True, Computers aren't that mysterious anymore, but I think that certain other series might do very well today. Today's athmosphere of abusive corporations and total networking might be ideal conditions for a new Max Headroom show.
What about Robin Williams as Michael Knight, driving a Smart (pimped up by East Coast Customs(C)(R)TM) with Jim Careys voice as KITTE (Knight Industries Two Thousand and Eight)? Oh! And since "KITTE" sounds like "kitty", KITTE will talk like a lolcat all the time.
Mike: "There's a gas station over there." - KITTE: "I can has gazoleene?"
Mike: "KITTE, come in through the front gate!" - KITTE: "Im in ur gate crushing ur recepshunist"
Mike: "Now where did I park my car...?" - KITTE: "Invisible car lol"
Mike: "Pursuit mode!" - KITTE: "VTEC JUST KICKED IN YO"
Then we let 4chan's/b/ channel write the scripts and we have the blockbuster series for 2008. Solid gold! *gives the thumbs-up sign and grins in a not entirely trustworthy manner*
and as a side note, the Sideshow Bob bit was grammatically incorrect. Bart is male, the correct phrase would have been "Der Bart, Der." Watching that episode in Germany (translated and all) made even less sense, I could not fathom how they arrived at the 'Die Bart' part, as the German word for that would have been 'stirb.'
Bob tattooed "die Bart, die" on his chest, with the English meaning of wanting Bart to die. When questioned about it he told the interviewers that it was German for "the Bart, the", expecting the interviewers to have no idea of German grammar. The interviewers, sticking to typical Simpson group stupidity, ignore the fact that regardless of Grammar, "the Bart, the" is obvious nonsense and release him on the grounds that "someone who speaks German can't be a bad person".
The bad translation was an inherent part of the joke. Of course, in the German version it didn't really work.
Note that DRM is akin to locking your house and then leaving the key under the doormat. DRM tries to both keep people from accessing the content and allow them to access the content. The whole concept doesn't really work, because one someone has found out how the DRM scheme works they can obtain the keys that have to be on their computer anyway and decrypt the DRM'd data at their leisure - and maybe distribute it via filesharing networks if they want to.
Look at the TPM. Its main function is to ensure that DRM works somewhat better by keeping the important parts from being under the user's control. (Yes, the TPM does verification etc., but that's pretty much just applied DRM.) And even TC doesn't have that bright a future because the whole Trusted Computing model is not quite compatible with the software landscape we're used to (plus, it's plain unpopular).
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of DRM after all it's been through?
AACS has been broken. Trusted Computing is unpopular. The TCPA had do change its name twice.
Slashdot turned out to be a newsblog, and now it's hosting a bunch of articles. All you people care about is warez and making money off of them.
It's a technology! What you don't realize is that DRM is making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it.
It hasn't been a good copy protection scheme for years. AACS is called "Advanced Access Content System" for a reason because all you people want is CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT!
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even occasionally works for some of you bastards! LEAVE DRM ALONE!
Please!
Anonymous Coward talked about professionalism and said if Microsoft was professional they would've let people download patches no matter what.
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash a technology which is going through a hard time?
Leave DRM alone, please.
LEAVE DRM ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
So it's considered a part of Office, but it's not actually sold as such, so a program that's unrelated to Office from a user perspective breaks Office's validation.
Am I the only one who thinks that Microsoft's product ranges get weirder by the minute? If they muddle it up any more, Visio won't be included in the next Office either, but Office won't validate at all if it's not installed...
That was also what fueled the German "Wirtschaftswunder" ("economic wonder"): After the war the allies looted the entire industrial infrastructure. When Germany became acceptable again we borrowed some money and replaced the missing stuff with high-tech equipment, giving us enormous advantages over other countries who still used their legacy systems.
Completely looting a country dry can lead to that country becoming economically stronger afterwards. Counterintuitive at first, but true.
OpenOffice Writer does junk like that as well. I often use cell values like "6/8", meaning "6 of 8". OpenOffice, being helpful, replaces the value with "08.06.1997" (the year might be off, I haven't encountered this in a while). Note that the format of the generated date implies a non-US locale (and indeed the locale is de-DE), which makes the translation of "X/Y"-type strings (which are often used for fractions) into dates much more of a hindrance than a feature. The only way to use such strings is by going through the AutoCorrect settings, which might or might not be available, depending on whether I'm in a table or not.
They made the AutoCorrect settings more sane with OOo2, but I'm still not quite comfortable using this kind of string around OOo.
This is starting to feel like an ALG... Uncovering tiny leads, applying science to the cryptic data one receives until one unlocks the next secret...
Just wait! We're going to find* another couple oddball bugs in Office, then a secret server under the microsoft.com domain will be unlocked and at the end we'll find out that Office 2007 was just a big ALG showing us a pretend world with two competing ISO standards for the next office format and the product being marketed is ODF, which Microsoft will wholeheartedly embrace with the new Office Vista, "available in stores today". (But upgrades from 2007 to Vista will still cost you 200 bucks.)
* Actually, they will most probably be "exposed" by "companies" created by Microsoft's PR agency.
Well, Rails is presented as the Next Big Thing in web development and people were going on about how awesome it is and how it makes web development so much easier etc. Ruby was never presented as a web development thing, it was always Rails. On the other hand, PHP has zero credibility as a general-purpose scripting language, it's usually only seen as a web development tool. So he compared one web development environment (PHP) with another (Rails). Quite sensible, in my opinion.
Haskell is actually used in the real world? Between the unpredictable whitespace rules, the rather ugly syntax and the fact that half of it consists of a procedural paradigm shoehorned onto a functional language I always assumed that its only use was as an example of functional programming in Programming 103.
(As for why someone would choose Ruby over it: Coding performance. Most people are more comfortable around procedural/OO languages like Ruby than the functional/procedural Haskell with its Monads.)
Oppressive laws aren't just gravy, they're part of how the whole plan works. If nothing happened, apart from people getting slightly nervous about planes, that wouldn't significantly impact the target country. Making the government paranoid enough that it enacts unpopular laws against a perceived threat, creating unrest and distrust on their own does much more towards destabilizing the country. Things like the "no nail clippers on the plane" rule are good examples for laws that make the government look more paranoid than competent.
That's also what the whole "people don't like entering the USA" thing is about: Your fingerprinting of foreigners has worsened your reputation with people from different countries. Sure, it alone didn't do much, but together with your warmongering, demanding boarding lists from other countries and other war-on-terrorism actions it does make you look like paranoid control freaks with too big guns. Your country's reputation and goodwill among the rest of the world going down the drain is pretty desirable to terrorists plotting your downfall.
As for not using German politics in this discussion: What do you think, who gave our brillant* leaders the idea of shooting down passenger planes? We still have plenty of politicians with an attitude of "America does it so it has to be sensible".
As for the Hamas thing: Okay, I concede. Not all terrorists operate in the same way; Hamas wants to drive the Israelis out of the country, so obviously they're more focused on making the general population as uncomfortable in the country as possible. The terrorists working against the USA are usually regarded as having the downfall of the USA in mind, making their modus operandi a different one.
As for the thought experiment: Most people over here would come to the conclusion that it's a weird T-Shirt. Even when in doubt they might have confiscated the shirt and/or detained her for further investiagation into what it is, but they wouldn't have arrested her at gunpoint** and locked her up for "possession of a hoax device". We don't exactly have a history of lethal breadboards and personal-area IEDs like, say, the city of Boston.
* Note to grammar nazis: That's not a typo but a Worse Than Failure reference meaning the exact opposite.
** Provided she didn't do something really suspicious like violently resisting the interrogation.
Exactly. Note that terrorism is not about killing a couplem thousand civilians. America has millions of them and the terrorists would run out of suicide bombers before they would've exhausted the American supply of civilians.
The whole point of terrorism is inducing enough fear in the target country that they start making oppressive laws for the sake of perceived security. You turn the target country's leaders into something not wanted by the people, thus creating unrest, thus making it easier to overthrow the country, pressure it into meeting your demands or reduce it to irrelevance.
I mean, look at what 9/11 has caused: Nobody wants to enter the USA anymore if they don't have to, because all foreigners are treated as suspects. People get arrested because they think breadboards are cool. People worldwide aren't allowed to take any kind of pointy object with them when they fly, let alone locked luggage (not to mention that searched luggage sometimes arrives in less-than-pristine condition). The German air force is officially declaring that they will disobey orders because certain politicians want them to shoot down passenger aircraft whenever it is suspected to have been hijacked.
Now compare that to the actual damage terrorist attacks have caused in the meanwhile. The main damage they have caused is turning half of the western world into a bunch of paranoid shitmongers who would gladly take over the killing of civilians if that meant that the terrorists don't get to do it.
No ifs; the terrorists have already won. We can do some damage control, but life will never be like back in those innocent days when you could actually take a bottle of coke with you on a plane.
On Orion, yes, I knew that there would be shock absorbers,
spreading the impulse out, but there will still be a huge
difference in timing, magnitude, and direction between
an infernal combustion engine and an Orion.
Yeah, but the Orion has much less wailing of tortured souls, which is a huge pro on long trips.
Yeah, they're looking for works like [i]Planejacking for Dummies[/i], [i]Terrorism in a nutshell[/i] or [i]How to become a world-class terrorist in 10 days[/i].
Well, 2.5" happens to be what's currently popular - and, quite honestly, I'm not interested in smaller portable hard drives unless they happen to have the GB-per-Dollar rate as the bigger ones. Which, of course, is complete nonsense.
Microdrives and sub-2.5" HDDs are fine and dandy, but two dollars per gig are as unacceptable as the tiny amount of space you get (I haven't been able to find an 1.8" drive with more than 60 gigs; stuff like the Spinpoint N2 isn't readily available). Give me a 200 GB 1.8" drive or microdrove for 120 Eurobucks and I'm interested.
Since such small HDDs don't suit my needs at all I don't see why I should pay extra just to accomodate for an ill-conceived inter-device connection standard that never was revised in a place where it should have been. If instead I just pay twenty bucks more (still staying way below what I'd pay for the same amount of storage in 1.8") and buy my external hard drive with Firewire, all of the energy problems disappear and I get faster transfers, too. It seems that in my case the inadequate component is clearly the USB standard and not the hard drive.
People paying $500 for a cellphone or continuing to buy MP3 players despite a hefty markup are not being rational - they have an emotional attachment to the brand. They will continue to buy Apple even when better, cheaper, more open [blogspot.com] alternatives exist.
Or they want to reflash their device with Rockbox so they can listen to chiptunes on it. Pre-current-gen iPods are known for excellent Rockbox compatibility and the 80G video iPod is not much more expensive than comparable Rockbox-supported players. Also, it's possible to actually obtain one in Europe while the other products in Rockbox's compatibility list either never made it to the European market or have all but disappeared due to being discontinued and having been sold at low quantities.
Show me an obtainable device that actually does what the iPod does and I'll show interest. "Build a Rockbox-compatible player yourself for 150 Dollars"-type instructions are welcome.
Slashdot Mirror
One tiny nitpick: Burning stuff releases CO2, not Co2. Cobalt is not usually involved with oxidation or the greenhouse effect.
True, Computers aren't that mysterious anymore, but I think that certain other series might do very well today. Today's athmosphere of abusive corporations and total networking might be ideal conditions for a new Max Headroom show.
What about Robin Williams as Michael Knight, driving a Smart (pimped up by East Coast Customs(C)(R)TM) with Jim Careys voice as KITTE (Knight Industries Two Thousand and Eight)? Oh! And since "KITTE" sounds like "kitty", KITTE will talk like a lolcat all the time.
/b/ channel write the scripts and we have the blockbuster series for 2008. Solid gold! *gives the thumbs-up sign and grins in a not entirely trustworthy manner*
Mike: "There's a gas station over there." - KITTE: "I can has gazoleene?"
Mike: "KITTE, come in through the front gate!" - KITTE: "Im in ur gate crushing ur recepshunist"
Mike: "Now where did I park my car...?" - KITTE: "Invisible car lol"
Mike: "Pursuit mode!" - KITTE: "VTEC JUST KICKED IN YO"
Then we let 4chan's
I say a trih xeem went off, but most of the blast was contained by an ancient Jjaro space station.
and as a side note, the Sideshow Bob bit was grammatically incorrect. Bart is male, the correct phrase would have been "Der Bart, Der." Watching that episode in Germany (translated and all) made even less sense, I could not fathom how they arrived at the 'Die Bart' part, as the German word for that would have been 'stirb.'
Bob tattooed "die Bart, die" on his chest, with the English meaning of wanting Bart to die. When questioned about it he told the interviewers that it was German for "the Bart, the", expecting the interviewers to have no idea of German grammar. The interviewers, sticking to typical Simpson group stupidity, ignore the fact that regardless of Grammar, "the Bart, the" is obvious nonsense and release him on the grounds that "someone who speaks German can't be a bad person".
The bad translation was an inherent part of the joke. Of course, in the German version it didn't really work.
Considering the UI Vista might as well have been developed by the movie industry...
Note that DRM is akin to locking your house and then leaving the key under the doormat. DRM tries to both keep people from accessing the content and allow them to access the content. The whole concept doesn't really work, because one someone has found out how the DRM scheme works they can obtain the keys that have to be on their computer anyway and decrypt the DRM'd data at their leisure - and maybe distribute it via filesharing networks if they want to.
Look at the TPM. Its main function is to ensure that DRM works somewhat better by keeping the important parts from being under the user's control. (Yes, the TPM does verification etc., but that's pretty much just applied DRM.) And even TC doesn't have that bright a future because the whole Trusted Computing model is not quite compatible with the software landscape we're used to (plus, it's plain unpopular).
How fucking dare anyone out there make fun of DRM after all it's been through?
AACS has been broken. Trusted Computing is unpopular. The TCPA had do change its name twice.
Slashdot turned out to be a newsblog, and now it's hosting a bunch of articles. All you people care about is warez and making money off of them.
It's a technology! What you don't realize is that DRM is making you all this money and all you do is write a bunch of crap about it.
It hasn't been a good copy protection scheme for years. AACS is called "Advanced Access Content System" for a reason because all you people want is CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT!
LEAVE IT ALONE! You are lucky it even occasionally works for some of you bastards! LEAVE DRM ALONE!
Please!
Anonymous Coward talked about professionalism and said if Microsoft was professional they would've let people download patches no matter what.
Speaking of professionalism, when is it professional to publicly bash a technology which is going through a hard time?
Leave DRM alone, please.
LEAVE DRM ALONE RIGHT NOW. I MEAN IT.
Anyone that has a problem with it you deal with me, because it is not well right now.
LEAVE IT ALONE!
So it's considered a part of Office, but it's not actually sold as such, so a program that's unrelated to Office from a user perspective breaks Office's validation.
Am I the only one who thinks that Microsoft's product ranges get weirder by the minute? If they muddle it up any more, Visio won't be included in the next Office either, but Office won't validate at all if it's not installed...
That was also what fueled the German "Wirtschaftswunder" ("economic wonder"): After the war the allies looted the entire industrial infrastructure. When Germany became acceptable again we borrowed some money and replaced the missing stuff with high-tech equipment, giving us enormous advantages over other countries who still used their legacy systems.
Completely looting a country dry can lead to that country becoming economically stronger afterwards. Counterintuitive at first, but true.
Hmm... Would holding a TFT screen showing a video of an explosion up to the camera constitute a crime?
And, for a fraction of the cost.
Yeah, the price for Ultimate is a bit steep. I heard that Germany will soon be able to afford one copy; I'm pretty excited about that.
UAC Notice
You know, something bad might just happen to that nice data you've got there... Happens all the time, you know.
[Allow] [Pay up]
Shouldn't that be "Microflaccid Strokes Again?"
$DEITY, please don't let a Zune owner see this or he'll start "squirting" all over the place.
OpenOffice Writer does junk like that as well. I often use cell values like "6/8", meaning "6 of 8". OpenOffice, being helpful, replaces the value with "08.06.1997" (the year might be off, I haven't encountered this in a while). Note that the format of the generated date implies a non-US locale (and indeed the locale is de-DE), which makes the translation of "X/Y"-type strings (which are often used for fractions) into dates much more of a hindrance than a feature. The only way to use such strings is by going through the AutoCorrect settings, which might or might not be available, depending on whether I'm in a table or not.
They made the AutoCorrect settings more sane with OOo2, but I'm still not quite comfortable using this kind of string around OOo.
This is starting to feel like an ALG... Uncovering tiny leads, applying science to the cryptic data one receives until one unlocks the next secret...
Just wait! We're going to find* another couple oddball bugs in Office, then a secret server under the microsoft.com domain will be unlocked and at the end we'll find out that Office 2007 was just a big ALG showing us a pretend world with two competing ISO standards for the next office format and the product being marketed is ODF, which Microsoft will wholeheartedly embrace with the new Office Vista, "available in stores today". (But upgrades from 2007 to Vista will still cost you 200 bucks.)
* Actually, they will most probably be "exposed" by "companies" created by Microsoft's PR agency.
Well, Rails is presented as the Next Big Thing in web development and people were going on about how awesome it is and how it makes web development so much easier etc. Ruby was never presented as a web development thing, it was always Rails. On the other hand, PHP has zero credibility as a general-purpose scripting language, it's usually only seen as a web development tool. So he compared one web development environment (PHP) with another (Rails). Quite sensible, in my opinion.
Haskell is actually used in the real world? Between the unpredictable whitespace rules, the rather ugly syntax and the fact that half of it consists of a procedural paradigm shoehorned onto a functional language I always assumed that its only use was as an example of functional programming in Programming 103.
(As for why someone would choose Ruby over it: Coding performance. Most people are more comfortable around procedural/OO languages like Ruby than the functional/procedural Haskell with its Monads.)
Oppressive laws aren't just gravy, they're part of how the whole plan works. If nothing happened, apart from people getting slightly nervous about planes, that wouldn't significantly impact the target country. Making the government paranoid enough that it enacts unpopular laws against a perceived threat, creating unrest and distrust on their own does much more towards destabilizing the country. Things like the "no nail clippers on the plane" rule are good examples for laws that make the government look more paranoid than competent.
That's also what the whole "people don't like entering the USA" thing is about: Your fingerprinting of foreigners has worsened your reputation with people from different countries. Sure, it alone didn't do much, but together with your warmongering, demanding boarding lists from other countries and other war-on-terrorism actions it does make you look like paranoid control freaks with too big guns. Your country's reputation and goodwill among the rest of the world going down the drain is pretty desirable to terrorists plotting your downfall.
As for not using German politics in this discussion: What do you think, who gave our brillant* leaders the idea of shooting down passenger planes? We still have plenty of politicians with an attitude of "America does it so it has to be sensible".
As for the Hamas thing: Okay, I concede. Not all terrorists operate in the same way; Hamas wants to drive the Israelis out of the country, so obviously they're more focused on making the general population as uncomfortable in the country as possible. The terrorists working against the USA are usually regarded as having the downfall of the USA in mind, making their modus operandi a different one.
As for the thought experiment: Most people over here would come to the conclusion that it's a weird T-Shirt. Even when in doubt they might have confiscated the shirt and/or detained her for further investiagation into what it is, but they wouldn't have arrested her at gunpoint** and locked her up for "possession of a hoax device". We don't exactly have a history of lethal breadboards and personal-area IEDs like, say, the city of Boston.
* Note to grammar nazis: That's not a typo but a Worse Than Failure reference meaning the exact opposite.
** Provided she didn't do something really suspicious like violently resisting the interrogation.
Exactly. Note that terrorism is not about killing a couplem thousand civilians. America has millions of them and the terrorists would run out of suicide bombers before they would've exhausted the American supply of civilians.
The whole point of terrorism is inducing enough fear in the target country that they start making oppressive laws for the sake of perceived security. You turn the target country's leaders into something not wanted by the people, thus creating unrest, thus making it easier to overthrow the country, pressure it into meeting your demands or reduce it to irrelevance.
I mean, look at what 9/11 has caused: Nobody wants to enter the USA anymore if they don't have to, because all foreigners are treated as suspects. People get arrested because they think breadboards are cool. People worldwide aren't allowed to take any kind of pointy object with them when they fly, let alone locked luggage (not to mention that searched luggage sometimes arrives in less-than-pristine condition). The German air force is officially declaring that they will disobey orders because certain politicians want them to shoot down passenger aircraft whenever it is suspected to have been hijacked.
Now compare that to the actual damage terrorist attacks have caused in the meanwhile. The main damage they have caused is turning half of the western world into a bunch of paranoid shitmongers who would gladly take over the killing of civilians if that meant that the terrorists don't get to do it.
No ifs; the terrorists have already won. We can do some damage control, but life will never be like back in those innocent days when you could actually take a bottle of coke with you on a plane.
On Orion, yes, I knew that there would be shock absorbers, spreading the impulse out, but there will still be a huge difference in timing, magnitude, and direction between an infernal combustion engine and an Orion.
Yeah, but the Orion has much less wailing of tortured souls, which is a huge pro on long trips.
Yeah, they're looking for works like [i]Planejacking for Dummies[/i], [i]Terrorism in a nutshell[/i] or [i]How to become a world-class terrorist in 10 days[/i].
Well, 2.5" happens to be what's currently popular - and, quite honestly, I'm not interested in smaller portable hard drives unless they happen to have the GB-per-Dollar rate as the bigger ones. Which, of course, is complete nonsense.
Microdrives and sub-2.5" HDDs are fine and dandy, but two dollars per gig are as unacceptable as the tiny amount of space you get (I haven't been able to find an 1.8" drive with more than 60 gigs; stuff like the Spinpoint N2 isn't readily available). Give me a 200 GB 1.8" drive or microdrove for 120 Eurobucks and I'm interested.
Since such small HDDs don't suit my needs at all I don't see why I should pay extra just to accomodate for an ill-conceived inter-device connection standard that never was revised in a place where it should have been. If instead I just pay twenty bucks more (still staying way below what I'd pay for the same amount of storage in 1.8") and buy my external hard drive with Firewire, all of the energy problems disappear and I get faster transfers, too. It seems that in my case the inadequate component is clearly the USB standard and not the hard drive.
I'm positive that they will invent a 2.5" HDD that requires less than 0.5 amps to spin up soon. Maybe making the platters from unobtanium might help.
People paying $500 for a cellphone or continuing to buy MP3 players despite a hefty markup are not being rational - they have an emotional attachment to the brand. They will continue to buy Apple even when better, cheaper, more open [blogspot.com] alternatives exist.
Or they want to reflash their device with Rockbox so they can listen to chiptunes on it. Pre-current-gen iPods are known for excellent Rockbox compatibility and the 80G video iPod is not much more expensive than comparable Rockbox-supported players. Also, it's possible to actually obtain one in Europe while the other products in Rockbox's compatibility list either never made it to the European market or have all but disappeared due to being discontinued and having been sold at low quantities.
Show me an obtainable device that actually does what the iPod does and I'll show interest. "Build a Rockbox-compatible player yourself for 150 Dollars"-type instructions are welcome.