Take a concept like "Tetris". How do you improve that!? Which version of Tetris are you thinking about? Almost certainly, the original Gameboy implementation.
Nope, I was fortunate enough to get ahold of the Russian version from a US military geek from Alaska who used to do stock-in-trade with his peers across the Strait...
Getting his money's worth
on
Tito In Space
·
· Score: 5
Tito, don't forget to take the towels from the bathroom, empty the complimentary mini-bar and stock up on those little soaps. You paid for them, you deserve them.
Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
Hey, I've got a DVD drive on my PowerBook, too, and I appreciate everyone's "I want it all now" stance, but only to the point of reasonableness. A DVD drive is not a fundamental part of the computing experience, included or not, advertised or not. If you bought a $5000 computer (or even $2000) primarily because it plays DVDs, then you're a pretty sad case. It's an extra. I use the CD-ROM capabilities far more, and that works find under OS X.
And while appreciate, too, the frustrations of having to boot into OS 9, I'd like to toss out a gentle reminder that you don't have to upgrade right away. Wait a little. Let the cutting edge be dulled by others who will suffer for you, fill the message boards with their complaints and their bug reports and their whining, let them influence the next version with their wishes and their demands. You can wait until Mac OS X.II or X.IV or whatever and then get exactly what you want.
Your Mac OS 9.x doesn't die and disappear the day Mac OS X is released.
Why is it that some people who are willing enough to exist on the frontline of technology are unwilling to bear the small penalties of being there first?
A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.
B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.
C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.
D. That certain extra features will not be included is not a secret. Apple's been saying this for weeks: employees with real names and titles--not "sources"-- have been going on the record to point this out. Always interesting how much crappy information sounds like a real scoop if you conveniently can't dig up other places where Apple reps have gone on the record. Too easy just to accept the PR department's "no comment" without, say, reading stories on the exact same subject written elsewhere.
E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?
I'll pay media companies cash money to never show me another fake windows alert banner again. It's insulting, played out and irrelevant to Macintosh, Linux and Unix. I'm continuously amazed at the lack of OS-awareness of the banner servers: a large part of the banners served to me on my Macintosh (which is what I usually use) hawk Windows-only software, Windows-only hardware or are dumbed down for the AOL-Wintel-AIM market.
"Your Internet connection is not optimized" my ass.
It was the summer of 1983 and I was on the beach on Majorca, two weeks of holiday in between shuttling tourist groups back and forth from Akron and Paris. That was my cover job, anyway. My real job, the one that bought the house in Majorca, in fact, was mule, hauling meth from the States in boxes marked "feminine napkins" and bringing Chinese "tourists" with fake papers back from Corsica.
On my last trip, the one before retirement, I was busted. A lanky dude with hair like Kris Kristofferson, what must have been a 15-gallon hat, and dusty iguana-skin boots was sitting there, pants at his ankles, using my beach house toilet and pointing a sawed-off shotgun at me in the doorway.
"Don't move, dude. And don't drink the water in Guayaquil."
Another reason HTML email is bad, besides: wasted bandwith and storage space, slow loading times, cruddy appearance in text interfaces, interference of ads in personal messages, tracking users' habits by matching email address to cookie, bad cross-platform compatibility, necessity of being connected to view it as intended, being filtered or bounced by no-HTML mail lists, etc., etc. It's not really that much of a surprise.
During the last few months in France, a debate has been inflamed by some authors and certain groups representing authors which feel that libraries are giving their work away for free, and that libraries should instate fee-based book-loaning. That would be, I think, a quick shut-down of one of the simplest sources of free information.
Congratualations on a well-written, engaging news story. Clear, concise, interesting with thrilling narrative, factually informative. This entry is a model for all good Slashdot entries.
"It's a paradox of the way the U.S. government works that the secret agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building Echelon and all the rest of the interception gear, but when it came down to defending the export controls over encryption in the federal courts you had a couple of assistant U.S. attorneys."
I should add that Hotlinks does not index nor search content on those millions of links it has.
If you search for "four score and seven years ago" (the beginning of American president Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, for our international visitors), you get bupkus. Nothing. Any other search engine will turn up the Gettysburg Address in the first ten links.
The first problem with this is that it requires too much pre-knowledge. I have to know that it is called the "Gettysburg Address" or get lucky in that someone might have titled their page or link "four score and seven years ago." If I was an Iranian student studying American slavery and somebody passed along the first few lines of the speech as something I should be aware of, Hotlinks is of no help whatsoever.
The second problem with this is that, in looking at my own links, I see that the titles of the links are often completely irrelevant, inaccurate or vague. What use is a search based on page titles? Even Yahoo returns normal search engine results when it doesn't find anything in its own directory.
Finally, if I want someplace to store my links, I'll use my own web site.
The problem with the bookmark approach is that it will tend to result in the Jukebox Phenomenon.
The short version of this is that current Top 40 radio station rotation systems are reputed to stem from the analysis of a jukebox supplier who noticed the same 40 records kept getting played over and over. This is because when a record gets played once, it tends to get played again, resulting in circular reinforcement, with hits one through 100 charted in a steeply declining curve. This is how current radio programming, music marketing and MTV work today: reinforcement.
The problem with this approach (in music or data) is that popularity is no guarantee of accuracy, appropriateness or utility. This is represented in the music world by the high cost (real and otherwise) of successful entry into the market. New music (data) is not popular enough to be included, but it can't easily be included without becoming popular.
Personal bookmark collections tend toward the same phenomena. Besides the inaccuracy stemming from factory-included links (which I would hope they account for), the bulk of entries will result from links in turn resulting from searches on existing search engines, which are, no matter how big, closed data sets: they have boundaries and do not include the entire web. These searches are also happening in a only few places, resulting in the JP. Hotlinks will thus tend to include sites that have already appeared elsewhere. A certain number of "missing" pages will be newly included (the user's own sites, work sites, sites of friends) but very few "missing" pages of other kinds, particularly low-traffic pages (such as those with refined and highly specialized content: deep governmental directories, university research labs). In other words, Hotlink's approach is not much different than Google's number-of-times-linked approach or bulk submitting on an engine's "add your site" link, just a larger population sample.
Napster experiences the Jukebox Phenomena: If I look for Loudon Wainwright III songs, I tend to find lots of iterations of the same three songs and not much else: Dead Skunk, I Wish I Was A Lesbian and the duo with Iris Dement. But if I want to find, say, any song off of the Therapy album, it tends not come up because it is not as popular. This is because the JP has propagated the popularity of the same three songs. An ideal data source would include the entire data set, popular or not. (I am aware Napster cannot and is not designed to be a complete data set).
If one's goal is to include more web sites, a more accurate approach than Hotlink's would be to scavenge user's History files. That would, in my case, include a few hundred additional sites a week, although I'm sure the privacy issues would be a problem. If one's goal is to return the most accurate results, an even better approach would be infinite page caching in which a new iteration of a page does not replace the previous entry, but is added to it. In this way, one could search across history as well as data.
This email hoax has been showing up lately in the mailbox. Considering this topic's forum is pretty much a free-for-all, I deem it appropriate. Note: it is a hoax. It is not real.
Sent: Thursday, October 30, 2000 3:32 a.m.
To: Recipient list suppressed
Subject: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT
Importance: High
Presidential Election Announcement
Due to an anticipated voter turnout much larger than originally expected, the polling facilities may not be able to handle the load all at once. Therefore,
Democrats and Independents are requested to vote on Tuesday, November 7.
Republicans will vote on Wednesday, November 8.
Please pass this message along and help us to make sure that nobody gets left out and everything will run smoothly with this minor change.
Be sure to vote!!! Know where your voting place is near you!!
If you do use floppies regularly, you should be using them this way:
1) One-time file storage for temporary transfer. They are not permanent storage devices. This bears repeating until somebody silk-screens it on the front of t-shirts.
2) Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket, wallet, purse, knapsack, book bag, pencil box, lunch box or thermos. A floppy disk is not a book mark. A front shirt pocket is perfect, if the disk is wrapped. If you have a plastic sleeve or floppy holder, use it. A Zip disk case will hold at least two floppies. This will increase the likelyhood that the floppy will work as intended and keep lint, sweat and fuzz out of the disk.
3) Do not work off/from the floppy. Copy the file you want over to the hard drive first, work on it there, then copy it back if necessary. This will prevent errors from interfering when saving your document. If you find that you cannot copy the document over, or you find that once the document is copied to the drive, there are problems or errors, you save yourself the grief of finding out later when you lose all the work you just did.
4) Consider using a "safety" folder on the disk which contains an extra copy of your important document. Do not make a duplicate of the folder already on the floppy. Instead, copy the document afresh from your hard drive to the safety folder. This is common practice in the creative world, a legacy from pre-Zip, pre-Jaz days when Syquests and floppies were standard.
5) If you don't have server access, consider mailing a copy of a document to yourself using free web email accounts. Make sure to use at least two services at a time as they are unreliable. This will allow you to avoid faulty or unworking floppy drives as well, which in a busy lab situation can mean the difference between getting right to work or waiting for the "good" machine.
Spread the word! Tell everyone! Post signs! How many times have I tried to explain that floppies are unreliable, tempermental and not to be trusted only to find that people don't believe me? They think I'm making it up. Really.
I used to run the IT department for an advertising agency in which one of the users saved *everything* to floppy because she believed her hard drive was untrustworthy. She had hundreds of disks. (Of course, this is the same woman who printed out all of her email messages and filed them alphabetically).
Yeah, experienced users. I hadn't used AOL in a decade until I moved to France. AOL is currently the only dial-up ISP in France that provides unlimited usage at a flat rate and pays the per-minute local telco fees, fees that do not exist in the US. There are numerous ISP's that claim to be "free" but they're free as in "not free" because what they give you is a small number of hours connect time per month, then gouge you for connect time after that, and force you to pay local telco per-minute fees at across the board. My usage, roughly 60 hours a month, is too great to bear that financial burden. So AOL it is: 199F (about US$25) a month all you can eat.
Most of the conclusions presented in this report and others like it depend on data that itself depends upon the subjects determining causal relationships for themselves. How accurate will data gathered from self-reporting respondents be? A subject claiming to be unaffected by net use and external data proving her to be unaffected are two different things.
I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive.
This is, of course, not true. The previous regime did not burn the temples, massacre villages, and, most of all, did not invade a sovereign nation. The Chinese have no more claim on Tibet than they do on Vancouver.
If your admin can't help you by using RBL or other spam-prevention measures on the server or network end, it's amazing what a few mail sorting rules will do on the user end.
Er, no it isn't. The world isn't simply divided into pro-NSA camps and anti-NSA camps, or pro-Carnivore, anti-Carnivore. I would bet that a sampling of people with identical high-level security clearances--not those cleared specifically for Carnivore, which seems to be today's Willful Misunderstanding (TM)--would turn out a fair number of people on both sides supporting or decrying the project, regardless of the number of thick-heads who think any large body of people they're not a part of share a monolithic point of view.
High-level security clearance is not an orthodoxy exam, a litmus test, a whose-side-are-you-on interrogation. These people who have NSA clearance may never have worked for the NSA, met anyone from the NSA or visited NSA facilties. Government clearances can be broad contingency certifications, just-in-case devices that cover eventualities. It's not like once you get security clearance they automatically invite you to office parties and give you keys to the building.
Was it the 100,000th Slashdot registration that was the turning point between informed community of geeks and paranoid band of idiots? Or was it the 250,000th?
Don't use Mailboxes Etc. Even shipping from New York City to myself in Paris they got the information wrong, costing me $90 extra in customs fees. You have to declare ZERO value, in any case, no matter what the destination, just to avoid problems with customs on the other end.
Your best bet is to fly over and include the goods in your carry-on luggage. It's the only guarantee.
Slashdot Mirror
Take a concept like "Tetris". How do you improve that!? Which version of Tetris are you thinking about? Almost certainly, the original Gameboy implementation.
Nope, I was fortunate enough to get ahold of the Russian version from a US military geek from Alaska who used to do stock-in-trade with his peers across the Strait...
Tito, don't forget to take the towels from the bathroom, empty the complimentary mini-bar and stock up on those little soaps. You paid for them, you deserve them.
This story is a huge crock of shit.
Before moving over to corporate sibling ZDNet, Matthew Rothenberg was director of online content at Mac Publishing LLC (MacWeek, MaCentral and MacWorld), and before that he was Senior News Editor at MacWeek itself. I don't think those credentials suggest anti-Apple bias.
Maybe anti-OSX bias, then?
Hey, I've got a DVD drive on my PowerBook, too, and I appreciate everyone's "I want it all now" stance, but only to the point of reasonableness. A DVD drive is not a fundamental part of the computing experience, included or not, advertised or not. If you bought a $5000 computer (or even $2000) primarily because it plays DVDs, then you're a pretty sad case. It's an extra. I use the CD-ROM capabilities far more, and that works find under OS X.
And while appreciate, too, the frustrations of having to boot into OS 9, I'd like to toss out a gentle reminder that you don't have to upgrade right away. Wait a little. Let the cutting edge be dulled by others who will suffer for you, fill the message boards with their complaints and their bug reports and their whining, let them influence the next version with their wishes and their demands. You can wait until Mac OS X.II or X.IV or whatever and then get exactly what you want.
Your Mac OS 9.x doesn't die and disappear the day Mac OS X is released.
Why is it that some people who are willing enough to exist on the frontline of technology are unwilling to bear the small penalties of being there first?
A. Dual-booting has always been an expected obligation until new versions of all the traditional Mac software are ported specifically OS X. Nobody but hack journalists are surprised. Most savvy Mac users consider this a real boon, as a kind of long-term protection measure for expensive software and years of skill investment. It eases the transition into the new Unix world.
B. As of the latest build, sleep functions on PowerBooks work perfectly, with two-second wake-up times. That's right: two seconds.
C. DVD playing is hardly a "key feature." DVD burning was *never* a key feature, nor was CD-RW. Until only recently this was always a third-party software opportunity.
D. That certain extra features will not be included is not a secret. Apple's been saying this for weeks: employees with real names and titles--not "sources"-- have been going on the record to point this out. Always interesting how much crappy information sounds like a real scoop if you conveniently can't dig up other places where Apple reps have gone on the record. Too easy just to accept the PR department's "no comment" without, say, reading stories on the exact same subject written elsewhere.
E. This article is a re-hash of an article that was on ZDNet and CNET last week. Notice the key bias words: inability, glitches, frustrate, annoying, frustrating, "not be able", "limit... usefulness", aggravation, lack. That's just in the headlines and first paragraph. Suspiciously like Linux reporting, eh?
I'll pay media companies cash money to never show me another fake windows alert banner again. It's insulting, played out and irrelevant to Macintosh, Linux and Unix. I'm continuously amazed at the lack of OS-awareness of the banner servers: a large part of the banners served to me on my Macintosh (which is what I usually use) hawk Windows-only software, Windows-only hardware or are dumbed down for the AOL-Wintel-AIM market.
"Your Internet connection is not optimized" my ass.
It was the summer of 1983 and I was on the beach on Majorca, two weeks of holiday in between shuttling tourist groups back and forth from Akron and Paris. That was my cover job, anyway. My real job, the one that bought the house in Majorca, in fact, was mule, hauling meth from the States in boxes marked "feminine napkins" and bringing Chinese "tourists" with fake papers back from Corsica.
On my last trip, the one before retirement, I was busted. A lanky dude with hair like Kris Kristofferson, what must have been a 15-gallon hat, and dusty iguana-skin boots was sitting there, pants at his ankles, using my beach house toilet and pointing a sawed-off shotgun at me in the doorway.
"Don't move, dude. And don't drink the water in Guayaquil."
My question: was that you, Cowboy Neal?
Another reason HTML email is bad, besides: wasted bandwith and storage space, slow loading times, cruddy appearance in text interfaces, interference of ads in personal messages, tracking users' habits by matching email address to cookie, bad cross-platform compatibility, necessity of being connected to view it as intended, being filtered or bounced by no-HTML mail lists, etc., etc. It's not really that much of a surprise.
During the last few months in France, a debate has been inflamed by some authors and certain groups representing authors which feel that libraries are giving their work away for free, and that libraries should instate fee-based book-loaning. That would be, I think, a quick shut-down of one of the simplest sources of free information.
Rob and the gang,
Congratualations on a well-written, engaging news story. Clear, concise, interesting with thrilling narrative, factually informative. This entry is a model for all good Slashdot entries.
Thanks.
"It's a paradox of the way the U.S. government works that the secret agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building Echelon and all the rest of the interception gear, but when it came down to defending the export controls over encryption in the federal courts you had a couple of assistant U.S. attorneys."
I should add that Hotlinks does not index nor search content on those millions of links it has.
If you search for "four score and seven years ago" (the beginning of American president Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, for our international visitors), you get bupkus. Nothing. Any other search engine will turn up the Gettysburg Address in the first ten links.
The first problem with this is that it requires too much pre-knowledge. I have to know that it is called the "Gettysburg Address" or get lucky in that someone might have titled their page or link "four score and seven years ago." If I was an Iranian student studying American slavery and somebody passed along the first few lines of the speech as something I should be aware of, Hotlinks is of no help whatsoever.
The second problem with this is that, in looking at my own links, I see that the titles of the links are often completely irrelevant, inaccurate or vague. What use is a search based on page titles? Even Yahoo returns normal search engine results when it doesn't find anything in its own directory.
Finally, if I want someplace to store my links, I'll use my own web site.
The problem with the bookmark approach is that it will tend to result in the Jukebox Phenomenon.
The short version of this is that current Top 40 radio station rotation systems are reputed to stem from the analysis of a jukebox supplier who noticed the same 40 records kept getting played over and over. This is because when a record gets played once, it tends to get played again, resulting in circular reinforcement, with hits one through 100 charted in a steeply declining curve. This is how current radio programming, music marketing and MTV work today: reinforcement.
The problem with this approach (in music or data) is that popularity is no guarantee of accuracy, appropriateness or utility. This is represented in the music world by the high cost (real and otherwise) of successful entry into the market. New music (data) is not popular enough to be included, but it can't easily be included without becoming popular.
Personal bookmark collections tend toward the same phenomena. Besides the inaccuracy stemming from factory-included links (which I would hope they account for), the bulk of entries will result from links in turn resulting from searches on existing search engines, which are, no matter how big, closed data sets: they have boundaries and do not include the entire web. These searches are also happening in a only few places, resulting in the JP. Hotlinks will thus tend to include sites that have already appeared elsewhere. A certain number of "missing" pages will be newly included (the user's own sites, work sites, sites of friends) but very few "missing" pages of other kinds, particularly low-traffic pages (such as those with refined and highly specialized content: deep governmental directories, university research labs). In other words, Hotlink's approach is not much different than Google's number-of-times-linked approach or bulk submitting on an engine's "add your site" link, just a larger population sample.
Napster experiences the Jukebox Phenomena: If I look for Loudon Wainwright III songs, I tend to find lots of iterations of the same three songs and not much else: Dead Skunk, I Wish I Was A Lesbian and the duo with Iris Dement. But if I want to find, say, any song off of the Therapy album, it tends not come up because it is not as popular. This is because the JP has propagated the popularity of the same three songs. An ideal data source would include the entire data set, popular or not. (I am aware Napster cannot and is not designed to be a complete data set).
If one's goal is to include more web sites, a more accurate approach than Hotlink's would be to scavenge user's History files. That would, in my case, include a few hundred additional sites a week, although I'm sure the privacy issues would be a problem. If one's goal is to return the most accurate results, an even better approach would be infinite page caching in which a new iteration of a page does not replace the previous entry, but is added to it. In this way, one could search across history as well as data.
If you do use floppies regularly, you should be using them this way:
1) One-time file storage for temporary transfer. They are not permanent storage devices. This bears repeating until somebody silk-screens it on the front of t-shirts.
2) Do not carry the floppy around loose in your back pocket, wallet, purse, knapsack, book bag, pencil box, lunch box or thermos. A floppy disk is not a book mark. A front shirt pocket is perfect, if the disk is wrapped. If you have a plastic sleeve or floppy holder, use it. A Zip disk case will hold at least two floppies. This will increase the likelyhood that the floppy will work as intended and keep lint, sweat and fuzz out of the disk.
3) Do not work off/from the floppy. Copy the file you want over to the hard drive first, work on it there, then copy it back if necessary. This will prevent errors from interfering when saving your document. If you find that you cannot copy the document over, or you find that once the document is copied to the drive, there are problems or errors, you save yourself the grief of finding out later when you lose all the work you just did.
4) Consider using a "safety" folder on the disk which contains an extra copy of your important document. Do not make a duplicate of the folder already on the floppy. Instead, copy the document afresh from your hard drive to the safety folder. This is common practice in the creative world, a legacy from pre-Zip, pre-Jaz days when Syquests and floppies were standard.
5) If you don't have server access, consider mailing a copy of a document to yourself using free web email accounts. Make sure to use at least two services at a time as they are unreliable. This will allow you to avoid faulty or unworking floppy drives as well, which in a busy lab situation can mean the difference between getting right to work or waiting for the "good" machine.
Spread the word! Tell everyone! Post signs! How many times have I tried to explain that floppies are unreliable, tempermental and not to be trusted only to find that people don't believe me? They think I'm making it up. Really.
I used to run the IT department for an advertising agency in which one of the users saved *everything* to floppy because she believed her hard drive was untrustworthy. She had hundreds of disks. (Of course, this is the same woman who printed out all of her email messages and filed them alphabetically).
Yeah, experienced users. I hadn't used AOL in a decade until I moved to France. AOL is currently the only dial-up ISP in France that provides unlimited usage at a flat rate and pays the per-minute local telco fees, fees that do not exist in the US. There are numerous ISP's that claim to be "free" but they're free as in "not free" because what they give you is a small number of hours connect time per month, then gouge you for connect time after that, and force you to pay local telco per-minute fees at across the board. My usage, roughly 60 hours a month, is too great to bear that financial burden. So AOL it is: 199F (about US$25) a month all you can eat.
Most of the conclusions presented in this report and others like it depend on data that itself depends upon the subjects determining causal relationships for themselves. How accurate will data gathered from self-reporting respondents be? A subject claiming to be unaffected by net use and external data proving her to be unaffected are two different things.
I would like to point out that the regime that the Chinese replaced was almost as repressive.
This is, of course, not true. The previous regime did not burn the temples, massacre villages, and, most of all, did not invade a sovereign nation. The Chinese have no more claim on Tibet than they do on Vancouver.
If your admin can't help you by using RBL or other spam-prevention measures on the server or network end, it's amazing what a few mail sorting rules will do on the user end.
Try this: Mail Filters: Out, Spam, Out!
It's a list of my pretty good mail filter rules.
Er, no it isn't. The world isn't simply divided into pro-NSA camps and anti-NSA camps, or pro-Carnivore, anti-Carnivore. I would bet that a sampling of people with identical high-level security clearances--not those cleared specifically for Carnivore, which seems to be today's Willful Misunderstanding (TM)--would turn out a fair number of people on both sides supporting or decrying the project, regardless of the number of thick-heads who think any large body of people they're not a part of share a monolithic point of view.
Dear imbeciles,
High-level security clearance is not an orthodoxy exam, a litmus test, a whose-side-are-you-on interrogation. These people who have NSA clearance may never have worked for the NSA, met anyone from the NSA or visited NSA facilties. Government clearances can be broad contingency certifications, just-in-case devices that cover eventualities. It's not like once you get security clearance they automatically invite you to office parties and give you keys to the building.
Was it the 100,000th Slashdot registration that was the turning point between informed community of geeks and paranoid band of idiots? Or was it the 250,000th?
Sincerely,
Mo Nickels
Your best bet is to fly over and include the goods in your carry-on luggage. It's the only guarantee.
The Darwinism Home Game
I agree, and I wrote about it:
Bad Geeks in Information Technology