This will someday show up in a Bond flick. James strapped to the concrete wall, underground, where the villain has been tunneling under the embassy, and the robot arm raises ominously....
In IBM vs. SCO, the only winners will be: the lawyers.
Everyone else will have to live with an uncomfortable fact: a system many base their business on was challenged, by a relatively insignificant and dying company. In the end, a judge and jury will determine what happens to billions of dollars across thousands of companies.
IBM will trounce SCO. There is no doubt about it, just like U.S.A. vs. Iraq. However, just like Iraq, the hardest part will be after the war. SCO must be strung up mercilessly, picked apart at every seam, laughed into oblivion, every claim exposed for every possible ridiculous angle. It needs to be shown that SCO was literally insane.
Anything less, and Linux will always carry a little baggage, perhaps that extra smidgen of doubt that prevents "Big Company" from setting up some Linux servers.
SCO needs to be a synonym for idiocy, even for Grandma on AOL. If Linux has any lasting bruises from this battle, the next blow will be even worse.
This whole thing just strikes me as too convenient for some other high-profile interests, and too much like part of a long-range plan.
Yeah, that makes sense. It's more likely he got air at 60 going over a hill.
Or maybe he just was going 114, which I can't visualize right now. In most areas where the speed limit is 30, at least in my town there are too many turns and stoplights. The road I live on would be a perfect drag strip, but they purposefully placed two very sharp bends in the road which pretty much keep everyone down to the speed limit.
Maybe another approach: clamp a stack of regular DVD blanks together on a length of all-thread, place in an engine lathe, and spin down to mini-DVD size.
Of course I don't know if any special configuration of the media is required on the outer edge of the disc.
Not necessarily. So perhaps the 114 MPH was when he was peeling out from a stop sign.
But still, he should and will be nailed to the wall for this. The idiots make driving conditions worse for all of us, and their lack of judgement is deadly. A residential neighborhood is where I drive the exact speed limit and keep my eyes peeled. There have been so many times something bad would have happened if I didn't have those extra couple seconds to react.
What I'd like to know is how in the world will they be able to differentiate true illness from mere consequences of eating airline food)?
When they notice you tensing up as the entree is served.
I know my popcorn well enough...
on
Corn-Based Plastic
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
...to know that michael meant to say "from the orville-redenbacher dept."
Corn keeps coming up in the news, with more and more uses. There is a corn-based fuel that's gaining popularity in Minnesota, especially among street rodders. Apparently it has a little more zip than gasoline, and hey, renewable energy (plus the by-products are still useful as animal feed). Corn is the most cost-effective solar cell we'll ever have.
But you know, in a hundred years, when our great-grandkids all drive corn-powered cars and use corn-plastic products, the alternative-energy quacks will just whine about Big Corn keeping them down.
I agree with you about the logging. At least, having it on by default. The perceived ephemeral nature of IM causes people to say things they normally wouldn't say; even if they didn't really mean it.
To illustrate just how annoying this could get, I put forward the example of a man and a woman arguing. Now imagine that everyone you know has the ability to quote verbatim every single mistake you've made since first meeting them.
(Word to the wise: when involved in such an argument, jokingly saying "the elephant remembers" will immediately be added to that very list of mistakes.)
Just one point of availability of cell phones in remote areas:
What's the deal with that? A cell phone vastly expands the number of places you can communicate. So you trek off into the boondocks and...whoops, your cell phone doesn't work. I don't see how you can consider yourself screwed...it's not like you would normally be able to hook up a landline anyway. You'd either have to find a pay phone or use someone else's.
Most populated areas have pretty good cell coverage already, and I think the cell industry has been doing a pretty good job of squeezing the most performance out of the network. If you get good cell coverage at home, cancel your landline. If not, just don't do it yet.
Then high school kids should not be provided with the tools to create such a simulator, if it's so dangerous. Game publishers should be sued for including map editors with their games.
It should also be illegal to create a game map based on any actual structure. Because high school kids are too stupid to recognize the difference between games and reality. And it's better for them to sit around doing nothing, alone, because their club dissolved after having nothing to do.
Any student caught looking too hard at the structure of the school itself, should be approached and placed in a rehabilitation program. Drawing a map of the school on a piece of notebook paper should result in two weeks suspension. School officials must make random house calls to observe students' living areas and ensure no maps or plans are being constructed.
Students should be blindfolded between rooms, and room locations switched on a regular basis, so that student will no longer know the layout of the school by heart. An added precaution would be the handcuffing of all students at the door, and chained manacles at each desk with just enough chain to access their desk area. Any resisting students can be placed on permanent sedation.
Guess I'll have to explain it: a parent gives a kid something, and tries to convince them it's cool, even using what they consider to be the jargon of the younger set. Then they explicitly forbid use of something. It stands to reason that the kid will become an expert in whatever was forbidden, which was the goal in the first place.
It was a reverse psychology joke, and it's supposed to be a +5, FUNNY!
I make my own ringtones. A *gasp* normal-sounding ring, or an unobtrusive ambient beat with tones designed to be heard in different environments. I got sick of hearing lame ringtones that even an AOL'er wouldn't embed into a web page.
It's easy to do with a basic MIDI editor and a web server you are allowed to set MIME types on. Or load it using this guy's website (Flash required - he's a bit of a freak that way). He doesn't keep your phone number.
Every high school club needs to do it. It cannot be bypassed, or you will forever regret it.
Model the school grounds in some popular first-person shooter. Extra points for accurately recreating textures. And if you're really socially challenged, custom player and enemy models are a nice touch.
Just don't mention it to anyone who seems idiotic and paranoid, they won't like the idea of schoolkids hunting each other through classrooms and firing a full rocket spread down the hall.
Give them Visual Basic.NET for their birthday, say how "rad" and "fly" it is and how you hope they will become a decent, clean-cut Microsoft programmer, and forbid them to speak of Perl, C++, or Linux. Over your dead body!
In five years you will have the next Linus Torvalds.
They can't fire all of them...at once. But there are plenty of people willing to do their jobs, whether they get fired piecemeal or walk out.
Think about it: if the company gets wind of this, they only have to start firing one person at a time at random intervals. The remaining employees will train the newcomer in the business, and before you know it the whole department will be replaced with people who won't complain for a few years. And the former employees no longer have their only bargaining chip: familiarity with the company systems and projects.
Was the company treating them bad before this? Maybe they are just feeling the effects of a tough economy. Seems like a pretty harsh thing to do, walk out when a place needs you most. They should be glad that the company is staying true to them, and not replacing them with cheap foreign labor. If the company ever gets back into boom times, I'd look for bonuses all around.
Child's play. Mine blocked all input, opened Konqueror, and started skipping through directories on up to/, randomly moving and executing files. It would be evil to do this to someone else's computer and walk away, but it would serve them right for leaving the workstation logged in as root....
I don't have a problem when people want to present theories, what-if scenarios, and even partial or inconclusive research. It's ok if they make a statement, but qualify it by saying it's not really nailed down yet. We'd get nowhere if people didn't make careful assumptions and then try to prove them right or wrong. We need to operate on confidence levels, not Boolean states.
But I don't appreciate it when a statement is made as fact, and there is zero fact or even anecdotal evidence provided to support the claim. Present it as a theory, not as a fact. By the way, your hair is purple with orange stripes.;-)
Um, is your brain in backwards? I did not claim there was a bottleneck, I was asking people to prove their claim that there isn't! I'm not the one making an unsubstantiated claim here!
Precisely. If we refused patents to inventors deemed incapable of implementing the described invention, then all we would hear about is how the Little Guy got ripped off by Major Corporation.
It happens far too much already, without giving the big guys another tool.
Often an inventor will do a lot of preliminary design, analysis, perhaps some initial feasibility testing. The patent document represents a collection of information, with major considerations outlined, that can be used to create a product. In way, that makes it very similar to source code.
Just because some people throw out ideas and barely flesh them out, doesn't mean that others should be penalized. It's much more efficient for a bright mind to churn out plans for new inventions, rather than force them to spend money and time building it. Let others buy it from you and build it, which will support you as you plan out more projects. This way a genius can get more than one invention out of a lifetime.
Slashdot Mirror
This will someday show up in a Bond flick. James strapped to the concrete wall, underground, where the villain has been tunneling under the embassy, and the robot arm raises ominously....
In IBM vs. SCO, the only winners will be: the lawyers.
Everyone else will have to live with an uncomfortable fact: a system many base their business on was challenged, by a relatively insignificant and dying company. In the end, a judge and jury will determine what happens to billions of dollars across thousands of companies.
IBM will trounce SCO. There is no doubt about it, just like U.S.A. vs. Iraq. However, just like Iraq, the hardest part will be after the war. SCO must be strung up mercilessly, picked apart at every seam, laughed into oblivion, every claim exposed for every possible ridiculous angle. It needs to be shown that SCO was literally insane.
Anything less, and Linux will always carry a little baggage, perhaps that extra smidgen of doubt that prevents "Big Company" from setting up some Linux servers.
SCO needs to be a synonym for idiocy, even for Grandma on AOL. If Linux has any lasting bruises from this battle, the next blow will be even worse.
This whole thing just strikes me as too convenient for some other high-profile interests, and too much like part of a long-range plan.
There ya go.
You're not going to be able to back up the 2,000 miles worth of fuel statement, no matter how much research you do.
Maybe you're thinking of that big vehicle they use to ferry the space shuttle from the Assembly Building to the launch pad.
2,000 miles eh? So while starting the truck, they have to refill the tanks several times?
Yeah, that makes sense. It's more likely he got air at 60 going over a hill.
Or maybe he just was going 114, which I can't visualize right now. In most areas where the speed limit is 30, at least in my town there are too many turns and stoplights. The road I live on would be a perfect drag strip, but they purposefully placed two very sharp bends in the road which pretty much keep everyone down to the speed limit.
Maybe another approach: clamp a stack of regular DVD blanks together on a length of all-thread, place in an engine lathe, and spin down to mini-DVD size.
Of course I don't know if any special configuration of the media is required on the outer edge of the disc.
Not necessarily. So perhaps the 114 MPH was when he was peeling out from a stop sign.
But still, he should and will be nailed to the wall for this. The idiots make driving conditions worse for all of us, and their lack of judgement is deadly. A residential neighborhood is where I drive the exact speed limit and keep my eyes peeled. There have been so many times something bad would have happened if I didn't have those extra couple seconds to react.
You can listen to their music on the web site.
It's so bad. And not like the Power Glove.
What I'd like to know is how in the world will they be able to differentiate true illness from mere consequences of eating airline food)?
When they notice you tensing up as the entree is served.
...to know that michael meant to say "from the orville-redenbacher dept."
Corn keeps coming up in the news, with more and more uses. There is a corn-based fuel that's gaining popularity in Minnesota, especially among street rodders. Apparently it has a little more zip than gasoline, and hey, renewable energy (plus the by-products are still useful as animal feed). Corn is the most cost-effective solar cell we'll ever have.
But you know, in a hundred years, when our great-grandkids all drive corn-powered cars and use corn-plastic products, the alternative-energy quacks will just whine about Big Corn keeping them down.
I agree with you about the logging. At least, having it on by default. The perceived ephemeral nature of IM causes people to say things they normally wouldn't say; even if they didn't really mean it.
To illustrate just how annoying this could get, I put forward the example of a man and a woman arguing. Now imagine that everyone you know has the ability to quote verbatim every single mistake you've made since first meeting them.
(Word to the wise: when involved in such an argument, jokingly saying "the elephant remembers" will immediately be added to that very list of mistakes.)
Just one point of availability of cell phones in remote areas:
What's the deal with that? A cell phone vastly expands the number of places you can communicate. So you trek off into the boondocks and...whoops, your cell phone doesn't work. I don't see how you can consider yourself screwed...it's not like you would normally be able to hook up a landline anyway. You'd either have to find a pay phone or use someone else's.
Most populated areas have pretty good cell coverage already, and I think the cell industry has been doing a pretty good job of squeezing the most performance out of the network. If you get good cell coverage at home, cancel your landline. If not, just don't do it yet.
Then high school kids should not be provided with the tools to create such a simulator, if it's so dangerous. Game publishers should be sued for including map editors with their games.
It should also be illegal to create a game map based on any actual structure. Because high school kids are too stupid to recognize the difference between games and reality. And it's better for them to sit around doing nothing, alone, because their club dissolved after having nothing to do.
Any student caught looking too hard at the structure of the school itself, should be approached and placed in a rehabilitation program. Drawing a map of the school on a piece of notebook paper should result in two weeks suspension. School officials must make random house calls to observe students' living areas and ensure no maps or plans are being constructed.
Students should be blindfolded between rooms, and room locations switched on a regular basis, so that student will no longer know the layout of the school by heart. An added precaution would be the handcuffing of all students at the door, and chained manacles at each desk with just enough chain to access their desk area. Any resisting students can be placed on permanent sedation.
I cannot believe no one got the joke.
Guess I'll have to explain it: a parent gives a kid something, and tries to convince them it's cool, even using what they consider to be the jargon of the younger set. Then they explicitly forbid use of something. It stands to reason that the kid will become an expert in whatever was forbidden, which was the goal in the first place.
It was a reverse psychology joke, and it's supposed to be a +5, FUNNY!
Sucker! ;-)
I make my own ringtones. A *gasp* normal-sounding ring, or an unobtrusive ambient beat with tones designed to be heard in different environments. I got sick of hearing lame ringtones that even an AOL'er wouldn't embed into a web page.
It's easy to do with a basic MIDI editor and a web server you are allowed to set MIME types on. Or load it using this guy's website (Flash required - he's a bit of a freak that way). He doesn't keep your phone number.
Every high school club needs to do it. It cannot be bypassed, or you will forever regret it.
Model the school grounds in some popular first-person shooter. Extra points for accurately recreating textures. And if you're really socially challenged, custom player and enemy models are a nice touch.
Just don't mention it to anyone who seems idiotic and paranoid, they won't like the idea of schoolkids hunting each other through classrooms and firing a full rocket spread down the hall.
Give them Visual Basic .NET for their birthday, say how "rad" and "fly" it is and how you hope they will become a decent, clean-cut Microsoft programmer, and forbid them to speak of Perl, C++, or Linux. Over your dead body!
In five years you will have the next Linus Torvalds.
They can't fire all of them...at once. But there are plenty of people willing to do their jobs, whether they get fired piecemeal or walk out.
Think about it: if the company gets wind of this, they only have to start firing one person at a time at random intervals. The remaining employees will train the newcomer in the business, and before you know it the whole department will be replaced with people who won't complain for a few years. And the former employees no longer have their only bargaining chip: familiarity with the company systems and projects.
Was the company treating them bad before this? Maybe they are just feeling the effects of a tough economy. Seems like a pretty harsh thing to do, walk out when a place needs you most. They should be glad that the company is staying true to them, and not replacing them with cheap foreign labor. If the company ever gets back into boom times, I'd look for bonuses all around.
Child's play. Mine blocked all input, opened Konqueror, and started skipping through directories on up to /, randomly moving and executing files. It would be evil to do this to someone else's computer and walk away, but it would serve them right for leaving the workstation logged in as root....
Try cat /dev/urandom > /dev/mouse in X.
Save your work first. Off your computer and any computers connected to it.
Ha! That's what was missing from Laser Tag. It just never felt right to shoot someone and not have them fall down twitching.
The pain factor explains why paintball is still around, IMHO.
I don't have a problem when people want to present theories, what-if scenarios, and even partial or inconclusive research. It's ok if they make a statement, but qualify it by saying it's not really nailed down yet. We'd get nowhere if people didn't make careful assumptions and then try to prove them right or wrong. We need to operate on confidence levels, not Boolean states.
;-)
But I don't appreciate it when a statement is made as fact, and there is zero fact or even anecdotal evidence provided to support the claim. Present it as a theory, not as a fact. By the way, your hair is purple with orange stripes.
Um, is your brain in backwards? I did not claim there was a bottleneck, I was asking people to prove their claim that there isn't! I'm not the one making an unsubstantiated claim here!
Precisely. If we refused patents to inventors deemed incapable of implementing the described invention, then all we would hear about is how the Little Guy got ripped off by Major Corporation.
It happens far too much already, without giving the big guys another tool.
Often an inventor will do a lot of preliminary design, analysis, perhaps some initial feasibility testing. The patent document represents a collection of information, with major considerations outlined, that can be used to create a product. In way, that makes it very similar to source code.
Just because some people throw out ideas and barely flesh them out, doesn't mean that others should be penalized. It's much more efficient for a bright mind to churn out plans for new inventions, rather than force them to spend money and time building it. Let others buy it from you and build it, which will support you as you plan out more projects. This way a genius can get more than one invention out of a lifetime.