(Yeesh, to whoever modded this guy don't to a Troll....He doesn't deserve it, he raises some valid questions/points.)
"Obviously this is a sad story, but when I was in high school I was in a car accident and woke up to my best friends head split open. That wasn't pleasant either, but did I never ride in a car again? Of course not. "
I should have also mentioned I have an enormous taboo against Death. When this happened, I realized it could have been a totally arbitrary choice on behalf of the murderer who's stairwell he ran up. Could have been mine. Since I was working at IBM at the time, I figured I had enough financial security to get the hell out and move somewhere else. My bed also faces the crime scene. I cant exactly sleep in my own bed or look out my living room window without seeing the place where a 19 year old girl got butchered. I had way too much going on at that point in my life to get saddled with that sort of brainweight, so I bailed. And it was a bad complex -- One of my friends wouldnt come over unless he brought his gun to protect his car incase someone tried to break into it. Relax, he's responsible with it.
"Did you ever try to sublet? It seems like your legal fees would have been well spent taking out some ads in the local paper."
I couldn't in good conscience sublet my apartment to a friend without telling them what happened there, or without telling them how unsafe it was. That place had gone downhill in a hurry in the past year. The people cross the way smoked pot in front of their kids, and oh, by the way, the guy who butchered the chick lived across the way, too, next door to the victim. Nice neighborhood, eh?
"Are you 17? How can your parents still dictate everything you do? Are you not an adult?"
Of course I am, but my mom & dad are 62 and 68 years old, respectively. They tend to get a little overanxious about what they watch on the news, and i'd be giving them a heart attack by getting on a plane around a Christian holiday. Plus, there was no guarantee back then that air travel would be safe. I'm considerate of my folks, thats all.
"You need to learn from your mistakes and take some direct accountability for your own fate instead of being a hapless bystander."
I agree with you. But you can only jump out of the frying pan and into the fire when you can find a way not to get burned.
Don't even bother reading the original posts about this article. I did, and like usual here on Slashdot, someone writes in screaming his head off in a panic about his "rights" are being violated and how much of a victim he is.
Qwest's policy was not only given in plain english to its customers, but it also gives you the ability to inform yourself further on the issue. If you don't, its your fault. Speaking of the issue, it really isn't one. All Qwest is doing is telling you that they will be sharing meaningless information like wether or not you have Caller ID or (gasp) Touch-Tone Service installed WITH OTHER BRANCHES OF QWEST. Nowhere in the original document does Qwest claim that its going to sell or otherwise share your information with parties you have not agreed to. When you set up your phone service, you give Qwest your personal information anyway. They're just sharing it within the different branches of the company, and why shouldn't they? If they really wanted to get into selling your info to telemarketers, dont you think they would have started doing that YEARS ago?
Take off your tinfoil hats, kids. The Qwest boogeyman isn't trying to send you evil messages through your television. And, in the future you might be better served to THINK, then react --- Not the other way around.
Yah, really.:) At first I was sort of insulted that someone thought my miserable year was "funny", but, I did too. More than once this year, I remember looking at my situation and just laughing hysterically at how miserably bad everything had turned so quickly. So bad its comical.
Goodbye 2001? Good riddance!
on
Google Recaps 2001
·
· Score: 4, Offtopic
This year has been one of the worst years I can remember in my entire life. Good riddance, this year sucked a big one and kept on sucking. Lets have a look at my timeline:
January: I go into debt.
February: Work stress piles up, I go further into debt.
March: The dickhead who was managing PROPAGANDA's SQL database decides to "upgrade" the box and torches damn near a thousand articles. I rebuild from scratch in my spare time with the help of some friends.
April: A girl gets butchered and raped in the apartment across the walkway from me. I stay until 10:30 or so to see what the news crews have learned, and decide to stay the night over at Ginger's place because I'm too creeped out about the whole thing. I give a taped statement to the police about what I may have heard or seen the night before. I leave, and just as I head out, I see them bringing the body bag out, and see the outline of the girl's head in the bag and damn near throw up. I spend the next week or so living with Ginger until I can get a chance to arrange to move to a new complex.
May: I move to a new, secure, gated apartment complex. The apartment manager at my old apartment complex refuses to break anyone's lease, and refuses let anyone out. He also refuses to allow anyone to pay off the remainder of their lease. I'm screwed for $3000, and spend the next 6 months paying off two apartments. Hired a lawyer in preparation to sue my former apartment complex to get out of the lease. It doesn't work. I talk to a news crew and light a fire under their ass, that still doesnt work. Ultimately, i'm screwed for three grand, and now carry $1100 a month in rent expenses. Thank god I work at IBM.
June: I find out my new neighbor at the new apartment complex wears a monitoring bracelet around his ankle. Wonderful. He also wears a two foot long tattoo across his midsection. This kid is 19 years old. Work stress continues as rumors circulate through IBM that contractors are about to get the axe..Myself included.
July: Laid off. IBM cuts 40% of their workforce here in town. Everyone I know is out of work. The economy tanks hard as the dot-com loser bubble bursts. My convicted-felon neighbor has a screaming argument outside on his balcony. His girlfriend jumps off the third story balcony and ends up being carried out on a stretcher. The police take another statement from me about what I might have heard or seen. They chuckle at my bad luck after I tell them where I lived a few months ago. I figure a piano is going to fall through the ceiling and kill me one of these days.
August: Mad rush to take shelter in classes at the local college to wait out the storm. Just barely get onboard in time. Word trickles out of IBM that nobody expects to be re-hired until early 2002. Great. Now I have to ask my parents for financial help, and will continue to rely on them for the next 4 months.
September: Mr. Roger's retires, the world explodes, and Ginger calls me up at 7 in the morning and tells me the World Trade Center is on fire. I watch as another plane hits, and what we thought at the time to be 30 to 40,000 people fall to their deaths on fire and pulverized by concrete. The entire country goes to hell in a handbasket. I can count the number of UNIX-related job openings on one hand. I prepare Ginger for the idea that I may have to move to Colorado to find work. Theres one company up there still hiring.
October: My car dies...A broken crank shaft that would cost more to repair than the entire vehicle was worth. Now I need to get a new car while paying off two apartments. Thankfully, this is the last month I'll have to pay rent in two different places. The new car costs $5K, and automatically dumps my head in the debt bucket and holds it under the water for the next few months. I start making the rounds of people I may have unjustly skewered over the past year or two with little success.. Whatever jobs were open have all now dried up as the industry tightens its belt and locks the door for the long run. Anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax.
November: A glimmer of hope. I run into a former coworker at a car wash, and beg her to bring word back that I've been holding out for months waiting to get back on the boat at IBM. More debt, more stress. Thank god I've got Ginger.
December: Cant go home for Christmas and be with my family because of Osama. Parents don't want me on a plane. Things start to settle down, i'm getting used to the idea of being unemployed. Just as I do, I get a call from a contractor firm that Big Blue as opened its doors. I do backflips and cartwheels and have my name on the dotted line within 45 minutes. The light at the end of the tunnel appears and Dick Clark looks like he's aged alot in the past year.
Good fucking riddance, 2001. I hope I forget you quickly.
No shit.:) Its about 6 years old, if I remember correctly. I was inferring that while I did know how to do little things like infinite loops, and make the machine print my name on the screen at age 4, I didn't do anything really concrete or substantitve till about 2nd grade.
I dont know why you guys have such a hard time understanding the concept of my learning how to code in BASIC at age 4. Its not like they singled me out and taught me specifically -- It was part of the curriculum, the whole class learned what HOME and PRINT and RUN meant..Hell, I even remember the first day they wheeled it into the classroom.
No doubt. See, i'm sure he's a bright kid and all...but you don't run around comparing your "experience" to that of your bosses, who probably have been doing what you do for longer than you've even been alive. You'll come off as nothing short of a "snot-nosed kid".
If he's truly good at what he does, the wheat will rise above the chaff regardless of what happens in the long run. This isn't a case of "age discrimination" as much as it is "you've got a long way to go before you can compare your experience to mine, kid. Start down here, and work your way up with the rest."
The elementary school I went to was one of the first in Illinois to have computers put in..even more rare, computers that were actually available for the students to use. Prairie Elementary, District 203, Naperville. Look it up. Probably in autumn 1979 or so.
While I wasn't exactly writing 2048-bit crypto engines, I was writing simple text games by second grade and doing crude GR-mode graphics programming by about the third grade. I only lived two houses away from the school, so often times I'd stay after school to play with the computers, play Lemonade, Moppettown Parade and Swords & Sorcery until the custodians threw me out around 5 PM. In particular, I remember modding Lemonade so that the weather was always thunderstorms, because I thought the lightning bolt animation was awesome. Was writing war games by 5th grade. Got in trouble in 6th grade because I carried around a blue folder with the words "GENOCIDE" on it..Some of my teachers had voiced some concern (heh) about why I was working so much on it. I kept all my code hand-written on paper, and after school would sit down and type it all in. In particular, I remember how difficult it was to draw the paths of the missiles on a 40x40 GR mode screen. Had no idea what a parabola was, so I hard-coded the strike paths using about 13 pages of VLIN, HLIN and PLOT statements. Never finished it.
What else do you wanna know about how "so full of shit" I am?
If you've approached your manager with the same pile of BS that you approached Slashdot:
"I'm 19 years old with 5 years industry experience"
You shouldn't be surprised that he's trying to get rid of you. That statement alone sort of underscores your ignorance. Incase you missed it, it implies that you've been working at a 6-to-5 job that actually _matters_ since the age of 14.
Warezing != "industry experience". Upgrading AOL on your dad's computer != "industry experience". Having a personal webpage != "industry experience".
Its like this, spudboy.."industry experience" means sleeping on the floor of your office overnight because you need to babysit half a dozen mission-critical AIX, Solaris and IRIX boxes following a complete power-failure and network outage, because if you dont, the entire department's workload might grind to a halt, and the company will lose $30,000 per minute until its fixed. Many people here have seen and dealt with that sort of thing. No offense, but I doubt you have seen anything similar during your "5 years of industry experience".
Here's another way to look at it --- I've been coding since about the age of 4. Yes, 4. And no, i'm not kidding. (Hell, my parents still have one of my "Apple ][ Operators License" picture IDs in a photo album from when I was in 2nd grade..) Now, do you think I would put "I'm 27 years old and have 23 years industry experience" on my resume'?
In a similar vein, I've spent the past week or two trying to develop a way to produce seamless, stereoscopic 3D desktop backgrounds. I've always had an interest in stereography, but until now I couldn't find a way to apply it to my PROPAGANDA tiles..
Just yesterday morning I finally managed to produce (and can reproduce at will) stereoscopic 3D wallpaper in Gimp. No rendering, no photography, nuthin but pure hand-made goodness in Gimp.:) The next best thing to holography, I suppose.:) Have a look here for a small example image, or if you have a very large display, you can see the unscaled original here. Just bring it up in any image viewer, or set it as your background..The fun part about it is that casual onlookers look at your desktop and just see a nice background...You would only know it was 3D if somebody told you.:) It doesn't require any special 3D glasses or anything stupid like that -- All you need to do is lightly cross your eyes like looking at the image. Here's a quick lesson in how to see it in 3D -- Sit squarely in your chair a few feet away, directly facing your monitor. Don't look at it at an angle. Cross your eyes lightly until you see "the one in the middle". If you have problems seeing it, hold up a pencil exactly halfway between your eyes and the screen. Focus on the tip of the pencil for a few seconds and whammo, you'll see the background show up in 3D.. When tiled as a background, the 3D effect looks like an egg-carton, or like the sound-dampening walls of a recording studio. Spikes and pits. For added mirth and merriment, swivel in your chair a little bit and you'll see the image move correspondingly. Even more fun, is trying to move back slowly while seeing it. The farther you move back, the deeper the image will appear. I'll probably surprise the gimp-devel folks with an explanation of how its done in a day or two.:)
Happy Birthday, Jesus! Here's a book on C/C++ with an emphasis on AI design!
Somehow, I just don't get it. What is it with people who want to exchange or return gifts? I grew up in a house where you appreciated such things. My first instinct upon getting a present that didn't quite fit or wasn't exactly to my tastes was that I could still find a use for it, not "Hmmmm.. I wonder I can pawn this off and get an XBox!!"
Gifts are gifts. And if youre buying a gift just to throw money at someone in lieu of actually giving a shit about them, you suck in my book. Similarly, if you don't even bother to consider the thought and effort someone else put in to giving you something they felt you'd enjoy, you also suck. Hard.
## Gammatwister 0.1 Released: 12/28/01
## Borderline psychotic RGB trig code by Bowie J. Poag
## Say NO to drugs.... Say YES to Gammatwister!;)
##
a=1;
COUNTER=0;
while true;
do
while [ $COUNTER -lt 625000 ]; do
a=$(echo "scale=4; $a+.013" | bc -l) ;
rgamma=$(echo "define abs(x){if(x Cut, paste, and enjoy.:)
Like my stuff? Sure, its free -- but rent isn't.:) You can help pay my rent by going here and clicking on the $1.00 Donation button. Quick and easy. Doing so will help ensure that the tiles remain free for you and others to enjoy.:)
Shamelessly begging for pocket change in the post-dot-com economy,;)
Be my guest. I'm under the impression that my point about who pays for your car's safety makes so much sense to you that you can no longer argue against it.
No, but if it were 1975 and I was interested in buying a Pinto, i'd want to know what the EPA says about it (after all, your tax dollars are being used to determine the safety, realiability, and efficiency of these cars, independant of manufacturer) plus I'd want to know how the car performed in crash tests (these were also commonly performed during the 1970's), I'd want to see how Consumer Reports rated it, and last but not least, i'd want to hear the reccomendations of others who have purchased the same model.
If you walk onto a car lot and say, "Duhhhhhh, I like that one!! Its purrrtty!!!" you're setting yourself up for a disaster.
The people who died in Pintos certainly didn't deserve to die--However, they could have probably avoided their own fate by conducting a minimal amount of research regarding their purchasing decision.
Besides, Ford's Model T is exponentially more unsafe than a '75 Pinto. Inadequate headlights, no crumple zones, hell, they didn't even have seat belts. Nonetheless, millions were sold, and plenty of people died in them, a percentage i'd assume dwarfs the percentage of people killed in Pintos.
By the way, it was Ford and other "evil" corporations who are responsible for making your cars as safe as they are today. Think about it.
In the UC case, shoddy plant maintenance and a shocking reduction in staff training -- a cut from six months of training, to a quick two weeks! -- led to a tragic chemical leak that resulted in 20000 deaths, another 120000 people requiring medical treatment, and a generation of grossly deformed children.
Sounds trite, but accidents like these are inevitable consequences of our civilization. Its our nature as human beings to maximize our effectiveness while minimizing our use of resources. Sure, its sad and terrible what happened. So was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 250,000 people died there--A quarter of a million people burst into flames, got buried by rubble, got impaled on things, or just plain disintegrated--But most historians agree that it had to be done. Japan wouldn't have given up, and a ground invasion would have cost at least 500,000 lives, some estimates as high as 750,000. See what I mean about "inevitable consequences" ?
The example of Ford and the Pinto you pointed out isn't that unusual. All companies make decisions regarding cost-effectiveness. If you dont like the decisions they make, you can buy from another car manufacturer. Its your responsibility as a buyer to thuroughly research your choices before putting your name on the dotted line and putting your money on the table. Of course, thats not to say that the people who died in Pintos deserved their fate -- It merely states that perhaps they would have been wise to question the motivations behind the design of Ford's products. Any mechanic will tell you that the engines Ford automobiles are generally difficult to repair. That translates into added cost to you, because in the long run, you'll be paying disproportionately more for labor. This doesn't mean that Ford is evil and makes their engines difficult to maintain because they take delight in seeing you shell out more money than others. Its your choice, ultimately. You didnt have to buy the car. You didnt' even have to buy American.
I'm tempted to not even bother with your third example, Kerr-McGee and Karen Silkwood, as its pure speculation, conjecture and Hollywood bullshit. Stranger things have happened out of pure coincedence, a woman driving home drowsy after a long day at work not withstanding.
Speaking as someone who, yes, has actually worked with the big iron...
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect. Recently, we've hit the point in the curve where supercomputers are no longer needed, nor cost-effective. That is, the time it takes for the industry to deliver a far superior product has eclipsed the average lifespan of your typical supercomputer.
We're living in an age where a single graphing calculator you can buy at Walgreens has more horsepower under the hood than what got us to the moon 30 years ago. Your $2700 PC will be worth $150 within 3 years.
Having a supercomputer in every garage makes about as much sense as taking a rocket fuel-powered dragster to the supermarket for a gallon of milk.
Dontcha just love how this article infers that corporate involvement is directly synonymous with a loss of personal freedom?
With companies, as with government, we all boo and hiss them to death because they make nice targets. Its a constantly renewable whine of "They take money from us!!!" or "They're trying to take my freedom away!!" when in reality, both institutions are providing you with services you both want, and need.
You pay taxes so you dont have to drive on a Fred Flintstone road in an unsafe car designed by 9 year olds. You pay your phone bill because youre tired of going down to the Western Union office and sending a telegram whenever you want to say hi to your folks or see if your girlfriend wants to go to dinner.
The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food. For example, I used to work for IBM. Big Blue. Perhaps the single largest corporate entity in the world. Did a big black raincloud show up on your radar because of it? With the money I earned, I was able to buy a nice ring for my girlfriend, move to a better neighborhood, get a better/nicer car, and actually sleep at night without freaking out when it comes to bills and rent. Many of you do the same thing...So if you think companies or governments are evil, doesn't that make you evil by definition? After all, you're 1/600,000th of IBM, or 1/350,000th of Hewlett-Packard, or 1/4th of VA Linux Super Research Mario Systems World Software Boy Storage Forge.
Think. Then react. Not the other way around. Cheers,
In a press release issued earlier today, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has announced that they will be renaming the term "million" to "mebibillions". When asked what prompted the move, an NIST spokesman said, "Initially, it was due to the problem of accurately naming the number of lines of sourcecode some guy wrote for the benefit of RMS' ego. Its just plain silly how much this guy wrote." , later adding, "So, we came to a consensus within the organization that a revision to the basic units of measurement should be made, so it looks like we're busy so we don't lose our funding. In addition, we feel that marketing people should always determine standards, not the engineers and scientists who actually know what they're doing. Its just good sense." Beginning January 1st, the new "mebibillions" unit will take affect.
Mebibillions of people are expected to shake their heads in disbelief at the NIST's continuined stupidity.
Anyway, a look at any MRTG graph will give you a good idea as to how human beings utilize bandwidth. The infamous porn curve. After 2 AM, everybody goes to sleep and traditional businesses cease to be profitable until about 7:30 if I remember correctly.
Not a bad idea. As the average amount of free space per PC increases, software makers will find a way to utilize it. They always have.
PDAs move to another level: The 1-GHz palmtop
Doubtful. Unlike cell phones, the demographic that buys palmtops aren't made up of teenagers. The people who buy and use palmtops aren't obsessed with making them smaller. They want connectivity first, then speed, then glitz. Besides, the typical uses of a palmtop don't extend to high-end computing. Having 1 Ghz under the hood isn't going to allow you to write your term paper any faster.
Vastly overhyped. The intensity of OLEDs fade with time. When compared next to TFT, they look like shit, perform like shit, and go bad far quicker than TFT. They're also more expensive to produce. It'll be a novelty, but, it wont go anywhere in the end, IMHO.
The message is the medium: Next-generation instant messaging
Uhhh.....Ever heard of IRC? CUSeeMe? This is hardly a new technology. Its the same paradox as the video phone. Everyone thinks that videophones would be totally cool, but no one's willing to have their hair and make-up done in order to answer the phone. Pound for pound, text remains the best medium for large groups of people to share information. What good is a teleconference if only one person at a time can talk? If more than one person starts talking, you might as well be listening to a washing machine.
Tireless wireless: 802.11 networks
I absolutely agree. 802.11 is the beginning of something very big. Community networks, and the death knell for wire-provided technologies like DSL, Cable, 56K modems, etc.
In search of a common language: Markup languages for everything
Here we go again, failing to learn from history. People, its like this -- Programmers dont think alike. Thats what makes them programmers. You'll no sooner see people using the same language for markup as you'll see people coding in Smalltalk. People gravitate towards languages based on their ability to be proficient at it. No matter how good XML is, people will still use HTML becuase it suits them better, or PHP, or Perl, or C, or Assembly, or freakin Smalltalk if they want. Name a single time in history when a programmer was considered proficient in his art, WITHOUT knowing more than one language. Get my drift?
Getting a little hyper: Hyper-threading
Big clue for ya, gang--99.9% of your PC's lifespan is spent waiting for your lazy human ass to tell it what to do. Hyperthreading assumes that Moore's Law will flatline. It wont. What good is greater availability of processing power when you're STILL not addressing the fact that for most of your machine's usable lifespan, it's sitting idle anyway? Its like code optimization research. As time goes on, it becomes more and more irrelevant.
And now, my short list of what WILL take off:
802.11 and its offspring
Corporation-controlled P2P trading
P2P For Programmers--Wide and seamless code-sharing environments that replace segmented environments like SourceForge, Savannah, etc. Why not search for a bunch of good 3D engine s to pick from instead of just MP3s?
GUI optimization. Out with the old, in with the new. The need for a more intuitive interface always wins in the long run, over tradition-based designs. (cough)Scrollball(cough):)
User-centric computing instead of application-centric computing.
Self-regulating and self-maintaining applications...Just picture it. Your antivirus software is eventually rendered obsolute because each of your applications, independant of one another, monitors its own structure and is aware of viruses that may attempt to exploit it. Also downloads and applies new updates, code patches, etc. Maintenance-free from a user standpoint.
Government requirements for both OS security and application security. Possibly even a ratings system.
Pictures of space will scare off women, and make your co-workers you're some sort of Star Trek idiot. On the other hand, if you have PROPAGANDA on your desktop, you're helping to promote Linux, women dig your style, and your co-workers will envy your desktop. Simple as that.
I simply followed the install script included on the CD, and it worked without a hitch. Sets up a print queue all its own, monitors it, and allows printing over a network. Like any other printer, I can mount it as a Samba share over the network and print on it from two rooms away with my Win2K laptop ontop of it all. What more can you ask for?
Even at that, a megabyte is megabyte. If you girls cant stand the idea of something not being flush to your idea of a "round number", follow the standard. A ton, by definition is 2000 pounds. A "metric ton" is 2200 pounds.
So call it what its supposed to be called. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. A "metric megabyte" by the same logic should be 1,000,000 bytes.
Slashdot Mirror
(Yeesh, to whoever modded this guy don't to a Troll....He doesn't deserve it, he raises some valid questions/points.)
"Obviously this is a sad story, but when I was in high school I was in a car accident and woke up to my best friends head split open. That wasn't pleasant either, but did I never ride in a car again? Of course not. "
I should have also mentioned I have an enormous taboo against Death. When this happened, I realized it could have been a totally arbitrary choice on behalf of the murderer who's stairwell he ran up. Could have been mine. Since I was working at IBM at the time, I figured I had enough financial security to get the hell out and move somewhere else. My bed also faces the crime scene. I cant exactly sleep in my own bed or look out my living room window without seeing the place where a 19 year old girl got butchered. I had way too much going on at that point in my life to get saddled with that sort of brainweight, so I bailed. And it was a bad complex -- One of my friends wouldnt come over unless he brought his gun to protect his car incase someone tried to break into it. Relax, he's responsible with it.
"Did you ever try to sublet? It seems like your legal fees would have been well spent taking out some ads in the local paper."
I couldn't in good conscience sublet my apartment to a friend without telling them what happened there, or without telling them how unsafe it was. That place had gone downhill in a hurry in the past year. The people cross the way smoked pot in front of their kids, and oh, by the way, the guy who butchered the chick lived across the way, too, next door to the victim. Nice neighborhood, eh?
"Are you 17? How can your parents still dictate everything you do? Are you not an adult?"
Of course I am, but my mom & dad are 62 and 68 years old, respectively. They tend to get a little overanxious about what they watch on the news, and i'd be giving them a heart attack by getting on a plane around a Christian holiday. Plus, there was no guarantee back then that air travel would be safe. I'm considerate of my folks, thats all.
"You need to learn from your mistakes and take some direct accountability for your own fate instead of being a hapless bystander."
I agree with you. But you can only jump out of the frying pan and into the fire when you can find a way not to get burned.
Don't even bother reading the original posts about this article. I did, and like usual here on Slashdot, someone writes in screaming his head off in a panic about his "rights" are being violated and how much of a victim he is.
Qwest's policy was not only given in plain english to its customers, but it also gives you the ability to inform yourself further on the issue. If you don't, its your fault. Speaking of the issue, it really isn't one. All Qwest is doing is telling you that they will be sharing meaningless information like wether or not you have Caller ID or (gasp) Touch-Tone Service installed WITH OTHER BRANCHES OF QWEST. Nowhere in the original document does Qwest claim that its going to sell or otherwise share your information with parties you have not agreed to. When you set up your phone service, you give Qwest your personal information anyway. They're just sharing it within the different branches of the company, and why shouldn't they? If they really wanted to get into selling your info to telemarketers, dont you think they would have started doing that YEARS ago?
Take off your tinfoil hats, kids. The Qwest boogeyman isn't trying to send you evil messages through your television. And, in the future you might be better served to THINK, then react --- Not the other way around.
Cheers,
Yah, really. :) At first I was sort of insulted that someone thought my miserable year was "funny", but, I did too. More than once this year, I remember looking at my situation and just laughing hysterically at how miserably bad everything had turned so quickly. So bad its comical.
This year has been one of the worst years I can remember in my entire life. Good riddance, this year sucked a big one and kept on sucking. Lets have a look at my timeline:
January: I go into debt.
February: Work stress piles up, I go further into debt.
March: The dickhead who was managing PROPAGANDA's SQL database decides to "upgrade" the box and torches damn near a thousand articles. I rebuild from scratch in my spare time with the help of some friends.
April: A girl gets butchered and raped in the apartment across the walkway from me. I stay until 10:30 or so to see what the news crews have learned, and decide to stay the night over at Ginger's place because I'm too creeped out about the whole thing. I give a taped statement to the police about what I may have heard or seen the night before. I leave, and just as I head out, I see them bringing the body bag out, and see the outline of the girl's head in the bag and damn near throw up. I spend the next week or so living with Ginger until I can get a chance to arrange to move to a new complex.
May: I move to a new, secure, gated apartment complex. The apartment manager at my old apartment complex refuses to break anyone's lease, and refuses let anyone out. He also refuses to allow anyone to pay off the remainder of their lease. I'm screwed for $3000, and spend the next 6 months paying off two apartments. Hired a lawyer in preparation to sue my former apartment complex to get out of the lease. It doesn't work. I talk to a news crew and light a fire under their ass, that still doesnt work. Ultimately, i'm screwed for three grand, and now carry $1100 a month in rent expenses. Thank god I work at IBM.
June: I find out my new neighbor at the new apartment complex wears a monitoring bracelet around his ankle. Wonderful. He also wears a two foot long tattoo across his midsection. This kid is 19 years old. Work stress continues as rumors circulate through IBM that contractors are about to get the axe..Myself included.
July: Laid off. IBM cuts 40% of their workforce here in town. Everyone I know is out of work. The economy tanks hard as the dot-com loser bubble bursts. My convicted-felon neighbor has a screaming argument outside on his balcony. His girlfriend jumps off the third story balcony and ends up being carried out on a stretcher. The police take another statement from me about what I might have heard or seen. They chuckle at my bad luck after I tell them where I lived a few months ago. I figure a piano is going to fall through the ceiling and kill me one of these days.
August: Mad rush to take shelter in classes at the local college to wait out the storm. Just barely get onboard in time. Word trickles out of IBM that nobody expects to be re-hired until early 2002. Great. Now I have to ask my parents for financial help, and will continue to rely on them for the next 4 months.
September: Mr. Roger's retires, the world explodes, and Ginger calls me up at 7 in the morning and tells me the World Trade Center is on fire. I watch as another plane hits, and what we thought at the time to be 30 to 40,000 people fall to their deaths on fire and pulverized by concrete. The entire country goes to hell in a handbasket. I can count the number of UNIX-related job openings on one hand. I prepare Ginger for the idea that I may have to move to Colorado to find work. Theres one company up there still hiring.
October: My car dies...A broken crank shaft that would cost more to repair than the entire vehicle was worth. Now I need to get a new car while paying off two apartments. Thankfully, this is the last month I'll have to pay rent in two different places. The new car costs $5K, and automatically dumps my head in the debt bucket and holds it under the water for the next few months. I start making the rounds of people I may have unjustly skewered over the past year or two with little success.. Whatever jobs were open have all now dried up as the industry tightens its belt and locks the door for the long run. Anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax.
November: A glimmer of hope. I run into a former coworker at a car wash, and beg her to bring word back that I've been holding out for months waiting to get back on the boat at IBM. More debt, more stress. Thank god I've got Ginger.
December: Cant go home for Christmas and be with my family because of Osama. Parents don't want me on a plane. Things start to settle down, i'm getting used to the idea of being unemployed. Just as I do, I get a call from a contractor firm that Big Blue as opened its doors. I do backflips and cartwheels and have my name on the dotted line within 45 minutes. The light at the end of the tunnel appears and Dick Clark looks like he's aged alot in the past year.
Good fucking riddance, 2001. I hope I forget you quickly.
No shit.
I dont know why you guys have such a hard time understanding the concept of my learning how to code in BASIC at age 4. Its not like they singled me out and taught me specifically -- It was part of the curriculum, the whole class learned what HOME and PRINT and RUN meant..Hell, I even remember the first day they wheeled it into the classroom.
Cheers,
No doubt. See, i'm sure he's a bright kid and all...but you don't run around comparing your "experience" to that of your bosses, who probably have been doing what you do for longer than you've even been alive. You'll come off as nothing short of a "snot-nosed kid".
If he's truly good at what he does, the wheat will rise above the chaff regardless of what happens in the long run. This isn't a case of "age discrimination" as much as it is "you've got a long way to go before you can compare your experience to mine, kid. Start down here, and work your way up with the rest."
"You are so full of shit."
Am I?
The elementary school I went to was one of the first in Illinois to have computers put in..even more rare, computers that were actually available for the students to use. Prairie Elementary, District 203, Naperville. Look it up. Probably in autumn 1979 or so.
While I wasn't exactly writing 2048-bit crypto engines, I was writing simple text games by second grade and doing crude GR-mode graphics programming by about the third grade. I only lived two houses away from the school, so often times I'd stay after school to play with the computers, play Lemonade, Moppettown Parade and Swords & Sorcery until the custodians threw me out around 5 PM. In particular, I remember modding Lemonade so that the weather was always thunderstorms, because I thought the lightning bolt animation was awesome. Was writing war games by 5th grade. Got in trouble in 6th grade because I carried around a blue folder with the words "GENOCIDE" on it..Some of my teachers had voiced some concern (heh) about why I was working so much on it. I kept all my code hand-written on paper, and after school would sit down and type it all in. In particular, I remember how difficult it was to draw the paths of the missiles on a 40x40 GR mode screen. Had no idea what a parabola was, so I hard-coded the strike paths using about 13 pages of VLIN, HLIN and PLOT statements. Never finished it.
What else do you wanna know about how "so full of shit" I am?
If you've approached your manager with the same pile of BS that you approached Slashdot:
"I'm 19 years old with 5 years industry experience"
You shouldn't be surprised that he's trying to get rid of you. That statement alone sort of underscores your ignorance. Incase you missed it, it implies that you've been working at a 6-to-5 job that actually _matters_ since the age of 14.
Warezing != "industry experience".
Upgrading AOL on your dad's computer != "industry experience".
Having a personal webpage != "industry experience".
Its like this, spudboy.."industry experience" means sleeping on the floor of your office overnight because you need to babysit half a dozen mission-critical AIX, Solaris and IRIX boxes following a complete power-failure and network outage, because if you dont, the entire department's workload might grind to a halt, and the company will lose $30,000 per minute until its fixed. Many people here have seen and dealt with that sort of thing. No offense, but I doubt you have seen anything similar during your "5 years of industry experience".
Here's another way to look at it --- I've been coding since about the age of 4. Yes, 4. And no, i'm not kidding. (Hell, my parents still have one of my "Apple ][ Operators License" picture IDs in a photo album from when I was in 2nd grade..) Now, do you think I would put "I'm 27 years old and have 23 years industry experience" on my resume'?
Nuff said.
In a similar vein, I've spent the past week or two trying to develop a way to produce seamless, stereoscopic 3D desktop backgrounds. I've always had an interest in stereography, but until now I couldn't find a way to apply it to my PROPAGANDA tiles..
Just yesterday morning I finally managed to produce (and can reproduce at will) stereoscopic 3D wallpaper in Gimp. No rendering, no photography, nuthin but pure hand-made goodness in Gimp.
Cheers,
Happy Birthday, Jesus! Here's a book on C/C++ with an emphasis on AI design!
Somehow, I just don't get it. What is it with people who want to exchange or return gifts? I grew up in a house where you appreciated such things. My first instinct upon getting a present that didn't quite fit or wasn't exactly to my tastes was that I could still find a use for it, not "Hmmmm.. I wonder I can pawn this off and get an XBox!!"
Gifts are gifts. And if youre buying a gift just to throw money at someone in lieu of actually giving a shit about them, you suck in my book. Similarly, if you don't even bother to consider the thought and effort someone else put in to giving you something they felt you'd enjoy, you also suck. Hard.
## Gammatwister 0.1 Released: 12/28/01 ;)
:)
## Borderline psychotic RGB trig code by Bowie J. Poag
## Say NO to drugs.... Say YES to Gammatwister!
##
a=1;
COUNTER=0;
while true;
do
while [ $COUNTER -lt 625000 ]; do
a=$(echo "scale=4; $a+.013" | bc -l) ;
rgamma=$(echo "define abs(x){if(x
Cut, paste, and enjoy.
~
~
~
Like my stuff? Sure, its free -- but rent isn't.
Shamelessly begging for pocket change in the post-dot-com economy,
Be my guest. I'm under the impression that my point about who pays for your car's safety makes so much sense to you that you can no longer argue against it.
No, but if it were 1975 and I was interested in buying a Pinto, i'd want to know what the EPA says about it (after all, your tax dollars are being used to determine the safety, realiability, and efficiency of these cars, independant of manufacturer) plus I'd want to know how the car performed in crash tests (these were also commonly performed during the 1970's), I'd want to see how Consumer Reports rated it, and last but not least, i'd want to hear the reccomendations of others who have purchased the same model.
If you walk onto a car lot and say, "Duhhhhhh, I like that one!! Its purrrtty!!!" you're setting yourself up for a disaster.
The people who died in Pintos certainly didn't deserve to die--However, they could have probably avoided their own fate by conducting a minimal amount of research regarding their purchasing decision.
Besides, Ford's Model T is exponentially more unsafe than a '75 Pinto. Inadequate headlights, no crumple zones, hell, they didn't even have seat belts. Nonetheless, millions were sold, and plenty of people died in them, a percentage i'd assume dwarfs the percentage of people killed in Pintos.
By the way, it was Ford and other "evil" corporations who are responsible for making your cars as safe as they are today. Think about it.
Cheers,
In the UC case, shoddy plant maintenance and a shocking reduction in staff training -- a cut from six months of training, to a quick two weeks! -- led to a tragic chemical leak that resulted in 20000 deaths, another 120000 people requiring medical treatment, and a generation of grossly deformed children.
Sounds trite, but accidents like these are inevitable consequences of our civilization. Its our nature as human beings to maximize our effectiveness while minimizing our use of resources. Sure, its sad and terrible what happened. So was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 250,000 people died there--A quarter of a million people burst into flames, got buried by rubble, got impaled on things, or just plain disintegrated--But most historians agree that it had to be done. Japan wouldn't have given up, and a ground invasion would have cost at least 500,000 lives, some estimates as high as 750,000. See what I mean about "inevitable consequences" ?
The example of Ford and the Pinto you pointed out isn't that unusual. All companies make decisions regarding cost-effectiveness. If you dont like the decisions they make, you can buy from another car manufacturer. Its your responsibility as a buyer to thuroughly research your choices before putting your name on the dotted line and putting your money on the table. Of course, thats not to say that the people who died in Pintos deserved their fate -- It merely states that perhaps they would have been wise to question the motivations behind the design of Ford's products. Any mechanic will tell you that the engines Ford automobiles are generally difficult to repair. That translates into added cost to you, because in the long run, you'll be paying disproportionately more for labor. This doesn't mean that Ford is evil and makes their engines difficult to maintain because they take delight in seeing you shell out more money than others. Its your choice, ultimately. You didnt have to buy the car. You didnt' even have to buy American.
I'm tempted to not even bother with your third example, Kerr-McGee and Karen Silkwood, as its pure speculation, conjecture and Hollywood bullshit. Stranger things have happened out of pure coincedence, a woman driving home drowsy after a long day at work not withstanding.
Cheers,
Speaking as someone who, yes, has actually worked with the big iron...
Why bother. Remember, Moore's Law is still in effect. Recently, we've hit the point in the curve where supercomputers are no longer needed, nor cost-effective. That is, the time it takes for the industry to deliver a far superior product has eclipsed the average lifespan of your typical supercomputer.
We're living in an age where a single graphing calculator you can buy at Walgreens has more horsepower under the hood than what got us to the moon 30 years ago. Your $2700 PC will be worth $150 within 3 years.
Having a supercomputer in every garage makes about as much sense as taking a rocket fuel-powered dragster to the supermarket for a gallon of milk.
Cheers,
Dontcha just love how this article infers that corporate involvement is directly synonymous with a loss of personal freedom?
With companies, as with government, we all boo and hiss them to death because they make nice targets. Its a constantly renewable whine of "They take money from us!!!" or "They're trying to take my freedom away!!" when in reality, both institutions are providing you with services you both want, and need.
You pay taxes so you dont have to drive on a Fred Flintstone road in an unsafe car designed by 9 year olds. You pay your phone bill because youre tired of going down to the Western Union office and sending a telegram whenever you want to say hi to your folks or see if your girlfriend wants to go to dinner.
The government, and corporations, are made up of you and I. They are not unthinking, uncaring robots that kidnap old people, puree them in a big blender, and sell them back to you as baby food. For example, I used to work for IBM. Big Blue. Perhaps the single largest corporate entity in the world. Did a big black raincloud show up on your radar because of it? With the money I earned, I was able to buy a nice ring for my girlfriend, move to a better neighborhood, get a better/nicer car, and actually sleep at night without freaking out when it comes to bills and rent. Many of you do the same thing...So if you think companies or governments are evil, doesn't that make you evil by definition? After all, you're 1/600,000th of IBM, or 1/350,000th of Hewlett-Packard, or 1/4th of VA Linux Super Research Mario Systems World Software Boy Storage Forge.
Think. Then react. Not the other way around.
Cheers,
In a press release issued earlier today, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has announced that they will be renaming the term "million" to "mebibillions". When asked what prompted the move, an NIST spokesman said, "Initially, it was due to the problem of accurately naming the number of lines of sourcecode some guy wrote for the benefit of RMS' ego. Its just plain silly how much this guy wrote." , later adding, "So, we came to a consensus within the organization that a revision to the basic units of measurement should be made, so it looks like we're busy so we don't lose our funding. In addition, we feel that marketing people should always determine standards, not the engineers and scientists who actually know what they're doing. Its just good sense." Beginning January 1st, the new "mebibillions" unit will take affect.
Mebibillions of people are expected to shake their heads in disbelief at the NIST's continuined stupidity.
:)
Cheers,
You aughtta be in bed by midnight.
Anyway, a look at any MRTG graph will give you a good idea as to how human beings utilize bandwidth. The infamous porn curve. After 2 AM, everybody goes to sleep and traditional businesses cease to be profitable until about 7:30 if I remember correctly.
Cheers,
Yeah, I know I mispelled "obsolete". Its 6 AM here, and i'm still a little goofy from all the egg nog.
:)
400 gigs and a cloud of dust: AFC hard drives
:)
:)
Not a bad idea. As the average amount of free space per PC increases, software makers will find a way to utilize it. They always have.
PDAs move to another level: The 1-GHz palmtop
Doubtful. Unlike cell phones, the demographic that buys palmtops aren't made up of teenagers. The people who buy and use palmtops aren't obsessed with making them smaller. They want connectivity first, then speed, then glitz. Besides, the typical uses of a palmtop don't extend to high-end computing. Having 1 Ghz under the hood isn't going to allow you to write your term paper any faster.
Scintillating screens: Organic-light-emitting diodes
Vastly overhyped. The intensity of OLEDs fade with time. When compared next to TFT, they look like shit, perform like shit, and go bad far quicker than TFT. They're also more expensive to produce. It'll be a novelty, but, it wont go anywhere in the end, IMHO.
The message is the medium: Next-generation instant messaging
Uhhh.....Ever heard of IRC? CUSeeMe? This is hardly a new technology. Its the same paradox as the video phone. Everyone thinks that videophones would be totally cool, but no one's willing to have their hair and make-up done in order to answer the phone. Pound for pound, text remains the best medium for large groups of people to share information. What good is a teleconference if only one person at a time can talk? If more than one person starts talking, you might as well be listening to a washing machine.
Tireless wireless: 802.11 networks
I absolutely agree. 802.11 is the beginning of something very big. Community networks, and the death knell for wire-provided technologies like DSL, Cable, 56K modems, etc.
In search of a common language: Markup languages for everything
Here we go again, failing to learn from history. People, its like this -- Programmers dont think alike. Thats what makes them programmers. You'll no sooner see people using the same language for markup as you'll see people coding in Smalltalk. People gravitate towards languages based on their ability to be proficient at it. No matter how good XML is, people will still use HTML becuase it suits them better, or PHP, or Perl, or C, or Assembly, or freakin Smalltalk if they want. Name a single time in history when a programmer was considered proficient in his art, WITHOUT knowing more than one language. Get my drift?
Getting a little hyper: Hyper-threading
Big clue for ya, gang--99.9% of your PC's lifespan is spent waiting for your lazy human ass to tell it what to do. Hyperthreading assumes that Moore's Law will flatline. It wont. What good is greater availability of processing power when you're STILL not addressing the fact that for most of your machine's usable lifespan, it's sitting idle anyway? Its like code optimization research. As time goes on, it becomes more and more irrelevant.
And now, my short list of what WILL take off:
802.11 and its offspring
Corporation-controlled P2P trading
P2P For Programmers--Wide and seamless code-sharing environments that replace segmented environments like SourceForge, Savannah, etc. Why not search for a bunch of good 3D engine s to pick from instead of just MP3s?
GUI optimization. Out with the old, in with the new. The need for a more intuitive interface always wins in the long run, over tradition-based designs. (cough)Scrollball(cough)
User-centric computing instead of application-centric computing.
Self-regulating and self-maintaining applications...Just picture it. Your antivirus software is eventually rendered obsolute because each of your applications, independant of one another, monitors its own structure and is aware of viruses that may attempt to exploit it. Also downloads and applies new updates, code patches, etc. Maintenance-free from a user standpoint.
Government requirements for both OS security and application security. Possibly even a ratings system.
Where will it end!
Cheers,
"Imagine being able to pull up 2001: A Space Odyssey at 2:38 a.m.."
Wow, you Californians are high-tech!!!
Ever heard of Kazaa, Lopster, or freakin' BLOCKBUSTER?
Pictures of space will scare off women, and make your co-workers you're some sort of Star Trek idiot. On the other hand, if you have PROPAGANDA on your desktop, you're helping to promote Linux, women dig your style, and your co-workers will envy your desktop. Simple as that.
Cheers, and have a merry one,
I simply followed the install script included on the CD, and it worked without a hitch. Sets up a print queue all its own, monitors it, and allows printing over a network. Like any other printer, I can mount it as a Samba share over the network and print on it from two rooms away with my Win2K laptop ontop of it all. What more can you ask for?
Even at that, a megabyte is megabyte. If you girls cant stand the idea of something not being flush to your idea of a "round number", follow the standard. A ton, by definition is 2000 pounds. A "metric ton" is 2200 pounds.
So call it what its supposed to be called. A megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. A "metric megabyte" by the same logic should be 1,000,000 bytes.