It reminds me of my favorite New Yorker Cartoon. It showed a 6 eyed creature with tentacles and antennae sprouting from his head. It was holding a sign that read "Do not suspect that I am an alien".
That reminds me of the situation in IT I've encountered at my last two jobs. The sysadmins and network people at these two mega corporations are all of the sort that just fell into computers from other fields, with no real background, education (or, in many cases, interest) in computers. They sort of flail along, day by day, rebooting things and clicking on wizards to get by. You't think I, with a lifelong burning interest in computer science, lots of education on the subject, and wide experience in admin, networking, and programming could really stand out in these situations? Oddly enough, it's not the case. These homegrown computer types are extremely suspicious of any high falutin' technical concepts, and certainly don't trust anything they can't understand. The mere ability to write a Perl script to automate a simple task at these two sites is viewed with exterme suspicion. At these two places, it's a case of the one eyed man in the country of the blind being in for a rough ride....anyone else encounter similar IT departments?
Yah...traditional FM broadcasters have managed to produce a product that people will not only not accept for free, but will pay $10.00 or so a month to avoid....
That someone like him is a "believer" is just proof that the pernicious religion meme, if implanted in childhood, is very hard to eradicate in later life...
Naw, it was just a regular probe by the name of Joel..it did a good job cleaning up the place, but his bosses didn't like him, so they shot him into space...
It's like the circa 1968 TV series, "The Immortal"...after a person donates blood to a blood bank, the blood is discovered to have potent rejuvenating properties. The evil medical industrial complex is determined to capture him and use him for a lab rat, so he has to go on the run...pretty decent series, but it didn't run long enough to go into syndication.
It's about time, it's about space, it's about strange people in the strangest place (sorry, can't get the theme song to this 1966 TV series out of my head)
I dunno about you, but I'd like to think that folks somewhere, be it Luna, Mars, or maybe Ceres and Vesta, are still rocking out to that good old rock & roll long after I'm gone, and after a planet busting asteroid destroys this greasy blue marble we all live on.
I agree...for the money wasted on shuttles and the space station, we could have had a lunar colony, or a manned Mars mission...either of which would have been vastly better use of the funds.
Money wasted on the space station in no way advances any of the things you are concerned about. Being in LEO and constantly resupplied from the ground, it provides no information on how to build a Martian or Lunar colony, or how to support a crew on a years long mission to Mars.
This reminds me of the funniest thing I've seen lately...Paul Kantner's album, "Blows Against the Empire" was recently re-released on CD. For those of you who are too young to have heard it when it came out around 1970, this album advocated violent overthrow of the US government, theft of government property, active draft resistance, drug use, and other assorted bits of anarchy. On the cover of the jewel box, and on the CD itself, it now has large FBI anti-piracy warnings, threatening you with government prosecution for attempting to pirate this album...ironic, nicht wahr?
Maybe it seemed way ahead of its time, if you didn't compare it with any non-X86 environments. At the time Netware was in its heyday, the networking and clustering capabilities of DEC's VMS made Netware seem like a crude caricature of networking.
My wife started teaching community college about 18 months ago (after being laid off from a $175,000/year job as an IT project manager at Coca Cola....there's a direct hit to my wallet), and she has been astounded at how many students, in an effort to save money, don't buy the textbooks for their courses, figuring they can pick up enough from the classes to get by...and even more surprising, they usually do get by!
You said just like riding a bike...but in the case of motorcycles, statistics and my personal experience shows that that sort of motor memory decays over the years. Personally, I started riding again after a 15 year hiatus, and promptly had a minor accident two days into it (as I flew through the air, I remember praying to the Goddess of Sudden and Unexpected Deceleration, "please don't let the bike land on the recently re-chromed parts". Overall, the accident death rate among "Born Again Bikers", that is, those who have started riding after a 15, 20, 30 year absence from the activity, is truly frightening - these guys are getting moved down in windrows. After a couple months of caution relearning, I'm up to my previous skill level.
No chance of ricochting off of a pet gerbil...with your Bergenholm on, you have no inertia,and no momentum either. When you hit the gerbil, you would stop abruptly, and since you were still inertialess, wouldn't feel a thing...jeez, what are they teaching you kids in Physics classes these day?
Slashdot Mirror
It reminds me of my favorite New Yorker Cartoon. It showed a 6 eyed creature with tentacles and antennae sprouting from his head. It was holding a sign that read "Do not suspect that I am an alien".
That's because your family class, and family and social connections are far far more connected with sucess than any actual ability you have.
That reminds me of the situation in IT I've encountered at my last two jobs. The sysadmins and network people at these two mega corporations are all of the sort that just fell into computers from other fields, with no real background, education (or, in many cases, interest) in computers. They sort of flail along, day by day, rebooting things and clicking on wizards to get by. You't think I, with a lifelong burning interest in computer science, lots of education on the subject, and wide experience in admin, networking, and programming could really stand out in these situations? Oddly enough, it's not the case. These homegrown computer types are extremely suspicious of any high falutin' technical concepts, and certainly don't trust anything they can't understand. The mere ability to write a Perl script to automate a simple task at these two sites is viewed with exterme suspicion. At these two places, it's a case of the one eyed man in the country of the blind being in for a rough ride....anyone else encounter similar IT departments?
Yah...traditional FM broadcasters have managed to produce a product that people will not only not accept for free, but will pay $10.00 or so a month to avoid....
I've never tasted dog, but I figure if they taste anything like they smell, then I'm pretty sure they wouldn't taste good...
That someone like him is a "believer" is just proof that the pernicious religion meme, if implanted in childhood, is very hard to eradicate in later life...
Yah, they got rules against killing...Except for the Buddha...if I see that guy on the road, I'm gonna gun him down...
You should have the guys from Car Talk on as guest stars for the next automotive related myth.
Terrific...life and death translations being done by a program...we'll be reading about this on comp.risks before too long.
Yah, and 2012 was the year of the Howard Family Convention where all the trouble started...Lazarus Long still won't talk about what really happened.
It wasn't the asteroids, or the airplanes...it was Jack Casady.
Yah, and he won't be very funny...
Naw, it was just a regular probe by the name of Joel..it did a good job cleaning up the place, but his bosses didn't like him, so they shot him into space...
It's like the circa 1968 TV series, "The Immortal"...after a person donates blood to a blood bank, the blood is discovered to have potent rejuvenating properties. The evil medical industrial complex is determined to capture him and use him for a lab rat, so he has to go on the run...pretty decent series, but it didn't run long enough to go into syndication.
It's about time, it's about space, it's about strange people in the strangest place (sorry, can't get the theme song to this 1966 TV series out of my head)
Heck, if the rest of the book could be written as funny as the post, I'd pay to read it.
We already have flying cars, and have had them for about 55 years now...it's just that they are a leetle expensive, and we call them helicopters.
I dunno about you, but I'd like to think that folks somewhere, be it Luna, Mars, or maybe Ceres and Vesta, are still rocking out to that good old rock & roll long after I'm gone, and after a planet busting asteroid destroys this greasy blue marble we all live on.
I agree...for the money wasted on shuttles and the space station, we could have had a lunar colony, or a manned Mars mission...either of which would have been vastly better use of the funds.
Money wasted on the space station in no way advances any of the things you are concerned about. Being in LEO and constantly resupplied from the ground, it provides no information on how to build a Martian or Lunar colony, or how to support a crew on a years long mission to Mars.
This reminds me of the funniest thing I've seen lately...Paul Kantner's album, "Blows Against the Empire" was recently re-released on CD. For those of you who are too young to have heard it when it came out around 1970, this album advocated violent overthrow of the US government, theft of government property, active draft resistance, drug use, and other assorted bits of anarchy. On the cover of the jewel box, and on the CD itself, it now has large FBI anti-piracy warnings, threatening you with government prosecution for attempting to pirate this album...ironic, nicht wahr?
Maybe it seemed way ahead of its time, if you didn't compare it with any non-X86 environments. At the time Netware was in its heyday, the networking and clustering capabilities of DEC's VMS made Netware seem like a crude caricature of networking.
My wife started teaching community college about 18 months ago (after being laid off from a $175,000/year job as an IT project manager at Coca Cola....there's a direct hit to my wallet), and she has been astounded at how many students, in an effort to save money, don't buy the textbooks for their courses, figuring they can pick up enough from the classes to get by...and even more surprising, they usually do get by!
You said just like riding a bike...but in the case of motorcycles, statistics and my personal experience shows that that sort of motor memory decays over the years. Personally, I started riding again after a 15 year hiatus, and promptly had a minor accident two days into it (as I flew through the air, I remember praying to the Goddess of Sudden and Unexpected Deceleration, "please don't let the bike land on the recently re-chromed parts". Overall, the accident death rate among "Born Again Bikers", that is, those who have started riding after a 15, 20, 30 year absence from the activity, is truly frightening - these guys are getting moved down in windrows. After a couple months of caution relearning, I'm up to my previous skill level.
No chance of ricochting off of a pet gerbil...with your Bergenholm on, you have no inertia,and no momentum either. When you hit the gerbil, you would stop abruptly, and since you were still inertialess, wouldn't feel a thing...jeez, what are they teaching you kids in Physics classes these day?