I attribute this behavior to men, particularly white men, thinking that nobody else knows anything but them and they are out to prove it!
That's a stereotype:-)
I attribute this kind of behaviour to a bitter vocal miniority. I've seen this behaviour in all groups. I think it is just as narrow to point a finger at "them" as it is for "them" to point a finger at you. I think you found the right solution though. Anonymity. Let them find out who they are after they already respect you.
For the mostpart the Internet is a medium where everybody online has an equally loud voice. Unfortunately, for the uninitiated, the power to have their thoughts heard by an entire community means that they will post their thoughts to the enitre community. Worse, for the mostpart the uninitated with their underdeveloped sense of netiquette, will post exactly what is on their mind -- whether the entire community cares or not.
People do learn netiquette. If not punished, they are made aware of their abberant behaviour. Try posting HTML to a mailing list, or post to usenet using ALL CAPS. You will be made quite aware that you are breaking the rules.
There's not a great deal of mystery about the source: it's generated largely by young men, the branch of the species that has the highest testosterone levels.
When I was younger I strongly resented being lumped into this category. I would like to believe that the source is inexperience. People make mistakes.
With the flood of "immigrants", and the stereotypical loud-mouthed youth there will always be an abundance of the uninitiated. As the net grows, the problem will only get worse. For BBSers, or members of any failed online community this is not news.
IIRC, he sold a whack of stock and paid off some debts a month before the results of a dissapointing quarter came out. He was being charged with insider trading.
I don't know why this warrants such a high moderation. The questions have been answered all over the media, and Cowpland has given "no comment" whenever anybody asked for more details.
It seems only natural that an exec would be investigated for selling off stock a month before a dissapointing quarter. However I'll be surprised if he's convicted of any wrongdoing... the stocks he sold didn't drop that much, and are now worth triple what he sold them for. A month is a long time in the terms of a quarter.
Regardless, I'm as ignorant as the next guy about the details of the case.
He said "...his flaws were in his content and his organization."
You replied "Specifically on what basis are his arguments bad? how is the content bad?"
Nobody said there was anything wrong with his arguments. I disagree with many of them, but they're simply different points of view.
As for content, what little content there is, is not "bad", I just think there needs to be much more of it. His Hellmouth bit, though lengthy, was one of the very few Katz articles I almost enjoyed.
The original author of this thread is not alone in his sentiments. Jon would be a much more effective writer if he put a little more emphasis on the facts and did not blither on paragraph after paragraph.
Everybody seems to have a very strong opinion about Katz. I think he's a lousy author. Others love his writing. I haven't a clue as to why, but I can't argue with their dollars.
I'll have to give one of his books a read some time. They simply can't be as bad as his columns. Can they?
PI was rather similar to The Matrix... except that the puppeteer is never revealed. In the end, the "illusion" is preserved and the main character takes the other pill.
Technologically, the movie is absurd, but they didn't bow down to the special effects like many other movies do. I think they really captured what it is to be obsessed with solving a really tough mathematical problem with deep philosophical ramifications.
It's kind of depressing and headachy at the same time. Interesting movie.
Absolutely true, and I do think about big companies in different terms than I do little ones.
Regarding the Lotus/Wordperfect/others issue, my point was that the industry had a leading wordprocessor, and they had a leading spreadsheet. Microsoft took the second-best spreadsheet along with the second best wordprocessor and marketed them together for the same price as either product individually. They do this perpetually bundling Word to Excel to Powerpoint to Money to Internet Explorer to Access to Photodraw to...
Funny you should mention Star Office. why would I want to use it when I need Visio? come the next version of Office, I would wager good money that Visio alone will cost marginally less than the full Office 200x suite. StarOffice, Smartsuite, Corel Office and all the kin were the industry's reply to MS Office. Do you really think Quattro and Wordperfect would have joined forces otherwise?
The only reason MS was so successful in this arena was because they were able to join their product lines much more easily than their competiors could join forces.
Claris? They started small and created a works package. They marketed the integration of their applications. They did not similtaneously compete price for price, feature for feature with Lotus and Wordperfect while drawing revenue from OS sales.
Yes, splitting up Microsoft won't diminish their market share, nor will it diminish the power they have through that marketshare. However, what it will do is prevent products from being developed, advertised, given away and bundled into other key products with 100% funding provided from their OS.
I don't know what lines to split them along, but as long as their application developers can bundle products together, they will always have an unfair edge.
They beat Lotus through manipulating their OS and bundling in a wordprocessor. Likewise, they beat Wordperfect by bundling in a spreadsheet. They beat Stac by bundling in Doublespace, they beat Netscape by bundling IE into their OS... there are countless others, but the trend is continuing...
We have them all over the place at work... great things, they even let you plug a mouse in similtaneously. I just avoid the nipples, because I tend to use them too much, and after about six months, my index fingers begin to get quite sore.
They're almost the perfect pointing device, you don't even have to take your fingers off the home row.
Just a thought, if it is programmer-endemic laziness, isn't there a good reason for not releasing the source until it is sharp and polished? Think about the security of a major website running an incomplete opensource engine.
It takes a lot of work to polish code and clearly document it... but I agree, the source code should at least be secretly released to a trusted handful of interested parties... They could then debug and document... the way opensource is supposed to work.
But then again, this may have already happened...
At the very least it is a good example of why to open your source from day one.
I agree with this completely, but as of the past couple years, this doesn't work anymore. Most applications are horribly underdocumented, or ship docs electronically.
Electronic documentation requires people to have a pre-existing knowledge of file types, and directory structures.
I think you're on to something here though. Our education department would probably serve users better by handing them a "for dummies" book and spending a day going over how to use the "F1" key, how to look things up and how to use files and directories.
It amazes me how some people can be whizzes at their jobs, but when you try to teach them something about computers, their eyes glaze over. A user just called me up because they couldn't figure out how to use an AOL CD. I mean they couldn't even figure out who supports the AOL CD.
On the other hand, I have one user at my location who over the course of a year went from little to no prior knowledge to being somewhat of an authority amongst her peers.
Many of these problems have nothing to do with technological illiteracy. Technology just highlights the people who have great difficulty learning.
Maybe we should spend less money on technical support, more money on education, and impose consequences for those who fail to learn the basics. Like any other basic job-skill.
Welcome to Millennium#2, the Third Millennium.
on
When Does Y2K Begin?
·
· Score: 1
A "zeroth year in the reign of the current Emperor" is obvious nonsense.
I could never understand this argument. How could anybody claim to have an intuative understanding of something which was decided upon two thousand years ago?
Is this 1999, or the one thousand, nine hundred and ninty-ninth year?
From my limited resources, the current calendar is set upon the birth of Christ. This was calculated in approximately 70AD by counting backwards on the Roman calendar. This and the calculation was later found to be incorrect, neglecting the reign of a particular emperor thus pushing the birth of Christ back to around 4BC.
Regardless, to counter a frankly silly argument that it is "obvious" that there was no zero; was Jesus, an infant like any other, ever zero years old?
Yes!, but nobody in the modern world would call him "Zero years old", they might say it is his first year of life, but most would say he is "minutes old", or "months old" or whatever.
Who's to know what was being thought of 70AD as to when or if there was a zero. Nobody I know of has stepped forward and claimed to have documentation to say that that monk fellow intended the birth of Christ to fall on zero or one. Though I'm sure somebody does have this information. I don't care enough to find out. Saying the new millenium starts in 2001 is saying that Jesus was one year old in year two and that by all modern numbering conventions, this is the one thousand nine hundred and ninty-ninth year, or... year number 1998.
Right or wrong, I don't really care all that much, but it is not "obvious" nor is it "nonsense." Pointless perhaps... but not nonsense.
The etoys site is claiming that Etoys is a registered trademark. Wasn't it overturned? Shouldn't NSI resurrect the etoy site because there are no longer any trademark issues?
But if they get 2M sigs, it will hit the news, and it will be yet another reason for hardware manufacturers to consider Linux when they're developing new products.
I agree that the intended use of the petition is probably flawed. And I don't think they'll get anywhere near 2M sigs, but it's only my name and my Hotmail address. It's worth a shot.
Comedy after all, is about escaping reality, not creating additional work.
I really can't disagree with this more. On the simplest level, what would satire be?
Regardless, Jim Carey has been milking toilet humour too long -- he's been typecast. I haven't seen this movie yet, but I look forward to seeing him in a serious role... it's a shame it has to be as a comedian though.
I think I'll catch it on video.
Let's pull www.nsi.com
on
Etoy Update
·
· Score: 1
I had a quick look at www.NSInc.com, and it seems that they infact exist. There could be some kind of brand confusion going on here, after all they're both interested in money. NSInc is roughly 15 years old.
I also noticed that www.ensi.com is also registered and is a real site.
I wonder if we can get Network Solutions to pull the plug on that pesky www.nsi.com?
Great movie. Just great. I saw it in a shiny new upscale downtown mass market "feely"-cinema complete with video-walls in a preview sponsored by a major radio station. I drank Coke(tm) and afterwards visited Chapters(tm) while drinking Starbucks(tm) coffee.
I would love to hear what an American history buff would have to say about it, but knowing absolutely nothing about the subject matter, I adored the movie.
On a totally unrelated note, for somebody who was bashing Katz for citing the Matrix as though it were underground theatre, anybody seen PI? Certainly not underground theatre, but as close as I get these days. GREAT movie for people who bash away too hard at any sort of algorithm.
Not to bash Microsoft for being Microsoft, but they're mindshare of IE is growing terribly fast. Communicator is buggy and lacking in features. They really need to get a rock solid product out the door and never look back.
Mozilla needs to penetrate a market where people are using the browser which ships on their system. Every killer feature in Mozilla will eventually be cloned in IE, and accordingly "incorporated into the OS."
Why do I care? Because no company should control the web. The more browsers, the more reasons to only design standards-compliant sites. More and more sites are cropping up which do not render or function properly under Netscape. It is only a matter of time before people start asking me "It is slower, more bloated, less stable than IE and it fails to render pages properly... why on earth are we still using it?"
Even Slashdot with its massive table format, is much faster rendered under IE than under Netscape.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely. I should have been more specific.
That's a stereotype :-)
I attribute this kind of behaviour to a bitter vocal miniority. I've seen this behaviour in all groups. I think it is just as narrow to point a finger at "them" as it is for "them" to point a finger at you. I think you found the right solution though. Anonymity. Let them find out who they are after they already respect you.
For the mostpart the Internet is a medium where everybody online has an equally loud voice. Unfortunately, for the uninitiated, the power to have their thoughts heard by an entire community means that they will post their thoughts to the enitre community. Worse, for the mostpart the uninitated with their underdeveloped sense of netiquette, will post exactly what is on their mind -- whether the entire community cares or not.
People do learn netiquette. If not punished, they are made aware of their abberant behaviour. Try posting HTML to a mailing list, or post to usenet using ALL CAPS. You will be made quite aware that you are breaking the rules.
When I was younger I strongly resented being lumped into this category. I would like to believe that the source is inexperience. People make mistakes.
With the flood of "immigrants", and the stereotypical loud-mouthed youth there will always be an abundance of the uninitiated. As the net grows, the problem will only get worse. For BBSers, or members of any failed online community this is not news.
IIRC, he sold a whack of stock and paid off some debts a month before the results of a dissapointing quarter came out. He was being charged with insider trading.
http://dailynews.yaho o.com/h/nm/20000114/tc/tech_corel_3.html
I don't know why this warrants such a high moderation. The questions have been answered all over the media, and Cowpland has given "no comment" whenever anybody asked for more details.
It seems only natural that an exec would be investigated for selling off stock a month before a dissapointing quarter. However I'll be surprised if he's convicted of any wrongdoing... the stocks he sold didn't drop that much, and are now worth triple what he sold them for. A month is a long time in the terms of a quarter.
Regardless, I'm as ignorant as the next guy about the details of the case.
He said "...his flaws were in his content and his organization."
You replied "Specifically on what basis are his arguments bad? how is the content bad?"
Nobody said there was anything wrong with his arguments. I disagree with many of them, but they're simply different points of view.
As for content, what little content there is, is not "bad", I just think there needs to be much more of it. His Hellmouth bit, though lengthy, was one of the very few Katz articles I almost enjoyed.
The original author of this thread is not alone in his sentiments. Jon would be a much more effective writer if he put a little more emphasis on the facts and did not blither on paragraph after paragraph.
I second that.
Everybody seems to have a very strong opinion about Katz. I think he's a lousy author. Others love his writing. I haven't a clue as to why, but I can't argue with their dollars.
I'll have to give one of his books a read some time. They simply can't be as bad as his columns. Can they?
PI was rather similar to The Matrix... except that the puppeteer is never revealed. In the end, the "illusion" is preserved and the main character takes the other pill.
Technologically, the movie is absurd, but they didn't bow down to the special effects like many other movies do. I think they really captured what it is to be obsessed with solving a really tough mathematical problem with deep philosophical ramifications.
It's kind of depressing and headachy at the same time. Interesting movie.
Absolutely true, and I do think about big companies in different terms than I do little ones.
Regarding the Lotus/Wordperfect/others issue, my point was that the industry had a leading wordprocessor, and they had a leading spreadsheet. Microsoft took the second-best spreadsheet along with the second best wordprocessor and marketed them together for the same price as either product individually. They do this perpetually bundling Word to Excel to Powerpoint to Money to Internet Explorer to Access to Photodraw to ...
Funny you should mention Star Office. why would I want to use it when I need Visio? come the next version of Office, I would wager good money that Visio alone will cost marginally less than the full Office 200x suite. StarOffice, Smartsuite, Corel Office and all the kin were the industry's reply to MS Office. Do you really think Quattro and Wordperfect would have joined forces otherwise?
The only reason MS was so successful in this arena was because they were able to join their product lines much more easily than their competiors could join forces.
Claris? They started small and created a works package. They marketed the integration of their applications. They did not similtaneously compete price for price, feature for feature with Lotus and Wordperfect while drawing revenue from OS sales.
Yes, splitting up Microsoft won't diminish their market share, nor will it diminish the power they have through that marketshare. However, what it will do is prevent products from being developed, advertised, given away and bundled into other key products with 100% funding provided from their OS.
I don't know what lines to split them along, but as long as their application developers can bundle products together, they will always have an unfair edge.
They beat Lotus through manipulating their OS and bundling in a wordprocessor. Likewise, they beat Wordperfect by bundling in a spreadsheet. They beat Stac by bundling in Doublespace, they beat Netscape by bundling IE into their OS... there are countless others, but the trend is continuing...
Why else do you think they bought Visio?
Heh heh....
I can see the billboards now... "Linux, put your middle finger to more productive uses"
We have them all over the place at work... great things, they even let you plug a mouse in similtaneously. I just avoid the nipples, because I tend to use them too much, and after about six months, my index fingers begin to get quite sore.
They're almost the perfect pointing device, you don't even have to take your fingers off the home row.
Whoops. Thanks.
Is there any reason we should trust George Lucas more than Steven Spielburg?
It will come out as soon as all the hype is dead.
Didn't he say the same thing about releasing E.T. on VHS? It took a while but his "masterpeice" eventually came out on tape.
(Or do I have my directors mixed up?)
Just a thought, if it is programmer-endemic laziness, isn't there a good reason for not releasing the source until it is sharp and polished? Think about the security of a major website running an incomplete opensource engine.
It takes a lot of work to polish code and clearly document it... but I agree, the source code should at least be secretly released to a trusted handful of interested parties... They could then debug and document... the way opensource is supposed to work.
But then again, this may have already happened...
At the very least it is a good example of why to open your source from day one.
I agree with this completely, but as of the past couple years, this doesn't work anymore. Most applications are horribly underdocumented, or ship docs electronically.
Electronic documentation requires people to have a pre-existing knowledge of file types, and directory structures.
I think you're on to something here though. Our education department would probably serve users better by handing them a "for dummies" book and spending a day going over how to use the "F1" key, how to look things up and how to use files and directories.
It amazes me how some people can be whizzes at their jobs, but when you try to teach them something about computers, their eyes glaze over. A user just called me up because they couldn't figure out how to use an AOL CD. I mean they couldn't even figure out who supports the AOL CD.
On the other hand, I have one user at my location who over the course of a year went from little to no prior knowledge to being somewhat of an authority amongst her peers.
Many of these problems have nothing to do with technological illiteracy. Technology just highlights the people who have great difficulty learning.
Maybe we should spend less money on technical support, more money on education, and impose consequences for those who fail to learn the basics. Like any other basic job-skill.
A "zeroth year in the reign of the current Emperor" is obvious nonsense.
I could never understand this argument. How could anybody claim to have an intuative understanding of something which was decided upon two thousand years ago?
Is this 1999, or the one thousand, nine hundred and ninty-ninth year?
From my limited resources, the current calendar is set upon the birth of Christ. This was calculated in approximately 70AD by counting backwards on the Roman calendar. This and the calculation was later found to be incorrect, neglecting the reign of a particular emperor thus pushing the birth of Christ back to around 4BC.
Regardless, to counter a frankly silly argument that it is "obvious" that there was no zero; was Jesus, an infant like any other, ever zero years old?
Yes!, but nobody in the modern world would call him "Zero years old", they might say it is his first year of life, but most would say he is "minutes old", or "months old" or whatever.
Who's to know what was being thought of 70AD as to when or if there was a zero. Nobody I know of has stepped forward and claimed to have documentation to say that that monk fellow intended the birth of Christ to fall on zero or one. Though I'm sure somebody does have this information. I don't care enough to find out. Saying the new millenium starts in 2001 is saying that Jesus was one year old in year two and that by all modern numbering conventions, this is the one thousand nine hundred and ninty-ninth year, or... year number 1998.
Right or wrong, I don't really care all that much, but it is not "obvious" nor is it "nonsense." Pointless perhaps... but not nonsense.
The etoys site is claiming that Etoys is a registered trademark. Wasn't it overturned? Shouldn't NSI resurrect the etoy site because there are no longer any trademark issues?
BTW Is there an etoy legal fund?
But if they get 2M sigs, it will hit the news, and it will be yet another reason for hardware manufacturers to consider Linux when they're developing new products.
I agree that the intended use of the petition is probably flawed. And I don't think they'll get anywhere near 2M sigs, but it's only my name and my Hotmail address. It's worth a shot.
Oh yeah, that's fair.
There are a shade under 300 machines registered to this project. Over 250 of them are linux boxes.
Comedy after all, is about escaping reality, not creating additional work.
I really can't disagree with this more. On the simplest level, what would satire be?
Regardless, Jim Carey has been milking toilet humour too long -- he's been typecast. I haven't seen this movie yet, but I look forward to seeing him in a serious role... it's a shame it has to be as a comedian though.
I think I'll catch it on video.
I had a quick look at www.NSInc.com, and it seems that they infact exist. There could be some kind of brand confusion going on here, after all they're both interested in money. NSInc is roughly 15 years old.
I also noticed that www.ensi.com is also registered and is a real site.
I wonder if we can get Network Solutions to pull the plug on that pesky www.nsi.com?
Great movie. Just great. I saw it in a shiny new upscale downtown mass market "feely"-cinema complete with video-walls in a preview sponsored by a major radio station. I drank Coke(tm) and afterwards visited Chapters(tm) while drinking Starbucks(tm) coffee.
I would love to hear what an American history buff would have to say about it, but knowing absolutely nothing about the subject matter, I adored the movie.
On a totally unrelated note, for somebody who was bashing Katz for citing the Matrix as though it were underground theatre, anybody seen PI? Certainly not underground theatre, but as close as I get these days. GREAT movie for people who bash away too hard at any sort of algorithm.
2% downtime over the course of a week is over three hours. If your system is down 9:00am to 5:00pm Monday to Friday that's a 76% uptime.
I hate 'uptime' figures.
This and the difference between M10 and M11 is night and day.
Not to bash Microsoft for being Microsoft, but they're mindshare of IE is growing terribly fast. Communicator is buggy and lacking in features. They really need to get a rock solid product out the door and never look back.
Mozilla needs to penetrate a market where people are using the browser which ships on their system. Every killer feature in Mozilla will eventually be cloned in IE, and accordingly "incorporated into the OS."
Why do I care? Because no company should control the web. The more browsers, the more reasons to only design standards-compliant sites. More and more sites are cropping up which do not render or function properly under Netscape. It is only a matter of time before people start asking me "It is slower, more bloated, less stable than IE and it fails to render pages properly... why on earth are we still using it?"
Even Slashdot with its massive table format, is much faster rendered under IE than under Netscape.