Windows 95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. Unix, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic.
What made old epics like Gilgamesh so powerful and so long-lived was that they were living bodies of narrative that many people knew by heart, and told over and over again--making their own personal embellishments whenever it struck their fancy. The bad embellishments were shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. Likewise, Unix is known, loved, and understood by so many hackers that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.
IBM has a long history of selling and supporting technologies long after the market has passed them by. It's part of their appeal to large institutions; if you invest umpty-ump gazillion dollars in boxes from IBM, you don't have to worry that a few years down the road you won't be able to get replacement parts, software, etc. for them.
This is less true today than it used to be but I would imagine it accounts for much of the reason why these workstations hung around for so long.
And the "canon" for crime drama is even larger and more restrictive.
There is no "canon" for "crime drama". "Crime drama" is a genre encompassing a wide range of storylines, each with its own canon. Law and Order and Starsky and Hutch could both be described as "crime dramas", but beyond the barest outlines of the plot they are completely different.
Is it really too much to ask that a story in an established franchise stick to previously established material?
No, it is not too much to ask. All it requires is a few TALENTED WRITERS.
The problem with that is that Star Trek has decades of "previously established material", much of it contradictory and internally inconsistent. Writing is a creative activity; religiously observing canon is more like bookkeeping than creativity.
You can force the writers to do the bookkeeping, but then you shouldn't be surprised when the final product has all the excitement of an accounts-receivable ledger.
The EeePC uses some weird hardware that isn't supported out-of-the-box by most distros. So you can install, say, Ubuntu on it, but you'll find things like wifi just don't work.
For now you can solve these problems by using a customized kernel for EeePCs and some other hacks, but it's a pain to figure out which hacks you need for your model. (It took me about a week to get Ubuntu fully functional on my EeePC 1000.)
Eventually all these customizations will probably find their way into the mainline distros, which will make things easier. But the EeePC has only been out for about a year, and these things take time.
Even though I see a good portion of bus riders every single day with normal old books, magazines, newspapers, laptops, and mobile devices (mostly Blackberries and iPhones), I have yet to see a single Kindle. I guess everyone else, very much like me, cannot justify the price of the device on top of the price of the reading material when there are better options available.
If we're going to be arguing by anecdote, here in DC I see Kindles on the subway pretty regularly. It's not like everyone in the car has one, but it's not unusual to see one being used, either.
I don't think anyone is encouraging the masses to use a nightly.
Yes they are. This whole "use Minefield, it's fast!!!!1!" meme is being spread by blog posts like this irresponsible post from CNet:
Feeling brave? Or simply feeling like your browser is too slow? Give Minefield a try. It's a separate install so it won't affect an existing Firefox install. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Firefox Minefield, a pre-release alpha version of the Firefox browser blows the speed limits out of the park making Google Chrome looks like a Toyota Prius against a Ferrari.
These articles generally include a token warning that Minefield is alpha code, but they seem to think of "alpha" in the Google sense of "try this, you might like it", rather than the more traditional sense of "dangerous, don't use unless you know what you're doing".
People. There is A REASON why Mozilla calls these builds "Minefield" rather than "Firefox".
It's because they're not ready for daily use.
They may be faster than the released version of Firefox, but they also may contain major, showstopping bugs, up to and including bugs that can cause data loss.
The only people who should be using them are people who understand this risk and are willing to accept it -- i.e. testers.
Anyone promoting these builds for use by the general public is being irresponsible and exposing anyone who takes their advice to risk.
TFA is bad enough, but it's worse to see major sites like Slashdot parroting this bad advice. You should be telling your friends to avoid Minefield, not to seek it out.
Screen-scraping some Web sites is hardly morally equivalent to launching an unjustified war that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Something tells me that an email system that only depends on your hard drive with no net connection wouldn't be very useful.
Not necessarily true -- in that scenario you can at least still access your old messages (assuming your client has cached them locally), and write new ones & queue them up for sending when your net connection comes back.
There's a business model here that no company seems to catch.
sell a cheap computer with adequate software. Asus fails, their repository is ridiculous.
sell media at reasonable prices. I'd never pay $15 for a movie, and renting DVDs is a hassle. I'd be ready to pay $1 or $2 to download a 700MB mpeg, why don't the media companies want to sell it to me?
Profit!
I'd pay for a *system* that solves this specific need, give me entertainment during my daily bus ride.
Such a system does exist: the iPod/iPhone and the iTunes store.
Slashdot Mirror
And SecuROM. Thanks, Sid. (grrr)
Or, as Neal Stephenson put it:
IBM has a long history of selling and supporting technologies long after the market has passed them by. It's part of their appeal to large institutions; if you invest umpty-ump gazillion dollars in boxes from IBM, you don't have to worry that a few years down the road you won't be able to get replacement parts, software, etc. for them.
This is less true today than it used to be but I would imagine it accounts for much of the reason why these workstations hung around for so long.
There is no "canon" for "crime drama". "Crime drama" is a genre encompassing a wide range of storylines, each with its own canon. Law and Order and Starsky and Hutch could both be described as "crime dramas", but beyond the barest outlines of the plot they are completely different.
The problem with that is that Star Trek has decades of "previously established material", much of it contradictory and internally inconsistent. Writing is a creative activity; religiously observing canon is more like bookkeeping than creativity.
You can force the writers to do the bookkeeping, but then you shouldn't be surprised when the final product has all the excitement of an accounts-receivable ledger.
The EeePC uses some weird hardware that isn't supported out-of-the-box by most distros. So you can install, say, Ubuntu on it, but you'll find things like wifi just don't work.
For now you can solve these problems by using a customized kernel for EeePCs and some other hacks, but it's a pain to figure out which hacks you need for your model. (It took me about a week to get Ubuntu fully functional on my EeePC 1000.)
Eventually all these customizations will probably find their way into the mainline distros, which will make things easier. But the EeePC has only been out for about a year, and these things take time.
Yeah! God, I hate George Washington. That guy is such a douche. Kudos to you for calling him out.
Wait, we're talking about who?
If we're going to be arguing by anecdote, here in DC I see Kindles on the subway pretty regularly. It's not like everyone in the car has one, but it's not unusual to see one being used, either.
Impossible. It's not like you can see China from Alaska. So how would she know?
This should fix most of your problems. It got Hardy working great for me on an Eee 1000.
You mean like this? Or is 83 pages of specific proposals in small type not concrete enough for you?
What's up with that? I thought this was America!
Locks cost the retail outlet money. Your slashed finger costs them nothing.
"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." -- Winston Churchill
Substitute "the Internet" for "democracy" and "networking" for "government" and you have a pretty good response to Payne...
You got lucky.
A nightly build is exactly what it says it is -- a snapshot of the codebase as of a given day.
Some nightly builds may be completely bug free. Others may be chock full of major dataloss bugs. It's a crapshoot.
Your friends may be fine today, but if they decide to "update Minefield" on the wrong day in the future, they're gonna get screwed.
That's why I call it irresponsible.
Yes they are. This whole "use Minefield, it's fast!!!!1!" meme is being spread by blog posts like this irresponsible post from CNet:
And this:
These articles generally include a token warning that Minefield is alpha code, but they seem to think of "alpha" in the Google sense of "try this, you might like it", rather than the more traditional sense of "dangerous, don't use unless you know what you're doing".
People. There is A REASON why Mozilla calls these builds "Minefield" rather than "Firefox".
It's because they're not ready for daily use.
They may be faster than the released version of Firefox, but they also may contain major, showstopping bugs, up to and including bugs that can cause data loss.
The only people who should be using them are people who understand this risk and are willing to accept it -- i.e. testers.
Anyone promoting these builds for use by the general public is being irresponsible and exposing anyone who takes their advice to risk.
TFA is bad enough, but it's worse to see major sites like Slashdot parroting this bad advice. You should be telling your friends to avoid Minefield, not to seek it out.
That's right, because it would be a huge waste of time trying to figure out what a town in Alaska has to do with Bill Clinton.
"AK" = Alaska. "AR" = Arkansas.
Screen-scraping some Web sites is hardly morally equivalent to launching an unjustified war that results in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Hey, there are people out there who find XKCD funny. So clearly there's an audience out there for any damn thing.
Not necessarily true -- in that scenario you can at least still access your old messages (assuming your client has cached them locally), and write new ones & queue them up for sending when your net connection comes back.
So the odds of it being a Google project are only 80% then. Reassuring!
Ooooh can Mono 2.0 run Paint.NET???
(please please please)
Such a system does exist: the iPod/iPhone and the iTunes store.
I dunno, Chuck Yeager is pretty bold and he's pushing 90. Scott Crossfield was 85 when he died (flying).
Trust no one?