I've heard tell of Mr. Ed. I've even heard of Nancy Pelosi, who, last I looked, was a consummate pol and nobody's fool. But I've never heard of "Chicago Boyz" -- are they a couple of blongers at Cheezeburgers 'R' Us? A quick scan of the "blog" reveals an emphassis on hard sell typography. Sheesh. Gimme Drudge any day.
Ubuntu's not perfect. It seems to be fanatically responsive to bug reports, but not necessarily to usability issues -- especially for the casual user who would hate the very concept of package management if he knew it existed.
Ubuntu does have the advantage of running well on a Dell notebook when Vista crashes and burns. And frankly, OOo is all the "office" software I've ever needed. But I installed it wrong, twice, and I don't want to install it again the right way, just to recover some unused partition space. It's not worth the risk, or the seething resentment about missing guidance.
Speaking from experience (which tells me that Vista is a virus and XP is only an inconvenience, like foot fungus), the only way that really works is to format the hard drive and install Ubuntu 8.04 or later. Of course, if you're referring to your own immune system, the job is already done. Congratulations.
Might not be his/her fault. The first thing you encounter on your first programming job is Tall Dogs, and if you want to run with 'em, you need 20 or 30 more I.Q. points and an honorary membership in Mensa. I thought I was smart, until I realized who my team mates were.
Fortunately, the only thing staving off disaster is politics, and as Morbius once remarked, a commanding officer needs a good loud voice more than brains.
-- Remember when you vote that your car will NEVER run on any form of Alternative Energy if John McCain wins.
So, your competitor "accidentally" sent you a copy of their A list, did they? And you're ready to believe that because your competition is... uhh, let me guess... stoopid, are they?
If you look a gift horse in the mouth, you're likely to see a bunch of hoplites grinning evilly back at you.
I dunno. My experience with female coders has generally been good, if limited. The individuals in my personal narrative arc wrote solid, if slightly pedestrian, code for solid, if slightly pedestrian, applications that still live, SFAIK, in the business world. One of them wrote absolutely brilliant code in the shrinkwrap industry; she was eventually hounded out of the cubenest for preferring to work during nearly normal business hours (say, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.)
The guys were all infested with 'oorah Marine Corps work ethic, and tended to quit as they burned out, if at all. The rawhiding and death march last stands, coupled with an almost religious awe of all nighters that should have been unnecessary, eventually destroyed the livelihoods of 10 times more people than there were coders in the building. I loved the final Twilight of these Götterlingen: The lemmings dove over the cliff edge with a real sense of urgency.
Some of my favorite applications were written for Windows XP and run fine under Vista SP1, but don't now and probably never will run under Linux. The spectrum extends from the infradig Konfabulator (Yahoo! Widgets) to middle-of-the-road stuff like SmartGo and Many Faces of Go to the ultracool iTunes and DVD movie players. OOo, of course, is the exception, not the rule.
Ubuntu (and everyone else in LinuxLand, I presume) offers about a billion small projects, competing with a score of other distros trying to making sense of it all for average users. Hopefully, considering Ubuntu's near-readiness for prime time (hell, it even recognized my Dell trackpad and my USB wireless mouse by Microsoft, straight out of the box), consumers (as opposed to yoozers) will clarify this situation by sheer Darwinian frenzy in the near future.
Sort of elitist and cute like Hasty Pudding, but only near-universal adoption for decades or hundreds of years will be considered. Since bananas are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon as we speak (metaphorically, we're actually typing, of course), the category gets mixed in with the awful permanence in school lunches of tapioca cups that need no refrigeration and are, by definition, not cool.
Meanwhile, let's work on the idea that 4-dollar gas is a Bush-Cheney plot to MAKE Americans conserve gas.
For some reason around the turn of last century, banana skins -- all of the Big Mike variety -- were a form of ubiquitous garbage in New York City, the center of the known universe then as now, as omnipresent on everyone's sidewalk as poo de poodle is today. Hence, the proverbial slip on a bananaskin, the slapstick schtick of all schtick, that obviates the need for engaging mental processes, such as irony. Apparently, the banana laughs last, but it will be missed.
Nobody gets telepathy, unless it's like radio. Sender, receiver, and the grunt of effort on lightning-lanced faces that just. can't. hear. hard. enough...
I haven't read Ubik, being more of a Pratchett fan, but it seems to me that "telepath" is as good a word as any for "paranoid schizophrenic." So, "Ubik" is a kind of tinfoil hat liner that one sprays on, like Off?
"Unassailable fact..."? I dunno. I put my faith in DNA cladistics, rather than taxonomy. The old form-and-function studies clearly belong with the dinosaurs these days (since fossils that old apparently don't preserve DNA). But if you look at dead-certain DNA clades for "obviously unrelated" (according to plant taxonomy) but nearly invariant (according to DNA) stuff like lotus lilies and plane trees (sycamores to us Midwesterners), then you get a really weird jolt.
It appears that DNA is extremely plastic, making Evolution extremely easy. In other words, species are a complete misreading of what's going on (little more than a cultural preference for Nouns instead of Verbs), and Darwin not only had it right, but had it righter than anyone prior to Watson & Crick could possibly have imagined.
The thing that makes variation go is the ability of DNA to conform itself like clay to gaps broadly opened by the ecosystem. That means so much for taxonomic "family trees," because any species capable of sex contains an entire Australia in its genes, regardless of starting point! And, considering some recent studies in apomictic species like dandelions, maybe even the sex part is optional.
Gratuitous pedantry in a milieau so orthographically deficient it has spawned (and outlawed) the spelling flame!? I dunno whether to laugh or laugh.
"Gee [sic] what a beautiful thought!" -- Albert the Alligator, in Walt Kelly's Pogo
Which 200 bugs are they talking about? Why do they know about 200 bugs? Does that mean 200 users of Mac OS X 10.5.3 have been screwed, if each bug is sufficiently obscure? What is the average user footprint of each of these ten score bugs?
Isn't progress wonderful? Now we use statistics and databases to decide how many bugs HAVE to be flushed before users balk and refuse to buy. In the old days, bugs were personally embarassing to the poor sap who perpetrated them during development.
I guess we have Bill Gates to thank for "Good Enough" programming, 'ey? What a champ!
Hypercard was slower than cold, frozen, Arctic molasses. We could demonstrate a peppy-seeming way to accomplish some serious text collecting, but by the time our client had entered so much data that re-entering it would be prohibitive under deadline constraints, the Fatal Flaw in this stupid equation had emerged: Getting data back OUT in a useful format, even merely the useful task of editing it, was hair-pullingly, exasperatingly, blue air and cusswords SLOW. Hypercard was, in short, a hot app, especially for our unfortunate sales team.
The next year we completely rewrote our "prototype" Hypercard stack from scratch as a plain, ordinary Macintosh C program, discovering event loops and everything, and recovered some good will from Sales, but many of those first-year clients had been burned so badly they never came back, and since the community of users tended to talk to each other, we had about two years to get our new programming right before it had to to matter again; to this day, I still regard Caroline Rose and Inside Macintosh as my personal saviors.
Your data is not your data, to paraphrase some trite poetaster or other. SSN's belong to the individuals who own them, not you, not your consultant. I agree with others here -- the heebiejeebie potential is mind melting. Can you imagine the class-action lawsuit your company faces if that data winds up in a Russian (Chinese, Bolivian, etc.) stolen identity database?
First rule of security: It's not. The egg was open when the yolk went in, and the egg is open when the chick comes out. The fox is patient.
Actually, that's too glib. "Security" is provided by processes having nothing to do with technology. The locked door shattered has merely proven breaking-and-entering, which triggers a whole new level of punitive retribution: I.e., the penalty for burglary is higher than the penalty for trespass. Any member in good standing knows the value of belonging.
You want your consultant's fingerprints, her posted bond, a sample of her DNA and a set of mugshots, plus a background check.
It's obvious misdirection. The top and bottom are just simple Ogham barcodes. The middle stuff is dust in your eyes. The message is from Google's HR department, aka "Famous Cryptographer's School," to anyone clever enough to detect the steganographic image of Bambi.
C. S. Lewis had a fairly defensible aversion to argument from improbability, or The Utter Size Of It All, and events tend to bear him out.
First, SETI throws in the towel on electromagnetic spectra as vectors of longrange communication (information entropy clouds the transmission, as signals attenuate to the point where they merge into background noise.)
Second, no one has yet found any other plausible string ("string," get it? heheheh) to connect the twin tin cans of Earth and the next most proximate civilization in the infosphere. So light is not the answer, whatever its wavelength. What IS? We'll assume "rhodomagnetic waves" are 1940's SciFi bunkum, while "dark matter" probably will turn out to be the WD-40 that unlocks the doors of our rusty perception.
Third, the human race has so far been incapable of recognizing intelligent behavior in non-human species, for the sane reason that one does not allow oneself empathy toward food, fuel, transportation or even entertainment as scintillating as monkeys on a rock. We are intellectual yakuza toward competitors, and blaze into open hostility at the slightest affront. We are, in short, either the pariahs of the civilized Universe, or there's something out there worse than us. (That's your cue, Q.)
And fourth, with rare exceptions the human race can't even think about reality without getting tangled up in paradox: To wit, back at the Beginning of Time (sirens, cop car in your rearview mirror!) there was a Big Bang (just breathe into this thing, sir...)
In short, there's no need for a "Great Filter" to flatline our ambitions. Ordinary stupidity does fine.
Used to know a guy who was even older than me, and pretty good with RF back in the '80's. He could read my Apple ][+ monitor, until I switched from text to what Apple used to call "HiRes graphics". Dunno if he ever rebuilt his equipment and got the picture back, I never heard. It seemed like a peculiar (and slightly crackpot) hobby with no obvious application. Heh.
Yeah, there's a couple of zcode fragments you can download. Neither are IMHO remotely "playable" -- more like sketches, or short drafts, or like thousands of 1/17th-finished Inform 6 games mouldering untouched in underwear drawers in college dorms from Gnome to Gnovosibirsk.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard tell of Mr. Ed. I've even heard of Nancy Pelosi, who, last I looked, was a consummate pol and nobody's fool. But I've never heard of "Chicago Boyz" -- are they a couple of blongers at Cheezeburgers 'R' Us? A quick scan of the "blog" reveals an emphassis on hard sell typography. Sheesh. Gimme Drudge any day.
Ubuntu's not perfect. It seems to be fanatically responsive to bug reports, but not necessarily to usability issues -- especially for the casual user who would hate the very concept of package management if he knew it existed. Ubuntu does have the advantage of running well on a Dell notebook when Vista crashes and burns. And frankly, OOo is all the "office" software I've ever needed. But I installed it wrong, twice, and I don't want to install it again the right way, just to recover some unused partition space. It's not worth the risk, or the seething resentment about missing guidance.
Speaking from experience (which tells me that Vista is a virus and XP is only an inconvenience, like foot fungus), the only way that really works is to format the hard drive and install Ubuntu 8.04 or later. Of course, if you're referring to your own immune system, the job is already done. Congratulations.
Might not be his/her fault. The first thing you encounter on your first programming job is Tall Dogs, and if you want to run with 'em, you need 20 or 30 more I.Q. points and an honorary membership in Mensa. I thought I was smart, until I realized who my team mates were. Fortunately, the only thing staving off disaster is politics, and as Morbius once remarked, a commanding officer needs a good loud voice more than brains.
-- Remember when you vote that your car will NEVER run on any form of Alternative Energy if John McCain wins.
This is why suicide is criminal. It affects friends, family and the innocent more than it affects the perp.
So, your competitor "accidentally" sent you a copy of their A list, did they? And you're ready to believe that because your competition is... uhh, let me guess... stoopid, are they?
If you look a gift horse in the mouth, you're likely to see a bunch of hoplites grinning evilly back at you.
I dunno. My experience with female coders has generally been good, if limited. The individuals in my personal narrative arc wrote solid, if slightly pedestrian, code for solid, if slightly pedestrian, applications that still live, SFAIK, in the business world. One of them wrote absolutely brilliant code in the shrinkwrap industry; she was eventually hounded out of the cubenest for preferring to work during nearly normal business hours (say, 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.)
The guys were all infested with 'oorah Marine Corps work ethic, and tended to quit as they burned out, if at all. The rawhiding and death march last stands, coupled with an almost religious awe of all nighters that should have been unnecessary, eventually destroyed the livelihoods of 10 times more people than there were coders in the building. I loved the final Twilight of these Götterlingen: The lemmings dove over the cliff edge with a real sense of urgency.
Some of my favorite applications were written for Windows XP and run fine under Vista SP1, but don't now and probably never will run under Linux. The spectrum extends from the infradig Konfabulator (Yahoo! Widgets) to middle-of-the-road stuff like SmartGo and Many Faces of Go to the ultracool iTunes and DVD movie players. OOo, of course, is the exception, not the rule. Ubuntu (and everyone else in LinuxLand, I presume) offers about a billion small projects, competing with a score of other distros trying to making sense of it all for average users. Hopefully, considering Ubuntu's near-readiness for prime time (hell, it even recognized my Dell trackpad and my USB wireless mouse by Microsoft, straight out of the box), consumers (as opposed to yoozers) will clarify this situation by sheer Darwinian frenzy in the near future.
Sort of elitist and cute like Hasty Pudding, but only near-universal adoption for decades or hundreds of years will be considered. Since bananas are going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon as we speak (metaphorically, we're actually typing, of course), the category gets mixed in with the awful permanence in school lunches of tapioca cups that need no refrigeration and are, by definition, not cool.
Meanwhile, let's work on the idea that 4-dollar gas is a Bush-Cheney plot to MAKE Americans conserve gas.
For some reason around the turn of last century, banana skins -- all of the Big Mike variety -- were a form of ubiquitous garbage in New York City, the center of the known universe then as now, as omnipresent on everyone's sidewalk as poo de poodle is today. Hence, the proverbial slip on a bananaskin, the slapstick schtick of all schtick, that obviates the need for engaging mental processes, such as irony. Apparently, the banana laughs last, but it will be missed.
Nobody gets telepathy, unless it's like radio. Sender, receiver, and the grunt of effort on lightning-lanced faces that just. can't. hear. hard. enough...
:)
I haven't read Ubik, being more of a Pratchett fan, but it seems to me that "telepath" is as good a word as any for "paranoid schizophrenic." So, "Ubik" is a kind of tinfoil hat liner that one sprays on, like Off?
Don't trust Hollywood with this one
"Unassailable fact..."? I dunno. I put my faith in DNA cladistics, rather than taxonomy. The old form-and-function studies clearly belong with the dinosaurs these days (since fossils that old apparently don't preserve DNA). But if you look at dead-certain DNA clades for "obviously unrelated" (according to plant taxonomy) but nearly invariant (according to DNA) stuff like lotus lilies and plane trees (sycamores to us Midwesterners), then you get a really weird jolt.
It appears that DNA is extremely plastic, making Evolution extremely easy. In other words, species are a complete misreading of what's going on (little more than a cultural preference for Nouns instead of Verbs), and Darwin not only had it right, but had it righter than anyone prior to Watson & Crick could possibly have imagined.
The thing that makes variation go is the ability of DNA to conform itself like clay to gaps broadly opened by the ecosystem. That means so much for taxonomic "family trees," because any species capable of sex contains an entire Australia in its genes, regardless of starting point! And, considering some recent studies in apomictic species like dandelions, maybe even the sex part is optional.
Gratuitous pedantry in a milieau so orthographically deficient it has spawned (and outlawed) the spelling flame!? I dunno whether to laugh or laugh. "Gee [sic] what a beautiful thought!" -- Albert the Alligator, in Walt Kelly's Pogo
Which 200 bugs are they talking about? Why do they know about 200 bugs? Does that mean 200 users of Mac OS X 10.5.3 have been screwed, if each bug is sufficiently obscure? What is the average user footprint of each of these ten score bugs? Isn't progress wonderful? Now we use statistics and databases to decide how many bugs HAVE to be flushed before users balk and refuse to buy. In the old days, bugs were personally embarassing to the poor sap who perpetrated them during development. I guess we have Bill Gates to thank for "Good Enough" programming, 'ey? What a champ!
Yeah. It never pays to be an early adopter.
Value is decided by auction, not appraisal.
Hypercard was slower than cold, frozen, Arctic molasses. We could demonstrate a peppy-seeming way to accomplish some serious text collecting, but by the time our client had entered so much data that re-entering it would be prohibitive under deadline constraints, the Fatal Flaw in this stupid equation had emerged: Getting data back OUT in a useful format, even merely the useful task of editing it, was hair-pullingly, exasperatingly, blue air and cusswords SLOW. Hypercard was, in short, a hot app, especially for our unfortunate sales team. The next year we completely rewrote our "prototype" Hypercard stack from scratch as a plain, ordinary Macintosh C program, discovering event loops and everything, and recovered some good will from Sales, but many of those first-year clients had been burned so badly they never came back, and since the community of users tended to talk to each other, we had about two years to get our new programming right before it had to to matter again; to this day, I still regard Caroline Rose and Inside Macintosh as my personal saviors.
Your data is not your data, to paraphrase some trite poetaster or other. SSN's belong to the individuals who own them, not you, not your consultant. I agree with others here -- the heebiejeebie potential is mind melting. Can you imagine the class-action lawsuit your company faces if that data winds up in a Russian (Chinese, Bolivian, etc.) stolen identity database? First rule of security: It's not. The egg was open when the yolk went in, and the egg is open when the chick comes out. The fox is patient. Actually, that's too glib. "Security" is provided by processes having nothing to do with technology. The locked door shattered has merely proven breaking-and-entering, which triggers a whole new level of punitive retribution: I.e., the penalty for burglary is higher than the penalty for trespass. Any member in good standing knows the value of belonging. You want your consultant's fingerprints, her posted bond, a sample of her DNA and a set of mugshots, plus a background check.
It's obvious misdirection. The top and bottom are just simple Ogham barcodes. The middle stuff is dust in your eyes. The message is from Google's HR department, aka "Famous Cryptographer's School," to anyone clever enough to detect the steganographic image of Bambi.
Ubuntu has released an OpenSSL fix already, it seems.
That's a LOT of Bill Clinton excuses!
C. S. Lewis had a fairly defensible aversion to argument from improbability, or The Utter Size Of It All, and events tend to bear him out. First, SETI throws in the towel on electromagnetic spectra as vectors of longrange communication (information entropy clouds the transmission, as signals attenuate to the point where they merge into background noise.) Second, no one has yet found any other plausible string ("string," get it? heheheh) to connect the twin tin cans of Earth and the next most proximate civilization in the infosphere. So light is not the answer, whatever its wavelength. What IS? We'll assume "rhodomagnetic waves" are 1940's SciFi bunkum, while "dark matter" probably will turn out to be the WD-40 that unlocks the doors of our rusty perception. Third, the human race has so far been incapable of recognizing intelligent behavior in non-human species, for the sane reason that one does not allow oneself empathy toward food, fuel, transportation or even entertainment as scintillating as monkeys on a rock. We are intellectual yakuza toward competitors, and blaze into open hostility at the slightest affront. We are, in short, either the pariahs of the civilized Universe, or there's something out there worse than us. (That's your cue, Q.) And fourth, with rare exceptions the human race can't even think about reality without getting tangled up in paradox: To wit, back at the Beginning of Time (sirens, cop car in your rearview mirror!) there was a Big Bang (just breathe into this thing, sir...) In short, there's no need for a "Great Filter" to flatline our ambitions. Ordinary stupidity does fine.
Used to know a guy who was even older than me, and pretty good with RF back in the '80's. He could read my Apple ][+ monitor, until I switched from text to what Apple used to call "HiRes graphics". Dunno if he ever rebuilt his equipment and got the picture back, I never heard. It seemed like a peculiar (and slightly crackpot) hobby with no obvious application. Heh.
Yeah, there's a couple of zcode fragments you can download. Neither are IMHO remotely "playable" -- more like sketches, or short drafts, or like thousands of 1/17th-finished Inform 6 games mouldering untouched in underwear drawers in college dorms from Gnome to Gnovosibirsk.
Wasn't the trick tea and no ... oops ... spoiler!