> The article glazes over everything and provides less information then a product pamplet . . . unless you don't know anything about digital cameras, haven't seen a digital camera, have never touched a digital camera, never read about a digital camera, and you've been living under a rock, I wouldn't bother reading this article.
Amen. From the article:
"There are two major factors that characterize a good focusing system: speed and accuracy."
Duh.
I'd like to know what he means by "accurate". My first (and last) experience with "intelligent" autofocus was with a camera that decided the window frame and wing struts were more "interesting" (whether on auto or "for vast landscapes instead of portraits with blurry backgrounds" mode) than the goddamn majestic glacier I flew two hours to see, to say nothing of some friends on the glacier waving up at me. Gee, thanks!
/has some nice pictures of wing struts, where you can see every scratch, every speck of dirt, and every bugsplat in perfect detail against a white background with a few globs of red and blue, not that I'm bitter or anything...
> > What? This is insult to every person who has ever started their own business. > > Oh come on, you know exactly what I'm saying. Think Enron. Think Tyco. There are many more. Use
your head and stop making a fool of yourself.
So what would you say to a redneck who says something like "virtually every [black person] is a criminal? Think [any inner city]."
Most CEOs are honest and hard working. As are most blacks. Even though it can be hard to believe either of those statements from time to time.
Re:"vows to mend his ways by teaching others about
on
Spammer Apologizes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> "vows to mend his ways by teaching others about the dangers of the internet." > >
Is that supposed to be a joke? Come on, what a cop out. I'm all for people reforming, but why does this sound so phoney? I give it 6 months before he's back at it again, probably based out of China or Russia.
You're an optimist.
The Rules Of Spam:
1) Spammers lie.
2) If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see rule #1.
3) Spam is theft.
4) Most spammers are stupid.
5) The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.
Considering that a lawsuit from Yahoo was the motivation of his "apology", and that his apology lays the bullshit on thicker than even you said, to wit:
"He's going to play in a band and find a way to use his knowledge to help protect kids on the Internet."
Not just "others", but the chilllllllldrun!
I'll see your six months and raise you three: I give him 90 days before he's spamming again, and place a side bet with 10:1 odds that as per Rule #4, the spam comes from hijacked PCs connected through a Yahoo! co-branded service such as SBC-Yahoo DSL.
> I wish my bank offered Bonking services - maybe I wouldn't moan about their monthly fees if they did.
> >
You would if they were any good at bonking.
If he were any good at bonking, his bank would be moaning. And he'd bemoan the state of banking.
> > "just finished my first year of college. > and > > once you have your degree, you can do anything you want. > > These two statements don't mesh with each other in any sort of reality.
What about the reality that exists during the four-month period after completion of the first year of college and before the start of the second year of college?
It doesn't have to be a big reality in order for someone to live in it long enough to post to Slashdot.
> Practice meditation. Don't become an Idealogue. Know the difference between knowledge and experience. Feed your heart and mind. Travel. Get to know people. Be generous. Remember, we are energy converters. Devote your energy to being yourself, spontaneous, unencumbered by fears. Never succumb to paranois. Intelligent people are most often emotionally sensitive. When you feel slighted, forgive and grow beyond it. Live simply. Take on as much as you can.
> >
We're counting on people like you to make Star Trek a reality.
Avoid zen kooks. Join a political party. Know the difference between knowledge and experience -- and realize that neither is as good as having connections. Feed your body and lusts. Travel to Florida. Get to know people you can blackmail. Be generous so they won't see it coming. Remember, we are energy converters for the spider-looking things in the Matrix. Devote your energy to advancing yourself in a methodical careful fashion. As Andy Grove of Intel said: "Only the paranoid survive". Intelligence people are most often able to exploit the emotionally sensitive. When you feel slighted, bear the grudge and pay it back 20 years from now. Live well. Take on less than the other guy.
We're counting on people like you to save us from Rick Berman's vision from becoming reality.
Well, we've Slashdotted damn near everything else on the planet (as well as several things off the planet). Taking on an entire country's phone system, complete with big fat pipes and uber-routers that do QoS management for 20 million people is just the next logical step.
Bring it on, BT! The power of a national telephone monopoly is insignificant compared to the power of the Slashdot effect!
>can you imagine people walking around who are forced not to engage in activities (through cameras), eventually those bottled up activities will explode as opposed to being released gradually.
I have trouble imagining that. What you say is plausible, but is not supported by any recently cited psychographic studies on large urban populations.
> People need avenues to release emotions, whether they are good bad or indifferent. If we force them to only release in their own homes, there will be no peer related checks and balances on them and people will gravitate towards every individual having their own (different) moral compass.
Not necessarily. First off, (twitch), I've already addressed the lack of evidence regarding your hypothesis regarding EEEEP! cathartic activity in the home. Even if I accept your hypothesis for the sake of arguFUCK YOUment, there are always peer-related GODDAMN CRACKHEAD SLASHDOT MODS checks and balances. Now if you'll excuse me, ASSHOLE, I have to go adjust the phase coil emitters on my tinfoil hat, clean the plant's litterbox, and water the cat.
> I agree and disagree. We have no privacy in a public place however there have been many times in which public officials deny people in public places the right to make a recording of a speach (for example). So how is the line determined?
The Constitution is pretty clear that the line is as far as Congress wants to draw it, plus however far past it the Executive goes while enforcing it, minus how far back the Supreme Court chooses to yank them:)
> Here is another thought. If we don't respect people in general in public, when do we start disrespecting people in private places (like your home?). 1984 is getting closer and closer with each step we take. Do we really want to live in that sort of society?
You labor under the delusion that you have a choice in the matter. This is irrational.
> We can see how this level of control has messed up other countries. Now they are trying to live like America (I don't intend to be inflametory with that comment btw). Communism isn't spreading. Democracy and Capitalism is.
The Communist states collapsed, in part, under the weight of their own surveillance programmes. East Germany was probably the worst example - when half your population is monitoring the other half, that's a lot of people who can't get anything useful done.
Some would argue that political freedom is a necessary component of economic freedom. Once upon a time, maybe - but no longer necessarily true. China's shaping up to be a superb example of how a surveillance state can be scaled up to control a population of over a billion people, while simultaneously increasing economic freedoms. (Admittedly, political and economic freedoms in China were starting from a pretty low level:)
Technology is a force multiplier. Properly deployed surveillance technology can enable a government to achieve East German levels of social control without the nasty economic side effects that come with having half your population unofficially working for STASI. By automating surveillance, a society can achieve near-total physical security for the rulers and others worth protecting, while still preserving some degree of political and economic freedom for those who serve them.
> Do we want our children living that way?
I'm sufficiently open-minded about the prospect to acknowledge that it might not suck as hard as people of our generation have been trained to think. But look on the bright side - even if oldthinkers unbellyfeel amsoc, your kids'll love it.
> Can someone please tell me why anal rape is so funny to Americans? Jesus Christ think about it for a second. > > Imagine being raped in the arse repeatedly for "Stealing" some source code... doesn't seem like fair punishment to me.
Yeah. If the HL2 source code theft was in any way responsible for the delay in the HL2 release cycle, prison rape is too good for them.
Grind off their genitalia with the solder side of a rusty 8-bit ISA VGA card. Only then shall the ass-pounding commence!
> > "The company also announced on Thursday that it had notified the Berlin-Bremen, Stuttgart and Frankfurt Freiverkehr stock exchanges that its ticker symbol had been listed without the company's permission. SCO is asking the exchanges to remove the symbol." > > What's next? CNET gets a "Cease & Desist" letter from SCO because the company's name was used in this story?
Actually, there's something more ornery going on than that.
A lot of US companies are popping up on German exchanges without the companies' knowledge or consent. It's a cheezy hack to get around US securities laws. Google for "naked short selling german exchange".
When you sell shares short, your broker is supposed to lend those shares to you so that you can sell them. (When you cover the short, you buy the shares on the open market and hand them back over to your broker). To sell a stock short without borrowing shares is called "naked short selling", and has been against NASDAQ regs for a while. As of April, more regulations went into effect in to prevent the practice.
The underlying principle is that you can't sell what doesn't exist. That's why your broker has to have some of those shares kicking around and be willing to loan them to you. If you can sell shares that don't exist, you can use that capability to manipulate the market in either direction.
Although I think SCO (the company) isn't worth a load of foetid dingo's kidneys, I wouldn't want to have a position in SCOX (the stock) either way - and that goes double given the ludicrously small float and high potential for manipulation.
But for once -- probably for the first and last time in their corporate history -- the litigious bastards who make up SCO are actually doing the right thing when they ask these exchanges to delist them.
> One of the corner stones of our democracy is anonimity from the government. People will say: "Oh your just a crank. _OUR_ government will _NEVER_ abuse this to repress us!". Say that to someone in China when RFID is introduced over there.
Look on the bright side: The Chinese get the crappy beta test implants that cause cancer in mice when you get 50 implants per square centimeter of skin. We get the debugged version!
> Or perhaps we should just stop invading and occupying their countries, supporting dictatorial
regimes which brutalize them and their families, and levelling sanctions against their nations for failing to comply with our demands of unlimited and unencumbered access to their markets and resources.
> >
Ah hell, what am I saying. You're right; I'm sure they'd rather have Counterstrike!
"Join the Army! Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people, and pwn them!"
> > the Ger? to the H?ler zur?zubringen and the purchase price zur?zufordern > > But if they H?ler zur?zubringen , and the purchase price zur?zufordern... we are DOOMED!
ACHTUNG! ALLES SLASHENTROLLERS!
Der WLAN-Access-Point WG602 is nicht fur surfen das Internet! Is easy schnappen der springenverk, blowenfus, remotexploiten, und owninatin mit spitzensparken. Der Firmwaren WG602 is night fur geverken by das dumpkopfen Netgear! Relaxen H?ler zur?zubringen der purchase price zur?zufordern und given das moddenpoints.
> OK, so that clarifies, but the point still stands - 95 wasn't designed as a net-connected OS
and the basic underlying objectives have changed little.
The ironic part is that 9x, being not designed for the Internet, doesn't really have any remotely-exploitable holes on an out-of-the-box installation. (Run IE or Outleak, get owned. Run Mozilla, don't get owned.)
Try it. Plug a 9x box into the network. No firewall. Although it may divulge some information about itself from the stupid (but easily-disabled) NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP shite, it'll basically sit there saying "Port what? I don't got nothin' runnin' there!" until 49 days later when the 32-bit int that counts the number of milliseconds since bootup overflows and the box blows up.
NT, 2K, XP, and 2K3, on the other hand, have out-of-the-box life expectancies measured in seconds. Plug it in, and the box is spamming away before you can even download the first patch.
> Geeks must have some sort of Advertising Impairment Syndrome, where in order to make a brand-name, they take the most unpronouncable and esoteric combinations of characters and stick them together. > > It's like all the crazies who go ballistic at people when people don't pronounce a hard "G" at
the beginning of "Gnome". Why the fuck should they? It's pronounced differently in every other
word beginning with "G-N".
So we did it your way.
"Yzis" == "why this", but it's also a play on "vi zis", vit un boguz Zherman aggzent.
Except, of course, that "vi" isn't pronounced "vye" except by noobs and clueless twits. It's pronounced "vee eye", as in, two syllables, for "visual interface". But "vim" is always pronounced "vim", not "vee eye emm", that is, it's proper to use one syllable instead of three.
Flammed if you do, flammed if you don't.
Why this? There's only one explanation: The naming convention for yzis was chosen by a Vast EMACS-Wing Conspiracy as part of an attempt to get both of the "vi" camps to wage holy war upon each other instead of the true enemy.
> You failed to read the last article "How to Break The Rules" which gives hints as to why and how to go against the standard guildlines.
Sometimes you don't have the choice. For instance, if you're indoors, you often have only two options:
1) Turn off the flash. Hold the camera as steady as you can to avoid blur (and take 10 shots between heartbeats), or if it's an action shot, pray that you can build a makeshift tripod in the 2 seconds you have before the shot goes away.
2) Turn on the flash. Get a weirdly-exposed picture (fine, I can live with that), but also get outrageous graininess in the background because the camera decided to go to ISO400 as a "favor". Thanks for nothing:)
Yes, you can fix some of this with postprocessing in software, but it's a PITA to have to do so in the first place.
> > Apart from Monkey Island, Lucasarts appear not to care for the genre they brought so much to in the early Nineties. > >
Not just Lucasarts. It seems *nobody* cares about adventures anymore. Because it's just more profitable to make yet-another-3d-first-person-shooter-this-time-with -prettier-graphics!
Huh? LucasArts?
Killing off Sam and Max
was teh suck, but have you played KOTOR?
Look beyond the 3D (it's purty!) and the fact that it has character stats/abilities a'la D20-based RPG. When I finished KOTOR, I didn't remember a damn thing about any of my characters' stats or class. For an RPG, that's unusual.
But I do remember spending a lot of time navigating dialog trees where my choices had a greater effect on my character's development than anything I chopped up for XP. I also remember a game salted liberally with math and logic puzzles, none of which would have been out of place in an Infocom title, and I remember a story featuring character development of the player, evolving relationships between the player and the NPCs, and considerable exposition of the history of the early SW universe.
It's ironic - George Lucas can't make a good movie to save his life. And yet, if you took a LucasArts/BioWare game, recorded it all the way through, edited out about 2/3 of the combat and "walking around town" between quests, you'd have about 2 hours of video that would better Star Wars movie than either of Episodes I or II. Go figure.
KOTOR, at least for me, was a work of interactive fiction, not an RPG. (A feature, not a bug!)
> > It is absolutely ridiculous to try and equate a movie with a child. Until you have had children, you cannot possibly understand their emotional significance to their parents. This is a genetic trait that is millions of years old. Be glad that your father didn't have problems deciding between a movie and his child. > >
I don't think the original poster meant much by equating children with movies.
True, I wasn't.
> My point is that you can't argue with someone who says that Lord of the Rings is more emotionaly significant than a child. Thats the problem with emotion: you can't prove or disprove how someone feels about something. That's why Appeal to Emotion is a logical fallacy.
Agreed. I should have chosen a better example, because you can't argue rationally with someone who's so wrapped up in their emotional attachment to their crotchfruit to recognize that people without kids give a shit about things other than work, too? (See, emotional attachment cuts both ways too - and as the guy I'm replying to pointed out, it's a poor substitute for rational argument:)
I chose LOTR because I was trying to get away from pulling on heartstrings and playing the world's smallest violin, but since the parental types insist on it ("OMG nothing is more important than teh chilllllldrun!"), to hell with LOTR. Why not your own aging parents, or to use the politically-correct buzzword, "elder care"?
If genetics is the be-all end-all, replace LOTR or the LAN party with, "my parents are trying to do some stuff around the house this afternoon, and they're stubborn old coots, and I'd really prefer to do the heavy lifting myself, rather than go home next weekend to discover that the house smells funny because they had heart attacks trying to do it themselves and have been rotting downstairs for three days."
There - a(nother) reason why someone without kids might feel the need for personal time just as strongly as someone with kids (for those wanting a rational argument), and it's sufficiently sappy that someone with kids (for those who require an emotional argument) might begin to get a flicker of understanding too.
> It's important to make sure that there are other parents in these places. If you're the lone 9 to 5er in a stable full of 20-somethings on the fast track to burnout, then you're going to be noticed and probably not in a positive way (I am narrowly considering the number of hours you have available to put in, of course). My anecdotal
evidence, there were subtle cases of discrimination (a loaded term in the US, I know) against programmers with "other" responsbilities when it comes to doing crunch projects.
Dude, you just touched a nerve with that "discrimination" concept. I grok where you're coming from -- but please understand that the "discrimination" feeling cuts both ways.
It doesn't matter whether a team is pulling 80-hour weeks or 40-hour weeks: If Paul Parenthood starts leaving work undone so he can be with Paul Jr., you just suggested that Joe stack the workplace deck with kids who can also leave work unfinished, all for the noble purpose of enabling management to shovel all the work down on those of us who don't have kids. Nice to have you out of the closet.
I realize that's not what you meant, and it's certainly not what you (or Paul Parenthood) intends, but it's what happens.
The common line (usually from a manager with kids) is something like "Well, we're asking you because you don't have children, you don't understand how much harder it is now that Paul has kids now, and because you don't, well, you obviously have so much more spare time than he does, well, we'd like you to do Paul's work."
If asking Paul Parenthood to keep up his productivity is "discriminating against him because he has kids", then so is asking Sam Singleton to pick up Paul's slack when he says he can't.
If there's any advice to the new parent here, it's to be aware that your single, childless, and/or childfree co-workers may feel just as shafted by management as you do!
If there's a silver lining behind this cloud, it's that the friction between parents and single/childfrees is caused to lousy management, not some evilness inherent to breeders or kid-haters. The two camps don't have to hate each other -- nor should they.
I'm lucky to work at a place where I, as a childfree employee, can say "Dude, I need to take care of Geeky Stuff [LOTR comes out, supplies for a LAN party] this afternoon", and he'll say "Go for it, I'll hold down the fort while you're gone." Likewise, my co-workers can say "Dude, I need to take care of Parental Stuff this afternoon", and I'll say "Cool, I'll hold the fort while you're out." More importantly, we're just as comfortable asking those questions in front of -- and sometimes to -- our manager.
It's rare, but there do exist managers who are sufficiently clued to realize that as far as Sam Singleton is concerned, seeing LOTR or setting the weekend's LAN party is just as emotionally important to Sam, as setting up the kid's birthday party is to Paul Parenthood.
If you're in management: Go thou and do likewise. For the sake of all your employees.
> if you're thinking the family life will suffer > >
Then just don't do it.
What he said.
To the original poster: isn't now a little fucking late to be asking Slashdot about it?
I mean, let's put the article poster's question:
After 5+ years of being married, my wife and I have been blessed by her becoming pregnant. [... ] How does a programming career jive with family life?
...into developer terms.
Suppose you've spent the past 5 months doing some work on a stable codebase of boring-ass procedural C code that talks to a Sybase back end, and wraps it in a GUI on Win9x. You're almost done -- the project's feature-complete, QA's been pretty good, and the release date is 1 month away.
Suppose further that your project manager comes in one day and said "Dude! Remember that salesweasel from Sun? And his friend from IBM/Rational? And the.NET guy? And the guy who's best friend's brother once sat in Larry Ellison's chair? Well, guess what! We just signed with them - the whole application is going to be done in Java, using the latest in OO and UML techniques, and it's gonna use.NET, so it can talk to an Oracle database! Did I mention we need it to run on XP, Linux, and OS X, too! We've just signed the check for $1.8M, which is 100% of our IT budget for the next 18 months, so there's no turning back."
Now suppose further that after telling you this, your project manager asks you something like:
"How does changing development environments, development methodologies, and targeted support platforms affect your life?"
I'm not the original poster. But I confess that "Dude, it's a little fucking late to be asking me, isn't it?" would at least flicker across my consciousness...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Amen. From the article:
"There are two major factors that characterize a good focusing system: speed and accuracy."
Duh.
I'd like to know what he means by "accurate". My first (and last) experience with "intelligent" autofocus was with a camera that decided the window frame and wing struts were more "interesting" (whether on auto or "for vast landscapes instead of portraits with blurry backgrounds" mode) than the goddamn majestic glacier I flew two hours to see, to say nothing of some friends on the glacier waving up at me. Gee, thanks!
>
> Oh come on, you know exactly what I'm saying. Think Enron. Think Tyco. There are many more. Use your head and stop making a fool of yourself.
So what would you say to a redneck who says something like "virtually every [black person] is a criminal? Think [any inner city]."
Most CEOs are honest and hard working. As are most blacks. Even though it can be hard to believe either of those statements from time to time.
>
> Is that supposed to be a joke? Come on, what a cop out. I'm all for people reforming, but why does this sound so phoney? I give it 6 months before he's back at it again, probably based out of China or Russia.
You're an optimist.
The Rules Of Spam:
1) Spammers lie.
2) If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see rule #1.
3) Spam is theft.
4) Most spammers are stupid.
5) The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.
Considering that a lawsuit from Yahoo was the motivation of his "apology", and that his apology lays the bullshit on thicker than even you said, to wit:
Not just "others", but the chilllllllldrun!
I'll see your six months and raise you three: I give him 90 days before he's spamming again, and place a side bet with 10:1 odds that as per Rule #4, the spam comes from hijacked PCs connected through a Yahoo! co-branded service such as SBC-Yahoo DSL.
>
> You would if they were any good at bonking.
If he were any good at bonking, his bank would be moaning. And he'd bemoan the state of banking.
>
and
> >
once you have your degree, you can do anything you want.
>
>
These two statements don't mesh with each other in any sort of reality.
What about the reality that exists during the four-month period after completion of the first year of college and before the start of the second year of college?
It doesn't have to be a big reality in order for someone to live in it long enough to post to Slashdot.
>
> We're counting on people like you to make Star Trek a reality.
Avoid zen kooks. Join a political party. Know the difference between knowledge and experience -- and realize that neither is as good as having connections. Feed your body and lusts. Travel to Florida. Get to know people you can blackmail. Be generous so they won't see it coming. Remember, we are energy converters for the spider-looking things in the Matrix. Devote your energy to advancing yourself in a methodical careful fashion. As Andy Grove of Intel said: "Only the paranoid survive". Intelligence people are most often able to exploit the emotionally sensitive. When you feel slighted, bear the grudge and pay it back 20 years from now. Live well. Take on less than the other guy.
We're counting on people like you to save us from Rick Berman's vision from becoming reality.
Bring it on, BT! The power of a national telephone monopoly is insignificant compared to the power of the Slashdot effect!
Something always gets lost in translation. That's what's hard to understand. For instance, here's the original:
YOU SET YOURSELF UP.
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE BELONG TO YOU EXCEPT EUROPA.
YOU HAVE NO CHANCE TO LAND THERE MAKE YOUR TIME.
I have trouble imagining that. What you say is plausible, but is not supported by any recently cited psychographic studies on large urban populations.
> People need avenues to release emotions, whether they are good bad or indifferent. If we force them to only release in their own homes, there will be no peer related checks and balances on them and people will gravitate towards every individual having their own (different) moral compass.
Not necessarily. First off, (twitch), I've already addressed the lack of evidence regarding your hypothesis regarding EEEEP! cathartic activity in the home. Even if I accept your hypothesis for the sake of arguFUCK YOUment, there are always peer-related GODDAMN CRACKHEAD SLASHDOT MODS checks and balances. Now if you'll excuse me, ASSHOLE , I have to go adjust the phase coil emitters on my tinfoil hat, clean the plant's litterbox, and water the cat.
The Constitution is pretty clear that the line is as far as Congress wants to draw it, plus however far past it the Executive goes while enforcing it, minus how far back the Supreme Court chooses to yank them :)
> Here is another thought. If we don't respect people in general in public, when do we start disrespecting people in private places (like your home?). 1984 is getting closer and closer with each step we take. Do we really want to live in that sort of society?
You labor under the delusion that you have a choice in the matter. This is irrational.
> We can see how this level of control has messed up other countries. Now they are trying to live like America (I don't intend to be inflametory with that comment btw). Communism isn't spreading. Democracy and Capitalism is.
The Communist states collapsed, in part, under the weight of their own surveillance programmes. East Germany was probably the worst example - when half your population is monitoring the other half, that's a lot of people who can't get anything useful done.
Some would argue that political freedom is a necessary component of economic freedom. Once upon a time, maybe - but no longer necessarily true. China's shaping up to be a superb example of how a surveillance state can be scaled up to control a population of over a billion people, while simultaneously increasing economic freedoms. (Admittedly, political and economic freedoms in China were starting from a pretty low level :)
Technology is a force multiplier. Properly deployed surveillance technology can enable a government to achieve East German levels of social control without the nasty economic side effects that come with having half your population unofficially working for STASI. By automating surveillance, a society can achieve near-total physical security for the rulers and others worth protecting, while still preserving some degree of political and economic freedom for those who serve them.
> Do we want our children living that way?
I'm sufficiently open-minded about the prospect to acknowledge that it might not suck as hard as people of our generation have been trained to think. But look on the bright side - even if oldthinkers unbellyfeel amsoc, your kids'll love it.
"Can you hear me now?"
[silence]
It's official. Someone finally found the Verizon guy and shoved his fucking cell phone back up where it belonged.
>
> Imagine being raped in the arse repeatedly for "Stealing" some source code... doesn't seem like fair punishment to me.
Yeah. If the HL2 source code theft was in any way responsible for the delay in the HL2 release cycle, prison rape is too good for them.
Grind off their genitalia with the solder side of a rusty 8-bit ISA VGA card. Only then shall the ass-pounding commence!
>
> What's next? CNET gets a "Cease & Desist" letter from SCO because the company's name was used in this story?
Actually, there's something more ornery going on than that.
A lot of US companies are popping up on German exchanges without the companies' knowledge or consent. It's a cheezy hack to get around US securities laws. Google for "naked short selling german exchange".
When you sell shares short, your broker is supposed to lend those shares to you so that you can sell them. (When you cover the short, you buy the shares on the open market and hand them back over to your broker). To sell a stock short without borrowing shares is called "naked short selling", and has been against NASDAQ regs for a while. As of April, more regulations went into effect in to prevent the practice.
The underlying principle is that you can't sell what doesn't exist. That's why your broker has to have some of those shares kicking around and be willing to loan them to you. If you can sell shares that don't exist, you can use that capability to manipulate the market in either direction.
Although I think SCO (the company) isn't worth a load of foetid dingo's kidneys, I wouldn't want to have a position in SCOX (the stock) either way - and that goes double given the ludicrously small float and high potential for manipulation.
But for once -- probably for the first and last time in their corporate history -- the litigious bastards who make up SCO are actually doing the right thing when they ask these exchanges to delist them.
Look on the bright side: The Chinese get the crappy beta test implants that cause cancer in mice when you get 50 implants per square centimeter of skin. We get the debugged version!
>
> Ah hell, what am I saying. You're right; I'm sure they'd rather have Counterstrike!
"Join the Army! Travel to exotic, distant lands. Meet exciting, unusual people, and pwn them!"
"A Slashdotter has discovered a truly wonderful proof of the sacking of the mathematician responsible, but his bandwidth is too narrow to host it!"
>
> But if they H?ler zur?zubringen , and the purchase price zur?zufordern... we are DOOMED!
ACHTUNG! ALLES SLASHENTROLLERS!
Der WLAN-Access-Point WG602 is nicht fur surfen das Internet! Is easy schnappen der springenverk, blowenfus, remotexploiten, und owninatin mit spitzensparken. Der Firmwaren WG602 is night fur geverken by das dumpkopfen Netgear! Relaxen H?ler zur?zubringen der purchase price zur?zufordern und given das moddenpoints.
The ironic part is that 9x, being not designed for the Internet, doesn't really have any remotely-exploitable holes on an out-of-the-box installation. (Run IE or Outleak, get owned. Run Mozilla, don't get owned.)
Try it. Plug a 9x box into the network. No firewall. Although it may divulge some information about itself from the stupid (but easily-disabled) NetBIOS-over-TCP/IP shite, it'll basically sit there saying "Port what? I don't got nothin' runnin' there!" until 49 days later when the 32-bit int that counts the number of milliseconds since bootup overflows and the box blows up.
NT, 2K, XP, and 2K3, on the other hand, have out-of-the-box life expectancies measured in seconds. Plug it in, and the box is spamming away before you can even download the first patch.
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> It's like all the crazies who go ballistic at people when people don't pronounce a hard "G" at the beginning of "Gnome". Why the fuck should they? It's pronounced differently in every other word beginning with "G-N".
So we did it your way.
"Yzis" == "why this", but it's also a play on "vi zis", vit un boguz Zherman aggzent.
Except, of course, that "vi" isn't pronounced "vye" except by noobs and clueless twits. It's pronounced "vee eye", as in, two syllables, for "visual interface". But "vim" is always pronounced "vim", not "vee eye emm", that is, it's proper to use one syllable instead of three.
Flammed if you do, flammed if you don't.
Why this? There's only one explanation: The naming convention for yzis was chosen by a Vast EMACS-Wing Conspiracy as part of an attempt to get both of the "vi" camps to wage holy war upon each other instead of the true enemy.
"Vellllly intellestink. But schtupid."
Sometimes you don't have the choice. For instance, if you're indoors, you often have only two options:
1) Turn off the flash. Hold the camera as steady as you can to avoid blur (and take 10 shots between heartbeats), or if it's an action shot, pray that you can build a makeshift tripod in the 2 seconds you have before the shot goes away.
2) Turn on the flash. Get a weirdly-exposed picture (fine, I can live with that), but also get outrageous graininess in the background because the camera decided to go to ISO400 as a "favor". Thanks for nothing :)
Yes, you can fix some of this with postprocessing in software, but it's a PITA to have to do so in the first place.
"...you are behind me! If I value my life, I should be somewhere else?"
- after the Sierra/LucasArts merger: "Escape from Babylon 5!"
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> Not just Lucasarts. It seems *nobody* cares about adventures anymore. Because it's just more profitable to make yet-another-3d-first-person-shooter-this-time-wit
Huh? LucasArts?
Killing off Sam and Max was teh suck, but have you played KOTOR?
Look beyond the 3D (it's purty!) and the fact that it has character stats/abilities a'la D20-based RPG. When I finished KOTOR, I didn't remember a damn thing about any of my characters' stats or class. For an RPG, that's unusual.
But I do remember spending a lot of time navigating dialog trees where my choices had a greater effect on my character's development than anything I chopped up for XP. I also remember a game salted liberally with math and logic puzzles, none of which would have been out of place in an Infocom title, and I remember a story featuring character development of the player, evolving relationships between the player and the NPCs, and considerable exposition of the history of the early SW universe.
It's ironic - George Lucas can't make a good movie to save his life. And yet, if you took a LucasArts/BioWare game, recorded it all the way through, edited out about 2/3 of the combat and "walking around town" between quests, you'd have about 2 hours of video that would better Star Wars movie than either of Episodes I or II. Go figure.
KOTOR, at least for me, was a work of interactive fiction, not an RPG. (A feature, not a bug!)
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> I don't think the original poster meant much by equating children with movies.
True, I wasn't.
> My point is that you can't argue with someone who says that Lord of the Rings is more emotionaly significant than a child. Thats the problem with emotion: you can't prove or disprove how someone feels about something. That's why Appeal to Emotion is a logical fallacy.
Agreed. I should have chosen a better example, because you can't argue rationally with someone who's so wrapped up in their emotional attachment to their crotchfruit to recognize that people without kids give a shit about things other than work, too? (See, emotional attachment cuts both ways too - and as the guy I'm replying to pointed out, it's a poor substitute for rational argument :)
I chose LOTR because I was trying to get away from pulling on heartstrings and playing the world's smallest violin, but since the parental types insist on it ("OMG nothing is more important than teh chilllllldrun!"), to hell with LOTR. Why not your own aging parents, or to use the politically-correct buzzword, "elder care"?
If genetics is the be-all end-all, replace LOTR or the LAN party with, "my parents are trying to do some stuff around the house this afternoon, and they're stubborn old coots, and I'd really prefer to do the heavy lifting myself, rather than go home next weekend to discover that the house smells funny because they had heart attacks trying to do it themselves and have been rotting downstairs for three days."
There - a(nother) reason why someone without kids might feel the need for personal time just as strongly as someone with kids (for those wanting a rational argument), and it's sufficiently sappy that someone with kids (for those who require an emotional argument) might begin to get a flicker of understanding too.
Everybody happy now? Let the flames continue... :)
Dude, you just touched a nerve with that "discrimination" concept. I grok where you're coming from -- but please understand that the "discrimination" feeling cuts both ways.
It doesn't matter whether a team is pulling 80-hour weeks or 40-hour weeks: If Paul Parenthood starts leaving work undone so he can be with Paul Jr., you just suggested that Joe stack the workplace deck with kids who can also leave work unfinished, all for the noble purpose of enabling management to shovel all the work down on those of us who don't have kids. Nice to have you out of the closet.
I realize that's not what you meant, and it's certainly not what you (or Paul Parenthood) intends, but it's what happens.
The common line (usually from a manager with kids) is something like "Well, we're asking you because you don't have children, you don't understand how much harder it is now that Paul has kids now, and because you don't, well, you obviously have so much more spare time than he does, well, we'd like you to do Paul's work."
If asking Paul Parenthood to keep up his productivity is "discriminating against him because he has kids", then so is asking Sam Singleton to pick up Paul's slack when he says he can't.
If there's any advice to the new parent here, it's to be aware that your single, childless, and/or childfree co-workers may feel just as shafted by management as you do!
If there's a silver lining behind this cloud, it's that the friction between parents and single/childfrees is caused to lousy management, not some evilness inherent to breeders or kid-haters. The two camps don't have to hate each other -- nor should they.
I'm lucky to work at a place where I, as a childfree employee, can say "Dude, I need to take care of Geeky Stuff [LOTR comes out, supplies for a LAN party] this afternoon", and he'll say "Go for it, I'll hold down the fort while you're gone." Likewise, my co-workers can say "Dude, I need to take care of Parental Stuff this afternoon", and I'll say "Cool, I'll hold the fort while you're out." More importantly, we're just as comfortable asking those questions in front of -- and sometimes to -- our manager.
It's rare, but there do exist managers who are sufficiently clued to realize that as far as Sam Singleton is concerned, seeing LOTR or setting the weekend's LAN party is just as emotionally important to Sam, as setting up the kid's birthday party is to Paul Parenthood.
If you're in management: Go thou and do likewise. For the sake of all your employees.
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> Then just don't do it.
What he said.
To the original poster: isn't now a little fucking late to be asking Slashdot about it?
I mean, let's put the article poster's question:
Suppose you've spent the past 5 months doing some work on a stable codebase of boring-ass procedural C code that talks to a Sybase back end, and wraps it in a GUI on Win9x. You're almost done -- the project's feature-complete, QA's been pretty good, and the release date is 1 month away.
Suppose further that your project manager comes in one day and said "Dude! Remember that salesweasel from Sun? And his friend from IBM/Rational? And the .NET guy? And the guy who's best friend's brother once sat in Larry Ellison's chair? Well, guess what! We just signed with them - the whole application is going to be done in Java, using the latest in OO and UML techniques, and it's gonna use .NET, so it can talk to an Oracle database! Did I mention we need it to run on XP, Linux, and OS X, too! We've just signed the check for $1.8M, which is 100% of our IT budget for the next 18 months, so there's no turning back."
Now suppose further that after telling you this, your project manager asks you something like:
I'm not the original poster. But I confess that "Dude, it's a little fucking late to be asking me, isn't it?" would at least flicker across my consciousness... :)