Lesson among all brick and mortar stores: your selection will always suck compared to online stores. Figure out a niche for yourself such that your selection doesn't suck so much, or have an online presence that's useful. I've given up a long time ago on blindly driving to a freaking store in the hopes they'd have this one thing I need and lo and behold they don't. So then I drive to another store, and another, etc. And after two hours I'm like, what the hell is wrong with me, I could've ordered this online. More and more of your shoppers will have this thinking, especially as gas prices keep increasing.
Tips for a useful online presence: I can check if something is in stock before I get there? Sweet. Even better, I can actually pay for it now and you'll have it ready to be picked up when I get there? Double sweet. I actually still buy stuff at Best Buy for this reason. Instant gratification by being able to get something right now instead of waiting for UPS is still an enticing thing, so I am sometimes willing to pay some extra markup for that (but not too much, Best Buy can be horrid but catch a sale our have a coupon, and it's not so bad).
Indeed, I think it is (was?) mandatory for US federal employees at a certain level to respond to any citizen correspondence, no matter how zany it might be. Remember my father way back when working as a physicist for the DOE having to respond to similar questions about particle colliders causing the end of the world or postulations about the flood in the bible somehow causing the hole in the ozone layer. There were some true/facepalm zingers he got, none of which I can remember now. Of course he didn't have the luxury of the internet or a blog site to post a mass-response, at the very best he had email or snail mail with which to respond to inquiries.
Being a scientist working for the government always got you weird requests it seemed, at least for him. Maybe it's not limited to government scientists.
After his retiring I remember either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel approached him about interviewing him as an expert for a show about atomic bomb tests causing cancer in John Wayne or something to that effect. He declined figuring they'd just make him look like a fool. Keep meaning to watch that program just to see what they came up with, assuming they followed through with it.
Back in my junior days I remember a team lead telling a junior colleague of mine, "Use tabs and I'll pull your scrotum over your head!!" Suffice to say I didn't use tabs for the next five years. Oddly enough though I've switched to tabs eventually.
On a TRS-80 CoCo, my first gaming experience was Dino Wars in cartridge form.
Being 4 years old I was entranced by Dino Wars... controlling a big red or blue dinosaur around on the TV screen was probably the coolest thing ever. The game itself probably wasn't that fun, but for the hardware it ran on it did some pretty advanced graphical stuff. Two dinosaurs on the screen at once, and you could move them left-right as well as toward the foreground/background. And the dinosaur "sprites" would scale in real-time (i.e. get smaller and smaller as you moved him further away).
In any case it left an impact on me. And when I got a little older and my Dad showed me how I could tell the computer what I wanted it to do using BASIC... I think that determined my career path right then.
But what a great piece of hardware the CoCo was, at least for me personally. First computer my family ever owned, back in 1983. I was able to teach myself BASIC and some rudimentary assembler on it, all before I was a teenager. Used it for a couple science projects even.
And all the while not realizing these were skills I could get paid for when I got older and entered the real world. It wasn't until high school where I saw they had a 3 year sequence of programming courses (BASIC to Pascal to a college level Computer Science course) that I realized it, haha.
Still have the CoCo in my closet. It still works last I checked. If I had a place for it I'd probably set it up but alas, fancier stuff has taken its place. Ah well. My rambling over.
great! in a few years we'll have holodecks! then maybe we'll finally have transporters (as far as I'm concerned, transporters should already have been invented... I'm tired of travelling and having to sit around for 8 blasted hours to get to Seattle! and waiting for things to come in the mail!!!!! damnit I want transporters!!!!!!!!!!!)
bye.
well, they have rights, but it's very popular to take some of them away to prtect their "safety", or something like that. Now, if this were some random person/corporation/gov't agency who demanded internet usage data from an ISP, and it held up in court, we'd be in trouble.... cough cough, ahem.
bye
what would be nice is for an actual movie to portray a "hacker" using vi in a simple text interface... instead of all this silly GUI stuff i see. enough's enough! it's time to show how boring programmers' lives really are!!!! (but really, a GUI just makes me less and less productive, pointing and clicking at things... to be fully optimized i MUST be using the keyboard only... anyone else feel the same way? or am i on crack? i could be, perhaps)
about nintendo playing a minor role in video games... it may come true in the home console market.... but no one can touch their gameboy.
Nintendo has a complete strangle hold over the hand held gaming business. The gameboy has been going strong for 10 freakin years it seems. It's probably the only reason why nintendo isnt out of business. you'd think that these gameboys would go away. i have three cousins... the oldest is 12. they play on them all the time. and its not just pokemon... i was shocked when i saw this. i remember playing this thing when i was their age... but now its in color and about a sixth of the size of my old one (i'm thinking of finding it and showing my cousins, just to scare the hell out of them).
then i realized... first its pretty damn cheap to buy. second theres gotta be a million games out for this thing now after 10 years... yes alot of those are probably really bad games, but there's must be good games for this thing. or maybe nintendo devised a way to transmit some sort of addictive substance through the buttons while youre playing. i cant tell... anyways just wanted to point out this fact.
yes the gameboy and gameboy advance are low tech... but just becuase something is lowtech doesnt mean it can have great games on it.
is this really that important subject? (i guess it is.... i just posted a comment... doh!) well since i'm here, i prefer email, because i'm too lazy to type the hyphen. in a perfect utopian society, though, there would be no email to begin with as we'd all be able to communicate through the use of brain waves. there would be an OSI model for brain communication, and CISCO would make brain routers (a brain network would be packet switched, i think). so there, i've changed subjects completely. haha!
what if you have a strictly unix environment for your network and someone installs nt? if i were IT dude in that possition i'd probably not care. but then again i'm a lazy bastard with no experience in IT management type stuff. this scenrio probably never happens. better scenraio: you have a bunch on linux machines and someone installs freeBSD!:P
why i dont vote: voting means nothing. politics means nothing. my belief is this: no matter who i vote for, i wont care. and i cannot decide on a candidate not because they are too much alike but because politicians hold too many beliefs of what the best way is. i am one to think that holding beliefs to is a dangerous thing. beliefs allow clouded thinking. maybe this is why i find myself so disinterested with politics. i just see it as alot of people ranting and raving about why such and such is good and why such and such is bad, and a whole lot of other people cheering for such and such because such and such is so great. i dont see a point.
i watched the first debate between bush and gore all the way through. the talked about nothing i care about. and the beliefs they hold on the subjects they did talk about are ridiculous. politics is a power trip for many. for others its an instrument to change society to the way they see fit. politics are dangerous. politics are like a religion. that is a bad thing.
politics have become so uninteresting to me. i am already a non-entity, especially in the minds of those trying tom get my vote. i dont find it to be that big of a deal. most of my friends vote. i dont see much of a difference between them and myself. if society comes crashing down or we become ruled by the militray you can blame me. i'll just apologize and go on with my life.
people have told me ms office when asked which OS is installed on their computer.
this does not mean office is an OS. 99.9% of the world's population can be highly uneducated on a subject, so why should their opinions matter? if i had some odd illness, would i listen to a doctor or take a survey of everyone and believe the most popular opinion?
Re:Haven't I seen this before?
on
Is UNIX An OS?
·
· Score: 1
i dont even think an OS should allow I/O. I/O is so slow and ineffcient. i want my athlon running at full speed all the time... i cant allow the von neuman bottleneck ruin my day. hell, running an OS requires memory... thats ineffcient too. thats why i run my processor with the null set OS! it's amazingly fast. and it can run anything you want, or actually it doesnt run anything at all but it dosnt matter because you be able to tell the difference because my OS uses no monitor. it uses nothing, and it itself is nothing.
by the way, i've already patented the null set OS and plan to buy microsoft within the next month.
um, just this past summer i was an intern doing Perl/SQL/HTML/unix sys admin for $19.50 an hour.
all my friends who have had technical interships have all gotten paid for it. (maybe not as much as me, but still plenty to consider them above the poverty line)
techie internships are verly likely to be paying, because there's a high demand for people who know how to do anything on a computer besides type.
Do you think the story is talking about sysadmins doing 25 hours shifts smacked out of their eyeballs, lying in a corner with a bucket of blood and puke?
heh... that'd be pretty interesting though. i'm wondering if some companies intentionally get their sysadmins addicted on some substance, so that they become their eternal slave/whores.
after looking behind me i have noticed a collection of re-animated corpses following me, calling me master and asking for brains to eat. how'd they get there? i guess i am a magician. wish someone would have told me beforehand. does anyone know how to get rid of these blasted things!
Slashdot Mirror
And thanks. Congratulations on a job well done
Lesson among all brick and mortar stores: your selection will always suck compared to online stores. Figure out a niche for yourself such that your selection doesn't suck so much, or have an online presence that's useful. I've given up a long time ago on blindly driving to a freaking store in the hopes they'd have this one thing I need and lo and behold they don't. So then I drive to another store, and another, etc. And after two hours I'm like, what the hell is wrong with me, I could've ordered this online. More and more of your shoppers will have this thinking, especially as gas prices keep increasing.
Tips for a useful online presence: I can check if something is in stock before I get there? Sweet. Even better, I can actually pay for it now and you'll have it ready to be picked up when I get there? Double sweet. I actually still buy stuff at Best Buy for this reason. Instant gratification by being able to get something right now instead of waiting for UPS is still an enticing thing, so I am sometimes willing to pay some extra markup for that (but not too much, Best Buy can be horrid but catch a sale our have a coupon, and it's not so bad).
Indeed, I think it is (was?) mandatory for US federal employees at a certain level to respond to any citizen correspondence, no matter how zany it might be. Remember my father way back when working as a physicist for the DOE having to respond to similar questions about particle colliders causing the end of the world or postulations about the flood in the bible somehow causing the hole in the ozone layer. There were some true /facepalm zingers he got, none of which I can remember now. Of course he didn't have the luxury of the internet or a blog site to post a mass-response, at the very best he had email or snail mail with which to respond to inquiries.
Being a scientist working for the government always got you weird requests it seemed, at least for him. Maybe it's not limited to government scientists.
After his retiring I remember either the History Channel or the Discovery Channel approached him about interviewing him as an expert for a show about atomic bomb tests causing cancer in John Wayne or something to that effect. He declined figuring they'd just make him look like a fool. Keep meaning to watch that program just to see what they came up with, assuming they followed through with it.
Indeed, indentation style is serious business.
Back in my junior days I remember a team lead telling a junior colleague of mine, "Use tabs and I'll pull your scrotum over your head!!" Suffice to say I didn't use tabs for the next five years. Oddly enough though I've switched to tabs eventually.
I'm amused by the fact the site is dead already. The mirrors hardly matter when the main site is hosed. ("Service Unavailable").
My servers! The mirrors do nothing!!!!
Anyone else read this as "Alien COMBAT May Have Infiltrated the Solar System"
I was thinking Star Wars when I clicked the link :(
On a TRS-80 CoCo, my first gaming experience was Dino Wars in cartridge form.
Being 4 years old I was entranced by Dino Wars... controlling a big red or blue dinosaur around on the TV screen was probably the coolest thing ever. The game itself probably wasn't that fun, but for the hardware it ran on it did some pretty advanced graphical stuff. Two dinosaurs on the screen at once, and you could move them left-right as well as toward the foreground/background. And the dinosaur "sprites" would scale in real-time (i.e. get smaller and smaller as you moved him further away).
In any case it left an impact on me. And when I got a little older and my Dad showed me how I could tell the computer what I wanted it to do using BASIC... I think that determined my career path right then.
But what a great piece of hardware the CoCo was, at least for me personally. First computer my family ever owned, back in 1983. I was able to teach myself BASIC and some rudimentary assembler on it, all before I was a teenager. Used it for a couple science projects even.
And all the while not realizing these were skills I could get paid for when I got older and entered the real world. It wasn't until high school where I saw they had a 3 year sequence of programming courses (BASIC to Pascal to a college level Computer Science course) that I realized it, haha.
Still have the CoCo in my closet. It still works last I checked. If I had a place for it I'd probably set it up but alas, fancier stuff has taken its place. Ah well. My rambling over.
great! in a few years we'll have holodecks! then maybe we'll finally have transporters (as far as I'm concerned, transporters should already have been invented... I'm tired of travelling and having to sit around for 8 blasted hours to get to Seattle! and waiting for things to come in the mail!!!!! damnit I want transporters!!!!!!!!!!!)
bye.
it's obvious we need quantum computers to tally votes. This way we'd know the results before anyone voted.
bye!
well, they have rights, but it's very popular to take some of them away to prtect their "safety", or something like that. Now, if this were some random person/corporation/gov't agency who demanded internet usage data from an ISP, and it held up in court, we'd be in trouble.... cough cough, ahem.
bye
what would be nice is for an actual movie to portray a "hacker" using vi in a simple text interface... instead of all this silly GUI stuff i see. enough's enough! it's time to show how boring programmers' lives really are!!!! (but really, a GUI just makes me less and less productive, pointing and clicking at things... to be fully optimized i MUST be using the keyboard only... anyone else feel the same way? or am i on crack? i could be, perhaps)
about nintendo playing a minor role in video games... it may come true in the home console market.... but no one can touch their gameboy.
:P im tired now
Nintendo has a complete strangle hold over the hand held gaming business. The gameboy has been going strong for 10 freakin years it seems. It's probably the only reason why nintendo isnt out of business. you'd think that these gameboys would go away. i have three cousins... the oldest is 12. they play on them all the time. and its not just pokemon... i was shocked when i saw this. i remember playing this thing when i was their age... but now its in color and about a sixth of the size of my old one (i'm thinking of finding it and showing my cousins, just to scare the hell out of them).
then i realized... first its pretty damn cheap to buy. second theres gotta be a million games out for this thing now after 10 years... yes alot of those are probably really bad games, but there's must be good games for this thing. or maybe nintendo devised a way to transmit some sort of addictive substance through the buttons while youre playing. i cant tell... anyways just wanted to point out this fact.
yes the gameboy and gameboy advance are low tech... but just becuase something is lowtech doesnt mean it can have great games on it.
the end
is this really that important subject? (i guess it is.... i just posted a comment... doh!) well since i'm here, i prefer email, because i'm too lazy to type the hyphen. in a perfect utopian society, though, there would be no email to begin with as we'd all be able to communicate through the use of brain waves. there would be an OSI model for brain communication, and CISCO would make brain routers (a brain network would be packet switched, i think). so there, i've changed subjects completely. haha!
what if you have a strictly unix environment for your network and someone installs nt? if i were IT dude in that possition i'd probably not care. but then again i'm a lazy bastard with no experience in IT management type stuff. this scenrio probably never happens. better scenraio: you have a bunch on linux machines and someone installs freeBSD! :P
why i dont vote: voting means nothing. politics means nothing. my belief is this: no matter who i vote for, i wont care. and i cannot decide on a candidate not because they are too much alike but because politicians hold too many beliefs of what the best way is. i am one to think that holding beliefs to is a dangerous thing. beliefs allow clouded thinking. maybe this is why i find myself so disinterested with politics. i just see it as alot of people ranting and raving about why such and such is good and why such and such is bad, and a whole lot of other people cheering for such and such because such and such is so great. i dont see a point.
i watched the first debate between bush and gore all the way through. the talked about nothing i care about. and the beliefs they hold on the subjects they did talk about are ridiculous. politics is a power trip for many. for others its an instrument to change society to the way they see fit. politics are dangerous. politics are like a religion. that is a bad thing.
politics have become so uninteresting to me. i am already a non-entity, especially in the minds of those trying tom get my vote. i dont find it to be that big of a deal. most of my friends vote. i dont see much of a difference between them and myself. if society comes crashing down or we become ruled by the militray you can blame me. i'll just apologize and go on with my life.
people have told me ms office when asked which OS is installed on their computer.
this does not mean office is an OS. 99.9% of the world's population can be highly uneducated on a subject, so why should their opinions matter? if i had some odd illness, would i listen to a doctor or take a survey of everyone and believe the most popular opinion?
i dont even think an OS should allow I/O. I/O is so slow and ineffcient. i want my athlon running at full speed all the time... i cant allow the von neuman bottleneck ruin my day. hell, running an OS requires memory... thats ineffcient too. thats why i run my processor with the null set OS! it's amazingly fast. and it can run anything you want, or actually it doesnt run anything at all but it dosnt matter because you be able to tell the difference because my OS uses no monitor. it uses nothing, and it itself is nothing.
by the way, i've already patented the null set OS and plan to buy microsoft within the next month.
also by the way, im kidding.
i've got a fix for that... back up all necessary files, format your hardrive and install anything other than win2k
this is obviously a ploy by microsoft to ruin file sharing for non-ms platforms. (i'm kidding :P)
about xawtv not working.... have you tried commenting out the omit xfree86-dga Option line in the your XF86config file. that worked for me
and yes, this is in the northeast.
um, just this past summer i was an intern doing Perl/SQL/HTML/unix sys admin for $19.50 an hour.
all my friends who have had technical interships have all gotten paid for it. (maybe not as much as me, but still plenty to consider them above the poverty line)
techie internships are verly likely to be paying, because there's a high demand for people who know how to do anything on a computer besides type.
-----------------------
Do you think the story is talking about sysadmins doing 25 hours shifts smacked out of their eyeballs, lying in a corner with a bucket of blood and puke?
heh... that'd be pretty interesting though. i'm wondering if some companies intentionally get their sysadmins addicted on some substance, so that they become their eternal slave/whores.
after looking behind me i have noticed a collection of re-animated corpses following me, calling me master and asking for brains to eat. how'd they get there? i guess i am a magician. wish someone would have told me beforehand. does anyone know how to get rid of these blasted things!
oh yeah forgot those. its still a silly society