I still have my original copy of "The Whole Internet"!
Ed Krol, 1992, cover art of a Socrates-type character examining a globe using a compass. Yeah, I still have mine, too, although the material on archie and gopher didn't age too well. Some things are just too beloved to toss. Like "Sed and Awk".
why not just let the media companies bid directly with parents on ourkids.ebay.com and let parents sell their kids' attention spans in five minute increments to the highest bidding media and product firms?
Gee, like they needed that helpful suggestion? No, I got one worse than that: Mandatory implants at birth that spew nonstop advertizing into your brain your whole life. You'll get paid to stay awake longer so you can listen to more.
who use Photoshop to earn more than the $500 it cost them.
$500 ?!? No wonder we have so much bile spewed about Gimp vs Photoshop. Hey, tell me, how does spending $500 on a tool put you ahead profit-wise, as opposed to obtaining a free tool that you can improve yourself legally?
Maybe somebody upstairs realized that a. it was a stupid idea to begin with, and b. wasn't working anyway.
I'm sorry, that's completely impossible. Humans are incapable of abandoning a practice based on those grounds, based on my observation of the entire political/economical system. What had to have happened was, their astrology guide told them it was a bad day to do business, so they shut down.
When the San Andreas Fault failed to fulfill the hope of all coastal Californians that everything East of it would collapse into the Atlantic ocean, leaving them with one big Baha all the way from Vancouver to Tijuana?
"How will they convince people that being anti-piracy is profitable?" The same way they put it over that somebody who loved you anyway REALLY loves you just because they gave you a lump of compressed carbon to wear on your finger: advertizing! It worked to convince half of you that a $200 operating system is cheaper than a free one. It was all that was needed to convince you that a $2000 developer's studio was more viable than a free one. Feed it through a spin doctor, and the magic art of *lying* *convincingly* will have you thinking freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength and that it actually matters which crook you vote for.
As for the people who openly admit to piracy anyway, you're not looking too hot yourself. If there were no alternative, I'd not only advocate stealing, but take over the whole damn building and shove the CEOs off the balcony, while you're at it being a pirate: get your eyepatch and your parrot and do it all the way! But free software *is* out there, and it's not just struggling along, it's coming out *on* *top* in many ways - so now how do you explain that rather than use the free alternative (which you can even rewrite to your liking and SELL), you'd instead steal the pay-stuff?
Why not just use the free software and cut both the suit-and-tie crooks and the pirate crooks out of the equation altogether? Because regardless of how you got it, USING the stolen stuff profits the corporation ANYWAY. (It's publicity for them: "So good people steal it!", It drives other people to go out and buy it to be compatible with what you use. It perpetuates the fallacy that their product is worth anything at all.) You're busting your ass to support a system which you show, by your own actions, you don't believe in!
Final score: Corporations: (-1), Consumers: (-1). Hey, boys? The field is *that* way.
Well, MIT doesn't grow corn. They don't research AIDS cures.
OK, I hear everybody saying MIT does, indeed, have it's fingers in these pies as well. But they're *famous* for engineering, or the MIT computer science lab only does computers, or something like that. Moral of the story: never make general statements about an area with a high concentration of brains. Brains always surprise you.
along with the BSOD jokes in 2005 and clippy jokes. They really aren't funny to the majority of people who will find the current MS OS stuff to be pretty stable
While it is true that a great deal of Linux users don't update their Windows experience firsthand, and hence may deride Windows for increasingly outdated reasons, I can personally attest that I sat down to use the Windows machine at my local internet cafe while polishing off my espresso and had an overflown buffer ("Internet Explorer cannot open the file %0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3..." etc scrolling off the dialog, if you know what I mean) and a blue screen (Explorer fault at 0xsomething something...) within minutes of each other - on XP. An *updated* XP. JUST TWO MONTHS AGO! All I was doing was browsing Wiki. Clippy holds no fear for me, as I manually deleted him the first time I saw him, back in my salad days.
By the way, from the *other* side of the fence: Linux MADE IT on the desktop, and now offers short installs of just a few clicks with automatic hardware detection, default partitioning, and grouped package installs. Games run on it now. We no longer have to telnet to Slashdot and grep for index in an 80-character console after we've recompiled our kernel to recognize the acoustic modem. We abandoned the coal-fired processor, too. Unless, of course, you're talking about Debian.
The country where I work is limited in its development for three major reasons: Education, Health and Infrastructure.
As your story left a lump in my throat, I recalled other stories from other places. In fact, every time I see a documentary on underdeveloped countries, or read about humanitarian efforts in foreign lands, these same factors come up again and again. Even amongst the ghettos and wastes of America (and I've waded in them hip-deep!), you have the same problem: you could literally go down skid row handing out hundred dollar bills - most of them would go on a drinking binge and the rest would blow it on lottery tickets. Both routes lead back to skid row. It isn't the lack of necessities that's the problem - that's just a symptom. The problem is that the US condones most of it's citizens' growing up as ignorant savages.
Where you are, I bet a mere book is a real treasure. Well, they're banned and burned, here. I bet a scholar is someone to be looked up to where you are. Not here; here, we're "geeks" and "nerds" and "literary faggots". With any luck, if these efforts do what they're supposed to do, the opportunity to join the 21st century will at last be placed in your people's hands.
I'm sure they will be eager to learn. Not here; instead a cursory reading of my fellow American's postings on Slashdot discovers a litany in praise of ignorance: "It's too difficult." "I'll just spend my money and pay somebody else to do it for me." "Why don't you like Bill Gates, are you a hippie communist terrorist?" and the resounding cry that roars from the mob above it all: "I'M TOO BUSY TO LEARN!!!" You know what they're too busy doing, don't you? Earning money working multiple jobs. So they can pay more money to other people to have them do things for them. Because they're too busy to learn how to do it themselves. But what happens when *nobody* knows *anything*? Money is a poor substitute for brains.
The scary part to me is, your country is heading where we are, while ours is heading where yours is! If so, I am almost fed up enough with this one to think, perhaps, that both nations shall get what they deserve.
You know those signs in the office that say "We have gone [x] days without a work-related injury"? I have one on my wall that says "[x] number of days sunce a Sony-related screw-up hit the news". Anybody have a javascript version of that for our blogs? Some RSS-witchcraft that cranks automatically?
Hey, now that 1337 has been abandoned by it's generation, we old farts are picking it up. It's actually easy to standardize it as a code, with tools like Firefox's https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=770&application=firefox leetspeak plugin - you just highlight text and click to encode/decode! Handy for getting past (speak o' th' devil) Yahoo's Fascistic "indecency" filter, yet clear to all those who can read it. Ironic, no?
but now I'm cheering it on! Nothing puts the lead in my pencil like pissing off the kind of people who've been expressing hostility towards this project.
Well, we're going to see our $100 laptop happen, ANYWAY!!! And it's going to be AMD powered and Linux powered ANYWAY!!! And poor and underpriveledged people the world over will have the power of computing in *their* hands, too, and they're going to use Linux and compute circles around the greedy pigs at the corporate trough and be smarter about computers than they were, ANYWAY!!! What are you critics going to do about it??? Wet your diaper?
Hey, is it OK to still give to Toys-for-Tots this year, or you people got a problem with THAT next?
I'm all for giving poor and developing nations access to this kind of technology but the fact remains that there are more pressing needs for these folks.
Well, MIT doesn't grow corn. They don't research AIDS cures. Other people are doing these things. MIT is helping the best way MIT can. MIT helps by building you a computer.
Amazing...MIT would be drawing 100% less criticism right now if they'd simply sat on their hands and done *nothing*. Why is it to get rotten egged off the podium in this world, all you have to do is volunteer to help?
Yeah, I've been saying it for months.
on
The Future of HTML
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
HTML is worse than bad; it needs to be buried. It looks like whoever wrote it must have been swigging absinthe while taking a case-by-case approach and writing *whatever* popped into their mind at the moment. "Um...how to make text bigger? h1,h2,h3,h4,...but we'll use "big" tags here. And change the font size there. And make it so you can also specify size in percent, pixels, *and* points, so no two pages will handle sizing of text the same way. Now, what else can I screw up?"
CSS, once I learned it (getting the excellent http://www.nvu.com/nvu helped), struck me as the way the web should have been designed to start with. At least all the style twiddling is done in one place. At least I use just *one* command to do one thing. Never mind "50 creative ways to do it."; just give me ONE way: the RIGHT way!
As for TFA, I love canvas and can't wait to start working with it. It looks like the kind of thing javascript was meant to do 20 years ago when everybody started trying to gangbang it. But javascript itself...I would still like to see java and css integrate themselves closer. In fact (as I've said before in these very hallowed halls) I wish for ONE language that does EVERYTHING with one unified syntax - not using this fourth of a language to write this module, and this tenth of a language to write that section. How about making a *whole* web language that can stand on it's own for a change? Since when is trying to knit five baby languages together to make one little page a good idea, when I only needed one language to write the whole operating system and the web browser on?
Last but not least, forget the backward compatibility. These days, my philosophy is: "Use the brightest and best technology that pleases me at the time, and if it's not compatible, tell 'em to get a REAL browser." I'm sick and tired of trying to build a page that will accomodate *any* Rube Goldberg contraption that *any* moron whacks together and calls a web browser. Do we make our freeways to accomodate ruk-tuks, Big Wheel tricycles, and pack elephants? Come to that, are the roads in a Tibetan temple designed to accomodate Mac trucks and American Monster SUVs? The time has come to say: "If you insist on traveling the world using only a Conestoga, there are certain places you just won't be able to go. We can't pave the ocean just for you."
CSS took the totally simple CENTER tag and "improved" it with kludgy auto-width margins that don't work in IE5/Win.
You've got to be kidding. CSS walks on water, and MS can't handle it, so it's CSS's fault? It's going to come down to you should either evolve or get off the web entirely. The rest of us have better things to do than remain stuck in 1995 with your Never-never-land web browser, or your monopoli$t OS, for that matter. I'm simply saying that it's *dead*; bury it and move on.
It's good to see such healthy skepticism. For once, I came into a discussion about "safety" mods "for our own good" and didn't have to confront 5000 drooling zombies chanting, "Yes, Corporation! We hear and obey, Corporation! All who disagree are infidels who hate us for our freedom!"
Dang, I think I'm ready to *bless* Sony! It's good we have a shake-down every now and then; keeps the community on it's toes!
By the way, not only do I run FOSS on every box, but I have a policy of just upgrading my hardware a piece at a time. It's gotten to where I no more trust a machine vendor selling me a whole system than I would a hustler on the street corner selling gold watches. If I put every component in the board myself, I know damn sure what's there and what isn't. Ironic: My years of being a cheapskate computer user has paid off in having better quality systems!
At least with a Mac, I can see that you *get* something for your money! Every time I wander into the Mac section at the comp store, I'm admiring the sleek designs and artistic colors. The interface is pure candy. I'm almost ready to blow a bundle on one...until I look behind the screen and see that I'll have a damn hard time upgrading this thing in five years... I'm just too cheap to buy a whole computer any more, the most I'll buy is a motherboard.
But during the times in my life when it was part of my job to use a Mac, I never regarded it as less than a pleasure. Even when it bombs, it tries to be funny about it. Macs are computers with character.
A week ago, I got into a muckpit with somebody who insisted that free speech was suffering NOT A BIT, was DOING JUST FINE, etc. Now it's gotten to the ultimately petty censorship of LYRICS. And I'm TYPING in randomly CAPITALIZED words because I LIKE to sound like ZIPPY THE PINHEAD.
I just love how people ride on this "it's only a hobby" thing and beat everything about Linux to death with it. Oh, how common sense, why couldn't we see that? Compare it to other hobbies:
Q: I wanna cook as a hobby?
A: Better stick to a microwave and TV dinners; anything more complicated than that would be WAY too deep for a hobbyist!
Q: I work on cars for a hobby?
A: You mean you only change the wiper blades and check the oil? Because, in spite of those muscle cars and lowrider jobs you see all over the custom cars shows, obviously anything requiring an actual tool of any kind will be going too far for a hobby!
Q: I paint for a hobby?
A: Only water-colors on construction paper is fit for a hobbyist! A hobbyist wouldn't be wanting to get involved in more sophisticated media.
Ohhhh, we could SO go on and on. I just don't have that much sadism - it isn't nearly as much fun stomping AC's faces into the ground while pointing out that they don't know jack-shit nor jill-turd about what they're blabbing about. A hobby, by definition, is something you do to stay busy with something you enjoy. You would know if you had one (besides being ignorant in public) that in fact a hobbyist is more likely to *enjoy* all the things you think of as "drudgery". They're DOING it for FUN, and part of that fun can be the CHALLENGE of tackling a difficult task, so that they might LEARN and GROW from it. How many "hobbyist" tic-tac-toe players do you know? Now how many hobbyist chess players? And do these chess players not devote a lot of time to the inherent complexities of the game, which is so ripe a ground for flexing their mental muscles? Do they not read books on openings and study the great games of the masters and compete in tournaments, etc yada yada?
You're not even going to the back of the class on this one, you need to get out of the school!
I have a better idea: let's NOT! Just don't use AOL, and to be on the safe side, don't even run the kind of system AOL runs on. A malicious computer program has just proven itself smarter than the average AOL user: for the love of humanity, WHY do you want these people in the gene pool any more?
This makes me interested in where biotechnology will be by the end of the century. Attatch a germ to the AOL-virus code and now it's worth money! "Stick yur f1ngr n teh fppy slt. No, it wn't mek u sick, it's lk an orggy." I'm beginning to re-eally like natural selection!
I *knew* Ajax was crap when it was unknown, and then overnight, there were these cult-members chanting "Ajax!Ajax!Ajax!" all of a sudden. When I tried to find out what everybody was so excited about, it went:
"AJAX good!"
Me: "What makes you say that?"
"I use AJAX!"
"OK, any other endorsements?"
"Sonny Bono use AJAX!"
"And..."
"You use AJAX!"
"But why should I?"
"AJAX good!"
PS It's things like this that keep me from getting too closely involved with Ubuntu. Mind you, zealotry is somebody who was actually *won* to a cause. AJAXmania and other manias of it's ilk aren't zealotry. They are cultism. Cultists were persuaded by peer pressure and/or media hype.
Not least there's the cost of re/training staff to use new software.
You can tell a real industry drone by the repetition of this tired old phrase. I'm sick of this. I learned MS Office in 1/2 an hour. I learned Open Office in 1/2 an hour. File->New,Open,Save,Save as...,Exit. The buttons do just what the little pictures suggest. There, you're trained.
What a crock! People, you need training on NOTHING until you get into engineering or design and have to use specialized tools. Any common office tool has a menu called "help" - use it! All these people paying $300-$500 to learn Excel and such are getting ripped. Like I said, I'm sick of this: "You can't switch mice because you'll have to put everybody through twelve hours of mouse training." "Somebody tripped and fell, so we all have to take one hour per day of floor safety." "Could you get the door for me? My doorknob certification expired at midnight."
Bill gates reading the news over the internet while he eats supper. Suddenly his eyes lock on a story about IBM. He begins to choke on his steakbone...
Slashdot Mirror
Ed Krol, 1992, cover art of a Socrates-type character examining a globe using a compass. Yeah, I still have mine, too, although the material on archie and gopher didn't age too well. Some things are just too beloved to toss. Like "Sed and Awk".
Gee, like they needed that helpful suggestion? No, I got one worse than that: Mandatory implants at birth that spew nonstop advertizing into your brain your whole life. You'll get paid to stay awake longer so you can listen to more.
$500 ?!? No wonder we have so much bile spewed about Gimp vs Photoshop. Hey, tell me, how does spending $500 on a tool put you ahead profit-wise, as opposed to obtaining a free tool that you can improve yourself legally?
I'm sorry, that's completely impossible. Humans are incapable of abandoning a practice based on those grounds, based on my observation of the entire political/economical system. What had to have happened was, their astrology guide told them it was a bad day to do business, so they shut down.
When the San Andreas Fault failed to fulfill the hope of all coastal Californians that everything East of it would collapse into the Atlantic ocean, leaving them with one big Baha all the way from Vancouver to Tijuana?
As for the people who openly admit to piracy anyway, you're not looking too hot yourself. If there were no alternative, I'd not only advocate stealing, but take over the whole damn building and shove the CEOs off the balcony, while you're at it being a pirate: get your eyepatch and your parrot and do it all the way! But free software *is* out there, and it's not just struggling along, it's coming out *on* *top* in many ways - so now how do you explain that rather than use the free alternative (which you can even rewrite to your liking and SELL), you'd instead steal the pay-stuff?
Why not just use the free software and cut both the suit-and-tie crooks and the pirate crooks out of the equation altogether? Because regardless of how you got it, USING the stolen stuff profits the corporation ANYWAY. (It's publicity for them: "So good people steal it!", It drives other people to go out and buy it to be compatible with what you use. It perpetuates the fallacy that their product is worth anything at all.) You're busting your ass to support a system which you show, by your own actions, you don't believe in!
Final score: Corporations: (-1), Consumers: (-1). Hey, boys? The field is *that* way.
OK, I hear everybody saying MIT does, indeed, have it's fingers in these pies as well. But they're *famous* for engineering, or the MIT computer science lab only does computers, or something like that. Moral of the story: never make general statements about an area with a high concentration of brains. Brains always surprise you.
While it is true that a great deal of Linux users don't update their Windows experience firsthand, and hence may deride Windows for increasingly outdated reasons, I can personally attest that I sat down to use the Windows machine at my local internet cafe while polishing off my espresso and had an overflown buffer ("Internet Explorer cannot open the file %0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3%0e3..." etc scrolling off the dialog, if you know what I mean) and a blue screen (Explorer fault at 0xsomething something...) within minutes of each other - on XP. An *updated* XP. JUST TWO MONTHS AGO! All I was doing was browsing Wiki. Clippy holds no fear for me, as I manually deleted him the first time I saw him, back in my salad days.
By the way, from the *other* side of the fence: Linux MADE IT on the desktop, and now offers short installs of just a few clicks with automatic hardware detection, default partitioning, and grouped package installs. Games run on it now. We no longer have to telnet to Slashdot and grep for index in an 80-character console after we've recompiled our kernel to recognize the acoustic modem. We abandoned the coal-fired processor, too. Unless, of course, you're talking about Debian.
As your story left a lump in my throat, I recalled other stories from other places. In fact, every time I see a documentary on underdeveloped countries, or read about humanitarian efforts in foreign lands, these same factors come up again and again. Even amongst the ghettos and wastes of America (and I've waded in them hip-deep!), you have the same problem: you could literally go down skid row handing out hundred dollar bills - most of them would go on a drinking binge and the rest would blow it on lottery tickets. Both routes lead back to skid row. It isn't the lack of necessities that's the problem - that's just a symptom. The problem is that the US condones most of it's citizens' growing up as ignorant savages.
Where you are, I bet a mere book is a real treasure. Well, they're banned and burned, here. I bet a scholar is someone to be looked up to where you are. Not here; here, we're "geeks" and "nerds" and "literary faggots". With any luck, if these efforts do what they're supposed to do, the opportunity to join the 21st century will at last be placed in your people's hands.
I'm sure they will be eager to learn. Not here; instead a cursory reading of my fellow American's postings on Slashdot discovers a litany in praise of ignorance: "It's too difficult." "I'll just spend my money and pay somebody else to do it for me." "Why don't you like Bill Gates, are you a hippie communist terrorist?" and the resounding cry that roars from the mob above it all: "I'M TOO BUSY TO LEARN!!!" You know what they're too busy doing, don't you? Earning money working multiple jobs. So they can pay more money to other people to have them do things for them. Because they're too busy to learn how to do it themselves. But what happens when *nobody* knows *anything*? Money is a poor substitute for brains.
The scary part to me is, your country is heading where we are, while ours is heading where yours is! If so, I am almost fed up enough with this one to think, perhaps, that both nations shall get what they deserve.
Wow...so it's called "constructionist learning". I always called it "learn by doing" or "hands-on", but now I have an official phrase for it.
You know those signs in the office that say "We have gone [x] days without a work-related injury"? I have one on my wall that says "[x] number of days sunce a Sony-related screw-up hit the news". Anybody have a javascript version of that for our blogs? Some RSS-witchcraft that cranks automatically?
Hey, now that 1337 has been abandoned by it's generation, we old farts are picking it up. It's actually easy to standardize it as a code, with tools like Firefox's https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=770&application=firefox leetspeak plugin - you just highlight text and click to encode/decode! Handy for getting past (speak o' th' devil) Yahoo's Fascistic "indecency" filter, yet clear to all those who can read it. Ironic, no?
"Sorry, Only Not Yet!"
Well, we're going to see our $100 laptop happen, ANYWAY!!! And it's going to be AMD powered and Linux powered ANYWAY!!! And poor and underpriveledged people the world over will have the power of computing in *their* hands, too, and they're going to use Linux and compute circles around the greedy pigs at the corporate trough and be smarter about computers than they were, ANYWAY!!! What are you critics going to do about it??? Wet your diaper?
Hey, is it OK to still give to Toys-for-Tots this year, or you people got a problem with THAT next?
Well, MIT doesn't grow corn. They don't research AIDS cures. Other people are doing these things. MIT is helping the best way MIT can. MIT helps by building you a computer.
Amazing...MIT would be drawing 100% less criticism right now if they'd simply sat on their hands and done *nothing*. Why is it to get rotten egged off the podium in this world, all you have to do is volunteer to help?
CSS, once I learned it (getting the excellent http://www.nvu.com/nvu helped), struck me as the way the web should have been designed to start with. At least all the style twiddling is done in one place. At least I use just *one* command to do one thing. Never mind "50 creative ways to do it."; just give me ONE way: the RIGHT way!
As for TFA, I love canvas and can't wait to start working with it. It looks like the kind of thing javascript was meant to do 20 years ago when everybody started trying to gangbang it. But javascript itself...I would still like to see java and css integrate themselves closer. In fact (as I've said before in these very hallowed halls) I wish for ONE language that does EVERYTHING with one unified syntax - not using this fourth of a language to write this module, and this tenth of a language to write that section. How about making a *whole* web language that can stand on it's own for a change? Since when is trying to knit five baby languages together to make one little page a good idea, when I only needed one language to write the whole operating system and the web browser on?
Last but not least, forget the backward compatibility. These days, my philosophy is: "Use the brightest and best technology that pleases me at the time, and if it's not compatible, tell 'em to get a REAL browser." I'm sick and tired of trying to build a page that will accomodate *any* Rube Goldberg contraption that *any* moron whacks together and calls a web browser. Do we make our freeways to accomodate ruk-tuks, Big Wheel tricycles, and pack elephants? Come to that, are the roads in a Tibetan temple designed to accomodate Mac trucks and American Monster SUVs? The time has come to say: "If you insist on traveling the world using only a Conestoga, there are certain places you just won't be able to go. We can't pave the ocean just for you."
You've got to be kidding. CSS walks on water, and MS can't handle it, so it's CSS's fault? It's going to come down to you should either evolve or get off the web entirely. The rest of us have better things to do than remain stuck in 1995 with your Never-never-land web browser, or your monopoli$t OS, for that matter. I'm simply saying that it's *dead*; bury it and move on.
Dang, I think I'm ready to *bless* Sony! It's good we have a shake-down every now and then; keeps the community on it's toes!
By the way, not only do I run FOSS on every box, but I have a policy of just upgrading my hardware a piece at a time. It's gotten to where I no more trust a machine vendor selling me a whole system than I would a hustler on the street corner selling gold watches. If I put every component in the board myself, I know damn sure what's there and what isn't. Ironic: My years of being a cheapskate computer user has paid off in having better quality systems!
But during the times in my life when it was part of my job to use a Mac, I never regarded it as less than a pleasure. Even when it bombs, it tries to be funny about it. Macs are computers with character.
A week ago, I got into a muckpit with somebody who insisted that free speech was suffering NOT A BIT, was DOING JUST FINE, etc. Now it's gotten to the ultimately petty censorship of LYRICS. And I'm TYPING in randomly CAPITALIZED words because I LIKE to sound like ZIPPY THE PINHEAD.
Q: I wanna cook as a hobby?
A: Better stick to a microwave and TV dinners; anything more complicated than that would be WAY too deep for a hobbyist!
Q: I work on cars for a hobby?
A: You mean you only change the wiper blades and check the oil? Because, in spite of those muscle cars and lowrider jobs you see all over the custom cars shows, obviously anything requiring an actual tool of any kind will be going too far for a hobby!
Q: I paint for a hobby?
A: Only water-colors on construction paper is fit for a hobbyist! A hobbyist wouldn't be wanting to get involved in more sophisticated media.
Ohhhh, we could SO go on and on. I just don't have that much sadism - it isn't nearly as much fun stomping AC's faces into the ground while pointing out that they don't know jack-shit nor jill-turd about what they're blabbing about. A hobby, by definition, is something you do to stay busy with something you enjoy. You would know if you had one (besides being ignorant in public) that in fact a hobbyist is more likely to *enjoy* all the things you think of as "drudgery". They're DOING it for FUN, and part of that fun can be the CHALLENGE of tackling a difficult task, so that they might LEARN and GROW from it. How many "hobbyist" tic-tac-toe players do you know? Now how many hobbyist chess players? And do these chess players not devote a lot of time to the inherent complexities of the game, which is so ripe a ground for flexing their mental muscles? Do they not read books on openings and study the great games of the masters and compete in tournaments, etc yada yada?
You're not even going to the back of the class on this one, you need to get out of the school!
I have a better idea: let's NOT! Just don't use AOL, and to be on the safe side, don't even run the kind of system AOL runs on. A malicious computer program has just proven itself smarter than the average AOL user: for the love of humanity, WHY do you want these people in the gene pool any more?
This makes me interested in where biotechnology will be by the end of the century. Attatch a germ to the AOL-virus code and now it's worth money! "Stick yur f1ngr n teh fppy slt. No, it wn't mek u sick, it's lk an orggy." I'm beginning to re-eally like natural selection!
"AJAX good!"
Me: "What makes you say that?"
"I use AJAX!"
"OK, any other endorsements?"
"Sonny Bono use AJAX!"
"And..."
"You use AJAX!"
"But why should I?"
"AJAX good!"
PS It's things like this that keep me from getting too closely involved with Ubuntu. Mind you, zealotry is somebody who was actually *won* to a cause. AJAXmania and other manias of it's ilk aren't zealotry. They are cultism. Cultists were persuaded by peer pressure and/or media hype.
You can tell a real industry drone by the repetition of this tired old phrase. I'm sick of this. I learned MS Office in 1/2 an hour. I learned Open Office in 1/2 an hour. File->New,Open,Save,Save as...,Exit. The buttons do just what the little pictures suggest. There, you're trained.
What a crock! People, you need training on NOTHING until you get into engineering or design and have to use specialized tools. Any common office tool has a menu called "help" - use it! All these people paying $300-$500 to learn Excel and such are getting ripped. Like I said, I'm sick of this: "You can't switch mice because you'll have to put everybody through twelve hours of mouse training." "Somebody tripped and fell, so we all have to take one hour per day of floor safety." "Could you get the door for me? My doorknob certification expired at midnight."
Bill gates reading the news over the internet while he eats supper. Suddenly his eyes lock on a story about IBM. He begins to choke on his steakbone...