Actually, there's still a substantial body of activities (most things, actually) that computers still can't do. The field of Artificial Intelligence as hyped in the 60's, 70's, and 80's has pretty much imploded.
It blows me away, BTW that I was able to link to Dreyfus at WallMart. I doubt if any of Minsky's blather is that widely available.
Laser surgery is relativly easy to perform, and was invented as a CHEAP alternitive to glasses, yet it is locked up for use at huge prices by only MDs.
Somehow, I can't see people lining up at a kiosk in the shopping mall to get laser eye surgery. If it wasn't a regulated procedure, they'd have it as a sideline at the Piercing Pagoda. That would suck.
I want an ATX form-factor board with a PPC chip in it. Preferrably one that is produced by several vendors. The hell with proprietary cases and boards.
Go ahead and do whatever you want to bring forward 'Linux Desktop.'
But, er.... (trying to be polite) please don't fuck with Unix. It all works, it all works well, and all you have to do is buy the appropriate O'Reilly books. I know some people would rather just be able to click buttons....
WTF?? What kind of eye-candy crap are you running?
Also, you could easily have stuck with the stock hardware on said P-II machine. The fact that you didn't have to (your Fiance pretty much had to) is added value to your choice to buy the non-Mac.
An additional fact that should come into play: you do NOT have to buy 'the latest greatest P4' machine that Intel pushes to get more than adequate performance. As a rule I ALWAYS buy systems below the 'bleeding edge' curve. I bought a PIII-450 back when the 550s cost twice as much. I bought a PIII-850 when the 1000 machines came out. With Apple, you're single-sourced. Where do you buy a processor upgrade, except from the same bloodsuckers who charged $300+ for a cooling fan to plug into the Mac Plus back in the day?
I have a Toshiba 486 laptop (a T2105) that only has a grayscale 640x480 screen. It runs NetBSD and is useful with FVWM2. I run the virtual screen size as 640x880 or so (I can't remember the exact number, I 'tuned' it by trying values down from 900 until pixels at the bottom of the screen stopped spilling off into scary noise.) It's useful that way, sort of a long narrow 'sleeve' of a window. With the touchpoint mouse, I found having X and Y virtualness just made it disturbing to try to focus on. Being as it's a 486 most of the X stuff open on it is 'classic' things like Xman and lots of Xterms anyway.
"Applets" are passionate about their Macs, and feel an allegiance to the company. Why?
Also part of it is that there is always a little segment of society that wants to be contrary, to do something different, not 'mainstream.' The guy in Detroit who drives the Citroen or Fiat.
Often times there isn't anything at else remarkable about said person. Since they can't distinguish themselves by accomplishment, they pick a subcult to hang out in instead.
There are many, many such people who buy Apple hardware. The 'Think Different' marketing campaing resonates through them. Even interesting projects like Linux are starting to draw these people in. Which is worrying.
Maybe you all have Mozilla set to only accept images from the originating server out of some obsessive need to avoid advertisements.
Actually, I just have the following line in my host file on this W2K box:
127.0.0.1 images.slashdot.org
It kills all the image croft from Slashdot and seems to eliminate a lot of the ads as well.
Not to fill any obsessive need. Just because I like breaking links to shit I don't particularly have any interest in downloading over this slow 56K modem connection.
I have to be careful about banging the mouse against the side of the viewable area, to avoid shifting my presentation off-screen.
You're referring to the 'virtual screen' function, which in my experience causes nausea and a great deal of unease in someone new to X. It really should be turned off by default and available as a menu choice to toggle on. Historically it's necessary for some of the older X applications written by 'workstation' people who at the time were rather proud of their high resolution grayscale monitors.
It's a trivial matter for the vendor of a DVD drive to slap in a little serial EEPROM chip (say, a 24C01) on the drive's logic board. There's a counted value stored in one byte of the EEPROM. When a specific number of incidents are counted, a bit is switched on the EEPROM, it won't allow you to change the region anymore. Or, the drive will just plain quit working (or quit playing DVD movies). No matter how often you 'reinstall the OS.' It isn't that uncommon, lots of hardware has a little bit of non-volatile memory like that plugged into it somewhere.
Well, for one thing, the typewriter is sort of like the microphone. Not many people type at enough length to actually create works equivalent to the novels that so many people are happy to shuffle around in the form of pirated eBooks.
Likewise, many of the people shuffling around canned music in the form of MP3 files have never, ever so much as plugged a microphone into their sound card.
The 'printing press' metaphor breaks down when the majority of the people are just copying and forwarding stuff they had absolutely zero part in creating. Hell, most aren't even 'quoting for editorial purposes' as some would say 'Fair Use' is intended for.
We were watching the sky on the fourth of July because there were rumors of a fireworks display.
I suspect you're one of those people who only votes on election day, since your view of the complex political process in this country (primaries, campaigning on the streets, etc.) is so stunted.
And your elitist attitude is just staggering. You clearly don't get around much if you think people just rattle off what they heard last night on television. Americans are smarter than that. In particular the ones who take the time out to vote are smarter than that.
Ah, but what has become of the 'this is the new era of the Internet, when all the old rules are changed' meme we've grown so accustomed to hearing? Now we're to go all conservative and say 'nothing is changed, laws don't need to be changed' as the barbarians teem over the walls of the 'Intellectual Property Fortress'??
I'm just asking because it seems sort of hypocritical.
Re:"just a computer programmer"
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 1
Being a computer programmer does not automatically make somebody a geek.
Some would say that unless a person can write code, read schematic diagrams, and maybe even solder, 'geek' status is questionable.
'Hardware' isn't plugging together stuff with a phillips screwdriver in your hand. And 'writing code' isn't just shoving together something that will compile and run in C. Assembly language might even be added as a fourth requirement.
Not that any of these things prevent wannas from ordering 'geek gear' from 'ThinkGeek' or other poseur salons.
Be kind of nice to do you graduate thesis on astronomy in space.
Cool idea! Launch all the graduate students into space. Can we let undergrads, suffering under said grad students as TAs, vote which ones to shove in the rockets, and how much to fund life support?
We aren't just meat robots that can be shipped to other planets in tin cans. That is one of the more ludicrous assumptions so many 'space exploration advocates' just refuse to get over.
We are part of a biosphere and can't be separated from said biosphere. It's possible the biosphere could be transplanted, but far from certain.
In any case, there's loads and loads more work to be done before any transplant type operation could be conducted. People with an attitude that we need to rush off to space strike me as having watched far too much science fiction television programming. Here's a hint: the script writers almost without exception don't know shit about the topic. It's all a diversion, entertainment.
the religious right would certainly organize a campaign to have NEA funds witheld from any artist that they didn't like.
I know how we can make it fair. Withhold NEA funds from any artist that anybody doesn't like. Oh, even easier: just get rid of the NEA. I don't want government bureaucrats deciding which artists are good and which aren't.
Of course in real life hackers and vampires are different, since putting Windows 2000 on an FTP site is a tad more benign than sucking the life out of a struggling human being, feeding your twisted bloodlust and creating yet another member of a terrible legion of undead.
Geez. But putting Windows 2000 on an FTP site is considerably less benign than rocking back in forth in a chair, crunching on cheetos, scratching your groin and throwing 20 sided dice.
You don't seriously think that AD&D stuff is real, do you??
You are making the classic 'The Internet is a whole new phenomenon so we must suspend reality and establish a whole new set of rules for it' mistake. Remember, that's the one that all those swindlers used to run the Dot.con scam. Nobody is gonna buy that anymore, except a handful of gradually-aging ex-editors of Online News Sites, and the older members of the staff at Wired Magazine.
Heavens no. The servers should be a snarl of ethernet cable, switches, hubs, etc. all mixed in with torn apart boxes. If you can't tell which machine is the server except by which box has the SCSI card in it with the LEDs illuminated (cover on said box should be OFF of course) you're wasting valuable company time fiddling with a phillips screwdriver when you should be:
changing the f-ing toner cartridge on the LJet2 up on the second floor.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's no reason it can't be slightly better than a Mac and still kinda look like one...
And then when you die from lack of efficacious treatment, Gaia absorbs your body as fertilizer and the marvelous Cycle of Life continues.
Actually, there's still a substantial body of activities (most things, actually) that computers still can't do. The field of Artificial Intelligence as hyped in the 60's, 70's, and 80's has pretty much imploded.
It blows me away, BTW that I was able to link to Dreyfus at WallMart. I doubt if any of Minsky's blather is that widely available.
Laser surgery is relativly easy to perform, and was invented as a CHEAP alternitive to glasses, yet it is locked up for use at huge prices by only MDs.
Somehow, I can't see people lining up at a kiosk in the shopping mall to get laser eye surgery. If it wasn't a regulated procedure, they'd have it as a sideline at the Piercing Pagoda. That would suck.
I want an ATX form-factor board with a PPC chip in it. Preferrably one that is produced by several vendors. The hell with proprietary cases and boards.
Go ahead and do whatever you want to bring forward 'Linux Desktop.'
But, er.... (trying to be polite) please don't fuck with Unix. It all works, it all works well, and all you have to do is buy the appropriate O'Reilly books. I know some people would rather just be able to click buttons....
Naw. The smartest users run Sparc Blade hardware. Blade 1000's in the backroom, and Blade 100's as snappy X-Terminals.
And the smartest poor users buy used Sparc hardware on eBay and run NetBSD on it.
A Pentium II is almost useless now?
WTF?? What kind of eye-candy crap are you running?
Also, you could easily have stuck with the stock hardware on said P-II machine. The fact that you didn't have to (your Fiance pretty much had to) is added value to your choice to buy the non-Mac.
An additional fact that should come into play: you do NOT have to buy 'the latest greatest P4' machine that Intel pushes to get more than adequate performance. As a rule I ALWAYS buy systems below the 'bleeding edge' curve. I bought a PIII-450 back when the 550s cost twice as much. I bought a PIII-850 when the 1000 machines came out. With Apple, you're single-sourced. Where do you buy a processor upgrade, except from the same bloodsuckers who charged $300+ for a cooling fan to plug into the Mac Plus back in the day?
I have a Toshiba 486 laptop (a T2105) that only has a grayscale 640x480 screen. It runs NetBSD and is useful with FVWM2. I run the virtual screen size as 640x880 or so (I can't remember the exact number, I 'tuned' it by trying values down from 900 until pixels at the bottom of the screen stopped spilling off into scary noise.) It's useful that way, sort of a long narrow 'sleeve' of a window. With the touchpoint mouse, I found having X and Y virtualness just made it disturbing to try to focus on. Being as it's a 486 most of the X stuff open on it is 'classic' things like Xman and lots of Xterms anyway.
"Applets" are passionate about their Macs, and feel an allegiance to the company. Why?
Also part of it is that there is always a little segment of society that wants to be contrary, to do something different, not 'mainstream.' The guy in Detroit who drives the Citroen or Fiat.
Often times there isn't anything at else remarkable about said person. Since they can't distinguish themselves by accomplishment, they pick a subcult to hang out in instead.
There are many, many such people who buy Apple hardware. The 'Think Different' marketing campaing resonates through them. Even interesting projects like Linux are starting to draw these people in. Which is worrying.
Maybe you all have Mozilla set to only accept images from the originating server out of some obsessive need to avoid advertisements.
Actually, I just have the following line in my host file on this W2K box:
127.0.0.1 images.slashdot.org
It kills all the image croft from Slashdot and seems to eliminate a lot of the ads as well.
Not to fill any obsessive need. Just because I like breaking links to shit I don't particularly have any interest in downloading over this slow 56K modem connection.
whoops. Look at those melf-package resistors rolling all over your board!
I have to be careful about banging the mouse against the side of the viewable area, to avoid shifting my presentation off-screen.
You're referring to the 'virtual screen' function, which in my experience causes nausea and a great deal of unease in someone new to X. It really should be turned off by default and available as a menu choice to toggle on. Historically it's necessary for some of the older X applications written by 'workstation' people who at the time were rather proud of their high resolution grayscale monitors.
It's a trivial matter for the vendor of a DVD drive to slap in a little serial EEPROM chip (say, a 24C01) on the drive's logic board. There's a counted value stored in one byte of the EEPROM. When a specific number of incidents are counted, a bit is switched on the EEPROM, it won't allow you to change the region anymore. Or, the drive will just plain quit working (or quit playing DVD movies). No matter how often you 'reinstall the OS.' It isn't that uncommon, lots of hardware has a little bit of non-volatile memory like that plugged into it somewhere.
You'll look pretty funny trying to pry off that Ball Grid Array package with your antique chip puller.
That is, if it's not chip-on-board with a blob of epoxy over it.
Well, for one thing, the typewriter is sort of like the microphone. Not many people type at enough length to actually create works equivalent to the novels that so many people are happy to shuffle around in the form of pirated eBooks.
Likewise, many of the people shuffling around canned music in the form of MP3 files have never, ever so much as plugged a microphone into their sound card.
The 'printing press' metaphor breaks down when the majority of the people are just copying and forwarding stuff they had absolutely zero part in creating. Hell, most aren't even 'quoting for editorial purposes' as some would say 'Fair Use' is intended for.
Dude,
We were watching the sky on the fourth of July because there were rumors of a fireworks display.
I suspect you're one of those people who only votes on election day, since your view of the complex political process in this country (primaries, campaigning on the streets, etc.) is so stunted.
And your elitist attitude is just staggering. You clearly don't get around much if you think people just rattle off what they heard last night on television. Americans are smarter than that. In particular the ones who take the time out to vote are smarter than that.
Get out more. Talk to people.
there's nothing wrong with the current systems.
Ah, but what has become of the 'this is the new era of the Internet, when all the old rules are changed' meme we've grown so accustomed to hearing? Now we're to go all conservative and say 'nothing is changed, laws don't need to be changed' as the barbarians teem over the walls of the 'Intellectual Property Fortress'??
I'm just asking because it seems sort of hypocritical.
Being a computer programmer does not automatically make somebody a geek.
Some would say that unless a person can write code, read schematic diagrams, and maybe even solder, 'geek' status is questionable.
'Hardware' isn't plugging together stuff with a phillips screwdriver in your hand. And 'writing code' isn't just shoving together something that will compile and run in C. Assembly language might even be added as a fourth requirement.
Not that any of these things prevent wannas from ordering 'geek gear' from 'ThinkGeek' or other poseur salons.
Be kind of nice to do you graduate thesis on astronomy in space.
Cool idea! Launch all the graduate students into space. Can we let undergrads, suffering under said grad students as TAs, vote which ones to shove in the rockets, and how much to fund life support?
We aren't just meat robots that can be shipped to other planets in tin cans. That is one of the more ludicrous assumptions so many 'space exploration advocates' just refuse to get over.
We are part of a biosphere and can't be separated from said biosphere. It's possible the biosphere could be transplanted, but far from certain.
In any case, there's loads and loads more work to be done before any transplant type operation could be conducted. People with an attitude that we need to rush off to space strike me as having watched far too much science fiction television programming. Here's a hint: the script writers almost without exception don't know shit about the topic. It's all a diversion, entertainment.
Deal with it.
the religious right would certainly organize a campaign to have NEA funds witheld from any artist that they didn't like.
I know how we can make it fair. Withhold NEA funds from any artist that anybody doesn't like. Oh, even easier: just get rid of the NEA. I don't want government bureaucrats deciding which artists are good and which aren't.
Of course in real life hackers and vampires are different, since putting Windows 2000 on an FTP site is a tad more benign than sucking the life out of a struggling human being, feeding your twisted bloodlust and creating yet another member of a terrible legion of undead.
Geez. But putting Windows 2000 on an FTP site is considerably less benign than rocking back in forth in a chair, crunching on cheetos, scratching your groin and throwing 20 sided dice.
You don't seriously think that AD&D stuff is real, do you??
You are making the classic 'The Internet is a whole new phenomenon so we must suspend reality and establish a whole new set of rules for it' mistake. Remember, that's the one that all those swindlers used to run the Dot.con scam. Nobody is gonna buy that anymore, except a handful of gradually-aging ex-editors of Online News Sites, and the older members of the staff at Wired Magazine.
Heavens no. The servers should be a snarl of ethernet cable, switches, hubs, etc. all mixed in with torn apart boxes. If you can't tell which machine is the server except by which box has the SCSI card in it with the LEDs illuminated (cover on said box should be OFF of course) you're wasting valuable company time fiddling with a phillips screwdriver when you should be:
changing the f-ing toner cartridge on the LJet2 up on the second floor.
Hop to it, now, admin-boy.