I love it how people talk about how they're using "encryption" when possessing the algorithm is enough to break it.
They can if it's ROT13.
Seriously, though, I'd expect that kind of comment from a mainstream news story or a press release, but the quote is attributed to the company's annual report -- not somewhere where you get to fudge without consequences.
This is particularly irritating for those of us that are allergic to triclosan. It's in all soap and all deoderent these days.
Happily, it's in non of these products: [product placement snipped]
This may sound reasonable to many at first glance, but it strikes me the same as hearing someone say, "Hydrogenated vegetable oil is in all food you buy, but it isn't in [insert name of favourite snack food]".
My reaction is always, "No, it's not. Hydrogenated vegetable oil is in most processed food and food products that comes from some manufacturer and marketed in an attractive box to those walking down the food aisles in your local supermarket, but it definitely is not in the sandwich I'm eating, or in any of the food I buy or in any of the food many people buy."
With respect to soap, have you ever noticed that walking down the soap aisle of a supermarket, your nose starts acting up? I have no allergies and I want to sneeze. The "soap" that you're buying isn't soap and hasn't been for years. In fact, most of it is a cheap commercial detergent mixed with a variety of other ingredients (foaming agents, colors, perfumes, etc.) to compensate for the original nasty ingredients, and then shaped into a soap-like shape and put into a colourful box. The liquid soaps are essentially shampoo with colour.
Real soap has always been lye and fat. The lye (sodium hydroxide) was obtained by passing water through burnt animal bones, wood ashes, etc. The fat was usually animal, but vegetable fats (olive oil, for example) were often used. Today, most fats are considered too expensive, and the soap making process requires too much time (also expensive) for most manufacturers. As a result, you get those nasty detergent bars in your local grocers, right next to the lotions (fake fats, if you will) sold to further offset the use of the fake soaps.
Companies and individuals have been making "specialty" (whatever that means) or "handmade" (another silly term) soaps for years, More recently, the popularity of such soap has experienced a boom, and you can find "real" soap just about anywhere. The irony, of course, is that most any "handmade" soap available today is better for your skin, smells better, is environmentally friendly and is actually cheaper as it simply lasts longer because you use far less of it. And, curiously, soap removes bacteria from your skin just fine.
So, forget the product-A vs. product-B recommendations. If you buy the "real" stuff, there's no need to bother with anything that involves spending your life reading labels.
While it's great to be able to reach a human, sometimes you have a simple question, or a complicated one with a simple solution, such that email is a lot more time efficient.
Generally, you're correct, email can be more efficient. Yet how much electronic correspondence (email, web or usenet posts, etc.) have you read that was written well enough so as to be complete and clear or otherwise void of ambiguity? Most email I read consists of a malformed sentence or two that leaves me shaking my head wondering why they bothered to write anything.
Also, electronic correspondence is written with the presumption that the reader is sufficiently able to read and interpret everything correctly. Follow ups questions are easy enough, but there you get into requirements for proper message editing, formatting and threading, features generally absent or abused in many email clients and their users.
The article makes the point that it was an unusual step for a web-based company to offer a telephone approach. I guess that's true enough, but I'm reminded when I registered a domain with the folks at GoDaddy. I received emails of all sorts, of course, but I also received a Welcome Wagon type of phone call from them (apparently they have their own department set up just for this purpose) offering an orientation and a check to be sure I didn't have any unanswered questions. By contrast, email communication is made via a web interface which, unusual for most such approaches, doesn't reformat or truncate messages. I don't use them anymore, but that phone call left a very positive impression.
I doubt anyone gets through a typical workday without being subjected to understaffed, poorly setup voice mail or call center of one sort or another. That Netflix is distinguishing themselves by doing things differently says a lot.
Re:Your Conspiracy-Fu is strong, young Grasshopper
on
Ubuntu Servers Hacked
·
· Score: 1
"The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working." - Jack Handey
LOL!
Ya know, I've probably read or owned and one time or another most of the works quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, but reading this makes me want to trade it all in a for single leather-bound edition of Deep Thoughts.
But I'm just hoping someone does the same double blind test, but for wine, so we can get connoisseurs to shut the **** up about the soil quality of where the grapes for their wine were grown...
Chances are high that if you're unable to discern the differences from a grape grown in one soil vs. another, then you've taken yourself out of the discussion. With respect to music, most people listening to mp3 files are listening to pop music. For them, the subtleties of sound and sound fidelity are unimportant. For someone who regularly listens to classical musical, solo instrumentation, jazz, etc., fidelity (or the lack of it) is a Really Big Deal.
But what is the price of inferior audio quality? Can poor audio touch the heart as deeply as better sound? John Meyer, who designs and builds some of the world's best speakers at his Meyer Sound Labs in Berkeley, Calif., doesn't think so.
"It turns you into an observer," Meyer says. "It forces the brain to work harder to solve it all the time. Any compression system is based on the idea you can throw data away, and that's proved tricky because we don't know how the brain works."
Throwing stuff away, unfortunately, is what most of us happily do. On the other hand, I doubt there's a single director or audio engineer who's worked on a movie and doesn't cringe when seeing someone watching it on a regular TV set. Maybe the viewer doesn't care, maybe he doesn't notice, or maybe he just doesn't know better. Either way, you can't dismiss that differences do exist.
Years ago, I was fortunate enough to see the Sex Pistols perform. I enjoyed every minute of it, but their music sounded as shitty live as it did on vinyl, tape, CDs or now, on mp3. And all the cheap beer I drank tasted good.
Is this really so hard to understand? As a parallel, consider the following statement: "Why do we praise countries that ease up on censorship a little bit, but damn countries that impose a little bit more censorship on its citizens?"
An insightful comment, yes, but personally, I'd rather have a car analogy.
That's why you surf the lighter-weight versions of pages: http://slashdot.org/palm/ gives a front page that weighs only 8 KB.
Wow. I've been dealing with oversized, CPU-intensive sites the entire morning. My headache just disappeared.
Seriously, I had no idea that existed. Now if I could read Slashdot in mutt (properly threaded, of course), my life would be complete. Hell, I'd pony up a fat subscription fee for such a service... providing I didn't get an itemized bill of the time I wasted, of course.
You can bet that the Western Paul Wolfowitz, IMF-types...
A person reasonably up to date with respect to current events would know that it was recently determined (by people who are in a position to decide WTF an "IMF-type" is) that Mr. Wolfowitz is decidedly not one of them.
Conspiracy theorists or those in the habit of carrying placards and/or smashing windows in advocacy of certain social causes may hold a different view, of course.;-)
I guess it depends on whether you consider mathematics to be a science (ergo singular) or a group of sciences (ergo plural).
To use your example, correct American usage would require that a group be considered a singular (abeit collective) noun, and would demand a singular verb (using both singular and plural forms in the same construction is a no-no). Eg. The group is responsible. vs. The students are responsible.
If typical English English usage, collective nouns are regularly treated as plural. Eg. Microsoft are the root of all evil.
Personally, I prefer the standard American usage in this case, but typically consider "real" English forms, spellings, etc. more correct. The reason for that is mostly due to being annoyed at having to teach remedial grammar (subject/verb conjuncations, etc.) to students whose first language is English.
fuck you zonk! no, I've had enough of your bullshit... fucking immune from moderation troll-assed motherfucker, I will sacrifice my "excellent" karma to bring you down!
Oh big deal. In a big fit of irony, the SDK will hit Bit-torrent within minutes.
May be it's just the triumph of optimism over experience?
I'm reminded of how every now and again someone sets out to develop a New and Improved USENET client (or file compression utility) and market it for sale to all those folks who spend their hours actively downloading such stuff for free.
The problem here is that it only assesses one kind of risk.
I think that's sort of the point. Fat people and smokers are easy targets, hence, a politically acceptable decision gets made. By comparison, those with "at-risk" lifestyles, bad heredity or who are simply poor are just as easy to quantify, but more challenging to discriminate against.
Put another way, I'm in excellent health and am blessed with genes that, God willing, will allow me to live to a ripe old age without any need for costly medication or require expensive medical procedures. Oh, yeah. I enjoy smoking, drinking, and sex (but not necessarily in that order). Reading all comments that suggest I should be discriminated against leaves me wondering whether I should feel victimised, smug that I'm healthier than most, or so resentful that my little group is being targetted (yet again) that I'd be willing to support expanding the list of discriminating criteria in retribution against others who do suck up a large portion of health care costs.
Personally, I don't think they'll get very far with targetting those who have weight problems. Using BMI numbers is questionable and IIRC, the airlines didn't do too well when they tried to charge more for the obvious "extra space". Also, because obesity is so widespread in the US, the general population (and those they elect) will have too much sympathy to allow it.
Maybe instead of going down this road, we should consider universal health coverage and face the challenge of deciding what we can afford. Even fat people need health care.
...a point hit home by the success of the "For Dummies/Idiots" series. It's one of the selling points of the books
I think the very readable For Dummies series of books hasn't reached the seemingly untapped potential of its target audience.;-)
Maybe someone with a better knowledge of history or who has studied technical writing can elaborate on this, but I believe it was the O'Reilly series of books that broke ground on changing the manner in which technical books were written from textbook-ish style to something more informal and entertaining.
I'd guess there's more than a few books in the O'Reilly catalogue, for example, on everybody's favourite list, but the increasing focus on appealing to readers often leads to compromising on actual content. More people educating themselves by buying or reading more books (or on-line documentation) is A Good Thing, of course, but my preference has been for the (apparently dated) textbook-ish approach. Compare, for example, something like Internetworking With Tcp/Ip: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture (Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. 1) published in 1991 with anything published today on the subject of networking. One is as comprehensive and as well written as it is boring to read, while the others are more accessible and topical and shorter. No surprise which sells more copies.
What I've never got my head around is that people increasingly don't want to read anything. I wonder how somehow making their living as a writer feels knowing that most of us are guilty of relying on a Google search for a quick intro or how-to when the READMEs, man pages, source code, etc. is sitting on their hard drive.
When I bought a Mac (because I wanted something better than Windows), I thought a nice side effect was I would have to learn more about UNIX. I bought a copy of "Learning UNIX for Mac OS X Tiger" and read through most of it. And I'm now very comfortable using the command line for simple things like FTPing, changing file permissions, and modifying simple text files (although I always use PICO because VI just seems like black magic to me).
Nice to read.
Funny how buying a simple book, or investing a bit of time learning something can yield benefits.;-)
Don't give up on vi, though. I remember when I first started learning it, I spent a solid week or two thinking "This is completely nuts." Now, I don't use anything else.
We are all more or less anonymous here on slashdot. Very few people know who hides behind a username. The problem with ACs isn't their anonymity, it's their lack of identity...
Interesting points of view. I'm wondering, though, can't the opposite be just as true?
For example, how would it appear if I call you joto? To me (and probably to thousands of others), "joto" isn't a name but an alphanumeric string that appears on Slashdot. Granted that while there are many like it, that one is indeed yours so I won't object if you find some attachment to it.;-) I'd wager that you'd feel slightly uncomfortable, and everyone else, to the extent your "name" is even noticed, "joto" means next to nothing.
Similarly, when reading a message on a mailing list or newsgroup subscribed to by thousands of people, aren't you put off by someone who starts his message with "Dear List" or "Hello Fellow Users"? Or the waiter putting his customers on a first name basis?
I'll agree that a lack of identity (or "formal introduction" for us old skool types), can and often does invite antisocial behaviour. How to explain the ease with which we can send a message to a perfect stranger and starting bitching at him or her about some issue?
You come very close to stepping over the line from "anti-Zionist" to fundamentalist racist in that sentence.
I suppost a construct like fundamentalist racist could mean something, but the closest I've come up with is in the present context is that it refers to someone who is an American Protestant belonging to one of the more vocal denominations drawing unfair distinctions of Africans who have converted to Judaism.
As for the line, I don't know where yours is drawn, but mine is drawn at the intersection between words meaning something, and the use of slogans, catchprases, propaganda and cliches.
This article plays on a disgusting pathology "all the best stuff is made in japan". No, Japan has been struggling through a crippling recession for ten years. What was true for Marty McFly in the 80s is simply dated now. And here's the kicker: some stuff is actually made for the US market first and then released to Japan. Ditto for Samsung in Singapore. You always release to your home market first to test out the waters.
Here's another kicker. A good amount of American beef (you know, the stuff raised by American cowboys on American farms for American families) typically gets shipped to Japan and is otherwise unavailable here. The same goes for countless other products.
That's called irony.
If you can get over this unhealthy preoccupation with foreign countries and the attendant need to making disparraging remarks, you might actually be able to smile and enjoy that irony. The beef, well, you're probably out of luck, but you may find some in better NY restaurants. Seems the American consumer isn't interested in paying the market price, or is otherwise satisfied with lower quality, or perhaps just doesn't know any better. Whether that has anything to do with the state of the cell phone market, I don't know.
"Hollywood is the main source of cash for Democrats" is just another legend in the rich and bizarre mythology of conservatism, and as such it is typically puerile and easily refuted.
LOL. Somebody bothered not only to think about it, but research the subject for himself? That's the problem with the world today -- too many of you free-thinkers running around disagreeing with everyone and spouting off facts. You must be a real lonely guy without a group to belong to.
Seriously, though, good for you. Reminds me of the the liberal media meme. Didn't occur to anyone that the most of the major networks are owned and operated by a bunch of rich white guys with too much money that vote Republican. Or that the news divisions heads and most of the anchors fall into the same group.
As for Hollywood, it's a vocal crowd consisting of people with easy access to free publicity living in a state that traditionally leans left of center. It's worth pointing, however, that the most vocal individuals do donate heavily to the Democratic party. Easy target at any rate. A hundred years ago it wasn't Hollywood, but those darned New Yorkers. I guess when you live in middle America, it's inevitable that you feel surrounded.
guess this is the main problem: for starters they seem to be harder, since they cannot see the letters, for pro-typists/programmers they do not offer enough gain, unless they have RSI. Maybe mobile typing will finally be their breakthrough. Took only 30 years.
Well, speaking as a pro typist, guitarist (the ten-finger kind), etc., I'm endlessly intrigued by these devices and the way keyboards are being designed, but I have strong concerns about anyone making use of them on a regular basis.
I don't know whether RSI is associated with small-device use, but I do know strain, injury and all-round weirdness results from doing too much of anything in an unnatural manner. Hell, most people using a regular keyboard get it all wrong, with results ranging from a lack of speed to errors to outright injury.
Put another way, I wouldn't want to be growing old with big and crippled thumbs.;-)
But I get the impression that what is referred to as old here is system produced 5 -7 years ago... Hell I'm running off an overclocked to just over 500Mhz box right now using Ubuntu. Its my main internet system. It does just fine.
From the fine article:
Let the 500MHz Celerons embrace their 128MB of RAM and run the world's best browser without feeling like they're being bent over a table and bitch-slapped by more capable machines.
My guess is the majority of home user systems out there fall into that category, so they're "old" only in the sense that they're not "shiny and new". As you've pointed out, a typical Pentium III 500MHz box is more than capable, and unless you're running Vista, such a system will meet most desktop needs for years to come.
As for the old 486 through earlier Pentiums, I'm afraid they've fallen out of favor and can be problematic. That's not to say that level of processing power is too low to be useful. My next purchase, for example, will be a couple of Soekris net 5501s. Upgrading from 266MHz to 433MHz boards, I expect I'll see dramatic performance increases.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I love it how people talk about how they're using "encryption" when possessing the algorithm is enough to break it.
They can if it's ROT13.
Seriously, though, I'd expect that kind of comment from a mainstream news story or a press release, but the quote is attributed to the company's annual report -- not somewhere where you get to fudge without consequences.
This is particularly irritating for those of us that are allergic to triclosan. It's in all soap and all deoderent these days.
Happily, it's in non of these products: [product placement snipped]
This may sound reasonable to many at first glance, but it strikes me the same as hearing someone say, "Hydrogenated vegetable oil is in all food you buy, but it isn't in [insert name of favourite snack food]".
My reaction is always, "No, it's not. Hydrogenated vegetable oil is in most processed food and food products that comes from some manufacturer and marketed in an attractive box to those walking down the food aisles in your local supermarket, but it definitely is not in the sandwich I'm eating, or in any of the food I buy or in any of the food many people buy."
With respect to soap, have you ever noticed that walking down the soap aisle of a supermarket, your nose starts acting up? I have no allergies and I want to sneeze. The "soap" that you're buying isn't soap and hasn't been for years. In fact, most of it is a cheap commercial detergent mixed with a variety of other ingredients (foaming agents, colors, perfumes, etc.) to compensate for the original nasty ingredients, and then shaped into a soap-like shape and put into a colourful box. The liquid soaps are essentially shampoo with colour.
Real soap has always been lye and fat. The lye (sodium hydroxide) was obtained by passing water through burnt animal bones, wood ashes, etc. The fat was usually animal, but vegetable fats (olive oil, for example) were often used. Today, most fats are considered too expensive, and the soap making process requires too much time (also expensive) for most manufacturers. As a result, you get those nasty detergent bars in your local grocers, right next to the lotions (fake fats, if you will) sold to further offset the use of the fake soaps.
Companies and individuals have been making "specialty" (whatever that means) or "handmade" (another silly term) soaps for years, More recently, the popularity of such soap has experienced a boom, and you can find "real" soap just about anywhere. The irony, of course, is that most any "handmade" soap available today is better for your skin, smells better, is environmentally friendly and is actually cheaper as it simply lasts longer because you use far less of it. And, curiously, soap removes bacteria from your skin just fine.
So, forget the product-A vs. product-B recommendations. If you buy the "real" stuff, there's no need to bother with anything that involves spending your life reading labels.
While it's great to be able to reach a human, sometimes you have a simple question, or a complicated one with a simple solution, such that email is a lot more time efficient.
Generally, you're correct, email can be more efficient. Yet how much electronic correspondence (email, web or usenet posts, etc.) have you read that was written well enough so as to be complete and clear or otherwise void of ambiguity? Most email I read consists of a malformed sentence or two that leaves me shaking my head wondering why they bothered to write anything.
Also, electronic correspondence is written with the presumption that the reader is sufficiently able to read and interpret everything correctly. Follow ups questions are easy enough, but there you get into requirements for proper message editing, formatting and threading, features generally absent or abused in many email clients and their users.
The article makes the point that it was an unusual step for a web-based company to offer a telephone approach. I guess that's true enough, but I'm reminded when I registered a domain with the folks at GoDaddy. I received emails of all sorts, of course, but I also received a Welcome Wagon type of phone call from them (apparently they have their own department set up just for this purpose) offering an orientation and a check to be sure I didn't have any unanswered questions. By contrast, email communication is made via a web interface which, unusual for most such approaches, doesn't reformat or truncate messages. I don't use them anymore, but that phone call left a very positive impression.
I doubt anyone gets through a typical workday without being subjected to understaffed, poorly setup voice mail or call center of one sort or another. That Netflix is distinguishing themselves by doing things differently says a lot.
"The complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working."
- Jack Handey
LOL!
Ya know, I've probably read or owned and one time or another most of the works quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, but reading this makes me want to trade it all in a for single leather-bound edition of Deep Thoughts.
Didn't learn anything at all from the elementary school story about the fox/crow/rabbit and the hungry, hungry alligator, eh?
If that's one of the O'Reilly books, then I think it's probably too advanced for kids in grade school.
Seriously, fox, crow and rabbit?
Chances are high that if you're unable to discern the differences from a grape grown in one soil vs. another, then you've taken yourself out of the discussion. With respect to music, most people listening to mp3 files are listening to pop music. For them, the subtleties of sound and sound fidelity are unimportant. For someone who regularly listens to classical musical, solo instrumentation, jazz, etc., fidelity (or the lack of it) is a Really Big Deal.
Throwing stuff away, unfortunately, is what most of us happily do. On the other hand, I doubt there's a single director or audio engineer who's worked on a movie and doesn't cringe when seeing someone watching it on a regular TV set. Maybe the viewer doesn't care, maybe he doesn't notice, or maybe he just doesn't know better. Either way, you can't dismiss that differences do exist.
Years ago, I was fortunate enough to see the Sex Pistols perform. I enjoyed every minute of it, but their music sounded as shitty live as it did on vinyl, tape, CDs or now, on mp3. And all the cheap beer I drank tasted good.
Is this really so hard to understand? As a parallel, consider the following statement: "Why do we praise countries that ease up on censorship a little bit, but damn countries that impose a little bit more censorship on its citizens?"
An insightful comment, yes, but personally, I'd rather have a car analogy.
Any takers?
That's why you surf the lighter-weight versions of pages: http://slashdot.org/palm/ gives a front page that weighs only 8 KB.
... providing I didn't get an itemized bill of the time I wasted, of course.
Wow. I've been dealing with oversized, CPU-intensive sites the entire morning. My headache just disappeared.
Seriously, I had no idea that existed. Now if I could read Slashdot in mutt (properly threaded, of course), my life would be complete. Hell, I'd pony up a fat subscription fee for such a service
You can bet that the Western Paul Wolfowitz, IMF-types ...
;-)
A person reasonably up to date with respect to current events would know that it was recently determined (by people who are in a position to decide WTF an "IMF-type" is) that Mr. Wolfowitz is decidedly not one of them.
Conspiracy theorists or those in the habit of carrying placards and/or smashing windows in advocacy of certain social causes may hold a different view, of course.
I guess it depends on whether you consider mathematics to be a science (ergo singular) or a group of sciences (ergo plural).
To use your example, correct American usage would require that a group be considered a singular (abeit collective) noun, and would demand a singular verb (using both singular and plural forms in the same construction is a no-no). Eg. The group is responsible. vs. The students are responsible.
If typical English English usage, collective nouns are regularly treated as plural. Eg. Microsoft are the root of all evil.
Personally, I prefer the standard American usage in this case, but typically consider "real" English forms, spellings, etc. more correct. The reason for that is mostly due to being annoyed at having to teach remedial grammar (subject/verb conjuncations, etc.) to students whose first language is English.
fuck you zonk! no, I've had enough of your bullshit... fucking immune from moderation troll-assed motherfucker, I will sacrifice my "excellent" karma to bring you down!
Yeah, but how do you *really* feel?
Oh big deal. In a big fit of irony, the SDK will hit Bit-torrent within minutes.
May be it's just the triumph of optimism over experience?
I'm reminded of how every now and again someone sets out to develop a New and Improved USENET client (or file compression utility) and market it for sale to all those folks who spend their hours actively downloading such stuff for free.
The problem here is that it only assesses one kind of risk.
I think that's sort of the point. Fat people and smokers are easy targets, hence, a politically acceptable decision gets made. By comparison, those with "at-risk" lifestyles, bad heredity or who are simply poor are just as easy to quantify, but more challenging to discriminate against.
Put another way, I'm in excellent health and am blessed with genes that, God willing, will allow me to live to a ripe old age without any need for costly medication or require expensive medical procedures. Oh, yeah. I enjoy smoking, drinking, and sex (but not necessarily in that order). Reading all comments that suggest I should be discriminated against leaves me wondering whether I should feel victimised, smug that I'm healthier than most, or so resentful that my little group is being targetted (yet again) that I'd be willing to support expanding the list of discriminating criteria in retribution against others who do suck up a large portion of health care costs.
Personally, I don't think they'll get very far with targetting those who have weight problems. Using BMI numbers is questionable and IIRC, the airlines didn't do too well when they tried to charge more for the obvious "extra space". Also, because obesity is so widespread in the US, the general population (and those they elect) will have too much sympathy to allow it.
Maybe instead of going down this road, we should consider universal health coverage and face the challenge of deciding what we can afford. Even fat people need health care.
I think you mean resuscitate.
...a point hit home by the success of the "For Dummies/Idiots" series. It's one of the selling points of the books
;-)
I think the very readable For Dummies series of books hasn't reached the seemingly untapped potential of its target audience.
Maybe someone with a better knowledge of history or who has studied technical writing can elaborate on this, but I believe it was the O'Reilly series of books that broke ground on changing the manner in which technical books were written from textbook-ish style to something more informal and entertaining.
I'd guess there's more than a few books in the O'Reilly catalogue, for example, on everybody's favourite list, but the increasing focus on appealing to readers often leads to compromising on actual content. More people educating themselves by buying or reading more books (or on-line documentation) is A Good Thing, of course, but my preference has been for the (apparently dated) textbook-ish approach. Compare, for example, something like Internetworking With Tcp/Ip: Principles, Protocols, and Architecture (Internetworking with TCP/IP Vol. 1) published in 1991 with anything published today on the subject of networking. One is as comprehensive and as well written as it is boring to read, while the others are more accessible and topical and shorter. No surprise which sells more copies.
What I've never got my head around is that people increasingly don't want to read anything. I wonder how somehow making their living as a writer feels knowing that most of us are guilty of relying on a Google search for a quick intro or how-to when the READMEs, man pages, source code, etc. is sitting on their hard drive.
This was covered yesterday on NPR Radio.
When I bought a Mac (because I wanted something better than Windows), I thought a nice side effect was I would have to learn more about UNIX. I bought a copy of "Learning UNIX for Mac OS X Tiger" and read through most of it. And I'm now very comfortable using the command line for simple things like FTPing, changing file permissions, and modifying simple text files (although I always use PICO because VI just seems like black magic to me).
;-)
Nice to read.
Funny how buying a simple book, or investing a bit of time learning something can yield benefits.
Don't give up on vi, though. I remember when I first started learning it, I spent a solid week or two thinking "This is completely nuts." Now, I don't use anything else.
the energy I normally expend is only enough to hold me up
It's only Monday. I expect by the end of the week someone might notice. If they don't, let me if they're hiring.
We are all more or less anonymous here on slashdot. Very few people know who hides behind a username. The problem with ACs isn't their anonymity, it's their lack of identity ...
;-) I'd wager that you'd feel slightly uncomfortable, and everyone else, to the extent your "name" is even noticed, "joto" means next to nothing.
Interesting points of view. I'm wondering, though, can't the opposite be just as true?
For example, how would it appear if I call you joto? To me (and probably to thousands of others), "joto" isn't a name but an alphanumeric string that appears on Slashdot. Granted that while there are many like it, that one is indeed yours so I won't object if you find some attachment to it.
Similarly, when reading a message on a mailing list or newsgroup subscribed to by thousands of people, aren't you put off by someone who starts his message with "Dear List" or "Hello Fellow Users"? Or the waiter putting his customers on a first name basis?
I'll agree that a lack of identity (or "formal introduction" for us old skool types), can and often does invite antisocial behaviour. How to explain the ease with which we can send a message to a perfect stranger and starting bitching at him or her about some issue?
Max Headroom would be proud.
But what would his brother say?
You come very close to stepping over the line from "anti-Zionist" to fundamentalist racist in that sentence.
I suppost a construct like fundamentalist racist could mean something, but the closest I've come up with is in the present context is that it refers to someone who is an American Protestant belonging to one of the more vocal denominations drawing unfair distinctions of Africans who have converted to Judaism.
As for the line, I don't know where yours is drawn, but mine is drawn at the intersection between words meaning something, and the use of slogans, catchprases, propaganda and cliches.
This article plays on a disgusting pathology "all the best stuff is made in japan". No, Japan has been struggling through a crippling recession for ten years. What was true for Marty McFly in the 80s is simply dated now. And here's the kicker: some stuff is actually made for the US market first and then released to Japan. Ditto for Samsung in Singapore. You always release to your home market first to test out the waters.
Here's another kicker. A good amount of American beef (you know, the stuff raised by American cowboys on American farms for American families) typically gets shipped to Japan and is otherwise unavailable here. The same goes for countless other products.
That's called irony.
If you can get over this unhealthy preoccupation with foreign countries and the attendant need to making disparraging remarks, you might actually be able to smile and enjoy that irony. The beef, well, you're probably out of luck, but you may find some in better NY restaurants. Seems the American consumer isn't interested in paying the market price, or is otherwise satisfied with lower quality, or perhaps just doesn't know any better. Whether that has anything to do with the state of the cell phone market, I don't know.
"Hollywood is the main source of cash for Democrats" is just another legend in the rich and bizarre mythology of conservatism, and as such it is typically puerile and easily refuted.
LOL. Somebody bothered not only to think about it, but research the subject for himself? That's the problem with the world today -- too many of you free-thinkers running around disagreeing with everyone and spouting off facts. You must be a real lonely guy without a group to belong to.
Seriously, though, good for you. Reminds me of the the liberal media meme. Didn't occur to anyone that the most of the major networks are owned and operated by a bunch of rich white guys with too much money that vote Republican. Or that the news divisions heads and most of the anchors fall into the same group.
As for Hollywood, it's a vocal crowd consisting of people with easy access to free publicity living in a state that traditionally leans left of center. It's worth pointing, however, that the most vocal individuals do donate heavily to the Democratic party. Easy target at any rate. A hundred years ago it wasn't Hollywood, but those darned New Yorkers. I guess when you live in middle America, it's inevitable that you feel surrounded.
guess this is the main problem: for starters they seem to be harder, since they cannot see the letters, for pro-typists/programmers they do not offer enough gain, unless they have RSI. Maybe mobile typing will finally be their breakthrough. Took only 30 years.
;-)
Well, speaking as a pro typist, guitarist (the ten-finger kind), etc., I'm endlessly intrigued by these devices and the way keyboards are being designed, but I have strong concerns about anyone making use of them on a regular basis.
I don't know whether RSI is associated with small-device use, but I do know strain, injury and all-round weirdness results from doing too much of anything in an unnatural manner. Hell, most people using a regular keyboard get it all wrong, with results ranging from a lack of speed to errors to outright injury.
Put another way, I wouldn't want to be growing old with big and crippled thumbs.
From the fine article:
My guess is the majority of home user systems out there fall into that category, so they're "old" only in the sense that they're not "shiny and new". As you've pointed out, a typical Pentium III 500MHz box is more than capable, and unless you're running Vista, such a system will meet most desktop needs for years to come.
As for the old 486 through earlier Pentiums, I'm afraid they've fallen out of favor and can be problematic. That's not to say that level of processing power is too low to be useful. My next purchase, for example, will be a couple of Soekris net 5501s. Upgrading from 266MHz to 433MHz boards, I expect I'll see dramatic performance increases.