I have no PS skills; I have no PS (although if I were worth a crap I would do it in InkScape 0.42, right?). But how about a Duck mascot, named "Dux", for the new convergence Windows-which-looks-an-awful-lot-like-linux: Windux(tm).
I suspect that some folks with mod points may attack early posts simply to discourage early posts. Without digressing too far OT (God forbid) about the merits of modding styles, I have seen a fair bit of instant TROLL modding for reasons I don't understand. Or do understand and don't agree with. But I'm not going to "explain" the joke. I'm confident that whoever modded me down simply likes MS and got offended that I poked a little fun at the latest in a long line of on-schedule*, stable*, secure*, enjoyable*, standards-compliant*, affordable*, innovative*, configurable*, intuitive* offerings from the good folks in Redmond.
... in a country with a falling birthrate? Japan can't muster enough children to pay for retirement benefits in twenty years, and they come up with this?
...I find your post reasoned, but not reasoned enough. SO I respectfully disagree:
Hitler only gave the German people what they needed: full employment, food in their children's mouths, and a restored sense of national pride. He also, unfortunately, gave them a scapegoat.
Hitler's government was National Socialism. A Socialist government cannot "give" full employment or well-fed children to its constituents any more than a Republican Democracy (or Democratic Republic, as you wish) can. The difference and the problem is this: a Socialist government thinks it can, and its chosen tool to accomplish this is always totalitarianism. This makes for powerful governments and obedient people. For a while.
As Konrad Heiden pointed out in his 1944 "Der Fuehrer", Hitler engaged in a particularly destructive political campaign against unemployed German coalworkers in the Ruhr valley on his rise to power. He did not give them jobs, although he could have supported incentives and conditions favorable to local employment. Instead, he spiked such efforts, dooming them to failure, and casting the coalworkers' hopes to the winds. Why? Because satisfied people are more difficult to motivate.
The only thing Hitler ever "gave" the German people was a swift kick in the ass, which most people in the world today could use, including you. He was in the business of taking, not giving, and I find your arm's-length equation of America with Hitler's Germany to be intellectually lazy at best, reprehensible at worst. America has hotly contested elections and vividly contrasting schools of political thought. All are openly expressed, and even the odious American Nazi Party exists as a legal organization. The GP was absolutely right to say that "Americans are not the obedient kind of lemmings that the Germans were under Hitler," and your coughing disagreement ("Don't be too sure...") is frankly out of order.
Why should WM care about training tens of thousands (I guess) of workers in counterfeit detection, when the value thereby gained (putative loss prevention) would be far outweighed by the cost of education? Further, what about the time spent by each clerk at every transaction for the LARGEST RETAILER IN THE WORLD? Sure, at first you're talking about mere seconds, but at the scale we're talking, it's a huge amount. And if you figure that A) other institutions will cover you through fraud detection, and B) anybody truly successful at counterfeiting (the only real threat, after all), probably won't shop at WM very long:-)
Besides which, courtesy to the customer weighed against the possibility of a small profit (as when the cashier at a gas station lets you replace your spilled SugarBombSodaGallon for free), has always gone a long way in my book. You assume the customer is decent, and they remember it.
I was raised poor, and remember where I was treated well. I remember the first barber who called me "Sir". I was seven at the time, and thereafter I went to his shop until he *died*. SO you get the odd counterfeit $20. Truly small change, even when multiplied against the scale of WM's activity, if you consider the damage that two or three incidents made public (which does NOT scale) could do to a company that size.
And I have another airport code (IATA, not ICAO):
DOS = Dios Field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea
...Lots of complaints about how it ought to be a damned vacuum cleaner motor or something. Wow and flutter, etc... Look. The mass of the "table" part and the LP itself are actually going to work in this thing's favor. The drive itself has very fine scale speed adjustments, but it's going to be applied to such a larger mass that the momentum (okay, the Angular Momentum) of the thing will reduce the motor's input to a gentle urge to speed up or slow down. Relatively, of course; the point is it's not going to whip an LP around like it were the moving part of a floppy, but it'll still get it going nice and quickly (YMMV). The result will be very smooth, precisely controlled speed.
One thing that strikes me as odd is the "echo" effect. While other freqs vary wildly, this stays fairly constant. I did the math, 27 minutes to 73 seconds of audio is a reduction by a factor of about 22. Estimating the echo to be at about 6 Hz, that means that the interval between "echo" peaks is about 3.7 seconds. Is that the time for an average field line to accelerate a spiralling particle from one pole to the other? (and back?) Or did the scientists throw in an echo effect? That would certainly keep it constant. Sampling problem?
I like the idea of experimenting with paper airplane design-by-committee.
But when management comes down the hall to the Open Source Software Seminar, looks in and sees twelve people on the clock trying to fold paper airplanes, that company is going to downsize and spend the savings on a shrink-wrapped solution from Redmond.
...and I mean that in the nicest possible way. This ain't about our baby going out into the world. This is about her getting into that metal-flake gold 1976 Delta 88 with leopard print plush seats and a Cadillac badge stuck on it what just rolled up in my driveway and played "brick............HOUSE!" on the horn for God's sake, with that hairy-chested (I can see it from here, Marge!) refugee from the P-Funk Mothership.
Recently, I got myself a membership on sdf.lonestar.org. Originally, I just wanted a truly external site from which to ping & probe back into my network (was studying for CCNA, got it!). But I went ahead and paid for the membership (there is a free version which is still satisfying). So now, I'm typing this from a hp laptop (which is yes on my lap) and still checking newsgroups using trn on the G4 iMac occupying the desk. I have pimped out my terminal emulator so that it shows bright green text on a green-black background, then made the whole thing largely transparent (the emulator, not the iMac) so I can keep an eye on my little Forex venture behind the terminal. It's all vaguely unsettling.
Anyhoo, does anybody remember a column/website/mailing list called "Outgoing Mail" from the early 1990's? This was when I first got online, at UNM. 2400, Lynx, trn, etc... Imagine my horror when I was ordered to "upgrade" all of those beautiful WFW 486s to Win95! We slapped in 14.4 modems, and might just as well have started using smoke signals. But eventually, we were MOSAIC and Netscape and happy.
Then, as others have pointed out, NS4 (Collabra, etc) came out and it sucked, and it was time to leave school, anyway...
And for those who missed it, let me just throw that little plug in there again: http://sdf.lonestar.org/. Hopefully, I'll see you there.
Well, I guess I can see it. He was released in beta, he crashed on his debut, and now he is a bloated, hairy, artificial construct with a proclivity for helping the Communists. Yup, he's legit!
---
Aw, geez, it's a MS joke. It's an Algore joke. Get over it.
Okay, okay! I got a laugh reading your first para. Hope I didn't do any lasting damage. The guy wanted an explanation with no jargon and was scheduled for a massive hangover by the time he read my post (if he remembered he'd been on slashdot at all), and I wanted to give him a picture of what would happen, even if he had no idea what orbital mechanics would do after a perturbation.
It's all well and good to talk about little hills and little valleys, but there's no actual force pulling outward if the ball comes inside its (nominal) orbit, so there shouldn't be a wall on the inside of the orbit, and there's certainly no force urging it to hurry up a little bit if it should happen to slow down for some reason, so there shouldn't be a wall just behind the ball, right? Unless you already have a grasp of orbital mechanics and the Coriolis effect. Because if our object is pushed slightly "inward" somehow, it doesn't go back outward as if trapped in a little valley; it seems to surge ahead, then veer outside, fall back, drift inward, surge ahead in an effectively clockwise motion about its previously expected position. This is as though it had encountered an imaginary bullsh-- well, it would be like a circular field. But only for small perturbations.
Don't get me wrong--I agree with you in general (although I think the little hills are actually "saddle" points, but I'm not sure). There's a school of thought that says the classical models of atoms do more harm than good by glossing over quantum reality. Nothing is orbiting, or spinning, for that matter. But how many people could have started with the real deal? Handy little models can come in, well, handy, for keeping straight some details of complicated processes. Just have to know the limitations of the model.
Perhaps the fellow making the request will let us know if I screwed him up even more.
... but a useful "mnemonic" for the LaGrange points:
Look at the Earth:moon system from Earth's north. You are now looking "down" on the northern hemisphere of earth from such a distance that the whole system looks flat, coins on a table. The moon (in this terrible view) revolves counterclockwise around the earth, and ignore any troublesome rotation. Here's the best (i.e., worst) part: imagine a clockwise field, denoted by little curved arrows all pointing around the moon, such that if you push the moon out of place, it must now move in the direction of the arrows.
Yes, this is all very bad; there is no field. Instead, the little clockwise field (for an object seen to orbit counterclockwise) is a little mental shorthand for orbital mechanics. This is only useful for very limited situations, and even then it's a terrible, really ugly way to understand something. This is a GOTO statement in an OO world.
Long story short; now picture the same little field around a third object at one of the two stable points (L4, L5) on the "circle" of the moon's orbit about Earth. If your third object is pushed a bit from it's own orbit around earth, the combination of those little arrows (er, orbital mechanics) and the shifted balance between the effect of Earth's and the moon's pull on your object will soon have it moving in little kidney-shaped (I think) orbits around the POINT, not around any object. The little orbits get smaller, I think, eventually putting the object back into a relaxed, stable circular orbit.
Incidentally, replace circle with ellipse, line with curve, field with "imaginary bullshit effect", stable with quasi-stable, useful with dangerous, and Windows with Linux, and I think you'll have an explanation acceptable to most/. readers.
...I would be pleased to get a line on just ONE "hot IT job". Write me a bot that will do that, and suddenly I'll care about your war3z. I live in Japan though. Interesting position. Or, lack thereof.
...I have waded through perhaps three copies of Mired, and thought the articles were interesting. But the damned thing is a half-inch thick with ads! With no more content than the usual skinny magazine. With all of that revenue coming in, you would think they could whack the price, but no, it's no bargain.
I guess we can tell now just how well that sales model has worked out for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I have no PS skills; I have no PS (although if I were worth a crap I would do it in InkScape 0.42, right?). But how about a Duck mascot, named "Dux", for the new convergence Windows-which-looks-an-awful-lot-like-linux: Windux(tm).
I suspect that some folks with mod points may attack early posts simply to discourage early posts. Without digressing too far OT (God forbid) about the merits of modding styles, I have seen a fair bit of instant TROLL modding for reasons I don't understand. Or do understand and don't agree with.
But I'm not going to "explain" the joke. I'm confident that whoever modded me down simply likes MS and got offended that I poked a little fun at the latest in a long line of on-schedule*, stable*, secure*, enjoyable*, standards-compliant*, affordable*, innovative*, configurable*, intuitive* offerings from the good folks in Redmond.
* Not Necessarily true.
...CrashDot!
... in a country with a falling birthrate? Japan can't muster enough children to pay for retirement benefits in twenty years, and they come up with this?
Hitler's government was National Socialism. A Socialist government cannot "give" full employment or well-fed children to its constituents any more than a Republican Democracy (or Democratic Republic, as you wish) can. The difference and the problem is this: a Socialist government thinks it can, and its chosen tool to accomplish this is always totalitarianism. This makes for powerful governments and obedient people. For a while.
As Konrad Heiden pointed out in his 1944 "Der Fuehrer", Hitler engaged in a particularly destructive political campaign against unemployed German coalworkers in the Ruhr valley on his rise to power. He did not give them jobs, although he could have supported incentives and conditions favorable to local employment. Instead, he spiked such efforts, dooming them to failure, and casting the coalworkers' hopes to the winds. Why? Because satisfied people are more difficult to motivate.
The only thing Hitler ever "gave" the German people was a swift kick in the ass, which most people in the world today could use, including you. He was in the business of taking, not giving, and I find your arm's-length equation of America with Hitler's Germany to be intellectually lazy at best, reprehensible at worst. America has hotly contested elections and vividly contrasting schools of political thought. All are openly expressed, and even the odious American Nazi Party exists as a legal organization.
The GP was absolutely right to say that "Americans are not the obedient kind of lemmings that the Germans were under Hitler," and your coughing disagreement ("Don't be too sure...") is frankly out of order.
True dat, yo. "Won't suck a dick and can't change a tire." Yes, that is my definition; you may quote me.
Why should WM care about training tens of thousands (I guess) of workers in counterfeit detection, when the value thereby gained (putative loss prevention) would be far outweighed by the cost of education? Further, what about the time spent by each clerk at every transaction for the LARGEST RETAILER IN THE WORLD? Sure, at first you're talking about mere seconds, but at the scale we're talking, it's a huge amount. And if you figure that A) other institutions will cover you through fraud detection, and B) anybody truly successful at counterfeiting (the only real threat, after all), probably won't shop at WM very long :-)
Besides which, courtesy to the customer weighed against the possibility of a small profit (as when the cashier at a gas station lets you replace your spilled SugarBombSodaGallon for free), has always gone a long way in my book. You assume the customer is decent, and they remember it.
I was raised poor, and remember where I was treated well. I remember the first barber who called me "Sir". I was seven at the time, and thereafter I went to his shop until he *died*. SO you get the odd counterfeit $20. Truly small change, even when multiplied against the scale of WM's activity, if you consider the damage that two or three incidents made public (which does NOT scale) could do to a company that size.
And I have another airport code (IATA, not ICAO): DOS = Dios Field, Bougainville Island, Papua New Guinea
...Lots of complaints about how it ought to be a damned vacuum cleaner motor or something. Wow and flutter, etc... Look. The mass of the "table" part and the LP itself are actually going to work in this thing's favor. The drive itself has very fine scale speed adjustments, but it's going to be applied to such a larger mass that the momentum (okay, the Angular Momentum) of the thing will reduce the motor's input to a gentle urge to speed up or slow down. Relatively, of course; the point is it's not going to whip an LP around like it were the moving part of a floppy, but it'll still get it going nice and quickly (YMMV).
The result will be very smooth, precisely controlled speed.
One thing that strikes me as odd is the "echo" effect. While other freqs vary wildly, this stays fairly constant. I did the math, 27 minutes to 73 seconds of audio is a reduction by a factor of about 22. Estimating the echo to be at about 6 Hz, that means that the interval between "echo" peaks is about 3.7 seconds. Is that the time for an average field line to accelerate a spiralling particle from one pole to the other? (and back?)
Or did the scientists throw in an echo effect? That would certainly keep it constant. Sampling problem?
I like the idea of experimenting with paper airplane design-by-committee.
But when management comes down the hall to the Open Source Software Seminar, looks in and sees twelve people on the clock trying to fold paper airplanes, that company is going to downsize and spend the savings on a shrink-wrapped solution from Redmond.
First time I've heard of it too, but it also seems to be on PageMaker's territory. Nothing wrong with PM, but I like the IS price beter.
Especially if you did it in space. Pedant.
...I'm not seeing it. GP, while flamingly off-topic, was at least not wrong.
...and I mean that in the nicest possible way. This ain't about our baby going out into the world. This is about her getting into that metal-flake gold 1976 Delta 88 with leopard print plush seats and a Cadillac badge stuck on it what just rolled up in my driveway and played "brick............HOUSE!" on the horn for God's sake, with that hairy-chested (I can see it from here, Marge!) refugee from the P-Funk Mothership.
And she AIN'T GOIN'!
Recently, I got myself a membership on sdf.lonestar.org. Originally, I just wanted a truly external site from which to ping & probe back into my network (was studying for CCNA, got it!). But I went ahead and paid for the membership (there is a free version which is still satisfying). So now, I'm typing this from a hp laptop (which is yes on my lap) and still checking newsgroups using trn on the G4 iMac occupying the desk. I have pimped out my terminal emulator so that it shows bright green text on a green-black background, then made the whole thing largely transparent (the emulator, not the iMac) so I can keep an eye on my little Forex venture behind the terminal. It's all vaguely unsettling.
Anyhoo, does anybody remember a column/website/mailing list called "Outgoing Mail" from the early 1990's? This was when I first got online, at UNM. 2400, Lynx, trn, etc... Imagine my horror when I was ordered to "upgrade" all of those beautiful WFW 486s to Win95! We slapped in 14.4 modems, and might just as well have started using smoke signals. But eventually, we were MOSAIC and Netscape and happy.
Then, as others have pointed out, NS4 (Collabra, etc) came out and it sucked, and it was time to leave school, anyway...
And for those who missed it, let me just throw that little plug in there again: http://sdf.lonestar.org/. Hopefully, I'll see you there.
Well, I guess I can see it. He was released in beta, he crashed on his debut, and now he is a bloated, hairy, artificial construct with a proclivity for helping the Communists. Yup, he's legit!
---
Aw, geez, it's a MS joke. It's an Algore joke. Get over it.
...blah blah blah BLOWJOB blah blah blah... React to what?
Okay, okay! I got a laugh reading your first para. Hope I didn't do any lasting damage. The guy wanted an explanation with no jargon and was scheduled for a massive hangover by the time he read my post (if he remembered he'd been on slashdot at all), and I wanted to give him a picture of what would happen, even if he had no idea what orbital mechanics would do after a perturbation.
It's all well and good to talk about little hills and little valleys, but there's no actual force pulling outward if the ball comes inside its (nominal) orbit, so there shouldn't be a wall on the inside of the orbit, and there's certainly no force urging it to hurry up a little bit if it should happen to slow down for some reason, so there shouldn't be a wall just behind the ball, right? Unless you already have a grasp of orbital mechanics and the Coriolis effect. Because if our object is pushed slightly "inward" somehow, it doesn't go back outward as if trapped in a little valley; it seems to surge ahead, then veer outside, fall back, drift inward, surge ahead in an effectively clockwise motion about its previously expected position. This is as though it had encountered an imaginary bullsh-- well, it would be like a circular field. But only for small perturbations.
Don't get me wrong--I agree with you in general (although I think the little hills are actually "saddle" points, but I'm not sure). There's a school of thought that says the classical models of atoms do more harm than good by glossing over quantum reality. Nothing is orbiting, or spinning, for that matter. But how many people could have started with the real deal? Handy little models can come in, well, handy, for keeping straight some details of complicated processes. Just have to know the limitations of the model.
Perhaps the fellow making the request will let us know if I screwed him up even more.
...I can deploy my private Army now? My shareholders have been itching for some action, and the government's got it all sewn up!
... but a useful "mnemonic" for the LaGrange points:
/. readers.
Look at the Earth:moon system from Earth's north. You are now looking "down" on the northern hemisphere of earth from such a distance that the whole system looks flat, coins on a table. The moon (in this terrible view) revolves counterclockwise around the earth, and ignore any troublesome rotation. Here's the best (i.e., worst) part: imagine a clockwise field, denoted by little curved arrows all pointing around the moon, such that if you push the moon out of place, it must now move in the direction of the arrows.
Yes, this is all very bad; there is no field. Instead, the little clockwise field (for an object seen to orbit counterclockwise) is a little mental shorthand for orbital mechanics. This is only useful for very limited situations, and even then it's a terrible, really ugly way to understand something. This is a GOTO statement in an OO world.
Long story short; now picture the same little field around a third object at one of the two stable points (L4, L5) on the "circle" of the moon's orbit about Earth. If your third object is pushed a bit from it's own orbit around earth, the combination of those little arrows (er, orbital mechanics) and the shifted balance between the effect of Earth's and the moon's pull on your object will soon have it moving in little kidney-shaped (I think) orbits around the POINT, not around any object. The little orbits get smaller, I think, eventually putting the object back into a relaxed, stable circular orbit.
Incidentally, replace circle with ellipse, line with curve, field with "imaginary bullshit effect", stable with quasi-stable, useful with dangerous, and Windows with Linux, and I think you'll have an explanation acceptable to most
...I would be pleased to get a line on just ONE "hot IT job". Write me a bot that will do that, and suddenly I'll care about your war3z. I live in Japan though. Interesting position. Or, lack thereof.
Thanks for the support. I really got ironed out on this one. I was so-o-o angry. Added a line to my comments for the rest of that day:
0 12495
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155206&cid=13
I'm fairly sure it's too late, but ah well. Thanks Anyway!
...I have waded through perhaps three copies of Mired, and thought the articles were interesting. But the damned thing is a half-inch thick with ads! With no more content than the usual skinny magazine. With all of that revenue coming in, you would think they could whack the price, but no, it's no bargain.
I guess we can tell now just how well that sales model has worked out for them.
...if they're address to Anonymous Coward?