I worked for ChimpUSA in Washington state while in College. Most of the people they hired knew NOTHING about computers, and they didn't care. Once I had a new hire for the tech department ask me what the difference between a ISA and PCI card was. As one of the two people in the entire store who understood computers, I was handed every sort of question that couldn't be answered by looking at the box, from the trivial ('Does this computer have some RAMs?') to the unanswerable ('Will this copy of Dragon Natural Speaking work with a cheap microphone and a portugese lisp?').
None of the sales force were given any education about product, and the main focus was to sell waranties, which had markup margins of about 3000%. All the sales people told customers that they weren't commissioned, and although they were paid a close to minuimum wage hourly rate, they recieved (small) bonuses when they sold warranties. The warranties where given marketing droid created osfucating names, like 'Technology Assurance Programs'.
Most of the 'sale items' were really regualr price with a rebate thrown in. Quite a bit of the hardware they carried was utter junk, packard bell, compaq, and taiwan made no-brand crap that didn't work right half the time. The classes they offered at inflated rates were worthless to anyone except Information Highway roadkill.
Their POS/inventory system was horrible, and half the time suff listed in the computer could never be found. (If you ever call to see if they have something in stock, don't believe a clerk if they say it is listed in the computer. Make them grab it and put it aside for you.)
Many times, the 'super deals' they list in their flyers wouldn't be backed up with stock on hand. They would have 3 on hand when they opened the doors on Sunday morning, and by 9:15 they would be sold out. Customers who persisted in demanding the item they had drove out to buy were directed to go put the item on back order. These back orders would languish for months, and typically never get filled.
If you want to do businuess with them, it is safe to buy software from them. They really can't fuck that up, other than not having it in stock.
Personally, I wouldn't trust them with a couple of burnt out matches. The greed, stupidity, and ignorance starts with the lowest floor staff and goes as high as I encountered people. The higher ranked the managers got the more ass-kissing became an art. They only cared about their numbers, PERIOD. Customers were considered an annoyance that they placated to get rid of. I can only imagine the mentality at the corporate level.
(Oh, yeah, they are based in Texas. You do the math...)
I may sound bitter about the company, but I don't have any personal axe to grind because I got fired or anything. I worked there for a year or so, saw they were fools and moved on. Shop there at your own risk.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think.
Interestingly enough, Godel's incompletness theorum should apply to legal affairs. The more laws you pass, and the more exact you make them, the more loopholes you open up, so a programmer couldn't actually do any better. The most complete law that could be written would be something like, 'Do onto others, as you would have them do to you', which is chock full of ambiguity. Even that one wouldn't work in actual practice, as those stupid Cristians have been demonstrating for the last two thousand years...
Since then (and that was in the 80's IIRC) I haven't paid much attention to what Mr. Dvorak. I daresay I haven't missed much.
He probably has a lot of coherent and interesting things to say; they just all come out as jibberish because he insists on using his goofy keyboard layout...
You misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'mispelled'.
I thought he misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'misspelled', not misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'mispelled', which would be an error on your part.
Luke is the one who rebalanced the force, not Anakin.
...or perhaps Anakin did bring balance to the force. after episode 3 there were about the same number of sith as jedi...
...or just the end of the End of Beginning...
on
Star Wars 3D And TV
·
· Score: 1
This allows people to *gasp* criticize movies. Just like it allows you to play the shameless apologist for lukewarm (pun intended) cinema.
Yeah, but was this really a critique? Was it constructive or insightful? Did it add anything to the discussion? I know, I know, slashdot discussions are about the intellectual equivalent of trying to discus Proust during a Motley Crue concert.
I for one, am getting tired of how it is now 'cool' to bash SW. Sure, it isn't a deep, soul searching drama. If you could't figure that after seeing ANH the first time, you are dumb as a rock.
Did the people bitch about who bad Episodes 1-3 are somehow missed the scenes of midget teddy bears slaughtering stormtroopers? How many lines in ANH were actually just screams and yelling?
Besides BitTorrent might not be the most efficient P2P system any more, but it is one of the most widely used.
No way man, just because bittorrent came first, doesn't mean that MS can't improve on it and release it as their own. Remember how MS improved on.mp3s with their.wma files and banished.mp3s into oblivion? Er, scratch that. Recall how MS won the browser wars once and for all by building IE into the OS? Um, ok skip that one too...
Microsoft - We make software so lame that even grandma won't be threatened by it...
With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K
Not even close. I have a box that runs perfectly when w2k is installed. When I put XP on it, the sound card doesnt work right (But I suppose a Soundblaster16 PCI card is a pretty esoteric card to test drivers aginst...), and SP2 destroys the machine's ability to connect to any sort of a network. (Again, a 3com 905 seriese NIC are pretty much unheard of, right?)
XP is GARBAGE. They even crippled some of the features that W2K had for XP, so they could sell more expensive versions of the OS. You can run a webserver from W2k Pro, try doing that with XP Pro.
You don't want to wear nano-pants in public. Sure, it will draw topless wacky granola chicks out of the woodwork, but then they will throw bucket of red nanos on you to represent the blood of...well, whatever they think was slaughtered to make those pants.
So we can stop the handwringing over the morality of this "weapon", as to use it as such would require luring the enemy into a chamber the size of a soup can and asking him to hold still while you blast him.
HEAR HEAR! I quite agree with the parent. This should be a discussion about the morality of lureing your enemies into soup can sized implosion chambers and asking him to hold still.
In this case, the lost cargo is probably in a UPS warehouse somewhere. They probably ran over the cargo with a forklift, and it's currently unidentifiable.
Nah, we got that crate in from UPS this afternoon. I told ol' mort to put it next to that strange pre-war government crate in the back of the warehouse that hums.
See, as much as Star Trek sucks in these last few, oh say decades, having Rick 'couldn't tell a good story reading from Shakespear' Bergman or Bugass or whatever his name is do another movie is a good thing. You see, that way it will give people an easy Sci-Fi flick to slam, and take the heat of Star Wars. I mean, I forgive George for Anakin's dialouge in episode I, once I got to see him slaughtering Jedi in episode III. There was a payoff, of sorts. The only payoff I could imagine for ST, would be the writers of Deep Space, Voyager, and Enterpirse being evicted from their Beverly Hills mansions in slo-motion. Sure, SW has Jar-Jar, but at least the theme isn't some smarmy love song.
"I have discovered a lovely little proof of my theorum about x^n + y^n = z^n, but alas, I fear to write it down because some french git will probably nick it."
See, what we need to do is to start to evangelize the mantra, 'P2P doesn't pirate movies, pirates do'. Then, the NRA will junp in the battle since it is so similar to their ongoing struggle to arm little old ladies with napalm launchers ('little old ladies with napalm don't kill people, texas governers kill people' or something like that). Then, The NRA and the MPAA will testify in a congressional hearning on the subject. When this happens, all the stupid in the room from the MPAA, the NRA, and congress critters will reach critical mass and explode, obliterating the lot. I see it as a definite 'win-win' outcome...
Ummm.....your reading comprehension is amazing. You used your laser-like reson to cut to the bone of my statement. The collective United States is now a divine being.
Tell me, when your mother put that helmet on your head every morning before the short bus picked you up for school, did she tell you the other kids teased you about it because it was so 'cool'? Just curious.
No, but at the same time I think the best way the West can stop China (or anyone else) from putting nuclear arsenals or other weapons in space is to develop a better long-term, mutually-beneficial partnership with them in space rather than just putting up whatever we like there and just keeping our fingers crossed that nobody else does the same.
Perhaps it isn't China that military planner are concerned about, but rather North Korea. While NK isn't going into space anytime in the next century, placing weapons above Kim Il Schlong's head might help disuade him from 'liberating' Seoul.
I for one, am all for putting the fear of GOD into mad petty dictators if it keeps them from launching wars.
People just don't grasp the difference between altering a work and redistributing the altered work.
So then, since you posess such infinite wisdom, what is the difference between distributing altered works, and distributing software that when used to alter the unaltered works the same way for everyone? The partent article mentions a slashdot plugin, that could alter the way that/. works for users. If everyone goes and gets it, how is that any different than if someone mirrored a 'fixed' slashdot on their server? It's kind of a slippery slope...
If the goal is to make something that behaves like a light sabre, it is probably possible. I think you could probably whip up a plasma jet that was contained in a magnetic field that would behave roughly like the sabres in the movies. Micronizing the power supply would be a challenge, and a plasma jet would be rather hot, so I doubt you would want to do a flip where your sabre passed under yourself.
I wrote up a little article several years back about how a pod racer is actually possible. If you get a pair of jet turbines with vectored thrust, and chained them to some sort of goofy chariot you could fly like in episode one. The catch is, you need to hook it up to a computer that can do real time physics calculations, since with no lift surface and non-fixed engine mountings, you need to make very fine adjustments to the thrust vectoring VERY quickly. That being said, I wouldn't be the first person to test dive it. Perhaps the ten thousandth person to drive it...
Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel...
Oh, I'm pretty sure the prefix on 'debone' is needed to differentiate the word from 'bone'. I can 'bone' something...you got a sister so I can demonstrate?
personally, seeing Jar-Jar die would be ok, but there is a scene I have been looking forward to for a long time: The scene where wookie women are rounded up, shaved and sent off to become imperial 'pleasure wookies', for lonely stormtroopers.
See, that is why you neger see any girl wookies in episodes 4-6.
A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend.
Why would money be an object? Just pop back to the early 1990s, buy a few shares of MS stock, and cash it in when you show up to stay in the presedential suite. It's not like you don't have about a million different ways to make enough money to time tavel in style...
Slashdot Mirror
IN COMMUNIST RUSSIA, THE COMMET SMASHES-
Dear god, I can't go through with it. The one place where the stupid joke might actually belong, too.
I worked for ChimpUSA in Washington state while in College. Most of the people they hired knew NOTHING about computers, and they didn't care. Once I had a new hire for the tech department ask me what the difference between a ISA and PCI card was. As one of the two people in the entire store who understood computers, I was handed every sort of question that couldn't be answered by looking at the box, from the trivial ('Does this computer have some RAMs?') to the unanswerable ('Will this copy of Dragon Natural Speaking work with a cheap microphone and a portugese lisp?').
None of the sales force were given any education about product, and the main focus was to sell waranties, which had markup margins of about 3000%. All the sales people told customers that they weren't commissioned, and although they were paid a close to minuimum wage hourly rate, they recieved (small) bonuses when they sold warranties. The warranties where given marketing droid created osfucating names, like 'Technology Assurance Programs'.
Most of the 'sale items' were really regualr price with a rebate thrown in. Quite a bit of the hardware they carried was utter junk, packard bell, compaq, and taiwan made no-brand crap that didn't work right half the time. The classes they offered at inflated rates were worthless to anyone except Information Highway roadkill.
Their POS/inventory system was horrible, and half the time suff listed in the computer could never be found. (If you ever call to see if they have something in stock, don't believe a clerk if they say it is listed in the computer. Make them grab it and put it aside for you.)
Many times, the 'super deals' they list in their flyers wouldn't be backed up with stock on hand. They would have 3 on hand when they opened the doors on Sunday morning, and by 9:15 they would be sold out. Customers who persisted in demanding the item they had drove out to buy were directed to go put the item on back order. These back orders would languish for months, and typically never get filled.
If you want to do businuess with them, it is safe to buy software from them. They really can't fuck that up, other than not having it in stock.
Personally, I wouldn't trust them with a couple of burnt out matches. The greed, stupidity, and ignorance starts with the lowest floor staff and goes as high as I encountered people. The higher ranked the managers got the more ass-kissing became an art. They only cared about their numbers, PERIOD. Customers were considered an annoyance that they placated to get rid of. I can only imagine the mentality at the corporate level. (Oh, yeah, they are based in Texas. You do the math...)
I may sound bitter about the company, but I don't have any personal axe to grind because I got fired or anything. I worked there for a year or so, saw they were fools and moved on. Shop there at your own risk.
If programmers ran the world, the law would be clear, concise, and unambiguous. Or at least that's what they'd like to think.
Interestingly enough, Godel's incompletness theorum should apply to legal affairs. The more laws you pass, and the more exact you make them, the more loopholes you open up, so a programmer couldn't actually do any better. The most complete law that could be written would be something like, 'Do onto others, as you would have them do to you', which is chock full of ambiguity. Even that one wouldn't work in actual practice, as those stupid Cristians have been demonstrating for the last two thousand years...
Since then (and that was in the 80's IIRC) I haven't paid much attention to what Mr. Dvorak. I daresay I haven't missed much.
He probably has a lot of coherent and interesting things to say; they just all come out as jibberish because he insists on using his goofy keyboard layout...
You mispelled "the". :-)
You misspelled "misspelled".
You misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'mispelled'.
I thought he misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'misspelled', not misquoted 'mispelled' as "misspelled" to indicate that 'misspelled' was misspelled as 'mispelled', which would be an error on your part.
Let me know if this is at all fuzzy.
Luke is the one who rebalanced the force, not Anakin.
...or perhaps Anakin did bring balance to the force. after episode 3 there were about the same number of sith as jedi...
This allows people to *gasp* criticize movies. Just like it allows you to play the shameless apologist for lukewarm (pun intended) cinema.
Yeah, but was this really a critique? Was it constructive or insightful? Did it add anything to the discussion? I know, I know, slashdot discussions are about the intellectual equivalent of trying to discus Proust during a Motley Crue concert.
I for one, am getting tired of how it is now 'cool' to bash SW. Sure, it isn't a deep, soul searching drama. If you could't figure that after seeing ANH the first time, you are dumb as a rock. Did the people bitch about who bad Episodes 1-3 are somehow missed the scenes of midget teddy bears slaughtering stormtroopers? How many lines in ANH were actually just screams and yelling?
Besides BitTorrent might not be the most efficient P2P system any more, but it is one of the most widely used.
.mp3s with their .wma files and banished .mp3s into oblivion? Er, scratch that. Recall how MS won the browser wars once and for all by building IE into the OS? Um, ok skip that one too...
No way man, just because bittorrent came first, doesn't mean that MS can't improve on it and release it as their own. Remember how MS improved on
Microsoft - We make software so lame that even grandma won't be threatened by it...
Oh, sure, you're pretty clever. Install IIS from the CD. Did you check to see how the capacity of IIS has been altered on XP pro, Einstein?
With the eye-candy disabled, XP is just a more up-to-date Win2K
Not even close. I have a box that runs perfectly when w2k is installed. When I put XP on it, the sound card doesnt work right (But I suppose a Soundblaster16 PCI card is a pretty esoteric card to test drivers aginst...), and SP2 destroys the machine's ability to connect to any sort of a network. (Again, a 3com 905 seriese NIC are pretty much unheard of, right?)
XP is GARBAGE. They even crippled some of the features that W2K had for XP, so they could sell more expensive versions of the OS. You can run a webserver from W2k Pro, try doing that with XP Pro.
Duh. Use it as stake money and enter poker tournaments.
You don't want to wear nano-pants in public. Sure, it will draw topless wacky granola chicks out of the woodwork, but then they will throw bucket of red nanos on you to represent the blood of...well, whatever they think was slaughtered to make those pants.
Plus, EB doesn't make nano-pants in your color.
So we can stop the handwringing over the morality of this "weapon", as to use it as such would require luring the enemy into a chamber the size of a soup can and asking him to hold still while you blast him.
HEAR HEAR! I quite agree with the parent. This should be a discussion about the morality of lureing your enemies into soup can sized implosion chambers and asking him to hold still.
(It doesn't sound cricket, if you ask me...)
In this case, the lost cargo is probably in a UPS warehouse somewhere. They probably ran over the cargo with a forklift, and it's currently unidentifiable.
Nah, we got that crate in from UPS this afternoon. I told ol' mort to put it next to that strange pre-war government crate in the back of the warehouse that hums.
See, as much as Star Trek sucks in these last few, oh say decades, having Rick 'couldn't tell a good story reading from Shakespear' Bergman or Bugass or whatever his name is do another movie is a good thing. You see, that way it will give people an easy Sci-Fi flick to slam, and take the heat of Star Wars. I mean, I forgive George for Anakin's dialouge in episode I, once I got to see him slaughtering Jedi in episode III. There was a payoff, of sorts. The only payoff I could imagine for ST, would be the writers of Deep Space, Voyager, and Enterpirse being evicted from their Beverly Hills mansions in slo-motion. Sure, SW has Jar-Jar, but at least the theme isn't some smarmy love song.
"I have discovered a lovely little proof of my theorum about x^n + y^n = z^n, but alas, I fear to write it down because some french git will probably nick it."
See, what we need to do is to start to evangelize the mantra, 'P2P doesn't pirate movies, pirates do'. Then, the NRA will junp in the battle since it is so similar to their ongoing struggle to arm little old ladies with napalm launchers ('little old ladies with napalm don't kill people, texas governers kill people' or something like that). Then, The NRA and the MPAA will testify in a congressional hearning on the subject. When this happens, all the stupid in the room from the MPAA, the NRA, and congress critters will reach critical mass and explode, obliterating the lot. I see it as a definite 'win-win' outcome...
Oh, now USA is a god?
Ummm.....your reading comprehension is amazing. You used your laser-like reson to cut to the bone of my statement. The collective United States is now a divine being.
Tell me, when your mother put that helmet on your head every morning before the short bus picked you up for school, did she tell you the other kids teased you about it because it was so 'cool'? Just curious.
Thank you so very much, neoconservatives.
I know Christopher Reeve would like to thank you too...unfortunately he's feeling rather dead at the moment. *GASP* George Bush killed Superman!
No, but at the same time I think the best way the West can stop China (or anyone else) from putting nuclear arsenals or other weapons in space is to develop a better long-term, mutually-beneficial partnership with them in space rather than just putting up whatever we like there and just keeping our fingers crossed that nobody else does the same.
Perhaps it isn't China that military planner are concerned about, but rather North Korea. While NK isn't going into space anytime in the next century, placing weapons above Kim Il Schlong's head might help disuade him from 'liberating' Seoul.
I for one, am all for putting the fear of GOD into mad petty dictators if it keeps them from launching wars.
People just don't grasp the difference between altering a work and redistributing the altered work.
/. works for users. If everyone goes and gets it, how is that any different than if someone mirrored a 'fixed' slashdot on their server? It's kind of a slippery slope...
So then, since you posess such infinite wisdom, what is the difference between distributing altered works, and distributing software that when used to alter the unaltered works the same way for everyone? The partent article mentions a slashdot plugin, that could alter the way that
If the goal is to make something that behaves like a light sabre, it is probably possible. I think you could probably whip up a plasma jet that was contained in a magnetic field that would behave roughly like the sabres in the movies. Micronizing the power supply would be a challenge, and a plasma jet would be rather hot, so I doubt you would want to do a flip where your sabre passed under yourself.
I wrote up a little article several years back about how a pod racer is actually possible. If you get a pair of jet turbines with vectored thrust, and chained them to some sort of goofy chariot you could fly like in episode one. The catch is, you need to hook it up to a computer that can do real time physics calculations, since with no lift surface and non-fixed engine mountings, you need to make very fine adjustments to the thrust vectoring VERY quickly. That being said, I wouldn't be the first person to test dive it. Perhaps the ten thousandth person to drive it...
Although one might reasonably argue that it is no different from words with redundant affixes like debone and unravel...
Oh, I'm pretty sure the prefix on 'debone' is needed to differentiate the word from 'bone'. I can 'bone' something...you got a sister so I can demonstrate?
personally, seeing Jar-Jar die would be ok, but there is a scene I have been looking forward to for a long time: The scene where wookie women are rounded up, shaved and sent off to become imperial 'pleasure wookies', for lonely stormtroopers.
See, that is why you neger see any girl wookies in episodes 4-6.
A few people will show up yesterday anyway just to grab the weekly rate, but they'll probably bop in, hand over their credit card, and not spend much time in the room until next weekend.
Why would money be an object? Just pop back to the early 1990s, buy a few shares of MS stock, and cash it in when you show up to stay in the presedential suite. It's not like you don't have about a million different ways to make enough money to time tavel in style...