You don't mind them checking your employment history, do you? You don't mind them checking to see if you have a criminal record, right? You don't mind them checking to see if they just happen to like you, right? So why is credit history any different?
This is not a privacy issue. It's your right to keep that history secret if you want. But it's their right not to spend money on stuff (you) that they can't check out first.
Bizarrely, when I rushed off to http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/ to read Opera's opinion, I found that the page looked fine in Opera whereas in IE the text in the yellow tables was rendered too small to see! IT'S ALL A HUGE, DARK, EVIL, CONSPIRACY!
No, seriously, it depresses me to see a company trying on these ridiculous tricks (remember their trial evidence) -- what the heck do the many very skilled developers at Redmond think when they hear about this?
Long ago, before I had a Real Job(tm), I helped out at one of the very first comdexes to earn money to buy crusts of dry bread.
And there were all these people there, totally focused on building a stand that was better than the next stand, which in turn was trying to be better than the next one. Not because all the people loved stands or anything, but just because they'd all talked each other into believing it was really important.
And they totally broke their backs to get their stands ready, they seriously worked 20 hour days to make sure their glossy stand thing worked perfectly and all the brochures and things were in the right place, although none of them actually cared about brochures or stands.
It was this experience(*) that has made me cynical about capitalism in general and trade shows in particular. The sense of 'why not just stop bothering' that I acquired then has stood me good stead ever since:)
(*)Along with the Tale of the Uneaten Breakfast, but that's another story.
By 'up' I didn't mean spreading from client to server, I meant spreading from less attractive/lucrative to more attractive market segments.
When MS were starting out, the lowest margin, most easily accessed market was the WP/spreadsheet client. Nowadays, clients are expensive things with lots of graphics and ram and commodity features, and it's the small server market that's low margin and easy to get into.
This is really quite analogous with what happned when MS's cheaper solutions began to eat the Unix market from the workstation up.
At first, MS's main advantage was price, but gradually they innovated(*) and re-engineered so that their product was always high enough quality to attack the next layer up -- from word processing platform up through file/print server to heavy-duty servers and workstations.
Now MS are being eaten from below by a new generation of even cheaper systems. Like early MS systems, these open source offerings are both derivative and weak except for their price advantage. However, a price advantage is enough to secure a foothold, and over time open source systems will be strengthened and will begin to innovate and will be able to take over better and better MS-held markets.
In about 10-15 years, the cycle will probably start again, taking us another step further from the days of monolithic systems and proprietry hardware/os/support lock-in (which is where we were at before the Attack of the Killer Micros, young'uns). It's all good.
(*)Rather than freaking out and writing posts about 'M$' and so on, why not go outside and get some fresh air?
Remember how the NeXT boxes had postscript displays? Whatever needed to be drawn on the screen was expressed as postscript, and the display was a postscript renderer. It worked beautifully.
SVG is much more powerful (for desktop things, not necessarily for printing/typesetting things) than postscript. I think this is an excellent step.
Thing is, we're dealing with an industry (the IT industry) that does not have the safely regulations and standards common in older sectors. There is no standard saying what steps must be taken to prevent your own systems damaging others, and no regulatory body to enforce compliance. Worms like this are creating a pressure to bring IT into line with the more, hm, predictable business areas.
Over time, IT, like other industries, will move toward public safety standards such as we see in transport, manufacturing, finance, and all those *boring* businesses. It's a necessary part of the evolution of this industry from backrooms to ubiquity, I guess.
In 20 years time we'll probably see the government fining companies that don't patch their servers to a certain standard, just like we see airports and tire makers being fined now.
This just reinforces what I've been thinking for a while now... time to move away from IT iself and into IT law/management/business...
The NGPC. To date, the finest handheld console to have existed. Died in the wreckage of SNK. I still take mine out when I want to feel the goodness of real SNK fighting action on a handheld.
the most seasoned and cunning code crackers, worm gurus and cyber soldiers from government and industry
Like all worms, Leaves bored through cyberspace, probing Internet connections for holes in personal computers or Web servers. It slithered inside the machines and spewed venomous strings of data that threw its victims into electronic shock.
I had all sorts of witty comments to make on this, but I just deleted them because it's all too pathetic.
I guess the point is to impress on people that cyberspace, too, is just like a big ol' Hollywood movie with good ol' Uncle Sam well in control. Or something.
Experts across the globe were unanimous today in agreeing that the Semantic Web hasn't happened yet and almost certainly never will, and that nobody would care or notice even if by some miracle it did.
"It's a wonder how this thing has remained vaporware for so long," said one analyst. "Normally, vaporware must actually offer something useful to maintain interest, but the SW just offers mindbogglingly abstruse XML schemas which nobody has any desire to even look at. Maybe that's their whole secret."
Political commentators were equally impressed by the achievement. "There's not much Saddam and I agree on," noted President George W Bush as he thumbed through a copy of the Iliad in the original Greek, "but a total and complete lack of interest in the Semantic Web is surely common ground between all of Mankind."
Biologists studying the few Semantic Web Evangelists known to exist are baffled by their hardy perseverance. The creatures seem able to struggle forever, for nebulous and rather silly goals, in the absence of any kind of reward or recognition. Some scientists postulate that they may be related to J2EE Consultants, although the latter typically require upwards of $200k a year to survive.
The non-news is a blow for 'Just Give It Up Already', a charity whose stated aim is to return Semantic Web developers to the wild, where they can hopefully resume normal lives. "I wish they'd just announce that they've finished and give the heck up," muttered an spokesperson. "I mean, they've had that web page up *forever*."
Even on such popular Internet forums as Slashdot, users risked burning large amounts of karma just to post long, satirical messages in pseudo-Onion format. "It's not much," said kahei, one such poster, "but if I can persuade even one of these poor guys to just let the Semantic Web thing go, then it's worth it."
1 -- It does not magically install itself, you have to either tell IE to let any old junk execute or click on the OK button yourself. Either way, it's your fault.
2 -- It is not hard to remove. There's even an uninstaller provided that works (I just tried it on a sacrificial computer).
3 -- No matter how much you like Linux or Mozilla or whatever, mere anti-MS fear and loathing is not news.
You have to bear in mind that these are extremely undemanding people who also don't mind the general squalor, despair and constant exploitation that life in the UK involves. Now go pay some more taxes -- I know you enjoy it, I watched how happy everyone was when they had a 2% tax increase last year. Seriously, they were *happy* cause it made them feel all virtuous and socialist.
Games available on Linux, right? So that would include every arcade game up till the late 90's, right? Unless there's a hidden rule saying the game can't be emulated or illegal...?
Samurai Shodown
Tempest
Strike Force
I, Robot
New Zealand Story
Drift Out
Metal Slug
Waku waku 7
Alien vs Predator...why, I don't believe it's possible to pick just 25! And that's before I turn on any *console* emulators! LIFE IS TOO GOOD!
I'd be the first to admit that XP offers a lot of risk-reduction -- for teams that are working on things that are easy to unit-test.
With a class that is supposed to take in a bond and output the yield curve, it's easy to write a unit test. But what about the next class, that renders the yield curve on the screen? What about the complex, distributed system of Excel objects and forms things that draw a network and things that flash green and go 'ping' to indicate a change, that are equally necessary but generally much harder to write and much more likely to go wrong?
Has anyone tried to apply test-first programming to complex guis? I can't say that any obvious way to do it has ever occurred to me. Worse yet, when I ask I generally find that people either
a) Are in the same position as me, or b) Believe that a GUI is a little thing you spend a couple of days on after you finish the application
So, for now XP is something I read about rather than something I actually do.
It's not that MS is now 'obliged' to work with Linux -- they proactively encouraged the development of Linux.NET from the very beginning, long before the actual release of.NET.
And a good thing too --.NET is *so* much better than Java as a framework, and with any luck the Linux versions of it won't have all that rubbishy 'everything's a web service, and all the world uses ASP' layer on top.
It's all good news, folks! Until Palladium destroys us all, that is.
If you took a whole bunch of airplane parts and all the Boeing engineers and put them in a room, the result would not be an airplane, because the Boeing company and the things it does in the way of managing/coordinating/research are indeed necessary for the production of airplanes.
If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music.
At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution, but now that physical media are not necessary, it's harder to make that case. They certainly aren't necessary in the way that Boeing are necessary for airplanes, anyway.
...but now there's a government website where I can be ignored by professionals, 24/7! I'll never have to wander about looking for people to completely ignore me again! And look, every time I'm ignored I get this free docket id absolutely FREE!
Incidentally, why does the Food & Drug Administration make regulations about pacemakers and medical X-rays?
I mean, why not sell to the US from Toronto, and to Canada from New York?
Because of the import tax? The one you should technically have been paying already, but which isn't normally levied on small packages -- yet? I imagine they'll start enforcing it if and when they implement a domestic sales tax.
Incidentally, here in lovely socialist England I am likely to pay 20% tax plus another 15% or so in tax-like handling charges on every single thing I mail order from the US -- which is a lot, since you can't buy clothes here unless you're a dwarf who loves terrible clothes. Luckily, the money is spent on a worthwhile cause, i.e. huge subsidies to companies that spend it on executive pay, share dividends, and disastrous foreign speculation. The locals love this state of affairs because hey, that's socialism!
(Prepares to lose all his karma to righteously indignant English people who think giving away your economy is morally virtuous and that the world is grateful to them, but heroically does not click the 'anonymous' button!)
After all, if it were possible to create unconstitutional legislation, we'd have suspects being indefinitely detained without trial, copyrights that last forever... why, it doesn't bear thinking about!
This article is pretty twisted...
on
PC Baangs In America
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
But the hordes of young men -- and a few female hangers-on -- who pack this place probably seldom muster the nerve to go out dancing. This is the refuge of the young and the unpopular, the boys and girls who don't fit into the gangster-rap chic so popular at their high schools. Here, there's no bullying, no catcalls, no thumping SUV subwoofers.
I don't actually do any of this 'online gaming' stuff, so I'm unbiased. Now...
Was this article written by a football hero or something? It seems to be obsessed with portraying PCBang culture as stereotypical asocial loser nerd pervert stuff, when in fact it's pretty much normal social life in Korea (where these things come from).
It spends whole sentences whining on about scantily clad cyber babes. It never once allows the possibility that playing Starcraft might just be a common pasttime for this particular generation in that particular area. It doesn't really describe PCBang culture so much as provide a handy toolkit for forcing it into that old Jocks-vs-Nerds idiom, the one some people don't quite grow out of.
I read this article because the spread of Korean culture (such as it is:)) interests me. What I got was eight full pages of a guy going 'THESE PEOPLE ARE NERDS! THEY ARE PATHETIC! I AM NOT LIKE THEM! OH NO! AT LEAST NOT ANY MORE!'
The writer aparrently has a few issues with self-image. That's fine. Some people get bullied, some people feel inadequate (in this case quite rightly), and that's normal. But he should have called the article 'My own psychological issues and how I work them out by randomly insulting groups of Asian teenagers', and then I would have known not to read it.
Does anyone know why the korean word is being transliterated 'baang' with two 'A's? I don't remember it being anything other than a regular A sound in Korean.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't mind them checking your employment history, do you? You don't mind them checking to see if you have a criminal record, right? You don't mind them checking to see if they just happen to like you, right? So why is credit history any different?
This is not a privacy issue. It's your right to keep that history secret if you want. But it's their right not to spend money on stuff (you) that they can't check out first.
Bizarrely, when I rushed off to http://deb.opera.com/howcome/2003/2/msn/ to read Opera's opinion, I found that the page looked fine in Opera whereas in IE the text in the yellow tables was rendered too small to see! IT'S ALL A HUGE, DARK, EVIL, CONSPIRACY!
No, seriously, it depresses me to see a company trying on these ridiculous tricks (remember their trial evidence) -- what the heck do the many very skilled developers at Redmond think when they hear about this?
Is this a pretty good joke, or just really really bad spelling?
Long ago, before I had a Real Job(tm), I helped out at one of the very first comdexes to earn money to buy crusts of dry bread.
And there were all these people there, totally focused on building a stand that was better than the next stand, which in turn was trying to be better than the next one. Not because all the people loved stands or anything, but just because they'd all talked each other into believing it was really important.
And they totally broke their backs to get their stands ready, they seriously worked 20 hour days to make sure their glossy stand thing worked perfectly and all the brochures and things were in the right place, although none of them actually cared about brochures or stands.
It was this experience(*) that has made me cynical about capitalism in general and trade shows in particular. The sense of 'why not just stop bothering' that I acquired then has stood me good stead ever since
(*)Along with the Tale of the Uneaten Breakfast, but that's another story.
Ah, you spotted my deliberate mistake :)
By 'up' I didn't mean spreading from client to server, I meant spreading from less attractive/lucrative to more attractive market segments.
When MS were starting out, the lowest margin, most easily accessed market was the WP/spreadsheet client. Nowadays, clients are expensive things with lots of graphics and ram and commodity features, and it's the small server market that's low margin and easy to get into.
This is really quite analogous with what happned when MS's cheaper solutions began to eat the Unix market from the workstation up.
At first, MS's main advantage was price, but gradually they innovated(*) and re-engineered so that their product was always high enough quality to attack the next layer up -- from word processing platform up through file/print server to heavy-duty servers and workstations.
Now MS are being eaten from below by a new generation of even cheaper systems. Like early MS systems, these open source offerings are both derivative and weak except for their price advantage. However, a price advantage is enough to secure a foothold, and over time open source systems will be strengthened and will begin to innovate and will be able to take over better and better MS-held markets.
In about 10-15 years, the cycle will probably start again, taking us another step further from the days of monolithic systems and proprietry hardware/os/support lock-in (which is where we were at before the Attack of the Killer Micros, young'uns). It's all good.
(*)Rather than freaking out and writing posts about 'M$' and so on, why not go outside and get some fresh air?
Remember how the NeXT boxes had postscript displays? Whatever needed to be drawn on the screen was expressed as postscript, and the display was a postscript renderer. It worked beautifully.
SVG is much more powerful (for desktop things, not necessarily for printing/typesetting things) than postscript. I think this is an excellent step.
6/10 for Lego. 1/10 for writing.
Unless the concept was something like 'let's write the Eye of Argon again, only not funny'.
Thing is, we're dealing with an industry (the IT industry) that does not have the safely regulations and standards common in older sectors. There is no standard saying what steps must be taken to prevent your own systems damaging others, and no regulatory body to enforce compliance. Worms like this are creating a pressure to bring IT into line with the more, hm, predictable business areas.
Over time, IT, like other industries, will move toward public safety standards such as we see in transport, manufacturing, finance, and all those *boring* businesses. It's a necessary part of the evolution of this industry from backrooms to ubiquity, I guess.
In 20 years time we'll probably see the government fining companies that don't patch their servers to a certain standard, just like we see airports and tire makers being fined now.
This just reinforces what I've been thinking for a while now... time to move away from IT iself and into IT law/management/business...
The NGPC. To date, the finest handheld console to have existed. Died in the wreckage of SNK. I still take mine out when I want to feel the goodness of real SNK fighting action on a handheld.
***minute of silence***
Hmm... it *does* make them look silly... now, how can we make them look even *more* silly? I wonder if I shoulg try and do a MST3K-ing of this...
I had all sorts of witty comments to make on this, but I just deleted them because it's all too pathetic.
I guess the point is to impress on people that cyberspace, too, is just like a big ol' Hollywood movie with good ol' Uncle Sam well in control. Or something.
SEMANTIC WEB 'NOT HERE YET' SHOCK!
Experts across the globe were unanimous today in agreeing that the Semantic Web hasn't happened yet and almost certainly never will, and that nobody would care or notice even if by some miracle it did.
"It's a wonder how this thing has remained vaporware for so long," said one analyst. "Normally, vaporware must actually offer something useful to maintain interest, but the SW just offers mindbogglingly abstruse XML schemas which nobody has any desire to even look at. Maybe that's their whole secret."
Political commentators were equally impressed by the achievement. "There's not much Saddam and I agree on," noted President George W Bush as he thumbed through a copy of the Iliad in the original Greek, "but a total and complete lack of interest in the Semantic Web is surely common ground between all of Mankind."
Biologists studying the few Semantic Web Evangelists known to exist are baffled by their hardy perseverance. The creatures seem able to struggle forever, for nebulous and rather silly goals, in the absence of any kind of reward or recognition. Some scientists postulate that they may be related to J2EE Consultants, although the latter typically require upwards of $200k a year to survive.
The non-news is a blow for 'Just Give It Up Already', a charity whose stated aim is to return Semantic Web developers to the wild, where they can hopefully resume normal lives. "I wish they'd just announce that they've finished and give the heck up," muttered an spokesperson. "I mean, they've had that web page up *forever*."
Even on such popular Internet forums as Slashdot, users risked burning large amounts of karma just to post long, satirical messages in pseudo-Onion format. "It's not much," said kahei, one such poster, "but if I can persuade even one of these poor guys to just let the Semantic Web thing go, then it's worth it."
1 -- It does not magically install itself, you have to either tell IE to let any old junk execute or click on the OK button yourself. Either way, it's your fault.
2 -- It is not hard to remove. There's even an uninstaller provided that works (I just tried it on a sacrificial computer).
3 -- No matter how much you like Linux or Mozilla or whatever, mere anti-MS fear and loathing is not news.
Thank you for your attention.
You have to bear in mind that these are extremely undemanding people who also don't mind the general squalor, despair and constant exploitation that life in the UK involves. Now go pay some more taxes -- I know you enjoy it, I watched how happy everyone was when they had a 2% tax increase last year. Seriously, they were *happy* cause it made them feel all virtuous and socialist.
Games available on Linux, right? So that would include every arcade game up till the late 90's, right? Unless there's a hidden rule saying the game can't be emulated or illegal...?
Samurai Shodown
Tempest
Strike Force
I, Robot
New Zealand Story
Drift Out
Metal Slug
Waku waku 7
Alien vs Predator
I'd be the first to admit that XP offers a lot of risk-reduction -- for teams that are working on things that are easy to unit-test.
With a class that is supposed to take in a bond and output the yield curve, it's easy to write a unit test. But what about the next class, that renders the yield curve on the screen? What about the complex, distributed system of Excel objects and forms things that draw a network and things that flash green and go 'ping' to indicate a change, that are equally necessary but generally much harder to write and much more likely to go wrong?
Has anyone tried to apply test-first programming to complex guis? I can't say that any obvious way to do it has ever occurred to me. Worse yet, when I ask I generally find that people either
a) Are in the same position as me, or
b) Believe that a GUI is a little thing you spend a couple of days on after you finish the application
So, for now XP is something I read about rather than something I actually do.
It's not that MS is now 'obliged' to work with Linux -- they proactively encouraged the development of Linux.NET from the very beginning, long before the actual release of .NET.
.NET is *so* much better than Java as a framework, and with any luck the Linux versions of it won't have all that rubbishy 'everything's a web service, and all the world uses ASP' layer on top.
And a good thing too --
It's all good news, folks! Until Palladium destroys us all, that is.
If you took a whole bunch of airplane parts and all the Boeing engineers and put them in a room, the result would not be an airplane, because the Boeing company and the things it does in the way of managing/coordinating/research are indeed necessary for the production of airplanes.
If you took a whole bunch of signed recording artists, and left them in a room with the appropriate tools, the result *would* be music, because the marketing/distribution/hyping done by record companies is *not* necessary for the production of music.
At one point, perhaps the record corps were necessary for distribution, but now that physical media are not necessary, it's harder to make that case. They certainly aren't necessary in the way that Boeing are necessary for airplanes, anyway.
...but now there's a government website where I can be ignored by professionals, 24/7! I'll never have to wander about looking for people to completely ignore me again! And look, every time I'm ignored I get this free docket id absolutely FREE!
Incidentally, why does the Food & Drug Administration make regulations about pacemakers and medical X-rays?
Because of the import tax? The one you should technically have been paying already, but which isn't normally levied on small packages -- yet? I imagine they'll start enforcing it if and when they implement a domestic sales tax.
Incidentally, here in lovely socialist England I am likely to pay 20% tax plus another 15% or so in tax-like handling charges on every single thing I mail order from the US -- which is a lot, since you can't buy clothes here unless you're a dwarf who loves terrible clothes. Luckily, the money is spent on a worthwhile cause, i.e. huge subsidies to companies that spend it on executive pay, share dividends, and disastrous foreign speculation. The locals love this state of affairs because hey, that's socialism!
(Prepares to lose all his karma to righteously indignant English people who think giving away your economy is morally virtuous and that the world is grateful to them, but heroically does not click the 'anonymous' button!)
Hmm, good point.
After all, if it were possible to create unconstitutional legislation, we'd have suspects being indefinitely detained without trial, copyrights that last forever... why, it doesn't bear thinking about!
Oh, I didn't say I wasn't worried about Korea :)
I don't actually do any of this 'online gaming' stuff, so I'm unbiased. Now...
Was this article written by a football hero or something? It seems to be obsessed with portraying PCBang culture as stereotypical asocial loser nerd pervert stuff, when in fact it's pretty much normal social life in Korea (where these things come from).
It spends whole sentences whining on about scantily clad cyber babes. It never once allows the possibility that playing Starcraft might just be a common pasttime for this particular generation in that particular area. It doesn't really describe PCBang culture so much as provide a handy toolkit for forcing it into that old Jocks-vs-Nerds idiom, the one some people don't quite grow out of.
I read this article because the spread of Korean culture (such as it is
The writer aparrently has a few issues with self-image. That's fine. Some people get bullied, some people feel inadequate (in this case quite rightly), and that's normal. But he should have called the article 'My own psychological issues and how I work them out by randomly insulting groups of Asian teenagers', and then I would have known not to read it.
Well, okay, it wasn't *quite* that bad.
But lord, it sure wasn't good.
Does anyone know why the korean word is being transliterated 'baang' with two 'A's? I don't remember it being anything other than a regular A sound in Korean.