Bart: [watching Flanders] An ax. He's got an ax! I'll save you, Lisa!
[tries to walk on his leg, falls back] Uh, I'll save you by
calling the police. [dials 911] Voice: Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u-
Fone[tm]. If you know the name of the felony being committed,
press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you
are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on
the line.
Bart: [growls, punches some numbers] Voice: You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or
queen being murdered, press one. -- Shockingly ineffective answering services, "Bart of Darkness"
who realized that grandparent (ie, YOU, I'm assuming) is a f* karmawhore. Post fulltexts as AC next time.
On the other hand, AC's have taken to posting fulltext with slight "modifications" -- the last one I saw involved CmdrTaco's sexual habits.
This baby showed up in my M2 box. I rated the "-1, Flamebait" as "Unfair". If anything, it's "Overrated" or perhaps "Redundant", but Karma Whoring just ain't "Flamebait" to me.
Well, if yours goes down, I just copied it to a Tripod mirror. I won't take it down until who knows when... hopefully, it won't make anyone mad. Cheers!
Here's the rest. I'm not posting AC because of the new troll technique (posting "creatively modified" mirror text).
What core developers should do to help future developers
There are many reasons for our difficulties to attract developers and other contributors, but it all comes back to the same problem: real or perceived, the barrier to entry is too high. To get more developers, we must make it easier to contribute to GnuCash. "Casual" hacking on GnuCash to scratch an itch is much to hard, even for an experienced developer.
Work on the developer documentation problem
There is no complete and current architecture and API reference. Now that we've put the doxygen plumbing in place, we must make sure that ALL functions that are in public headers ARE documented, even if only by saying "Document me!", so the doxygen docs become truly authoritative. Then put the docs on the web site. We must also write a report writing Howto: We already have some very powerful reports, but this is the single most common offer for help we receive "Hi, I'd like to write "foo" report for GnuCash, can someone help me or point me to documentation on that subject". Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows anymore... So the answer is always the same: 'there isn't any; use the source Luke'. We are wasting the chance to hook countless new developers.
Fix core capabilities in the engine
Existing developers should focus on architecture issues and completing existing core features that only they can realistically tackle, such as Lots (which are needed to support accounting periods) or fixing the problems in the scheduled transactions, so that new developers can build on that functionality.
Improve interoperability with other software or new modules
GnuCash has a great, powerful multi-user financial engine that many people ask to plug into. Unfortunately much of this power is locked away. There is no way to interface with a running GnuCash (the RPC backend and perl bindings have bitrotted), there is no way to start a new instance while passing parameters like "import this file". We need a wrapper that will start GnuCash if it isn't already started and pass API requests to it, with or without GUI. The current module system needs to be completed or replaced. It's hard for new developers to integrate new modules in the build and menu system (we need a howto on that too...). Also, data import isn't enough, we must also support export to inter-operate with other software. (LibOfx should get us there if I can just find time to work on it).
I think fixing/developing external interfaces and writing additional import and export support should greatly help our developer crunch in the medium term, by consolidating part of financial software development in the free software ecosystem. We have received many, many inquiries from people wanting to integrate gnucash with (name of web system, database, payroll, kde front end or whatever). We can't afford to loose these people, whether or not the core developers like their pet project. We must use the gnome 2 port as an opportunity to finish/cleanup/document our interfaces and from then on answer "I don't know if your idea will work, but you're welcome to try; here's the relevant documents to get you started."
What developers should do to help users and decrease developer load
Make sure the mailing lists are easily searchable And/or document how to properly search them (Google isn't cutting it).
Get more people write access to the website
We have received many offers to help, but turned most of them down for no good reason. The website is nice, but it isn't up to date, it's a source of frustration, misleading to users and future developers, and pointlessly increases traffic on gnucash-user and the #gnucash IRC channel.
Quickly implement a Wiki or similar system
This will allow us to have an effective place to point users on gnucash-user
Sorry, I know I'll get modded down to nothing, but I've got Karma to burn and this just cracked me up:
Mortgage and Loan Repayment druid and many, many others.
I imagined the barbarian horde from those Capital One "What's In Your Wallet?" ads fighting it out with the Loan Repayment druids, like something from Star Wars II or The Two Towers.
I'm guilty of depending on the built-in "Automatic Updates" function in Win 2k. I don't really have a good excuse -- I'm a programmer, or at least that's what my boss thinks. But I know the non-technical people believed Bill Gates when his program said:
Automatic Updates Windows can find the updates you need and deliver them directly to your computer.
[X] Keep my computer up to date. With this setting enabled, Windows Update software may be automatically updated prior to applying any other updates.
Settings:
(o) Notify me before downloading any updates and notify me again before installing them on my computer
The only update I've been "notified" about is the Windows Media Player update, which I've kept ignoring because I don't use Media Player.
Besides, windowsupdate.com wouldn't have done me any good. It only seems to work in IE. I run Opera, you insensitive clods!
Just FYI, I've confirmed on my system that at least some of the parent's information is true. I got hit around 2pm Dallas time, and I've now got a file called msblast.exe in c:\winnt\system32 with a file length of 6176 bytes.
After the "to say LOVE YOU SAN!!" string, I find these words: bill gates you make hi possi. And before it, it looks like it says "I ju wan to say" (with control characters that may or may not be of interest).
Sure enough, Symantec has some info now, too (just sent by someone in my co.).
Timing sucks on this one -- I'm right in the middle of coding for 3rd quarter tax changes. Crap!
What are your views on the RIAA's recent actions to protect their copyrights?
Although it's a cool question, I doubt this one will make the cut. Copyright law is a federal issue, not a state issue.
Contract law, on the other hand, is indeed written at the state level. In September 2001, artists from Courtney Love to LeeAnn Rimes testified in Sacramento about artists' rights issues. Also in the state capitol that day were the Dixie Chicks, before they became a hot political topic for other reasons.
When I was in customer support, attention to details was an essential part of diagnosing users' problems... especially since I was supporting international clients who 1) were highly non-technical, 2) were using hugely outdated equipment, 3) were not native English speakers, and most importantly 4) had a job to do other than dinking on a PC.
So the AC's post really scared me when I saw he claims to do tech support for a living:
so [1]whats [2] your point.. that doesnt proove [3] anything, other than the fact that the fictional client is a lot smarter than the idiots [4] that made the previously reported calls to tech support... I mean I do tech support for a living, and if you think you have prooved [5] anything just cause [6] u [7] can give an example of a good tech suport call.. [8] Thats how most of my calls go.. [9] Its the really stupid ones that get too [10] ya.
Ok, how many of those 10 highlighted items seem needlessly picky? Like 8 and 9, run-on sentences and ellipses without enough dots. Or 3 and 5, mispelled "prove"? And we can't forget 1, capitalization, right?
Do you say, "what's the big deal, you *know* what I'm trying to say! Why should my grammar matter?" Well, that's exactly what our users are saying. They *know* how to do their job, just like you *know* how to write a coherent sentence. But computers aren't as forgiving, so they have to spell every word correctly, and to have perfect grammar every time.
I guess the strange thing is this: if we Slashdotters are such hotshot coders and hAxX0r5, why can't we spell?
When I heard the story this morning, I thought of bone marrow transplants. In that case, aren't you getting someone else's blood-generating cells? And wouldn't your blood cells then contain someone else's DNA?
It seems like they'd make a Law & Order or CSI episode from this: a career criminal arranges to get a bone marrow transplant from someone whose DNA is known to authorities, but who hasn't yet been apprehended (ooh, big word!). Then, the real bad guy can leave all the blood he wants at the crime scene, and never worry about being tracked.
Of course, the side effects would probably make a lifestyle of violent crime a bit more difficult than, say, the odd embezzlement here and there.
"I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market," said Jonathan Thompson, vice president of the Washington-based trade group, which has more than 650 members.
That's great. I'd put Mr. Thompson right up there with the Iraqi Information Minister, and his "deathless quotes":
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"
"God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis."
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Oh, um... scratch that last one, ok?
And he gets better and better!
Thompson said customers need to have realistic expectations. He urged buyers to ask themselves two questions before plunking down cash for software: "What is it that I want this software to do?" and "Am I going to use this software as it's been marketed?"
Well, if I were to use Microsoft software "as it's been marketed", I'd expect to be using it to magically draw pretty pictures around my everyday activities, transforming a burned-out building shell into a stage with a spotlight.
"Make sure that your expectations are appropriate to what a product is marketing," he said.
What the hell does that mean? Intel marketed its product -- a chunk of finely-etched silicon in a plastic box -- with a bunch of blue guys. What expectations are appropriate in that case?
Well, I may never understand all the cultural references in Miyazaki-san's Spirited Away, but at least now I understand what Rin was doing in the scene where she is moving a barrel-shaped boat along, seemingly by doing nothing more than twisting what I thought was a rudder.
"Sculling" -- my vocabulary word of the day. Thanks!
I love it -- I think -- when I get replies like this in my Metamoderation bucket. On one hand, it's +1, Insightful... on the other, it's -1, Troll. Makes me wish for a "+/- 1, Insightful Troll" moderation.
So I'm faced with this question:
Original Discussion: Community Involvement for an Open Source Project? Rating: Troll. This rating is Unfair ( ) (o) ( ) Fair
I don't believe in wimping out and selecting the middle choice, so I picked Fair. It's a troll. It just happens to be an Interesting and/or Insightful one.
I say a bunch of us should get together, pool our resources, and buy up a couple of thousand square miles of land and have it designated a no-light zone.
Loving County consists of
671 square miles of flat desert terrain with a few low-rolling hills stretching over calichified bedrock and wash deposits of pebbles, gravel, and sand. The county closed its school system in 1972 because only two students were enrolled. In 1980 there were fifty-nine whites and thirty-two Hispanics in the county; the median age was 45.3 years. Fifty residents had received four years of high school, and there were four college graduates. At the end of 1989 the estimated population increased slightly to 100, but prospects for future development remained slim.
Looks like a good bet for your proposal! Imagine a whole community of Slashdotters in the middle of the West Texas desert.
But don't forget to bring your own water. "Water from the Pecos, however, is too saline for drinking, so the 100 residents of the county haul water from a community tank." Evian, it ain't.
On the bright side, though, we could elect CowboyNeal as County Sheriff!
By contrast, the efficient low-pressure sodium bulbs now used in some street lamps emit only a narrow range of yellow light. This minimizes ecological disruptions, since creatures don't perceive low-pressure sodium as natural light. [...] But at least one, San Diego, decided to switch back to high-pressure sodium after residents complained that the yellow pall cast by low-pressure sodium bulbs made them uneasy.
I'm with the creatures... I don't preceive that ugly yellow light as natural, either! One Dallas suburb uses what I assume are low-pressure sodium lights, and it's downright painful to drive down the street. In fact, it's moderately dangerous -- you can't tell the streetlights from the traffic lights, especially when fatigued.
On the other hand, I didn't know that the lights were easier on the light pollution -- in fact, I had heard that they were worse, but I probably got them confused with the wide-spectrum high-pressure sodium lights mentioned in the article.
Hmmm... wonder what would happen if you broke a sodium vapor light under water? If you try it, don't forget to send the story to this guy.
A dupe bug would bring the economics of such a system crashing down.
Interestingly, the article's authors came up with a solution to the problem of software bugs, though I don't think it was their intention:
- Farms/Forestry: Farms produce perishable food, wood, or textile items in predictable quantities that may vary with the weather. Farms may be damaged or destroyed by war, mismanagement or natural disasters.
Just imagine a "software bug" in the context of the original "bug": an insect that causes big trouble (think Biblically, as in plagues of locusts).
Someone hacks into the system and steals $5,000 of real-world l00t? Bad news for local farmers, a cloud of hungry grasshoppers devoured your fields yesterday. Estimated damages are g$1 million ($5,000 real-world).
Game designer conference... in Barbados? News flash: last night's thunderstorms spawned an F5 tornado that tore through the center of Avatarville. No PKs, but damage is estimated in the g$Millions.
[FBI | SEC | DEA] investigation? We're sorry, but a record-shattering earthquake destroyed all your possessions, the bank where your money was kept, and by the way, You Are Dead.
As for myself, if I wanted that level of uncontrollable risk, I'd play Real Life.
... I had always wondered if anyone would actually buy from a spammer.
Any chance the spammer did a media honeypot? Released fake records to make marketers *think* he was successful?
From a working horse owner's perspective
on
Scientists Clone Horse
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't claim to have real "working" horses -- we're not on the King Ranch riding a hundred miles of fence on horseback. We've got a couple of horses (with more on the way) that we've selected for their smarts and endurance. They're Appaloosas, but the pretty patterns are strictly a nice feature, not a design requirement.
So this statement really irritates me:
[Texas A&M research veterinarian Katrin] Hinrichs is awaiting the birth of a cloned American quarter horse -- a copy of Hinrichs' 9-year-old daughter's show horse -- in mid-November. She believes cloning's most obvious use in the horse industry would be cloning such show horses.
Unfortunately, this researcher is probably right on the money, literally. There is huge money in show horses, just like there is in purebred show dogs. The problem is how selective breeding -- in both cases -- has resulted in an animal that is useless for any real purpose.
Appaloosas get bred for particular patterns of spots, Quarter Horses get bred for very specific ratios of body parts, Arabians are bred to hold themselves "just so"... you get the picture. Thoroughbreds, bred for speed, may be the only horses that are commercially bred for something that is even remotely "natural" to a horse's instincts -- and even they are broken down and "retired" at an age when a working horse is just getting started.
What you see, way too often, is a horse that looks pretty, but is completely screwed up in the head. And that's with traditional breeding (and I'm including the straw o'semen in the "traditional" category). I can only imagine the neurotic, unpredictable horses that will come from cloning the "best" show horses. They'll be useless for any actual work, probably won't be able to reproduce without assistance (already a problem today), and will be a danger to their rider and anyone nearby.
Give me a field-bred "grade" horse over a "show" horse any day. It's like our dogs -- we have two mixed-breed puppies (half Jack Russell) that are sharp as a tack. The big black dog that got dumped as a puppy is the loyal protector of the household. And the $700 Schnauzer is the stupidest creature on the face of God's green earth. Show dog? No thanks, I'll take the mutt in the corner.
One pa-packet, two pa-packet, three pa-packet, four...
All this is only true if you abuse yourself by eating the Elmer's Glue-derived paste misleadingly called Ramen Noodles by companies like Top Ramen or the too-aptly-named Smack Ramen.
In college in the 80s, I was introduced to real ramen noodles by some Malaysian friends. They invited me to their apartment and fixed the most wonderful dish, adding fresh vegetables and meat. But the base of the dish wasn't American-style paste-flavored ramen! They told me to check out the oriental food store, so I did.
Probably the most accessible brand for US folks is Sapporo Ichiban, from Japan. I can't find an English-language web site for the company, but this review sums it up pretty well. The packaging and instructions are in English, so it makes a good start. Although it seems to be available online, you can save the shipping costs by simply visiting your local Asian market, if you live in any large US city. (Side note: I also found Sapporo Ichiban at a convenience store in Corsicana, TX! Coming from the south, take Bus I-45.)
Once you've mastered Sapporo Ichiban, you will be ready for real adventure. Start with the SI brand noodles with mostly-Japanese text, then move to noodles from all over Asia with no English at all! I've found Vietnamese noodles to be way too fishy, but most everything else has been good. And the best of all is one I just found: a Malaysian brand of noodles that just might be the ones from that delicious dish from Oklahoma State University, long ago.
My friends also tried to teach me how to say some very vulgar things in Chinese... fortunately, that memory wasn't as enduring as the memory of those noodles.
Two decades of VR Gloves, with nothing to show
on
Sign Language Out Loud
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It seems like the VR glove concept appears over and over again, but never seems to "click". I remember the Nintendo Power Glove from the late '80s - early '90s -- for the original NES. If it had been such a hit with the gaming community, why wasn't there a N64 and GameCube version?
And outside gaming, the idea comes and just as quickly goes. Here's an article about tele-medicine using VR gloves, where someone at location A pushes on your abdomen and a doctor at location B "feels" whether your spleen is out of joint. The date on the article... July, 2000. Going nowhere.
And here's a telling statement from the referenced article:
Although there is more work to be done with the AcceleGlove, Hernandez-Rebollar is not sure if he will have the necessary financial support to continue his research after his dissertation.
Something is making it darned difficult to bring VR Glove technology to fruition, despite almost two decades of poking around with it.
What's the "killer app" that will have us all putting on our V-Gloves?
Slashdot Mirror
That wasn't the Simpson family's only encounter with automated law enforcement, as I recall:
Bart of Darkness
Bart: [watching Flanders] An ax. He's got an ax! I'll save you, Lisa!
[tries to walk on his leg, falls back] Uh, I'll save you by
calling the police. [dials 911]
Voice: Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u-
Fone[tm]. If you know the name of the felony being committed,
press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you
are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on
the line.
Bart: [growls, punches some numbers]
Voice: You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or
queen being murdered, press one.
-- Shockingly ineffective answering services, "Bart of Darkness"
Apparently it made someone mad :)
I had wondered what the limits of a Tripod mirror would be. Looks like I found out!
ALLOTMENT
Total Bandwidth Allotted: 1.0 GB
And the hourly stats - wow! Hittin' the links all night long! FYI, they appear to have an hourly limit of 5.7MB:
7 pm: 0 KB
8 pm: 603.9 KB
9 pm: 8.2 MB
10 pm: 10.2 MB
11 pm: 5.3 MB
12 am: 5.5 MB
1 am: 8.2 MB
2 am: 6.0 MB
3 am: 3.3 MB
4 am: 3.8 MB
5 am: 3.6 MB
6 am: 4.1 MB
7 am: 4.2 MB
8 am: 7.4 MB
9 am: 1.3 MB
10 am: tilt!
So I've officially Slashdotted a site. Though it hardly counts, being a Tripod free account. But hey, gotta start somewhere!
who realized that grandparent (ie, YOU, I'm assuming) is a f* karmawhore. Post fulltexts as AC next time.
On the other hand, AC's have taken to posting fulltext with slight "modifications" -- the last one I saw involved CmdrTaco's sexual habits.
This baby showed up in my M2 box. I rated the "-1, Flamebait" as "Unfair". If anything, it's "Overrated" or perhaps "Redundant", but Karma Whoring just ain't "Flamebait" to me.
You'd think every hotmail account would get a message saying "Plug that hole" from whoever it is that runs hotmail.
From the bottom of the www.hotmail.com page:
(C)2003 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
There's your answer!
Well, if yours goes down, I just copied it to a Tripod mirror. I won't take it down until who knows when... hopefully, it won't make anyone mad. Cheers!
elementary quantum physics... charged fermions... dipolar magnetic field... hyperfine splitting... spin coupling... energy is quantized... antiparallel... rough analogy... multiple valence numbers... valence shell geometry... gamma-radiation quanta
Holy crap! I thought a Slurpee brain freeze was bad enough!
(Although I must admit, once I slowed down enough to read the terms, I really enjoyed the trip. Thanks!)
Here's the rest. I'm not posting AC because of the new troll technique (posting "creatively modified" mirror text).
What core developers should do to help future developers
There are many reasons for our difficulties to attract developers and other contributors, but it all comes back to the same problem: real or perceived, the barrier to entry is too high. To get more developers, we must make it easier to contribute to GnuCash. "Casual" hacking on GnuCash to scratch an itch is much to hard, even for an experienced developer.
Work on the developer documentation problem
There is no complete and current architecture and API reference. Now that we've put the doxygen plumbing in place, we must make sure that ALL functions that are in public headers ARE documented, even if only by saying "Document me!", so the doxygen docs become truly authoritative. Then put the docs on the web site. We must also write a report writing Howto: We already have some very powerful reports, but this is the single most common offer for help we receive "Hi, I'd like to write "foo" report for GnuCash, can someone help me or point me to documentation on that subject". Sometimes I wonder if anyone knows anymore... So the answer is always the same: 'there isn't any; use the source Luke'. We are wasting the chance to hook countless new developers.
Fix core capabilities in the engine
Existing developers should focus on architecture issues and completing existing core features that only they can realistically tackle, such as Lots (which are needed to support accounting periods) or fixing the problems in the scheduled transactions, so that new developers can build on that functionality.
Improve interoperability with other software or new modules
GnuCash has a great, powerful multi-user financial engine that many people ask to plug into. Unfortunately much of this power is locked away. There is no way to interface with a running GnuCash (the RPC backend and perl bindings have bitrotted), there is no way to start a new instance while passing parameters like "import this file". We need a wrapper that will start GnuCash if it isn't already started and pass API requests to it, with or without GUI. The current module system needs to be completed or replaced. It's hard for new developers to integrate new modules in the build and menu system (we need a howto on that too...). Also, data import isn't enough, we must also support export to inter-operate with other software. (LibOfx should get us there if I can just find time to work on it).
I think fixing/developing external interfaces and writing additional import and export support should greatly help our developer crunch in the medium term, by consolidating part of financial software development in the free software ecosystem. We have received many, many inquiries from people wanting to integrate gnucash with (name of web system, database, payroll, kde front end or whatever). We can't afford to loose these people, whether or not the core developers like their pet project. We must use the gnome 2 port as an opportunity to finish/cleanup/document our interfaces and from then on answer "I don't know if your idea will work, but you're welcome to try; here's the relevant documents to get you started."
What developers should do to help users and decrease developer load
Make sure the mailing lists are easily searchable
And/or document how to properly search them (Google isn't cutting it).
Get more people write access to the website
We have received many offers to help, but turned most of them down for no good reason. The website is nice, but it isn't up to date, it's a source of frustration, misleading to users and future developers, and pointlessly increases traffic on gnucash-user and the #gnucash IRC channel.
Quickly implement a Wiki or similar system
This will allow us to have an effective place to point users on gnucash-user
Sorry, I know I'll get modded down to nothing, but I've got Karma to burn and this just cracked me up:
Mortgage and Loan Repayment druid and many, many others.
I imagined the barbarian horde from those Capital One "What's In Your Wallet?" ads fighting it out with the Loan Repayment druids, like something from Star Wars II or The Two Towers.
Besides, windowsupdate.com wouldn't have done me any good. It only seems to work in IE. I run Opera, you insensitive clods!
Just FYI, I've confirmed on my system that at least some of the parent's information is true. I got hit around 2pm Dallas time, and I've now got a file called msblast.exe in c:\winnt\system32 with a file length of 6176 bytes.
After the "to say LOVE YOU SAN!!" string, I find these words: bill gates you make hi possi. And before it, it looks like it says "I ju wan to say" (with control characters that may or may not be of interest).
Sure enough, Symantec has some info now, too (just sent by someone in my co.).
Timing sucks on this one -- I'm right in the middle of coding for 3rd quarter tax changes. Crap!
Tony Blair has insisted repeatedly that the assertion is true.
If I assert that you are, in fact, a sentient talking frog -- and insist repeatedly that it's so -- does that make it true?
Or to take the Dubya role: if you tell me you are a talking frog, and I tell the world that you are a talking frog, does it *then* make you a frog?
Replying to ACs... kind of like kissing your sister. I think. I'm an only child.
What are your views on the RIAA's recent actions to protect their copyrights?
Although it's a cool question, I doubt this one will make the cut. Copyright law is a federal issue, not a state issue.
Contract law, on the other hand, is indeed written at the state level. In September 2001, artists from Courtney Love to LeeAnn Rimes testified in Sacramento about artists' rights issues. Also in the state capitol that day were the Dixie Chicks, before they became a hot political topic for other reasons.
When I was in customer support, attention to details was an essential part of diagnosing users' problems... especially since I was supporting international clients who 1) were highly non-technical, 2) were using hugely outdated equipment, 3) were not native English speakers, and most importantly 4) had a job to do other than dinking on a PC.
So the AC's post really scared me when I saw he claims to do tech support for a living:
so [1] whats [2] your point.. that doesnt proove [3] anything, other than the fact that the fictional client is a lot smarter than the idiots [4] that made the previously reported calls to tech support... I mean I do tech support for a living, and if you think you have prooved [5] anything just cause [6] u [7] can give an example of a good tech suport call.. [8] Thats how most of my calls go.. [9] Its the really stupid ones that get too [10] ya.
Ok, how many of those 10 highlighted items seem needlessly picky? Like 8 and 9, run-on sentences and ellipses without enough dots. Or 3 and 5, mispelled "prove"? And we can't forget 1, capitalization, right?
Do you say, "what's the big deal, you *know* what I'm trying to say! Why should my grammar matter?" Well, that's exactly what our users are saying. They *know* how to do their job, just like you *know* how to write a coherent sentence. But computers aren't as forgiving, so they have to spell every word correctly, and to have perfect grammar every time.
I guess the strange thing is this: if we Slashdotters are such hotshot coders and hAxX0r5, why can't we spell?
When I heard the story this morning, I thought of bone marrow transplants. In that case, aren't you getting someone else's blood-generating cells? And wouldn't your blood cells then contain someone else's DNA?
It seems like they'd make a Law & Order or CSI episode from this: a career criminal arranges to get a bone marrow transplant from someone whose DNA is known to authorities, but who hasn't yet been apprehended (ooh, big word!). Then, the real bad guy can leave all the blood he wants at the crime scene, and never worry about being tracked.
Of course, the side effects would probably make a lifestyle of violent crime a bit more difficult than, say, the odd embezzlement here and there.
"I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market," said Jonathan Thompson, vice president of the Washington-based trade group, which has more than 650 members.
That's great. I'd put Mr. Thompson right up there with the Iraqi Information Minister, and his "deathless quotes":
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"
"God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis."
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Oh, um... scratch that last one, ok?
And he gets better and better!
Thompson said customers need to have realistic expectations. He urged buyers to ask themselves two questions before plunking down cash for software: "What is it that I want this software to do?" and "Am I going to use this software as it's been marketed?"
Well, if I were to use Microsoft software "as it's been marketed", I'd expect to be using it to magically draw pretty pictures around my everyday activities, transforming a burned-out building shell into a stage with a spotlight.
"Make sure that your expectations are appropriate to what a product is marketing," he said.
What the hell does that mean? Intel marketed its product -- a chunk of finely-etched silicon in a plastic box -- with a bunch of blue guys. What expectations are appropriate in that case?
Well, I may never understand all the cultural references in Miyazaki-san's Spirited Away , but at least now I understand what Rin was doing in the scene where she is moving a barrel-shaped boat along, seemingly by doing nothing more than twisting what I thought was a rudder.
"Sculling" -- my vocabulary word of the day. Thanks!
I love it -- I think -- when I get replies like this in my Metamoderation bucket. On one hand, it's +1, Insightful... on the other, it's -1, Troll. Makes me wish for a "+/- 1, Insightful Troll" moderation.
So I'm faced with this question:
Original Discussion: Community Involvement for an Open Source Project?
Rating: Troll.
This rating is Unfair ( ) (o) ( ) Fair
I don't believe in wimping out and selecting the middle choice, so I picked Fair. It's a troll. It just happens to be an Interesting and/or Insightful one.
Well, you could always buy Loving County, Texas. From the Handbook of Texas Online:Looks like a good bet for your proposal! Imagine a whole community of Slashdotters in the middle of the West Texas desert.
But don't forget to bring your own water. "Water from the Pecos, however, is too saline for drinking, so the 100 residents of the county haul water from a community tank." Evian, it ain't.
On the bright side, though, we could elect CowboyNeal as County Sheriff!
From the article:
By contrast, the efficient low-pressure sodium bulbs now used in some street lamps emit only a narrow range of yellow light. This minimizes ecological disruptions, since creatures don't perceive low-pressure sodium as natural light. [...] But at least one, San Diego, decided to switch back to high-pressure sodium after residents complained that the yellow pall cast by low-pressure sodium bulbs made them uneasy.
I'm with the creatures... I don't preceive that ugly yellow light as natural, either! One Dallas suburb uses what I assume are low-pressure sodium lights, and it's downright painful to drive down the street. In fact, it's moderately dangerous -- you can't tell the streetlights from the traffic lights, especially when fatigued.
On the other hand, I didn't know that the lights were easier on the light pollution -- in fact, I had heard that they were worse, but I probably got them confused with the wide-spectrum high-pressure sodium lights mentioned in the article.
Hmmm... wonder what would happen if you broke a sodium vapor light under water? If you try it, don't forget to send the story to this guy.
A dupe bug would bring the economics of such a system crashing down.
Interestingly, the article's authors came up with a solution to the problem of software bugs, though I don't think it was their intention:
- Farms/Forestry: Farms produce perishable food, wood, or textile items in predictable quantities that may vary with the weather. Farms may be damaged or destroyed by war, mismanagement or natural disasters.
Just imagine a "software bug" in the context of the original "bug": an insect that causes big trouble (think Biblically, as in plagues of locusts).
Someone hacks into the system and steals $5,000 of real-world l00t? Bad news for local farmers, a cloud of hungry grasshoppers devoured your fields yesterday. Estimated damages are g$1 million ($5,000 real-world).
Game designer conference... in Barbados? News flash: last night's thunderstorms spawned an F5 tornado that tore through the center of Avatarville. No PKs, but damage is estimated in the g$Millions.
[FBI | SEC | DEA] investigation? We're sorry, but a record-shattering earthquake destroyed all your possessions, the bank where your money was kept, and by the way, You Are Dead.
As for myself, if I wanted that level of uncontrollable risk, I'd play Real Life.
I perfected this online business plan back in the DOS days, when most games required you to make a stop at the "casino" to earn "money".
LastCash = Cash
Do While Cash < DesiredCash
{
Play_casino_game()
If Cash > LastCash
{
SaveGame()
LastCash = Cash
}
If Cash < FrustrationLevel
{
Reboot/Power off
End
}
}
Hey, it worked while playing Pokemon on my Game Boy! I mean, my kids' Game Boy, yeah, that's the ticket...
... I had always wondered if anyone would actually buy from a spammer.
Any chance the spammer did a media honeypot? Released fake records to make marketers *think* he was successful?
So this statement really irritates me:Unfortunately, this researcher is probably right on the money, literally. There is huge money in show horses, just like there is in purebred show dogs. The problem is how selective breeding -- in both cases -- has resulted in an animal that is useless for any real purpose.
Appaloosas get bred for particular patterns of spots, Quarter Horses get bred for very specific ratios of body parts, Arabians are bred to hold themselves "just so"... you get the picture. Thoroughbreds, bred for speed, may be the only horses that are commercially bred for something that is even remotely "natural" to a horse's instincts -- and even they are broken down and "retired" at an age when a working horse is just getting started.
What you see, way too often, is a horse that looks pretty, but is completely screwed up in the head. And that's with traditional breeding (and I'm including the straw o'semen in the "traditional" category). I can only imagine the neurotic, unpredictable horses that will come from cloning the "best" show horses. They'll be useless for any actual work, probably won't be able to reproduce without assistance (already a problem today), and will be a danger to their rider and anyone nearby.
Give me a field-bred "grade" horse over a "show" horse any day. It's like our dogs -- we have two mixed-breed puppies (half Jack Russell) that are sharp as a tack. The big black dog that got dumped as a puppy is the loyal protector of the household. And the $700 Schnauzer is the stupidest creature on the face of God's green earth. Show dog? No thanks, I'll take the mutt in the corner.
One pa-packet, two pa-packet, three pa-packet, four...
All this is only true if you abuse yourself by eating the Elmer's Glue-derived paste misleadingly called Ramen Noodles by companies like Top Ramen or the too-aptly-named Smack Ramen.
In college in the 80s, I was introduced to real ramen noodles by some Malaysian friends. They invited me to their apartment and fixed the most wonderful dish, adding fresh vegetables and meat. But the base of the dish wasn't American-style paste-flavored ramen! They told me to check out the oriental food store, so I did.
Probably the most accessible brand for US folks is Sapporo Ichiban, from Japan. I can't find an English-language web site for the company, but this review sums it up pretty well. The packaging and instructions are in English, so it makes a good start. Although it seems to be available online, you can save the shipping costs by simply visiting your local Asian market, if you live in any large US city. (Side note: I also found Sapporo Ichiban at a convenience store in Corsicana, TX! Coming from the south, take Bus I-45.)
Once you've mastered Sapporo Ichiban, you will be ready for real adventure. Start with the SI brand noodles with mostly-Japanese text, then move to noodles from all over Asia with no English at all! I've found Vietnamese noodles to be way too fishy, but most everything else has been good. And the best of all is one I just found: a Malaysian brand of noodles that just might be the ones from that delicious dish from Oklahoma State University, long ago.
My friends also tried to teach me how to say some very vulgar things in Chinese... fortunately, that memory wasn't as enduring as the memory of those noodles.
And outside gaming, the idea comes and just as quickly goes. Here's an article about tele-medicine using VR gloves, where someone at location A pushes on your abdomen and a doctor at location B "feels" whether your spleen is out of joint. The date on the article... July, 2000. Going nowhere.
And here's a telling statement from the referenced article:Something is making it darned difficult to bring VR Glove technology to fruition, despite almost two decades of poking around with it.
What's the "killer app" that will have us all putting on our V-Gloves?