That's it? Come on. I take all this time to read this *compelling story* hoping for something profound and you give me the same quote again. Please. For once I am going to burn karma and answer a troll. I don't give a shit about whether one believes in God or not, but I do believe in making the story end well. At least one better ending would have the Marine die, go to heaven with God standing there waiting. "What the fuck marine, I got you a seat in a college course even though your dumb as a brick and you blow it on that line? Get the hell out of here", and thus he sends him back to earth. The marine finally understand Miton.
Seriously, if you take up band width of slashdot with a off topic story, at least have a good ending. Now to find good karma again.
Thank you. I am tired of people who figure out how to write in php, c++,.net, java etc then write some POS system to perform some specific task that later on is a mess to change. Let's apply the thought in the opposite direction and see how comfortable business would be...
Computer programmer part times as pilot for Delta Network technician moonlights as surgeon at Walter Reed. Web designer tackles high rise construction project in spare time.
Please...Yet we seem to accept the opposite as you say, MBAs write fuel tax analysis systems using Excel, or time clock processing developed via Access from the payroll clerk because he took a class one year. I honestly miss the Mainframe coding days when you had to give blood sacrifice to join the brotherhood and enter the inner sanctum to compile your program. (sigh)
'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"
What bullshit comes from the mouths of corporate executives and the media wonks that love to parrot them. The type of job or career Mr Spector talks about is about as rare an item as a top NFL position these days. No matter what is taught in high school and college any more, the type of computer job he talks about is only for the select few. The rest of the standard business coding is slowing being stripped from the United States and send overseas in the form of "consulting" and Enterprise Development solutions. Take a look at many of the top US companies and you will see they are managing their resources, which translates to sending the work overseas for competitive pricing. Good for the short term investment? Of course, but not really for any long term positive development gains.
I really don't give a damn about the term "nerd" though come on, that is really getting old. We all live in a technological society today where the lines are blurrier then they were in the 80s. having a diverse educational background is beneficial towards living a full life. When I went to high school and college we were required to take liberal arts classes along with CompSci to keep in touch with the world around us. Did it make me a better employee? I like to believe so. However, companies back then valued more diversity because they still recognized the human behind the skill. More and more what i see today is that Programmers, mostly business Programmers are being pushed aside for the commidty programmer. "can you program in ? Great, your hired" Doesn't matter that the person may not give a shit about the company or can do anthing but write code in language X. Can they think? Yikes, can't have that any more, because it threatens the managers position. Why care about anything when your position may be "downsized" or dropped with no regard to your status, position, or contribution to said company.
Instead of focusing on creating "cool nerds", how about we focus on getting companies to retain employees, valuing their whole lives, not just the automoton skillsets that drive the assembly line mentality that is development these days. And to comment on the first poster, one huge difference between the NFL player and a computer programmer is that you cannot offshore the NFL position while the programmer position gets "traded" to a offshore team. The day they can do that in football is the day salaries will drop in the NFL. Cool Nerds? Meh!
I pondered your title for a moment. Was this an old english spelling test? Wrods coming from a Celtic derivation of the word Words? I realize you were trying to include the equine species in your comments and I thank you from my mare. She gets very confused over wrods or Words. As a German Trakhener, she is partial to SUSE and would rather Linux get away from the US centric orientation of Kubuntu.
Alas, her hooves are not quite capable of operating a keyboard so she has to rely on my fingers, which are squarely comfortable with Gnome and the Mint distros, for her Google searches on hot stallions, joint supplements, and Eventing results. Wrods or Words, Mares rule the fields against us mere mortals.
its like the warm up laps at Talledega (NASCAR) before they throw the green flag. You know there is going to be a big collision after the start, you just don't know when and how big. For the End of the World it would be if all 43 cars got wrecked so bad that not one could continue the race. Game over.
agreed!! I just tried an upgrade of Kubuntu 9.04 to Karmic and it crashed at 89% complete. This was a hole in the ground crash that now has me starting fresh. So I figure hey, lets try Fedora 11 or lets try something else.
I was able to recover 99% of my data so I am not that pissed, but this reminded me to NEVER upgrade an OS. Reinstall after good backups and a list of all actively used programs.
Why are evil minions so dumb. This guy gets access to all these passwords and his only idea is to blackmail a corporate entity more evil then himself...by doling out uid/pwd combinations a few at a time...please!!
As was already stated the first action by evil corporation is to get the law on their side so they do not have to do any work to change anything. The law pursues the bad guy and he realizes the grand scheme not only fails, but now he's screwed because ultimately he either gets caught, or can't release anything else for fear of being caught and thus becomes harmless. He never gets what he wants.
Were it me (and I most certainly do not live in Belgium) and I choose to do evil I would have blasted all uid/pwds at once across as many nodes as possible thus, for a moment, potentially hurting the pockets of evil corporation. Short lived excitement with no long term reward, but still would be fun to watch the fallout.
My other idea would be to use my new found data to my advantage. Can I load slaves on all those systems so that when I want to watch streaming video of pr0n I piggyback on someone else's quota. Perhaps I can monitor usage and find users with low bandwidth and borrow (steal) from them. I would never ever share this information with others, because certainly at some point a "friend" would abuse the system, or rat me out if/when caught.
No, the guy blackmails a corporate with some stupid ass name and a piss poor methodology for revenge. Do they not teach anything at Evil U any more?
I can't remember the title of the story, but it was portrayed on Twilight Zone. In the story the military (of the future) was screwed because their computers were failing and no one knew how to fix them. They could not figure out how to target the missiles. The janitor was the saviour, because he alone knew how to do math using pen and paper. I wish I could remember more. I found it a very thought provoking story. What happens as we let more and more automatics into our lives? Do I really need to know how to kill and skin a beast for food...just in case...or accept that if I survive the first cataclysm I'll die, not being able to get food.
Hold, the blender just told me my drink is ready, do I have to get up now?
I would have welcomed our new corporate overlords, but hell, they've been here for some time now. How about, I rejoice in the continued glorified presence of our existing, and most wondrous corporate Uberlords and their subservient cronies.
(I think I'll go wash my mind out with a good Vodka at this point)
Had had a different understanding of the OP. I do not believe the basic statement was against exercise or even collecting data, it was the obsession of doing both. I fidn that in my exercise times I cannot use headphones because they do distract from the world around me. People who jog, ride, row using headphones clsoe out the world around them with the consequence of getting hurt ("I did not hear that bus"), or hurting others "("I'm sorry, I did not hear you screaming at me"). Now if the only exercise option I had was a machine in a rows of machines in a club in a city, I'd have the headphones on tight. Its about location.
When it comes to data, I take that as a personal choice. I collected data on my bikes rides and graphed the results. Like others point out, it helps show my progress and set goals based on trends. I would spend all of 15 minutes on that and let it go till hte next session. If someone pours over the data after the workout for long periods of time I would consider it an obsession, though what harm if it does not impact others.
So I agree that headphones on people working out in the outdoors is not the best idea, and pouring over minutia of data points could be wasteful, at least it does mean some is taking care of their body and not counting the number of Nacho flavored Doritos they eat in a day.
Maybe we should just start over completely. Make a new standard that doesn't rely on the rigid and inflexible concept of tags and use a scripting language and have a standard API. Leave HTML for TEXT formatting, and return it back to a document formatting language, leaving dynamic content to a totally separate system....
This has to be the most reasoned thought I've read on slashdot about web develop period. I watch in amazement how the IT industry tries to make a silk purse out of a sows ear, suing bastardized splicing of tags and code to make a current web page/site work. The process reminds me more of my days working on minis developing UI forms and putting code in the same code base. It was ugly.
The idea of providing common APIs and separating form processing from HTML would be a nice change. Wont happen, but something to wish for before I retire (someday).
Have we really become that fractured and that single-minded about things?
Neil
Sadly, yes we have. It is hard to say why other then in a complicated world, some people want simple answers. There is a longer explanation, but that would to complicated and reasoned for much of the population.
Too funny, that was my exact thought just before I read your comment. I started in this industry before the internet, when remote support was done over 1200 baud, and the thought of a multi windowed screen was unthinkable. My first experience with a "windows" system was "No way will I ever have more then one or two windows open, its too confusing".
Today it averages 10 or more, I remote support from my home, across the country, with negligible lag time on a desktop connection, and can be contacted when I am out on my boat sailing. I have maybe 15 more years to go in this industry and frankly I cannot even imagine what systems will be like then.
God, 14 years old remembering Geocities...I feel a lawn comment coming on.
I was going to use my mod points to mod you informative, but when I got to the web site I got this little conundrum: -------------- Subscribe/Join AAAS or Buy Access to This Article to View Full Text. The content you requested requires a AAAS member subscription to this site or Science Pay per Article purchase. If you already have a user name and password, please sign in below -------------------- If you provide a link, please at least make it one where I don't have to pay, or provide the full text here.
As it is I can hardly determine if your thoughts about the EPA are a troll, or true. Try again.
Bloggers are not the most reliable way to get accurate news.
And the news media these is more reliable? Between the farce that is Fox, the corporate business owned CNBC as just two examples of less then reliable reporting, I would start to put my faith more in bloggers. There was a time when I was an avid reader of the paper. I felt I was reading news items, not spun facts to fit an editorial slant set by ownership of the paper. I still would prefer the paper over internet content, but I do not have the time to sit and enjoy a morning read. Sadly, it takes almost as long to weed through all the ad content on something like CNN.com as it does to read a front page article in the paper.
I switched over to Ubuntu in 2007 on my home box. I now run a music server with Linux, have two other systems that run linux and promote linux to friends when I can. Though I make money as a developer on a MS platform I am a linux convert. I just wish development tools where as strong on linux. There really is nothing compared to VS, and yes, I've tried Mono. I'll give it a few more years.
"DATA: The transporters conveniently failed after sending Picard, so I'm going to leap across space to get to Shinzon's ship. GEORDI: What about the transporters in the shuttles? DATA: Shut up. GEORDI: What about the Captain's Yacht? DATA: Shut up. GEORDI: Why didn't we just send a bomb instead of Picard? DATA: Shut up. GEORDI: What about the transporters in the cargo bays? They're independent units, remember? DATA: What part of "shut the fuck up" do you not understand? This is my big heroic exit, asshole. Don't fuck it up."
This has to be some of the best dialog I've read for Star Trek. if sums up every contrived scene in almost every show and movie. FCOL, if you can't use technology to your advantage, you don't deserve it.
Why are you modded a troll? I think that is a valid point. You must has pissed off all the OSS developers with the basic browser statement. When the general population is presented with one option (IE) they will not typically go shopping around until someone shows them the shiny new toy, or they have a disparate need for something that IE does not provide.
You just did...keep going. I look forward to the next installment of/.s Funniest Quotes. Who knows, maybe the next great meme will burst forth, like an alien from a cyborg's chest.
It is wrong to tease new linux users with distros that do not exist. I took valuable time from my life to look for this reference only to discover that ninnle linux is a red herring, a joke, a hoax about as stupid as "pull my finger".
If it exists, post a link, cite an article with a link, do something other the re-enforce a bad meme.
Why did I search? Because *as* a new linux user I am always interested if the next distro is better, easier, more fun to play with then the last one I tried (or Ubuntu, my current distro).
You must need to be hit in the head with a 2x4 to get a point or lack skills to see subtle hints of humor. I took his statement to mean that any country that limits access to current video for legal sale must have third world overtones of government.
Sadly, I think it is less the burden of countries like Germany or the UK that create the limitations, but the greed mongering whores of the USA that create the roadblocks.
One suggestion may be to stop taking things so literal and enjoy the nuance of color now and then. Just remember to have a good day.
The FAA requires a minimum of 40 hours for a PVT license. On average the training time is much longer. It took 63 hours to achieve my PVT rating. Flying has gotten more complex since the days when the government established the initial time limit. Not so much the actual flying, but the rules, and that instructors are teaching better judgment these days. That takes time.
I think I'll wait till they automate a flying car into traffic before considering a purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
The Marine replied, "God was busy, so He sent me.
That's it? Come on. I take all this time to read this *compelling story* hoping for something profound and you give me the same quote again. Please. For once I am going to burn karma and answer a troll. I don't give a shit about whether one believes in God or not, but I do believe in making the story end well. At least one better ending would have the Marine die, go to heaven with God standing there waiting. "What the fuck marine, I got you a seat in a college course even though your dumb as a brick and you blow it on that line? Get the hell out of here", and thus he sends him back to earth. The marine finally understand Miton.
Seriously, if you take up band width of slashdot with a off topic story, at least have a good ending. Now to find good karma again.
Thank you. I am tired of people who figure out how to write in php, c++, .net, java etc then write some POS system to perform some specific task that later on is a mess to change. Let's apply the thought in the opposite direction and see how comfortable business would be...
Computer programmer part times as pilot for Delta
Network technician moonlights as surgeon at Walter Reed.
Web designer tackles high rise construction project in spare time.
Please...Yet we seem to accept the opposite as you say, MBAs write fuel tax analysis systems using Excel, or time clock processing developed via Access from the payroll clerk because he took a class one year. I honestly miss the Mainframe coding days when you had to give blood sacrifice to join the brotherhood and enter the inner sanctum to compile your program. (sigh)
'We need to gain an understanding in the population that education in computer science is both extraordinarily important and extraordinarily interesting,' says Alfred Spector, vice president for research and special initiatives at Google. 'The fear is that if you pursue computer science, you will be stuck in a basement, writing code. That is absolutely not the reality.'"
What bullshit comes from the mouths of corporate executives and the media wonks that love to parrot them. The type of job or career Mr Spector talks about is about as rare an item as a top NFL position these days. No matter what is taught in high school and college any more, the type of computer job he talks about is only for the select few. The rest of the standard business coding is slowing being stripped from the United States and send overseas in the form of "consulting" and Enterprise Development solutions. Take a look at many of the top US companies and you will see they are managing their resources, which translates to sending the work overseas for competitive pricing. Good for the short term investment? Of course, but not really for any long term positive development gains.
I really don't give a damn about the term "nerd" though come on, that is really getting old. We all live in a technological society today where the lines are blurrier then they were in the 80s. having a diverse educational background is beneficial towards living a full life. When I went to high school and college we were required to take liberal arts classes along with CompSci to keep in touch with the world around us. Did it make me a better employee? I like to believe so. However, companies back then valued more diversity because they still recognized the human behind the skill. More and more what i see today is that Programmers, mostly business Programmers are being pushed aside for the commidty programmer. "can you program in ? Great, your hired" Doesn't matter that the person may not give a shit about the company or can do anthing but write code in language X. Can they think? Yikes, can't have that any more, because it threatens the managers position. Why care about anything when your position may be "downsized" or dropped with no regard to your status, position, or contribution to said company.
Instead of focusing on creating "cool nerds", how about we focus on getting companies to retain employees, valuing their whole lives, not just the automoton skillsets that drive the assembly line mentality that is development these days. And to comment on the first poster, one huge difference between the NFL player and a computer programmer is that you cannot offshore the NFL position while the programmer position gets "traded" to a offshore team. The day they can do that in football is the day salaries will drop in the NFL. Cool Nerds? Meh!
I pondered your title for a moment. Was this an old english spelling test? Wrods coming from a Celtic derivation of the word Words? I realize you were trying to include the equine species in your comments and I thank you from my mare. She gets very confused over wrods or Words. As a German Trakhener, she is partial to SUSE and would rather Linux get away from the US centric orientation of Kubuntu.
Alas, her hooves are not quite capable of operating a keyboard so she has to rely on my fingers, which are squarely comfortable with Gnome and the Mint distros, for her Google searches on hot stallions, joint supplements, and Eventing results. Wrods or Words, Mares rule the fields against us mere mortals.
its like the warm up laps at Talledega (NASCAR) before they throw the green flag. You know there is going to be a big collision after the start, you just don't know when and how big. For the End of the World it would be if all 43 cars got wrecked so bad that not one could continue the race. Game over.
I get a charge out of all this co-motion over the LHC
agreed!! I just tried an upgrade of Kubuntu 9.04 to Karmic and it crashed at 89% complete. This was a hole in the ground crash that now has me starting fresh. So I figure hey, lets try Fedora 11 or lets try something else.
I was able to recover 99% of my data so I am not that pissed, but this reminded me to NEVER upgrade an OS. Reinstall after good backups and a list of all actively used programs.
Why are evil minions so dumb. This guy gets access to all these passwords and his only idea is to blackmail a corporate entity more evil then himself...by doling out uid/pwd combinations a few at a time...please!!
As was already stated the first action by evil corporation is to get the law on their side so they do not have to do any work to change anything. The law pursues the bad guy and he realizes the grand scheme not only fails, but now he's screwed because ultimately he either gets caught, or can't release anything else for fear of being caught and thus becomes harmless. He never gets what he wants.
Were it me (and I most certainly do not live in Belgium) and I choose to do evil I would have blasted all uid/pwds at once across as many nodes as possible thus, for a moment, potentially hurting the pockets of evil corporation. Short lived excitement with no long term reward, but still would be fun to watch the fallout.
My other idea would be to use my new found data to my advantage. Can I load slaves on all those systems so that when I want to watch streaming video of pr0n I piggyback on someone else's quota. Perhaps I can monitor usage and find users with low bandwidth and borrow (steal) from them. I would never ever share this information with others, because certainly at some point a "friend" would abuse the system, or rat me out if/when caught.
No, the guy blackmails a corporate with some stupid ass name and a piss poor methodology for revenge. Do they not teach anything at Evil U any more?
I can't remember the title of the story, but it was portrayed on Twilight Zone. In the story the military (of the future) was screwed because their computers were failing and no one knew how to fix them. They could not figure out how to target the missiles. The janitor was the saviour, because he alone knew how to do math using pen and paper. I wish I could remember more. I found it a very thought provoking story. What happens as we let more and more automatics into our lives? Do I really need to know how to kill and skin a beast for food...just in case...or accept that if I survive the first cataclysm I'll die, not being able to get food.
Hold, the blender just told me my drink is ready, do I have to get up now?
I would have welcomed our new corporate overlords, but hell, they've been here for some time now. How about, I rejoice in the continued glorified presence of our existing, and most wondrous corporate Uberlords and their subservient cronies.
(I think I'll go wash my mind out with a good Vodka at this point)
Had had a different understanding of the OP. I do not believe the basic statement was against exercise or even collecting data, it was the obsession of doing both. I fidn that in my exercise times I cannot use headphones because they do distract from the world around me. People who jog, ride, row using headphones clsoe out the world around them with the consequence of getting hurt ("I did not hear that bus"), or hurting others "("I'm sorry, I did not hear you screaming at me"). Now if the only exercise option I had was a machine in a rows of machines in a club in a city, I'd have the headphones on tight. Its about location.
When it comes to data, I take that as a personal choice. I collected data on my bikes rides and graphed the results. Like others point out, it helps show my progress and set goals based on trends. I would spend all of 15 minutes on that and let it go till hte next session. If someone pours over the data after the workout for long periods of time I would consider it an obsession, though what harm if it does not impact others.
So I agree that headphones on people working out in the outdoors is not the best idea, and pouring over minutia of data points could be wasteful, at least it does mean some is taking care of their body and not counting the number of Nacho flavored Doritos they eat in a day.
Maybe we should just start over completely. Make a new standard that doesn't rely on the rigid and inflexible concept of tags and use a scripting language and have a standard API. Leave HTML for TEXT formatting, and return it back to a document formatting language, leaving dynamic content to a totally separate system....
This has to be the most reasoned thought I've read on slashdot about web develop period. I watch in amazement how the IT industry tries to make a silk purse out of a sows ear, suing bastardized splicing of tags and code to make a current web page/site work. The process reminds me more of my days working on minis developing UI forms and putting code in the same code base. It was ugly.
The idea of providing common APIs and separating form processing from HTML would be a nice change. Wont happen, but something to wish for before I retire (someday).
It's quite simple Pinky, I'm going to Take Over The World
talk about door to door pickup/dropoff, now that is customer service.
Have we really become that fractured and that single-minded about things?
Neil
Sadly, yes we have. It is hard to say why other then in a complicated world, some people want simple answers. There is a longer explanation, but that would to complicated and reasoned for much of the population.
(God, I really have become a cynic...sigh)
Too funny, that was my exact thought just before I read your comment. I started in this industry before the internet, when remote support was done over 1200 baud, and the thought of a multi windowed screen was unthinkable. My first experience with a "windows" system was "No way will I ever have more then one or two windows open, its too confusing".
Today it averages 10 or more, I remote support from my home, across the country, with negligible lag time on a desktop connection, and can be contacted when I am out on my boat sailing. I have maybe 15 more years to go in this industry and frankly I cannot even imagine what systems will be like then.
God, 14 years old remembering Geocities...I feel a lawn comment coming on.
I was going to use my mod points to mod you informative, but when I got to the web site I got this little conundrum:
--------------
Subscribe/Join AAAS or Buy Access to This Article to View Full Text. The content you requested requires a AAAS member subscription to this site or Science Pay per Article purchase. If you already have a user name and password, please sign in below
--------------------
If you provide a link, please at least make it one where I don't have to pay, or provide the full text here.
As it is I can hardly determine if your thoughts about the EPA are a troll, or true. Try again.
Bloggers are not the most reliable way to get accurate news.
And the news media these is more reliable? Between the farce that is Fox, the corporate business owned CNBC as just two examples of less then reliable reporting, I would start to put my faith more in bloggers. There was a time when I was an avid reader of the paper. I felt I was reading news items, not spun facts to fit an editorial slant set by ownership of the paper. I still would prefer the paper over internet content, but I do not have the time to sit and enjoy a morning read. Sadly, it takes almost as long to weed through all the ad content on something like CNN.com as it does to read a front page article in the paper.
I switched over to Ubuntu in 2007 on my home box. I now run a music server with Linux, have two other systems that run linux and promote linux to friends when I can. Though I make money as a developer on a MS platform I am a linux convert. I just wish development tools where as strong on linux. There really is nothing compared to VS, and yes, I've tried Mono. I'll give it a few more years.
"DATA: The transporters conveniently failed after sending Picard, so I'm going to leap across space to get to Shinzon's ship.
GEORDI: What about the transporters in the shuttles?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: What about the Captain's Yacht?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: Why didn't we just send a bomb instead of Picard?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: What about the transporters in the cargo bays? They're independent units, remember?
DATA: What part of "shut the fuck up" do you not understand? This is my big heroic exit, asshole. Don't fuck it up."
This has to be some of the best dialog I've read for Star Trek. if sums up every contrived scene in almost every show and movie. FCOL, if you can't use technology to your advantage, you don't deserve it.
Best laugh of the morning for me.
Why are you modded a troll? I think that is a valid point. You must has pissed off all the OSS developers with the basic browser statement. When the general population is presented with one option (IE) they will not typically go shopping around until someone shows them the shiny new toy, or they have a disparate need for something that IE does not provide.
Troll? I'd say a smart troll at least.
You just did...keep going. I look forward to the next installment of /.s Funniest Quotes. Who knows, maybe the next great meme will burst forth, like an alien from a cyborg's chest.
It is wrong to tease new linux users with distros that do not exist. I took valuable time from my life to look for this reference only to discover that ninnle linux is a red herring, a joke, a hoax about as stupid as "pull my finger".
If it exists, post a link, cite an article with a link, do something other the re-enforce a bad meme.
Why did I search? Because *as* a new linux user I am always interested if the next distro is better, easier, more fun to play with then the last one I tried (or Ubuntu, my current distro).
Cough up a link!
You must need to be hit in the head with a 2x4 to get a point or lack skills to see subtle hints of humor. I took his statement to mean that any country that limits access to current video for legal sale must have third world overtones of government.
Sadly, I think it is less the burden of countries like Germany or the UK that create the limitations, but the greed mongering whores of the USA that create the roadblocks.
One suggestion may be to stop taking things so literal and enjoy the nuance of color now and then. Just remember to have a good day.
The FAA requires a minimum of 40 hours for a PVT license. On average the training time is much longer. It took 63 hours to achieve my PVT rating. Flying has gotten more complex since the days when the government established the initial time limit. Not so much the actual flying, but the rules, and that instructors are teaching better judgment these days. That takes time.
I think I'll wait till they automate a flying car into traffic before considering a purchase.