IBM is and has always been a Business Machine company. It's in their name. They have historically made time clocks, photocopiers, typewriters, etc. Computers turned out to be a lucrative line of business for them, and it was a natural evolution for IBM, which was producing powerful 'Data Processing' systems long before there were computers powering them. The punched card WAS the data set back in those days, and 'queries' were programmed into card sorters using jumper wire panels, etc.
(unless you believe that living corpses like Terry Schiavo were "killed" when their life support hardware was turned off),
Whoah, you sounded like a reasonable person worth including in a discussion there for awhile. Please put 'ringers' like the above early in your rants in the future so we don't need to waste time reading on.
There is a move in several state legislatures to provide an exemption to the 'Mandatory Helmet Law.' If a motorcyclist carries the designation on his license that he is an organ donor, he is not required to wear a helmet.
No, you're wrong. Ham Radio wasn't 'obsoleted' because it was never about calling to see if one should pick up a carton of milk on the way home. It would have had to have that mundane utility for 'cell phones' to replace it. Open Source is, again like Ham Radio, based in a subculture of people who like tinkering.
Not really. That is the historical trend, but have you noticed the kind of twinks being churned out to do corporate IT these days? Freenix and nerd stuff is becoming a subculture. Running open source software is headed the way of Ham Radio.
(I like ham radio, and I have never wanted to be anything more than part of a subculture)
Microsoft might only have 30% of the Server Market, but they essentially have sewn up the part of it that people will pay money for: the part of the server market that corporate desktops connect to. I seriously doubt that Microsoft is worried yet about the huge market of thin Internet-facing servers running free software.
I wish it wasn't so. I am tired of the servers falling over that the machine in my cubicle needs to function usefully. I am completely resigned, though, to the fact that my company (like almost any other large business) is gonna stick with Redmondware.
This place is scaring me. Because you know somebody has won when their opponents are spending a lot of time making vulgar jokes about them. And I don't really want Microsoft to win.
Okay, Microsoft can wait to lose until after Vista obsoletes another generation of hardware for me to buy cheap at auction (to run NetBSD on.)
How many of them have actual *company-building* experinece, let alone software development experience?
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but Scott McNeely is essentially a hockey player, and Larry Ellison is essentially a used car salesman. And they've done alright throughout recent tech history.
but they don't have the right to perpetually DOS everybody else's brain cycles with their spam.
I hadn't noticed that happening. All I see is them being completely squelched, unlike many other crackpot theoriticians.
At a Library Used Book Sale last weekend I bought a book, published in 1967, that proposed in alarmist print on the front cover, that there would be mass starvation by the year 1975. There was a period in the recent past when the alarmist blather was all about a 'New Ice Age' coming on.
There's always someone pushing a political agenda out there, and using 'Science' as a justification. And there always will be. It's been done over and over again as a theme in shows like Star Trek.
It is very *very* western for 'white man' to wander off on a pilgrimage 'to the east' and bring back a passel of ideas and set up a smorgasboard philosophy based on them.
In fact, that form of 'veneration of the East' is patently racist. It's like admiring a comic book mythisized version of the 'American Indian religion' made up by a new age guru. And it's very VERY patronizing to people who live their real lives in said system.
It has great appeal for people with a moderate but not deep world experience, it gives them an 'other' to admire in their shallow way.
But it's based, sadly, in ignorance of the whole truth. Think a little more about the grandparent commenter's query and what he was getting at.
Now, now. Let's not start hurling terms like 'freeper' and 'moonbat' around or this will turn into another political blog. We're better than that, honest we are.
Alan Watts? your kidding right? oh your not, you just stupid.
Cut the guy some slack. Don't you remember when *you* were a freshman and discovered that everything you'd ever been taught before by your elders was *all* *wrong* ?
Give him a few years to play around with utopias before slapping him down.
I think your boogeyman needs to be defined more widely. It isn't just 'western culture' it's pretty much 'all of us.' Look close at just about any place on earth and you'll find people ripping and tearing at the earth to scratch out a living. The notion that it's 'western culture' is a delusion. There's no 'sacred path' outside the mainstream that we've horribly wandered off. There are certainly alternatives and there are tendencies that all of humanity exhibit (a short-term point of view that doesn't plan ahead.) What I'm trying to get at is: don't just blame one part of humanity. You can go to where the 'noble savages' that so many who believe these myths venerate, and you'll find them burning down as much forest as they can.
And it isn't just chemicals and gravity. There is a complex symbiotic 'web of life' that we are part of. There's nothing at all 'mystical' about it, but it is horrendously complex. There's no way we could load a bunch of samples into tanks and trundle off to space. We need to know MUCH more about the mechanisms of life, and our biosphere, before we will be ready to replicate it.
Which is what makes the 'we've gotta HURRY and get outta here' people so deplorable. Often, they seem to feel that cutting corners that damage the earth further are acceptable, i.e. all the damage that every shuttle launch does.
I don't know that much about the mechanisms of evolution (just what I learned in one Geology course on the topic in College) but I do know enough to say that your concept of 'evolution' is comically ignorant.
Slashdot Mirror
Nasty old 'freedom' rears it's ugly head. To recap it for you:
Anybody can charge whatever they want to whomever they want (except where said freedom is taken away by government edict).
I can sell you my digital camera for $4, or I can give it to you, or I can refuse to sell it to you for $17,348.54.
I can single you out because you drive a BMW if I like (or, rather, because you're probably a prick, which is a good bet.)
Menards is another good example.
IBM is and has always been a Business Machine company. It's in their name. They have historically made time clocks, photocopiers, typewriters, etc. Computers turned out to be a lucrative line of business for them, and it was a natural evolution for IBM, which was producing powerful 'Data Processing' systems long before there were computers powering them. The punched card WAS the data set back in those days, and 'queries' were programmed into card sorters using jumper wire panels, etc.
Ham Radio wasn't killed.
People like you who, the kind who will say 'Open Source is now big business' want to think it's dead, of course.
If I had mod points I'd mark you a troll.
You just defined yourself as trolled, dude.
'Living Corpse' was inflammatory language.
Whoah. You trolled me.
Define 'they' without reference to the scary monster under your bed.
I thought for a moment, with a name like 'OpenSky' that it was going to be a Japanese website airborne on a small plane.
Sadly, it's far, far less interesting than that.
Also, there are unpleasant side effects not present with other forms of heroin. Tendencies toward pedophilia often surface, for instance.
(unless you believe that living corpses like Terry Schiavo were "killed" when their life support hardware was turned off),
Whoah, you sounded like a reasonable person worth including in a discussion there for awhile. Please put 'ringers' like the above early in your rants in the future so we don't need to waste time reading on.
There is a move in several state legislatures to provide an exemption to the 'Mandatory Helmet Law.' If a motorcyclist carries the designation on his license that he is an organ donor, he is not required to wear a helmet.
No, you're wrong. Ham Radio wasn't 'obsoleted' because it was never about calling to see if one should pick up a carton of milk on the way home. It would have had to have that mundane utility for 'cell phones' to replace it. Open Source is, again like Ham Radio, based in a subculture of people who like tinkering.
Not really. That is the historical trend, but have you noticed the kind of twinks being churned out to do corporate IT these days? Freenix and nerd stuff is becoming a subculture. Running open source software is headed the way of Ham Radio.
(I like ham radio, and I have never wanted to be anything more than part of a subculture)
I almost choked the first time I realized that Pepsi was using iTunes bottlecaps to sell sugar water.
But, then, Jobs is essentially a vendor of pop tunes now. . .
Microsoft might only have 30% of the Server Market, but they essentially have sewn up the part of it that people will pay money for: the part of the server market that corporate desktops connect to. I seriously doubt that Microsoft is worried yet about the huge market of thin Internet-facing servers running free software.
I wish it wasn't so. I am tired of the servers falling over that the machine in my cubicle needs to function usefully. I am completely resigned, though, to the fact that my company (like almost any other large business) is gonna stick with Redmondware.
This place is scaring me. Because you know somebody has won when their opponents are spending a lot of time making vulgar jokes about them. And I don't really want Microsoft to win.
Okay, Microsoft can wait to lose until after Vista obsoletes another generation of hardware for me to buy cheap at auction (to run NetBSD on.)
How many of them have actual *company-building* experinece, let alone software development experience?
I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but Scott McNeely is essentially a hockey player, and Larry Ellison is essentially a used car salesman. And they've done alright throughout recent tech history.
but they don't have the right to perpetually DOS everybody else's brain cycles with their spam.
I hadn't noticed that happening. All I see is them being completely squelched, unlike many other crackpot theoriticians.
At a Library Used Book Sale last weekend I bought a book, published in 1967, that proposed in alarmist print on the front cover, that there would be mass starvation by the year 1975. There was a period in the recent past when the alarmist blather was all about a 'New Ice Age' coming on.
There's always someone pushing a political agenda out there, and using 'Science' as a justification. And there always will be. It's been done over and over again as a theme in shows like Star Trek.
You keep blatting out social darwinist cliches like it makes you sound clever. Which, I caution you, does not.
It is very *very* western for 'white man' to wander off on a pilgrimage 'to the east' and bring back a passel of ideas and set up a smorgasboard philosophy based on them.
In fact, that form of 'veneration of the East' is patently racist. It's like admiring a comic book mythisized version of the 'American Indian religion' made up by a new age guru. And it's very VERY patronizing to people who live their real lives in said system.
It has great appeal for people with a moderate but not deep world experience, it gives them an 'other' to admire in their shallow way.
But it's based, sadly, in ignorance of the whole truth. Think a little more about the grandparent commenter's query and what he was getting at.
Now, now. Let's not start hurling terms like 'freeper' and 'moonbat' around or this will turn into another political blog. We're better than that, honest we are.
One of my co-workers had a wonderful time at a Dude Ranch last summer.
Alan Watts? your kidding right? oh your not, you just stupid.
Cut the guy some slack. Don't you remember when *you* were a freshman and discovered that everything you'd ever been taught before by your elders was *all* *wrong* ?
Give him a few years to play around with utopias before slapping him down.
I think your boogeyman needs to be defined more widely. It isn't just 'western culture' it's pretty much 'all of us.' Look close at just about any place on earth and you'll find people ripping and tearing at the earth to scratch out a living. The notion that it's 'western culture' is a delusion. There's no 'sacred path' outside the mainstream that we've horribly wandered off. There are certainly alternatives and there are tendencies that all of humanity exhibit (a short-term point of view that doesn't plan ahead.) What I'm trying to get at is: don't just blame one part of humanity. You can go to where the 'noble savages' that so many who believe these myths venerate, and you'll find them burning down as much forest as they can.
And it isn't just chemicals and gravity. There is a complex symbiotic 'web of life' that we are part of. There's nothing at all 'mystical' about it, but it is horrendously complex. There's no way we could load a bunch of samples into tanks and trundle off to space. We need to know MUCH more about the mechanisms of life, and our biosphere, before we will be ready to replicate it.
Which is what makes the 'we've gotta HURRY and get outta here' people so deplorable. Often, they seem to feel that cutting corners that damage the earth further are acceptable, i.e. all the damage that every shuttle launch does.
I don't know that much about the mechanisms of evolution (just what I learned in one Geology course on the topic in College) but I do know enough to say that your concept of 'evolution' is comically ignorant.
Typical, though.