That's a myth put about by the scientists and religionists who want a conflict...
Ad hominem.
...(after all, it sells books), that I believe can only be sustained by taking an unusual definition of religion (or science).
Very well. What are the usual definitions?
What do you think science is? What do think religion is?
Science is the systematic empirical inquiry into the nature of the universe. The hypotheses, theories and laws of science are characteristically falsifiable. They are also subject to alteration upon the introduction of new evidence. A scientific conjecture can never be proven, only disproven.
Religion is characterized by steadfast belief in a set of cultural myths in spite of the presence of contravening evidence. Given an ever-present choice between myth and incontrovertible fact, the religious practitioner chooses myth. Religion is therefore inherently irrational.
Why do you think one is the antithesis of the other?
Precisely because science, claiming to be capable of knowing nothing beyond a statistical certainty, starts from ignorance and uses evidence and logic to proceed toward a description of the universe which is both logically and factually consistent.
Religion, antithetically, begins with the assumption of factual certainty of propositions not in evidence. Religion strives to maintain belief in myth in the face of outright disproof.
Hint: religion is far more empirical than most of its critics realise.
Unsubstantiated and preposterous.
By the way, slightly tongue in Hegelian cheek: if religion (being older than science) is the thesis, and science is the antithesis, what do you thing should be the synthesis?
There can be no synthesis even in principle. Hegel assumed rationality and intellectual responsibility on the part of both parties to a dialectic. Religion is categorically irrational precisely because its tenets are immutable by definition. There can be no rationality because there can be no ratio, no balancing or weighing of fact. Religion alters its dogma only as a last resort in the face of overwhelming evidence. Absent science, the Catholic Church, one can only presume, would happily be teaching geocentric cosmology -- if the word can be applied to such a thing -- to this day.
>There are precedents. Even though President >Bush and his administration never said that Iraq >sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not >stand the fact that Americans had that >misapprehension - so you pounded us with the fact >that there was no such link. (Along the way, you >created the false impression that Bush had lied >to them and said that there was a connection.)
Oh, that's rich! Here's a quote from a Boston globe Article dated June 16, 2004:
>Bush has previously said there was ''no >evidence" linking Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001 >attacks, but he and other members of his >administration have continued to say they >believe there were ties between Hussein and Al >Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison >Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called >Hussein ''a patron of terrorism" and said ''he >had long established ties with Al Qaeda."
Please stop reading Orson Scott Card. He's completely full of shit.
Sure it is. Let's imagine that the entertainment industry did not exist and that we dreamed it up in its current form. We would go to venture capitalists with a proposal that outlined our business model, right? And, being sensible people, they would say, "Garsh! Your plan sounds really good right up until we get to the distribution model. You see, silly dreamers, your model is based on the economics of scarcity. As you well know, information is easily digitized and copied without inherent limit. How would you keep people from just taking your product without paying you for it? The honor system?" At this point all of the venture capitalists in the meeting would laugh uproariously and we would skulk out of the room feeling extra stupid.
Now, what's the difference between our thought experiment and the real world? You're quite right that there is nothing wrong in principle with the old *AA business model. In theory it is a grand thing. It simply no longer works in practice. Buggy whip makers could lobby their little hearts out but that won't stop the historically inevitable rise of the automobile, will it?
History has passed the *AA by. Adapt or perish. Amen.
These papers should be watched carefully for any alterations occurring as a result of propagation in the form of file transmission and storage. One of these alterations per billion should result in a more viable paper than the original. These altered papers will tend to reproduce more efficiently than either the originals or the detrimentally altered copies.
The ISO sold its intrinsic value, in the form of its integrity and credibility, to Microsoft Corporation. Now the utterances of ISO functionaries are of no importance whatsoever, just as the standards maintained by the ISO are of no value at all. We will interpret the actions of M$ and the ISO as the damage that they truly are and simply route around them. The lesson here is that, in the brave new interconnected world, centralized authorities are single points of failure. They are utterly vulnerable to the enemies of freedom, and must be eliminated. We will therefore evolve distributed standards authorities of some fundamentally new nature. Soviet-era centralized control systems are as obsolete as proprietary operating systems. These things will chaotically destabilize and vanish to be replaced by an equilibrium of resilient, distributed algorithms.
Does anyone know of a package of some sort that will shut off all of the "helpful" bells & whistles? I'm a crusty old vi user who recoils in pain and rage every time one of these GUIs insists on jumping in and doing things for me. I like OoO very much. I would love it if if would get out of my way and let me do precisely and only what I am trying to do. Thanks.
Seriously. The entire objection to eliminating DST seems to reduce to people wanting more daylight playtime in the evenings. So, go to DST and quit. Done. And now that we're going to have to patch and boot every last server in the enterprise (again) lets do something really smart and put the whole planet on GMT permanently and have done with it. Yes, that means you too, Indiana.
Practical timekeeping involves nothing more than assigning an arbitrary set of integers to the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Why make anybody correct for time zone? This is nothing more than a senseless source of error. We can do the big shift while my aged parents are preoccupied with the Commie plot to destroy analog TV signals. Hell, they're still stunned that their man Mitt gave up on the White House. They have bigger fish to fry.
The latter day Fischer was a raving lunatic. His "politics" do not merit rebuttal or even serious consideration. I choose to remember the Fischer of my youth -- which was quite pleasantly misspent in the 70s. No single player has ever so completely dominated chess like Fischer. His play is a model of simplicity, logic, creativity, and elegance. I would say that he will be missed, but, in truth, we in the international chess community have already missed the real Bobby Fisher for many years.
"Checkmate", from the Persian "shah mat" meaning, "the king is dead".
> These days, being a programmer generalist (even worse, one with admin experience) just increases the types of shit that get dumped on you..
I would love nothing more than to have management give me the whole works and get the hell out of my way while I complete the project. I am a Unix System Admin at a fortune 150. I specialize in system programming. Every so often we get a wish list from the generalist admins and danged if it doesn't have some real good ideas on it. This is a source of project ideas, but most of our programs start as band-aids.
Here's the deal. Trench admins are outstanding triage people and they can write a mean quick & dirty shell script which will fix the immediate problem. If the problem was interesting enough, they'll email the details of the cause and solution to the group along with the {box}:/path/to/script that they just wrote to fix it. We in coder land monitor the use of these scripts and if one of them is used a lot and/or manages to get itself into an automonitor program that starts generating a lot of false negatives (or, in theory, positives) we will review it and add all of the invariably missing return checks, usage functions, man pages, additional functionality, &etc. Some of these puppies grow to behemoth proportions and require a far more sophisticated user interface than we can easily manage in the shell. At this point there is a terrible danger that one of our managers will discover the thing and "help" us out by trying to raise money for a formal Internal Systems development project. God forbid he actually gets funded. Now we can't just pick the tool for the job and knock it out. We have to wade with these sorry people through months of requirements gathering, use case analysis, prototyping, alpha- and beta-testing, and all of the other horseshit that happens to occur to whatever utterly superfluous project manager is assigned to the thing. In the end the "developers" in IS will puke forth a.NET solution that runs right only on IE. Unix admins work on the command line. Internal Systems developers know exactly fuck all about Unix. Nobody uses the "solution" and we get blamed by association for its egregious nastiness.
I have determined quite conclusively that these fucking IS morons have never heard of a finte state machine, cannot process CSV files (buggy.dll in their BillyWare), do not know what a linked list is... They are, in brief, incompetent morons. I have theorized about the cause and effect of this putrid situation at incredible length. It just seems to be the case that some folks are compelled by nature to work from first principles, and some are content to accumulate seemingly random senseless facts about systems that will be for them forever completely opaque. The first principle people become your theoretical physicists and top gun *nix admins and the like. The fact accumulators, who are just flat out intellectually inferior, are best suited to the help desk or project management or some such. The fact accululators invariably arrive at "development" by making office apps out of Excel macros and Access crap. Management, in all its abject stupidity, cannot differentiate this from real software. Voila! The lowly fact accumulator is thus Peter principled into "development" and is now officially the hell in my way.
The sorry fact is that all of the decent software coming out of my little group is manufactured by stealth. We develop very solid software in spite of our "helpers." Unfortunately, the only way to change this mess is to go into management and spend enough years playing petty political games and garnering good relations with stupid people to start to make a difference. First principle people simply can't do it. We'd vomit explosively at the first opportunity to compromise technical elegance for expediency. We can just write a book exposing the whole process, but The Mythical Man Month is already there. Management can't learn from it. They are not incented to learn from it. They are incented to find more shit to manage. And more shitheads. And the cycle of poo continues.
Nossir! I don't like it one little bit! This whole thing stinks to high heaven of the slippery slope to people farming. From here it's just one baby step to yoking us to massive turbines and forcing us to slog around in mind-destroying circles all day long generating power for our Republican Overlords. And before you smarty-pants Windows admins start in with your, "and that's different how?" comments, just think through to the next baby step where the yoke sensors detect your drag on the system and the hive mind slides one of those floor tiles right out from under you and you plunge down a shiny stainless steel chute a la James Bond (or Austin Powers) and land your ass smack in the interlocking helical razor blades of the soylant green production line, stage zero. Then you wind up in the IV drips of a couple dozen of your former colleagues the next day. And all of it owned and operated by Area 51 Aliens flying around in Halliburton's black helicopters and giving each other the Bavarian Illuminati secret handshake with their tentacles. Nossir! Nope! I don't like it atall!
I misread the parent's title as "Mutual Masturbation." I insist that someone post a comment with this title and make heavy use of the circle jerk as a metaphor for corporate IT activity of any kind. Thanks in advance.
I seriously and strenuously doubt that this 8500 pages constitutes the purported documentation. Far more likely it is a masterwork of corporate techno-drivel. I expect to hear from independent qualified judges that this material is not, in fact, necessary and sufficient information to enable an expert to create a system capable of reliably interacting with M$ machines on a network. Likewise with file formats, &etc. This present waste of paper is nothing more than yet another chess move by M$. The EU will have to burn months deciphering and testing the documents, more months filing reports on how extrmely bogus it actually is. The EU bureaucracy machine will piss away many more months spinning up. M$ will whine and wail to the press about how the oppressive socialist regime is never satisfied no matter how many earnest efforts poor little M$ makes to comply with the the horrible old EU's draconian and anti-competitive rules. Neelie Kroes will impose more very impressive sounding, but ultimately trivial fines on M$. The EU will decree that M$ can not distribute software in their constituent countries. M$ will instantly appeal. An automatic injunction will take effect, nullifying the decree. The decree was, after all, nothing but hollow posturing from the get go. M$ will pay the fines -- which have been for years factored into the cost of doing business in the EU. M$ accountants will treat the whole matter as a simple, standard, albeit largish, bribe. The wheels on the bus will go round and round. Macchielvelli's rotten, grinning corpse will cum in it's shorts again. Same Old Shit.
Repeat after me: M$ will NEVER give up their wire protocols, APIS, ABIs, or file formats. Ever. Not until doing so presents itself as the most profitable course of action. At present, such a disclosure would be nothing short of financially catastrophic for them. Complying with the EU's demands is quite out of the question. So forget about it. Now. Do it.
There are advantages to both. It all depends on whether or not you need to win in the end even though you finish last. Often, the evil guys have cooler uniforms. Being mean to kittens and your Grandma can relieve stress. If you have a strong conscience, though, you'll want to go with "good." Otherwise you'll spend your nights flopping around in bed in a cold sweat worrying about the inevitable day when you'll be forced to shield yourself from small arms fire behind the tiny, frail body of a sweet little girl and then one of the "good" guys will just completely ignore your shrill demands for $5 million and a Lear jet and just shoot you in the face and you'll look silly and be dead.
I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. I am personally acquainted with upper managers who are just dying to replace OpenBSD-based firewalls with M$ Vista Server. THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami.
That M$ can now, on the one hand, generate security holes of arbitrary obscurity, and, on the other, miraculously detect and repair them far and away better than their erstwhile "competitors" is a final and apocalyptic testimonial to the supreme stupidity (I use the word advisedly, in the sense of "willful ignorance") of our omnipotent layers of corporate management.
Wasn't it bad enough when M$ were the sole possessors of the Most Sacred A[PB]Is? Wasn't it awful enough that they were able to ignore even the most rudimentary dictates of software engineering with impugnity -- that the drooling imbeciles in management would keep right on paying vast sums of money for hideous deformities of Logic without batting an eyelash? Do they now get to rake in huge profits from "repairing" systemic defects of their own intentional manufacture?
I am 41. I am tired and old. I have watched, like a Felliniesque "Sad Clown of Life," wave upon wave of utter inanity wash up on the vast, dead-whale-stinking beach of corporate and academic IT. I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps? How, for the bleeding love of the pumping, pulsating heart of Jesus Christ on a pogo stick do I just sit in meetings daydreaming about jumping into my big yellow H2 and driving back to my prefab McMansion in the burb-sprawl and staining my redwood deck with Johnson's WaterSeal? Why oh why must I KNOW that the imminent deaths of such elegancies as Tru64 Unix and MIPS and Alpha are a sin against art and science and technology and Man? Can't I just be stupid too? What's so wrong with me? What have I done? Why must I suffer so?
One day, my friends, we will all lounge in paradise happily signing off on million-dollar purchases of Microsoft AntiVirus Protection(TM) with huge idiotic grins upon our faces and lovely oblivious strings of rancid drool dangling from our chins. We will not be tormented by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our eyes will bear the brilliant, unfocused glow of perfect, orgasmic stupidity. Until then, we must work to balance our egregious karma. Can there be any doubt whatever that we fried and devoured living human babies in each of our wretched previous incarnations? What more glaring evidence can there be of our complete, total, and inherent evil?
We sinners must needs endure the terrible, sadistic wrath of a cold and childish god. May he soon tire of so gleefully tormenting us. Amen.
Railgun Sally
Arrrrgh!! The first few pages, I'm all "oooh aaah" and then the little wavy bloze window icon comes and I projectile vomit. There should be a warning page. How am I ever supposed to enjoy whisky again? And don't say "drink it" you flippant bastards. I am traumatized and I deserve sympathy and you know it.
This might be the goods. Grandma buys a Google-branded flash drive from Wal-Mart and plugs it into her crotchety old win95 box and viola! She can take it to the kids' houses and have her environment follow her around. She's got a bunch of AJAX apps running local CGI when she's offline and syncing up with her Google account when she connects to the world. The apps access OpenOffice libs to render and edit M$-docs. The jump drive appears as a data drive under M$-Ware and even has the same AJAX utilities with the same look+feel and syncing capabilities. Grandma just plugs in and goes. She can boot from the drive or just use it under the Billyware or whatever. Done right, she would neither know nor care about the OS layer. She surfs the net and sends electronic greeting cards via email. That's the extent of Grandma's computational skill set. The whole environment fits in Granny's reading glasses case. Life is good.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a myth put about by the scientists and religionists who want a conflict...
Ad hominem.
...(after all, it sells books), that I believe can only be sustained by taking an unusual definition of religion (or science).
Very well. What are the usual definitions?
What do you think science is? What do think religion is?
Science is the systematic empirical inquiry into the nature of the universe. The hypotheses, theories and laws of science are characteristically falsifiable. They are also subject to alteration upon the introduction of new evidence. A scientific conjecture can never be proven, only disproven.
Religion is characterized by steadfast belief in a set of cultural myths in spite of the presence of contravening evidence. Given an ever-present choice between myth and incontrovertible fact, the religious practitioner chooses myth. Religion is therefore inherently irrational.
Why do you think one is the antithesis of the other?
Precisely because science, claiming to be capable of knowing nothing beyond a statistical certainty, starts from ignorance and uses evidence and logic to proceed toward a description of the universe which is both logically and factually consistent.
Religion, antithetically, begins with the assumption of factual certainty of propositions not in evidence. Religion strives to maintain belief in myth in the face of outright disproof.
Hint: religion is far more empirical than most of its critics realise.
Unsubstantiated and preposterous.
By the way, slightly tongue in Hegelian cheek: if religion (being older than science) is the thesis, and science is the antithesis, what do you thing should be the synthesis?
There can be no synthesis even in principle. Hegel assumed rationality and intellectual responsibility on the part of both parties to a dialectic. Religion is categorically irrational precisely because its tenets are immutable by definition. There can be no rationality because there can be no ratio, no balancing or weighing of fact. Religion alters its dogma only as a last resort in the face of overwhelming evidence. Absent science, the Catholic Church, one can only presume, would happily be teaching geocentric cosmology -- if the word can be applied to such a thing -- to this day.
>There are precedents. Even though President
>Bush and his administration never said that Iraq
>sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not
>stand the fact that Americans had that
>misapprehension - so you pounded us with the fact
>that there was no such link. (Along the way, you
>created the false impression that Bush had lied
>to them and said that there was a connection.)
Oh, that's rich! Here's a quote from a Boston globe Article dated June 16, 2004:
>Bush has previously said there was ''no
>evidence" linking Hussein to the Sept. 11, 2001
>attacks, but he and other members of his
>administration have continued to say they
>believe there were ties between Hussein and Al
>Qaeda. In a speech to the conservative Madison
>Institute in Orlando on Monday, Cheney called
>Hussein ''a patron of terrorism" and said ''he
>had long established ties with Al Qaeda."
Please stop reading Orson Scott Card. He's completely full of shit.
What is that, like, a C? I was never able to do percentages.
Plus, the chicks will just assume...
Sure! 64 cores should be enough for anybody!
Sure it is. Let's imagine that the entertainment industry did not exist and that we dreamed it up in its current form. We would go to venture capitalists with a proposal that outlined our business model, right? And, being sensible people, they would say, "Garsh! Your plan sounds really good right up until we get to the distribution model. You see, silly dreamers, your model is based on the economics of scarcity. As you well know, information is easily digitized and copied without inherent limit. How would you keep people from just taking your product without paying you for it? The honor system?" At this point all of the venture capitalists in the meeting would laugh uproariously and we would skulk out of the room feeling extra stupid.
Now, what's the difference between our thought experiment and the real world? You're quite right that there is nothing wrong in principle with the old *AA business model. In theory it is a grand thing. It simply no longer works in practice. Buggy whip makers could lobby their little hearts out but that won't stop the historically inevitable rise of the automobile, will it?
History has passed the *AA by. Adapt or perish. Amen.
These papers should be watched carefully for any alterations occurring as a result of propagation in the form of file transmission and storage. One of these alterations per billion should result in a more viable paper than the original. These altered papers will tend to reproduce more efficiently than either the originals or the detrimentally altered copies.
The ISO sold its intrinsic value, in the form of its integrity and credibility, to Microsoft Corporation. Now the utterances of ISO functionaries are of no importance whatsoever, just as the standards maintained by the ISO are of no value at all. We will interpret the actions of M$ and the ISO as the damage that they truly are and simply route around them. The lesson here is that, in the brave new interconnected world, centralized authorities are single points of failure. They are utterly vulnerable to the enemies of freedom, and must be eliminated. We will therefore evolve distributed standards authorities of some fundamentally new nature. Soviet-era centralized control systems are as obsolete as proprietary operating systems. These things will chaotically destabilize and vanish to be replaced by an equilibrium of resilient, distributed algorithms.
Does anyone know of a package of some sort that will shut off all of the "helpful" bells & whistles? I'm a crusty old vi user who recoils in pain and rage every time one of these GUIs insists on jumping in and doing things for me. I like OoO very much. I would love it if if would get out of my way and let me do precisely and only what I am trying to do. Thanks.
Seriously. The entire objection to eliminating DST seems to reduce to people wanting more daylight playtime in the evenings. So, go to DST and quit. Done. And now that we're going to have to patch and boot every last server in the enterprise (again) lets do something really smart and put the whole planet on GMT permanently and have done with it. Yes, that means you too, Indiana.
Practical timekeeping involves nothing more than assigning an arbitrary set of integers to the position of the Earth relative to the Sun. Why make anybody correct for time zone? This is nothing more than a senseless source of error. We can do the big shift while my aged parents are preoccupied with the Commie plot to destroy analog TV signals. Hell, they're still stunned that their man Mitt gave up on the White House. They have bigger fish to fry.
The latter day Fischer was a raving lunatic. His "politics" do not merit rebuttal or even serious consideration. I choose to remember the Fischer of my youth -- which was quite pleasantly misspent in the 70s. No single player has ever so completely dominated chess like Fischer. His play is a model of simplicity, logic, creativity, and elegance. I would say that he will be missed, but, in truth, we in the international chess community have already missed the real Bobby Fisher for many years.
"Checkmate", from the Persian "shah mat" meaning, "the king is dead".
> These days, being a programmer generalist (even worse, one with admin experience) just increases the types of shit that get dumped on you..
.NET solution that runs right only on IE. Unix admins work on the command line. Internal Systems developers know exactly fuck all about Unix. Nobody uses the "solution" and we get blamed by association for its egregious nastiness.
.dll in their BillyWare), do not know what a linked list is... They are, in brief, incompetent morons. I have theorized about the cause and effect of this putrid situation at incredible length. It just seems to be the case that some folks are compelled by nature to work from first principles, and some are content to accumulate seemingly random senseless facts about systems that will be for them forever completely opaque. The first principle people become your theoretical physicists and top gun *nix admins and the like. The fact accumulators, who are just flat out intellectually inferior, are best suited to the help desk or project management or some such. The fact accululators invariably arrive at "development" by making office apps out of Excel macros and Access crap. Management, in all its abject stupidity, cannot differentiate this from real software. Voila! The lowly fact accumulator is thus Peter principled into "development" and is now officially the hell in my way.
I would love nothing more than to have management give me the whole works and get the hell out of my way while I complete the project. I am a Unix System Admin at a fortune 150. I specialize in system programming. Every so often we get a wish list from the generalist admins and danged if it doesn't have some real good ideas on it. This is a source of project ideas, but most of our programs start as band-aids.
Here's the deal. Trench admins are outstanding triage people and they can write a mean quick & dirty shell script which will fix the immediate problem. If the problem was interesting enough, they'll email the details of the cause and solution to the group along with the {box}:/path/to/script that they just wrote to fix it. We in coder land monitor the use of these scripts and if one of them is used a lot and/or manages to get itself into an automonitor program that starts generating a lot of false negatives (or, in theory, positives) we will review it and add all of the invariably missing return checks, usage functions, man pages, additional functionality, &etc. Some of these puppies grow to behemoth proportions and require a far more sophisticated user interface than we can easily manage in the shell. At this point there is a terrible danger that one of our managers will discover the thing and "help" us out by trying to raise money for a formal Internal Systems development project. God forbid he actually gets funded. Now we can't just pick the tool for the job and knock it out. We have to wade with these sorry people through months of requirements gathering, use case analysis, prototyping, alpha- and beta-testing, and all of the other horseshit that happens to occur to whatever utterly superfluous project manager is assigned to the thing. In the end the "developers" in IS will puke forth a
I have determined quite conclusively that these fucking IS morons have never heard of a finte state machine, cannot process CSV files (buggy
The sorry fact is that all of the decent software coming out of my little group is manufactured by stealth. We develop very solid software in spite of our "helpers." Unfortunately, the only way to change this mess is to go into management and spend enough years playing petty political games and garnering good relations with stupid people to start to make a difference. First principle people simply can't do it. We'd vomit explosively at the first opportunity to compromise technical elegance for expediency. We can just write a book exposing the whole process, but The Mythical Man Month is already there. Management can't learn from it. They are not incented to learn from it. They are incented to find more shit to manage. And more shitheads. And the cycle of poo continues.
Hope this helps!
Nossir! I don't like it one little bit! This whole thing stinks to high heaven of the slippery slope to people farming. From here it's just one baby step to yoking us to massive turbines and forcing us to slog around in mind-destroying circles all day long generating power for our Republican Overlords. And before you smarty-pants Windows admins start in with your, "and that's different how?" comments, just think through to the next baby step where the yoke sensors detect your drag on the system and the hive mind slides one of those floor tiles right out from under you and you plunge down a shiny stainless steel chute a la James Bond (or Austin Powers) and land your ass smack in the interlocking helical razor blades of the soylant green production line, stage zero. Then you wind up in the IV drips of a couple dozen of your former colleagues the next day. And all of it owned and operated by Area 51 Aliens flying around in Halliburton's black helicopters and giving each other the Bavarian Illuminati secret handshake with their tentacles. Nossir! Nope! I don't like it atall!
I misread the parent's title as "Mutual Masturbation." I insist that someone post a comment with this title and make heavy use of the circle jerk as a metaphor for corporate IT activity of any kind. Thanks in advance.
High energy physics, baby! Makes me all weepy...
He should take it on the road!
I seriously and strenuously doubt that this 8500 pages constitutes the purported documentation. Far more likely it is a masterwork of corporate techno-drivel. I expect to hear from independent qualified judges that this material is not, in fact, necessary and sufficient information to enable an expert to create a system capable of reliably interacting with M$ machines on a network. Likewise with file formats, &etc. This present waste of paper is nothing more than yet another chess move by M$. The EU will have to burn months deciphering and testing the documents, more months filing reports on how extrmely bogus it actually is. The EU bureaucracy machine will piss away many more months spinning up. M$ will whine and wail to the press about how the oppressive socialist regime is never satisfied no matter how many earnest efforts poor little M$ makes to comply with the the horrible old EU's draconian and anti-competitive rules. Neelie Kroes will impose more very impressive sounding, but ultimately trivial fines on M$. The EU will decree that M$ can not distribute software in their constituent countries. M$ will instantly appeal. An automatic injunction will take effect, nullifying the decree. The decree was, after all, nothing but hollow posturing from the get go. M$ will pay the fines -- which have been for years factored into the cost of doing business in the EU. M$ accountants will treat the whole matter as a simple, standard, albeit largish, bribe. The wheels on the bus will go round and round. Macchielvelli's rotten, grinning corpse will cum in it's shorts again. Same Old Shit. Repeat after me: M$ will NEVER give up their wire protocols, APIS, ABIs, or file formats. Ever. Not until doing so presents itself as the most profitable course of action. At present, such a disclosure would be nothing short of financially catastrophic for them. Complying with the EU's demands is quite out of the question. So forget about it. Now. Do it.
There are advantages to both. It all depends on whether or not you need to win in the end even though you finish last. Often, the evil guys have cooler uniforms. Being mean to kittens and your Grandma can relieve stress. If you have a strong conscience, though, you'll want to go with "good." Otherwise you'll spend your nights flopping around in bed in a cold sweat worrying about the inevitable day when you'll be forced to shield yourself from small arms fire behind the tiny, frail body of a sweet little girl and then one of the "good" guys will just completely ignore your shrill demands for $5 million and a Lear jet and just shoot you in the face and you'll look silly and be dead.
I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. I am personally acquainted with upper managers who are just dying to replace OpenBSD-based firewalls with M$ Vista Server. THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami. That M$ can now, on the one hand, generate security holes of arbitrary obscurity, and, on the other, miraculously detect and repair them far and away better than their erstwhile "competitors" is a final and apocalyptic testimonial to the supreme stupidity (I use the word advisedly, in the sense of "willful ignorance") of our omnipotent layers of corporate management. Wasn't it bad enough when M$ were the sole possessors of the Most Sacred A[PB]Is? Wasn't it awful enough that they were able to ignore even the most rudimentary dictates of software engineering with impugnity -- that the drooling imbeciles in management would keep right on paying vast sums of money for hideous deformities of Logic without batting an eyelash? Do they now get to rake in huge profits from "repairing" systemic defects of their own intentional manufacture? I am 41. I am tired and old. I have watched, like a Felliniesque "Sad Clown of Life," wave upon wave of utter inanity wash up on the vast, dead-whale-stinking beach of corporate and academic IT. I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps? How, for the bleeding love of the pumping, pulsating heart of Jesus Christ on a pogo stick do I just sit in meetings daydreaming about jumping into my big yellow H2 and driving back to my prefab McMansion in the burb-sprawl and staining my redwood deck with Johnson's WaterSeal? Why oh why must I KNOW that the imminent deaths of such elegancies as Tru64 Unix and MIPS and Alpha are a sin against art and science and technology and Man? Can't I just be stupid too? What's so wrong with me? What have I done? Why must I suffer so? One day, my friends, we will all lounge in paradise happily signing off on million-dollar purchases of Microsoft AntiVirus Protection(TM) with huge idiotic grins upon our faces and lovely oblivious strings of rancid drool dangling from our chins. We will not be tormented by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our eyes will bear the brilliant, unfocused glow of perfect, orgasmic stupidity. Until then, we must work to balance our egregious karma. Can there be any doubt whatever that we fried and devoured living human babies in each of our wretched previous incarnations? What more glaring evidence can there be of our complete, total, and inherent evil? We sinners must needs endure the terrible, sadistic wrath of a cold and childish god. May he soon tire of so gleefully tormenting us. Amen. Railgun Sally
Arrrrgh!! The first few pages, I'm all "oooh aaah" and then the little wavy bloze window icon comes and I projectile vomit. There should be a warning page. How am I ever supposed to enjoy whisky again? And don't say "drink it" you flippant bastards. I am traumatized and I deserve sympathy and you know it.
This might be the goods. Grandma buys a Google-branded flash drive from Wal-Mart and plugs it into her crotchety old win95 box and viola! She can take it to the kids' houses and have her environment follow her around. She's got a bunch of AJAX apps running local CGI when she's offline and syncing up with her Google account when she connects to the world. The apps access OpenOffice libs to render and edit M$-docs. The jump drive appears as a data drive under M$-Ware and even has the same AJAX utilities with the same look+feel and syncing capabilities. Grandma just plugs in and goes. She can boot from the drive or just use it under the Billyware or whatever. Done right, she would neither know nor care about the OS layer. She surfs the net and sends electronic greeting cards via email. That's the extent of Grandma's computational skill set. The whole environment fits in Granny's reading glasses case. Life is good.
... with pants constantly on fire?