Erm... Apple and Sun come to mind as non-MS companies doing the same thing... at least MicroSoft is itself a non-dictionary name!
IBM has the "Chicklet" keyboard on the XT, which was funny if you like the Adams Gum. DEC made the Rainbow. Apple also made a PEAR. Not to mention the Lisa. Coleco made the Adam. Commodore is a naval rank... plus the Amiga is a friend. Hmm. My cousin had an Odyssey video game system growing up. How about Oracle? Java? Acrobat by Adobe? Opera?? Oh, and bever mind the Palm Pilots!
JP Morgan and some other firms are now outsourcing finance positions to India for the first time. If the US doesn't wake up and go for FAIR trade, FREE trade will cut all of our collective throats.
Because those of us that are acutally *good* at what we do would be scared shitless if our compensation was dictated by the lowest common denomenator.
Would you really want a unionized IT shop? Consider: your routers are now being worked on by some guy with 20 years seniority (say, on Notes or IBM mainframes) that doesn't know what an event horizon is.
Don't forget Poland & Jan Sobieski III in 1683 at Vienna -- Europe could be Islamic today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna
"At about 5 in the afternoon, four cavalry groups, one of them German-Austrian and the other three Polish heavy cavalry (Hussars), 20,000 men in all, charged down the hills led personally by the Polish king. In the confusion, they made straight for the Ottoman camps, while the Vienna garrison sallied out of its defenses and joined in the assault. In less than three hours, the battle was won, as the Turks beat a hasty retreat to the south and east. Although no one realized it at the time, the entire war was won that day, as well. The Ottomans fought on for another 16 years before giving up, losing vast territories in the process."
Re:Corps will continue to rule, people are sheep..
on
Amateur Revolution?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You're probably right, if only because eventually rap artists will run out of other music to sample.
Such as Norton or whatever, be aware that if XP's firewall is turned on (as it gets turned on by default in SP2) you won't be able to hit the 'net on that PC.
The Russians 1st & Gene Cernan
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've recently finished reading "Last Man on the Moon", which is an autobiographical account of Gene's life. Gene, in my mind, is perhaps the best astronaut the US ever had. He made the hardest spacewalk in US history on Gemini 9, flew (and nearly landed) on the moon on Apollo 10, and was the last man to walk on the moon when he commanded Apollo 17.
In his book, he points out that the Russians did land (Luna 9 in 1966) on the moon before the US, and up to Apollo 8 (the first Apollo to fly around the moon, included Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 fame) there were serious fears that the USSR would land a manned mission to the moon first.
I love comments like this. If humanity actually EVER stopped to keep all of its members from being in poverty, we'd still be back at the level of the Spartans. They were the last (and perhaps only successful) society to function without money.
There has NEVER been a society with money and without poverty, period. And I, for one, and SICK of hearing how people shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that because we should help the impoverished.
I'm not saying that the poor don't need help. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be agencies to help them. What I *am* saying is that the "this is a waste of money" arguement is a fallacy at best.
Conisider: What if Spain had used it's money to fund a social welfare system instead of Columbus's four voyages? What if the US had spent Nasa's budget on the the "Great Society" instead?...in both cases, probably not much. The old give a man a fish/teach a man to fish analogy still stands. The trouble is that on a scale of more than one, it becomes a much more complex issue.
In the cold reality of day, we've "Fed the Children" for 30 years now, and probably will for 300 more. All it equates to is a temporary bandage, not a cure for poverty. There isn't one, barring full employment for the planet, which won't be possible unless one of two things happens: a) We become a singular world government and start working on superprojects. b) We stop the world economy and get rid of the concept of money. This, of course, will practically guarantee an end of modern society.... I don't see either happening anytime soon...
I've been reading "The Hitchhiker", a biography of Douglas Adams. Douglas wrote 3-5 stories (one under a psuedonym, one he's uncredited...) and worked as an editor and script producer role for a year during Tom Baker's tenure.
Douglas hated dealing with the Dalek scripts, because "Terry would have a storyboard with people running down a hallway and explosions... I'd have to write a story out of it!"
BTW, Shada was only made because the BBC considered the Krikketmen script too silly. Silly. For a character that flies around the universe in a Police Box, has a robotic dog and offers jelly babies to people...
Step 1) Find a Russian that can program in Cobol. Step 2) Lock in a room with 30 PCs and 29 other (can even be previously non-computer using) Russians. Allow 48 hours, with generous room services. Step 3) Profit!
Note: The Russian in step 1 must also speak your language! If not, and you speak no Russian, the project may grow or shrink in direct proportion to quality of room services in step 2!
What's going on in today's working world is a "decentralization", similar to the old days where you might be a ditch digger one day, a crop picker the next, etc.
I've worked on both sides of the table, sort of. I've done work for a consulting firm in DC, and was an SE in a Board of Ed with 30,000 students.
The fact is that for all the money spent on education over the last 30 years, test scores haven't moved. AT ALL.
The main problem? There are simply too many hands in the pot. Right now, most school systems get local, state, and federal money. And all of them have different requirements! Where I worked, it was nothing to bus the students around to make as many schools as possible 90% free lunch in order to get more federal money, for example. The others were made into "Magnets", so that although they didn't get that money, they got the initial magnet grants, etc. However, because the city votes for one party and the Governor is of the other, they got less state funds, etc. It's all a big money shuffle.
What needs to be done: * Abolish the Department of Education, and put everything on a STATE level. Why not a local, do you ask? In my town the BoE already takes 62% of the town budget! I'm not willing to trust an ex-teacher-turned-Selectman with the checkbook. Too much like giving the fox the key to the henhouse.
* The state would handle all bidding for contracts. There is *so much* pork and waste in this area, it's awful. For example, the same bus company serves two adjoingin towns where I live. One town pays nearly 20% more per bus (that's times several trips daily, folks) than the other, because of the wording on the bid!!
* Abolish the unions. They do some good, but more harm than anything else. The poor preformers are saved/coddled/kept around, and the excellent are held back.
As a longtime user of 8-bit PCs back in the day (Video 7 modems, anyone?), 300 baud was perfect for the old systems. Why? Easy.
**300 baud is the speed you can read at when receiving text from a BBS! *** The 110 was too slow, the 1200 was great for games (LORD, Trade Wars/Yankee Trader anyone?), but you kept having to hit PAUSE to read posts! This was a big deal, since back then a 2-5 page post (remember, 40 columns!) was pretty common. Especially if you had a heated message board discussion or a PBMB RPG (play by message board role playing game).
It was a much different world when e-mail only worked on the BBS you had your account on.
True. But by the same token, is "Finding Forrester" just "Good Will Hunting"? The point I'm making is that (at least some) of the "Card-iacs" credit him for being such an original writer, whereas it's been done before.
It's not that authors build off of each other that I mind. That's the way of any progress. It's the zealots/fanboys who latch on and decry anything that's not "from scripture".
You do realize, of course, that Card got most of his ideas *from* Ursula Le Guin? I encountered this little phenomena upon one of my friends being blown away by Card's "originality"...:-)
That's not a flame, just pointing out the obvious...
Slashdot Mirror
Erm... Apple and Sun come to mind as non-MS companies doing the same thing... at least MicroSoft is itself a non-dictionary name!
IBM has the "Chicklet" keyboard on the XT, which was funny if you like the Adams Gum.
DEC made the Rainbow.
Apple also made a PEAR. Not to mention the Lisa.
Coleco made the Adam.
Commodore is a naval rank... plus the Amiga is a friend. Hmm.
My cousin had an Odyssey video game system growing up.
How about Oracle?
Java?
Acrobat by Adobe?
Opera??
Oh, and bever mind the Palm Pilots!
It's hardly a one way street, IMHO....
Huh. I'm still waiting for the "paperless office by 1985" and for my flying car... after all, 50% of all cars were to fly by 1990.
As much as I love the show (esp SVU), I keep seeing the scripts when I read The New York Post every day on the train ride home...
She is most certainly *NOT* Number 6! She looks NOTHING LIKE Patrick McGoohan!!
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061287 if you've never been to The Village...)
Be seeing you!
JP Morgan and some other firms are now outsourcing finance positions to India for the first time. If the US doesn't wake up and go for FAIR trade, FREE trade will cut all of our collective throats.
Sorry, I mistyped. That's SPLIT horizon.
Because those of us that are acutally *good* at what we do would be scared shitless if our compensation was dictated by the lowest common denomenator.
Would you really want a unionized IT shop? Consider: your routers are now being worked on by some guy with 20 years seniority (say, on Notes or IBM mainframes) that doesn't know what an event horizon is.
Go sit in on a teacher's union meeting sometime.
To see if they explain how the humans killed "the Gods", and who the gods were anyway.
That "AOL is the Internet!" just wasn't enough???
You hit the nail on the head there!
Michael Dell is a BUSINESS MAN. He wants to make MONEY. Red Hat is just that: another revenue stream.
Don't forget Poland & Jan Sobieski III in 1683 at Vienna -- Europe could be Islamic today!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Vienna
"At about 5 in the afternoon, four cavalry groups, one of them German-Austrian and the other three Polish heavy cavalry (Hussars), 20,000 men in all, charged down the hills led personally by the Polish king.
In the confusion, they made straight for the Ottoman camps, while the Vienna garrison sallied out of its defenses and joined in the assault. In less than three hours, the battle was won, as the Turks beat a hasty retreat to the south and east. Although no one realized it at the time, the entire war was won that day, as well. The Ottomans fought on for another 16 years before giving up, losing vast territories in the process."
You're probably right, if only because eventually rap artists will run out of other music to sample.
Even rabbits can count to four!!
-Markvs
Such as Norton or whatever, be aware that if XP's firewall is turned on (as it gets turned on by default in SP2) you won't be able to hit the 'net on that PC.
-Markvs
How on *Earth* did someone mod this as Troll?
-Markvs
I've recently finished reading "Last Man on the Moon", which is an autobiographical account of Gene's life.
Gene, in my mind, is perhaps the best astronaut the US ever had. He made the hardest spacewalk in US history on Gemini 9, flew (and nearly landed) on the moon on Apollo 10, and was the last man to walk on the moon when he commanded Apollo 17.
In his book, he points out that the Russians did land (Luna 9 in 1966) on the moon before the US, and up to Apollo 8 (the first Apollo to fly around the moon, included Jim Lovell of Apollo 13 fame) there were serious fears that the USSR would land a manned mission to the moon first.
-Markvs
I love comments like this. If humanity actually EVER stopped to keep all of its members from being in poverty, we'd still be back at the level of the Spartans. They were the last (and perhaps only successful) society to function without money.
...in both cases, probably not much.
... I don't see either happening anytime soon...
There has NEVER been a society with money and without poverty, period. And I, for one, and SICK of hearing how people shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that because we should help the impoverished.
I'm not saying that the poor don't need help. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be agencies to help them. What I *am* saying is that the "this is a waste of money" arguement is a fallacy at best.
Conisider: What if Spain had used it's money to fund a social welfare system instead of Columbus's four voyages?
What if the US had spent Nasa's budget on the the "Great Society" instead?
The old give a man a fish/teach a man to fish analogy still stands. The trouble is that on a scale of more than one, it becomes a much more complex issue.
In the cold reality of day, we've "Fed the Children" for 30 years now, and probably will for 300 more. All it equates to is a temporary bandage, not a cure for poverty. There isn't one, barring full employment for the planet, which won't be possible unless one of two things happens:
a) We become a singular world government and start working on superprojects.
b) We stop the world economy and get rid of the concept of money. This, of course, will practically guarantee an end of modern society.
-Markvs
I've been reading "The Hitchhiker", a biography of Douglas Adams. Douglas wrote 3-5 stories (one under a psuedonym, one he's uncredited...) and worked as an editor and script producer role for a year during Tom Baker's tenure.
Douglas hated dealing with the Dalek scripts, because "Terry would have a storyboard with people running down a hallway and explosions... I'd have to write a story out of it!"
BTW, Shada was only made because the BBC considered the Krikketmen script too silly. Silly. For a character that flies around the universe in a Police Box, has a robotic dog and offers jelly babies to people...
-Markvs
Need to get a project done in Cobol in a hurry?
Step 1) Find a Russian that can program in Cobol.
Step 2) Lock in a room with 30 PCs and 29 other (can even be previously non-computer using) Russians. Allow 48 hours, with generous room services.
Step 3) Profit!
Note: The Russian in step 1 must also speak your language! If not, and you speak no Russian, the project may grow or shrink in direct proportion to quality of room services in step 2!
-Markvs
You took the words right out of my mouth!
What's going on in today's working world is a "decentralization", similar to the old days where you might be a ditch digger one day, a crop picker the next, etc.
-Markvs
I've worked on both sides of the table, sort of. I've done work for a consulting firm in DC, and was an SE in a Board of Ed with 30,000 students.
The fact is that for all the money spent on education over the last 30 years, test scores haven't moved. AT ALL.
The main problem? There are simply too many hands in the pot. Right now, most school systems get local, state, and federal money. And all of them have different requirements! Where I worked, it was nothing to bus the students around to make as many schools as possible 90% free lunch in order to get more federal money, for example. The others were made into "Magnets", so that although they didn't get that money, they got the initial magnet grants, etc. However, because the city votes for one party and the Governor is of the other, they got less state funds, etc. It's all a big money shuffle.
What needs to be done:
* Abolish the Department of Education, and put everything on a STATE level. Why not a local, do you ask? In my town the BoE already takes 62% of the town budget! I'm not willing to trust an ex-teacher-turned-Selectman with the checkbook. Too much like giving the fox the key to the henhouse.
* The state would handle all bidding for contracts. There is *so much* pork and waste in this area, it's awful. For example, the same bus company serves two adjoingin towns where I live. One town pays nearly 20% more per bus (that's times several trips daily, folks) than the other, because of the wording on the bid!!
* Abolish the unions. They do some good, but more harm than anything else. The poor preformers are saved/coddled/kept around, and the excellent are held back.
Just my $0.02
-Markvs
As a longtime user of 8-bit PCs back in the day (Video 7 modems, anyone?), 300 baud was perfect for the old systems. Why? Easy.
**300 baud is the speed you can read at when receiving text from a BBS! ***
The 110 was too slow, the 1200 was great for games (LORD, Trade Wars/Yankee Trader anyone?), but you kept having to hit PAUSE to read posts! This was a big deal, since back then a 2-5 page post (remember, 40 columns!) was pretty common. Especially if you had a heated message board discussion or a PBMB RPG (play by message board role playing game).
It was a much different world when e-mail only worked on the BBS you had your account on.
-Markvs
True. But by the same token, is "Finding Forrester" just "Good Will Hunting"? The point I'm making is that (at least some) of the "Card-iacs" credit him for being such an original writer, whereas it's been done before.
It's not that authors build off of each other that I mind. That's the way of any progress. It's the zealots/fanboys who latch on and decry anything that's not "from scripture".
You do realize, of course, that Card got most of his ideas *from* Ursula Le Guin? I encountered this little phenomena upon one of my friends being blown away by Card's "originality"... :-)
That's not a flame, just pointing out the obvious...
Pakistani, you insensitive clod!