Larry Osterman's WebLog

Although there is certainly a level of truth to that, as a reader of The Daily WTF (http://www.thedailywtf.com/) I think we also shouldn't overrate cluelessness. I think there is such a thing as being too clueless. :)

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Seymour Cray once said he preferred hiring new college graduates, simply because they don't yet know what is impossible.

(I cannot find the exact quote; my Google skills are failing me.)

Ah, yes, here's to the undereducated masses! Here's to the antithesis of education! I, for one, welcome our new dark age overlords and their total disregard for the "knowledge" of "specialists"!

- Drew

Drew, I don't think it's actually saying it's better to be uneducated. More like, if you "know" something is impossible, then you're not even going to *try*. Someone who doesn't "know" it's impossible will at least give it a go and maybe find some other solution along the way (or heck, maybe they discover it's not impossible at all)

How many shims are in Windows due to the clueless?

Really REALLY OT: I'm sorry to be asking it here Larry, but before I decided to reformat I decided to ask (and you don't get slapped for asking ;-)):

I'm running WinXP Pro SP2 (up-to-date).

I'm having a strange problem where MSN Messenger does not play back Voice Clips, and I don't get sound from Macromedia Flash neither from IE7 nor from Firefox, yet I can watch movies and listen to music with WMP10 (and other audio/video players).

I don't do any Windows audio programming though, but a bit of API hooking showed that MSN is loading WINMM.DLL and trying to use waveOutOpen(). Maybe that's what Flash is trying to use aswell...

Also, for some _very_ strange reason the volume icon refuses to show up in the task notification area!

Any idea what to do beside wipin' the good old disk?

I'm afraid that a distinction needs to be made here between the clueless and the naive. The examples they gave (the guy who ran a 4-minute mile and the girls who got a theater opened up) were of people who definitely had a clue, but simply lacked the knowledge that it couldn't be done.

Contrast this with today's entry from the daily WTF (http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/61531/ShowPost.aspx) where some guy is hired as a network engineer and is assigned to add another 24-port hub to a network. This is something I'm naive about because I've never done it before, but I have a clue how to do it (and I'm sure it's pretty trivial). Meanwhile this "network engineer" is clueless because after snooping around his own company's network to figure out how to do it, he required a fax from his company's competitor with detailed instructions.

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