but when you really look at a desktop OS, any desktop OS, isn't it a little like watching sausage being made? Maybe "greatest" should be restricted to something a little smaller where the word "elegant" still applies?
Worth _emphasizing_ but not new
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 1
I have read one essayist suggesting that the Romantic Age spoiled us in this. You aren't cool if you make it look like work so exceptionally creative people downplay the fact that they've been practicing their talent since they were 3. Outside of this article, how many artists are you aware of who have been "overnight sensations" after a decade or more of showing/touring/circulating their rejected work? It's a cliche. How many black singers cut their chops as kids in the church choir? Oddly enough, even an haute artiste like Britney Spears qualifies after child labor in the Disney trenches, right?
One might look at Before the Gates of Excellence: The Determinants of Creative Genius, Cambridge, 1990. She discusses various research on nature and nurture and stresses in Chapter 8, "The Developmental Pattern", that one factor in recognized genius is indeed starting practice of one's talent at an early age. Not a 2006 idea although she is far less emphatic in the cases of excellence that the mix IS nurture and NOT nature.
Don't eat food XYZ. Why? Because God said so. In reality, they likely noticed that people who ate XYZ wound up getting sick or dieing of food poisoning more often. In reality, it was probably due to bacteria proliferating in certain types of food more than others. For them, it was wrath of their god. The result? Dietary laws.
I am aware of the explanations about trichinosis and poison shellfish but have you considered that such explanations already look at the bible through a scientific mind? And avoid counter-examples. A commandment to avoid eating rabbit or catfish isn't a "dietary recommendation". "Shame on you -- fried catfish will make you fat and clog your arteries!" It is a taboo. It is unseamingly in God's eyes and such a person must be removed from the tribe lest God's wrath fall upon all who would condone it. The word "taboo" might bring Polynesian tikis to mind but it is the appropriate term for a superstitious practice.
It's far more likely that rabbits were a competing fertility god of the tribe down the road at some point in time. Catfish and eels I can only imagine.
Perhaps we should start a hippocratic oath for coders that entails immediate resignation from any employer who attempts to enforce their software patents?
An anti-hypocritical oath for judges to serve their society instead of their corporations would probably be more effective.
on his radio show at the demise of Sonny Bono when someone called Sonny (who was management before he was talent) a "genius": "How much genius does it take to meet on Monday morning to decide how to smear the payola?" Randi Rhodes, the talk show host, had an amusing comment the other month as well when she said, "I have the coolest iPod in New York because I was a DJ. I know which demos came with the little pack of blow."
The record industry is apparently just a bunch of scummy thugs. "Ya die widout paying, ya kids pay" seems so, well, "typical".
Don't kid yourself...this is NOT a case of Windows securing itself -- this is revenue protectionism at its best. Microsoft is actively trying to make third-party security vendors a thing of the past.
Well, then, maybe Microsoft will have to do the "charitable" thing and help out poor old Symantec like they did Apple and Borland to keep the monopoly monster away?
No doubt one will remaain a felon for watching a DVD on linux but it shows they are thinking of a strategy to adapt.
Whether it is competitive depends on how smart they are. Would they accept a dollar/disk royalty? Even at that, it isn't like 100 disk cakeboxes would be competitive -- $130/box? But wouldn't a lot of people buy 6-packs at the checkout counter for $10? Could work.
And it seems only inevitable that the DVD store will eventually be a machine.
Yup. Turbo let you feel like you had some control. Flip the nitro switch and peel out at a blazing 10 mhz. I can remember setting a full test of my dBase program running before I left for the day and didn't check the Turbo switch. It was still running when I got in the next morning.
College "Age" Story -- not tech
on
How Old is Too Old?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Some time ago I took an evening extension with graduate credit at a Big 10 in Norwegian painting from 1750 through Munch. (And who wouldn't?) One evening the professor came in and with some exasperation in his voice said, "I've got to tell you a story. I haven't been distinguishing between the evening class and the day class. I just put all your papers in a pile and grade them together. Today, a self-appointed committee of my graduate students came into my office and complained that I wasn't being fair. The evening students were raising the curve and hurting their record. They said the evening students were just there because they were interested in the subject and we are here to train for a career! And I said, 'Yes, I can see that there is a problem. And if any of you come into my office and bring this up again, you will be in trouble with me.'"
The moral? Don't knock maturity. Don't knock motivation. You can probably build a better relationship with your professors and forge better contacts for internships and jobs.
Shudder. How can someone use the "Delete" word with such abandon? Sure, eliminate the oldest 9,000 messages by archiving them to CD with a copy of Mutt. But delete? Never!
My motto, "Email becomes inoperative when the media becomes unreadable." Which, I've come to accept probably applies to my Commodore floppies from the 80s.
If I remember, it is just "slow-scan". They could probably find a middle-aged amateur radio operator with the necessary skills to dig up a set of heads and transport and tweak the specs to get a signal.
It seems to me the important things is that they LOST THE TAPES.
scientists develop a technique using a particle accelerator to discern the earlier patterns under what appears to be the practices of a religious cult called American Idol.
I agree. It sounds like he needs a little more experience. Maybe just grazing PC tech reading or an A+ book as well.
For me, I love having an inexpensive PowMax power supply tester so I can reduce my guessing on whether that is causing anomalies. Then, a download of the Ultimate Boot CD ISO for a number of tests. I always run a few passes of memtest in particular with all new memory. And, yes, a copy of an Ubuntu live disk (or Knoppix in my case). Do Windows people realize that there is a free bare-metal partition backup program in partimage? A GUI Partition Magic clone in QTPartEd? And a way to boot up and dig into their root partition. Recover data, etc.
Other than that I guess just the boring recommendations to standardize and document as well as possible in a loose group like that.
Yes. Management made the moronic decision to voluntarily change their recognized and respected brand name to Inprise -- for a while. I doubt that Microsoft has ever felt a burning need to change its name to "Unprize" or something for better brand recognition. But at that same time they were hit with the curse of Version 4. Like the screw-ups in dBase 4 which tanked that product (that Borland then acquaired incidentally), "Inprise" Delphi 4 went through three revisions that were more like rewrites than patches before they got it right.
I don't see a lot of management wisdom and vision in bringing back the "Turbo" name either. A lot of people who would get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the name probably aren't programming anymore or have long moved on to other platforms. And it won't mean anything to the kids so why bother? My first reaction was sarcastic. "Gee, they'll have some tough competition from Free Pascal now."
Sounds like a sour grapes rant to me. There are those of us who are _not_ consciously displaying a $2000 consumer item.
First, I'm old enough to have seen TV go from black-and-white to color and I say, "Don't knock fetishism until you've tried it." It isn't enough to have "heard" about HDTV. HDTV is a third state of broadcast and the closest thing to looking through a window until we get 3D.
Second, we only watch a few hours of TV per week here. The biggest chunk is local news and weather. Passive entertainment isn't our focus and I've always thought part of being a techno-fetishist is knowing there are better channels of information than TV.
That said, third, we've never owned anything bigger than a 19" TV. Therefore, it isn't that expensive for us to watch a 19" LCD monitor from 8 feet and get the same perceived viewport to a 19" TV at 12 feet. And part of being techno is that I _can_ build the MythTV from mostly rebate parts.
The home HDTV/media file server is just a dedicated tool. Being dedicated, not even that techno-interesting because the tinkering potential is low once it is set up.
the 'bob' user account that Bob made for his everyday use is an administrator, whether he knows it or not
Yup. People here are talking like "the darned user" is going to choose to run administrator. Most probably, administrator privileges is what the local Nerd Brigade outlet handed them. The behavior that has to be changed is at the retailer's shop. If Vista will get Windows techs to do an "su" instead of running admin, that is fine.
Nerds have been indulging in it for decades in the privacy of their rooms. It's called science fiction -- with an emphasis on the science. "Futurism" seems like a PR attempt to get invited to better parties and better academic or think tank gigs. Perhaps by those who don't feel competent to handle the "fiction" half?
Flippant? I don't know. How many sci fi writers have, or have had, day jobs as scientists and mathematicians? (Quite a few.) "Serious" science fiction has always been that outlet where people can explore their "futuristic" speculations without being considered a crank in their day job.
As for dealing with gadgets, I think William Gibson would say he has always dealt with how his envisioned distopia affects the lives of his characters. Any good writer would. Perhaps that is where "futurism" has always been inferior to science fiction.
Two, actually. One used. Linux CUPS driver -- basically seems to be a "4" anyway. Running linux, it has been punished with many manuals of several hundred pages (manually) double-sided.
$39.95 print server at Microcenter. At least one recharge from every cartridge -- works well, takes about 5 minutes like they advertise, and reduces the per-page cost of these smaller "toaster" printers.
I saw a fish wall sculpture out of disks some guy did that looked pretty good. And never again will I be able to open my door and say, "I've got mail!" as one of their packages propped up by my mailman falls before me. Actually, the wood/pressed cardboard boxes they got into made nice remailers. End of an era.
The upgrade from 98 to XP was a no brainer because of how much more stable and quick XP was.
Maybe you could have run NT 4.0 all along -- but the thing with XP is that it let you run all, or most, of your Windows 98 _specific_ programs, right? That's what they got right in seamlessly rolling in added functionality to the NT line.
In fact, that might have always been what Microsoft got right. When you got a new Apple, you probably traded in everything: new software with that new hardware and OS. But there was an obvious _marketing_ decision at Microsoft that OS transitions should be as transparent to the customer as possible. That old software should just install and run. I can remember discussion, probably on/. years ago, about how the developers of Windows 95 should have been given more credit than some people think. They put a horse's ass and pig's head on a dodo body and it actually flew. The fact that Windows 95 mixed and matched cooperative and preemptively multitasked 16 and 32-bit Win 3.1 and Win 95 programs as well as it did should have been an opportunity to praise the developers' ingenuity. Not because it was the best way to do things but because it was the best way to keep things simple for the user who puts an install disk in the drive and expects it to just work.
I guess my question is: with Vista, is this pointedly _marketing_ paradigm crashing? Has backward compatibility, to the genuinely admirable goal of reducing customer confusion, finally made Vista so internally ungainly that they really should pull an Apple -- a new, clean Vista running exclusively Vista apps. Everything else running in some obvious virtualization. That might be a good thing -- whether it pisses off legacy users or not.
I have the impression the Java mail program has languished a bit and I haven't used it for years, but the best spam filter I've used I built up myself using their filtering capabilities. You didn't just "add" filter criteria. You could link them together in "AND", "OR" and "XOR".
It does make me wonder though; how many people after entering a default web search, don't try the "news" category too? A quick scan through the responses and I don't see anyone recommending "good, old" usenet news. There are a number of linux forums and they are still very active as far as I can see.
Assuming FTL drive is a crock, the setup necessary to beam power to even a small intersteller ship going about.6 light speed is hard to imagine. We'll probably have well-colonized the asteroid belt by the time we figure it out. And then it is likely we'd send no more than a small "council of elders" (female?) and a lot of "snowflake babies" and "snowflake cats" and "snowflake chickens", etc. etc. in current U.S. speak and a way to gestate them.
I have a terrific niece-in-law. We were over there once and she told her five-year-old, "If you pick up your things, you can have a carrot!" And it worked.
I suspect many parents really just don't bother to think about shaping their children's behavior in gentle ways.
Slashdot Mirror
but when you really look at a desktop OS, any desktop OS, isn't it a little like watching sausage being made? Maybe "greatest" should be restricted to something a little smaller where the word "elegant" still applies?
I have read one essayist suggesting that the Romantic Age spoiled us in this. You aren't cool if you make it look like work so exceptionally creative people downplay the fact that they've been practicing their talent since they were 3. Outside of this article, how many artists are you aware of who have been "overnight sensations" after a decade or more of showing/touring/circulating their rejected work? It's a cliche. How many black singers cut their chops as kids in the church choir? Oddly enough, even an haute artiste like Britney Spears qualifies after child labor in the Disney trenches, right?
One might look at Before the Gates of Excellence: The Determinants of Creative Genius, Cambridge, 1990. She discusses various research on nature and nurture and stresses in Chapter 8, "The Developmental Pattern", that one factor in recognized genius is indeed starting practice of one's talent at an early age. Not a 2006 idea although she is far less emphatic in the cases of excellence that the mix IS nurture and NOT nature.
Don't eat food XYZ. Why? Because God said so. In reality, they likely noticed that people who ate XYZ wound up getting sick or dieing of food poisoning more often. In reality, it was probably due to bacteria proliferating in certain types of food more than others. For them, it was wrath of their god. The result? Dietary laws.
I am aware of the explanations about trichinosis and poison shellfish but have you considered that such explanations already look at the bible through a scientific mind? And avoid counter-examples. A commandment to avoid eating rabbit or catfish isn't a "dietary recommendation". "Shame on you -- fried catfish will make you fat and clog your arteries!" It is a taboo. It is unseamingly in God's eyes and such a person must be removed from the tribe lest God's wrath fall upon all who would condone it. The word "taboo" might bring Polynesian tikis to mind but it is the appropriate term for a superstitious practice.
It's far more likely that rabbits were a competing fertility god of the tribe down the road at some point in time. Catfish and eels I can only imagine.
Perhaps we should start a hippocratic oath for coders that entails immediate resignation from any employer who attempts to enforce their software patents?
An anti-hypocritical oath for judges to serve their society instead of their corporations would probably be more effective.
on his radio show at the demise of Sonny Bono when someone called Sonny (who was management before he was talent) a "genius": "How much genius does it take to meet on Monday morning to decide how to smear the payola?" Randi Rhodes, the talk show host, had an amusing comment the other month as well when she said, "I have the coolest iPod in New York because I was a DJ. I know which demos came with the little pack of blow."
The record industry is apparently just a bunch of scummy thugs. "Ya die widout paying, ya kids pay" seems so, well, "typical".
Don't kid yourself...this is NOT a case of Windows securing itself -- this is revenue protectionism at its best. Microsoft is actively trying to make third-party security vendors a thing of the past.
Well, then, maybe Microsoft will have to do the "charitable" thing and help out poor old Symantec like they did Apple and Borland to keep the monopoly monster away?
No doubt one will remaain a felon for watching a DVD on linux but it shows they are thinking of a strategy to adapt.
Whether it is competitive depends on how smart they are. Would they accept a dollar/disk royalty? Even at that, it isn't like 100 disk cakeboxes would be competitive -- $130/box? But wouldn't a lot of people buy 6-packs at the checkout counter for $10? Could work.
And it seems only inevitable that the DVD store will eventually be a machine.
Yup. Turbo let you feel like you had some control. Flip the nitro switch and peel out at a blazing 10 mhz. I can remember setting a full test of my dBase program running before I left for the day and didn't check the Turbo switch. It was still running when I got in the next morning.
Some time ago I took an evening extension with graduate credit at a Big 10 in Norwegian painting from 1750 through Munch. (And who wouldn't?) One evening the professor came in and with some exasperation in his voice said, "I've got to tell you a story. I haven't been distinguishing between the evening class and the day class. I just put all your papers in a pile and grade them together. Today, a self-appointed committee of my graduate students came into my office and complained that I wasn't being fair. The evening students were raising the curve and hurting their record. They said the evening students were just there because they were interested in the subject and we are here to train for a career! And I said, 'Yes, I can see that there is a problem. And if any of you come into my office and bring this up again, you will be in trouble with me.'"
The moral? Don't knock maturity. Don't knock motivation. You can probably build a better relationship with your professors and forge better contacts for internships and jobs.
Shudder. How can someone use the "Delete" word with such abandon? Sure, eliminate the oldest 9,000 messages by archiving them to CD with a copy of Mutt. But delete? Never!
My motto, "Email becomes inoperative when the media becomes unreadable." Which, I've come to accept probably applies to my Commodore floppies from the 80s.
If I remember, it is just "slow-scan". They could probably find a middle-aged amateur radio operator with the necessary skills to dig up a set of heads and transport and tweak the specs to get a signal.
It seems to me the important things is that they LOST THE TAPES.
scientists develop a technique using a particle accelerator to discern the earlier patterns under what appears to be the practices of a religious cult called American Idol.
I agree. It sounds like he needs a little more experience. Maybe just grazing PC tech reading or an A+ book as well.
For me, I love having an inexpensive PowMax power supply tester so I can reduce my guessing on whether that is causing anomalies. Then, a download of the Ultimate Boot CD ISO for a number of tests. I always run a few passes of memtest in particular with all new memory. And, yes, a copy of an Ubuntu live disk (or Knoppix in my case). Do Windows people realize that there is a free bare-metal partition backup program in partimage? A GUI Partition Magic clone in QTPartEd? And a way to boot up and dig into their root partition. Recover data, etc.
Other than that I guess just the boring recommendations to standardize and document as well as possible in a loose group like that.
Yes. Management made the moronic decision to voluntarily change their recognized and respected brand name to Inprise -- for a while. I doubt that Microsoft has ever felt a burning need to change its name to "Unprize" or something for better brand recognition. But at that same time they were hit with the curse of Version 4. Like the screw-ups in dBase 4 which tanked that product (that Borland then acquaired incidentally), "Inprise" Delphi 4 went through three revisions that were more like rewrites than patches before they got it right.
I don't see a lot of management wisdom and vision in bringing back the "Turbo" name either. A lot of people who would get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the name probably aren't programming anymore or have long moved on to other platforms. And it won't mean anything to the kids so why bother? My first reaction was sarcastic. "Gee, they'll have some tough competition from Free Pascal now."
Sounds like a sour grapes rant to me. There are those of us who are _not_ consciously displaying a $2000 consumer item.
First, I'm old enough to have seen TV go from black-and-white to color and I say, "Don't knock fetishism until you've tried it." It isn't enough to have "heard" about HDTV. HDTV is a third state of broadcast and the closest thing to looking through a window until we get 3D.
Second, we only watch a few hours of TV per week here. The biggest chunk is local news and weather. Passive entertainment isn't our focus and I've always thought part of being a techno-fetishist is knowing there are better channels of information than TV.
That said, third, we've never owned anything bigger than a 19" TV. Therefore, it isn't that expensive for us to watch a 19" LCD monitor from 8 feet and get the same perceived viewport to a 19" TV at 12 feet. And part of being techno is that I _can_ build the MythTV from mostly rebate parts.
The home HDTV/media file server is just a dedicated tool. Being dedicated, not even that techno-interesting because the tinkering potential is low once it is set up.
the 'bob' user account that Bob made for his everyday use is an administrator, whether he knows it or not
Yup. People here are talking like "the darned user" is going to choose to run administrator. Most probably, administrator privileges is what the local Nerd Brigade outlet handed them. The behavior that has to be changed is at the retailer's shop. If Vista will get Windows techs to do an "su" instead of running admin, that is fine.
Nerds have been indulging in it for decades in the privacy of their rooms. It's called science fiction -- with an emphasis on the science. "Futurism" seems like a PR attempt to get invited to better parties and better academic or think tank gigs. Perhaps by those who don't feel competent to handle the "fiction" half?
Flippant? I don't know. How many sci fi writers have, or have had, day jobs as scientists and mathematicians? (Quite a few.) "Serious" science fiction has always been that outlet where people can explore their "futuristic" speculations without being considered a crank in their day job.
As for dealing with gadgets, I think William Gibson would say he has always dealt with how his envisioned distopia affects the lives of his characters. Any good writer would. Perhaps that is where "futurism" has always been inferior to science fiction.
Two, actually. One used. Linux CUPS driver -- basically seems to be a "4" anyway. Running linux, it has been punished with many manuals of several hundred pages (manually) double-sided.
$39.95 print server at Microcenter. At least one recharge from every cartridge -- works well, takes about 5 minutes like they advertise, and reduces the per-page cost of these smaller "toaster" printers.
Invest now: http://www.aolmemorabilia.com/links.html
I saw a fish wall sculpture out of disks some guy did that looked pretty good. And never again will I be able to open my door and say, "I've got mail!" as one of their packages propped up by my mailman falls before me. Actually, the wood/pressed cardboard boxes they got into made nice remailers. End of an era.
The upgrade from 98 to XP was a no brainer because of how much more stable
/. years ago, about how the developers of Windows 95 should have been given more credit than some people think. They put a horse's ass and pig's head on a dodo body and it actually flew. The fact that Windows 95 mixed and matched cooperative and preemptively multitasked 16 and 32-bit Win 3.1 and Win 95 programs as well as it did should have been an opportunity to praise the developers' ingenuity. Not because it was the best way to do things but because it was the best way to keep things simple for the user who puts an install disk in the drive and expects it to just work.
and quick XP was.
Maybe you could have run NT 4.0 all along -- but the thing with XP is that it let you run all, or most, of your Windows 98 _specific_ programs, right? That's what they got right in seamlessly rolling in added functionality to the NT line.
In fact, that might have always been what Microsoft got right. When you got a new Apple, you probably traded in everything: new software with that new hardware and OS. But there was an obvious _marketing_ decision at Microsoft that OS transitions should be as transparent to the customer as possible. That old software should just install and run. I can remember discussion, probably on
I guess my question is: with Vista, is this pointedly _marketing_ paradigm crashing? Has backward compatibility, to the genuinely admirable goal of reducing customer confusion, finally made Vista so internally ungainly that they really should pull an Apple -- a new, clean Vista running exclusively Vista apps. Everything else running in some obvious virtualization. That might be a good thing -- whether it pisses off legacy users or not.
I have the impression the Java mail program has languished a bit and I haven't used it for years, but the best spam filter I've used I built up myself using their filtering capabilities. You didn't just "add" filter criteria. You could link them together in "AND", "OR" and "XOR".
It does make me wonder though; how many people after entering a default web search, don't try the "news" category too? A quick scan through the responses and I don't see anyone recommending "good, old" usenet news. There are a number of linux forums and they are still very active as far as I can see.
Assuming FTL drive is a crock, the setup necessary to beam power to even a small intersteller ship going about .6 light speed is hard to imagine. We'll probably have well-colonized the asteroid belt by the time we figure it out. And then it is likely we'd send no more than a small "council of elders" (female?) and a lot of "snowflake babies" and "snowflake cats" and "snowflake chickens", etc. etc. in current U.S. speak and a way to gestate them.
You may be right.
I have a terrific niece-in-law. We were over there once and she told her five-year-old, "If you pick up your things, you can have a carrot!" And it worked.
I suspect many parents really just don't bother to think about shaping their children's behavior in gentle ways.
Neither Ghandi or King masterbated in public.
But Gandhi admitted to drinking his own urine.
So which would you rather admit to in public: masterbating or drinking your urine?