What's really amazing is that the people chiming in, who don't for some reason know the difference between Betamax and Betacam, think they are somehow showing off their knowledge.
This is where I am supposed to paste in that old bromide everybody rattles off:
They came for the Sheboygan pork chop enthusiasts, and I didn't say anything.
They came for that mentally retarded guy who was running a risk of burning down his apartment, and I didn't say anything.
They came for the gypsies, but the Jewish lobby has mostly written them out of the Holocaust history cuz they're poor
Then they came for me, and when they handed me the giant-sized check and asked me to smile for the camera, I knew I was moving to Maui
But, but, but... if you don't play around with this paranoia, and nobody else does, only criminals and thugs and child pornographers will be using crypto! (and of course a few tinfoil loonies)
We can't have that! Please won't you be part of the forest for the malcontents to hide within??
Religion is a deep and personal thing. Not something based on a crappy movie series, with deities emblazoned on Plastic Cups at fast food joints.
It's a trivial matter to discern which 'one is better or worse than another' when one is based on novelty marketing and 'based on a movie, cuz the movie sold pretty well so we threw together a mythos' crap.
I once had hundreds of 9 volt ni-cad batteries from work that weren't new (from demo units) so couldn't be sent out. I brought them to a hamfest to sell really cheap or give away. I put a big sign on the table that said 'free batteries- please only take ten apiece' (to keep someone from just taking the whole box in which case they'd probably all go to waste in someone's hoard). People were very very leery about taking them. Finally a guy came buy who offered to pay for all of them, so I sold him all that were left.
6. You came in to the first meeting and it was obvious you made heavy use of terms like 'clueless' when dealing with people who know their business very well. They figured you for a hotdog renegade who they'd never be able to communicate properly with.
Since the people willing to pay for programming...
Who says we're willing to pay for PBS indefinitely?
Yes, I know that not a lot of Tax money goes directly into PBS. Tons and tons of subsidies go indirectly into it. All those tax writeoffs for corporate sponsorship, for instance, represent tax money siphoned off to PBS.
You have a shockingly different version of history than the rest of us, if you ever think there was a time when the only Linux distributions were Red Hat and Slackware.
Even if you go way back in time to the beginning of Linux, when there were only a few distributions, it wasn't Red Hat and Slackware.
Mandrake only offers binary ISOs; people have to make their own ISO cd images from their source directory.
What's so terrible about that? Source directories can be downloaded as a tree, in fact you don't have to wonder what you're going to end up with the way you are when you download a big hideous.ISO of source code.
As an aside, I shudder every time I see source code held captive in an.RPM, because the source should be in a tarball, not someone's idea of 'one package system to rule them all.'
It's probably the same phenomenon that makes AOL the largest ISP.
As an aside: Does anybody else find an IBM VP referring to Microsoft 'dominance and attitude' a bit ironic? Any of us old enough to remember the old IBM sure do.
There just isn't any reason for PBS to exist anymore. There are other channels on cable that provide the specialized content that used to be PBS-only. They're commercial, and they're successful. PBS truly is redundant at this point in time and probably won't last another decade.
I remember I finally had to go out and buy a color VGA monitor (paperwhite wouldn't cut it any longer!) when I first saw SimEarth (MS-DOS version). And I'm the guy who ran Windows 3.0 on an 8088 machine with Hercules Graphics.
PySol rulez. That's all there is to it. When I want to play solitaire on my windoze box, when I'll fire up eXceed and run PySol over on the headless NetBSD box in the corner. It's pretty damned high-octane, at least some of the cardsets are...
The problem was that graphic technology had not advanced enough to make the machine both reliable and inexpensive.
Yes. The stuff in an early Mac was expensive at the time. But: what explains the $3-400 people were expected to pay for a third-party cooling fan to slip into the handhold on that generation of Mac? It seems like coming out of the early days an 'expensive is better' ethos took effect with the Macintosh user that's still never really gone away. It's always reminded me of the rich kid on the block when we were kids who had the Schwinn bike (with all Schwinn-approved accessories). We all had enuff fun on our Huffy and department-store branded bikes (Holiday, JC Penny, Monkey-Ward, Sears, etc.) but we clearly weren't as cool as that guy with his Schwinn...
Just because you can't afford one at home doesn't mean nobody can.
Me, all my case mods (I speak in the past tense, now) were to be cheap. I put an XT-clone motherboard and IBM power supply (the old 63.5 watt one!) into an old 'Leading Edge Model D' case back in the 80's because I couldn't afford a real XT-clone case. What a dremel-tool project THAT was. I remember when buying that case at a swapmeet that the guy told me 'the coffee stain on the case is free.'
My friend lives in a one room efficiency apartment, but he's got five computers hooked up to his DSL. Sadly, he's more of a spender than a techie. I helped him upgrade to his second machine, a 486 box he mail-ordered, from the 8088 box I'd sold him to run his MIDI card and MIDI gear with.
He has a Gig of RAM in all his boxes and even went out and bought Windows 2000 because he needed it to make use of the dual processor motherboard he'd put together. Truly he's a screwdriver shop's best customer, though he provides the screwdriver.
Last time I talked to him about he was superstitious about running anything but Windows 98 on his machines, because he said 'Windows 95 machines won't network to Windows 98 machines, and Windows ME sucks.' I haven't checked recently to see how his Windows 2000 machine is coming along in awhile now.
I like older stuff that's made the way $180,000 worth of hardware is made better than cheap stuff that's faster, yet built the way a $28 toaster is made.
But then, I am a geek, not a hot-dog. I have 8 bit machines here that I appreciate for what they are.
Slashdot Mirror
He'll post part two of his Creative Writing assignment tomorrow at Noon. It'll all be on The FUD Registry by tomorrow afternoon.
What's really amazing is that the people chiming in, who don't for some reason know the difference between Betamax and Betacam, think they are somehow showing off their knowledge.
It must be lonely, being the Betamax Zealot in the year 2002.
Well, you sure get defensive about it.
If that's any indicator.
Or somesuch other drivel.
But, but, but... if you don't play around with this paranoia, and nobody else does, only criminals and thugs and child pornographers will be using crypto! (and of course a few tinfoil loonies)
We can't have that! Please won't you be part of the forest for the malcontents to hide within??
You're right.
Religion is a deep and personal thing. Not something based on a crappy movie series, with deities emblazoned on Plastic Cups at fast food joints.
It's a trivial matter to discern which 'one is better or worse than another' when one is based on novelty marketing and 'based on a movie, cuz the movie sold pretty well so we threw together a mythos' crap.
Oh, come on now. Christians don't claim that ordinary laypeople can turn water into wine. That was a miracle, and so unusual it was noted.
It's the hocus-pocus bunch who claim they can do 'Magick.'
I once had hundreds of 9 volt ni-cad batteries from work that weren't new (from demo units) so couldn't be sent out. I brought them to a hamfest to sell really cheap or give away. I put a big sign on the table that said 'free batteries- please only take ten apiece' (to keep someone from just taking the whole box in which case they'd probably all go to waste in someone's hoard). People were very very leery about taking them. Finally a guy came buy who offered to pay for all of them, so I sold him all that were left.
6. You came in to the first meeting and it was obvious you made heavy use of terms like 'clueless' when dealing with people who know their business very well. They figured you for a hotdog renegade who they'd never be able to communicate properly with.
Since the people willing to pay for programming ...
Who says we're willing to pay for PBS indefinitely?
Yes, I know that not a lot of Tax money goes directly into PBS. Tons and tons of subsidies go indirectly into it. All those tax writeoffs for corporate sponsorship, for instance, represent tax money siphoned off to PBS.
Wow.
You have a shockingly different version of history than the rest of us, if you ever think there was a time when the only Linux distributions were Red Hat and Slackware.
Even if you go way back in time to the beginning of Linux, when there were only a few distributions, it wasn't Red Hat and Slackware.
Mandrake only offers binary ISOs; people have to make their own ISO cd images from their source directory.
.ISO of source code.
.RPM, because the source should be in a tarball, not someone's idea of 'one package system to rule them all.'
What's so terrible about that? Source directories can be downloaded as a tree, in fact you don't have to wonder what you're going to end up with the way you are when you download a big hideous
As an aside, I shudder every time I see source code held captive in an
It's probably the same phenomenon that makes AOL the largest ISP.
As an aside: Does anybody else find an IBM VP referring to Microsoft 'dominance and attitude' a bit ironic? Any of us old enough to remember the old IBM sure do.
Actually, Cable TV has virtually killed PBS.
There just isn't any reason for PBS to exist anymore. There are other channels on cable that provide the specialized content that used to be PBS-only. They're commercial, and they're successful. PBS truly is redundant at this point in time and probably won't last another decade.
I remember I finally had to go out and buy a color VGA monitor (paperwhite wouldn't cut it any longer!) when I first saw SimEarth (MS-DOS version). And I'm the guy who ran Windows 3.0 on an 8088 machine with Hercules Graphics.
PySol rulez. That's all there is to it. When I want to play solitaire on my windoze box, when I'll fire up eXceed and run PySol over on the headless NetBSD box in the corner. It's pretty damned high-octane, at least some of the cardsets are...
The problem was that graphic technology had not advanced enough to make the machine both reliable and inexpensive.
Yes. The stuff in an early Mac was expensive at the time. But: what explains the $3-400 people were expected to pay for a third-party cooling fan to slip into the handhold on that generation of Mac? It seems like coming out of the early days an 'expensive is better' ethos took effect with the Macintosh user that's still never really gone away. It's always reminded me of the rich kid on the block when we were kids who had the Schwinn bike (with all Schwinn-approved accessories). We all had enuff fun on our Huffy and department-store branded bikes (Holiday, JC Penny, Monkey-Ward, Sears, etc.) but we clearly weren't as cool as that guy with his Schwinn...
Good grief.
Just because you can't afford one at home doesn't mean nobody can.
Me, all my case mods (I speak in the past tense, now) were to be cheap. I put an XT-clone motherboard and IBM power supply (the old 63.5 watt one!) into an old 'Leading Edge Model D' case back in the 80's because I couldn't afford a real XT-clone case. What a dremel-tool project THAT was. I remember when buying that case at a swapmeet that the guy told me 'the coffee stain on the case is free.'
My friend lives in a one room efficiency apartment, but he's got five computers hooked up to his DSL. Sadly, he's more of a spender than a techie. I helped him upgrade to his second machine, a 486 box he mail-ordered, from the 8088 box I'd sold him to run his MIDI card and MIDI gear with.
He has a Gig of RAM in all his boxes and even went out and bought Windows 2000 because he needed it to make use of the dual processor motherboard he'd put together. Truly he's a screwdriver shop's best customer, though he provides the screwdriver.
Last time I talked to him about he was superstitious about running anything but Windows 98 on his machines, because he said 'Windows 95 machines won't network to Windows 98 machines, and Windows ME sucks.' I haven't checked recently to see how his Windows 2000 machine is coming along in awhile now.
Developers who think like that need to be pounded upon until their brains squirt out their ears.
Really. Developers should have two machines on their desktop. A fast machine to compile on, and a slow machine (say, a PII-300) to test the code on.
Well, the Intel P4 2.5 something (it'd be called a 2800+ if Intel used AMD's marketing trickery) is about the same price as that AMD part.
Why would you turn a dual processor machine into a print server?
Why would it need a 30 Gig drive?
Printer servers chug along fine with 486 processors and 400 MB drives. They run cooler, less noisy, and they last forever.
I would rather have the ten-way Alpha.
I like older stuff that's made the way $180,000 worth of hardware is made better than cheap stuff that's faster, yet built the way a $28 toaster is made.
But then, I am a geek, not a hot-dog. I have 8 bit machines here that I appreciate for what they are.
I think he meant 'Amiga' and somehow 'Atari' came out by mistake.