That's okay. The next step they'll want is to tie your social security number to the pass to prevent terrorism. And they'll be allowed to. Anything is okay as long as it's to fight terrorism.
Sorry. I don't conesnt to a biometric scan of anything. Period. If soomeone else so desperately wants to go to Disneyland that they're willing to give up any number of privacies and rights, that's their business. I respect mine just a little too much to give them up for a ride in a fucking tea-cup.
A lot of things might be a big deal to one specific person - that doesn't make it news.
Look at it this way:
+She is not the first kid around that age to get an MCSE or a MCP or any other Microsoft certification. +She is not the first kid that age to do so from that region of the globe. +She is not the first kid to do so in the last year. +She is not the first kid to hang with Bill Gates as a result.
It was a big deal the first time. It was pretty interesting to read about the kid who did this stuff so young and even check out his website where he wrote about all the stuff he had been able to do as a result of his accomplishment. But you know what? That was done with. It was old news. It's over.
Beating every "youngster gets a Microsoft Certification" story to death every month or two is silly. Who was the second man to reach the top of Everest? The third? The fourth? The fifth? Right, who knows - because nobody cares. It was news the first time.
But I guess the reason this is such a big deal is because she's from Pakistan and we all have idiotic preconceptions about what live all over that part of the region is like. The first picture in everyone's head is probably of some poor girl living in an aluminum shack next to her family's herd of goats, caked in dried mud, dodging bullets and carrying buckets of water half a mile from the river to do their laundry by hand in.
I'm sorry, but my entire point (besides this just not being a very interesting story) is that people respond to it with offensively stupid preconieved notions. Like if she didn't become a computer expert at the age of ten, her only other option in life would be washing feet and selling trinkets to tourists on the road. Come on. If this kid was from Canada, nobody would give a crap.
People need to check out some photos of Pakistan. Especially places liek Islamabad. Except for some of the more interesting architecture, I dare you to differentiate it from any other fairly large city. It's not like this kid was sleeping on the floor in a yurt. She's just a normal, inquisitive kid with parents that provide her with plenty of resources. Hell, resources that a lot of kids in America don't have. So don't act like this is some kid from the outback being rescued and brought to America by Kevin Bacon.
I'd be more impressed if she had acquired one of those linux certifications. Or better, solaris admin and network certifications. Everybody and their brother is an MCSE. Big deal.
Not that solaris certifications are even remotely difficult. Just saying - I've never heard of a ten year old getting one of those, but we hear of another nine or ten year old getting their MCSE almost every month.
And again, that's why I don't see how this is a big deal. She isn't the first kid that young to accomplish this AT ALL. Sarabha Nagar did the same thing and was written about just a few months ago.
When I was a kid, you didn't have to write your own pseudo worms or virii. You could just rent a game on floppies from Software Pipeline and install it somewhere.
I did something similar way back when. There were startup ANSI screens and I edited one to say "WELCOME TO HELL!!" and blink instead of the "Welcome to...(whatever)" that it originally said.
Two months later, someone did something stupid on one of the machines, causing it to have to be reformatted and reinstalled and I was blamed for "hacking" the computer... because I had the intelligence to edit an ANSI data file one time on one machine and change one word in it...
Gee, another stupid Microsoft publicity article about yet another young kid with an MCSE. We see about one of these articles per month. I think this says a little more about the "difficulty" of the MCSE test than it does about the caliber of the children.
Also, could this kid kiss Bill's ass just a little more? Wrote a poem celebrating his life's history? Are you fucking yanking my dick here? And they seem to gloss by her being a "computer programmer". What, because she made a little clicky-thingy in LOGO?
Plenty of kids her age (and within that age range) have written programs. In fact, a number within just a couple or so years of her age have started their own successful computer companies. Unusual, but hardly unheard of.
Anyway, assuming the husband that her family picks out for her to marry in exchange for a goat lets her work, she'll just be taking your job over for a measly $5,000/yr, so suck on that. And we won't even bother considering the chances that she'll end up glowing next time her country gets in a nuke tiff with India again.
And you're god damn right I'm not posting anonymously. You can suck on that, too.
Don't get me wrong. D&D stuff is retarded, too. But honeslty, dressing like a vampire and hanging out with 80 other wannabe-oh-so-cool types at the local Shari's all night, becuase you couldn't get a real date and have to hang out with a bunch of losers under the premise of a "game"? Sheesh. Just retarded.
And yes, I found myself stuck in the middle of such a LARP event once at a Sharis when it was invaded by a bunch of these morons. They made RHPS regulars look totally fucking sane, normal and even attractive.
The jokes about half-naked fugly chicks and annorexic retarded looking pasty boys pretending to be vampires at your local WOC/WW LARP Shari's event at 2am practically write themselves
Seriously, D&D nerds make fun of LARPers... Do you realize how lame you have to be for a D&D nerd to make fun of you?!
How can outsourcing jokes be passe when some guys are floating around a business plan currently to put a cruise ship three miles off the coast of America and fill it with sub-$22,000/yr (mostly non-American) programmers so that htey don't have to bide by American salaries and labor laws?
If that doesn't clearly show that this is PRIME TIME for outsourcing jokes, I don't know what does.
Since all of our jobs are being outsourced to other countries, this keyboard will be perfect for public schools where they will need to teach children to function in the wonderful world of order-taking at fast food restaurants on those nifty little picture-only cash-registers..
I haven't bought a CD since 1998. I have no intention to ever buy a CD. But I'm not going to buy music either. I'll pay for a subscription service to a massive library. Rhapsody is great at just under $9/mo for unlimited music. But unfortunately, those of us who primarily live on our Macs have no such service. You can either pay a buck a song on iTunes or get nothing at all.
If someone wants to put together an affordable subscription service with a client for Mac that has the same selection as Rhapsody or iTunes, I'm all over it. Until then, I'm a SoulSeek man.
I think the dashboard concept would be awesome for a handful of things, but not in the way widgets are currently used and viewed.
It would be nice to have a very clean, slick, useful screen to F12 to that shows weather, that day's appointments, your packages arriving or being sent via courier (fdex/ups, etc) and various network/system monitoring items.
I know most of these things exist already for dashboard, but the way they're implemented into dashboard doesn't do it for me. And really, I don't get why a widget should consume so many resources? I'm pretty sure that while adding Foxcast to Firefox consumes more resources, it doesn't consume 10 or 20mb worth. And if I want to track a fedex package, I'd rather paste the tracking number into the search field of the browser and let google display the results for me than suck up extra resources.
Maybe this is all some sort of complex plot to force users to buy more of that ridiculously expensive Apple RAM.
Well, the weather widget (default) takes about 20mb. So does the calendar (default) and phonebook (default) and 3M Notes and so on and countdown widget and dictionary and translator.
Even at 10mb per widget, I haven't found any functionality in dashboard to justify giving up 10 to 20% of my ram or virtual memory for.
A thin client at home would be very practical. One powerful machine to build maintain and upgrade and repair and smaller, cheaper, quieter, cooler clients throughout the house.
My cute little sunray at work is connected to an enormous 21" elephantine Sun monitor. Kind of negates the point of using an energy-efficient, quiet, small-foot-print thin client.
Of course, with a standard desktop, the only problem that could affect everyone is a network problem. With a thin client, any kind of server problem is going to wipe out productivity for the entire department, building, campus, state or company. I'd rather have six people standing around waiting for their computers to be fixed than 10,000 waiting for their thin-clients to come back up.
Ask the average person to name 20 currently extremely wealthy people that made their money strictly because of their brains and hard work. When they stop at around number two or three, ask them to name 20 famous and rich people who are famous and rich because they play a sport well or look good on TV or poster.
Yeah, if you are worth 50 billion dollars, you can make a Bill Gates attractive and make up for what are traditionally "failures" in as much as being an attractive mate/provider. But chances are better that your kid will be good looking and well-built and charismatic than becoming a multi-billionaire.
Just because money is more useful and provides greater security in a modern society than a good physique, white smile and winning charismatic presence doesn't mean people aren't still biologically geared to respond more favorably to the traditional "hunter/provider/security" guy than the "dork with money".
Not to mention, more attractive (and taller) people earn bigger salaries and get more promotions. This is a known fact.
No, I want a "speechserver" voice of Steve Jobs (why hasn't a Steve Jobs voice been added to Fred and Bells and GoodNews and the rest?!) announcing that a glorious new update is available. Then I want it to launch a flashy fireworks screensaver while the details of the update and a big status bar scroll by in the background. Then, I want it to redirect my browser to KOOL-AIDE's website.
Now that I look at the link to Apple in the blurb, the screenshot the show has 9 widgets going. That's at least 200mb of memory right there. The default powerbook comes with 512mb ram. Do you really want to use 50% of your resources for frigging glossy "widgets"?
I was on the widget-bandwagon for a bit, because I liked a few of them and liked having them available at the press of one button. But after I noticed how much of a hog dashboard and the widgets were, I disabled the fuck right out of it.
The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.
Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)
Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.
Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).
Well, as an engineer I hate my thin client because I obviously don't get root on it and it has limited functionality unless you're a paper-pushing human-resources/legal/finance/management dweeb.
But the positives are:
- Quiet. - Low energy - Low heat - Small physical foot print - Cheaper than a full system - Not much good to anyone if they steal it
I've always had an amazing amount of crap at home. Three laptops. Four 21" monitors (including two Sun monitors), a 19", a 17", a 15", a 23" apple cinema display, two linux boxes, two spare windows boxes, an Ultra 5, an Ultra 10, a Sunblade 150, a Sunblade 2000 and a kick ass high-end windows gaming box. Then two flatbed scanners, an inkjet printer, a brother laser printer, a huge set of speakers, three D-Link 7-port USB hubs and 24 external USB-connected IDE drives.
I got tired of all the crap, so I gave away everything except the drives, the gaming box, the 23" cinema display, scanner and laser printer. Then I went out and bought a 17" PowerBook which I use as my main desktop box and my portable (to take to work) and a 30" Apple Cinema Display. Now it's quieter, there are hardly any cords (I use a wireless network, wireless laser mouse, wireless keyboard) and I stuck the gaming box in a closet and connected all of the external drives to it.
Cords, noise and heat are no longer a problem. Sure, I can't really do any gaming on a PowerBook, but if I get back into playing games a lot, I'll just pull it out again for awhile.
In summary - I found that the best way to deal with the clutter and crap is to.. well... get rid of the clutter and crap. It's amazing how much garbage hardware and computers you collect over time that you simply DO NOT NEED.
I agree except for the "important" part. There's nothing "important" about some blockhead who can run down a football field in 20 pieces of padding with a ball in his hand. Communities rally around the highschool "sports hero". When was the last time anyone rallied around anyone because of their intellectual prowess?
Of course, that's because highschool mimics life. Our failure is in telling children that being smart is the important thing. It isn't. Being a fit male who is attractive to the opposite sex so you can be a desirable reproductive partner is. That means you have to be powerful, charismatic and able to provide physical security (above all).
If I ever have a child, I will instill in him the importance of intelligence and a hard work ethic if he wants to be financially successful as well as the importance of taking excellent physical care of himself if he ever wants to be desired by women or respected by society.
We spend all of this energy telling children one thing when we really admire something else entirely. Think of all the young school girls we've suckered into believing the whole "full time mom, full time career equals extreme happiness" thing when the girls who really seem the happiest are the ones who take care of their bodies and snag a good looking rich guy?
Slashdot Mirror
That's okay. The next step they'll want is to tie your social security number to the pass to prevent terrorism. And they'll be allowed to. Anything is okay as long as it's to fight terrorism.
Sorry. I don't conesnt to a biometric scan of anything. Period. If soomeone else so desperately wants to go to Disneyland that they're willing to give up any number of privacies and rights, that's their business. I respect mine just a little too much to give them up for a ride in a fucking tea-cup.
A lot of things might be a big deal to one specific person - that doesn't make it news.
Look at it this way:
+She is not the first kid around that age to get an MCSE or a MCP or any other Microsoft certification.
+She is not the first kid that age to do so from that region of the globe.
+She is not the first kid to do so in the last year.
+She is not the first kid to hang with Bill Gates as a result.
It was a big deal the first time. It was pretty interesting to read about the kid who did this stuff so young and even check out his website where he wrote about all the stuff he had been able to do as a result of his accomplishment. But you know what? That was done with. It was old news. It's over.
Beating every "youngster gets a Microsoft Certification" story to death every month or two is silly. Who was the second man to reach the top of Everest? The third? The fourth? The fifth? Right, who knows - because nobody cares. It was news the first time.
But I guess the reason this is such a big deal is because she's from Pakistan and we all have idiotic preconceptions about what live all over that part of the region is like. The first picture in everyone's head is probably of some poor girl living in an aluminum shack next to her family's herd of goats, caked in dried mud, dodging bullets and carrying buckets of water half a mile from the river to do their laundry by hand in.
I'm sorry, but my entire point (besides this just not being a very interesting story) is that people respond to it with offensively stupid preconieved notions. Like if she didn't become a computer expert at the age of ten, her only other option in life would be washing feet and selling trinkets to tourists on the road. Come on. If this kid was from Canada, nobody would give a crap.
People need to check out some photos of Pakistan. Especially places liek Islamabad. Except for some of the more interesting architecture, I dare you to differentiate it from any other fairly large city. It's not like this kid was sleeping on the floor in a yurt. She's just a normal, inquisitive kid with parents that provide her with plenty of resources. Hell, resources that a lot of kids in America don't have. So don't act like this is some kid from the outback being rescued and brought to America by Kevin Bacon.
I'd be more impressed if she had acquired one of those linux certifications. Or better, solaris admin and network certifications. Everybody and their brother is an MCSE. Big deal.
Not that solaris certifications are even remotely difficult. Just saying - I've never heard of a ten year old getting one of those, but we hear of another nine or ten year old getting their MCSE almost every month.
And again, that's why I don't see how this is a big deal. She isn't the first kid that young to accomplish this AT ALL. Sarabha Nagar did the same thing and was written about just a few months ago.
When I was a kid, you didn't have to write your own pseudo worms or virii. You could just rent a game on floppies from Software Pipeline and install it somewhere.
I did something similar way back when. There were startup ANSI screens and I edited one to say "WELCOME TO HELL!!" and blink instead of the "Welcome to...(whatever)" that it originally said.
:/
Two months later, someone did something stupid on one of the machines, causing it to have to be reformatted and reinstalled and I was blamed for "hacking" the computer... because I had the intelligence to edit an ANSI data file one time on one machine and change one word in it...
So dumb...
Gee, another stupid Microsoft publicity article about yet another young kid with an MCSE. We see about one of these articles per month. I think this says a little more about the "difficulty" of the MCSE test than it does about the caliber of the children.
Also, could this kid kiss Bill's ass just a little more? Wrote a poem celebrating his life's history? Are you fucking yanking my dick here? And they seem to gloss by her being a "computer programmer". What, because she made a little clicky-thingy in LOGO?
Plenty of kids her age (and within that age range) have written programs. In fact, a number within just a couple or so years of her age have started their own successful computer companies. Unusual, but hardly unheard of.
Anyway, assuming the husband that her family picks out for her to marry in exchange for a goat lets her work, she'll just be taking your job over for a measly $5,000/yr, so suck on that. And we won't even bother considering the chances that she'll end up glowing next time her country gets in a nuke tiff with India again.
And you're god damn right I'm not posting anonymously. You can suck on that, too.
Clearly spoken like someone who hasn't had a nice latenight coffee ruined by a bunch of loud, obnoxious freaks.
Don't get me wrong. D&D stuff is retarded, too. But honeslty, dressing like a vampire and hanging out with 80 other wannabe-oh-so-cool types at the local Shari's all night, becuase you couldn't get a real date and have to hang out with a bunch of losers under the premise of a "game"? Sheesh. Just retarded.
And yes, I found myself stuck in the middle of such a LARP event once at a Sharis when it was invaded by a bunch of these morons. They made RHPS regulars look totally fucking sane, normal and even attractive.
But at least they don't go around shouting "TWO MAGIC TWO MAGIC TWO MAGIC!" and hitting each other with paper-towel tubes.
The jokes about half-naked fugly chicks and annorexic retarded looking pasty boys pretending to be vampires at your local WOC/WW LARP Shari's event at 2am practically write themselves
Seriously, D&D nerds make fun of LARPers... Do you realize how lame you have to be for a D&D nerd to make fun of you?!
(Former minor-D&D nerd)
How can outsourcing jokes be passe when some guys are floating around a business plan currently to put a cruise ship three miles off the coast of America and fill it with sub-$22,000/yr (mostly non-American) programmers so that htey don't have to bide by American salaries and labor laws?
If that doesn't clearly show that this is PRIME TIME for outsourcing jokes, I don't know what does.
Since all of our jobs are being outsourced to other countries, this keyboard will be perfect for public schools where they will need to teach children to function in the wonderful world of order-taking at fast food restaurants on those nifty little picture-only cash-registers..
I haven't bought a CD since 1998. I have no intention to ever buy a CD. But I'm not going to buy music either. I'll pay for a subscription service to a massive library. Rhapsody is great at just under $9/mo for unlimited music. But unfortunately, those of us who primarily live on our Macs have no such service. You can either pay a buck a song on iTunes or get nothing at all.
If someone wants to put together an affordable subscription service with a client for Mac that has the same selection as Rhapsody or iTunes, I'm all over it. Until then, I'm a SoulSeek man.
I think the dashboard concept would be awesome for a handful of things, but not in the way widgets are currently used and viewed.
It would be nice to have a very clean, slick, useful screen to F12 to that shows weather, that day's appointments, your packages arriving or being sent via courier (fdex/ups, etc) and various network/system monitoring items.
I know most of these things exist already for dashboard, but the way they're implemented into dashboard doesn't do it for me. And really, I don't get why a widget should consume so many resources? I'm pretty sure that while adding Foxcast to Firefox consumes more resources, it doesn't consume 10 or 20mb worth. And if I want to track a fedex package, I'd rather paste the tracking number into the search field of the browser and let google display the results for me than suck up extra resources.
Maybe this is all some sort of complex plot to force users to buy more of that ridiculously expensive Apple RAM.
Well, the weather widget (default) takes about 20mb. So does the calendar (default) and phonebook (default) and 3M Notes and so on and countdown widget and dictionary and translator.
Even at 10mb per widget, I haven't found any functionality in dashboard to justify giving up 10 to 20% of my ram or virtual memory for.
A thin client at home would be very practical. One powerful machine to build maintain and upgrade and repair and smaller, cheaper, quieter, cooler clients throughout the house.
My cute little sunray at work is connected to an enormous 21" elephantine Sun monitor. Kind of negates the point of using an energy-efficient, quiet, small-foot-print thin client.
Of course, with a standard desktop, the only problem that could affect everyone is a network problem. With a thin client, any kind of server problem is going to wipe out productivity for the entire department, building, campus, state or company. I'd rather have six people standing around waiting for their computers to be fixed than 10,000 waiting for their thin-clients to come back up.
Ask the average person to name 20 currently extremely wealthy people that made their money strictly because of their brains and hard work. When they stop at around number two or three, ask them to name 20 famous and rich people who are famous and rich because they play a sport well or look good on TV or poster.
Yeah, if you are worth 50 billion dollars, you can make a Bill Gates attractive and make up for what are traditionally "failures" in as much as being an attractive mate/provider. But chances are better that your kid will be good looking and well-built and charismatic than becoming a multi-billionaire.
Just because money is more useful and provides greater security in a modern society than a good physique, white smile and winning charismatic presence doesn't mean people aren't still biologically geared to respond more favorably to the traditional "hunter/provider/security" guy than the "dork with money".
Not to mention, more attractive (and taller) people earn bigger salaries and get more promotions. This is a known fact.
No, I want a "speechserver" voice of Steve Jobs (why hasn't a Steve Jobs voice been added to Fred and Bells and GoodNews and the rest?!) announcing that a glorious new update is available. Then I want it to launch a flashy fireworks screensaver while the details of the update and a big status bar scroll by in the background. Then, I want it to redirect my browser to KOOL-AIDE's website.
Now that I look at the link to Apple in the blurb, the screenshot the show has 9 widgets going. That's at least 200mb of memory right there. The default powerbook comes with 512mb ram. Do you really want to use 50% of your resources for frigging glossy "widgets"?
I was on the widget-bandwagon for a bit, because I liked a few of them and liked having them available at the press of one button. But after I noticed how much of a hog dashboard and the widgets were, I disabled the fuck right out of it.
The widget manager would be neat if I hadn't already turned my dashboard off.
Dashboard itself takes about 20MB of memory. Each widget takes at least 20MB of memory. Most people I've seen have at least a half dozen widgets going (if nothing else, the default calendar widget, a notes widget, a weather widget, calculator, countdown...)
Six widgets and dashboard will take up a good 150mb of RAM right there. I'll save my 150mb of ram and use stickies, weather.com, regular calendar and the OSX calculator instead, thanks.
Dashboard could be potentially useful, but not if it keeps sucking up the resources it currently needs. And not if all people keep making for dashboard are widgets to replicate what OSX already has readily available (why would I use a stickies/notes feature in dashboard for 20MB ram when I could use the builtin OSX stickies at 9MB?).
Well, as an engineer I hate my thin client because I obviously don't get root on it and it has limited functionality unless you're a paper-pushing human-resources/legal/finance/management dweeb.
But the positives are:
- Quiet.
- Low energy
- Low heat
- Small physical foot print
- Cheaper than a full system
- Not much good to anyone if they steal it
All your lagrange points are belong to U.S.
I've always had an amazing amount of crap at home. Three laptops. Four 21" monitors (including two Sun monitors), a 19", a 17", a 15", a 23" apple cinema display, two linux boxes, two spare windows boxes, an Ultra 5, an Ultra 10, a Sunblade 150, a Sunblade 2000 and a kick ass high-end windows gaming box. Then two flatbed scanners, an inkjet printer, a brother laser printer, a huge set of speakers, three D-Link 7-port USB hubs and 24 external USB-connected IDE drives.
I got tired of all the crap, so I gave away everything except the drives, the gaming box, the 23" cinema display, scanner and laser printer. Then I went out and bought a 17" PowerBook which I use as my main desktop box and my portable (to take to work) and a 30" Apple Cinema Display. Now it's quieter, there are hardly any cords (I use a wireless network, wireless laser mouse, wireless keyboard) and I stuck the gaming box in a closet and connected all of the external drives to it.
Cords, noise and heat are no longer a problem. Sure, I can't really do any gaming on a PowerBook, but if I get back into playing games a lot, I'll just pull it out again for awhile.
In summary - I found that the best way to deal with the clutter and crap is to.. well... get rid of the clutter and crap. It's amazing how much garbage hardware and computers you collect over time that you simply DO NOT NEED.
I agree except for the "important" part. There's nothing "important" about some blockhead who can run down a football field in 20 pieces of padding with a ball in his hand. Communities rally around the highschool "sports hero". When was the last time anyone rallied around anyone because of their intellectual prowess?
Of course, that's because highschool mimics life. Our failure is in telling children that being smart is the important thing. It isn't. Being a fit male who is attractive to the opposite sex so you can be a desirable reproductive partner is. That means you have to be powerful, charismatic and able to provide physical security (above all).
If I ever have a child, I will instill in him the importance of intelligence and a hard work ethic if he wants to be financially successful as well as the importance of taking excellent physical care of himself if he ever wants to be desired by women or respected by society.
We spend all of this energy telling children one thing when we really admire something else entirely. Think of all the young school girls we've suckered into believing the whole "full time mom, full time career equals extreme happiness" thing when the girls who really seem the happiest are the ones who take care of their bodies and snag a good looking rich guy?