Earth first as in the way things are going we may need to terraform Earth before we ever get to Mars.
Right now, with rapidly accelerating desertification, we're marsiforming Earth. When the CEO of Shell Oil is "terribly worried" about the environment, that's when you know we are FUCKED.
In the stage of the war during which the balloon bombs were used, Japan was no longer a conventional threat to the United States.
It was kind of the United States to "liberate" the Philippines, especially after the American occupation of the Philippines earlier in the century wherein we massacred hundreds of thousands of islanders.
Was the war on Japan a war of survival for the US? It was certainly necessary for us to remove them as a threat. Would we have given a damn about their invasion of the Philippines, Burma etc. and the Rape of Nanking if it were not for Pearl Harbor? I think not.
Your emotional and idealistic view of history is quaint.
Except, of course, for the Japanese. Very little threat to the US, except when we let our pants down at Pearl Harbor. It certainly was a war for survival for them, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate (both of which occurred when the Japanese were completely blockaded and had nowhere to go...)
Apparently singing in tune doesn't matter to the critics.
Not that this is a surprise.
Kind of original. Far too emo/indy. To call this rock is a ridiculous stretch.
I utterly hate this, which probably means that Starlister will become the bellwether of a whole new generation of schlock. I imagine they will go very far.
I wasn't being sarcastic OR fanboy. I thought the post I replied to was funny. I admit I am very slightly biased towards apple right now but a few months ago I couldn't give two shits about them and I'd been in that state for 10 years or more.
One thing you didn't mention is how each little bit of Linux code is a labor of love for the geeks that work on it. They aren't working for money, they're working because they are really interested in getting that Amiga video-toaster coprocessor to run Linux.
It's really kind of cool when you think about it, how Microsoft's huge money muscle is no match for the coding done by kids and ponytail grad students in the small hours.
I HATE hitches. When gaming or doing anything else, Windows has to write to the disk or read from the disk every little while. You kind of get used to them, but for some reason I've become very annoyed by Windows writing cache or whatever it does.
UNIX does not seem to do this. In fact, the memory management and drive handling in Linux is so much smoother than Windows that it astonishes me. Applications running on Wine, even applications running in emulated XP on VMware, run smoother than applications running in native windows.
Yes, I know about drive fragmentation, and I do have enough RAM to do what I do. Shouldn't be a problem. It shouldn't BE that a 233 box from, uh, 1998 is silky smooth in comparison to a hitchy XP on an Athlon 1800. Totally ridiculous. This is obviously not taking into account rendering speed or drive access while loading. However, when doing browsing and word processing, running a fairly stripped down Gnome, the 233 is buttery smooth and never touches the drive. Oh, and the AMD box has 1/8 the memory. NOT ONLY ALL THIS but I think Linux has greatly slowed the drive wear and tear I was getting with Windows.
WHY WHY WHY could some bozo in Finland cobble together an OS that absolutely wipes the floor with the best that a multibillion dollar corporation can come up with? On something as apparently straight forward and uninteresting as memory management?
There are also issues about the way that windows are presented. I'm not really sure about the way Windows does event handling, but when an application crashes, the inability to close the window the application is in or do anything with it (Norton Processviewer helps extremely with the ability to kill them) is totally inexcusable. Why should a hung application also hang the widgets of the window the application it's in?
I suppose I should be thankful it no longer hangs the box it's running on. That's one thing I'll say is that XP uptime is now measured in even weeks instead of hours or minutes on 98.
But it's still a piece of dog shit. Oh, and there's the fact that it's a black box, so I need 3rd party software (originally ported from Unix I think) such as uhhh Filemon to see who among the processes is hitting the disk. And then I usually see that they're system processes, which if killed crash the box.
Software support was the thing that was keeping me on Windows. Now that I can run Windows stably and reliably and fairly "fastly" on VMware, there's no reason for me to boot into it anymore.
Now that linux and BSD finally have some big-name support from the likes of IBM and Apple (and yes, even Novell) things seem to be really clipping. Those guys haven't forgotten the way Microsoft has dealt with them, and we can hope they're not above a little bit of predatory marketing and sharp business practices themselves. I hope they blast Microsoft back to Bob.
Sorry for the rant, but god it pisses me off. There's no excuse for the way that Windows behaves, and then it's shoved down our throats with the sarcastic nerdy smugness of Clippy to add insult to injury. If they spent as much money on stability as they do on retard-crutches like Clippy and Rover, they might actually have an OS that's not a total piece.
Why is it that a corporation worth ~100 billion dollars is apparently unable to come out with an OS as stable and smooth as one written by some bozo from Finland?
I think the answer must lie in short-term profit motivation.
There are now finally things about Microsoft OSs that aren't horrendously bad. XP and NT now have uptimes measured in weeks and maybe more if you don't actually use the machines for anything.
But the degree of suckitude that does exist there is just utterly staggering. Look at the command shell for gods' sake. I guess they are tailoring the OS to a very narrow set of procedures needed for business and recreational computing, and not much more.
I don't know what's to come for Microsoft. They're beginning to get that surrounded feel-- they'll have their niches, but now with Apple and IBM both supporting Unix, it's starting to look like the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
You know, people aren't going to like this crap they keep trying to shove through. It's going to get to the point where there are going to be huge record company acts like Madonna and Britney Spears, and then there are going to be other acts who couldn't give a damn about them all, and who make music for other reasons than gigantic shitpiles of money. It's already happening. Ultimately, in this situation, I think heart may win out because good music requires heart. (Not Heart the band.:) )
There needs to be a filter for this sort of stuff... like "-5 frivolous." "Frivolous" would filter out things like lifesize models of Luke Skywalker made of mashed potatoes and Testor's enamel. This stuff hurts me.
It's easily the most corrupt administration in history, far worse IMO than even Nixon. Big difference: Nixon got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. This gang of crooks just seems to keep on stealing.
I wonder to what extent they will go to hold onto power.
I wonder if Diebold machines will be foisted on us, for another Bush Election Blowout.
Kind of suspicious how far these treasonous criminals are going to support Diebold. Kind of makes you wonder. Or would make you wonder if you didn't already know the answer.
Those kids are going to be able to eat some mean pussy when they get older. Perhaps quadriplegics will become inexplicably sexy, show up on the cover of People Magazine, and we guys will wonder why wheelchair-bound quads are ending up with all the hot babes.
I'd say if you're going to get a degree you might as well get out of the field.
I don't know how long you've been in computer support, but it's my personal suspicion that the market is going to continue to head downhill. Yes, by whoring and resume-padding, you can compete with the other whorers and padders. Yes, people and companies are always going to need maintenance work. But it's going to be a long time before the market looks like it did in the late 90s.
It's also my opinion that certs aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They're so easy to get, with the possible exception of the ridiculous ones (Cisco for example) and they're so common. There are also numerous ways to cheat on the cert tests. I know this because I worked in the industry for a number of years-- the cert industry was, in my opinion, corrupt then and getting worse. Back then, you could take a test as many times as you wanted to and could pay for. We were passing people who we KNEW didn't know squat, just because they showed up and took the test enough times, and I'm talking 7-8 times for low-level Microsoft tests. It's possible that salaries based on cert paper were one reason for the inflation of the dotcom bubble. People with plenty of paper were getting into positions they didn't nearly deserve from a technical standpoint.
Just about anywhere else you go, your computer skills will stand you in good stead. If you do stay in computers, go for coding of some kind-- unless some souped-up VB-alike thing comes out that doesn't suck, coding ability is always going to be worth gold. If you take the trouble to get a degree, make it in something that's not going to be redundant with your present skillset. I know a number of very intelligent computer people, some PHDs, who are looking for work right now. I don't see the market getting any better.
Re:Logic, Logic -- Who's Got the Logic?
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
Another trait of geeks is obsessive hairsplitting. I mean my god, man.
Did you read and retain the part where it says "...if we ever got into extremis such as a fight with another technological power?"
I'm not referring to rousting the goat-herdsmen in stony wastelands, which is what we're currently doing.
You talk about flight helmets which prevent people from getting blinded by guide beams. Last I checked, they aren't using lasers of that power level to detonate missiles in the air.
Hmmm, how silly of me. You're right, this system won't work anyway! Threat nations can simply coat their missiles with the same material your magic flight helmets are made of. End of problem. We must warn the pentagon before they spend billions more on a system whose beam can be stopped by a simple mylar sheet! And you're right about the US always abiding by the Geneva Conventions. Like treatment of prisoners.
I'm not even going to address the other asinine points you raise. You're out, next batter please.
The first thing I think of when I see this is that it could be used for a blinder/dazzler with an immense range. Instant air superiority.
Someone said "green lasers burn out your eye..." This may or may not be true of green lasers but I understand that their wavelength is much more subject to diffusion by microabrasions in such materials as glass. If they're shone at car windows, supposedly the effects vary from a large blinding spot on the window to turning the entire window into a brilliant green sheet.
I understand that blinding lasers are against some Geneva accord. They're so different from blinding grenades, and blinding napalm, and blinding shell fragments, don't you know... Whether or not we respect the Geneva convention at all anymore, or whether such a ruling might just be trampled on by us if we ever got into extremis such as a fight with another technological power, I can easily see us using a theatre-wide laser this way. The benefits would be huge.
When they talk about the economy being good, and lots of money moving around, that means that rich bankers and loan officers are able to skim more. The government is able to skim gigantic amounts on taxes, and to then dole it out in the form of lucrative contracts to the rich.
You may be a liberal pinko. Me, I used to be pretty much centrist. The economic wedge that's come down in the last four years has pushed me to the left to a degree that surprises me.
What the fuck is going on in this country? Anyone in the bottom 99% who believe that their interests align in any way with the top 1% (yes, the dichotomy is rapidly becoming that wide) is smoking some incredibly good crack.
Slashdot Mirror
Not Earth First as in AKs and birkenstocks
Earth first as in the way things are going we may need to terraform Earth before we ever get to Mars.
Right now, with rapidly accelerating desertification, we're marsiforming Earth. When the CEO of Shell Oil is "terribly worried" about the environment, that's when you know we are FUCKED.
Wow, the timing for such an article.
On the other hand, I hear they're hiring an Apache technician...
Problem with that type of position is the headhunters don't take no for an answer.
In the stage of the war during which the balloon bombs were used, Japan was no longer a conventional threat to the United States.
It was kind of the United States to "liberate" the Philippines, especially after the American occupation of the Philippines earlier in the century wherein we massacred hundreds of thousands of islanders.
Was the war on Japan a war of survival for the US? It was certainly necessary for us to remove them as a threat. Would we have given a damn about their invasion of the Philippines, Burma etc. and the Rape of Nanking if it were not for Pearl Harbor? I think not.
Your emotional and idealistic view of history is quaint.
Yes, but it wasn't a war for survival.
Except, of course, for the Japanese. Very little threat to the US, except when we let our pants down at Pearl Harbor. It certainly was a war for survival for them, as Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrate (both of which occurred when the Japanese were completely blockaded and had nowhere to go...)
Apparently singing in tune doesn't matter to the critics.
Not that this is a surprise.
Kind of original. Far too emo/indy. To call this rock is a ridiculous stretch.
I utterly hate this, which probably means that Starlister will become the bellwether of a whole new generation of schlock. I imagine they will go very far.
I wasn't being sarcastic OR fanboy. I thought the post I replied to was funny. I admit I am very slightly biased towards apple right now but a few months ago I couldn't give two shits about them and I'd been in that state for 10 years or more.
Hilarious.
Good reply.
One thing you didn't mention is how each little bit of Linux code is a labor of love for the geeks that work on it. They aren't working for money, they're working because they are really interested in getting that Amiga video-toaster coprocessor to run Linux.
It's really kind of cool when you think about it, how Microsoft's huge money muscle is no match for the coding done by kids and ponytail grad students in the small hours.
Hitches and lags are what keep me off Windows.
I HATE hitches. When gaming or doing anything else, Windows has to write to the disk or read from the disk every little while. You kind of get used to them, but for some reason I've become very annoyed by Windows writing cache or whatever it does.
UNIX does not seem to do this. In fact, the memory management and drive handling in Linux is so much smoother than Windows that it astonishes me. Applications running on Wine, even applications running in emulated XP on VMware, run smoother than applications running in native windows.
Yes, I know about drive fragmentation, and I do have enough RAM to do what I do. Shouldn't be a problem. It shouldn't BE that a 233 box from, uh, 1998 is silky smooth in comparison to a hitchy XP on an Athlon 1800. Totally ridiculous. This is obviously not taking into account rendering speed or drive access while loading. However, when doing browsing and word processing, running a fairly stripped down Gnome, the 233 is buttery smooth and never touches the drive. Oh, and the AMD box has 1/8 the memory. NOT ONLY ALL THIS but I think Linux has greatly slowed the drive wear and tear I was getting with Windows.
WHY WHY WHY could some bozo in Finland cobble together an OS that absolutely wipes the floor with the best that a multibillion dollar corporation can come up with? On something as apparently straight forward and uninteresting as memory management?
There are also issues about the way that windows are presented. I'm not really sure about the way Windows does event handling, but when an application crashes, the inability to close the window the application is in or do anything with it (Norton Processviewer helps extremely with the ability to kill them) is totally inexcusable. Why should a hung application also hang the widgets of the window the application it's in?
I suppose I should be thankful it no longer hangs the box it's running on. That's one thing I'll say is that XP uptime is now measured in even weeks instead of hours or minutes on 98.
But it's still a piece of dog shit. Oh, and there's the fact that it's a black box, so I need 3rd party software (originally ported from Unix I think) such as uhhh Filemon to see who among the processes is hitting the disk. And then I usually see that they're system processes, which if killed crash the box.
Software support was the thing that was keeping me on Windows. Now that I can run Windows stably and reliably and fairly "fastly" on VMware, there's no reason for me to boot into it anymore.
Now that linux and BSD finally have some big-name support from the likes of IBM and Apple (and yes, even Novell) things seem to be really clipping. Those guys haven't forgotten the way Microsoft has dealt with them, and we can hope they're not above a little bit of predatory marketing and sharp business practices themselves. I hope they blast Microsoft back to Bob.
Sorry for the rant, but god it pisses me off. There's no excuse for the way that Windows behaves, and then it's shoved down our throats with the sarcastic nerdy smugness of Clippy to add insult to injury. If they spent as much money on stability as they do on retard-crutches like Clippy and Rover, they might actually have an OS that's not a total piece.
I was just thinking about this the other day.
Why is it that a corporation worth ~100 billion dollars is apparently unable to come out with an OS as stable and smooth as one written by some bozo from Finland?
I think the answer must lie in short-term profit motivation.
There are now finally things about Microsoft OSs that aren't horrendously bad. XP and NT now have uptimes measured in weeks and maybe more if you don't actually use the machines for anything.
But the degree of suckitude that does exist there is just utterly staggering. Look at the command shell for gods' sake. I guess they are tailoring the OS to a very narrow set of procedures needed for business and recreational computing, and not much more.
I don't know what's to come for Microsoft. They're beginning to get that surrounded feel-- they'll have their niches, but now with Apple and IBM both supporting Unix, it's starting to look like the Cathedral and the Bazaar.
You know, people aren't going to like this crap they keep trying to shove through. It's going to get to the point where there are going to be huge record company acts like Madonna and Britney Spears, and then there are going to be other acts who couldn't give a damn about them all, and who make music for other reasons than gigantic shitpiles of money. It's already happening. Ultimately, in this situation, I think heart may win out because good music requires heart. (Not Heart the band. :) )
Does this run under Wine?
Is there a linux version? If so, are there RPMs for it? Too lazy to mess with compiles...
There needs to be a filter for this sort of stuff... like "-5 frivolous." "Frivolous" would filter out things like lifesize models of Luke Skywalker made of mashed potatoes and Testor's enamel. This stuff hurts me.
What does vetinerary mean? Is that the itinerary of a veterinarian?
No kidding.
It's easily the most corrupt administration in history, far worse IMO than even Nixon. Big difference: Nixon got caught with his hand in the cookie jar. This gang of crooks just seems to keep on stealing.
I wonder to what extent they will go to hold onto power.
I wonder if Diebold machines will be foisted on us, for another Bush Election Blowout.
Kind of suspicious how far these treasonous criminals are going to support Diebold. Kind of makes you wonder. Or would make you wonder if you didn't already know the answer.
Those kids are going to be able to eat some mean pussy when they get older. Perhaps quadriplegics will become inexplicably sexy, show up on the cover of People Magazine, and we guys will wonder why wheelchair-bound quads are ending up with all the hot babes.
I thought we were past the whole "Trusting Microsoft" question. Isn't that the whole reason people use Macs in the first place?
I wonder if the Iraqis will be equally entertained when they see battallions of these marching in lockstep down the street...
and nobody knows the sorrow.
How long will it take someone to hack these?
Dancing traffic cones at curbside, anyone? How about traffic cones doing wild sufi raga dances in the middle of the highway at rush hour?
Get to it!
I'd say if you're going to get a degree you might as well get out of the field.
I don't know how long you've been in computer support, but it's my personal suspicion that the market is going to continue to head downhill. Yes, by whoring and resume-padding, you can compete with the other whorers and padders. Yes, people and companies are always going to need maintenance work. But it's going to be a long time before the market looks like it did in the late 90s.
It's also my opinion that certs aren't worth the paper they're printed on. They're so easy to get, with the possible exception of the ridiculous ones (Cisco for example) and they're so common. There are also numerous ways to cheat on the cert tests. I know this because I worked in the industry for a number of years-- the cert industry was, in my opinion, corrupt then and getting worse. Back then, you could take a test as many times as you wanted to and could pay for. We were passing people who we KNEW didn't know squat, just because they showed up and took the test enough times, and I'm talking 7-8 times for low-level Microsoft tests. It's possible that salaries based on cert paper were one reason for the inflation of the dotcom bubble. People with plenty of paper were getting into positions they didn't nearly deserve from a technical standpoint.
Just about anywhere else you go, your computer skills will stand you in good stead. If you do stay in computers, go for coding of some kind-- unless some souped-up VB-alike thing comes out that doesn't suck, coding ability is always going to be worth gold. If you take the trouble to get a degree, make it in something that's not going to be redundant with your present skillset. I know a number of very intelligent computer people, some PHDs, who are looking for work right now. I don't see the market getting any better.
Another trait of geeks is obsessive hairsplitting. I mean my god, man.
Why is it this reminds me of "Day of the Triffids?"
There's a little black spot on the sun today...
Did you actually read my whole post?
Did you read and retain the part where it says "...if we ever got into extremis such as a fight with another technological power?"
I'm not referring to rousting the goat-herdsmen in stony wastelands, which is what we're currently doing.
You talk about flight helmets which prevent people from getting blinded by guide beams. Last I checked, they aren't using lasers of that power level to detonate missiles in the air.
Hmmm, how silly of me. You're right, this system won't work anyway! Threat nations can simply coat their missiles with the same material your magic flight helmets are made of. End of problem. We must warn the pentagon before they spend billions more on a system whose beam can be stopped by a simple mylar sheet! And you're right about the US always abiding by the Geneva Conventions. Like treatment of prisoners.
I'm not even going to address the other asinine points you raise. You're out, next batter please.
The first thing I think of when I see this is that it could be used for a blinder/dazzler with an immense range. Instant air superiority.
Someone said "green lasers burn out your eye..." This may or may not be true of green lasers but I understand that their wavelength is much more subject to diffusion by microabrasions in such materials as glass. If they're shone at car windows, supposedly the effects vary from a large blinding spot on the window to turning the entire window into a brilliant green sheet.
I understand that blinding lasers are against some Geneva accord. They're so different from blinding grenades, and blinding napalm, and blinding shell fragments, don't you know... Whether or not we respect the Geneva convention at all anymore, or whether such a ruling might just be trampled on by us if we ever got into extremis such as a fight with another technological power, I can easily see us using a theatre-wide laser this way. The benefits would be huge.
I just realized something today.
When they talk about the economy being good, and lots of money moving around, that means that rich bankers and loan officers are able to skim more. The government is able to skim gigantic amounts on taxes, and to then dole it out in the form of lucrative contracts to the rich.
You may be a liberal pinko. Me, I used to be pretty much centrist. The economic wedge that's come down in the last four years has pushed me to the left to a degree that surprises me.
What the fuck is going on in this country? Anyone in the bottom 99% who believe that their interests align in any way with the top 1% (yes, the dichotomy is rapidly becoming that wide) is smoking some incredibly good crack.