Since the story is so old and nobody will see my comment anyway, I decided to RTFA for a change. It isn't a rehash of old slashdot arguments. One line that really struck my eye was this: "In essence, Sigfrid is saying that something in unlimited supply can't be stolen."
It made me think of the Golgafrinchins. The linked Wikipedia article is both incomplete and inaccurate (somebody fix it please?) as anybody who has read the series (meaning everyone here) knows.
Wikipedia says the three classes of Golgafrinchans were the upper class thinkers, the lower class doers, and the middle class on the "ark ship". The actual novel says no such thing. There was no reference in Adam's novel to economic classes, but only to the thinkers (designers, archetechs, engineers, etc), the doers (factory workers, pilots, bricklayers, etc) and the useless "ark ship" Golgafrinchans: the hairdressers, telephone sanitisers, record label executives*, etc.
The Golgafrinchan Ark Ship with its useless PHBs crashed on prehistoric Earth, where they decided to use tree leaves as money, making everyone wealthy. Of course, this created a terrible inflation problem, which they solved by burning down the forest.
People who think "IP" is property and noncommercial copyright infringement is theift are the same kind of people the Golgafrinchans put on the Ark Ship.
-mcgrew
*Actually Adams didn't mention record company executives, but he should have.
Twenty years ago we had a Compaq portable that ran on a 16 mhz 286 at work, and it was HOT. Blazingly fast, could do anything. That is, for its time. The supercomputers then weren't as powerful as your laptop today.
So if I can manage to stay alive for another 20 years, I'll probably have a laptop more powerful than the supercomputer in TFA. I guess I'll just have to wait a while.
-mcgrew (link is to "Growing Up With Computers", a 2 year old K5 article)
You call these people some pretty harsh names here on Slashdot. If they killed themselves as a result, what do you think we should do to you...?
It happened at K5 a few years ago when I was active there. IIRC (and I may not) the fellow, and Australian, wasn't very well liked and had quite a few very unkind things said to and about and by him.
He disappeared and folks thought he just moved on. It was found later he committed suicide, but the consensus was that everyone felt sorry for him but if you commit suicide, it's nobody's fault but your own.
A friend of mine I've spoken of in my journals (but I won't name here) was in a mutually abusive relationship with a guy for nine years. He wound up hanging himself. I keep trying to convince her that nothing she could have done would have prevented it, and the guy's own mother tried to convince her she couldn't have stopped it.
Suicide is the most selfish act a human can commit, and it is an act that isn't going to happen unless the person who commits it is seriously mentally ill. The fiend here isn't the prankster, but the suicide. The harm is done to those the dead person leaves behind.
If comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous, it seems that a company saying IT WILL "just do" something are even more disingenuous.
Nobody said it was easy. Instead of saying "we're going to interoperate" they could do something; Documenting APIs are work, but you know, they're not in business for their health. The goddamned APIs should have been documented as the APIs themselves were written. You sound like the kid who won't clean his room for three months and then complains to his mom that cleaning his room is too much work but he wants his allowance anyway.
Microsoft won't even interoperate with itself, as my friend Mike mentioned to me in a bar. I'd loaned him a crossover cable, which didn't work, so he bought a router and some lan cables, which also didn't work.
First, I DID check the checkbox. The dog trotted off into the horizon. The next time I opened search up, there he was. I've heard that one definition of insanity is expecting different results from the same action, so it seemed pointless to click that box again.
Second, I'm not usinhg a dvorak keyboard. g and h are right next to each other, and I have fat fingers.
Third, sorry about your having to be the guy who animated that dog and getting grief from me and other slashdotters about it but honestly, it sucks.
Any law that attempts to regulate speech will be shot down. Or at least, SHOULD BE shot down (but with the esteemed members of the US Supreme Court these days, who knows what could happen? After all, they ruled that "limited" means whatever Congress says it means.
I wish I could have my country back. This isn't the same place I grew up in.
Dude, you must not be American (lucky you). Here they teach pledges in grade school, so I'll try to enlighten.
A "pledge" is a promise one makes under threat or other coercion that one has no want or need to actually follow. They've outlawed corporal punishment here since I went to school with Fred and Barney, but you were forced to recite the pledge or go to the principal's office and be caned.
Today if you don't recite the pledge they expel you, unless you go to school in the inner city in which case they don't even give a shit if you bring a gun, unless you shoot it at one of the staff.
Schoolchildren use the pledge to learn parody, as in
I pledge alliegance to the fag In the principal's orifice in a married can One notion, under Gold, invisible, with libber trees and just ass for owls.
When the President of the US is sworn in to office, the Constitution says he must pledge to uphold the Constitution. Although every President has taken this pledge, none have as yet actually done anything whatever to uphold said Constitution.
Pledge is also the brand name of some stuff your mom sprays on the end tables before she wipes your nasty fingerprints off.
I personally pledge to not hit "submit" with this comment. Oops...
I like Wikipedia but unfortunately I'm in a bad mood and need a good laugh. So I looked Microsoft up in the Uncyclopedia.
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner." ~ Oscar Wilde on Microsoft
"In the case of Microsoft software, nobody knows, what is a bug and what is a marketing strategy" ~ Unknown User
"Nonsense, that's just an optical illusion! Aren't we great!" ~ Miscrosoft on the Red Ring of Death
"PEICE OF SHIT!!! SON OF A BITCH MICROSOFT CRASHED AGAIN!!" ~ Mother Teresa on Microsoft
"Cannot find REALITY.SYS...Universe Halted." ~ God on phone with Microsoft Customer Support
"You've got questions. We've got dancing paperclips." ~ Microsoft on In need of assistance
"Microsoft Anti-Virus software had a stroke of genius. They give you some free samples of viruses!" ~ Bill Gates, Head of the SS
"Buy our new ShitoSoft FK, for all your incontinental needs!" ~ Bill Gates, Head of the SS
"Does anyone know how to reverse the calibration on the leggimonitoner and change the halter on the second flartion of the JCU cable while simultaneously ordering 30 pounds of chicken nuggets by whispering to the graphics card? Me neither." ~ The guy who invented the Automatic Transmission on Microsoft and all things in general
"Where do you want to go today?" Evidently, Gates lacked the foresight to realise one cannot go far without a ticket...If you have more than six hundred and sixty six brain cells and don't want to enter hell, the religious nutcakes at Conservapedia have written an article about Microsoft.Micro$$$oft (formerly known as Magma, ltd and the translation from German of micro schaft, literally meaning small penis and international communist bureau of the Holy See) is the name of a now defunct software company coined by Jeff Metz and his first wife. Since its incorporation it has distributed duct tape, wombats, cinnamon, toilet rolls, Donald Trump, turnips, syphilis and horn-rimmed spectacles to numerous international markets. It has also had a minor role in the computer industry. The opposite of Microsoft is Megahard.
Two pilots are flying their helicopter along when all of a sudden a thick blanket of fog appears out of knowhere. The pilot fly's to a nearby building and holds up a sign saying 'Where are we?'. A person in a nearby window writes on a piece of paper 'here'. The pilot is then able to find himself on the map and fly home. An amazed co-pilot asks him how he knew, to which is reply is "It had to be the microsoft building, While technically correct, the answer was a load of bullshit."
Oh shit the boss is coming, you'll have to click the link to see the rest.
They will get bashed anyway. Bashed if they do, bashed if they don't. They can't win.
yes they can. Instead of announcing yet again (and how many times have we heard it already?) that they were going to interoperate, they could shut the hell up and just DO IT. If they did that they'd get kudos from me.
But for a couple of trite but true old sayings -- once bitten, twice shy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Until I see some real actual interoperability I'm forced to believe that it's the same lie we've heard over and over again. I'll no more believe Microsoft's lies than I'll let Bighead in my house again.
I won't argue with that, but I've seen first posts that were actually commenting about the topic itself that were modded "redundant". In fact I try to not submit a comment until I see at least one other posted, because otherwise it will be modded to oblivion and nobody will see it, so what's the point of making the effort?
Fortunately it seems that whenever I happen to hit slashdto right when they've posted something new I'm invited to metamoderate, so by the time I'm done with thet there are at least a dozen posts already.
No, I expect a general purpose OS to cater to the ignorant. Everybody is ignorant about more things than they're knowledgeable about. The difference between ignorant and stupid is ignorance is curable, stupidity isn't.
When I say they cater to the stupid, I mean the mentally disabled. They should cater to the ignorant person of average intelligence and expect the mentally handicapped to have someone help them to use it. They have different versions; Professional, Home, etc, why can't they write them for the average Joe (who is by no means stupid, ignorant though he may be) and have a "Vista Special Edition" for the mentally deficient?
My dad's 76 years old and never used a computer in his life. My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 I bought when I was about 30, around the time the IBM PC came out.
I've been using Mandrake/iva since eight point something, and yes I've googled, and asked slashdotters, but that's the price of Linux. If I can't get decent documentation and ease of use, what's the point in spending all that money?
DOS came on one floppy, and its manual was an inch and a half thick. Windows comes on a CD and its manual (if you can call it that) is about thirty pages IIRC.
If I bought Mandriva at a store (If I could I would but I can't find it for sale anywhere) I wouldn't expect to google for a fix then, either. If it wasn't in a manual I'd call their tech support, and bitch about the shitty manual while I was on the line with them.
All software sucks, all software has always sucked, but it shouldn't. Maybe sometime in the future it won't.
I've seen the option to get rid of the dog, but the next time I search, the damned thing's back. But wow, Buy Vista! Now without the stupid search dog!
My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.
Yo! You be trippin' about dis sheeit, but you not be unnerstandin' how fuckin' moronic it make you be lookin', foo. Word.
I speak redneck fluently, too, y'all. It ain't gonna make nobody thank I'm booklarned neither.
The summary was so, shall we say, "unlearned" that I doubt far too seriously that if someone with the lack of communication skills exhibited by the anonymous submitter submitted it, then it can't be worth reading. Did this fellow ever make it past the 8th grade?
The harder you try to be cool, the more uncool you look. Cool people don't try. Just submit the damned story in the English you learned in school, or risk being thought not only a fool but a poser as well.
You only have to comment on slashdot to tell that this is a really bad idea. You have people modding a comment "troll" because they don't like a stated opinion, for example. You have people modding a first post as "redundant" and a spot-on comment as "offtopic". People suck, especially at judging other people.
And on a thing like that, you may have someone who knows absolutely nothing about code making judgements about coders.
It's a stupid idea. It actually sounds like some harebrained idea thought up by a PHB. This idea needs to die quickly and horribly.
Yes, my newer car not only has a big knob for volume too, and better yet it has controls on the steering wheel as well.
Those new cars with the voice activated stuff wouldn't work for me, because unless I've got passengers I have the stereo turned up way to loud for voice activation to work. Plus, my last cell phone had voice dial, but in the car doing over 50 mph (when it would do the most good) it wouldn't work even with the stereo shut off. In fact any extraneous noise or sound got in its way.
Also I can see driving along: Stereo: "But in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair. But Gollum and the..." Me (almost getting run off the road by an idiot in a SUV): SHIT!!!! (Stereo switches to Britney Spears song)
That's what I hate about Microsoft products. The stupid program assumes you're stupid. The stupid program forces you to do things backwards.
Microsoft seems to design for the developmentally disabled, and does a bad job of even that. And they can't seem to learn from their horrible mistakes. Did they learn from Clippy? Hell no, now they have the stupid dog on their XP search. If you tell the damned thing to gho away it comes back the next time you do a search. Yeah, I could probably google for a hack to fix it but damn it, I shouldn't have to.
Well, in cars speech makes great sense. I don't want to take more than one hand off the wheel, and I don't want to take my eyes off the road. That's why I like my stereo controls and cruise controls that reside on the steering wheel, and wish the heater controls didn't force me to look away from the road as well. Saying "KSHE" and having your stereo tune itself to 94.7 is, to me, far preferable than hitting that control on the wheel several times, or finding the button on the stereo.
And when at home I'd like to be able to say "lights off" instead of having to get my lazy ass off of the couch. Everybody else must be the same way or TVs wouldn't have remotes.
When I had my Razr I loved the voice dial, especially when driving. It also got people saying "cool!" when I'd flip in open and say "Leila" into it and it would dial my daughter (I should sue Futurama for copyright infringement and bad spelling!)
I'd like a computer that needed no keyboard. Keyboards should be optional accessories.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the story is so old and nobody will see my comment anyway, I decided to RTFA for a change. It isn't a rehash of old slashdot arguments. One line that really struck my eye was this: "In essence, Sigfrid is saying that something in unlimited supply can't be stolen."
It made me think of the Golgafrinchins. The linked Wikipedia article is both incomplete and inaccurate (somebody fix it please?) as anybody who has read the series (meaning everyone here) knows.
Wikipedia says the three classes of Golgafrinchans were the upper class thinkers, the lower class doers, and the middle class on the "ark ship". The actual novel says no such thing. There was no reference in Adam's novel to economic classes, but only to the thinkers (designers, archetechs, engineers, etc), the doers (factory workers, pilots, bricklayers, etc) and the useless "ark ship" Golgafrinchans: the hairdressers, telephone sanitisers, record label executives*, etc.
The Golgafrinchan Ark Ship with its useless PHBs crashed on prehistoric Earth, where they decided to use tree leaves as money, making everyone wealthy. Of course, this created a terrible inflation problem, which they solved by burning down the forest.
People who think "IP" is property and noncommercial copyright infringement is theift are the same kind of people the Golgafrinchans put on the Ark Ship.
-mcgrew
*Actually Adams didn't mention record company executives, but he should have.
I don't know why, but I want one.
Twenty years ago we had a Compaq portable that ran on a 16 mhz 286 at work, and it was HOT. Blazingly fast, could do anything. That is, for its time. The supercomputers then weren't as powerful as your laptop today.
So if I can manage to stay alive for another 20 years, I'll probably have a laptop more powerful than the supercomputer in TFA. I guess I'll just have to wait a while.
-mcgrew (link is to "Growing Up With Computers", a 2 year old K5 article)
You call these people some pretty harsh names here on Slashdot. If they killed themselves as a result, what do you think we should do to you...?
It happened at K5 a few years ago when I was active there. IIRC (and I may not) the fellow, and Australian, wasn't very well liked and had quite a few very unkind things said to and about and by him.
He disappeared and folks thought he just moved on. It was found later he committed suicide, but the consensus was that everyone felt sorry for him but if you commit suicide, it's nobody's fault but your own.
A friend of mine I've spoken of in my journals (but I won't name here) was in a mutually abusive relationship with a guy for nine years. He wound up hanging himself. I keep trying to convince her that nothing she could have done would have prevented it, and the guy's own mother tried to convince her she couldn't have stopped it.
Suicide is the most selfish act a human can commit, and it is an act that isn't going to happen unless the person who commits it is seriously mentally ill. The fiend here isn't the prankster, but the suicide. The harm is done to those the dead person leaves behind.
Will a beowold cluster of them run Linux in Soviet Russia?
It's impossible to "buy" more than you can afford.
So long as credit exists, it IS possible to buy more than you can afford.
If comments that a company should "just do" something are a little disingenuous, it seems that a company saying IT WILL "just do" something are even more disingenuous.
Nobody said it was easy. Instead of saying "we're going to interoperate" they could do something; Documenting APIs are work, but you know, they're not in business for their health. The goddamned APIs should have been documented as the APIs themselves were written. You sound like the kid who won't clean his room for three months and then complains to his mom that cleaning his room is too much work but he wants his allowance anyway.
Microsoft won't even interoperate with itself, as my friend Mike mentioned to me in a bar. I'd loaned him a crossover cable, which didn't work, so he bought a router and some lan cables, which also didn't work.
First, I DID check the checkbox. The dog trotted off into the horizon. The next time I opened search up, there he was. I've heard that one definition of insanity is expecting different results from the same action, so it seemed pointless to click that box again.
Second, I'm not usinhg a dvorak keyboard. g and h are right next to each other, and I have fat fingers.
Third, sorry about your having to be the guy who animated that dog and getting grief from me and other slashdotters about it but honestly, it sucks.
Fourth, who said I was smart?
Well, as flamebait goes, yours was at least gramattically correct. I thank you for that.
First amendment.
Any law that attempts to regulate speech will be shot down. Or at least, SHOULD BE shot down (but with the esteemed members of the US Supreme Court these days, who knows what could happen? After all, they ruled that "limited" means whatever Congress says it means.
I wish I could have my country back. This isn't the same place I grew up in.
A "pledge" is a promise one makes under threat or other coercion that one has no want or need to actually follow. They've outlawed corporal punishment here since I went to school with Fred and Barney, but you were forced to recite the pledge or go to the principal's office and be caned.
Today if you don't recite the pledge they expel you, unless you go to school in the inner city in which case they don't even give a shit if you bring a gun, unless you shoot it at one of the staff.
Schoolchildren use the pledge to learn parody, as inWhen the President of the US is sworn in to office, the Constitution says he must pledge to uphold the Constitution. Although every President has taken this pledge, none have as yet actually done anything whatever to uphold said Constitution.
Pledge is also the brand name of some stuff your mom sprays on the end tables before she wipes your nasty fingerprints off.
I personally pledge to not hit "submit" with this comment. Oops...
They will get bashed anyway. Bashed if they do, bashed if they don't. They can't win.
yes they can. Instead of announcing yet again (and how many times have we heard it already?) that they were going to interoperate, they could shut the hell up and just DO IT. If they did that they'd get kudos from me.
But for a couple of trite but true old sayings -- once bitten, twice shy. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
Until I see some real actual interoperability I'm forced to believe that it's the same lie we've heard over and over again. I'll no more believe Microsoft's lies than I'll let Bighead in my house again.
I won't argue with that, but I've seen first posts that were actually commenting about the topic itself that were modded "redundant". In fact I try to not submit a comment until I see at least one other posted, because otherwise it will be modded to oblivion and nobody will see it, so what's the point of making the effort?
Fortunately it seems that whenever I happen to hit slashdto right when they've posted something new I'm invited to metamoderate, so by the time I'm done with thet there are at least a dozen posts already.
No, I expect a general purpose OS to cater to the ignorant. Everybody is ignorant about more things than they're knowledgeable about. The difference between ignorant and stupid is ignorance is curable, stupidity isn't.
When I say they cater to the stupid, I mean the mentally disabled. They should cater to the ignorant person of average intelligence and expect the mentally handicapped to have someone help them to use it. They have different versions; Professional, Home, etc, why can't they write them for the average Joe (who is by no means stupid, ignorant though he may be) and have a "Vista Special Edition" for the mentally deficient?
ask your dad
My dad's 76 years old and never used a computer in his life. My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000 I bought when I was about 30, around the time the IBM PC came out.
I've been using Mandrake/iva since eight point something, and yes I've googled, and asked slashdotters, but that's the price of Linux. If I can't get decent documentation and ease of use, what's the point in spending all that money?
DOS came on one floppy, and its manual was an inch and a half thick. Windows comes on a CD and its manual (if you can call it that) is about thirty pages IIRC.
If I bought Mandriva at a store (If I could I would but I can't find it for sale anywhere) I wouldn't expect to google for a fix then, either. If it wasn't in a manual I'd call their tech support, and bitch about the shitty manual while I was on the line with them.
All software sucks, all software has always sucked, but it shouldn't. Maybe sometime in the future it won't.
I've seen the option to get rid of the dog, but the next time I search, the damned thing's back. But wow, Buy Vista! Now without the stupid search dog!
My mind is sorta tripping over how something like this could work, but I gotta admit that the idea is really cool.
Yo! You be trippin' about dis sheeit, but you not be unnerstandin' how fuckin' moronic it make you be lookin', foo. Word.
I speak redneck fluently, too, y'all. It ain't gonna make nobody thank I'm booklarned neither.
The summary was so, shall we say, "unlearned" that I doubt far too seriously that if someone with the lack of communication skills exhibited by the anonymous submitter submitted it, then it can't be worth reading. Did this fellow ever make it past the 8th grade?
The harder you try to be cool, the more uncool you look. Cool people don't try. Just submit the damned story in the English you learned in school, or risk being thought not only a fool but a poser as well.
-mcgrew
You only have to comment on slashdot to tell that this is a really bad idea. You have people modding a comment "troll" because they don't like a stated opinion, for example. You have people modding a first post as "redundant" and a spot-on comment as "offtopic". People suck, especially at judging other people.
And on a thing like that, you may have someone who knows absolutely nothing about code making judgements about coders.
It's a stupid idea. It actually sounds like some harebrained idea thought up by a PHB. This idea needs to die quickly and horribly.
-mcgrew
Yes, my newer car not only has a big knob for volume too, and better yet it has controls on the steering wheel as well.
Those new cars with the voice activated stuff wouldn't work for me, because unless I've got passengers I have the stereo turned up way to loud for voice activation to work. Plus, my last cell phone had voice dial, but in the car doing over 50 mph (when it would do the most good) it wouldn't work even with the stereo shut off. In fact any extraneous noise or sound got in its way.
Also I can see driving along:
Stereo: "But in the darkest depths of Mordor I met a girl so fair. But Gollum and the..."
Me (almost getting run off the road by an idiot in a SUV): SHIT!!!!
(Stereo switches to Britney Spears song)
If I buy more stuff from you than I can afford, I have a problem. If my country imports more than it exports, It has a balance of trade problem.
That's what I hate about Microsoft products. The stupid program assumes you're stupid. The stupid program forces you to do things backwards.
Microsoft seems to design for the developmentally disabled, and does a bad job of even that. And they can't seem to learn from their horrible mistakes. Did they learn from Clippy? Hell no, now they have the stupid dog on their XP search. If you tell the damned thing to gho away it comes back the next time you do a search. Yeah, I could probably google for a hack to fix it but damn it, I shouldn't have to.
Linux never does that shit to me.
Downgrade? If going from Vista to XP is a downgrade, then replacing your carburated four cylinder with a fuel injected V-8 is a downgrade.
If it makes my computyer run slower it's NOT an upgrade.
"Finding kill Google?" Huh?
Well, in cars speech makes great sense. I don't want to take more than one hand off the wheel, and I don't want to take my eyes off the road. That's why I like my stereo controls and cruise controls that reside on the steering wheel, and wish the heater controls didn't force me to look away from the road as well. Saying "KSHE" and having your stereo tune itself to 94.7 is, to me, far preferable than hitting that control on the wheel several times, or finding the button on the stereo.
And when at home I'd like to be able to say "lights off" instead of having to get my lazy ass off of the couch. Everybody else must be the same way or TVs wouldn't have remotes.
When I had my Razr I loved the voice dial, especially when driving. It also got people saying "cool!" when I'd flip in open and say "Leila" into it and it would dial my daughter (I should sue Futurama for copyright infringement and bad spelling!)
I'd like a computer that needed no keyboard. Keyboards should be optional accessories.
Considering there's a fix for it every tuesday, that's a funny use of the word "done".
Back in the stone age of PC computing, Microsoft's motto was "DOS ain't done 'til Lotus won't run". That's how Microsoft has always Exceled.