Don't make us geeks out like we're the only stupid ones. There's plenty of stupid to go around here.
Yes, but we (generally speaking) often hold ourselves up as paragons of intelligence and rationality. Just as we laugh at preachers who fall short of their own moral teachings, stupidity that would be cleared if one were being truly rational, is quite heinous when rationality is one of the key attributes we profess. In reality, you are correct - we are all only human. But when we paragons of intelligence and rationality are hoist on our own petard, failing to point out how stupid and irrational we are smacks of hypocrisy. And when we don't point it out, it blinds us not only to our frailties, but to our own hypocrisy.
... regulation is -never- the answer when it comes to the economy.
Because we should allow the economy to give us unfettered access to hit men. Yeah. That works well.
Hey idiot Libertarians - there is no such thing as a "free" market - even your idiot philosophy stops when it comes to things like fraud, theft, and direct harm to individuals. Of course, you like to play intellectually dishonest games like saying that the "free" market doesn't allow that - by what logical principal should you disengage the guileful and the naive, the cruel and the kind, the strong and the weak? That's not freedom. That's why I can respect anarchists more than you fools. Either you set rules or you don't. After you agree to that, it's just a question of where you set them.
It reminds me of the old story: A man says to a woman, "Would you sleep with me for ten million dollars?" The woman thinks for a couple moments and says, "Yeah, I guess so." The man says, "How about for quarter?" The woman shrieks, "What? What kind of woman do you think I am?" The man said, "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." And that's what Libertarians are, the intellectual whores of anarchists.
This law is de facto targeted at a very specific minority group. There's no getting around it. Even if other groups could theoretically be targeted by it, that's not going to happen as long as the AZ police have Hispanics to round up.
I love computers. I wouldn't have gotten into the field if I didn't love them.
Yeah, so did I. But that was thirty years ago. I've seen the industry take so many wrong turns since then I'm alternately astonished, appalled, and amused now. That's why I'm a manager now... well, that and the money. I try all the time to get the guys who work for me to understand that, for most users, simpler = better.
I get pissed off every time some stupid OS vendor (Microsoft, Apple, or Linux distro) changes its API for no apparent benefit to the customer or because some jack-off OS developer wants a new flavor of the day. I get saddened every time some poor user gets run into their individual brick walls because some crappy hardware vendor decided to save a nickel on a mobo component. So all of you wankers who are bitching about the "walled garden" model, all I can say is that you brought it on yourselves. You made your systems so crappy and hard to use that no one wants to deal with the crappiness anymore. They'll sacrifice their "freedoms" (which they didn't really want in the first place) for simplicity. And, in the end, you'll be the ones screwed, with no interesting APIs and nothing new and shiny to play with. And all because you couldn't see past your own need for complexity to keep you mentally entertained while you cranked out yet another for loop (and didn't develop the languages that had the for loops internalized so you could map functions onto collections without a bunch of hideous repetitive syntax, anyhow).
I didn't understand this ten years ago when I told an industry luminary that I wanted to make things simpler for the programmer. He looked at me and said "Don't talk to me about programmers. I don't give a shit about how hard it is for the programmers. I want things simple for the users." He was so right.
Of course, maybe I'm cranky because it's late on Friday and I have a cold. Yeah... that's it...
Republicans say that the government doesn't work, and when they get elected, they set out to prove it.
Laugh all you want but, if you'd uncovered evidence of financial irregularities, and every time you raised it, your politically appointed bosses said "Shut up and let the free market work," how long would it be until you found other ways to entertain yourself at work?
I don't actually believe that Apple lost a lot of momentum in this defection. In general, it's the folks who had alternative ideas for an architecture that didn't win out that tend to leave. I bet Google eventually gets stuck with something like a chip that has an insane pipeline structure, makes a different power/speed tradeoff (and probably for the worse), or has some other weird bag o'crap bolted to the side.
In addition, there are a *lot* of chip designers still left over from the chip manufacturer layoffs after the crashes of.com and bank that Apple can pick from. When you get right down to it, once the architecture is developed (and, by this, I don't only mean ISA, I also include things like clock/signal distribution, internal bus structure, pipelining strategy, cache structure, etc.) which only takes a small team - in fact, it works better with a small team - it's just moving little mask rectangles around with automated logic generation and, after that, a buttload of QA.
So, even if Apple sues, it's just because (a) Apple like using its lawyers and (b) it kicks Google in the nuts - it really doesn't mean much for Apple's future chip development.
Or at least a couple of backplanes from them... I carted them around for a couple of moves until I figured that they were unlikely to be used in an art project anytime soon.
Note that it wasn't the CTOs of the actual trading firms speaking. In reality, almost every cycle that's not being used during the trading day is being used either in trading on foreign markets when yours are closed or running stats to drive the next day's domestic trading. A "market data" firm? Yeah, I can believe that. Real trading companies? Not so much.
To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator.
I hate it when people toss words like "dictator" around casually. Not that I disagree that Obama isn't shredding civil rights as bad (or perhaps even worse) than Bush did. But I don't think you'd bandy about the word dictator quite as quickly if you had lived under Stalin or Pinochet. It really doesn't help the level of discourse when people use hyperbole as their only means of rhetorical strength.
And are you seriously suggesting that the US at large is culpable for the actions of William Calley, Jesse England, and any other rapist, murderer, or degenerate who manages to make it into the uniformed service.
Actually, yes. Even though you may punish after the fact, it does not remove your culpability. And, in fact, it keeps you from seeing having potentially dangerous individuals in your employ as a good thing rather than as a (perhaps necessary) evil. Seeing soldiers as unvarnished good leads you down a dangerous path - one that usually ends in a military takeover of your government. You probably don't want that.
So, a woman manages to overcome all the dificulties it represents to move in a male-dominated environment, doing what few women have done in the past, struggling not only to accomplish her main mission in space but also to destroy those obsolete, yet still in place, ideas that certain areas belong to men only, and here comes some idiotic designer saying "a girl has to be pretty"?
How many times have you had a woman appear before Congress and one of the things the news story mentions is what she is wearing? Just because a woman has overcome sexism to get where she is doesn't mean that sexism is done with her. And, yes, women are still judged that way.
Re:My experience with Apple...
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 1
After some Googling I discover that you can't just copy mp3's to the iStick -- you have to fire up Apple's software, which is labyrinthine and ridiculous, and jump through hoops to transfer them.
You know what? I had one of those mp3 players that just looked like a file system (and no, this was a few months ago, not two years ago). No playlists, the UI was hideous, and half the time it shut down randomly. Yes, it was cheaper than the iPod. But, yes, it sucked.
If you look at iTunes as what it is - an entertainment management system, it's pretty understandable. No, you can't copy a mass of random mp3 files from the file system into the iPod and have them play - but you can get them into the iPod almost as easily (and you get a UI that actually works): Download files from the random folder into iTunes, sync, and go. But most people don't see having to use iTunes as a great disadvantage - in fact, they like having playlists; they like organizing their songs; they like having album covers automatically found (even for random mp3 files). Just face it - you're not the average user who actually wants a decent player with a reasonable UI that just works.
Re:Jesus Tap Dancing Christ...
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Whereas today if you jailbreak your iPad to install a Python interpreter, according to Apple you're a criminal.
No, according to Congress and the Executive branch via the DMCA, you're a criminal. According to Apple, they just won't support you. And, if you try to sell stuff that might make others devices unsupportable, they may sue you - but that would be civil, not criminal.
Re:Apple has made Microsoft look "open".
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
Not only can you get Microsoft developer tools for free, more that a couple Microsoft compilers are installed by default on Vista/7 and are delivered to XP with service pack 2.
Do you know what? As far as I'm concerned, if you want to avoid "dumbing down" the hobby, make everyone take the equivalent of the old Advanced license knowledge test. Morse code had absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, if you don't have grandfathering and make everyone who has an old license re-take the Advanced test, we could get rid of a lot of the stupid old farts who prattle on about lack of Morse "dumbing down" the license, too.
Slashdot Mirror
... will your wonders never cease?
Don't make us geeks out like we're the only stupid ones. There's plenty of stupid to go around here.
Yes, but we (generally speaking) often hold ourselves up as paragons of intelligence and rationality. Just as we laugh at preachers who fall short of their own moral teachings, stupidity that would be cleared if one were being truly rational, is quite heinous when rationality is one of the key attributes we profess. In reality, you are correct - we are all only human. But when we paragons of intelligence and rationality are hoist on our own petard, failing to point out how stupid and irrational we are smacks of hypocrisy. And when we don't point it out, it blinds us not only to our frailties, but to our own hypocrisy.
... regulation is -never- the answer when it comes to the economy.
Because we should allow the economy to give us unfettered access to hit men. Yeah. That works well.
Hey idiot Libertarians - there is no such thing as a "free" market - even your idiot philosophy stops when it comes to things like fraud, theft, and direct harm to individuals. Of course, you like to play intellectually dishonest games like saying that the "free" market doesn't allow that - by what logical principal should you disengage the guileful and the naive, the cruel and the kind, the strong and the weak? That's not freedom. That's why I can respect anarchists more than you fools. Either you set rules or you don't. After you agree to that, it's just a question of where you set them.
It reminds me of the old story: A man says to a woman, "Would you sleep with me for ten million dollars?" The woman thinks for a couple moments and says, "Yeah, I guess so." The man says, "How about for quarter?" The woman shrieks, "What? What kind of woman do you think I am?" The man said, "We've already established that. Now we're just haggling over the price." And that's what Libertarians are, the intellectual whores of anarchists.
It's like they're the zombie of jurisprudence (or would that be juris-impudence?).
I use them to back up my 5TB RAID array...
Most H1-B holders don't look like Hispanics...
This law is de facto targeted at a very specific minority group. There's no getting around it. Even if other groups could theoretically be targeted by it, that's not going to happen as long as the AZ police have Hispanics to round up.
I think tax money could be better spent fixing the system.
I think that campaign contribution money has "fixed the system" quite well up to this point. I'm not sure I could stand any more "fixing".
Look at that... CRASH!!!!... babe.
If this is what future geeks are going to look like, I'ms sure as hell staying in the industry!
I love computers. I wouldn't have gotten into the field if I didn't love them.
Yeah, so did I. But that was thirty years ago. I've seen the industry take so many wrong turns since then I'm alternately astonished, appalled, and amused now. That's why I'm a manager now... well, that and the money. I try all the time to get the guys who work for me to understand that, for most users, simpler = better.
I get pissed off every time some stupid OS vendor (Microsoft, Apple, or Linux distro) changes its API for no apparent benefit to the customer or because some jack-off OS developer wants a new flavor of the day. I get saddened every time some poor user gets run into their individual brick walls because some crappy hardware vendor decided to save a nickel on a mobo component. So all of you wankers who are bitching about the "walled garden" model, all I can say is that you brought it on yourselves. You made your systems so crappy and hard to use that no one wants to deal with the crappiness anymore. They'll sacrifice their "freedoms" (which they didn't really want in the first place) for simplicity. And, in the end, you'll be the ones screwed, with no interesting APIs and nothing new and shiny to play with. And all because you couldn't see past your own need for complexity to keep you mentally entertained while you cranked out yet another for loop (and didn't develop the languages that had the for loops internalized so you could map functions onto collections without a bunch of hideous repetitive syntax, anyhow).
I didn't understand this ten years ago when I told an industry luminary that I wanted to make things simpler for the programmer. He looked at me and said "Don't talk to me about programmers. I don't give a shit about how hard it is for the programmers. I want things simple for the users." He was so right.
Of course, maybe I'm cranky because it's late on Friday and I have a cold. Yeah... that's it...
Republicans say that the government doesn't work, and when they get elected, they set out to prove it.
Laugh all you want but, if you'd uncovered evidence of financial irregularities, and every time you raised it, your politically appointed bosses said "Shut up and let the free market work," how long would it be until you found other ways to entertain yourself at work?
That's the most beautiful poem I've ever read! Author! Author!
I don't actually believe that Apple lost a lot of momentum in this defection. In general, it's the folks who had alternative ideas for an architecture that didn't win out that tend to leave. I bet Google eventually gets stuck with something like a chip that has an insane pipeline structure, makes a different power/speed tradeoff (and probably for the worse), or has some other weird bag o'crap bolted to the side.
In addition, there are a *lot* of chip designers still left over from the chip manufacturer layoffs after the crashes of .com and bank that Apple can pick from. When you get right down to it, once the architecture is developed (and, by this, I don't only mean ISA, I also include things like clock/signal distribution, internal bus structure, pipelining strategy, cache structure, etc.) which only takes a small team - in fact, it works better with a small team - it's just moving little mask rectangles around with automated logic generation and, after that, a buttload of QA.
So, even if Apple sues, it's just because (a) Apple like using its lawyers and (b) it kicks Google in the nuts - it really doesn't mean much for Apple's future chip development.
Or at least a couple of backplanes from them... I carted them around for a couple of moves until I figured that they were unlikely to be used in an art project anytime soon.
Hate this fuckin' planet so hard. Let me off.
You're free to leave any time you wish - you just may not like the life (or lack thereof) afterward.
When will they solve the mystery of the inflamed ring around Uranus?
They started with Preperation A and have made it up to Preparation F now, but they figure another couple tries and they'll have it licked.
...has anyone checked if he has a short position in Apple stock?
I mean if Rupert likes the iPad then, ipso facto, the iPad can't be a good thing. And that means Apple's stock is going down.
...said one CTO of a market data firm...
Note that it wasn't the CTOs of the actual trading firms speaking. In reality, almost every cycle that's not being used during the trading day is being used either in trading on foreign markets when yours are closed or running stats to drive the next day's domestic trading. A "market data" firm? Yeah, I can believe that. Real trading companies? Not so much.
To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator.
I hate it when people toss words like "dictator" around casually. Not that I disagree that Obama isn't shredding civil rights as bad (or perhaps even worse) than Bush did. But I don't think you'd bandy about the word dictator quite as quickly if you had lived under Stalin or Pinochet. It really doesn't help the level of discourse when people use hyperbole as their only means of rhetorical strength.
And are you seriously suggesting that the US at large is culpable for the actions of William Calley, Jesse England, and any other rapist, murderer, or degenerate who manages to make it into the uniformed service.
Actually, yes. Even though you may punish after the fact, it does not remove your culpability. And, in fact, it keeps you from seeing having potentially dangerous individuals in your employ as a good thing rather than as a (perhaps necessary) evil. Seeing soldiers as unvarnished good leads you down a dangerous path - one that usually ends in a military takeover of your government. You probably don't want that.
So, a woman manages to overcome all the dificulties it represents to move in a male-dominated environment, doing what few women have done in the past, struggling not only to accomplish her main mission in space but also to destroy those obsolete, yet still in place, ideas that certain areas belong to men only, and here comes some idiotic designer saying "a girl has to be pretty"?
How many times have you had a woman appear before Congress and one of the things the news story mentions is what she is wearing? Just because a woman has overcome sexism to get where she is doesn't mean that sexism is done with her. And, yes, women are still judged that way.
After some Googling I discover that you can't just copy mp3's to the iStick -- you have to fire up Apple's software, which is labyrinthine and ridiculous, and jump through hoops to transfer them.
You know what? I had one of those mp3 players that just looked like a file system (and no, this was a few months ago, not two years ago). No playlists, the UI was hideous, and half the time it shut down randomly. Yes, it was cheaper than the iPod. But, yes, it sucked.
If you look at iTunes as what it is - an entertainment management system, it's pretty understandable. No, you can't copy a mass of random mp3 files from the file system into the iPod and have them play - but you can get them into the iPod almost as easily (and you get a UI that actually works): Download files from the random folder into iTunes, sync, and go. But most people don't see having to use iTunes as a great disadvantage - in fact, they like having playlists; they like organizing their songs; they like having album covers automatically found (even for random mp3 files). Just face it - you're not the average user who actually wants a decent player with a reasonable UI that just works.
Whereas today if you jailbreak your iPad to install a Python interpreter, according to Apple you're a criminal.
No, according to Congress and the Executive branch via the DMCA, you're a criminal. According to Apple, they just won't support you. And, if you try to sell stuff that might make others devices unsupportable, they may sue you - but that would be civil, not criminal.
Not only can you get Microsoft developer tools for free, more that a couple Microsoft compilers are installed by default on Vista/7 and are delivered to XP with service pack 2.
Oh. That explains the bloat.
Do you know what? As far as I'm concerned, if you want to avoid "dumbing down" the hobby, make everyone take the equivalent of the old Advanced license knowledge test. Morse code had absolutely nothing to do with intelligence. In fact, if you don't have grandfathering and make everyone who has an old license re-take the Advanced test, we could get rid of a lot of the stupid old farts who prattle on about lack of Morse "dumbing down" the license, too.