I suppose you do have me caught in a fallancy there. I'm sorry.
Still, there is certainly every kind of evidence you would ever want to see, including formal surveys, that show that an overwhelming percentage of academics are left-wingers. I don't think there's any major dispute of this, even among academics themselves.
If reality really had a left-wing bias, Russia and the Eastern Bloc would have become the richest countries in the world by 1989.
Instead, they dissolved into nothingness.
Since I live in Pennsylvania, in the chilly East, I tell you honestly that I welcome our Global Warming Overlords. Please, a 10degF warming today would have been absolutely delightful. Bjorn Lomberg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist quite rightly points out that global warming, if it is in fact occuring, would have benefits as well as costs.
There have been a lot of accusations moving back and forth over this issue, and I'm not convinced one way or the other that warming is happening or not. However, I am convinced that if it exists, it's part of a natural cycle and it's highly unlikely we can influence it in any significant way. The idea that we can influence it by giving up the products of our industrial society strikes me as wistful thinking on the part of the left. After all, if you read anything that's been said on the left, no matter what the problem, giving up the car and the factory always seems to be the answer.
I'm uncomfortable with this argument by authority. People who are knowledgeable about a subject have their own biases, and sometimes they show pretty clearly.
For example, the report gives points to people who point out that an EDU or GOV site is inherently less biased than a.COM site. This is wistful thinking on the part of people who are marinated in the academic environment.
Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias. I spent a very interesting year working in an academic environment, and can confirm this to be true through direct observation. Government, of course, has a bias in favour of the programs it's referencing. If I wanted to find an impartial take on the Social InSecurity programme, for example, I don't think SSA.GOV would be the right place to start.
Finally, their mostly content-free slide presentation does not inspire confidence, at least in me. And the Flash "Demo" doesn't allow me to try it out; it just demonstrates it in action. Boring, and the use of audio makes it over-long and far more tedious than it would have otherwise been. Thes are not the information management and presentation skills I expect from a world-class organization - especially since far less complex and easier to develop systems would have worked better.
I have to say, I feel Acer's pain on this one. That price is absurd in view of what computers cost nowadays.
Even enterprises might start considering MacOS X if this kind of pricing sticks and applies to all vendors.
Anyone know how much Dell will wind up paying? Is this a giveaway to Dell? I wouldn't think Dell would pay more than $40 a unit for Vista if they want to keep the $300 PC alive. And I doubt they are accepting the "Basic" version, either.
D
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
For over a decade, parsers have successfully figured out URL references and numbers without quotes without any significant difficulty that I know of.
I don't think there's any place in my writings where I have advocated no use of spaces. In fact, I was flamed for saying "rows = 0" instead of "rows=0" because I find it easier to read in the former way. I guess you can't win.
It seems to me the world will not collapse if I say "rows = 0" instead of "rows = '0'". I know of no programming language that requires "rows = '0'". In fact, many programming languages will then interpret the 0 as a string and cause an error!
I have recently written a program that tries to find and complain about "dirty" HTML often caused by people trying to sneak illegal constructs into systems. It became apparent early on that a parser that followed the rules would not work well, because people trying to sneak in "dirty" HTML knew how to trick them. So I wound up writing a program that understands "dirty" HTML as typically written and I think my tool is a lot stronger thanks to it.
This is good, because it shows that capitalism works. The businesses that install the ramps get the business. If it's a lot of business, everyone would install ramps. If it's very little business (as I think), the people who install ramps will lose.
I'm not against installing ramps if company owners think they will benefit. I'm very much against the government putting a gun to your head and saying "Install ramps -- OR ELSE!", or people being allowed to sue businesses for not having ramps.
D
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
I use one of those programs (TextMate for the Mac) to edit my Ruby on Rails code. This is mainly because TextMate makes it easy to maintain the directory structure required by RoR, which would be a horrid pain in emacs.
Sometimes it makes it easier to balance quotes, and other times it doesn't. If you're modifying code that needs to have quotes added, wen you type your right quote after an object, it often adds another right quote you have to delete (and often forget to).
Most SGML editors I've seen make it way too clumsy to write code. I can live with TextMate because it imitates some of the emacs editing keystrokes I've memorized over the years. Any tool that doesn't let me use those keystrokes makes me feel enormous pain when editing text.
D
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
I'm pretty sure that modern web crawlers in the real world are designed to cope with just about anything. I know that if I wrote one, that's what I would do.
If you create a web crawler that only accepts valid markup, the only pages it will crawl successfully are the ones about creating valid markup!
Yes, a slight exaggeration, but I think you get the point. D
Forcing it down our throats is wrong, in any language, and that's exactly the type of behaviour guaranteed to close a heart, forever. If you have to spend $10,000 to install wheelchair ramps, and not one wheelchair patron ever shows up, have you not wasted your money?
Doing things to "help" 1% of the population, when they don't even use the things we're forced to give them isn't compassion, it's stupidity.
If they USED the wheelchair ramps, I'd be all for them. If the visitors to my web site consisted primarily of blind people, I'd cater to them. But we're being asked by an external source, not our customers, to do things that are expensive but help nobody.
I don't call that compassion at all.
D
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1
But it's completely unambiguous because a space or a > terminate the string, and neither character is legal in a URL.
And of course numbers are guaranteed never to have space or > in them and so there is never any problem.
So why quote if you know it's completely unambiguous up front?
Just because it's the law doesn't mean it's good law.
I see people redesigning everything for wheelchairs, but the number of times I've actually seen people with wheelchairs USING them I can count on the fingers of two hands, in a decade of watching.
Wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking are great for hospitals, a stupid waste of effort and money for everything else.
And I think the same thing about accessiblity for HTML, especially when it's rammed down people's throats with all this politically correct garbage saying we're all disabled at heart.
People who are disabled, retarded, ADD, stupid, etc, etc, get all the special treatment in our society and those with brains get nothing. The "Exceptional Child" in education courses is the dumb child, not the smart one - and you can guess who gets all the attention.
I think it's just plain, well, dumb for a society to act this way.
D
Re:We don' need no steenking standards...
on
Slashdot's Vastu
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Now, I think her critique of Slashdot is nonsense -- I would not want the page to be shortened, for example, because I like to see a lot of stories without clicking off to a continuation page.
That being said, the concepts of Vastu itself are completely unrelated to implementation. She is not calling herself a technical expert on HTML. She is calling herself someone who understands human psychology as it applies to web design, which is at least a potentially interesting idea.
Personally, I think you web standards guys are way too anal. HTML was originally designed with a very loose syntax, and that's how many people were taught to use it. It takes hours of hard, tedious work to make a site written to the old standards validate, and in the end the site doesn't look any different than it did before.
For instance, you say this is morally bad:
<a href = http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
I say it's much easier to write than
<a href = "http://amazing.com/">amazing.com</a>
and far less prone to error, since one of the most common errors is leaving out the trailing quote:
<a href = "http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
Why not keep HTML easy for humans to write? Why make it harder to write programs to write HTML, by forcing us to gum things up with quotes when it doesn't make the slightest difference in any browser used today?
The guy on the street trying to make a living hates web standards and validation because of things like this. I think you would find that there would be much more support for web standards and validation if you didn't make them so unnecessarily anal and only flagged truly ambiguous cases.
is just plain silly. The numbers are completely umambiguous unquoted.
Well, I suppose that was too long an aside, but the point is that HTML is not a programming language and as someone who has been using HTML since 1994 I don't see why it should be thought of one now.
And I certainly would not criticise someone trying to make a psychological point for HTML problems. I would instead listen to her points and value them entirely independently of the correctness of her HTML. It's in no way important outside of the web standard geek universe.
Incidentally, I think her page design was ghastly. Attack her on her own turf, and in my opinion you'll be a lot more successful. And that's my point.
I would think that they'd want to put their best stuff in the MacBook Pro, considering that a well-equipped 17" model goes for almost $3,000 - or about the same as a Mac Pro + a good-quality 17" LCD.
I thought for sure that when they started supporting 2GB memory chips, we would be able to put 2 2GB chips into our Mac Pros, giving us 4GB.
Why wouldn't this work, or would it?
The OS can surely handle it; Mac Pros can go up to 16GB. In fact, top on my current PowerMac G4 with 2GB RAM reports 17gb of virtual memory, so it seems like it's addressing more than even the total capacity of a Mac Pro.
Apple seems to have done pretty good with my wishlist on the new machine, except for one item. I was intrigued by the claim of better sound, thinking they might have added a tiny subwoofer like other notebooks have. Alas, this seems not to be the case, with the advertising just noting "stereo speakers". Anyone know if they were improved significantly?
What's wrong with a game console for those people? Gaming consoles cost about as much as a high-end graphics card and my impression is that they still work better than most PCs.
Let me just say that every single computer I have seen owned by someone not actually involved in the computing industry in some capacity is riddled with spyware and/or virii.
Generally, the anti-* software is not updated, it is not run periodically because the computers are not kept on 24/7, and problems are allowed to fester until the only solution is to reformat the drive or buy a new computer.
If anti-malware software actually worked, the malware companies will go out of business. I don't think I need to tell you what's actually happening.
These things may seem simple to you, but you are a genuine security expert compared to the person on the street who has a computer. I hate to sound condescending to the average Joe, because the public is often more intelligent than they are given credit for, but in the case of protecting their computer, they're dumb as rocks.
CDE, Enlightenment and all those other environments run under X. X is the fundemental source of the problem, since from what I understand it's a horrible pain to write for.
I checked out your screen shot and it has one thing that makes me dislike it. It looks remarkably similar to Windows. KDE's interface waas in fact based on Windows, and although that makes it familiar to a lot of people, they also make me think that if I really wanted Windows, well I would use the real thing.
At least you will never confuse an Apple screen with a Windows screen, and - and this is very important - it's still very well designed.
I sort of speak from a mid-90s perspective here, when I was using SGI computers because I just couldn't take how ugly X-Windows on Linux looked. SGI's sense of aesthetics was class-leading until Steve Jobs unveiled MacOS X. No matter what else you may say about Steve, his mastery of computing aesthetics has been absolutely unsurpassed in our largely beauty-deprived industry.
The mid-90s were where I founded a lot of my deepest views about computing, and this is an intersting problem for Microsoft. I would never buy an American car beause I hate the way US automakers made inferior junk in the 70s, and don't trust them. I can say the same thing about Microsoft; however much their OS may have improved, I still remember how horrible it was back then, and fear that if I use it it will once again leave me bitterly disappointed as it has in the past. (Even the machine I use to test my work on Windows makes me think this is still all too true).
I have a comparable problem with Linux; I love my MacOS X products, they serve me exceptionally well, so there is little point in trying something new, especially if it's still at least somewhat inferior. (Having to apt-get display drivers is a bit of a clue that this is still the case.)
In the 90s, where SGI was too expensive, Windows too crashy and Linux too raw, I was ready for something new. That opening seems to have pretty much closed for me today since I'm so happy with where I am, and - amazingly enough! - my chosen side has even been gaining considerable market momentum..
People who hate Microsoft founded the site, and still control it.
I would say that a very high percentage of people who love computers, as opposed to simply making a living off them, hate Microsoft.
For many of us, Microsoft's invasion of pretty much everything we held dear made computing a gray, unlovable world whose primary feature was continuous crashes.
Windows 2000 came close to fixing the crashes, and Windows XP was less gray and grim than previous versions. Just as Microsoft started to look almost tolerable, an explosion of malware came, creating waves of horrible problems that required you to become a security expert just to run a PC.
At the same time, open source software, whether free as in liberty or beer, gave us new hope for an alternative that wasn't priced out of the market by the soulless commodity PC. It co-opted the commodity pricing but added an interface we're familiar with and like.
At the same time, it was still a commodity PC, a product that was slapped together by the cheaper-is-better brigade. It's great to save money, not so great to be saddled with hardware that scrapes our knuckles every time we added RAM.
So Apple came on the scene. Want a system that works at base like Linux, but has style and flair and beautiful fonts? Want something more modern than that awful X-Windows, that wasn't even that great when it was founded 30 years ago? Want some cool ways to get reative with photos, music and video?
Well, then, Apple's stuff was made for you.
Apple has created an interesting split among us. Those of us who like using our computers instead of tinkering with them, and who have some disposable income, love Apple. Those who think the principle of open source is better than having things work out of the box, or who don't have the extra bucks, love Linux. Sometimes we'll have fights, sometimes bitter ones, but in the end we're really cut out of the same cloth.
(Have you ever noticed the bitterest fights often come from people who are almost the same? But that's a question for another day.)
I hope that has explained something of the reason for Microsoft hatred, and why Slashdot covers the stories it does, the way it does.
I'm curious about how many people use cellphone plans that charge by the bit nowadays. My T-Mobile Sidekick has had unlimited data for years now. I think even Verizon gives you unlimited data, albiet for a horrible price, around $ 90 a month if I recall correctly.
But I think anyone interested in pushing bits down their cellphone should get an unlimited plan and forget about per-byte charges.
That being said, I really want to give my social networking site a cellphone version, but Google ads are Javascript based and won't work on many phones. Worse, they really clutter up the screen. So I was thinking the best solution would be to ask people to pay a fee for no ads on the main site and the cellphone version, say $24.95 a year, same as Flickr.
In return, there would be no ads on the site and the cellphone version would basically cut out the left sidebars with navigation stuff, bringing you to the main menu bar and then the content window.
I'm a little confused about this post because Flickr has hardly any ads at all. It appears to make money mainly through the $24.95 yearly subscription for the pro accounts.
I think this is cultural. Many of the "unhappy" cultures really push people like crazy towards achievement, and really emphasize it, from the curriculum on down.
We seem to emphasize apparent results - namely, grades to get you in a good school. So in our culture, "dumbed down" classes are rewarded because they give students better grades and better chances at admission. And of course this makes students feel better and more confident - it just doesn't make them better at what they're learning.
I'd be curious to hear what you think of the works of Bjorn Lomberg ("The Skeptical Environmentalist") who pointed out that there are almost certainly factors other than pollution behind global warming, and our ability to reduce CO2 output is limited at best. He recommends that instead of trying to prevent what's probably coming no matter what we do, we instead try to take advantage of the positive impacts of global warming(*), and mitigating the circumstances of people affected negatively by it. He suggested this is much better than trying to stop the economy.
I hope you'll consider reading his book because I really like his tone and the attitude he takes in debunking a lot of commonly held viewpoints that have surprisingly little support behind them. In environmentalism, I hear a lot more religion and blind assertions than serious argument, at least in books designed for the public.
Remember, a lot of people have been predicting doom for decades, and somehow doom has not arrived. There seems to be a lesson in that somewhere...
D
(*) If it was, oh, about 15 degrees warmer where I am right now, I'd be a lot happier. Trust me.
You're buying into some common but unfortunate misconceptions. Bin Laden and his Arab crew had essentially nothing to do with the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. In fact, in a particularly brutal power grab they murdered the guy who actually did the heavy lifting, Ahmad Massoud.
Carter quite rightly mobilized and supplied people within Afghanistan to take back their country. Unless you wanted Afghanistan to remain a Soviet client state, that was the right decision. We did not supply Bin Laden, at least not directly. The Saudis did, on a voluntary (unofficial) basis. Even in those days Bin Laden was not much liked by the establishment of his native country. In a war involving hundreds of thousands, there were only a handful (around 100) people under Osama's command and they were responsible for no major attacks or victories.
You may want to read "The Looming Tower" and/or "The Osama bin Laden I know" by Peter L Bergen for details.
President Carter did bungle an attempted hostage rescue mission and that made him decide against launching any more. It's that memory that makes me treat his role very negatively, regardless of any role Reagan's guys played.
We did support Saddam against the Iranians. It's possible we should not have, but it's also possible that we delayed their acquisition of nuclear weapons. One of the most successful tactics in history is to let your enemies consume each other, instead of you.
However, the fact that we did this gives us a certain moral responsibility to take out Saddam when his brutality became too much for his people to handle. I approve of the fact that we did destroy his regime, because he was Hitler with a smaller canvas. There's no question that he would have caused us trouble in the future, even if we don't now know its exact nature.
I think people who oppose our war against Saddam underrate his level of evil. Many of them have portrayed life under Saddam as almost idyllic to make their case, and that's just plain wrong.
It may be necessary to generalize about people ("us" vs "you") just to write an argument simple enough to be understandable and sound good. Literal correctness just doesn't have the same punch. Sometimes simplifying things really does work better.
We've done a lot of talking in the middle east, and about Palestine, whatever that actually is, and I can't think of any of it that's actually done any good, at least over more than the very short term.
President Carter may have had moral purity but I don't feel Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il do. By assuming those nice folks are just like him, I think he buys into a self-deception that hurts us all. And, of course, we cannot forget his record as President, parts of which helped turn Osama bin Laden against us by making him feel we were all weak imbeciles who could be easily defeated.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose you do have me caught in a fallancy there. I'm sorry.
Still, there is certainly every kind of evidence you would ever want to see, including formal surveys, that show that an overwhelming percentage of academics are left-wingers. I don't think there's any major dispute of this, even among academics themselves.
D
If reality really had a left-wing bias, Russia and the Eastern Bloc would have become the richest countries in the world by 1989.
Instead, they dissolved into nothingness.
Since I live in Pennsylvania, in the chilly East, I tell you honestly that I welcome our Global Warming Overlords. Please, a 10degF warming today would have been absolutely delightful. Bjorn Lomberg, author of the Skeptical Environmentalist quite rightly points out that global warming, if it is in fact occuring, would have benefits as well as costs.
There have been a lot of accusations moving back and forth over this issue, and I'm not convinced one way or the other that warming is happening or not. However, I am convinced that if it exists, it's part of a natural cycle and it's highly unlikely we can influence it in any significant way. The idea that we can influence it by giving up the products of our industrial society strikes me as wistful thinking on the part of the left. After all, if you read anything that's been said on the left, no matter what the problem, giving up the car and the factory always seems to be the answer.
Here's lots more:
http://www.lomborg.com/
D
I'm uncomfortable with this argument by authority. People who are knowledgeable about a subject have their own biases, and sometimes they show pretty clearly.
.COM site. This is wistful thinking on the part of people who are marinated in the academic environment.
For example, the report gives points to people who point out that an EDU or GOV site is inherently less biased than a
Actually, it's fairly well known that academics have a left-wing bias. I spent a very interesting year working in an academic environment, and can confirm this to be true through direct observation. Government, of course, has a bias in favour of the programs it's referencing. If I wanted to find an impartial take on the Social InSecurity programme, for example, I don't think SSA.GOV would be the right place to start.
Finally, their mostly content-free slide presentation does not inspire confidence, at least in me. And the Flash "Demo" doesn't allow me to try it out; it just demonstrates it in action. Boring, and the use of audio makes it over-long and far more tedious than it would have otherwise been. Thes are not the information management and presentation skills I expect from a world-class organization - especially since far less complex and easier to develop systems would have worked better.
D
I have to say, I feel Acer's pain on this one. That price is absurd in view of what computers cost nowadays.
Even enterprises might start considering MacOS X if this kind of pricing sticks and applies to all vendors.
Anyone know how much Dell will wind up paying? Is this a giveaway to Dell? I wouldn't think Dell would pay more than $40 a unit for Vista if they want to keep the $300 PC alive. And I doubt they are accepting the "Basic" version, either.
D
For over a decade, parsers have successfully figured out URL references and numbers without quotes without any significant difficulty that I know of.
I don't think there's any place in my writings where I have advocated no use of spaces. In fact, I was flamed for saying "rows = 0" instead of "rows=0" because I find it easier to read in the former way. I guess you can't win.
It seems to me the world will not collapse if I say "rows = 0" instead of "rows = '0'". I know of no programming language that requires "rows = '0'". In fact, many programming languages will then interpret the 0 as a string and cause an error!
I have recently written a program that tries to find and complain about "dirty" HTML often caused by people trying to sneak illegal constructs into systems. It became apparent early on that a parser that followed the rules would not work well, because people trying to sneak in "dirty" HTML knew how to trick them. So I wound up writing a program that understands "dirty" HTML as typically written and I think my tool is a lot stronger thanks to it.
D
This is good, because it shows that capitalism works. The businesses that install the ramps get the business. If it's a lot of business, everyone would install ramps. If it's very little business (as I think), the people who install ramps will lose.
I'm not against installing ramps if company owners think they will benefit. I'm very much against the government putting a gun to your head and saying "Install ramps -- OR ELSE!", or people being allowed to sue businesses for not having ramps.
D
I use one of those programs (TextMate for the Mac) to edit my Ruby on Rails code. This is mainly because TextMate makes it easy to maintain the directory structure required by RoR, which would be a horrid pain in emacs.
Sometimes it makes it easier to balance quotes, and other times it doesn't. If you're modifying code that needs to have quotes added, wen you type your right quote after an object, it often adds another right quote you have to delete (and often forget to).
Most SGML editors I've seen make it way too clumsy to write code. I can live with TextMate because it imitates some of the emacs editing keystrokes I've memorized over the years. Any tool that doesn't let me use those keystrokes makes me feel enormous pain when editing text.
D
I'm pretty sure that modern web crawlers in the real world are designed to cope with just about anything. I know that if I wrote one, that's what I would do.
If you create a web crawler that only accepts valid markup, the only pages it will crawl successfully are the ones about creating valid markup!
Yes, a slight exaggeration, but I think you get the point.
D
Forcing it down our throats is wrong, in any language, and that's exactly the type of behaviour guaranteed to close a heart, forever. If you have to spend $10,000 to install wheelchair ramps, and not one wheelchair patron ever shows up, have you not wasted your money?
Doing things to "help" 1% of the population, when they don't even use the things we're forced to give them isn't compassion, it's stupidity.
If they USED the wheelchair ramps, I'd be all for them. If the visitors to my web site consisted primarily of blind people, I'd cater to them. But we're being asked by an external source, not our customers, to do things that are expensive but help nobody.
I don't call that compassion at all.
D
But it's completely unambiguous because a space or a > terminate the string, and neither character is legal in a URL.
And of course numbers are guaranteed never to have space or > in them and so there is never any problem.
So why quote if you know it's completely unambiguous up front?
D
Just because it's the law doesn't mean it's good law.
I see people redesigning everything for wheelchairs, but the number of times I've actually seen people with wheelchairs USING them I can count on the fingers of two hands, in a decade of watching.
Wheelchair ramps and handicapped parking are great for hospitals, a stupid waste of effort and money for everything else.
And I think the same thing about accessiblity for HTML, especially when it's rammed down people's throats with all this politically correct garbage saying we're all disabled at heart.
People who are disabled, retarded, ADD, stupid, etc, etc, get all the special treatment in our society and those with brains get nothing. The "Exceptional Child" in education courses is the dumb child, not the smart one - and you can guess who gets all the attention.
I think it's just plain, well, dumb for a society to act this way.
D
Now, I think her critique of Slashdot is nonsense -- I would not want the page to be shortened, for example, because I like to see a lot of stories without clicking off to a continuation page.
That being said, the concepts of Vastu itself are completely unrelated to implementation. She is not calling herself a technical expert on HTML. She is calling herself someone who understands human psychology as it applies to web design, which is at least a potentially interesting idea.
Personally, I think you web standards guys are way too anal. HTML was originally designed with a very loose syntax, and that's how many people were taught to use it. It takes hours of hard, tedious work to make a site written to the old standards validate, and in the end the site doesn't look any different than it did before.
For instance, you say this is morally bad:
<a href = http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
I say it's much easier to write than
<a href = "http://amazing.com/">amazing.com</a>
and far less prone to error, since one of the most common errors is leaving out the trailing quote:
<a href = "http://amazing.com/>amazing.com</a>
Why not keep HTML easy for humans to write? Why make it harder to write programs to write HTML, by forcing us to gum things up with quotes when it doesn't make the slightest difference in any browser used today?
The guy on the street trying to make a living hates web standards and validation because of things like this. I think you would find that there would be much more support for web standards and validation if you didn't make them so unnecessarily anal and only flagged truly ambiguous cases.
To see hundreds of errors where you said
<img src = "foo.gif" height = 100 width = 100>
when you should have said
<img src = "foo.gif" height = "100" width = "100">
is just plain silly. The numbers are completely umambiguous unquoted.
Well, I suppose that was too long an aside, but the point is that HTML is not a programming language and as someone who has been using HTML since 1994 I don't see why it should be thought of one now.
And I certainly would not criticise someone trying to make a psychological point for HTML problems. I would instead listen to her points and value them entirely independently of the correctness of her HTML. It's in no way important outside of the web standard geek universe.
Incidentally, I think her page design was ghastly. Attack her on her own turf, and in my opinion you'll be a lot more successful. And that's my point.
D
I would think that they'd want to put their best stuff in the MacBook Pro, considering that a well-equipped 17" model goes for almost $3,000 - or about the same as a Mac Pro + a good-quality 17" LCD.
D
I thought for sure that when they started supporting 2GB memory chips, we would be able to put 2 2GB chips into our Mac Pros, giving us 4GB.
Why wouldn't this work, or would it?
The OS can surely handle it; Mac Pros can go up to 16GB. In fact, top on my current PowerMac G4 with 2GB RAM reports 17gb of virtual memory, so it seems like it's addressing more than even the total capacity of a Mac Pro.
Apple seems to have done pretty good with my wishlist on the new machine, except for one item. I was intrigued by the claim of better sound, thinking they might have added a tiny subwoofer like other notebooks have. Alas, this seems not to be the case, with the advertising just noting "stereo speakers". Anyone know if they were improved significantly?
D
They don't love Windows.
They love games.
What's wrong with a game console for those people? Gaming consoles cost about as much as a high-end graphics card and my impression is that they still work better than most PCs.
D
Let me just say that every single computer I have seen owned by someone not actually involved in the computing industry in some capacity is riddled with spyware and/or virii.
Generally, the anti-* software is not updated, it is not run periodically because the computers are not kept on 24/7, and problems are allowed to fester until the only solution is to reformat the drive or buy a new computer.
If anti-malware software actually worked, the malware companies will go out of business. I don't think I need to tell you what's actually happening.
These things may seem simple to you, but you are a genuine security expert compared to the person on the street who has a computer. I hate to sound condescending to the average Joe, because the public is often more intelligent than they are given credit for, but in the case of protecting their computer, they're dumb as rocks.
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CDE, Enlightenment and all those other environments run under X. X is the fundemental source of the problem, since from what I understand it's a horrible pain to write for.
I checked out your screen shot and it has one thing that makes me dislike it. It looks remarkably similar to Windows. KDE's interface waas in fact based on Windows, and although that makes it familiar to a lot of people, they also make me think that if I really wanted Windows, well I would use the real thing.
At least you will never confuse an Apple screen with a Windows screen, and - and this is very important - it's still very well designed.
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I sort of speak from a mid-90s perspective here, when I was using SGI computers because I just couldn't take how ugly X-Windows on Linux looked. SGI's sense of aesthetics was class-leading until Steve Jobs unveiled MacOS X. No matter what else you may say about Steve, his mastery of computing aesthetics has been absolutely unsurpassed in our largely beauty-deprived industry.
The mid-90s were where I founded a lot of my deepest views about computing, and this is an intersting problem for Microsoft. I would never buy an American car beause I hate the way US automakers made inferior junk in the 70s, and don't trust them. I can say the same thing about Microsoft; however much their OS may have improved, I still remember how horrible it was back then, and fear that if I use it it will once again leave me bitterly disappointed as it has in the past. (Even the machine I use to test my work on Windows makes me think this is still all too true).
I have a comparable problem with Linux; I love my MacOS X products, they serve me exceptionally well, so there is little point in trying something new, especially if it's still at least somewhat inferior. (Having to apt-get display drivers is a bit of a clue that this is still the case.)
In the 90s, where SGI was too expensive, Windows too crashy and Linux too raw, I was ready for something new. That opening seems to have pretty much closed for me today since I'm so happy with where I am, and - amazingly enough! - my chosen side has even been gaining considerable market momentum..
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People who hate Microsoft founded the site, and still control it.
I would say that a very high percentage of people who love computers, as opposed to simply making a living off them, hate Microsoft.
For many of us, Microsoft's invasion of pretty much everything we held dear made computing a gray, unlovable world whose primary feature was continuous crashes.
Windows 2000 came close to fixing the crashes, and Windows XP was less gray and grim than previous versions. Just as Microsoft started to look almost tolerable, an explosion of malware came, creating waves of horrible problems that required you to become a security expert just to run a PC.
At the same time, open source software, whether free as in liberty or beer, gave us new hope for an alternative that wasn't priced out of the market by the soulless commodity PC. It co-opted the commodity pricing but added an interface we're familiar with and like.
At the same time, it was still a commodity PC, a product that was slapped together by the cheaper-is-better brigade. It's great to save money, not so great to be saddled with hardware that scrapes our knuckles every time we added RAM.
So Apple came on the scene. Want a system that works at base like Linux, but has style and flair and beautiful fonts? Want something more modern than that awful X-Windows, that wasn't even that great when it was founded 30 years ago? Want some cool ways to get reative with photos, music and video?
Well, then, Apple's stuff was made for you.
Apple has created an interesting split among us. Those of us who like using our computers instead of tinkering with them, and who have some disposable income, love Apple. Those who think the principle of open source is better than having things work out of the box, or who don't have the extra bucks, love Linux. Sometimes we'll have fights, sometimes bitter ones, but in the end we're really cut out of the same cloth.
(Have you ever noticed the bitterest fights often come from people who are almost the same? But that's a question for another day.)
I hope that has explained something of the reason for Microsoft hatred, and why Slashdot covers the stories it does, the way it does.
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I'm curious about how many people use cellphone plans that charge by the bit nowadays. My T-Mobile Sidekick has had unlimited data for years now. I think even Verizon gives you unlimited data, albiet for a horrible price, around $ 90 a month if I recall correctly.
But I think anyone interested in pushing bits down their cellphone should get an unlimited plan and forget about per-byte charges.
That being said, I really want to give my social networking site a cellphone version, but Google ads are Javascript based and won't work on many phones. Worse, they really clutter up the screen. So I was thinking the best solution would be to ask people to pay a fee for no ads on the main site and the cellphone version, say $24.95 a year, same as Flickr.
In return, there would be no ads on the site and the cellphone version would basically cut out the left sidebars with navigation stuff, bringing you to the main menu bar and then the content window.
What do you folks think of that plan?
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I'm a little confused about this post because Flickr has hardly any ads at all. It appears to make money mainly through the $24.95 yearly subscription for the pro accounts.
Or am I missing something?
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I think this is cultural. Many of the "unhappy" cultures really push people like crazy towards achievement, and really emphasize it, from the curriculum on down.
We seem to emphasize apparent results - namely, grades to get you in a good school. So in our culture, "dumbed down" classes are rewarded because they give students better grades and better chances at admission. And of course this makes students feel better and more confident - it just doesn't make them better at what they're learning.
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I'd be curious to hear what you think of the works of Bjorn Lomberg ("The Skeptical Environmentalist") who pointed out that there are almost certainly factors other than pollution behind global warming, and our ability to reduce CO2 output is limited at best. He recommends that instead of trying to prevent what's probably coming no matter what we do, we instead try to take advantage of the positive impacts of global warming(*), and mitigating the circumstances of people affected negatively by it. He suggested this is much better than trying to stop the economy.
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I hope you'll consider reading his book because I really like his tone and the attitude he takes in debunking a lot of commonly held viewpoints that have surprisingly little support behind them. In environmentalism, I hear a lot more religion and blind assertions than serious argument, at least in books designed for the public.
Remember, a lot of people have been predicting doom for decades, and somehow doom has not arrived. There seems to be a lesson in that somewhere
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(*) If it was, oh, about 15 degrees warmer where I am right now, I'd be a lot happier. Trust me.
You're buying into some common but unfortunate misconceptions. Bin Laden and his Arab crew had essentially nothing to do with the defeat of the Russians in Afghanistan. In fact, in a particularly brutal power grab they murdered the guy who actually did the heavy lifting, Ahmad Massoud.
Carter quite rightly mobilized and supplied people within Afghanistan to take back their country. Unless you wanted Afghanistan to remain a Soviet client state, that was the right decision. We did not supply Bin Laden, at least not directly. The Saudis did, on a voluntary (unofficial) basis. Even in those days Bin Laden was not much liked by the establishment of his native country. In a war involving hundreds of thousands, there were only a handful (around 100) people under Osama's command and they were responsible for no major attacks or victories.
You may want to read "The Looming Tower" and/or "The Osama bin Laden I know" by Peter L Bergen for details.
President Carter did bungle an attempted hostage rescue mission and that made him decide against launching any more. It's that memory that makes me treat his role very negatively, regardless of any role Reagan's guys played.
We did support Saddam against the Iranians. It's possible we should not have, but it's also possible that we delayed their acquisition of nuclear weapons. One of the most successful tactics in history is to let your enemies consume each other, instead of you.
However, the fact that we did this gives us a certain moral responsibility to take out Saddam when his brutality became too much for his people to handle. I approve of the fact that we did destroy his regime, because he was Hitler with a smaller canvas. There's no question that he would have caused us trouble in the future, even if we don't now know its exact nature.
I think people who oppose our war against Saddam underrate his level of evil. Many of them have portrayed life under Saddam as almost idyllic to make their case, and that's just plain wrong.
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It may be necessary to generalize about people ("us" vs "you") just to write an argument simple enough to be understandable and sound good. Literal correctness just doesn't have the same punch. Sometimes simplifying things really does work better.
We've done a lot of talking in the middle east, and about Palestine, whatever that actually is, and I can't think of any of it that's actually done any good, at least over more than the very short term.
President Carter may have had moral purity but I don't feel Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il do. By assuming those nice folks are just like him, I think he buys into a self-deception that hurts us all. And, of course, we cannot forget his record as President, parts of which helped turn Osama bin Laden against us by making him feel we were all weak imbeciles who could be easily defeated.
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