I know someone who had a G3 iBook -- couldn't browse worth a damn, which she blamed on my IDSN (she couldn't spell ISDN) rather than accepting my explanation about her old software.
I've tangled with a couple of Linux flavors over the years, and the above sort of stuff is why I've eschewed it -- not a fanboy (or however the kids spell it this week), but I enjoy OSX because it's still a *ix that lets me do shell stuff, but which (also unlike Solaris as a *desktop*) just works. It just works. I don't have enough time these days to do half the stuff I *want* to do, and I sure don't want to dick with my desktop environment endlessly. Sure, hardware choices are limited, but my time is more limited, and more valuable.
Indeed. I keep wanting to jump on Sun's CMT bandwagon, but the boxes just don't fit a single application that my group manages. The high entry-level price doesn't help (the t1000 is completely useless and doesn't count). What concerns me more than the future of SPARC is the future of Sun's x86 boxes. They're built well, remotely manageable, easy to work on, talk to a serial console right out of the box (unlike the HP I'm currently evaluating), and run Solaris 10 without dicking with drivers.
As far as I can tell Peter Gabriel can walk just fine but I've seen a commercial video of him riding one back and forth on stage. Sure, he's been lame in a musical sense since he left Genesis, but not in a locomotion sense.
Pollan at times appears to be "getting it", eg. cattle not being designed to eat corn. He then makes a 180 and rationalizes his penis-driven mistaking of animals for food with isolated crypto-sustainable / local special cases. You quote him above talking about Western diseases, yet in the latter part of TOD he dives right back into just that diet. Having a pig killed right in front of you doesn't make it any healthier to eat, or any more sustainable on a global -- not boutique -- scale.
Of the ~1000 CD's I have, probably fewer than 20 were bought full-price retail from storefronts. Their selection and markup has always, by and large, sucked.
Twenty years ago I was buying from Noteworthy's extensive mail-order catalog regularly. No driving, no mazes, no monsters, no rummaging, no towing, no clerks. In fact the only place I've ever seen where prices weren't marked was Bill's (of "Bill's, Bill's, Bill's Bill's Bill's, eighty-one-eighteen Spring Val-ley" fame) and while asses were involved, let's leave a discussion of the proprietor for another thread.
Since then we've had CDNOW, half.com, Amazon, etc. Can't wait for a few days for a CD to arrive? Two choices:
1) Grow up and/or 2) Amazon Prime
Amazon stuff for me often arrives the day after ordering. Once it arrived *the same day*.
I looked at leeched music once back in the Napster days. Saw lots of truncated, incomplete files. I also looked once at modern P2P sharing. Lots of badly-ripped albums with corrupt tags, missing tracks, etc. If I want a CD, I can generally buy it legit on half.com for a fraction of the new price, then rip it myself, get CDDB/Gracenote/whatever tags, correct them readily, and still have a physical digital copy to fall back on, with liner notes etc.
Some time ago I interviewed with a certain Wall Street company (you've heard of them in the last year for sure). They damned well didn't act as though there were a huge demand:
o All suit, including tie, all the time. For a sysadmin. You can't even use the customer-contact excuse here, and this is a concrete canyon that roasts in the summer.
o I would have had a cubicle literally around 6 ft^2 in size, barely big enough to squeeze into. Yeah I know space is expensive in NYC, but sheesh. I would have had a 16" monochrome thin client sort of desktop.
o They had half a floor of the building (AMEX tower IIRC) devoted to a medical lab. Turned out that this was for on-site piss testing. They hadn't mentioned anything about that, and demanded that I give them a sample before the interview could proceed
o My air travel was booked in someone else's name. When pressed they handwaved about some accounting requirement, but I was later told by my (tech) contact there that this was so that they could keep the FF miles.
o I lived in Texas at the time. They were too cheap to put me up overnight, so I had to get up at 3am to get into the interview suit, get to the airport, and fly across the country (and return the same day). They FedEx'd me a "voucher" for a car to shuttle me from the airport and the phone numbers of two companies to call once I hit LaGuardia. When I landed and somehow managed to get the screwy payphones to let me make the calls, neither company admitted to knowing anything about these vouchers, but I did get one to send a car. The driver was stereotypical -- marginal English skills and apparently from a country where Americans are hated. He claimed to not know where the AMEX tower -- OR EVEN WALL STREET --- was, but somehow got me there.
o The receptionist-gatekeeper at the front desk (repurposed from a courtroom, I suspect) had never heard of my contact and had to call around for 20 minutes to find someone who had.
o At one point I was shown a small room with a table and chair, and a crushed brown paper bag. I was told that such was my lunch -- impressive! At no point did they ask me about dietary needs or preferences, or even let me into said room, so they had me go the whole day without food or even water.
o They weren't willing to pay any more than I was making in TX, despite the massively higher cost of living and lack of decent housing.
o The classic, though, was when I was told that my socks were to light, and that I'd have to get darker-colored ones. Oh, and of course there was a hairstyle code.
So, given my experiences, I find it hard to believe that techies are in demand.
>Concerts, comedy clubs, bars, etc., wear them out. They still do these things >but only once in a while. They just don't have the will do do them on a regular basis.
More to the point, being alone in such a setting is no more productive than being alone at home. They really aren't conducive to meeting people.
>Whether on the internet, in the "real world" or wherever, human nature is always > drawn to physical attraction first, and personality compatibility second.
Agreed - men and women are no different in this respect, and many summarily judge based on a profile picture.
>Average people chase after hot people for a while, and then eventually settle for other average people.
This is the approaching-middle-age phenomenon I've written about. When I found myself single, I noticed a distinct difference between the criteria of 37-year-olds and 43-year-olds.
>Some of us just have to accept the fact that we don't measure up, that the only >mates we could have are ones that will not make us happy, and that we will be alone all our lives
I felt that way for a *lot* of years, up to my first marriage -- it's part of why I was foolish enough to get trapped in it, then she encouraged the idea that nobody else would ever want me, which enabled her to keep feeding off me, Wraith-style. A certain non-prospect (but definitely "hot") female friend helped me see that both 1) it wasn't true and 2) it was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was kinda surprised too. Women love jerks. One who once was a fair-weather friend told me that I was too nice and that I'd need to work on that to get dates.
I progressively came to the realization that lots of women, at least those in the class of singles in their mid-late 30's, don't want a guy who's like them. As I switched my profiles from trying to come off as an evolved, sensitive, gentleman to one with more intrepid/bold/brash notes, the response/interest rate rose significantly. I'm not making a blanket claim here, but how many times have you seen an attractive woman/girl dressed nicely in the company of some knuckle-dragging guy who couldn't be bothered to even tuck in his dirty t-shirt or put on real shoes instead of grungy flip-flops?
I tried the specialist (veg) sites first, both free and minimal-charge. A substantial part of what I wrote above reflects my experiences there. Many inactive profiles. High rate of failure to spend a few seconds on even a courtesy reply. Two who blocked me from any future communication without a word. Another (who I encounter IRL periodically and know to still be single) told me explicitly that I wasn't attractive enough to talk to. Others went incommunicado mid-conversation after expressing initial interest. One turned out to be MPD and a swinger after a few dates.
As for going out and doing stuff to meet people: that might work in some regions, but much has been written about the local social "freeze" -- people tend to be extremely guarded here, to the point of not even talking to their neighbors. I tried this a bunch, though. Bars? No thanks. Not interested in habitual drinkers and smokers, in a setting with bad music so loud as to render talking impossible.
Things that multiple women (mostly not prospects) told me at the time:
o) They summarily ignored any guy who wrote more than a few lines. What he had to say was mostly irrelevant, and ability to respond to what they'd written in their profiles in a thoughtful manner was a sign of being a wuss. o) They almost never initiated contact. They wanted an agressive guy to "pursue" them o) They were mostly "window shopping"
It was informative to see one who wouldn't even talk to me socially go all gushy and sparkly when an unemployed, sloppily dressed guy she'd not met before walked up. Said guy is 6'5". They had a couple dates, then he dumped her for a "hotter" woman at a party.
There are some more clueful women out there, but the haystack is daunting. Maybe the situation is different for 20-somethings, but I doubt it.
Match.com was caught a few years ago scamming [paying] members: just as one's membership was about to expire, if it wasn't renewed or set to auto-renew, an employee would contact you and pretend to be interested until you paid again.
Sure, the companies to varying extent are exploiting the lonely. For all their faults (like continually matching me with necrophages) they seemed to put a lot of effort into encouraging people to avoid delusion and to consider criteria that make for lasting relationships. The places like Great Expectations, though, are predators for sure. They tried to convince me that I'd signed up with them online (I'd never even been to their site), wanted me to pay to tape a video profile, etc.
As for inactivity -- there was a lot of that out there, correlating to how inexpensive a site was. Lots of people on both sides of the chromosomal fence simply ignore the site when they're talking to / dating someone and lack the courtesy to suspend matches.
Others can be seen to log in, change their profiles, etc., but lack the courtesy to respond at all -- most likely because the other person's photo didn't resemble a romance novel or one of the criteria was a non-starter (notice how height is always right at the top with age?).
>There are plenty of places dedicated to single people anywhere in Europe or in the USA
Indeed, but "single people" >> "people looking for an LTR". After I ditched my abusive, BPD ex-wife, I tried some singles events. At some, the median age was at least mine+20. At the rest, the population consisted largely of men trying to get laid, and women looking for men who'd look good in a snapshot with them.
Someone above mentioned looking for a dating site with the lowest riffraff factor -- indeed it varies considerably, and there's a strong inverse correlation between riffraff and cost. Yahoo personals was free, so there were lots of window-shoppers, and a fair number of, well, let's call them "pros". Match.com charged a bit, so it was a bit better. eHarmony cost a bunch, and had an exhaustive (well, exhausting, at least, as it lacked the ability to specify non-starters other than smokin) entrance survey -- both of which served to *drastically* weed out those who weren't serious about a relationship.
I went into the process at 38 thinking that I'd find women who, like me, were exiting a mistake relationship with an abusive/drunk/etc. partner, and who had a better set of lasting-relationship criteria this time around. I saw a bit of that, but to a surprising extent I found two clusters:
1) Shopping for exactly the sort of dork they broke up with, somehow expecting a different outcome this time 2) Those who in their mid-late 30's had never had a long term relationship (and may never) because instead of considering a guy who they could have that with (be it me or anyone) they were holding out for Superman.
Another recurring theme was hair - lots of women said they wanted a guy with a full head of hair, but temporized when presented with one. In the end, the single most important criterion I saw was height. A majority of women required a guy to be at least 5'10", and very few would even talk to one under 5'8". I once overheard a lunchtime first-coffee-date downtown -- the woman was telling the guy about some previous guy who expressed interest, laughing at how foolish he was because he was, and I quote, "tiny, like 5'7" ". This sort of thinking concentrates interest on a limited set of the single population, with the result that yes there indeed "must" be a girl feeling lonely just like you, but there's a good chance that she's holding out / competing for the same subset of guys as a much larger subset of women. Many veg*n women, for would rather have a 6'4" blood-guzzling hunter than a 5'6" veg*n guy.
After, say, 42 or so, this seemed to fade a bit, once they start seriously being afraid of middle age alone.
In the end I found someone on eHarmony, got married again, and have arguably the most adorable baby son on the planet. It took a *lot* of searching and lots of wasted time/energy to find that.
My first thought was "Why is this kid going to a *community college*"? Whether one considers the 2 year degree a big deal for an adult, for an 11 year old it certainly is. I would think that UC Irvine or any of the other universities in that region would have offered the kid a scholarship. Maybe the 2-year CC degree was planned to get their attention for that purpose?
Re:The importance of Open Systems.
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
I remember a quote attributed to Gates in the MSWNT 3.51-4.0 days something like "NT is just another UNIX".
What really gets me is when the Linux-du-jour kids go out of their way to distance themselves from the distasteful word "UNIX", as if the two are unrelated.
I installed OSS on an AXi some years ago. It wedged the box, and after I reset, sound never worked again, despite removing OSS and running an OS upgrade. I can't imagine this ALSA is any worse.
Slashdot Mirror
I know someone who had a G3 iBook -- couldn't browse worth a damn, which she blamed on my IDSN (she couldn't spell ISDN) rather than accepting my explanation about her old software.
I've tangled with a couple of Linux flavors over the years, and the above sort of stuff is why I've eschewed it -- not a fanboy (or however the kids spell it this week), but I enjoy OSX because it's still a *ix that lets me do shell stuff, but which (also unlike Solaris as a *desktop*) just works. It just works. I don't have enough time these days to do half the stuff I *want* to do, and I sure don't want to dick with my desktop environment endlessly. Sure, hardware choices are limited, but my time is more limited, and more valuable.
Indeed. I keep wanting to jump on Sun's CMT bandwagon, but the boxes just don't fit a single application that my group manages. The high entry-level price doesn't help (the t1000 is completely useless and doesn't count). What concerns me more than the future of SPARC is the future of Sun's x86 boxes. They're built well, remotely manageable, easy to work on, talk to a serial console right out of the box (unlike the HP I'm currently evaluating), and run Solaris 10 without dicking with drivers.
I'd rather use Kibo.
CMU Tutor was doing this sort of thing 20+ years ago.
As far as I can tell Peter Gabriel can walk just fine but I've seen a commercial video of him riding one back and forth on stage. Sure, he's been lame in a musical sense since he left Genesis, but not in a locomotion sense.
... not to mention the childish misuse of "fail" as a noun.
Pollan at times appears to be "getting it", eg. cattle not being designed to eat corn. He then makes a 180 and rationalizes his penis-driven mistaking of animals for food with isolated crypto-sustainable / local special cases. You quote him above talking about Western diseases, yet in the latter part of TOD he dives right back into just that diet. Having a pig killed right in front of you doesn't make it any healthier to eat, or any more sustainable on a global -- not boutique -- scale.
It's the American Way!
Huh?
Of the ~1000 CD's I have, probably fewer than 20 were bought full-price retail from storefronts. Their selection and markup has always, by and large, sucked.
Twenty years ago I was buying from Noteworthy's extensive mail-order catalog regularly. No driving, no mazes, no monsters, no rummaging, no towing, no clerks. In fact the only place I've ever seen where prices weren't marked was Bill's (of "Bill's, Bill's, Bill's Bill's Bill's, eighty-one-eighteen Spring Val-ley" fame) and while asses were involved, let's leave a discussion of the proprietor for another thread.
Since then we've had CDNOW, half.com, Amazon, etc. Can't wait for a few days for a CD to arrive? Two choices:
1) Grow up
and/or
2) Amazon Prime
Amazon stuff for me often arrives the day after ordering. Once it arrived *the same day*.
I looked at leeched music once back in the Napster days. Saw lots of truncated, incomplete files. I also looked once at modern P2P sharing. Lots of badly-ripped albums with corrupt tags, missing tracks, etc. If I want a CD, I can generally buy it legit on half.com for a fraction of the new price, then rip it myself, get CDDB/Gracenote/whatever tags, correct them readily, and still have a physical digital copy to fall back on, with liner notes etc.
Some time ago I interviewed with a certain Wall Street company (you've heard of them in the last year for sure). They damned well didn't act as though there were a huge demand:
o All suit, including tie, all the time. For a sysadmin. You can't even use the customer-contact excuse here, and this is a concrete canyon that roasts in the summer.
o I would have had a cubicle literally around 6 ft^2 in size, barely big enough to squeeze into. Yeah I know space is expensive in NYC, but sheesh. I would have had a 16" monochrome thin client sort of desktop.
o They had half a floor of the building (AMEX tower IIRC) devoted to a medical lab. Turned out that this was for on-site piss testing. They hadn't mentioned anything about that, and demanded that I give them a sample before the interview could proceed
o My air travel was booked in someone else's name. When pressed they handwaved about some accounting requirement, but I was later told by my (tech) contact there that this was so that they could keep the FF miles.
o I lived in Texas at the time. They were too cheap to put me up overnight, so I had to get up at 3am to get into the interview suit, get to the airport, and fly across the country (and return the same day). They FedEx'd me a "voucher" for a car to shuttle me from the airport and the phone numbers of two companies to call once I hit LaGuardia. When I landed and somehow managed to get the screwy payphones to let me make the calls, neither company admitted to knowing anything about these vouchers, but I did get one to send a car. The driver was stereotypical -- marginal English skills and apparently from a country where Americans are hated. He claimed to not know where the AMEX tower -- OR EVEN WALL STREET --- was, but somehow got me there.
o The receptionist-gatekeeper at the front desk (repurposed from a courtroom, I suspect) had never heard of my contact and had to call around for 20 minutes to find someone who had.
o At one point I was shown a small room with a table and chair, and a crushed brown paper bag. I was told that such was my lunch -- impressive! At no point did they ask me about dietary needs or preferences, or even let me into said room, so they had me go the whole day without food or even water.
o They weren't willing to pay any more than I was making in TX, despite the massively higher cost of living and lack of decent housing.
o The classic, though, was when I was told that my socks were to light, and that I'd have to get darker-colored ones. Oh, and of course there was a hairstyle code.
So, given my experiences, I find it hard to believe that techies are in demand.
If one wants to see Metallica, it's already too late.
Metallica early 80's: "Death to false metal! Metal up the ass!"
Metallica 90's: "We're not a metal band"
>Concerts, comedy clubs, bars, etc., wear them out. They still do these things
>but only once in a while. They just don't have the will do do them on a regular basis.
More to the point, being alone in such a setting is no more productive than being alone at home. They really aren't conducive to meeting people.
>Whether on the internet, in the "real world" or wherever, human nature is always
> drawn to physical attraction first, and personality compatibility second.
Agreed - men and women are no different in this respect, and many summarily judge based on a profile picture.
>Average people chase after hot people for a while, and then eventually settle for other average people.
This is the approaching-middle-age phenomenon I've written about. When I found myself single, I noticed a distinct difference between the criteria of 37-year-olds and 43-year-olds.
>Some of us just have to accept the fact that we don't measure up, that the only
>mates we could have are ones that will not make us happy, and that we will be alone all our lives
I felt that way for a *lot* of years, up to my first marriage -- it's part of why I was foolish enough to get trapped in it, then she encouraged the idea that nobody else would ever want me, which enabled her to keep feeding off me, Wraith-style. A certain non-prospect (but definitely "hot") female friend helped me see that both 1) it wasn't true and 2) it was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I was kinda surprised too. Women love jerks. One who once was a fair-weather friend told me that I was too nice and that I'd need to work on that to get dates.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/04/wolcott200804 is long-winded but has some notable views.
I progressively came to the realization that lots of women, at least those in the class of singles in their mid-late 30's, don't want a guy who's like them. As I switched my profiles from trying to come off as an evolved, sensitive, gentleman to one with more intrepid/bold/brash notes, the response/interest rate rose significantly. I'm not making a blanket claim here, but how many times have you seen an attractive woman/girl dressed nicely in the company of some knuckle-dragging guy who couldn't be bothered to even tuck in his dirty t-shirt or put on real shoes instead of grungy flip-flops?
I tried the specialist (veg) sites first, both free and minimal-charge. A substantial part of what I wrote above reflects my experiences there. Many inactive profiles. High rate of failure to spend a few seconds on even a courtesy reply. Two who blocked me from any future communication without a word. Another (who I encounter IRL periodically and know to still be single) told me explicitly that I wasn't attractive enough to talk to. Others went incommunicado mid-conversation after expressing initial interest. One turned out to be MPD and a swinger after a few dates.
As for going out and doing stuff to meet people: that might work in some regions, but much has been written about the local social "freeze" -- people tend to be extremely guarded here, to the point of not even talking to their neighbors. I tried this a bunch, though. Bars? No thanks. Not interested in habitual drinkers and smokers, in a setting with bad music so loud as to render talking impossible.
Things that multiple women (mostly not prospects) told me at the time:
o) They summarily ignored any guy who wrote more than a few lines. What he had to say was mostly irrelevant, and ability to respond to what they'd written in their profiles in a thoughtful manner was a sign of being a wuss.
o) They almost never initiated contact. They wanted an agressive guy to "pursue" them
o) They were mostly "window shopping"
It was informative to see one who wouldn't even talk to me socially go all gushy and sparkly when an unemployed, sloppily dressed guy she'd not met before walked up. Said guy is 6'5". They had a couple dates, then he dumped her for a "hotter" woman at a party.
There are some more clueful women out there, but the haystack is daunting. Maybe the situation is different for 20-somethings, but I doubt it.
Match.com was caught a few years ago scamming [paying] members: just as one's membership was about to expire, if it wasn't renewed or set to auto-renew, an employee would contact you and pretend to be interested until you paid again.
Sure, the companies to varying extent are exploiting the lonely. For all their faults (like continually matching me with necrophages) they seemed to put a lot of effort into encouraging people to avoid delusion and to consider criteria that make for lasting relationships. The places like Great Expectations, though, are predators for sure. They tried to convince me that I'd signed up with them online (I'd never even been to their site), wanted me to pay to tape a video profile, etc.
As for inactivity -- there was a lot of that out there, correlating to how inexpensive a site was. Lots of people on both sides of the chromosomal fence simply ignore the site when they're talking to / dating someone and lack the courtesy to suspend matches.
Others can be seen to log in, change their profiles, etc., but lack the courtesy to respond at all -- most likely because the other person's photo didn't resemble a romance novel or one of the criteria was a non-starter (notice how height is always right at the top with age?).
>There are plenty of places dedicated to single people anywhere in Europe or in the USA
Indeed, but "single people" >> "people looking for an LTR". After I ditched my abusive, BPD ex-wife, I tried some singles events. At some, the median age was at least mine+20. At the rest, the population consisted largely of men trying to get laid, and women looking for men who'd look good in a snapshot with them.
Someone above mentioned looking for a dating site with the lowest riffraff factor -- indeed it varies considerably, and there's a strong inverse correlation between riffraff and cost. Yahoo personals was free, so there were lots of window-shoppers, and a fair number of, well, let's call them "pros". Match.com charged a bit, so it was a bit better. eHarmony cost a bunch, and had an exhaustive (well, exhausting, at least, as it lacked the ability to specify non-starters other than smokin) entrance survey -- both of which served to *drastically* weed out those who weren't serious about a relationship.
I went into the process at 38 thinking that I'd find women who, like me, were exiting a mistake relationship with an abusive/drunk/etc. partner, and who had a better set of lasting-relationship criteria this time around. I saw a bit of that, but to a surprising extent I found two clusters:
1) Shopping for exactly the sort of dork they broke up with, somehow expecting a different outcome this time
2) Those who in their mid-late 30's had never had a long term relationship (and may never) because instead of considering a guy who they could have that with (be it me or anyone) they were holding out for Superman.
Another recurring theme was hair - lots of women said they wanted a guy with a full head of hair, but temporized when presented with one. In the end, the single most important criterion I saw was height. A majority of women required a guy to be at least 5'10", and very few would even talk to one under 5'8". I once overheard a lunchtime first-coffee-date downtown -- the woman was telling the guy about some previous guy who expressed interest, laughing at how foolish he was because he was, and I quote, "tiny, like 5'7" ". This sort of thinking concentrates interest on a limited set of the single population, with the result that yes there indeed "must" be a girl feeling lonely just like you, but there's a good chance that she's holding out / competing for the same subset of guys as a much larger subset of women. Many veg*n women, for would rather have a 6'4" blood-guzzling hunter than a 5'6" veg*n guy.
After, say, 42 or so, this seemed to fade a bit, once they start seriously being afraid of middle age alone.
In the end I found someone on eHarmony, got married again, and have arguably the most adorable baby son on the planet. It took a *lot* of searching and lots of wasted time/energy to find that.
There's a certain irony to a post that deems another post "stupid" yet misuses the word "reiterate".
How would you compare it to the Westin office building, which has redundant power risers, etc.?
My first thought was "Why is this kid going to a *community college*"? Whether one considers the 2 year degree a big deal for an adult, for an 11 year old it certainly is. I would think that UC Irvine or any of the other universities in that region would have offered the kid a scholarship. Maybe the 2-year CC degree was planned to get their attention for that purpose?
I remember a quote attributed to Gates in the MSWNT 3.51-4.0 days something like "NT is just another UNIX".
What really gets me is when the Linux-du-jour kids go out of their way to distance themselves from the distasteful word "UNIX", as if the two are unrelated.
I installed OSS on an AXi some years ago. It wedged the box, and after I reset, sound never worked again, despite removing OSS and running an OS upgrade. I can't imagine this ALSA is any worse.
Gallileo.
Having suffered through Lost in Translation, I can't imagine that Garfield was worse.
Your assertion is that television isn't communication?