There's the bowling ball on a string. I like that one...
The spinning chair: get someone to sit in a chair you can spin. Give her 2 dumbbells. She spins faster when she draws her arms in, slower when she extends them.
The rifle: Hang a block on a long piece of string. It has to be a large-ish, heavy block of wood. Clamp a rifle into a firing bench, aim at block, pull trigger. Block goes flying up. You can measure the transfer of momentum by measuring how high the block went.
Various exploding and noxious chemicals, of course.
Then there's my all-time favorite: Measuring the volume of someone's ass. Really, we did this in High School physics. It's a non-trivial experimental problem. How do you measure the volume of someone's ass, without direct measurements? We used a chalked hard board, some estimates of the elasticity of your butt, and some exprerimental/anectodal estimates of the curvature of your butt when you stood up.
But then, most of these would be deemed too dangerous or "inappropriate" these days.
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I don't filter but I will add OpenDNS to my repertoire.
One thing that I do that I have not mentioned: Get mythtv and filter those commercials! They're worse than porn. I can see my kids getting grossed out if they hit goatse, but those damn Disney commercials are worse. They sell a totally believable but completely unrealistic image of girls, especially tween girls.
He. I lsot a high level job interview over this very topic. I was asked how I would handle a long-term employee who has a lot of unique, irreplaceable knowledge about the system but refuses to divulge it or to work with other employees.
Without hesitation, I said, "Fire them". The entire interview panel leaned back in their chairs, as if I just puked up blood or had the alien baby rip open my gut.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job, even after explaining that a person who won't do their job is detrimental to the team, and any knowledge they may have is useless if they refuse to share it.
No one is irreplaceable on a team, and if you don't want to be a team player, I don't want you on my team.
But really, the paradigm of all modern GUIs is the same. There really isn't that much difference between XP or XFCE on a paradigm level. It's all clicky menus and icons.
My parents, who are about the most illiterate people I've ever met, went from Win98 to Gnome to Mac OSX over the years without a single complaint about usability of the GUI. Plenty of other issues, but never about the GUI.
So yes, I agree with the article. The biggest difference is in the icons and the games.
Well, the point is that if you value your resellers, you will help them through the tough times. Driving your resellers into bankrupcy is not a good long term strategy.
While *legally* MS is in the right, from a business standpoint they may not be.
It's a paradigm shift. We use "Track Changes" quite a bit. It's a frigging nightmare to keep track of the correct revision, who did what, what's the latest version, etc. But everyone is so invested in it that it's impossible to change.
I tried really hard to get a real versioning system going, but really, no one is interested because MS Office is so entrenched it would take a major disaster to change it. Even then, I suspect it would be blamed on us the users rather than a totally broken "collaborative" app.
(We have another "web app" that only works with IE, that's completely broken, but upper mgt, who doesn't use it, has bought off on it completely and they want wider usage, in spite of *every single user* of this app saying it sucks hind tit on a wild boar.)
But TV is the opiate for the masses! How can you govern an intelligent, reasoning populace? You can't give them drugs, so you give them free coupons for TV!
The best aspect of 7 that no one talks about (and it may be in Vista, which I've used for only a couple of hours) is C:\Users\Public. Brilliant. If I want to share files across multiple user accounts on the same computer (such as mp3s), I now have a good place to put them. Linux should make note with a/home/public standard as well.
+1!
I don't use windows at all but that sounds like something that is so commonsense...
I've been using a/home/common hack but it would be great to have a standard shared directory.
You can do either. Either way you gain and lose. I personally have a hard time with the kitchen sink approach, preferring C as my programming environment. This leaves me in the cold as far as contributing to, say, mythtv, but then I can contribute to other projects, like lirc.
So it all comes out in the wash. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yeah, too true. I quit buying music years ago when CD prices got ridiculous. I haven't bought (or downloaded) music for years. Now my daughter is getting into music, and surprisingly for our 40-years-of-age difference, our music tastes are similar, so we've been building our library.
She's started sending me links to youtube videos of her faves. Sent one today. I gave it a quick listen at work; kind-of-liked it, went back to listen again at home and it's been taken down. Humph. No sale there.
I end up buying about 1/4 of the music links she sends me. This just makes no sense at all - the music industry is shooting itself in the foot. All the younguns are growing up pirating music instead of buying it - because the industry has created such hurdles to getting music legally.
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed.
Did you ever monitor a project maillist? I'm constantly amazed at the nit-picky details that must be addressed before a patch is accepted. The submitter is held to an incredibly high standard.
I've worked in a commercial outfit, and if it worked, we shipped.
The quality control that a patch goes through, the ruthless dissection of programming style, usefulness, and clarity is something I've never seen in a commercial environment.
Heh. I'm within 60 miles of 10,000'+ mountains, several wilderness areas, and, in the other direction, I'm within 60 miles of the ocean. I don't have to go very far to go somewhere interesting.
We picked the town we live in for that reason. We picked the house we live in because there are 9 schools within walking distance and 2 universities within biking distance. Our kids may not have to drive until they're out of college.
You choose your lifestyle. You can choose a lifestyle that minimizes your impact on the earth and lets you do what you want.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
I think your car analogy hits the nail on the head. MS thinks in terms of monolithic systems. Thus you buy a Honda Civic, there is no way to add features to make it a pickup truck.
Software OTOH doesn't work that way. You can have a simple bare bones OS and add features - if you design it right. The US Military does the HumVee that way. You can snap on a variety parts onto the base chassis. Thus an ambulance and a mobile rocket launcher platform are the same vehicle and the military doesn't need to keep a whole bunch of spare parts laying around for specialy vehicles.
MS thinks in terms of market fragmentation, creating haves and have nots. Will the ego of any third world dictator allow him to use a 'starter' version?
It's the same thing IBM did way back when with the PC XT and PC AT. The secretaries got the XT and the execs got the AT, which cost twice as much. Never mind that the secretaries did most of the work and the execs couldn't even turn the thing on. The execs got to dangle a little silver key off their keychain, that said, *I have an expensive computer, what do you have?*
Yeah, well, and that attitude has kept the US at the forefront of individual freedom and liberty... Like, oh, habeas corpus.. No wait, they did away with that.. OK, freedom from snooping on phone conversations... Oh, they did away with that too. Like the ability to watch a DVD on my computer, or share music with my friends. No, wait, can't do that either.
What were you saying about leaving a hostile environment?
And don't forget - export to pdf without an expensive propriatary package.
Also, search using regex. Not even close in MS Office.
As we are taxpayer supported, the whole idea of using closed file formats runs counter to the FOIA. So far that has fallen on deaf ears, but there is a storm coming....
We're facing layoffs due to budget cuts while our IT chief spends $$$$$ upgrading everyone to Office 2007. Go figure.
I wish our IT chief would see that... Even his IT staff has come out publicly and said they would like to use linux for specific purposes.
Fat chance. You can't connect your PDA unless it runs windows mobile. You can't even get to our internal web services unless it's with IE. You can't check your paycheck unless it's with IE. You can't check email externally unless it's with IE.
I asked about using OpenOffice since it has functionality I need and MSOffice doesn't have. No chance.
His priority is:
Has the MS brand on it. If not, then it must be commercial.
So we have this virtual outboard software which is a total piece of shit; once in a while it corrupts its own database and frantic emails go out asking everyone to close it so the database can be reset. I've offered to rewrite it in PHP and put it on the website. No way. And they pay a per-seat license for this POS.
Unfortunately there are too many people like this in the IT world. They know no one gets fired for using MS, and that's the way they will go. No risk taking for them - MS is in the same position as IBM was a couple of decades ago.
The risk thing.... That might have been true 20 - 30 years ago when agents actually scoured the bars to find talent. These days you are more than likely to have manufactured pop divas and even entire groups. All cut from the same mold, great looks, skimpy clothes, lots of scandal, mediocre talent and singing ability, and music that's written for them and over produced and corrected in the studio.
Does anyone really think that Janis Joplin would make it today?
The music business these days is all about "creating a product", not about making music. They reduce their risk by creating a star. Hannah Montana is a classic example of this. Nothing to do with music; it's all about avarice.
So they can go choke. They produce nothing of lasting value; their business model is exploitation and greed. The music put out by the major labels mostly sucks - it's so devoid of any real emotions that I can't stand it. Give me Root Boy Slim, Janis Joplin, Cake, Miranda Louise.... Heck the music industry won't even sell Root Boy anymore, eventhough vinyl albums are going for $100+ on ebay....
Well, yes and no.... I taught at a small college, mostly attended by non-traditional students. I taught junior and senior level courses. Some of my students had never, in 14 years of education, taken a test that was not multiple choice. I asked for definition of terms on an open book exam. The bloody glossary was in the back of the book. All they had to do was to copy word-for-word from the glossary. Some couldn't even figure that out.
One woman even filed a formal complaint against me, claining that my tests couldn't be judged "objectively" and thus were unfair.
So when your whole education is reduced to A, B, C, or D - well, let's face it, that might prepare you for being a cashier and McD but it certainly fails any reasonable standard for education.
When you're presented with something new, and you've always been offered one of four fixed choices and the answer isn't there, this is what you can expect. It's Dell's fault, it's the university's fault, it's everyone's fault but mine. They didn't give me the right choices to pick from.
Get a copy of D&D, set up a dungeon the old fashioned way - you know, with paper and pencil. Then run it with your imagination.
OK, horribly old and fuddy duddy, but it's a lot more fun than any computer game I've ever played, because your dungeon master is a person - and a good DM will anticipate your reactions, give real depth to your adversaries, and otherwise have lots of fun.
And yes, when you're dead, you're pretty much dead. Your characters die and don't come back.
Slashdot Mirror
"No direct measurement"... The idea was to get the volume of someone's butt without their knowledge or cooperation.
Thus the chalked board; you can dust chalk on benches, bleachers, whereever kids hang out.... :-)
But I do like the "humiliating" part of the deal.
There's the bowling ball on a string. I like that one...
The spinning chair: get someone to sit in a chair you can spin. Give her 2 dumbbells. She spins faster when she draws her arms in, slower when she extends them.
The rifle: Hang a block on a long piece of string. It has to be a large-ish, heavy block of wood. Clamp a rifle into a firing bench, aim at block, pull trigger. Block goes flying up. You can measure the transfer of momentum by measuring how high the block went.
Various exploding and noxious chemicals, of course.
Then there's my all-time favorite: Measuring the volume of someone's ass. Really, we did this in High School physics. It's a non-trivial experimental problem. How do you measure the volume of someone's ass, without direct measurements? We used a chalked hard board, some estimates of the elasticity of your butt, and some exprerimental/anectodal estimates of the curvature of your butt when you stood up.
But then, most of these would be deemed too dangerous or "inappropriate" these days.
Yeah, I'm with you on that. I don't filter but I will add OpenDNS to my repertoire.
One thing that I do that I have not mentioned: Get mythtv and filter those commercials! They're worse than porn. I can see my kids getting grossed out if they hit goatse, but those damn Disney commercials are worse. They sell a totally believable but completely unrealistic image of girls, especially tween girls.
He. I lsot a high level job interview over this very topic. I was asked how I would handle a long-term employee who has a lot of unique, irreplaceable knowledge about the system but refuses to divulge it or to work with other employees.
Without hesitation, I said, "Fire them". The entire interview panel leaned back in their chairs, as if I just puked up blood or had the alien baby rip open my gut.
Needless to say, I didn't get the job, even after explaining that a person who won't do their job is detrimental to the team, and any knowledge they may have is useless if they refuse to share it.
No one is irreplaceable on a team, and if you don't want to be a team player, I don't want you on my team.
But really, the paradigm of all modern GUIs is the same. There really isn't that much difference between XP or XFCE on a paradigm level. It's all clicky menus and icons.
My parents, who are about the most illiterate people I've ever met, went from Win98 to Gnome to Mac OSX over the years without a single complaint about usability of the GUI. Plenty of other issues, but never about the GUI.
So yes, I agree with the article. The biggest difference is in the icons and the games.
Wait till they get a patent on this method!
Well, the point is that if you value your resellers, you will help them through the tough times. Driving your resellers into bankrupcy is not a good long term strategy.
While *legally* MS is in the right, from a business standpoint they may not be.
It's a paradigm shift. We use "Track Changes" quite a bit. It's a frigging nightmare to keep track of the correct revision, who did what, what's the latest version, etc. But everyone is so invested in it that it's impossible to change.
I tried really hard to get a real versioning system going, but really, no one is interested because MS Office is so entrenched it would take a major disaster to change it. Even then, I suspect it would be blamed on us the users rather than a totally broken "collaborative" app.
(We have another "web app" that only works with IE, that's completely broken, but upper mgt, who doesn't use it, has bought off on it completely and they want wider usage, in spite of *every single user* of this app saying it sucks hind tit on a wild boar.)
But TV is the opiate for the masses! How can you govern an intelligent, reasoning populace? You can't give them drugs, so you give them free coupons for TV!
The best aspect of 7 that no one talks about (and it may be in Vista, which I've used for only a couple of hours) is C:\Users\Public. Brilliant. If I want to share files across multiple user accounts on the same computer (such as mp3s), I now have a good place to put them. Linux should make note with a /home/public standard as well.
+1!
I don't use windows at all but that sounds like something that is so commonsense...
I've been using a /home/common hack but it would be great to have a standard shared directory.
You can do either. Either way you gain and lose. I personally have a hard time with the kitchen sink approach, preferring C as my programming environment. This leaves me in the cold as far as contributing to, say, mythtv, but then I can contribute to other projects, like lirc.
So it all comes out in the wash. When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
Yeah, too true. I quit buying music years ago when CD prices got ridiculous. I haven't bought (or downloaded) music for years. Now my daughter is getting into music, and surprisingly for our 40-years-of-age difference, our music tastes are similar, so we've been building our library.
She's started sending me links to youtube videos of her faves. Sent one today. I gave it a quick listen at work; kind-of-liked it, went back to listen again at home and it's been taken down. Humph. No sale there.
I end up buying about 1/4 of the music links she sends me. This just makes no sense at all - the music industry is shooting itself in the foot. All the younguns are growing up pirating music instead of buying it - because the industry has created such hurdles to getting music legally.
I know that it's always silly to try to predict the future, but here I go none the less. For the most part, all of the core computing applications have already been developed.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4070/is_2000_Jan/ai_59586526
Did you ever monitor a project maillist? I'm constantly amazed at the nit-picky details that must be addressed before a patch is accepted. The submitter is held to an incredibly high standard.
I've worked in a commercial outfit, and if it worked, we shipped.
The quality control that a patch goes through, the ruthless dissection of programming style, usefulness, and clarity is something I've never seen in a commercial environment.
Heh. I'm within 60 miles of 10,000'+ mountains, several wilderness areas, and, in the other direction, I'm within 60 miles of the ocean. I don't have to go very far to go somewhere interesting.
We picked the town we live in for that reason. We picked the house we live in because there are 9 schools within walking distance and 2 universities within biking distance. Our kids may not have to drive until they're out of college.
You choose your lifestyle. You can choose a lifestyle that minimizes your impact on the earth and lets you do what you want.
http://wiki.c3sl.ufpr.br/multiseat/index.php/Main_Page
My setup:
http://wiki.c3sl.ufpr.br/multiseat/index.php/NVidia_multiseat
Sorry, but that's a bullshit answer.
I use about 150 gallons of gasoline a year for my 2 cars. Why? We ride bikes. Pretty much everywhere. The only time I actually drive is on road trips. And we do a lot of those.
There are a lot of ways you can save without being "more poor". You can save and "be richer".
My solar water heater gives me enough hot water for my family to take showers without running out of hot water - as we used to with only the electric heater. We have "always on" computers because I run multihead off the main server, saving the powerbill for individual computers. You want a computer? Turn the monitor on. No boot time, no waiting. I could go on and on. A little bit of care and though and you can save and be rich.
I think your car analogy hits the nail on the head. MS thinks in terms of monolithic systems. Thus you buy a Honda Civic, there is no way to add features to make it a pickup truck.
Software OTOH doesn't work that way. You can have a simple bare bones OS and add features - if you design it right. The US Military does the HumVee that way. You can snap on a variety parts onto the base chassis. Thus an ambulance and a mobile rocket launcher platform are the same vehicle and the military doesn't need to keep a whole bunch of spare parts laying around for specialy vehicles.
MS thinks in terms of market fragmentation, creating haves and have nots. Will the ego of any third world dictator allow him to use a 'starter' version?
It's the same thing IBM did way back when with the PC XT and PC AT. The secretaries got the XT and the execs got the AT, which cost twice as much. Never mind that the secretaries did most of the work and the execs couldn't even turn the thing on. The execs got to dangle a little silver key off their keychain, that said, *I have an expensive computer, what do you have?*
It's marketing creating reality.
Yeah, well, and that attitude has kept the US at the forefront of individual freedom and liberty... Like, oh, habeas corpus.. No wait, they did away with that.. OK, freedom from snooping on phone conversations... Oh, they did away with that too. Like the ability to watch a DVD on my computer, or share music with my friends. No, wait, can't do that either.
What were you saying about leaving a hostile environment?
And don't forget - export to pdf without an expensive propriatary package.
Also, search using regex. Not even close in MS Office.
As we are taxpayer supported, the whole idea of using closed file formats runs counter to the FOIA. So far that has fallen on deaf ears, but there is a storm coming....
We're facing layoffs due to budget cuts while our IT chief spends $$$$$ upgrading everyone to Office 2007. Go figure.
I wish our IT chief would see that... Even his IT staff has come out publicly and said they would like to use linux for specific purposes.
Fat chance. You can't connect your PDA unless it runs windows mobile. You can't even get to our internal web services unless it's with IE. You can't check your paycheck unless it's with IE. You can't check email externally unless it's with IE.
I asked about using OpenOffice since it has functionality I need and MSOffice doesn't have. No chance.
His priority is:
Has the MS brand on it.
If not, then it must be commercial.
So we have this virtual outboard software which is a total piece of shit; once in a while it corrupts its own database and frantic emails go out asking everyone to close it so the database can be reset. I've offered to rewrite it in PHP and put it on the website. No way. And they pay a per-seat license for this POS.
Unfortunately there are too many people like this in the IT world. They know no one gets fired for using MS, and that's the way they will go. No risk taking for them - MS is in the same position as IBM was a couple of decades ago.
The risk thing.... That might have been true 20 - 30 years ago when agents actually scoured the bars to find talent. These days you are more than likely to have manufactured pop divas and even entire groups. All cut from the same mold, great looks, skimpy clothes, lots of scandal, mediocre talent and singing ability, and music that's written for them and over produced and corrected in the studio.
Does anyone really think that Janis Joplin would make it today?
The music business these days is all about "creating a product", not about making music. They reduce their risk by creating a star. Hannah Montana is a classic example of this. Nothing to do with music; it's all about avarice.
So they can go choke. They produce nothing of lasting value; their business model is exploitation and greed. The music put out by the major labels mostly sucks - it's so devoid of any real emotions that I can't stand it. Give me Root Boy Slim, Janis Joplin, Cake, Miranda Louise.... Heck the music industry won't even sell Root Boy anymore, eventhough vinyl albums are going for $100+ on ebay....
Well, yes and no.... I taught at a small college, mostly attended by non-traditional students. I taught junior and senior level courses. Some of my students had never, in 14 years of education, taken a test that was not multiple choice. I asked for definition of terms on an open book exam. The bloody glossary was in the back of the book. All they had to do was to copy word-for-word from the glossary. Some couldn't even figure that out.
One woman even filed a formal complaint against me, claining that my tests couldn't be judged "objectively" and thus were unfair.
So when your whole education is reduced to A, B, C, or D - well, let's face it, that might prepare you for being a cashier and McD but it certainly fails any reasonable standard for education.
When you're presented with something new, and you've always been offered one of four fixed choices and the answer isn't there, this is what you can expect. It's Dell's fault, it's the university's fault, it's everyone's fault but mine. They didn't give me the right choices to pick from.
Get a copy of D&D, set up a dungeon the old fashioned way - you know, with paper and pencil. Then run it with your imagination.
OK, horribly old and fuddy duddy, but it's a lot more fun than any computer game I've ever played, because your dungeon master is a person - and a good DM will anticipate your reactions, give real depth to your adversaries, and otherwise have lots of fun.
And yes, when you're dead, you're pretty much dead. Your characters die and don't come back.
Interesting... Either I was totally out of it when I last looked at the site, or it's a recent addition.....