You know, we can screw up a lot of robotic missions, leave a ton of craters on Mars, and still get the scientific data we want for much less than sending a manned mission to Mars.
A manned mission would cost several orders of magintude more than a fleet of simple robots. We'd have to provide a human-liveable habitat for astronauts that was absolutely fail-safe, to prevent loss of life (and the loss of a far more costly mission). We coudln't do a "fast-better-cheaper" human mission. The risks are too high. And risky missions are what steered NASA away from the huge, monolithic "everything including the kitchen sink" mode of exploration. I'm not talking about just the risk to human life, but the risk of failure of the mission.
And yes, I've heard the "but astronauts are brave pioneers who know the risks" argument. Even if we find people to shoot into space on a risky mission, I'd rather not spend a huge amount of money so some rocket jocky can Evil-Knevil his way to Mars.
We still know very little about Mars. Mars is a more complex evironment than the moon, and a hell of a lot further away. While manned missions to Mars will make sense someday, now is not that time. I'd say, let NASA continue with its plans. The funding we're expending on these missions isn't so great that screwing up and losing a few robots is such an issue. The more we learn about Mars in this "little to lose" mode, the safer (and probably more cost-effective) any future manned exploration will be.
One of the points of working where you live is that you get to make your own environment. OSHA making that decision basically forces companies to either invade your home to shield them from litigation or not allow telecommuting.
Yes, but basically this reversal means that the company has no limits on what they can do. They can stick you with equipment they could never allow you to use in the workplace.
There is a balance here as far as where the fiscal responsibilities lie for work-at-home employees. In my experience, full-time (or mostly full-time) people who work at home have gotten PC's from their employer, or the employer has opted to buy them laptops so they can use them at home and in the office. I've never heard of the company spinging for furniture.
I think what's needed here is a happy medium. Anything that the employer povides to the employee should meet OSHA standards. That means if the employer gives you a PC, the PC must meet whatever OSHA standards there might be for ergonomics (which, I think, is not much). If the employer simply pays for you to buy a PC, they must supply you with enough money to buy a PC that meets OSHA standards. If you, on your own, decide to buy a bed of nails with lousy neck support to use as chair while using said PC, that's your business. If the employer gives you crummy machinery that explodes, killing your cat, they should be held liable.
While I think the work-at-home movement is good, I do tend to worry about a resurgence of the "piecework" problems that we had in the late 19th century. People (mostly women) were expected to do ungodly amounts of work, out of their own home, under poor conditions with few resources. While, in this economic boom and labor shortage we probably won't see much of that, I can see a future where, if you want to work, you'll have to supply your own equipment and your own space to do your job.
The Apple II was the original "geek dream machine." I mean, the Apple ][+ we got back in 1982 or so came with schematics! Talk about an open system!
Pretend that Apple (or some other company) came to you and asked you to design a PC that would "fill the shoes" of the Apple II line. What do you think you'd put in it?
From reading your website, I know you're pretty pro-Macintosh... is that the ultimate in what you'd want to see in a personal computer, or would you do some things differently? Where, do you think, that current PC's (not meaning just WinTel machines) reflect the philosophy of the Apple II, and what do you think they have missed?
Disclaimer: I'm a tech writer. I do this for a living. Don't try this at home;)
So, if you were to say "Hey, you, write good documentation for Linux", I think I'd run into a few problems quite quickly...
Which Linux? Red Hat? Debian? Which Desktop? Gnome? KDE? Some other? Is Linuxconf installed? Something else? Which editor did they install, if any? Are they on PPC? x86? Command line only or X?
The fact that Linux isn't just one thing is good in that it's flexible. Don't like the look of the GUI? Write a new one! Know every line of every config file in the/etc directory? Great! Fire up vi and configure your system.
When it comes to documentation, though, the flexibility is a curse.
Be-all and end-all documentation for Linux is very hard to get your hands around. Even if, say, you're a writer at Red Hat, and you can just stick to what is available in Red Hat, you have very little control over what the newbie has installed. Maybe they didn't install Linuxconf. Maybe they didn't install an editor... Unless you can say for sure what the user has on his or her machine, you're left to doing glittering generalities, and hoping people can follow along.
One issue is the depth of UNIX in general. If you're brand new to UNIX, tugging on one thread of an issue can lead to unravelling a whole lot more than you want. Linux (and UNIX in general) doesn't layer complexity well. It hasn't had to, since up until now, it's been just used by experts whose day-to-day worklife revolves around the complexities of the system. A newbie would have to instanty grok a whole steaming load of info before he or she could do something like set up a Samba share. They have to learn about file permissions, networking, networkied file systems, potentially recompiling the kernel, configuration of Samba itself, the Sys V init process, etc. It's just huge. Yes, something like Linuxconf will help with this, but the number of things that Linuxconf could deal with probably grows faster than the Linuxconf people can put them into the program.
Another major issue is, simply, that documentation is always chasing functionality. In the case of Linux, the entire programming community has had something like 8 or 9 years to work on this stuff. Tech writers in the community are A) vastly outnumbered by programmers (which, actually, is the way it is software companies anyhow, but I suspect the ratio is much worse in OS) and B) dreadfully behind. The question of "where do I start" is overwhelming. Even if you can manage to document something, most likely the programmers have totally changed it, ported it to KDE, or some other thing.
Add to this the lack of a standard help system for Linux. As others have mentioned, there is no one single place to go for help in Linux. There are man pages... mostly for terminal-based apps, but a good number of X apps also rely on man pages. KDE has HTML-based help. GNOME, I think, may also use HTML. Other apps just have readme files. Many others don't have anything at all. Under windows, there is no question what you do: you make a standard windows help file. The search mechanism is built into the system. Every app (well, every major one) uses the same help system. Once the user has used help in one app, she knows how to use it in all apps.
In addition, the tools for documentation on Linux tend to be primitive. One of the major issues that have kept me from writing documentation for Linux is this issue. I looked into pitching in on OS projects at various times over the past several years, but tthe thought of hand-coding XML, or man pages, or some other thing really got to me. It would be like asking all programmers to code X apps using just vi and straight gcc (no make files, no gdb) and just the low-level Xlib. Yeah, you can do it. Yeah, it's been done. But it's not the way I want to spend my free time. I did try to code a man page for an Open Source editor app years ago (in fact, a version of it may be on your Linux PC right now) but just found it frustrating. Why do this when I can whip out documentation fast in a robust tool on another platform?
Another aspect is that documentation alone doesn;t cover all needs. Different people learn in different ways. RTFM doesn't help you much when your optimal ways of learning is through listening or through more graphical means.
Some days, I think I should track down an Open Source project or a writer group and volunteer. Other days, I think that people who really need beginner-level Linux docs might be better served by installing Be, or some other alternative OS which may not be as robust and flexible, but certainly can be easier to use.
Einstien is probably the best choice from the aspect of "this is someone we're proud of."
Who has had real impacts on the 20th century? Well... Hitler and Stalin come to mind. Both individuals certainly changed the course of history in a way that, possibly, no one else could. Hitler's aftermath, especially, is still being felt today. The reunifcation of Germany and the events in Bosnia after communism's collapse are both events that have hitler's fingerprints on them. Of course, few would want to commemorate sharing a century with him...
You might argue that Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others of a more humane bent had a major impact on the 20th century. Certainly, their impact on their homelands was great... and their philosophies have inspired many beyond the borders of the lands where they primarily did their work. But, quantifying their direct impact on any arbitrary world citizen's daily life is hard. There are still the opressed, there are still those killed in the name of supressing freedom.
Einstien is a safer choice. His work has weaved its way into our lives on a daily basis. His papers basically jump-started the field of quantum mechanics, which gave rise to modern electronics, which gave rise to Slashdot (how could you get more noble?;). Aside from the passion of the moment, computers and the Internet, Einstien's work also made possible the earlier communications revolutions, such as TV.
And... of course, his little E=MC^2 equation was put to rather dramatic use in Hiroshima, and held the world hostage to the fear of complete and utter destruction for the better part of half a century.
I guess, in all, that sort of duality is symbolic of the 20th century. We've seen advances in medicine that can cure as a matter of course what was incurable at the start of the century. We can save the unsaveable, give relief to those in great pain. And, we've also seen the infliction of pain en-mass, from the mustard gas of WWI, to the ovens of Auschwitz. We saw the Earth rise over the barren wastes of the moon, a tiny, fragile world... conspicuosly lacking the lines demarking the arbitrary borders that people have fought and died over. We've also seen that we can destroy the Earth (at least for ourselves) either quickly through nuclear explosion and fallout, or slowly through CO2, DDT, CFC, and...
Einstien, as part of all this, can be credited with the best and damned with the worst. Well, perhaps damning is too strong a word. Certainly, though, it's a warning that even the work of what seemingly was a kind, gentle man can wreak havoc when let loose in this world.
Actually, the last time I went into the local MicroCenter, they had an entire little free-standing shelf thing where they were featuring some Linux distros and games (Myth II, the Quake boxed set, and Civ II, I think). This was in *addition* to their normal shelf space for Linux and stuff like Wordperfect and other office-ish stuff. Seems like they are pretty supportive of Linux these days.
I remember this... dear god, the therapy hasn't expunged it from my memory....
Well, anyhow, the only part I actually recall (or maybe this is just my memory playing tricks on me) is that when Chewie and Han show up, there some tussle with Stormtroopers (hey, is't Star Wars, how can there not be) which results in one of the stormtroopers being pitched over the balcony on the huge friggin tree fort that the family Chewbacca live in, presumably to fall hundereds of feet to a messy end.
You know, I'm hard pressed to think of another holiday special where someone is killed. Not that everyone involved in this stinkburger (and any variety show of the 70's in general) has not richly earned a painful death... It's just, somehow, most Christmas specials managed to avoid introducing fatality into the whole mix.
Nature does not abhore a vacuum. Just look at these people's minds...
What items would you take into the bunker...
"Bike, Camera, Telescope/Binoculars."
Errr... yeah. Camera's going to be really useful after the friggin' apocolypse, won't it? I suspect the Photomat booths are going to be kinda sparse.
I wonder what sort of "reaserch" the "scientist" is involved in. Doubtlessly, it involves the science of acting...
As for everyone asking why people would do this... simple. Look at the "what I wanna bes" in the list: musician, broadcaster, DJ, actor, etc. Self promotion. It's all about self promotion. What a fitting way to end the 20th Century.
Did a search for "Mars Probe" in the Science Friday show, and got this snippet:
.. of deep space walk which show the first I am to arrive and interplanetary space another mars or murder ritual rides the september twenty third of mars lander which lands on...
Err... yeah. That would explain a great many things about space probes. Actually, I'm sure the textified show would be a lot more interesting than the real show. And then, we could shove it through Babelfish for added enjoyment...
I recently installed the ViaVoice beta for Linux, and found its recognition not quite ready for prime time... at least for my needs. I'd be surprised if radio shows, which often have people on fairly crummy phone connections, would be an ideal candidate for automated indexing.
Totally missed the Natalie Portman thing...
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Huh, and I thought to be real 1337, ya had to fsck Natalie Portman in every post.
Not only that, no REAL 1337 would bother posting to slashdot. He'd use his scripts to post for him. He's much too busy looking at pr0n to be bothered.
When I see the Easter Eggs that those fun-loving wacky light-hearted minions of the Dark Side over in Redmond toss into their products, I immediately wonder "how many of the fscking bugs in your fscking products could you have fixed while you were programming that fscking pinball game!?"
(Funny, I tend to use the phrase 'fscking' an awful lot when it comes to our pals at Microsoft....)
I suspect that people are coming to realize that unless you have a nearly airtight application, you'd better not trumpet the fact hat you let your programmers goof off and do silly things with their time. Now, minor little quirky easter eggs, such as the little taxi that zips across your screen in some version of the Pilot OS, are less harmful along those lines. I don't believe the Apple folks were every guilty of the excesses of the Microsoft folks. But, programmers being programmers are always going to try to outdo each other, so... perhaps it's better to nip it in the bud.
This reminds me of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In the future, animals were so rare, that everyone had synthetic pets. Only the rich could afford real pets...
Been a while since I was at their site, but I recall that Junkbusters has a lot of this information. Reminds me that I want to go there and opt out of every credit card list (can we say identity theft waiting to happen? Thought you could...).
The thing that really freaks me about these databases is that you know people you don;t want to get access to them will get access to them. Imagine a pair of burglers casing a neighborhood... a net-connected PDA and access to this database would be all they need to choose a victim. "Letsee... this house here, yearly income $250,000... single female... bought lots of jewelry recently... just had a credit card activity several states away... let's go for it..." Sure, sure, peole like this won't be allowed to access the information. Yeah, right.
A few years back, there was a controversy over a talking Barbie doll which included, among other phrases "math is hard!"
Well, a bunch of folks, fed up with the stupid blond stereotype, decided that Barbie needed a bit of motivational therapy. They bought some of the talking Barbies, and some talking GI Joes, and proceded to do a brain transplant.
So, you'd have Barbie barking orders like "we must attack the enemy headquarters!!!" while the emasculated GI Joes would suggest having a pjama party...
My personal definition of a hack is more along classic lines... something done cheap and quick. IMHO, Apollo 11 and Xerox's PARC coming up wth the classic GUI do not fall into this category. Granted, Apollo 11 was done in a short amount of time (for what it actually acheieved) but consdering a measureable amount of the GNP of the US went into the feat, I don't really consider it it cheap. Ditto for the GUI design. It wasn;t done that quickly, and Xerox dumped tons of money into PARC.
I'm not disputing that these were legendary technological achievements, but they really don't fit the category of a "hack" (in my sense, at least).
The legend of Woz coming up with the floppy controller for the Apple II on a napkin, and implementing it in an insanely short amount of time is definitly a legendary hack.
Hell, for that matter, the Apple II entirely was a hack. Name another commercial PC which was designed by one person. And, I believe, he wrote the first OS for it, to boot.
I've been going to a place for years now that's local (PC's for everyone in the Boston area.. just a customer, not an employee yaddah yaddah) and haven't had a problem with them. In fact, I picked up several chunks of what will be my dual Celeron system from them the other day.
One of the first times I bought parts via mailorder, I did get burned... I got a 486 Moboard with fake cache RAM on it. This was a scam going around years ago, when cache RAM was soldered onto the board. They would take 8K (or something) ram chips, solder them onto the board, then hack the BIOS to make it look like there was more (I forget how much cache was usual back in those days... 64K? 32K?). Needless to say, the system locked hard very often. Eventually, I pinned down the problem when I started getting internal errors from GCC while recompiling the Linux kernel.
Local places, if they do rip you off, are at least in arm's reach. You can go to the attorney general of your state and hope they'll take action. You could even take them to small claims court. You could warn your local Better Business Burea about them. Action against a company that's in another state is a lot harder.
And, finally, you get what you pay for... my local place does charge higher rates than the web vendors... but you know they've been around, and that they will be around in the future...
Avangto will suck down a web site for you, and put it into a format that can be stored on your Pilot and read offline. True, a lot of web sites really don't work well on a Pilot's screen, but many do. Some, such as Wired News and C|NET have special version for Avantgo. I believe there is a FAQ on Slashdot on how to make your story preferences Avantgo friendly.
At work, I always toss the Pilot in the cradle and hotsynch before a potty break. I can read up on stuff... or just play a game if there's nothing to read.
'course, it's Windows only. I suspect that there's a similar thing out that will download websites and translate them into doc format. If not... there should be. Hmm... sounds like a job for Perl:)
had 15-20 minute introduction? I remember seeing a version that set the scene for the movie by explaining the background for Dune. There were a few artist renderings (evil machines enslaving humans, humans overthrowing them, etc.) that really put the movie in context.
I had actually read the book a year or two before seeing the movie, and the prolog gave me information that I'd somehow missed in the books.
Of course, by the time 1-1-3111 is around, we'll be using a calendar that counts time from some differnt point... like the birthdate of Linus ("he who delivered us from the beast of Redmond") or the first packet transmitted on the Internet, or the dissolution of Microsoft...
Of course, even if we had an odd or even day then, our robot masters, (whose internal clocks tick off the seconds from the curiously arbitrary point in time marked on our calendar as 1-1-1970) won't allow us to celebrate. They will whip us, and we will get back to work, while cursing our ancestors for fixing the bug that would have made them all crash early in the 21st century..
Making the newly popped up window active is the window manager's job. While most distros enable Enlightenment as the default window manager by default (well, OK, the distros I have seen) you can use any Gnome compliant window manager. Unlike KDE, there really isn't a specific Gnome WM.
I suggest you look at the config for whatever window manager you are running. I believe both Enlightenment and WindowMaker (the two Gnome-aware WM I've used) allow you to set policies like this.
Until you programmed a seat-kicking, loud whispering, cell phone and beeper carrying jackass simulation... at least, every time I go to the movies, that's who ends up sitting behind me... Oh, and toss in some surround-sound crying babies belonging to the "we're too cheap to hire a babysitter, so we brought our baby to see the Matrix, I'm sure the gunshots won't upset him/her/it" couple in the front row.
*My* nostalgic memories are based on the original Castle Wolfenstein, which came out for the Apple II in... uh... the early 80's some time. It was 2D, of course, and the graphics... well... not all that great. But it managed to actually have sound beyond the usual bleeps and bloops. Guards actually shouted "Halt!" The dreaded SS officers shouted "Halt! SS." All in hi-fidelity 1-bit sound:)
It was a neat puzzle solving game. In many ways, the FPSs of today follow the same plot... find a key, open doors, find ammo and grenades. Kill wandering guards... I'm not sure that's a great comment on today's games...
Ah, well, maybe it's time to unpack the old Apple II for a trip down memory lane...
Slashdot Mirror
You know, we can screw up a lot of robotic missions, leave a ton of craters on Mars, and still get the scientific data we want for much less than sending a manned mission to Mars.
A manned mission would cost several orders of magintude more than a fleet of simple robots. We'd have to provide a human-liveable habitat for astronauts that was absolutely fail-safe, to prevent loss of life (and the loss of a far more costly mission). We coudln't do a "fast-better-cheaper" human mission. The risks are too high. And risky missions are what steered NASA away from the huge, monolithic "everything including the kitchen sink" mode of exploration. I'm not talking about just the risk to human life, but the risk of failure of the mission.
And yes, I've heard the "but astronauts are brave pioneers who know the risks" argument. Even if we find people to shoot into space on a risky mission, I'd rather not spend a huge amount of money so some rocket jocky can Evil-Knevil his way to Mars.
We still know very little about Mars. Mars is a more complex evironment than the moon, and a hell of a lot further away. While manned missions to Mars will make sense someday, now is not that time. I'd say, let NASA continue with its plans. The funding we're expending on these missions isn't so great that screwing up and losing a few robots is such an issue. The more we learn about Mars in this "little to lose" mode, the safer (and probably more cost-effective) any future manned exploration will be.
Yes, but basically this reversal means that the company has no limits on what they can do. They can stick you with equipment they could never allow you to use in the workplace.
There is a balance here as far as where the fiscal responsibilities lie for work-at-home employees. In my experience, full-time (or mostly full-time) people who work at home have gotten PC's from their employer, or the employer has opted to buy them laptops so they can use them at home and in the office. I've never heard of the company spinging for furniture.
I think what's needed here is a happy medium. Anything that the employer povides to the employee should meet OSHA standards. That means if the employer gives you a PC, the PC must meet whatever OSHA standards there might be for ergonomics (which, I think, is not much). If the employer simply pays for you to buy a PC, they must supply you with enough money to buy a PC that meets OSHA standards. If you, on your own, decide to buy a bed of nails with lousy neck support to use as chair while using said PC, that's your business. If the employer gives you crummy machinery that explodes, killing your cat, they should be held liable.
While I think the work-at-home movement is good, I do tend to worry about a resurgence of the "piecework" problems that we had in the late 19th century. People (mostly women) were expected to do ungodly amounts of work, out of their own home, under poor conditions with few resources. While, in this economic boom and labor shortage we probably won't see much of that, I can see a future where, if you want to work, you'll have to supply your own equipment and your own space to do your job.
Hi Steve,
The Apple II was the original "geek dream machine." I mean, the Apple ][+ we got back in 1982 or so came with schematics! Talk about an open system!
Pretend that Apple (or some other company) came to you and asked you to design a PC that would "fill the shoes" of the Apple II line. What do you think you'd put in it?
From reading your website, I know you're pretty pro-Macintosh... is that the ultimate in what you'd want to see in a personal computer, or would you do some things differently? Where, do you think, that current PC's (not meaning just WinTel machines) reflect the philosophy of the Apple II, and what do you think they have missed?
IT'S BETTER TO BURN OUT, THAN FADE AWAY!!!
Err... sorry, suddenly channeling bad 80's glam metal.
Disclaimer: I'm a tech writer. I do this for a living. Don't try this at home ;)
/etc directory? Great! Fire up vi and configure your system.
So, if you were to say "Hey, you, write good documentation for Linux", I think I'd run into a few problems quite quickly...
Which Linux? Red Hat? Debian? Which Desktop? Gnome? KDE? Some other? Is Linuxconf installed? Something else? Which editor did they install, if any? Are they on PPC? x86? Command line only or X?
The fact that Linux isn't just one thing is good in that it's flexible. Don't like the look of the GUI? Write a new one! Know every line of every config file in the
When it comes to documentation, though, the flexibility is a curse.
Be-all and end-all documentation for Linux is very hard to get your hands around. Even if, say, you're a writer at Red Hat, and you can just stick to what is available in Red Hat, you have very little control over what the newbie has installed. Maybe they didn't install Linuxconf. Maybe they didn't install an editor... Unless you can say for sure what the user has on his or her machine, you're left to doing glittering generalities, and hoping people can follow along.
One issue is the depth of UNIX in general. If you're brand new to UNIX, tugging on one thread of an issue can lead to unravelling a whole lot more than you want. Linux (and UNIX in general) doesn't layer complexity well. It hasn't had to, since up until now, it's been just used by experts whose day-to-day worklife revolves around the complexities of the system. A newbie would have to instanty grok a whole steaming load of info before he or she could do something like set up a Samba share. They have to learn about file permissions, networking, networkied file systems, potentially recompiling the kernel, configuration of Samba itself, the Sys V init process, etc. It's just huge. Yes, something like Linuxconf will help with this, but the number of things that Linuxconf could deal with probably grows faster than the Linuxconf people can put them into the program.
Another major issue is, simply, that documentation is always chasing functionality. In the case of Linux, the entire programming community has had something like 8 or 9 years to work on this stuff. Tech writers in the community are A) vastly outnumbered by programmers (which, actually, is the way it is software companies anyhow, but I suspect the ratio is much worse in OS) and B) dreadfully behind. The question of "where do I start" is overwhelming. Even if you can manage to document something, most likely the programmers have totally changed it, ported it to KDE, or some other thing.
Add to this the lack of a standard help system for Linux. As others have mentioned, there is no one single place to go for help in Linux. There are man pages... mostly for terminal-based apps, but a good number of X apps also rely on man pages. KDE has HTML-based help. GNOME, I think, may also use HTML. Other apps just have readme files. Many others don't have anything at all. Under windows, there is no question what you do: you make a standard windows help file. The search mechanism is built into the system. Every app (well, every major one) uses the same help system. Once the user has used help in one app, she knows how to use it in all apps.
In addition, the tools for documentation on Linux tend to be primitive. One of the major issues that have kept me from writing documentation for Linux is this issue. I looked into pitching in on OS projects at various times over the past several years, but tthe thought of hand-coding XML, or man pages, or some other thing really got to me. It would be like asking all programmers to code X apps using just vi and straight gcc (no make files, no gdb) and just the low-level Xlib. Yeah, you can do it. Yeah, it's been done. But it's not the way I want to spend my free time. I did try to code a man page for an Open Source editor app years ago (in fact, a version of it may be on your Linux PC right now) but just found it frustrating. Why do this when I can whip out documentation fast in a robust tool on another platform?
Another aspect is that documentation alone doesn;t cover all needs. Different people learn in different ways. RTFM doesn't help you much when your optimal ways of learning is through listening or through more graphical means.
Some days, I think I should track down an Open Source project or a writer group and volunteer. Other days, I think that people who really need beginner-level Linux docs might be better served by installing Be, or some other alternative OS which may not be as robust and flexible, but certainly can be easier to use.
Einstien is probably the best choice from the aspect of "this is someone we're proud of."
;). Aside from the passion of the moment, computers and the Internet, Einstien's work also made possible the earlier communications revolutions, such as TV.
Who has had real impacts on the 20th century? Well... Hitler and Stalin come to mind. Both individuals certainly changed the course of history in a way that, possibly, no one else could. Hitler's aftermath, especially, is still being felt today. The reunifcation of Germany and the events in Bosnia after communism's collapse are both events that have hitler's fingerprints on them. Of course, few would want to commemorate sharing a century with him...
You might argue that Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr., and others of a more humane bent had a major impact on the 20th century. Certainly, their impact on their homelands was great... and their philosophies have inspired many beyond the borders of the lands where they primarily did their work. But, quantifying their direct impact on any arbitrary world citizen's daily life is hard. There are still the opressed, there are still those killed in the name of supressing freedom.
Einstien is a safer choice. His work has weaved its way into our lives on a daily basis. His papers basically jump-started the field of quantum mechanics, which gave rise to modern electronics, which gave rise to Slashdot (how could you get more noble?
And... of course, his little E=MC^2 equation was put to rather dramatic use in Hiroshima, and held the world hostage to the fear of complete and utter destruction for the better part of half a century.
I guess, in all, that sort of duality is symbolic of the 20th century. We've seen advances in medicine that can cure as a matter of course what was incurable at the start of the century. We can save the unsaveable, give relief to those in great pain. And, we've also seen the infliction of pain en-mass, from the mustard gas of WWI, to the ovens of Auschwitz. We saw the Earth rise over the barren wastes of the moon, a tiny, fragile world... conspicuosly lacking the lines demarking the arbitrary borders that people have fought and died over. We've also seen that we can destroy the Earth (at least for ourselves) either quickly through nuclear explosion and fallout, or slowly through CO2, DDT, CFC, and...
Einstien, as part of all this, can be credited with the best and damned with the worst. Well, perhaps damning is too strong a word. Certainly, though, it's a warning that even the work of what seemingly was a kind, gentle man can wreak havoc when let loose in this world.
Actually, the last time I went into the local MicroCenter, they had an entire little free-standing shelf thing where they were featuring some Linux distros and games (Myth II, the Quake boxed set, and Civ II, I think). This was in *addition* to their normal shelf space for Linux and stuff like Wordperfect and other office-ish stuff. Seems like they are pretty supportive of Linux these days.
I remember this... dear god, the therapy hasn't expunged it from my memory....
Well, anyhow, the only part I actually recall (or maybe this is just my memory playing tricks on me) is that when Chewie and Han show up, there some tussle with Stormtroopers (hey, is't Star Wars, how can there not be) which results in one of the stormtroopers being pitched over the balcony on the huge friggin tree fort that the family Chewbacca live in, presumably to fall hundereds of feet to a messy end.
You know, I'm hard pressed to think of another holiday special where someone is killed. Not that everyone involved in this stinkburger (and any variety show of the 70's in general) has not richly earned a painful death... It's just, somehow, most Christmas specials managed to avoid introducing fatality into the whole mix.
"Happy Life Day!" *Splat*
Nature does not abhore a vacuum. Just look at these people's minds...
What items would you take into the bunker...
"Bike, Camera, Telescope/Binoculars."
Errr... yeah. Camera's going to be really useful after the friggin' apocolypse, won't it? I suspect the Photomat booths are going to be kinda sparse.
I wonder what sort of "reaserch" the "scientist" is involved in. Doubtlessly, it involves the science of acting...
As for everyone asking why people would do this... simple. Look at the "what I wanna bes" in the list: musician, broadcaster, DJ, actor, etc. Self promotion. It's all about self promotion. What a fitting way to end the 20th Century.
not to use MS Access to maintain their address databases...
Did a search for "Mars Probe" in the Science Friday show, and got this snippet:
Err... yeah. That would explain a great many things about space probes. Actually, I'm sure the textified show would be a lot more interesting than the real show. And then, we could shove it through Babelfish for added enjoyment...
I recently installed the ViaVoice beta for Linux, and found its recognition not quite ready for prime time... at least for my needs. I'd be surprised if radio shows, which often have people on fairly crummy phone connections, would be an ideal candidate for automated indexing.
Huh, and I thought to be real 1337, ya had to fsck Natalie Portman in every post.
Not only that, no REAL 1337 would bother posting to slashdot. He'd use his scripts to post for him. He's much too busy looking at pr0n to be bothered.
Oh, BTW, ZEROTH POST!
When I see the Easter Eggs that those fun-loving wacky light-hearted minions of the Dark Side over in Redmond toss into their products, I immediately wonder "how many of the fscking bugs in your fscking products could you have fixed while you were programming that fscking pinball game!?"
(Funny, I tend to use the phrase 'fscking' an awful lot when it comes to our pals at Microsoft....)
I suspect that people are coming to realize that unless you have a nearly airtight application, you'd better not trumpet the fact hat you let your programmers goof off and do silly things with their time. Now, minor little quirky easter eggs, such as the little taxi that zips across your screen in some version of the Pilot OS, are less harmful along those lines. I don't believe the Apple folks were every guilty of the excesses of the Microsoft folks. But, programmers being programmers are always going to try to outdo each other, so... perhaps it's better to nip it in the bud.
This reminds me of Philip K Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In the future, animals were so rare, that everyone had synthetic pets. Only the rich could afford real pets...
Been a while since I was at their site, but I recall that Junkbusters has a lot of this information. Reminds me that I want to go there and opt out of every credit card list (can we say identity theft waiting to happen? Thought you could...).
The thing that really freaks me about these databases is that you know people you don;t want to get access to them will get access to them. Imagine a pair of burglers casing a neighborhood... a net-connected PDA and access to this database would be all they need to choose a victim. "Letsee... this house here, yearly income $250,000... single female... bought lots of jewelry recently... just had a credit card activity several states away... let's go for it..." Sure, sure, peole like this won't be allowed to access the information. Yeah, right.
I just remembered this clever hack...
A few years back, there was a controversy over a talking Barbie doll which included, among other phrases "math is hard!"
Well, a bunch of folks, fed up with the stupid blond stereotype, decided that Barbie needed a bit of motivational therapy. They bought some of the talking Barbies, and some talking GI Joes, and proceded to do a brain transplant.
So, you'd have Barbie barking orders like "we must attack the enemy headquarters!!!" while the emasculated GI Joes would suggest having a pjama party...
My personal definition of a hack is more along classic lines... something done cheap and quick. IMHO, Apollo 11 and Xerox's PARC coming up wth the classic GUI do not fall into this category. Granted, Apollo 11 was done in a short amount of time (for what it actually acheieved) but consdering a measureable amount of the GNP of the US went into the feat, I don't really consider it it cheap. Ditto for the GUI design. It wasn;t done that quickly, and Xerox dumped tons of money into PARC.
I'm not disputing that these were legendary technological achievements, but they really don't fit the category of a "hack" (in my sense, at least).
The legend of Woz coming up with the floppy controller for the Apple II on a napkin, and implementing it in an insanely short amount of time is definitly a legendary hack.
Hell, for that matter, the Apple II entirely was a hack. Name another commercial PC which was designed by one person. And, I believe, he wrote the first OS for it, to boot.
I've been going to a place for years now that's local (PC's for everyone in the Boston area.. just a customer, not an employee yaddah yaddah) and haven't had a problem with them. In fact, I picked up several chunks of what will be my dual Celeron system from them the other day.
One of the first times I bought parts via mailorder, I did get burned... I got a 486 Moboard with fake cache RAM on it. This was a scam going around years ago, when cache RAM was soldered onto the board. They would take 8K (or something) ram chips, solder them onto the board, then hack the BIOS to make it look like there was more (I forget how much cache was usual back in those days... 64K? 32K?). Needless to say, the system locked hard very often. Eventually, I pinned down the problem when I started getting internal errors from GCC while recompiling the Linux kernel.
Local places, if they do rip you off, are at least in arm's reach. You can go to the attorney general of your state and hope they'll take action. You could even take them to small claims court. You could warn your local Better Business Burea about them. Action against a company that's in another state is a lot harder.
And, finally, you get what you pay for... my local place does charge higher rates than the web vendors... but you know they've been around, and that they will be around in the future...
Avangto will suck down a web site for you, and put it into a format that can be stored on your Pilot and read offline. True, a lot of web sites really don't work well on a Pilot's screen, but many do. Some, such as Wired News and C|NET have special version for Avantgo. I believe there is a FAQ on Slashdot on how to make your story preferences Avantgo friendly.
At work, I always toss the Pilot in the cradle and hotsynch before a potty break. I can read up on stuff... or just play a game if there's nothing to read.
'course, it's Windows only. I suspect that there's a similar thing out that will download websites and translate them into doc format. If not... there should be. Hmm... sounds like a job for Perl :)
had 15-20 minute introduction? I remember seeing a version that set the scene for the movie by explaining the background for Dune. There were a few artist renderings (evil machines enslaving humans, humans overthrowing them, etc.) that really put the movie in context.
I had actually read the book a year or two before seeing the movie, and the prolog gave me information that I'd somehow missed in the books.
Of course, by the time 1-1-3111 is around, we'll be using a calendar that counts time from some differnt point... like the birthdate of Linus ("he who delivered us from the beast of Redmond") or the first packet transmitted on the Internet, or the dissolution of Microsoft...
Of course, even if we had an odd or even day then, our robot masters, (whose internal clocks tick off the seconds from the curiously arbitrary point in time marked on our calendar as 1-1-1970) won't allow us to celebrate. They will whip us, and we will get back to work, while cursing our ancestors for fixing the bug that would have made them all crash early in the 21st century..
Making the newly popped up window active is the window manager's job. While most distros enable Enlightenment as the default window manager by default (well, OK, the distros I have seen) you can use any Gnome compliant window manager. Unlike KDE, there really isn't a specific Gnome WM.
I suggest you look at the config for whatever window manager you are running. I believe both Enlightenment and WindowMaker (the two Gnome-aware WM I've used) allow you to set policies like this.
Until you programmed a seat-kicking, loud whispering, cell phone and beeper carrying jackass simulation... at least, every time I go to the movies, that's who ends up sitting behind me... Oh, and toss in some surround-sound crying babies belonging to the "we're too cheap to hire a babysitter, so we brought our baby to see the Matrix, I'm sure the gunshots won't upset him/her/it" couple in the front row.
*My* nostalgic memories are based on the original Castle Wolfenstein, which came out for the Apple II in... uh... the early 80's some time. It was 2D, of course, and the graphics... well... not all that great. But it managed to actually have sound beyond the usual bleeps and bloops. Guards actually shouted "Halt!" The dreaded SS officers shouted "Halt! SS." All in hi-fidelity 1-bit sound :)
It was a neat puzzle solving game. In many ways, the FPSs of today follow the same plot... find a key, open doors, find ammo and grenades. Kill wandering guards... I'm not sure that's a great comment on today's games...
Ah, well, maybe it's time to unpack the old Apple II for a trip down memory lane...