I emigrated from the UK to Australia five years ago, because basically, as one tradesman-type person said to me very succinctly before I left: "Yeah, Don't blame yer mate, it's all fucked, innit?".
And it is. It's not just the government though - it's also overpopulation, and the fact the the average Brit is happy to work all hours for faceless corps who don't give a fuck about them, because they're all up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt (and are led to believe that owning ones own house is the be-all and end-all of existence, so it's all worth it really). Towns are unfriendly and jammed with cars - there are now so many cars you can't move for the fucking things, being used or just parked. Housing estates are horrible hideous anonymous places with bad architecture, built so shoddily and close together that everyone's at each others' throats about the noise and where everyone shuns their neighbours because there is just no fucking privacy anymore. Simple fact - 60 million people and counting simply do not FIT into the British Isles.
People pay insane prices for food and other basic needs, and put up with crap quality because they have gradually forgotten what good quality IS. Supermarkets have taken over every town and turned them all into identikit clones of each other - distinguishable only by the small differences in their dysfunctional traffic-saturated ring-road systems. And what are the supermarkets full of? Ready meals full of chemicals - for FUCKS sake Britain, cook your own food!
There's no pride in anything - ones work, ones environment, ones town, and nobody actually makes anything anymore - it's all "service industry" whatever the fuck that means, what 'industry'?
I don't believe in conspiracy theories generally, (after all, conspiracies require competence, and that's a precious commodity these days), but if some shady organisation had wanted to hatch a plot (in the 1960s, say) to turn Britain into a sleepwalking nation of compliant consumers that took any old shit thrown at them with a shrug, they could not have done better than what has actually taken place since then. Britain can be a beautiful place, and it has its good points, and good people, but as a nation it's lost its soul. Very sad. WAKEY WAKEY!!!
's not like the monkeys are going to suddenly figure out how to turn sticks and branches into a car and drive out of the forest and start wearing suits and ties and drinking $4 lattes at Starbucks.
I merely have to remove my foot from the accelerator so I don't convert my kinetic energy to heat
Though you will do anyway. Engine braking converts kinetic energy to heat as well - heat that exits via your exhaust pipe rather than radiated from your brake discs. Physics is a bitch, isn't it?
You would think the original programmer would have the wherewithal to market their own creation instead of leaving it for someone else
Why would you think that? People are usually good at some things, not at others. I think it's very likely that a person good at programming and software design wouldn't necessarily be good at (or even interested in) running a business, accounting, marketing, all the legal stuff, etc. It's also very hard to find people to come in with you who are, based only on your software/coding expertise. I speak from experience.
I keep seeing reports in newspapers and online suggesting the child porn is rife on the 'net and "is everywhere". The strange thing is that even though I'm probably a heavy net user, I have not once seen any child porn online. It just doesn't come up accidentally like some people seem to assume (and get worried about). I'm guessing it's there if you really are into it and know where to get it (and I further assume there's more to it than just doing a google search... yup, no child porn there AFAICS). So what's to be worried about? Those that use this material will find it one way or another, just as they have for decades. Those that are not, which is probably most, will never see it.
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient
electric winch and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as
much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical
People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west
wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of "defocused
temporal perception". In other words they have the capacity to see
dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on
the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it,
thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends
that people were previously forced to do whist waiting for elevators.
About this time someone rediscovered an old patent for an ancient device called a "staircase" that let people simply walk from one floor to another, thus dispensing with the whole tedious need for elevators at all...
Quick, someone patent the paper and pencil shopping list!
In other words, morals or the difference between right and wrong don't come into it. Stolen goods are a perfectly valid alternative "competition" to legitimately purchased goods, in your world view. And people wonder why the world seems to be going into a tailspin.
"It was about this time I was out with a girl I knew having a drink in a little bar in town. I was staring out the window and thinking about how I could make my own cabinet."
Yep, the guy is a true-blue, 100% signed up member of the geek community! Fair play.
Radio Shack used to employ salesmen who actually knew about electronics
I'm a Brit and my first encounter with Radio Shack was in Canada in 1976. It was an amazing shop for a budding nerd like me - loved it! We didn't have high-street shops like that in the UK back then (though I did discover some other gems not long after, such as the original Watford Electronics...). By the time Tandy (as R-S was branded in the UK) arrived in the 80s the rot had already set in, and sadly it's gone steadily downhill ever since.
Yeah, I see what you did there. You used the term "lossless" to mean "not making a loss" where in fact it could also be taken to mean "without lossy compression". Clever. Your intellect dazzles me.
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
What whole round number would that be then? Don't forget it's humans that choose the numbers - sometimes we choose certain numbers as the basis of systems (e.g. SI) to make them come out to whole numbers for many practical problems - this reduces errors when doing the arithmetic. But often other phenomena don't fit into a neat system of whole numbers and we are left with awkward constants. Nearly every real physical constant you care to name is not a round number, unless the "system" was designed around it. 1 second equals 1000 milliseconds, how weird is that!!!!
I can only speak for myself of course, but I give away lots of code. Copyright issues bore the pants off me, and take up way too much time I'd rather be coding. All I really want from anyone using my code is recognition for whatever work I did - as long as you say somewhere "so-and-so wrote this bit" then use it with my blessing. Obviously plenty of licenses cover this - BSD, etc. but sometimes even dealing with that can be annoying.
Essentially, while the law doesn't necessarily agree with me, I think that if you publish code (and putting it anywhere on the net is an act of publishing) then as far as I'm concerned it's fair game. Use it freely, just remember to attribute it. If you don't want your code used on that basis, don't publish it.
In any case the quote has always annoyed me... but not as much as the conservatives who quote it (with a "when you're older and wiser, you'll come around" attitude about them). As I'm getting older I'm paying more attention to politics and getting more involved, and probably even more liberal than I was at 18.
I've also taken it to mean that when you're 40, you have money and property you want to be greedy about and protect, and so don't care as much about the welfare of your fellow man. Likewise I'm better off than at 18, and it sure doesn't deter me from wanting to make the world better overall.
Amen! I was going to make pretty much the same point after reading the first post but you beat me to it. This quotation annoys the hell out of me too!
Course, that's not actually sufficient to power our civilization
Ha ha! Of course it is! Have you any idea just how much energy it takes to lift the entire oceans of the earth twice a day? That's just tidal. Solar incidence averages something like 200W per square metre for the entire planet - how much energy is that? The problem of course is harnessing it effectively but given the absolutely collosal amounts of energy involved we actually don't need to harness all that much of it. Mankind's needs are not as huge as you assume, and are in fact dwarfed by the amount of energy that arrives on the planet every single day. Nuclear is short-term and lazy application of our existing knowledge. If we apply ourselves these other forms of energy have far greater potential.
As for your other comments, I assume they are directed at someone else since I certainly didn't advocate anything of the sort.
We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem
So would solar + tidal + geothermal + wind. And those would have the added advantage of not leaving behind exceedingly toxic pollutants that will haunt us for ever (in practical terms).
..from the power-mad fools who have got control of it. You have spent your credit with the rest of the world. Even your friends have serious disquiet about what's going on (I speak as one of them). When that happens, surely it's time to take your collective heads out of your collective a(r)ses and fix it!
I completely agree with the sentiment you express in your post - servers in many cases should be a box you buy, switch on and it works. IT people are afraid of this possibility. However:
... truth be told, Apple demonstrates that IT doesn't have to be complicated and that, in particular, a server can be something that normal people can use...
While Xserves may be as close as you're going to get to this at the moment they are not quite as simple as the desktop version to set up. We bought an Xserve recently to serve a small business and it took about three weeks of scratching through the manuals and a lot of fiddling and experimentation to get it set up how we needed. That may have been complicated by the need to serve a lot of Windows computers but nevertheless it wasn't as easy as I was led to believe from the marketing and from a OS X server course run by Apple that I attended. That said the day-to-day admin, which is in fact a once-a-month sort of thing, is now very easy.
One thing still puzzles me however, and that is Apple's choice of form factor. For big-company server rooms, its 1U box probably makes sense - you can sneak one in somewhere wihout too much space needed. But for its real market, which is small businesses, the very long 1U case is stupid - you need to buy a huge rack cabinet to house it (900 or 1000mm deep) and then most of the space is then wasted. A 2U case with half the depth would find a home much more readily in a typical switchgear cabinet and that would make a lot more sense for small companies, that usually already have such a thing. In this regard, I'm afraid Apple have once again gone for impressive styling over practicality.
I've largely given up on Wikipedia as a contributor. Partly it's just a getting over it kind of thing, and on that I'm obviously not alone, judging from recently publicised stats. However, it's much more to do with the very demoralising feeling that having contributed much time and effort in drawing illustrations, taking photographs, writing articles and generally getting caught up in the original spirit of the project, I'm now frequently having my work deleted (particularly images, which in all cases are completely fine and freely given by me) by non-creative finger-wagging types who have taken over the whole thing and turned into a sort of "no ball games allowed" boot camp.
Fuck you, tossers - I'll save my creative time and effort for someone who can appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
I emigrated from the UK to Australia five years ago, because basically, as one tradesman-type person said to me very succinctly before I left: "Yeah, Don't blame yer mate, it's all fucked, innit?".
And it is. It's not just the government though - it's also overpopulation, and the fact the the average Brit is happy to work all hours for faceless corps who don't give a fuck about them, because they're all up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt (and are led to believe that owning ones own house is the be-all and end-all of existence, so it's all worth it really). Towns are unfriendly and jammed with cars - there are now so many cars you can't move for the fucking things, being used or just parked. Housing estates are horrible hideous anonymous places with bad architecture, built so shoddily and close together that everyone's at each others' throats about the noise and where everyone shuns their neighbours because there is just no fucking privacy anymore. Simple fact - 60 million people and counting simply do not FIT into the British Isles.
People pay insane prices for food and other basic needs, and put up with crap quality because they have gradually forgotten what good quality IS. Supermarkets have taken over every town and turned them all into identikit clones of each other - distinguishable only by the small differences in their dysfunctional traffic-saturated ring-road systems. And what are the supermarkets full of? Ready meals full of chemicals - for FUCKS sake Britain, cook your own food!
There's no pride in anything - ones work, ones environment, ones town, and nobody actually makes anything anymore - it's all "service industry" whatever the fuck that means, what 'industry'?
I don't believe in conspiracy theories generally, (after all, conspiracies require competence, and that's a precious commodity these days), but if some shady organisation had wanted to hatch a plot (in the 1960s, say) to turn Britain into a sleepwalking nation of compliant consumers that took any old shit thrown at them with a shrug, they could not have done better than what has actually taken place since then. Britain can be a beautiful place, and it has its good points, and good people, but as a nation it's lost its soul. Very sad. WAKEY WAKEY!!!
's not like the monkeys are going to suddenly figure out how to turn sticks and branches into a car and drive out of the forest and start wearing suits and ties and drinking $4 lattes at Starbucks.
Ah, you say that, but they did, didn't they?
The sad thing is I woke up lying in my own bed
Phew! Bed. I thought you were going to say something else...
I merely have to remove my foot from the accelerator so I don't convert my kinetic energy to heat
Though you will do anyway. Engine braking converts kinetic energy to heat as well - heat that exits via your exhaust pipe rather than radiated from your brake discs. Physics is a bitch, isn't it?
You would think the original programmer would have the wherewithal to market their own creation instead of leaving it for someone else
Why would you think that? People are usually good at some things, not at others. I think it's very likely that a person good at programming and software design wouldn't necessarily be good at (or even interested in) running a business, accounting, marketing, all the legal stuff, etc. It's also very hard to find people to come in with you who are, based only on your software/coding expertise. I speak from experience.
I keep seeing reports in newspapers and online suggesting the child porn is rife on the 'net and "is everywhere". The strange thing is that even though I'm probably a heavy net user, I have not once seen any child porn online. It just doesn't come up accidentally like some people seem to assume (and get worried about). I'm guessing it's there if you really are into it and know where to get it (and I further assume there's more to it than just doing a google search... yup, no child porn there AFAICS). So what's to be worried about? Those that use this material will find it one way or another, just as they have for decades. Those that are not, which is probably most, will never see it.
You just gave me a new sig :)
Sorry, I just could not resist
Never mind, try harder next time, OK?
400mhz on the low end, 200mhz on the high end
Those millihertz really add up too!
Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and "maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital.
This is because they operate on the curious principle of "defocused temporal perception". In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing, and making friends that people were previously forced to do whist waiting for elevators.
About this time someone rediscovered an old patent for an ancient device called a "staircase" that let people simply walk from one floor to another, thus dispensing with the whole tedious need for elevators at all...
Quick, someone patent the paper and pencil shopping list!
I'm getting bored of reading about the EU's investigations into Microsoft
To paraphrase Burke: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to get bored of [sic] attempts to stop it.
I would bet money that WMP doesn't [work with Macs].
You lose: Windows media components for Mac
In fact the very definiton of an oxymoron:
Barry Manilow - "The Greatest Songs of the Seventies"
Absolutely.
In other words, morals or the difference between right and wrong don't come into it. Stolen goods are a perfectly valid alternative "competition" to legitimately purchased goods, in your world view. And people wonder why the world seems to be going into a tailspin.
From the article about building the TARDIS:
"It was about this time I was out with a girl I knew having a drink in a little bar in town. I was staring out the window and thinking about how I could make my own cabinet."
Yep, the guy is a true-blue, 100% signed up member of the geek community! Fair play.
Radio Shack used to employ salesmen who actually knew about electronics
I'm a Brit and my first encounter with Radio Shack was in Canada in 1976. It was an amazing shop for a budding nerd like me - loved it! We didn't have high-street shops like that in the UK back then (though I did discover some other gems not long after, such as the original Watford Electronics...). By the time Tandy (as R-S was branded in the UK) arrived in the 80s the rot had already set in, and sadly it's gone steadily downhill ever since.
Yeah, I see what you did there. You used the term "lossless" to mean "not making a loss" where in fact it could also be taken to mean "without lossy compression". Clever. Your intellect dazzles me.
Why would the universe choose a round whole number for its law of gravity? That's just way too weird.
What whole round number would that be then? Don't forget it's humans that choose the numbers - sometimes we choose certain numbers as the basis of systems (e.g. SI) to make them come out to whole numbers for many practical problems - this reduces errors when doing the arithmetic. But often other phenomena don't fit into a neat system of whole numbers and we are left with awkward constants. Nearly every real physical constant you care to name is not a round number, unless the "system" was designed around it. 1 second equals 1000 milliseconds, how weird is that!!!!
I can only speak for myself of course, but I give away lots of code. Copyright issues bore the pants off me, and take up way too much time I'd rather be coding. All I really want from anyone using my code is recognition for whatever work I did - as long as you say somewhere "so-and-so wrote this bit" then use it with my blessing. Obviously plenty of licenses cover this - BSD, etc. but sometimes even dealing with that can be annoying.
Essentially, while the law doesn't necessarily agree with me, I think that if you publish code (and putting it anywhere on the net is an act of publishing) then as far as I'm concerned it's fair game. Use it freely, just remember to attribute it. If you don't want your code used on that basis, don't publish it.
In any case the quote has always annoyed me... but not as much as the conservatives who quote it (with a "when you're older and wiser, you'll come around" attitude about them). As I'm getting older I'm paying more attention to politics and getting more involved, and probably even more liberal than I was at 18.
I've also taken it to mean that when you're 40, you have money and property you want to be greedy about and protect, and so don't care as much about the welfare of your fellow man. Likewise I'm better off than at 18, and it sure doesn't deter me from wanting to make the world better overall.
Amen! I was going to make pretty much the same point after reading the first post but you beat me to it. This quotation annoys the hell out of me too!
Course, that's not actually sufficient to power our civilization
Ha ha! Of course it is! Have you any idea just how much energy it takes to lift the entire oceans of the earth twice a day? That's just tidal. Solar incidence averages something like 200W per square metre for the entire planet - how much energy is that? The problem of course is harnessing it effectively but given the absolutely collosal amounts of energy involved we actually don't need to harness all that much of it. Mankind's needs are not as huge as you assume, and are in fact dwarfed by the amount of energy that arrives on the planet every single day. Nuclear is short-term and lazy application of our existing knowledge. If we apply ourselves these other forms of energy have far greater potential.
As for your other comments, I assume they are directed at someone else since I certainly didn't advocate anything of the sort.
We KNOW that converting to nuclear energy would largely solve the global warming problem
So would solar + tidal + geothermal + wind. And those would have the added advantage of not leaving behind exceedingly toxic pollutants that will haunt us for ever (in practical terms).
..from the power-mad fools who have got control of it. You have spent your credit with the rest of the world. Even your friends have serious disquiet about what's going on (I speak as one of them). When that happens, surely it's time to take your collective heads out of your collective a(r)ses and fix it!
I completely agree with the sentiment you express in your post - servers in many cases should be a box you buy, switch on and it works. IT people are afraid of this possibility. However:
... truth be told, Apple demonstrates that IT doesn't have to be complicated and that, in particular, a server can be something that normal people can use...
While Xserves may be as close as you're going to get to this at the moment they are not quite as simple as the desktop version to set up. We bought an Xserve recently to serve a small business and it took about three weeks of scratching through the manuals and a lot of fiddling and experimentation to get it set up how we needed. That may have been complicated by the need to serve a lot of Windows computers but nevertheless it wasn't as easy as I was led to believe from the marketing and from a OS X server course run by Apple that I attended. That said the day-to-day admin, which is in fact a once-a-month sort of thing, is now very easy.
One thing still puzzles me however, and that is Apple's choice of form factor. For big-company server rooms, its 1U box probably makes sense - you can sneak one in somewhere wihout too much space needed. But for its real market, which is small businesses, the very long 1U case is stupid - you need to buy a huge rack cabinet to house it (900 or 1000mm deep) and then most of the space is then wasted. A 2U case with half the depth would find a home much more readily in a typical switchgear cabinet and that would make a lot more sense for small companies, that usually already have such a thing. In this regard, I'm afraid Apple have once again gone for impressive styling over practicality.
I've largely given up on Wikipedia as a contributor. Partly it's just a getting over it kind of thing, and on that I'm obviously not alone, judging from recently publicised stats. However, it's much more to do with the very demoralising feeling that having contributed much time and effort in drawing illustrations, taking photographs, writing articles and generally getting caught up in the original spirit of the project, I'm now frequently having my work deleted (particularly images, which in all cases are completely fine and freely given by me) by non-creative finger-wagging types who have taken over the whole thing and turned into a sort of "no ball games allowed" boot camp.
Fuck you, tossers - I'll save my creative time and effort for someone who can appreciate it.