Skinner: Children, the times they are a-becoming quite different. Test
scores are at an all-time low, so I've come up with these
academic alerts. [hold stack of cards] You will receive one as
soon as your grades start to slip in any subject. This way
your parents won't have to wait until report card time to
punish you.
Martin: How innovative. I like it!
Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin.
[Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as
"Eat up Martha"]
I have noticed that all of the TCO reports always deal will 100% MS vs 100% *nix. Has anyone calculated what it would take to run a hybrid of the two? But I guess that would completely depend on what you wanted it to do.
In this particular case, it is client/server, so I don't think there could be too much crossover, but I am sure in other applications it could. Of course, that integration would be much easier if MS played well with others. But what about setting up an infrastructure so that the client side could be anything? (Linux, Windows, Mac) In reality they usually aren't pure client/server but some kind of bastard stepchild.
So I have a suggestion -- someone should start an open source project to create a re-writing proxy for updates that strips out all the stuff Microsoft is sending in the updates, except what is absolutely needed. Make it open enough that we can plug it re-writers for other companies as well.
I was thinking that there should be an OSS project that sends updates with whatever you define. It would be much more fun:
OS: Windows Shitacular
Word Processing: Open Office, ha ha fuck you
Web Browser: Standard Compliant, i.e. not IE
MediaPlayer: BillGatese.cx . . .
What happened to the good old days when college students sold blood, sperm or surfed the web to earn beer money!
You know you are old when:
You had to work a real job to get money in college
People refer to the "good old days" and in your mind it was yesterday
There was no World Wide Web when you were in college (unless you count FTP, BBSs, and Gopher sites)
Your final paper in Computer Hardware Design was on the Pentium processor, and you could only find three sources because it wasn't due to be released for another 6 months.
You post on Slashdot recounting how old you are, hoping someone will think you are cool
What percentage of Office sales goes to home users as opposed to corporate Knowledge Workers? The was a basic alternative to Office from Microsoft, it was called MS Works. Except no one used it because they had Office at work and couldn't fathom anything else. When Win95 shipped, all OEMs included Works. These days it's Office, even though Works is still available. Why is that?
I think that the key here is that people can get a copy of Office from their friends or from work for home. I don't know too many people that would shell out the money for MSOffice at home. Is it technically legal? No. Does it happen? Yes, a lot.
People may have Office at home, but how many people use all the components of it? MS bundled them together, and people are used to the name. Brand recognition is HUGE. I wonder how many people reading this are saying to themselves "What is MS Works?". One could argue that by bundling the components of Office that MS was ensuring that they would all get purchased, installed, and used.
Me? I don't care, because I don't use it at home. Even though I have it installed (won't say where I got it..., umm, I mean I bought it), and I also have Open Office installed, I don't use them. I don't do anything at home that requires a word processor. I was all excited when I got OpenOffice downloaded, but after installing it I think I launched it once. But that is just me. People use Office because it is the standard. Now WHY it is the standard can be argued.
What's sad is it is all too true. Instead of innovating, a lot of OSS projects that are supposed to be like MS apps usually just mimick, rather than truly innovate.
This of course assumes that everything MS does is innovative.
To the end user, it may seem that MS innovates, but in reality they buy (or partner with) the companies that innovate. Now I am not saying that they don't come up with some new ideas, you would be blind to think that they haven't had one or two good ideas. But I truly believe that all the REAL innovation comes from smaller companies.
I don't deny that MSOffice is a good product, but I don't use 90% of the features in it for home use. There is a need for basic alternatives to MSOffice for the home user. How many home users use revision tracking, embedded notes, and a lot of the other features included in Office? There needs to be alternatives to MSOffice that MS cannot push around.
(I saw the smiley, too bad the moderators didn't.)
Nope. Didn't see a computer until a couple of years later. TRS-80 I believe, then we got a used C64 at home. When I got to high school, started taking computer classes, programming BASIC on the TRS-80s. Then we got in the new 286s. Sweet.
I don't proclaim to be some uber-geek, I can swap "my first computer" stories, but they aren't that impressive. I didn't actually buy a computer myself until 1990 (3rd year of college), and that was a 386dx-33 for about $2200. My next computer was a P266. The one after that was an Athlon900. I was around the damn things all day, I didn't want to go home and mess with them. I had no desire to use them at home, until Linux came along.:-) Before that, anything I needed to do could be done at work.
Yeah, I know, there are people around here who probably built PDP-11s from spare parts around the house when they were 12, but not me. I didn't get into computers until high-school. I played a lot of Atari2600 and ColecoVision and visited one or both of the arcades that managed to stay in business in my home town. Computers were fringe, man. Why sit at home in front of a tiny screen when you could be at an arcade pumping in quarters, sneaking cigarettes, swearing at the games, and hanging out? I had Pac-Man fever. If you didn't grow up during that time, you just don't understand.
To which 12yr old me would say:
What the hell does register mean, and what is slashdot.org?
33yroldme: It is a website
12yroldme: What the hell is a website?
33yroldme: You know the internet.
12yroldme: What the hell is the internet?
33yroldme: A bunch of computers hooked up together to share information.
12yroldme: What the hell is a computer?
33yroldme: You know, a personal computer.
12yroldme: No, I have no idea what you are talking about.
33yroldme: It is a screen, like a TV, and you can do all kinds of things on it, like playing games.
12yroldme: Oh, in your house, like an Atari?
33yroldme: Yeah, sort of, but they are all over the world too.
12yroldme: Oh, you mean in the arcade like a Pac-Man machine? And that new game, Pole Position? That game is cool. It is so realistic! Or Joust, that game is fun because two people can play at once. I have only played it a couple of times because it is brand new. There is always a line for it.
33yroldme: Dude, nevermind. Have fun.
will tell you, a good amount of SCAMMERS are on ebay and I swear most of them end up scamming people on performance car parts... or fake "upgrades" like a teeny $0.05 resistor that is supposed to add 20 HP for $50..
Honda's with fake performance parts and upgrades? No way. That coffee can doesn't really add 15 HP? Stickers don't make me go faster? That wing isn't really doing anything? I can't just add up the HP claims on all my parts to get my total HP?
Don't blame eBay, there are plenty of other places to get scammed on this stuff.
No pr0n jokes, please... how big does a hard drive need to be? I mean, once everyone is doing their own digital video, PVR software, archiving their entire music library in MP3 format... you're only up to a couple-hundred GB. Does a 4TB hard drive make sense in a personal computer? Can you apply the TB/inch in much smaller form factors, such as SD cards? Even there, do I need more than, say 20GB on a palm pilot? How do you back up such huge systems? Summary: the server market has a use for these future maxi-drives, but they'll be a hard sell to the general public.
It still amazes me that tech people can be so short-sighted.
Stop thinking with your current brain - think with the brain that you'll have in 10 years! Think about where we were 10 years ago. What was the fastest PC you could buy? I believe that the Pentium was just being released. Now I have a Pentium that just acts as my firewall, because it can't really do much else. Hard drives were around 200 MB I think. What if engineers back then said "why would you ever need more than 200 MB?" Reasons for more storage? How about 100GB on a card the size of a compact flash card. For what? How about to replace DVDs? We rip our music to the MP3 format to save space. We encode movies to save space. Ask a TiVO owner if they would like to have a TB drive. Then ask a TiVO owner who has HDTV.
Your backup issues are not relative either. How do you back up a 100MB drive? With a bigger drive. How do you back up a 10GB drive? With a bigger drive. You can see where this is going.
Think about this: Look at the way drives work now. We (well, the OS really) reuses the space on them, and has to keep track of where all the data physically resides on the disk. What if the drive was so large, say 10 TB, that you didn't need to do that? Instead of deleting something off the drive, you simply write it to a new location and move on. I know that is what happens now, but there would me less management of that data if it didn't have to consider size constraints. Now we use disks that spin, and talk about seek time and platters. With advances in storage, these could be things of the past. Who knows, maybe data will be stored in an organically organized 3D matrix of atomic-level particles, and seek time will be static. Maybe there will be no heat build-up, no moving parts to fail.
The possibilities of endless, instant-access storage would be amazing. 24/7 digital video recording for security systems. Las Vegas alone could use this. No more wondering "do I have enough space to install this?". Want to install the latest release of RedHat 23.0, just install it to a new partition (or quadrant, or whatever we have) and go.
I am just throwing out stuff here, but we have advanced pretty far in 10 years because of advancements in technology. Sure, the ideas have been there too, but the technology has to be in sync for it to take off. (Apple Newton?) I know the tech industry hasn't been around that long, but we have some history to look back on. Don't say things like "I'll never use that much space" or "Why would I need a processor that powerful?". We will need it, we will think of ways to use it.
The speed at which the team was able to fix all of the branding graphics, text, and registry entries in the system is a testament to the company's dynamic process for fixing bugs, Wanke said. The problem was that several thousand changes needed to be made, and that would normally require several thousand new entries in the product's bug tracking system. "I went out and handpicked the three best developers on the team and said, 'just go and fix it.' One developer fixed over 7,000 references to [Windows].NET Server. Let's just say that there are people I trust, and people I don't trust. I told these guys, 'don't tell me what you're doing. Just do it.'"
Ahh, good ol' sed. I wonder if he used the Windows version, or if he booted up the Linux box?:-)
This just goes to show that even the biggest software developers have to deal with "simple" requests like name changes that are very inefficient uses of engineers time. I want to know what super-duper advanced bug system they use.
HAHA. that's funny. I can think of three reasons to do this: ((snip))
Or maybe it is as simple as EVERYONE HATES SPAMMERS! Even Microsoft.
Or maybe it is just because there is something out there that Microsoft doesn't own. It could be that one of the stipulations of the lawsuit is that Microsoft is allowed to purchase the spam harvesting intellectual property rights.;-)
At first I thought you were just another troll, but then I realized that you aren't. You are just someone who thinks they know how everything works, which probably hasn't changed since you got beaten up in high school. Allow me to retort...
So the popular people you mention had physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if you weren't given athletic ability, screw you, eh?...and I bet you think you left that behavior back in high school.
Nope. Of the two people I mentioned, one was athletic (a pitcher and runner), the other really wasn't. But he joined the tennis and golf team. They were both grade A geeks. They had uber-geek friends. They did get picked on, but they also had friends. They dated girls. They looked like normal teenage kids, kind of funny looking. They didn't fit the stereotype you wish they did. Well, maybe they fit several stereotypes.
PS -- you don't know trauma. In every instance where "smart" kids were part of the popular crowd, there were enough of them to form a clique, they were in a school district with wealth (their high school had average incomes above $50k/y, adjust for local cost of living), and it wasn't in a surrounding culture that valued "book learnin'" as a negative characteristic.
Yes, I can imagine in such a setting that not getting your first choice for the prom is indeed a passing trauma, quickly forgotten. But clearly you were never stuffed into a locker or knocked down for being yourself.
You were lucky. Pure and simple, you were lucky. Who you were was compatible with social norms. You went to a rich high school ("oh, not that rich," you'll say, proving you don't know the meaning of poor) and you had a peer group. I bet you were athletic.
Gee, I guess if by "rich" you mean "a farming community", then we were millionaires. There were good country people, rednecks, farmers, and some (relatively) wealthy people. The vast majority were NOT wealthy, we certainly weren't. Hard working, middle-lower class people. My dad never bought a new car, we grew a lot of our own food.
If you think some big, corn-fed rednecks don't look down on "book learnin'" then you are sadly mistaken. I was picked on and made fun of quite a bit. I don't know if I would call it trauma, but I sure never forgot it. I was somewhat athletic, but I had to work at it. But I didn't hang out with the jocks, more often with the geeks. So I got picked on by a multitude of people. I don't think I was ever stuffed into a locker, but I know my head dented a few. Tripped, clothes ripped, books knocked out of my hands, charley horses, etc etc. It's all there.
Now--imagine not being athletic. You didn't get to play any sports, so you couldn't tell your safety cheerleader (remember, the first one turned you down) which sport you played. "Chess club," you say, and you get laughter from the chicks who get snubbed by the cheerleaders.
You try vainly to wear what everybody else wears. You shower twice a day to make sure there's no oil on your face. Maybe you endure some humiliating medical treatments because the acne just doesn't pass. But "Buck up, little camper! Just smile and have self-confidence and be yourself and you'll be liked for who you are!"
Unless who you are doesn't involve charisma, soccer, or invovles a less than perfectly symmetric face. Then your smiles are greeted with smirks, your self-confidence ruthlessly assailed until you turn away, and then somebody knocks you down from behind.
The coach assigned to watch the kids laughs.
Feeling good about yourself yet? Think it's your fault for not playing soccer well enough? Damn, if only you'd learned to not mention a book you read. Stupid geek, books are for nerds.
And you never went to the prom. It wasn't an option. Maybe you wanted to, maybe you didn't, maybe you pretended you didn't. But you didn't, and you didn't have a choice. And honestly, that's the least traumatic thing about high school.
You don't know shit about trauma. *I* call BS.
Dude, you have some issues. What I have said is true, I am sorry that upsets you. Sounds to my like you tried REALLY hard to fit in, and that probably showed. I know, everyone tries to fit in, I did too. But if all you are trying to do is keep up and be everyone else, you aren't going to get anywhere.
I don't know how old you are, but if you are over 21, you need to snap the fuck out of it. I never said I had some kind of major trauma, I didn't know this was a "let's compare our miserable high school experiences" game. Fine, you WIN. Are you happy now? I am not going to feel sorry for you, because that will do you no good. But just like you have no idea who I am, I am not going to pretend like I know who you are. You have to figure that out. I am guessing that you are relatively young, and that you will grow up to realize that high-school, while traumatic, wasn't that big of a deal unless you allow it to be. Provided of course that you can move on, and get past everything.
The sad people are the ones who are still living their high school lives 10 years later. That applies to EVERYONE, not just geeks.
Here is a little insight for you. I went to my 10 year reunion. The talk of the reunion was one of the biggest dorks who had a very hot woman on his arm. Some of the "badasses" in high school were married with kids, and were totally cool to me, even though they had kicked my ass all through high school. Then there were those people who hadn't changed a bit. It was very obvious, and I felt really sorry for them. The good part about not being one of the cool people in high school is being able to look back on it after you have made something of yourself and realize that you have grown up. I don't look back on high school as my "glory days", those are ahead of me.
"Being smart doesn't mean you are a nerd. I knew straight A students who were all around athletes and in the "cool" crowd. "
I would rather have a child eho challenged himself and got B's, then one that took the easy couses and got A's.
Nice ASSumption and pigeonholing. Except the person I was actually referring to was the valedictorian, I think he went on to get an aerospace engineering degree from the University of Illinois. Another relatively cool guy I knew now works at Fermilab.
"Being a nerd (or smart) doesn't mean you can't be athletic. See #2. "
True. But to become really good at something it requires lots of time. this is why 'Nerds' seldom are at the top of any athletic ranking. Because they enjoy and spend most of there time thinking of something besides sports.
I think you have watched the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" too many times.
Yes, but when you get the snot pounded out of you regularly for watching star trek reruns, and enjoying activities like chess, and cryptograms it can and will, have an effect that will ripple though someones life.
Sounds like you are still living in the past. And I doubt you got beat up for watching a TV show. Maybe it was because you spoke Klingon to your friends, or got into huge arguements about D&D, or insulted people bigger than you by calling them morons, or didn't stick up for yourself, or one of the other thousands of reasons that people get picked on in high school. It happens for a very wide variety of reasons, and not just to geeks and not just by jocks.
These werent your usual software types. Just young naive greedy guys. No way theyd make a business.
There are no "usual software types". And there were a lot of these types of people around during the.com years. They were programmers that were suddenly executives. The movie wasn't necessarily only about programmers, but I think the portrayal of the programmers in it was accurate.
To be honest, why would you want to see an accurate portrayal of a programmer in a movie? There is nothing exciting or interesting about it, unless you are into technology. The average person (what is it nowadays, "joe sixpack"?) would be very uninterested in an accurate portrayal of programmers.
It's a lengthy but engaging writeup of that chamber of horrors we call high school and why being smarter than the average bear is more of a liability than an asset during that stage in life.
Sorry, but I call BS.
1. Being a nerd doesn't mean you are smart. I knew plenty of dumbass nerds.
2. Being smart doesn't mean you are a nerd. I knew straight A students who were all around athletes and in the "cool" crowd.
3. Being a nerd (or smart) doesn't mean you can't be athletic. See #2.
4. High school is a traumatic time for pretty much everyone, not just the smart/nerdy people.
And I use "traumatic" lightly, because I realize that high school was not that big of a deal. (I hope everyone else realizes that) It was just another period in my life.
Yep. startup.com was a pretty accurate portrayal. IMDB Link
It was a documentary, and it was real people, but what do you want, another Office Space comment?
Actually, a pretty accurate portrayal of a programmer in a movie was in Pump Up the Volume, even though he ran a pirate radio station and wasn't a programmer. He worked out of his parent's basement, was a loner, and had a different on-air personality than in real life.
eah I agree. He didn't have good questions to answer in the first place. Garbage in, Garbage out. (or "Shit I/O" as I say).
The interview questions made me shake my head in embarassment as a/. reader. The answers were about as good as anyone could do. The last question really summed it up.
What I do picture as funny is the dorks who got their questions modded up, sitting there excitedly reading the response, hoping for any acknowledgement of their "witty" question, and getting nothing. Oh, the rationalizations that must follow "He just didn't get it!", "Dave Barry just isn't funny", or hopefully "God, I AM a loser fanboy".
Now if users believe that Palladium = evil, they will just not buy new computers. Sure, some peopel will, but what matters is the public at large.
So suppose all the major comptuer makers go Pallidum only (you seem to forget that 50% of comptuer are purchased form a non-major manufacturer like local shops). Fine, if the public believes that Palladium = the sux and just doesn't buy it, then the consequence is that the big makers loose money. A lot of money.
First of all, nobody knows what Palladium is. Sure, you and your friends may know, but ask your parents, ask 10 people on the street. Ask the computer guy at Circuit City. I'll bet they don't know. And I highly doubt that Palladium would be released with evil set to 11 right out of the gate. MS is too smart for that. They would release a dormant version, or an inactive version. They would first capture the market.
MS is like Ron Jeremy. Ease it in, nice and slow. Once it is in, they would just ram it home, bukake their customers, and collect their paychecks.
Slashdot Mirror
5. Goto 4
Martin: How innovative. I like it!
Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin.
[Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as "Eat up Martha"]
Dolph: Bah! [throws Newton]
Martin: [being bonked on the head] Ow!
In this particular case, it is client/server, so I don't think there could be too much crossover, but I am sure in other applications it could. Of course, that integration would be much easier if MS played well with others. But what about setting up an infrastructure so that the client side could be anything? (Linux, Windows, Mac) In reality they usually aren't pure client/server but some kind of bastard stepchild.
What do you mean? Mine's out.
Obviously, I cannot compete with someone who is old enough to use the phrase "bee's knees". :-)
I was thinking that there should be an OSS project that sends updates with whatever you define. It would be much more fun:
OS: Windows Shitacular
.
.
.
Word Processing: Open Office, ha ha fuck you
Web Browser: Standard Compliant, i.e. not IE
MediaPlayer: BillGatese.cx
Oh, the fun we could have.
You know you are old when:
You had to work a real job to get money in college
People refer to the "good old days" and in your mind it was yesterday
There was no World Wide Web when you were in college (unless you count FTP, BBSs, and Gopher sites)
Your final paper in Computer Hardware Design was on the Pentium processor, and you could only find three sources because it wasn't due to be released for another 6 months.
You post on Slashdot recounting how old you are, hoping someone will think you are cool
I think that the key here is that people can get a copy of Office from their friends or from work for home. I don't know too many people that would shell out the money for MSOffice at home. Is it technically legal? No. Does it happen? Yes, a lot.
People may have Office at home, but how many people use all the components of it? MS bundled them together, and people are used to the name. Brand recognition is HUGE. I wonder how many people reading this are saying to themselves "What is MS Works?". One could argue that by bundling the components of Office that MS was ensuring that they would all get purchased, installed, and used.
Me? I don't care, because I don't use it at home. Even though I have it installed (won't say where I got it..., umm, I mean I bought it), and I also have Open Office installed, I don't use them. I don't do anything at home that requires a word processor. I was all excited when I got OpenOffice downloaded, but after installing it I think I launched it once. But that is just me. People use Office because it is the standard. Now WHY it is the standard can be argued.
You need to get a real browser. :-)
This of course assumes that everything MS does is innovative.
To the end user, it may seem that MS innovates, but in reality they buy (or partner with) the companies that innovate. Now I am not saying that they don't come up with some new ideas, you would be blind to think that they haven't had one or two good ideas. But I truly believe that all the REAL innovation comes from smaller companies.
I don't deny that MSOffice is a good product, but I don't use 90% of the features in it for home use. There is a need for basic alternatives to MSOffice for the home user. How many home users use revision tracking, embedded notes, and a lot of the other features included in Office? There needs to be alternatives to MSOffice that MS cannot push around.
(I saw the smiley, too bad the moderators didn't.)
Nope. Didn't see a computer until a couple of years later. TRS-80 I believe, then we got a used C64 at home. When I got to high school, started taking computer classes, programming BASIC on the TRS-80s. Then we got in the new 286s. Sweet.
I don't proclaim to be some uber-geek, I can swap "my first computer" stories, but they aren't that impressive. I didn't actually buy a computer myself until 1990 (3rd year of college), and that was a 386dx-33 for about $2200. My next computer was a P266. The one after that was an Athlon900. I was around the damn things all day, I didn't want to go home and mess with them. I had no desire to use them at home, until Linux came along. :-) Before that, anything I needed to do could be done at work.
Yeah, I know, there are people around here who probably built PDP-11s from spare parts around the house when they were 12, but not me. I didn't get into computers until high-school. I played a lot of Atari2600 and ColecoVision and visited one or both of the arcades that managed to stay in business in my home town. Computers were fringe, man. Why sit at home in front of a tiny screen when you could be at an arcade pumping in quarters, sneaking cigarettes, swearing at the games, and hanging out? I had Pac-Man fever. If you didn't grow up during that time, you just don't understand.
To which 12yr old me would say:
What the hell does register mean, and what is slashdot.org?
33yroldme: It is a website
12yroldme: What the hell is a website?
33yroldme: You know the internet.
12yroldme: What the hell is the internet?
33yroldme: A bunch of computers hooked up together to share information.
12yroldme: What the hell is a computer?
33yroldme: You know, a personal computer.
12yroldme: No, I have no idea what you are talking about.
33yroldme: It is a screen, like a TV, and you can do all kinds of things on it, like playing games.
12yroldme: Oh, in your house, like an Atari?
33yroldme: Yeah, sort of, but they are all over the world too.
12yroldme: Oh, you mean in the arcade like a Pac-Man machine? And that new game, Pole Position? That game is cool. It is so realistic! Or Joust, that game is fun because two people can play at once. I have only played it a couple of times because it is brand new. There is always a line for it.
33yroldme: Dude, nevermind. Have fun.
Honda's with fake performance parts and upgrades? No way. That coffee can doesn't really add 15 HP? Stickers don't make me go faster? That wing isn't really doing anything? I can't just add up the HP claims on all my parts to get my total HP?
Don't blame eBay, there are plenty of other places to get scammed on this stuff.
It still amazes me that tech people can be so short-sighted.
Stop thinking with your current brain - think with the brain that you'll have in 10 years! Think about where we were 10 years ago. What was the fastest PC you could buy? I believe that the Pentium was just being released. Now I have a Pentium that just acts as my firewall, because it can't really do much else. Hard drives were around 200 MB I think. What if engineers back then said "why would you ever need more than 200 MB?" Reasons for more storage? How about 100GB on a card the size of a compact flash card. For what? How about to replace DVDs? We rip our music to the MP3 format to save space. We encode movies to save space. Ask a TiVO owner if they would like to have a TB drive. Then ask a TiVO owner who has HDTV.
Your backup issues are not relative either. How do you back up a 100MB drive? With a bigger drive. How do you back up a 10GB drive? With a bigger drive. You can see where this is going.
Think about this: Look at the way drives work now. We (well, the OS really) reuses the space on them, and has to keep track of where all the data physically resides on the disk. What if the drive was so large, say 10 TB, that you didn't need to do that? Instead of deleting something off the drive, you simply write it to a new location and move on. I know that is what happens now, but there would me less management of that data if it didn't have to consider size constraints. Now we use disks that spin, and talk about seek time and platters. With advances in storage, these could be things of the past. Who knows, maybe data will be stored in an organically organized 3D matrix of atomic-level particles, and seek time will be static. Maybe there will be no heat build-up, no moving parts to fail.
The possibilities of endless, instant-access storage would be amazing. 24/7 digital video recording for security systems. Las Vegas alone could use this. No more wondering "do I have enough space to install this?". Want to install the latest release of RedHat 23.0, just install it to a new partition (or quadrant, or whatever we have) and go.
I am just throwing out stuff here, but we have advanced pretty far in 10 years because of advancements in technology. Sure, the ideas have been there too, but the technology has to be in sync for it to take off. (Apple Newton?) I know the tech industry hasn't been around that long, but we have some history to look back on. Don't say things like "I'll never use that much space" or "Why would I need a processor that powerful?". We will need it, we will think of ways to use it.
Don't worry your pretty little head about that, let Uncle Palladium take care of it.
Ahh, good ol' sed. I wonder if he used the Windows version, or if he booted up the Linux box? :-)
This just goes to show that even the biggest software developers have to deal with "simple" requests like name changes that are very inefficient uses of engineers time. I want to know what super-duper advanced bug system they use.
Or maybe it is as simple as EVERYONE HATES SPAMMERS! Even Microsoft.
Or maybe it is just because there is something out there that Microsoft doesn't own. It could be that one of the stipulations of the lawsuit is that Microsoft is allowed to purchase the spam harvesting intellectual property rights. ;-)
So the popular people you mention had physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if you weren't given athletic ability, screw you, eh? ...and I bet you think you left that behavior back in high school.
Nope. Of the two people I mentioned, one was athletic (a pitcher and runner), the other really wasn't. But he joined the tennis and golf team. They were both grade A geeks. They had uber-geek friends. They did get picked on, but they also had friends. They dated girls. They looked like normal teenage kids, kind of funny looking. They didn't fit the stereotype you wish they did. Well, maybe they fit several stereotypes.
PS -- you don't know trauma. In every instance where "smart" kids were part of the popular crowd, there were enough of them to form a clique, they were in a school district with wealth (their high school had average incomes above $50k/y, adjust for local cost of living), and it wasn't in a surrounding culture that valued "book learnin'" as a negative characteristic. Yes, I can imagine in such a setting that not getting your first choice for the prom is indeed a passing trauma, quickly forgotten. But clearly you were never stuffed into a locker or knocked down for being yourself. You were lucky. Pure and simple, you were lucky. Who you were was compatible with social norms. You went to a rich high school ("oh, not that rich," you'll say, proving you don't know the meaning of poor) and you had a peer group. I bet you were athletic.
Gee, I guess if by "rich" you mean "a farming community", then we were millionaires. There were good country people, rednecks, farmers, and some (relatively) wealthy people. The vast majority were NOT wealthy, we certainly weren't. Hard working, middle-lower class people. My dad never bought a new car, we grew a lot of our own food.
If you think some big, corn-fed rednecks don't look down on "book learnin'" then you are sadly mistaken. I was picked on and made fun of quite a bit. I don't know if I would call it trauma, but I sure never forgot it. I was somewhat athletic, but I had to work at it. But I didn't hang out with the jocks, more often with the geeks. So I got picked on by a multitude of people. I don't think I was ever stuffed into a locker, but I know my head dented a few. Tripped, clothes ripped, books knocked out of my hands, charley horses, etc etc. It's all there.
Now--imagine not being athletic. You didn't get to play any sports, so you couldn't tell your safety cheerleader (remember, the first one turned you down) which sport you played. "Chess club," you say, and you get laughter from the chicks who get snubbed by the cheerleaders. You try vainly to wear what everybody else wears. You shower twice a day to make sure there's no oil on your face. Maybe you endure some humiliating medical treatments because the acne just doesn't pass. But "Buck up, little camper! Just smile and have self-confidence and be yourself and you'll be liked for who you are!" Unless who you are doesn't involve charisma, soccer, or invovles a less than perfectly symmetric face. Then your smiles are greeted with smirks, your self-confidence ruthlessly assailed until you turn away, and then somebody knocks you down from behind. The coach assigned to watch the kids laughs. Feeling good about yourself yet? Think it's your fault for not playing soccer well enough? Damn, if only you'd learned to not mention a book you read. Stupid geek, books are for nerds. And you never went to the prom. It wasn't an option. Maybe you wanted to, maybe you didn't, maybe you pretended you didn't. But you didn't, and you didn't have a choice. And honestly, that's the least traumatic thing about high school. You don't know shit about trauma. *I* call BS.
Dude, you have some issues. What I have said is true, I am sorry that upsets you. Sounds to my like you tried REALLY hard to fit in, and that probably showed. I know, everyone tries to fit in, I did too. But if all you are trying to do is keep up and be everyone else, you aren't going to get anywhere.
I don't know how old you are, but if you are over 21, you need to snap the fuck out of it. I never said I had some kind of major trauma, I didn't know this was a "let's compare our miserable high school experiences" game. Fine, you WIN. Are you happy now? I am not going to feel sorry for you, because that will do you no good. But just like you have no idea who I am, I am not going to pretend like I know who you are. You have to figure that out. I am guessing that you are relatively young, and that you will grow up to realize that high-school, while traumatic, wasn't that big of a deal unless you allow it to be. Provided of course that you can move on, and get past everything.
The sad people are the ones who are still living their high school lives 10 years later. That applies to EVERYONE, not just geeks.
Here is a little insight for you. I went to my 10 year reunion. The talk of the reunion was one of the biggest dorks who had a very hot woman on his arm. Some of the "badasses" in high school were married with kids, and were totally cool to me, even though they had kicked my ass all through high school. Then there were those people who hadn't changed a bit. It was very obvious, and I felt really sorry for them. The good part about not being one of the cool people in high school is being able to look back on it after you have made something of yourself and realize that you have grown up. I don't look back on high school as my "glory days", those are ahead of me.
I would rather have a child eho challenged himself and got B's, then one that took the easy couses and got A's.
Nice ASSumption and pigeonholing. Except the person I was actually referring to was the valedictorian, I think he went on to get an aerospace engineering degree from the University of Illinois. Another relatively cool guy I knew now works at Fermilab.
"Being a nerd (or smart) doesn't mean you can't be athletic. See #2. "
True. But to become really good at something it requires lots of time. this is why 'Nerds' seldom are at the top of any athletic ranking. Because they enjoy and spend most of there time thinking of something besides sports.
I think you have watched the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" too many times.
Yes, but when you get the snot pounded out of you regularly for watching star trek reruns, and enjoying activities like chess, and cryptograms it can and will, have an effect that will ripple though someones life.
Sounds like you are still living in the past. And I doubt you got beat up for watching a TV show. Maybe it was because you spoke Klingon to your friends, or got into huge arguements about D&D, or insulted people bigger than you by calling them morons, or didn't stick up for yourself, or one of the other thousands of reasons that people get picked on in high school. It happens for a very wide variety of reasons, and not just to geeks and not just by jocks.
There are no "usual software types". And there were a lot of these types of people around during the .com years. They were programmers that were suddenly executives. The movie wasn't necessarily only about programmers, but I think the portrayal of the programmers in it was accurate.
To be honest, why would you want to see an accurate portrayal of a programmer in a movie? There is nothing exciting or interesting about it, unless you are into technology. The average person (what is it nowadays, "joe sixpack"?) would be very uninterested in an accurate portrayal of programmers.
Sorry, but I call BS.
1. Being a nerd doesn't mean you are smart. I knew plenty of dumbass nerds.
2. Being smart doesn't mean you are a nerd. I knew straight A students who were all around athletes and in the "cool" crowd.
3. Being a nerd (or smart) doesn't mean you can't be athletic. See #2.
4. High school is a traumatic time for pretty much everyone, not just the smart/nerdy people. And I use "traumatic" lightly, because I realize that high school was not that big of a deal. (I hope everyone else realizes that) It was just another period in my life.
It was a documentary, and it was real people, but what do you want, another Office Space comment?
Actually, a pretty accurate portrayal of a programmer in a movie was in Pump Up the Volume, even though he ran a pirate radio station and wasn't a programmer. He worked out of his parent's basement, was a loner, and had a different on-air personality than in real life.
The interview questions made me shake my head in embarassment as a /. reader. The answers were about as good as anyone could do. The last question really summed it up.
What I do picture as funny is the dorks who got their questions modded up, sitting there excitedly reading the response, hoping for any acknowledgement of their "witty" question, and getting nothing. Oh, the rationalizations that must follow "He just didn't get it!", "Dave Barry just isn't funny", or hopefully "God, I AM a loser fanboy".
A few other things:
I never thought it would make you go blind, but you do it so much you just might.
What is with the NSync and David Hasselhoff posters?
Members Only jackets will never come back in style - throw it away!
As much as I would hate to watch it - exercise!
Please, for the love of all that is sane and holy, stop trying to imitate that goatse guy in your bedroom mirror.
First of all, nobody knows what Palladium is. Sure, you and your friends may know, but ask your parents, ask 10 people on the street. Ask the computer guy at Circuit City. I'll bet they don't know. And I highly doubt that Palladium would be released with evil set to 11 right out of the gate. MS is too smart for that. They would release a dormant version, or an inactive version. They would first capture the market.
MS is like Ron Jeremy. Ease it in, nice and slow. Once it is in, they would just ram it home, bukake their customers, and collect their paychecks.