The three people who still use IRC are going to be *pissed!*
(Last time I used IRC was in an attempt to get support on a particular open source software package. Worst. Support. Ever. In a room with 50+ connected people, seemingly every single one was AFK for a solid 5 minutes. Of course when someone got back, they just told me I was in the wrong IRC room to ask that question, [you know, the one in the product's documentation!] and I was stupid for not knowing it. The other 49 AFK people never said a word, so I kind of wondered why the hell they even bothered to connect. Of course, maybe they were all secret IRC logging bots, heh.)
In the words of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song:
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just repeat to yourself: 'it's just a show, I should really just relax.'"
Re:The Secret to Futurama's success
on
Futurama Returns!
·
· Score: 1
Look closely at Bender's brain when the professor shines the Z-ray on it in the episode with the Slurm factory. Specifically, look at the model number of the CPU: 6502
My 2008 Ford Focus has gone in for repairs three times in the four months that I've owned it, and Ford has been building those motherfuckers for over 100 years now.
Yeah, the Focus model is badly in need of a refresh.
At long as I have the option to opt-out, I'm all for it. I've seen what mandatory union membership has done to the American automotive industry, and to education... no thanks, not interested!
At-will employment goes both ways. Sure, the employer can fire you without warning or reason, but at the same time you can quit your job without warning or reason as well. If a fast-moving industry like technology, I see that as a good thing.
Also, if you don't like that, just have your employer write up a contract. If you're employed on a contract, you're not at-will.
You're not even competent enough to keep your mailbox in order
My email box *is* in order. It's just 500+ MB of "in order." I happen to be in a field where if a client discovers a new "problem", it's nice to be able to dig back a year and a half and send a reply like, "we discussed this during scoping in 2005, here's a copy of that thread I hope it answers your questions."
and several hours of your time costs more than paying IT technicians' wages whilst they add new storage, backup capacity, testing, etc. etc.
Considering that the IT people working on this will benefit all 250+ users on the same email server, you should divide the value of their time by 250 or so. And yes, that would make my time worth more.
If I'm your IT support, you've failed as an end user.
I have 3.5 GB of email on my home computer, and it runs just fine. If my work computer with IT support doesn't run at least as well as my home computer with just me fumbling around on it, then something is terribly wrong. (And yes, my 3.5 GB of email is backed-up to a remote location.)
That said, at every client I've seen exchange, users always complain about email storage limits. Don't know why.
Because it takes me several hours to clean out my email during which I'm not getting any actual work done, when IT could have just added more space to the SAN in the same amount of time for much less money than my lost productivity cost the company.
Having users waste time cleaning out their email is IT failure, plain and simple-- either IT needs to make some kind of automated 'old mail' purge, or they need to add more storage, but if I, as an end user, have to even THINK about email storage limits, you've failed as my IT support.
That's been a feature in Outlook for ages, I knew about it. Good tip for those who don't, though.
But what I'm talking about is the email client looking into the text of your email and finding bits of text that look like locations or dates, then linking to the appropriate actions for them. If Gmail sees something in your text that looks like an address, it can add a "view this in Google Maps" link that will locate the address on Google Maps. Additionally, if it sees text like "this friday at 4:00 we'll have a BBQ" it'll ask if you want to add an event named "BBQ" on friday at 4:00 to your calendar. Outlook doesn't do this.
Finally, I'd like to add that OS X Leopard has a feature where emails that contain text that seems like it might be something you might want to add to your calendar get parsed and get a little right-click menu to get added to iCal. Which is neat!
Gmail's been doing that for like a solid year now. I don't get the excitement now that Mail.app does it in OS X... it's not a new feature, they ripped it from Google.
But why spend money on GameCube games? You'll never have enough time to to play them all. You're being manipulated into thinking this will make your life complete. you should look beyond material possessions to what's really important. Why not put the money in a 401k for retirement or donate to a homeless shelter?
Why click through to stories about video games only to spend time typing long messages to tell people they're wasting their lives? Does that make your life complete in some way? Hypocrite.
Sounds conceptually a lot like the crayon bomb I read in a book years ago (I want to say Chicken Soup of the Soul? But maybe one of Dave Barry's books?) It drops construction paper and boxes of Crayola crayons.
That, for all I know, is the crucial point. All the unusually intelligent people I know (myself included) see the challenge as the interesting part, and the "victory" when you've overcome it much less so, in fact "winning" is the boring part.
Yeah, but that can really make it hard to complete projects. "When will your paint program be done?" "Well I figured out how to do the flood fill in record time, but the menus and stuff-- well I'll get around to it eventually."
How do you propose fixing schools? Any additional money you give them is immediately sucked up by stupid irresponsible projects by administrators (implementing the latest buzz-word, buying equipment without investing in training*, etc.)
Back in the day, the school district my mom worked at bought every classroom 5 brand-new (at the time) Apple PowerMac 5500 computers. They provided exactly 0 training on how to use them. The computers mostly collected dust. Imagine how much better things would have been with, say, 3 computers per classroom and a couple weeks of training for teachers?
When she got a throat ailment, her doctor prescribed a microphone and amplifier so that she could teach her class without straining her throat. The school district made her (and her doctor!) fill out tons of forms and turn them in. A month later, there's still no microphone. The only way she was able to get a microphone for her classroom was by threatening to go to the union's lawyers. (After she send that email, bam, there was a microphone and amplifier the next day in her classroom!)
Of course unions add to the whole mess as well, you have teacher's unions which are dedicated to retaining every teacher on staff-- even the really, really bad ones. Additionally, union rules mostly assign better pay and better positions based only on experience (or more accurately: time worked), not on performance.
I don't know what the solution is, but to say something like "schools aren't good at handling 'gifted' or special needs kids" without offering any solutions just simply isn't helpful. There are a lot of people in education who are dedicated to... education.
There are teachers who work in schools when they could be making three times as much in the private sector, despite all the bullcrap they have to go through. I honestly think that borders on heroism in the current educational climate, I know personally I'd have quit and gone to the public sector in a flash.
The article never really states that intelligence is terribly malleable. This is more of a general impression left with the reader - which is mostly incorrect.
Wait, what?
You're saying that people can't increase their intelligence? At all? What measure of intelligence are you using? What does "mostly incorrect" mean in this context exactly?
I'm personally wary of any web-based solution. I'd much prefer a stand-alone application for performance reasons-- if I select 20 messages and drag them into a folder, I want to see that feedback in real-time. Frankly though, if I had to recommend a non-Microsoft solution to a company, I'd certainly look into that as IBM's stand-alone application sucks beans.
For what it's worth, I do have a plan to develop that domain name into a site, I just don't have the free time to do it. In the meantime, it's on Sedo so someone can make me an offer if they want it. If you looked at my Sedo account, you'd see I own less than 10 domains; I'm not a "domain spammer" by any stretch of the imagination.
(But I also don't see anything wrong with being one; with the current domain registration rules, you can make a lot of cash that way. If you want to get rid of "domain spammers" you need to go to the source and change the registration rules.)
Perhaps this exampe will cause understanding: Microsoft Windows Vista. If they can produce a product which is universally known for being terrible in multiple ways and still make bank, you should be able to see this is a hint that something is wrong. In other words, bad or even just _mediocre_ products usually have negative financial implications for businesses in a fair and balanced environment.
First of all, Vista isn't nearly as bad as Slashdotters say it is. And normal humans beings, you know the kind you might run into on the street, when asked about Vista won't go into foaming-at-the-mouth rants about it like the average Slashdotter will, so that's pretty much a non-starter right there.
That said, Vista *isn't* doing well, at least not as well as Microsoft expected it to. I'm sure it still has more installs than Linux or OS X, so everything's relative of course.
Exhibit A: Microsoft's game division produces the Xbox 360 which is marginally better than the original Xbox and started out with hardware problems. Without arguing the value of the Xbox 360, competition was able to produce more innovative products and since Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the video game industry, the normal (and good) response occurred being that they lost money.
First of all, the Xbox 360 is a lot more than "marginally better than the Xbox." Sure, the PS3 is a lot better than the PS2, but the Xbox was always pretty damned good even when it first came out. Even now, an original Xbox would have no problems holding its own (graphically) against Nintendo's next-gen console. Remember, it did 1080i at a steady 30 FPS on a couple games.
Secondly, every innovation (with the exception of Nintendo's motion sensing controller) this current console generation has produced has come from the original Xbox: * Real HDTV support * Integrated broadband networking support * Integrated mass storage device * Online games download service
That's not to disrespect Nintendo's work on the Wii, but in a world where the sequel to the most popular console of the last generation consists of nothing but ideas ripped-off of Microsoft and Nintendo, it falls pretty flat to claim that the Xbox has not been innovative. You can argue that the Wii is a "more innovative" than the Xbox 360, but the Playstation 3 definitely ain't.
Thirdly, this sentence:
the normal (and good) response occurred being that they lost money.
Do you really honestly believe an operating system and a document editor need more than 64MB of RAM to run?
An operation system and a document editor, at least one supporting some small subset of Word/Excel/Powerpoint's functionality can be made to run in less than 64 MB of RAM. If you could make a document editor with all the features of Office (*all* the features, not just the subset that OpenOffice offers) run in 64 MB of RAM, I'd be very impressed.
Of course your statement is also very misleading. Although you could build an OS/Office App combo that can run in 64 MB of RAM, that doesn't help the tons and tons of people who want to play video games, edit their home movies, mix music tracks, use their computer as a Tivo, and all the hundreds of other things people do with their computers in the year 2007 that can't possibly run in 64 MB of RAM.
(That includes multitasking BTW; at the moment my PC is ripping a DVD into MP4 format, playing another MP4 file from iTunes, has 4 websites open, 2 of which heavily use AJAX, has an IM client open, has an email client open, and has a remote desktop connection to my work computer open. Can you fit that in 64 MB of RAM? If so, you're a miracle worker.)
Why do you assume that investing in defense technology does *not* help the people of the US?
As I see it, any enemy we'd have to use this against would be throwing ICBMs with nukes at us. Why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-terrorist ops?
You're right, we should be like France before WWII and just invest all our military spending on a single type of defense because it made sense when we started building it. How stupid of us to diversify!
(When France started building the Maginot Line, it was actually impossible for tanks at that time to cross through the forested regions they decided to leave undefended; by the time war actually broke out, tanks could do it with ease and the entire installation was useless.)
Bribes - you're gonna have to cite a reference here. (And to head you off at the pass, this is a US court, you can't count bribes outside the US.) "Illegal Threats" - cite? Libel - cite? I've never heard of a libel case against Microsoft, at least not in the last 5-10 years since I've been following them closely. Deliberate Fraud - cite? Privacy violations - 1) was it actually against the law? 2) cite? Abuse of the patent system - Not against the law, unfortunately Corrupt behavior abroad - Not against US law
what laws have Microsoft ever broken?
You tell me, your post is setting a new record for vagueness.
We use "shoddy crud products" like Windows because it's jam-packed with features that corporations love, and corporations represent something like 50% of all computer users. Until Linux or OS X have complete, functional, integrated competitors to: Active Directory, Exchange/Outlook (including portable device syncing), SQL Server, Office (*all* the functionality of Office, not just the subset offered by OpenOffice), Sharepoint (*all* the functionality of Sharepoint, not just the subset offered by wikis)... until that happens, you're not going to get corporate users away from Microsoft.
Sure, you might be able to hobble together a system with much of the same functionality using Redhat, Oracle, Lotus Domino/Notes, OpenOffice etc. But it's not going to work as well, and frankly it'll probably cost much more. (Domino/Notes is twice as much as Outlook per seat, and Oracle isn't exactly cheap compared to MS SQL Server.)
Open Source development definitely works, but the problem is that Open Source isn't set to replicate the entire Microsoft software stack, at least not in the near term. Give me a call when I can install something like RedHat Client on all our computers, and RedHat Server in a few racks and take care of all the business needs listed above for less money than Microsoft can do it, then you'll start taking customers from Microsoft.
Maybe Microsoft software is more buggy than Open Source, but the simple fact of the matter is that they offer exactly what the corporate market wants right now and the alternatives don't.
Slashdot Mirror
The three people who still use IRC are going to be *pissed!*
(Last time I used IRC was in an attempt to get support on a particular open source software package. Worst. Support. Ever. In a room with 50+ connected people, seemingly every single one was AFK for a solid 5 minutes. Of course when someone got back, they just told me I was in the wrong IRC room to ask that question, [you know, the one in the product's documentation!] and I was stupid for not knowing it. The other 49 AFK people never said a word, so I kind of wondered why the hell they even bothered to connect. Of course, maybe they were all secret IRC logging bots, heh.)
In the words of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theme song:
"If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just repeat to yourself: 'it's just a show, I should really just relax.'"
Look closely at Bender's brain when the professor shines the Z-ray on it in the episode with the Slurm factory. Specifically, look at the model number of the CPU: 6502
My 2008 Ford Focus has gone in for repairs three times in the four months that I've owned it, and Ford has been building those motherfuckers for over 100 years now.
Yeah, the Focus model is badly in need of a refresh.
Valve's orange box gave us 'Achievements', which are viewable online.
"Us" being the set of people who have never, ever touched or even read about an Xbox 360? Achievements have been around awhile, buddy.
This is the 2nd space station... compare that to the 2nd airplane.
It's at LEAST the third space station, Mir and Skylab were pretty well-publicized. I'm guessing you don't actually work at NASA.
At long as I have the option to opt-out, I'm all for it. I've seen what mandatory union membership has done to the American automotive industry, and to education... no thanks, not interested!
At-will employment goes both ways. Sure, the employer can fire you without warning or reason, but at the same time you can quit your job without warning or reason as well. If a fast-moving industry like technology, I see that as a good thing.
Also, if you don't like that, just have your employer write up a contract. If you're employed on a contract, you're not at-will.
You're not even competent enough to keep your mailbox in order
My email box *is* in order. It's just 500+ MB of "in order." I happen to be in a field where if a client discovers a new "problem", it's nice to be able to dig back a year and a half and send a reply like, "we discussed this during scoping in 2005, here's a copy of that thread I hope it answers your questions."
and several hours of your time costs more than paying IT technicians' wages whilst they add new storage, backup capacity, testing, etc. etc.
Considering that the IT people working on this will benefit all 250+ users on the same email server, you should divide the value of their time by 250 or so. And yes, that would make my time worth more.
If I'm your IT support, you've failed as an end user.
I have 3.5 GB of email on my home computer, and it runs just fine. If my work computer with IT support doesn't run at least as well as my home computer with just me fumbling around on it, then something is terribly wrong. (And yes, my 3.5 GB of email is backed-up to a remote location.)
That said, at every client I've seen exchange, users always complain about email storage limits. Don't know why.
Because it takes me several hours to clean out my email during which I'm not getting any actual work done, when IT could have just added more space to the SAN in the same amount of time for much less money than my lost productivity cost the company.
Having users waste time cleaning out their email is IT failure, plain and simple-- either IT needs to make some kind of automated 'old mail' purge, or they need to add more storage, but if I, as an end user, have to even THINK about email storage limits, you've failed as my IT support.
That's been a feature in Outlook for ages, I knew about it. Good tip for those who don't, though.
But what I'm talking about is the email client looking into the text of your email and finding bits of text that look like locations or dates, then linking to the appropriate actions for them. If Gmail sees something in your text that looks like an address, it can add a "view this in Google Maps" link that will locate the address on Google Maps. Additionally, if it sees text like "this friday at 4:00 we'll have a BBQ" it'll ask if you want to add an event named "BBQ" on friday at 4:00 to your calendar. Outlook doesn't do this.
Finally, I'd like to add that OS X Leopard has a feature where emails that contain text that seems like it might be something you might want to add to your calendar get parsed and get a little right-click menu to get added to iCal. Which is neat!
Gmail's been doing that for like a solid year now. I don't get the excitement now that Mail.app does it in OS X... it's not a new feature, they ripped it from Google.
But why spend money on GameCube games? You'll never have enough time to to play them all. You're being manipulated into thinking this will make your life complete. you should look beyond material possessions to what's really important. Why not put the money in a 401k for retirement or donate to a homeless shelter?
Why click through to stories about video games only to spend time typing long messages to tell people they're wasting their lives? Does that make your life complete in some way? Hypocrite.
Wow, I've never seen so much smug in a single post outside of a Prius owner's forum. Does it hurt?
Sounds conceptually a lot like the crayon bomb I read in a book years ago (I want to say Chicken Soup of the Soul? But maybe one of Dave Barry's books?) It drops construction paper and boxes of Crayola crayons.
That, for all I know, is the crucial point. All the unusually intelligent people I know (myself included) see the challenge as the interesting part, and the "victory" when you've overcome it much less so, in fact "winning" is the boring part.
Yeah, but that can really make it hard to complete projects. "When will your paint program be done?" "Well I figured out how to do the flood fill in record time, but the menus and stuff-- well I'll get around to it eventually."
How do you propose fixing schools? Any additional money you give them is immediately sucked up by stupid irresponsible projects by administrators (implementing the latest buzz-word, buying equipment without investing in training*, etc.)
Back in the day, the school district my mom worked at bought every classroom 5 brand-new (at the time) Apple PowerMac 5500 computers. They provided exactly 0 training on how to use them. The computers mostly collected dust. Imagine how much better things would have been with, say, 3 computers per classroom and a couple weeks of training for teachers?
When she got a throat ailment, her doctor prescribed a microphone and amplifier so that she could teach her class without straining her throat. The school district made her (and her doctor!) fill out tons of forms and turn them in. A month later, there's still no microphone. The only way she was able to get a microphone for her classroom was by threatening to go to the union's lawyers. (After she send that email, bam, there was a microphone and amplifier the next day in her classroom!)
Of course unions add to the whole mess as well, you have teacher's unions which are dedicated to retaining every teacher on staff-- even the really, really bad ones. Additionally, union rules mostly assign better pay and better positions based only on experience (or more accurately: time worked), not on performance.
I don't know what the solution is, but to say something like "schools aren't good at handling 'gifted' or special needs kids" without offering any solutions just simply isn't helpful. There are a lot of people in education who are dedicated to... education.
There are teachers who work in schools when they could be making three times as much in the private sector, despite all the bullcrap they have to go through. I honestly think that borders on heroism in the current educational climate, I know personally I'd have quit and gone to the public sector in a flash.
The article never really states that intelligence is terribly malleable. This is more of a general impression left with the reader - which is mostly incorrect.
Wait, what?
You're saying that people can't increase their intelligence? At all? What measure of intelligence are you using? What does "mostly incorrect" mean in this context exactly?
I'm personally wary of any web-based solution. I'd much prefer a stand-alone application for performance reasons-- if I select 20 messages and drag them into a folder, I want to see that feedback in real-time. Frankly though, if I had to recommend a non-Microsoft solution to a company, I'd certainly look into that as IBM's stand-alone application sucks beans.
Uh, huh?
For what it's worth, I do have a plan to develop that domain name into a site, I just don't have the free time to do it. In the meantime, it's on Sedo so someone can make me an offer if they want it. If you looked at my Sedo account, you'd see I own less than 10 domains; I'm not a "domain spammer" by any stretch of the imagination.
(But I also don't see anything wrong with being one; with the current domain registration rules, you can make a lot of cash that way. If you want to get rid of "domain spammers" you need to go to the source and change the registration rules.)
Off-topic, sorry.
Perhaps this exampe will cause understanding: Microsoft Windows Vista. If they can produce a product which is universally known for being terrible in multiple ways and still make bank, you should be able to see this is a hint that something is wrong. In other words, bad or even just _mediocre_ products usually have negative financial implications for businesses in a fair and balanced environment.
First of all, Vista isn't nearly as bad as Slashdotters say it is. And normal humans beings, you know the kind you might run into on the street, when asked about Vista won't go into foaming-at-the-mouth rants about it like the average Slashdotter will, so that's pretty much a non-starter right there.
That said, Vista *isn't* doing well, at least not as well as Microsoft expected it to. I'm sure it still has more installs than Linux or OS X, so everything's relative of course.
Exhibit A: Microsoft's game division produces the Xbox 360 which is marginally better than the original Xbox and started out with hardware problems. Without arguing the value of the Xbox 360, competition was able to produce more innovative products and since Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly in the video game industry, the normal (and good) response occurred being that they lost money.
First of all, the Xbox 360 is a lot more than "marginally better than the Xbox." Sure, the PS3 is a lot better than the PS2, but the Xbox was always pretty damned good even when it first came out. Even now, an original Xbox would have no problems holding its own (graphically) against Nintendo's next-gen console. Remember, it did 1080i at a steady 30 FPS on a couple games.
Secondly, every innovation (with the exception of Nintendo's motion sensing controller) this current console generation has produced has come from the original Xbox:
* Real HDTV support
* Integrated broadband networking support
* Integrated mass storage device
* Online games download service
That's not to disrespect Nintendo's work on the Wii, but in a world where the sequel to the most popular console of the last generation consists of nothing but ideas ripped-off of Microsoft and Nintendo, it falls pretty flat to claim that the Xbox has not been innovative. You can argue that the Wii is a "more innovative" than the Xbox 360, but the Playstation 3 definitely ain't.
Thirdly, this sentence:
the normal (and good) response occurred being that they lost money.
Makes no damned sense.
Do you really honestly believe an operating system and a document editor need more than 64MB of RAM to run?
An operation system and a document editor, at least one supporting some small subset of Word/Excel/Powerpoint's functionality can be made to run in less than 64 MB of RAM. If you could make a document editor with all the features of Office (*all* the features, not just the subset that OpenOffice offers) run in 64 MB of RAM, I'd be very impressed.
Of course your statement is also very misleading. Although you could build an OS/Office App combo that can run in 64 MB of RAM, that doesn't help the tons and tons of people who want to play video games, edit their home movies, mix music tracks, use their computer as a Tivo, and all the hundreds of other things people do with their computers in the year 2007 that can't possibly run in 64 MB of RAM.
(That includes multitasking BTW; at the moment my PC is ripping a DVD into MP4 format, playing another MP4 file from iTunes, has 4 websites open, 2 of which heavily use AJAX, has an IM client open, has an email client open, and has a remote desktop connection to my work computer open. Can you fit that in 64 MB of RAM? If so, you're a miracle worker.)
Why do you assume that investing in defense technology does *not* help the people of the US?
As I see it, any enemy we'd have to use this against would be throwing ICBMs with nukes at us. Why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-terrorist ops?
You're right, we should be like France before WWII and just invest all our military spending on a single type of defense because it made sense when we started building it. How stupid of us to diversify!
(When France started building the Maginot Line, it was actually impossible for tanks at that time to cross through the forested regions they decided to leave undefended; by the time war actually broke out, tanks could do it with ease and the entire installation was useless.)
Anti-trust I'll give you, but:
Bribes - you're gonna have to cite a reference here. (And to head you off at the pass, this is a US court, you can't count bribes outside the US.)
"Illegal Threats" - cite?
Libel - cite? I've never heard of a libel case against Microsoft, at least not in the last 5-10 years since I've been following them closely.
Deliberate Fraud - cite?
Privacy violations - 1) was it actually against the law? 2) cite?
Abuse of the patent system - Not against the law, unfortunately
Corrupt behavior abroad - Not against US law
what laws have Microsoft ever broken?
You tell me, your post is setting a new record for vagueness.
We use "shoddy crud products" like Windows because it's jam-packed with features that corporations love, and corporations represent something like 50% of all computer users. Until Linux or OS X have complete, functional, integrated competitors to: Active Directory, Exchange/Outlook (including portable device syncing), SQL Server, Office (*all* the functionality of Office, not just the subset offered by OpenOffice), Sharepoint (*all* the functionality of Sharepoint, not just the subset offered by wikis)... until that happens, you're not going to get corporate users away from Microsoft.
Sure, you might be able to hobble together a system with much of the same functionality using Redhat, Oracle, Lotus Domino/Notes, OpenOffice etc. But it's not going to work as well, and frankly it'll probably cost much more. (Domino/Notes is twice as much as Outlook per seat, and Oracle isn't exactly cheap compared to MS SQL Server.)
Open Source development definitely works, but the problem is that Open Source isn't set to replicate the entire Microsoft software stack, at least not in the near term. Give me a call when I can install something like RedHat Client on all our computers, and RedHat Server in a few racks and take care of all the business needs listed above for less money than Microsoft can do it, then you'll start taking customers from Microsoft.
Maybe Microsoft software is more buggy than Open Source, but the simple fact of the matter is that they offer exactly what the corporate market wants right now and the alternatives don't.