From: Roberto ... <...>
Subject: Platform tips
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 12:22:03 +0800
To: jwz@jwz.orgHello jwz! How u doin? I d like to ask u, if u have got some spare time of course, if u could hit me with some knowledge regarding the building of a social platform. As if it was a flowchart. Wat are the technical parts (soft and hardware) and social aspects (find the right< partners/right number of builders) of the whole process from day 1 to the customer delivery?
Hope not to bother u and just wana let u know that U d give me the biggest help ever :))
ciao, Roberto
From: Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Subject: Re: Platform tips
Date: Tue, 12 Apr 2011 01:30:53 -0700
To: Roberto ... <...>Phase one: Collect underpants.
Phase three: Profit.I'll take 30%.
From: Kedar ... <...>
Subject: about the pearl app/script
Date: Sun, 1 May 2011 14:38:03 +0530
To: jwz@jwz.orgHI...JAMIE ZAWINSKI...
i have found ur website and found it very intresting.....
i wanted to ask ur created app called
"stockWorth.p....on site.."http://www.dzm.com/soft/"..as we know tht....
stockWorth.pl is a perl script originally written by U.
www.jwz.orgmy question's:-
1.Does this app/script works only..on perl based website...
2.how to use this script with firefox 3.6..
3.details to use this script....with launch of firefox.
4.How to use this script..with stock marketing...
5.can i use this script for "PLAYING WITH STOCK MARKET" to earn money...
6.AS I LIVE IN INDIAN....can this script use with "INDIAN STOCK MARKET"....can u give me these script...with advance features...
thank u...... reply soon
When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity — y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
music
movies
microcode (software)
high-speed pizza delivery
This has not escaped my notice.
Your next move then must be to get in to the USA's other notable product: religious scams.
I look forward to donating to your ministries.
There are some pretty great movies made outside the US of A. Unless all you like is guys in capes, in which case, I dunno, go Hollywood.
Ditto for music; but I'm not going to judge you if you can't get enough Gaga.
Microcode: yeah, maybe. For now. For this month.
I'll give you pizza delivery.
are you quoting snow crash?
How does this stuff not end up in your spam folder?
Because, being mail from actual humans, it's not spam?
I don't run "moronassassin".
The english is so bad I'm just surprised it doesn't trigger something.
In fairness, that last guy does LIVE IN INDIAN.
Surely every Indian lives in an Indian?
Roberto doesn't sound indian.
At least you don't have to actually interact with these people. I'm a college professor teaching engineering classes, and I get email like this all the time from my students. They send these off the wall requests and just plain dumb questions. Then they come to class the next day acting like level headed, intelligent people. Maybe there's a lot of drugs and alcohol involved.
If you were to meet one of these senders in real life, you probably could never guess that they were the one to send such drivel. Get them in front of a keyboard, and they revert to having the intellect of a four year old.
At least they can write code, right?
Oh, I crack myself up.
Sadly, no, they can't code. I'm teaching mechanical engineering classes, but I include programming projects.
I get students that email me at 3 in the morning, where they copy-paste a good 120 lines of junk, with no whitespace, and variable and function names like a,b, function1, etc. Then they just ask "what's wrong with it?"
I guess you must have had the bad luck to be handed the students that didn't know anything about a subject before they started taking a course in it.
Granted, if a prerequisite is "these four programming courses", then yes, they probably should know that. But teaching and learning programming is hard, especially when it's not the main subject of a course.
You have to teach problem solving all over again because it is literally a foreign language and a new way of thinking. You have to teach that it's not really okay to copy and paste mindlessly while in many places taking that approach during the course just to have something to work off of. You have to make people think in programming terms, which involves just the right examples for every person. Not everyone's going to get this immediately or even after several months.
I'm in full agreement Jesper, and I try not to be that professor. (You know, that one.) I present the assignments assuming no programming experience, and acknowledge how difficult it can be. What gets me is that the crazy factor of the emails gets enhanced by the confusion and frustration of being introduced to programming.
I know I'm in for it when an email starts with "most exalted professor" and ends with "please be hoping for your prompt response", with a peppering of "ur", "U", and misspellings I've never seen before. I have to try not to respond with "How exactly did you pull a 98 on that last exam when your peers pulled a 75?", or "How did you manage to write the essay that got you admitted here?".
That makes it clearer. Yeah, that'd probably bake my noodle too.
"Okay, Kedar, I'm going to let you in on the big secret technology behind stockWorth.pl. It's two things, actually. One is subtraction. The other is multiplication. Okay, three things. I'm gonna whisper the third thing, 'kay? - the third thing is you subtract first, then multiply. - I'll take 30%."
Reminds me of a response I wrote to a lazy ass recruiter back in the day.
Yay! I'm in your spam!
Oddly I have never, ever received such an email about stockWorth.pl.
I keep telling myself that I should write an iPhone version of "worth" to separate these people from their money -- my preferred form of payment would be "give me one share of whatever stock you're waiting for" -- but then I remember what a pain in the ass it is to write UI stuff on the iPhone, and I go back to not bothering.
Or use phonegap and write it in javascript+html.
...because HTML+CSS+Javascript is so much better for doing UI.
It absolutely is. Especially if your UI is a simple screen showing your net-worth with a flip screen for settings.
A while back I spent a few minutes looking at Phonegap and it looked like almost as much of a pain in the butt to set up as the (joke that is the) Android Java development environment, so I ignored it.
It would be nice if I was wrong.
But what will you do with 30% of the underpants?