Everytime I look up their stock report online, there's an accompanying stock analyst report saying how much their stock is undervalued. With education sales, excitement over the new iBooks, and 10.1 finally making OS X an OS that is stable AND resposnive, I expect apple to continue to be profitable through the 4 quarter.
And what apple has that a lot of companies do not have is an energized user base. How many people are really that excited about XP? How about a new Dell computer? These things just don't get people going like in the mac community. We're very enthusiastic about apple products and where they are going.
Price gouging like this is exactly why there has been any move to break up microsoft. Having a virtually complete monopoly of the OS market leaves customers vulnerable to the whimsacle price increases that Billy wants to have to make it to the 100 billion mark. Imagine what happens when they make you pay every year for a subscription fee: you'll be forced to pay whatever price they want to continue the subscription, or you will have no OS at all. And a lot of companies can't make a transition from Windows to MacOS or Linux within days, so companies would be forced to comply. If I had a windows box, I'd keep a version of 2000 around just for this reason.
Businesses should have complete control over their prices. BUT, the ability for microsoft to control the markey and force customers to pay incredible prices is an example of why some type of legal action needs to be taken against Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and help protect consumers and businesses.
Linux would be forced to use propriatary software (from the federal gov't) to be legal, which is the antithesis of the open source movement. There should be no forceably entered closed source applications integrated into Linux. And it might be illegal to actually remove the digital protecttion software, which an open source model would obviously allow you to do no matter what. Linux as we know it would be dead, and we could bet that more gov't interventions into software woould be soon to follow.
Hey WhiteWholf, long time no see. Yes, the odds look bleak, and I find it hard to tell a Congressman a good reason why all "digital devices" (whatever those are) should not have federally approved safegaurds against illegal intellectual property right violations.
The one I can think of refers to free speech. I have a right to say whatever I want, regardless if it is obscene or fight provoking. BUT, ther are consequences for those actions. I can go to jail, be fined, ect. Here, the gov't is actively preventing me from performing a crime. This would be the equivalent of the gov't implanting chips in my throat that some how stopped my vocal cords from issuing swear words in an obscene manner.
Actually, it's not the equivalent, but my argument would work better if it was. The government can make it illegel for you to make counterfeiting machines, and will actively try to stop you from making counterfeit dollars. Also, the gov't tries to stop people from killing each other.
So what we've got is a mess. It's not idiotic; it makes perfect sense to a lot of Americans. Why shouldn't devices that can copy copyrighted materials have safegaurds against illegal copying? Because by the same argument, we should have no sharp edges because they could be used for something they generally shouldn't (like killing people). And heaven forbid they take away our cars because car accidents account for somany deaths every year.
But if we sit around for a year and do nothing, I'm sure our gov't will deal with all of these issues for us.
Yes, I've heard. Kills men by the hundreds, and if he were here he'd consume the SSSCA with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse.
I AM Steve Wozniak! And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men...and free men you are. What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?
[Fight? Against that? NO! We will run...and we will live.]
Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live...at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that...for one chance, JUST ONE CHANCE, TO COME BACK HERE AND TELL OUR ENEMIES THAT THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES...BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!
Let's not jump to conclusions. The poster is comitting the logical intent fallacy, because we can never truely know the intent of the senator. Humans often act contrary to how their enviornment around them would make you believe they would.
Additionally, we should have a little more faith in our system. I have no problem with the congressman presenting this bill, because I have good faith that one of two things will happen: 1) a majority of other congressmen(and women) will see this type of legislation as being a violation of indiviudal liberties and vote aginst it, or 2) this would get struct down by the Supreme Court.
Now, it is possible that out system will fail. And I'm ready to move to a little island somewhere in the Bahamas. But let's not freak out yet. What we can do is:
1) Public protests in large numbers - the media loves to cover stuff like that
2) Mail, not email - most congressmen don't have time to read the millions of emails/spam they recieve. A letter seeems like you put more effort into your comment anyway.
3) Run for office. Elections are right around the door. There are plenty of geeky people in the US who have enough knowledge of political science and related fields to make a run for it. Competent legislaturers are a must.
4) Move to Canada. We'll c how good the US economy does after the whole tech sector moves out.
Now you don't only have to talk dirty, but you can sketch picturers of what my body would look like if I hadn't been playing Wolfenstein for the past couple of days and loved on a steady diet of Good and Plenty's and Jolt. My nerdy body was approaching "rather not see naked, but it wouldn't kill me," but I can always aspire for this some other time.
The more technology advances, the better the artificial sex.
I think the rendering of services cannot be stopped on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, or physical ability (aka being disabled). But of you do it for another reason (such as for being a hater), it is legal.
And hey, if companies want to start making bigoted licenses, I'm all for it! Think of all the people would migrate from Microsoft to even half-assed alternatives if Microsoft admitted openly that they discriminate on the basis of sex. I think we've gotten to the point that big companies will have trouble getting away with such open discrimination without an economiuc hit. It's the smaller businesses that are more likely to not have their racists practices uncovered and blared on every major network news station.
Maybe there isn't anything good to mod up. It isn't like any of the subjects are all that explosive, and most people (atleast in the US) are probably watching Bush's address to Congress and the nation about this "war" called Operation: Infinite Justice.
Besides the spelling, I have no idea why they called this Operation: Infinte Justice. Why not Operation: CounterTerrorist Assualt or Operation: Kill Terrorist or Operation: Get Bin Laden, etc? Oh yeah, because the federal government sounds better if it uses words that mask the meaning of the operation. It's a linguistic game they play all the time. You know, when your job is being reingeneered instead of being fired? One sounds a lot worse than the other. The gov't is obviously going to pick a name that obscures the questionable actions of the gov't and replaces them with something less attackable, such as reaping justice. Bringing down revenge would put some people in a fit, but who can argue with getting justice?
Not saying that the operation may not be for the best, but this is probably wy they chose the name: it limited potential criticism.
Of course they can. They can limit whatever speech through their medium that they want. Republican talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh don't have to allow liberals (or atleast, the smart ones) on their show if they don't want to. So what do liberals do when they don't have their voice heard on the EIB network? They go elsewhere.
And frontpage is nowhere near a monopoly, and there are tons of alternatives, so the ability to have speech is not limited through a medium, just one avenew out of several similiar avenews for expressing free speech in one medium is limited.
Restrictions like this should make a lot of people consider using alternatives. The more people that move away from microsoft products, the better. And if microsoft is going to give people good reason to switch, I'm not going to complain.
1. I'm more mad about people continually modding the quote up than it being posted. Somebody's picking up a lot of extra karma for a redundant quote.
2. I guess any safety is temporary, therefore we should never abridge any freedom for safety? Ever?
3. I am from the good Old USA, but my point was that you can be safe (from harm) with the loss of some liberty (aka socialism). The catch with countries that don't put a lot of emphasis on liberty is the rise of corrupt leaders, but for some people that's an acceptable risk.
4. Yes, this does effect a whole bunch of issues. The thing is these are mainly conviences, that while making our lives easier, have also made it more dangerous. So now we have to balance liberty and convience against safety.
1) This has been posted 5,000,001 times this past month, and it's getting old.
2) Note the key word "temporary." If this security would be longlasting (which it conceivably could be), then this statement would become nullified.
3) I wonder of BF thinks that all socialist contries deserve no safety? Hmm... maybe he means safety from future liberty losses.
4) Is complete online privacy as essential liberty that can never be abrdged? Hell no, it can be abridged with a court order as it has been done with wiretapping. Atleast it should be. That's why we have courts: to decide on a case-by-case basis which rights are most important. In this case, it is the right of life vs the right of privacy.
Should the government beable to obtain information about online conversations you've had related to events of national importance, that is whenever they feel it is of national importance to do so, that is whenever they want, that is they're going to expand their net of social control to incompass all forms of communication and thinking?
(Yeah, the last part is suppose to be part of a statement; it's a trick like that: instead of being asked what you think, by the end of the poll you're being told what to think).
but this helps set a precedent. Too bad it's not in the legal sense.
What we really need is a test case, to find some business that violated the GPL and take them to court over a big, intentional GPL violation where they'll attack the integrity of the GPL. If it survives the court case, we're in good shape and makes it likely that companies will think twice before they violate the GPL.
For some strange reason I have an urge to dig through code from a certain company.
They could easily pull the same type of attack ina week or so. We won't have air marshalls on planes for a while, and I'm sure they're not going to have steel bolted cockpit doors for quite some time, so terrorists could use theur same old strategy again. Why reinvent the wheel when you already have something that works.
If this is a well thought out terrorist plan, they'll proabably attack something relatively soon. Probably not this week, but next week. Make us feel a little safe agai, and then stuff it right back into our faces.
The sad thing is there is ultimately nothing that can be done to stop terrorism in general. We can stop simple cases (aka terrorists with box cutters), but it's nearly impossible to block off terrorism at every turn without substantially limiting everyones individual freedom. It'll take something like a Matrix world, where government or some machine locks us away and/or watches our every move, possibly being able to immediately "deactive" us for "inappropraite" behavior. We can never have complete security without complete loss of freedom... but then, is it really worth it.
I remember the scene from Star Trek: Generation, when James T. Kirk is loving the Nexus, the ability to go back and do everything he wanted to in the past. But then it hits him, after he jumps over a stream with his horse, that life isn't meanignful if it can't be lost, or you can't fail. That's why watching sporting activities is so much fun, because the outcome is never for sure.
I don't know about #1, but I got to disagree with you on #2.
Most of the work opensource developers will put in will directly influence whether or not the companies that produce linux distros will make a profit. If linux sucks and doesn't improve, then they don't make money. If it rocks and it's getting better, then these companies will make more money (because more people will buy their distro + tech support).
People volunteer for companies that are out to make profits all the time. If I volunteer, it's not because it's for a non-profit cause, but that it's for a good cause.
When my Appl IIgs didn't have a hardrive. I always had to boot off a floppy disk of some sort. Number Munchers was the closest thing I had to a violent game... I still have nightmares of troggles.
And then there was Wolfenstein. Too bad I didn't find out about it until last year (thank you emulation.net). I could only imagine how great these graphics must have been back in the late 80s. That's when Mario brothers had great graphics (until my brother stuck a marshmello into my Nintendo on my b-day...). The game play was simple, but involving. Did anyone complain back then about bloatware games and crappy graphics? Heck no, everything was pretty well equal.
But now we're half way between low n polygon 3D and high n polygon 3D, with stuff like FinalFantasy 7 being on the lower end, and Final Fantasy 9 on the higher end. If you played 8, you saw how crappy everybody looked; you could barely make out the characters (not to mention the crappy GF system, but that's another matter). 2D used to be good, and always getting better. When we went from good looking 2D to shoddy looking 3D, it really pissed me off. I couldn't figure out why everything looked so choppy all of a sudden (this was before I took geometry in high school).
But the good old days will never be back... except through emulation. I hope multiplayer Wolfenstein gives us something to talk about, not just something to complain about.
From the article:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro.
Wow, uhhh.. this sounds like a major problem to me. It's pretty easy to get use to (no rocket science behind holding down or not holding down the shift-key), and it would be trivial to fix. And it's open source, so they could just recompile KSpread with it not caring about case-sensitivity. Any novi programmer can do that.
Actually, a lot of linux apps would proabably get more acceptance from the business community if they actually cost something. Business people know you don't get something for nothing; there are almost always strings attached. That makes them a little cautious about Linux.
Also, productivity could be a more important issue. Even though KOffice functions a lot like it's counterparts in the non-open source world, there are definite differences. Just getting copy and paste to work right is a chore. And any time you use different software, you need training. Training costs money, so biz people would probably defer to something they know does exactly what they need, even though it costs way too much.
From article:
Timeport(TM) 270c pretty much allows you to have the conveniences of a pager, cell phone, and laptop all in one little device.
WOW! I can play Q3 on this baby!?! And I can compile my little C and Java apps. I bet the resolution of the TV in from my TV tuner will be fantastic! Why on earth did I spend so much money on a laptop when I can get it all for less in the plam of my hand?
If he ever refused to hire somebody based on their inability to see color, I bet he'd lose in Court, lose bad too.
Chuck would have to prove that the ability to percieve colors in MANDATORY to coding, which it is not. It's understandable that people in wheel chairs don't run marathons, because a prerequisite to running is having legs. The only prerequisite for programming is a brain that contain knowledge of the language and some way to relay thoughts. There's braile keyboards for th second, and I'm assuming the previous poster has a brain.
If guys are successfully sueing Hooters to be able to work there (actually I haven't heard about this ina while, does anyone have an update?), then blind programmers could defintey when this case.
That, and probably because half of them also don't look right in links. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a blind person to try to navigate sites with multiple frames and poor info ordering. I mean, there's no big candy-coated indicators for braile users to look for when they're scanning a website via a braille interface. But web designers probably don't take this into account because their managers usually just want to see cool designs that they can see and that are easy to navigate for them (aka usually people who can see).
Slashdot Mirror
Everytime I look up their stock report online, there's an accompanying stock analyst report saying how much their stock is undervalued. With education sales, excitement over the new iBooks, and 10.1 finally making OS X an OS that is stable AND resposnive, I expect apple to continue to be profitable through the 4 quarter.
And what apple has that a lot of companies do not have is an energized user base. How many people are really that excited about XP? How about a new Dell computer? These things just don't get people going like in the mac community. We're very enthusiastic about apple products and where they are going.
F-bacher
Price gouging like this is exactly why there has been any move to break up microsoft. Having a virtually complete monopoly of the OS market leaves customers vulnerable to the whimsacle price increases that Billy wants to have to make it to the 100 billion mark. Imagine what happens when they make you pay every year for a subscription fee: you'll be forced to pay whatever price they want to continue the subscription, or you will have no OS at all. And a lot of companies can't make a transition from Windows to MacOS or Linux within days, so companies would be forced to comply. If I had a windows box, I'd keep a version of 2000 around just for this reason.
Businesses should have complete control over their prices. BUT, the ability for microsoft to control the markey and force customers to pay incredible prices is an example of why some type of legal action needs to be taken against Microsoft's anticompetitive practices and help protect consumers and businesses.
F-bacher
Linux would be forced to use propriatary software (from the federal gov't) to be legal, which is the antithesis of the open source movement. There should be no forceably entered closed source applications integrated into Linux. And it might be illegal to actually remove the digital protecttion software, which an open source model would obviously allow you to do no matter what. Linux as we know it would be dead, and we could bet that more gov't interventions into software woould be soon to follow.
F-bacher
Hey WhiteWholf, long time no see. Yes, the odds look bleak, and I find it hard to tell a Congressman a good reason why all "digital devices" (whatever those are) should not have federally approved safegaurds against illegal intellectual property right violations.
The one I can think of refers to free speech. I have a right to say whatever I want, regardless if it is obscene or fight provoking. BUT, ther are consequences for those actions. I can go to jail, be fined, ect. Here, the gov't is actively preventing me from performing a crime. This would be the equivalent of the gov't implanting chips in my throat that some how stopped my vocal cords from issuing swear words in an obscene manner.
Actually, it's not the equivalent, but my argument would work better if it was. The government can make it illegel for you to make counterfeiting machines, and will actively try to stop you from making counterfeit dollars. Also, the gov't tries to stop people from killing each other.
So what we've got is a mess. It's not idiotic; it makes perfect sense to a lot of Americans. Why shouldn't devices that can copy copyrighted materials have safegaurds against illegal copying? Because by the same argument, we should have no sharp edges because they could be used for something they generally shouldn't (like killing people). And heaven forbid they take away our cars because car accidents account for somany deaths every year.
But if we sit around for a year and do nothing, I'm sure our gov't will deal with all of these issues for us.
F-bacher
Sons of Technology, I am Steve Wozniak.
[Steve Wozniak is seven feet tall!]
Yes, I've heard. Kills men by the hundreds, and if he were here he'd consume the SSSCA with fireballs from his eyes and bolts of lightning from his arse.
I AM Steve Wozniak! And I see a whole army of my countrymen here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men...and free men you are. What will you do without freedom? Will you fight?
[Fight? Against that? NO! We will run...and we will live.]
Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live...at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that...for one chance, JUST ONE CHANCE, TO COME BACK HERE AND TELL OUR ENEMIES THAT THEY MAY TAKE OUR LIVES...BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR FREEDOM!!!
F-bacher
Let's not jump to conclusions. The poster is comitting the logical intent fallacy, because we can never truely know the intent of the senator. Humans often act contrary to how their enviornment around them would make you believe they would.
Additionally, we should have a little more faith in our system. I have no problem with the congressman presenting this bill, because I have good faith that one of two things will happen: 1) a majority of other congressmen(and women) will see this type of legislation as being a violation of indiviudal liberties and vote aginst it, or 2) this would get struct down by the Supreme Court.
Now, it is possible that out system will fail. And I'm ready to move to a little island somewhere in the Bahamas. But let's not freak out yet. What we can do is:
1) Public protests in large numbers - the media loves to cover stuff like that
2) Mail, not email - most congressmen don't have time to read the millions of emails/spam they recieve. A letter seeems like you put more effort into your comment anyway.
3) Run for office. Elections are right around the door. There are plenty of geeky people in the US who have enough knowledge of political science and related fields to make a run for it. Competent legislaturers are a must.
4) Move to Canada. We'll c how good the US economy does after the whole tech sector moves out.
F-bacher
Now you don't only have to talk dirty, but you can sketch picturers of what my body would look like if I hadn't been playing Wolfenstein for the past couple of days and loved on a steady diet of Good and Plenty's and Jolt. My nerdy body was approaching "rather not see naked, but it wouldn't kill me," but I can always aspire for this some other time.
The more technology advances, the better the artificial sex.
F-bacher
I think the rendering of services cannot be stopped on the basis of sex, race, sexual orientation, or physical ability (aka being disabled). But of you do it for another reason (such as for being a hater), it is legal.
And hey, if companies want to start making bigoted licenses, I'm all for it! Think of all the people would migrate from Microsoft to even half-assed alternatives if Microsoft admitted openly that they discriminate on the basis of sex. I think we've gotten to the point that big companies will have trouble getting away with such open discrimination without an economiuc hit. It's the smaller businesses that are more likely to not have their racists practices uncovered and blared on every major network news station.
F-bacher
Maybe there isn't anything good to mod up. It isn't like any of the subjects are all that explosive, and most people (atleast in the US) are probably watching Bush's address to Congress and the nation about this "war" called Operation: Infinite Justice.
F-bacher
Besides the spelling, I have no idea why they called this Operation: Infinte Justice. Why not Operation: CounterTerrorist Assualt or Operation: Kill Terrorist or Operation: Get Bin Laden, etc? Oh yeah, because the federal government sounds better if it uses words that mask the meaning of the operation. It's a linguistic game they play all the time. You know, when your job is being reingeneered instead of being fired? One sounds a lot worse than the other. The gov't is obviously going to pick a name that obscures the questionable actions of the gov't and replaces them with something less attackable, such as reaping justice. Bringing down revenge would put some people in a fit, but who can argue with getting justice?
Not saying that the operation may not be for the best, but this is probably wy they chose the name: it limited potential criticism.
F-bacher
Of course they can. They can limit whatever speech through their medium that they want. Republican talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh don't have to allow liberals (or atleast, the smart ones) on their show if they don't want to. So what do liberals do when they don't have their voice heard on the EIB network? They go elsewhere.
And frontpage is nowhere near a monopoly, and there are tons of alternatives, so the ability to have speech is not limited through a medium, just one avenew out of several similiar avenews for expressing free speech in one medium is limited.
Restrictions like this should make a lot of people consider using alternatives. The more people that move away from microsoft products, the better. And if microsoft is going to give people good reason to switch, I'm not going to complain.
F-bacher
1. I'm more mad about people continually modding the quote up than it being posted. Somebody's picking up a lot of extra karma for a redundant quote.
2. I guess any safety is temporary, therefore we should never abridge any freedom for safety? Ever?
3. I am from the good Old USA, but my point was that you can be safe (from harm) with the loss of some liberty (aka socialism). The catch with countries that don't put a lot of emphasis on liberty is the rise of corrupt leaders, but for some people that's an acceptable risk.
4. Yes, this does effect a whole bunch of issues. The thing is these are mainly conviences, that while making our lives easier, have also made it more dangerous. So now we have to balance liberty and convience against safety.
F-bacher
1) This has been posted 5,000,001 times this past month, and it's getting old.
2) Note the key word "temporary." If this security would be longlasting (which it conceivably could be), then this statement would become nullified.
3) I wonder of BF thinks that all socialist contries deserve no safety? Hmm... maybe he means safety from future liberty losses.
4) Is complete online privacy as essential liberty that can never be abrdged? Hell no, it can be abridged with a court order as it has been done with wiretapping. Atleast it should be. That's why we have courts: to decide on a case-by-case basis which rights are most important. In this case, it is the right of life vs the right of privacy.
F-bacher
Should the government beable to obtain information about online conversations you've had related to events of national importance, that is whenever they feel it is of national importance to do so, that is whenever they want, that is they're going to expand their net of social control to incompass all forms of communication and thinking?
(Yeah, the last part is suppose to be part of a statement; it's a trick like that: instead of being asked what you think, by the end of the poll you're being told what to think).
F-bacher
but this helps set a precedent. Too bad it's not in the legal sense. What we really need is a test case, to find some business that violated the GPL and take them to court over a big, intentional GPL violation where they'll attack the integrity of the GPL. If it survives the court case, we're in good shape and makes it likely that companies will think twice before they violate the GPL.
For some strange reason I have an urge to dig through code from a certain company.
F-bacher
They could easily pull the same type of attack ina week or so. We won't have air marshalls on planes for a while, and I'm sure they're not going to have steel bolted cockpit doors for quite some time, so terrorists could use theur same old strategy again. Why reinvent the wheel when you already have something that works.
If this is a well thought out terrorist plan, they'll proabably attack something relatively soon. Probably not this week, but next week. Make us feel a little safe agai, and then stuff it right back into our faces.
The sad thing is there is ultimately nothing that can be done to stop terrorism in general. We can stop simple cases (aka terrorists with box cutters), but it's nearly impossible to block off terrorism at every turn without substantially limiting everyones individual freedom. It'll take something like a Matrix world, where government or some machine locks us away and/or watches our every move, possibly being able to immediately "deactive" us for "inappropraite" behavior. We can never have complete security without complete loss of freedom... but then, is it really worth it.
I remember the scene from Star Trek: Generation, when James T. Kirk is loving the Nexus, the ability to go back and do everything he wanted to in the past. But then it hits him, after he jumps over a stream with his horse, that life isn't meanignful if it can't be lost, or you can't fail. That's why watching sporting activities is so much fun, because the outcome is never for sure.
F-bacher
And it's even worse when you're trying to help them fix a problem with their computer.
"Okay, now go to the StartMenu and select Run"
"The what menu"
"You know, the menu in the bottom left that says 'Start'"
"I don't have one of those"
"why not?"
"It got in the way, so I deleted it"
"Then how do you get to your programs?"
"You mean my porn?"
"Uhmm... yes"
"I don't know, that's why I was calling you"
"Do you have an icon called 'My computer' on your desktop"
"No"
"Do you have a desktop?"
"Yes, I have my laptop on it right now"
"No, on your computer."
"Why would I put my desktop ontop of my computer"
"[insert long description of what the desktop metaphor is]"
"Oh... I don't think I have one of those."
"Why not?"
"I figured if I got rid of this thing you call the 'desktop,' then I'd have more room for porn."
"[hand to forehead]"
F-bacher
I don't know about #1, but I got to disagree with you on #2.
Most of the work opensource developers will put in will directly influence whether or not the companies that produce linux distros will make a profit. If linux sucks and doesn't improve, then they don't make money. If it rocks and it's getting better, then these companies will make more money (because more people will buy their distro + tech support).
People volunteer for companies that are out to make profits all the time. If I volunteer, it's not because it's for a non-profit cause, but that it's for a good cause.
F-bacher
When my Appl IIgs didn't have a hardrive. I always had to boot off a floppy disk of some sort. Number Munchers was the closest thing I had to a violent game... I still have nightmares of troggles.
And then there was Wolfenstein. Too bad I didn't find out about it until last year (thank you emulation.net). I could only imagine how great these graphics must have been back in the late 80s. That's when Mario brothers had great graphics (until my brother stuck a marshmello into my Nintendo on my b-day...). The game play was simple, but involving. Did anyone complain back then about bloatware games and crappy graphics? Heck no, everything was pretty well equal.
But now we're half way between low n polygon 3D and high n polygon 3D, with stuff like FinalFantasy 7 being on the lower end, and Final Fantasy 9 on the higher end. If you played 8, you saw how crappy everybody looked; you could barely make out the characters (not to mention the crappy GF system, but that's another matter). 2D used to be good, and always getting better. When we went from good looking 2D to shoddy looking 3D, it really pissed me off. I couldn't figure out why everything looked so choppy all of a sudden (this was before I took geometry in high school).
But the good old days will never be back... except through emulation. I hope multiplayer Wolfenstein gives us something to talk about, not just something to complain about.
F-bacher
From the article:
Unfortunately, performance of this component proved troublesome. Trying to get the software to compute a basic SUM() function on a range of cells yielded an error. We later found out that, unlike in Excel, function names in KSpread are case-sensitive, so typing "=SUM(A1:A15)" in a cell yields an error while typing "=sum(a1:a15)" does not. This is a major shortcoming for anyone who has ever used another spreadsheet, including Lotus 1-2-3 and Quattro.
Wow, uhhh.. this sounds like a major problem to me. It's pretty easy to get use to (no rocket science behind holding down or not holding down the shift-key), and it would be trivial to fix. And it's open source, so they could just recompile KSpread with it not caring about case-sensitivity. Any novi programmer can do that.
F-bacher
Actually, a lot of linux apps would proabably get more acceptance from the business community if they actually cost something. Business people know you don't get something for nothing; there are almost always strings attached. That makes them a little cautious about Linux.
Also, productivity could be a more important issue. Even though KOffice functions a lot like it's counterparts in the non-open source world, there are definite differences. Just getting copy and paste to work right is a chore. And any time you use different software, you need training. Training costs money, so biz people would probably defer to something they know does exactly what they need, even though it costs way too much.
F-bacher
Italics, bold, underline, superscript, subscript, etc could all be use as substitues for colors. This is not unreasonable.
F-bacher
From article:
Timeport(TM) 270c pretty much allows you to have the conveniences of a pager, cell phone, and laptop all in one little device.
WOW! I can play Q3 on this baby!?! And I can compile my little C and Java apps. I bet the resolution of the TV in from my TV tuner will be fantastic! Why on earth did I spend so much money on a laptop when I can get it all for less in the plam of my hand?
F-bacher
If he ever refused to hire somebody based on their inability to see color, I bet he'd lose in Court, lose bad too.
Chuck would have to prove that the ability to percieve colors in MANDATORY to coding, which it is not. It's understandable that people in wheel chairs don't run marathons, because a prerequisite to running is having legs. The only prerequisite for programming is a brain that contain knowledge of the language and some way to relay thoughts. There's braile keyboards for th second, and I'm assuming the previous poster has a brain.
If guys are successfully sueing Hooters to be able to work there (actually I haven't heard about this ina while, does anyone have an update?), then blind programmers could defintey when this case.
F-bacher
That, and probably because half of them also don't look right in links. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a blind person to try to navigate sites with multiple frames and poor info ordering. I mean, there's no big candy-coated indicators for braile users to look for when they're scanning a website via a braille interface. But web designers probably don't take this into account because their managers usually just want to see cool designs that they can see and that are easy to navigate for them (aka usually people who can see).
F-bacher