Looking at your comment history / bio / journal I perceive that you work for MSFT, of course I could be way wrong about that.
But, I've gotta ask...I have been seeing a lot of MSFT guys on here with high/. IDs. Enough for me to take notice. Did Microsoft tell you all to sign up on/. to see what the word on the street is?
No seriously, not trying to be sarcastic. I have seen enough posts from different users (who at least purport to be MSFT guys) with IDs in the 900000's to make me ask. Maybe it's just the posts I happened to notice. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly. Maybe I am imagining things. Which is it?
I honestly just don't care for many MS products (exceptions: XP is decent, Visual Studio is good, SQL Server is a nice "toy" DB, though not better than Oracle, Office is good but overpriced). I may not care for your company, but I think your team does great work.
Believe me, I can understand that they might have to hustle for resources. I work for a company that is so large it could swallow Microsoft (>350K employees last time I checked) up and not even notice. I worked with a team of about 6 which was very grassroots, and we hustled for resources and made do with what we had, which wasn't much. We had a great product that really caught on, and now our product is established, entrenched, now we have nearly 30 people, etc. As a sidebar, I enjoyed being the rogues, the underdogs much more than being the establishment. Being the establishment sucks the fun out of things. But I digress. I can definitely see how even in a large company who throws tons of money around there can exist sort of a skunkworks team. I have been there. I simply take issue with the astroturf website. MS is not a grassroots startup and ultimately, everyone there works for MS. They should just have a page at microsoft.com and call it what it is.
As for entrenching the MS brand, you can't restrict mashups to one company's sites (I guess you *could* if you wanted to re-engineer them all and then severely hamstring the tool). What I mean is that it probably has hooks to IE or some MS service. That or the resulting markup is optimized for IE. I don't know, just speculating based on what I have to deal with every day dealing with writing web code for IE.
As for silverlight, got one word for you: Flex. I have not used Silverlight, but I am sure in time I'll get acquainted. From what I've read, it's a direct competitor with Flex. Me thinks that's what's wrong with Microsoft: you cannot compete with every area of the business that seems to be profitable. You're better off sticking with what you do well than trying to do everything. When you try to do everything then you come out with ridiculous products like Zune. Will Silverlight be a Visual studio or will it be a Zune? We'll see, I guess.
If I get this post on metamod.pl, I'll roast the moderator who modded this informative.
Watching drunk people can be funny. Listening to drunk people can get annoying. Reading the ramblings of drunk people is just lame. Grousing about it by posting something in response is just a waste of time.
For the first time ever, the "you must be new here" meme has been used against...someone new!
Of course Tux fans are paranoid. And don't try to change that, you!, with all your common sense and all. I run a tinfoil haberdashery and make quite a good living at it.
"Maybe once you have the chance to use the site you'll have a more informed opinion on whether the app is cool or not, huh?"
Maybe. One of the few Microsoft products I like is Visual Studio, so they do seem to get IDEs right.
Or not.
From the looks of thing, based on what I see on the Overview page, its the next-gen frontpage all gussied up for the web2.0 (which would have been trendy -- two years ago).
I write loads of web code using jEdit and Firefox. Works great for me. I can write better code than a program, anyhow, at least when it comes web markup, javascript, css, ajax calls, etc. It probably writes code that locks in IE anyhow.
On the positive, the site itself worked with Firefox. On the downside it did not work with Opera. If a company is selling you a tool that lets you write web code, and their site doesn't adhere to web standards (because it would work with Opera if it did), then that's not a great ad for their product.
That in itself created a bad impression. Not trying to be negative, just being honest.
One was the obligatory girl. She probably did design work. Not that she couldn't code circles around the guys and all, but you know, gotta keep up appearances.
There were three guys on there, I swear, I saw them on NBC's To Catch A Predator getting arrested. It's good microsoft hires ex-cons. Keeps em off the streets.
Sloth from Goonies evidently works there now. Good for him. I'll bet he eats a LOT of Baby Ruths.
There were plenty of forgettable, dorky white guys who, together, probably own every D&D and Warhammer piece ever made.
Finally, the project lead was surely the guy on top (of the pyramid, you perverts!). I guess I have worked on enough projects to know.
*Sigh*
Well, what do you know? popfly.ms IS good for something! It amused me for ten minutes.
I get a kick out of when a large corporation tries to make itself look all independent and hip and stuff with a so-called irreverent site.
Did you look at the About Us page? "the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun" Good night, does anyone really believe that within Microsoft there are real innovative ideas that don't simply involve entrenching the Microsoft brand? Not that there aren't smart people there, it's just that I have not seen many good ideas coming from there as of late (IE7, Vista, Zune, Media Player, Silverlight...need I go on?) And if this team does exist, then surely their ideas are too innovative and rogue for stodgy old Microsoft and outside of some pseudo-web2.0 site won't see the light of day.
Case in point, the only way to log into the site is with a Microsoft passport. Therefore, I don't know what else is there, but from the looks of things, not much. And isn't "web 2.0" supposed to be made with valid markup? Grumble grumble...
That's what she is saying. The summary says she is calling on gamers to stop this so someone else doesn't have to. That means she doesn't want games to be censored.
I'll second that bit about the local roaster. There's a little coffee shop by my house that roasts their own beans. Every Tuesday night I drive by there and smell the coffee roasting. On about Thursday I go there to get some, and that is the best coffee you can get. The things that matter are fresh beans and purified or bottled water. I'd say it's better to have a cheap coffee maker and good beans than a great coffee maker and stale, or worse yet, pre-ground coffee.
I have never heard of an Aerobie, but I have a good quality drip coffee maker, a french press, a percolator, and a stove top espresso maker. All of them make equally good coffee; it's all about the coffee and water and not the hardware. This Aerobie thingamabob sounds interesting, though. I think I'll have to check that out.
I always get Motorolas. I have a motorola l6, which has a camera, plays mp3, has bluetooth, blah blah. But it is an excellent phone. I don't use any of that stuff really and it stays out of the way pretty well if I don't ask for it.
I detest phones. I have smashed a few Motorolas in my day (crappy flip phones from Nextel...grumble grumble). But I actually like this phone and do not want to get rid of it (plus I dropped crappy Nextel for Cingular, which makes it even better).
A friend of mine has a motorla L2, which is the same phone only without the camera and stuff. That might be right up your alley. Again, coming from someone who hates phones and the useless gadgetry that accompanies most phones. It's gotta be better than that Nokia you say you have. My wife has a Nokia 6102 I think and that phone is a cheap plastic toy.
Yes, and ironically...is anyone going to their local music store to buy all the Hal Leonard tabs? Anyone? Someone? Yeah. Didn't think so.
Here's what you'll do: you will get with a more experienced player and learn from him, go to the library, or *gasp* learn it by ear (which how the old school musicians did it).
It's not such a smart move to criminalize your would-be consumers. It's called shooting yourself in the foot. Especially considering the target audience for guitar tabs: teenage and twentysomething guys. Not exactly the most forgiving lot, especially for these kind of shenanigans.
Very well said. The ITIL reference made me laugh out loud. The company I work for recently restructured the entire IT dept to be in line with ITIL. Nobody knows what they do or how they do it anymore. It's like... alchemy for the information age. Or opium. Your choice.
This is why many real musicians operate outside of the music industry (Zappa, many jazz greats, and groups like Thievery Corporation). Babylon is just way too oppressive. First, to the musicians, and now to their customers. Brilliant strategy, criminalize consumption of your product.
Ok, so published tabs are under fire. People will do what they have always done: learn popular songs and teach other people and maybe put the tabs online. Seriously: apart from guitar mags, who buys tabs? I think I bought two tab books during my teenage days (one for Metallica and one for Soundgarden Superunknown). That's not much.
The real problem is that sites like olga.net get taken down because of OCILLA, which is ridiculous. I mean, how is posting tabs to popular songs bad? It's no different than what people did before the net, that is, teach other people how to play songs. It's not as though anyone learning songs from TAB is going to put the original musicians out of business (it's TAB!!! for goodness sake!). Besides, one of the biggest honors a band/songwriter can have is legions of cover bands playing their music.
OCILLA is just another example of the GREEDY MAFIAA stepping on musicians, both professional and amateur. I am sure you could count on your hand the musicians who oppose kids/cover bands playing their music, so this is obviously the suits. Sad. Don't they have more no-talent losers to ink deals with like Britney and Jesse McCartney?
Yeah, thanks. As a non Spanish speaker, I can only spell phonetically what I vaguely remember from my childhood cartoon watching. But you got the point. I guess nobody else found Speedy funny, but he sure cracked me up.
Well, if you are calling good old outsourcing SaaS, then I see your point. But I will say this: I work for a F500 company, and in the last two years the pendulum has really swung to what you are calling SaaS.
From a user perspective, I find this software to be quite bad. Many of the purchased web based solutions are unusable, overly complex, and are very brittle. I upgraded to IE7 and half of them stopped working -- and that's just inexcusable! And if you are the sort that cares, the markup is so incredibly sloppy, many of these sites work in spite of themselves. I suspect that many of these vendor software packages are bought on a golf course or after some fancy presentation.
I am not even sure if they cost less. The problem with corporate America is that the mindset is so short term. You have to consistently produce "stockholder value" that all that matters are short term costs (i.e. this quarter). That's why large corporations sell their real estate and lease it back. Short term, it looks like a HUGE cost savings. This whole SaaS business is the same thing. It's a big shell game and I have yet to see SaaS provide better software than traditional in-house software, at least for things that are company-specific (please don't take my argument further than I intended by pointing to things like Office suites, web browsers, etc).
Honestly, though, I didn't see this article as talking about corporate America so much. I see it talking about SaaS so that you can replace your OS, Office Suite, etc. That is total vapour. Nobody is going for that. What's the point? Office is fine. OOo is fine. The dominant OS'es out there (Windows, Linux, OSX) are fine. So what's the point in changing from something works well to something that has had issues in the past, and due to its very design, will continue to do so? The internet will never be 100% available. Until it is, SaaS cannot work. Sure my computer isn't 100% available either, but at least I have some control over that.
Or what about this? He states that his purpose is to:
"be descriptive and intelligent in giving people an understanding of open source and debunk a lot of the mythology around open source."
What does that even mean? I'm sorry, "intelligent" people make sense. Someone needs to run this guy's quotes through bullfighter to make sense out of them.
The part that's even funnier to me is that he is southeast Asia, which of course is the Windoze piracy capital of the world. What, would he rather everyone there use pwned copies of teh Windoze? And what's next on his agenda? Moscow? Nigeria?
Yes, thank you. I hear loads and loads of talk about software as a service, online office suites, etc. Ridiculous.
Do people really want this? Seriously? I have never heard anyone talking about how they wish they could store their all-important documents on the web somewhere. Non-geeks surely must not like the idea of the "data not being in the box under the desk" and instead in some California datacenter. Geeks know what can happen to data on servers; who hasn't lost a server or some data at some point? As a geek, if I lose my data, I want it to be because I forgot to back up my HDD and not because one of Google's servers fizzled. And that totally leaves the privacy issue out of the discussion. Does anyone really trust a corporation with their personal documents? I think not.
Just look at the story that was right here on slashdot a few weeks ago. If that can happen with someone's home page settings, what of their documents? This is why some software (like operating systems, office suites, etc) will never be a service. This is why operating systems like Linux, OSX, and yes even Windows aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Don't stop there. I'd say that the leaders of most mainstream religions don't believe in God. Maybe at lower levels you find sincere people just trying to do some good, but I doubt you will find them at the higher echelons. I'd say they all enjoy the money and power over the people in what is largely a social engineering experiment.
Sure, I know. But we both know that wasn't the case here. The guy was a bozo. "Toggle Breakpoints" is a verb - noun construct.
It was at a community college, but it is actually a pretty good one. Many of the profs for IS courses were industry professionals who taught night courses. Most, except for this guy.
I had a college professor when I took a VB course (yuck!) who was incredibly incompetent. You know when someone just misuses terms in such a fashion that you immediately see that they have no clue?
For example, this guy used to tell us to use "Toggle Breakpoints" when debugging our code, because there was a menu item in the IDE that said "Toggle Breakpoints". Toggle is a verb, Breakpoints is a noun, and the menu item turned breakpoints on or off. A small quibble I know, but the guy was clueless and that was the entire semester in a nutshell. In his defense, he was probably a windows admin who once knew BASIC and got roped into teaching VB. I am sure there are more like him. Maybe that's why so many programmers don't know programming theory, they just know how to click buttons in an IDE and a program "magically" comes out.
If you can't teach, do the world a favor: don't teach!
and of course, the act of dialing numbers will chew up all of the memory on your phone for about five minutes. But other than that, and the few trivial items you mentioned, this will be great! Everyone else uses Java, therefore it should be used everywhere, right?
But you can waste their time without wasting much of yours. I have messed with them for a while now, and I just send them the same old crap (turnabout is fair play, after all), just a copy and paste job from the last scammer I messed with unless I want to have some fun and write something new. It takes little of my time and lot of theirs, and that serves the purpose. Since I pretty much check eMail every day anyhow, it only takes five minutes to send them crap.
so that I can spend my energy on something more useful instead.
You may be mother Theresa's apprentice and spend every waking moment thinking about how to help the poor orphaned disfigured children in bangladesh, I don't know. Most people, though, watch a lot of TV and spend oodles of time surfing the web aimlessly. I think scambaiting is entertaining; to me it's more fun than watching TV or surfing the web. So I buy out five or ten minutes when I feel like it from these other worthless things to mess with scammers. You get to be creative and come up with crazy stories and mess with someone's head. As soon as it stops being fun, I'll stop. For me, it's entertainment that just so happens to (at least, I'd like to think) save someone from losing money they cannot afford to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
"Mod me insightful please."
Say something insightful and you might be. Stop complaining about moderation. It makes you look like you have nothing better to say.
Looking at your comment history / bio / journal I perceive that you work for MSFT, of course I could be way wrong about that.
/. IDs. Enough for me to take notice. Did Microsoft tell you all to sign up on /. to see what the word on the street is?
But, I've gotta ask...I have been seeing a lot of MSFT guys on here with high
No seriously, not trying to be sarcastic. I have seen enough posts from different users (who at least purport to be MSFT guys) with IDs in the 900000's to make me ask. Maybe it's just the posts I happened to notice. Maybe it's just a statistical anomaly. Maybe I am imagining things. Which is it?
I honestly just don't care for many MS products (exceptions: XP is decent, Visual Studio is good, SQL Server is a nice "toy" DB, though not better than Oracle, Office is good but overpriced). I may not care for your company, but I think your team does great work.
Believe me, I can understand that they might have to hustle for resources. I work for a company that is so large it could swallow Microsoft (>350K employees last time I checked) up and not even notice. I worked with a team of about 6 which was very grassroots, and we hustled for resources and made do with what we had, which wasn't much. We had a great product that really caught on, and now our product is established, entrenched, now we have nearly 30 people, etc. As a sidebar, I enjoyed being the rogues, the underdogs much more than being the establishment. Being the establishment sucks the fun out of things. But I digress. I can definitely see how even in a large company who throws tons of money around there can exist sort of a skunkworks team. I have been there. I simply take issue with the astroturf website. MS is not a grassroots startup and ultimately, everyone there works for MS. They should just have a page at microsoft.com and call it what it is.
As for entrenching the MS brand, you can't restrict mashups to one company's sites (I guess you *could* if you wanted to re-engineer them all and then severely hamstring the tool). What I mean is that it probably has hooks to IE or some MS service. That or the resulting markup is optimized for IE. I don't know, just speculating based on what I have to deal with every day dealing with writing web code for IE.
As for silverlight, got one word for you: Flex. I have not used Silverlight, but I am sure in time I'll get acquainted. From what I've read, it's a direct competitor with Flex. Me thinks that's what's wrong with Microsoft: you cannot compete with every area of the business that seems to be profitable. You're better off sticking with what you do well than trying to do everything. When you try to do everything then you come out with ridiculous products like Zune. Will Silverlight be a Visual studio or will it be a Zune? We'll see, I guess.
"The site reeks of marketing. It smells phony. It reads like it's not written by the people it claims wrote it."
Mowing the astroturf, eh?
If I get this post on metamod.pl, I'll roast the moderator who modded this informative.
Watching drunk people can be funny. Listening to drunk people can get annoying. Reading the ramblings of drunk people is just lame. Grousing about it by posting something in response is just a waste of time.
I guess I'll stop typing now.
You must be new here...wait, you ARE new here!
For the first time ever, the "you must be new here" meme has been used against...someone new!
Of course Tux fans are paranoid. And don't try to change that, you!, with all your common sense and all. I run a tinfoil haberdashery and make quite a good living at it.
"Maybe once you have the chance to use the site you'll have a more informed opinion on whether the app is cool or not, huh?"
Maybe. One of the few Microsoft products I like is Visual Studio, so they do seem to get IDEs right.
Or not.
From the looks of thing, based on what I see on the Overview page, its the next-gen frontpage all gussied up for the web2.0 (which would have been trendy -- two years ago).
I write loads of web code using jEdit and Firefox. Works great for me. I can write better code than a program, anyhow, at least when it comes web markup, javascript, css, ajax calls, etc. It probably writes code that locks in IE anyhow.
On the positive, the site itself worked with Firefox. On the downside it did not work with Opera. If a company is selling you a tool that lets you write web code, and their site doesn't adhere to web standards (because it would work with Opera if it did), then that's not a great ad for their product.
That in itself created a bad impression. Not trying to be negative, just being honest.
Hey, did you laugh at the pictures like I did?
One was the obligatory girl. She probably did design work. Not that she couldn't code circles around the guys and all, but you know, gotta keep up appearances.
There were three guys on there, I swear, I saw them on NBC's To Catch A Predator getting arrested. It's good microsoft hires ex-cons. Keeps em off the streets.
Sloth from Goonies evidently works there now. Good for him. I'll bet he eats a LOT of Baby Ruths.
There were plenty of forgettable, dorky white guys who, together, probably own every D&D and Warhammer piece ever made.
Finally, the project lead was surely the guy on top (of the pyramid, you perverts!). I guess I have worked on enough projects to know.
*Sigh*
Well, what do you know? popfly.ms IS good for something! It amused me for ten minutes.
Anyone check out the popfly site?
I get a kick out of when a large corporation tries to make itself look all independent and hip and stuff with a so-called irreverent site.
Did you look at the About Us page? "the team hustles for resources every day and is innovative, scrappy, and fun" Good night, does anyone really believe that within Microsoft there are real innovative ideas that don't simply involve entrenching the Microsoft brand? Not that there aren't smart people there, it's just that I have not seen many good ideas coming from there as of late (IE7, Vista, Zune, Media Player, Silverlight...need I go on?) And if this team does exist, then surely their ideas are too innovative and rogue for stodgy old Microsoft and outside of some pseudo-web2.0 site won't see the light of day.
Case in point, the only way to log into the site is with a Microsoft passport. Therefore, I don't know what else is there, but from the looks of things, not much. And isn't "web 2.0" supposed to be made with valid markup? Grumble grumble...
That's what she is saying. The summary says she is calling on gamers to stop this so someone else doesn't have to. That means she doesn't want games to be censored.
I'll second that bit about the local roaster. There's a little coffee shop by my house that roasts their own beans. Every Tuesday night I drive by there and smell the coffee roasting. On about Thursday I go there to get some, and that is the best coffee you can get. The things that matter are fresh beans and purified or bottled water. I'd say it's better to have a cheap coffee maker and good beans than a great coffee maker and stale, or worse yet, pre-ground coffee.
I have never heard of an Aerobie, but I have a good quality drip coffee maker, a french press, a percolator, and a stove top espresso maker. All of them make equally good coffee; it's all about the coffee and water and not the hardware. This Aerobie thingamabob sounds interesting, though. I think I'll have to check that out.
I always get Motorolas. I have a motorola l6, which has a camera, plays mp3, has bluetooth, blah blah. But it is an excellent phone. I don't use any of that stuff really and it stays out of the way pretty well if I don't ask for it.
I detest phones. I have smashed a few Motorolas in my day (crappy flip phones from Nextel...grumble grumble). But I actually like this phone and do not want to get rid of it (plus I dropped crappy Nextel for Cingular, which makes it even better).
A friend of mine has a motorla L2, which is the same phone only without the camera and stuff. That might be right up your alley. Again, coming from someone who hates phones and the useless gadgetry that accompanies most phones. It's gotta be better than that Nokia you say you have. My wife has a Nokia 6102 I think and that phone is a cheap plastic toy.
Yes, and ironically...is anyone going to their local music store to buy all the Hal Leonard tabs? Anyone? Someone? Yeah. Didn't think so.
Here's what you'll do: you will get with a more experienced player and learn from him, go to the library, or *gasp* learn it by ear (which how the old school musicians did it).
It's not such a smart move to criminalize your would-be consumers. It's called shooting yourself in the foot. Especially considering the target audience for guitar tabs: teenage and twentysomething guys. Not exactly the most forgiving lot, especially for these kind of shenanigans.
Very well said. The ITIL reference made me laugh out loud. The company I work for recently restructured the entire IT dept to be in line with ITIL. Nobody knows what they do or how they do it anymore. It's like ... alchemy for the information age. Or opium. Your choice.
This is why many real musicians operate outside of the music industry (Zappa, many jazz greats, and groups like Thievery Corporation). Babylon is just way too oppressive. First, to the musicians, and now to their customers. Brilliant strategy, criminalize consumption of your product.
Ok, so published tabs are under fire. People will do what they have always done: learn popular songs and teach other people and maybe put the tabs online. Seriously: apart from guitar mags, who buys tabs? I think I bought two tab books during my teenage days (one for Metallica and one for Soundgarden Superunknown). That's not much.
The real problem is that sites like olga.net get taken down because of OCILLA, which is ridiculous. I mean, how is posting tabs to popular songs bad? It's no different than what people did before the net, that is, teach other people how to play songs. It's not as though anyone learning songs from TAB is going to put the original musicians out of business (it's TAB!!! for goodness sake!). Besides, one of the biggest honors a band/songwriter can have is legions of cover bands playing their music.
OCILLA is just another example of the GREEDY MAFIAA stepping on musicians, both professional and amateur. I am sure you could count on your hand the musicians who oppose kids/cover bands playing their music, so this is obviously the suits. Sad. Don't they have more no-talent losers to ink deals with like Britney and Jesse McCartney?
Yeah, thanks. As a non Spanish speaker, I can only spell phonetically what I vaguely remember from my childhood cartoon watching. But you got the point. I guess nobody else found Speedy funny, but he sure cracked me up.
Gonzales? Credibility? hahahahahhaahahahahahahhahahahahaha
Why, Speedy Gonzales has more credibility! Yeeha yeeha! ungulay ungulay!
Well, if you are calling good old outsourcing SaaS, then I see your point. But I will say this: I work for a F500 company, and in the last two years the pendulum has really swung to what you are calling SaaS.
From a user perspective, I find this software to be quite bad. Many of the purchased web based solutions are unusable, overly complex, and are very brittle. I upgraded to IE7 and half of them stopped working -- and that's just inexcusable! And if you are the sort that cares, the markup is so incredibly sloppy, many of these sites work in spite of themselves. I suspect that many of these vendor software packages are bought on a golf course or after some fancy presentation.
I am not even sure if they cost less. The problem with corporate America is that the mindset is so short term. You have to consistently produce "stockholder value" that all that matters are short term costs (i.e. this quarter). That's why large corporations sell their real estate and lease it back. Short term, it looks like a HUGE cost savings. This whole SaaS business is the same thing. It's a big shell game and I have yet to see SaaS provide better software than traditional in-house software, at least for things that are company-specific (please don't take my argument further than I intended by pointing to things like Office suites, web browsers, etc).
Honestly, though, I didn't see this article as talking about corporate America so much. I see it talking about SaaS so that you can replace your OS, Office Suite, etc. That is total vapour. Nobody is going for that. What's the point? Office is fine. OOo is fine. The dominant OS'es out there (Windows, Linux, OSX) are fine. So what's the point in changing from something works well to something that has had issues in the past, and due to its very design, will continue to do so? The internet will never be 100% available. Until it is, SaaS cannot work. Sure my computer isn't 100% available either, but at least I have some control over that.
What does that even mean? I'm sorry, "intelligent" people make sense. Someone needs to run this guy's quotes through bullfighter to make sense out of them.
The part that's even funnier to me is that he is southeast Asia, which of course is the Windoze piracy capital of the world. What, would he rather everyone there use pwned copies of teh Windoze? And what's next on his agenda? Moscow? Nigeria?
Yes, thank you. I hear loads and loads of talk about software as a service, online office suites, etc. Ridiculous.
Do people really want this? Seriously? I have never heard anyone talking about how they wish they could store their all-important documents on the web somewhere. Non-geeks surely must not like the idea of the "data not being in the box under the desk" and instead in some California datacenter. Geeks know what can happen to data on servers; who hasn't lost a server or some data at some point? As a geek, if I lose my data, I want it to be because I forgot to back up my HDD and not because one of Google's servers fizzled. And that totally leaves the privacy issue out of the discussion. Does anyone really trust a corporation with their personal documents? I think not.
Just look at the story that was right here on slashdot a few weeks ago. If that can happen with someone's home page settings, what of their documents? This is why some software (like operating systems, office suites, etc) will never be a service. This is why operating systems like Linux, OSX, and yes even Windows aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
This Milf guy is on crack.
Don't stop there. I'd say that the leaders of most mainstream religions don't believe in God. Maybe at lower levels you find sincere people just trying to do some good, but I doubt you will find them at the higher echelons. I'd say they all enjoy the money and power over the people in what is largely a social engineering experiment.
Sure, I know. But we both know that wasn't the case here. The guy was a bozo. "Toggle Breakpoints" is a verb - noun construct.
It was at a community college, but it is actually a pretty good one. Many of the profs for IS courses were industry professionals who taught night courses. Most, except for this guy.
I had a college professor when I took a VB course (yuck!) who was incredibly incompetent. You know when someone just misuses terms in such a fashion that you immediately see that they have no clue?
For example, this guy used to tell us to use "Toggle Breakpoints" when debugging our code, because there was a menu item in the IDE that said "Toggle Breakpoints". Toggle is a verb, Breakpoints is a noun, and the menu item turned breakpoints on or off. A small quibble I know, but the guy was clueless and that was the entire semester in a nutshell. In his defense, he was probably a windows admin who once knew BASIC and got roped into teaching VB. I am sure there are more like him. Maybe that's why so many programmers don't know programming theory, they just know how to click buttons in an IDE and a program "magically" comes out.
If you can't teach, do the world a favor: don't teach!
and of course, the act of dialing numbers will chew up all of the memory on your phone for about five minutes. But other than that, and the few trivial items you mentioned, this will be great! Everyone else uses Java, therefore it should be used everywhere, right?
But you can waste their time without wasting much of yours. I have messed with them for a while now, and I just send them the same old crap (turnabout is fair play, after all), just a copy and paste job from the last scammer I messed with unless I want to have some fun and write something new. It takes little of my time and lot of theirs, and that serves the purpose. Since I pretty much check eMail every day anyhow, it only takes five minutes to send them crap.You may be mother Theresa's apprentice and spend every waking moment thinking about how to help the poor orphaned disfigured children in bangladesh, I don't know. Most people, though, watch a lot of TV and spend oodles of time surfing the web aimlessly. I think scambaiting is entertaining; to me it's more fun than watching TV or surfing the web. So I buy out five or ten minutes when I feel like it from these other worthless things to mess with scammers. You get to be creative and come up with crazy stories and mess with someone's head. As soon as it stops being fun, I'll stop. For me, it's entertainment that just so happens to (at least, I'd like to think) save someone from losing money they cannot afford to lose.