Seriously. Let's break out the World's Smallest Violin. The world is changing-- in a good way. The Internet is a wonderful thing. The newspapers need to change with the changing times, or perish.
I think you're too optimistic. When Bush was elected, I said "We are going to get into a war. Maybe TWO wars." People kept saying I was being pessimistic. I was right. Pessimism is merely another name for realism. "Eventually we will prevail"? In what rose-tinted fantasy realm?
This just shows something most geeks are too naive to realize: There exists a huge gap between how geeks see MS and how Everyone Else(TM) sees MS. Call it the "Microsoft Gap".
Had the 14 million people eligible to take a small slice of Microsoft's money all been geeks, I'd say at least 10 million would have claimed the money-- not because they needed it, but simply to hurt, and spite, MS. It would have been a little "death of a thousand cuts" for MS. Instead, we got a lackluster 1 million claiming their slice of the pie. Actually, it's a miracle that even that many people signed on.
Most geeks are too naive to realize just how popular Microsoft really is among the general populace.
To most geeks, Bill Gates is a wily scuzzbag who happened to be in the right place at the right time, applied his incredible business acumen, and now is in a position where his company can milk the general populace for a significant percentage of the cost of a new computer every single time they buy one. He's a robber baron who takes other companies'/peoples' good ideas, bastardizes them, and makes money on them, leaving the original creators to go bankrupt (at worst) or carve out tiny niche markets (at best). Or he just buys them out.
However, to non-geeks (reminder: this covers 99+% of the US population), Bill Gates is a hero and a role model. He is someone that they aspire to be like, due to his incredible wealth and business acumen. The general Party Line among the unwashed masses seems to be "Well, Windows is what everyone runs, so it must be the best." This is rather akin to "every keyboard uses QWERTY, so QWERTY must be better than all other layouts" (e.g. Dvorak). It's also akin to "VHS beat out Beta, so VHS must be better in all ways." Nevertheless, this is how most people in the US feel on the matter.
Until geeks understand how non-geeks think, no progress will be made in educating the public.
Bill Gates could take a dump in a box and label it "Microsoft Windows SE (Shit Edition) 2005" and people would line up in droves to buy it. As long as an operating system has "Microsoft Windows" in the name, people will believe that they have to run it-- that if they don't, the world will end, or their computer will blow up, or they'll be confronted with an 80x25 greenscreen full of text, or something...
When will technology like this actually be put into production in a major American city?
2020? 2030? Never?
I'm really getting completely jaded by hearing of all of these wonderful things being developed, which will be put into production Real Soon Now(TM)...
What about those machines that make just about anything into oil? How many plants based on those things are currently operating in the US? One? Two? Maybe THREE? What percentage of our oil production does that account for? 0.01%? Maybe 0.02%? Maybe less?
Color me skeptical, but inertia has taken such a hold in human endeavors (at least, here in the US) that I get really upset whenever I read of all of these wonderful things which are supposedly coming up "just along the pike", as it were, but which I have to remind myself I will never see in operation in my life.
Note that it will cover 90% of the city by the end of 2005. That's just a year away.
Here in America, we make plans like "Scientists will launch a robotic mission to Mars... by 2009." or "We will return to the Moon... by 2010." We never say "Such-and-such big technological plan will be in effect... by the end of next year."
We move so slowly, like the lumbering elephant we, as a nation, are.
Eventually, the more nimble nations will simply overtake us if we don't stop miring every project we undertake in red tape...
...who of the original lineup of Nullsoft/Winamp coders are still there.... and how many people are working on it now vs. when it was in the Winamp 1.0/2.0 stages...
Don't MS already have some deal with NBC? What is "MSNBC"? Are they actually merged, or is it some partnership thingy between MS and NBC? Is this going to make them MSNBCSBC?
I mean, lots of people jokingly refer to "Outlook" as "LookOut" (i.e. for viruses/etc.)? There is actually a company/product called "Lookout" for Outlook?
Also-- to the people who are pointing out (and/or will point out) that this sounds like Apple's "Spotlight" tech... I personally loathe Microsoft, but I DO recall them speaking about making the entire filesystem one big relational database (and I recall the mixed reactions among the/. crowd)... Why would they make the filesystem a database if it weren't to allow searching the whole system in some organized manner? And MS was talking about this stuff LONG before I ever heard of Spotlight... Maybe for once (well, excepting pre-emptive multitasking or true multi-user systems, which Apple was talking about for far too long until Jobs kicked their butts and spurred the creation of OS X at long last) MS got to something before Apple?
Of course, this being Microsoft, they probably took the idea from someone else first;)
Joe Beer thinks "the Internet" is around ten years old, since that's when he first heard of it. Smarter Joe-Beers would point to the date of the invention of the Web (not "the Internet" as a whole) and say "See? The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 199x... I read it on such-and-such"...
[cue OT rant]
Most bozos nowadays can't distinguish between:
* "The Internet" and "The Web"
* "PC" and "Windows"
* "Microsoft" and "Windows"
* "Macintosh" and "the Mac OS" (or "Mac OS X")
* "Apple" and "Macintosh"
Thus, you will hear things like "Yeah, I'm on the Web" (translation: "I have a connection to the Internet"), or "Are you running Windows or Mac?" (translation: "Windows or Mac OS X"), or "This game is only available for the PC" (read: "...for Windows").
However, these same functional computer illiterates (read: 99% of the US population) manage to think that "Linux", "Unix", "Red Hat" and "Solaris" (to give four examples) are completely different skillsets (talk to any typical "tech recruiter" and you'll see what I mean. I've met guys who have twenty years of experience in half a dozen commercial Unices, but can't get a job dealing with the one major flavor they've never touched... 'cuz as we all know, they don't all share 99% of the same stuff.... Oh, wait, they do...)
Apparently, a highly technical standard body is harder to snowjob than the usual clueless consumers.
For the moment. The bar for what is considered "highly technical" is lowered all the time. Consider the following:
1) I've met people with Master's Degrees in CompSci who are clueless about coding. Maybe this "has been the case for a while", but surely it hasn't consistently been the case since the birth of CS as a discipline?
2) 20 years ago, I would have been a mediocre Unix SA... today, I'm practically deified by 90% of so-called SAs.
There will always be a few amazing brainiac engineer-types, and a few hard-theory CS geniuses (a la Knuth), and a few master hackers who can code x86, PPC, SPARC, and z80 assembly in their sleep... but their percentages among society will get smaller and smaller. Within 50 years, expect (e.g.) the IEEE, or the ACM, or whatever, to have devolved into organizations no more technical or consumer-minded than the RIAA or MPAA...
A few remain behind and write about why they don't use the new "standard". They get branded "communists". Historical revisionism takes over, and the creators of the useless file format standard get lauded as "innovators". Anyone who complains is tagged as "just jealous".
Yet more Science-Wankery. Yeah, I know the score. "We'll have practical fusion power Real Soon Now(TM)." "We'll have hydrogen-powered cars Real Soon Now(TM)." Please... wake me when I can go down to a local car dealership and get a hydrogen-powered car, and actually use it in day-to-day life. Until then... please don't bother us all with this speculative BS. Remember all the ho-hum in the 1960s about "FLYING CARS BY YEAR 2000?"?
I am confused as to the plot of "This Wonderful Life".
This woman's obviously lost her husband; hence the crying and the kissing
of the ring. Then she sees the baby, which seems to bring a new hope into
her life. But she abandons the baby (placing its fragile head far too
close to the stone walls of the bridge where a single jerk could damage
it-- she seems intelligent enough, and any intelligent woman wouldn't do
that) to jump off the bridge when she loses her ring... and then what? She
doesn't die immediately, but what happens? While she's down there lying on
the rock (wounded?), someone else comes and takes the baby away-- because
she was too afraid to 'let go' of her deceased husband and open a new life
with the baby?
How about an essay on the plot? A review? A synopsis? Anything? Bueller?
I asked this in a recent STORY... but they published it off the front page, since obviously Non-Windows users aren't a priority here at SlashDot... Oh, wait...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. Let's break out the World's Smallest Violin. The world is changing-- in a good way. The Internet is a wonderful thing. The newspapers need to change with the changing times, or perish.
I think you're too optimistic. When Bush was elected, I said "We are going to get into a war. Maybe TWO wars." People kept saying I was being pessimistic. I was right. Pessimism is merely another name for realism. "Eventually we will prevail"? In what rose-tinted fantasy realm?
This just shows something most geeks are too naive to realize: There exists a huge gap between how geeks see MS and how Everyone Else(TM) sees MS. Call it the "Microsoft Gap".
Had the 14 million people eligible to take a small slice of Microsoft's money all been geeks, I'd say at least 10 million would have claimed the money-- not because they needed it, but simply to hurt, and spite, MS. It would have been a little "death of a thousand cuts" for MS. Instead, we got a lackluster 1 million claiming their slice of the pie. Actually, it's a miracle that even that many people signed on.
Most geeks are too naive to realize just how popular Microsoft really is among the general populace.
To most geeks, Bill Gates is a wily scuzzbag who happened to be in the right place at the right time, applied his incredible business acumen, and now is in a position where his company can milk the general populace for a significant percentage of the cost of a new computer every single time they buy one. He's a robber baron who takes other companies'/peoples' good ideas, bastardizes them, and makes money on them, leaving the original creators to go bankrupt (at worst) or carve out tiny niche markets (at best). Or he just buys them out.
However, to non-geeks (reminder: this covers 99+% of the US population), Bill Gates is a hero and a role model. He is someone that they aspire to be like, due to his incredible wealth and business acumen. The general Party Line among the unwashed masses seems to be "Well, Windows is what everyone runs, so it must be the best." This is rather akin to "every keyboard uses QWERTY, so QWERTY must be better than all other layouts" (e.g. Dvorak). It's also akin to "VHS beat out Beta, so VHS must be better in all ways." Nevertheless, this is how most people in the US feel on the matter.
Until geeks understand how non-geeks think, no progress will be made in educating the public.
Stupid rackafratchin' metric conversions ;)
As opposed to Gilbert and Sullivan, who simply sang a catchy ditty about the subject...
she had reached 2.0 beta ;)
...it's time for a lawsuit.
Seriously. Netscape-- the biggest competitor to IE-- now will have the ability to use IE's rendering engine?
Isn't MS gonna sue AOL over this? They're mortal enemies... no?
Bill Gates could take a dump in a box and label it "Microsoft Windows SE (Shit Edition) 2005" and people would line up in droves to buy it. As long as an operating system has "Microsoft Windows" in the name, people will believe that they have to run it-- that if they don't, the world will end, or their computer will blow up, or they'll be confronted with an 80x25 greenscreen full of text, or something...
When will technology like this actually be put into production in a major American city?
2020? 2030? Never?
I'm really getting completely jaded by hearing of all of these wonderful things being developed, which will be put into production Real Soon Now(TM)...
What about those machines that make just about anything into oil? How many plants based on those things are currently operating in the US? One? Two? Maybe THREE? What percentage of our oil production does that account for? 0.01%? Maybe 0.02%? Maybe less?
Color me skeptical, but inertia has taken such a hold in human endeavors (at least, here in the US) that I get really upset whenever I read of all of these wonderful things which are supposedly coming up "just along the pike", as it were, but which I have to remind myself I will never see in operation in my life.
Note that it will cover 90% of the city by the end of 2005. That's just a year away.
Here in America, we make plans like "Scientists will launch a robotic mission to Mars... by 2009." or "We will return to the Moon... by 2010." We never say "Such-and-such big technological plan will be in effect... by the end of next year."
We move so slowly, like the lumbering elephant we, as a nation, are.
Eventually, the more nimble nations will simply overtake us if we don't stop miring every project we undertake in red tape...
...who of the original lineup of Nullsoft/Winamp coders are still there.... and how many people are working on it now vs. when it was in the Winamp 1.0/2.0 stages...
Don't MS already have some deal with NBC? What is "MSNBC"? Are they actually merged, or is it some partnership thingy between MS and NBC? Is this going to make them MSNBCSBC?
I mean, lots of people jokingly refer to "Outlook" as "LookOut" (i.e. for viruses/etc.)? There is actually a company/product called "Lookout" for Outlook?
/. crowd)... Why would they make the filesystem a database if it weren't to allow searching the whole system in some organized manner? And MS was talking about this stuff LONG before I ever heard of Spotlight... Maybe for once (well, excepting pre-emptive multitasking or true multi-user systems, which Apple was talking about for far too long until Jobs kicked their butts and spurred the creation of OS X at long last) MS got to something before Apple?
;)
Also-- to the people who are pointing out (and/or will point out) that this sounds like Apple's "Spotlight" tech... I personally loathe Microsoft, but I DO recall them speaking about making the entire filesystem one big relational database (and I recall the mixed reactions among the
Of course, this being Microsoft, they probably took the idea from someone else first
Joe Beer thinks "the Internet" is around ten years old, since that's when he first heard of it. Smarter Joe-Beers would point to the date of the invention of the Web (not "the Internet" as a whole) and say "See? The Internet was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 199x... I read it on such-and-such"...
[cue OT rant]
Most bozos nowadays can't distinguish between:
* "The Internet" and "The Web"
* "PC" and "Windows"
* "Microsoft" and "Windows"
* "Macintosh" and "the Mac OS" (or "Mac OS X")
* "Apple" and "Macintosh"
Thus, you will hear things like "Yeah, I'm on the Web" (translation: "I have a connection to the Internet"), or "Are you running Windows or Mac?" (translation: "Windows or Mac OS X"), or "This game is only available for the PC" (read: "...for Windows").
However, these same functional computer illiterates (read: 99% of the US population) manage to think that "Linux", "Unix", "Red Hat" and "Solaris" (to give four examples) are completely different skillsets (talk to any typical "tech recruiter" and you'll see what I mean. I've met guys who have twenty years of experience in half a dozen commercial Unices, but can't get a job dealing with the one major flavor they've never touched... 'cuz as we all know, they don't all share 99% of the same stuff.... Oh, wait, they do...)
The only problem is that the degree an aspiring sysadmin or coder is "expected" to get is a degree in CompSci.
Apparently, a highly technical standard body is harder to snowjob than the usual clueless consumers.
For the moment. The bar for what is considered "highly technical" is lowered all the time. Consider the following:
1) I've met people with Master's Degrees in CompSci who are clueless about coding. Maybe this "has been the case for a while", but surely it hasn't consistently been the case since the birth of CS as a discipline?
2) 20 years ago, I would have been a mediocre Unix SA... today, I'm practically deified by 90% of so-called SAs.
There will always be a few amazing brainiac engineer-types, and a few hard-theory CS geniuses (a la Knuth), and a few master hackers who can code x86, PPC, SPARC, and z80 assembly in their sleep... but their percentages among society will get smaller and smaller. Within 50 years, expect (e.g.) the IEEE, or the ACM, or whatever, to have devolved into organizations no more technical or consumer-minded than the RIAA or MPAA...
"Hopefully this will cut down on vendor lock-in and lure people from using Microsoft Office."
*steals rose-tinted spectacles* Yoink!
A few remain behind and write about why they don't use the new "standard". They get branded "communists". Historical revisionism takes over, and the creators of the useless file format standard get lauded as "innovators". Anyone who complains is tagged as "just jealous".
Yet more Science-Wankery. Yeah, I know the score. "We'll have practical fusion power Real Soon Now(TM)." "We'll have hydrogen-powered cars Real Soon Now(TM)." Please... wake me when I can go down to a local car dealership and get a hydrogen-powered car, and actually use it in day-to-day life. Until then... please don't bother us all with this speculative BS. Remember all the ho-hum in the 1960s about "FLYING CARS BY YEAR 2000?"?
I am confused as to the plot of "This Wonderful Life".
This woman's obviously lost her husband; hence the crying and the kissing of the ring. Then she sees the baby, which seems to bring a new hope into her life. But she abandons the baby (placing its fragile head far too close to the stone walls of the bridge where a single jerk could damage it-- she seems intelligent enough, and any intelligent woman wouldn't do that) to jump off the bridge when she loses her ring... and then what? She doesn't die immediately, but what happens? While she's down there lying on the rock (wounded?), someone else comes and takes the baby away-- because she was too afraid to 'let go' of her deceased husband and open a new life with the baby?
How about an essay on the plot? A review? A synopsis? Anything? Bueller?
Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?
I asked this in a recent STORY... but they published it off the front page, since obviously Non-Windows users aren't a priority here at SlashDot... Oh, wait...
Anyhow, if you find any answers, let me know.
PENUOS? Do you mean PENIS?
"I need TP For my Ubuntu!"
Big deal. Most of my closets meet that description. Now if only I could get one of those walk-in models...