I think talent is usually correlated with motivation and desire to succeed, more than anything else.
You can become talented by practicing skills enough - the will to practice is all on you, though. I wasn't born understanding pointers or virtual functions, but man, when I discovered them it was so damn interesting I had to understand everything about them.
Alternately, you're saying that you have no interest in what poor people have to say.
Only here in the US do we consider people who have enough money for a phone, computer, a place to put them all, electricity, and an ISP connection "poor".
Poor people don't play with computers. They are trying to eat and find a place to live.
Not necessarily. What's printed on the label as an ale or lager does not mean what yeast is used. Some states have weird laws determining what you are allowed to call an "ale" which are not the technically correct definitions. (Ale yeast ferement at room temps, 60-70F. Lager yeasts ferment at refrigerated temperatures - 35F.)
Basically, the ingredients listed here are useless. Brewing is all about technique, not ingredients. In order to realistically clone a beer, you need to know:
The yeast strain to produce the correct flavor profile. Even specifying "ale yeast" is not enough. There are dozens and dozens of strains with very different flavors.
What kind/brand of grain used and its color. Caramel malt comes in a wide spectrum of colors and varieties.
The expected alpha acid % in the hops to normalize for natural differences. One day your Hallertauer might be 2% and the next 4%. If you don't normalize, the second will be roughly twice as bitter.
What temperataure it's fermented and conditioned at, and for how long. Some beers have complex fermentation schedules with many changes.
Mineral profile of the water they use. You can't substitute hard water for soft and expect it to be the same.
How it's mashed. Single infusion? Double? Protein rest? Mash out? Maybe it's a (single/double triple) decoction?
Without all that, you are not cloning a beer, but merely making something vaguely similar. This level of detail is what brewmasters need to do to make a zillion gallons that all tastes the same, regardless of region. That's why when you buy Sam Adams in Arizona, made with different ingredients, it still tastes like Sam Adams.
Basically, this recipe is a marketing ploy and not useful in the least.
If we pulled out of Saudi Arabia and Iraq today, I believe they'd find something else to justify their actions -- something like less defined like "cultural imperialism".
Let's define $evil_thing, which could be porn, or hamburgers, or maybe even just women driving.
So, $evil_thing anywhere near a Muslim, even in the middle of France, is now grounds for war, because of the corrosive and corruptive effects.
So we remove all our $evil_things. But, there's TV and the Internet and word of mouth, and now there's the temptation of going to America and seeing $evil_thing!
Religious nutjobs will justify what they want with anything.
I'm not using this to justify anything. If anything, I think everything we've done so far is precisely the wrong thing to do.
Am I the only one just not that scared of terror? My view is that the chance from getting from injured by terror is much less than getting into a car accident. Yet, I still drive daily. Come back to me when the terror kills more than heart disease, or cancer, or whatever causes people to really die en masse.
The sad thing is I actually worked on a project where version 1.2 was delivered before 1.1.
No time travel involved, just PHBs.
For the bored: 1.1 and 1.2 were both spec'd with separate feature sets that really weren't dependent on each other. As PHBs are wont to do, they futzed with the specs endlessly, and then decided to deliver 1.1 feature set later than the 1.2 feature set.
Of course, any rational human being would either not name the feature set "1.1" until it's about to go out the door, or rename 1.2 to 1.1 as the politic^H^H^H^H^H^H^H scheduling changed.
Almost. Great works have been republished over the centuries, and each edition gets a new copyright. I'll speak from personal experience:
For example, Gilbert and Sullivan's operas are public domain. However, than doesn't necessarily mean that if you find a printed libretto or score, you can copy it legally.
There are people creating new editions of these all the time, and those fall under modern copyright. The only difference is they don't have to ask the heirs of G&S to do so. They can reverse engineer it from a recording, or, much easier, simply write a new score out based on an old one.
This is a great thing: I can go and buy a beautifully engraved new edition of "Pirates or Penzance", or, I can sit down and make my own edition. No need to ask G&S's great-great-great-grandlawyer to do so.
I spend time working with local opera companies. Sometimes they'll perform an opera in which the only score and parts are hand-written and very hard to read. If it's particularly bad, they'll legally take on the work to do it themselves. Once done, that edition is copyright to them. Some sell it, some rent it, some hoard it. High-end music is almost always rented - you cannot legally purchase the score or parts to most Broadway musicals, for example.
All the hard work in producing a professional score is not just the notes - it's the layout. Making something readable and professional takes time and a lot of practice.
Depends what you want to do. I have only ever wanted to be a developer, and to write "off the shelf" software. I started off out of college at a enormous, well-known defense contractor. It's not the most exciting programing, but the benefits are this:
- If you have 1/3 of a brain, you will likely be one of the best programmers there. There are lot Wallys in a place like that.
- Good pay, benefits and travel. I got deployed overseas for a while, which is "mad money": in 4 months, I saved an amount almost equal my entire yearly salary. That bought my house.
- You will meet a lot of people, and a lot of them will quit. If you network right and are smart, it's a great asset. People will remember you and try to pull you along to their new company. If I got canned today there are probably 50 people I could email or call for an "in" somewhere else.
- You'll gain experience.
I quit after a few years, and wound up doing exactly what I want - programming at a small ISV.
I think it shouldn't be for just owning a computer, but plugging it in to a broadband connection.
To make an analogy, you can drive around your land on an unregistered, uninsured car with no driver's license. You only need a license to drive on public roads, because what you do will affect other people.
The only way for that to happen is for an ISP to be a government agency (like the DMV) and to gate access based on some training. Private operators will probably not do it until they get sued enough to lose money (think amusement parks with race tracks).
Consider for a second that OpenOffice.org has a silly name for legal reasons. They can't use the more obvious "OpenOffice" name because of trademark conflicts.
Now consider OpenOffice adopting your strategy using a blue-W icon. Or Mozilla using a blue-E icon. How will will that wash with Microsoft's lawyers?
If I put that money into a savings account, I'll realize a wonderful -100% interest when the wife spends it all. Zero is much better than that.
The point is not everyone is as financially disciplined as you or me, and anything that increases the savings rate is a good thing - when compared with the alternative saving nothing.
Now look at the average US savings rate, and tell me if actually saving something is retarded and lazy.
It may make more sense for a person get a refund of a few hundred dollars, than blow the cash on coffee and movies over the year, if they are not a good saver. Many people have a very difficult time keeping money liquid and not spending it.
In this case the IRS acts as a zero-interest, one-withdrawal-per-year savings account for free, with automatic deposits. And, it's trivial to set up because you have to do it anyway.
Automatic savings, via whatever means, is one the first step towards fiscal responsibility and lowering your expenses. It takes effort to keep your expenses to rising to meet your income. You may get this intuitively, but many don't, and it doesn't help to berate them because you're so suprerior.
Yeah, my wife's catching on too. I could see her BS detector starting to go off, and she asked me, in a very I-dont-believe-it-tone: "is that possible?" No, pure bullshit I said. Still a fun show, though. They should dose down on the techno-bull otherwise its starting to be like a bad Star Trek episode (see sig).
We record some shows for my two toddlers. With the ReplayTV, it's great -- the commercials are skipped without anyone having to sit and skip it for them. So the kids rarely see ads. They never watch any live TV at all.
That way it's easy to carefully control the amount of TV. You can pop on a show, they can watch it... and when it's over, it's OVER. There is nothing after it. So they get bored, and go play with something else.
Occasionally, one will squeak through, especially on the tail end of a show. It's amazing to watch. They might just be casually interested in the show, but when a "kids" (say Lucky Charms) commerical comes on, it's like something puts them into a trance. Wide-eyed, slack-jawed, drooling stare. Geez!
I don't think ads are terribly harmful, but they've got the rest of their lives to watch ads, so why not fill that time with something better? They can watch their show in half the time and then get on to playing with blocks or coloring.
I had a Citibank Visa a while back. You could send them a photo ID and a signature and they would emblazen both on the front of the card.
One would think this is a pretty good form of verification, and signing the back would be pointless. So I never signed the back.
So what happened to me? "You haven't signed the back of the card". Excuse me! Look at the front. See that picture? And signature...?
So, I wrote on the back "SEE FRONT FOR SIGNATURE".
Then you go to place that apparently can't read, and the person is comparing the "SEE FRONT FOR SIGNATURE" but not actually reading it, and wondering why it doesn't match...
Sigh. But this was years ago. Maybe they don't check anymore.
Yeah, the daemon thing bugs the hell out of me. I run KDE, but occasionally use a gnome app, whether on my box or another. I get random gnome daemons stranded all over the network. Remember, this is X, and sometimes we do useful things like run apps on remote boxes.
KDE seems to know how to start up DCOP and all that stuff, and then blow it away when you're not using it. Not well, but it does.
The last thing that really drives me nuts is forcing apps and settings to be session specific. Example: I use VNC frequently for work. In the olden days, it was possible to run just sawfish and panel inside a VNC, because I could tell sawfish to do opaque moves and wire-frame resizes. Using VNC remotely over DSL, this is the fastest way to operate.
Enter metacity. In the name of reducing preferences that people ostensibly don't use, they got rid of the option. Now you only have "reduced resources" which means wire-frame move AND wire-frame resize. BUT: wire-frame move over VNC is slower than opaque move.
Gee, thanks. Guess I won't use GNOME anymore inside VNC anymore.
I would like to use GNOME or KDE inside the VNC, rather than yet another environment. After all, I use plently of KDE and GNOME apps.
On my main desktop, I want all that stuff turned on - font AA, opaque resize, blah blah. But not inside my VNC session.
Finally, there seems to be no way to have two sets of settings, one stuck to my VNC desktop, and one stuck to my real desktop. Turn off font AA? Well, it's off everywhere. Turn on "reduced" resource? Too bad, it's off everywhere. There seems to be "session managers" and I've tried making a VNC session - but it does nothing. All settings still affect my main desktop too.
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You can become talented by practicing skills enough - the will to practice is all on you, though. I wasn't born understanding pointers or virtual functions, but man, when I discovered them it was so damn interesting I had to understand everything about them.
He knows his stuff, he's just started a new company for fun. Which is profitable, right now.
What have you written?
Only here in the US do we consider people who have enough money for a phone, computer, a place to put them all, electricity, and an ISP connection "poor".
Poor people don't play with computers. They are trying to eat and find a place to live.
Basically, the ingredients listed here are useless. Brewing is all about technique, not ingredients. In order to realistically clone a beer, you need to know:
Without all that, you are not cloning a beer, but merely making something vaguely similar. This level of detail is what brewmasters need to do to make a zillion gallons that all tastes the same, regardless of region. That's why when you buy Sam Adams in Arizona, made with different ingredients, it still tastes like Sam Adams.
Basically, this recipe is a marketing ploy and not useful in the least.
It's pretty funny, although I almost stopped reading when I saw that font...
If we pulled out of Saudi Arabia and Iraq today, I believe they'd find something else to justify their actions -- something like less defined like "cultural imperialism".
Let's define $evil_thing, which could be porn, or hamburgers, or maybe even just women driving.
So, $evil_thing anywhere near a Muslim, even in the middle of France, is now grounds for war, because of the corrosive and corruptive effects.
So we remove all our $evil_things. But, there's TV and the Internet and word of mouth, and now there's the temptation of going to America and seeing $evil_thing!
Religious nutjobs will justify what they want with anything.
I'm not using this to justify anything. If anything, I think everything we've done so far is precisely the wrong thing to do.
Am I the only one just not that scared of terror? My view is that the chance from getting from injured by terror is much less than getting into a car accident. Yet, I still drive daily. Come back to me when the terror kills more than heart disease, or cancer, or whatever causes people to really die en masse.
No time travel involved, just PHBs.
For the bored: 1.1 and 1.2 were both spec'd with separate feature sets that really weren't dependent on each other. As PHBs are wont to do, they futzed with the specs endlessly, and then decided to deliver 1.1 feature set later than the 1.2 feature set.
Of course, any rational human being would either not name the feature set "1.1" until it's about to go out the door, or rename 1.2 to 1.1 as the politic^H^H^H^H^H^H^H scheduling changed.
But: PHB.
For example, Gilbert and Sullivan's operas are public domain. However, than doesn't necessarily mean that if you find a printed libretto or score, you can copy it legally.
There are people creating new editions of these all the time, and those fall under modern copyright. The only difference is they don't have to ask the heirs of G&S to do so. They can reverse engineer it from a recording, or, much easier, simply write a new score out based on an old one.
This is a great thing: I can go and buy a beautifully engraved new edition of "Pirates or Penzance", or, I can sit down and make my own edition. No need to ask G&S's great-great-great-grandlawyer to do so.
I spend time working with local opera companies. Sometimes they'll perform an opera in which the only score and parts are hand-written and very hard to read. If it's particularly bad, they'll legally take on the work to do it themselves. Once done, that edition is copyright to them. Some sell it, some rent it, some hoard it. High-end music is almost always rented - you cannot legally purchase the score or parts to most Broadway musicals, for example.
All the hard work in producing a professional score is not just the notes - it's the layout. Making something readable and professional takes time and a lot of practice.
Depends what you want to do. I have only ever wanted to be a developer, and to write "off the shelf" software. I started off out of college at a enormous, well-known defense contractor. It's not the most exciting programing, but the benefits are this:
- If you have 1/3 of a brain, you will likely be one of the best programmers there. There are lot Wallys in a place like that.
- Good pay, benefits and travel. I got deployed overseas for a while, which is "mad money": in 4 months, I saved an amount almost equal my entire yearly salary. That bought my house.
- You will meet a lot of people, and a lot of them will quit. If you network right and are smart, it's a great asset. People will remember you and try to pull you along to their new company. If I got canned today there are probably 50 people I could email or call for an "in" somewhere else.
- You'll gain experience.
I quit after a few years, and wound up doing exactly what I want - programming at a small ISV.
I think it shouldn't be for just owning a computer, but plugging it in to a broadband connection.
To make an analogy, you can drive around your land on an unregistered, uninsured car with no driver's license. You only need a license to drive on public roads, because what you do will affect other people.
The only way for that to happen is for an ISP to be a government agency (like the DMV) and to gate access based on some training. Private operators will probably not do it until they get sued enough to lose money (think amusement parks with race tracks).
Thus: "Anyone trying to make bits uncopyable is selling something", QED.
Consider for a second that OpenOffice.org has a silly name for legal reasons. They can't use the more obvious "OpenOffice" name because of trademark conflicts.
Now consider OpenOffice adopting your strategy using a blue-W icon. Or Mozilla using a blue-E icon. How will will that wash with Microsoft's lawyers?
...and only in the US would describing a newspaper as "liberal" actually mean "moderate" in the context of the rest of the world.
25 points if you spell it that way.
If I put that money into a savings account, I'll realize a wonderful -100% interest when the wife spends it all. Zero is much better than that.
The point is not everyone is as financially disciplined as you or me, and anything that increases the savings rate is a good thing - when compared with the alternative saving nothing.
Now look at the average US savings rate, and tell me if actually saving something is retarded and lazy.
It may make more sense for a person get a refund of a few hundred dollars, than blow the cash on coffee and movies over the year, if they are not a good saver. Many people have a very difficult time keeping money liquid and not spending it.
In this case the IRS acts as a zero-interest, one-withdrawal-per-year savings account for free, with automatic deposits. And, it's trivial to set up because you have to do it anyway.
Automatic savings, via whatever means, is one the first step towards fiscal responsibility and lowering your expenses. It takes effort to keep your expenses to rising to meet your income. You may get this intuitively, but many don't, and it doesn't help to berate them because you're so suprerior.
True. If you have more than one under your direct control, something's strange.
Yeah, my wife's catching on too. I could see her BS detector starting to go off, and she asked me, in a very I-dont-believe-it-tone: "is that possible?" No, pure bullshit I said. Still a fun show, though. They should dose down on the techno-bull otherwise its starting to be like a bad Star Trek episode (see sig).
We record some shows for my two toddlers. With the ReplayTV, it's great -- the commercials are skipped without anyone having to sit and skip it for them. So the kids rarely see ads. They never watch any live TV at all.
That way it's easy to carefully control the amount of TV. You can pop on a show, they can watch it... and when it's over, it's OVER. There is nothing after it. So they get bored, and go play with something else.
Occasionally, one will squeak through, especially on the tail end of a show. It's amazing to watch. They might just be casually interested in the show, but when a "kids" (say Lucky Charms) commerical comes on, it's like something puts them into a trance. Wide-eyed, slack-jawed, drooling stare. Geez!
I don't think ads are terribly harmful, but they've got the rest of their lives to watch ads, so why not fill that time with something better? They can watch their show in half the time and then get on to playing with blocks or coloring.
This actually happened to me:
I had a Citibank Visa a while back. You could send them a photo ID and a signature and they would emblazen both on the front of the card.
One would think this is a pretty good form of verification, and signing the back would be pointless. So I never signed the back.
So what happened to me? "You haven't signed the back of the card". Excuse me! Look at the front. See that picture? And signature...?
So, I wrote on the back "SEE FRONT FOR SIGNATURE".
Then you go to place that apparently can't read, and the person is comparing the "SEE FRONT FOR SIGNATURE" but not actually reading it, and wondering why it doesn't match...
Sigh. But this was years ago. Maybe they don't check anymore.
From fucking the article?
Did you get any paper cuts, or electrical burns in sensitve places? I'm not sure I want to imagine how you did that.
Yeah, the daemon thing bugs the hell out of me. I run KDE, but occasionally use a gnome app, whether on my box or another. I get random gnome daemons stranded all over the network. Remember, this is X, and sometimes we do useful things like run apps on remote boxes.
KDE seems to know how to start up DCOP and all that stuff, and then blow it away when you're not using it. Not well, but it does.
The last thing that really drives me nuts is forcing apps and settings to be session specific. Example: I use VNC frequently for work. In the olden days, it was possible to run just sawfish and panel inside a VNC, because I could tell sawfish to do opaque moves and wire-frame resizes. Using VNC remotely over DSL, this is the fastest way to operate.
Enter metacity. In the name of reducing preferences that people ostensibly don't use, they got rid of the option. Now you only have "reduced resources" which means wire-frame move AND wire-frame resize. BUT: wire-frame move over VNC is slower than opaque move.
Gee, thanks. Guess I won't use GNOME anymore inside VNC anymore.
I would like to use GNOME or KDE inside the VNC, rather than yet another environment. After all, I use plently of KDE and GNOME apps.
On my main desktop, I want all that stuff turned on - font AA, opaque resize, blah blah. But not inside my VNC session.
Finally, there seems to be no way to have two sets of settings, one stuck to my VNC desktop, and one stuck to my real desktop. Turn off font AA? Well, it's off everywhere. Turn on "reduced" resource? Too bad, it's off everywhere. There seems to be "session managers" and I've tried making a VNC session - but it does nothing. All settings still affect my main desktop too.
Given the reality of the US patent system, maybe the "patent pending" icon should read "patent granted"?
Mang, use gpdf already. It has, like, fonts...
Or, just make it Denis Leary's "asshole" song.
I bet you think digital watches are pretty neat.