The reality is that often it isn't, people (not just IT workers) fail to see just how good their job is.....I love my job, I love the variety, the sallary is good for my age and my coworkers are motivated but easy enough to get a long with.
Thank you so much for being our sunbeam. You may now retire from your prozac break and go back to work.
For the rest of us, living in the world with the *blue* sky, this study proves (a) you still get bothered at work by morons waving pieces of paper in your face, demanding that you fill them out immediately, and (b) The UK and US are pretty much in lockstep.
But no need to worry your pretty little head about it over on that side of the pond! I'm sure that UK society will become the same kind of totalitarian Fascism based on slavery and pillage that we enjoy over here on the red, white, and blue soil. They have some catching up to do, but they've got a second wind. And when they do catch up, they can rest assured that their workers will stay in their hamster wheels just like our American workers do, simply because there is no option.
Until you buck the system and go do your own thing, of course...
But let's not forget the most entertaining: blowing off steam in mid-hack!
/* Wheee! bsetroot insists on getting it's gradient values in "rgb:xx/xx/xx" format where tk_chooseColor has returned color values in canonical "#xxxxxx" format. So we get to play "sausage-factory" with the strings when we should be done by now! */
Anybody ever seen the comment header at the beginning of screenhack.h of Xscreensaver fame? Any comment that includes that many appropriate references to Monty Python deserves some kind of award!
Hey, there *are* some valid points, here. Try to remember that when we look at proprietary software, we're looking at the products of an impersonal corporation. Any random coder from company Foo is likely to look at the code they wrote for that company's software as being just another ten miles of running in the hamster wheel, forgotten the minute they clock out. Open source has a more "personal" feel to it, and people are likely to feel more attatched to code they wrote themselves at home for the sheer love of coding and desire to give the world something it never had before. Just explaining the psychology!
Count me as one who is such a Linux fanatic, that I blow raspberries at the whole "get people to switch from Windows to Linux" movement. What for, so the lusers can hose up Linux, too? We're giving it away for free! What's our motive in marketing it? Most especially, what the heck is the point of becoming "all market, no substance" like so much of what else is out there? To what end?
That being said, any tools that aide cross-platform compatibility is a win for everybody. I don't see it as a Holy Grail, but it is yet another useful option.
"...from a company that seems to have squandered all of its money... and now seems to play the U.S. legal system like a lottery..." Linus Torvalds. This is just a weak attempt from them, trying to justify their existence. I personally hope it fails badly.
Parent was undeservedly modded flamebait, so I thought I'd repeat it.
Where patents become meaningless. The kicker was "adding and removing whitespace from a document" , done with Unix's "sed" program nearly 50 years ago - much more quickly than any editor running under M$. These people are essentially patenting air so they can charge everybody to breathe. At some point, perhaps after you've patented DNA, sunshine, and the orbiting of galaxies, a credulity barrier must be breached. M$ has made it so that software patents in the future will hold as much water as those famous http://www.legal-forms-kit.com/legal-jokes/dumb-la ws.html
"dumb laws" ; pushed onto the books...just to quietly rot.
Wow, what could be more stereotypically Slashdot than a flame-war over desktops?
No, KDE has all kinds of merit - I set it up for my kids running Mandriva and it's no end of entertainment. KDE has eye-candy for days, and I never met the person who needed more than a few pointers to learn it. KDE's great - for play.
But try this on your machine: develop a game. In desktop one, you have POVray script running in vi and the rendered output on screen one to get the graphics drawn. (Four height-fields in crossing spotlights on a mirrored background -ouch!), Audacity in desktop two creating the sound effects (blending several tones and white noise in a microsecond clip to create a nice crash sound), Emacs in split window on desktop three writing the code and checking the makefile, with Mozilla open on desktop four to a reference manual for Your Favorite Programming language. Oh, yeah, you need desktop five open to test-run the game. Under these conditions, 2 seconds to open each window is a blink to you. It's an eternity for me. Hence, Black/Fluxbox, for utility's sake. And when the crunch is really on, I use TWM!
and I might add to the other reply to the reply...
$1400 for a COMPUTER??? And I bet you use it to run Windows! Listen, computers are free. You just need to learn how to score leftovers and snap up a new motherboard out of the bargain bin.
I have one downstairs running Mandriva and it does every game!
Of my family members, so far I have gotten my brother-in-law to switch to Mac OS X (he is a photographer and wanted Mac anyway) and my sister to switch to Linux
Ye Gods, you're smart! Of my imediate family, I have only gotten my grade-school-age kids to switch to Linux (to the point where they complain constantly of the Windows-only computers at school - exactly my goal!). It takes no effort to get kids to learn Linux at all - unlike adults, they haven't had years of MS brainwashing. Just show them Linux and they go "Cool! Let me try!" Linux, counting the Gnome games and KDE games alone, comes with something like 25-30 games out of the box. Windows has Minesweeper, Solitare, Freecell, and Hearts - case closed.
My In-laws are hopeless: They can *barely* handle anything at all, and are cookie-cutter conformists in every single way. It's not only that they can't handle Linux, it's that Linux would be "perverted" to them. Free Software sounds just like Communism, and Senator McCarthy would roll right over in his grave if he knew.
The battle rages on for the soul of my spouse. I've gotten her to using Linux 90% of the time, but I'll catch her booting over to Windows - ask why and it'll be some dumb toy that they just released for Yahoo chat that insists on Windows-only to run. (Yahoo for Linux works just fine, but doesn't get the Happy-Meal-Toy-of-the-week that the Windows version does) Everytime I put in a work-around, that's just the time they come up with a new dumb frob to keep people using Windows. It's like battling Satan! Because one person uses Windows 10% of the time, I *still* have to sit with the Windows disk once a month and shovel out the virusware! *sigh*
You know what our problem is? We're too indulgent! All we have to do the next time Windows crashes is just say, "Sorry, looks like it's broke and I can't fix it this time! You can pay another arm for another Windows system or run this free Linux disk I'm giving you!"
, I wonder if you can provide the functionality that goes missing by running your own services.
*ding* *ding* *ding*! Jackpot! Yes, in the pre-Linux days, you could write your own version of any program using QBasic (version QB4.5 compiled to executables - I still guard a platinum-iridium floppy with QB4.5.zip on it).
Put that together with stuffing DOS commands into DOS batch files - bletch! DOS is like 1/1000th of Bash, but the same concepts apply.
These days, you can dual-boot Linux and Windows from the same PC, mount the Windows drive from Linux, and then -heh - you have much more *powerful* tools to manage Microsloth with! By the way, Emacs is available for Windows, and can be run in batch mode to execute Lisp scripts. Ditto Tcl/Tk, Python, and others. Some compilers can be set for producing Windows.exe's instead of Linux binaries. vi can edit.COM and.INI files. And then, of course, Linux has Wine to run Windows programs anyway...
See, folks, Windows really *was* user-friendly the whole time! But, like a crack whore, you have to know what to give it to make it your friend, first!
I'm pretty surprised that this wasn't common knowledge! Here, all this time, I thought everybody ran their Windows system this way!
Those of you who had Windows back when it was 3.1, scanned the famous "for Dummies" books, absorbed Peter Norton's work, learned QBasic, and wrote your own DOS batch scripts are with me on this, perhaps? Windows can quite handily be "lobotomized" into obeying your wishes! Even the famous binaries can be edited using a hex editor, which is how we fixed our systems before Linux came along.
Regardless of how stupid the priprietary software vendors tell you you are, I would like to once again point out that it's YOUR computer which YOU paid for, and you have the right to change ANYTHING on your system that you want, regardless of what the EULA says.
Read through your system today! You'll find config.sys, autoexec.bat, win.ini and company in pretty much the same form they were back in 1992. The same lousy.dll's and CAB files. The DOS utilities are still there. You can still make a Windows boot disk and run your system from that. Microsoft actually changes little from one release to another, they just patch it and play a shell game to make it look like you got something for your money when you bought the new version.
Yes, Windows shills, it turns out that we Linux geeks aren't bashing M$ all this time out of bigotry: we bash M$ because we are computer geeks who Know Our Stuff!
If you mod me down, I will come to your house and take away your children
OK, I won't mod you down, after you switched to your other account and modded yourself +5 funny. I especially won't deign to dignify the cow-pattie in your link as a blog with any kind of critique. I will say that you're a huge asshole instead, but you probably already know this and are quite happy about it!
Video game consoles that hook up to your TV just might be going the way of the typewriter, the phonograph record, the corded telephone, and the fountain pen. I can remember when video pong seemed the most exciting thing in the home. Now, games come on a cell phone - in color! My watch plays games. PC computer games have come up to catch up with and even surpass consoles, given the right hardware.
I only hope it's not long before I get to give this speech about Wintendo as well.
But Fluxbox/Blackbox own my heart forever, once I discovered them. And I just dump "kicker" into my Flux menu right between "gnome-panel" and "xfce4-panel" and I get everything when I need it.
KDE's nice, though, if you have lightening-fast hardware.
My way, my man, leads to change. The public can assert itself and refuse to be treated like lab rats doing tricks to earn their next pellet, or it can go on running the rat race. You, me, everybody: we all need to be free. And if freedom were all that easy, there'd be a lot more of it to go around.
My apologies for being offensive. I'm just pointing out, I do what I want these days. I work for me. I alter the rules to fit myself. I don't have millions of dollars, but I get by and provide for my family. And the attitude I have demonstrated, that's what got me here. You can try that path, or find your own.
But I see the business world hasn't changed much since I left it, and I don't miss it. My sympathy is with you, hero, for putting up with this circus!
As for my idea: Richard M Stallman often drew comparisons between open source code and cookie recipes. To this day, a page of cookie recipes even comes with a standard install of Emacs.
A recipe, he pointed out, costs the owner nothing to share. When you're hungry, you make up a new recipe for baking cookies and then eat your cookies, your problem was solved. It then costs you nothing to share your recipe with other people. And next time, somebody might even share their recipe with you.
Now, bring BOXES of cookies with you to the meeting, and work out some kind of visual where you pretend the ingredients list cut off the back of the package is the "cookie source code". Be sure your audience gets to eat plenty of cookies during the presentation. Bring a Sesame Street(TM) cookie monster puppet along to demonstrate greedy Proprietary software tycoons who want to horde all the recipes and keep all the cookies for themselves. Perhaps work out that the "cookie box" is a "compiler" and you feed it the "source code" and out pops a cookie. Let everybody run down to their last recipe before you point out that they can make as many copies of the "source code" in the copier as they want, and then they'll never run out of cookies!
I have no idea how much time you have, here, but fifteen minutes should be filled. If you make sure everybody has eaten a cookie at the beginning of the presentation, fifteen minutes will be just enough time for the dopamine from the chocolate and sugar to hit their brains just as your presentation concludes and it's time for them to stand up and applaud. Can't hurt!
Microsoft has always been derivative, granted. But...you call this a feature list?
"security enhancements" We wish. We really, really wish! But every other system left MS behind on this point a decade ago.
"a new searching mechanism" you mean like "grep" or "locate" like Linux has had for years? Or locking in the desktop to MSN search?
"lots of new laptop features" we really hope that doesn't mean it'll run as a live CD on a laptop like Knoppix or anything. That would be too weird.
"parental controls" You mean like a root/admin account like Unix had 50 years ago?
"better home networking" Hopefully, it will now recognize an ethernet board when I plug it in. Like Linux has for years.
"shiny translucent windows" Anybody seen a screenshot of Fluxbox window manager for Linux, lately? Hey, can you do the menus and tabs and taskbar translucent while you're at it?
"icons that are a tiny representation of a document itself" - gasp! Astounding! What a stroke of genius! They're called "thumbnails", Billy, and Gnome and KDE have had that going since the turn of the century.
When, oh when, are we of the Open-Source community going to get the money and the brains at the same time to hire a pack of lawyers and sue this asshole for ripping off our hard work?
For the longest time, I've protested the push to lobotomize and thorozine-inject Linux until it's a perfect Windows clone, to the purpose of attracting more Windows users at the expense of killing everything that makes Linux great.
So now, one of the distinguishing features of MacIntosh, it's vaunted hardware integration, is going the way of the dodo. Yes, I presume Mac will still make it's hardware: step back and take the wide view with me for one second, here, OK? My puzzle is, to what purpose do we port Mac OS to Intel chips? Groovy that I'll have yet another operating system choice...but when I'm running Mac OS on my ATX mobo and my garage-sale monitor, *what* advantage will Mac have left over other OSs?
In case you were wondering, "the gutter" is where I was born, the "mean streets" are where I was raised. I don't make my judgements on society from the window of my ivory tower, I'm doing it based on looking back on my own struggle. Everything I've ever gotten in my life, I fought for. If I were the kind of wuss who clung to one thing in life for security, living my whole life like a rat afraid to go out of his hole, I never would have survived very long. And I still kept to my scruples, my conscience, my morals, the entire time.
Yes, I'm talking to you. Quit and go on welfare. Better your position is unfilled, with nobody to carry out those orders; and when I pay taxes, this is the exact kind of use I dream of it being put to (this, and keeping the libraries around, are pretty much the only two Government programs that work). And you certainly deserve to take it easy, if you find your world so overwhealing. God forbid you'd have had to live any year of my life, you'd have blown your fucking brains out.
Very funny, but don't laugh too hard. A few years ago in Vegas, a town which averages three new casinos and two new strip bars per year, a bill was proposed to allocate a small five-figure sum to build a few more libraries to keep step with the exploding population. The citizens of Las Vegas actually took picket signs to the streets to protest it, and the measure was shot down. Very seldom have I been filled with such horror and loathing, as when I saw an entire population voluntarily act to stay as ignorant as possible. Then I moved to Iowa.
However, PLEASE try and remember something. The people you talk to and buy things from are not the store owners. In fact, they're lucky if they've ever even met the franchise owner of the store, let alone the owner of the company.
You knew this was bogus even as you typed it, didn't you?
The purpose of applying heat to salesdrones is to supply them with a negative feedback loop between myself and their employer. When they get tired of taking flack from customers for *doing their job* they'll either complain about that particular duty to the boss (hiding his cowardly ass behind closed doors where I can't question his stupid policy directly), or will quit, costing the boss a cost of replacing and retraining the employee, as well as causing the employee to be motivated to work a real job where their duties don't require them to harass the public.
Wahhhhh-h-h, give me a bunch of guff about how Mr. and Mrs. Salesdrone need to eat, etc. I eat plenty, so do my family, and I never worked behind a register a day in my life. Or telemarketing, or drug dealing, or terrorism, or putting cookies on people's computers, or working for Bill Gates, or manning the showers at Aushwitz (sp?), or any of the other activities somebody else can hire you to do which are detrimental to the public. Is it your job to make other people's lives hell? Tell your boss you refuse to do that. If you lose that job, consider it a blessing. If it happens enough times with enough people, watch Holy "store policy" change!
But if we all continue acting like spineless worms, we quite rightly deserve to be powerless to do anything about the various hells of modern society except snivel about it to the thin air on Slashdot. I do something about it. Salesdrones, "customer service representatives", "telecommunications-enabled consumer assitance technicians" or any other bogus thing they're called get the full heat of my wrath, as if they, personally set the policy themselves. And if my job makes me do something I morally disagree with, I circumvent the rule, campaign to get it changed, or quit.
[Begin humor--!-
PS I hope I've offended you and ruined your day! Because I didn't decide to type this post. I work for a homeless guy who lives in a dumpster in LA, who paid me a dime back in 1986 and said, "Go bug somebody else!" I am committed to carrying out my Mission Statement, and it is not my fault what consequences of that action transpire because I'm only following company policy. -!--End humor]
And I might add, anybody who sees a story about plugging a device into your skull to electrically stimulate the pleasure center of the brain and doesn't immediately flash on tasps, wireheads, Larry Niven, and Louis Wu (the most famous recovering wirehead of Known Space; so painfull his withdrawals were, that he'd risk a kzin's ire to get his fix!) probably has stumbled onto Slashdot by mistake, although it's a mystery how such person could get mod access so quickly.
Go READ A BOOK, you surfium illiterum! Next, I suppose we'll see Terry Pratchett references modded down OT in discussions about traveling luggage...
We, as consumers, bought and paid for every single byte of memory on our hard drives. Which leads one to the logical conclusion that we, and nobody else including God Himself, should have final say over what does and doesn't get written to those hard drives.
Even if cookies cured cancer and promoted world peace and got me dates with Claudia Schiffer, I would still delete them, because they are data on my hard drive which I did not give explicit permission to to exist. I will remember my own log-ins, thank you. It's none of anybody's business what my buying/surfing habits are. And Bash shell scripts/cron jobs will continue to kill cookies in every folder they accumulate in, no matter what devious tricks Madison Avenue comes up with.
Would you buy a car just to let somebody else drive it? And you notice that it's *marketers*, not consumers wringing their hands over cookies. That should clue you right there.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you so much for being our sunbeam. You may now retire from your prozac break and go back to work.
For the rest of us, living in the world with the *blue* sky, this study proves (a) you still get bothered at work by morons waving pieces of paper in your face, demanding that you fill them out immediately, and (b) The UK and US are pretty much in lockstep.
But no need to worry your pretty little head about it over on that side of the pond! I'm sure that UK society will become the same kind of totalitarian Fascism based on slavery and pillage that we enjoy over here on the red, white, and blue soil. They have some catching up to do, but they've got a second wind. And when they do catch up, they can rest assured that their workers will stay in their hamster wheels just like our American workers do, simply because there is no option.
Until you buck the system and go do your own thing, of course...
Make trouble? Hah! I INVENTED trouble!!!
Anybody ever seen the comment header at the beginning of screenhack.h of Xscreensaver fame? Any comment that includes that many appropriate references to Monty Python deserves some kind of award!
But not as much fun as exagerated ridicule!
Hey, there *are* some valid points, here. Try to remember that when we look at proprietary software, we're looking at the products of an impersonal corporation. Any random coder from company Foo is likely to look at the code they wrote for that company's software as being just another ten miles of running in the hamster wheel, forgotten the minute they clock out. Open source has a more "personal" feel to it, and people are likely to feel more attatched to code they wrote themselves at home for the sheer love of coding and desire to give the world something it never had before. Just explaining the psychology!
Count me as one who is such a Linux fanatic, that I blow raspberries at the whole "get people to switch from Windows to Linux" movement. What for, so the lusers can hose up Linux, too? We're giving it away for free! What's our motive in marketing it? Most especially, what the heck is the point of becoming "all market, no substance" like so much of what else is out there? To what end?
That being said, any tools that aide cross-platform compatibility is a win for everybody. I don't see it as a Holy Grail, but it is yet another useful option.
Parent was undeservedly modded flamebait, so I thought I'd repeat it.
Where patents become meaningless. The kicker was "adding and removing whitespace from a document" , done with Unix's "sed" program nearly 50 years ago - much more quickly than any editor running under M$. These people are essentially patenting air so they can charge everybody to breathe. At some point, perhaps after you've patented DNA, sunshine, and the orbiting of galaxies, a credulity barrier must be breached. M$ has made it so that software patents in the future will hold as much water as those famous http://www.legal-forms-kit.com/legal-jokes/dumb-la ws.html
"dumb laws" ; pushed onto the books...just to quietly rot.
No, KDE has all kinds of merit - I set it up for my kids running Mandriva and it's no end of entertainment. KDE has eye-candy for days, and I never met the person who needed more than a few pointers to learn it. KDE's great - for play.
But try this on your machine: develop a game. In desktop one, you have POVray script running in vi and the rendered output on screen one to get the graphics drawn. (Four height-fields in crossing spotlights on a mirrored background -ouch!), Audacity in desktop two creating the sound effects (blending several tones and white noise in a microsecond clip to create a nice crash sound), Emacs in split window on desktop three writing the code and checking the makefile, with Mozilla open on desktop four to a reference manual for Your Favorite Programming language. Oh, yeah, you need desktop five open to test-run the game. Under these conditions, 2 seconds to open each window is a blink to you. It's an eternity for me. Hence, Black/Fluxbox, for utility's sake. And when the crunch is really on, I use TWM!
$1400 for a COMPUTER??? And I bet you use it to run Windows! Listen, computers are free. You just need to learn how to score leftovers and snap up a new motherboard out of the bargain bin.
I have one downstairs running Mandriva and it does every game!
Ye Gods, you're smart! Of my imediate family, I have only gotten my grade-school-age kids to switch to Linux (to the point where they complain constantly of the Windows-only computers at school - exactly my goal!). It takes no effort to get kids to learn Linux at all - unlike adults, they haven't had years of MS brainwashing. Just show them Linux and they go "Cool! Let me try!" Linux, counting the Gnome games and KDE games alone, comes with something like 25-30 games out of the box. Windows has Minesweeper, Solitare, Freecell, and Hearts - case closed.
My In-laws are hopeless: They can *barely* handle anything at all, and are cookie-cutter conformists in every single way. It's not only that they can't handle Linux, it's that Linux would be "perverted" to them. Free Software sounds just like Communism, and Senator McCarthy would roll right over in his grave if he knew.
The battle rages on for the soul of my spouse. I've gotten her to using Linux 90% of the time, but I'll catch her booting over to Windows - ask why and it'll be some dumb toy that they just released for Yahoo chat that insists on Windows-only to run. (Yahoo for Linux works just fine, but doesn't get the Happy-Meal-Toy-of-the-week that the Windows version does) Everytime I put in a work-around, that's just the time they come up with a new dumb frob to keep people using Windows. It's like battling Satan! Because one person uses Windows 10% of the time, I *still* have to sit with the Windows disk once a month and shovel out the virusware! *sigh*
You know what our problem is? We're too indulgent! All we have to do the next time Windows crashes is just say, "Sorry, looks like it's broke and I can't fix it this time! You can pay another arm for another Windows system or run this free Linux disk I'm giving you!"
*ding* *ding* *ding*! Jackpot! Yes, in the pre-Linux days, you could write your own version of any program using QBasic (version QB4.5 compiled to executables - I still guard a platinum-iridium floppy with QB4.5.zip on it). Put that together with stuffing DOS commands into DOS batch files - bletch! DOS is like 1/1000th of Bash, but the same concepts apply.
These days, you can dual-boot Linux and Windows from the same PC, mount the Windows drive from Linux, and then -heh - you have much more *powerful* tools to manage Microsloth with! By the way, Emacs is available for Windows, and can be run in batch mode to execute Lisp scripts. Ditto Tcl/Tk, Python, and others. Some compilers can be set for producing Windows .exe's instead of Linux binaries. vi can edit .COM and .INI files. And then, of course, Linux has Wine to run Windows programs anyway...
See, folks, Windows really *was* user-friendly the whole time! But, like a crack whore, you have to know what to give it to make it your friend, first!
Those of you who had Windows back when it was 3.1, scanned the famous "for Dummies" books, absorbed Peter Norton's work, learned QBasic, and wrote your own DOS batch scripts are with me on this, perhaps? Windows can quite handily be "lobotomized" into obeying your wishes! Even the famous binaries can be edited using a hex editor, which is how we fixed our systems before Linux came along.
Regardless of how stupid the priprietary software vendors tell you you are, I would like to once again point out that it's YOUR computer which YOU paid for, and you have the right to change ANYTHING on your system that you want, regardless of what the EULA says.
Read through your system today! You'll find config.sys, autoexec.bat, win.ini and company in pretty much the same form they were back in 1992. The same lousy .dll's and CAB files. The DOS utilities are still there. You can still make a Windows boot disk and run your system from that. Microsoft actually changes little from one release to another, they just patch it and play a shell game to make it look like you got something for your money when you bought the new version.
Yes, Windows shills, it turns out that we Linux geeks aren't bashing M$ all this time out of bigotry: we bash M$ because we are computer geeks who Know Our Stuff!
OK, I won't mod you down, after you switched to your other account and modded yourself +5 funny. I especially won't deign to dignify the cow-pattie in your link as a blog with any kind of critique. I will say that you're a huge asshole instead, but you probably already know this and are quite happy about it!
Funny, I thought Linux was Debian without the BS
I only hope it's not long before I get to give this speech about Wintendo as well.
KDE's nice, though, if you have lightening-fast hardware.
My way, my man, leads to change. The public can assert itself and refuse to be treated like lab rats doing tricks to earn their next pellet, or it can go on running the rat race. You, me, everybody: we all need to be free. And if freedom were all that easy, there'd be a lot more of it to go around.
My apologies for being offensive. I'm just pointing out, I do what I want these days. I work for me. I alter the rules to fit myself. I don't have millions of dollars, but I get by and provide for my family. And the attitude I have demonstrated, that's what got me here. You can try that path, or find your own.
As for my idea: Richard M Stallman often drew comparisons between open source code and cookie recipes. To this day, a page of cookie recipes even comes with a standard install of Emacs.
A recipe, he pointed out, costs the owner nothing to share. When you're hungry, you make up a new recipe for baking cookies and then eat your cookies, your problem was solved. It then costs you nothing to share your recipe with other people. And next time, somebody might even share their recipe with you.
Now, bring BOXES of cookies with you to the meeting, and work out some kind of visual where you pretend the ingredients list cut off the back of the package is the "cookie source code". Be sure your audience gets to eat plenty of cookies during the presentation. Bring a Sesame Street(TM) cookie monster puppet along to demonstrate greedy Proprietary software tycoons who want to horde all the recipes and keep all the cookies for themselves. Perhaps work out that the "cookie box" is a "compiler" and you feed it the "source code" and out pops a cookie. Let everybody run down to their last recipe before you point out that they can make as many copies of the "source code" in the copier as they want, and then they'll never run out of cookies!
I have no idea how much time you have, here, but fifteen minutes should be filled. If you make sure everybody has eaten a cookie at the beginning of the presentation, fifteen minutes will be just enough time for the dopamine from the chocolate and sugar to hit their brains just as your presentation concludes and it's time for them to stand up and applaud. Can't hurt!
"security enhancements" We wish. We really, really wish! But every other system left MS behind on this point a decade ago.
"a new searching mechanism" you mean like "grep" or "locate" like Linux has had for years? Or locking in the desktop to MSN search?
"lots of new laptop features" we really hope that doesn't mean it'll run as a live CD on a laptop like Knoppix or anything. That would be too weird.
"parental controls" You mean like a root/admin account like Unix had 50 years ago?
"better home networking" Hopefully, it will now recognize an ethernet board when I plug it in. Like Linux has for years.
"shiny translucent windows" Anybody seen a screenshot of Fluxbox window manager for Linux, lately? Hey, can you do the menus and tabs and taskbar translucent while you're at it?
"icons that are a tiny representation of a document itself" - gasp! Astounding! What a stroke of genius! They're called "thumbnails", Billy, and Gnome and KDE have had that going since the turn of the century.
When, oh when, are we of the Open-Source community going to get the money and the brains at the same time to hire a pack of lawyers and sue this asshole for ripping off our hard work?
So now, one of the distinguishing features of MacIntosh, it's vaunted hardware integration, is going the way of the dodo. Yes, I presume Mac will still make it's hardware: step back and take the wide view with me for one second, here, OK? My puzzle is, to what purpose do we port Mac OS to Intel chips? Groovy that I'll have yet another operating system choice...but when I'm running Mac OS on my ATX mobo and my garage-sale monitor, *what* advantage will Mac have left over other OSs?
A real-life LARTing! If you happen upon a sysadmin in an un-naturally good mood, that's probably the perpetrator.
In case you were wondering, "the gutter" is where I was born, the "mean streets" are where I was raised. I don't make my judgements on society from the window of my ivory tower, I'm doing it based on looking back on my own struggle. Everything I've ever gotten in my life, I fought for. If I were the kind of wuss who clung to one thing in life for security, living my whole life like a rat afraid to go out of his hole, I never would have survived very long. And I still kept to my scruples, my conscience, my morals, the entire time.
Yes, I'm talking to you. Quit and go on welfare. Better your position is unfilled, with nobody to carry out those orders; and when I pay taxes, this is the exact kind of use I dream of it being put to (this, and keeping the libraries around, are pretty much the only two Government programs that work). And you certainly deserve to take it easy, if you find your world so overwhealing. God forbid you'd have had to live any year of my life, you'd have blown your fucking brains out.
Very funny, but don't laugh too hard. A few years ago in Vegas, a town which averages three new casinos and two new strip bars per year, a bill was proposed to allocate a small five-figure sum to build a few more libraries to keep step with the exploding population. The citizens of Las Vegas actually took picket signs to the streets to protest it, and the measure was shot down. Very seldom have I been filled with such horror and loathing, as when I saw an entire population voluntarily act to stay as ignorant as possible. Then I moved to Iowa.
You knew this was bogus even as you typed it, didn't you?
The purpose of applying heat to salesdrones is to supply them with a negative feedback loop between myself and their employer. When they get tired of taking flack from customers for *doing their job* they'll either complain about that particular duty to the boss (hiding his cowardly ass behind closed doors where I can't question his stupid policy directly), or will quit, costing the boss a cost of replacing and retraining the employee, as well as causing the employee to be motivated to work a real job where their duties don't require them to harass the public.
Wahhhhh-h-h, give me a bunch of guff about how Mr. and Mrs. Salesdrone need to eat, etc. I eat plenty, so do my family, and I never worked behind a register a day in my life. Or telemarketing, or drug dealing, or terrorism, or putting cookies on people's computers, or working for Bill Gates, or manning the showers at Aushwitz (sp?), or any of the other activities somebody else can hire you to do which are detrimental to the public. Is it your job to make other people's lives hell? Tell your boss you refuse to do that. If you lose that job, consider it a blessing. If it happens enough times with enough people, watch Holy "store policy" change!
But if we all continue acting like spineless worms, we quite rightly deserve to be powerless to do anything about the various hells of modern society except snivel about it to the thin air on Slashdot. I do something about it. Salesdrones, "customer service representatives", "telecommunications-enabled consumer assitance technicians" or any other bogus thing they're called get the full heat of my wrath, as if they, personally set the policy themselves. And if my job makes me do something I morally disagree with, I circumvent the rule, campaign to get it changed, or quit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scruples
[Begin humor--!- PS I hope I've offended you and ruined your day! Because I didn't decide to type this post. I work for a homeless guy who lives in a dumpster in LA, who paid me a dime back in 1986 and said, "Go bug somebody else!" I am committed to carrying out my Mission Statement, and it is not my fault what consequences of that action transpire because I'm only following company policy. -!--End humor]
And I might add, anybody who sees a story about plugging a device into your skull to electrically stimulate the pleasure center of the brain and doesn't immediately flash on tasps, wireheads, Larry Niven, and Louis Wu (the most famous recovering wirehead of Known Space; so painfull his withdrawals were, that he'd risk a kzin's ire to get his fix!) probably has stumbled onto Slashdot by mistake, although it's a mystery how such person could get mod access so quickly.
Go READ A BOOK, you surfium illiterum! Next, I suppose we'll see Terry Pratchett references modded down OT in discussions about traveling luggage...
Even if cookies cured cancer and promoted world peace and got me dates with Claudia Schiffer, I would still delete them, because they are data on my hard drive which I did not give explicit permission to to exist. I will remember my own log-ins, thank you. It's none of anybody's business what my buying/surfing habits are. And Bash shell scripts/cron jobs will continue to kill cookies in every folder they accumulate in, no matter what devious tricks Madison Avenue comes up with.
Would you buy a car just to let somebody else drive it? And you notice that it's *marketers*, not consumers wringing their hands over cookies. That should clue you right there.