I had a relatively good time in HS. I was pretty isolated from all but a _very_ small number of other people, but part of that is my fault, and I'm sorry to say that I still tend to have a tough time getting friendly with people.
Anyhow, the reason that so many people appear to be in support of those two murderers in Colorado is because many of us have imagined, probably in our darkest hour, doing exactly the same sort of thing.
It seems pretty likely that some of the factors that led up to their killing spree have been experienced by/.ers. A lot of people here experienced a lot of really bad, heavy shit. Consider it a trial by fire. But they didn't make the ultimate choice to go out and murder people.
Don't get me wrong; I find the idea of taking another person's life, be it murder, or war, or execution, or whatever, abhorrent. I have no sympathy for those two kids. No one, IMHO, has the right to do what they did for any reason whatsoever.
But a great number of people here have discovered that they COULD have been them. They weren't, but they could have been. They can understand the pressures that can drive people to perform such terrible acts, and how easily those pressures can be generated.
So I'd say that the enormous response around here (/. has been totally/.ed at last) is because people want to point out that some of the factors that led to this matter have been around for a long time, that they are still with us, and that they are certainly able to push people into doing awful things. I'm glad that the hundreds of people here who have come close to making the wrong choice didn't, but it's a danger that has to be pointed out. We can't just permit people to keep walking down that road, thinking that they're the only ones, and having to make that choice.
Honestly, I doubt that more than a handful of people here really sympathize with the murderers. What they're doing is sympathizing with themselves; the people who could have been, but didn't become, murderers.
Sorry if I'm ranting here, it's pretty late. Still, I thought the point needed to be clarified.
As I recall they're singing a couple of lines in Sanskrit. If you go to the Boston Globe's website and search around for articles dating back to the first week of April, you ought to find a very nice article about John Williams and the new music. Ain't It Cool News also had a link to this, earlier in the month.
Yeah I hate toolbars too. I wish I had the code for MS Word 4 - that was the last thing they made that was actually good. I'd give my left arm, or at least my crummy copy of Word98 for an up to date copy of Word 4.
Anyhow, I suspect that there's going to be some trouble with extensible interfaces. Having done a good bit of HTML design, I suspect that there are two schools of design. The first codes to specific browsers and uses tables, etc. for exact positioning. The second is more abstract, with use of CSS and other standards for layout that can be interpreted differently, but without obfuscating the content.
An extensible interface that was anything more than changing the colors of the existing interface would have to be VERY abstract. Especially if fundemental parts of the interface changed (like changing icons back from nouns to verbs - could be useful, I dunno)
A very difficult thing to work up a standard for, much less convince people to design for (in adherence). I suggest reading the Apple Human Interface Guidelines book, as well as Tog on Interface. Both very handy sources of information for this sort of thing (there are lots of others, but those two stand out)
That's the one thing I absolutely hate about the various Dooms and Quakes. I really hate playing games in which everything is a shade of brown. Brown ground, brown metal, brown enemies, brown weapons, EVERYTHING looks like it got hit with the Brown stick.
In an environment with a very limited color palette (e.g. Doom, 8bit color) I can accept this. With 32bit color it's stupid. Unreal is frequently willing to avoid brown, and use other colors instead (although it's still pretty boring in a lot of respects). I rather liked the original Marathon (not 2 or 3 so much) for their willingness to use different color schemes for stuff.
I swear the guys at Id must be color blind or something... jeeze...
You bastard! I didn't know that! I can't believe you just ruined something as mind-blowing as that for me! Next you'll be telling me that everyone in the whole series is somehow related!
Arrgh! You just killed any kind of wonder I could have had... Geeze.
i am still frustrated about 3d... when you are blind in one eye everything just comes out blue... i can't see those stupid pictures of squigly lines that suddenly become a picture... and hand eye coordination should be hand eye*s*... but i digress... does anyone know if this 3d will work for me?
Hand-eyes coordination? Nice way to treat one handed people;)
Honestly I doubt that most (if any) 3d displays will work for you, as they all tend to exploit stereoscopic vision (trying to fool sensory inputs into accepting a false image as a true one...)
Also, you're not missing much in the way of those magic eye pictures - I can't use one without crossing my eyes, and it's not like they're all that amazing in the first place.
Crackers don't make money, Hackers need new name
on
"Hackers" are Dumb
·
· Score: 1
Martha? Brian? I still like 'motherfuckers' (from an earlier post re: crackers)
I dunno about you, but my SGI (using Irix, none of that NT here) gives me telepathic abilities.
For instance I have precognative powers. I can accurately predict that my system will work more reliably than win98. I also have telepathic abilities at certain resturants; I enter and immediately my sixth sense tells me that I'm going to enjoy a good meal.
I remember TurboGopherVR. It was like playing Spectre (which it was a contemporary of, IIRC) but when you drove into a link-block, it would move you around through gopherspace, further down a tree, or to another gopher site.
Pretty cool. Not all that useful, but cool. (And whatever happened to the similarly useless but cool 3d information system Apple developed about, oh, four years ago?)
Maybe these 'IT professionals' they interviewed were actually full time graphic artists, web designers, or mostly management and marketting people with spare cycles to burn.
Oh thanks. I'm a graphic artist/web designer (and coca-cola addict). During my idle time at work (waiting for Photoshop to do something, usually) I like to balance my checkbook, doodle, or talk to my co-workers.
In the future, I'd appreciate it if you reserved comments like that for mangement and marketing. I don't care about any of their feelings;)
Apple doesn't have a monopoly in personal computers. Furthermore, there aren't eight jillion companies who have their balls in Apple's grip. Apple isn't abusing their monopoly on computers they make (and that's silly anyhow; Dell has a monopoly on Dells, Packard Bell has a monopoly on Packard Bells (not that anyone would want it)) anyhow.
To be a monopoly you have to be BIG. Then the government doesn't care unless you use that monopoly to get another monopoly. And Apple has a monopoly in what now? And they're leveraging it into... gee, you tell me.
RMS is being pragmatic. There is actually a possibility that MS will undergo some sort of externally mandated change. Apple isn't even in court - why would he waste his time on comparatively small potatoes (e.g. everyone who isn't MS).
When Apple is the undisputed ruler of the microcomputer world this exercise has merit. Otherwise who cares?
I'm not sure if the federal govt. does, but the state governments already have this power, though it's hardly ever been used.
I suppose the SEC or some other body could work in conjunction with the Washington state government to prevent MS from transferring their assets, etc. to a different company (chartered in a different state) if this went through. It probably wouldn't unless the Washington judiciary is pro open source.
Corporations are not people in the same way that you and I are.
The rights of a corporation are granted to it by the government, IIRC because the corporation can somehow achieve a greater good for the populace than individuals could, even if they worked together. These rights can be, and I feel this ought to be used more often, revoked if the corporation does not do some common good. (There is a campaign going to have Phillip-Morris' charter revoked. I'm no lawyer, but I expect this would nullify their copyrights, patents, etc. as the entity that owned them no longer existed)
If MS really were just a bunch of people, then they would not have the limited liability that they currently enjoy. MS could go down in flames, but no one would be responsible for paying their debts, or would go to jail, etc. You can't put a corporation in jail. Except maybe in Texas;)
Also, I guess they wouldn't be able to own things jointly. So each person would need to own their own tools, or have to borrow them or something. Would definately be interesting....
But at any rate, the rights of corporations are few. OTOH, they (sometimes literally) get away with murder, because most laws only apply to real people, and certainly a lot of meaningful penalties only do.
Anyone know more on the subject? (corrections, perhaps?)
Also depends on where you shop. I've seen TRON from anywhere from $20-30. Amazon tends to have fairly good prices, although there's still the matter of shipping.
ObSimpsons: Uh... it's like... did anyone seen the movie TRON?
Well, they were incredibly foul. Certainly I can understand how United Media was so quick to take action.
OTOH, it was funnier than South Park, in the same sort of 'I can't believe that this isn't being piped in from another dimension that wasn't taught any manners' way. (Although not in the way that the Simpsons is funny. They've had a lot of good writing, which usually doesn't depend on the novelty of foulmouthed little kids. Usually)
Certainly I can't believe that UM would get away with this if it did go to court. It falls pretty squarely into the parody box.
Actually, I'd say that the computer on the Enterprise in Next Generation was pretty evil. I tell you, I wouldn't dare use the holodeck; you always get stuck there, and the computer always tries to kill you. I'd rather have Holly, because at least he doesn't intentionally harm you, although he does enjoy pratical jokes.
As for UI, let me point out that it's really essential that the various design choices all work well together, rather than working okay. Case in point: Windows lets you resize any given window from any border. BUT, the region in which you can do that is quite small, and marked only by a cursor change. Worse, the mouse tracking algorithm is awful, and it's quite a lot of work to get the mouse to be in the right spot (especially as clicking a mouse tends to nudge it).
So if you're going to use a similar resize interface, make the mouse tracking more appropriate to such small adjustments; make the resize border more than a few pixels; always provide a nice big target in the lower right hand corner (the default for this sort of thing) for people who don't want to deal with the edges.
Mostly though, think about the repercussions of some fundamental UI choices, and if there's a better way, would it make life better in general, not just within a specific app?
There are similar issues, like weighting the importance of bindings by memnonic devices (N for new folder) or placement (Z undo, X cut C copy V paste are all near where the Mac originally had its command key - some of the easier buttons to press in conjunction). And think about two hands having to press the buttons, or if one hand is likely to be on the mouse when an operation is performed. And if so maybe you want to keep the commands on one side of the keyboard (probably the left - only right handed people are important;)
Being able to infer information from other config files (e.g. is the mouse set for a right handed or left handed person? can you shift things around because of that? is it wise to?) is also a good plan. But ask before doing stuff that differs from the default configuration!
Ten gallon hats haven't got anything to do with any sort of liquid measurement. In fact a typical ten gallon hat probably wouldn't hold more than a single gallon.
The name derives, IIRC, from the spanish galon, which was a braid that was used for decoration on the hat.
Now the five gallon gloves and seven liter boots are a different story....
I guess that now I'll have to deliberately put my web pages in a different room, to make me get up;)
Seriously though, if you're using this and moving around, you'd better have a really good model of the environment or a camera mounted on the outside of the headset or something. Otherwise you'd be forever bumping into things.
Anyway, MIT should to go over (yeah, all of 'em) to You Do It Electronics in Needham, and build the laser display into the shell of the Sony Glasstron. Which is not very good, and way overpriced, but looks very cool. I played with one over there.
Don't believe the 52" thing though. It looked like a 20" screen to me....
Slashdot Mirror
Tell it like it is.
Damn, I wished I had worked up the nerve to get together with Summer.
I had a relatively good time in HS. I was pretty isolated from all but a _very_ small number of other people, but part of that is my fault, and I'm sorry to say that I still tend to have a tough time getting friendly with people.
/.ers. A lot of people here experienced a lot of really bad, heavy shit. Consider it a trial by fire. But they didn't make the ultimate choice to go out and murder people.
/.ed at last) is because people want to point out that some of the factors that led to this matter have been around for a long time, that they are still with us, and that they are certainly able to push people into doing awful things. I'm glad that the hundreds of people here who have come close to making the wrong choice didn't, but it's a danger that has to be pointed out. We can't just permit people to keep walking down that road, thinking that they're the only ones, and having to make that choice.
Anyhow, the reason that so many people appear to be in support of those two murderers in Colorado is because many of us have imagined, probably in our darkest hour, doing exactly the same sort of thing.
It seems pretty likely that some of the factors that led up to their killing spree have been experienced by
Don't get me wrong; I find the idea of taking another person's life, be it murder, or war, or execution, or whatever, abhorrent. I have no sympathy for those two kids. No one, IMHO, has the right to do what they did for any reason whatsoever.
But a great number of people here have discovered that they COULD have been them. They weren't, but they could have been. They can understand the pressures that can drive people to perform such terrible acts, and how easily those pressures can be generated.
So I'd say that the enormous response around here (/. has been totally
Honestly, I doubt that more than a handful of people here really sympathize with the murderers. What they're doing is sympathizing with themselves; the people who could have been, but didn't become, murderers.
Sorry if I'm ranting here, it's pretty late. Still, I thought the point needed to be clarified.
As I recall they're singing a couple of lines in Sanskrit. If you go to the Boston Globe's website and search around for articles dating back to the first week of April, you ought to find a very nice article about John Williams and the new music. Ain't It Cool News also had a link to this, earlier in the month.
Yeah I hate toolbars too. I wish I had the code for MS Word 4 - that was the last thing they made that was actually good. I'd give my left arm, or at least my crummy copy of Word98 for an up to date copy of Word 4.
Anyhow, I suspect that there's going to be some trouble with extensible interfaces. Having done a good bit of HTML design, I suspect that there are two schools of design. The first codes to specific browsers and uses tables, etc. for exact positioning. The second is more abstract, with use of CSS and other standards for layout that can be interpreted differently, but without obfuscating the content.
An extensible interface that was anything more than changing the colors of the existing interface would have to be VERY abstract. Especially if fundemental parts of the interface changed (like changing icons back from nouns to verbs - could be useful, I dunno)
A very difficult thing to work up a standard for, much less convince people to design for (in adherence). I suggest reading the Apple Human Interface Guidelines book, as well as Tog on Interface. Both very handy sources of information for this sort of thing (there are lots of others, but those two stand out)
That's the one thing I absolutely hate about the various Dooms and Quakes. I really hate playing games in which everything is a shade of brown. Brown ground, brown metal, brown enemies, brown weapons, EVERYTHING looks like it got hit with the Brown stick.
In an environment with a very limited color palette (e.g. Doom, 8bit color) I can accept this. With 32bit color it's stupid. Unreal is frequently willing to avoid brown, and use other colors instead (although it's still pretty boring in a lot of respects). I rather liked the original Marathon (not 2 or 3 so much) for their willingness to use different color schemes for stuff.
I swear the guys at Id must be color blind or something... jeeze...
You bastard! I didn't know that! I can't believe you just ruined something as mind-blowing as that for me! Next you'll be telling me that everyone in the whole series is somehow related!
Arrgh! You just killed any kind of wonder I could have had... Geeze.
i am still frustrated about 3d ... when you are blind in one eye everything just comes out blue ... i can't see those stupid pictures of squigly lines that suddenly become a picture ... and hand eye coordination should be hand eye*s* ... but i digress ... does anyone know if this 3d will work for me?
Hand-eyes coordination? Nice way to treat one handed people ;)
Honestly I doubt that most (if any) 3d displays will work for you, as they all tend to exploit stereoscopic vision (trying to fool sensory inputs into accepting a false image as a true one...)
Also, you're not missing much in the way of those magic eye pictures - I can't use one without crossing my eyes, and it's not like they're all that amazing in the first place.
Martha? Brian? I still like 'motherfuckers' (from an earlier post re: crackers)
I dunno about you, but my SGI (using Irix, none of that NT here) gives me telepathic abilities.
;)
For instance I have precognative powers. I can accurately predict that my system will work more reliably than win98. I also have telepathic abilities at certain resturants; I enter and immediately my sixth sense tells me that I'm going to enjoy a good meal.
So says Criswell.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
^a^
(And then you won't have to pay extra for shipping. Next after Canada: Cuba. Then we retake the Canal Zone!)
HOOHOOHOOHOOHOOHAHAHAHAHA
I remember TurboGopherVR. It was like playing Spectre (which it was a contemporary of, IIRC) but when you drove into a link-block, it would move you around through gopherspace, further down a tree, or to another gopher site.
Pretty cool. Not all that useful, but cool. (And whatever happened to the similarly useless but cool 3d information system Apple developed about, oh, four years ago?)
Maybe these 'IT professionals' they interviewed were actually full time graphic artists, web designers, or mostly management and marketting people with spare cycles to burn.
Oh thanks. I'm a graphic artist/web designer (and coca-cola addict). During my idle time at work (waiting for Photoshop to do something, usually) I like to balance my checkbook, doodle, or talk to my co-workers.
In the future, I'd appreciate it if you reserved comments like that for mangement and marketing. I don't care about any of their feelings ;)
As long as they haven't found out about the barnyard animals in the server room, I think we can get through this.
No, the other one. Yeah, that's me.
I was waiting for that... jeeze, you people.
Apple doesn't have a monopoly in personal computers. Furthermore, there aren't eight jillion companies who have their balls in Apple's grip. Apple isn't abusing their monopoly on computers they make (and that's silly anyhow; Dell has a monopoly on Dells, Packard Bell has a monopoly on Packard Bells (not that anyone would want it)) anyhow.
To be a monopoly you have to be BIG. Then the government doesn't care unless you use that monopoly to get another monopoly. And Apple has a monopoly in what now? And they're leveraging it into... gee, you tell me.
RMS is being pragmatic. There is actually a possibility that MS will undergo some sort of externally mandated change. Apple isn't even in court - why would he waste his time on comparatively small potatoes (e.g. everyone who isn't MS).
When Apple is the undisputed ruler of the microcomputer world this exercise has merit. Otherwise who cares?
I'm not sure if the federal govt. does, but the state governments already have this power, though it's hardly ever been used.
I suppose the SEC or some other body could work in conjunction with the Washington state government to prevent MS from transferring their assets, etc. to a different company (chartered in a different state) if this went through. It probably wouldn't unless the Washington judiciary is pro open source.
Corporations are not people in the same way that you and I are.
;)
The rights of a corporation are granted to it by the government, IIRC because the corporation can somehow achieve a greater good for the populace than individuals could, even if they worked together. These rights can be, and I feel this ought to be used more often, revoked if the corporation does not do some common good. (There is a campaign going to have Phillip-Morris' charter revoked. I'm no lawyer, but I expect this would nullify their copyrights, patents, etc. as the entity that owned them no longer existed)
If MS really were just a bunch of people, then they would not have the limited liability that they currently enjoy. MS could go down in flames, but no one would be responsible for paying their debts, or would go to jail, etc. You can't put a corporation in jail. Except maybe in Texas
Also, I guess they wouldn't be able to own things jointly. So each person would need to own their own tools, or have to borrow them or something. Would definately be interesting....
But at any rate, the rights of corporations are few. OTOH, they (sometimes literally) get away with murder, because most laws only apply to real people, and certainly a lot of meaningful penalties only do.
Anyone know more on the subject? (corrections, perhaps?)
Also depends on where you shop. I've seen TRON from anywhere from $20-30. Amazon tends to have fairly good prices, although there's still the matter of shipping.
ObSimpsons: Uh... it's like... did anyone seen the movie TRON?
Well, they were incredibly foul. Certainly I can understand how United Media was so quick to take action.
OTOH, it was funnier than South Park, in the same sort of 'I can't believe that this isn't being piped in from another dimension that wasn't taught any manners' way. (Although not in the way that the Simpsons is funny. They've had a lot of good writing, which usually doesn't depend on the novelty of foulmouthed little kids. Usually)
Certainly I can't believe that UM would get away with this if it did go to court. It falls pretty squarely into the parody box.
Actually, I'd say that the computer on the Enterprise in Next Generation was pretty evil. I tell you, I wouldn't dare use the holodeck; you always get stuck there, and the computer always tries to kill you. I'd rather have Holly, because at least he doesn't intentionally harm you, although he does enjoy pratical jokes.
;)
As for UI, let me point out that it's really essential that the various design choices all work well together, rather than working okay. Case in point: Windows lets you resize any given window from any border. BUT, the region in which you can do that is quite small, and marked only by a cursor change. Worse, the mouse tracking algorithm is awful, and it's quite a lot of work to get the mouse to be in the right spot (especially as clicking a mouse tends to nudge it).
So if you're going to use a similar resize interface, make the mouse tracking more appropriate to such small adjustments; make the resize border more than a few pixels; always provide a nice big target in the lower right hand corner (the default for this sort of thing) for people who don't want to deal with the edges.
Mostly though, think about the repercussions of some fundamental UI choices, and if there's a better way, would it make life better in general, not just within a specific app?
There are similar issues, like weighting the importance of bindings by memnonic devices (N for new folder) or placement (Z undo, X cut C copy V paste are all near where the Mac originally had its command key - some of the easier buttons to press in conjunction). And think about two hands having to press the buttons, or if one hand is likely to be on the mouse when an operation is performed. And if so maybe you want to keep the commands on one side of the keyboard (probably the left - only right handed people are important
Being able to infer information from other config files (e.g. is the mouse set for a right handed or left handed person? can you shift things around because of that? is it wise to?) is also a good plan. But ask before doing stuff that differs from the default configuration!
Ten gallon hats haven't got anything to do with any sort of liquid measurement. In fact a typical ten gallon hat probably wouldn't hold more than a single gallon.
The name derives, IIRC, from the spanish galon, which was a braid that was used for decoration on the hat.
Now the five gallon gloves and seven liter boots are a different story....
must've read HIT as MIT. D'oh!
I guess that now I'll have to deliberately put my web pages in a different room, to make me get up ;)
Seriously though, if you're using this and moving around, you'd better have a really good model of the environment or a camera mounted on the outside of the headset or something. Otherwise you'd be forever bumping into things.
Anyway, MIT should to go over (yeah, all of 'em) to You Do It Electronics in Needham, and build the laser display into the shell of the Sony Glasstron. Which is not very good, and way overpriced, but looks very cool. I played with one over there.
Don't believe the 52" thing though. It looked like a 20" screen to me....
The planets and all the stuff on/in them were created on days Bleem through Florp (inclusive). Then, on Xyzzy, nothing happened.