There is nothing remotely funny or challenging about giving a new user an unfamiliar command to wipe his disk clean.
Yes, there is: We're not talking about an innocent n00b---we're talking about a malicious yet fundamentally clueless asshole who was attempting to vandalize someone else's machine. bitchcheck acted like he was some sort of 1337 HaX0r God yet demonstrated an astonishing degree of incompetence. He tried to commit a crime and it backfired. That's funny for all the right reasons.
Oh, and giving a bunch of n00bs a keen flash of insight about Alt-F4 and getting a good laugh while costing them nothing more than the few seconds it takes to reconnect is a harmless prank. Harmless. And if there's this one guy who keeps reconnecting and Alt-F4'ing back out, so much the better.
What IBM asked for long ago was something along the lines of "all documents, letters, e-mails, files, recordings, minutes, blah blah blah, ever created or exchanged on the following topics or with the following parties." So they've already been subpoenaed, see.
So SCO sends a list over: "Here are all the documents pertaining to this matter we have ever produced." Call that list List A. Then they send a list that says "here are all the documents on List A that we won't hand over, because they are covered by client-attorney privilege." That's List B, the Privilege Log. What SCO has to hand over is all documents on List A but not on List B.
What IBM has done is complained to the court that SCO is putting lots of documents on List B for no good reason.
I guess IBM can be happy that these documents are missing from the list now, since it means they can try to subpoena them.
They've already been subpoenaed. That's how they wound up on the Privilege List.
P.S. If you have a document pertaining to a lawsuit, but you don't declare it, you go to jail for obstruction of justice.
Right now, I don't have $200 or whatever for a converter box. And the time I spend watching television is wasteful---destructive to other parts of my life. So in a way, I really do hope this goes through by the end of 2006. So long as I can keep buying DVDs for a while---our toddler needs his Teletubbies.
This is a really great opportunity for 70 million households to improve their quality of life by turning off their televisions for good---or having them cut off for them.
OTOH this is a rather hilarious demonstration of how thoroughly a government can fuck up a free market with its high-minded bullshit.
I totally disagree with you. You have blown an inoccuous statement way out of proportion, and are attacking her unnecessarily. I think you have fallen to the cult of victimization. Frankly, you're starting to sound a bit shrill.
You should ask yourself where all this venom is coming from, because there's something here that bothers you a whole lot---way out of proportion with what it deserves. Here original sentence was
While some men apparently would be happy to spend the next 40 years of their lives working on the next version of MS Office, I want to *do* something.
If you're going to quibble and overanalyze, I invite you to look at the second word of that sentence, the one which modifies "men". It's "some", isn't it? "Some men". I have awful news for you, Moofie. Some men would be happy to spend the next 40 years of their lifes working on the next version of MS Office.
KhTM also expressed concern that if she did this, she would see her life as wasted, as 40 years of missed opportunities. I agree with her: I lack the capacity for that sort of monomania. I'd like to think I'm not that boring or that obsessed with stability.
I'm finding this thread a bit tedious now, so if it's all the same to you, I'm going to stop participating in it.
I gotta tell you, Moofie, I don't see the insult. I think she may be attributing to all men what only a few men---and a few women as well---commit to.
There ain't a thing in the world I see myself doing for twenty straight years, except, Ghod willing, still being a good husband and father. Also alive. Alive is good. Mostly. I'm told.
But I totally respect KhTM's desire not to be tied down with a job that is also an identity. And restlessness as graduation approaches ain't out of the ordinary. I'm graduating in December and for a little while there I go so desperate I acutally considered law school.
I also respect her statement about ruining hobbies with work. But the computer stuff I do at home has always been different from the computer stuff I did at work. More porn involved, for one thing. But tedious load balancing and tablespace allocation at work becomes tinkering with PHP at home. Different enough I don't feel an overlap.
That said, I think women are seriously underrepresented in our field. I'm actually seeking my CS degree right now, and there aren't very many women in my classes. The ones who are here are 70% foreign nationals, many of whom I expect will be returning to their home countries when they finish.
TFA showed about 27% of BSCS degrees going to women---down from 37% in 1982. OTOH, the number of overall bachelor's degrees going to women is currently 58%---and has been above 50% since 1981. I guess the moral of the story is that the women are getting smarter, and guys are getting dumber, and that the guys who are getting smarter are going to be working for women.
The field has been bloated with get-rich-quick degree-seekers for too long, the way engineering was in the 1980s. I plan to stick around, so the odds are better for me to get a job instead of somebody taking it out of a love of money rather than a love of the work.
Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high.
With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure.
Legend has it that Napoleon had his new soldiers measured on two scales: ambitious vs. lazy, and smart vs. stupid. This produced a 2x2 decision matrix used as follows:
If a soldier is ambitious and smart, he will be made a sargeant.
If a soldier is lazy and smart, he will be made an officer.
If a soldier is lazy and stupid, he will be made cannon fodder.
If a soldier is ambitious and stupid, he will be taken out and shot.
Of course, it does have to be the right kind of lazy, which acknowledges that getting things done is good, but knows you should never bust your ass when you can get someone else to bust theirs on your behalf:
The general says "We need to win this battle."
The colonel says, "To win this battle, we need to take that ridgeline."
The major says, "To take that ridgeline, we need to take that hill."
The captain says, "Sargeant, take that hill and report back to me when you're done. Just wave a flag or something." Then he goes to the officers' club to drink Scotch and figure out whether nailing the major's wife or the colonel's will be better for his career.
...and maybe some day I will learn how to close an <em> tag, or maybe even how to click "Preview" before submitting a rant. Pity Slashdot doesn't support versioning---don't have VBScript installed, I suppose.
Very few people or departments make actual, serious use of "Track Changes," or bother with any sort of revision management except on the most formal of documents. I'm willing to bet that well over 90%, and possibly over 99% of the documents that are produced collaberatively are done without "Track Changes." At most, coauthors will use "Show Revisions;" most often they just attach the document to an e-mail that says "I added a paragraph about how they have to sign the contract before we start working."
Word97 supports versioning. It's right there on the File menu. Eight year old feature, at least. I believe versioning is an intrinsic; VBScript simply provides an interface through which one can access its rather snazzier features directly.
At any rate, a word processor having a scripting language is nothing new; having a scripting language that borders on being a real programming language is nothing new; that Microsoft may or may not implement out-of-the-box features of their word processor using a scripting language is nothing new, and is in fact entirely peripheral to a discussion of why features needed by fewer than three percent of users are being incorporated into a general-purpose product, particularly when their addition reduces the oveall quality of the product.
I find your reasoning hasty and specious. False dilemmas are a logical fallacy, as are slippery slopes. It's been some time since I've taken rhetoric, so I'm just going to file your statements under "sloppy thinking" and get on with better things.
At home, Clippy is disabled. At school, (when I wrote "at work" above, I meant "at school"), the computers in the labs forget your Word XP settings between sessions, so you have to disable Clippy every time you log in.
As for OpenOffice, I think it is a wonderful and usable product, but it is a serious heavyweight compared to Word97. My primary computer at home is a Pentium II/300 with 160MB RAM, more than enough to run anything in the Office97 suite, even with Firefox and Thunderbird running at the same time. OpenOffice (which I have only tried under Debian/Sarge and Gnome) on this machine is frustratingly slow.
I was working on a paper today, using (surprise!) Word. At home I use Word 97. At work, I had been tinkering with it a bit using Word XP. I was perfectly okay with this (as was Word), because I needed not a single feature that Word XP that was not also in Word 97.
Then I realized something: I was using not a single feature in Word 97 that was not also in Word 5.0 for DOS, which was first published in 1989. And the only feature in Word 5.0 that wasn't also in 1987's Word 4.0 was the print preview.
That's it. Since 1987, the only thing that has changed in this product is that the product is more bloated, the GUI dynamic prettification lures me into dicking with the format when I should be worrying about content, and Clippy keeps making surprise visits.
The headline here says proprietary software will continue to suck "unless consumers start demanding more"
The problem is, consumers are demanding more---more features, more bells, more whistles. Prettier interfaces. If your new word processor doesn't have more features in it, why would anybody take it over what they already have?
The problem is that quality is suffering due to demand for quantity. Quality just doesn't sell. How's this sound on a box: "Now, more stable than ever!" If you're writing server software or industrial process controllers, it sounds great. But it won't impress the consumer market at all. This is how the market works: Quantity of features sells. Quality of software comes in the form of patches and service packs.
Apollo 13 is easily one of the ten best geek movies out there. I really and truly admired the engineers the film portrayed---they were clever and resourceful, kluging up a solution to a life-threatening problem tens of thousands of miles away.
The reason this is such a wonderful geek film is that there is no bad guy. No evil to overcome. It's not even man versus nature. It's man versus The Problem, and man, brandishing a slide rule and some duct tape, triumphs.
You need to do your homework, too. Nobody launches a ten million dollar speculative venture without at least calling a lawyer.
The laws for international cruises and other shipping are not as simplistic as lines drawn in the water.
If this ship bothers to dock in Mexico from time to time, it's an international cruise ship. These people working on the ship are considered crew. The payroll of the crew (and for that matter, all other labor laws beyond international treaty) comes under the jurisdiction of the country where the ship is registered. A quote:
If the ships flew U.S. flags, they would have to employ more expensive U.S. crews as well as have U.S. ownership and be U.S.-built...Wage and hour laws were written decades ago...And, court decisions have since concluded, Congress didn't say these laws apply to foreign-flag vessels.
Under the Internal Revenue Code, some non-U.S. companies incorporated in certain jurisdictions -- Panama, for example -- are not subject to federal income tax on the money from the international operation of ships.
So all they have to do is not operate between two or more U.S. ports. They will owe their country of registry some money. Sure. But a lot of countries, like Liberia and Panama, have companies around the world registering ships there, precisely because their tax (and inspection, and labor) laws are so lenient.
And if the U.S. tries to get pushy, all they have to do is weigh anchor and park three miles off the coast of San Diego---in Mexican territorial waters.
When some geeky friends of mine came to town, we naturally went to the local B&N to inspect the computer section. Many of the books had electronic tags tucked between the pages. Close inspection revealed that a price of around $35 qualified a book as worth tagging. So I set about removing about a half dozen tags and slipping them into one friend's various pockes, his book bag, pants cuff, wherever. He's usually the amiable, cooperative type, so when the alarms went off, I was sure that hilarity would ensue.
They waved him through! I was looking forward to at least five minutes of LMAO, but they just said, "Sorry 'bout that. Have a good day!" and sent him on his way.
If one of those beepers goes off, depending on the store, I instantly either
Turn and stare patiently at the nearest clerk. They will wave me out the door.
Turn and give my best Italian "Whaaaaat?"---with hand gesture---to the nearest clerk. They will wave me out the door.
Shout "Goddammit!", turn and glare murderously at the nearest clerk. They will wave me out the door.
I can't remember the last time I was actually asked to submit to a search. It's been long enough that I can't remember how well I cooperated. I do know I don't handle it with much courtesy, particularly if I'm being treated like cattle. If afterwards they said "Thank you," I'm almost positive I replied "and thank you for treating me like a criminal!"
I have a Petzl 3 LED headlamp , the size of half a golf ball, with a retracting headband. I keep it in my motorcycle tank bag---and use to hike to the the deer stand. Incredibly light, good for reading in a tent, for roadside map consultation (back before I invested in a GPS). Three LEDs, sips battery power, a good, natural color of light.
The absolute best use for new-generation LEDs I have seen is for brake lights. Many high-end cars, and even some delivery trucks, use LEDs now, and the advantages are clear: they are damned bright, highly directional, don't burn out, and best of all, they reach full brightness a tenth of a second faster than an incandescent bulb. That may not sound like much, but at 60MPH, 0.1 second is 8.8 feet extra feet for the car behind you to start reacting (100km/h ==> 2.8m in 0.1s). I have blinky LEDs on my motorcycle and they solve all sorts of problems with tailgaters.
Believe it or not, some things are better taught without a computer. English, which involves reading things called "books," and the unaided creation of things called "cohesive sentences," is probably one of them. The most advanced technology required in that classroom is an overhead projector for the teacher to diagram sentences.
The only time an English teacher should need a computer is to compose tests and submit grades.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to Manuel Noriega and Saddam Hussein.
Stupid +3 threshold threaded browsing had me thinking that what I replied to was actually in reply to this.
Yah, if somebody comes to you looking for legitimate, honest help, and you screw them over in a big way, you're an asshole.
Never mind, then. Sorry.
Yes, there is: We're not talking about an innocent n00b---we're talking about a malicious yet fundamentally clueless asshole who was attempting to vandalize someone else's machine. bitchcheck acted like he was some sort of 1337 HaX0r God yet demonstrated an astonishing degree of incompetence. He tried to commit a crime and it backfired. That's funny for all the right reasons.
Oh, and giving a bunch of n00bs a keen flash of insight about Alt-F4 and getting a good laugh while costing them nothing more than the few seconds it takes to reconnect is a harmless prank. Harmless. And if there's this one guy who keeps reconnecting and Alt-F4'ing back out, so much the better.
Check this out from bash.org.
So SCO sends a list over: "Here are all the documents pertaining to this matter we have ever produced." Call that list List A. Then they send a list that says "here are all the documents on List A that we won't hand over, because they are covered by client-attorney privilege." That's List B, the Privilege Log. What SCO has to hand over is all documents on List A but not on List B.
What IBM has done is complained to the court that SCO is putting lots of documents on List B for no good reason.
They've already been subpoenaed. That's how they wound up on the Privilege List.
P.S. If you have a document pertaining to a lawsuit, but you don't declare it, you go to jail for obstruction of justice.
Remind me not to use the Internet before my first cup of coffee.
This is a really great opportunity for 70 million households to improve their quality of life by turning off their televisions for good---or having them cut off for them.
OTOH this is a rather hilarious demonstration of how thoroughly a government can fuck up a free market with its high-minded bullshit.
You should ask yourself where all this venom is coming from, because there's something here that bothers you a whole lot---way out of proportion with what it deserves. Here original sentence was
If you're going to quibble and overanalyze, I invite you to look at the second word of that sentence, the one which modifies "men". It's "some", isn't it? "Some men". I have awful news for you, Moofie. Some men would be happy to spend the next 40 years of their lifes working on the next version of MS Office.
KhTM also expressed concern that if she did this, she would see her life as wasted, as 40 years of missed opportunities. I agree with her: I lack the capacity for that sort of monomania. I'd like to think I'm not that boring or that obsessed with stability.
I'm finding this thread a bit tedious now, so if it's all the same to you, I'm going to stop participating in it.
Just run it under Wine...
There ain't a thing in the world I see myself doing for twenty straight years, except, Ghod willing, still being a good husband and father. Also alive. Alive is good. Mostly. I'm told.
But I totally respect KhTM's desire not to be tied down with a job that is also an identity. And restlessness as graduation approaches ain't out of the ordinary. I'm graduating in December and for a little while there I go so desperate I acutally considered law school.
I also respect her statement about ruining hobbies with work. But the computer stuff I do at home has always been different from the computer stuff I did at work. More porn involved, for one thing. But tedious load balancing and tablespace allocation at work becomes tinkering with PHP at home. Different enough I don't feel an overlap.
TFA showed about 27% of BSCS degrees going to women---down from 37% in 1982. OTOH, the number of overall bachelor's degrees going to women is currently 58%---and has been above 50% since 1981. I guess the moral of the story is that the women are getting smarter, and guys are getting dumber, and that the guys who are getting smarter are going to be working for women.
Besides, if there's a an employee shortage, salaries are more likely to stay high.
With the offshoring of certain types of work, I must wonder if the number of IT jobs in the U.S. is actually going to shrink---at least in relative numbers, rather than increase over then next decade. It'll all be interesting, I'm sure.
Of course, it does have to be the right kind of lazy, which acknowledges that getting things done is good, but knows you should never bust your ass when you can get someone else to bust theirs on your behalf:
The general says "We need to win this battle."
The colonel says, "To win this battle, we need to take that ridgeline."
The major says, "To take that ridgeline, we need to take that hill."
The captain says, "Sargeant, take that hill and report back to me when you're done. Just wave a flag or something." Then he goes to the officers' club to drink Scotch and figure out whether nailing the major's wife or the colonel's will be better for his career.
...and maybe some day I will learn how to close an <em> tag, or maybe even how to click "Preview" before submitting a rant. Pity Slashdot doesn't support versioning---don't have VBScript installed, I suppose.
Very few people or departments make actual, serious use of "Track Changes," or bother with any sort of revision management except on the most formal of documents. I'm willing to bet that well over 90%, and possibly over 99% of the documents that are produced collaberatively are done without "Track Changes." At most, coauthors will use "Show Revisions;" most often they just attach the document to an e-mail that says "I added a paragraph about how they have to sign the contract before we start working."
Word97 supports versioning. It's right there on the File menu. Eight year old feature, at least. I believe versioning is an intrinsic; VBScript simply provides an interface through which one can access its rather snazzier features directly.
At any rate, a word processor having a scripting language is nothing new; having a scripting language that borders on being a real programming language is nothing new; that Microsoft may or may not implement out-of-the-box features of their word processor using a scripting language is nothing new, and is in fact entirely peripheral to a discussion of why features needed by fewer than three percent of users are being incorporated into a general-purpose product, particularly when their addition reduces the oveall quality of the product.
I find your reasoning hasty and specious. False dilemmas are a logical fallacy, as are slippery slopes. It's been some time since I've taken rhetoric, so I'm just going to file your statements under "sloppy thinking" and get on with better things.
As for OpenOffice, I think it is a wonderful and usable product, but it is a serious heavyweight compared to Word97. My primary computer at home is a Pentium II/300 with 160MB RAM, more than enough to run anything in the Office97 suite, even with Firefox and Thunderbird running at the same time. OpenOffice (which I have only tried under Debian/Sarge and Gnome) on this machine is frustratingly slow.
I was working on a paper today, using (surprise!) Word. At home I use Word 97. At work, I had been tinkering with it a bit using Word XP. I was perfectly okay with this (as was Word), because I needed not a single feature that Word XP that was not also in Word 97.
Then I realized something: I was using not a single feature in Word 97 that was not also in Word 5.0 for DOS, which was first published in 1989. And the only feature in Word 5.0 that wasn't also in 1987's Word 4.0 was the print preview.
That's it. Since 1987, the only thing that has changed in this product is that the product is more bloated, the GUI dynamic prettification lures me into dicking with the format when I should be worrying about content, and Clippy keeps making surprise visits.
The problem is, consumers are demanding more---more features, more bells, more whistles. Prettier interfaces. If your new word processor doesn't have more features in it, why would anybody take it over what they already have?
The problem is that quality is suffering due to demand for quantity. Quality just doesn't sell. How's this sound on a box: "Now, more stable than ever!" If you're writing server software or industrial process controllers, it sounds great. But it won't impress the consumer market at all. This is how the market works: Quantity of features sells. Quality of software comes in the form of patches and service packs.
The reason this is such a wonderful geek film is that there is no bad guy. No evil to overcome. It's not even man versus nature. It's man versus The Problem, and man, brandishing a slide rule and some duct tape, triumphs.
The laws for international cruises and other shipping are not as simplistic as lines drawn in the water.
If this ship bothers to dock in Mexico from time to time, it's an international cruise ship. These people working on the ship are considered crew. The payroll of the crew (and for that matter, all other labor laws beyond international treaty) comes under the jurisdiction of the country where the ship is registered. A quote:
So all they have to do is not operate between two or more U.S. ports. They will owe their country of registry some money. Sure. But a lot of countries, like Liberia and Panama, have companies around the world registering ships there, precisely because their tax (and inspection, and labor) laws are so lenient.
And if the U.S. tries to get pushy, all they have to do is weigh anchor and park three miles off the coast of San Diego---in Mexican territorial waters.
They waved him through! I was looking forward to at least five minutes of LMAO, but they just said, "Sorry 'bout that. Have a good day!" and sent him on his way.
So much for social engineering.
I can't remember the last time I was actually asked to submit to a search. It's been long enough that I can't remember how well I cooperated. I do know I don't handle it with much courtesy, particularly if I'm being treated like cattle. If afterwards they said "Thank you," I'm almost positive I replied "and thank you for treating me like a criminal!"
...and in every state, if it turns out I'm not actual shoplifter, I get to claim false imprisonment and (probably) assault.
Q: "How many Californians does it take to resolder an LED?"
A: "Californians don't resolder in LEDs. They resolder in hot tubs."
One can only pray for a GFI failure.
Q: "How many trailer trash rednecks does it take to resolder an LED?"
A: "They still use lightbulbs!"
Okay, that one's still okay.
The absolute best use for new-generation LEDs I have seen is for brake lights. Many high-end cars, and even some delivery trucks, use LEDs now, and the advantages are clear: they are damned bright, highly directional, don't burn out, and best of all, they reach full brightness a tenth of a second faster than an incandescent bulb. That may not sound like much, but at 60MPH, 0.1 second is 8.8 feet extra feet for the car behind you to start reacting (100km/h ==> 2.8m in 0.1s). I have blinky LEDs on my motorcycle and they solve all sorts of problems with tailgaters.
The only time an English teacher should need a computer is to compose tests and submit grades.