"The executive order bans any regulation from moving forward without the approval of an agency's regulatory policy officer, who would be a political appointee."
> Step 1: Get everyone to admit the project has a problem >
Step 2: Figure out what that problem everyone admits is wrong really is
1. We admitted we were powerless over this schedule -- that our project had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power easier to blame than ourselves could restore us to schedule.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Consultant as we hired Him.
4. Performed an overreaching and mindless team-building exercise.
5. Admitted to the Consultant, to ourselves, and to the CEO the exact nature of our incompetence.
6. Were entirely ready to have the Consultant take over our jobs duties.
7. Humbly paid the Consultant to fix it for us.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make suck up to them all.
9. Sucked directly up to the CIO wherever possible, except when to do so would involve our beating him at golf.
10. Continued to perform team-building exercises, and when we thought it was silly, we still faked it to HR.
11. Sought through kickback and corruption to improve our friendship with the Consultant as we understood Him, paying only for Coverage of Our Asses and the budget to carry that out.
12. Having had a Machiavellian awakening as the result of the project's inevitable failure, we fired the Consultant and resolved to carry the blame to other departments, and to re-hire the Consultant next year so that we can practice these principles when the next project goes off the fucking rails too.
> What humans there can accomplish what robots can't.
"Dig a 1-foot deep hole in 30 seconds, as opposed to 30 years."
"Walk further than 100m per day"
"Walk into the bowl of a crater, poke around for interesting rocks, and carry the interesting rocks out."
"Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions."
No disrespect intended to our robot overlords; they've done wonderful work over the past few decades, but sometimes the right tool for a job is pickaxe powered by 200 pounds of meat.
> You could just say "the article sucks" and cut the caustic, sarcastic crap.
"Welcome to Slashdot!"
Actually, I liked the article (although I would have preferred it if the claims on market share had been backed up with links -- and not just because it would have made a parody "FreeBSD is Dying" easier to write). The author's underlying thesis is correct: if Linux is going to become a viable alternative for Aunt Tillie, rather than just us Slashdotters, it needs to be as easy for Aunt Tillie to administer as Windows and OS X. Ubuntu's the first beginner-friendly distro that's gained significant mindshare (which is why we all accept the claims of Ubuntu's popularity even without links to the numbers), and in so doing, probably has positioned itself as the most likely beginner-friendly distro to take over that segment of the Linux marketspace. That's an interesting development, and reason to believe that Matt's article won't turn out to be as off-the-mark as Netcraft's FreeBSD report.
It is now official. MadPenguin.org has confirmed: Ubuntu is not dying.
One more encouraging sign hit the already triumphant Ubuntu
community when MadPenguin confirmed that Ubuntu market share has risen yet
again, now up to to some number that would actually make this parody
much easier to write had been cited in the fucking article.
Coming with a hotlink to a recent MadPenguin.org article which plainly
states that Microsoft Does't Care About Destroying Linux,
this news serves to reinforce
what we've known all along. It's simply a matter of numbers,
despite it being a sore spot with Fedora and SuSe users
who've failed to get over it.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin
to predict Ubuntu's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ubuntu
has won the hearts of common users. In fact there won't be any future at all
without Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not dying. Things are looking very good for
Ubuntu. As many of us are already aware, Ubuntu continues to gain
market share. Take a cold, hard look around.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, had a much slower
development cycle than many of us would amit.
The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time
Fedora communicy relations issues
only serve to
underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any
doubt: Ubuntu is not dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
If there were any in TFA, I'd have talked about the number of users Ubuntu has, made a few wisecracks about Theo and FreeBSD, and compared the number of Ubuntu vs FreeBSD articles on Slashdot, divided by the number of modpoints used. So let's just skip that bit and call it as done. Throw me a frickin' bone here, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
All major surveys show that Ubuntu has steadily risen in market
share. Ubuntu is very healthy and its long term survival prospects are very
good. If Ubuntu is to triumph at all it will be over Vista itself. Ubuntu continues to grow. Nothing short of a disaster could
kill it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ubuntu is alive.
>> "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." >> - Cardinal Richelieu > > He doesn't even define line length, so we'll assume length is unimportant:
> >
01 The number 1 >
02 The number 2 >
03 The number 3 >
04 The number 4 >
05 I eat babies >
06 The number 6 > >
Oh shit..
See? He uses a programming language with line numbers. Hangin's too good for 'im! But at least he kept his line length below 80 colum--oh shit.
> I'm in the minority because I like the Bush administration, but I do have to say that Ashcroft pissed me off when they imprisoned Tommy Chong. For the longest time anyone could buy drug paraphernalia in head shops. There was no law against it. Then suddenly Tommy Chong gets arrested ex post facto. They changed the interpretation of anti-drug laws on the fly so they imprisoned a man who did nothing illegal, and had no chance to stop doing it once they declared it illegal.
"Did you really think that we want those laws to be observed?" said
Dr. Ferris. "We want them broken. You'd better get it straight that
it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against - then you'll know
that this is not the age for beautiful gestures. We're after power
and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick,
and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.
The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.
Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares
so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live
without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens'
What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that
can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted - and
you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt.
Now that's the system, Mr. Rearden, that's the game, and once you
understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1957
And for those who don't like Rand, how about this quote, from a guy who preceded Rand by 17 years, and just might have been qualified to have an opinion on jurisprudence, seeing as how it was his entire career and stuff.
"With the law books filled with a great assortment of crimes,
a prosecutor stands a fair chance of finding at least a technical
violation of some act on the part of almost anyone. In such a case,
it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and
then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of
picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting
investigators to work, to pin some offense on him."
- Robert H. Jackson, Attorney General (1940-1941), Supreme Court Justice (1948-1954), from a speech given in 1940
> Republican Stooge [ ] >
Democrat Stooge [ ] >
Some Wacko Independant [ ] >
None of the above [X]
Or the next best thing. If you can't vote with your dollars, vote with your feet.
"Stephen Harper, or whoever else is Prime Minister of Canada on November 5, 2008 [X]"
Anyone who can scrape together 67 points can get in, and anyone with a Bachelor's degree (which guarantees you'll get the full 16 points for English proficiency, even though your Americanness guarantees you'll get 0 points for French:) and one year's work experience and a job offer -- or one year's work experience and a spouse with a Bachelor's degree -- is going to make the cut.
> i've been hearing about how ip4 will run out in the next 5 years for the last TEN years.
We've been in various stages of Imminent Death of the Net Predicted for at least 25 years. Y2K was merely the last version, and running out of IPv4 is merely the current version.
Just wait until we abandon CSS in order to ensure that an entire page can be rendered by through a single TCP/IPv6 connection. Domain names with vowels! HTML with serifed fonts! Imminent Death of Web 2.0 predicted!
> My cookies files and folders are read-only. Every time I shut down the browser (at least daily), all cookies are gone. Works great with cookies-required sites, since they're still enabled, but leaves no trail beyond the session.
And of course, there must be thousands of people in my ISP's/16 of the network, who, once a day, log onto Slashdot, hits Digg's homepage, checks stock quotes for MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, FOO, BAR, and BAZ (and only those six stocks, and always in that order), and then does some SSL with Quuxbank (and only Quuxbank), before going back to reading stories on Slashdot and Digg, predominantly in the "YRO" category.
What are these cookies of which you speak? Cookies only make tracking easier. NSA had to compromise the backbone routers to gain access to every user's clickstream. All Microsoft has to do is control the browser and embed the spyware in the OS... oh, wait.
You're closer to the truth than you know. The format that's cracked first, provides better value for the consumer, and wins.
Case in point: Player piano rolls vs. sheet music publishers. Everything vs. Minidisc. CD vs. SACD. DVD vs. DIVX (Circuit City's pay-per-view-disc scheme, not the codec)
> screw terrorism, screw weather, is it BACKHOE proof?
Depends on the backhoe, doesn't it? An God-fearing American backhoe will do what comes naturally - severing both the power cable and the jacket that carries the liquid nitrogen coolant.
But a terrorist backhoe, that's the problem. It'll happily chomp away at the cable, knowing that as soon as it breaks the liquid nitrogen containment, its innocent operator will notice the plume of boiling liquid nitrogen, and immediately throw it into reverse!
A few moments later, the intact cable warms up just enough to becomes the world's longest fusible link. The innocent operator then blamed while the terrorist backhoe diesels quietly in the background, unnoticed by all.
I'd tell you more about the threat of terrorist backhoes, but it'll take at least hundred million in funding.
> To say... I pity you guys/gals in England. And I thought we had a police state here in the United States.
Don't worry, UAVs are also being used to keep the American civilian population in line, too.
Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters,
when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a
phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would
never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to
use the law that way as early and as often as possible.
an HDMI or DVI signal is a real-time, one-way stream of pixels that doesn't stop, doesn't error-check, and doesn't repair its mistakes--it just runs and runs, regardless of what's happening at the other end of the signal chain.
Listen, and understand. The DRM is out there.
It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
> "Set v underscore tab equals space parenthesis parenthesis x minus lev schema dot all recs concatenate..."
Yeah, but if you put a beat to it, you've got something.
{ } . !/
& ; ^ # -
< > @ \
{ } _ SYSTEM HALTED
"Left titty, right titty, dot bang slash.
Ampersand semicolon, caret pound dash.
Less than greater than, at back slash,
left titty, right titty, under score crash!"
"Star pound bang bang, open-paren.
Tilde and pipe, close-paren.
One quote, two quote, dot dot delete,
pound bell, bang bang, process complete!"
Google's USENET archive dates it back to 1990, but it predates the 1990 post ("Stuck Shift Key Poetry") to rec.humor.funny by several years.
You haven't lived until you've seen a dozen drunken geeks trying to sing "Waka Waka", or the entirety of "Hatless Atlas", while seeing only one character at a time. Well, maybe you have, but this is Slashdot.
> We're past the stage where there's a debate about who's better -- machines or grand masters -- and we're just looking for interesting ways to make the competition fairer.'"
How about we play overnight on January 19, 2038? I'll use this mechanical chess clock to keep track of my times, and Deep Blue can use those two 32-bit integers holding time_t, and subtract one from the other!
Spacewar on original hardware!
on
Videogames Turn 40
·
· Score: 3, Informative
> I was just about say the same thing. Spacewar was created by students at MIT on a DEC PDP-5 mainframe. They even created a special input device with dials and switches just to control this game.
Nitpick: It was a PDP-1, one of which has been restored to working order, much to the delight of Spacewar's creators.
But everything else you said was essentially correct, including the homebuilt input device, which consists of five switches laid out in a pattern that anyone who played the coin-op versions of Spacewar and Asteroids will immediately recognize.
Slashdot Mirror
>
> trashin ur racks
Lizzie Borden did teh h4x,
Got drunk and unplugged 40 racks.
When she saw what she had done,
She unplugged number 41.
(Lawn. Off. Git.)
"Don't turn around.
Der Kommissar's in town."
- Falco
There's an In Democratic Republic of Germany joke in there, but my regulatory political officer oversees me.
> Step 2: Figure out what that problem everyone admits is wrong really is
1. We admitted we were powerless over this schedule -- that our project had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power easier to blame than ourselves could restore us to schedule.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Consultant as we hired Him.
4. Performed an overreaching and mindless team-building exercise.
5. Admitted to the Consultant, to ourselves, and to the CEO the exact nature of our incompetence.
6. Were entirely ready to have the Consultant take over our jobs duties.
7. Humbly paid the Consultant to fix it for us.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make suck up to them all.
9. Sucked directly up to the CIO wherever possible, except when to do so would involve our beating him at golf.
10. Continued to perform team-building exercises, and when we thought it was silly, we still faked it to HR.
11. Sought through kickback and corruption to improve our friendship with the Consultant as we understood Him, paying only for Coverage of Our Asses and the budget to carry that out.
12. Having had a Machiavellian awakening as the result of the project's inevitable failure, we fired the Consultant and resolved to carry the blame to other departments, and to re-hire the Consultant next year so that we can practice these principles when the next project goes off the fucking rails too.
"It's a TRAP!"
"Hey! That's GNU/Hypocrisy to you, buddy, and don't you forget it!"
"Dig a 1-foot deep hole in 30 seconds, as opposed to 30 years."
"Walk further than 100m per day"
"Walk into the bowl of a crater, poke around for interesting rocks, and carry the interesting rocks out."
"Immediately discern between 'interesting' and 'uninteresting' rocks without having to wait 24 hours to ask for new instructions."
No disrespect intended to our robot overlords; they've done wonderful work over the past few decades, but sometimes the right tool for a job is pickaxe powered by 200 pounds of meat.
"Welcome to Slashdot!"
Actually, I liked the article (although I would have preferred it if the claims on market share had been backed up with links -- and not just because it would have made a parody "FreeBSD is Dying" easier to write). The author's underlying thesis is correct: if Linux is going to become a viable alternative for Aunt Tillie, rather than just us Slashdotters, it needs to be as easy for Aunt Tillie to administer as Windows and OS X. Ubuntu's the first beginner-friendly distro that's gained significant mindshare (which is why we all accept the claims of Ubuntu's popularity even without links to the numbers), and in so doing, probably has positioned itself as the most likely beginner-friendly distro to take over that segment of the Linux marketspace. That's an interesting development, and reason to believe that Matt's article won't turn out to be as off-the-mark as Netcraft's FreeBSD report.
One more encouraging sign hit the already triumphant Ubuntu community when MadPenguin confirmed that Ubuntu market share has risen yet again, now up to to some number that would actually make this parody much easier to write had been cited in the fucking article.
Coming with a hotlink to a recent MadPenguin.org article which plainly states that Microsoft Does't Care About Destroying Linux, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. It's simply a matter of numbers, despite it being a sore spot with Fedora and SuSe users who've failed to get over it.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Ubuntu's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. In fact there won't be any future at all without Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not dying. Things are looking very good for Ubuntu. As many of us are already aware, Ubuntu continues to gain market share. Take a cold, hard look around.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, had a much slower development cycle than many of us would amit. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Fedora communicy relations issues only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is not dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
If there were any in TFA, I'd have talked about the number of users Ubuntu has, made a few wisecracks about Theo and FreeBSD, and compared the number of Ubuntu vs FreeBSD articles on Slashdot, divided by the number of modpoints used. So let's just skip that bit and call it as done. Throw me a frickin' bone here, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
All major surveys show that Ubuntu has steadily risen in market share. Ubuntu is very healthy and its long term survival prospects are very good. If Ubuntu is to triumph at all it will be over Vista itself. Ubuntu continues to grow. Nothing short of a disaster could kill it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ubuntu is alive.
There is no spoon.
>> - Cardinal Richelieu
>
> He doesn't even define line length, so we'll assume length is unimportant:
>
> 01 The number 1
> 02 The number 2
> 03 The number 3
> 04 The number 4
> 05 I eat babies
> 06 The number 6
>
> Oh shit..
See? He uses a programming language with line numbers. Hangin's too good for 'im! But at least he kept his line length below 80 colum--oh shit.
And for those who don't like Rand, how about this quote, from a guy who preceded Rand by 17 years, and just might have been qualified to have an opinion on jurisprudence, seeing as how it was his entire career and stuff.
His tongue's strong to the finish,
'Cos he eats more than spinach,
He's Popeye the Slashdot-man!
Definitely. Definitely slightly ironic.
"Stop giving away our plans, Pinky, or I shall have to hurt you."
Hey, we wanted a government that listens to its people, and we got one!
> Democrat Stooge [ ]
> Some Wacko Independant [ ]
> None of the above [X]
Or the next best thing. If you can't vote with your dollars, vote with your feet.
"Stephen Harper, or whoever else is Prime Minister of Canada on November 5, 2008 [X]"
Anyone who can scrape together 67 points can get in, and anyone with a Bachelor's degree (which guarantees you'll get the full 16 points for English proficiency, even though your Americanness guarantees you'll get 0 points for French :) and one year's work experience and a job offer -- or one year's work experience and a spouse with a Bachelor's degree -- is going to make the cut.
Canadian income taxes aren't much more than US income taxes. US Federal tax forms don't show the extra 6.2% that's getting taken off for Socialist Insecurity, nor do they take into effect state taxes. The Canadian federal government just turned a $10 billion surplus, and you even get the equivalent of catastrophic health care insurance in exchange for your tax dollars.
Atlas shrugs, eh?
We've been in various stages of Imminent Death of the Net Predicted for at least 25 years. Y2K was merely the last version, and running out of IPv4 is merely the current version.
Just wait until we abandon CSS in order to ensure that an entire page can be rendered by through a single TCP/IPv6 connection. Domain names with vowels! HTML with serifed fonts! Imminent Death of Web 2.0 predicted!
And of course, there must be thousands of people in my ISP's /16 of the network, who, once a day, log onto Slashdot, hits Digg's homepage, checks stock quotes for MSFT, GOOG, AAPL, FOO, BAR, and BAZ (and only those six stocks, and always in that order), and then does some SSL with Quuxbank (and only Quuxbank), before going back to reading stories on Slashdot and Digg, predominantly in the "YRO" category.
What are these cookies of which you speak? Cookies only make tracking easier. NSA had to compromise the backbone routers to gain access to every user's clickstream. All Microsoft has to do is control the browser and embed the spyware in the OS... oh, wait.
You're closer to the truth than you know. The format that's cracked first, provides better value for the consumer, and wins.
Case in point: Player piano rolls vs. sheet music publishers. Everything vs. Minidisc. CD vs. SACD. DVD vs. DIVX (Circuit City's pay-per-view-disc scheme, not the codec)
Depends on the backhoe, doesn't it? An God-fearing American backhoe will do what comes naturally - severing both the power cable and the jacket that carries the liquid nitrogen coolant.
But a terrorist backhoe, that's the problem. It'll happily chomp away at the cable, knowing that as soon as it breaks the liquid nitrogen containment, its innocent operator will notice the plume of boiling liquid nitrogen, and immediately throw it into reverse!
A few moments later, the intact cable warms up just enough to becomes the world's longest fusible link. The innocent operator then blamed while the terrorist backhoe diesels quietly in the background, unnoticed by all.
I'd tell you more about the threat of terrorist backhoes, but it'll take at least hundred million in funding.
Don't worry, UAVs are also being used to keep the American civilian population in line, too.
From TFA:
Listen, and understand. The DRM is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.
Yeah, but if you put a beat to it, you've got something.
{ } . ! /
& ; ^ # -
< > @ \
{ } _ SYSTEM HALTED
"Left titty, right titty, dot bang slash.
Ampersand semicolon, caret pound dash.
Less than greater than, at back slash,
left titty, right titty, under score crash!"
* # ! ! (
~ & | )
' " . . DEL
# ^G ! ! working... done.
"Star pound bang bang, open-paren.
Tilde and pipe, close-paren.
One quote, two quote, dot dot delete,
pound bell, bang bang, process complete!"
Google's USENET archive dates it back to 1990, but it predates the 1990 post ("Stuck Shift Key Poetry") to rec.humor.funny by several years.
You haven't lived until you've seen a dozen drunken geeks trying to sing "Waka Waka", or the entirety of "Hatless Atlas", while seeing only one character at a time. Well, maybe you have, but this is Slashdot.
How about we play overnight on January 19, 2038? I'll use this mechanical chess clock to keep track of my times, and Deep Blue can use those two 32-bit integers holding time_t, and subtract one from the other!
Nitpick: It was a PDP-1, one of which has been restored to working order, much to the delight of Spacewar's creators.
But everything else you said was essentially correct, including the homebuilt input device, which consists of five switches laid out in a pattern that anyone who played the coin-op versions of Spacewar and Asteroids will immediately recognize.