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A little searching brought up this page from the Emergency! Equpment Manifest Dates from the early 70's

...you posted such a long reply to something that is below watching grass grow.

Anyway, I believe that grammar is a thing that would interest geeks. I know that I have been interested in grammar since grammar school :)

Seriously, I loved diagramming sentences. I like it that I know how to use the subjunctive mood in English. I've read the Elements of Style. The online version is pretty watered down, but its still worth a look. For example, they clarify the proper use of bring and take. Yes, it is incorrect to say: What kind of computer to bring to college? How ironic!

Maybe my interest in grammar is why I like programming, and can do it. After all, a programming language is a language, and each one has its own grammar. I beg you or anyone else to try and use the grammar incorrectly when programming.

It just ain't gonna work!

Since I remembered the lawsuit by Monsanto, I entered into Google:

farmer sued genetically corn patented

And these articles came forth:

The farmer's page
Article"
Another
Another
Tale of the Absurd
Monsano wins
Commentary
and on...
and on...
Comment
Good ol' Mother Jones

Y'all see, there is a damned good chance that such corn will contaminate the other crops, and then Monsanto or whomever will own their souls. Or GNP, whatever works.

I'm surprised that the Canadian case isn't common knowledge. Then again, it wasn't exactly Evening News material for the U.S. No network news department head wants to seem "liberal" nowadays, which translates to "damned few stories critical of corporations" (balance), which of course is not connected to trying to please conservative corporate owners who have become quite.... proactive in their news departments of late.

The submitter of the item is correct in identifying IP lawsuit threats as an important datum in the decision to decline the food, even if the article cited doesn't make a point of it. An informed person would already know about the enormous lawsuit potential, and add that to the stack.

(Maybe you should come up with some other abbreviation for "Playstation 2"...abbreviation overloading is a Bad Thing. :-) )

I'm sorry about the pun. Any sarcasm from your side is well waranted.

Seriously, though, I think you are somewhat on the money about KDE, but not in the way that you intended. KDE has more usability problems than GNOME (although both environments have quite a few of these). Among KDE's worst usability problems are the multitude of tiny, undescriptive icons whose tinyness makes them far slower to access with a mouse (via Fitts' Law) and whose action is hard to decipher because the icons are so non-descriptive and tiny. And mind you that because KDE does not have button-labelling turned on by default, the lack of a label makes button even smaller and slower to access, and the lack of a label means that the user has to basically guess what the icon does, or find out the hard way by doing something that might possibly destroy their work. Or they can wait a painful 3-5 seconds for the tooltip label to come up. The end result is that most of the buttons are going to go unused, just like what happens in programs authored by Microsoft, who KDE bases most of their designs off of. The problem with doing a carbon copy of microsoft is that many of Microsoft's designs are flawed in one way or another, and many of those flaws have found their way into KDE. Good artists create, great artists steal, bad artists steal crap.

Re aesthetics: be sure to remember that just because something is aesthetically pleasing does not mean that has greater usability, and a lot of linux geeks who've tried for the desktop (and who don't have a lot to show for it) equate usability solely with aesthetics, I once talked to a distribution installer author about the usability problems in his installer. He couldn't understand what the problem was; he assumed I thought that "it wasn't pretty enough".

You should also not place any serious bets on the Zaurus as far success with the non-geek community(unless TrollTech will get their act together with Qtopia, which I highly doubt). From what I've seen of the UI design and some of the initial reports from reviewers, Sharp has fallen into the same trap as many other linux PDA developers/manufacturers where they design the hardware/system software first, and only after they've got that all done do they design the interface and come up the user interaction model.You can't do that with a PDA. People will put up with inefficient and bad interfaces on desktops because they budget several hours a day to kludging through their task. They grow surprisingly less tolerant of ill-designed interfaces when the screen is shrunk down to 240X320 and they have only 20 seconds to get down an important phone number. You might have good marketing; you might get some people to buy the PDA, but if the interface doesn't work, those people will subconsciously try to find every excuse they can to use the PDA as little as possible.If that happens, you can forget about selling those people hardware add-ons and software after the first several months. The chance that they'll upgrade to the next latest and greatest thing, or that they'll convince a friend to buy one of the PDA's, drops down to 0% as well.

With PDA graphic toolkits based on desktop toolkits (i.e. qt & Qtopia), there's also that fatal trap of thinking "with this mobile version of this widget toolkit, I can easily port over all the desktops to the PDA and everything will be good". Again, apps with UI's that work with full sized mouse and keyboard and a 17" monitor will often not translate very well into a PDA with a small screen and a stylus. Microsoft made this mistake with WinCE, and I saw Agenda make the same mistake with FLTK. Agenda is dead, and PalmPC's only survive because PalmOS isn't yet running on equivalent hardware.

If you take nothing else from my PDA advice, understand that the most successful PDA in history, the Palm, was fashioned after a block of wood that Palm creator Jeff Hawkins carried around with him to use in pondering what a good PDA should act like. Before the dies had been tooled or the system software was finished, he designed the interaction. There has been no block of wood involved in the creation of the Zaurus.

You're welcome to either take my advice or drag it to trash and empty. But I've seen too many linux companies get splattered across the industry because they said "to hell with good design". Yes, it really is that important.

thats really interesting. i never thought of it that way. i still have trouble justifying wrong actions that way. have you ever heard two wrongs dont make a right?

In fact, when the blank media levy went on in Canada, it simultaneously and explicitly became legal to have music that you never paid for. The details are crazy; I think it goes like this: I can lend you a CD, you can copy it, you give back the original, all is kosher; I cannot, however, make a copy of my CD and give it to you. See Canadian copyright levy on blank audio recording media.

-Gareth

Visit me at my site.

Anyone who does not see the parallel between the GPL and communism is ignorant.

I've seen programs whose release notice said that they can be used freely, except by certain named individuals. Others, that they can be hosted freely, except by certain servers. The GPL, similarly, says that certain programs can be used freely, but only by those willing to GPL their work in turn. You can put any arbitrary terms into your license, so why is that communism? I think that Marx would see the GPL as utopian socialism (like Richard Owens' ideal communities), peacefully coexisting with the capitalist system, and would be against it.

For that reason, calling GPL a "Communist" idea makes less sense than calling it either "Anarchist" or "Christian," since the latter two promote extreme sharing within a community of common beliefs. People just forget how radical Christianity is in this respect, but reading "Acts" will cure that.

-Gareth

visit my site

To stay on topic, I am disgusted that personal expression is now considered journalism, and can be regulated as such. Now to get slightly off-topic.

I've been fascinated by the trend to stupider and stupider sports in the Olympics. Rhythmic gymnastics? Target shooting? Which of "Faster, Stronger, Higher" applies to any of those?

I wrote a short satire on the trend. Unfortunately, not long after I posted it, I saw a documentary on CBC about the struggle to get ballroom dancing accepted as an Olympic sport. They've passed the first hurdle ... it's now a recognized sport, as long as they don't call it Ballroom, just "Dance Sport."

As Tom Lehrer said, satire is dead. :-(

Why?

Here's my answer. Some of the other articles on my page are also germane.

-Gareth

A better method would be to contact each author/corporation before posting it. While being inconvenient, it's really the best way to ensure you aren't violating anybody's rights.

Well, at least that would make it legal. But how effective would it be?

You'd be amazed. I'm part of an effort to find copyright holders of Apple II software and to persuade them to reclassify their programs as freeware. In the last couple of months I've managed to free The Ancient Art of War, Ancient Art of War at Sea, Balance of Power, a set of statistical programs, and I've sent copies of ThinkTank and Advanced VisiCalc to their respective authors to post on their sites. Just about all Beagle Bros and Penguin/Polarware programs are now freeware. Yes, the big corporations are a problem ... especially Apple, I'm sorry to say. But what can be done is pretty amazing.

-Gareth Jones

Visit me and poke around!