Apple IIe to Vectrex to the nearly unplayable BattleMech (due to clipping of really big triangles) to Rise of the Triad (woof.. woof!) to Doom to Quake I to Everquest to Everquest 2/Wow. Once it the EQ/Wow/Call of Duty level, the last 2% isn't near as important to me.
Exactly. If you come from a position of having devoted hundreds of hours to games such as Bubble Bobble, Pirates!, Defender of the Crown etc. in the C64 and XT days, the last 2% of graphical improvement is hardly detectable. Only recently was I able to play such classics as Deus Ex and System Shock 2, for example. The graphics were still brilliant compared to what I remember from my Quake I days.
The difference is the story and gameplay. A game with superior gameplay from yesteryear is still far more enjoyable than a crap game released yesterday with superior graphics. And there is such a catalog of great games with great gameplay and story from the last 15 years or so compared with my available free time that I'm still working my way through the better games ever created. Maybe one of these days I'll get to Bioshock or Half Life 2. (I like the single player FPS genre because once I have devoted my 20+ hours to the game, I don't have a pressing need to complete one more level, unlike online multiplayer where there is an infinite amount of novel engrossing gameplay.)
In this way, it's no different to movies. The top 100 on imdb (and in your favorite genres) will still be more enjoyable and engrossing than 99.999% of summer blockbusters with great special effects. The occasional genuinely great summer blockbuster with great special effects (e.g. Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Terminator II in its time) will eventually bubble up on those lists anyway. At which point I'll see them.
Show me the female equivalents of an Euler, Pascal, Leibnitz, Newton, Laplace, Riemann, Fourier, Gauss, Euclid, Archimedes, Poincare, Lagrange, or this article is only so much Dvorakian handwaving crap.
I've actually never seen a co-worker use one of the books either.
I find a book can be helpful when I'm getting a general overview of a complex topic. You can lay in bed (or on the floor) and read, which is harder to do with google. I found it difficult to grok how to design database tables for example, without sitting down, reading and thinking. And falling asleep, and getting up and doing it all over. It's a lot harder to learn databases than say, learn enough Perl to do something useful. Hence why the only computer books I have ever bought (outside of class) have been database books. And they are not sitting prominently on some bookshelf, they are scattered around the house or workplace somewhere.
Of course, once you are familiar with the layout of the book it is indeed quicker to go to where you know the answer is than use google, which is why the book still has use.
One last thought for all of you folks who have a ton of $ITEM in your house.
The last time I threw out $ITEM I ended up needing it later at more time and expense than I wanted. Meanwhile it costs nothing to sit in a box somewhere. It may as well sit there as in a landfill.
Hoarding gets a bad rap. The hoarding instinct is well honed over the centuries from when all the energy we could use was energy that crops could absorb in a year from the sun (e.g. human or literal horse power). Making stuff was expensive. Now every year we use the energy that was socked away in peat bogs over millions of years. This won't last. $ITEM won't always be easily and cheaply manufactured.
Of course, if you are sure you aren't going to use it, it's bulky, price >> postage and it is depreciating rapidly, ebay is always a good option.
The reason why the quants ignore Black Swan events is that they are not financially impacted by them to any real extent. They make their living from making small amounts of money using lots and lots of leverage. But I prefer Buffett's metaphor for this sort of practice: picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer.
As long as "quants" can pick up "nickels" in front of a bulldozer for a few years, they can retire and never have to work again, even if their parent companies (and the companies they borrow from) go bankrupt. Those "nickels" are many millions, their percentage of those "nickels" are still high enough to retire on. Of course, they risk billions in the process.
I suspect the only way to really curb the practice would be to either limit amounts of leverage or cause complete bankruptcy/imprisonment/physical harm somehow to those responsible when the bulldozer (the black swan) eventually comes along. Of course, these laws can't really be applied to those responsible for the GFC. Laws can and probably will be created, and then after a few generations those laws will be repealed as the creation of a few old fuddy duddies who didn't understand whatever "new economy" comes along, and the cycle will repeat.
I'd also call it an improvement. Cheap whoring is what it is. It teaches a person that truth doesn't come gift wrapped. From my perspective the alternative - journalists pretending that they are some sort of magical, objective, opinionless fourth estate - always made me want to gag.
I can sympathize with the Boy Scouts of America - Manson and Rader are terrible, horrible examples. If they had been just that little bit more prepared, they wouldn't be in jail, would they?
If all you have is a Commodore and you have to send commands to the drive to initialize the hardware, and you have to poke values in order to create a little assembly routine or change colors, it just makes it so much more *real*, and there's a lot less to explain of what's going on in the background. Since everything is an extrapolation of that pattern of thought anyway, I think it's better to start the understanding at that level.
I also like the idea of using that old hardware, or at least, starting on using something where you can easily prod at the "guts" of the device. It might be just as easy to whack some version of Linux or BSD on an old PC. But I think it's useful to get them exposed to the idea that there is more than one way to do things. An old Mac, an old Commodore, Linux, a Dos box... maybe even Windows.
The biggest asset a kid has is lots of time and a clean slate (they don't come pre-addicted to windows). The biggest danger is that they will get sucked into something very addictive and never be able to addict themselves to something that will earn themselves a living. I think it would be to their advantage to feel most at home with the Unix paradigm - I think feeling comfortable with vim, scripting, bash etc. will be the most useful computing tools they could learn. You can make them feel at home with powerful tools without them resenting you for making them endure a steeper learning curve. When they finally encounter the easy to learn but weak alternatives (e.g. notepad.exe), they will wonder why anyone uses such junk and thank you for giving them such advantages. They will also learn that free is just as often better than "paid for", however, it's harder to find (which isn't a disadvantage if you are smart enough to do your research.
I've thought about teaching them Dvorak, but doubt the benefits (RSI reduction, slight increase in speed) outweigh the costs (e.g. having to use other people's computers and experiencing difficulty, or even if you are coding for QWERTY users, understanding what a convenient shortcut key is).
Another thing of benefit would be to encourage them to join some sort of FOSS project and progress through the ranks of bug tester, patch submitter and eventually developer. Maybe a game project of some description.
But I agree with you, I also want to also teach them not to be scared of interacting with the actual hardware when necessary. A lot of these things (including the actual electronics) aren't intrinsically hard, they just require some specialized knowledge.
The key I think is to figure out what they might or are interested in, and use that to your advantage - it gives them a reason to learn. At the end of the day, you want them to be as capable as possible, for as little cost and time as possible, teaching them how to teach themselves... while not getting caught in the trap of heading down paths that give other entities income streams at your expense - e.g. really easy to use stuff that is not powerful and costs money (or has to be stolen), or convincingly marketed stuff that is no better than the free alternative. I also would prefer for them to get addicted to something that will provide them an income stream without getting addicted to things that will only eat their time or cost them money. Games have some use (e.g. RTS games have taught me to pit strength against weakness, and adapt to your problem), but I don't want to create a WoW addict for example.
Yes, I split my sides at "Double Hobbit" and couldn't stop after that.
And not just sad, it's really weird how fun/addictive it is. For some reason I just don't want to shut it off. It's sitting there, accumulating gibberish terms generated from some sort of random phrase generator, gaining levels and abilities that have no bearing on anything at all, not even in the game (other than strength, which increases "encumbrance"), and I'm not even in control of it (which somehow appeals to my sense of laziness, that it's doing "work" for nothing). It's not even properly a game, for crying out loud! I mean, all you do is roll for stats and start the game, sit back and relax!
But maybe understanding the addiction is key to ending the addiction. It's just dumb, really, so why do it if it's impacting negatively on your life?
Likewise, pro-Microsoft posts are commonly modded up. Due in part to the over-demonization of the company, a calm post explaining that the company isn't as bad as everyone thinks will frequently be modded up as a voice of reason. Even posts that extol the virtues of Microsoft (great software) and Bill Gates (worldwide philanthropy), while seemingly over the top, will get positive modification.
No doubt there are some people who genuinely think that and will mod accordingly. While I didn't have an account on slashdot at the time, I even used to be one of them. And you are certainly right, many forums have elements designed to increase addiction, slashdot included.
However, astroturfing has to be one of the best bang/back methods of advertising/publicity/damage control available to any company and your post ignores this rather obvious explanation for the modification status/presence of many posts on here.
Why would we want a colony on Mars or the Moon? No magnetic shield makes radiation very hazardous. We can't live there.
Radiation pretty much mandates living under the surface of the moon or mars, and routing sunlight collected from mirrors on the surface to plants grown under the surface. It necessitates doing whatever needs to be done on the surface be done with robots instead of humans. With enough dedication, I suspect that those problems could be solved. The most pertinent reason to colonize is that if there is a cataclysm of some kind on earth, humanity needs a remote backup otherwise every other activity we do is for naught.
To my mind, the keys to developing such a colony are:
1. Developing a robust closed circuit ecosystem capable of sustaining humans. Closed circuit because transporting matter through space is prohibitively expensive and continuously so; R&D to develop the closed circuit ecosystem (that needs no continuous transport of matter from earth to the colony) is very hard but only needs to be done once and can be then mass produced.
2. Developing robotic technology to mine and manufacture more mining robots, solar collectors (and eventually, the human habitat) so that the whole system is net energy and (useful) material positive.
3. Project Orion type technology to get the initial building blocks of the system to the destination. There will likely be certain elements that are in short supply on the moon or mars and will need to be transported in bulk until they figure out where to mine them from.
I know that if the colony is staffed with intelligent enough people, they will lay awake at night thinking of ways to make things work better. Smart people with their backs against the wall and their bridges burnt are capable of amazing things.
The whole project may seem impossible, but I don't think we will really know until we put the resources into it that we put into things like occupying Iraq. Creating the technology for closed loop ecosystems would also allow populating deserts on earth, and sustainable human habitat in general.
That's the funniest comment I've read on slashdot since that Antarctic movie script idea. "He must be trying to optimize the variables of his problem." Classic!
Until there is an economic incentive to consume far less, we are not in control of when we make the switch.
I'm not so sure. Personally speaking, the key to being financially independent or even wealthy lies at least partly in efficiency. The typical variable costs in a typical consumer's life have great scope for reduction. Living close to work, bicycling everywhere, wearing extra layers of clothing instead of turning on the heater (in every room), growing your own food if you have the area to do so, and in general, living low on the food chain instead of eating higher order animals... all will cut your expenses to a fraction of the typical. Almost anything I can think of that costs money, I can usually think of a better solution that is cheap or free, it just takes more research. Of course, there is no economic incentive to advertise/brainwash consumers into this behavior. The difference is that because I do so, I can afford to have more kids than those who don't. That behavior will propagate. Stupid consumers will by contrast be "overfished" by corporations into extinction.
In fact, it's the classic commons problem - while it is in the interest of every corporation to kill off the miser who is resistant to their advertising and make sure new generations of brainless consuming idiots come into being, who will provide the resources to do that? It's easier to let another corporation deal with that problem, and just up your sales, advertising and R&D budgets.
Regardless, whether or not global warming is anthropogenically induced is really immaterial to me. Using resources that have taken billions of years to produce in the space of centuries is just really, really, horribly dumb. It's the equivalent of diligently saving a lifetime of income and then converting it all to cash to use to light a fire to warm your house. We may need to use those resources for something actually worthwhile (in the sense of benefiting all future generations), and to get them back will literally take billions of years.
Thanks for pointing this out. While the rest of slashdot is throwing feces back and forth, the information in your mod pointless post will be the main topic of discussion in meetings at Microsoft, guaranteed. If the exponential growth continues, in 2013 Linux will be bigger than Mac. In 2015, it will have dominant market share.
While all exponential growth in history has eventually had limits, this is still worth worrying about for MS because of Network Effect. When things change in the computing world, they change hard and fast. See Lotus 123 and WordPerfect for examples of this.
On another note, while I have grown to love Linux, and especially Ubuntu, making it have higher mind or marketshare has become less important for me. Now I have all my hardware working and almost all the software I want working with it, I am happy. I don't need higher marketshare to pressure companies to produce drivers or more software than I already have. All that I would like is that the support not to diminish. Ironically, these facts will probably make Ubuntu and Linux in general more popular. I suspect that we will look back at these years as a golden age before the downside of popularity starts to make the Linux experience less fun or useful.
For me, Ubuntu has been a great product. I can access whatever software I want through the repos, and they have not been infected with malware. In XP the typical search for new software will over time, result in a compromised machine. Ubuntu just keeps working reliably, with little in the way of maintenance.
Often it is said that Linux is an OS for developers. But maybe it works the other way too, maybe it turns one into a developer if one has the ability.
It has turned me into more of a developer than I could be in Windows, because everything is so accessible. You can easily tinker, hack (in the original sense) and create, so you do. As you get more comfortable with tinkering and new projects are less intimidating, a positive feedback loop develops as you both create more and appreciate/love the environment that allows you to do this. And when I talk about hacking/tinkering/creating, I'm talking specifically about useful stuff that saves me time or gives me abilities I didn't have before, not "tinkering with the OS" just to mitigate its deficiencies.
I think the type of kids who used to tinker with C64s or DOS (I used to be one) will really appreciate this type of power. It's the accessibility. The bar is lowered: 1. You can google any info you want for free, and it's almost ALWAYS there, usually in a question and answer format, that can be copied and pasted if desired. So, so easy. And if you desire manuals, they are there as well. So you don't need specialized training, if you are even mildly autodidactically inclined. 2. Most of the tools are there right on your system, and the rest needing only synaptic or apt-get to access. You've got a useful terminal and scripting environment already set up, along with a great set of text editors. 3. Costs are lowered. A spare computer is either free or almost free. 4. Community. There are always people willing to help.
Those kids have power. They will be the same kids shaping the environment of their workplace, their business, their family, their friends in years to come.
What is strange is that this is the first post I've read of yours that makes sense. Usually you would poke fun at your post as a "conspiracy theory".
The only way I can make sense of it is as follows: 1. GFC hits. 2. Several rich neocons living in New York are particularly hard hit, and have to cut costs. 3. Folks in 2. stop funding you for proselytizing the party line, both on slashdot and (as they would figure from your posting history) in your movie. 4. This post was a warning to them.... 5. You go back to flipping burgers because folks in 2 realize your slashdot addiction will keep you posting, and you have enough common cause with them (fear of "racist", gun bearing "yokels" who you well know never would have voted for the immigration laws that allowed you to migrate to the US in the first place, but weren't given the option) that you will continue posting what they want anyway. (See your next post). 6. Duke Nukem Forever is released. 7. World peace breaks out. 8. Cure for cancer discovered. 9. Bangamovie enters post-production.
It was. That's why the Germans went around it (maginot line) instead of through it.:)
Which makes me think: as long as the average stupid user is an integral component of the average system, which is also connected to the internet... it matters not if your OS is the security equivalent of the Maginot line.
Access is as much a database as a go-cart is a race car (which is to say, kinda-sorta, but not really).
Access is more like a race car body (Forms and Reports generation) that comes with a free go-cart engine (Jet) that you can drop in if you don't know any better. As a RAD tool Access is still better than equivalent FOSS offerings, unfortunately. The gap is closing.
I dunno about that. I'm pretty sure that if your only tool is a hammer, all of your problems start looking like nails . . . allowing the hammer to be "applied" to every application . ..
Hammers are a bit too technical for me. Is there an excel function that does the same thing?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. If you come from a position of having devoted hundreds of hours to games such as Bubble Bobble, Pirates!, Defender of the Crown etc. in the C64 and XT days, the last 2% of graphical improvement is hardly detectable. Only recently was I able to play such classics as Deus Ex and System Shock 2, for example. The graphics were still brilliant compared to what I remember from my Quake I days.
The difference is the story and gameplay. A game with superior gameplay from yesteryear is still far more enjoyable than a crap game released yesterday with superior graphics. And there is such a catalog of great games with great gameplay and story from the last 15 years or so compared with my available free time that I'm still working my way through the better games ever created. Maybe one of these days I'll get to Bioshock or Half Life 2. (I like the single player FPS genre because once I have devoted my 20+ hours to the game, I don't have a pressing need to complete one more level, unlike online multiplayer where there is an infinite amount of novel engrossing gameplay.)
In this way, it's no different to movies. The top 100 on imdb (and in your favorite genres) will still be more enjoyable and engrossing than 99.999% of summer blockbusters with great special effects. The occasional genuinely great summer blockbuster with great special effects (e.g. Alien, Aliens, Terminator, Terminator II in its time) will eventually bubble up on those lists anyway. At which point I'll see them.
Show me the female equivalents of an Euler, Pascal, Leibnitz, Newton, Laplace, Riemann, Fourier, Gauss, Euclid, Archimedes, Poincare, Lagrange, or this article is only so much Dvorakian handwaving crap.
I find a book can be helpful when I'm getting a general overview of a complex topic. You can lay in bed (or on the floor) and read, which is harder to do with google. I found it difficult to grok how to design database tables for example, without sitting down, reading and thinking. And falling asleep, and getting up and doing it all over. It's a lot harder to learn databases than say, learn enough Perl to do something useful. Hence why the only computer books I have ever bought (outside of class) have been database books. And they are not sitting prominently on some bookshelf, they are scattered around the house or workplace somewhere.
Of course, once you are familiar with the layout of the book it is indeed quicker to go to where you know the answer is than use google, which is why the book still has use.
The last time I threw out $ITEM I ended up needing it later at more time and expense than I wanted. Meanwhile it costs nothing to sit in a box somewhere. It may as well sit there as in a landfill.
Hoarding gets a bad rap. The hoarding instinct is well honed over the centuries from when all the energy we could use was energy that crops could absorb in a year from the sun (e.g. human or literal horse power). Making stuff was expensive. Now every year we use the energy that was socked away in peat bogs over millions of years. This won't last. $ITEM won't always be easily and cheaply manufactured.
Of course, if you are sure you aren't going to use it, it's bulky, price >> postage and it is depreciating rapidly, ebay is always a good option.
Don't think Microsoft haven't considered it. It either won't work or it's not cost effective.
The reason why the quants ignore Black Swan events is that they are not financially impacted by them to any real extent. They make their living from making small amounts of money using lots and lots of leverage. But I prefer Buffett's metaphor for this sort of practice: picking up nickels in front of a bulldozer.
As long as "quants" can pick up "nickels" in front of a bulldozer for a few years, they can retire and never have to work again, even if their parent companies (and the companies they borrow from) go bankrupt. Those "nickels" are many millions, their percentage of those "nickels" are still high enough to retire on. Of course, they risk billions in the process.
I suspect the only way to really curb the practice would be to either limit amounts of leverage or cause complete bankruptcy/imprisonment/physical harm somehow to those responsible when the bulldozer (the black swan) eventually comes along. Of course, these laws can't really be applied to those responsible for the GFC. Laws can and probably will be created, and then after a few generations those laws will be repealed as the creation of a few old fuddy duddies who didn't understand whatever "new economy" comes along, and the cycle will repeat.
I'd also call it an improvement. Cheap whoring is what it is. It teaches a person that truth doesn't come gift wrapped. From my perspective the alternative - journalists pretending that they are some sort of magical, objective, opinionless fourth estate - always made me want to gag.
I can sympathize with the Boy Scouts of America - Manson and Rader are terrible, horrible examples. If they had been just that little bit more prepared, they wouldn't be in jail, would they?
I also like the idea of using that old hardware, or at least, starting on using something where you can easily prod at the "guts" of the device. It might be just as easy to whack some version of Linux or BSD on an old PC. But I think it's useful to get them exposed to the idea that there is more than one way to do things. An old Mac, an old Commodore, Linux, a Dos box... maybe even Windows.
The biggest asset a kid has is lots of time and a clean slate (they don't come pre-addicted to windows). The biggest danger is that they will get sucked into something very addictive and never be able to addict themselves to something that will earn themselves a living. I think it would be to their advantage to feel most at home with the Unix paradigm - I think feeling comfortable with vim, scripting, bash etc. will be the most useful computing tools they could learn. You can make them feel at home with powerful tools without them resenting you for making them endure a steeper learning curve. When they finally encounter the easy to learn but weak alternatives (e.g. notepad.exe), they will wonder why anyone uses such junk and thank you for giving them such advantages. They will also learn that free is just as often better than "paid for", however, it's harder to find (which isn't a disadvantage if you are smart enough to do your research.
I've thought about teaching them Dvorak, but doubt the benefits (RSI reduction, slight increase in speed) outweigh the costs (e.g. having to use other people's computers and experiencing difficulty, or even if you are coding for QWERTY users, understanding what a convenient shortcut key is).
Another thing of benefit would be to encourage them to join some sort of FOSS project and progress through the ranks of bug tester, patch submitter and eventually developer. Maybe a game project of some description.
But I agree with you, I also want to also teach them not to be scared of interacting with the actual hardware when necessary. A lot of these things (including the actual electronics) aren't intrinsically hard, they just require some specialized knowledge.
The key I think is to figure out what they might or are interested in, and use that to your advantage - it gives them a reason to learn. At the end of the day, you want them to be as capable as possible, for as little cost and time as possible, teaching them how to teach themselves... while not getting caught in the trap of heading down paths that give other entities income streams at your expense - e.g. really easy to use stuff that is not powerful and costs money (or has to be stolen), or convincingly marketed stuff that is no better than the free alternative. I also would prefer for them to get addicted to something that will provide them an income stream without getting addicted to things that will only eat their time or cost them money. Games have some use (e.g. RTS games have taught me to pit strength against weakness, and adapt to your problem), but I don't want to create a WoW addict for example.
Yes, I split my sides at "Double Hobbit" and couldn't stop after that.
And not just sad, it's really weird how fun/addictive it is. For some reason I just don't want to shut it off. It's sitting there, accumulating gibberish terms generated from some sort of random phrase generator, gaining levels and abilities that have no bearing on anything at all, not even in the game (other than strength, which increases "encumbrance"), and I'm not even in control of it (which somehow appeals to my sense of laziness, that it's doing "work" for nothing). It's not even properly a game, for crying out loud! I mean, all you do is roll for stats and start the game, sit back and relax!
But maybe understanding the addiction is key to ending the addiction. It's just dumb, really, so why do it if it's impacting negatively on your life?
No doubt there are some people who genuinely think that and will mod accordingly. While I didn't have an account on slashdot at the time, I even used to be one of them. And you are certainly right, many forums have elements designed to increase addiction, slashdot included.
However, astroturfing has to be one of the best bang/back methods of advertising/publicity/damage control available to any company and your post ignores this rather obvious explanation for the modification status/presence of many posts on here.
http://www.progressquest.com/
The character creation screen alone is worth the download. I don't think I've laughed that hard since Airplane.
(And it's in the Ubuntu repositories. You gotta love Ubuntu.)
Radiation pretty much mandates living under the surface of the moon or mars, and routing sunlight collected from mirrors on the surface to plants grown under the surface. It necessitates doing whatever needs to be done on the surface be done with robots instead of humans. With enough dedication, I suspect that those problems could be solved. The most pertinent reason to colonize is that if there is a cataclysm of some kind on earth, humanity needs a remote backup otherwise every other activity we do is for naught.
To my mind, the keys to developing such a colony are:
1. Developing a robust closed circuit ecosystem capable of sustaining humans. Closed circuit because transporting matter through space is prohibitively expensive and continuously so; R&D to develop the closed circuit ecosystem (that needs no continuous transport of matter from earth to the colony) is very hard but only needs to be done once and can be then mass produced.
2. Developing robotic technology to mine and manufacture more mining robots, solar collectors (and eventually, the human habitat) so that the whole system is net energy and (useful) material positive.
3. Project Orion type technology to get the initial building blocks of the system to the destination. There will likely be certain elements that are in short supply on the moon or mars and will need to be transported in bulk until they figure out where to mine them from.
I know that if the colony is staffed with intelligent enough people, they will lay awake at night thinking of ways to make things work better. Smart people with their backs against the wall and their bridges burnt are capable of amazing things.
The whole project may seem impossible, but I don't think we will really know until we put the resources into it that we put into things like occupying Iraq. Creating the technology for closed loop ecosystems would also allow populating deserts on earth, and sustainable human habitat in general.
That's the funniest comment I've read on slashdot since that Antarctic movie script idea. "He must be trying to optimize the variables of his problem." Classic!
It had to be said.
I'm not so sure. Personally speaking, the key to being financially independent or even wealthy lies at least partly in efficiency. The typical variable costs in a typical consumer's life have great scope for reduction. Living close to work, bicycling everywhere, wearing extra layers of clothing instead of turning on the heater (in every room), growing your own food if you have the area to do so, and in general, living low on the food chain instead of eating higher order animals... all will cut your expenses to a fraction of the typical. Almost anything I can think of that costs money, I can usually think of a better solution that is cheap or free, it just takes more research. Of course, there is no economic incentive to advertise/brainwash consumers into this behavior. The difference is that because I do so, I can afford to have more kids than those who don't. That behavior will propagate. Stupid consumers will by contrast be "overfished" by corporations into extinction.
In fact, it's the classic commons problem - while it is in the interest of every corporation to kill off the miser who is resistant to their advertising and make sure new generations of brainless consuming idiots come into being, who will provide the resources to do that? It's easier to let another corporation deal with that problem, and just up your sales, advertising and R&D budgets.
Regardless, whether or not global warming is anthropogenically induced is really immaterial to me. Using resources that have taken billions of years to produce in the space of centuries is just really, really, horribly dumb. It's the equivalent of diligently saving a lifetime of income and then converting it all to cash to use to light a fire to warm your house. We may need to use those resources for something actually worthwhile (in the sense of benefiting all future generations), and to get them back will literally take billions of years.
Get a bag of crystalline kitty litter. Cut the top off the bag. Place in cupboard or box with your HDDs. Close cupboard or box. Problem solved.
These seats are makin' me itchy, man. What are they made out of, cactus?
Thanks for pointing this out. While the rest of slashdot is throwing feces back and forth, the information in your mod pointless post will be the main topic of discussion in meetings at Microsoft, guaranteed. If the exponential growth continues, in 2013 Linux will be bigger than Mac. In 2015, it will have dominant market share.
While all exponential growth in history has eventually had limits, this is still worth worrying about for MS because of Network Effect. When things change in the computing world, they change hard and fast. See Lotus 123 and WordPerfect for examples of this.
On another note, while I have grown to love Linux, and especially Ubuntu, making it have higher mind or marketshare has become less important for me. Now I have all my hardware working and almost all the software I want working with it, I am happy. I don't need higher marketshare to pressure companies to produce drivers or more software than I already have. All that I would like is that the support not to diminish. Ironically, these facts will probably make Ubuntu and Linux in general more popular. I suspect that we will look back at these years as a golden age before the downside of popularity starts to make the Linux experience less fun or useful.
For me, Ubuntu has been a great product. I can access whatever software I want through the repos, and they have not been infected with malware. In XP the typical search for new software will over time, result in a compromised machine. Ubuntu just keeps working reliably, with little in the way of maintenance.
Often it is said that Linux is an OS for developers. But maybe it works the other way too, maybe it turns one into a developer if one has the ability.
It has turned me into more of a developer than I could be in Windows, because everything is so accessible. You can easily tinker, hack (in the original sense) and create, so you do. As you get more comfortable with tinkering and new projects are less intimidating, a positive feedback loop develops as you both create more and appreciate/love the environment that allows you to do this. And when I talk about hacking/tinkering/creating, I'm talking specifically about useful stuff that saves me time or gives me abilities I didn't have before, not "tinkering with the OS" just to mitigate its deficiencies.
I think the type of kids who used to tinker with C64s or DOS (I used to be one) will really appreciate this type of power. It's the accessibility. The bar is lowered:
1. You can google any info you want for free, and it's almost ALWAYS there, usually in a question and answer format, that can be copied and pasted if desired. So, so easy. And if you desire manuals, they are there as well. So you don't need specialized training, if you are even mildly autodidactically inclined.
2. Most of the tools are there right on your system, and the rest needing only synaptic or apt-get to access. You've got a useful terminal and scripting environment already set up, along with a great set of text editors.
3. Costs are lowered. A spare computer is either free or almost free.
4. Community. There are always people willing to help.
Those kids have power. They will be the same kids shaping the environment of their workplace, their business, their family, their friends in years to come.
What is strange is that this is the first post I've read of yours that makes sense. Usually you would poke fun at your post as a "conspiracy theory".
The only way I can make sense of it is as follows: ...
1. GFC hits.
2. Several rich neocons living in New York are particularly hard hit, and have to cut costs.
3. Folks in 2. stop funding you for proselytizing the party line, both on slashdot and (as they would figure from your posting history) in your movie.
4. This post was a warning to them.
5. You go back to flipping burgers because folks in 2 realize your slashdot addiction will keep you posting, and you have enough common cause with them (fear of "racist", gun bearing "yokels" who you well know never would have voted for the immigration laws that allowed you to migrate to the US in the first place, but weren't given the option) that you will continue posting what they want anyway. (See your next post).
6. Duke Nukem Forever is released.
7. World peace breaks out.
8. Cure for cancer discovered.
9. Bangamovie enters post-production.
Which makes me think: as long as the average stupid user is an integral component of the average system, which is also connected to the internet... it matters not if your OS is the security equivalent of the Maginot line.
It's a lot easier if what you are competing with requires silicon dioxide to be melted before it can be used, which in turn requires a lot of energy.
I didn't know Fire Island was an archipelago.
Access is more like a race car body (Forms and Reports generation) that comes with a free go-cart engine (Jet) that you can drop in if you don't know any better. As a RAD tool Access is still better than equivalent FOSS offerings, unfortunately. The gap is closing.
Hammers are a bit too technical for me. Is there an excel function that does the same thing?