Yeah. And it's weird how, like, negative forces in politics cause all these different parties to emerge, dividing politicians into two camps and not giving an edge to either one. Obviously, the next logical step is to elect me as your SUPREME LEADER.
Further, the design assumes a middle mouse button, and middle mouse buttons are falling out of favor
What planet are you living on?
In the PC world, at least, middle-button mice are finally becoming standard. What do you think the scroll wheel does when you press it? Mice, IMO, are heading in the direction of SUVs: Giganticism and feature rot. The latest offerings from MS look like X-box controllers: Extra doo-dads for thumbs, pinkies, tongues... Oh well; at least they put the third button back on.:)
The real trick is figuring out how to squelch the mentally deficient default behaviour given to the third button by the Doze. Really, now; don't I have enough ways of scrolling??
As a net.admin forced to spend most of his time with windoze boxen, I'd be tempted to simply power-cycle the patients. Is this correct medical procedure?
If you do that you will warp to a negatively numbered world which is an water level that keeps going.
Oh wow. So if you complete a complex task perfectly, you're rewarded by being removed to a position where the work is repetitive, impossible and ultimately futile. Minusland is middle management!
Hmm. Now I'm tempted to author a klez-like virus and send it to, oh, I don't know, carly@hp.com, billg@microsoft.com, ashcroft@hotmail.mil. Then, when they get angry, I can claim in(gnorance|nocence).
I don't see any technical reason why your school of choice would reject you, provided your grades (and/or, I suppose, your extracurriculars) are solid. In my experience, universities ('colleges', for 'merkins in the audience) don't really sweat the details. For instance, they don't sit around saying, "Well, look here, Bob Jones felt it necessary to take a break from the expedition to the summit of human knowledge; cast him into the outer darkness!". The registrars of big unis (for instance, McGill, my soon-to-be alma mater) have many thousands of your ilk to process; if they gave a shit about every little detail on every transcript, they'd go mad.
The real concern is that you might wind up hanging around with "the wrong type." Yes, boys and girls, the existentialists were right: Your sense of self is almost entirely the engineered product of your own consciousness! That is to say: If you tend to kick around with a lot of non-uni humans, it becomes harder to see yourself as the sort of fellow who goes to university; your identity can settle when you least expect it. My friend 'Susan', for instance, took a year off CEGEP(*) to deal with some personal problems and wound up in three-year odyssey of boring, min-wage jobs, grubby leather jackets, bad music and perpetual broke-ness. (It has a certain early-Tom-Waits-ish appeal, I must admit.) As she set and broke dozens of 'return dates' and made the necessitated flurry of excuses, it became clear that she simply no longer saw herself as 'the kind of person' who goes to uni; as her financial situation worsened, her resentful comments and bitter epithets about the 'preppies' attending such institutions increased dramatically in frequency and vehemence. She managed to weasel her way back into academe by dint of hard work and persistence, but I think she now has deeply-ingrained feelings --- or at least, habits --- of alienation towards the campus and her peers. This makes it difficult for her to enjoy school and/or work hard at it.She threw her lot in with academe, only to find out that it had already been thrown somewhere else.
On the other hand, another friend of mine took a year off between high school and uni to tour Europe. She had a blast and is going on to do her Masters in Germany next year; really, you never know.
(*) CEGEP (there's an accent aigu on the first 'E') is a Quebec-only state-run thingamagig which comprises what Americans call the senior year of high school and accredits you with either the (I can never get this right; 'sophomore'? 'little league'? 'First', at any rate) year of university or a vocational diploma. Imagine the senior year of high school glued onto a community college glued onto a university dorm. Yes, I know it's silly, but so is gravy and cheese curds on french fries; it's Quebec, it can't help it.
The underlying phenomenon here was illuminated many moons ago by ESR in his 'noosphere' essay, and is broadly obvious to anyone with a background in marketing.
Windows has a distinctive look-and-feel. The macintosh has a distinctive l&f. Why? Branding, branding branding! The same organisation that is responsible for the overall package -- the OS in Microsoft's case; computer in Apple's --- is responsible for the interface. The visual differences between KDE and Gnome exist for similar reasons. By replacing their respective brand-imagery with its own, RedHat now gets to gobble up the mindshare of both teams -- the only form of 'payment' that these projects really ask for --- without any sort of renumeration. Need I remind the reader how important mindshare is to the financing and ultimate success of any open source project? Would KDE have received funding from the German government if it had just been some grey nnonymous widget-maker for a couple of American software firms?
Sure, you could characterise this as a case of warring egos; but egos are essential to survival: The perfectly altruisitic quickly become fodder for the pragmatically selfish. KDE and Gnome are well within their rights to protest; their identities are their equity. That's how this market works --- regardless of the apparent legality or probity of such maneuvers under license.
(1) 'Telbus'. With your cell, call the number listed on your bus stop and get information on the next couple of busses.
(2) 'Tous Azimuts'. (http://www.stm.info). Calculate the shortest route between two points, using metro (subway), light-rail and bus.
(3) Online timetables, etc. Not that interesting, but useful nevertheless.
(3) Boards in the metro stations that indicate when the next metro is coming. This is AFAIK currently a pilot project.
(4) Fat racist fifty-somethings that yell horrible things in incomprehensibly thick accents over the metro's PA system whenever some bubble-headed Hilfiger-clad teen causes a ruckus by, eg, holding the door open for thirty seconds so his ugly girlfriend won't break her ankles by running in this season's shoes. Very effective technology.
Every IM and gooey IRC client these days is replacing the noble ASCII smile with the hideous rictus of a yellow dot. Even punctuation is threatened by the forces of Disnification.
My office is divided between the savvy Engineering department, which uses Linux and gcc for development and, believe it or not, groff for written stuff, and the Sales department, which used to use MSOffice 97. Due to extensive lobbying by the lead engineer, and some incompatibilities between Office97 and 2000, when the hour came for an upgrade we seized the opportunity to switch sales and management to an OO-based environment.
The results so far are that:
(1) Some unexpected people are going to _need_ MS Office, point-blank. The popular financial package we use only 'exports' data to Excel. Not excel file formats; just Excel (via OLE or COM or whatever they're calling it this week.) Although it has a 'print to CSV' feature (don't ask), it saves the file with some silly Lotus-specific extension that OpenOffice doesn't believe is actually a CSV file. Although renaming should in principle be easy, the people who need to use this data are simply not up to the task of understanding (a) why they need to set their folder options to show all those funny little three-letter thingies at the end of the filename, and (b) why they can't just click the 'Excel' button like they used to. So the people that need to regularly manipulate the data in the financial database at a relatively low level need MSO. Also, upper management simply adores Outlook, so you might have to appease them with the real mccoy. So buy a couple of copies of MSO, just in case.
(2) Many other people won't notice the switch. (Seriously!) Or, at least until they try to open a heavily-formatted word document sent to them from someone outside the company, which leads to point
(3). Always install the freely-downloadable viewers for Office documents, which are available for free on MS' website, and make sure that they map to the MSO filetypes. Really, the Word-document import engine of OO is not yet up to snuff, and the spreadsheet (although very, very close in quality and feel to Excel) barfs in some strange places where Excel is still (perversely) happy. For instance, if you cut and paste a column of cells into a column absolutely referenced by the formulae in those cells, it becomes self-referential and then, in the judgement of both reason and OpenOffice, should display an error. However, Excel will simply display the original contents of the cells before they were copied, and silently ignores the formulae. OO's is obviously the theoretically correct response, but many of the (ahem) generalists in Sales have a hard time understanding what, precisely, they're copying, and Excel's behaviour often gives them what they want despite their incompetence. This is just one small fruit on the tree grown of the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft on focus-group testing and UI design, which is still growing and bearing dividends. OpenOffice has a formidable competitor, even if it is overpriced.
(4) Consider using StarOffice, which is cheap (although not free, obviously) and handles Word and Excel documents better. Or, wait for whatever it is that 'GoBe Productive' is metamorphosing into, which I have not tried and cannot speak knowledgably about.
Not that serious, if you buy it a beer and take a little time to see the world from its perspective. It'll lighten up considerably.
Re:One of my favourite quotes...
on
Want Freedom?
·
· Score: 2
A citizen of the US should be able to plan out, including diagrams and timetables, how to blow up the WTC.
The notion of planning (as a species of of discourse) raises an interesting way of framing the problem of code-as-speech.
Imagine that you've planned out, in great detail, a plan to demolish the pentagon building. However, your medium is not pen and napkin, but rather a sophisticated software package that plots attack angles, security concentration, response times, etc, all from publicly available information, and essentially coordinates the entire effort.
Do you think you could distribute such a program successfully?
Do you think you could distribute such a program successfully, if it were/good/?
Code isn't speech. You'd be quashed. Perhaps the thin edge of the wedge is already beneath our feet: New media types are not permitted to enjoy freedom of presses. Only the _bien_pensant_ syncophants, or the merely banal, can use these new tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I should add that I mean charged rechargeables.
Obviously, alkaline batteries would be simply manufactured.
We can set up a generator on top and sell batteries at a steep markup at the Body Shop. :)
...at least they haven't been gagged from reporting the gag on the gag.
Yeah. And it's weird how, like, negative forces in politics cause all these different parties to emerge, dividing politicians into two camps and not giving an edge to either one. Obviously, the next logical step is to elect me as your SUPREME LEADER.
. o O ( Just wait till they find the 'Clippy gets a BJ' easter egg in Office XP )
Latest Dubya Quote: "mmmphhmmmppffbpt"
Not...tantalum carbide...?
What planet are you living on?
In the PC world, at least, middle-button mice are finally becoming standard. What do you think the scroll wheel does when you press it? Mice, IMO, are heading in the direction of SUVs: Giganticism and feature rot. The latest offerings from MS look like X-box controllers: Extra doo-dads for thumbs, pinkies, tongues... Oh well; at least they put the third button back on.
The real trick is figuring out how to squelch the mentally deficient default behaviour given to the third button by the Doze. Really, now; don't I have enough ways of scrolling??
Oh wait: it is
Oh wow. So if you complete a complex task perfectly, you're rewarded by being removed to a position where the work is repetitive, impossible and ultimately futile. Minusland is middle management!
I haven't heard that circumlocution before.
For everyone else out there who's in the same boat, as it were, but hasn't gotten around to adding a google luckbutton to your Mozilla derivate,
http://www.jumptheshark.com/
Why use a radio when you can simply have the dentist reconfigure your oral cavity?
I know, I feel your pain.
:(
My reaction to useraccounts was,
"Oh, faugh, it'll never take off, no need to register..." I believe I held off for months, perhaps almost a year.
I *could* have a priceless four-digit number, but nooo
Hmm. Now I'm tempted to author a klez-like virus and send it to, oh, I don't know, carly@hp.com, billg@microsoft.com, ashcroft@hotmail.mil. Then, when they get angry, I can claim in(gnorance|nocence).
I don't see any technical reason why your school of choice would reject you, provided your grades (and/or, I suppose, your extracurriculars) are solid. In my experience, universities ('colleges', for 'merkins in the audience) don't really sweat the details. For instance, they don't sit around saying, "Well, look here, Bob Jones felt it necessary to take a break from the expedition to the summit of human knowledge; cast him into the outer darkness!". The registrars of big unis (for instance, McGill, my soon-to-be alma mater) have many thousands of your ilk to process; if they gave a shit about every little detail on every transcript, they'd go mad.
The real concern is that you might wind up hanging around with "the wrong type." Yes, boys and girls, the existentialists were right: Your sense of self is almost entirely the engineered product of your own consciousness! That is to say: If you tend to kick around with a lot of non-uni humans, it becomes harder to see yourself as the sort of fellow who goes to university; your identity can settle when you least expect it. My friend 'Susan', for instance, took a year off CEGEP(*) to deal with some personal problems and wound up in three-year odyssey of boring, min-wage jobs, grubby leather jackets, bad music and perpetual broke-ness. (It has a certain early-Tom-Waits-ish appeal, I must admit.) As she set and broke dozens of 'return dates' and made the necessitated flurry of excuses, it became clear that she simply no longer saw herself as 'the kind of person' who goes to uni; as her financial situation worsened, her resentful comments and bitter epithets about the 'preppies' attending such institutions increased dramatically in frequency and vehemence. She managed to weasel her way back into academe by dint of hard work and persistence, but I think she now has deeply-ingrained feelings --- or at least, habits --- of alienation towards the campus and her peers. This makes it difficult for her to enjoy school and/or work hard at it.She threw her lot in with academe, only to find out that it had already been thrown somewhere else.
On the other hand, another friend of mine took a year off between high school and uni to tour Europe. She had a blast and is going on to do her Masters in Germany next year; really, you never know.
(*) CEGEP (there's an accent aigu on the first 'E') is a Quebec-only state-run thingamagig which comprises what Americans call the senior year of high school and accredits you with either the (I can never get this right; 'sophomore'? 'little league'? 'First', at any rate) year of university or a vocational diploma. Imagine the senior year of high school glued onto a community college glued onto a university dorm. Yes, I know it's silly, but so is gravy and cheese curds on french fries; it's Quebec, it can't help it.
The underlying phenomenon here was illuminated many moons ago by ESR in his 'noosphere' essay, and is broadly obvious to anyone with a background in marketing.
Windows has a distinctive look-and-feel. The macintosh has a distinctive l&f. Why? Branding, branding branding! The same organisation that is responsible for the overall package -- the OS in Microsoft's case; computer in Apple's --- is responsible for the interface. The visual differences between KDE and Gnome exist for similar reasons. By replacing their respective brand-imagery with its own, RedHat now gets to gobble up the mindshare of both teams -- the only form of 'payment' that these projects really ask for --- without any sort of renumeration. Need I remind the reader how important mindshare is to the financing and ultimate success of any open source project? Would KDE have received funding from the German government if it had just been some grey nnonymous widget-maker for a couple of American software firms?
Sure, you could characterise this as a case of warring egos; but egos are essential to survival: The perfectly altruisitic quickly become fodder for the pragmatically selfish. KDE and Gnome are well within their rights to protest; their identities are their equity. That's how this market works --- regardless of the apparent legality or probity of such maneuvers under license.
Q: Why would anyone want to profile a race?
A: To remove the loopier elements so that the rest will figgin' fly.
Could someone mod this up please? This is actually quite insightful.
(1) 'Telbus'. With your cell, call the number listed on your bus stop and get information on the next couple of busses.
(2) 'Tous Azimuts'. (http://www.stm.info). Calculate the shortest route between two points, using metro (subway), light-rail and bus.
(3) Online timetables, etc. Not that interesting, but useful nevertheless.
(3) Boards in the metro stations that indicate when the next metro is coming. This is AFAIK currently a pilot project.
(4) Fat racist fifty-somethings that yell horrible things in incomprehensibly thick accents over the metro's PA system whenever some bubble-headed Hilfiger-clad teen causes a ruckus by, eg, holding the door open for thirty seconds so his ugly girlfriend won't break her ankles by running in this season's shoes. Very effective technology.
There's extra formatting in the Excel spreadsheet, such as formulae and hidden cells, that would be impossible to add back in via a macro.
Also, this is just one instance of random weird COM+-centric dependencies; there are others.
Every IM and gooey IRC client these days is replacing the noble ASCII smile with the hideous rictus of a yellow dot. Even punctuation is threatened
by the forces of Disnification.
My office is divided between the savvy Engineering department, which uses Linux and gcc for development and, believe it or not, groff for written stuff, and the Sales department, which used to use MSOffice 97. Due to extensive lobbying by the lead engineer, and some incompatibilities between Office97 and 2000, when the hour came for an upgrade we seized the opportunity to switch sales and management to an OO-based environment.
The results so far are that:
(1) Some unexpected people are going to _need_ MS Office, point-blank. The popular financial package we use only 'exports' data to Excel. Not excel file formats; just Excel (via OLE or COM or whatever they're calling it this week.) Although it has a 'print to CSV' feature (don't ask), it saves the file with some silly Lotus-specific extension that OpenOffice doesn't believe is actually a CSV file. Although renaming should in principle be easy, the people who need to use this data are simply not up to the task of understanding (a) why they need to set their folder options to show all those funny little three-letter thingies at the end of the filename, and (b) why they can't just click the 'Excel' button like they used to. So the people that need to regularly manipulate the data in the financial database at a relatively low level need MSO. Also, upper management simply adores Outlook, so you might have to appease them with the real mccoy. So buy a couple of copies of MSO, just in case.
(2) Many other people won't notice the switch. (Seriously!) Or, at least until they try to open a heavily-formatted word document sent to them from someone outside the company, which leads to point
(3). Always install the freely-downloadable viewers for Office documents, which are available for free on MS' website, and make sure that they map to the MSO filetypes. Really, the Word-document import engine of OO is not yet up to snuff, and the spreadsheet (although very, very close in quality and feel to Excel) barfs in some strange places where Excel is still (perversely) happy. For instance, if you cut and paste a column of cells into a column absolutely referenced by the formulae in those cells, it becomes self-referential and then, in the judgement of both reason and OpenOffice, should display an error. However, Excel will simply display the original contents of the cells before they were copied, and silently ignores the formulae. OO's is obviously the theoretically correct response, but many of the (ahem) generalists in Sales have a hard time understanding what, precisely, they're copying, and Excel's behaviour often gives them what they want despite their incompetence. This is just one small fruit on the tree grown of the millions of dollars spent by Microsoft on focus-group testing and UI design, which is still growing and bearing dividends. OpenOffice has a formidable competitor, even if it is overpriced.
(4) Consider using StarOffice, which is cheap (although not free, obviously) and handles Word and Excel documents better. Or, wait for whatever it is that 'GoBe Productive' is metamorphosing into, which I have not tried and cannot speak knowledgably about.
This has, of course, already been prefigured in sci fi; someone at that company has been reading Bruce Sterling.
Not that serious, if you buy it a beer and take a little time to see the world from its perspective. It'll lighten up considerably.
A citizen of the US should be able to plan out, including diagrams and timetables, how to blow up the WTC.
/good/?
The notion of planning (as a species of of discourse) raises an interesting way of framing the problem of code-as-speech.
Imagine that you've planned out, in great detail, a plan to demolish the pentagon building. However, your medium is not pen and napkin, but rather a sophisticated software package that plots attack angles, security concentration, response times, etc, all from publicly available information, and essentially coordinates the entire effort.
Do you think you could distribute such a program successfully?
Do you think you could distribute such a program successfully, if it were
Code isn't speech. You'd be quashed. Perhaps the thin edge of the wedge is already beneath our feet: New media types are not permitted to enjoy freedom of presses. Only the _bien_pensant_ syncophants, or the merely banal, can use these new tools.