Well, some would argue that people are also just automata.... that humans are so complex, and have such a complex web of influences and forces, that the human mind cannot reliably predict what another human may do....we are predictable, just not to any intellect we have yet spwaned or encountered.
Ok, so how a car works is magical, mysterious, even random and unpredictable to a child who hasn't studied physics or mechanical engineering yet, certainly. But to say human intelligence IS a predictable automa to a HIGHER intelligence just postpones the problem. Is the not yet spawned or encounterd HIGHER intelligence itself a computer simulatable automa or not? Can IT be comprehended and understood, modeled and computable by an even greater intelligence??
who's the genie-ass at MS who created a button labled "PREVIOUS" that moves a pointer to an event that comes AFTER the one you were just viewing? Someone there clearly has their ass on backwards. Or Outlook being so adamant about shoving itself in your face that it covers up it's own "you have mail" box. That this stuff is worth billions just drives me crazy. That we are FORCED to use it against our wills by business personages who want buy it because they want to be billionairs too is a crime aginst my engineering sense of mathematically perfect reason and order.:))
I get your drift tho - excess vilification is not a good thing - we'd like to get at the truth, but lacking that, our overworked active imaginations fill in their own facts for characters of such large proportions.
Time will tell, and the stories will be told. From what I understand about the Rockefeller legend, for example, he was a clerk in a company, sent on assignment to investigate some black, tarry substance that was a nuisence to Pennsylvania farmers. He came back, told his boss it was completely worthless, quit, hired a chemist and went on to build a huge empire. Clever move or dasterdly deed? The employer he shafted trusted him, and sent him to his destiny. Will the legend of Gates be a + or - ? Probably a positive one. The good stuff will be remembered and the bad forgotten. Thank God.
in this modern day USA, that "anything goes - just don't get caught at it" - and that goes for the prez and many other clever, tricky illuminaries who think they're above the laws we little folk are held to. These people are NOT good role models (or maybe you enjoy the current state of kids in school). So everyone's a criminal, just the 'successful' ones get away with it and hire a media consultant and launch an ad campaign. The unsuccessful must have some kind of conscience that is limiting their career, but we do get a good night sleep.
where Iran is the enemy and Saddam is the good guy, then Saddam becomes the enemy and the Kurds are the poor victims, untill you chum up to Turkey and then the Kurds are the enemy, and once upon a time Albania was the communist enemy then suddenly the Serbs are the hated murders of poor Albanian victims . etc, etc, etc.
Sadly few people seem to remember or care about the days when IBM did with hardware what MS does w/ software, or when AT&T was the spawn of much wacko conspiracy theories since they were a monopoly that even owned the phone in your house, which you had to have to fit in society and had to rent from them and only them; kinda like most businesses today feel arm twisted to run their company on MS property, w/ no choice in the matter.
the idea of Gates as a well-loved philanthropist is something we should hold more strongly in our minds than the "BillGatus of Borg" image we beat to death. Whether truth or opinion, the image of Gates as an evil dictator is not very appealing and does no one good.
Image?? Have we really deteriorated to the point where all a captain of industry/politician is is just a mere 'image' or phantasm projected on a TV screen? How about what they have actually DONE? I see a little too much of this these days where someone commits heinous crimes, and then they clean up their act, get super polite and then try to convince the jury what a GOOOOOOD person they are. Yeah, lets forget about all the pain of dislocation, downsizing, job retraining and everyone else whose been trampled underfoot for daring to oppose the MS business cultural revolution. So he moves a gold brick from one account to another and he's suddenly a GOOOOOOD philantropist. What I've learned from MS is that, to succeed, you A) Rob a bank (you have to do something bold, risky and daring, some power grab!) then once the heat is off and you've gotten away with it B) donate large chunks to law enforcement and crime prevention (so nobody will rob YOUR bank!) Heee.
hatred flowing from what I usually find an extremely open minded, intelligent, and positive community just sickens me sometime
Well, if anyone has ever made billions from 'duping the masses' this has got to be it. The hateful bile is really just natural catharsis, psychological healing from being paid to spend all day pretending that shit smells really good! There isn't a day goes by in my current job that at least 5 or 7 people complain about "my computer's broken again" - I'm sure this scenario is repeated endlessly across the corporate landscape - and 9 out of 10 times the COMPUTER is PERFECTLY OK! IT's the SOFTWARE whats got a registry error, or whatever, and I'm really on a crusade to enlighten all the rats following these pied pipers that the SOFTWARE IS THE PROPERTY of the MS Corp. and that they're paying me to spend hours rebuilding SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY everytime the lousy house of cards topples over. I would LOVE to take pride in my work, but I've come to accept that it is impossible as an McSE (thank gawd I've the old BSEE) to avoid all the little glitches that make for embarassing presentations.
In short, THEY make billions, and I get laughed at. What a ceramic container of organic fertilizer!
Not exactly offtopic, but obliquely connected - I've always thought things like this, the govt adopting, deploying, using an OPEN software referance model, would be the best way to solve the MS 'monopoly' problem without resorting to draconian 'break 'em up' or worse measures, kinda like all the technological 'spin off's' we got from the Space Program.
Being shared in public, at taxpayer expense, whaddya expect. Good incentive to find a job and buy a PERSONAL computer; that was the whole driving force behind PC's, build one at home so you don't have to share it or go by lots of little picky corporate rules about what you can run, where and why.
if anything, a meaningful breakup with real 'firewalls' between os and app developerss (such that non M$ app developers have as much access to os secrets as M$ developers when attempting to compete on the say os playing field, ala Netscape) would add admin costs, that plus the recent temp appeal and Caldera settlement etc means that either the per cpu license costs will go up, or stock dividends will go down; either way it'll be less attractive all around and people may stop being M$ robots and falling for their whitewashed crap, and maybe consider products that are more than a bunch of barely fulfilled & not-quite-working-right marketing bullets on the full page ads.
at the Harry Shearer Le Show archive , right he re (Should be the June 13th show) - while your there you may check out the Nov 7 program with "Male Models sell their sperm online" and "Bill Gates plans his next move".
I'm not a media analyst, but what's this talk about 'monopoly' - aren't there plenty of viable competitors like Disney/ABC, Murdock's News/FOX, Viacom, MSNBC, Viacom, etc? To draw analogy from the car industry, there once was a LOT of little auto companies, they eventually consolidated (must be SOME economic advantage of doing so) into the big three (Warning: US centric pov) Also Ford was big on vertical integration, owned or wanted to own everything from the coal/iron mines to the dealerships and everything inbetween.
is that this technique will probably go thru the same trajectory as the "colorizing old B&W films" flap of many years ago - it'll all blow over and people will, like spam, just accept it and the media companies will continue to do whatever the fsck they want to do, in the name of free speach.
yeah it is pretty neat to be able to take a shot across, say, a baseball diamond and replace one of the local hardware stores ads on the fence with, say, "AOL" or whatever, seamlessly. I haven't beleived anything or anyone in years - like Hindu theology, everything is just a grand illusion.
Once upon a time (ahem) Time-Warner bought and ruined Atari - but THIS time, haha, the boot is on the other foot. Who woulda thought that some little outfit that started out trying to deliver Atari 2600 video games over the phone (now known as the mightly AOL) would be buying out TW - heeheehee.
Boojum
Arg, er - info & energy
on
The Regulon
·
· Score: 2
Seems I read an old Scientific American article once that related information to energy and entropy. Without energy input to a system it decays, increasing entropy and losing info content. They actually did a rough calculation involving the amount of energy received from the sun, and the earth's existing and potential information content. The dramatic conclusion: you ain't seen nothing yet. This was like in the 50's or 60's, and the author pointed out that the amount of energy received could support a HUGE amount of information, which we had just barely begun to tap at the time, and probably aren't much further along even now.
This supports my thesis that, altho there may be an economic slump at the moment, the upside potential going forward afterwards is tremendous - that is, the "latest and greatest" info systems of today and the near future are going to look quite primitive someday.
I ordered one for my boss last July, via web entry and it was a nightmare - after weeks of hearing nothing got on the phone and was passed from one dept to another, eventually back to sq. 1 - the old 'runaround'. A month later we got the unit, a solo laptop, and just yesterday I dropped it off at the 'Country Store' for servicing the display and a shift key that thinks it's a tab. "When she gets it on the service bench...." I think they're the usual big company more interested in a media image of being P.C. than selling quality PC's. Quoth the admin, Nevermore.
(posting this about 5 hours to late to be seen but anyway) I'd recently downloaded an MP3 file (a 1944 new years "swing around the clock" - perfectly legal) and thought that it would be cool to put onto an audio CD for my dad - so how to convert MP3 to the proper wav format for the cd burner? Researching 'doze solutions turns up a $30 module for a popular 'doze program that requires the 'pro' version, which is $400. Yikes!!! So did a little google research on Linux solutions and found a neat simple script to pipe the output of mpg123 to sox and accomplish the job perfectly. Of course it doesn't proactively jump in your face with "What format would you like to convert to?" help wiz's, but the software was all there, mission accomplished. There's a LOT of hidden talent in most Linux distro's, more than most newbies & reviewers realize.
As Oscar Wilde said, "I can resis anything but temptation" - if someone/can/ dup a work for a needy friend, they will, it makes the 'supplier' a real nice guy ("Hey, I didn't have enough to buy SO-n-So's latest, but Fred ripped me a copy on his new computer! Gee, Fred's a real great guy!"), nobody will find out, etc. So there MUST be some kind of technical barrier to easy copying, to at lease foil the casual PC pirate, even if the expurt can always break it. I'm sorry, but that's the way it's going to work. Trust you? In business, you trust nobody. In God we trust, all others pay cash.
Slashdot Mirror
For instance, I'm free to go out to lunch or stay here and read this fascinating and enlightening discussion, and I choose to...
Go eat!
Well, some would argue that people are also just automata .... that humans are so complex, and have such a complex web of influences and forces, that the human mind cannot reliably predict what another human may do. ...we are predictable, just not to any intellect we have yet spwaned or encountered.
Ok, so how a car works is magical, mysterious, even random and unpredictable to a child who hasn't studied physics or mechanical engineering yet, certainly. But to say human intelligence IS a predictable automa to a HIGHER intelligence just postpones the problem. Is the not yet spawned or encounterd HIGHER intelligence itself a computer simulatable automa or not? Can IT be comprehended and understood, modeled and computable by an even greater intelligence??
who's the genie-ass at MS who created a button labled "PREVIOUS" that moves a pointer to an event that comes AFTER the one you were just viewing? Someone there clearly has their ass on backwards. Or Outlook being so adamant about shoving itself in your face that it covers up it's own "you have mail" box. That this stuff is worth billions just drives me crazy. That we are FORCED to use it against our wills by business personages who want buy it because they want to be billionairs too is a crime aginst my engineering sense of mathematically perfect reason and order. :))
Boojum
back to the Linux 'dos' emulator...
I get your drift tho - excess vilification is not a good thing - we'd like to get at the truth, but lacking that, our overworked active imaginations fill in their own facts for characters of such large proportions.
Time will tell, and the stories will be told. From what I understand about the Rockefeller legend, for example, he was a clerk in a company, sent on assignment to investigate some black, tarry substance that was a nuisence to Pennsylvania farmers. He came back, told his boss it was completely worthless, quit, hired a chemist and went on to build a huge empire. Clever move or dasterdly deed? The employer he shafted trusted him, and sent him to his destiny. Will the legend of Gates be a + or - ?
Probably a positive one. The good stuff will be remembered and the bad forgotten. Thank God.
Boojum
in this modern day USA, that "anything goes - just don't get caught at it" - and that goes for the prez and many other clever, tricky illuminaries who think they're above the laws we little folk are held to. These people are NOT good role models (or maybe you enjoy the current state of kids in school). So everyone's a criminal, just the 'successful' ones get away with it and hire a media consultant and launch an ad campaign. The unsuccessful must have some kind of conscience that is limiting their career, but we do get a good night sleep.
Boojum
where Iran is the enemy and Saddam is the good guy, then Saddam becomes the enemy and the Kurds are the poor victims, untill you chum up to Turkey and then the Kurds are the enemy, and once upon a time Albania was the communist enemy then suddenly the Serbs are the hated murders of poor Albanian victims . etc, etc, etc.
Sadly few people seem to remember or care about the days when IBM did with hardware what MS does w/ software, or when AT&T was the spawn of much wacko conspiracy theories since they were a monopoly that even owned the phone in your house, which you had to have to fit in society and had to rent from them and only them; kinda like most businesses today feel arm twisted to run their company on MS property, w/ no choice in the matter.
Boojum
the idea of Gates as a well-loved philanthropist is something we should hold more strongly in our minds than the "BillGatus of Borg" image we beat to death. Whether truth or opinion, the image of Gates as an evil dictator is not very appealing and does no one good.
Image?? Have we really deteriorated to the point where all a captain of industry/politician is is just a mere 'image' or phantasm projected on a TV screen? How about what they have actually DONE? I see a little too much of this these days where someone commits heinous crimes, and then they clean up their act, get super polite and then try to convince the jury what a GOOOOOOD person they are. Yeah, lets forget about all the pain of dislocation, downsizing, job retraining and everyone else whose been trampled underfoot for daring to oppose the MS business cultural revolution. So he moves a gold brick from one account to another and he's suddenly a GOOOOOOD philantropist.
What I've learned from MS is that, to succeed, you A) Rob a bank (you have to do something bold, risky and daring, some power grab!) then once the heat is off and you've gotten away with it B) donate large chunks to law enforcement and crime prevention (so nobody will rob YOUR bank!) Heee.
Boojum
are getting really long-winded here.
Damage control! Battlestations!! Ensign, prepare a press release...
Boojum
hatred flowing from what I usually find an extremely open minded, intelligent, and positive community just sickens me sometime
Well, if anyone has ever made billions from 'duping the masses' this has got to be it. The hateful bile is really just natural catharsis, psychological healing from being paid to spend all day pretending that shit smells really good! There isn't a day goes by in my current job that at least 5 or 7 people complain about "my computer's broken again" - I'm sure this scenario is repeated endlessly across the corporate landscape - and 9 out of 10 times the COMPUTER is PERFECTLY OK! IT's the SOFTWARE whats got a registry error, or whatever, and I'm really on a crusade to enlighten all the rats following these pied pipers that the SOFTWARE IS THE PROPERTY of the MS Corp. and that they're paying me to spend hours rebuilding SOMEONE ELSES PROPERTY everytime the lousy house of cards topples over. I would LOVE to take pride in my work, but I've come to accept that it is impossible as an McSE (thank gawd I've the old BSEE) to avoid all the little glitches that make for embarassing presentations.
In short, THEY make billions, and I get laughed at. What a ceramic container of organic fertilizer!
Boojum
Not exactly offtopic, but obliquely connected - I've always thought things like this, the govt adopting, deploying, using an OPEN software referance model, would be the best way to solve the MS 'monopoly' problem without resorting to draconian 'break 'em up' or worse measures, kinda like all the technological 'spin off's' we got from the Space Program.
Boojum
Being shared in public, at taxpayer expense, whaddya expect. Good incentive to find a job and buy a PERSONAL computer; that was the whole driving force behind PC's, build one at home so you don't have to share it or go by lots of little picky corporate rules about what you can run, where and why.
Boojum
extremely vitriolic, invective hurling, Microsoft® bashing diatribe? And I work so hard at it too...
Boojum
if anything, a meaningful breakup with real 'firewalls' between os and app developerss (such that non M$ app developers have as much access to os secrets as M$ developers when attempting to compete on the say os playing field, ala Netscape) would add admin costs, that plus the recent temp appeal and Caldera settlement etc means that either the per cpu license costs will go up, or stock dividends will go down; either way it'll be less attractive all around and people may stop being M$ robots and falling for their whitewashed crap, and maybe consider products that are more than a bunch of barely fulfilled & not-quite-working-right marketing bullets on the full page ads.
Boojum
at the Harry Shearer Le Show archive , right he re (Should be the June 13th show) - while your there you may check out the Nov 7 program with "Male Models sell their sperm online" and "Bill Gates plans his next move".
Boojum
I'm not a media analyst, but what's this talk about 'monopoly' - aren't there plenty of viable competitors like Disney/ABC, Murdock's News/FOX, Viacom, MSNBC, Viacom, etc? To draw analogy from the car industry, there once was a LOT of little auto companies, they eventually consolidated (must be SOME economic advantage of doing so) into the big three (Warning: US centric pov) Also Ford was big on vertical integration, owned or wanted to own everything from the coal/iron mines to the dealerships and everything inbetween.
Boojum
Wow, with articles like this:
Hacker penetrates
Virgin
Service put on hold after
back door breached
who can resist?
Boojum
is that this technique will probably go thru the same trajectory as the "colorizing old B&W films" flap of many years ago - it'll all blow over and people will, like spam, just accept it and the media companies will continue to do whatever the fsck they want to do, in the name of free speach.
Boojum
yeah it is pretty neat to be able to take a shot across, say, a baseball diamond and replace one of the local hardware stores ads on the fence with, say, "AOL" or whatever, seamlessly. I haven't beleived anything or anyone in years - like Hindu theology, everything is just a grand illusion.
Boojum
Once upon a time (ahem) Time-Warner bought and ruined Atari - but THIS time, haha, the boot is on the other foot. Who woulda thought that some little outfit that started out trying to deliver Atari 2600 video games over the phone (now known as the mightly AOL) would be buying out TW - heeheehee.
Boojum
Seems I read an old Scientific American article once that related information to energy and entropy. Without energy input to a system it decays, increasing entropy and losing info content. They actually did a rough calculation involving the amount of energy received from the sun, and the earth's existing and potential information content. The dramatic conclusion: you ain't seen nothing yet. This was like in the 50's or 60's, and the author pointed out that the amount of energy received could support a HUGE amount of information, which we had just barely begun to tap at the time, and probably aren't much further along even now.
This supports my thesis that, altho there may be an economic slump at the moment, the upside potential going forward afterwards is tremendous - that is, the "latest and greatest" info systems of today and the near future are going to look quite primitive someday.
The future's so bright....
at any location authorised to refund unused bundled new PC software OS & Application license fees per the EULA.
Boojum
I ordered one for my boss last July, via web entry and it was a nightmare - after weeks of hearing nothing got on the phone and was passed from one dept to another, eventually back to sq. 1 - the old 'runaround'. A month later we got the unit, a solo laptop, and just yesterday I dropped it off at the 'Country Store' for servicing the display and a shift key that thinks it's a tab. "When she gets it on the service bench...." I think they're the usual big company more interested in a media image of being P.C. than selling quality PC's. Quoth the admin, Nevermore.
Boojum
(posting this about 5 hours to late to be seen but anyway) I'd recently downloaded an MP3 file (a 1944 new years "swing around the clock" - perfectly legal) and thought that it would be cool to put onto an audio CD for my dad - so how to convert MP3 to the proper wav format for the cd burner? Researching 'doze solutions turns up a $30 module for a popular 'doze program that requires the 'pro' version, which is $400. Yikes!!! So did a little google research on Linux solutions and found a neat simple script to pipe the output of mpg123 to sox and accomplish the job perfectly. Of course it doesn't proactively jump in your face with "What format would you like to convert to?" help wiz's, but the software was all there, mission accomplished. There's a LOT of hidden talent in most Linux distro's, more than most newbies & reviewers realize.
Boojum
As Oscar Wilde said, "I can resis anything but temptation" - if someone /can/ dup a work for a needy friend, they will, it makes the 'supplier' a real nice guy ("Hey, I didn't have enough to buy SO-n-So's latest, but Fred ripped me a copy on his new computer! Gee, Fred's a real great guy!"), nobody will find out, etc. So there MUST be some kind of technical barrier to easy copying, to at lease foil the casual PC pirate, even if the expurt can always break it. I'm sorry, but that's the way it's going to work. Trust you? In business, you trust nobody. In God we trust, all others pay cash.
here
Boojum