Tap water tastes fucking gross, and they slowly whittle down the standards for it without telling anyone. Plus, uh, how many times do they clean the pipes? Oh? And the "last leg" into your home? Never, you say?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Yes, I know Penn and Teller found some idiots who couldn't tell the difference between bottled/storebought/filtered and tap. Good for them. In unrelated news, I don't taste a difference between the various wines. Others can.
And what the fuck is up with fluoridation? Yeah, let's mix a poison in people's water and hope there are no harmful side effects.
I will agree that milk is awesome. I drink over 2 US gallons of skim milk a week. Good stuff.
It's probably too late for me to get a lot of eyes with this response, but this is bugging me so much I have to respond. You said:
There's a lot of good original information inside that article that Gamespot doesn't seem to think is interesting.
I agree, the Time story got some things right. But this story reminded me why I canceled my subscription a long, long time ago. Time talks down to you. And it's not talking down to you as in "simplifying" or explaining basic concepts. The writing style they use is so casual and careless, it's like they hired teenagers to speak off the top of their heads and transcribe it all relatively correctly.
Imagine you tried to turn in these kinds of lines to your English teacher:
-Maybe you've heard of a little guy named Mario? Italian plumber, likes jumping? A big angry ape by the name of... Donkey Kong? The Legend of Zelda? All Miyamoto. Ellipses? "All Miyamoto."?
-But Nintendo is no longer the global leader in games that it was during Miyamoto's salad days. Salad days? Who the fuck says that anymore?
-But they're going to do it in the weirdest, riskiest way you could think of. Who? Me personally? And "weirdest way"?
-All three machinesPlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube--are showing their age, and a new generation of game hardware is aborning Ah, in case anyone would correctly infer the writer is a moron, he slips in another word no one uses.
-Those changeovers, which happen every four or five years, are moments of opportunity in the gaming industry, when the guard changes and the underdog has its day. Calling the release of new consoles "the changing of the guard" is a stupid metaphor that clarifies nothing. Lets, see, a new person guards in that case, and new gaming systems come out in this case. Close enough!
- to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework. NO!!!! A thousand times, no! First, dude, give up the hip talk. Second, punctuate to maintain a pretense of grown-up writing. "Like, 'hard' as in 'homework'." And what part of their readers are "down" with the "homework is so hard, man!" mentality and find it relevant?
-The standard video-game controller is a kind of Siamese-twin affair, two joysticks fused together and studded with buttons, Wow, disparaging a controller design by comparing it to a birth defect. Real nice!
-players have to manipulate both joysticks simultaneously while working both triggers and pounding half a dozen buttons at the same time. This time, it's not just Time that does it, but nevertheless, WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO SAY "HALF A DOZEN"? For the love of God, say SIX! It's not that hard! Really! And of course, if he actually did his homework (you know, the stuff that's, like[,] hard), he'd know you don't hit six buttons at once in Halo.
I could go on, but I hope I've made my point. Reading a Time article is excruciatingly painful to finish. As far as I'm concerned, Time is a tabloid. The way they sensationalize everything and throw out any semblance of writing standards or respect for their readers is extremely annoying, and I'm just glad I'm not sending them money anymore.
Downmods don't count when they counteract a Funny.
Tell that to the Slashcode. The only negative modding I got between going from "neutral" to "bad" karma was the overrated on that comment. I've gotten enough karma-related up-moddings outside of that to counteract all my other down-moddings. The only way to account for the bad karm is from the "overrated" on that comment.
And can I put "The Wii is a great system. I want to buy an Uus." in my sig?
Clever, but it didn't get me any karma either. In fact, it lost me some, because while I kept getting modded up to 5, all of those moddings were for "funny", which doesn't help karma, while I got modded down for "overrated", which hurts karma. Someone needs to fix that. Getting modded up to 5 for funny shouldn't hurt your karma.
That said, I think a great way of protesting the name would be to refer to it as the "Uus" in the accusative case. Example: "The Wii is a great system. I want to buy an Uus."
I agree, as long as it's clear that management is a separate skill from pure engineering. It's vital to have the management also have a good understanding of the technology on which the company is built, but at the time too many firms take the attitude that *all* they need is good technology, and any other function is unnecessary, that it "isn't real work". But I definitely agree, at any point where the management is too far removed from the real building blocks of the company, it's time to sell.
I'm glad you've brought up the economic issues because I wanted to make a point about interest. People think interest is evil or at least "unearned income", but the growth in technology argues precisely the opposite. The phenomenon of interest is a result of the very real fact that production earlier is better (from the standpoint of society) than production later, and consumption later rather than earlier is better for society. When you loaned out your money rather than cashing it in for present consumption, you allowed people to improve the level of technology, and in general, society's capability of satisfying human desires.
The future will be a better place in terms of technology. Our decisions now, of how much to set aside for it through investment, greatly determine how much better it will be. Those who save should be praised.
That said, I think the AC replying to you had it right. The market is much more shackled where there has been little progress (health care/education) than where it has progressed (newer technologies). Notice how there's no government certification for programmers that you have to meet before writing code (yet). Be thankful for that.
The most significant thing you can do for you ability to communicate to a non-technical audience (or one otherwise not familiar with your area) is to just *let go* of whatever tendency you have to make what you're doing seem difficult. Get over yourself, in other words.
I thought a lot of job sites would allow you to hide your name from your profile so they wouldn't see it even if they found your resume. Of course, that would mean hiding your phone # (or them calling without a name), but they can still contact you. Now, an employer could still put two and two together, but they likelihood would be a lot smaller.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way, I don't know how you could make such a statement after contemplating the issue for more than 30 seconds. People need to be informed of new products. That is a fact of life. If one day people stopped advertising (or you could enforce a complete ban) we'd be stuck with all existing providers of services, and they would "rest on their laurels" and not have to do much to keep our business, never having to fear new upstarts. Competition, and with it the "search costs" of advertising, always seems wasteful to those ignorant of the discovery process that makes up a market economy. In theory, it would be better to have just one factory for each product, rather than the "wasteful duplication", but realistically, such a monopoly would never discover newer and better ways of doing things.
Search engines and phone books are great. I don't dispute that at all. But they only help when you've already done a lot of legwork in identifying your need.
Nor do I dispute that certain kinds are disruptive. However, the ones that are, are typically already in violation of rights of yours that have nothing to do with advertising, and you're trying to use them to ridicule all advertising.
But perhaps the best argument for advertising is you. Rather than humbly sticking to a "just the facts" approach to conveying information to people who want it, you chose to identify yourself with the clever label "c0d3h4x0r", to fool people into thinking your posts are more with reading than they really are. Just like I dress nicely at work and use a creative resume to rook people into thinking I'm more competent than I really am. Just like women put on make up and do "other things" to rook men into thinking they are better looking than they really are. Are things things evil? Of course not. Yet that is advertising!
Right. They can't stop themselves from visiting a park where children are. They can't stop themselves from offering the children candy. They can't stop themselves from driving away with the kid.
Molesting a child requires a complex chain of events and a well-thought-out plan. It's not something you can do on impulse like washing your hands.
Good point. A better analogy would be to tell your friends, whom you know are going to betray you, that you're training a rancher's pony to bite off your arch-rival's dick, and then warning the rancher (whom you know is a crazy redneck who shoots trespassers on sight) that there are crazed pony-killers in the area so that if your arch-rival (or anyone he delegates) tries to take the pony, after being warned by your friends, he dies. It's not illegal, but definitely not a cool thing to do. Of course, cutting up the then-dead bodies and putting them in someone's chili *would* be illegal.
That's because you're a rational individual who is already familiar with console gaming and will buy based on technical merit. You don't care about the name, so Nintendo doesn't care what you think of the name. They picked the name to appeal to a more lay audience. What has been perplexing, therefore, is not that "the name doesn't appeal to us", but the name doesn't appeal to *anyone*. Like I said here, if they had named it Flower Power rather than Wii, you and I still wouldn't care (in terms of decision to purchase) but at least we'd understand who *would* like the name and find it more appealing based on that.
will France please, please, PLEASE for once grow some balls and stand up us?
Good point. If they don't, we might set up them the bomb. They would then be on the way to destruction, at which point they would have no chance to survive make their time.
Open source is there to *help* people free themselves from the profit-making corporations. It's a way of telling them you don't need their ridiculously expensive license to get good quality software and interoperability. An integral part of that ideology is that *you don't try to profit off of other people* through open source. That's why accepting money for writing software that will be GPL'd is seriously frowned upon by FOSS advocates. So to ask if open source has helped you "commercially" misses the point. Open source is a way to *liberate* us from profit, not bind us to it! You might as well ask a priest which sermon gets the most donations.
I think you can get it at www.ubuntu.com. That's pure speculation though. Also, make sure that if this is the first time, download and burn the Live CD along with the install CD. They don't tell you to do that on site (they just suggest the Live CD to try it out, not as a necessary component of a clean install). And if you get, hypothetically, locked out of both OS's when installing Ubuntu dual boot through GRUB, they *will* have a difficulty, on the forums, understanding the concept of "I don't have a Live CD and can't get one."
Whenever anyone *but* Google looks for cheap labor, no matter what it's for, and gets it, everyone on Slashdot is livid. Why can't anyone here realize that Google is just exploiting cheap labor rather than paying a living wage to the *professional* programmers *here* in America? It doesn't matter that it's "giving young workers experience to help them get better jobs"... THAT THE EXACT justification people use to defend the exploitation of migrant Mexican labor, that they're building a better life.
Exploitation is exploiatation, and a race to the bottom is a race to the bottom, whether you're Google, whether your project will support FOSS, and whether or not you hide the low pay in "contract labor".
I can understand why they don't care what people who will buy the system anyway would think about the name. I hate the name, and based on what I've heard about the system itself, I would still buy it, even despite the name. If they had named it "Flower Power", I would still hate the name, and I would still buy it in spite of the hatred, but -- and this is important -- at least I would understand why the name would appeal to other people. You're right: who would like this name? And who wouldn't have to overcome embarassment to get it?
You don't think code should be commented at all? Because that too is "dumbing down". That too is "wasting the time of the author". That too is "making the code more accessible for an inexperienced user" (at the very least, someone not experienced with that particular program). If a major goal of FOSS is to enable people to modify and learn (like, I don't know, its leading exponents spend the majority of their lives claiming), then yes, it should be built around outsiders being about to understand it and find the implementation of the features they want to learn from or modify.
Another person missing the point. It shouldn't "take a lot of time" to learn *where* a certain feature is implemented. It shouldn't be difficult to understand the coding of that feature when you get to it.
It's too much to ask that you be able to add a feature to an OPEN SOURCE "hey you can learn from this and modify it" program by finding a similar feature and mimicking it? Damn, I really wish I had gone into software "engineering" (rather than real engineering) where low standards like these are the norm.
If you think my comments are irrelevant, explain why. I specifically related them to the topic by showing how open sourced software isn't really conducive to learning and modification as advertised.
Correct, but like everyone else responding to me on this topic, utterly irrelevant. The story (and relating discussion) is whether poor coding and documentation hinder the promised benefits of open source software. Photoshop isn't open source; it's irrelevant here. Bugginess isn't relevant here either. It's whether actual OSS, in practice, has allowed people to learn from and modify the software. My point is it hasn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Tap water tastes fucking gross, and they slowly whittle down the standards for it without telling anyone. Plus, uh, how many times do they clean the pipes? Oh? And the "last leg" into your home? Never, you say?
Yeah, that's what I thought.
Yes, I know Penn and Teller found some idiots who couldn't tell the difference between bottled/storebought/filtered and tap. Good for them. In unrelated news, I don't taste a difference between the various wines. Others can.
And what the fuck is up with fluoridation? Yeah, let's mix a poison in people's water and hope there are no harmful side effects.
I will agree that milk is awesome. I drink over 2 US gallons of skim milk a week. Good stuff.
It's probably too late for me to get a lot of eyes with this response, but this is bugging me so much I have to respond. You said:
... Donkey Kong? The Legend of Zelda? All Miyamoto. Ellipses? "All Miyamoto."?
There's a lot of good original information inside that article that Gamespot doesn't seem to think is interesting.
I agree, the Time story got some things right. But this story reminded me why I canceled my subscription a long, long time ago. Time talks down to you. And it's not talking down to you as in "simplifying" or explaining basic concepts. The writing style they use is so casual and careless, it's like they hired teenagers to speak off the top of their heads and transcribe it all relatively correctly.
Imagine you tried to turn in these kinds of lines to your English teacher:
-Maybe you've heard of a little guy named Mario? Italian plumber, likes jumping? A big angry ape by the name of
-But Nintendo is no longer the global leader in games that it was during Miyamoto's salad days. Salad days? Who the fuck says that anymore?
-But they're going to do it in the weirdest, riskiest way you could think of. Who? Me personally? And "weirdest way"?
-All three machinesPlayStation 2, Xbox and GameCube--are showing their age, and a new generation of game hardware is aborning Ah, in case anyone would correctly infer the writer is a moron, he slips in another word no one uses.
-Those changeovers, which happen every four or five years, are moments of opportunity in the gaming industry, when the guard changes and the underdog has its day. Calling the release of new consoles "the changing of the guard" is a stupid metaphor that clarifies nothing. Lets, see, a new person guards in that case, and new gaming systems come out in this case. Close enough!
- to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework. NO!!!! A thousand times, no! First, dude, give up the hip talk. Second, punctuate to maintain a pretense of grown-up writing. "Like, 'hard' as in 'homework'." And what part of their readers are "down" with the "homework is so hard, man!" mentality and find it relevant?
-The standard video-game controller is a kind of Siamese-twin affair, two joysticks fused together and studded with buttons, Wow, disparaging a controller design by comparing it to a birth defect. Real nice!
-players have to manipulate both joysticks simultaneously while working both triggers and pounding half a dozen buttons at the same time. This time, it's not just Time that does it, but nevertheless, WHY THE FUCK DO YOU HAVE TO SAY "HALF A DOZEN"? For the love of God, say SIX! It's not that hard! Really! And of course, if he actually did his homework (you know, the stuff that's, like[,] hard), he'd know you don't hit six buttons at once in Halo.
I could go on, but I hope I've made my point. Reading a Time article is excruciatingly painful to finish. As far as I'm concerned, Time is a tabloid. The way they sensationalize everything and throw out any semblance of writing standards or respect for their readers is extremely annoying, and I'm just glad I'm not sending them money anymore.
Just had to get that off my chest.
Downmods don't count when they counteract a Funny.
:-)
Tell that to the Slashcode. The only negative modding I got between going from "neutral" to "bad" karma was the overrated on that comment. I've gotten enough karma-related up-moddings outside of that to counteract all my other down-moddings. The only way to account for the bad karm is from the "overrated" on that comment.
And can I put "The Wii is a great system. I want to buy an Uus." in my sig?
Please do!
Clever, but it didn't get me any karma either. In fact, it lost me some, because while I kept getting modded up to 5, all of those moddings were for "funny", which doesn't help karma, while I got modded down for "overrated", which hurts karma. Someone needs to fix that. Getting modded up to 5 for funny shouldn't hurt your karma.
That said, I think a great way of protesting the name would be to refer to it as the "Uus" in the accusative case. Example: "The Wii is a great system. I want to buy an Uus."
I agree, as long as it's clear that management is a separate skill from pure engineering. It's vital to have the management also have a good understanding of the technology on which the company is built, but at the time too many firms take the attitude that *all* they need is good technology, and any other function is unnecessary, that it "isn't real work". But I definitely agree, at any point where the management is too far removed from the real building blocks of the company, it's time to sell.
I'm glad you've brought up the economic issues because I wanted to make a point about interest. People think interest is evil or at least "unearned income", but the growth in technology argues precisely the opposite. The phenomenon of interest is a result of the very real fact that production earlier is better (from the standpoint of society) than production later, and consumption later rather than earlier is better for society. When you loaned out your money rather than cashing it in for present consumption, you allowed people to improve the level of technology, and in general, society's capability of satisfying human desires.
The future will be a better place in terms of technology. Our decisions now, of how much to set aside for it through investment, greatly determine how much better it will be. Those who save should be praised.
That said, I think the AC replying to you had it right. The market is much more shackled where there has been little progress (health care/education) than where it has progressed (newer technologies). Notice how there's no government certification for programmers that you have to meet before writing code (yet). Be thankful for that.
The most significant thing you can do for you ability to communicate to a non-technical audience (or one otherwise not familiar with your area) is to just *let go* of whatever tendency you have to make what you're doing seem difficult. Get over yourself, in other words.
I thought a lot of job sites would allow you to hide your name from your profile so they wouldn't see it even if they found your resume. Of course, that would mean hiding your phone # (or them calling without a name), but they can still contact you. Now, an employer could still put two and two together, but they likelihood would be a lot smaller.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way, I don't know how you could make such a statement after contemplating the issue for more than 30 seconds. People need to be informed of new products. That is a fact of life. If one day people stopped advertising (or you could enforce a complete ban) we'd be stuck with all existing providers of services, and they would "rest on their laurels" and not have to do much to keep our business, never having to fear new upstarts. Competition, and with it the "search costs" of advertising, always seems wasteful to those ignorant of the discovery process that makes up a market economy. In theory, it would be better to have just one factory for each product, rather than the "wasteful duplication", but realistically, such a monopoly would never discover newer and better ways of doing things.
Search engines and phone books are great. I don't dispute that at all. But they only help when you've already done a lot of legwork in identifying your need.
Nor do I dispute that certain kinds are disruptive. However, the ones that are, are typically already in violation of rights of yours that have nothing to do with advertising, and you're trying to use them to ridicule all advertising.
But perhaps the best argument for advertising is you. Rather than humbly sticking to a "just the facts" approach to conveying information to people who want it, you chose to identify yourself with the clever label "c0d3h4x0r", to fool people into thinking your posts are more with reading than they really are. Just like I dress nicely at work and use a creative resume to rook people into thinking I'm more competent than I really am. Just like women put on make up and do "other things" to rook men into thinking they are better looking than they really are. Are things things evil? Of course not. Yet that is advertising!
Right. They can't stop themselves from visiting a park where children are. They can't stop themselves from offering the children candy. They can't stop themselves from driving away with the kid.
Molesting a child requires a complex chain of events and a well-thought-out plan. It's not something you can do on impulse like washing your hands.
Good point. A better analogy would be to tell your friends, whom you know are going to betray you, that you're training a rancher's pony to bite off your arch-rival's dick, and then warning the rancher (whom you know is a crazy redneck who shoots trespassers on sight) that there are crazed pony-killers in the area so that if your arch-rival (or anyone he delegates) tries to take the pony, after being warned by your friends, he dies. It's not illegal, but definitely not a cool thing to do. Of course, cutting up the then-dead bodies and putting them in someone's chili *would* be illegal.
to paraphrase Oscar Wilde: Anyone who doesn't have enough time to do it right, has enough time to do it again.
That would be more believable if the Dutch regularly spoke English or had a similar word in their language for that bodily fluid.
That's because you're a rational individual who is already familiar with console gaming and will buy based on technical merit. You don't care about the name, so Nintendo doesn't care what you think of the name. They picked the name to appeal to a more lay audience. What has been perplexing, therefore, is not that "the name doesn't appeal to us", but the name doesn't appeal to *anyone*. Like I said here, if they had named it Flower Power rather than Wii, you and I still wouldn't care (in terms of decision to purchase) but at least we'd understand who *would* like the name and find it more appealing based on that.
will France please, please, PLEASE for once grow some balls and stand up us?
Good point. If they don't, we might set up them the bomb. They would then be on the way to destruction, at which point they would have no chance to survive make their time.
Open source is there to *help* people free themselves from the profit-making corporations. It's a way of telling them you don't need their ridiculously expensive license to get good quality software and interoperability. An integral part of that ideology is that *you don't try to profit off of other people* through open source. That's why accepting money for writing software that will be GPL'd is seriously frowned upon by FOSS advocates. So to ask if open source has helped you "commercially" misses the point. Open source is a way to *liberate* us from profit, not bind us to it! You might as well ask a priest which sermon gets the most donations.
I think you can get it at www.ubuntu.com. That's pure speculation though. Also, make sure that if this is the first time, download and burn the Live CD along with the install CD. They don't tell you to do that on site (they just suggest the Live CD to try it out, not as a necessary component of a clean install). And if you get, hypothetically, locked out of both OS's when installing Ubuntu dual boot through GRUB, they *will* have a difficulty, on the forums, understanding the concept of "I don't have a Live CD and can't get one."
Yeah.
One trick is not to pirate music and movies.
Goodbye, account.
Whenever anyone *but* Google looks for cheap labor, no matter what it's for, and gets it, everyone on Slashdot is livid. Why can't anyone here realize that Google is just exploiting cheap labor rather than paying a living wage to the *professional* programmers *here* in America? It doesn't matter that it's "giving young workers experience to help them get better jobs" ... THAT THE EXACT justification people use to defend the exploitation of migrant Mexican labor, that they're building a better life.
Exploitation is exploiatation, and a race to the bottom is a race to the bottom, whether you're Google, whether your project will support FOSS, and whether or not you hide the low pay in "contract labor".
I can understand why they don't care what people who will buy the system anyway would think about the name. I hate the name, and based on what I've heard about the system itself, I would still buy it, even despite the name. If they had named it "Flower Power", I would still hate the name, and I would still buy it in spite of the hatred, but -- and this is important -- at least I would understand why the name would appeal to other people. You're right: who would like this name? And who wouldn't have to overcome embarassment to get it?
It should be "Developers React to Uus".
You don't think code should be commented at all? Because that too is "dumbing down". That too is "wasting the time of the author". That too is "making the code more accessible for an inexperienced user" (at the very least, someone not experienced with that particular program). If a major goal of FOSS is to enable people to modify and learn (like, I don't know, its leading exponents spend the majority of their lives claiming), then yes, it should be built around outsiders being about to understand it and find the implementation of the features they want to learn from or modify.
Another person missing the point. It shouldn't "take a lot of time" to learn *where* a certain feature is implemented. It shouldn't be difficult to understand the coding of that feature when you get to it.
It is.
It's too much to ask that you be able to add a feature to an OPEN SOURCE "hey you can learn from this and modify it" program by finding a similar feature and mimicking it? Damn, I really wish I had gone into software "engineering" (rather than real engineering) where low standards like these are the norm.
If you think my comments are irrelevant, explain why. I specifically related them to the topic by showing how open sourced software isn't really conducive to learning and modification as advertised.
Correct, but like everyone else responding to me on this topic, utterly irrelevant. The story (and relating discussion) is whether poor coding and documentation hinder the promised benefits of open source software. Photoshop isn't open source; it's irrelevant here. Bugginess isn't relevant here either. It's whether actual OSS, in practice, has allowed people to learn from and modify the software. My point is it hasn't.