you might actually be pleasantly surprised.
Yours,
-Tom Stuart Software developer, network engineer, project manager, Linux advocate.
the only disconcerting thing is the idea of MS-Perl modules showing up on CPAN.
yes, i know there's already some win32-specific stuff up there (registry, thread manipulation, blah de blah) but i fear the day i download a perl application and the first thing it does is try to install itself in the fucking system tray.
ianal, but the gist of it is that you can modify and redistribute perl as you wish, in accordance with some fairly lenient conditions (which do *not* oblige you to redistribute the source, although you get out of some other clauses if you do).
beware the trap of thinking that everything's gpl'd.
however, this can't really be as bad as it first looks. if microsoft go ahead and 'embrace' perl, what's the worst market it's going to affect? NT web servers? do we care?
assuming for argument's sake that a display could ever produce an image that was sharp and high-res enough to fool the camera, it still wouldn't work against systems that tested for a live eyeball.
if the system was looking for pupillatory oscillations it wouldn't find them, unless you were playing high-resolution video of a real eyeball. if it was generating different light levels and observing the response of the iris, the static / prerecorded video image wouldn't be up to par.
and if you were smart enough to develop an interactive, real-time, high-resolution, realistic computer-generated iris image that can behave just like a real eye and respond instantaneously to external stimuli, why the fuck would you waste your time trying to get fifty bucks out of an ATM?
My question would be what about people with Hazel eyes? My eyes change from dark brown to bright green. The iris also expands/contracts to let more/less light in depending on the lighting in the area.
well, those are really advantages to the technology. provided the software is good enough, it should be able to take account of those factors and use them to confirm whether it's really you when you step up to that atm.
all implementations of iris scanning [that i've seen so far] have an initial training or enrollment procedure where you have to stare into the camera for a minute or so and allow it to record some data about your iris. notice that it doesn't just take a single static snapshot; in principle it could record information like how your pupil responds to variations in ambient light, how the color varies over time, and so on.
I find this hard to believe that this is iris scanning. It probably scans the back of the retina
nope. iris scanning is proving to be far more practical than retinal scanning these days. cheaper equipment, if nothing else, and less invasive (at least conceptually; everyone can already see your iris).
Slashdot Mirror
isn't stupidity a handicap?
----
i'd like to see someone develop a comic strip whose sole purpose was to mock other "artists" with absolutely no artistic talent and a very weak grasp of humour.
"i just had illiad on the phone - he's doing a really bad drawing, and he was asking me for ideas for really poor linux gags."
'WHAT DISTRO!?!?!?!!!!!'
oh, wait...
----
it's poorly drawn. every single joke is of the "let's use microsoft windoze"/"no it sux let's use linux!"/"BUT WHICH DISTRIBUTION!!!!!!" variety and it gets incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly. why anyone would want a book of this rubbish is beyond me.
i'm absolutely dumbfounded by the quotes on the site from various high-profile open source types. have none of these people read a good comic? do none of them know how a good joke works? for christ's sake, if you're genuinely amused by endless repetition of anti-microsoft/pro-linux sentiment combined with that low-level cup-holder-anecdote tech support humour, why fucking bother reading a comic at all? i'm sure a quick browse over the mindless shite that gets moderated up as "funny" on slashdot will be enough to hospitalise you for a week.
----
I was reeding the news on the internet and i was looking at cnn.com and i saw a story about a boy beeing in jale for writing a story about GUNS in school and boom i new that john cats was going to rite about it boom DING DONG john cats in my head and then I thought it might be safe but boom no becaus the next day in the morning as i was eating my Breakfast i went to read slashdot in a very slowly scared way and BOOM Ding dong john cats in my face and i saw columbine and it was about the boy being in JALE for riting a story about killing his teacher and guns BOOM and freon bustin out his 9mm so i was reeding the article and this bloody body droped down in front of me and scared me half to death and ismael did some freon with me Then we saw these piles of rocks and some twigs hanging from a tree and now we are dead. I wish that john cats would rite a halloween storie and get put in jale BOOM because ding dong no more stupid john cats in my face and grate i wish john cats didnt have any heads
----
and you thought he was just a clueless media whore!
tune in for the next article on this subject, where our hero postulates that the effect is due to a new era of Internet-Based Geek Astronomy that will change the whole paradigm of human existence. and also his book on the subject will now be available. on slashdot.
----
for('activism','terrorism','protest','action','pol itihack'){$a =$_;for('cyber','e-','i-','net.','meta'){print;pri nt$a."\n"}}
----
where would we be without danny o'brien, eh? erm, probably doing more work on friday afternoons. that's where.
----
then again, your post did appear an hour and a half after mine. ;)
and you probably weren't up all night because of hurricane floyd. or maybe you were!
cheers.
----
run that command at your shell, paste in the binary stuff, hit ctrl-d to tell it you're done, and the secret messages shall spew forth.
and kids, please remember: don't try this in C.
----
but then again, maybe i'm just reading too much into things, and it's just another crazy foo who can't spell.
----
uh.. thanks for nixing my <>, Slash.
perl -e '$d = join("",<>); @b=split(/\s/,$d); foreach (@b) {print pack("B8",$_);}'
----
perl -e '$d = join("",); @b=split(/\s/,$d); foreach (@b) {print pack("B8",$_);}'
----
World of Wonder's shows are typically concerned with giving cameras to talented people and seeing what happens. Adam & Joe was perhaps the best result of this formula (it was smart, funny and incisive, and often used its 'cheapness' to a humourous advantage) and it would be a shame to see this sort of thing die out. i suppose it's akin to the 'public broadcast' television that exists in the US and Canada, from whence several good shows have sprung (MST3K, Tom Green, etc).
maybe it's just me, but most of the time i find it much more entertaining to watch genuinely interesting people do genuinely interesting things than to watch some smarmy overpaid talking head delivering a vacuous script in a shiny studio. and guess which is more expensive?
----
afaik it's oriented towards web transactions etc but i can't see any reason (barring a complete refusal on your part to do any software tinking) that it couldn't be used in conjunction with a vanilla magnetic card reader to make a 'real' POS machine.
----
that's a pretty strange about-face. one moment i rule, the next i suck? hmph. even i'm confused.
firstly, i'm not bragging about causing trouble on slashdot. it's a good site, but people here can be stupid. if i can bring a few smiles to a few faces by taking advantage of that, then who really loses?
secondly, i'm not really that anti-army. i was being inflammatory, and of course it worked. i do, however, think that lots of people are lured into joining for the wrong reasons (have you heard the "join the army and get twelve thousand dollars!" commercials?), and i do grow increasingly weary of people who insist upon tacking "when i was in the army..." onto every tedious anecdote. the reason you and 'other people' deeply resent my attitude is that you apparently feel that any random person deserves awe and respect just for having served in the military. in reality there are many other more worthwhile things people can do to help each other, so i'm sorry for not dropping to my knees. i'm terrible with orders!
i'm disappointed that you're disappointed in me. i strive only to make the world a more interesting place. i do try my best. i'm sorry if you don't get it.
hey, you did that java book, didn't you? see below.
ah, laura lemay. there's a wacky one.
oh, how i do live for those occasional hours of moderation glory!
hey, look, there's roger cadenhead. he did the new version of that laura lemay book. awesome. i loved the original.
you're completely entitled to abandon all desire to examine and discuss the nature of our existence, but there's absolutely no excuse for being so rude just because other people aren't as quick to give up. keep "we will never understand", "there can be no explaining it all", and your vague supernatural gesticulations to yourself and let the rest of us get down to some real thinking.
thanks!
-t
i'm not a member myself, but i know a few friends who got the offer.
none of them took it up, of course. heh.
yes, i know there's already some win32-specific stuff up there (registry, thread manipulation, blah de blah) but i fear the day i download a perl application and the first thing it does is try to install itself in the fucking system tray.
ianal, but the gist of it is that you can modify and redistribute perl as you wish, in accordance with some fairly lenient conditions (which do *not* oblige you to redistribute the source, although you get out of some other clauses if you do).
beware the trap of thinking that everything's gpl'd.
however, this can't really be as bad as it first looks. if microsoft go ahead and 'embrace' perl, what's the worst market it's going to affect? NT web servers? do we care?
you thought the cadenhead / theobvious.com piece was bad; did you ever see what lloyd wood had to say about it?
-t
if the system was looking for pupillatory oscillations it wouldn't find them, unless you were playing high-resolution video of a real eyeball. if it was generating different light levels and observing the response of the iris, the static / prerecorded video image wouldn't be up to par.
and if you were smart enough to develop an interactive, real-time, high-resolution, realistic computer-generated iris image that can behave just like a real eye and respond instantaneously to external stimuli, why the fuck would you waste your time trying to get fifty bucks out of an ATM?
well, those are really advantages to the technology. provided the software is good enough, it should be able to take account of those factors and use them to confirm whether it's really you when you step up to that atm.
all implementations of iris scanning [that i've seen so far] have an initial training or enrollment procedure where you have to stare into the camera for a minute or so and allow it to record some data about your iris. notice that it doesn't just take a single static snapshot; in principle it could record information like how your pupil responds to variations in ambient light, how the color varies over time, and so on.
nope. iris scanning is proving to be far more practical than retinal scanning these days. cheaper equipment, if nothing else, and less invasive (at least conceptually; everyone can already see your iris).