If OSS is to thrive, it needs to not offer worse alternatives, and by so doing, convince people that OSS is unreliable.
No matter what people who wish it were otherwise say, OpenOffice is a piece of junk. It's huge. It's buggy. It has difficulties using other formats. It explodes frequently. It requires massive Java-ware installed on the machines of otherwise happily non-bloated users. It's worse than anything Microsoft has shipped.
Point people toward Abiword, or point them toward Google apps, but don't push that piece of junk on them, unless you want to cement in their minds the idea that "free but inferior" is the definition of open source.
Being faceless and depersonalized is too simple. You have to mix in social standing and effect of a level playing field, as well as the human desire to belong to a group, and the tendency of any group to develop and reward groupthink.
I think this is perceptive. Everyone is depersonalized not only by the nature of the medium, but by the lack of a social context, so it's like Chomskian social climbing all over the place. Groupthink I don't know how to explain except that it's easier to trust "the way things always are" than think up some new way. Any ideas?
I don't have the patience to sue spammers. But in a society where we all whine about the erosion of our lifestyles owing to bad government and bad corporations, here is a guy actually doing something about it.
So to Bennett, I have to say: Go for it, man. You're putting pressure on those judges who don't know what spam is, and making it less profitable for spammers to spam. They're after the easy buck. Make them fight for it and they'll go back to making pornography and selling novelties.
Or even 1984. People have been observing for some time that computer mediated communication has two negative traits:
1. Depersonalizing. We lose sight of the fact that there's another person on the other end of the line. Then again, who cares? When you're looking for answers, worrying too much about whether someone else is offended by the truth is totally counterproductive.
2. Lack of facial expression and gestures. This is the biggest for me. A message normally delivered with a wry friendly smile could be seen as supportive cynicism, where online it comes across as aggressive sarcasm.
They also failed to mention the biggest problem, which is the proliferation of stupid people since AOL came online. Put a smart person in a room and make them answer to morons, and soon they're pretty irate. As any experienced user must be reading that recycled, contentless, but provocative article.
They turned honest Japanese into Mac-worshipping fools.
Get a desk you can pull to your lap
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 1
Laplander. I've been jonesing for one of these for a few years. It's not a lap desk per se, but it's the best option for ergonomics that I've found, since I am also a slouch on the sofa person.
Given the latency involved with getting 65,000 people into the right parking spaces, much less coding up an operating system, I'd guess the list is this:
1. Telepathy 2. Time Travel 3. Prescience 4. Anomie 5. 4D Interface 6. Zen 7. Levitation
Genetically engineer humans not to be afraid of the opinions of others, and then we'll have fun watching flash mobs nail them to crosses and make them prophets.
The moon was once inhabited by an intelligent but thoughtless species that developed technology, covered the planet in concrete, and then died of their own selfishness, leaving behind a barren gray wasteland that resembles an asteroid-pocked version of Houston, Texas...
He did something for which the company might get sued (sexual harassment could qualify) and has been fired to protect the company. Legal action is like being bit by a zombie. Expect your former friends to shoot you in the head ASAP.
Please, Yahoo!, step aside with your feeble attempts to please one of your host countries. We have more important wars to wage, and may indeed want to take out those pesky Chinese. So you moral pygmies, out of our war errr our way, for we have important wars errr good deeds to wage.
Ignore the homeless, the ghetto, the pollution, the drug addicts, the crime, the Wal-mart, the blind political correctness, the perversion of religion and patriotism, the secret detention camps and the suburban blight on your way out.
Well, good to see nothing's new here. I wonder if those 2/3 who paid nothing would have bought the album anyway, or if they are people with stacks of dubs and no purchased CDs. It is possible they steal music, but give back in other ways, making that "theft" moot. Like if one of them invents the cure for cancer we will feel stupid for yelling at them for not paying for some ridiculous overinflated retro band's digital album.
More anarchy, crime, terrorism, fear... or stronger government. There's probably a third way around this that involves smaller nations with fewer rules, but that's for political theorists, not technical writers.
Second Life players are used to harassment from morons. When you are harassed by morons in real life, you have to move away, as that's the path of least resistance. When you are harassed online, you completely ignore them, as that's the path of least resistance.
They should have given their spamatar a virtual trenchcoat and bare feet, had it holding out lollipops and rasping about the joy of intergenerational love, and then they would have fit right in.
This is where a conventional encyclopedia, with experienced editors, outshines wikipedia (one of the many places).
An experienced editor will usually reject forced outing of people, or revealing that they're gay when they'd rather keep that private, because it rarely adds to the factual content of the article and can interrupt the parts of their lives that should be private.
Shame on wikipedia. Although I agree with the courts, I see this forced outing as a bad call for wikipedia to have made.
Avoid the two big warring parties that are too big to get anything right, strip down your runtime and spend more time being less concerned with government or browsers. Opera is the Ron Paul of browsers in that it seems a lot of us use it online, but you never see mention of it in the "real world," and this article is part of that trend. Why?
That's an odd thing to post. What, you do not like our glorious worker's paradise? I know a Party psychologist who can help you get over these fears. The future does not reward those who oppose the Party, however decentralized it may be in the liberal democratic West.
Or take Columbine. When this tragedy hit, our readers took it a differently. Instead of blaming video games, we looked hard at the culture of abuse that drives high school. We talked about how the jocks beat us up. We knew that the terrible events of that day are almost inevitable when you stick kids into a system where certain groups of kids are given free reign to beat up others based on extra curricular activities.
This is what I like about Slashdot. A focus on technology and a view that solutions are not necessarily what everyone else on all sides of the political spectrum seems to think they are.
When I see people imbibing the kool-aid of Macintosh, Linux, Libertarianism or any of a dozen other -isms or fanboy silos, I sense the creeping death that threatens any organization: groupthink. Moo.
It's to your credit that you've kept it at bay. Ten more years, at least, and keep it hairy here so if the corporates want to intervene, they'll get F1R5T P05T and goatse in their laps.
Someone mentioned the "MS monoculture." Assuming I understand that term, we can construct a model in the following way:
Apple - hardware monoculture, operating system monoculture, software polyculture Microsoft - hardware polyculture, operating system monoculture, software polyculture
In this light, let's look at open source or free operating systems:
FOSS/F/OSS - hardware polyculture, operating system polyculture, software polyculture
Interestingly, I like the idea of hardware monoculture or limited polyculture (oligoculture). The crap PC hardware that bluescreens is what gives Windows a bad name, because if you install Windows XP on quality hardware, you will never see the blue screen. Similarly, I've seen such hardware freeze BSDs and crash Linuxes.
Really I wish there were more people out there who could tell the difference between a crap product and a good product, and recognize that with economies of scale, a good product will cost as little as a crap product within a year of production.
I don't like Apple. They're smug, unethical, bad for backward compatibility, and their hardware is often extremely unreliable. Compared to the white boxes I build, Macs are junk, but so are the offerings from Dell.
With the white box however, you see a lot of power. You can build your own machine and upgrade it incrementally, which reduces the amount of stuff you throw out. You can run Linux, BSD or Windows on it, or like me, run BSD and keep Windows in a VMware partition, which gives you the best of both worlds.
The Houston Slashdot party was quite a success, with a write-up at that link. I'm grateful for all the people I met and hope to see you maniacs again when my wounds heal.
They're reversing direction. The idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit seems to be too much of a problem, so they're doing a silly little dance to get around the fact that now they're hiring a staff, implementing a hierarchy and control procedures, and publishing a finalized product...... just like Encyclopedia Brittanica does, but without academic titles behind the articles.
I enjoy early music, which is medieval and before classical-styled ecclesiastical music. There are some who still practice it, and having their MP3s has allowed me to know what to buy when I do place that order through the pain-in-the-ass place in Ohio that actually has some of these CDs.
See Google reliance on Mozilla. They're using open source software and net standards as a way of warring against Microsoft, Sun and Apple. Soon they will own just about anything, so we the consumers should make a decision now about how much of our data we want Google to be able to correlate from the many different sources (search, blogs, micro-blogs, cloud OS, chat) it has at its disposal, and can reveal to law enforcement agencies.
Slashdot Mirror
If OSS is to thrive, it needs to not offer worse alternatives, and by so doing, convince people that OSS is unreliable.
No matter what people who wish it were otherwise say, OpenOffice is a piece of junk. It's huge. It's buggy. It has difficulties using other formats. It explodes frequently. It requires massive Java-ware installed on the machines of otherwise happily non-bloated users. It's worse than anything Microsoft has shipped.
Point people toward Abiword, or point them toward Google apps, but don't push that piece of junk on them, unless you want to cement in their minds the idea that "free but inferior" is the definition of open source.
Thank you.
I think this is perceptive. Everyone is depersonalized not only by the nature of the medium, but by the lack of a social context, so it's like Chomskian social climbing all over the place. Groupthink I don't know how to explain except that it's easier to trust "the way things always are" than think up some new way. Any ideas?
I don't have the patience to sue spammers. But in a society where we all whine about the erosion of our lifestyles owing to bad government and bad corporations, here is a guy actually doing something about it.
So to Bennett, I have to say: Go for it, man. You're putting pressure on those judges who don't know what spam is, and making it less profitable for spammers to spam. They're after the easy buck. Make them fight for it and they'll go back to making pornography and selling novelties.
Or even 1984. People have been observing for some time that computer mediated communication has two negative traits:
1. Depersonalizing. We lose sight of the fact that there's another person on the other end of the line. Then again, who cares? When you're looking for answers, worrying too much about whether someone else is offended by the truth is totally counterproductive.
2. Lack of facial expression and gestures. This is the biggest for me. A message normally delivered with a wry friendly smile could be seen as supportive cynicism, where online it comes across as aggressive sarcasm.
They also failed to mention the biggest problem, which is the proliferation of stupid people since AOL came online. Put a smart person in a room and make them answer to morons, and soon they're pretty irate. As any experienced user must be reading that recycled, contentless, but provocative article.
They turned honest Japanese into Mac-worshipping fools.
Laplander. I've been jonesing for one of these for a few years. It's not a lap desk per se, but it's the best option for ergonomics that I've found, since I am also a slouch on the sofa person.
Given the latency involved with getting 65,000 people into the right parking spaces, much less coding up an operating system, I'd guess the list is this:
1. Telepathy
2. Time Travel
3. Prescience
4. Anomie
5. 4D Interface
6. Zen
7. Levitation
Genetically engineer humans not to be afraid of the opinions of others, and then we'll have fun watching flash mobs nail them to crosses and make them prophets.
Just shoot back at the enemy. If your tanks are getting hacked, cancel the MySpace page for your regiment.
The moon was once inhabited by an intelligent but thoughtless species that developed technology, covered the planet in concrete, and then died of their own selfishness, leaving behind a barren gray wasteland that resembles an asteroid-pocked version of Houston, Texas...
He did something for which the company might get sued (sexual harassment could qualify) and has been fired to protect the company. Legal action is like being bit by a zombie. Expect your former friends to shoot you in the head ASAP.
Please, Yahoo!, step aside with your feeble attempts to please one of your host countries. We have more important wars to wage, and may indeed want to take out those pesky Chinese. So you moral pygmies, out of our war errr our way, for we have important wars errr good deeds to wage.
Ignore the homeless, the ghetto, the pollution, the drug addicts, the crime, the Wal-mart, the blind political correctness, the perversion of religion and patriotism, the secret detention camps and the suburban blight on your way out.
Well, good to see nothing's new here. I wonder if those 2/3 who paid nothing would have bought the album anyway, or if they are people with stacks of dubs and no purchased CDs. It is possible they steal music, but give back in other ways, making that "theft" moot. Like if one of them invents the cure for cancer we will feel stupid for yelling at them for not paying for some ridiculous overinflated retro band's digital album.
More anarchy, crime, terrorism, fear... or stronger government. There's probably a third way around this that involves smaller nations with fewer rules, but that's for political theorists, not technical writers.
Second Life players are used to harassment from morons. When you are harassed by morons in real life, you have to move away, as that's the path of least resistance. When you are harassed online, you completely ignore them, as that's the path of least resistance.
They should have given their spamatar a virtual trenchcoat and bare feet, had it holding out lollipops and rasping about the joy of intergenerational love, and then they would have fit right in.
This is where a conventional encyclopedia, with experienced editors, outshines wikipedia (one of the many places). An experienced editor will usually reject forced outing of people, or revealing that they're gay when they'd rather keep that private, because it rarely adds to the factual content of the article and can interrupt the parts of their lives that should be private. Shame on wikipedia. Although I agree with the courts, I see this forced outing as a bad call for wikipedia to have made.
Avoid the two big warring parties that are too big to get anything right, strip down your runtime and spend more time being less concerned with government or browsers. Opera is the Ron Paul of browsers in that it seems a lot of us use it online, but you never see mention of it in the "real world," and this article is part of that trend. Why?
That's an odd thing to post. What, you do not like our glorious worker's paradise? I know a Party psychologist who can help you get over these fears. The future does not reward those who oppose the Party, however decentralized it may be in the liberal democratic West.
Or take Columbine. When this tragedy hit, our readers took it a differently. Instead of blaming video games, we looked hard at the culture of abuse that drives high school. We talked about how the jocks beat us up. We knew that the terrible events of that day are almost inevitable when you stick kids into a system where certain groups of kids are given free reign to beat up others based on extra curricular activities.
This is what I like about Slashdot. A focus on technology and a view that solutions are not necessarily what everyone else on all sides of the political spectrum seems to think they are.
When I see people imbibing the kool-aid of Macintosh, Linux, Libertarianism or any of a dozen other -isms or fanboy silos, I sense the creeping death that threatens any organization: groupthink. Moo.
It's to your credit that you've kept it at bay. Ten more years, at least, and keep it hairy here so if the corporates want to intervene, they'll get F1R5T P05T and goatse in their laps.
Someone mentioned the "MS monoculture." Assuming I understand that term, we can construct a model in the following way:
Apple - hardware monoculture, operating system monoculture, software polyculture
Microsoft - hardware polyculture, operating system monoculture, software polyculture
In this light, let's look at open source or free operating systems:
FOSS/F/OSS - hardware polyculture, operating system polyculture, software polyculture
Interestingly, I like the idea of hardware monoculture or limited polyculture (oligoculture). The crap PC hardware that bluescreens is what gives Windows a bad name, because if you install Windows XP on quality hardware, you will never see the blue screen. Similarly, I've seen such hardware freeze BSDs and crash Linuxes.
Really I wish there were more people out there who could tell the difference between a crap product and a good product, and recognize that with economies of scale, a good product will cost as little as a crap product within a year of production.
I don't like Apple. They're smug, unethical, bad for backward compatibility, and their hardware is often extremely unreliable. Compared to the white boxes I build, Macs are junk, but so are the offerings from Dell.
With the white box however, you see a lot of power. You can build your own machine and upgrade it incrementally, which reduces the amount of stuff you throw out. You can run Linux, BSD or Windows on it, or like me, run BSD and keep Windows in a VMware partition, which gives you the best of both worlds.
The Houston Slashdot party was quite a success, with a write-up at that link. I'm grateful for all the people I met and hope to see you maniacs again when my wounds heal.
They're reversing direction. The idea of an encyclopedia that anyone can edit seems to be too much of a problem, so they're doing a silly little dance to get around the fact that now they're hiring a staff, implementing a hierarchy and control procedures, and publishing a finalized product...... just like Encyclopedia Brittanica does, but without academic titles behind the articles.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2704,2204615,00.asp
I enjoy early music, which is medieval and before classical-styled ecclesiastical music. There are some who still practice it, and having their MP3s has allowed me to know what to buy when I do place that order through the pain-in-the-ass place in Ohio that actually has some of these CDs.
See Google reliance on Mozilla. They're using open source software and net standards as a way of warring against Microsoft, Sun and Apple. Soon they will own just about anything, so we the consumers should make a decision now about how much of our data we want Google to be able to correlate from the many different sources (search, blogs, micro-blogs, cloud OS, chat) it has at its disposal, and can reveal to law enforcement agencies.