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Any sufficiently advanced political correctness is indistinguishable
from irony.
If you build it, they will hack...
"All snakes that want to stay in Ireland please raise their right hands."
- St. Patrick
>On the theory that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for one day,
>but if you teach a man to fish, he'll laze away entire days in the
>sun, drinking beer while his line trails neglected in the water:
Winston Churchill's six words on how to succeed - "Never, never, never,
never, give up."
Smith & Wesson: The original point and click interface.
(from a thread on failing hard disks)
... if your drive sounds like a click-beetle on ampetamines ...
Sometimes a .sig is just a .sig.
>Frankly, I've been disturbed by this thread, because not only are many
>of the nominees European, they are also eukaryotic. With such a
>narrow and biased view, we are ignoring the rich cultural diversity of
>the prokaryotes.
Seen in source code:
if (symlink(ti->LinkName,fnamenewvb.buf))
ohshite(_("error creating symbolic link `%.255s'"),ti->Name);
I use good techniques, you rely on heuristics, he uses dubious hacks.
>This is a little like saying "Still it is interesting that although the Alpha
>is over twice as fast in floating point, the case is a darker shade of beige"
Any questions? Write them on a twenty, and send them to me.
-- C.J.
America: the land of the Freeh.
English - as spoken throughout the civilized world - AND in the United
States of America...
I admit that X is the second worst windowing system in the world, but
all the others I've used are tied for first.
. o o o o . . . . O
^
You are here
>Never mind - the trick of asking for help in a public forum has once
.again assisted me to resolve the problem a matter of seconds after
>hitting the send button.
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A few concerning M$:
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"we build confusing systems with nonfunctioning or poor quality drivers"
- Jim Allchin, senior vice president of Microsoft, WinHEC 98
Microsoft acknowledges Windows NT is not as robust as some other
operating systems but plans to change this during the next few years,
said a company official at the WebIT 97 conference here this week.
>The MS people working on WinCE don't even understand real-world
>real-time systems. They can't, they've been living in MS's reality
>deprivation chamber their entire professional life.
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Here's a bit by James Gleick, from http://www.around.com/microspeak.html
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These are not lies, exactly. They
are the form of debased language that George Orwell
called "euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy
vagueness." <br>
"A mass of Latin words falls
upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and
covering up all the details," he wrote. "The
great enemy of clear language is insincerity."
Lately we call this "spin." [...]
The company denies, by the way,
that its technical-support people have formal
instructions never to say "bug." However, the
phrase "known issue" is preferred, a spokesman
said, "due to the complex nature of the word
'bug.' " This is what happens when you get too
comfortable with Microspeak -- <i>known issue</i> seems
simple, while <i>bug</i> seems complex. It is what Orwell
saw as language of orthodoxy, of concealment, of the
party line. <br>
"A speaker who uses that
kind of phraseology," he wrote, "has gone some
distance into turning himself into a machine."<P>
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I suppose most of you know about www.slashdot.org. For those who
don't, it's a popular place for wannabes who've jumped on the Linux
bandwagon to hang out. They're eL33T and everybody should phear them.
The "news items" are usually tendentious, frequently wrong. But it's
fun to lurk anyway. From a thread on the 2.2.0pre1 kernel:
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GNU/Linux-Mozilla
Linux 2.3 MUST begin the integration of Mozilla and/or NGLayout into
the Linux kernel core or we will be severely behind the times in terms
of OS technology. Microsoft is leading the charge by fully integrating
their MSIE into the Win98 kernel and we must not fall behind! I guess
we will need XFree86 integrated into the kernel as well but that is a
small price to pay for innovation! We must not sit idle while
Microsoft paves the way with these advanced technologies. Integrate!
Integrate! Integrate!
==
innovate! integrate! rah rah rah!
>I guess we will need XFree86 integrated into the kernel . . . but that
>is a small price to pay for innovation!
this sort of benign complacency is just what we can't allow ourselves
to fall into (or should i say, "just what into which we can't allow
ourselves to fall"? i should? yes? thank you).
look, frineds, it's whole hawg or none: we need to integrate the shell
also -- but first we have to "innovate" it's ass by picking the worst
shell available, breaking it, and then forbidding all others.
next, we integrate a few random interpreted languages, preferably
lousy ones. if we can't find any that are lousy enough, we can grab
the worst of what we've got and innovate on 'em until they're
sufficiently broken.
next, we inno^H^Htegrate fonts. fonts should be part of the
kernel. anybody who says otherwise is a luddite and a communist. that
goes for text editors and word processors as well. also
spreadsheets. any fool can see that a kernel without a spreadsheet is
like, well . . . it's like a kernel without fonts! games, too. the
kernel has to have games. there's no other way to compel an OS upgrade
when we fix a bug in our flight simulator.
if we fail in this mission, the *entire global economy* will be
*gripped by a disaster more vast and more terrible than the human mind
can comprehend!* it's true, i read it on zdnet.
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Well, I 'spose you get the idea.
Bye,
Røß.