Have you seen the movie? Wow, that guy was hot, wasn't he? But if you know kung-fu so well as the handsome player on the clip in question then why would you want to play someone who does? It's like playing sim city by a real mayor instead of ruling his own city or playing half life by someone who already has a life of his own, and a full one at that. Doesn't make much sense. In addition with poor graphics and lame music I just can't see it popular among the video games target audience (read: nonathletic teenage males with poor social skills). All in all, a great idea to use in the movie industry during the next 5-7 years for cheap side effects in straight-to-DVD productions for kids but hardly a success as a game per se. But the movie was great. In fact, I think I'll watch it again.
How on Earth could Google possibly compete with paypal? Unless... they are silently planning their gebay? Now I see. It will be an interesting war. But will good (Google) win with evil (not Google) this time? Only time will tell.
1. Microsoft (virri vulnerabilities) causes SPAM. Slashdot outraged. 2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged. Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.
I bet that if it was a story about Gmail then it would be a great idea, becasue Google never does evil.
What people like Larry McVoy seem to be unable to understand is that any innovation in computer science takes years and sometimes decades to be easily available to the end user and it usually happens in the academia with no press releases and conferences.
For example, there is a lot of innovation in the Hurd kernel and that is why it is not ready yet. And I'm sure that when it is ready and stable then Larry McVoy will complain that those ideas are old and obviously he'll be correct.
I'm sorry, Larry, but once again you complain that you don't have innovative mature systems. Do you want innovation? Use Debian GNU/Hurd. Do you want a mature system? Use Debian GNU/Linux. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Sad but true.
It seems that the Spotlight is in the spotlight. Contrary to what I said before, the AC might have been right about Spotlight being overhyped in the extremes. It is overhyped to the max.
Here's a link for anyone wondering what the Tiger Spotlight is. (In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.)
(By the way, here's a direct link to the article in question.)
Anyway, call me oldfashioned but an Anonymous Coward writing "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users" is hardly the end of the world. Innovative interfaces may be "major pain" for an AC on Slashdot but meanwhile a lot of people in the Real World find it very useful (pun not intended), all the "overhyping in the extremes" (or even overhyping to the max) notwithstanding. Don't like it? Don't use it! Simple as that. Fortunately, as always with Apple, there's more than one way to do it. Do you think that Microsoft's SQL filesystem works better? Use Longhorn then.
Well, that's it then. Since my hobbist software development budget is approximately zero - I'm going to have to give up on Windows Mobile development. [emphasis added]
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair?... One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. Bill Gates, An Open Letter to Hobbyists, February 3, 1976.
It has been thirty and you still can't realize that you are non grata? Your patience is unbelievable but why won't you just get over it and go somewhereelse where people actually want you? Crazy idea, isn't it?
It's just like Wikipedia only with one-sentence articles with no punctuation, every query costs you arm and leg and reading with 2-point font makes you blind in the process. I expect it to be a great success. Cellphones are truly amazing.
The correct headline sould be: Push a button and land on a carrier as long as there is no software "glitch" or any single thing unforseen by the programmers, because unlike a real pilot, the computer will not quickly learn new skills to survive. Or are they going to make the system perfect, just like ABS, or ATMs, or PC software? Good luck.
Please let me explain the above post. This entire "Microsoft vs Linux" war (a war nota bene interesting only for infantile cheerleaders and crazy zealots on both sides and otherwise bearing very little if any relevance for real system administrators) is utterly pointless and has been from the very beginning. Everyone is basically saying: "We think that you should buy from us because..." and the "facts" follow. Does it really surprise anyone? Does it still have to be a front page news? Do we really have to waste our valuable time on explaining lies and FUD being spread by Microsoft? Can't we just accept that lying Microsoft is a status quo and start posting front page news after it becomes status quo ante? Now that would be some interesting news I would like to read about. People, we as a community have a lot of much more important things to do but we prefer to write countless posts about Microsoft and meanwhile the sarge is still frozen, the kernel is still buggy, pasting is still inconsistent and we are still not ready for the desktop. Why? Because we waste our time on arguing that we have great software instead of making it even greater. That is our biggest problem.
"A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding that ISPs disclose the names of suspected file sharers."
Entertainment industry be damned. What we should worry about is network and systems security, DDoS, botnets, zombies, and of course SPAM and PORN. I hope we will not have to block *.de on our SMTP relays and TCP/IP firewalls like we had with *.cn and *.ne. Hopefully Germans will know how to be responsible with their privacy and lack of control. Only time will tell.
"The BBC is reporting on the UK government's latest policy to tackle obesity - through offering iPods and XBoxes to pupils."
XBoxes? To tackle obesity? What else? A new TV set? Why not offer bikes and musical instruments instead of XBoxes and iPods? This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard.
In other words: forget the static billboards and welcome the spinning billtorusii thanks to the general relativity theory and the equivalence principle in non-inertial frames of reference. Another example of politicians who want to write laws to control the entire universe without any knowledge of the real laws of said universe. (Pun most definitely intended.) Sad. Very sad.
Depression, bipolar disorder, mania, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Asperger's syndrome (we can read about them in Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality by Eric S. Raymond) are very common among intelligent people in general, not only IT workers. Somewhat less common are dyslexia, schizophrenia and various types of psychosis. This seems to be rather widely known but at the same time many people tend to forget about autism. Some of you may remember that back in 2003 I made some research to find a correlation between IQ (the intelligence quotient) and AQ (the autism-spectrum quotient). The results pretty much speak for themselves. Needless to say it seems that while some of the symptoms may result from caffeinism, sleep deprivation and other drugs abuse, at least some of them seem to be directly correlated with other personality characteristics and sexual habits or the lack thereof. But we have to keep in mind that it is very easy to fall into post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. We have to ask ourselves whether these are intelligence and technical skills that cause personality weaknesses or the other way around when a weak psyche and antisocial attitude result in the concentration on abstract concepts and thinking in general. In short: those who are more intelligent do not necessarily have to be psychopaths but any sociopaths most certainly have a lot of time to think and tinker with their hardware. That may in turn result in the perception that intelligence makes people crazy which does not have to be true at all.
It is not what have been said but rather whom have it been said by that is really important here. We as a community of programmers, coders, hackers, engineers and otherwise intelligent people knew it from the beginning. We had no doubt. We avoided those pathetic scam artists like fire, we abandoned their products, we laughed at their employees (I even stopped visiting Santa Cruz every year for that matter) but let's face it: the uneducated masses kept happily buying their stock like there had been no yesterday. This time, however, we finally have got someone to refer our CEO to while talking about SCO, and who could possibly serve that purpose better than SEC? This is a very important step on our way to victory of the Freedom of Software. Kudos to everyone who kept fighting against those immoral bastards. Kudos to SEC, kudos to fellow Slashdotters, kudos to the Groklaw team, and especially kudos to Pamela Jones without whom the already inflated SCO stock would probably be worth twice as much today. Thanks Pamela!
Yeah, just like a mouse driver having full access to kernel security structures and raw disk partitions, it doesn't seem all that worrying at all (except when your entire system crashes thanks to a buggy sound driver, or you get rooted, or...).
Not fixing this design mistake while laughing at respected experts in the field reminds me something. I was hoping that we as a community might have became a little bit more mature during the last decade, but I seem to have been naïve again.
I cannot just advise you to do what I do in equivalent situations,
because I do not really think
it is appropriate,
to say the very least,
for a man to punch a woman in the face,
especially an older woman.
Men should never hit women.
This is an extremely difficult situation.
I can only wish you good luck
and say that as a woman working as a consultant
in sys/net security industry
I can understand it very, very well.
First of all, I wonder who you are, Mr. Anonymous Coward, that you know my sex so well
to post such lies.
Second of all, as I have already explained,
I do not really care a lot
about that "Karma."
I am actually quite surprised that all of you people
take this Slashdot "Karma" so seriously, like it was an IQ or something.
Anyone wants to take a bet?
OK, my bet is Mozilla, followed by Galeon, Opera on the third place (very good for a proprietary software), then Pheonix and Lynx. What do you think?
I have seen this graphics already, and I really like it. I wonder when graphics designers are going to follow
game engine coders and release their work under a copyleft license, so everyone could use their work in free software games.
It would be very useful for the WorldForge Project, which I am sort of into.
This graphics could be great to start this new trend.
Dear Old Uncle Bill
(if that is your real name),
I find it hilariously amusing that you hate me so much and yet you devote such a great amount of your precious time to make sure you have read every single word I have ever typed on Slashdot.
It is indeed extremely amusing, however I also feel very sorry for you, as you apparently have nothing more interesting to do, like e.g. getting a life perhaps.
I feel sorry, because it must be a terribly boring life, which is spent on carefully reading
everything ever written by someone whom you find absolutely not interesting, i.e. me--from posts, to journals, to signatures, to user informations--even calculating the exact time intervals between different posts.
I am really glad I haven't posted URL of my personal web site, or all of the addresses from which I have ever posted on public mailing lists and usenet for that matter, because I would have been certainly killed by pangs of conscience
for giving you hours upon hours of boring reading in terrible anger.
You might consider calming down a little bit. Otherwise you risk a heart attack. I am serious.
Living proof that you can be a mensa member and still be a fucking moron. Read her journal... Yikes.
Please don't mind if I take the liberty to suggest you something. If you don't like my journal, you might consider... maybe... well... like... not reading it any more?
I realise this highly abstract concept might me quite difficult to understant at first and might deeply confuse you, but I am sure you will understand it sooner or later. I wish you good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you seen the movie? Wow, that guy was hot, wasn't he? But if you know kung-fu so well as the handsome player on the clip in question then why would you want to play someone who does? It's like playing sim city by a real mayor instead of ruling his own city or playing half life by someone who already has a life of his own, and a full one at that. Doesn't make much sense. In addition with poor graphics and lame music I just can't see it popular among the video games target audience (read: nonathletic teenage males with poor social skills). All in all, a great idea to use in the movie industry during the next 5-7 years for cheap side effects in straight-to-DVD productions for kids but hardly a success as a game per se. But the movie was great. In fact, I think I'll watch it again.
How on Earth could Google possibly compete with paypal? Unless ... they are silently planning their gebay? Now I see. It will be an interesting war. But will good (Google) win with evil (not Google) this time? Only time will tell.
1. Microsoft (virri vulnerabilities) causes SPAM. Slashdot outraged.
2. Microsoft fights SPAM. Slashdot equally outraged.
Conclusion: Microsoft is always evil no matter what they do.
I bet that if it was a story about Gmail then it would be a great idea, becasue Google never does evil.
Very little in the most popular free software projects has ever been innovative. Sadly, it's true. And even sadlier, this is even more true for proprietary software. We all know that Microsoft has never contributed a single notable innovation to any computer-related field. That didn't stop them from the world domination, did it?
What people like Larry McVoy seem to be unable to understand is that any innovation in computer science takes years and sometimes decades to be easily available to the end user and it usually happens in the academia with no press releases and conferences.
For example, there is a lot of innovation in the Hurd kernel and that is why it is not ready yet. And I'm sure that when it is ready and stable then Larry McVoy will complain that those ideas are old and obviously he'll be correct.
I'm sorry, Larry, but once again you complain that you don't have innovative mature systems. Do you want innovation? Use Debian GNU/Hurd. Do you want a mature system? Use Debian GNU/Linux. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Sad but true.
It seems that the Spotlight is in the spotlight. Contrary to what I said before, the AC might have been right about Spotlight being overhyped in the extremes. It is overhyped to the max.
Here's a link for anyone wondering what the Tiger Spotlight is. (In short: With Spotlight, you can find anything on your computer as quickly as you type. Search your entire system from one place: Files, emails, contacts, images, calendars and applications appear instantly.)
(By the way, here's a direct link to the article in question.)
Anyway, call me oldfashioned but an Anonymous Coward writing "Spotlight turns out to be a major pain for many users" is hardly the end of the world. Innovative interfaces may be "major pain" for an AC on Slashdot but meanwhile a lot of people in the Real World find it very useful (pun not intended), all the "overhyping in the extremes" (or even overhyping to the max) notwithstanding. Don't like it? Don't use it! Simple as that. Fortunately, as always with Apple, there's more than one way to do it. Do you think that Microsoft's SQL filesystem works better? Use Longhorn then.
Well, that's it then. Since my hobbist software development budget is approximately zero - I'm going to have to give up on Windows Mobile development. [emphasis added]
... One thing you do do is prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? The fact is, no one besides us has invested a lot of money in hobby software. We have written 6800 BASIC, and are writing 8080 APL and 6800 APL, but there is very little incentive to make this software available to hobbyists. Most directly, the thing you do is theft. Bill Gates, An Open Letter to Hobbyists, February 3, 1976.
As the majority of hobbyists must be aware, most of you steal your software. Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? Is this fair?
It has been thirty and you still can't realize that you are non grata? Your patience is unbelievable but why won't you just get over it and go somewhere else where people actually want you? Crazy idea, isn't it?
It's just like Wikipedia only with one-sentence articles with no punctuation, every query costs you arm and leg and reading with 2-point font makes you blind in the process. I expect it to be a great success. Cellphones are truly amazing.
The correct headline sould be: Push a button and land on a carrier as long as there is no software "glitch" or any single thing unforseen by the programmers, because unlike a real pilot, the computer will not quickly learn new skills to survive. Or are they going to make the system perfect, just like ABS, or ATMs, or PC software? Good luck.
Please let me explain the above post. This entire "Microsoft vs Linux" war (a war nota bene interesting only for infantile cheerleaders and crazy zealots on both sides and otherwise bearing very little if any relevance for real system administrators) is utterly pointless and has been from the very beginning. Everyone is basically saying: "We think that you should buy from us because..." and the "facts" follow. Does it really surprise anyone? Does it still have to be a front page news? Do we really have to waste our valuable time on explaining lies and FUD being spread by Microsoft? Can't we just accept that lying Microsoft is a status quo and start posting front page news after it becomes status quo ante? Now that would be some interesting news I would like to read about. People, we as a community have a lot of much more important things to do but we prefer to write countless posts about Microsoft and meanwhile the sarge is still frozen, the kernel is still buggy, pasting is still inconsistent and we are still not ready for the desktop. Why? Because we waste our time on arguing that we have great software instead of making it even greater. That is our biggest problem.
wait a minute, since when is porn a bad thing?
You are joking, right? This is not funny at all.
"A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding that ISPs disclose the names of suspected file sharers."
Entertainment industry be damned. What we should worry about is network and systems security, DDoS, botnets, zombies, and of course SPAM and PORN. I hope we will not have to block *.de on our SMTP relays and TCP/IP firewalls like we had with *.cn and *.ne. Hopefully Germans will know how to be responsible with their privacy and lack of control. Only time will tell.
"The BBC is reporting on the UK government's latest policy to tackle obesity - through offering iPods and XBoxes to pupils."
XBoxes? To tackle obesity? What else? A new TV set? Why not offer bikes and musical instruments instead of XBoxes and iPods? This is the most stupid idea I have ever heard.
In other words: forget the static billboards and welcome the spinning billtorusii thanks to the general relativity theory and the equivalence principle in non-inertial frames of reference. Another example of politicians who want to write laws to control the entire universe without any knowledge of the real laws of said universe. (Pun most definitely intended.) Sad. Very sad.
Depression, bipolar disorder, mania, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Asperger's syndrome (we can read about them in Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality by Eric S. Raymond) are very common among intelligent people in general, not only IT workers. Somewhat less common are dyslexia, schizophrenia and various types of psychosis. This seems to be rather widely known but at the same time many people tend to forget about autism. Some of you may remember that back in 2003 I made some research to find a correlation between IQ (the intelligence quotient) and AQ (the autism-spectrum quotient). The results pretty much speak for themselves. Needless to say it seems that while some of the symptoms may result from caffeinism, sleep deprivation and other drugs abuse, at least some of them seem to be directly correlated with other personality characteristics and sexual habits or the lack thereof. But we have to keep in mind that it is very easy to fall into post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. We have to ask ourselves whether these are intelligence and technical skills that cause personality weaknesses or the other way around when a weak psyche and antisocial attitude result in the concentration on abstract concepts and thinking in general. In short: those who are more intelligent do not necessarily have to be psychopaths but any sociopaths most certainly have a lot of time to think and tinker with their hardware. That may in turn result in the perception that intelligence makes people crazy which does not have to be true at all.
It is not what have been said but rather whom have it been said by that is really important here. We as a community of programmers, coders, hackers, engineers and otherwise intelligent people knew it from the beginning. We had no doubt. We avoided those pathetic scam artists like fire, we abandoned their products, we laughed at their employees (I even stopped visiting Santa Cruz every year for that matter) but let's face it: the uneducated masses kept happily buying their stock like there had been no yesterday. This time, however, we finally have got someone to refer our CEO to while talking about SCO, and who could possibly serve that purpose better than SEC? This is a very important step on our way to victory of the Freedom of Software. Kudos to everyone who kept fighting against those immoral bastards. Kudos to SEC, kudos to fellow Slashdotters, kudos to the Groklaw team, and especially kudos to Pamela Jones without whom the already inflated SCO stock would probably be worth twice as much today. Thanks Pamela!
Using an iMac would be a better idea, for it has a monitor already included.
"it doesn't seem all that worrying in real life."
Yeah, just like a mouse driver having full access to kernel security structures and raw disk partitions, it doesn't seem all that worrying at all (except when your entire system crashes thanks to a buggy sound driver, or you get rooted, or...).
Not fixing this design mistake while laughing at respected experts in the field reminds me something. I was hoping that we as a community might have became a little bit more mature during the last decade, but I seem to have been naïve again.
I cannot just advise you to do what I do in equivalent situations, because I do not really think it is appropriate, to say the very least, for a man to punch a woman in the face, especially an older woman. Men should never hit women. This is an extremely difficult situation. I can only wish you good luck and say that as a woman working as a consultant in sys/net security industry I can understand it very, very well.
First of all, I wonder who you are, Mr. Anonymous Coward, that you know my sex so well to post such lies. Second of all, as I have already explained, I do not really care a lot about that "Karma." I am actually quite surprised that all of you people take this Slashdot "Karma" so seriously, like it was an IQ or something.
Anyone wants to take a bet? OK, my bet is Mozilla, followed by Galeon, Opera on the third place (very good for a proprietary software), then Pheonix and Lynx. What do you think?
I have seen this graphics already, and I really like it. I wonder when graphics designers are going to follow game engine coders and release their work under a copyleft license, so everyone could use their work in free software games. It would be very useful for the WorldForge Project, which I am sort of into. This graphics could be great to start this new trend.
Dear Old Uncle Bill (if that is your real name), I find it hilariously amusing that you hate me so much and yet you devote such a great amount of your precious time to make sure you have read every single word I have ever typed on Slashdot.
It is indeed extremely amusing, however I also feel very sorry for you, as you apparently have nothing more interesting to do, like e.g. getting a life perhaps.
I feel sorry, because it must be a terribly boring life, which is spent on carefully reading everything ever written by someone whom you find absolutely not interesting, i.e. me--from posts, to journals, to signatures, to user informations--even calculating the exact time intervals between different posts.
I am really glad I haven't posted URL of my personal web site, or all of the addresses from which I have ever posted on public mailing lists and usenet for that matter, because I would have been certainly killed by pangs of conscience for giving you hours upon hours of boring reading in terrible anger.
You might consider calming down a little bit. Otherwise you risk a heart attack. I am serious.
Please don't mind if I take the liberty to suggest you something. If you don't like my journal, you might consider... maybe... well... like... not reading it any more? I realise this highly abstract concept might me quite difficult to understant at first and might deeply confuse you, but I am sure you will understand it sooner or later. I wish you good luck.