I think most people here understand this, but the tone of this "story" seems to imply that there are so-called intuitive interfaces out there.
Having done several years of desktop and internet support, I can tell you that NEITHER Windows or the MacOS is "intuitave" for most of whom we might call "joe/jane random user". Learning to use any UI is like learning anything. You have to learn, granted the learning curve for dragging and dropping icons into folders *might* be a little less steep than "cp file1 file2" for some.
I spent most of my time doing phone support giving "windows" or finder "101" lessons.
People do NOT "intuitively" grasp "windows" any more than they intiutively grasp carburator repair. They have to learn. The questions to ask when you're building a UI is: "Is this UI going to be easy to teach?" - "Can useful documentation be written to explain the basics of operation?" Maybe even "Is this system going to be efficient to use once learned?"
The whole idea of a "perfect" UI is a crock. Until UIs are completely transparent (i.e. you get to explain to the "computer" what you want in your terms) -- which isn't going to happen RSN -- there will be people who don't like computers.
Having said that, the only potential difference between KDE or GNOME and Windows or MacOS is market share and (for the individual) "Do I know anyone who can help me work my new machine that runs ?" - which is a reflection of the first difference...
Looks to me like Navigator (The only useful part of Communicator IMO) is still 4.08... which has been out for months... Unless they actually modified it and didn't change the version number.
Remember that "Win2K" is the end result of an 11-year development cycle. It started development in 1989, as "Cairo" - with a codebase completely independent from the at-that-time windows source tree, whereas win3.1/95/98 have all been forks off the same tree, likewise with NT3/3.51/4 (with the kernel src from VMS...)
Cairo was (I dunno if it still is) supposed to be "from scratch" - although I'm sure they carried over stuff from VMS. - so 65,000 "defects" in what is effectively an 11-year-old version _ONE_ release... doesn't suprise me.
It can't possibly be worse than NT4, at least in terms of bugs. I don't even want to think about how many reghacks/serviccepacks/hotfixes/patches I've applied to NT boxen.
I'm not defending M$ here, but I'd be surprised if even 1/10 of 1% of those bugs resulted in BSOD's
How do you explain then that HALF of the people in US State and Federal prisons are in on drug charges then? That's 1 million out of 2 million inmates... do the resear ch if you're really interested, it's there.
Ever notice that the "Crime Rate" is supposedly "going down"... Know why? Because "drug crimes" are NOT INCLUDED in the crime rate statistics that are commonly reported... "Prison crowding" is one of the biggest lies in the last 60 years.
...scientists who discovered this doubt very much it will ever be useful for communication. (For one, it probably won't work across lightyears, and for two, probably the most complex method of communication you could do with it would be Morse-code type on-off communication.)
I don't mean to split particles here... (ahem) but isn't that basically the kind of digital communication we have now? Streams of ones and zeroes? If an entagled "particle" can have its "state" changed and it's "twin" - existing somewhere else - mirrors the state change, then you have a bit that can be turned on and off, right? Just checkin.
Well, the real difference is that you can't hijack Main Street or Central Park, whereas you can hijack an airplane...
Logical restrictions as to what you can and can't bring on an airplane make sense, for many reasons.
I too am VERY opposed to illegal search and seisure, but the fact of the matter is that it's not your airplane. A street is a public place, an airplane is privately owned property.
Would you let random strangers on your private jet without knowing what they were bringing on board?
If we weren't so prudish as a specie, this would be a great idea. I really wouldn't care if a security guard gets to see me "naked" on a black and white scanner as I walk into the airport boarding terminal. Especially if it speeds up airport check-in, and increases the safety of air travel. I don't see what is so "private" about one's skin. Medical records and such may be private, but I don't know about you, but I often use *imagination* to "see" what people look like under their clothes... and I don't think that's an invasion of anyone's privacy...
Scenario: A Perl Script running on your laptop that loads TVGuide's webpage, and when you select the show you want to record, it programs the cable box and the VCR and what-not with all the appropriate codes and stuff via the IR port in the laptop. Of course, it'd also let you build "contral panels" for all your IR controlled devices. And you could literally "teach" the software by pointing your various remotes at the computer's IR port.
I've been contemplating writing something like this for a while... but since I'm inherantly lazy, I've been waiting to see if someone else would do it first:-)
Yes, The Twelfth PLanet by Zecharia Sitchin. The 12th planet, according to him, orbits the sun once every 3,600 years. So that would put this theoretical blob right out as it (Since, theoretically, they're saying that this thing orbits the sun in millions of years, not thousands)
Although, in that article, the caption on the picture indicates that this "new" planet would dwarf Jupiter... well Jupiter is supposed to be like.998 solar masses or something like that... so wouldn't that make it a star?
Sitchin is referring to the 12th planet in Astrological terms, i.e. Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Chiron (an extra-orbital planetoid, about tht size of Pluto) & the 12th planet, or in Sumerian: Nefilim.
One of the more interesting facts he uncovered was that the Sumerians called the earth the 7th planet, not the 3rd... and from the perspective of the "mythical" 12th planet with it's hyper-eliptical orbit, it is the 7th large body from the outside of the solar system. Not to mention the fact that they seem to have known about Neptune, Uranus, Pluto & Chiron as well as numerous comets.
I'd highly recommend his books for those interested in mythology & ancient cultures.
I too don't take everything Sitchin says at face value, but some of it is far too interesting to be ignored.
Put in some Video in/out ports, a huge HD or two and bundle it with a cable-box tuner (or at least IR codes for most cable boxes) and video recording software, and viola, it's your VCR, it's your MP3 player, it plays games, and you can surf the web on it, or your big TV in your living room.
These kind of features would make if worthwile for people to start putting machines like this in their living room, rather than in the office...
Apple seems to be moving slowly toward the "home electronics" market with these iMac things... why not go full-tilt?
Whether or not people want to admit it, depictions of glorified violence in various forms of media _IS_ a problem. Maybe not a problem for 99% of us: (It's not a problem for me personally, since I simply refuse to watch fictitious violence) but the scores of incidents of 'copycat' murders, and a very apparent lack of ethics in at least a minority of the population, something has to be done, on a societal level to raise the conciousness of the admittedly small percent of the population that is sick enough to actually do something that they see depicted in a violent media content..
I don't see this proposed legislation as a violation of freedoms, and while it is likely that it is just part of a politicical agenda for various upcoming re-election campaigns, because it's a hot topic, I don't see that it hurts anyone or anything. If you sell something that's potentially biologically poisonous, there has to be a label on it saying so. If something is potentially psychologically poisionous, why shouldn't the same thing apply?
Albeit somewhat offtopic, I'd also like to raise the point of WHY people 'like' to watch fabricated violent material. If you need to explore such ideas for whatever reason, try watching CourtTV, Unsolved Mysteries, or other investigative reporting shows that deal with the REAL issues of murder and violence in socity. I don't see fake blood and gore as 'entertainment' at all. So I ask slashdot readers:
What is the appeal of "sick fiction?" I don't (and probably won't) understand it.
This may sound like flamebait, but these are my honest feelings and opinions.
Not that Apple doesn't use cutthroat business techniques, (as do most other Big Money Corps) but I have to defend them here. They didn't 'Disable' anything. Can you upgrade a Pentium (586) to a Pentium II? Not really... not directly anyway. Sure, you can stick an 'upgrade' CPU in A PCI slot or retrofit it into the socket7(?), but there needs to be new hardware surrounding the 'upgrade' chip that makes it look like the OLD CPU to the motherboard's chip set. This has been done for years. In reality, it's usually a waste of money. No matter how fast your 'upgrade' CPU is, you're limited by the bus and by the chipset(s) that funnel data to and from the CPU. This is just common sense.
The G4 has a different Architecture compared to the G3. And yes, you CAN upgrade a blue G3 with 1.1 firmware to a G4. But why? it will make the machine go a little faster, but you won't get the performance of the new G4, since the support chipset won't know that it can send 4 simultaneous instruction streams at the thing anyway. So what's the big deal. If you *really* want the G4 machine's performance, sell your G3, and buy a G4. The resale value on the G3's won't be much lower than what you paid, and the price difference would probably cost less than an upgrade card (Since you aren't wasting a G3 in the process)
I used to work for a medium sized ISP. At max (when I was there) we supported 10-15k dial-up users on _one_ mail machine (a 266 Alpha running DecUNIX) with a 1/2 gig of Ram)
When the # of users started to reach 20k, a half-refrigerator-sized Sun box was used to pick up the slack. The switchover was flawless. No mail was lost.
This was accomplished with plain 'ol sendmail for an MTA and a hacked-up Qualcomm POP server.
After the switch to the Sun box, the old single-proc Alpha continued to run the POP server for 20k users quite nicely, and is still going. Maybe $100,000 for hardware (big box, RAID, etc.) and if you use an open-source OS (The DecUnix licensing was kinda steep I think) and tools, the software is _free_.
Granted this was all dial-up (read, low-bandwidth.)
However, this same user base, with M$ Exchange, would have not only required dozens of machines, but Thousands of $ in software...
Do the math. Don't use Exchange unless you like wasting money and time.
I remember watching a NOVA (PBS Science Show) episode back in the '80s where someone had broken down English into a big associative array, assuming that the brain stores things associatively (at least language-based things) and that he calculated that a simple store-and-retrieve memory system that indexed and made available all English language constructs for "send" and "receive" on an instantaneous basis would require more storage "bits" than there are atoms in the known universe... on the basis of the number of possible permutations of english words and phrases that could make discrete sense.
I remember thinking recently that such a system wouldn't need to be nearly as big if it were based on a kind of a quantum 'hash' where elements were actually cross-referenced and instantly available when triggered... a sort of an n-bit quantum computer. Granted, that's just language... what about images, facial recognition, aural recognition, smells... etc.
I 'spose it's possible for a brain to be "full" (mine feels that way sometimes) but there must be some AWESOME 'garbage collection' processes that re-allocate space when anything 'fills up'...
My brain hurts just thinking about it...Maybe the brain uses all the atoms of the body as storage space, and we just don't know it... so when we're talking out our asses, we might sometimes be right!
No Matter how hard they try, M$ Can't brainwash Larry, all of CPAN, perl.org; even if they do corrupt ActiveState, who cares? Perl will live on.
I've been using PerlScript for ASP now for several months. It makes developing on NT that much less unpleasant when I have to. And I've used ActiveState's Perl since the first builds of perl5 for win32. That's been a couple years now, and I don't see perl ruined by that... in fact, it's created MORE Perl programmers!
I'm personally quite excited about fork() for Perl on NT, among other things.
But Whatever M$ does, they can't "Ruin" Perl or any other language, anymore than America can ruin the English language (despite some of the arguments to the contrary...) Even if they make proprietary crap for Perl for win32, good for them! It won't hurt Perl as a whole, nor effect the non-M$ world one fig.
Been there, dealt with that. I never use PerlEx unless I have to... in fact (don't hit me) I program in ASP using ActiveState PerlScript now. Memory leaks all gone. PerlEx runs in the memory space of IIS, it has none of it's own. If you forget to undef ANYTHING before a PerlEx script terminates, IIS doesn't clean up after it.
It's actually better to use straight-up perl.exe, as long as you have plenty of memory in the server if it gets loaded.
I wouldn't blame ActiveState, I blame M$ for not giving developers clear specs for how to write software for it's crappy systems.
The h2g2.com server seems quite distressed ever since the post on/. I was using the site this morning and it was speedy... NT & IIS under heavy load, ick.
I've had correspondance with eBay over the past few days about this. I've tried out blue_adept's code, and it does work. I even e-mailed a little chunk of perl to eBay support with a description of the problem and a solution that could be easily implemented.
Initially I got back a very misinformed response recommending that I change my password. I finally (3 emails later) got them to understnad what I was talking about, and they claim that they are working on a JS filter and will have the status posted to:
Yet another group of irresponsible parents trying to use the legal system to make money off of other irresponsible parents... It's just so sad.
I do happen to wish that there were no violent movies, violent video games, and especially no actual violence, and while I do actually agree that violence (in any form) begets violence, it's completely ludicrous to place the blame for such an atrocity on specific symptoms of a sick society. You might as well say that someone who dies from a heart attack died because he ate too many eggs and smoked cigarettes... Oh yeah, people do say that!!!
Then again, I suppose that's why fantasy violence exists right now in such voluminous quantity, to seperate the _extremely_ stupid and negligent people from the merely stupid people.
I'd even say that religion has _already_ gone the way of the dodo. Humans need spirituality, not religion.
Since, religion is what (IMHO) CAUSED much of the inequity in the world as it has been for the last couple thousand years. I mean think about it, would people go try and conquer their neighbors if they weren't worked up into a fervor by some religious zealot?
Anyway, the internet isn't going to solve the worlds problems, but anything that helps to spread the truth, and not superstition and propaganda will certianly help! Which the internet is (arguably) doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most people here understand this, but the tone of this "story" seems to imply that there are so-called intuitive interfaces out there.
Having done several years of desktop and internet support, I can tell you that NEITHER Windows or the MacOS is "intuitave" for most of whom we might call "joe/jane random user". Learning to use any UI is like learning anything. You have to learn, granted the learning curve for dragging and dropping icons into folders *might* be a little less steep than "cp file1 file2" for some.
I spent most of my time doing phone support giving "windows" or finder "101" lessons.
People do NOT "intuitively" grasp "windows" any more than they intiutively grasp carburator repair. They have to learn. The questions to ask when you're building a UI is: "Is this UI going to be easy to teach?" - "Can useful documentation be written to explain the basics of operation?" Maybe even "Is this system going to be efficient to use once learned?"
The whole idea of a "perfect" UI is a crock. Until UIs are completely transparent (i.e. you get to explain to the "computer" what you want in your terms) -- which isn't going to happen RSN -- there will be people who don't like computers.
Having said that, the only potential difference between KDE or GNOME and Windows or MacOS is market share and (for the individual) "Do I know anyone who can help me work my new machine that runs ?" - which is a reflection of the first difference...
Just my 2 sense.
Looks to me like Navigator (The only useful part of Communicator IMO) is still 4.08... which has been out for months... Unless they actually modified it and didn't change the version number.
Remember that "Win2K" is the end result of an 11-year development cycle. It started development in 1989, as "Cairo" - with a codebase completely independent from the at-that-time windows source tree, whereas win3.1/95/98 have all been forks off the same tree, likewise with NT3/3.51/4 (with the kernel src from VMS...)
Cairo was (I dunno if it still is) supposed to be "from scratch" - although I'm sure they carried over stuff from VMS. - so 65,000 "defects" in what is effectively an 11-year-old version _ONE_ release... doesn't suprise me.
It can't possibly be worse than NT4, at least in terms of bugs. I don't even want to think about how many reghacks/serviccepacks/hotfixes/patches I've applied to NT boxen.
I'm not defending M$ here, but I'd be surprised if even 1/10 of 1% of those bugs resulted in BSOD's
How do you explain then that HALF of the people in US State and Federal prisons are in on drug charges then? That's 1 million out of 2 million inmates... do the resear ch if you're really interested, it's there.
Ever notice that the "Crime Rate" is supposedly "going down"... Know why? Because "drug crimes" are NOT INCLUDED in the crime rate statistics that are commonly reported... "Prison crowding" is one of the biggest lies in the last 60 years.
-Erik
I don't mean to split particles here... (ahem) but isn't that basically the kind of digital communication we have now? Streams of ones and zeroes? If an entagled "particle" can have its "state" changed and it's "twin" - existing somewhere else - mirrors the state change, then you have a bit that can be turned on and off, right? Just checkin.
Logical restrictions as to what you can and can't bring on an airplane make sense, for many reasons.
I too am VERY opposed to illegal search and seisure, but the fact of the matter is that it's not your airplane. A street is a public place, an airplane is privately owned property.
Would you let random strangers on your private jet without knowing what they were bringing on board?
If we weren't so prudish as a specie, this would be a great idea. I really wouldn't care if a security guard gets to see me "naked" on a black and white scanner as I walk into the airport boarding terminal. Especially if it speeds up airport check-in, and increases the safety of air travel. I don't see what is so "private" about one's skin. Medical records and such may be private, but I don't know about you, but I often use *imagination* to "see" what people look like under their clothes... and I don't think that's an invasion of anyone's privacy...
There's gotta be software to do this...
:-)
Scenario: A Perl Script running on your laptop that loads TVGuide's webpage, and when you select the show you want to record, it programs the cable box and the VCR and what-not with all the appropriate codes and stuff via the IR port in the laptop. Of course, it'd also let you build "contral panels" for all your IR controlled devices. And you could literally "teach" the software by pointing your various remotes at the computer's IR port.
I've been contemplating writing something like this for a while... but since I'm inherantly lazy, I've been waiting to see if someone else would do it first
A + infinity = B + another infinity
:-)
Therefore A = B.
Yeah, but what about the fact that "infinity" might be "bigger" or "smaller" than the "other infinity"
Yes, The Twelfth PLanet by Zecharia Sitchin. The 12th planet, according to him, orbits the sun once every 3,600 years. So that would put this theoretical blob right out as it (Since, theoretically, they're saying that this thing orbits the sun in millions of years, not thousands)
.998 solar masses or something like that... so wouldn't that make it a star?
Although, in that article, the caption on the picture indicates that this "new" planet would dwarf Jupiter... well Jupiter is supposed to be like
Sitchin is referring to the 12th planet in Astrological terms, i.e. Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus, Pluto, Chiron (an extra-orbital planetoid, about tht size of Pluto) & the 12th planet, or in Sumerian: Nefilim.
One of the more interesting facts he uncovered was that the Sumerians called the earth the 7th planet, not the 3rd... and from the perspective of the "mythical" 12th planet with it's hyper-eliptical orbit, it is the 7th large body from the outside of the solar system. Not to mention the fact that they seem to have known about Neptune, Uranus, Pluto & Chiron as well as numerous comets.
I'd highly recommend his books for those interested in mythology & ancient cultures.
I too don't take everything Sitchin says at face value, but some of it is far too interesting to be ignored.
Hey Apple!
Put in some Video in/out ports, a huge HD or two and bundle it with a cable-box tuner (or at least IR codes for most cable boxes) and video recording software, and viola, it's your VCR, it's your MP3 player, it plays games, and you can surf the web on it, or your big TV in your living room.
These kind of features would make if worthwile for people to start putting machines like this in their living room, rather than in the office...
Apple seems to be moving slowly toward the "home electronics" market with these iMac things... why not go full-tilt?
Whether or not people want to admit it, depictions of glorified violence in various forms of media _IS_ a problem. Maybe not a problem for 99% of us: (It's not a problem for me personally, since I simply refuse to watch fictitious violence) but the scores of incidents of 'copycat' murders, and a very apparent lack of ethics in at least a minority of the population, something has to be done, on a societal level to raise the conciousness of the admittedly small percent of the population that is sick enough to actually do something that they see depicted in a violent media content..
I don't see this proposed legislation as a violation of freedoms, and while it is likely that it is just part of a politicical agenda for various upcoming re-election campaigns, because it's a hot topic, I don't see that it hurts anyone or anything. If you sell something that's potentially biologically poisonous, there has to be a label on it saying so. If something is potentially psychologically poisionous, why shouldn't the same thing apply?
Albeit somewhat offtopic, I'd also like to raise the point of WHY people 'like' to watch fabricated violent material. If you need to explore such ideas for whatever reason, try watching CourtTV, Unsolved Mysteries, or other investigative reporting shows that deal with the REAL issues of murder and violence in socity. I don't see fake blood and gore as 'entertainment' at all. So I ask slashdot readers:
What is the appeal of "sick fiction?" I don't (and probably won't) understand it.
This may sound like flamebait, but these are my honest feelings and opinions.
Not that Apple doesn't use cutthroat business techniques, (as do most other Big Money Corps) but I have to defend them here. They didn't 'Disable' anything. Can you upgrade a Pentium (586) to a Pentium II? Not really... not directly anyway. Sure, you can stick an 'upgrade' CPU in A PCI slot or retrofit it into the socket7(?), but there needs to be new hardware surrounding the 'upgrade' chip that makes it look like the OLD CPU to the motherboard's chip set. This has been done for years. In reality, it's usually a waste of money. No matter how fast your 'upgrade' CPU is, you're limited by the bus and by the chipset(s) that funnel data to and from the CPU. This is just common sense.
:-)
The G4 has a different Architecture compared to the G3. And yes, you CAN upgrade a blue G3 with 1.1 firmware to a G4. But why? it will make the machine go a little faster, but you won't get the performance of the new G4, since the support chipset won't know that it can send 4 simultaneous instruction streams at the thing anyway. So what's the big deal. If you *really* want the G4 machine's performance, sell your G3, and buy a G4. The resale value on the G3's won't be much lower than what you paid, and the price difference would probably cost less than an upgrade card (Since you aren't wasting a G3 in the process)
OR, save your pennies, and wait for the G5
I used to work for a medium sized ISP. At max (when I was there) we supported 10-15k dial-up users on _one_ mail machine (a 266 Alpha running DecUNIX) with a 1/2 gig of Ram)
When the # of users started to reach 20k, a half-refrigerator-sized Sun box was used to pick up the slack. The switchover was flawless. No mail was lost.
This was accomplished with plain 'ol sendmail for an MTA and a hacked-up Qualcomm POP server.
After the switch to the Sun box, the old single-proc Alpha continued to run the POP server for 20k users quite nicely, and is still going. Maybe $100,000 for hardware (big box, RAID, etc.) and if you use an open-source OS (The DecUnix licensing was kinda steep I think) and tools, the software is _free_.
Granted this was all dial-up (read, low-bandwidth.)
However, this same user base, with M$ Exchange, would have not only required dozens of machines, but Thousands of $ in software...
Do the math. Don't use Exchange unless you like wasting money and time.
I remember watching a NOVA (PBS Science Show) episode back in the '80s where someone had broken down English into a big associative array, assuming that the brain stores things associatively (at least language-based things) and that he calculated that a simple store-and-retrieve memory system that indexed and made available all English language constructs for "send" and "receive" on an instantaneous basis would require more storage "bits" than there are atoms in the known universe... on the basis of the number of possible permutations of english words and phrases that could make discrete sense.
I remember thinking recently that such a system wouldn't need to be nearly as big if it were based on a kind of a quantum 'hash' where elements were actually cross-referenced and instantly available when triggered... a sort of an n-bit quantum computer. Granted, that's just language... what about images, facial recognition, aural recognition, smells... etc.
I 'spose it's possible for a brain to be "full" (mine feels that way sometimes) but there must be some AWESOME 'garbage collection' processes that re-allocate space when anything 'fills up'...
My brain hurts just thinking about it...Maybe the brain uses all the atoms of the body as storage space, and we just don't know it... so when we're talking out our asses, we might sometimes be right!
No Matter how hard they try, M$ Can't brainwash Larry, all of CPAN, perl.org; even if they do corrupt ActiveState, who cares? Perl will live on.
I've been using PerlScript for ASP now for several months. It makes developing on NT that much less unpleasant when I have to.
And I've used ActiveState's Perl since the first builds of perl5 for win32. That's been a couple years now, and I don't see perl ruined by that... in fact, it's created MORE Perl programmers!
I'm personally quite excited about fork() for Perl on NT, among other things.
But Whatever M$ does, they can't "Ruin" Perl or any other language, anymore than America can ruin the English language (despite some of the arguments to the contrary...) Even if they make proprietary crap for Perl for win32, good for them! It won't hurt Perl as a whole, nor effect the non-M$ world one fig.
Been there, dealt with that. I never use PerlEx unless I have to... in fact (don't hit me) I program in ASP using ActiveState PerlScript now. Memory leaks all gone. PerlEx runs in the memory space of IIS, it has none of it's own. If you forget to undef ANYTHING before a PerlEx script terminates, IIS doesn't clean up after it.
It's actually better to use straight-up perl.exe, as long as you have plenty of memory in the server if it gets loaded.
I wouldn't blame ActiveState, I blame M$ for not giving developers clear specs for how to write software for it's crappy systems.
The h2g2.com server seems quite distressed ever since the post on /. I was using the site this morning and it was speedy... NT & IIS under heavy load, ick.
Initially I got back a very misinformed response recommending that I change my password. I finally (3 emails later) got them to understnad what I was talking about, and they claim that they are working on a JS filter and will have the status posted to:
http://www2.ebay.com/aw/announce.shtml
I also cautioned them against prosecuting blue_adept, since that wouldn't be very good for them in a PR sense...
Hopefully they listen.
IMHO:
pot && !harmful && relaxing && fun;
alcohol && !harmful && relaxing if !stupid;
psychadelics && !harmful && mind-expanding;
cocaine && empty_wallet && habit-forming;
crack && cheap && dangerous;
heroin && die "Slowly and Painfully";
meth && fry-brains && habit-forming;
drug_laws && extremely_stupid;
(programmers || sysadmins) && !harmful_drugs && more_sane;
apprx 5000 lines of perl... granted, prolly 1/3 of the code was just printing lines of html...
(Customer Database interface for a big ISP)
I shudder to think how much code that would have been in VB or some other icky language like that.
Nice poll tho!
*Sigh*
Yet another group of irresponsible parents trying to use the legal system to make money off of other irresponsible parents... It's just so sad.
I do happen to wish that there were no violent movies, violent video games, and especially no actual violence, and while I do actually agree that violence (in any form) begets violence, it's completely ludicrous to place the blame for such an atrocity on specific symptoms of a sick society. You might as well say that someone who dies from a heart attack died because he ate too many eggs and smoked cigarettes... Oh yeah, people do say that!!!
Then again, I suppose that's why fantasy violence exists right now in such voluminous quantity, to seperate the _extremely_ stupid and negligent people from the merely stupid people.
*bangs head on desk*
sigh.
I'd even say that religion has _already_ gone the way of the dodo. Humans need spirituality, not religion.
Since, religion is what (IMHO) CAUSED much of the inequity in the world as it has been for the last couple thousand years. I mean think about it, would people go try and conquer their neighbors if they weren't worked up into a fervor by some religious zealot?
Anyway, the internet isn't going to solve the worlds problems, but anything that helps to spread the truth, and not superstition and propaganda will certianly help! Which the internet is (arguably) doing.