Am I the first to point to The Lord of the... whatever ?! Tolkien's fens on rec.arts.books.tolkien have created a parody of the book. It's hilarious! Guaranteed to piss off any die-hard LOTR fanatic. It nearly pissed me off on a couple of occasions, but mostly it made me laugh.
C'mon, that one is easy! Instead of haiku, filters should let trough SCO-copyrighted source code. Any spammer using it to get trough the filters will receive a letter from Mr. Boies soon. We _know_ SCO are serious about protecting their intellectual property:)
From "The Messages in a Battle" article: ...No nukes, no M-16s, no RPGs, no complications of gender, ethnicity, creed or race, like our messy modern affairs. Also, no ambiguity, no peace marches, no talking heads or torrential blogs zigging this way and that ideologically. No sir. In those days, even if those days are set in an Oxford don's fantasy life, war was war, war was man's business, up was up, down was down, enemies were demons, and best of all, killing them was holy work about which no one had to be guilty...
Yup, those were the days! Men were real men, women were real women and the little furry creatures from Alpha Centaury were real little furry etc...
...The overwhelming visual metaphor is men vs. hordes, which in turn plays on deep Western prejudices (Tolkien, after all, was an Englishman to his DNA). It's difficult to see this great battle without thinking of "us": us the West, with our science, our medicine, our literature, our culture, our government, vs. "them," the Others who are not of the West...
It's not Western only, it's universal. I'm an East European, from the Balkans actually, and this motive (us vs. the alien hordes) flows throughout our history. As trough anybody's history, I guess. No?
Playing is supposed to be for fun! Not a small part of it is the realization that you are spending precious time enjoying yourself instead of working/studying/social obligations.
When you do it as a job, by the hours, all day, every day - the fun is gone!
observing that a program that produces no output because it succeeded cannot be distinguished from a program that produced no output because it failed badly
Apparently Mr. Spolsky does not understand one of the principles of Unix programming: The Rule of Repair. "When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible." When an Unix program can not do its job, it lets you know.
Many Windows widgets including moving progress bars, constantly moving icons and spinning logos are there just to reassure the user that something is indeed happening and that Windows has not crashed in the meantime.
Irritating, isn't it? Sometimes I see a zero activity on the network connection, yet the browser progress bar keeps crawling! "The download continues, don't worry". It insults my intelligence. And sometimes the machine freezes WITH the blinking and moving gadgets, too...
Can you feel these looks now? We're staring at you, buddy:)
Seriously, those looks will get harder now, because Saddam has grown long beard and will appear on all photos like that. In the mind of the average coach-potatoes, long black-gray beard is an attribute of the ayatollah. So, Saddam must be a Muslim fundamentalist and a supporter of ben Laden, as they have already been told at least 864 times!
Too far fetched? Wait and see. You can never overestimate the rationality of the crowd. Gustave Lebon said it first, I think.
This guy's interviewing experience is thought-provoking, indeed. If "no spy has ever been caught by a polygraph examination", why are they used in job interviews? The explanation seems to be: to make applicants talk about things they would otherwise hide. It's not about security but about control.
The "foreign interests" questions must have been crucial for the examiner, and what ultimately caused the rejection. After all, if he passed the other tests and reached the personal interview in the Cadillac, what happened there must be the reason for the "fail" mark. It makes me think that, if an applicant has frequently traveled to the Middle East, or has family ties to Muslim countries in the region, or knows Arabic/Persian/Afghan, or simply has an interest in the culture and mentality of these people, there is precious little chance he/she will pass the test.
Are you surprised then that the NSA and CIA can not prevent terrorist attacks on American targets at home and abroad? Acres of computers are no substitute for insider knowledge. WMD in Iraq? Mobile laboratories for nerve gas? The bombed, embargoed, Third World country couldn't feed and provide medical care for its children, for Christ! Is NSA clueless?
Or, does it produce whatever it is told to produce?
Don't answer, if you think it's flame bait, I don't care. These are just my thoughts upon reading the stuff.
Domination often leads to overconfidence and sloppiness. Intel's domination in the chip market makes them no better than Microsoft, with their domination in software. After all, most common desktops today are WINTEL.
Remember the floating-point-calculation bug in the early Pentiums? Intel had found it, fixed it in their new Pentiums, and kept quiet, hoping nobody will notice. Of course someone did, (someone always does!) and it turned out that lots of people were using faulty calculations in their work.
The decision not to extend the Pentium processor line to 64-bit, and to stick with the Itanium ( which does not natively support 32-bit operation) is another shot-in-the-leg. Market signals (very few Itaniums sold) and voiced concerns from people like Linus Torvalds did not cut into their strategy.
AMD on the other hand, is building a new factory (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand for Opterons and Athlon64s. The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit, and it looks they won't be "Intel inside".
And not "Windows outside", I think:)
But right now, I'm stuck with Celeron/WinXP boxes at work, unfortunately. Gasp.
One of the greatest shots-in-the-leg in IT business history was Intel's decision to stop developing the 32-bit Pentium processors line and design 64-bit processors without native 32-bit support.
AMD couldn't have hoped for a better present from it's greatest rival. They have started building a new factory in Dresden (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand of Opterons and Athlon64s.
The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit and it seams they won't be "intel inside".
Slashdot Mirror
We are the JPF suicide squad!
Obviously logic hasn't played a big part in any of their actions
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn make sence! But look at Chewbacca here ...
Other self-chosen names were "Skythian" and "Celt".
Am I the first to point to The Lord of the ... whatever ?! Tolkien's fens on rec.arts.books.tolkien have created a parody of the book. It's hilarious! Guaranteed to piss off any die-hard LOTR fanatic. It nearly pissed me off on a couple of occasions, but mostly it made me laugh.
desktop GNU/Linux is just around the corner :-)
Oh, yeah? How close?
200[45]
200[5-9]
201[0-9]
:)
Nah ... impossible!
Good enough?
Swordforum has two articles about the people who created the swords for LOTR and "invented" the martial arts of the different races in the movie. Enjoy!
From "The Messages in a Battle" article:
...No nukes, no M-16s, no RPGs, no complications of gender, ethnicity, creed or race, like our messy modern affairs. Also, no ambiguity, no peace marches, no talking heads or torrential blogs zigging this way and that ideologically. No sir. In those days, even if those days are set in an Oxford don's fantasy life, war was war, war was man's business, up was up, down was down, enemies were demons, and best of all, killing them was holy work about which no one had to be guilty...
Yup, those were the days! Men were real men, women were real women and the little furry creatures from Alpha Centaury were real little furry etc...
It's not Western only, it's universal. I'm an East European, from the Balkans actually, and this motive (us vs. the alien hordes) flows throughout our history. As trough anybody's history, I guess. No?
When you do it as a job, by the hours, all day, every day - the fun is gone!
Apparently Mr. Spolsky does not understand one of the principles of Unix programming: The Rule of Repair. "When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible." When an Unix program can not do its job, it lets you know.
Many Windows widgets including moving progress bars, constantly moving icons and spinning logos are there just to reassure the user that something is indeed happening and that Windows has not crashed in the meantime.
Irritating, isn't it? Sometimes I see a zero activity on the network connection, yet the browser progress bar keeps crawling! "The download continues, don't worry". It insults my intelligence. And sometimes the machine freezes WITH the blinking and moving gadgets, too...
Seriously, those looks will get harder now, because Saddam has grown long beard and will appear on all photos like that. In the mind of the average coach-potatoes, long black-gray beard is an attribute of the ayatollah. So, Saddam must be a Muslim fundamentalist and a supporter of ben Laden, as they have already been told at least 864 times!
Too far fetched? Wait and see. You can never overestimate the rationality of the crowd. Gustave Lebon said it first, I think.
The "foreign interests" questions must have been crucial for the examiner, and what ultimately caused the rejection. After all, if he passed the other tests and reached the personal interview in the Cadillac, what happened there must be the reason for the "fail" mark. It makes me think that, if an applicant has frequently traveled to the Middle East, or has family ties to Muslim countries in the region, or knows Arabic/Persian/Afghan, or simply has an interest in the culture and mentality of these people, there is precious little chance he/she will pass the test.
Are you surprised then that the NSA and CIA can not prevent terrorist attacks on American targets at home and abroad? Acres of computers are no substitute for insider knowledge. WMD in Iraq? Mobile laboratories for nerve gas? The bombed, embargoed, Third World country couldn't feed and provide medical care for its children, for Christ! Is NSA clueless?
Or, does it produce whatever it is told to produce?
Don't answer, if you think it's flame bait, I don't care. These are just my thoughts upon reading the stuff.
Remember the floating-point-calculation bug in the early Pentiums? Intel had found it, fixed it in their new Pentiums, and kept quiet, hoping nobody will notice. Of course someone did, (someone always does!) and it turned out that lots of people were using faulty calculations in their work.
The decision not to extend the Pentium processor line to 64-bit, and to stick with the Itanium ( which does not natively support 32-bit operation) is another shot-in-the-leg. Market signals (very few Itaniums sold) and voiced concerns from people like Linus Torvalds did not cut into their strategy.
AMD on the other hand, is building a new factory (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand for Opterons and Athlon64s. The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit, and it looks they won't be "Intel inside".
And not "Windows outside", I think :)
But right now, I'm stuck with Celeron/WinXP boxes at work, unfortunately. Gasp.
The Inquirer: Linus Torvalds, Itanium "threw out all the good parts of the x86"
AMD Breaks Ground on 300 Millimeter Manufacturing Facility in Dresden, Germany
AMD couldn't have hoped for a better present from it's greatest rival. They have started building a new factory in Dresden (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand of Opterons and Athlon64s.
The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit and it seams they won't be "intel inside".