I still haven't met as generally kick-ass an engineering team since, tho.
Sheesh. That's seriously tragic. I remember seeing the website early on when Monta Vista was still trying to find people for top management positions. Kinda cart-before-horse in my mind but I am no MBA, and besides...
Sounds like you guys had a sort of skunkworks mentality. I know the feeling, but in geeky endeavors I work alone. Ok. I guess I have to admit that I don't know The feeling you're talking about in engineering specifically, but I know some things about the esprit de corps feelings outside the field and can imagine the rest. Some people in the world just cannot grok vocational hedonism. If management gets the machine firing on all 8 cylinders, boy, look out. Oh well. Now (from what I read in the papers) it's just Snoop For Same in India and Tell Shareholders that Engineering Is Generic and Works Fine Through the Wire. Of course, that puts morale right up there with the mindset of a slaughterhouse worker whose union just got busted, but (as always?;-) I digess.
FWIW, I used to work at MontaVista. I'm still kind of fond of the product we made.
Product schoduct! The cartoon-like picture of tux with a hard hat on--now there was something neat!;-D I drooled over Hard Hat Linux too, cduffy. In fact, I'm sorry I neglected to mention and link it.:-| Monta Vista Products here
I love having this argument with people, particularly in bars. How precisely is the United States' democracy and capitalist society any different than any other first world country? Cite specific examples.
Look. For three centuries, there has been a semi-permeable membrane around the U.S.A. If you are discontent where you are, and if that place (where you are) is outside the U.S.A. then you "invite yourself" in. We have a disproportionately high population of go-getters, of ambitious people. Our ethos is so opportunity-oriented that our left wing does not bother to gripe (even to itself!) about the "propertied classes". No. It's about proportions of borne responsibility in funding the government, equal protection for wage negotiations and the like. More often yet, the gripe from the left is, "There are not enough opportunities for..." Opportunities.
Now what about the right wing in this country? For the sake of argument, I will grant the right wing every courtesy. Let's say American "conservatism" is legitimate and sincere. What is it? It is a nose-thumbing at Burke and the whole crowd. "Let the marketplace decide," decries the right wing. Bottom line in intellectual history, that's liberal. It seeks to preserve no particular social order but seeks to do what? To increase opportunity as a built-in feature of the ideology.
Ok. Still staying on the right, and still being nice about it, let's move on to foreign policy, and we'll allow for a fork. First let us consider what we might (too) commonly call the neoconservative point of view along the lines of Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Company. So we worry about the spawning vats and Daddy War Bucks of insanely hateful practitioners of a warped variation on Muslim religious tradition. How do we do that, "neocon" style? We take out our huge American wallets. Then we kick out a vicious right wing racist dictator. (Translating "N.A.Z.I." into English and then translating "Ba-ath" into English, adapting for local prejudices, yields up pretty much the same formulas.) Then we point guns at millions of people, forcing them eventually to form a representative government that compels the tolerance of various ethic groups and religious traditions. It's liberal politics with guns and attitude. To some it's offensive, but its aim is not. Its aim is to offer someone else a society where ordinary people have what? Have what! Opportunity! That's where all the American prayer rugs point.
Ok. Just as promised, let's consider a different kind of conservative in the U.S.A., the kind fashionably labelled "paleoconservative". They want hard-hat-wearing blue collar workers to have a shot at living like Ward and June Cleaver (at least in the off hours). They want kids to pray in school so that they will have a sort of emotional mindset that infuses self-discipline, which (through individual and opportunistic means in a labor market) offers them an earned petit bourgeois life that only a "paleoconservative" could consider fulfilling.
What about the center? Look at Clinton/Gore/Lieberman/Bayh/Gephart/etc (the right wing of the Democratic Party) are aiming at: systemic moderation of health care costs to the average person, education funding assistance (for whom? for those ambitious enough to learn and to aim higher in their career), more cops to make ghettos safer (for business, um, opportunity) more loans to minority owned businesses and tax breaks for businesses in inner cities, etc. etc. etc., all of which aims at the enhancement of opportunity or the increase in the population exposed to the same.
What about the left wing of the Republican Party? Yeah. What about it? Elizabeth Dole (cough-BS-cough) had "fundraising difficulties" in the 2000 primary campaign. Uh huh. Moving right along...
How could the U.S.A. possibly cohere? From whence comes the "unum" after the "e pluribus"? Rule out ethnicity. Rule out religion. Rule out geographical ba
that is Clue Number One that you should not. What pisses me off is that it is darned difficult to deny the previous sentence. This damaged faith is not faith in humanity per se but of, um, I guess some abstract "Security Protocol Capability" or somesuch. I'm no let's-all-make-evil-obsolete Pollyana, but neither am I a moral solipsist (which would be an abstraction of opinion of the paranoiac?).
As a sort of rhetorical question "once and for all", what can be done? Jeeze. You know, governance was a pretty crude endeavor in the 18th century, and the radical liberals seem to have gotten it down pretty well. Some kind of system of checks and balances has to play a role in data security (Privacy with a capital P?) just as it has done well for more than two centuries in governance, right?
And why shouldn't I! Why shouldn't you? Well, the truth is that neither is a rhetorical question. That is my point. There are too many specific considerations, many of which are important, to declare dogmatically that any one operating system ought to be embedded--or even embedded "most often". This is not efficient executive decision-maker thinking. This kind of "debate" is about topics that permit/encourage the deadness of brains of said executives. (And we wonder why tech equity share prices stay in the gutter?)
I was just thinking about A to D converters, all of which wind up offering Data, which seems reasonable for something whose acronym would be A.D.D.--what do you mean by swing? Golf? Baseball? Java? Music? Sex?
Hey wait a minute! What was it we were talking about?
Now if you could just automate the conversion of the httpd usage data over time, then convert that into the right scale, put it out through a ttyx, whereupon it could enjoy a leisurely conversion, D to A, and then connect the analog output to a proportional low-frequency-compatible amplifier, in turn, to a large diameter speaker in the back of a garbage can, the other end of which has a moderate-to-small orfice in it, then the thing could blow more smoke, as per previous article, than all of us/. blowhards combined.;-) (Just a thought.)
A TV show is intelligent? Now I have heard everything.
About a week ago, Sen Brownback (R, KS) was running the show at what seemed to be an oversight committee for NASA. Something like this dialog took place:
Senator to nervous-nice-old-nerdy-scientist: Mathematically, what is your opinion about the probability of there being life in the universe?
Scientist: (pause) (deferential I-am-talking-to-egomaniacal-morons pause) (meek smile) Well, yes. It is my opinion that there is life out there.
Same Senator: Me too. (as if that closed the case) So what is the future of humanity?
All of a sudden, I had a pinch-me-this-can't-be-happening moment. America is like the most Type A personality infested place on earth, and our political system weeds out all but the strong willed in pursuit of elected office. On and on and on. Washington D.C. is like the most hostile place on earth to the stereotypical lazy philosopher king type and/or chin-in-hand-and-elbow-on-knee types. There is very little reason to suspect that C-SPAN would carry a question from a go-getter winner type fella, "So what is the future of humanity?" To a scientist? Shit almighty. That smells like humanism--like it's our choice. Can you imagine how many thousands of dollars would need to be added to the reelection budget to undo the damage of the label, "humanist"? It boggles the mind.
FOX has to be THE worst network for scheduling consistency.
A few years back, I was an instant addict of Junkyard Wars. The Learning Channel jerked me around, which is kinda how I realized that I was hooked. Anybody think The Learning Channel is most fickle?
Ok. So I heard this news of the coming demise of Futurama. It seemed like just yesterday when I learned that Futurama was going to get started. Heck. The same goes for the show with the dim middle class stains-on-shirt guys in the backyard show. I read about these things in news magazines. I procrastinated watching them. Heck. I procrastinated watching the "X Files".
I realized that I was a fan of, ahem, the guy when he drew up "Life in Hell" in the underground music magazines about 2/7 of a lifetime ago, give or take. Matt Groening! Yeah. Wow. At least I don't yet have Alzeimer's, but I wonder. Then he went mainstream with "The Simpsons", which I watched religiously (along with "...Next Generation" and "L.A. Law"). Then I just fell off the couch as in potato. I also got sick of the commercials (AM talk pinheads, FM hit music formulae, etc.), turned off the radio, and (almost) never got around to turning it back on.
I learned a while back never to flatter myself by thinking I am unique and never to disparage myself by thinking I am weird. What I need to do is to find my pop-clueless peers. Who has not seen more than a minute per viewing of Friends? Who has missed all episodes of Futurama? Who had to use the Web to learn the meaning of J-Lo? Who learned what an Anna Nicole Smith was only weeks ago? I am not the only one. Can't be.
Horror stories of this parent comment most welcome. How far under a rock have you lived, folks?
That was absolutely beautiful. Mind if I pass it on (with appropriate attribution, of course)?
:::::laughing:::: Of course not!:-p If I didn't offer proper attribution, why should you?;-)
It's the speech of the character Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" with the only exceptions being that wherever Shakespeare wanted the word "Jew" I inserted "penguin" and wherever Shakespeare wanted the word "Christian" I inserted "SCO luser".
Bear in mind that Shylock was feeling intense heat and prejudice from the Christians in the court of law who wanted him executed. Y'see, Shylock, a lending company executive/owner foreclosed on a merchant's loan and looked at the legalese in the contract. It entitled him to a pound of flesh from his debtor. He initiated legal proceedings to get that, but the system turned around on him and insisted that he get that pound but leave all the blood behind (just flesh, no blood). Because he then decided to leave the loan in default, the system bit him back and sought to punish him for failing his end of the contract. He smelled revenge from the Christians against him, and he knew that the raw and simple accusation of revenge just would not do because there was plenty of guilt to go all around. Then he began his defense with, "The quality of mercy is not strained." Somewhere in there he asked, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" I used Google with "Hath not a Jew eyes" to find it online and grabbed the text and did what I said I did. The stuff is not copyrighted at all.
Bear in mind that I learned this stuff quite a number of years ago. I hope I did the synopsis right. =-\
The problem with posts about Microsoft is that they're all assumption.
Look. For years it was common knowledge that Microsoft was draining talent from academia and other places. Newsweek published info about it back in the middle 90's. There were attitudes like, "Oh, I know it's beneath my dignity to work for a DOS company, but Microsoft gave me such a generous offer that I just couldn't refuse." No. That is not a direct quote. I just used quotation marks and convenient grammar to give the impression that I got IIRC. It is common knowledge that extremely bright people are on the payroll of Microsoft. Given the universal hatred of unstable technological products, and given the immense immediate talent on the Redmond campus, how could a rational person conclude something other than that Microsoft's rank and file is full of people who like/"need" the money but wish like crazy that they could exhibit more craftsmanship? The Halloween Documents are darned good proof of that kind of thing. We are not talking about assumptions. It is a convenient double bind that rigorous backing of such opinions is "too long" and that quick assertions of opinion are "unsupported" or "assumptions".
TFA (of RTFA fame) brags up vector graphics. There could be some leverage here with previously untapped technology. It seems to me that for the last thousand years, give or take, the Un*x world has bent over backwards to accomodate cheap printers and such when the really good printers want...
Want what?
They want someone to talk to them in PostScript. (Otherwise they feel lonely.) I bet these platforms would be keen for both people on earth who might be eager to write games in PostScript. Y'spose?
Even if we don't use "Adobe's brand name", it seems to me that the folks who gave us various printer control languages (which are useful to convert things to vectors that lasers inside laser printers like) would be keen on this kind of thing. Then again, I would suppose that (A) an extra chip or two and (B) the kind of assembly language programming that even I can do should be able to convert back and forth, raster versus vector, most of all if there is some kind of "nearly instruction level" programming interface to write directly to video RAM when necessary.
Hmm... Ok. IIRC, Sun has done stuff to make graphics happy in general purpose circumstances... Yup. Hey. Kill two birds with one stone. Sun's for-geeks literature has bragged up how flexible the low end Sparc chips are vis a vis hardware memory architectures. I bet we could kill two birds with one stone here. Toss the weak processor of this XGameStation-or-whatever, and put in a low end (but VIS-ready) low power Sparc of some sort. The only drawback I can think of is the crowded namespace. Let's call it a Shirkstation! Yeah. finallyHasANickname has "prior art"ed ya.:-p
Boy, Sun would be eating crow if that happened. Imagine The Register with headline,
In Yet Another Humiliating Change of Strategy, McNealy Flogs High Tech Open Bleep-Bloop-Boom Architecture for Tomorrow's Misspent Youth ("TMY" technology, love child of Jini) Whilst The Beast (Still) Flourishes and Pixellated Virtual Aliens Perish En Masse (as always, mind you) (Sun Microsystems Suddenly Has Long List of Disparaging Things to Say about X Box, Naturally.)
"I can't think of any sane reason why a kid would choose CISC achitecture to blow up androids," McNealy was quoted saying to both attendees at the San Jose press conference, "It's worse than a room full of rack mounted throwback 32-bit x86, acting more as a furnace than anything," he added with a sneer and a roll of his eyes. Industry insiders have long known that focus groups of ten-year-olds have found nothing determinate in the marketing of CPU's brand names and part numbers nearly as much as the AMPHTS quotient. ("Awesome, My Parents Hate This Shit.") Conversely, as Silicon Valley marketing executives know, TLA's do very well with CIO's, who have, until recent years, obediently invested shareholder wealth into all recent TLA tech instead of focusing (as do their children) on the end-user experience--splattering green guts of androids as the case may be.
One youth was quoted as saying, "Like, shit. Should I give two fucks if the green guts come from, like, from, like, y'know raster or, like, vector or like with pipelining and fully optimized superscalar architecture? It's like, um, well, I guess the Sparc chips with Single Instruction, Multiple Data are better 'n shit, but I just can't see myself getting laid any more probable, like, when I get old enough to get a driver's licence, and shit, and like, having this Sparc in my game. Like, I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's all the same to me. Know what I'm sayin'? I just want it to work. Androids, death, green guts on wall. Impress chicks. Get laid. It's all in line, like poetry, see? I just can't see the connection with this fancy, like, Sparc architecture. Know what I'm sayin'?"
As previously reported, upon hearing the news, McNealy promptly fired 60% of the consumer hardware marketing staff at Su
The problem with Windows is that it's made by nerds against their better engineering judgment as commanded by Suits in a Sinking Ship for prey, and the process is so lucrative that others can be paid to
I don't know what those bastards in Washington are telling you, but I say that it is not an actual smoking gun; it is a vortex-creating toy. And don't disparage me for being humorless. I get paid to be humorless. Sincerely, Hans Blix
An afternoon of scrounging for parts, construction, and experimentation with your kids is probably a more valuable experience than just shelling out for a vortex gun with nasty smoke in it.
Ah! Now I know who is to blame. It's you! It's all your fault! Now I'm adding "istartedi" to my list of scapegoats for the slow economy.
Well I, Mandark, have done the very same thing, emitting only 352.547 millifwops. Bwahahahaha.
Re:For those of you complaining about the 'ads'
on
Zero Blaster Reviewed
·
· Score: 1
Posted by michael on Saturday August 09, @07:58PM
from the scare-the-cat dept.
Daniel Rutter writes "I've just reviewed the Zero Blaster, the smoke ring gun that ThinkGeek (among others) sell. It works. It's fun. It's a vortex ring physics demonstration with two triggers and a see-through mechanism with Linda Tripp sitting on the other side, eager to engage in girl talk. What more could you want for $20?" Thinkgeek and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software.
I proudly announce now that I am a value-added reseller. For only $49.99 you can get not only the nifty thing to blow your "O" at your throng of ladies in thongs; now, when the amazing machine invariably scares the crap out of your dog, you get a poop scooper clipped to the handle in case you can talk someone into cleaning up the doggy crap.
Yes. You heard it here first.
Disclaimer: Keyboard key actuators are owned by Not-VA-but-ME Software, and any problems you have with said company are, um, the fault of Arthur Anderson and Associates and of most other currently defunct liability sinks. Furthermore, this is void where prohibited, must be 18 to enter, available only at participating retailers, except as is necessary to avoid flying "O" in the throng, operators are standing by, but that does not inhere liability to answer the phones, nor does it imply any fitness or suitability for any purpose. By agreeing to the terms of this disclaimer, you promise never to compare its performance to Java, which is solely the responsibility of Scott McNealy between eye-blackening sessions with most billionaires you have heard of.
Manufacturers must realise that cost savings is not everything these days. People want quality too.
Hey! I thought we were talking about laptop PC's! Now I'm completely confused. Price: $2000, MTBF ~1 year, 4000 sales Price $600, MTBF ~1 day, 400,000 sales. Right? Shouldn't that just about show the tilt on the demand curve? I mean if a computer of high quality for a price premium were all that popular, then all the rich kids would be playing Quake 18 (or GTA 2 or whatever these days) on full-blown UN*X workstations at 8 grand each.
The old argument that no one likes reading on a computer has pretty much eroded.
It's about time. I've tried raising a family, cooking, lawn mowing, sky diving, midget tossing, ferret pantsing, opera singing, and rodeo events on my computer screen. None of it panned out. Now I'm boring again, and I just do plain old reading on my computer screen.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh. That's seriously tragic. I remember seeing the website early on when Monta Vista was still trying to find people for top management positions. Kinda cart-before-horse in my mind but I am no MBA, and besides...
Sounds like you guys had a sort of skunkworks mentality. I know the feeling, but in geeky endeavors I work alone. Ok. I guess I have to admit that I don't know The feeling you're talking about in engineering specifically, but I know some things about the esprit de corps feelings outside the field and can imagine the rest. Some people in the world just cannot grok vocational hedonism. If management gets the machine firing on all 8 cylinders, boy, look out. Oh well. Now (from what I read in the papers) it's just Snoop For Same in India and Tell Shareholders that Engineering Is Generic and Works Fine Through the Wire. Of course, that puts morale right up there with the mindset of a slaughterhouse worker whose union just got busted, but (as always? ;-) I digess.
Hey! That reminds me...
:::::searching:::::: :::::cutting, pasting:::::
Which would you rather have?
An serious-minded, experienced and respected Chairman of the Armed Services Committee
An eager, qualified challenger with new ideas
Cowboy Neal
Kind words. Hmm. Strange. Thanks. :-) ::::typing::::
/
$ cd
$ find . | grep nice
/dev/altrui
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$
Product schoduct! The cartoon-like picture of tux with a hard hat on--now there was something neat! ;-D I drooled over Hard Hat Linux too, cduffy. In fact, I'm sorry I neglected to mention and link it. :-| Monta Vista Products here
Look. For three centuries, there has been a semi-permeable membrane around the U.S.A. If you are discontent where you are, and if that place (where you are) is outside the U.S.A. then you "invite yourself" in. We have a disproportionately high population of go-getters, of ambitious people. Our ethos is so opportunity-oriented that our left wing does not bother to gripe (even to itself!) about the "propertied classes". No. It's about proportions of borne responsibility in funding the government, equal protection for wage negotiations and the like. More often yet, the gripe from the left is, "There are not enough opportunities for..." Opportunities.
Now what about the right wing in this country? For the sake of argument, I will grant the right wing every courtesy. Let's say American "conservatism" is legitimate and sincere. What is it? It is a nose-thumbing at Burke and the whole crowd. "Let the marketplace decide," decries the right wing. Bottom line in intellectual history, that's liberal. It seeks to preserve no particular social order but seeks to do what? To increase opportunity as a built-in feature of the ideology.
Ok. Still staying on the right, and still being nice about it, let's move on to foreign policy, and we'll allow for a fork. First let us consider what we might (too) commonly call the neoconservative point of view along the lines of Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Company. So we worry about the spawning vats and Daddy War Bucks of insanely hateful practitioners of a warped variation on Muslim religious tradition. How do we do that, "neocon" style? We take out our huge American wallets. Then we kick out a vicious right wing racist dictator. (Translating "N.A.Z.I." into English and then translating "Ba-ath" into English, adapting for local prejudices, yields up pretty much the same formulas.) Then we point guns at millions of people, forcing them eventually to form a representative government that compels the tolerance of various ethic groups and religious traditions. It's liberal politics with guns and attitude. To some it's offensive, but its aim is not. Its aim is to offer someone else a society where ordinary people have what? Have what! Opportunity! That's where all the American prayer rugs point.
Ok. Just as promised, let's consider a different kind of conservative in the U.S.A., the kind fashionably labelled "paleoconservative". They want hard-hat-wearing blue collar workers to have a shot at living like Ward and June Cleaver (at least in the off hours). They want kids to pray in school so that they will have a sort of emotional mindset that infuses self-discipline, which (through individual and opportunistic means in a labor market) offers them an earned petit bourgeois life that only a "paleoconservative" could consider fulfilling.
What about the center? Look at Clinton/Gore/Lieberman/Bayh/Gephart/etc (the right wing of the Democratic Party) are aiming at: systemic moderation of health care costs to the average person, education funding assistance (for whom? for those ambitious enough to learn and to aim higher in their career), more cops to make ghettos safer (for business, um, opportunity) more loans to minority owned businesses and tax breaks for businesses in inner cities, etc. etc. etc., all of which aims at the enhancement of opportunity or the increase in the population exposed to the same.
What about the left wing of the Republican Party? Yeah. What about it? Elizabeth Dole (cough-BS-cough) had "fundraising difficulties" in the 2000 primary campaign. Uh huh. Moving right along...
How could the U.S.A. possibly cohere? From whence comes the "unum" after the "e pluribus"? Rule out ethnicity. Rule out religion. Rule out geographical ba
As a sort of rhetorical question "once and for all", what can be done? Jeeze. You know, governance was a pretty crude endeavor in the 18th century, and the radical liberals seem to have gotten it down pretty well. Some kind of system of checks and balances has to play a role in data security (Privacy with a capital P?) just as it has done well for more than two centuries in governance, right?
I've been drooling over embedded platforms for nearly a decade--jeeze, I hate the look of that word combination, but, moving right along...
The truth is that I'm a fan of all of them. Here, in no particular order, are some links.
Lynx is a link on the bottom left at this page.
An old standby, which really isn't that different from GNU HURD.
Sun's "telephone system"
This might very well be the most generic.
I even like this kind of thing, which displaces quite a bit of O/S purpose.
And why shouldn't I! Why shouldn't you? Well, the truth is that neither is a rhetorical question. That is my point. There are too many specific considerations, many of which are important, to declare dogmatically that any one operating system ought to be embedded--or even embedded "most often". This is not efficient executive decision-maker thinking. This kind of "debate" is about topics that permit/encourage the deadness of brains of said executives. (And we wonder why tech equity share prices stay in the gutter?)
Hey wait a minute! What was it we were talking about?
Now if you could just automate the conversion of the httpd usage data over time, then convert that into the right scale, put it out through a ttyx, whereupon it could enjoy a leisurely conversion, D to A, and then connect the analog output to a proportional low-frequency-compatible amplifier, in turn, to a large diameter speaker in the back of a garbage can, the other end of which has a moderate-to-small orfice in it, then the thing could blow more smoke, as per previous article, than all of us /. blowhards combined. ;-) (Just a thought.)
About a week ago, Sen Brownback (R, KS) was running the show at what seemed to be an oversight committee for NASA. Something like this dialog took place:
All of a sudden, I had a pinch-me-this-can't-be-happening moment. America is like the most Type A personality infested place on earth, and our political system weeds out all but the strong willed in pursuit of elected office. On and on and on. Washington D.C. is like the most hostile place on earth to the stereotypical lazy philosopher king type and/or chin-in-hand-and-elbow-on-knee types. There is very little reason to suspect that C-SPAN would carry a question from a go-getter winner type fella, "So what is the future of humanity?" To a scientist? Shit almighty. That smells like humanism--like it's our choice. Can you imagine how many thousands of dollars would need to be added to the reelection budget to undo the damage of the label, "humanist"? It boggles the mind.
Now you have heard everything!
A few years back, I was an instant addict of Junkyard Wars. The Learning Channel jerked me around, which is kinda how I realized that I was hooked. Anybody think The Learning Channel is most fickle?
I realized that I was a fan of, ahem, the guy when he drew up "Life in Hell" in the underground music magazines about 2/7 of a lifetime ago, give or take. Matt Groening! Yeah. Wow. At least I don't yet have Alzeimer's, but I wonder. Then he went mainstream with "The Simpsons", which I watched religiously (along with "...Next Generation" and "L.A. Law"). Then I just fell off the couch as in potato. I also got sick of the commercials (AM talk pinheads, FM hit music formulae, etc.), turned off the radio, and (almost) never got around to turning it back on.
I learned a while back never to flatter myself by thinking I am unique and never to disparage myself by thinking I am weird. What I need to do is to find my pop-clueless peers. Who has not seen more than a minute per viewing of Friends? Who has missed all episodes of Futurama? Who had to use the Web to learn the meaning of J-Lo? Who learned what an Anna Nicole Smith was only weeks ago? I am not the only one. Can't be.
Horror stories of this parent comment most welcome. How far under a rock have you lived, folks?
Oh jeez. It was Portia who said the "quality of mercy" stuff. This ought to settle it in, ahem, any case. hehehe
:::::laughing:::: Of course not! :-p If I didn't offer proper attribution, why should you? ;-)
It's the speech of the character Shylock in Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" with the only exceptions being that wherever Shakespeare wanted the word "Jew" I inserted "penguin" and wherever Shakespeare wanted the word "Christian" I inserted "SCO luser".
Bear in mind that Shylock was feeling intense heat and prejudice from the Christians in the court of law who wanted him executed. Y'see, Shylock, a lending company executive/owner foreclosed on a merchant's loan and looked at the legalese in the contract. It entitled him to a pound of flesh from his debtor. He initiated legal proceedings to get that, but the system turned around on him and insisted that he get that pound but leave all the blood behind (just flesh, no blood). Because he then decided to leave the loan in default, the system bit him back and sought to punish him for failing his end of the contract. He smelled revenge from the Christians against him, and he knew that the raw and simple accusation of revenge just would not do because there was plenty of guilt to go all around. Then he began his defense with, "The quality of mercy is not strained." Somewhere in there he asked, "Hath not a Jew eyes?" I used Google with "Hath not a Jew eyes" to find it online and grabbed the text and did what I said I did. The stuff is not copyrighted at all.
Bear in mind that I learned this stuff quite a number of years ago. I hope I did the synopsis right. =-\
Look. For years it was common knowledge that Microsoft was draining talent from academia and other places. Newsweek published info about it back in the middle 90's. There were attitudes like, "Oh, I know it's beneath my dignity to work for a DOS company, but Microsoft gave me such a generous offer that I just couldn't refuse." No. That is not a direct quote. I just used quotation marks and convenient grammar to give the impression that I got IIRC. It is common knowledge that extremely bright people are on the payroll of Microsoft. Given the universal hatred of unstable technological products, and given the immense immediate talent on the Redmond campus, how could a rational person conclude something other than that Microsoft's rank and file is full of people who like/"need" the money but wish like crazy that they could exhibit more craftsmanship? The Halloween Documents are darned good proof of that kind of thing. We are not talking about assumptions. It is a convenient double bind that rigorous backing of such opinions is "too long" and that quick assertions of opinion are "unsupported" or "assumptions".
Want what?
They want someone to talk to them in PostScript. (Otherwise they feel lonely.) I bet these platforms would be keen for both people on earth who might be eager to write games in PostScript. Y'spose?
Even if we don't use "Adobe's brand name", it seems to me that the folks who gave us various printer control languages (which are useful to convert things to vectors that lasers inside laser printers like) would be keen on this kind of thing. Then again, I would suppose that (A) an extra chip or two and (B) the kind of assembly language programming that even I can do should be able to convert back and forth, raster versus vector, most of all if there is some kind of "nearly instruction level" programming interface to write directly to video RAM when necessary.
Hmm... Ok. IIRC, Sun has done stuff to make graphics happy in general purpose circumstances... Yup. Hey. Kill two birds with one stone. Sun's for-geeks literature has bragged up how flexible the low end Sparc chips are vis a vis hardware memory architectures. I bet we could kill two birds with one stone here. Toss the weak processor of this XGameStation-or-whatever, and put in a low end (but VIS-ready) low power Sparc of some sort. The only drawback I can think of is the crowded namespace. Let's call it a Shirkstation! Yeah. finallyHasANickname has "prior art"ed ya. :-p
Boy, Sun would be eating crow if that happened. Imagine The Register with headline,
The problem with Windows is that it's made by nerds against their better engineering judgment as commanded by Suits in a Sinking Ship for prey, and the process is so lucrative that others can be paid to
if (!strcmp("prey", input)) {printf{"customer");}
By the choice of words, obviously they were too conceited to admit the truth: They had discovered the famous Monkey's Uncle.
I don't know what those bastards in Washington are telling you, but I say that it is not an actual smoking gun; it is a vortex-creating toy. And don't disparage me for being humorless. I get paid to be humorless. Sincerely, Hans Blix
Ah! Now I know who is to blame. It's you! It's all your fault! Now I'm adding "istartedi" to my list of scapegoats for the slow economy.
Well I, Mandark, have done the very same thing, emitting only 352.547 millifwops. Bwahahahaha.
Posted by michael on Saturday August 09, @07:58PM from the scare-the-cat dept. Daniel Rutter writes "I've just reviewed the Zero Blaster, the smoke ring gun that ThinkGeek (among others) sell. It works. It's fun. It's a vortex ring physics demonstration with two triggers and a see-through mechanism with Linda Tripp sitting on the other side, eager to engage in girl talk. What more could you want for $20?" Thinkgeek and Slashdot are both owned by VA Software.
Yes. You heard it here first.
Disclaimer:
Keyboard key actuators are owned by Not-VA-but-ME Software, and any problems you have with said company are, um, the fault of Arthur Anderson and Associates and of most other currently defunct liability sinks. Furthermore, this is void where prohibited, must be 18 to enter, available only at participating retailers, except as is necessary to avoid flying "O" in the throng, operators are standing by, but that does not inhere liability to answer the phones, nor does it imply any fitness or suitability for any purpose. By agreeing to the terms of this disclaimer, you promise never to compare its performance to Java, which is solely the responsibility of Scott McNealy between eye-blackening sessions with most billionaires you have heard of.
Hey! I thought we were talking about laptop PC's! Now I'm completely confused.
Price: $2000, MTBF ~1 year, 4000 sales
Price $600, MTBF ~1 day, 400,000 sales.
Right? Shouldn't that just about show the tilt on the demand curve? I mean if a computer of high quality for a price premium were all that popular, then all the rich kids would be playing Quake 18 (or GTA 2 or whatever these days) on full-blown UN*X workstations at 8 grand each.
It's about time. I've tried raising a family, cooking, lawn mowing, sky diving, midget tossing, ferret pantsing, opera singing, and rodeo events on my computer screen. None of it panned out. Now I'm boring again, and I just do plain old reading on my computer screen.