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I catch myself thinking about how well kids have it today

It's like that with every generation. My dad rode a mule to school, I had a school bus. Today's kids (some of them anyway) have air conditioning in the classrooms.

But in a lot of ways the kids have it harder. For instance, there was no such thing as crack when I was a kid, and meth was only manufactured in drug company factories. If I needed a ride I could find a pay phione, today if you lose your cell you can't make a call.

My kids take for granted what I found to be amazing and new

I took running water for granted; well, mostly, because when I was small my grandparents still didn't have running water.

However, I'm not looking forward to being as old as my parents are now. My dad says "I lived 78 years without a computer and cell phone and I don't need it now", while my maternal grandfather said the same thing about indoor plumbing. Even afetr my uncle put a bathroom in his house, he still used the outhouse! I visited my Mom Saturday, and she was saying the same thing about cell phones. She has one, but she never uses it (it's maddening, these days you expect to actually be able to communicate with people).

When I was a kid, only rich, giant corporations had computers and about the the only interaction a normal person had with one was that your electric bill came on a Hollerith card.

BTW and OT, but who gave mod points to a troll? The parent comment should have been left neutral, or at worst, modded "overrated". The book would indeed make a good gift.

They've had "eye in the sky" helicopters for years. I've said before that we're already a police state and the bill of rights is meaningless. We didn't even notice that it happened, it happened so slowly.

Any time you have Secret Police (which we euphamistically call "plainclothesmen" and "undercover agents") you have a police state.

In 1972 I was in the USAF at Beale and drove the flightline (I recounted it in Growing Up with Computers back in 2005).

By 1972 I was in the US Air Force as a driver, working on the flight line in the Aerospace Ground Equipment (AGE) unit. One cold, snowy night a half hour from the swing shift's quitting time, a call came in for two air conditioners way over on the other side of the base. My tractor had a top speed of about ten miles per hour - I was looking forward to a beer, and here I had to drag these damned air conditioners out. I was going to be working late. Hell!

A half an hour or so later I arrived at the facility, swearing, with air conditioners in tow. To my amazement there were two guys standing outside in the snow waiting for me.

"What the fuck do you need a God damned air conditioner in the snow for? I demanded.

"Oh, man," one replied excitedly, "this is so cool. You have to see it!" These guys were bouncing around like kids at a birthday party. One showed me around as the other hooked up the hoses from the air conditioners and turned them on.

Inside was what looked like a library. Every room was filled with rows and rows of what appeared to be bookshelves. However, instead of books, these shelves held printed circuit boards. There must have been thousands of them. I was duly impressed, and had nerdily forgotten about the beer I had wanted so badly.

"Cool. But what is it for?" I asked.

"Ahh," he said, "come in here," and led me to yet another room. This room was huge, and had little in it that I recognized. It was straight out of a science fiction movie, only less corny looking.

"Ok," I replied stupidly, "what is it?"

"It's a C5 simulator! Come on inside!"

And inside the contraption was the cockpit of a C-5A cargo plane, at the time the largest aircraft in the world. We had several C5s there at Dover, which was, of course, why they needed a C5 simulator. And two SUV sized air conditioners to cool the contraption's circuitry.

It was identical to a C5 cockpit, right down to the bolts and carpets. The only difference was that the windows were ground glass rather than clear, for projecting images on.

They let me "fly" it. It was incredible! It sat on hydraulics, so when you accelerated, it felt like acceleration. Likewise banking, diving, etc. You could even crash the thing! This was even cooler than the other computer I had seen back when I was 12.

I assure you, you're wrong. Your laptop is more powerful than twenty year old supercomputer. It has more storage, more memory, faster processing, and better graphics.

Funny thing is, they're already in the middle of a major revision project. After Fx2, Brendan Eich released a set of goals for Mozilla 2. The idea is/was to do a large scale cleanup and refactoring (explicitly not a rewrite, however) in order to get rid of some legacy code still around from overly ambitious plans that didn't pan out (e.g. XPCOM). That was to happen in parallel to the development of Fx3 on Gecko 1.9.0.

It's not clear how much progress has been made on Gecko 2.0—almost no public-facing announcements are made about it to the community, and the wiki page is dormant. All the work and focus seems to have been poured into Gecko 1.9.1 (Fx3.5) and now 1.9.2 (Firefox.next).

One element of Eich's vision for Mozilla 2 was implemented in 3.5 – the new faster javascript implementation. But the smaller, leaner, more approachable codebase goal? Who knows.

Now it seems they're attempting 'Electrolysis' (the codename for process separation) in parallel to the development of Firefox.next (Gecko 1.9.2), which is already ostensibly being done in parallel to the Mozilla 2 refactoring. Makes you wonder if there's anyone at the wheel.

Here's an essay I wrote about Mozilla's direction back in 2007 when Mozilla 2 was supposed to kick off.

lol @ ESR and his delusions of grandeur. Nedanet is of questionable utility at best, except maybe to linkspammers.

lol @ ESR and his delusions of grandeur. Nedanet is of questionable utility at best, except maybe to linkspammers.

Thanks for pointing me to those writings you made.

Here are some more...
mcgrew journal
Summary of 2008 "Paxil Diary" - like stories
2007
The Paxil Diaries

The arguments about "religion vs science" are silly at best. Religion/philosophy and science ask completely different questions, and neither can disprove any claim of the other. To hunt for scientific proof of God's existance or nonexistance is absurd.

The difference between God and the Flying Spagetti Monster is that nobody has ever experienced the flying spagetti monster. See Death

MS never actually wrote a TCP/IP stack. The one that's still in Windows is the development one (that was quite broken) that they stole from BSD back in the early 90s...

Look at how wrong you are

It does seem rather unlikely that in the incredibly vast Milky Way Galaxy, let alone an infinite universe, only one planet would produce life. It seems that if a planet produced life, eventally that life would likely evolve intelligence.

As to semi-inteligent life, we're more primitive compared to our decendants a hundred years in the future than our anscestors a hundred years ago were primitive compared to us.

As to God and believability, see Death and Gecko Poker.

It does seem rather unlikely that in the incredibly vast Milky Way Galaxy, let alone an infinite universe, only one planet would produce life. It seems that if a planet produced life, eventally that life would likely evolve intelligence.

As to semi-inteligent life, we're more primitive compared to our decendants a hundred years in the future than our anscestors a hundred years ago were primitive compared to us.

As to God and believability, see Death and Gecko Poker.

Two words: Biters anonymous. Yeah, sometimes I relapse...

What a coincidence, I just post a journal pointing out that some mods are idiots, and an anonymous troll gets modded "insightful". OK, troll, I'll bite (I have to).

Yes, art is for homos. It's for heteros, too. I pity anyone who is so culturally deprived that they can't appreciate art.

What's funny is about ten years ago, I was in an online discussion with Charles Broussard, who was of the opinion that videogames were NOT art. I think in the end we agreed to disagree, I wonder if he ever changed his mind? I certainly haven't changed mine, games ARE art. Some are good art and some are bad art, but all are art.

And I do think that censorship may be keeping the art from advancing, but what is a bigger factor is the fact that the folks who make games don't see them as art.

My daughter Leila, still an avid gamer, mentioned to me that in the last GTA she got, there's a dope dealer named "Osama". It seems to me that the designers are censoring themselves, and pushing politically correct themes (like dope dealers being terrorists) and their snideness is hurting both their art and the quality of the games themselves.

It's a long way from Duke Nukem 1, where shooting the Energizer Bunny resulted in points. I remeber when games were a lot more primitive, but a lot more fun. And a lot more artistic.

Chris Messina did the same thing in a 50+ minute rant about Mozilla and RIA technologies two years ago. Why do people pay attention to him?

The only real difference between sustainable technologies and cancerous growth is that the plan for obsolescence includes the needs of the many, not just the wants of the few.

Your attitude can be summed up in the following immortal words:

We're placing this wood in your ass for the good of the world.

So as long as there's a "plan" for including the "needs of the many", that is, I go limply through the motions of pretending to follow the moral fad of the day, cancerous growth is ok. I think I'll pledge to bury quickly any peasants I run over while I'm bulldozing land for my real estate projects. Consideration for others? Check! Just think how close I was to being a cancerous growth while blatantly pursuing my obsession for wealth and power! Now, I'm "sustainable", whatever the hell that means.

You can sample the radio and make your MP3s out of the tunes. I have a lot of cassettes I recorded off of KSHE, the St Louis station that has been playing seven full, uncut albums back to back every Sunday night for decades. I had Ted Nugent's Stranglehold a week before you could buy it in the stores. See Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station, an article I wrote five years ago.

Your CD of the sampled songs will sound as good as FM (not quite CD quality but better than MP3).

If you make MP3s out of albums or cassettes, unfortunately the encoder amplifys the flaws.

You can sample the radio and make your MP3s out of the tunes. I have a lot of cassettes I recorded off of KSHE, the St Louis station that has been playing seven full, uncut albums back to back every Sunday night for decades. I had Ted Nugent's Stranglehold a week before you could buy it in the stores. See Birth of a label-sanctioned pirate radio station, an article I wrote five years ago.

Your CD of the sampled songs will sound as good as FM (not quite CD quality but better than MP3).

If you make MP3s out of albums or cassettes, unfortunately the encoder amplifys the flaws.

"You're a fucking PUSSY, boy!" Here in Springfield we do our trolling offline. Grow a pair and put your name and address on your post, Toad.

BTW, quoting Walt (Gran Torino) again, "get off my lawn!"

1.Lay down on the floor and throw a tantrum.
2.Start your own SlashNot site.

Not a bad idea, in principle. Over the years, there have been several sites that slashdotters would talk about as good alternatives. I was active on the old kuro5hin.org site for a while, before they erased the whole database of stories and comments and started over again from scratch. A lot of those folks seemed to move over to hulver.com. Bruce Perens tried to do it with technocrat.net, which is now a redirect to his own blog because he gave up on it. There was also half-empty (what was the url?), which was cool for a while.

The impression I got in the cases of technocrat and the original kuro5hin was that they failed because of issues with social dynamics. Kuro5hin somehow lent itself to a cliquish dynamic, where tribes got more and more hostile to one another, and it also seemed somehow very vulnerable to trolls and sock-puppets. At some point there was an infamous incident where someone got a hold of a picture of Rusty's (the owner's) wife and photoshopped it onto a porn picture. I believe Technocrat somehow attracted a nucleus of crazies (right-wing survivalists types, IIRC?), who dominated the site.

Although slashdot is having some serious technical problems with slashcode these days, the truth is that they've accomplished something very rare. They've managed to reach a stable equilibrium, where jerks, trolls, and crazies aren't able to make things miserable for everyone. They've also built up the membership of the site enough so that on a lot of issues, you'll get comments from individuals who are experts on the topic. (Of course you'll also get 10 times as many people who think they're experts.)

In the past when I've looked at Slash's perl code, I was always very impressed by how clean it was. However, they just seem to have taken a wrong turn with all the CSS and javascript features, and they seem to have zero interest in fixing bugs like these.

What they really need is an option 3 to add to your list: admit they have a problem with maintaining slashcode, and open up the development process in the same way that X11 had to fork and evolve into x.org to keep from dying.

His keyboard has never worked. Check the date stamp on the linked comment.

Windows NT never used the BSD networking stack. Microsoft originally purchased a stack from Spider Systems, and their userland tools were ports of the BSD versions, so the regents copyright notices were included. In NT 3.5, Microsoft replaced the Spider stack with their own, but the userland tools weren't updated because there was no need.

Must... not... feed... Ah, screw it.

There are a lot of reasons why windows has so many viruses. The one touted by Windows fans is that 90% of PCs have Windows, making it a fat target. Of course, this discounts the fact that Apple sells millions of computers every year, which should make it a fat target, too, but I don't see any Apple viruses either.

But the 90% seems to me to be the reason, but a different reason - Microsoft has no incentive to "get it right". As long as they can get their OS preinstalled on all the Dells and HPs and etc, and aren't losing revenue by writing a secure OS, why bother? After all, their only aim, unlike Linux's aim, is to make money, like every other corporation. You don't start a corporation to better the world, you start a corporation to make money. period. Apple makes their PCs secure because they have to - they don't own the market likd MS does.

And the 90% also means that Windows users are, on the whole, less tech-savvy, making not only the OS but its users easy targets. A non-tech savvy user will install a trojan where someone who knows better will think twice. A tech savvy user will have a password like Xc4-99_Zza?R2D2, while most Windows users will use something like 1234.

Windows almost requires its users to run as admin (remember, Microsoft has no incentive to do it differently) while better written OSes don't need this. No other OS has anything as stupidly dangerous as Active-X.

There are many, many more reasons. These are just a few that popped into the top of my head.

Is basically Retarded

"It hurts to breathe, should I go to the hospital?"

That's too dumb to be real. Pranksters and trolls are everywhere. But, you know, slashdot is a social site of sorts, so if you believe social sites are retarded, what does that say about you?

I do. IIRC I voted for the Libertarian in the last Presidential election. As a potsmoker, I have to say that a vote for someone who wants to put you in jail is WORSE than a wasted vote.

Whoever modded my comment "troll", see this. "Troll" doesn't mean "an opinion I disagree with". That was my honest opinion; I actually have little use for either of the mainstream, not covered by corporate media, corporate-controlled parties.

Believe it or not, all this might prove is that you spoke with the creator of those forum posts. It doesn't prove or disprove anything about the identity of the contributor to those articles and software projects in the mid-to-late 1990's.
Your standards of proof, just like those of the AC who claims to be APK, are inadequate.

Anyway, I've been reading this. Perhaps you and the AC that I've been conversing with [0] might wish to read it as well and mull over what it has to say.

[0] I have a strong suspicion that you and the AC are one and the same person. If the AC is the fellow who went by the name of Alecstarr over on Ars and many other forums, this sort of behaviour is his MO.

.. comfort is NOT IT. Instead, footwear protects us from worms, parasites, and infectious diseases. Oh, and people like this:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971 ... and then his follow up three years later:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053 ... which doesn't mention the fact that he's now SELLING these worms to people.

.. comfort is NOT IT. Instead, footwear protects us from worms, parasites, and infectious diseases. Oh, and people like this:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2006/4/30/91945/8971 ... and then his follow up three years later:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2009/3/16/3408/66053 ... which doesn't mention the fact that he's now SELLING these worms to people.

Can forced-anonymous commenting focus writers' attention on substance and quality, instead of flame wars or other personal one-upsmanship?

The GP was NOT talking about enemy combatants but about this guy: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/11/5/94852/0804 He's now suing the govts involved and will likely get a big payout as the authorities' treatment of him was totally abhorrent.

Biters Anonymous

Hi, my name's mcgrew and I'm a biter.

Biters Anonymous is a crowd of losers who share their experience, roflcopters and lolerskates with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from the ravages of biting.

The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop biting.

There are no dues or fees for BA membership; we are self-supporting through our own contributions. BA is not allied with any sect, denomination, politics, organization or institution or endorses nor opposes any causes.

Our primary purpose is to stay troll-free and help other Biters to achieve bitelessness.

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over biting - that our bites had become unmanageable

Step 2: Came to believe that a poster greater than ourselves could return our lollerskates

Step 3: Made a decision to turn our stories and our diaries over to the care of CmdrTaco and His "editors"

Step 4: Use the <li> operator or risk being called a lamer by trolls, tempting you to bite

Step 5: We must never ever be at all honest with anybody evar.

Step 6: I am not a step, I am a free man!

Step 7: Craps

Step 8: Stop giving a shit.

Step 9: Step 9: Step 9: Step 9:

Step 10: You still didn't follow step 4 yet, lamer

Step 11: Mind your own damned business

Step 12: Shut off the fucking computer and go outside for God's sake!

I'd like to see it too, but it won't really help. 4th amendment? The Springfield police "had a look around" my garage, without a warrant, on Memorial Day of all days! My car and person were searched (thankfully not strip searched) on another occasion because I was unknowingly parked in front of a dope house (details at link).

And I'm an old white guy, imagine if I were black or Hispanic. The bill of rights has been dead, for all intents and purposes, for a very long time.

It's shameful that those who take an oath to protect the Constitution trash it at every opportunity.

The best protection is public domain.

In some instances, yes.

Retaining ownership to force an ideological end is silly

Your straw man is on fire; it has nothing to do with ideology, everything to do with practicality. If you place your work in the public domain, a commercial vendor can freely use your code to compile a binary, and then copyright the binary that was compiled with your code. He then "owns" (actually has a limited time monopoly) the product of YOUR work with out compensating you.

The GPL protects the individual programmer against the corporation that would use him and abuse him.

Nope, we're still stuck with it, even though everyone knows vi is better....

IWNFTT, espacially such an old one

It's possible I'm not.

I wonder how they determined piousness? The churches are full of closeted athiests who are only there for social standing. For example, it would be damned hard for an avowed athiest to be elected to the US Senate, but I doubt that all 100 of them are relly Christians and not just pretending.

Hell, even Jesus talked about hypocrites who pretend to be religious but don't believe in God.

I had a death experience in 1976, and since that day there is no way I could doubt God's existance -- once you have seen an oliphant, you can no longer disbelieve in oliphants. I also lost my fear of death that day, although I do fear the excruciating pain that accompanies death.

But I do think I would ask for extrordinary measures to keep me alive, out of love for those who would be terribly hurt should I die. My parents are still alive, and as a dad I know there could never be anything worse that could happen to a person than to outlive one's children.

I remember as a kid arguing with my dad who thought 8-track was much better than casette tapes.

In theory they should have been better - they had double the transport speed, and should have had nearly double the frequency response. In practice, however, they weren't. The reason was that they were illogically fated for cars and their bad acoustics (worse than today's cars) and the labels didn't bother with fidelity.

The thing I hated about eight tracks was they would interrupt a song in the middle of the tape for a track change.

I mentioned eight track tapes a few years ago in Good Riddance to Bad Tech, where I go into more detail about why these pieces of crap sucked.

"In my line of work, disability comes down to two things: memory loss and, I forget what." -Garrison Keillor

Star Trek was always a fantasy to me as an engineer about what 'could be'.

Much of the fantasy gizmos that could only live in science fiction are common today. When TOS was on TV in the 60s, there were no cell phones (communicators), no self-opening doors, no flat screen voice activated computers, and if I sat here and thought about it for a while I could probably come up with a lot more.

Real technology in some cases has surpassed TOS. In Star Trek II, Bones gives Kirk reading glasses for his age-related presbyopia because Kirk was allergic to "Retinox" (presumably a drug that softens the eye's lens so geezers can focus), but in 2003 the FDA approved the implant in my left eye which cured my extreme myopia (nearsightedness), age related presbyopia (farsightedness), and the cataract that had formed. If I'd been astigmatic the implant would have cured that as well, too.

I've been amazed at the scientific and technological advances in my lifetime. McCoy would be in awe if he could see a 21st century operating room!

Don't fill it with too much technobabble

The technobabble has always irked me, and it got worse with TNG. Why say "blind as an antarian bat?" That's just dumb IMO, "blind as a bat" suffices. I parodied 1960s sci-fi a few years ago with Saturday, written as Science Fiction from the early 1960s

I stuck some science fiction 21st century optical devices on my eyeballs and drank some coffee. The devices are great, they're nothing at all like sticking pieces of glass in your eyes, as you had to do back in the 1970s. This new, science fiction technology is (usually) completely invisible to the user.

Patty wasn't answering the voice communicator.

About quarter to ten she transmitted her coordinates via the afformentioned device, and said she overslept. Was it aliens? No, I believe her friend was born in the US. In fact, she doesn't have a foregn name. Now, if she had been named Gordo Burro, that would have perhaps been an interesting alien.

But this was just a blonde American kid.

I flipped a switch, and the computing device stirred to life, causing a pot of coffee to appear in the coffeepot. I removed an anesceptic wrapping from a pastry and installed it in the radiation chamber for fifteen seconds. With butter.

Have you by chance ever been to kuro5hin?

These days it's cesspit, but during its best days it was a site where users published long, well thought, and often technical articles about interesting subjects, some of which had effect beyond the website. For instance, Opennic (alternative root DNS servers) got started at an article on K5. Users submitted stories, and other users offered criticism during an editing period and collectively approved or rejected the story.

See for example a few links in the hall of fame to see what it used to be like.

I'd really like to find another place like that, its degeneration was very unfortunate.

Dude, you need to join Biters Anonymous

Do you care to expand on your argument, this time laying out your reasons for making it in clear, concise manner with appropriate references? Because I can.

• MP3 and other patents will be expiring within the next 2-3 years.
• Microsoft not having the same teeth: here, here, here, and here, and here.

OTOH, you have given us no reason to accept your argument.

This is the USA and the US constitution does not apply. :/

I wrote an article about this back in 2005. It details exactly how each amendment in the the US Bill of Rights has been rendered meaningless.

Go back to K5.

freeze dry in liquid nitrogen, use the resulting powder as fertilizer. wrote a diary a few years back:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/11/6/0016/23536

I take exception to the idea that only scholarly journals may be primary sources of information

Actually, scholarly journals can be sources of disinformation, too. It's happened before that researchers have gotten something wrong, then were quoted by other researchers in other papers. It has often gone full circle (and I wish I had a citation, but it's been a long time since I read about it).

There have been instances of respected newspapers using The Onion as sources, not realizing that fine news source is humor. The Onion must hate that, it would be like when you make a joke comment on slashdot and it gets modded as "insightful".

In Wikipedia's defence, I've complained about an edit I made after I became a cyborg in its entry about cataract surgery. I added information about the accomodating lens I had implanted in my eye, and it was quickly removed. I added it again and it was removed again. I gave up, and a few months ago I mentioned it here and someone encouraged me to try once more.

The entry finally stayed put, although someone changed the date that the FDA approved it from 2003 to 2004, despite the manufacturer's website says 2003 (I just now changed it to 2003, I wonder if it will stay?). I suspect that a different IOL manufacturer edited my edit out because the device is by far superior to any other IOL.

Kudos to Wikipedia. It is a great resource for satisfying curiosity; when I found I needed cataract surgery it was the first place I went. Same goes for when I had to undergo a vitrectomy (I wouldn't wish that procedure on my worst enemy).

It's also great for when you're turning old LPs and cassettes into CDs, you can copy and paste track titles into your burning software.

My dad gave me great advice when I was a kid: never believe anything you hear (or read) and only half of what you see.

with the same sort of humility in mind...

This advice is really rich coming from you, cts, considering...

Actually, it's not true.

You should read this article http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=displaystory;sid=2001/6/19/05641/7357

Microsoft did use code from BSD, but it was licensed from UCB (via Spider Software) and predates the first open source versions of BSD's network stack, as evidenced by the copyright dates. And Windows Network stack is not based on it anymore.

Still doing it years later!

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/7/15/165541/099

I guess the question is can Cher sue over this technology?

Only if lawmakers pass the Cher Patent Term Extension Act.

Oddly enough, nobody did when some of their W2k code was leaked.

This, coupled with the earth apparently being a giant hologram...Can someone say, custom reality?

Synopsis

enjoy freedom,
enjoy while you can

Freedom? What freedom?