chiffonade

> Is it being intellectually lazy or socially malleable to enjoy the occasional piece of well-written, high-budget content?

No, it's not. But the television infrastructure as we know it is designed not for people who enjoy it "occasionally", but for hours upon hours every day.

Oh, please, spare me your elitism. It was an especially good one.

What most computer people don't get about TV is that there are millions upon millions of intellectual lazy and/or socially malleable people who would rather follow the tube. It's a demographic, and it's not going away.

In Soviet Russia, loop flies plane.

> Is time an illusion?

Yeah, probably, just like all human sensory input.

> I can tell you that that was certainly not my experience- I could speak basic German at 6 months

So in other words, you learned German within 6 months.

I have no idea why you're being downmodded, that description is hilariously cynical.

Officiated by the ISO-9001 Referee.

English is a Germanic language. It's actually Germanic, Greek, and Latin, but...

I didn't know this was a joke until I read the comments.

Call me jaded.

Eh, I wouldn't romanticize it too much. Silicon Valley is just a bunch of strip malls, suburban homes and office parks.

Why not use colorful language?

It's not like the Flickr, Twitter, Rumblr, Tumblr, Dumbler, Fumblr thing we have going on in the web 2.0 world is any better.

> My big question: will the rest of the world continue to use USA's economy and currency as the global economic focal point and medium? -or will it abandon them for alternatives?

Here's the crux of the matter: there are no alternatives. The US is a meta-country that drives the rest of the world. It's a proxy for the world.

> something-something" will follow whatever we end up calling this mess.

The boom that follow this shitcan of an economy will favor the operationally frugal and those who know how to turn a dollar out of fifteen cents. No doubt some clever writer at WIRED magazine will coin some catchy term for this generation of people in the year 2011. It will coincide conveniently with the rise of Green revolution, no doubt.

God damn, go out and have a drink son. You have the rest of your life to learn how to traverse a fucking graph.

You sound exactly like someone who has been in college for 2 or 3 years and thinks he now knows all the answers to every problem.

Wait until you try to get a job. Then the real fun begins.

> How easy it is to live there without knowing Spanish

Impossible, because if you move somewhere foreign, you're going to learn the language unconsciously within 6 months. People who have only lived in the US don't know this. It almost takes no effort. The human brain is good at this sort of thing.

Trust me, there's no shortage of entrepreneurialism in China.

Insert something about sufficient sample size and selection bias here. Is there something hard wired in Americans' (specifically white Americans') brains that assume that anything they read about a few Chinese people automatically apply to the entire country?

> I'm a little scared of China

How can you say this when the Bush administration has just spent the past 8 years systematically dismantling your privacy rights and running a global kidnapping and torture network?

Meanwhile, the US imprisons more of its population than any other nation on earth, especially for non-violent crimes. It doesn't scare you that you can be thrown in jail for years because you like to smoke a little weed?

I think what you meant to say is "I'm afraid of Chinese people/China and I haven't really put much thought into this." Why don't you go there before you start getting afraid of it. Do you even own a passport?

If you choose not to go to college do everyone a favor and don't have a chip on your shoulder about it and bring it up at every opportunity and talk shit about people who do.

Nobody really cares that much.

> virtual Silicon Valley on the internet?

Yeah, that's called the Internet.

Educated Chinese Americans send their kids to private and very good (i.e. high property tax areas) public schools.

Something nobody ever mentions is that there is a huge rich/poor divide in public education quality, it's not universally terrible. The best public schools are just as good as private schools, and this is represented at elite universities.

> We need somewhat higher resolution, color, and a nice interface for flitting around from place to place.

Laptop works fine for this. A reader is for reading linearly.

Their technicians once left 2 active network interfaces down for 45 minutes on one of our servers when upgrading something and didn't fix it until we called them.

They're just overworked like most NOC guys.

> There is something about a physical book that just can't be replaced in my head just yet.

The $100 you're shelling out every year for the new edition?

Rackspace is on the very high end of the cost spectrum, and the service really isn't that great. But at least their servers are fast and real, if you/your organization doesn't care about the budget, they're probably as good a choice as any as far as quality of infrastructure goes.

Just make sure the person signing the hosting contract actually reads it, also. You might be surprised to find what they try to bury in there.

It's worth noting that they bought out their lower-priced competition at ServerBeach.

They better think of an interim solution, because databases with schemas are not going away for quite a while, even if they are eventually going to be replaced by giant single key hash tables like everyone is clamoring about these days.

> So glad I'm on cluster 4.

So glad I lease real servers.

We just transitioned a customer off of MT onto some cheap dedicated servers with Amazon S3 storage and not only did their hosting costs go down, the performance went up dramatically.

In the business parlance of today, my stakeholder expectations were not aligned with their soup to nuts value proposition.

He'd make a killing in LA selling NY water.