Damn, who pulled the pins off the jumpers on *your* motherboard?
Look, the whole *point* of an economy is to provide an environment where each entity is able to seek out it's own "best good". Hence, gas stations *compete* by lowering prices, and we *reward* that behavior as consumers by purchasing from the distributor who gives us the best deal. Otherwise....why even HAVE an economy? We could just go on good faith and virtue.
Companies which embrace this attitude need to be aware that getting our money is also a priveledge, not a right.
As for me and my household, we have some five, six devices (counting the three computers, which *all* run Linux) that play music CDs. We have ecclectic tastes throughout history, anyway. We buy our CDs used. I still have a tape-deck recorder that can tape off the radio at nearly the same quality. When a device breaks down, I just fix it (especially if I'm the one who broke it!).
So it really doesn't affect us too much, but my sympathies lie with those whom it does affect. I personally, will refuse to buy any device which infringes on my *natural* right to use it to it's full extent, until I have no choice, and once I don't have a choice, I not only intend to - but swear to - circumvent it by any means known to software or hardware. It's my house and my business. Come to that, I still have a soldering iron and a box of transistor parts...obtained back when Radio Shack was the kind of place that sold that kind of stuff...
The Linux community is doing an excellent job of killing Linux for it, without Microsoft having to lift a finger. Interior battles tore Unix apart: well, then that makes us all think twice before we flame-war about distros, now, doesn't it?
The other thing is biting the hand that feeds it: Geeks. Yes, I know, we geeks are unmarketable, economically unviable, socially inept, prone to expect other people to know how to do Really Complex Stuff like unzip an archive, but before you burn us all at the stake just to get us out of the way so you can sell Linux for $14.99 off the shelf at WalMart, you might want to preserve a couple of us. Nobody else is going to make more Linux for you to sell. Programs do not write themselves.
No kidding: Programs really do NOT write themselves!!!!! So if you throw out the compilers based on the notion that including them with the distro will just confuse Joe Sixpack? That's disabling the programming process. If you get rid of the command line? Programs are written there. Throw out programs like vi, Emacs, gcc, gdb, yacc, sed, awk, and man just because they have funny names that won't look tasty on the flashy label? Wait, those are programming tools, we need those! If you make Linux into a Windows clone, thinking you'll attract all the Windows users and be just as rich as Bill Gates (because that's exactly what people are thinking!)? But Linux programmers would really hate that, and you'll scare them all away to BSD or BeOS. Hang lots of whistles and bells on it, decorate it with frosting, throw out every particle of substance and dumb it down? Yes, you will win points with the very lowest common denominator market segment - the ones who spend the money, after all - but you'll ostricize all the other users, who will get tired of being locked in another playpen and wander off looking for better stimulation. Believe it or not, Linux did NOT get to where it is by being Just Like Everybody Else.
Yes, yes, yes, I know this post is getting flamed to a crisp the moment I hit the "submit" button. That's OK, you don't have to listen to me. Look around in three years, five, ten, and see what happened.
Yah, even though Python is my language of choice currently, the whitespace thing was like the prank the frat plays on you during pledge week. "Whitespace-delimited? You sh*ttin' me? Like a freaking Apple II?" Believe it or not, they did it that way to appease all the people who complained about all the braces and parenthesis in the other languages. Great, so now we're stuck debugging code that uses *invisible* delimiters that we *can't* SEE! Hey, is that three spaces together instead of a tab? What was I thinking?
Now, I think one solution might be a language that lets you *pick* your *own* delimiter. Whatever format the code is in if you're reading someone else's, when you paste it into your editor, it reads your settings and changes it accordingly. All compilers in the language recognize and code either one. That would be a compromise, but there's probably problems with how that would work in The Real World.
Actually, from the manic madcap release cycle, I'd say Python's already where it will be in 2013. They're coding the releases from 2035 about now, in order to stay ahead of the 2036 releases.
Re:Screensavers, music, and Unicode?
on
State of the Onion 9
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
in the time that Perl 6 has been coming "Real Soon Now".
I know replys that begin "you should be thankful, imagine if..." suck, but:
Be a Python programmer for awhile and see the *other* extreme: a programming language that never stops being a moving target! Wrote a program in Python yesterday? It's outdated, they no longer use that function, you gotta re-code it. Should you do it today? Nahhh, it's nearly five o'clock, better wait for tomorrow's edition of Python so we get a whole day's use out of it.
Let's make a deal, six months out of the year, we swap Larry for Guido.
Since my blog is a gallery of artwork, I've neatly side-stepped the issues of whether to rant about my personal life and sound like a navel-gazing weenie (stay with that image in your mind for a minute...OK, now go ahead:), or rant about the state of the world and sound like Rush Limbaugh or Mike Moore (take your pick). I *just* *draw*!
And I tried doing the whole spectrum of blogs from geek/tech to political to personal. None of them came close to this one for hits, where I utter not a word except to put the title of the pictures. Goes to show, people see better than they read (or, uh, something like that?).
Yah, but Slashdot is my therapy. Better to come in here and flame off at random about tech-tweak trivia (hereby abbreviated to TTT) then let the buildup of stress drive you to CompUSA to run down the aisles hitting Ctrl-Esc Alt-minus-C on all the Windows boxes...
LOL! OK, now that it got modded up "interresting", let's spread the fad! I want to drive down the street next spring seeing AOL-biles on at least half the porches!
I doubt we'll see our government do anything about it.
Don't worry, Europe will beat them up! This should be the new US National Anthem (particularly after Hurricane Katrina): "Thank God for Other Country's Governments".
And we look to other countries/nationalities for protection of our freedom of speech, too, such as when we're passing around an honest, matter-of-fact opinion about the state of services in this Republic which we are charged with running democraticly, and get modded down "Troll" about it. You can bet the finger that clicked *that* button was white as a dildo!
Skil circular saws, Porter-Cable hand-held band saws, Bosch jackhammers, Hitachi chop saws. How about Milwaukee sawzalls-- if you saw nothing but Makita, I'd be willing to bet money you never regularly used a sawzall.
Granted, memories *do* fade after five years. Yes, the rest of those names ring a bell. Also Caterpillar (!?) busted out with the occasional light equipment.
Man, it's been five years, and I do *not* miss that field a bit! You're welcome to it!
Heck, I'm saving up eight different colors of AOL CDs to use as a mobile, myself. Break them in half, melt them to strings, tie the strings to dowels, and you have a hanging porch ornament that catches the sun in flashing half-arc rainbows. I tried the coaster bit, but the hole in the middle lets the moisture leak through.
I doubt we'll see our government do anything about it.
Don't worry, Europe will beat them up! This should be the new US National Anthem (particularly after Hurricane Katrina): "Thank God for Other Country's Governments".
construction workers were using DeWalt power tools and loving them
I worked construction jobs from 1995 to 2000 and the three most popular brands were Makita, Makita, and Makita. Black and Decker, disguised or not, was never seen. Not everybody who wears a hard hat is stupid, some of us are merely slow-witted engineers. Which "Seven Steps of Highly Effective Managers" did you get this story from?
I just couldn't miss the fact that *somebody* wasted all of their mod points modding down five random comments of mine for random reasons after you quit posting to this thread. You are to vindictive revenge for imagined, petty slights what KMart is to blue-light-specials.
My karma dropped from "excellent" to "good" for about five hours yesterday. It's back up to "excellent" today. Ooh, that tickled, do it again! I *love* the attention!
How you explain the intricacies of computer architechture to 12 jurors sufficiently that they can arrive at a well-informed verdict, yet tech support people become continuously frustrated trying to explain to the average user that it's a CD tray and not a cup-holder, etc.?
Slashdot Mirror
Damn, who pulled the pins off the jumpers on *your* motherboard?
Look, the whole *point* of an economy is to provide an environment where each entity is able to seek out it's own "best good". Hence, gas stations *compete* by lowering prices, and we *reward* that behavior as consumers by purchasing from the distributor who gives us the best deal. Otherwise....why even HAVE an economy? We could just go on good faith and virtue.
As for me and my household, we have some five, six devices (counting the three computers, which *all* run Linux) that play music CDs. We have ecclectic tastes throughout history, anyway. We buy our CDs used. I still have a tape-deck recorder that can tape off the radio at nearly the same quality. When a device breaks down, I just fix it (especially if I'm the one who broke it!).
So it really doesn't affect us too much, but my sympathies lie with those whom it does affect. I personally, will refuse to buy any device which infringes on my *natural* right to use it to it's full extent, until I have no choice, and once I don't have a choice, I not only intend to - but swear to - circumvent it by any means known to software or hardware. It's my house and my business. Come to that, I still have a soldering iron and a box of transistor parts...obtained back when Radio Shack was the kind of place that sold that kind of stuff...
The other thing is biting the hand that feeds it: Geeks. Yes, I know, we geeks are unmarketable, economically unviable, socially inept, prone to expect other people to know how to do Really Complex Stuff like unzip an archive, but before you burn us all at the stake just to get us out of the way so you can sell Linux for $14.99 off the shelf at WalMart, you might want to preserve a couple of us. Nobody else is going to make more Linux for you to sell. Programs do not write themselves.
No kidding: Programs really do NOT write themselves!!!!! So if you throw out the compilers based on the notion that including them with the distro will just confuse Joe Sixpack? That's disabling the programming process. If you get rid of the command line? Programs are written there. Throw out programs like vi, Emacs, gcc, gdb, yacc, sed, awk, and man just because they have funny names that won't look tasty on the flashy label? Wait, those are programming tools, we need those! If you make Linux into a Windows clone, thinking you'll attract all the Windows users and be just as rich as Bill Gates (because that's exactly what people are thinking!)? But Linux programmers would really hate that, and you'll scare them all away to BSD or BeOS. Hang lots of whistles and bells on it, decorate it with frosting, throw out every particle of substance and dumb it down? Yes, you will win points with the very lowest common denominator market segment - the ones who spend the money, after all - but you'll ostricize all the other users, who will get tired of being locked in another playpen and wander off looking for better stimulation. Believe it or not, Linux did NOT get to where it is by being Just Like Everybody Else.
Yes, yes, yes, I know this post is getting flamed to a crisp the moment I hit the "submit" button. That's OK, you don't have to listen to me. Look around in three years, five, ten, and see what happened.
Yah, even though Python is my language of choice currently, the whitespace thing was like the prank the frat plays on you during pledge week. "Whitespace-delimited? You sh*ttin' me? Like a freaking Apple II?" Believe it or not, they did it that way to appease all the people who complained about all the braces and parenthesis in the other languages. Great, so now we're stuck debugging code that uses *invisible* delimiters that we *can't* SEE! Hey, is that three spaces together instead of a tab? What was I thinking?
Now, I think one solution might be a language that lets you *pick* your *own* delimiter. Whatever format the code is in if you're reading someone else's, when you paste it into your editor, it reads your settings and changes it accordingly. All compilers in the language recognize and code either one. That would be a compromise, but there's probably problems with how that would work in The Real World.
Actually, from the manic madcap release cycle, I'd say Python's already where it will be in 2013. They're coding the releases from 2035 about now, in order to stay ahead of the 2036 releases.
I know replys that begin "you should be thankful, imagine if..." suck, but:
Be a Python programmer for awhile and see the *other* extreme: a programming language that never stops being a moving target! Wrote a program in Python yesterday? It's outdated, they no longer use that function, you gotta re-code it. Should you do it today? Nahhh, it's nearly five o'clock, better wait for tomorrow's edition of Python so we get a whole day's use out of it.
Let's make a deal, six months out of the year, we swap Larry for Guido.
And I tried doing the whole spectrum of blogs from geek/tech to political to personal. None of them came close to this one for hits, where I utter not a word except to put the title of the pictures. Goes to show, people see better than they read (or, uh, something like that?).
Yah, but Slashdot is my therapy. Better to come in here and flame off at random about tech-tweak trivia (hereby abbreviated to TTT) then let the buildup of stress drive you to CompUSA to run down the aisles hitting Ctrl-Esc Alt-minus-C on all the Windows boxes...
LOL! OK, now that it got modded up "interresting", let's spread the fad! I want to drive down the street next spring seeing AOL-biles on at least half the porches!
If they turn to the darkside, we're all screwed.
And we look to other countries/nationalities for protection of our freedom of speech, too, such as when we're passing around an honest, matter-of-fact opinion about the state of services in this Republic which we are charged with running democraticly, and get modded down "Troll" about it. You can bet the finger that clicked *that* button was white as a dildo!
Granted, memories *do* fade after five years. Yes, the rest of those names ring a bell. Also Caterpillar (!?) busted out with the occasional light equipment.
Man, it's been five years, and I do *not* miss that field a bit! You're welcome to it!
Heck, I'm saving up eight different colors of AOL CDs to use as a mobile, myself. Break them in half, melt them to strings, tie the strings to dowels, and you have a hanging porch ornament that catches the sun in flashing half-arc rainbows. I tried the coaster bit, but the hole in the middle lets the moisture leak through.
Don't worry, Europe will beat them up! This should be the new US National Anthem (particularly after Hurricane Katrina): "Thank God for Other Country's Governments".
I worked construction jobs from 1995 to 2000 and the three most popular brands were Makita, Makita, and Makita. Black and Decker, disguised or not, was never seen. Not everybody who wears a hard hat is stupid, some of us are merely slow-witted engineers. Which "Seven Steps of Highly Effective Managers" did you get this story from?
My karma dropped from "excellent" to "good" for about five hours yesterday. It's back up to "excellent" today. Ooh, that tickled, do it again! I *love* the attention!
This is like if Target wanted to "kill" Saks Fifth Avenue. So they buy Kmart.
OK, I give up. Refresh my memory. *What* did Microsoft innovate in the 1980's?
How you explain the intricacies of computer architechture to 12 jurors sufficiently that they can arrive at a well-informed verdict, yet tech support people become continuously frustrated trying to explain to the average user that it's a CD tray and not a cup-holder, etc.?
I seen 'em come and go. Last year this time, if you weren't running Gentoo, you weren't "l33t".
Oh, so *that's* where the Obfuscated C contest came from!
What a lousy time to run out of mod points!
No sense of humor at all, eh?
...because as illiterate as the US is, they couldn't possibly sell fewer books.
...and I've been a good - *fairly* good boy all year!
Gee, thanks for putting *that* picture in my head. Like this discussion wasn't creepy enough already...