Physics don't matter. In a few years, all fuel will be replaced by Brawndo. (It's got what Buses Crave.)
This is an old debate. Yes, TV and Movies largely rob you of time and money, and take up brain-cycles and memory capacity that could be used more productively for other things. Largely. It's because people choose to watch that kind of movie. We could all be watching intelligent, thought-provoking documentaries and technical films. But we don't. (Exceptions are noted.)
Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful ability. I'm glad I have it, it allows me to be entertained by reading, hearing, and watching works of pure fiction. I'm also glad that I'm smart enough to know the difference between fiction and fact. I got that by asking questions (stimulated in many cases by unrealistic scenes in movies, I'm sure). Not everyone wants to learn, however, and those that don't want to learn are probably irredeemable anyway. And laying the blame for their failures at Hollywood's doorstep is like blaming Goth Music and Violent Video Games for school shootings. It completely misses the point that solid education (or other forms of intervention, usually originating with parents that actually, gasp, pay attention to their children) would obviate the need for babysitting people through basic fact-versus-fancy analyses of obviously unrealistic media.
Some of us are able to handle our mindless entertainment responsibly. Those that can learn, will. Those that can't, will probably massively outnumber us within a generation or two anyway, if they don't already.
I don't think you have to go even this far. There are some excellent performance artists and comedians out there that work with their audiences and use varying degrees of improvisation, that are far more interesting and artistic than a more "static" performance would be. An example from the Comedy side would be Paula Poundstone. The funniest bits, IMHO, in her performances are the parts where she's talking to audience members and spinning up whole new bits on the spot as a result of them. She's a gifted improvisationalist.
How about Jazz? Jazz musicians interact with each other and their environment. The end result is rarely the same thing twice, and some Jazz musicians even improvise bits on the spot based on people or things they see in the audience. It's not an intentional act on the audience's part, but still the "observer" influences the process.
Since he mentions Soup Cans, maybe we should bring in a quote commonly attributed to Warhol: Art is whatever you can get away with.
My situation was a mirror image. I struggled desperately through most simple mathmatics, even as far back as grade school. Memorizing mulitplication tables was damned near impossible for me. I never could get teachers to answer the question of WHY certain principles of math worked the way they did, which probably would have helped conceptualize it. Instead, I was a C math studen, passing only because I could demonstrate knowledge of theory while still failing in application.
Then came a geometry class, and everything made sense. Defining all math as spatial relations and logical verbal constructs did something to my brain. Basic algebra, when examined post-geometry, made sense and suddenly wasn't hard. But following that up with Trigonometry, it collapsed again. (To be fair to the subject, let me say that my geometry teacher was pretty good, and my Trig teacher was a re-purposed football coach who was required by state law to teach at least one academic class, but couldn't work his own problems on the board without several mistakes. Oh lucky me. This was clearly a factor in not 'getting' trig.)
So I still hated math *until* picking up Hoffstadter's GEB. Again, certain concepts started making sense again. Following this with Metamagical Themas carved out still more brain-space for math concepts, such that I'm now usually able to follow new (to me) math concepts with only a little brow-wrinkling. (I won't claim to be a math geek by a long stretch, but I've grown interested enough in math to actually buy books about math. That's an impressive delta.)
Resultant to this announcement, it seems all the more vital that all Discordians should remember to eat a hot dog tomorrow.
Might we have another holiday to lodge onto the Discordian calendar?
How appropriate is it that this should happen in the Season of Bureaucracy? Mark your calednars, all . . . Sweetmorn, Bureaucracy the 37th, 3242 . . . Discordians finally get a planet they can migrate to (as soon as a few technical hurdles are . . . well . . . hurdled.)
Someone did some research that supports your premise. I can't find the reference at the moment, but an article I read a while back about fear and panic attack triggers, which rated dentist drills and bees swarming as some of the most anxiety inducing noises. The article mentioned that dental drill noises and bee noises are sometimes added in subtle ways to movie soundtracks, because even when you can't consciously pick the noise out from the background sounds, a part of your brain is picking them up and reacting to various degrees.
As opposed to human females performing unspeakable acts with male gnomes, which is just fine. Date outside your species, just get the sex right.
Then there's the *real* attrocities on the Horde side.
Homonecrobestial-back Mountain: Ang Lee's controversial new film involving two males, a Tauren and an Undead, and their forbidden moment of passion in the steamy heat of the Molten Core . ..
A casual 2 minute browse of that site (meaning rootkit.com) revealed 2 exploits that can hide from RootkitRevealer. One hopes that Russinovich and others are paying attention to these exploits and coming up with ways to counter them.
No doubt they're going to ask what technologies SCO is seeking to acquire and why they'd need the copyrights to do so.
Possible SCO (il)logic: SCO needs the copyrights to acquire the UNIX technology, so that they can show clear ownership, so that they can sue Novell for defamation of title.
Or perhaps: SCO needs the copyrights assigned so they can continue to sue IBM for violations of copyrights that SCO needs assigned.
"Your Honor, we will show beyond a doubt that Novell has acted in bad faith, as soon as you compel them to act in good faith, which will be in bad faith. We'd also like you to assign us the patent on patenting things, so we can sue everyone who has used our patented patenting patent."
Somehow, this sounds plausible.
Re:The Colour of Magic is a weird choice...
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
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· Score: 1
For the little "buried" jokes, I have a fond spot in my heart for HEX being labeled with "Anthill Inside". (Things like "Ram Skulls", and the "Beehive long-term storage", having caused fits and snorts of laughter as well.)
I still detest Rincewind. TCoM was my first Pratchett book, and would have been my last, were it not for friends who provided copies of the Watch series to convince me that the rest of Discworld was worth reading.
So does that mean that Microsoft succeeded in binding the Windows license to the physical machine?
I know most of the hardware resellers (Dell, HP, etc.) affix the license sticker (pretty much permanently) to the case. When I asked a rep at Dell if I could take a copy of Windows 2000 Pro off of one laptop and install it on another (that had come with ME), I was told this violated the licensing agreement.
On the other hand, I've heard that it's legal to transfer a retail copy from one machine to another so long as you remove it from the first. Is it "First Sale" or "First Install" we need to worry about here?
Hmmm... I can think of another obvious way. The various MMORPG like Camelot, Evercrack, and even various LAN shooters, can devour bandwidth. Nothing illegal or contrary to TOS there.
I think the problem is that ISP's oversell their networks, and then try to blame / charge the end-user when resources are spread too thin.
Hmmm . . . just a small side note, the Viking King Herold was not a direct participant in the Battle of Hastings. The direct participants were William the Conqueror and Edward the Confessor. Edward was defeated. It's worth noting, however, that a few weeks prior to the battle of Hastings, King Herold did try to invade England. The Battle of Stamford Bridge *was* an attempted Norse (Northmen) invasion and is sometimes lumped together with Hastings. I've heard some theories that had Edwards troops not been reduced somewhat by the attempted Viking invasion, Hastings might have had a whole 'nother result.
Sounds like I had more fun and got more concise and well presented information at that Timeshare seminar I went to. And I came out feeling far less ripped off, too.
Maybe SCO should take some lessons from Hilton?
Oh, wait, Hilton has an actual product to sell. Woops, my bad.
I agree that MS is capable of pumping a large amount of cash and labor into any project they set their minds to. And yes, they've made (in some cases) significant improvements to software that was designed by others or created their own, sometimes improved, versions of some software. (Though some would argue that they do this in order to destroy competitors that don't want to sell out to Redmond.)
But they rarely, if ever, come up with any NEW ideas. In the sense that Ballmer used "Innovative", MS doesn't fit the description any better than OSS does. Both use concepts that are largely derivative but embellished.
I'll draw a parallel that may be a bit flameworthy here: Asian Automobiles in the 70's and early 80's were mostly not innovative at all. They used very available technology, very derivative designs, cheaper components, and so forth. But they improved their process, which, coupled with lower labor and materials costs, allowed them to sell cheaper. The cars weren't better, they mostly didn't do anything new, they simply exploited what was already available and made it CHEAP. So their innovation was in marketting, not in engineering. I think the same is true with MS. They're not really innovators, they're just good marketers who have a dominant mind-share.
As for OS/2, I'll be the first to say that IBM dropped the ball big time. It could have been great, but Gerstner didn't want to put the time and money into marketting it. The technology was superior in most respects to anything MS had to offer, but once again, MS had a hold on mindshare and aggressively protected that hold through marketting and aggressive BUSINESS tactics. They certainly didn't win on the basis of product quality, robustness, etc.
OS/2 Warp 4 was every bit as easy to install as a Win9x release, had every feature that a Win 9x box had, and was generally less likely to crash than 9x at that time. But it was too little too late, and IBM never put a tenth as much into advertising it as MS did with Windows. The whole picture of things could have been changed by IBm making some aggressive marketting stances and taking some risk, but Gerstner wouldn't have it. In marketting, not technology, did OS/2 die.
As far as OS/2's technology goes, Microsoft benefitted, during their partnership with IBM, by access to a lot of IBM's technology. NT would probably have taken longer to come out, and may not have had some of its strengths without Microsoft's access to IBM's engineering.
Okay, maybe I'm just missing the big pic here, but what exactly has MS innovated again? (Apart from massively restricitive licensing, anti-competitive "bundling", etc.) From what I can see:
MS has a GUI. Apple and Xerox did it first.
MS has multi-tasking. OS/2 had it before MS did, and many OS's did/do it better even after MS finally got around to it.
MS has Word. WordPerfect, among others, did it first.
MS has Excel. Anyone heard of Lotus 1-2-3? Or VisiCalc?
MS has IE. Netscape, Mosaic, et al. all came first.
MS has Outlook, and I know for a fact I got e-mail on various clients long before Outlook was a glint in the e-postman's eye.
MS has "Age of Empire". Microprose already did Civilization.
MS has X-Box. Sony and Nintendo already had products in this area.
MS Money is a Quicken clone.
Visio was already Visio before MS purchased them.
MS NetMeeting was innovated by another company (Databeam) and purchased by MS.
MSN Instant Messenger comes from IRC by way of AIM and ICQ.
For that matter, MSN is basicaly a value-added ISP, essentially AOL with butterflies.
Windows NT was really IBM's OS/2 technology for the most part.
DOS was purchased, and was, in any case, basically CP/M.
Windows post 95(b) provides Internet Access via TCP/IP, but they were probably the last player to enter that game.
Media Player is basically just RealPlayer.
Someone please enlighten me . . . apart from legal and marketting ploys, what has MS actually innovated? What technology did they come up with themselves? (As opposed to either buying someone else's tech and rebranding it, or cloning someone else's idea.) So far, only ones I see as possibles are MS Project and MS PowerPoint, but I have a feeling that these are purchased technology also. (I seem to recall reading as much, but can't find the reference at the moment.)
Any MS apologists care to give us a list of MS innovations?
Slashdot Mirror
Physics don't matter. In a few years, all fuel will be replaced by Brawndo. (It's got what Buses Crave.)
This is an old debate. Yes, TV and Movies largely rob you of time and money, and take up brain-cycles and memory capacity that could be used more productively for other things. Largely. It's because people choose to watch that kind of movie. We could all be watching intelligent, thought-provoking documentaries and technical films. But we don't. (Exceptions are noted.)
Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful ability. I'm glad I have it, it allows me to be entertained by reading, hearing, and watching works of pure fiction. I'm also glad that I'm smart enough to know the difference between fiction and fact. I got that by asking questions (stimulated in many cases by unrealistic scenes in movies, I'm sure). Not everyone wants to learn, however, and those that don't want to learn are probably irredeemable anyway. And laying the blame for their failures at Hollywood's doorstep is like blaming Goth Music and Violent Video Games for school shootings. It completely misses the point that solid education (or other forms of intervention, usually originating with parents that actually, gasp, pay attention to their children) would obviate the need for babysitting people through basic fact-versus-fancy analyses of obviously unrealistic media.
Some of us are able to handle our mindless entertainment responsibly. Those that can learn, will. Those that can't, will probably massively outnumber us within a generation or two anyway, if they don't already.
I don't think you have to go even this far. There are some excellent performance artists and comedians out there that work with their audiences and use varying degrees of improvisation, that are far more interesting and artistic than a more "static" performance would be. An example from the Comedy side would be Paula Poundstone. The funniest bits, IMHO, in her performances are the parts where she's talking to audience members and spinning up whole new bits on the spot as a result of them. She's a gifted improvisationalist.
How about Jazz? Jazz musicians interact with each other and their environment. The end result is rarely the same thing twice, and some Jazz musicians even improvise bits on the spot based on people or things they see in the audience. It's not an intentional act on the audience's part, but still the "observer" influences the process.
Since he mentions Soup Cans, maybe we should bring in a quote commonly attributed to Warhol: Art is whatever you can get away with.
Ahh, there it is.
Am I the only one waiting for an "All your bases" joke?
Good.
PCC (PseudoCode Compiler) output--
Compiler error: plaintiff does not exist in this context.
Did you mean pliantiff?
Compilers: the ultimate dictionary flamers.
A Rose Pedal from a Rose Bicycle?
Maybe Rosebud *wasn't* a sled?
There'a a proverb about litagation silence?
Something like "Blessed are the mute lawyers, for they shall not poison the air with their heated breath." perhaps?
Wait, that's a beatitude . . . hmmm . .
"A fool and his lawyer are soon to be silenced." That works.
My situation was a mirror image. I struggled desperately through most simple mathmatics, even as far back as grade school. Memorizing mulitplication tables was damned near impossible for me. I never could get teachers to answer the question of WHY certain principles of math worked the way they did, which probably would have helped conceptualize it. Instead, I was a C math studen, passing only because I could demonstrate knowledge of theory while still failing in application.
Then came a geometry class, and everything made sense. Defining all math as spatial relations and logical verbal constructs did something to my brain. Basic algebra, when examined post-geometry, made sense and suddenly wasn't hard. But following that up with Trigonometry, it collapsed again. (To be fair to the subject, let me say that my geometry teacher was pretty good, and my Trig teacher was a re-purposed football coach who was required by state law to teach at least one academic class, but couldn't work his own problems on the board without several mistakes. Oh lucky me. This was clearly a factor in not 'getting' trig.)
So I still hated math *until* picking up Hoffstadter's GEB. Again, certain concepts started making sense again. Following this with Metamagical Themas carved out still more brain-space for math concepts, such that I'm now usually able to follow new (to me) math concepts with only a little brow-wrinkling. (I won't claim to be a math geek by a long stretch, but I've grown interested enough in math to actually buy books about math. That's an impressive delta.)
Resultant to this announcement, it seems all the more vital that all Discordians should remember to eat a hot dog tomorrow.
Might we have another holiday to lodge onto the Discordian calendar?
How appropriate is it that this should happen in the Season of Bureaucracy? Mark your calednars, all . . . Sweetmorn, Bureaucracy the 37th, 3242 . . . Discordians finally get a planet they can migrate to (as soon as a few technical hurdles are . . . well . . . hurdled.)
Someone did some research that supports your premise. I can't find the reference at the moment, but an article I read a while back about fear and panic attack triggers, which rated dentist drills and bees swarming as some of the most anxiety inducing noises. The article mentioned that dental drill noises and bee noises are sometimes added in subtle ways to movie soundtracks, because even when you can't consciously pick the noise out from the background sounds, a part of your brain is picking them up and reacting to various degrees.
Then there's the *real* attrocities on the Horde side.
Homonecrobestial-back Mountain: Ang Lee's controversial new film involving two males, a Tauren and an Undead, and their forbidden moment of passion in the steamy heat of the Molten Core . .
It seems to be some sort of inverted gerund. Adding -ING to a noun to make it a verb, instead of adding -ING to a verb to make it a noun.
Anagerund?
The process of which would be Anagerunding?
Hey, it's got self-reference, and that makes it stylish.
A casual 2 minute browse of that site (meaning rootkit.com) revealed 2 exploits that can hide from RootkitRevealer. One hopes that Russinovich and others are paying attention to these exploits and coming up with ways to counter them.
Possible SCO (il)logic: SCO needs the copyrights to acquire the UNIX technology, so that they can show clear ownership, so that they can sue Novell for defamation of title.
Or perhaps: SCO needs the copyrights assigned so they can continue to sue IBM for violations of copyrights that SCO needs assigned.
"Your Honor, we will show beyond a doubt that Novell has acted in bad faith, as soon as you compel them to act in good faith, which will be in bad faith. We'd also like you to assign us the patent on patenting things, so we can sue everyone who has used our patented patenting patent."
Somehow, this sounds plausible.
For the little "buried" jokes, I have a fond spot in my heart for HEX being labeled with "Anthill Inside". (Things like "Ram Skulls", and the "Beehive long-term storage", having caused fits and snorts of laughter as well.)
I still detest Rincewind. TCoM was my first Pratchett book, and would have been my last, were it not for friends who provided copies of the Watch series to convince me that the rest of Discworld was worth reading.
So does that mean that Microsoft succeeded in binding the Windows license to the physical machine?
I know most of the hardware resellers (Dell, HP, etc.) affix the license sticker (pretty much permanently) to the case. When I asked a rep at Dell if I could take a copy of Windows 2000 Pro off of one laptop and install it on another (that had come with ME), I was told this violated the licensing agreement.
On the other hand, I've heard that it's legal to transfer a retail copy from one machine to another so long as you remove it from the first. Is it "First Sale" or "First Install" we need to worry about here?
. . . a revised EULA in the next Fix Pack.
If, as TFA suggests, this is a loophole in the licensing agreements, a simple change to the already largely ignored EULA should adroitly close it.
Mercury as 'Neural Grease'?
"A little 'Arctic QuickSilver' for ya?"
"No, I won't be overclocking my brain, but thanks anyway."
Hmmm... I can think of another obvious way. The various MMORPG like Camelot, Evercrack, and even various LAN shooters, can devour bandwidth. Nothing illegal or contrary to TOS there.
I think the problem is that ISP's oversell their networks, and then try to blame / charge the end-user when resources are spread too thin.
Hmmm . . . just a small side note, the Viking King Herold was not a direct participant in the Battle of Hastings. The direct participants were William the Conqueror and Edward the Confessor. Edward was defeated. It's worth noting, however, that a few weeks prior to the battle of Hastings, King Herold did try to invade England. The Battle of Stamford Bridge *was* an attempted Norse (Northmen) invasion and is sometimes lumped together with Hastings. I've heard some theories that had Edwards troops not been reduced somewhat by the attempted Viking invasion, Hastings might have had a whole 'nother result.
Sounds like I had more fun and got more concise and well presented information at that Timeshare seminar I went to. And I came out feeling far less ripped off, too.
Maybe SCO should take some lessons from Hilton?
Oh, wait, Hilton has an actual product to sell. Woops, my bad.
You can always go to Lotus 1-2-3. You'll have the option of using either the Lotus formula language or "LotusScript" which is a VB clone.
That whole story was actually bogus.
See the Snopes Article for more.
I agree that MS is capable of pumping a large amount of cash and labor into any project they set their minds to. And yes, they've made (in some cases) significant improvements to software that was designed by others or created their own, sometimes improved, versions of some software. (Though some would argue that they do this in order to destroy competitors that don't want to sell out to Redmond.)
But they rarely, if ever, come up with any NEW ideas. In the sense that Ballmer used "Innovative", MS doesn't fit the description any better than OSS does. Both use concepts that are largely derivative but embellished.
I'll draw a parallel that may be a bit flameworthy here: Asian Automobiles in the 70's and early 80's were mostly not innovative at all. They used very available technology, very derivative designs, cheaper components, and so forth. But they improved their process, which, coupled with lower labor and materials costs, allowed them to sell cheaper. The cars weren't better, they mostly didn't do anything new, they simply exploited what was already available and made it CHEAP. So their innovation was in marketting, not in engineering. I think the same is true with MS. They're not really innovators, they're just good marketers who have a dominant mind-share.
As for OS/2, I'll be the first to say that IBM dropped the ball big time. It could have been great, but Gerstner didn't want to put the time and money into marketting it. The technology was superior in most respects to anything MS had to offer, but once again, MS had a hold on mindshare and aggressively protected that hold through marketting and aggressive BUSINESS tactics. They certainly didn't win on the basis of product quality, robustness, etc.
OS/2 Warp 4 was every bit as easy to install as a Win9x release, had every feature that a Win 9x box had, and was generally less likely to crash than 9x at that time. But it was too little too late, and IBM never put a tenth as much into advertising it as MS did with Windows. The whole picture of things could have been changed by IBm making some aggressive marketting stances and taking some risk, but Gerstner wouldn't have it. In marketting, not technology, did OS/2 die.
As far as OS/2's technology goes, Microsoft benefitted, during their partnership with IBM, by access to a lot of IBM's technology. NT would probably have taken longer to come out, and may not have had some of its strengths without Microsoft's access to IBM's engineering.
Okay, maybe I'm just missing the big pic here, but what exactly has MS innovated again? (Apart from massively restricitive licensing, anti-competitive "bundling", etc.) From what I can see:
MS has a GUI. Apple and Xerox did it first.
MS has multi-tasking. OS/2 had it before MS did, and many OS's did/do it better even after MS finally got around to it.
MS has Word. WordPerfect, among others, did it first.
MS has Excel. Anyone heard of Lotus 1-2-3? Or VisiCalc?
MS has IE. Netscape, Mosaic, et al. all came first.
MS has Outlook, and I know for a fact I got e-mail on various clients long before Outlook was a glint in the e-postman's eye.
MS has "Age of Empire". Microprose already did Civilization.
MS has X-Box. Sony and Nintendo already had products in this area.
MS Money is a Quicken clone.
Visio was already Visio before MS purchased them.
MS NetMeeting was innovated by another company (Databeam) and purchased by MS.
MSN Instant Messenger comes from IRC by way of AIM and ICQ.
For that matter, MSN is basicaly a value-added ISP, essentially AOL with butterflies.
Windows NT was really IBM's OS/2 technology for the most part.
DOS was purchased, and was, in any case, basically CP/M.
Windows post 95(b) provides Internet Access via TCP/IP, but they were probably the last player to enter that game.
Media Player is basically just RealPlayer.
Someone please enlighten me . . . apart from legal and marketting ploys, what has MS actually innovated? What technology did they come up with themselves? (As opposed to either buying someone else's tech and rebranding it, or cloning someone else's idea.) So far, only ones I see as possibles are MS Project and MS PowerPoint, but I have a feeling that these are purchased technology also. (I seem to recall reading as much, but can't find the reference at the moment.)
Any MS apologists care to give us a list of MS innovations?