I bet you'll think that funny until you wake up to find a Tivo remote crammed up your ass... Hard to wipe the Santorum from between the buttons, you know.
It's round. On first impression, one might naively get the idea that it's designed with the hand in mind. Wonderful... except that is only ONE environment in which it must function!
Coffee table operation
Have you ever tried to push the volume or channel up/down buttons while the remote is on the coffee table? Imagine dozing on the couch, and reaching out to the coffee table to flip the channel, only to have the STUPID ROUND remote roll over when you press the button which is so BRILLIANTLY placed to the side of the STUPID ROUND remote's axis of rotation? That's right, the result of this operation is not the channel being changed, the result is the STUPID ROUND remote flipping over on it's back.
Armchair placement
Have you ever tried to put the remote down next to you, on a surface that was not perfectly horizontal? Remember the remote is a STUPID ROUND remote... This means that the contact area underneath the remote would approach a point, were it not for the small, inadequate flat spot under there. The small, inadequate flat spots which do nothing to keep the STUPID ROUND remote from sliding off of any fabric covered surface you might place it on. A fabric covered surface, which might not always be perfectly horizontal... hmm... let me think of an example. Ah. Maybe a COUCH or SOFA perhaps? Pretty rare environment for a TV remote, so I can understand how this slipped by during testing...
Seat cushion placement
Okay, I think you can see where I'm going with this STUPID ROUND idea. Imagine you place the remote next to you on your prize sofa, an exotic artifact which you imported at great expense just for the novelty of it. (Imagine that... actually owning a SOFA!) Next, imagine a friend who comes to sit down near you on the sofa, and the cushion the STUPID ROUND remote is sitting on is compressed on one side (please, try to imagine this even though it might seem alien and unfamiliar). Now, the surface of the cushion is no longer horizontal. Promptly, the STUPID ROUND remote, as round objects are want to do, rolls on the surface of the cushion. Which way does it roll? Yes, that right, DOWN. Down between the cushions. Out of sight. Inaccessable.
Perfect.
*Some* aspects of the Tivo remote reflect really good design. It would be a good design, if the only thing I ever used my hand for was to hold the remote! This design is arrogant. It may not have been their intention, but underlying assumption that I'm never going to remove from my hand this 'oh-so-important and marvelously designed' object d'art just drips from its very essense.
How many times I've had that thing flip out from underneath my fingers when trying to flip channels when an obnoxious commercial roused me from my slumber... Oh, how I long for the chance, just once, to get up off the couch, and KICK THAT DESIGNER SQUARE IN THE NUTS AS HARD AS I CAN!!!
DON'T GIVE ME YOUR DAMMED "IMPROVED" DESIGN UNTIL WORKED THROUGH ALL OF THE SIDE EFFECTS THAT YOUR "IMPROVEMENT" IS GOING TO CAUSE !!! In the meantime, I'll use my crappy, square, poorly designed remote.
And people, stop gushing over this piece of crap plastic...
Well wouldn't that percentage depend on temperature, pressure and the oxygen concentration of the environment in which the methonol encounters an ignition source? Just because it won't burn in my living room, doesn't mean it wouldn't burn in a serious fire aboard an aircraft.
I hereby grant you permission to recruit hundreds of amateurs to create fonts on one condition:... you hide the results from me!!
Font creation isn't something that can be learned or pursued in one's spare time. Even some fonts I've paid money to professionals for look like garbage in some circumstances.
Please spare me the crappy fonts, I beg you, without sarcasm and quite honestly!! Shitty fonts waste the time of thousands of users who are just trying to make a decent looking screen/page/document. No more crappy fonts; I already have about 700 on my computer already.
Fixed width fonts are crucial on screen and in print for:
* source code listings
* columns of numerics
$0.50
$0.50
-----
$1.00
* ASCII art - shall it never perish from this earth
(no pre tag, lameness filter choking on comment chars wastes 20 minutes of my time, thanks guys)
I'd pay fifty cents a line to keep my text properly aligned; why you could get rich if you helped me do this !!
And another thing: Fixed width fonts should really be fixed width!! Do you know how many times I've tried a 'monospace' font whose glyphs have different widths when I have selected bold ?!? This is heinous in syntax-aware code editors that will colorize/bold language keywords.
(Yes, it's true that the coders and the DTP people don't understand or respect each other's needs. Monospace fonts are sometimes derided on a.b.f, much to my dismay.)
I am reading at +3, and I am seeing a rather mixed reaction to eclipse, which surprises me. Perhaps this is because I run Win2k. I have had nothing but pleasant surprises working with code freeze releases of Eclipse over the last 6 weeks. The installer on Win2k was my first surprise, the executable *is* the installer, just unzip and run, the exe configures itself, found my JRE. I was up an running in no time.
The 'workspace' concept takes a little getting used to, but everything they do is just so slick and well thought out. The debugger is pretty sweet, especially in comparison to something like JBuilder.
The perspective system is really cool; you can choose from many pre-defined perspectives, or define your own. A perspective is a collection of on screen views of your project, a view being an editor, a class broswer, a debug window, and output window, and so forth. I defined an 'edit' perspective, which has a giant edit window, a small class browser window, and a quick display/hide button for the filesystem navigator view. I switch between that and the debug perspective often. Very convenient.
SWT makes this Java app a pleasure. Yes, good swing apps are possible, but *damn* they've done a good job with this thing.
In summation, I urge anyone looking at Java IDE's to give Eclispe a look-see.
(4) In sexual symbolism that Roger Ebert was the first to point out-I wasn't the first to recognize this-the phallus penetrates the slot in the rotating female space station: coitus.
Oh, my aching head. God, (some other god, not the man-god we created to fear) created the universe, and its laws of physics, to support Kubrick's desire to exercise metaphors for a brief moment 20 billion years after creation, in one tiny corner of the universe. Okay. That's the only way that it fits! Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity is all part of God's plan to make it all work out so that engineers would be forced to design space station docking mechanisims in such a way to allow Kubrick to allude to coitus !!! I FIANLLLAYY USNGDER STATNDD!!!!
It would really bother me if I didn't realize that this all represents the most elaborate and brillant troll in the history of the web. (But maybe not usenet)
By the way, Wheat does make some good points about Kubrick's wordplay. (It just serves to make it seem all the more real !!)
You've hit on something crucial, behind HOW is WHY
on
The Leased Life?
·
· Score: 2
Effugas,
This is quite an astute set of observations on your part, in my opinion. The leased life is a reality. And we do almost nothing to notice this fact. The bandwidth in our mediasphere is completely plugged with messages about the new and the better, the sexy, the without-which-you-can't-hope-to-mate.
Slashdotters and the like spend their lives struggling towards new innovations and 'better' applications of technology, with the assumption that 'forwards' is always better, no matter what. But, who owns the game?
Think about the answer really carefully before you put in that next all-nighter. Successful consumers ( the relevance of citizenship approached an epsilon sometime in the seventies ) struggle for that next promotion so that they can have the money to buy that better car/condo/computer/SUV/GPS/PDA so that they can have the status to mix with those of higher status so that they can get that next promotion so that they can......
And what is the end game of technology? (At least, as it is applied in our culture) More productivity. But why? So I can enjoy my life more fully? I don't think so. What life? I have to work like mad to keep my skills current and meet that next OH-SO-IMPORTANT deadline, (like someone is going to starve if we ship a week later) while this 'prosperity' passes by my car window as I drive from my sleep unit to my workstation.
Aside: Work - Station. Roll that one around on your tongue for a while. Is this why we are here? Is this why we have worked so hard to create this prosperity? What happened to the 30 hour work week? When the hell are we going to enjoy this 'prosperity' that we've created?
This culture is hostile to activities other than sleeping, working, and spending. You are not a citizen, you are a consumer. So, go forth, and fulfill your role, slave! And be grateful for the gilding of your cell! Don't question who owns this 'prosperity', or you will be denied its fruits! Get your hands off those control levers, we are in control now, just sit and watch your (our) television, and learn what will make you happy next!
So, the next time you stretch for that 'heroic' all-nighter, consider what you are struggling for. Are you really making the world a better place, or are you simply making the machinery of America[tm] more efficient?
What the hell is the point making something so *almost* healthy, and then ruining it with salt? I appreciate the attempt at vegetarianism, but this isn't quite what I was hoping for.
Huh? The tradition that the Clinton administration started? ?? For most of its existence, the Clinton administration has been the enemy of sensible export restrictions. Let's not be grateful to an entity who has merely decided to oppress us less.
I highly recommend it. I rarely watch any television, occasionally I watch one owned by a friend, so I am exposed to TV every once in a while.
I have to agree. Watching people watch TV is kind of horrifying. It's weird so see a perfectly good brain just sitting there rotting itself. Even if a person only watches a couple of shows every week, this translates into a pretty significant percentage of a person's non-work hours being spent in an activity that benefits only the advertizers.
I cannot believe that people *volunteer* to be abused by corporations in this way. People PAY for televisions, and PAY for cable/satellite service, which they really don't need, and why? So they can watch largely useless and silly programming, the only purpose of which is to trick you into watching hours and hours of subtle, mindbending persuasion, the purpose of which, in turn, is to condition viewers/subjects/victims to buy still MORE shit they don't need and didn't even know that wanted until they saw whichever bimbo-with-a-toothy-and-seductive-grin is popular this month on that INFERNAL FUCKING BOX OF DISTRACTION!!
This development is just disgusting. How much industial capacity ( == (pollution output && resource consumption) ) does this represent? We've got to get a handle on ourselves, folks, our thoughtless urge to consume will do us in materially in the long run, if not spiritually in the short run.
Success is an essentially meaningless term. Many of us know this, experiencing the meaningless thrust towards an artificial deadline, to release a product of dubious value to the user.
How much of the technology that we toot our own horns about really provides significant benefit to mankind? I think most slashdoters have the sense that it really takes a technologically savvy person to really exploit and profit from technology, at least on a personal level. How much progress has the user seen, in say a word processor, in the last 5 or 10 years? That's right. None. We're all writing the exact same letters and resumes with SUPER-ULTRA-BETTER-THAN-BRAND-X-Y2K-TURBO-WHATEVER -V12.9pluspak that we did when we used Xy-write.
So what of the average person? What is this bubble of so-called prosperity made of? Endless forced upgrades, where the customer is snowed into believing that he absolutely has to have the latest and greatest in order to keep typing out his invoices? Sure, our stock options are fat, but is this something to be proud of?
Without doubt, automation and networking have provided massive economies of scale, allowing industry to be much more productive. I don't really think that there is any argument there. Items that used to be optional luxuries are now seen as requirements: $500 Weber grill, useless sport utility monstrosities that spend 95% of their existence on a freeway or a parking lot...
So, *yay*, our society is the most productive and opulent in all history. Am I the only one feeling a bit hollow? We've created a giant army of highly productive and innovative professionals, but WE FORGOT TO DECIDE WHERE WE WERE GOING BEFORE WE SET OUT ON THIS JOURNEY TO NOWHERE!!!
Look up from your cubicle and tell me we haven't built ourselves a guilded cage.
Well wait... that wasn't the scenario. Perhaps you did nothing wrong at all, and there is nothing in the encrypted message itself that would be 'self incriminating'. There is secret information in the file, and the authorities want the information in order to pursue someone else, not you.
You couldn't claim 5th amendment protection if the information they are after isn't about you to begin with.
Which leaves us back at the beginning, you are in violation of the law simply for failing to surrender the key.
-Helping Satan Daily, in small amounts Satan's Little Helper
Slashdot Mirror
I bet you'll think that funny until you wake up to find a Tivo remote crammed up your ass... Hard to wipe the Santorum from between the buttons, you know.
It's round. On first impression, one might naively get the idea that it's designed with the hand in mind. Wonderful... except that is only ONE environment in which it must function!
Coffee table operation
Have you ever tried to push the volume or channel up/down buttons while the remote is on the coffee table? Imagine dozing on the couch, and reaching out to the coffee table to flip the channel, only to have the STUPID ROUND remote roll over when you press the button which is so BRILLIANTLY placed to the side of the STUPID ROUND remote's axis of rotation? That's right, the result of this operation is not the channel being changed, the result is the STUPID ROUND remote flipping over on it's back.
Armchair placement
Have you ever tried to put the remote down next to you, on a surface that was not perfectly horizontal? Remember the remote is a STUPID ROUND remote... This means that the contact area underneath the remote would approach a point, were it not for the small, inadequate flat spot under there. The small, inadequate flat spots which do nothing to keep the STUPID ROUND remote from sliding off of any fabric covered surface you might place it on. A fabric covered surface, which might not always be perfectly horizontal... hmm... let me think of an example. Ah. Maybe a COUCH or SOFA perhaps? Pretty rare environment for a TV remote, so I can understand how this slipped by during testing...
Seat cushion placement
Okay, I think you can see where I'm going with this STUPID ROUND idea. Imagine you place the remote next to you on your prize sofa, an exotic artifact which you imported at great expense just for the novelty of it. (Imagine that... actually owning a SOFA!) Next, imagine a friend who comes to sit down near you on the sofa, and the cushion the STUPID ROUND remote is sitting on is compressed on one side (please, try to imagine this even though it might seem alien and unfamiliar). Now, the surface of the cushion is no longer horizontal. Promptly, the STUPID ROUND remote, as round objects are want to do, rolls on the surface of the cushion. Which way does it roll? Yes, that right, DOWN. Down between the cushions. Out of sight. Inaccessable.
Perfect.
*Some* aspects of the Tivo remote reflect really good design. It would be a good design, if the only thing I ever used my hand for was to hold the remote! This design is arrogant. It may not have been their intention, but underlying assumption that I'm never going to remove from my hand this 'oh-so-important and marvelously designed' object d'art just drips from its very essense.
How many times I've had that thing flip out from underneath my fingers when trying to flip channels when an obnoxious commercial roused me from my slumber... Oh, how I long for the chance, just once, to get up off the couch, and KICK THAT DESIGNER SQUARE IN THE NUTS AS HARD AS I CAN!!!
DON'T GIVE ME YOUR DAMMED "IMPROVED" DESIGN UNTIL WORKED THROUGH ALL OF THE SIDE EFFECTS THAT YOUR "IMPROVEMENT" IS GOING TO CAUSE !!! In the meantime, I'll use my crappy, square, poorly designed remote.
And people, stop gushing over this piece of crap plastic...
for all you nyookular geniuses.
Wah! I want to see how it looks in context on the stonework!!
Q: What is 'local loop' ?? Thanks.
Consider the markup the airlines enjoy on scotch, and you'll understand why they are willing to take the risk.
Well wouldn't that percentage depend on temperature, pressure and the oxygen concentration of the environment in which the methonol encounters an ignition source? Just because it won't burn in my living room, doesn't mean it wouldn't burn in a serious fire aboard an aircraft.
I hereby grant you permission to recruit hundreds of amateurs to create fonts on one condition: ... you hide the results from me!!
Font creation isn't something that can be learned or pursued in one's spare time. Even some fonts I've paid money to professionals for look like garbage in some circumstances.
Please spare me the crappy fonts, I beg you, without sarcasm and quite honestly!! Shitty fonts waste the time of thousands of users who are just trying to make a decent looking screen/page/document. No more crappy fonts; I already have about 700 on my computer already.
Fixed width fonts are crucial on screen and in print for:
* source code listings
* columns of numerics
$0.50
$0.50
-----
$1.00
* ASCII art - shall it never perish from this earth
(no pre tag, lameness filter choking on comment chars wastes 20 minutes of my time, thanks guys)
I'd pay fifty cents a line to keep my text properly aligned; why you could get rich if you helped me do this !!
while ( true == fixedWidth ) {
sourceCode = WM_HAPPYMESSAGE;
}
And another thing: Fixed width fonts should really be fixed width!! Do you know how many times I've tried a 'monospace' font whose glyphs have different widths when I have selected bold ?!? This is heinous in syntax-aware code editors that will colorize/bold language keywords.
(Yes, it's true that the coders and the DTP people don't understand or respect each other's needs. Monospace fonts are sometimes derided on a.b.f, much to my dismay.)
I am reading at +3, and I am seeing a rather mixed reaction to eclipse, which surprises me. Perhaps this is because I run Win2k. I have had nothing but pleasant surprises working with code freeze releases of Eclipse over the last 6 weeks. The installer on Win2k was my first surprise, the executable *is* the installer, just unzip and run, the exe configures itself, found my JRE. I was up an running in no time.
The 'workspace' concept takes a little getting used to, but everything they do is just so slick and well thought out. The debugger is pretty sweet, especially in comparison to something like JBuilder.
The perspective system is really cool; you can choose from many pre-defined perspectives, or define your own. A perspective is a collection of on screen views of your project, a view being an editor, a class broswer, a debug window, and output window, and so forth. I defined an 'edit' perspective, which has a giant edit window, a small class browser window, and a quick display/hide button for the filesystem navigator view. I switch between that and the debug perspective often. Very convenient.
SWT makes this Java app a pleasure. Yes, good swing apps are possible, but *damn* they've done a good job with this thing.
In summation, I urge anyone looking at Java IDE's to give Eclispe a look-see.
Oh, but you *can* see borders from space...
t hl ights_dmsp_big.jpg
Look at the border between North and South Korea visible here, my friend:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0011/ear
Oh, my aching head. God, (some other god, not the man-god we created to fear) created the universe, and its laws of physics, to support Kubrick's desire to exercise metaphors for a brief moment 20 billion years after creation, in one tiny corner of the universe. Okay. That's the only way that it fits! Using centrifugal force to simulate gravity is all part of God's plan to make it all work out so that engineers would be forced to design space station docking mechanisims in such a way to allow Kubrick to allude to coitus !!! I FIANLLLAYY USNGDER STATNDD!!!!
It would really bother me if I didn't realize that this all represents the most elaborate and brillant troll in the history of the web. (But maybe not usenet)
By the way, Wheat does make some good points about Kubrick's wordplay. (It just serves to make it seem all the more real !!)
Umm... the GPL ?? Just guessing.
This is quite an astute set of observations on your part, in my opinion. The leased life is a reality. And we do almost nothing to notice this fact. The bandwidth in our mediasphere is completely plugged with messages about the new and the better, the sexy, the without-which-you-can't-hope-to-mate.
Slashdotters and the like spend their lives struggling towards new innovations and 'better' applications of technology, with the assumption that 'forwards' is always better, no matter what. But, who owns the game?
Think about the answer really carefully before you put in that next all-nighter. Successful consumers ( the relevance of citizenship approached an epsilon sometime in the seventies ) struggle for that next promotion so that they can have the money to buy that better car/condo/computer/SUV/GPS/PDA so that they can have the status to mix with those of higher status so that they can get that next promotion so that they can
And what is the end game of technology? (At least, as it is applied in our culture) More productivity. But why? So I can enjoy my life more fully? I don't think so. What life? I have to work like mad to keep my skills current and meet that next OH-SO-IMPORTANT deadline, (like someone is going to starve if we ship a week later) while this 'prosperity' passes by my car window as I drive from my sleep unit to my workstation.
This culture is hostile to activities other than sleeping, working, and spending. You are not a citizen, you are a consumer. So, go forth, and fulfill your role, slave! And be grateful for the gilding of your cell! Don't question who owns this 'prosperity', or you will be denied its fruits! Get your hands off those control levers, we are in control now, just sit and watch your (our) television, and learn what will make you happy next!
So, the next time you stretch for that 'heroic' all-nighter, consider what you are struggling for. Are you really making the world a better place, or are you simply making the machinery of America[tm] more efficient?
ssia
http://www.theonion.com/onion3123/hawkingexo.html
Subject says it all. (Nearly)
What the hell is the point making something so *almost* healthy, and then ruining it with salt? I appreciate the attempt at vegetarianism, but this isn't quite what I was hoping for.
Huh? The tradition that the Clinton administration started? ?? For most of its existence, the Clinton administration has been the enemy of sensible export restrictions. Let's not be grateful to an entity who has merely decided to oppress us less.
Oh, absolutely!
And come to think of it, I shouldn't vote anymore, since I can't watch Meet the Press every Sunday... jeez.
I highly recommend it. I rarely watch any television, occasionally I watch one owned by a friend, so I am exposed to TV every once in a while.
I have to agree. Watching people watch TV is kind of horrifying. It's weird so see a perfectly good brain just sitting there rotting itself. Even if a person only watches a couple of shows every week, this translates into a pretty significant percentage of a person's non-work hours being spent in an activity that benefits only the advertizers.
I cannot believe that people *volunteer* to be abused by corporations in this way. People PAY for televisions, and PAY for cable/satellite service, which they really don't need, and why? So they can watch largely useless and silly programming, the only purpose of which is to trick you into watching hours and hours of subtle, mindbending persuasion, the purpose of which, in turn, is to condition viewers/subjects/victims to buy still MORE shit they don't need and didn't even know that wanted until they saw whichever bimbo-with-a-toothy-and-seductive-grin is popular this month on that INFERNAL FUCKING BOX OF DISTRACTION!!
Oooh.. that feels better...
Check this out:
http://www.adbusters.org
Oh my... The uninformed rantings of those who
cling to proprietary licensing schemes will surely now add mention of this to thier chants.
"If the GPL isn't about the destruction of capitalism, then why do communists love it so much?"
This will be offered as 'proof' of the GPL's illegitimacy.
I agree with this.
This development is just disgusting. How much industial capacity ( == (pollution output && resource consumption) ) does this represent? We've got to get a handle on ourselves, folks, our thoughtless urge to consume will do us in materially in the long run, if not spiritually in the short run.
-Helping Satan Daily, in small portions
Success is an essentially meaningless term. Many of us know this, experiencing the meaningless thrust towards an artificial deadline, to release a product of dubious value to the user.
R -V12.9pluspak that we did when we used Xy-write.
How much of the technology that we toot our own horns about really provides significant benefit to mankind? I think most slashdoters have the sense that it really takes a technologically savvy person to really exploit and profit from technology, at least on a personal level. How much progress has the user seen, in say a word processor, in the last 5 or 10 years? That's right. None. We're all writing the exact same letters and resumes with SUPER-ULTRA-BETTER-THAN-BRAND-X-Y2K-TURBO-WHATEVE
So what of the average person? What is this bubble of so-called prosperity made of? Endless forced upgrades, where the customer is snowed into believing that he absolutely has to have the latest and greatest in order to keep typing out his invoices? Sure, our stock options are fat, but is this something to be proud of?
Without doubt, automation and networking have provided massive economies of scale, allowing industry to be much more productive. I don't really think that there is any argument there. Items that used to be optional luxuries are now seen as requirements: $500 Weber grill, useless sport utility monstrosities that spend 95% of their existence on a freeway or a parking lot...
So, *yay*, our society is the most productive and opulent in all history. Am I the only one feeling a bit hollow? We've created a giant army of highly productive and innovative professionals, but WE FORGOT TO DECIDE WHERE WE WERE GOING BEFORE WE SET OUT ON THIS JOURNEY TO NOWHERE!!!
Look up from your cubicle and tell me we haven't built ourselves a guilded cage.
---
Explore:
http://www.adbusters.org/
http://www.unamerican.com/
If you have similar links, please send them my way.
Celebrate International Buy Nothing Day on November 26, 1999.
Well wait... that wasn't the scenario. Perhaps you did nothing wrong at all, and there is nothing in the encrypted message itself that would be 'self incriminating'. There is secret information in the file, and the authorities want the information in order to pursue someone else, not you.
You couldn't claim 5th amendment protection if the information they are after isn't about you to begin with.
Which leaves us back at the beginning, you are in violation of the law simply for failing to surrender the key.
-Helping Satan Daily, in small amounts
Satan's Little Helper