"In the higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therefore also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the production forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! [Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme"] "
Even if parts of it are cool, the problem with invoking Marxism is the connotation it invokes. It's the same problem that Chomsky has when he advocates anarchy (and he means something else entirely different from smashing and burning things down). For better or worse, words aquire a different meaning due to historic usage, and it's NOT a good idea to associate linux with marxism, simply because the overwhelming majority of readers will misunderstand it. "Socialism" is bad enough as it is. It invokes completely different meanings in Americans as opposed to Europeans and Asians. Far better to pick a different word than one whose meaning has been lost and distorted.
A bigger factor is how long it takes to get a visa, since it determines whether companies want to hire international applicants. Work visas vary a lot from country to country both in terms of time and effort.
Australia - the best anywhere. A company needs to first obtain Pre-Qualified Business Sponsor status (which takes a month), and once they have this, they can hire foreigners easily with a 2 week process per person. Most IT staffing firms have PQBS status, so effectively it takes 2 weeks to get approval for a new employee, and once they have this, the Australian consulate in your country of residence stamps the visa within a day.
The best thing about.au is that it has MANY companies eager to hire international candidates and they know the process.
Canada - Has a "software pilot" program to grant visas rapidly. Like many things in Canada, this works in theory. Very few companies actually hire people on a work visa, and insist on you being a Canadian citizen/immigrant. Most companies are ignorant of the Software Pilot thingie and get scared on hearing the word "visa". To add to the problem, the time required to get the visa varies extremely - if you are residing in Australia, NZ, or South Africa and apply for this visa, it can take 2-3 months. In the US, it takes less than a week (LA consulate).
Combined with the lack of companies willing to hire on a work permit and the erratic time frame, Canada is not a good option.
try positionwatch.com for jobs.
UK - The UK has a long process requiring the employer to place ads, go thru various hurdles, etc. to get approval for the work permit. It takes about 4-6 weeks, and quite a few IT companies do hire on this basis. try jobserve.com for searches.
Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain - These countries have a "Shenghan" visa agreement, which is a business visa and takes about a week. Some companies get people over on this visa and process a long term visa once you're there, as it takes a while.
Of course, this doesn't apply to EU people, who can move freely across most of Europe. Again, jobserve.com for searches.
New Zealand - NZ has a long process which takes a month+ and few companies are willing to do this. Quite a contrast to Australia.
Switzerland - Possibly the hardest country to get a work permit in. Not a part of the EU, somewhat isolated, and it takes 3 months to get a visa. It isn't exactly a big IT hotspot either. However, business apps. software like SAP is a scarce skill.
Keep in mind that many countries have different rules for citizens of certain friendly countries, and may not require a visa at all if you're from there.
Most industry icons tend to favor the status quo. It's very difficult to find anyone in the music industry who openly says they don't give a fuck about people dishing out their MP3s. Just look at the way most music labels try to clamp down instead of trying to understand how the net works.
In that light, what's surprising is how in-tune with the whole trading/dl'ing/mp3 culture bowie is, especially given the fact that he's from an older generation. I know *programmers* his age who have difficulty understanding the whole net culture and dismiss the internet as a fad.
Also, you need to keep in mind that celebrities are not particularly intelligent, smart people. When asked what she wished her computer could do, Jennifer Anniston wanted it to do her workouts. Scary Spice is known to have pointed to a monitor and ask if that was the internet. So....it's all the more admirable that Bowie is in touch with the whole net culture and actually grasps it much more than the industry executives. Even the frigging teletubby people have unleashed lawyers prohibiting fan sites from showing an image of Tinky Winky. Oh well.
Yahoo has been adding a bunch of new features that run only on the Windows and Mac (Yahoo Companion, instant messaging client). Sure, you can get the basic functions with java and html, but I suspect their Windows version has extras that are gradually becoming lockins. I guess this is the MS masterplan - make their platform indispensable, so that even if Yahoo is used on small clients, it can use WinCE or whatever. Basically, Windows everywhere, and they are gradually doing this, mainly coz the alternatives never succeeded (Java isn't hitting the mark anymore.)
Will making a snappy Mozilla convince Yahoo, excite, and all the other big sites to not use Windows add-ons? I don't think so. Everybody caters to the mom-and-pop market, and unless there's a massively good alternative that will make Yahoo re-think its windows focus and follow universal standards, they will continue to do so, because they know 200 million people use Windows, and it's easier to just build on top of it. Mozilla won't make any difference unless it has an impact on the sites catering to the teenagers, home users, kids, etc. etc. It will just become a lynx like geek toy with us whining about how nobody is following standards.
I'm not sure what "power feature" alternative there is, but I doubt mozilla will spread all over to mainstream sites at this point.
BTW, for the netscape crashing on java, I too have java disabled, but an AC provided the answer on an earlier/. post, the star wars ASCIImation thingie:
Java under netscape in stock Redhat 6 (Score:5) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, @11:08AM EDT (#330) I had the problem with netscape crashing. It seems you need to load *all* the font RPMs.
Recently there was an item in the local news about a school using laptops in classrooms. Very wonderstruck reporter talking about how these students of the future are prepared for the hi-tech 21st century (camera pans the classroom, with kids tapping away at keyboards). A lot of the educators and parents are clueless about computers, and assume that if children use PCs a lot, it somehow imparts them skills useful for this technology world we are immersed in.
Used correctly, PCs could be powerful tools, but so far their use in schools seems to be pretty superficial. The general public tends to be filled with indimidation and awe at the sight of a classroom of children sitting in front of PCs. Some months ago the head of a Texas initiative to replace textbooks with laptops was describing with great cluelessness how computers would be cheaper to maintain (haha) and instead of these textbooks which required repeated printing, they could "put cards into the computer, and when they need to study another book, they can put in a different card". Most educators' statements on how they plan to use computers tend to be similarly shallow.
With their Palms, students can graph temperature changes over time in ponds and piles of leaves, at various depths and at different times of day.
OK, so they are learning basic graph theory, ecology and temperature distribution. It's anybody's guess how much time they will spend actually learning these core science concepts and how much time will be spent learning how to use the Palm program to collect date, interface it with a laptop, and figure out how to collate multiple sets of data with another program. The gimmick leaves educators thinking students have mastered "hi-tech" skills and science, while it's likely the science will take a back seat to fiddling and configuring the programs. Great if you want a generation of tech support phone jockeys. Lousy if you want a better understanding of basic science.
When they start using phrases like "the culture of real virtuality", "the space of flows" and "timeless time", my eyes begin to roll over. I think we are getting inundated by shovelfuls of vague mish-mash from futurologists, philosophers, sociologists and other assorted "academic experts" analysing the internet phenomenon. Just read some stories from 4 yrs ago, and these kinds of philosophical musings about "identity in the chat room" start looking incredibly corny and stupid. Internet time doesn't spare journalists and academics, anymore than it does politicians.
OTOH, the mix of silicon valley and politics is something new, and a lot of it was spurred on by the MS trial. (Did you know Bob Dole was hired by Netscape and Sun to lobby against MS?) I don't think it's a good idea that govt. is getting so fascinated by the smell of new money that hi-tech companies are forced to do political lobbying (because their competitors are). Sure, we may cheer the focus against MS because Novell, Sun, etc. bankrolled some senators to twist the screws on Redmond, but ultimately, this is a bad thing. Some day MS will be gone, but the necessity of lobbying will be there.
This is what I was wondering too. For instance, if PC Chips sells 5 million motherboards to Compaq, and ships linux CDs with each one, it doesn't mean Compaq is going to pre-load linux into the boxes it makes.
I guess it makes a big difference to hobbyists and small PC makers, who get an OS for free and thus may be intrigued to try it out. But as far as brand name PC makers are concerned, they will pursue their own marketing strategy, and getting free linux CDs should not make any difference to them. After all, they could easily get their own linux CDs if they wanted to ship linux with their million+ PCs.
A bigger win for Corel, I guess, to increase its marketshare. What distro do they use?
Keep on marking me down as flamebait. I'll never go away!
This is one of the scariest threats I've ever read....appropriate for Halloween, I guess.
After reading your persistent dissenting arguments, I've been swayed by their eloquence and changed my mind entirely. Now I agree with roblimo's article - if there were no internet, you would be spending your time more wisely (it's difficult to think of a more wasteful activity than civil disobedience in protest of a/. post). Your rebellious nature would have been channeled in more fruitful directions. In a sense, you are making a subtle point in an indirect manner, heavy with metaphor - by wasting your time here, you are underscoring how harmful the net can be.
I get it now. Ironic, I suppose, but effective. : /
1) The author takes the thousands of people working on the internet, asks us to remove the internet out of the equation, and then places those people in jobs designing Artesian desert pumps and space engines. In reality, the people working today on the internet would be doing what they were doing 10 years ago, when almost NOBODY was working on the net. They were writing mainframe programs, client/server stuff, graphics design brochures, etc.
This is the same mistake that Cliff Stoll made when he said "If people weren't wasting their time chatting online or reading crappy web sites, they would be planting tomatoes, helping sick children in hospitals, or studying books". In reality, they would be lying on the couch drinking beer and watching the Simpsons.
2) The bigger flaw in the article is that it assumes the net helps only the elite, and then the author gives an example of 2 people in fairly elite positions in an elite society to make his point. However, if he were to look at a lot of the developing world, the net is HUGELY helpful. Governments in Asia are using email to cut down on bureaucracy, human rights dissidents are more effective than ever, to the point where even Singapore has decided not to censor the net as it used to, and because of the net, businesses are booming way, way more rapidly than the glacial pace common in those countries. Just read newspapers from around the world (on the net, of course) for a good insight into this phenomenon.
Saying the internet only helps idiots in elite positions to waste time is a little like a nineteenth century author pondering that electricity is useless for the masses - after all, the people he spoke to in the palace used it to glaze their succulent cakes.
The net is becoming an infrastructure pipeline that will be present everywhere at all times, like electricity. To claim that it won't be useful for the masses at large is losing sight of the fact that it provides what people have aspired to for ages - instant communication.
On every story, I've noticed the first post accumulates a lot of attention, getting the most replies, etc. This is somewhat unfair, because a lot of times it's a fairly uninteresting post or a simple question, but it pulls in all the hits. By first post, I don't mean first chronologically - I have my sort set by highest scores, but even in that case, if there are 5 posts with score 2, the first one has a sort of gravitational effect.
How about periodically shuffling blocks of threads with the same score, to even out the exposure? I don't think it matters if a later thread is placed above an earlier one - I've rarely seen any context flowing chronologically across threads.
I think it won't work, but for a different reason. First of all, a soda is a simple product - there's not much involved in the decision making, and not much in the transaction.
When you add the complexity of raising the price from 50 cents o 62 cents depending on the weather, it becomes an irritant. This is the same factor that comes into play when you pick your long distance carrier - I hate figuring out when a call is expensive, when the special rate applies, etc., so I take a constant rate rather than spend synaptic cycles on this crap.
Now...coke is even cheaper than long distance, and it's a trivial product. If people used to inserting 50 cents stand there pushing the button and then realize it's now 63 cents, it will just irritate the fuck out of them and they'll avoid the unpredictable experience.
It's interesting how various tiny nations have tried to cash in on the net.
Like Nauru, tuvalu is a tiny pacific island, the world's 4th smallest nation. Population : 10,000. When the internet boom began, tuvalu stood to make a fortune on the domain name trade - it's.TV country code was a potential goldmine (www.fox.tv ?)
What happened next was a sad tale of how a pacific nation, remote and unaware of the existence of the internet, was swindled by domain name sharks.
First, webTV grabbed admin. control of the.tv domain from ICANN without informing Tuvalu - further proof that webTV is evil incarnate. Tuvalu's prime minister came to know that something called the "Internet" existed after visiting Australia, and managed to get ICANN to hand them control.
Next, VCs and domain name companies descended on the remote island, courting the confused govt. Ultimately, Tuvalu signed a deal with a Canadian company, which failed to deliver the $50 million it had promised in a year (that's 10 times the country's entire GDP). Sad story.
Now Tuvalu, wiser and bitter, is still looking for a company to administer.TV and raise the nation's fortunes. Being honest religious folks, they don't want to do pr0n, shady financial deals, or anything unethical.
If only they could be like Nauru, with its offshore banking, or Niue, which hosts tons of porn on the.nu (naked in French) domain, or like Tonga, which sells $100.to domains, no questions asked; they could improve their per capita income 10 times, but instead, they are fumbling in confusion.
I felt particularly sorry for them because they are so naive and quaint. It's a custom on the island to apologize if you walk past someone sitting, since the level of your head is higher than theirs. And hey, you can climb on top of the local church if you ask permission from the pastor. They're so naive their web site is a Yahoo Club.
Poor Tuvalu. Maybe the linux community can help them out by hosting their domain thingie and transforming their island.:)
Better also tell scientists who assume the existence of electrons, the mantle of the earth, the proton, the photon, the boson, the positron, the ozone layer, e=mc^2, etc., etc.
All these things are not observable or provable to the naked eye, but they are explained by science nonetheless.
Occasionally we hear the bible thumpers claim that evolution is a theory simply because it's not observable directly. Yet, these folks do undertake PET scans (which use positrons, just as flimsy a theory as evolution).
It's sad that an illiterate crowd that relies on blind belief and has a weak grasp on what science is, struggles to come up with good analogies and consistent "proofs". It's even sadder that they ensure their kids remain illiterate too.
w/m.
PS - your example is particularly bad because string theory is not considered proven yet. It's still in the realm of speculation at this point.
1) People using computers no longer wear long white coats and use punch cards
2) Do not quote IBM magazines. There's a simple reason for this - nobody reads IBM's "official technical magazines", including IBM employees. On the brighter side, everybody recycles them. There's a simple reason for this - they are incredibly boring, especially the cartoons and jokes.
3) Your CEO is a former "cost efficiency expert" and avoids interviews where technical questions could be asked. Replace him with somebody who knows what an "operating system" means. Meanwhile, it may also be a good idea to change your culture, fire the bureaucrats, and put real programmers in charge.
4) You say that
...surveys continue to show that the threat from inside an organization is greater than from outside.)
There's a major threat from within IBM....the threat of boring everyone to tears. Stop this epidemic before it gets serious. Hire people who don't talk like IRS employees.
5) Do not show ads. with people wearing black suits and staring straight ahead. It scares customers away.
6) Don't try to act like a "fun", "hip", "Gen-X" company. It scares customers away.
7) Do not use words like "IT visioneering" and assorted crap.
8) Do not read memos from/. readers. If you do, do NOT reply with a witty response. This is extremely dangerous, and possibly impossible for IBM...
NPR Science Friday had a "Brain Update" show which examines various issues in detail, with Charles Gross on the program (the one who conducted the monkey expt.) Worth listening to, since so many are complaining about lack of info. Here's the link
In the history of the software industry, there are the inventors and there are the businessmen. The inventors are people like :
Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston (Visicalc) Woz (Apple) Bill Gates (BASIC) Bill Joy (vi, BSD, NFS) Douglas Engelbart (mouse, GUI, groupware, live video conferencing, hypertext help) Bob Metcalf (ethernet) Richie, Kernighan, Thompson (C, unix) Seymour Cray (Cray supercomputers) David Patterson (RISC, RAID) Tim Berners-Lee (the world wide web) etc.
Most of them didn't succeed commercially.
And there are the businessmen, the people who are really good at understanding a totally new fertile field and transforming technology into success:
Scott McNealy (sun) Bill Gates (Microsoft) Jim Clark (SGI, netscape) Seymour Cray (Cray supercomputers) Larry Ellison (Oracle) Mitch Kapor (Lotus) Steve Jobs (apple)
These are two very different fields, and very few people are good at both.
Frankly, marca hasn't invented anything, and he was never a business leader. He took an existing product (the web browser) and made it popular thru free downloading. Yes, this was an earthshaking phenomenon in the industry, but he did not invent the browser, nor did he lead Netscape on to a powerful business position. In fact, he was hardly ever in charge of netscape - that was Barksdale.
And if we are to believe news reports, he never coded anything after Netscape took off. Whatever your opinion of Bill Gates is, he still codes, and he has even participated in coding competitions as CEO. It probably explains why he's good at understanding both the technical and business end of things.
I would be surprised if anything radical comes from Andreesen. Heck, I would be surprised if anything radical comes from this new company - web hosting & e-commerce isn't likely to shock anyone at this point.
The gas in beer is carbonated and under pressure. As you can observe, it bubbles out once the can is opened due to reduction in pressure. It would go flat after a while, at which point beer would be like any other liquid, and only its thermal capacity and conductivity would matter.
I must have been asleep for ages, but what exactly is this scavenger hunt? How can it be "live and interactive" if it's a URL with trivia questions?
showing text boxes popping up and mouse arrows clicking won't be too exciting. OTOH, if it will show live people scavenging, who will they be and where will this aforementioned scavenging be carried out?
But I am open-minded enough to see that the serious creationists raise some very scientifically valid points.
No, they don't. Let me explain why - If theory X is wrong, that doesn't prove theory Y is right.
Or specifically, if evolution has drawbacks, that doesn't prove creationism.
Basically, all the "scientifically valid points" of creationism consists of pointing at loopholes in scientific theories, that's pretty much it. Let me explain another fallacy of creationists - you think that because nobody can disprove your theory, it's correct. This is totally stupid
I can claim that the universe was created today at 11 AM by God, with all the fossils, memories and things in motion. There, prove me wrong. Or I can claim that there there is a purple jello ball at the center of Pluto. Nobody can prove me wrong, so it must be right.
Do you understand this? In science, you try to prove something, you don't make a claim and assume it's correct unless someone disproves it.
that anyone with a religious worldview is automatically excluded from consideration
Nobody is excluding anyone based on this. If you have any evidence, submit it to a recognized journal. It gets peer reviewed and published if it's valid. What you are doing is NOT SUBMITTING any evidence and then claiming you're being dismissed. This is a little like throwing your article in your desk drawer and whining that every newspaper is ignoring you.
although science reveals certain truths, our understanding of them is often woefully incomplete
Wait, what are you saying - that religion explains everything?
I get tired of hearing this over and over - of course science is incomplete! Who said science is total and explains every fucking thing that exists? When William Harvey explained the cardiovascular system, it explained just that - it doesn't explain the entire universe and astrophysics. When Dirac explained anti-matter, it explained precisely that - nobody is claiming that it explains everything in existence.
OTOH, religion explains nothing at any level, of any phenomenon. It just puts forth a hypothesis and claims it is correct unless someone disproves it. (Read the purple jello example above for why this is stupid).
I strongly disagree with your assertion that only the quantitative is true. There are many things in life which are demonstrably true but which cannot be quantified, including (but not limited to) all things which have an as-yet-undiscovered scientific explanation.
I didn't say only the quantitative is true - I said a valid theory has to be quantitative. OTOH, vague subjective theories can neither be proved right nor wrong - like your statement above.
Science...attempting to force-fit it is a bit like driving screws with a hammer.
To explain biological phenomena with science is force fitting? Then why do you go to a doctor or dentist? that's all they use.
The only thing science is being fit into is factual phenomena. It's only the religious wackos who think otherwise. Maybe you can correct me...
flood waters went was a prticularly bad choice in light of the fact that I included a link in my original post
Read it. It says that water is seeping into the mantle.
Does this prove the flood? Of course not, but it should make an open-minded person think, at least.
So you're saying it doesn't prove anything. Just wondering...why did you ask me to read it then? Just to bring us all up to date on geophysics?:)
Wooly Mammoth.
PS - I still have to get any evidence or factual stuff. If you give me another link about water movement and ask me to think about how creationism is valid, I'll give you a link about Saturn's movement and ask you to think about Heaven's Gate...
Hmmm...I've never tried northernlight either. BTw, they were profiled in a story as being the search engine which has indexed more of the web than any of the others (altavista was 2nd, I think). Even at that, it was really small, something like 12%.
It makes you wonder why such a big % of the web isn't registered in engines. Don't ppl want visits? Odd.
But here in Australa, the queen has not been thought of as the leader for a rather long time.
She's a ceremonial figure in Canada as well. However, it's rather anachronistic at this end of the century to have a British monarch as the official head of state. I'm not sure why canada and australia don't finally break off and declare themselves republics. Even Malta did that, and I can't see anybody in Australia rioting in the streets because they can't salute their queen.
In fact, most nations of the commonwealth are independent nations which don't recognize the queen as their official head of state. You can still be a member for the sporting events and the govt. summits which jointly waste everyone's money.
Slashdot Mirror
While they may not really be communist, they'd like to think they are.
:)
No, they'd like OTHERS to think they are.
w/m
The original quote:
o rding.htm
"In the higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therefore also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the production forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!
[Marx, "Critique of the Gotha Programme"] "
http://www.pg.net/users/c/charconet/to_each_acc
Even if parts of it are cool, the problem with invoking Marxism is the connotation it invokes. It's the same problem that Chomsky has when he advocates anarchy (and he means something else entirely different from smashing and burning things down). For better or worse, words aquire a different meaning due to historic usage, and it's NOT a good idea to associate linux with marxism, simply because the overwhelming majority of readers will misunderstand it. "Socialism" is bad enough as it is. It invokes completely different meanings in Americans as opposed to Europeans and Asians. Far better to pick a different word than one whose meaning has been lost and distorted.
w/m
A bigger factor is how long it takes to get a visa, since it determines whether companies want to hire international applicants. Work visas vary a lot from country to country both in terms of time and effort.
.au is that it has MANY companies eager to hire international candidates and they know the process.
Australia - the best anywhere. A company needs to first obtain Pre-Qualified Business Sponsor status (which takes a month), and once they have this, they can hire foreigners easily with a 2 week process per person. Most IT staffing firms have PQBS status, so effectively it takes 2 weeks to get approval for a new employee, and once they have this, the Australian consulate in your country of residence stamps the visa within a day.
The best thing about
http://www.zdnet.com.au/jobs/
http://www.jobnet.com.au/
http://employment.byron.com.au/
Canada - Has a "software pilot" program to grant visas rapidly. Like many things in Canada, this works in theory. Very few companies actually hire people on a work visa, and insist on you being a Canadian citizen/immigrant. Most companies are ignorant of the Software Pilot thingie and get scared on hearing the word "visa". To add to the problem, the time required to get the visa varies extremely - if you are residing in Australia, NZ, or South Africa and apply for this visa, it can take 2-3 months. In the US, it takes less than a week (LA consulate).
Combined with the lack of companies willing to hire on a work permit and the erratic time frame, Canada is not a good option.
try positionwatch.com for jobs.
UK - The UK has a long process requiring the employer to place ads, go thru various hurdles, etc. to get approval for the work permit. It takes about 4-6 weeks, and quite a few IT companies do hire on this basis. try jobserve.com for searches.
Netherlands, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Spain - These countries have a "Shenghan" visa agreement, which is a business visa and takes about a week. Some companies get people over on this visa and process a long term visa once you're there, as it takes a while.
Of course, this doesn't apply to EU people, who can move freely across most of Europe. Again, jobserve.com for searches.
New Zealand - NZ has a long process which takes a month+ and few companies are willing to do this. Quite a contrast to Australia.
Switzerland - Possibly the hardest country to get a work permit in. Not a part of the EU, somewhat isolated, and it takes 3 months to get a visa. It isn't exactly a big IT hotspot either. However, business apps. software like SAP is a scarce skill.
Keep in mind that many countries have different rules for citizens of certain friendly countries, and may not require a visa at all if you're from there.
Well, hope that helps.
w/m
Most industry icons tend to favor the status quo. It's very difficult to find anyone in the music industry who openly says they don't give a fuck about people dishing out their MP3s. Just look at the way most music labels try to clamp down instead of trying to understand how the net works.
In that light, what's surprising is how in-tune with the whole trading/dl'ing/mp3 culture bowie is, especially given the fact that he's from an older generation. I know *programmers* his age who have difficulty understanding the whole net culture and dismiss the internet as a fad.
Also, you need to keep in mind that celebrities are not particularly intelligent, smart people. When asked what she wished her computer could do, Jennifer Anniston wanted it to do her workouts. Scary Spice is known to have pointed to a monitor and ask if that was the internet. So....it's all the more admirable that Bowie is in touch with the whole net culture and actually grasps it much more than the industry executives. Even the frigging teletubby people have unleashed lawyers prohibiting fan sites from showing an image of Tinky Winky. Oh well.
w/m.
Yahoo has been adding a bunch of new features that run only on the Windows and Mac (Yahoo Companion, instant messaging client). Sure, you can get the basic functions with java and html, but I suspect their Windows version has extras that are gradually becoming lockins. I guess this is the MS masterplan - make their platform indispensable, so that even if Yahoo is used on small clients, it can use WinCE or whatever. Basically, Windows everywhere, and they are gradually doing this, mainly coz the alternatives never succeeded (Java isn't hitting the mark anymore.)
/. post, the star wars ASCIImation thingie:
h tml
Will making a snappy Mozilla convince Yahoo, excite, and all the other big sites to not use Windows add-ons? I don't think so. Everybody caters to the mom-and-pop market, and unless there's a massively good alternative that will make Yahoo re-think its windows focus and follow universal standards, they will continue to do so, because they know 200 million people use Windows, and it's easier to just build on top of it. Mozilla won't make any difference unless it has an impact on the sites catering to the teenagers, home users, kids, etc. etc. It will just become a lynx like geek toy with us whining about how nobody is following standards.
I'm not sure what "power feature" alternative there is, but I doubt mozilla will spread all over to mainstream sites at this point.
BTW, for the netscape crashing on java, I too have java disabled, but an AC provided the answer on an earlier
Java under netscape in stock Redhat 6 (Score:5)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 22, @11:08AM EDT (#330)
I had the problem with netscape crashing. It seems you need to load *all* the font RPMs.
rpm -i XFree86-100dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-75dpi-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-100dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-75dpi-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-2-Type1-fonts-1.0-8.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-100dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-ISO8859-9-75dpi-fonts-2.1.2-9.noarch.rpm
rpm -i XFree86-cyrillic-fonts-3.3.3.1-49.i386.rpm
rpm -i chkfontpath-1.4.1-1.i386.rpm
rpm -i ghostscript-fonts-5.10-3.noarch.rpm
[
hope this helps
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/05/22/1341217.s
w/m
Has anyone tried emacspeak? I've read a bit about it and it seems pretty cool (esp. since it was developed by a blind Unix programmer).
Here's a scientific american story which I felt was neat. And a linux HOWTO. And a DDJ article on the design
I always felt this was a very underrated tool.
w/m
Recently there was an item in the local news about a school using laptops in classrooms. Very wonderstruck reporter talking about how these students of the future are prepared for the hi-tech 21st century (camera pans the classroom, with kids tapping away at keyboards). A lot of the educators and parents are clueless about computers, and assume that if children use PCs a lot, it somehow imparts them skills useful for this technology world we are immersed in.
Used correctly, PCs could be powerful tools, but so far their use in schools seems to be pretty superficial. The general public tends to be filled with indimidation and awe at the sight of a classroom of children sitting in front of PCs. Some months ago the head of a Texas initiative to replace textbooks with laptops was describing with great cluelessness how computers would be cheaper to maintain (haha) and instead of these textbooks which required repeated printing, they could "put cards into the computer, and when they need to study another book, they can put in a different card". Most educators' statements on how they plan to use computers tend to be similarly shallow.
With their Palms, students can graph temperature changes over
time in ponds and piles of leaves, at various depths and at different
times of day.
OK, so they are learning basic graph theory, ecology and temperature distribution. It's anybody's guess how much time they will spend actually learning these core science concepts and how much time will be spent learning how to use the Palm program to collect date, interface it with a laptop, and figure out how to collate multiple sets of data with another program. The gimmick leaves educators thinking students have mastered "hi-tech" skills and science, while it's likely the science will take a back seat to fiddling and configuring the programs. Great if you want a generation of tech support phone jockeys. Lousy if you want a better understanding of basic science.
w/m
When they start using phrases like "the culture of real virtuality", "the space of flows" and "timeless time", my eyes begin to roll over. I think we are getting inundated by shovelfuls of vague mish-mash from futurologists, philosophers, sociologists and other assorted "academic experts" analysing the internet phenomenon. Just read some stories from 4 yrs ago, and these kinds of philosophical musings about "identity in the chat room" start looking incredibly corny and stupid. Internet time doesn't spare journalists and academics, anymore than it does politicians.
OTOH, the mix of silicon valley and politics is something new, and a lot of it was spurred on by the MS trial. (Did you know Bob Dole was hired by Netscape and Sun to lobby against MS?) I don't think it's a good idea that govt. is getting so fascinated by the smell of new money that hi-tech companies are forced to do political lobbying (because their competitors are). Sure, we may cheer the focus against MS because Novell, Sun, etc. bankrolled some senators to twist the screws on Redmond, but ultimately, this is a bad thing. Some day MS will be gone, but the necessity of lobbying will be there.
w/m.
This is what I was wondering too. For instance, if PC Chips sells 5 million motherboards to Compaq, and ships linux CDs with each one, it doesn't mean Compaq is going to pre-load linux into the boxes it makes.
I guess it makes a big difference to hobbyists and small PC makers, who get an OS for free and thus may be intrigued to try it out. But as far as brand name PC makers are concerned, they will pursue their own marketing strategy, and getting free linux CDs should not make any difference to them. After all, they could easily get their own linux CDs if they wanted to ship linux with their million+ PCs.
A bigger win for Corel, I guess, to increase its marketshare. What distro do they use?
w/m
Keep on marking me down as flamebait. I'll never go away!
/. post). Your rebellious nature would have been channeled in more fruitful directions. In a sense, you are making a subtle point in an indirect manner, heavy with metaphor - by wasting your time here, you are underscoring how harmful the net can be.
This is one of the scariest threats I've ever read....appropriate for Halloween, I guess.
After reading your persistent dissenting arguments, I've been swayed by their eloquence and changed my mind entirely. Now I agree with roblimo's article - if there were no internet, you would be spending your time more wisely (it's difficult to think of a more wasteful activity than civil disobedience in protest of a
I get it now. Ironic, I suppose, but effective. : /
w/m --->> humbler and wiser
There are 2 massive flaws in this article -
1) The author takes the thousands of people working on the internet, asks us to remove the internet out of the equation, and then places those people in jobs designing Artesian desert pumps and space engines. In reality, the people working today on the internet would be doing what they were doing 10 years ago, when almost NOBODY was working on the net. They were writing mainframe programs, client/server stuff, graphics design brochures, etc.
This is the same mistake that Cliff Stoll made when he said "If people weren't wasting their time chatting online or reading crappy web sites, they would be planting tomatoes, helping sick children in hospitals, or studying books". In reality, they would be lying on the couch drinking beer and watching the Simpsons.
2) The bigger flaw in the article is that it assumes the net helps only the elite, and then the author gives an example of 2 people in fairly elite positions in an elite society to make his point. However, if he were to look at a lot of the developing world, the net is HUGELY helpful. Governments in Asia are using email to cut down on bureaucracy, human rights dissidents are more effective than ever, to the point where even Singapore has decided not to censor the net as it used to, and because of the net, businesses are booming way, way more rapidly than the glacial pace common in those countries. Just read newspapers from around the world (on the net, of course) for a good insight into this phenomenon.
Saying the internet only helps idiots in elite positions to waste time is a little like a nineteenth century author pondering that electricity is useless for the masses - after all, the people he spoke to in the palace used it to glaze their succulent cakes.
The net is becoming an infrastructure pipeline that will be present everywhere at all times, like electricity. To claim that it won't be useful for the masses at large is losing sight of the fact that it provides what people have aspired to for ages - instant communication.
w/m.
On every story, I've noticed the first post accumulates a lot of attention, getting the most replies, etc. This is somewhat unfair, because a lot of times it's a fairly uninteresting post or a simple question, but it pulls in all the hits. By first post, I don't mean first chronologically - I have my sort set by highest scores, but even in that case, if there are 5 posts with score 2, the first one has a sort of gravitational effect.
How about periodically shuffling blocks of threads with the same score, to even out the exposure? I don't think it matters if a later thread is placed above an earlier one - I've rarely seen any context flowing chronologically across threads.
w/m
I think it won't work, but for a different reason. First of all, a soda is a simple product - there's not much involved in the decision making, and not much in the transaction.
When you add the complexity of raising the price from 50 cents o 62 cents depending on the weather, it becomes an irritant. This is the same factor that comes into play when you pick your long distance carrier - I hate figuring out when a call is expensive, when the special rate applies, etc., so I take a constant rate rather than spend synaptic cycles on this crap.
Now...coke is even cheaper than long distance, and it's a trivial product. If people used to inserting 50 cents stand there pushing the button and then realize it's now 63 cents, it will just irritate the fuck out of them and they'll avoid the unpredictable experience.
Nice idea in theory, but it won't work.
It's interesting how various tiny nations have tried to cash in on the net.
.TV country code was a potential goldmine (www.fox.tv ?)
.tv domain from ICANN without informing Tuvalu - further proof that webTV is evil incarnate. Tuvalu's prime minister came to know that something called the "Internet" existed after visiting Australia, and managed to get ICANN to hand them control.
.TV and raise the nation's fortunes. Being honest religious folks, they don't want to do pr0n, shady financial deals, or anything unethical.
.nu (naked in French) domain, or like Tonga, which sells $100 .to domains, no questions asked; they could improve their per capita income 10 times, but instead, they are fumbling in confusion.
:)
Like Nauru, tuvalu is a tiny pacific island, the world's 4th smallest nation. Population : 10,000. When the internet boom began, tuvalu stood to make a fortune on the domain name trade - it's
What happened next was a sad tale of how a pacific nation, remote and unaware of the existence of the internet, was swindled by domain name sharks.
First, webTV grabbed admin. control of the
Good wired story here.
Next, VCs and domain name companies descended on the remote island, courting the confused govt. Ultimately, Tuvalu signed a deal with a Canadian company, which failed to deliver the $50 million it had promised in a year (that's 10 times the country's entire GDP). Sad story.
Now Tuvalu, wiser and bitter, is still looking for a company to administer
If only they could be like Nauru, with its offshore banking, or Niue, which hosts tons of porn on the
I felt particularly sorry for them because they are so naive and quaint. It's a custom on the island to apologize if you walk past someone sitting, since the level of your head is higher than theirs. And hey, you can climb on top of the local church if you ask permission from the pastor. They're so naive their web site is a Yahoo Club.
Poor Tuvalu. Maybe the linux community can help them out by hosting their domain thingie and transforming their island.
w/m.
Better tell that to the String Theory scientists
Better also tell scientists who assume the existence of electrons, the mantle of the earth, the proton, the photon, the boson, the positron, the ozone layer, e=mc^2, etc., etc.
All these things are not observable or provable to the naked eye, but they are explained by science nonetheless.
Occasionally we hear the bible thumpers claim that evolution is a theory simply because it's not observable directly. Yet, these folks do undertake PET scans (which use positrons, just as flimsy a theory as evolution).
It's sad that an illiterate crowd that relies on blind belief and has a weak grasp on what science is, struggles to come up with good analogies and consistent "proofs". It's even sadder that they ensure their kids remain illiterate too.
w/m.
PS - your example is particularly bad because string theory is not considered proven yet. It's still in the realm of speculation at this point.
One last thing one of the ministers of state is even blind and takes his guide (seeing eye) dog in with him.
That's nothing. In the US, all of our politicians are blind.
1) People using computers no longer wear long white coats and use punch cards
...surveys continue to show that the threat from inside an organization is greater than from outside.)
/. readers. If you do, do NOT reply with a witty response. This is extremely dangerous, and possibly impossible for IBM...
2) Do not quote IBM magazines. There's a simple reason for this - nobody reads IBM's "official technical magazines", including IBM employees. On the brighter side, everybody recycles them. There's a simple reason for this - they are incredibly boring, especially the cartoons and jokes.
3) Your CEO is a former "cost efficiency expert" and avoids interviews where technical questions could be asked. Replace him with somebody who knows what an "operating system" means. Meanwhile, it may also be a good idea to change your culture, fire the bureaucrats, and put real programmers in charge.
4) You say that
There's a major threat from within IBM....the threat of boring everyone to tears. Stop this epidemic before it gets serious. Hire people who don't talk like IRS employees.
5) Do not show ads. with people wearing black suits and staring straight ahead. It scares customers away.
6) Don't try to act like a "fun", "hip", "Gen-X" company. It scares customers away.
7) Do not use words like "IT visioneering" and assorted crap.
8) Do not read memos from
w/m
NPR Science Friday had a "Brain Update" show which examines various issues in detail, with Charles Gross on the program (the one who conducted the monkey expt.) Worth listening to, since so many are complaining about lack of info. Here's the link
a te=10/22/1999&PrgID=5
http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn/cmnpd01fm.cfm?PrgD
Needs Real Audio, btw.
Wooly Mammoth.
In the history of the software industry, there are the inventors and there are the businessmen. The inventors are people like :
Dan Bricklin & Bob Frankston (Visicalc)
Woz (Apple)
Bill Gates (BASIC)
Bill Joy (vi, BSD, NFS)
Douglas Engelbart (mouse, GUI, groupware, live video conferencing, hypertext help)
Bob Metcalf (ethernet)
Richie, Kernighan, Thompson (C, unix)
Seymour Cray (Cray supercomputers)
David Patterson (RISC, RAID)
Tim Berners-Lee (the world wide web)
etc.
Most of them didn't succeed commercially.
And there are the businessmen, the people who are really good at understanding a totally new fertile field and transforming technology into success:
Scott McNealy (sun)
Bill Gates (Microsoft)
Jim Clark (SGI, netscape)
Seymour Cray (Cray supercomputers)
Larry Ellison (Oracle)
Mitch Kapor (Lotus)
Steve Jobs (apple)
These are two very different fields, and very few people are good at both.
Frankly, marca hasn't invented anything, and he was never a business leader. He took an existing product (the web browser) and made it popular thru free downloading. Yes, this was an earthshaking phenomenon in the industry, but he did not invent the browser, nor did he lead Netscape on to a powerful business position. In fact, he was hardly ever in charge of netscape - that was Barksdale.
And if we are to believe news reports, he never coded anything after Netscape took off. Whatever your opinion of Bill Gates is, he still codes, and he has even participated in coding competitions as CEO. It probably explains why he's good at understanding both the technical and business end of things.
I would be surprised if anything radical comes from Andreesen. Heck, I would be surprised if anything radical comes from this new company - web hosting & e-commerce isn't likely to shock anyone at this point.
w/m.
The gas in beer is carbonated and under pressure. As you can observe, it bubbles out once the can is opened due to reduction in pressure. It would go flat after a while, at which point beer would be like any other liquid, and only its thermal capacity and conductivity would matter.
I must have been asleep for ages, but what exactly is this scavenger hunt? How can it be "live and interactive" if it's a URL with trivia questions?
showing text boxes popping up and mouse arrows clicking won't be too exciting. OTOH, if it will show live people scavenging, who will they be and where will this aforementioned scavenging be carried out?
Brrrr...scavenging - brings back bad memories.
Wooly Mammoth.
But I am open-minded enough to see that the serious creationists raise some very scientifically valid points.
:)
No, they don't. Let me explain why - If theory X is wrong, that doesn't prove theory Y is right.
Or specifically, if evolution has drawbacks, that doesn't prove creationism.
Basically, all the "scientifically valid points" of creationism consists of pointing at loopholes in scientific theories, that's pretty much it. Let me explain another fallacy of creationists - you think that because nobody can disprove your theory, it's correct. This is totally stupid
I can claim that the universe was created today at 11 AM by God, with all the fossils, memories and things in motion. There, prove me wrong. Or I can claim that there there is a purple jello ball at the center of Pluto. Nobody can prove me wrong, so it must be right.
Do you understand this? In science, you try to prove something, you don't make a claim and assume it's correct unless someone disproves it.
that anyone with a religious worldview is automatically excluded from consideration
Nobody is excluding anyone based on this. If you have any evidence, submit it to a recognized journal. It gets peer reviewed and published if it's valid. What you are doing is NOT SUBMITTING any evidence and then claiming you're being dismissed. This is a little like throwing your article in your desk drawer and whining that every newspaper is ignoring you.
although science reveals certain truths, our understanding of them is often woefully incomplete
Wait, what are you saying - that religion explains everything?
I get tired of hearing this over and over - of course science is incomplete! Who said science is total and explains every fucking thing that exists? When William Harvey explained the cardiovascular system, it explained just that - it doesn't explain the entire universe and astrophysics. When Dirac explained anti-matter, it explained precisely that - nobody is claiming that it explains everything in existence.
OTOH, religion explains nothing at any level, of any phenomenon. It just puts forth a hypothesis and claims it is correct unless someone disproves it. (Read the purple jello example above for why this is stupid).
I strongly disagree with your assertion that only the quantitative is true. There are many things in life which are demonstrably
true but which cannot be quantified, including (but not limited to) all things which have an as-yet-undiscovered scientific explanation.
I didn't say only the quantitative is true - I said a valid theory has to be quantitative. OTOH, vague subjective theories can neither be proved right nor wrong - like your statement above.
Science...attempting to force-fit it is a bit like driving screws with a hammer.
To explain biological phenomena with science is force fitting? Then why do you go to a doctor or dentist? that's all they use.
The only thing science is being fit into is factual phenomena. It's only the religious wackos who think otherwise. Maybe you can correct me...
flood waters went was a prticularly bad choice in light of the fact that I included a link in my original post
Read it. It says that water is seeping into the mantle.
Does this prove the flood? Of course not, but it should make an open-minded person think, at least.
So you're saying it doesn't prove anything. Just wondering...why did you ask me to read it then? Just to bring us all up to date on geophysics?
Wooly Mammoth.
PS - I still have to get any evidence or factual stuff. If you give me another link about water movement and ask me to think about how creationism is valid, I'll give you a link about Saturn's movement and ask you to think about Heaven's Gate...
Hmmm...I've never tried northernlight either. BTw, they were profiled in a story as being the search engine which has indexed more of the web than any of the others (altavista was 2nd, I think). Even at that, it was really small, something like 12%.
It makes you wonder why such a big % of the web isn't registered in engines. Don't ppl want visits? Odd.
w/m.
But here in Australa, the queen has not been thought of as the leader for a rather long time.
She's a ceremonial figure in Canada as well. However, it's rather anachronistic at this end of the century to have a British monarch as the official head of state. I'm not sure why canada and australia don't finally break off and declare themselves republics. Even Malta did that, and I can't see anybody in Australia rioting in the streets because they can't salute their queen.
In fact, most nations of the commonwealth are independent nations which don't recognize the queen as their official head of state. You can still be a member for the sporting events and the govt. summits which jointly waste everyone's money.
w/m
You forgot...
1999 - My OS is better than your OS.
w/m.