This isn't a story about Linux, it isn't a story about Apple, it's a story about Microsoft. If it were a story about Pintos catching fire and burning people alive, people like you would be saying "so what? People get burned alive in Chevy pickup trucks, too!"
If it was a story about Charles Manson you'd say "so what? Jeffery Dalmer killed them AND ATE THEM!"
Ford and Chevy sucking doesn't excuse Crysler's sucking. Lets stay on topic, shall we?
That's such a loaded and flamebait-ridden summary it's not even funny.
It's only flamebait if you are a Microsoft employee. Sorry, dude, but the summary is accurate. Yes, I did in fact RTFA.
If you want a "loaded and flamebait-ridden summary" here's what it would have looked like:
All of us have one time or another been completely frustrated by that POS Windows and its fuctarded non-usability, and usually our experiences have driven us over to Linux or Apple or ANYTHING BUT WINDOWS FOR GOD'S SAKE, and kept us there. Good riddance, <a href="http://www.goatse.cx">Microsoft</a>. For anyone that has ever been frustrated because they actually used Microsoft's garbage, you will LOL to know you aren't the only one. After reading this leaked Microsoft memo from that asshole Bill Gates back in 2003, you will surely have more insight into why Vista is a complete buttfuck due to Microsoft being nothing but a bunch of retarded cockbites
Yes, I metamoderate. If you get mod points and mod something like the real summary "flamebait" or "troll" you may not get mod points again. My made-up summary, OTOH, would be quite different (and many here would write such a comment and be surprised when they are modded down).
The Joe and Jane Sixpacks of the world don't understand what 1 != l != i. They think it's "stupid" to have to get it right.
IMO Joe and Jane are correct. What's stupid is having a forty digit alphanumeric code you have to type in, with ls and 1s and 0s and Os and Is and any other alphanumeric characters that can be confused interspersed with each other!
Why do you think it took GUIs to get any serious home PC market going?
It didn't. It took apps that made a computer a useful addition to the average home, and PCs that were actually affordable. Normal people don't spend thousands of dollars (which a new PC cost in the '80s) for a home appliance. A good used car cost less than a computer before the GUI age.
And you guys who say that editing a couple of config files isn't a big deal have never seen the wreck that a common user can make of a text document.
I've used Linux since the early '00s (Mandrake, Mandriva, Suse) and never manually edited a config file. You Microsoft shills, Mr Anonymous, should stop with the inaccurate nonsense because people who actually USE Linux are going to call you on it.
I recently had to deal with a college educated professional on the proper way to use the shift key, forgodssake
Unless by "recently" you mean fifteen years ago and by "college educated" you mean "he got his BA in 1970" I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe you. Few of my offline friends are nerds; my friends include hookers, construction workers, bartenders, factory workers, etc. and I don't know a single one that can't use a "shift" key.
Which dividion of Microsoft do you work in, Mr anonymous coward?
Except as head of the company, his job is not to make himslef look better, it is to make the company look better.
No, his job isn't to make his company LOOK better; that's the marketing people's job. His job is to make his company BE better. IMO he's failed at it miserably.
I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs.
I find it hard to believe that Gates would think that Linux programmers could do something that his well paid staff can't! I don't think I've ever rebooted Linux unless I was replacing the kernel by trying a different distro or updating an existing one. And even then there's only ONE reboot; you put the CD in the drive, reboot, and the distro installs.
If I was Gates, heads would have been rolling years ago. But I agree with you, I think the email is bogus. The line at the bottom:
So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven't run Moviemaker and I haven't got the plus package.
I wouldn't be "scared" and I can't believe Gates would be, either.
many, many years ago now, in the late 90's
The late '90s was only a decade ago, young fellow! Many, many years ago my electric bill came on Hollerith cards.
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
I've been vindicated for all those times I've been modded "flamebait" when I insist that people at Microsoft must be incredibly stupid. How can you NOT anticipate that people just might want to download something from a download page?
Go ahead, Microsoft employees, mod me down again. I'm sure with all the people at Microsoft there are lots of very intelligent folks, but when Pointy Haired Boss is in charge and Catbert is head of HR, it doesn't matter how smart Dilbert is, the product is going to look like it was designed by Uncyclopedia authors who are high on something.
The email reads like something I might have written. Had Microsoft not had a defacto monopoly they would likely have gone out of business years ago.
I'd like to know what idiot came up with some of the Microsoft "innovations" like menus that don't show all the menu items? Don't they try their poorly designed crap out on real people?
"Skews me" while I read the rest of the user rants and shill excuses.
REAL scientists know wikipedia is unreliable. That's why they use the Uncyclopedia.
Scientific Way of Doing Things Developed at the precise moment everyone thought science was just a passing fad, the Scientific Way of Doing Things formalized the approach scientists would take to remove knowledge from human minds, allowing the field to flourish and fully separate itself from its mystic beginnings. In the words of metascience expert John "Don't quote me on this" Smith, "The Scientific Way of Doing Things is based on the ancient divination ritual of Guess and Check. Thanks to the innovations of the past century, we've been able to remove the 'Check' phase."
The Scientific Way of Doing Things is strictly adhered to by all respectable scientists and involves 6 steps:
Find a piece of information you dislike. In our example, we will use the statement "1+1=2"
Form a statement which will take its place ("1+1=Dolemite")
Email this statement to everyone you know. Include the subject line "FWD: Something u didn't know!!! I no i didn't!"
Publish an article on your Myspace.
Brush your teeth. A fresh smile adds a layer of believability.
Um, no, that's not how it works. The legislature (that's the House and Senate) writes laws. The President either vetos or enforces those laws. After enforcement, the judiciary judges whether or not said law has been broken.
The primary law that all other laws must conform to is the Constitution. If the Constitutions doesn't say Congress has the power to pass a certain law, than said law doesn't have to be obeyed (in theory, of course).
Laser printers are power hogs by the very way they work. They're space heaters! If you have a laser printer running, it most likely consumes more power than all your other hardware combined, and certainly puts out more heat.
The way a laser printer works is that the laser beam puts an electrostatic charge wherever it lands - which wouold be where you want the paper to be black.
The charge on the paper attracts the toner, which is black plastic ground into fine powder. A heater in the unit, at 1800 degrees f, melts the black plastic on to the paper.
If you care about your wallet (let alone global warming from the coal they have to burn for its electricity), you'll keep the laser turned off most of the time.
Time is NOT a component of the "watts" unit. A watt is current times voltage; e.g. at 100 volts one ampre, you have 100 watts. If you run it for ten hours, you have consumed one kilowatt hour.
The joule is is the SI unit of energy measuring heat, electricity and mechanical work. One joule is the work done, or energy expended, by a force of one newton moving one metre along the direction of the force. This quantity is also denoted as a newton metre with the symbol Nm. Wikipedia may be able to clear all this up for you, but if you check your electric bill you'll see that you aren't billed for watts used, but kilowatt hours used.
But that doesn't matter at all, now does it? The GP commented on whether or not Obama will even show up for the vote. We weren't talking about Presidential Candidate Obama, we were talking about Senator Obama. McCain had nothing to do with the subject.
He may be the intelligence community's boss, but without their actual support it gets him nowhere
If you don't have your employees' support, you fire them.
Admittedly, this is a pretty serious issue, but is it possible that he's giving up something now in order to gain a better foothold later?
Possibly, but I really don't think so. Legislators legislate, and he's now a legislator (albeit a new one). Legislators write the law, and the President either vetos it or enforces it.
The only actual change that can occur will be from the bottom... Anyway, this is not an issue about candidacy, this is an issue about why someone would vote for such a terrible bill in the first place.
About ten or fifteen years ago I had to analyse 30,000 questionaires in my job. I'm not a statistician, but my boss is. We had all sorts of learned experts, a roomful of PhDs, giving input into the survey instrument. As the "computer guy" my task was to take these 30,000 pieces of paper, put them in the computer, and turn the data into information.
I might as well have been surveying slashdot to find opinions about the RIAA or SCO. The data were overwhelmingly negative. Obscenely negative. Scatologically negative. People HATED us and the program we were surveying.
The results were quicky buried. Somehow that was more signifigant to me than the data.
I don't know, it seems to be random. Yesterday I had to put a <p> between all paragraphs, then it sems to have gone ok today, but when I posted a journal I had to put one <p> in it. Maybe it was because it was a blockquote?
But at any rate, slashdot seems to be <p>ing its pants. Maybe it has something to do with moving to Chicago?
The other major failure of TFA is that I can't find a car analogy anywhere
Here ya go:
Ok, first we only had cars. It took a lot of trips to move, and moving the couch was an utter bitch. But now we have bigassed trucks, so we can just throw our cars away.
Not all data is created equally. You have to ask how it was collected, according to what rules, and with what purpose
I wear a goatee as a result of a small study.
Several years ago after after my marriage unravelled and I got divorced and couldn't as much as get a dinner date, I decided "fuck it, why do I bother buying razors?" and simply stopped shaving.
Then one night in a bar a woman told me I should shave it into a goatee. So I started asking women "goatee or full beard?" and collecting the binary (y/n) data. Of seventeen randomly selected women aged 21 to 70, sixteen said "goatee". The one who said "full beard" was standing beside her boyfriend, who wore a full beard.
all of our current (or now previous) models for collecting data are dead.
I guess I have to R this FA. ALL the models for data collection? No more controlled double-blind studies?
It notes that we've entered the Age of the Petabyte -- where one can collect intense amounts of data that is paradigm agnostic.
Science has always at least tried to be paradigm agnostic. It can't always succeed of course, but I don't see how... Ok, I guess I'd better RTFA.
OK, I'm back. The article is horseshit. It is a whole bunch of words that add up to essentially what the summary said, only in a really long winded fashion.
"No theory needed, now we have models". How do you make the model without theory?
Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?"
No. In the first place, no data that comes from the internet can be taken at face value (and this Wired article is a good example of how the internet is full of crappy data). Secondly, I hate inaccurate yuppiespeak, like talking about "couuds of information." It's stupid. Information doesn't gather in clouds, it's gathered in big heaps of paper and on hard drives and optical disks. The only clouds are the clouds of crack smoke surrounding the heads of the people who say things like "clouds of information".
We still use the same tools to analyse data. We just have more data to analyse. Th escientific method itself is nowhere near dead.
Oh, and the parent is not offtopic - It hit the nail on the head. I guess a Wired editor had mod points.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah? Tell me who you are and I might believe you. When an AC posts something like you just posted I feel obligated to call bullshit.
-mcgrew
This isn't a story about Linux, it isn't a story about Apple, it's a story about Microsoft. If it were a story about Pintos catching fire and burning people alive, people like you would be saying "so what? People get burned alive in Chevy pickup trucks, too!"
If it was a story about Charles Manson you'd say "so what? Jeffery Dalmer killed them AND ATE THEM!"
Ford and Chevy sucking doesn't excuse Crysler's sucking. Lets stay on topic, shall we?
That's such a loaded and flamebait-ridden summary it's not even funny.
It's only flamebait if you are a Microsoft employee. Sorry, dude, but the summary is accurate. Yes, I did in fact RTFA.
If you want a "loaded and flamebait-ridden summary" here's what it would have looked like:
Yes, I metamoderate. If you get mod points and mod something like the real summary "flamebait" or "troll" you may not get mod points again. My made-up summary, OTOH, would be quite different (and many here would write such a comment and be surprised when they are modded down).HAND.
The Joe and Jane Sixpacks of the world don't understand what 1 != l != i. They think it's "stupid" to have to get it right.
IMO Joe and Jane are correct. What's stupid is having a forty digit alphanumeric code you have to type in, with ls and 1s and 0s and Os and Is and any other alphanumeric characters that can be confused interspersed with each other!
Why do you think it took GUIs to get any serious home PC market going?
It didn't. It took apps that made a computer a useful addition to the average home, and PCs that were actually affordable. Normal people don't spend thousands of dollars (which a new PC cost in the '80s) for a home appliance. A good used car cost less than a computer before the GUI age.
And you guys who say that editing a couple of config files isn't a big deal have never seen the wreck that a common user can make of a text document.
I've used Linux since the early '00s (Mandrake, Mandriva, Suse) and never manually edited a config file. You Microsoft shills, Mr Anonymous, should stop with the inaccurate nonsense because people who actually USE Linux are going to call you on it.
I recently had to deal with a college educated professional on the proper way to use the shift key, forgodssake
Unless by "recently" you mean fifteen years ago and by "college educated" you mean "he got his BA in 1970" I'm sorry, but I simply don't believe you. Few of my offline friends are nerds; my friends include hookers, construction workers, bartenders, factory workers, etc. and I don't know a single one that can't use a "shift" key.
Which dividion of Microsoft do you work in, Mr anonymous coward?
Except as head of the company, his job is not to make himslef look better, it is to make the company look better.
No, his job isn't to make his company LOOK better; that's the marketing people's job. His job is to make his company BE better. IMO he's failed at it miserably.
I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs.
I find it hard to believe that Gates would think that Linux programmers could do something that his well paid staff can't! I don't think I've ever rebooted Linux unless I was replacing the kernel by trying a different distro or updating an existing one. And even then there's only ONE reboot; you put the CD in the drive, reboot, and the distro installs.
If I was Gates, heads would have been rolling years ago. But I agree with you, I think the email is bogus. The line at the bottom:
I wouldn't be "scared" and I can't believe Gates would be, either.
many, many years ago now, in the late 90's
The late '90s was only a decade ago, young fellow! Many, many years ago my electric bill came on Hollerith cards.
So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.
I've been vindicated for all those times I've been modded "flamebait" when I insist that people at Microsoft must be incredibly stupid. How can you NOT anticipate that people just might want to download something from a download page?
Go ahead, Microsoft employees, mod me down again. I'm sure with all the people at Microsoft there are lots of very intelligent folks, but when Pointy Haired Boss is in charge and Catbert is head of HR, it doesn't matter how smart Dilbert is, the product is going to look like it was designed by Uncyclopedia authors who are high on something.
The email reads like something I might have written. Had Microsoft not had a defacto monopoly they would likely have gone out of business years ago.
I'd like to know what idiot came up with some of the Microsoft "innovations" like menus that don't show all the menu items? Don't they try their poorly designed crap out on real people?
"Skews me" while I read the rest of the user rants and shill excuses.
Crack cocaine makes you stupid.
Oh, you were talking about the "information cloud" the crackheads at Wired always talk about. Never mind.
Who needs books? Most scientists read wikipedia.
REAL scientists know wikipedia is unreliable. That's why they use the Uncyclopedia.
Another place scientists go is Bob the Angry Flower. Here's another. And another. Oh look, here's one for you!You are correct. It doesn't hold that 94% of women prefer a goatee on anyone, just me.
Um, no, that's not how it works. The legislature (that's the House and Senate) writes laws. The President either vetos or enforces those laws. After enforcement, the judiciary judges whether or not said law has been broken.
The primary law that all other laws must conform to is the Constitution. If the Constitutions doesn't say Congress has the power to pass a certain law, than said law doesn't have to be obeyed (in theory, of course).
Bob the Angry Flower has Schrödinger's fridge.
Laser printers are power hogs by the very way they work. They're space heaters! If you have a laser printer running, it most likely consumes more power than all your other hardware combined, and certainly puts out more heat.
The way a laser printer works is that the laser beam puts an electrostatic charge wherever it lands - which wouold be where you want the paper to be black.
The charge on the paper attracts the toner, which is black plastic ground into fine powder. A heater in the unit, at 1800 degrees f, melts the black plastic on to the paper.
If you care about your wallet (let alone global warming from the coal they have to burn for its electricity), you'll keep the laser turned off most of the time.
Time is NOT a component of the "watts" unit. A watt is current times voltage; e.g. at 100 volts one ampre, you have 100 watts. If you run it for ten hours, you have consumed one kilowatt hour.
The joule is is the SI unit of energy measuring heat, electricity and mechanical work. One joule is the work done, or energy expended, by a force of one newton moving one metre along the direction of the force. This quantity is also denoted as a newton metre with the symbol Nm. Wikipedia may be able to clear all this up for you, but if you check your electric bill you'll see that you aren't billed for watts used, but kilowatt hours used.
We should get "arsewaddle" (or the Anerican version, "asswaddle") into the popular lexicon!
Odd, your source doesn't mention Barr.
But that doesn't matter at all, now does it? The GP commented on whether or not Obama will even show up for the vote. We weren't talking about Presidential Candidate Obama, we were talking about Senator Obama. McCain had nothing to do with the subject.
He may be the intelligence community's boss, but without their actual support it gets him nowhere
If you don't have your employees' support, you fire them.
Admittedly, this is a pretty serious issue, but is it possible that he's giving up something now in order to gain a better foothold later?
Possibly, but I really don't think so. Legislators legislate, and he's now a legislator (albeit a new one). Legislators write the law, and the President either vetos it or enforces it.
The only actual change that can occur will be from the bottom... Anyway, this is not an issue about candidacy, this is an issue about why someone would vote for such a terrible bill in the first place.
Sadly, I agree.
This myopic self centredness would not have yielded them a clear signal on their iPhone. Science did that.
No, engineering did that. Science just explained how the engineers should go about it.
About ten or fifteen years ago I had to analyse 30,000 questionaires in my job. I'm not a statistician, but my boss is. We had all sorts of learned experts, a roomful of PhDs, giving input into the survey instrument. As the "computer guy" my task was to take these 30,000 pieces of paper, put them in the computer, and turn the data into information.
I might as well have been surveying slashdot to find opinions about the RIAA or SCO. The data were overwhelmingly negative. Obscenely negative. Scatologically negative. People HATED us and the program we were surveying.
The results were quicky buried. Somehow that was more signifigant to me than the data.
That's what SHE said!
WTF is up with /.?
I don't know, it seems to be random. Yesterday I had to put a <p> between all paragraphs, then it sems to have gone ok today, but when I posted a journal I had to put one <p> in it. Maybe it was because it was a blockquote?
But at any rate, slashdot seems to be <p>ing its pants. Maybe it has something to do with moving to Chicago?
The other major failure of TFA is that I can't find a car analogy anywhere
Here ya go:
Ok, first we only had cars. It took a lot of trips to move, and moving the couch was an utter bitch. But now we have bigassed trucks, so we can just throw our cars away.
Not all data is created equally. You have to ask how it was collected, according to what rules, and with what purpose
I wear a goatee as a result of a small study.
Several years ago after after my marriage unravelled and I got divorced and couldn't as much as get a dinner date, I decided "fuck it, why do I bother buying razors?" and simply stopped shaving.
Then one night in a bar a woman told me I should shave it into a goatee. So I started asking women "goatee or full beard?" and collecting the binary (y/n) data. Of seventeen randomly selected women aged 21 to 70, sixteen said "goatee". The one who said "full beard" was standing beside her boyfriend, who wore a full beard.
My losing streak ended, thanks to pseudoscience!
Information doesn't want to be free. But when it isn't, neither are you.
Yeah, we don't need methodologies any more, because, maaaan, we've got tubes!
They're not tubes, they're pipes. Big fat pipes. With clouds of "information" rolling out of them.
all of our current (or now previous) models for collecting data are dead.
I guess I have to R this FA. ALL the models for data collection? No more controlled double-blind studies?
It notes that we've entered the Age of the Petabyte -- where one can collect intense amounts of data that is paradigm agnostic.
Science has always at least tried to be paradigm agnostic. It can't always succeed of course, but I don't see how... Ok, I guess I'd better RTFA.
OK, I'm back. The article is horseshit. It is a whole bunch of words that add up to essentially what the summary said, only in a really long winded fashion.
"No theory needed, now we have models". How do you make the model without theory?
Have we reached a time where all of our tool-sets are now made moot by vast clouds of information and strictly applied maths?"
No. In the first place, no data that comes from the internet can be taken at face value (and this Wired article is a good example of how the internet is full of crappy data). Secondly, I hate inaccurate yuppiespeak, like talking about "couuds of information." It's stupid. Information doesn't gather in clouds, it's gathered in big heaps of paper and on hard drives and optical disks. The only clouds are the clouds of crack smoke surrounding the heads of the people who say things like "clouds of information".
We still use the same tools to analyse data. We just have more data to analyse. Th escientific method itself is nowhere near dead.
Oh, and the parent is not offtopic - It hit the nail on the head. I guess a Wired editor had mod points.