I started out a geek who had interest in history. So, silly me I became a history teacher hated and went back to my then hobby of computers. Therefore, while I sysadmin greping my way through the day I still have a distinct interest in social aspect of the technology industry.
The idea that guys who spend most of their time in virtual worlds building apps and server environments that have never been there before would take such delight in the fantasy of anime is not startling.
While science fiction appeals to the ideas most tech folks have of the way the world or technology could be, anime appeals to the spirit of wonder and the hero/epic side of most male imagination. If it was not a hero fantasy then it would be for a non-geek stereotypical guy some sports saga or wrestling match.
Fantasy is important to males and females the only notable difference with guys being that incredible to watch someone conquering or fighting his way to the top over huge odds.
I am glad to see someone taking a look at this and putting their views out there for the world to comment on.
BTW, I can't wait either for the new Cowboy Bebop and Serial Experiment Lain was very thought-provoking without being completely depressing.
Great one of the things that really stood out to me looking at the site is they complain about the lack of consistency across *NIX platforms and say their GUI will provide a uniform way of dealing with administration.
Wonderful. I need some poor lost junior admin operator wannabe whining because they can't add the user account they need to because the only experience in administration is from some damn uniform GUI.
There are reasons that things are not uniform acroos different platforms. If people don't realize this then they are going to be lost switching from *NIX to another.
They usually are execept until the iMac they had horrible timing. They starting using SCSI on their boxes when nobody dared putting it on a desktop. Apple was moving forward into multimedia before most PC makers even considered speakers necessary.
They stole the whole GUI thing from Palto Alto guys and actually had the balls to try and sell it. They are constantly doing things like that but they usually implement badly or time it wrong. I still think that home PCs will eventually come by default with tv cards and such like one of the old PowerMac home units they put out a few years ago. They have a good feel on the technological next step.
This does not mean they always implement correctly.
Once this kind of nonsense starts there is not a whole lot one can do about it except damage control and putting your servers back up one by one.
What I don't understand is this. Somebody out there with real coding and sysadmin skills actually takes the time to write the scripts these numbnuts use. Who actually gives these buggers their code?
Ok, Perl is faster and better and its a complete re-write?!?
Yeah right. All I know is that you are never going to get all three things right the first time off. It may be faster and a complete re-write or better and a complete re-write but come on. Larry Wall may be wired tight for coding but I will believe the perfect perl when I C it.
Despite the censorship, this is a classic anime and it will be interesting to see the response it gets from traditional early teen Cartoon Network style audiences.
I will wait and see before passing judgement but I really want to see a network grow some balls and put Cowboy Bebop on prime time. That would rock!:-> Yeah, like that would ever happen.
Even more than the predatory tactics used against Netscape, the contract deals requiring HW folks to bundle Mickey$oft and their associated products has always seemed to me to be heavy handed for a company with monopoly status.
If the company backed off of this part of the contracts I think M$ would have a much better time defending itself in court. I do not think it means a whole lot in terms of legal precedent. I think it would help in the hearts and minds of future judges looking at this case on review.
Hopefully, this will mean more penetration for Linux in Germany and provide the basis of reform in the US. The worst part of the monopoly status is not the mediocre performance of Windows but the natural lack of alternatives in a world taken over by the Gates borg.
Using computers to teach children math is usually bad unless used as a quizing device. Teaching children how to use computers in class is good.
Listen, if you are using the computers as the sole method of teaching a kid about Social Studies (Carmen Sandiego was cute but come on) then it sucks. If you teach a kid about programming to illustrate practical uses for abstract math then it rocks. You are teaching a child about a core subject and illustrating a real world use of the tool at the same time. Computers in class are not bad. The way computers are being used in class is what is bad.
I fenced at Georgia Southern with Dr. French. Great fun. The sad part is that it is great fun but rather expensive for someone starting out because the classes were very costly from what I remember from calling the Atlanta Fencing Club.
I live in Lawrenceville just north of Atlanta. Good to heer from a neighbor, y'all.:->
Your rapier arguement is well-taken and that is why the author did not list the weapon alone and mentioned the longsword and other lighter blades. A good swordsmen learns many techniques and just for the reason you listed many learned how to re-direct as opposed to blocking a large blade directly. This seems limiting but it is fairly easy when you get a person swinging a heavy blade around in slash and hack motions.
There is a logical reason why lighter swords and sabres (lighter versions of the usual hacker swords) came to dominate a landscape of warfare that had not see a gun come on the scene for dominance. The reason is quite simple, the knights were getting poked with smaller blades left and right. The whole reason lighter blades came into use is the fact that people began to realize (despite what fantasy fans like to think) that it is easier to poke a knight through the cracks in the armor than it is to hack through it.
In reponse the armor became better, the cracks were smaller and either you had to have pike formations and very skilled swordsmen (longbowmen helped too:->) or the knights on armor would rip your ranks apart. It is not a very macho or elegant weapon but the pike formations and not the rise of the gunpowder spelled the real doomed to the mounted knights in armor.
Then pick yourself up a sabre sir and take up fencing. Tournament or Olympic fencing can be tiresome but the sport and the sparring and the actual practice that many fencers participate in will be as close to you ever get to a duel. There is even a category for your mentioned weapon, the sabre.
The foil is not the only weapon in a fencer's arsenal.
The deal is that the sport may have a lot of tiresome rules but the actual swordsplay and techniques you learn are usually better than the experience you get from a Society for Creative Anachronisms tournament where too many of the folks have spent too much damn time making their costumes and not enough time actually learning how to use the blade.
There are very good swordsmen in those groups but they are swamped by the unskilled and usually overshadowed by the history and custome buffs that dominate so many of the groups.
Out of the eight replies I got to this I decided out some masochistic urge I don't want to admit to answer to this one.
Resistance is NOT futile. However, you do not beat the big monopoly by taking it on directly. Microsoft learned this lesson early on with IBM. Sun and Oracle need to make better products and hype them up with marketing hard if they want to bear Micro$oft.
Linux in an interesting contrast is using the same tactic Microsoft did in the day. Microsoft got into other markets (software) that IBM (hardware) was not into. They slowly began to dominate everywhere the monopoly was not. They surrounded the bear as Paul Allen put it they rode the bear to survive the monopoly days of IBM.
Linux has made its way into the mail server and web server markets that Microsoft by its high liscensing fees have abandoned. We are slowly surrounded the Microsoft bear and eventually could dominate the server rooms in a way that will make Mickeysoft's Neanderthal Technology a thing of the past. However, I hope that the effort is not hampered by the insistence that Linux become an end-user product. I think it is nice that Linux has become so easy for the geekish population to use.
However, I don't want my brother or god forbid my mother calling me asking questions about how to install Debian on some silly Compaq Presario.
I know that is elitist but I can't help it. I don't want some watered down dummy-proofed operating system. If it was hard to install it means that you had to have half a clue about computers to get it running. I like that.
This kind of corporate behavior may be typical but it is not right. Using private eyes to spy on the competition is a bad thing anyway you look at it.
Oracle makes a good database product and that is where it should end. Like Sun, the paranoia over Microsoft is amazing. The companies have to start spending more time making better products that are marketed well and stop looking to find some sort of dirt on Redmond. This is silly to say the least.
will the FAA ever let this guy try to pull it off?
There have been a lot of rocket comments and jokes about how he will blow up. However, I think the guy will not get shot into the sky but shot down by the FAA instead. Is it possible this eccentric will ever get off the ground with government approval?
So, what is he going to do suggest they disband everytime they ask for input?
Listen, the guy is an intelligent important idealistic intellectual in the Free Software Open Source world. However, is he the guy we really want talking to the USPTO? Are they going to use his input as an excuse to ignore their own screwups by turning around and pointing to the man's extreme positions on some of the issues (I say extreme by the way only in light of the current USPTO's line of thought).
It would be interesting if they actually took or considered his point of view. Yet, I feel he is going to be token techie in view but unheard.
Come on people the original platform rocked. However, why the hell would anyone waste the energy reviving this platform? Instead of improving the variety of open/free OS systems that have already gotten the support of big money some poor schmuck is going to go out and reinvent the wheel. Good luck, I guess. Still, it seems like an awful waste of energy.
There is only one reason to create a brand new Operating System. The time to create an OS is when you look around and realize you simply do not have the tools to fill an important niche in your devlopment or system needs. Linux played on the fact that sysadmins did not want to go with a buggy NT and the commercial Unixes were stabbing people for massive bucks to make up for their limited server sales. BeOS wanted to fill the niche for a great multimedia OS but between companies that already had the halfway decent Macs and the over-priced SGI boxes the Be folks seem to barely have a chance. (BTW, I really hope they succeed because it is damn good desktop OS.)
Until, the Amiga folks can come up with a compelling reason for buying the Operating system that justifies the price of the whole computer people will continue to ask, "So what?"
I think the biggest issue with Corel's latest group of products is the fact that they are using Wine to make the ports work. This leads to sluggish performance and even worse flaky behavior that people dealing with big art projects are not likely to want to endure.
However, I do not believe this whole GIMP versus Draw stuff is really fair. It is as many readers have pointed out a completely different tool. In addition the pricing seems pretty comparitive to the Windows versions.
As a community would it not be better to support the people coming together and making products for our favorite OS as opposed to busting on them for not giving their products away? I mean eventually I am going to have to get the WordPerfect suite to get my wife completely off the Windows products and finally claim back the Windows 95 machine so it can take its rightfull place as a linux box.
The problem is not with mergers or corporations or even the insane concept that big corps live and breath to make money and squash competition.
The problem is that there is a big media war brewing and the storm clouds are gathering into huge masses on either side of the sky, AT&T with Media One to one side and Time/Warner with AOL on the other. This looms high and large and in the end there will be only one with all other comers being crushed between the two before the dust settles like a pebble between two large rocks.
When these sort of big wars happen they tend to result in one large corporation ending up in court fighting their way out of a monopoly lawsuit. This is not the prime condition. The big boys ought to realize that between the two megacorps they should split about eighty percent market share and help out a fewer smaller corps to make themselves look good to the feds. This way they still get huge profits, marketshares and secure places in the digital world without the government pissing on their parade.
They will not do it. The momentum is rising and speed is gaining. The clash between the dinosaurs of the old media is coming. It ain't gonna be pretty.
I am not really sure why the leading Distribution company out there really needed this publicity.
First, I thought as another user that it was obvious that Google was using Linux. Also, the whole clustering capability has been known for awhile.
Do we need every site to have a THIS SITE RUNS ON... statement at the bottom? Come on, we all have our reasons for running Linux. It just seems like fluff or worse geek bragging.
I can hear the slashdotters now:
"You can't be a real geek site you run RedHat and not Debian!"
"Well little boy you aren't a real man till you have gotten Slackware working on a 486 33mhz machine with a bad BIOS."
"You are all full of crap because I run BSD and it has REAL security."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. They can run a cluster and that is really neat and I love to Quake from their server and I bet my projects would compile really quick and wouldn't be neat if..... I think you know the rest.
Actually, if you look at Xfree86, KDE and Gnome, it is amazing what can be done in an open source project.
That is the very reason that I do not understand why big players like RedHat, Caldera, VaLinux and Corel don't pick their projects and put some serious money and extra man power in not just getting Gnome or KDE up beyond what other operating systems are currently doing at this time in terms of interface. More so they could all pool money to improve different aspects of Xfree86. Listen I know that RedHat has supported Gnome but even this fine project has a ways to go before it becomes more than a fine interface for X windows and becomes a truly revolutionary interface moving the whole interaction between user and the system forward.
BTW, my wife seems to have no problem getting around in KDE. I don't personally like the interface but she does seems to be able to use it quite well. I believe that the distributions have a ways to go before they understand the needs of the end user instead of the usual geek/server crowd. After a bit of setup, she was playing Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, using KICQ, getting email through XcMail, dialing out through Kppp and getting online to her favorite boards to post with Netscape.
It is not the individual pieces that are proprietary. I was under the impression and you seem to more about it than I do that only Apple could get the G3 and G4 series of processors and I thought the old clone makers were not getting the the inside specs to make the system 100% compatible. I thought this was the reason that people are not making Mac clones anymore (along with the fact that they can no longer bundle a pre-installed OS with the thing). If this is not the case, please correct me further. I actually enjoy gaining new information as opposed to being one of those people that only wants to hear what they already know. That is why many of my comments were posed as questions.
I also never asserted that the Mac OS X was NOT the better mousetrap. The deal was that I was asserting that we in the Open Source community could take the big leap inspired by the new OS to think out of the box and build something revolutionary as opposed to just something that does what the current range of OS GUI interfaces do.
Ever since the NextStep buyout by Apple this has seemed like a good idea. The idea of an all-encompassing friendly GUI wrapped around an industrial based Unixed system. But why has it taken so long? The work needed to make it backwards compatible was done a looong time ago. Apple has needed a new OS for longer than I care to go into. So, why has it taken Apple so long to pick up the ball and really run with it?
Listen, I understand that the corporate emphasis has been on the success of making cute little boxes and all. I know that and it works for them. Yet, it is amazing that someone particularily in our own Open Source community hasn't taken the clue and built an easy to use windowing interface for the end-user and left the procrastinating Apple in the dust. As long as there is a terminal and GNU commands to be taken and Xfree86 for those who want to go bare-bones then the geeks out there will be happy. Apple for once has the right idea. Make the system easy to use for the end luser and built on top of a system made to take loads of punishment.
If they were not so tightly tied to their proprietary hardware I would say that Apple had a chance of taking some steam out of the Linux community. However, because they are so stingy with their technology they have no chance of that even if they give part of the OS away. I hope that the UI gives the GNOME and KDE folks some ideas.
I hope even harder that they will take the hint and try to move the interface forward as opposed to just copying the coolest ideas from this or that other OS. Our whole movement has been about making the better mousetrap. Maybe it is time to do one-upmanship on the Apple folks and reinvent the mousetrap all together.
451 and what makes good Sci-Fi
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
A few people have commented on the fact that the book is dated. Others have already pointed out that most Science Fiction points out situations in today's society more than it points to the future.
I will take it one step further. Most of the great science fiction written today or yesterday reflects a vision of the time the people lived more than it embodies a visionaries gaze into the future. Yet, it is the ability to speak to themes that are universal that keep drawing people back to works by Bradbury or even Asimov. The trick is therefore to speak about the situation of your world today through an inherently dated vision of the future that speaks to a theme that never ceases to touch people who care enough to pick up a book.
Personally, I thought Philip K. Dick (Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?) had a prose style that was a good mix of the soft style of writing that Bradbury was famous for and the hard more technical style of Bradbury. Bradbury had a wonderful imagination for the results and consequences of the possible future that lay ahead from the perspective of his world. That is what makes him special.
Slashdot Mirror
I started out a geek who had interest in history. So, silly me I became a history teacher hated and went back to my then hobby of computers. Therefore, while I sysadmin greping my way through the day I still have a distinct interest in social aspect of the technology industry.
The idea that guys who spend most of their time in virtual worlds building apps and server environments that have never been there before would take such delight in the fantasy of anime is not startling.
While science fiction appeals to the ideas most tech folks have of the way the world or technology could be, anime appeals to the spirit of wonder and the hero/epic side of most male imagination. If it was not a hero fantasy then it would be for a non-geek stereotypical guy some sports saga or wrestling match.
Fantasy is important to males and females the only notable difference with guys being that incredible to watch someone conquering or fighting his way to the top over huge odds.
I am glad to see someone taking a look at this and putting their views out there for the world to comment on.
BTW, I can't wait either for the new Cowboy Bebop and Serial Experiment Lain was very thought-provoking without being completely depressing.
Great one of the things that really stood out to me looking at the site is they complain about the lack of consistency across *NIX platforms and say their GUI will provide a uniform way of dealing with administration.
Wonderful. I need some poor lost junior admin operator wannabe whining because they can't add the user account they need to because the only experience in administration is from some damn uniform GUI.
There are reasons that things are not uniform acroos different platforms. If people don't realize this then they are going to be lost switching from *NIX to another.
They usually are execept until the iMac they had horrible timing. They starting using SCSI on their boxes when nobody dared putting it on a desktop. Apple was moving forward into multimedia before most PC makers even considered speakers necessary.
They stole the whole GUI thing from Palto Alto guys and actually had the balls to try and sell it. They are constantly doing things like that but they usually implement badly or time it wrong. I still think that home PCs will eventually come by default with tv cards and such like one of the old PowerMac home units they put out a few years ago. They have a good feel on the technological next step.
This does not mean they always implement correctly.
Are there any numbers on the people using Macintosh systems with Linux? Usually half the Mac mystique is the love most mac folks have for the OS.
Are there any numbers on performance versus Intel Linux based systems?
I never knew you well but I will miss you just the same.
Once this kind of nonsense starts there is not a whole lot one can do about it except damage control and putting your servers back up one by one.
What I don't understand is this. Somebody out there with real coding and sysadmin skills actually takes the time to write the scripts these numbnuts use. Who actually gives these buggers their code?
Just wondering.
Ok, Perl is faster and better and its a complete re-write?!?
Yeah right. All I know is that you are never going to get all three things right the first time off. It may be faster and a complete re-write or better and a complete re-write but come on. Larry Wall may be wired tight for coding but I will believe the perfect perl when I C it.
Despite the censorship, this is a classic anime and it will be interesting to see the response it gets from traditional early teen Cartoon Network style audiences.
:-> Yeah, like that would ever happen.
I will wait and see before passing judgement but I really want to see a network grow some balls and put Cowboy Bebop on prime time. That would rock!
Even more than the predatory tactics used against Netscape, the contract deals requiring HW folks to bundle Mickey$oft and their associated products has always seemed to me to be heavy handed for a company with monopoly status.
If the company backed off of this part of the contracts I think M$ would have a much better time defending itself in court. I do not think it means a whole lot in terms of legal precedent. I think it would help in the hearts and minds of future judges looking at this case on review.
Hopefully, this will mean more penetration for Linux in Germany and provide the basis of reform in the US. The worst part of the monopoly status is not the mediocre performance of Windows but the natural lack of alternatives in a world taken over by the Gates borg.
Using computers to teach children math is usually bad unless used as a quizing device. Teaching children how to use computers in class is good.
Listen, if you are using the computers as the sole method of teaching a kid about Social Studies (Carmen Sandiego was cute but come on) then it sucks. If you teach a kid about programming to illustrate practical uses for abstract math then it rocks. You are teaching a child about a core subject and illustrating a real world use of the tool at the same time. Computers in class are not bad. The way computers are being used in class is what is bad.
I fenced at Georgia Southern with Dr. French. Great fun. The sad part is that it is great fun but rather expensive for someone starting out because the classes were very costly from what I remember from calling the Atlanta Fencing Club.
:->
I live in Lawrenceville just north of Atlanta. Good to heer from a neighbor, y'all.
Your rapier arguement is well-taken and that is why the author did not list the weapon alone and mentioned the longsword and other lighter blades. A good swordsmen learns many techniques and just for the reason you listed many learned how to re-direct as opposed to blocking a large blade directly. This seems limiting but it is fairly easy when you get a person swinging a heavy blade around in slash and hack motions.
:->) or the knights on armor would rip your ranks apart. It is not a very macho or elegant weapon but the pike formations and not the rise of the gunpowder spelled the real doomed to the mounted knights in armor.
There is a logical reason why lighter swords and sabres (lighter versions of the usual hacker swords) came to dominate a landscape of warfare that had not see a gun come on the scene for dominance. The reason is quite simple, the knights were getting poked with smaller blades left and right. The whole reason lighter blades came into use is the fact that people began to realize (despite what fantasy fans like to think) that it is easier to poke a knight through the cracks in the armor than it is to hack through it.
In reponse the armor became better, the cracks were smaller and either you had to have pike formations and very skilled swordsmen (longbowmen helped too
Then pick yourself up a sabre sir and take up fencing. Tournament or Olympic fencing can be tiresome but the sport and the sparring and the actual practice that many fencers participate in will be as close to you ever get to a duel. There is even a category for your mentioned weapon, the sabre.
The foil is not the only weapon in a fencer's arsenal.
The deal is that the sport may have a lot of tiresome rules but the actual swordsplay and techniques you learn are usually better than the experience you get from a Society for Creative Anachronisms tournament where too many of the folks have spent too much damn time making their costumes and not enough time actually learning how to use the blade.
There are very good swordsmen in those groups but they are swamped by the unskilled and usually overshadowed by the history and custome buffs that dominate so many of the groups.
Out of the eight replies I got to this I decided out some masochistic urge I don't want to admit to answer to this one.
Resistance is NOT futile. However, you do not beat the big monopoly by taking it on directly. Microsoft learned this lesson early on with IBM. Sun and Oracle need to make better products and hype them up with marketing hard if they want to bear Micro$oft.
Linux in an interesting contrast is using the same tactic Microsoft did in the day. Microsoft got into other markets (software) that IBM (hardware) was not into. They slowly began to dominate everywhere the monopoly was not. They surrounded the bear as Paul Allen put it they rode the bear to survive the monopoly days of IBM.
Linux has made its way into the mail server and web server markets that Microsoft by its high liscensing fees have abandoned. We are slowly surrounded the Microsoft bear and eventually could dominate the server rooms in a way that will make Mickeysoft's Neanderthal Technology a thing of the past. However, I hope that the effort is not hampered by the insistence that Linux become an end-user product. I think it is nice that Linux has become so easy for the geekish population to use.
However, I don't want my brother or god forbid my mother calling me asking questions about how to install Debian on some silly Compaq Presario.
I know that is elitist but I can't help it. I don't want some watered down dummy-proofed operating system. If it was hard to install it means that you had to have half a clue about computers to get it running. I like that.
This kind of corporate behavior may be typical but it is not right. Using private eyes to spy on the competition is a bad thing anyway you look at it.
Oracle makes a good database product and that is where it should end. Like Sun, the paranoia over Microsoft is amazing. The companies have to start spending more time making better products that are marketed well and stop looking to find some sort of dirt on Redmond. This is silly to say the least.
will the FAA ever let this guy try to pull it off?
There have been a lot of rocket comments and jokes about how he will blow up. However, I think the guy will not get shot into the sky but shot down by the FAA instead. Is it possible this eccentric will ever get off the ground with government approval?
So, what is he going to do suggest they disband everytime they ask for input?
Listen, the guy is an intelligent important idealistic intellectual in the Free Software Open Source world. However, is he the guy we really want talking to the USPTO? Are they going to use his input as an excuse to ignore their own screwups by turning around and pointing to the man's extreme positions on some of the issues (I say extreme by the way only in light of the current USPTO's line of thought).
It would be interesting if they actually took or considered his point of view. Yet, I feel he is going to be token techie in view but unheard.
Come on people the original platform rocked. However, why the hell would anyone waste the energy reviving this platform? Instead of improving the variety of open/free OS systems that have already gotten the support of big money some poor schmuck is going to go out and reinvent the wheel. Good luck, I guess. Still, it seems like an awful waste of energy.
There is only one reason to create a brand new Operating System. The time to create an OS is when you look around and realize you simply do not have the tools to fill an important niche in your devlopment or system needs. Linux played on the fact that sysadmins did not want to go with a buggy NT and the commercial Unixes were stabbing people for massive bucks to make up for their limited server sales. BeOS wanted to fill the niche for a great multimedia OS but between companies that already had the halfway decent Macs and the over-priced SGI boxes the Be folks seem to barely have a chance. (BTW, I really hope they succeed because it is damn good desktop OS.)
Until, the Amiga folks can come up with a compelling reason for buying the Operating system that justifies the price of the whole computer people will continue to ask, "So what?"
I think the biggest issue with Corel's latest group of products is the fact that they are using Wine to make the ports work. This leads to sluggish performance and even worse flaky behavior that people dealing with big art projects are not likely to want to endure.
However, I do not believe this whole GIMP versus Draw stuff is really fair. It is as many readers have pointed out a completely different tool. In addition the pricing seems pretty comparitive to the Windows versions.
As a community would it not be better to support the people coming together and making products for our favorite OS as opposed to busting on them for not giving their products away? I mean eventually I am going to have to get the WordPerfect suite to get my wife completely off the Windows products and finally claim back the Windows 95 machine so it can take its rightfull place as a linux box.
The problem is not with mergers or corporations or even the insane concept that big corps live and breath to make money and squash competition.
The problem is that there is a big media war brewing and the storm clouds are gathering into huge masses on either side of the sky, AT&T with Media One to one side and Time/Warner with AOL on the other. This looms high and large and in the end there will be only one with all other comers being crushed between the two before the dust settles like a pebble between two large rocks.
When these sort of big wars happen they tend to result in one large corporation ending up in court fighting their way out of a monopoly lawsuit. This is not the prime condition. The big boys ought to realize that between the two megacorps they should split about eighty percent market share and help out a fewer smaller corps to make themselves look good to the feds. This way they still get huge profits, marketshares and secure places in the digital world without the government pissing on their parade.
They will not do it. The momentum is rising and speed is gaining. The clash between the dinosaurs of the old media is coming. It ain't gonna be pretty.
I am not really sure why the leading Distribution company out there really needed this publicity.
... statement at the bottom? Come on, we all have our reasons for running Linux. It just seems like fluff or worse geek bragging.
First, I thought as another user that it was obvious that Google was using Linux. Also, the whole clustering capability has been known for awhile.
Do we need every site to have a THIS SITE RUNS ON
I can hear the slashdotters now:
"You can't be a real geek site you run RedHat and not Debian!"
"Well little boy you aren't a real man till you have gotten Slackware working on a 486 33mhz machine with a bad BIOS."
"You are all full of crap because I run BSD and it has REAL security."
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. They can run a cluster and that is really neat and I love to Quake from their server and I bet my projects would compile really quick and wouldn't be neat if..... I think you know the rest.
Actually, if you look at Xfree86, KDE and Gnome, it is amazing what can be done in an open source project.
That is the very reason that I do not understand why big players like RedHat, Caldera, VaLinux and Corel don't pick their projects and put some serious money and extra man power in not just getting Gnome or KDE up beyond what other operating systems are currently doing at this time in terms of interface. More so they could all pool money to improve different aspects of Xfree86. Listen I know that RedHat has supported Gnome but even this fine project has a ways to go before it becomes more than a fine interface for X windows and becomes a truly revolutionary interface moving the whole interaction between user and the system forward.
BTW, my wife seems to have no problem getting around in KDE. I don't personally like the interface but she does seems to be able to use it quite well. I believe that the distributions have a ways to go before they understand the needs of the end user instead of the usual geek/server crowd. After a bit of setup, she was playing Eric's Ultimate Solitaire, using KICQ, getting email through XcMail, dialing out through Kppp and
getting online to her favorite boards to post with Netscape.
It is not the individual pieces that are proprietary. I was under the impression and you seem to more about it than I do that only Apple could get the G3 and G4 series of processors and I thought the old clone makers were not getting the the inside specs to make the system 100% compatible. I thought this was the reason that people are not making Mac clones anymore (along with the fact that they can no longer bundle a pre-installed OS with the thing). If this is not the case, please correct me further. I actually enjoy gaining new information as opposed to being one of those people that only wants to hear what they already know. That is why many of my comments were posed as questions.
I also never asserted that the Mac OS X was NOT the better mousetrap. The deal was that I was asserting that we in the Open Source community could take the big leap inspired by the new OS to think out of the box and build something revolutionary as opposed to just something that does what the current range of OS GUI interfaces do.
Ever since the NextStep buyout by Apple this has seemed like a good idea. The idea of an all-encompassing friendly GUI wrapped around an industrial based Unixed system. But why has it taken so long? The work needed to make it backwards compatible was done a looong time ago. Apple has needed a new OS for longer than I care to go into. So, why has it taken Apple so long to pick up the ball and really run with it?
Listen, I understand that the corporate emphasis has been on the success of making cute little boxes and all. I know that and it works for them. Yet, it is amazing that someone particularily in our own Open Source community hasn't taken the clue and built an easy to use windowing interface for the end-user and left the procrastinating Apple in the dust. As long as there is a terminal and GNU commands to be taken and Xfree86 for those who want to go bare-bones then the geeks out there will be happy. Apple for once has the right idea. Make the system easy to use for the end luser and built on top of a system made to take loads of punishment.
If they were not so tightly tied to their proprietary hardware I would say that Apple had a chance of taking some steam out of the Linux community. However, because they are so stingy with their technology they have no chance of that even if they give part of the OS away. I hope that the UI gives the GNOME and KDE folks some ideas.
I hope even harder that they will take the hint and try to move the interface forward as opposed to just copying the coolest ideas from this or that other OS. Our whole movement has been about making the better mousetrap. Maybe it is time to do one-upmanship on the Apple folks and reinvent the mousetrap all together.
A few people have commented on the fact that the book is dated. Others have already pointed out that most Science Fiction points out situations in today's society more than it points to the future.
I will take it one step further. Most of the great science fiction written today or yesterday reflects a vision of the time the people lived more than it embodies a visionaries gaze into the future. Yet, it is the ability to speak to themes that are universal that keep drawing people back to works by Bradbury or even Asimov. The trick is therefore to speak about the situation of your world today through an inherently dated vision of the future that speaks to a theme that never ceases to touch people who care enough to pick up a book.
Personally, I thought Philip K. Dick (Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?) had a prose style that was a good mix of the soft style of writing that Bradbury was famous for and the hard more technical style of Bradbury. Bradbury had a wonderful imagination for the results and consequences of the possible future that lay ahead from the perspective of his world. That is what makes him special.