Whenever I need permissions to do something on my machine I immediately start whining really loud and repeatedly emailing our IT department, calling people, etc., in other words making a big noise. I shouldn't have to but what can you do?
When I stepped out the door of my apartment this morning, I smelled concrete again from the WTC, and it's more than a month later. If you were down here in the middle of what's going on, you would realize that the FBI has a lot more to worry about right now than your pot plants.
What exactly is the price that you have to pay for the freedom to be able to come and go as you choose without being searched? Is it a price that only soldiers pay, like the people in our armed forces who died in WWII so that you can live in peace and enjoy that freedom? Or is it a price that some civilians must pay, like the people in the World Trade Center? Regardless of how you look at it, it's always a few giving their lives so that the many can have the object, the goal -- freedom, safety, security, privacy, the right to pursue happiness.
However, it obviously doesn't make sense to say that "we all must die so that we can have freedom". Then who is left to enjoy the freedom? No one. Of course this doesn't make sense -- but so what?
Well, "so what" is that, if we're not already there, we are quickly approaching an era when a single person can get off a plane at Chicago O'Hare Airport, walk out onto the sidewalk, release some kind of gas/germ/nanobot, or detonate some device, and kill ALL THE AMERICANS ON THE GLOBE, if not all the human beings. And there will be no one left to enjoy the freedom.
That's why our definitions will have to change. That's why they are calling September 11th a "wake up call". The world is different now. America can and will fall and vanish as thoroughly as the Roman Empire vanished if it does not change with the times. But if America does change, and it puts in place measures and systems that block and defend against terrorism as effectively as we have defended against hostile nations in the past, then you could make a case that those people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the planes will not have died entirely in vain.
Re:All I have to say is this
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More WTC News
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· Score: 1
p.s.
You picked on the wrong country, buddy.
All I have to say is this
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More WTC News
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Nobody comes into MY country and does this kind of thing and gets away with it. NOBODY. Bin-Laden, or whoever you are -- you'd better just watch your back. We're gonna find you, and we're gonna take you to school, and you're not going to like it.
Interesting, interesting. Let's talk (off topic) about right and wrong...
Right and wrong... these are concepts, right? Ideas. But does a sea turtle know the difference between right and wrong? No. And what guides the actions of a sea turtle? Just drives, hunger, sex, etc. How are we different? Why do we bother to talk about concepts like right and wrong? Are we only driven by hunger, thirst? No... we are driven by ideas. You serve an idea. It drives you, determines what you do in the same way hunger drives a sea turtle.
Ideas are programs, sets of instructions, and you are the computer that follows them. So who are the programmers?
Philosophers and religious leaders. The ones who come up with the ideas.
The same, incidentally, goes for hiring programmers. Requiring interviewees to answer questions like "what are the arguments of the 'exportObject' method in the java.rmi.UnicastRemoteObject class?" will result in you hiring programmers who have maybe done a lot of programming, or maybe a lot of memorizing, but who have not (necessarily) done a whole lot of thinking, learning, or architecting systems. Additional minor details that questions like this don't test for are understanding computers, computer science, or algorithms. Remember, we're supposed to be ENGINEERS -- not typists!
"accepting of sexuality as an everyday part of existence"
Let me relate a story to you. Yesterday I was on my way home from work and I was sitting on the subway by myself playing chess on the palm pilot. I live in New York, so I expect to be harassed by crazies every once in a while, but it doesn't make it any less disturbing when it happens. When you're riding the subway in New York, you really, really want to be left alone. Anyway, so this guy comes up to me, looks perfectly normal, no puke or bad smell, obviously not a bum, and he says "Hey, where'd you get the chess game for the Palm Pilot?"
So first of all the guy is looking over my shoulder, which is a little annoying but I can deal. So I say "My friend gave it to me." Then he comes out with this: "I love the Palm Pilot, I have all kinds of stuff on it -- do you have the Palma Sutra?"
Thanks, dude. I don't want to know you, I don't want to know your name or talk to you, I wish you would go away, and I CERTAINLY don't want to know about your sex life or how you have the fucking "Palma Sutra" on your goddamn palm pilot. Leave me the fuck alone.
So I say, "Oh really." He makes some more small talk and then says something like, "I beam programs back and forth to my friends all the time, we'll get together, I'll give you the Palma Sutra. Sorry to disturb your game.", and he gets off the train.
I don't know how you would feel at this point, but at this point I felt like the guy had tried to feel me up or something. I'm a guy, so I guess he thought that he could safely talk to me about the fact that he was a disgusting pervert and I would be right on the same page, but he was wrong. I like to keep my private life private. And I am NOT accepting of trumpeting out in the open every single detail of everyone's sex life all the goddamn time. Like for example, all of America knows that Clinton did something disgusting with an intern and a cigar. Need I say more?
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Napster will start filtering any song that *doesn't* have a valid watermark. Want to put your band's song on Napster, you have to send someone an MP3 and they "sign" it with the watermark and return it to you. Meanwhile Sting and Michael Jackson get their money for "Every Breath You Take" and "Thriller" because the servers now know who has those songs.
Record companies are not the problem. The problem are idiotic people who don't know anything about what is good music and what is crap, so they continue to consume the non-musical crap that the record companies feed them. I think I remember reading somewhere that in the 18th century, almost every family had at least one person in it that could play a musical instrument (i.e. read sheet music) -- because the only way to listen to music was if somebody played it for you!
If it wasn't for this, we'd feel a lot more guilt downloading songs for free and not paying anyone for them -- because we'd have respect for the makers and distributors of the music. You wouldn't be reading stuff about a "revolution in free information".
In general I don't believe in this "revolution of free information". Don't kid yourself. You can have bad quality information or good quality information. The better the quality, the higher price you pay. TANSTAAFL.
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because of idiots who don't know anything about music and misattribute songs. Here's a list compiled so far by me:
Bob Marley -- Red Red Wine (should be UB-40)
Steve Miller Band -- Stuck in the Middle W/ You (should be Stealer's Wheel)
Steve Miller Band -- Sweet Home Alabama -- (should be Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Led Zep -- Black Dog (rare acoustic) -- (some nobody who sampled Robert Plant overtop of himself playing guitar)
Dead Can Dance and Enigma -- Enigma of the Absolute (just DCD, not Enigma)
Aphex Twin -- Answers Come in Dreams (from The Snow) -- (should be Coil)
If you're not going to pay artists, at least give them fucking credit for the songs they do instead of being ignorant.
Look, please think about what I'm saying -- take a second look at it. Reread it. I DIDN'T EVEN READ HIS POST. I didn't have to, because my point is not about whether he's right or wrong about databases, it has to do with the WAY he was talking about it. Sure, he may be right -- I do happen to work with databases a lot, and I've never had a problem with joins, but I won't rule out the possibility that someday I may have to denormalize in a way similar to how he describes.
The real issue here is that I just get sick and tired of arrogant know-it-alls going around saying "actually, you're wrong/stupid, it's this way", correcting each other, etc. Computer programmers all tend to be like this -- I probably even do it too unconsiously to some extent. I just wish people had more respect for each other on/. I mean, you're anonymous here -- nobody knows who you are anyway, so why is everybody so concerned with how smart they appear? I'm more concerned about whether my boss thinks I'm smart than whether/. thinks I'm smart!
One thing that, given my limited experience, seems to be often true with both database design and writing code is that sacrificing modularity for performance can make things less maintainable, harder to work with and debug, less extensible, and more specialized for one application/use. So this would mean in this case that making a data model less modular by denormalizing it might prevent you from using that database for anything other than its originally intended purpose. In other words, you optimize one query by making another query very inefficient. But of course that isn't a hard-and-fast rule, and I haven't worked in every kind of software development project in every industry, so of course there's zillions of situations I know nothing about. So, maybe denormalization is fine for what you're doing.
BTW, I'd be willing to bet that most of those university professors are well aware that joins slow down database accesses, and in fact they can probably tell you exactly how and why they slow down database accesses, W/R/T the actual algorithms the databases are using to retrieve and process the data. Raghu Ramakrishnan's book (Database Management Systems) is really good for this, this is the text I used in my Databases class.
Geez, another Friday night wasted posting messages to somebody I don't know. Every time this happens I tell myself I'm never reading/. again.
I don't believe in creationism but you have to admit that it's absolutely impossible to disprove it.
"Well, we have all these fossils of dinosaurs."
Rebuttal: "God created the fake fossils to test your faith."
"Okay, what about these genes? Take a look at this?"
Rebuttal: "God is not kidding about testing your faith. He'll go to great lengths... just look at these genes. It really makes it look like we evolved, doesn't it?"
Most of the time your typical religious nut is too dumb to make these arguments, but they conceivably could. That's why it's such a powerful idea. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted so many thousands of years. Frankly, I'm surprised when scientists try to say that you can "disprove" creationism, almost like they are getting upset about it. It's actually illogical to say that you can disprove it, and scientists are supposed to be logical (not emotional). But I guess it's just because they are not philosophers. They are in the business of collecting data and making conclusions based on it, not figuring out what can be absolutely true and false and what can't based on logic.
Similarly, you also can't disprove sollipsism (don't know if I'm spelling that right). I recently met someone who had never heard that word before, so I'll define it: it's the belief that the entire universe is just a dream inside your head, including everything you feel and see and know and every person you come in contact with. In fact, you are the one and only sentient being that exists. Sort of like everyone's favorite movie, The Matrix, except there is no "reality" that you can break out into by taking some pill.
You moderate yourself up. Plus, you're obviously much smarter than the university professors with multiple PhD's who taught me to normalize data, and the ones who wrote the textbooks, etc. In fact, maybe you're God... can you please help me by telling me the answer to all of my problems?
Slashdotters are so arrogant. Who do you think you are? I'm going to post something that will be a first on Slashdot -- hey everyone! Guess what! I'm not perfect, in fact, I make programming mistakes sometimes and there's a lot of stuff I don't know!
You need to go back to school and take humility 101. What am I saying, you're probably just trolling in a very devious way. If you really are that arrogant, I feel sorry for you. I don't care if you have 20 more years of experience than I do. It doesn't matter -- I sincerely hope that I will keep learning my whole life, and never get to a point where I think I know everything about a certain subject. Because that's the beginning of the end.
You know what I think about normalization? This is what I think: I don't know. It depends on the situation and the requirements. You'd have to test it. I'm not sure.
thinking about whether code is art or not. You could be doing so many more useful things with your time. For example, you could be writing some code. Or painting a picture. Or doing your tax return.
Is your life that easy/boring that you have no other problems or issues to concern yourself with?
the DSL thing sucks all around
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DSL Woes
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· Score: 1
I went, unwillingly, with Verizon because I gave up on Covad, C. couldn't even manage to get a representative to my apartment because the big V wouldn't let them send a Covad-human before they got a chance to send their own Verizon-human, to "check my wiring" or something. But when I went through V. directly they just sent me a kit in the mail, no humans (ever heard this? "Our service technician will be coming to your house sometime between 7:00 am and 8:00 pm. Please be there to answer the door.") Also, the V-human really took his Time-izon showing up, in fact me and my wife took turns staying home all day two days in a row and the guy didn't show. The real problem was that V wouldn't let C do line-sharing (phone traffic and DSL over same line). Also I think they allocate their stupidest humans to do the "wire checking" and confuse them before they leave the central office in a subtle attempt to undermine their mission. Correction: the guy did show the first day, but he just wandered around my house for a while in a puzzled way and finally said he had to bring back his associate.
The only reason it's not illegal is that nobody understands why it should be. Anyway, so now I have this service that really sucks. This is also what I get for being a cheap bastard and wanting to pay only $50 for a DSL modem in a promotional deal. I guess I shouldn't be b*tching since there are people who can't get DSL service at all. The whole thing is depressing, though, and I am probably too resigned about it because I could probably find better service if I really looked around.
"I have two domain names here -- one of which is owned by an giant multinational aerospace corporation, the other of which is owned by a fat suburban teenage boy in Wisconsin with zits who has no girlfriend. I want you to guess which one is which. The two names are... ready? 'LockheedMartinSucks.com' and 'LockheedMartin.com'. Now -- guess!"
"Uhh... I'm not sure... I'm kind of confused. I mean, these names are really similar..."
I think even a retarded person could figure this out. I mean that, I'm not joking, even a person with Downs Syndrome or who was mentally retarded would not be "confused" because of the "similarity" of these names. No offense to anyone who has these disorders or knows anyone with them. My cat might find it difficult to figure it out, but only because it she doesn't understand English and doesn't care to.
okay now I am putting lots of lowercase letters in this post because of slashdot's terrific censorship RE: all-caps. It doesn't matter that the point I'm trying to communicate is best communicated in all caps. Instead, I get this juvenile "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted" message. You should warn, not prohibit.
Isn't this the same Kent State where 4 students got killed for protesting the Vietnam War? This was before my time, and I don't know if the University itself had anything to with it, but still it seems kind of ironic.
Actually the only real difference between the Kent State thing and the Tiannenmen Square (sp?) massacre was the number of people killed. News flash: you're not supposed to kill ANY humans, not even four.
These cops just went in there thinking they would find an arsenal (like they did in that kid's dorm room last week at DeAnza college in San Jose). All they found was some kids, a computer, and not even any pot -- they are probably miffed at this point and trying to save face.
This is why we have defense lawyers. Let's hope they can get a good one if they need one.
I really don't want to sound harsh here. The thing is, you can make bagels and stand out on the street and serve them to people for free, or you can go work for a company that sells bagels, and serve them to people for 80 cents a pop (or whatever). If you do the former, you'll lose money, and you won't be able to keep it up. Why? Because you have to eat too.
Wolves have to hunt, caribou have to graze, humans have to go to work to get money so they can eat. We have a more complicated system than the wolves and caribou, but it's still the same thing. So this guy is posting a message saying "I don't know, I've been hunting for food in this particular hunting ground and there just seems to be no game here, and I'm getting really hungry. But I still really believe in this hunting ground." So I'm telling him that he's got his head up his butt, and he's got to get out there and find a new place to hunt for caribou.
You know very well that my post did not indicate any contempt at all for people serving bagels. In fact, it indicated contempt for a system that pretends to reward hard work, where the truth is that rewards come from only one thing: being in the right place at the right time.
In fact, you're using a sly argumentative technique where you pretend not to understand what I'm saying so as to cloud the issue. You are betting that other people who read this post will get confused and think that I have contempt for people who serve bagels, which is not the case.
I can't even understand why there is even a CONCEPT of company loyalty. What are you being loyal to? What are you even talking about? Throughout the ages, human beings have been loyal to things like religious causes, their nation or ethnic group, their families... where it actually MEANT something. Who has ever heard of being loyal to a company? Think about it -- what does a company stand for? Making money. Selling widgets. Commerce. That's it, it's totally shallow. If you really believed in what you were doing, you wouldn't try to make any money from it, you would be running a NON PROFIT ORGANIZATION!
The dot com thing and the startup cult mentality thing have gotten people so confused they don't even remember that it's JUST A JOB. And by the way, that's why you shouldn't go to work with your friends.
I think the problem is that your typical Ivy League educated kid jumps right out of school and into one of these dot com cults and thinks it a way of life or a belief system. Get some perspective. I worked for years at delis and as a secretary and whatever before I went back to school and got a batchelors in Comp Sci. Now I've got a different job that pays more money. But it's still not that different from when I went to work every day to serve bagels to somebody. It's hard to believe in bagels. I guess it's a little easier to fool yourself into thinking you believe in software.
as a device to help the person charging $899 for it make lots of money
But if you want to use the device help improve your child's attention span, forget it.
Some true insight on ADD? My kid brother had it. It's no big secret -- he's just a smart guy who's just BORED because at that school they are teaching him simple and boring stuff. It's sadistic to force a smart person to sit and "pay attention" to a crossword puzzle where you fill in presidents' names or other crap like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever I need permissions to do something on my machine I immediately start whining really loud and repeatedly emailing our IT department, calling people, etc., in other words making a big noise. I shouldn't have to but what can you do?
When I stepped out the door of my apartment this morning, I smelled concrete again from the WTC, and it's more than a month later. If you were down here in the middle of what's going on, you would realize that the FBI has a lot more to worry about right now than your pot plants.
What exactly is the price that you have to pay for the freedom to be able to come and go as you choose without being searched? Is it a price that only soldiers pay, like the people in our armed forces who died in WWII so that you can live in peace and enjoy that freedom? Or is it a price that some civilians must pay, like the people in the World Trade Center? Regardless of how you look at it, it's always a few giving their lives so that the many can have the object, the goal -- freedom, safety, security, privacy, the right to pursue happiness.
However, it obviously doesn't make sense to say that "we all must die so that we can have freedom". Then who is left to enjoy the freedom? No one. Of course this doesn't make sense -- but so what?
Well, "so what" is that, if we're not already there, we are quickly approaching an era when a single person can get off a plane at Chicago O'Hare Airport, walk out onto the sidewalk, release some kind of gas/germ/nanobot, or detonate some device, and kill ALL THE AMERICANS ON THE GLOBE, if not all the human beings. And there will be no one left to enjoy the freedom.
That's why our definitions will have to change. That's why they are calling September 11th a "wake up call". The world is different now. America can and will fall and vanish as thoroughly as the Roman Empire vanished if it does not change with the times. But if America does change, and it puts in place measures and systems that block and defend against terrorism as effectively as we have defended against hostile nations in the past, then you could make a case that those people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the planes will not have died entirely in vain.
p.s.
You picked on the wrong country, buddy.
Nobody comes into MY country and does this kind of thing and gets away with it. NOBODY. Bin-Laden, or whoever you are -- you'd better just watch your back. We're gonna find you, and we're gonna take you to school, and you're not going to like it.
Interesting, interesting. Let's talk (off topic) about right and wrong...
Right and wrong... these are concepts, right? Ideas. But does a sea turtle know the difference between right and wrong? No. And what guides the actions of a sea turtle? Just drives, hunger, sex, etc. How are we different? Why do we bother to talk about concepts like right and wrong? Are we only driven by hunger, thirst? No... we are driven by ideas. You serve an idea. It drives you, determines what you do in the same way hunger drives a sea turtle.
Ideas are programs, sets of instructions, and you are the computer that follows them. So who are the programmers?
Philosophers and religious leaders. The ones who come up with the ideas.
THANK YOU.
The same, incidentally, goes for hiring programmers. Requiring interviewees to answer questions like "what are the arguments of the 'exportObject' method in the java.rmi.UnicastRemoteObject class?" will result in you hiring programmers who have maybe done a lot of programming, or maybe a lot of memorizing, but who have not (necessarily) done a whole lot of thinking, learning, or architecting systems. Additional minor details that questions like this don't test for are understanding computers, computer science, or algorithms. Remember, we're supposed to be ENGINEERS -- not typists!
For that you deserve to be beaten senseless with a mithril baseball bat.
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"accepting of sexuality as an everyday part of existence"
Let me relate a story to you. Yesterday I was on my way home from work and I was sitting on the subway by myself playing chess on the palm pilot. I live in New York, so I expect to be harassed by crazies every once in a while, but it doesn't make it any less disturbing when it happens. When you're riding the subway in New York, you really, really want to be left alone. Anyway, so this guy comes up to me, looks perfectly normal, no puke or bad smell, obviously not a bum, and he says "Hey, where'd you get the chess game for the Palm Pilot?"
So first of all the guy is looking over my shoulder, which is a little annoying but I can deal. So I say "My friend gave it to me." Then he comes out with this: "I love the Palm Pilot, I have all kinds of stuff on it -- do you have the Palma Sutra?"
Thanks, dude. I don't want to know you, I don't want to know your name or talk to you, I wish you would go away, and I CERTAINLY don't want to know about your sex life or how you have the fucking "Palma Sutra" on your goddamn palm pilot. Leave me the fuck alone.
So I say, "Oh really." He makes some more small talk and then says something like, "I beam programs back and forth to my friends all the time, we'll get together, I'll give you the Palma Sutra. Sorry to disturb your game.", and he gets off the train.
I don't know how you would feel at this point, but at this point I felt like the guy had tried to feel me up or something. I'm a guy, so I guess he thought that he could safely talk to me about the fact that he was a disgusting pervert and I would be right on the same page, but he was wrong. I like to keep my private life private. And I am NOT accepting of trumpeting out in the open every single detail of everyone's sex life all the goddamn time. Like for example, all of America knows that Clinton did something disgusting with an intern and a cigar. Need I say more?
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Napster will start filtering any song that *doesn't* have a valid watermark. Want to put your band's song on Napster, you have to send someone an MP3 and they "sign" it with the watermark and return it to you. Meanwhile Sting and Michael Jackson get their money for "Every Breath You Take" and "Thriller" because the servers now know who has those songs.
Record companies are not the problem. The problem are idiotic people who don't know anything about what is good music and what is crap, so they continue to consume the non-musical crap that the record companies feed them. I think I remember reading somewhere that in the 18th century, almost every family had at least one person in it that could play a musical instrument (i.e. read sheet music) -- because the only way to listen to music was if somebody played it for you!
If it wasn't for this, we'd feel a lot more guilt downloading songs for free and not paying anyone for them -- because we'd have respect for the makers and distributors of the music. You wouldn't be reading stuff about a "revolution in free information".
In general I don't believe in this "revolution of free information". Don't kid yourself. You can have bad quality information or good quality information. The better the quality, the higher price you pay. TANSTAAFL.
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anybody who has time to sit and read this whole thing must be unemployed or between projects.
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because of idiots who don't know anything about music and misattribute songs. Here's a list compiled so far by me:
Bob Marley -- Red Red Wine (should be UB-40)
Steve Miller Band -- Stuck in the Middle W/ You (should be Stealer's Wheel)
Steve Miller Band -- Sweet Home Alabama -- (should be Lynyrd Skynyrd)
Led Zep -- Black Dog (rare acoustic) -- (some nobody who sampled Robert Plant overtop of himself playing guitar)
Dead Can Dance and Enigma -- Enigma of the Absolute (just DCD, not Enigma)
Aphex Twin -- Answers Come in Dreams (from The Snow) -- (should be Coil)
If you're not going to pay artists, at least give them fucking credit for the songs they do instead of being ignorant.
Look, please think about what I'm saying -- take a second look at it. Reread it. I DIDN'T EVEN READ HIS POST. I didn't have to, because my point is not about whether he's right or wrong about databases, it has to do with the WAY he was talking about it. Sure, he may be right -- I do happen to work with databases a lot, and I've never had a problem with joins, but I won't rule out the possibility that someday I may have to denormalize in a way similar to how he describes.
The real issue here is that I just get sick and tired of arrogant know-it-alls going around saying "actually, you're wrong/stupid, it's this way", correcting each other, etc. Computer programmers all tend to be like this -- I probably even do it too unconsiously to some extent. I just wish people had more respect for each other on
One thing that, given my limited experience, seems to be often true with both database design and writing code is that sacrificing modularity for performance can make things less maintainable, harder to work with and debug, less extensible, and more specialized for one application/use. So this would mean in this case that making a data model less modular by denormalizing it might prevent you from using that database for anything other than its originally intended purpose. In other words, you optimize one query by making another query very inefficient. But of course that isn't a hard-and-fast rule, and I haven't worked in every kind of software development project in every industry, so of course there's zillions of situations I know nothing about. So, maybe denormalization is fine for what you're doing.
BTW, I'd be willing to bet that most of those university professors are well aware that joins slow down database accesses, and in fact they can probably tell you exactly how and why they slow down database accesses, W/R/T the actual algorithms the databases are using to retrieve and process the data. Raghu Ramakrishnan's book (Database Management Systems) is really good for this, this is the text I used in my Databases class.
Geez, another Friday night wasted posting messages to somebody I don't know. Every time this happens I tell myself I'm never reading
I don't believe in creationism but you have to admit that it's absolutely impossible to disprove it.
"Well, we have all these fossils of dinosaurs."
Rebuttal: "God created the fake fossils to test your faith."
"Okay, what about these genes? Take a look at this?"
Rebuttal: "God is not kidding about testing your faith. He'll go to great lengths... just look at these genes. It really makes it look like we evolved, doesn't it?"
Most of the time your typical religious nut is too dumb to make these arguments, but they conceivably could. That's why it's such a powerful idea. Otherwise it wouldn't have lasted so many thousands of years. Frankly, I'm surprised when scientists try to say that you can "disprove" creationism, almost like they are getting upset about it. It's actually illogical to say that you can disprove it, and scientists are supposed to be logical (not emotional). But I guess it's just because they are not philosophers. They are in the business of collecting data and making conclusions based on it, not figuring out what can be absolutely true and false and what can't based on logic.
Similarly, you also can't disprove sollipsism (don't know if I'm spelling that right). I recently met someone who had never heard that word before, so I'll define it: it's the belief that the entire universe is just a dream inside your head, including everything you feel and see and know and every person you come in contact with. In fact, you are the one and only sentient being that exists. Sort of like everyone's favorite movie, The Matrix, except there is no "reality" that you can break out into by taking some pill.
You moderate yourself up. Plus, you're obviously much smarter than the university professors with multiple PhD's who taught me to normalize data, and the ones who wrote the textbooks, etc. In fact, maybe you're God... can you please help me by telling me the answer to all of my problems?
Slashdotters are so arrogant. Who do you think you are? I'm going to post something that will be a first on Slashdot -- hey everyone! Guess what! I'm not perfect, in fact, I make programming mistakes sometimes and there's a lot of stuff I don't know!
You need to go back to school and take humility 101. What am I saying, you're probably just trolling in a very devious way. If you really are that arrogant, I feel sorry for you. I don't care if you have 20 more years of experience than I do. It doesn't matter -- I sincerely hope that I will keep learning my whole life, and never get to a point where I think I know everything about a certain subject. Because that's the beginning of the end.
You know what I think about normalization? This is what I think: I don't know. It depends on the situation and the requirements. You'd have to test it. I'm not sure.
thinking about whether code is art or not. You could be doing so many more useful things with your time. For example, you could be writing some code. Or painting a picture. Or doing your tax return.
Is your life that easy/boring that you have no other problems or issues to concern yourself with?
I went, unwillingly, with Verizon because I gave up on Covad, C. couldn't even manage to get a representative to my apartment because the big V wouldn't let them send a Covad-human before they got a chance to send their own Verizon-human, to "check my wiring" or something. But when I went through V. directly they just sent me a kit in the mail, no humans (ever heard this? "Our service technician will be coming to your house sometime between 7:00 am and 8:00 pm. Please be there to answer the door.") Also, the V-human really took his Time-izon showing up, in fact me and my wife took turns staying home all day two days in a row and the guy didn't show. The real problem was that V wouldn't let C do line-sharing (phone traffic and DSL over same line). Also I think they allocate their stupidest humans to do the "wire checking" and confuse them before they leave the central office in a subtle attempt to undermine their mission. Correction: the guy did show the first day, but he just wandered around my house for a while in a puzzled way and finally said he had to bring back his associate.
The only reason it's not illegal is that nobody understands why it should be. Anyway, so now I have this service that really sucks. This is also what I get for being a cheap bastard and wanting to pay only $50 for a DSL modem in a promotional deal. I guess I shouldn't be b*tching since there are people who can't get DSL service at all. The whole thing is depressing, though, and I am probably too resigned about it because I could probably find better service if I really looked around.
Imagine the situation:
"I have two domain names here -- one of which is owned by an giant multinational aerospace corporation, the other of which is owned by a fat suburban teenage boy in Wisconsin with zits who has no girlfriend. I want you to guess which one is which. The two names are... ready? 'LockheedMartinSucks.com' and 'LockheedMartin.com'. Now -- guess!"
"Uhh... I'm not sure... I'm kind of confused. I mean, these names are really similar..."
I think even a retarded person could figure this out. I mean that, I'm not joking, even a person with Downs Syndrome or who was mentally retarded would not be "confused" because of the "similarity" of these names. No offense to anyone who has these disorders or knows anyone with them. My cat might find it difficult to figure it out, but only because it she doesn't understand English and doesn't care to.
BECAUSE OF H1 TAG
okay now I am putting lots of lowercase letters in this post because of slashdot's terrific censorship RE: all-caps. It doesn't matter that the point I'm trying to communicate is best communicated in all caps. Instead, I get this juvenile "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted" message. You should warn, not prohibit.
This thread is making me laugh... c'mon, go to the park or something and calm down. Life is not that bad! Smile!
Isn't this the same Kent State where 4 students got killed for protesting the Vietnam War? This was before my time, and I don't know if the University itself had anything to with it, but still it seems kind of ironic.
Actually the only real difference between the Kent State thing and the Tiannenmen Square (sp?) massacre was the number of people killed. News flash: you're not supposed to kill ANY humans, not even four.
These cops just went in there thinking they would find an arsenal (like they did in that kid's dorm room last week at DeAnza college in San Jose). All they found was some kids, a computer, and not even any pot -- they are probably miffed at this point and trying to save face.
This is why we have defense lawyers. Let's hope they can get a good one if they need one.
I really don't want to sound harsh here. The thing is, you can make bagels and stand out on the street and serve them to people for free, or you can go work for a company that sells bagels, and serve them to people for 80 cents a pop (or whatever). If you do the former, you'll lose money, and you won't be able to keep it up. Why? Because you have to eat too.
Wolves have to hunt, caribou have to graze, humans have to go to work to get money so they can eat. We have a more complicated system than the wolves and caribou, but it's still the same thing. So this guy is posting a message saying "I don't know, I've been hunting for food in this particular hunting ground and there just seems to be no game here, and I'm getting really hungry. But I still really believe in this hunting ground." So I'm telling him that he's got his head up his butt, and he's got to get out there and find a new place to hunt for caribou.
You know very well that my post did not indicate any contempt at all for people serving bagels. In fact, it indicated contempt for a system that pretends to reward hard work, where the truth is that rewards come from only one thing: being in the right place at the right time.
In fact, you're using a sly argumentative technique where you pretend not to understand what I'm saying so as to cloud the issue. You are betting that other people who read this post will get confused and think that I have contempt for people who serve bagels, which is not the case.
I can't even understand why there is even a CONCEPT of company loyalty. What are you being loyal to? What are you even talking about? Throughout the ages, human beings have been loyal to things like religious causes, their nation or ethnic group, their families... where it actually MEANT something. Who has ever heard of being loyal to a company? Think about it -- what does a company stand for? Making money. Selling widgets. Commerce. That's it, it's totally shallow. If you really believed in what you were doing, you wouldn't try to make any money from it, you would be running a NON PROFIT ORGANIZATION!
The dot com thing and the startup cult mentality thing have gotten people so confused they don't even remember that it's JUST A JOB. And by the way, that's why you shouldn't go to work with your friends.
I think the problem is that your typical Ivy League educated kid jumps right out of school and into one of these dot com cults and thinks it a way of life or a belief system. Get some perspective. I worked for years at delis and as a secretary and whatever before I went back to school and got a batchelors in Comp Sci. Now I've got a different job that pays more money. But it's still not that different from when I went to work every day to serve bagels to somebody. It's hard to believe in bagels. I guess it's a little easier to fool yourself into thinking you believe in software.
"Loyalty"? Give me a break.
as a device to help the person charging $899 for it make lots of money
But if you want to use the device help improve your child's attention span, forget it.
Some true insight on ADD? My kid brother had it. It's no big secret -- he's just a smart guy who's just BORED because at that school they are teaching him simple and boring stuff. It's sadistic to force a smart person to sit and "pay attention" to a crossword puzzle where you fill in presidents' names or other crap like that.