Nope. Haberman, I quote from memory, 'conquered the pain of the up-and-out. Separated the brain from the arms and the legs, from the eyes and the ears...' (I'm fairly sure I'm a bit off, but you get the picture.)
'The Game of Rat and Dragon' is a later story of a later age, after the Scanners - already people traveled the stars completely conscious, only the telepaths and their Partners (i.e. cats) combatted the fierce Dragons that lurked in the darkness...
"Heber-Katz, who is also an adjunct professor in the pathology and laboratory medicine department at Penn's School of Medicine, (...)"
Her last name is Katz and she makes mice that regenerate? Hmmm... do I smell a rat in here?
Even worse, for those of you that have read 'Scanners Live in Vain' by Cordwainer Smith and are familiar with the Haberman device, whatever will happen to cats if the Heber-Katz device is invented?
Here, I just checked the aforementioned computer in college... sending from it now.
It has some kind of Intel Pentium II, don't know how fast, and 128 MB RAM.
It's almost as bad as the 386 with Win95 installed: about 2-3 minutes to boot, over a minute for logging in, then more than 30 seconds until Firefox starts.
It's painfully slow - for there just isn't enough memory.
I remember upgrading from Win3.11 to Win95. It was a 100 MHz computer with some 32 MB RAM.
The slowdown was immense, although I cannot really claim the system was unusable - only irritating.
A 386 with 8 MB of RAM (IIRC the stated minimum was 4) was disastrous; the woman who worked on that computer literally came to work, started the computer and went for a coffee - by the time she was back, the computer was just about ready for work.
It was a 15-floppy version of Windows, too... By all the Greek Pantheon, that was a slow and tedious install...
When i bought a new computer, a Duron 600 (it is the one I'm presently working on) with 128 MB of RAM (now upgraded to 256), Win98SE worked OK. A re-install here and a re-install there, but it worked. I guess it still does; haven't booted into Windows for almost a year.
When XP came around, I went to see how it worked. Then I compared the computer it was installed on with my computer (pun alert) and decided it was not worth it - it would take way too much disk space and memory. It's not quite the same as the 386 and Win95, but it is nevertheless a big deal - I work on a computer similar to mine in college - it has Win2k and is much slower than my computer running Gnome with quite a lot of bells and whistles. Now imagine XP... Gods know I did.
So no, I never *had* to buy new hardware for any of the new Windows versions, but all - except maybe Win98SE - have shown a steady increase in resource hogging compared to the previous version.
Not all of us can afford computers new enough to run the upgrades to our operating systems... Hell, if push came to shove, I couldn't even afford Windows (no, I don't own the copy on my computer - it's one of the reasons I run Linux, although practically no-one in Croatia really buys Windows they use at home. *Way* too expensive.) - when I bought this computer, although new, it was already a not-so-good middle-class model - a month or so later, the weakest processor widely available was Duron 700.
My next upgrade (coming soon, thanks to a quiz show a while ago) will not be forced by Windows, but my upgrade of Windows (should I choose to waste some disk space only for a few games and troubleshooting service for my friends) will undoubtedly coincide with my hardware upgrade. Care to guess why?
I distincly recall Neil Gaiman telling about his interviewing a Penthouse model, asking her whether she felt exploited.
Her reply was something on the line of "Honey, I make more money in one photo shoot than in a week in the factory. If anyone's exploited, it's the wankers who pay to see the pictures."
FWIW, it's a job I find much less immoral than, say, MLM or politics.
1. Get a job in Microsoft.
2. Give the flu to as many people there as possible.
3. Post the story to/. It won't even be a dupe, so you might have to try a few times.
4. Observe the glee. Wipe the tear from your eye.
5. Observe your ass getting fired. Wipe another tear from your eye.
6. No profit for quite soe time, but some things are priceless.
A cheaper alternative (as in: no job loss for you!) is alleging that your colleague's wife or whoever is working for Microsoft. Just re-submit the story padded with the additional data.
We may not eat grass, but when you eat lettuce or cabbage you eat leaves - quite similar to grass if I'm to judge.
Oh, well... I know quite a few people that only eat meat and bread; they probably do not need the appendix as even if something lived there (I really wouldn't know about that), it has probably died out years ago.
Now, IIRC, Macromedia bought Freehand from Aldus; therefore, Freehand is not Macromedia's version of anything - they didn't *make* it.
Not to mention what people said before about IE/FF.
Funny how Adobe gets everything eventually... PageMaker was also an Aldus product...
Perhaps we'd be better off with a benevolent elite that wields absolute power.
Well, I guess that the real difference would be the benevolence of said elite, for it seems to me that American govenment in general falls into all the other categories. It is elite (how many of American presidents weren't WASPs?), and it wields nearly absolute power, since it can bomb the Earth thrice into oblivion.
The only thing the world can see is its malevolence, though.
Democracy isn't the best form of government, at least not according to some criteria. It does have the best systems of control, but that's about it.
In my country, everyone talks about democracy, and they all think it means "you can do whatever you want". What I'm trying to say here, most people who talk about democracy don't know what the bloody hell they're talking about.
Every government wields (nearly) absolute power; in democracy, the main advantage is that people can elect said wielders. The main disadvantage of democracy is that the people can elect said wielders - Bush is a prototypical example (although I'm invoking Godwin's Law here, Hitler was also elected in a purely democratic fashion).
But I would like to think that if I buy a wireless router, I can take it out of the box, plug it in, and not do anything else and it will work. If it broadcasts to the world, that is something the manufacturer did wrong, setting it as default that way. The other end of the spectrum is the people who will get a router with restricted access, and not be able to configure it to work with their computers. What do you do? Does owning a wireless router require someone to read a 100 page manual. How many people read the manual that comes with their car, that tells them what grade of oil to use? Most people say fuck it, and just have the oil change place put in the 10w40, regardless of what is best for their car.
Well, there you have it.
The manual is there for you so that you can read it; the fact most people do not is no excuse. Ignorantia manualis neminem excusat;)
Fact is, if you leave your network wide open, as some do for the sake of their customers (at least mostly), you have nothing to sue anyone over.
As in an unmarked property, you might ask the offender to get lost, he can then say 'sorry, I haven't seen any signs or boundaries' and that can only be it.
Wide open network is exactly that - wide open. To the public. Which is something some companies want.
Others may want a more secure network, which is also fine.
Neither can be assumed to be 'wrong' in any way; both uses are legitimate and common.
If you, however, do not use the device properly, you and you alone are responsible for any damages resulting in it. Check the warranty; each and every one says that. I know, I've translated quite a few.
Besides, a company can be assumed to have a systems administrator; it can then also be assumed that if their network is wide open, it is intentionally so.
I wonder whether this guy's lawyer will think of entrapment:
1. Open your network wide.
2. Wait for people to start logging in on your wide open network.
3. Catch them.
4. Sue them.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Sounds like entrapment to me, although not only AINAL, but am also not inside any Anglo-American legal system.
I think New World languages just sound more like they are spelled. New Worlders like to simplify things. Think of Canadian French or Columbian Spanish vs. the original European versions.
Actually, GenAm is - as funny as it may seem - an archaic version of the British pronunciation of English.
Some things, such as spelling, are simplified in comparison to the British English; however, the GenAm pronunciation is archaic, and RP is quite innovative.
Think about it: GenAm is the pronunciation of the people who had moved out from Britain, and generally not from the highest circles of society.
After the independence, Americans generally wanted to differ from the British as much as possible; therefore, when the British innovated and started talking differently, Americans replied with "won't do". There is a similar perversion going on with Croatian and Serbian tongues, with people trying to reconstruct the Croatian of the 19th century just so that it would be as different from Serbian as possible.
So while you are right that New Worlders like to simplify stuff, you're still a bit off... it is the spelling that was simplified to suit pronunciation better, and not vice versa (which reminds me: the way Americans pronounce Latin is just horrible).
2. Controls on the device should allow the user to "zoom in" on particular areas. This would help the user more easily find toolbar buttons and the like.
How about breaking up the userspace then?
The old Gnome apps had detachable menus and toolbars; how about separating the toolbar and the workspace parts? I hear many designers use dual monitors for a similar purpose... tools on one screen, the uncluttered workspace on the other.
One of the ways of communication with the deaf-blind is a tactile language that reminds me - at least the little bit I've seen - of "sticky hands" (chi sau).
Also, the sign language of the deaf uses certain movements as parts of speech.
Although most blind people can type very well, and deaf people can see quite clearly, some redesign of input methods probably wouldn't hurt anyone, easpecially the deaf-blind... and probably some "normal" users as well.
For instance, we could recycle the nearly forgotten 'cyber-gloves' - they could both serve as input devices in the most traditional manner (including serving as a virtual keyboard, probably greatly alleviating the stress on the wrists and, hence, removing the risk of RSI), and as output devices, which I also believe not only the deaf-blind would use.
For instance, you could feel a pop-up somewhere on your forearm; by ignoring it, it would remain lowered, while by reacting to it you could pop it up... or vice versa.
Of course, it would be expensive and "non-intuitive"... but who knows; we just might see some of the forgotten SF stuff in a new role.
F***ing grow up. Can you people discuss ANYTHING without mentioning MS Windows? You remind me of a guy who can't stop mentioning his ex-wife whom he supposedly has gotten over.
That's interesting... see, you were the first one to mention Windows in this thread.
You remind me of a scene from Orson Scott Card's 'Speaker for the Dead', when Quim screams something along the lines of "You'll regret calling my mother a whore!", only to realize, after a moment of utter silence in the town square, that it was him that uttered those words first, while Ender had said nothing of the sort.
I'm not sure that a Beowulf cluster of these is actually offtopic...
I imagine mobile phones interacting with each other via Bluetooth, automatically setting up a cluster as soon as there are ore than two of them in a given area... I don't know whatever for would it be useful, but it seems an interesting idea.
It is also reminiscent of Cranium Rats from Planescape, which is why I'm not certain I'd like to see that happen. Terminator may be the first that comes to mind when people think of machines ruling over people, but I find Stanislaw Lem's ideas much more disturbing... and the mobile phones, with their incessant miniaturization, are heading right there.
So please, moderators, don't go modding down memes just because you've seen them before. An apparent smart-ass can give you quite a lot to think about.
I, for one, would mod parent up Insightful, or at least Interesting.
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'The Game of Rat and Dragon' is a later story of a later age, after the Scanners - already people traveled the stars completely conscious, only the telepaths and their Partners (i.e. cats) combatted the fierce Dragons that lurked in the darkness...
Haven't read it in a long, long time...
Even worse, for those of you that have read 'Scanners Live in Vain' by Cordwainer Smith and are familiar with the Haberman device, whatever will happen to cats if the Heber-Katz device is invented?
It has some kind of Intel Pentium II, don't know how fast, and 128 MB RAM.
It's almost as bad as the 386 with Win95 installed: about 2-3 minutes to boot, over a minute for logging in, then more than 30 seconds until Firefox starts.
It's painfully slow - for there just isn't enough memory.
I remember upgrading from Win3.11 to Win95. It was a 100 MHz computer with some 32 MB RAM.
The slowdown was immense, although I cannot really claim the system was unusable - only irritating.
A 386 with 8 MB of RAM (IIRC the stated minimum was 4) was disastrous; the woman who worked on that computer literally came to work, started the computer and went for a coffee - by the time she was back, the computer was just about ready for work.
It was a 15-floppy version of Windows, too... By all the Greek Pantheon, that was a slow and tedious install...
When i bought a new computer, a Duron 600 (it is the one I'm presently working on) with 128 MB of RAM (now upgraded to 256), Win98SE worked OK. A re-install here and a re-install there, but it worked. I guess it still does; haven't booted into Windows for almost a year.
When XP came around, I went to see how it worked. Then I compared the computer it was installed on with my computer (pun alert) and decided it was not worth it - it would take way too much disk space and memory. It's not quite the same as the 386 and Win95, but it is nevertheless a big deal - I work on a computer similar to mine in college - it has Win2k and is much slower than my computer running Gnome with quite a lot of bells and whistles. Now imagine XP... Gods know I did.
So no, I never *had* to buy new hardware for any of the new Windows versions, but all - except maybe Win98SE - have shown a steady increase in resource hogging compared to the previous version.
Not all of us can afford computers new enough to run the upgrades to our operating systems... Hell, if push came to shove, I couldn't even afford Windows (no, I don't own the copy on my computer - it's one of the reasons I run Linux, although practically no-one in Croatia really buys Windows they use at home. *Way* too expensive.) - when I bought this computer, although new, it was already a not-so-good middle-class model - a month or so later, the weakest processor widely available was Duron 700.
My next upgrade (coming soon, thanks to a quiz show a while ago) will not be forced by Windows, but my upgrade of Windows (should I choose to waste some disk space only for a few games and troubleshooting service for my friends) will undoubtedly coincide with my hardware upgrade. Care to guess why?
Her reply was something on the line of "Honey, I make more money in one photo shoot than in a week in the factory. If anyone's exploited, it's the wankers who pay to see the pictures."
FWIW, it's a job I find much less immoral than, say, MLM or politics.
2. Give the flu to as many people there as possible.
3. Post the story to
4. Observe the glee. Wipe the tear from your eye.
5. Observe your ass getting fired. Wipe another tear from your eye.
6. No profit for quite soe time, but some things are priceless.
A cheaper alternative (as in: no job loss for you!) is alleging that your colleague's wife or whoever is working for Microsoft. Just re-submit the story padded with the additional data.
Oh, well... I know quite a few people that only eat meat and bread; they probably do not need the appendix as even if something lived there (I really wouldn't know about that), it has probably died out years ago.
Lame, but couldn't resist... /duck
Not to mention what people said before about IE/FF.
Funny how Adobe gets everything eventually... PageMaker was also an Aldus product...
I wonder...
Oh, well...
Maybe they are not saving money on workers, but rather on some other things?
The only thing the world can see is its malevolence, though.
Democracy isn't the best form of government, at least not according to some criteria. It does have the best systems of control, but that's about it.
In my country, everyone talks about democracy, and they all think it means "you can do whatever you want". What I'm trying to say here, most people who talk about democracy don't know what the bloody hell they're talking about.
Every government wields (nearly) absolute power; in democracy, the main advantage is that people can elect said wielders. The main disadvantage of democracy is that the people can elect said wielders - Bush is a prototypical example (although I'm invoking Godwin's Law here, Hitler was also elected in a purely democratic fashion).
The manual is there for you so that you can read it; the fact most people do not is no excuse. Ignorantia manualis neminem excusat ;)
Fact is, if you leave your network wide open, as some do for the sake of their customers (at least mostly), you have nothing to sue anyone over.
As in an unmarked property, you might ask the offender to get lost, he can then say 'sorry, I haven't seen any signs or boundaries' and that can only be it.
Wide open network is exactly that - wide open. To the public. Which is something some companies want.
Others may want a more secure network, which is also fine.
Neither can be assumed to be 'wrong' in any way; both uses are legitimate and common.
If you, however, do not use the device properly, you and you alone are responsible for any damages resulting in it. Check the warranty; each and every one says that. I know, I've translated quite a few.
Besides, a company can be assumed to have a systems administrator; it can then also be assumed that if their network is wide open, it is intentionally so.
I wonder whether this guy's lawyer will think of entrapment:
1. Open your network wide.
2. Wait for people to start logging in on your wide open network.
3. Catch them.
4. Sue them.
5. ???
6. Profit!
Sounds like entrapment to me, although not only AINAL, but am also not inside any Anglo-American legal system.
And it would be a good word, actually...
Quasi-egalitarian stuff.
Some things, such as spelling, are simplified in comparison to the British English; however, the GenAm pronunciation is archaic, and RP is quite innovative.
Think about it: GenAm is the pronunciation of the people who had moved out from Britain, and generally not from the highest circles of society.
After the independence, Americans generally wanted to differ from the British as much as possible; therefore, when the British innovated and started talking differently, Americans replied with "won't do". There is a similar perversion going on with Croatian and Serbian tongues, with people trying to reconstruct the Croatian of the 19th century just so that it would be as different from Serbian as possible.
So while you are right that New Worlders like to simplify stuff, you're still a bit off... it is the spelling that was simplified to suit pronunciation better, and not vice versa (which reminds me: the way Americans pronounce Latin is just horrible).
The old Gnome apps had detachable menus and toolbars; how about separating the toolbar and the workspace parts? I hear many designers use dual monitors for a similar purpose... tools on one screen, the uncluttered workspace on the other.
Also, the sign language of the deaf uses certain movements as parts of speech.
Although most blind people can type very well, and deaf people can see quite clearly, some redesign of input methods probably wouldn't hurt anyone, easpecially the deaf-blind... and probably some "normal" users as well.
For instance, we could recycle the nearly forgotten 'cyber-gloves' - they could both serve as input devices in the most traditional manner (including serving as a virtual keyboard, probably greatly alleviating the stress on the wrists and, hence, removing the risk of RSI), and as output devices, which I also believe not only the deaf-blind would use.
For instance, you could feel a pop-up somewhere on your forearm; by ignoring it, it would remain lowered, while by reacting to it you could pop it up... or vice versa.
Of course, it would be expensive and "non-intuitive"... but who knows; we just might see some of the forgotten SF stuff in a new role.
And I'm quite certain there are other OSs to which that could (have) be(en) applied.
You remind me of a scene from Orson Scott Card's 'Speaker for the Dead', when Quim screams something along the lines of "You'll regret calling my mother a whore!", only to realize, after a moment of utter silence in the town square, that it was him that uttered those words first, while Ender had said nothing of the sort.
Freudian slip, anyone?
It'll still be at least 6-8 times faster than what I'm using now.
Does that mean that in Soviet Russia, OS X runs Beowulf clusters?
I imagine mobile phones interacting with each other via Bluetooth, automatically setting up a cluster as soon as there are ore than two of them in a given area... I don't know whatever for would it be useful, but it seems an interesting idea.
It is also reminiscent of Cranium Rats from Planescape, which is why I'm not certain I'd like to see that happen. Terminator may be the first that comes to mind when people think of machines ruling over people, but I find Stanislaw Lem's ideas much more disturbing... and the mobile phones, with their incessant miniaturization, are heading right there.
So please, moderators, don't go modding down memes just because you've seen them before. An apparent smart-ass can give you quite a lot to think about.
I, for one, would mod parent up Insightful, or at least Interesting.
I'm poor, yet I want to buy a new PC.
Therefore, if new CPUs come out, I can get an old one at a greatly reduced price.
I do hope I'll be able to afford a 64-bit CPU... otherwise my new computer will be even more outdated as soon as I buy it.
Which I guess would not be such a problem for a Beowulf cluster of anything.
Of course, now we're both -1 Offtopic ;)
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