Sip

quote:Originally posted by Stormy:Wishing you all the best in your upcoming interviews, Sip! Thanks! I have changed my talk around like 14 times already and it's still missing some parts ... I think I now know how if must feel like to be a female shopping for something like furniture. But I did go down from 67 slides to around 30 (so I am still pretty sure of my maleness). Oooops ... did I say all that out loud? Random thought for today (inspired by our VH1 music channel on TV here): I wonder how many people realize that this extremely popular YMCA song by the Village People in the 70s/80s is actually about GAY SEX.

Nice!!! You do realize you are in a very select few 2% in the world that could possibly solve this? I have heard several times that this was proposed by Einstein and that he claimed that 98% of the people would not be able to solve it How true that is, I don't know.

quote:Originally posted by Accelerated: quote:the most serious current problem in the world is IRAQ and not the US?What about Palestine, North Korea, Ivory Coast, Congo, Columbia etc.I was going to mention them but unfortunately, I couldn't locate them on a map. Plus, CNN hasn't talked about them too much.

so how do we get this amazing insight from the problem statement? (Nairi, if you would be kind enough to explain ) [ March 02, 2003, 04:58 PM: Message edited by: Sip ]

quote:Originally posted by KoRn:... I don't know if you guys would agree but in my opinion Hayastantsis are much open minded than other ARmenians in diaspora. Sorry ... I don't agree with that one. The "Hyastantsis" that I see, as a group (the ones that have recently come to the US), seem to me as a lot more closed-mined and racist than the typical "diasporan" Armenian ... whether it's with respect to turks, jews, blacks, hispanics, hindus, muslims in general, or even angolians and even OTHER Armenians!!!). Hyastantsis just don't seem to like anyone else but themselves. Am I generalizing? Damn straight! [ March 02, 2003, 04:14 PM: Message edited by: Sip ]

quote:Originally posted by Stormy:Paraphrasing Einstein's quote: ... The reason why Germany gets any respect in today's world is because it has officially scraped its Nazi past. Same with Japan. You don't expect people to glorify them for their achievements and/or culture when they have a long record of committing atrocities, whatever the ratio of good to bad, because they constitute quite something in the world one way or another. Please. Well, although I am a COMPLETE CONFUSED MESS at the moment about the point of this thread, I can't help but to ask: How many of the current "regimes" in the world have used chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons in the past? You are probably going to come back and tell me that the US used nuclear weapons on Japan and is therefore a completely horrible entity. But you have to admit that whether this US is the same US of the World War II era can be subject of a HUGE debate (it is not that clear cut). However, I highly doubt you can make the same claim about Iraq. This in fact is THE SAME Iraq that burnt thousands and thousands with biological and chemical weapons. This is the same Iraq that WILL do it again given the chance. I just cannot comprehend how all these "anti-US" sentiments in the world (which may well be warranted for verious reasons) are coming in the way of doing what is right. Why use IRAQ as an excuse to lash back at the US when it is completely obvious that the most serious current problem in the world is IRAQ and not the US? I was at least comforted a bit to see that a whole bunch of Arab countries are in fact demanding that Sadam step down. At least they have some shred of logic left in them!!! [ March 02, 2003, 02:30 PM: Message edited by: Sip ]

quote:Originally posted by Stormy:... Your country has to find a means to bring food on the table without stealing from someone else. I am sorry but I am TOTALLY sick of the US bashing. I was raised with "death to America" and "America is the biggest Satan" blah blah blah Screams in my ear EVERYDAY. Every fricking time Sadam dropped a bomb on us, I heard that US was responsible for it. Well, I don't buy it anymore. I grew up. I opepend my eyes ... and I see that US is not the huge EVIL everyone around me made it sound to be. FOR ONCE I want to hear: [*]thanks US, for giving us the polio vaccine so our kids don't have to suffer [*]thanks US, for giving us the semiconductor chip on which the world is running right now [*]thanks US, for giving us the most amazing new agricultural techniques so we can feed this ever expanding population (guess where it's expanding the most?) [*]thanks US, for velcro [*]thanks US, for connecting the world with satellites [*]thanks US, for helping us get into the nuclear age [*]thanks US, ... How come I never hear any of that? How come I only hear bitching and crying from the world? How come they don't teach any of this to their amazingly "smart" students that can locate Iraq on the map but don't know that the US is responsible for the creation and development of the majority of things they now take for granted?

All I can say is, If you don't like it, go back to whereever the hell you came from. Disclaimer: As a US Citizen, I have earned the right to say this to anyone about anything. Even to you stormy. Even without reading any of the above!!! [ March 01, 2003, 02:41 PM: Message edited by: Sip ]

Do I even need to say anything?

quote:Originally posted by hyebruin:oh my God! I've actually done that !!! Forgot to say that I think one of them is Miss Greece, and the other MIss Cyprus.

quote:Originally posted by Stormy: I for one couldn't live without my PC, my books, etc., because I like to educate myself, and an educated brain IS a happy one. Of course I totally 100% agree with the PC part, but totally 100% disagree with the last part. As education, knowledge, and intelligence level goes up, level of happiness goes down. I am very convinced of that. The supposedly "happy" people I see are those that have somehow convinced themselves that they are happy. Convincing a smart person of something is not that easy ... especially if it's something that doesn't really exist and is just an illusion.

So Harut, what you said reminded me of this famous quote: "If you can't beat them, join them ... then beat them."

http://zr2.cs.ucla.edu/hf/tech_women.jpg Caption: "Women and Technology"

LMAO Storm I was trying to picture it in my mind but I just can't figure how it would look like!!! My contribution for today: There is something disturbing when you realize that you are stressing a lot more about what you are going to buy and wear to a job interview rather than the hours and hours you will spend being drilled with tons of supposedly "difficult" technical questions and trying to prove your qualifications to a bunch of experts.

dl, I used to be somewhat against this "sheltering" attitudes ... until I saw what happens when kids end up being loose and expected to discover and learn on their own. My attitude right now is that kids need strict boundaries but should be allowed to be free within those boundaries. As they grow, the parents should expand the boundaries. For each kid, and each environment, this will be different of course. If the child crosses those boundaries, there should be a punishment. Something well defined, strictly enforced, but not too harsh. Repeated offenses should result in harshening punishments. On a related note, I believe it is wrong when parents try to be "friends" with their kids. I have seen it around me and I don't think it works well at all. Parents should be parents ... no more, no less. This means that they should take a authoritative stance, but at the same time be caring, nurturing, attentive, and supportive. Main point I am trying to make is clearly neither extreme is healthy. Exactly where the balance is, is very hard to define in my opinion and highly depends on the situation, environment, and personalities of the child and the parent.

quote:Originally posted by nairi: quote:Originally posted by Stormy:Health and happiness, neither of which money can buy. You obviously don't know where to shop. I am guessing you live somewhere in Amsterdam then I have a buddy that used to go "shopping" there everytime he went back home (Serbia) to visit the family. But he's married now. Money can certainly make a LOT of things happen. It can get you true love, it can even go a LOOOONG way to improve you health. But I think money is only good up to a certain level ... above that critical level required for survival, it has diminishing returns just like anything else.

That's it. I have figured out the PERFECT Armenian: ... the graduate computer science student!!! No frat parties (actually no parties of any kind) and you really don't have to worry about the sex before marriage thing Best of all? On top of all that, you get to enjoy ever second of your college life

quote:Originally posted by wh00t:Why did the eBay police remove the item? The auction has long been over. I think something like after a month eBay deletes the auction page.

Domino, I think Marklar is from South Park (not sure if you know what it is). Sounds like a typical word that a true geek would use!!! There was this eposide where they went to some alien planet (planet Marklar I believe) and the aliens there used Marklar to refer to EVERYTHING. It's one of the funniest South Park esposides ever.

quote:Originally posted by nairi:... Formal education, regardless of its nationality, is there to systematically brainwash us. I hope you know that. Hmmm ... next thing you're going to tell me that "Grade Point Average" is not a sign of intelligence and that standardized tests are biased?

You are the outcast since you are telling people that they should take a more serious look at their lives, ponder about what is really important, and put some effort in something. Yup ... that will make you the bad guy really fast. I think the source of your frustration here is that the fraternity is labeled as an "Armenian" organization. In your view, an Armenian organization must in some ways be involved in some of the stuff you said above about cultrual this and that and ancestoral stuff. That may not necessarily be the case all the time as I see it. I think it is irrelevant who goes to those parties and not. I also think it's irrelevant how people choose to waste their times. What is very relevant is why there is so little interest (as you claim) in the more "important" cultural activities. Basically, what I am saying is you should not take your frustration on the important issues and project it to something which in my mind is rather irrelevant (e.g. the "Armenian" frat and their parties).

Let me tell you what I believe has been the major "success" factor for mac... they claim all these reliability things and how they are so superior to PCs ... Well of course they are because they have such tight control over their hardware. You and I both know their "OS" and software is nothing too amazing. The reason they can be so predictable in reliability is because their hardware platform is so well defined and constrained. Now you port MAC OS onto a PC with all the hosh-posh of different addon third-party peripherals, bus and memory architectures, video subsystems, multimedia stuff, it is totally obvious to me that MAC OS will just be yet another OS and nothing too amazing. So I personally don't see any value in porting MAC OS to x86. What do you think may be advantages of having Mac OS X?

By the way, in my mind the battle has been won convincingly by intel with CISC! RISC is a conceptually simpler design and therefor could be optimized a lot. They were traditionally much more high performance than their counterpart CISC chips. But intel put all other chips to shame basically in the last decade or so. No one talks of an Alpha, PowerPC, or Sparc processor anymore. The trend setter and the chip which is pushing the envelope in general purpose computing is intel and x86 for now. New ones are on the way but somehow keep getting delayed ... like this Merced or the IA64 ... and AMD has a few new designs in the pipeline. But clearly, x86 is the dominant winner in the personal computing domain for now ... doesn't mean it's superior though ... as you know, a lot of other factors play into it. Why did Sony's betamax die? It was clearly a better technology than VHS!

MAC has always had this RISC processing philosophy. I don't know how much you know about RISC and CISC so I won't go too much into it. RISC basically stands for "reduced instruction set computing" (I think) while CISC stands for "complex instruction set computing". The entire architecture for each system is very different. There have been HUGE debates on this topic in computer science (system architecture and compiler) circles ... much deeper than simple "mac" vs. "PC" debates Sun Sparc chips for example I believe follow risc philosophies so it's not "MAC" alone. Anyway, the point is, with RISC, the basic architecture underlying the system is very different than with CISC (i.e. intel x86). So, even though on the front end they use "free BSD" or a unix flavor, I am sure the back end and the kernel is entirely optimized for their MAC processors ... ala PowerPC, etc. By the way, that is why simply analyzing a system based on "Mhz" numbers is very inaccurate. Mhz doesn't mean much since a superscalar RISC processor can execute multiple instructions per cycle. On the same note, a single CISC instruction may do what RISC would require 100 instructions to do!!!!

That thing is just WRONG!