OK. So they move independently. Is that all that's necessary for a "robot"? So, like, if I rigged up a remote control car to drive mindlessly back and forth, back and forth all day, is it now a "robot"?
Where is the dividing line between "automatic mechanized device" and "robot"?
The "particular piece of software"
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 1
is called Windows XP, Office XP, etc. etc. etc......
Good God. They look so god-damned like the same person... I would say to them, "you want ice-cream cone?", both of them say yes. How in the hell?
Re:The swing of the pendulum
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I am a "she", not a "he".
The swing of the pendulum
on
Why I.T. Matters
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
My boss is a non-techie managerial type. (This is scary, as I work for a Web site.) She told me,
to my face, within a week of starting work there, that "the dot-com bust was the fault of you
techies." She makes no bones about the fact that she hates techies, and
blames them for people like her losing lots of money during the dot-bomb.
The problem is the incredibly facile mindset of the typical manager. All they
think about is profit. As a result, they think of trends, technologies, even
people as "a good way to make me money" or "not a good way to make
me money." That's about all they see in anything; it's a sort of managerial
binary.
For a period, during the dot-com era, computer geeks like us lived like rock
stars, because the Powers That Be in the business world had become convinced
that "geeks are human money machines"-- that "IT" (let's face it, "IT" is just a
corporate way of saying "computers and computer geeks, as they relate to
business") existed to help fill their coffers, and that a computer-- by
definition!-- was a machine to make rich people richer.
Then came the dot-bomb, and now the pendulum has swung too far in the other
direction (as it always does, humanity being what it is). Medium-sized
businesses hire one or two techies, who are inevitably terribly overworked, to
manage their entire "IT infrastructure" (read: anything involving digital
technology, which means computers, network cables, routers, hubs, switches,
"smart phones", PBX systems, Palm Pilots, Game Boys...) company-wide. Geeks are
seen almost as traitors-- since we "failed" to make the rich folks richer. (Of
course, it was their silly notion that geeks would make them rich in the
first place-- but, of course, part of the mindset of a manager is to never blame
themselves...) As a result, companies are under-hiring in terms of number
of geeks per end-user, and to some extent under-buying in terms of
computer expenditures per seat. Plain and simple, computers are seen as
"something that won't make us money".
I've been saying (perhaps a bit too optimistically) for years that eventually, hopefully, some smart businesspeople
(oxymoron?) will figure out that the IT budget, like everything else, works best
in moderation-- that is, neither hiring geeks by the dozen because
"they'll make us the next amazon.com" nor laying off all but one geek
since "they failed us!". Hopefully, this will happen some day... but I won't
hold my breath.
It's not nitpicking. It's doing my small part to slow the society-wide degradation of all knowledge. Even reputable news sources now get computer history wrong, use "it's" instead of "its", and so on.
Now, in English, for those of us who've dealt with few to none of those technologies and hence don't have all those words in our mental buzzword<->English dictionaries?;)
I'm a Unix SA and a Web programmer (Perl, PHP, Oracle, PostgreSQL and the like), and I have no clue what the hell this thing does!
It's not the developers' computer. It's MY computer, and a lot of my hardware is "old" and CANNOT HANDLE anything higher than "Low Quality"! And not giving me a freaking VOLUME KNOB is absolutely ridiculous.
I don't care. It's MY computer and MY speakers, and I (not some snot-nosed punk with a copy of FrontPage and a warezed copy of Macromedia Director) have the right to change MY settings.
The context-sensitive menus in the Flash plug-in on ALL platforms seem to have some major issues. You right-click over a Flash animation in a Web page, and sometimes you get the ability to change the quality... sometimes you don't. Sometimes, all you get is a useless "options" screen that lets you change things like microphone volume and camera (!!!???) settings, but not things like, oh, speaker volume or video quality. I've seen this problem in Mozilla for Linux and in IE for Windows. WTF up with that?
Your machine had 512 MEGABITS (YOU said "Mb", I didn't!) of RAM? That'd be... what... 64MB of RAM. I doubt that would be enough.
I believe you meant "MB", which means "megabytes".
I just wanted to point out that "Creative Commons" is a singular entity, despite the fact that it ends in the letter "s". Therefore, it is "Creative Commons's" license (or whatever), not "Creative Commons'" license (or whatever),
Slashdot Mirror
...that the source made available is actually the code running on the machine?
...but that wouldn't actually make it Linux.
I could write a closed-source proprietary OS and have it go:
printf("Kernel version: Linux 2.4.26\n");
...and run at a blistering 5 KIPS! (Thousand Instructions Per Second)
OK. So they move independently. Is that all that's necessary for a "robot"? So, like, if I rigged up a remote control car to drive mindlessly back and forth, back and forth all day, is it now a "robot"?
Where is the dividing line between "automatic mechanized device" and "robot"?
is called Windows XP, Office XP, etc. etc. etc......
When the techie is simply doing what the manager asks for, any decent manager takes all of the blame for a failure.
Actually, Group X didn't do the "End of the World" cartoon. It was another entity impersonating them.
It is called "Prime Twins", they look the same!
Good God. They look so god-damned like the same person... I would say to them, "you want ice-cream cone?", both of them say yes. How in the hell?
I am a "she", not a "he".
My boss is a non-techie managerial type. (This is scary, as I work for a Web site.) She told me, to my face, within a week of starting work there, that "the dot-com bust was the fault of you techies." She makes no bones about the fact that she hates techies, and blames them for people like her losing lots of money during the dot-bomb.
The problem is the incredibly facile mindset of the typical manager. All they think about is profit. As a result, they think of trends, technologies, even people as "a good way to make me money" or "not a good way to make me money." That's about all they see in anything; it's a sort of managerial binary.
For a period, during the dot-com era, computer geeks like us lived like rock stars, because the Powers That Be in the business world had become convinced that "geeks are human money machines"-- that "IT" (let's face it, "IT" is just a corporate way of saying "computers and computer geeks, as they relate to business") existed to help fill their coffers, and that a computer-- by definition!-- was a machine to make rich people richer.
Then came the dot-bomb, and now the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction (as it always does, humanity being what it is). Medium-sized businesses hire one or two techies, who are inevitably terribly overworked, to manage their entire "IT infrastructure" (read: anything involving digital technology, which means computers, network cables, routers, hubs, switches, "smart phones", PBX systems, Palm Pilots, Game Boys...) company-wide. Geeks are seen almost as traitors-- since we "failed" to make the rich folks richer. (Of course, it was their silly notion that geeks would make them rich in the first place-- but, of course, part of the mindset of a manager is to never blame themselves...) As a result, companies are under-hiring in terms of number of geeks per end-user, and to some extent under-buying in terms of computer expenditures per seat. Plain and simple, computers are seen as "something that won't make us money".
I've been saying (perhaps a bit too optimistically) for years that eventually, hopefully, some smart businesspeople (oxymoron?) will figure out that the IT budget, like everything else, works best in moderation-- that is, neither hiring geeks by the dozen because "they'll make us the next amazon.com" nor laying off all but one geek since "they failed us!". Hopefully, this will happen some day... but I won't hold my breath.
It's not nitpicking. It's doing my small part to slow the society-wide degradation of all knowledge. Even reputable news sources now get computer history wrong, use "it's" instead of "its", and so on.
It had a 68020. My bad. It most certainly did not, though, have a 68040, which was a comparatively modern innovation.
First of all, it's "Mac II", not "MAC II". "MAC", as in "Macintosh", is not an acronym.
Secondly, it's "68040", not "608040".
Thirdly, the Mac II did not have a 68040. It had a 68000.
The fastest CPU I presently own is a Pentium II 400.
Now, in English, for those of us who've dealt with few to none of those technologies and hence don't have all those words in our mental buzzword<->English dictionaries? ;)
I'm a Unix SA and a Web programmer (Perl, PHP, Oracle, PostgreSQL and the like), and I have no clue what the hell this thing does!
It's not the developers' computer. It's MY computer, and a lot of my hardware is "old" and CANNOT HANDLE anything higher than "Low Quality"! And not giving me a freaking VOLUME KNOB is absolutely ridiculous.
I don't care. It's MY computer and MY speakers, and I (not some snot-nosed punk with a copy of FrontPage and a warezed copy of Macromedia Director) have the right to change MY settings.
The context-sensitive menus in the Flash plug-in on ALL platforms seem to have some major issues. You right-click over a Flash animation in a Web page, and sometimes you get the ability to change the quality... sometimes you don't. Sometimes, all you get is a useless "options" screen that lets you change things like microphone volume and camera (!!!???) settings, but not things like, oh, speaker volume or video quality. I've seen this problem in Mozilla for Linux and in IE for Windows. WTF up with that?
"And worst of all, they posted their code online to demonstrate how "secure" it was..."
Bill? Is that you?
Your machine had 512 MEGABITS (YOU said "Mb", I didn't!) of RAM? That'd be... what... 64MB of RAM. I doubt that would be enough. I believe you meant "MB", which means "megabytes".
Since when do Web pages give "all lines are full" errors? Isn't that a phone thing?
That's "McDonald's" ;)
...it isn't April 1st already, is it?
That's Ms. Grammar Nazi, and "All the jeans' have holes" is incorrect.
The word is "lose", not "loose". You "lose" the song. You do not "loose" the song.
I just wanted to point out that "Creative Commons" is a singular entity, despite the fact that it ends in the letter "s". Therefore, it is "Creative Commons's" license (or whatever), not "Creative Commons'" license (or whatever),