I'm no blogging cheerleader, but the patronizing tone he uses is bound to alienate a less enthusiastic booster of the blogosphere than I. He comes across as an arrogant prig who's using his (extremely limited) bully pulpit to bash those about whom he admittedly (and rather proudly) knows little. I have nothing but regard for the ALA and love my local libraries, but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.
My math professor answered his phone during lecture once. He talked for about a minute, exchanging pleasantries, etc, then hung up and said, "I get to go to the symphony tonight!" The class was in hysterics.
I know another professor who elaborately staged an event where he made it look as though he snatched a student's phone out of her purse and stomped on it. He heard rumors about himself at other colleges in the area within a few weeks. Apparently the act of violence made a big splash.
A friend of mine recently posted a long rant to a community we're both in about how he knows that someone out there that he doesn't know probably has a really embarrassing photograph of him making a fool of himself in a public place (you know, someone taking a picture of him with his mouth full inadvertently while actually shooting something else). He's worried about becoming famous because he thinks that this mysterious person will come out of the woodwork and sell the picture for millions. I pointed out that they probably already deleted the picture because that guy making the weird face in the background totally ruined it.
Still, I see his point, in a way. It is sort of weird to think that every time you go outside and mind your own business, you're ripe to be documented by strangers with camera phones and the like.
Hey, that's not just in gaming...I tried to hit ctrl-F when I was looking for my keys the other day and then realized that I was looking at my bedroom, not a monitor. Siiiigh.
Seems like a large portion of people commenting so far have (fond?) memories of Tetris completely taking over. I haven't played Tetris in years and I can still conjure up games in my head.
I know also that I became really suspicious about social interactions while I was playing the Sims. I'd talk to people and know they were just doing it so their social meter would rise, and would leave feeling used and resentful. It was really terrible, because while it's generally not so hard to curb violent impulses, I started feeling like none of the people who talked to me throughout the course of the day actually had any regard for me and get really discontented.
Thanks for your kind advice...I haven't found spyware on my system since the first time I ran Adaware; however, I do have a few tracking cookies a month and I've recently changed my browser settings to attempt to combat that.
Listen, dumbass, while I may enjoy finding the occasional tracking cookie, the fact is that I use Mozilla and am in general pretty paranoid about what I'll let onto my computer, just like any other sane person (as opposed to my idiot boyfriend, who stubbornly uses IE despite all his friends' adminitions to do otherwise). I like finding spyware on my system because it means the software's working, and I'm sure many male hackers secretly enjoy the chase as much as I do, but it doesn't happen too often.
God,/. is annoying sometimes. But I guess I brought it on myself by revealing my own shameful femininity.
I'd like to be the counterexample to your assertion; I ran the MS program and found nothing, then immediately afterward, I ran Adaware and Spybot, in that order, and found one file with Adaware and a whopping 19 with Spybot.
The thing that makes me sad is that I kind of like finding spyware on my system, just to make me feel like I'm a kind of savvy Internet user who does what she can to protect her computer, and the much-vaunted Microsoft adware utility didn't give me any satisfaction at all.
I'd like to share an amusing anecdote involving somebody I know and a cell phone. Last week she was waiting for a class to begin and she went up and looked in the window of the room. It was supposed to be a section with 20 people enrolled and there was one guy in there. Rather than go in and ask him what was going on, she took out her phone and pretended to be standing there talking to somebody, while actually just waiting to see if anyone else would go into the room. Talk about using the phone to avoid a social situation...
Eventually, she went in and it turned out that a few students had some to the consensus that the professor was at a conference. Took her ten minutes of standing outside the window "talking" to work up the nerve, though.
I ran the MS spyware program. It took half an hour and it didn't find shit. I decided to run AdAware and see how it measured up...it's been running for all of two minutes and it's found a new file.
LJ offers some pretty cool (to the type of person who enjoys LiveJournal-type activities) incentives for users who buy subscriptions. I've certainly put more cash money into LJ than I have into, say,/. for example.
As a LiveJournal user who's about to celebrate my journal's 3rd birthday, and who's young and female enough not to be embarrassed about it, I doubt most LJ users will know or care. It would be stupid to make more than minor changes to the interface, and if they do, I'm sure old interfaces will be selectable options (as is the case now). The fact is that the vast majority of LJ users came on when the site stopped requiring invite codes to join and feel very little connection with the LJ community as a whole--certainly, no obligation to become paid members just to support the site, or volunteer as coders, testers, or what not. I honestly don't think any of these people will notice anything beyond interface changes, except "Hey, my journal's loading faster than usual. Sweet!"
I think it's telling that the blurbs about LJ don't mention that it's open source. Yeah, it's cool when it's an OS or a browser or a media format, but what movement of/. nerds wants to be associated with online diaries. Eeeeew.
I'll second the recommendation of Practical Electronics for Inventors. I got it at a summer program at MIT when I was in high school and we used almost exclusively that book and a single lecture to build motors from scratch.
Thank you. I just ran out of mod points, but I really appreciated this post, and I wanted to let you know. It drives me mad that there's always the/. cowboy mentality voice of "We don't need unions". We need worldwide fucking unions that take care of workers because companies never, ever will and individual workers are too afraid and too insignificant to do it all alone.
We're in a bad way as a society when workers cease to recognize the necessity of collective action.
I do. And I do it well, and I'm proud of it. Of course, I'm in the dying breed that considers the ability to write legibly by hand a part of fluency in one's language. Maybe I should just give in and go back to third grade where I belong.
I'd definitely be willing to get in on that project in some capacity and I'm sure there are other OSS types who would too. Even those of us who don't use Windows probably still have family or friends who do, and would like a one-stop spyware detector...I find that I'm installing a new damn spyware detection program on my sisters' computer every time I see them these days. It'd be great if we could have them all in one place.
Sure, my SSN is constant, but my address has changed three times in the last year. I am absolutely positive this database will never stay updated if they choose to archive college students' addresses.
On the other hand, I think this database would be insanely easy to build; my university already has all this data and I'm sure most other institutions of higher learning do as well. Last year some of our school's security was compromised and there was a big to-do about how we all had to report the incident to all the major credit report companies because the people who did it hadaccess to all the tools they needed for identity theft.
Perhaps the Department of Education is planning to hijack the credit cards of irresponsible students who don't check the charges as carefully as they should, to pay for No Child Left Behind.
We actually had to take just such a test before we could get online at my school. It was ten questions on anti-virus, mail attachments, legality of downloading some materials (hey, they're an ISP, they're covering their own asses) and so forth.
I still knew a ton of people who got viruses and the like, though, and of course everyone pirated music. A lot of people know very well what they need to be doing and just don't actually do it.
Listen, we've done the best we can to get him out. Surely you recall the almost unprecedented vote of no confidence during last annual meeting? And the similarly unprecedented hubris he displayed when he decided that meant he could stay when a near-majority of shareholders wanted him out?
The thing is that while he's lost us a lot of money, Disney was in terrible straits before he came along and, like it or not, experienced an impressive renaissance in the late '80s to mid '90s. I may have faded now, and a lot of that's his fault, but give credit where credit is due.
I hate Michael Eisner as much as any Disney stockholder, but the name recognition Disney has in my generation is due mainly to masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, the Lion King, and Aladdin--all of which were made under Eisner's watch. Don't oversimplify. It's partially his fault, but it sure as hell isn't all his fault. The whole freaking board of directors wants replacing, for one. But just take a look at what's happened at Disneyland over the past few months under new management and you'll see how quickly a competent leader can turn things around.
I went to a presentation a month or so ago on how technology is used in not-America (it baffles the best of us!) and the speaker spent some time on a service in China where by one could subscribe to a serialized novella on the cell phone; I believe the installments were delivered during peak commute hours, and some huge percentage of the population of China signed up. Now, obviously, that's not as easy to do in English because we use letters, so we can't fit as much story on a tiny screen. I was wondering whether a development like this would come up so that we in the States, too, can get fictional content on our phones.
I suppose the answer is yes, then. Cool...I'd still rather read than watch a commercial-length piece of film on a teeny screen, though.
I think it's because there was a fad for awhile for directors of TV and movies to film in Canada, because it was cheaper, and for a little while a lot of places in Southern California were feeling it. But then prices started going up in the areas in Canada where filming was being done because there was awareness that there were lots of rich people there all of a sudden, and the locals acted accordingly. It'll balance itself out. At least, in my youthful optimism, I'm going to hope it will.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm no blogging cheerleader, but the patronizing tone he uses is bound to alienate a less enthusiastic booster of the blogosphere than I. He comes across as an arrogant prig who's using his (extremely limited) bully pulpit to bash those about whom he admittedly (and rather proudly) knows little. I have nothing but regard for the ALA and love my local libraries, but this mocking, snobbish attitude isn't going to win anyone over to his side.
What I got out of it is that the president of the ALA is afraid that his way of life and his preferred methods af acquiring information are becoming less relevant, and rather than changing the way he and his association do business, he figures he'll stand up and mock the people who are changing things in hope that others wil listen. Nice try, man.
My math professor answered his phone during lecture once. He talked for about a minute, exchanging pleasantries, etc, then hung up and said, "I get to go to the symphony tonight!" The class was in hysterics.
I know another professor who elaborately staged an event where he made it look as though he snatched a student's phone out of her purse and stomped on it. He heard rumors about himself at other colleges in the area within a few weeks. Apparently the act of violence made a big splash.
A friend of mine recently posted a long rant to a community we're both in about how he knows that someone out there that he doesn't know probably has a really embarrassing photograph of him making a fool of himself in a public place (you know, someone taking a picture of him with his mouth full inadvertently while actually shooting something else). He's worried about becoming famous because he thinks that this mysterious person will come out of the woodwork and sell the picture for millions. I pointed out that they probably already deleted the picture because that guy making the weird face in the background totally ruined it. Still, I see his point, in a way. It is sort of weird to think that every time you go outside and mind your own business, you're ripe to be documented by strangers with camera phones and the like.
It would've been a good idea to ask David Duchovny if he wanted to be in more than one episode of the last season, too, but it didn't stop 'em then.
Hey, that's not just in gaming...I tried to hit ctrl-F when I was looking for my keys the other day and then realized that I was looking at my bedroom, not a monitor. Siiiigh.
Seems like a large portion of people commenting so far have (fond?) memories of Tetris completely taking over. I haven't played Tetris in years and I can still conjure up games in my head.
I know also that I became really suspicious about social interactions while I was playing the Sims. I'd talk to people and know they were just doing it so their social meter would rise, and would leave feeling used and resentful. It was really terrible, because while it's generally not so hard to curb violent impulses, I started feeling like none of the people who talked to me throughout the course of the day actually had any regard for me and get really discontented.
Thanks for your kind advice...I haven't found spyware on my system since the first time I ran Adaware; however, I do have a few tracking cookies a month and I've recently changed my browser settings to attempt to combat that.
Listen, dumbass, while I may enjoy finding the occasional tracking cookie, the fact is that I use Mozilla and am in general pretty paranoid about what I'll let onto my computer, just like any other sane person (as opposed to my idiot boyfriend, who stubbornly uses IE despite all his friends' adminitions to do otherwise). I like finding spyware on my system because it means the software's working, and I'm sure many male hackers secretly enjoy the chase as much as I do, but it doesn't happen too often.
/. is annoying sometimes. But I guess I brought it on myself by revealing my own shameful femininity.
God,
I'd like to be the counterexample to your assertion; I ran the MS program and found nothing, then immediately afterward, I ran Adaware and Spybot, in that order, and found one file with Adaware and a whopping 19 with Spybot.
The thing that makes me sad is that I kind of like finding spyware on my system, just to make me feel like I'm a kind of savvy Internet user who does what she can to protect her computer, and the much-vaunted Microsoft adware utility didn't give me any satisfaction at all.
I'd like to share an amusing anecdote involving somebody I know and a cell phone. Last week she was waiting for a class to begin and she went up and looked in the window of the room. It was supposed to be a section with 20 people enrolled and there was one guy in there. Rather than go in and ask him what was going on, she took out her phone and pretended to be standing there talking to somebody, while actually just waiting to see if anyone else would go into the room. Talk about using the phone to avoid a social situation...
Eventually, she went in and it turned out that a few students had some to the consensus that the professor was at a conference. Took her ten minutes of standing outside the window "talking" to work up the nerve, though.
I ran the MS spyware program. It took half an hour and it didn't find shit. I decided to run AdAware and see how it measured up...it's been running for all of two minutes and it's found a new file.
LJ offers some pretty cool (to the type of person who enjoys LiveJournal-type activities) incentives for users who buy subscriptions. I've certainly put more cash money into LJ than I have into, say, /. for example.
As a LiveJournal user who's about to celebrate my journal's 3rd birthday, and who's young and female enough not to be embarrassed about it, I doubt most LJ users will know or care. It would be stupid to make more than minor changes to the interface, and if they do, I'm sure old interfaces will be selectable options (as is the case now). The fact is that the vast majority of LJ users came on when the site stopped requiring invite codes to join and feel very little connection with the LJ community as a whole--certainly, no obligation to become paid members just to support the site, or volunteer as coders, testers, or what not. I honestly don't think any of these people will notice anything beyond interface changes, except "Hey, my journal's loading faster than usual. Sweet!"
/. nerds wants to be associated with online diaries. Eeeeew.
I think it's telling that the blurbs about LJ don't mention that it's open source. Yeah, it's cool when it's an OS or a browser or a media format, but what movement of
I'll second the recommendation of Practical Electronics for Inventors. I got it at a summer program at MIT when I was in high school and we used almost exclusively that book and a single lecture to build motors from scratch.
Thank you. I just ran out of mod points, but I really appreciated this post, and I wanted to let you know. It drives me mad that there's always the /. cowboy mentality voice of "We don't need unions". We need worldwide fucking unions that take care of workers because companies never, ever will and individual workers are too afraid and too insignificant to do it all alone.
We're in a bad way as a society when workers cease to recognize the necessity of collective action.
I do. And I do it well, and I'm proud of it. Of course, I'm in the dying breed that considers the ability to write legibly by hand a part of fluency in one's language. Maybe I should just give in and go back to third grade where I belong.
I'd definitely be willing to get in on that project in some capacity and I'm sure there are other OSS types who would too. Even those of us who don't use Windows probably still have family or friends who do, and would like a one-stop spyware detector...I find that I'm installing a new damn spyware detection program on my sisters' computer every time I see them these days. It'd be great if we could have them all in one place.
I think a DVD set of Jennings' streak would be a great focal point for the occasional obsessive trivia gathering.
Wow, that would be a beautifully nerdy party. I can see myself settling down on a Friday night in front of a few episodes of Ken, too, just to unwind.
Sure, my SSN is constant, but my address has changed three times in the last year. I am absolutely positive this database will never stay updated if they choose to archive college students' addresses.
On the other hand, I think this database would be insanely easy to build; my university already has all this data and I'm sure most other institutions of higher learning do as well. Last year some of our school's security was compromised and there was a big to-do about how we all had to report the incident to all the major credit report companies because the people who did it hadaccess to all the tools they needed for identity theft.
Perhaps the Department of Education is planning to hijack the credit cards of irresponsible students who don't check the charges as carefully as they should, to pay for No Child Left Behind.
We actually had to take just such a test before we could get online at my school. It was ten questions on anti-virus, mail attachments, legality of downloading some materials (hey, they're an ISP, they're covering their own asses) and so forth.
I still knew a ton of people who got viruses and the like, though, and of course everyone pirated music. A lot of people know very well what they need to be doing and just don't actually do it.
Listen, we've done the best we can to get him out. Surely you recall the almost unprecedented vote of no confidence during last annual meeting? And the similarly unprecedented hubris he displayed when he decided that meant he could stay when a near-majority of shareholders wanted him out?
The thing is that while he's lost us a lot of money, Disney was in terrible straits before he came along and, like it or not, experienced an impressive renaissance in the late '80s to mid '90s. I may have faded now, and a lot of that's his fault, but give credit where credit is due.
I hate Michael Eisner as much as any Disney stockholder, but the name recognition Disney has in my generation is due mainly to masterpieces like Beauty and the Beast, the Lion King, and Aladdin--all of which were made under Eisner's watch. Don't oversimplify. It's partially his fault, but it sure as hell isn't all his fault. The whole freaking board of directors wants replacing, for one. But just take a look at what's happened at Disneyland over the past few months under new management and you'll see how quickly a competent leader can turn things around.
I went to a presentation a month or so ago on how technology is used in not-America (it baffles the best of us!) and the speaker spent some time on a service in China where by one could subscribe to a serialized novella on the cell phone; I believe the installments were delivered during peak commute hours, and some huge percentage of the population of China signed up. Now, obviously, that's not as easy to do in English because we use letters, so we can't fit as much story on a tiny screen. I was wondering whether a development like this would come up so that we in the States, too, can get fictional content on our phones.
I suppose the answer is yes, then. Cool...I'd still rather read than watch a commercial-length piece of film on a teeny screen, though.
They're Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnson, two old-school Disney animators (one of whome recently died).
I think it's because there was a fad for awhile for directors of TV and movies to film in Canada, because it was cheaper, and for a little while a lot of places in Southern California were feeling it. But then prices started going up in the areas in Canada where filming was being done because there was awareness that there were lots of rich people there all of a sudden, and the locals acted accordingly. It'll balance itself out. At least, in my youthful optimism, I'm going to hope it will.