I might say that I'd personally like to see more of the different types of craft in the Trek universe, less emphasis on Enterprise and it's sisters, but that would make me sound like a geek.
And I suppose I could say that I'd personally like to see more of the different garbage dumps that just the one we saw in Sanford and Sons. But that would make me sound like a geek.
Even if you didn't believe the characters were going to die in the main show, you couldn't be positive.
Well, that would have been true when people were watching the original airing of Star Trek. But few of us here watched the entire original series. I for onc only remember watching one episode live, when it was first telecast.
It is like any other series of the time. We all knew the castaways were never going to get off Gilligan's Island. Even though they did in an episode where they ended up back on the island.
People today who weren't there don't realize what Television was like back in the 60's. It was a live, instantaneous experience when new episodes of a program came out. But that is such a small, small fragment of the eventual Star Trek audience.
as a society, we have often failed miserably in managing the factors which really cause death and suffering: diet, exercise, and environmental quality.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country that 'manages my diet.' Similarly, I don't want to live in a country that 'manages my exercise.'
I could see there being some social movement to encourage a better diet and more exercise, but I am not keen on government being the mechanism to 'manage' either of these.
I suppose in the future, when we all live in high rise apartment buildings along light rail transit corridors, possibly the government will be 'managing' our exercise by lining us up twice daily for sit-ups. While there are doubtless social planners looking forward to wielding that level of power over people 'for their own good' I don't think it will be accepted.
It is also conceivable that this is because the manipulation being foisted off on me and many other people DOES affect us directly. It detracts, influences choices in negative ways, and is an intrusion. 'More relevant' ads will just do so more.
I'm sorry. I don't need a bunch of 'smart thinkers' pushing their thoughts at me. That's called propaganda.
Advertising sucks. It really, really does.
There used to be a nerd meme on the internet that advertising was BAD. Sadly, there are a lot of people in eye-tee who are now working full time for the hucksters. The 'ad supported' meme has taken over.
Careful, there. You'll hit the nerve of a whole passel of 'hardware experts' here. They'll grip their phillips screwdriver in one hand and mod you down to oblivion.
Whoa, slow down there cowboy. Any webmail service has to "read" email that it relays through the system.
Wrong. The service has to 'process' the email. It does not need to run cognitive pattern recognition algorithms against it. If the CIA was doing this as routinely as google, people would be peeing their britches.
There is a big difference between something 'reading' your mail and equipment that processes it. Otherwise, it could be said that a typewriter 'reads' the writing of what somebody types on it. All those whirring mechanical gears must be getting smart.
The difference, and it is a big one, is that google is processing the text you transport through their mechanism to discern information to use against you. Yes, I view advertisers and advertising as primarily being targeted to be used against the consumer. It isn't uncommon for people to view advertising as intrusive and a bad thing. Even in this new world of google-worship.
It's kind of shocking, to be frank, how much some people lick the boots of the advertisers these days.
no matter how much you'd like to dramatize it, a bot collecting statistics from your email (which you knowingly agreed to if your using gmail) is not a criminal offense.
And technically, it's not spyware, since spyware usually resides on the client's machine.
if google wants to collect data on my account and throw up targeted ads for me why should i give 2 shakes of a donkey's dick about it?
I dunno. Some of us do care. We do not approve of our communications being 'harvested' and used to direct targeted advertising (propaganda) against us.
The whole 'they came for the gypsies...' bromide could be rattled off here.
The blackberries out in our field have gone to seed and the birds are eating them. And there's poision ivy in the midst of the patch. And last time my wife went out into it to pick blackberries she found four or five ticks afterwards.;)
If by Native Apps you mean OpenOffice, yes, OpenOffice is as robust and powerful as Microsoft Works. Part of what turned me off, awhile back, to Linux-desktop evangelism was when I found myself excited to be running a vector-based drawing package. I got to thinking "wow, this is pretty good." But then I reflected on it a bit, kicked the tires some, and had to acknowledge it was about as good as Micrografx In*A*Vision was on Windows 2.1.
a standard, central, and above all trusted source of software, that contains properly tested and fully supported programs to do most of the things a user will ever need.
Central control can get rather prescriptive. Granted, anybody can start up any kind of software project they like. However, for it to be part of the 'package system' for a Linux-based OS, it has to be Open Source, or it doesn't make it into said 'central source.'
It's rather frightening to think that all software comes down from on high, from a coordinated 'package' system. Clearly 'The Committee' must approve. What if I am declared 'Unmutual?' I prefer things a little more chaotic, whether it means 'sh./config; make; make install' from a source tarball, or downloading binaries I judiciously select for Windows.
I doubt anyone would care. People don't want choice for choice's sake, they just want it to be easy to find the damn software.
I used Windows back when using Windows wasn't cool.
You mean, you used Windows back before Windows 3.0?? I used it for a few things, too. I had Micrografx In-A-Vision and it was an amazingly nice vector based drawing program that I ran on Windows 2.1.
When Works was what people used and I was being different by using Word.
I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about now. Before people used Word widely, the popular choice was WordPerfect or Wordstar. Now, I used WordStar and occasional loaded up Microsoft Works for DOS, too. But I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS for most purposes fairly early.
I don't understand where it was that you were, that people were using 'Works' and you were being different by using 'Word'? There are too many possible 'spheres' that you could be referring to. Claris Works versus Microsoft Word on the Macintosh? On DOS? I have NEVER seen many people using Microsoft Works for Windows anywhere.... Maybe you hearken from a different universe.
I migrated from Windows 98 to Windows XP quite happily because of one very important feature: the damn thing stopped crashing.
A bunch of us, on our Windows boxes, switched from NT 4.0 (or 3.51, which was better) to Windows 2000. Many of us still haven't switched to XP. Because we don't want the damn thing to start crashing again and/or we frown on the 'phone home' features Microsoft puts in everything now. I've never seen anybody who made the jump from Windows 98 directly to XP who I didn't consider a 'lightweight' type computer user. I mean, get real. Windows 2000 came out, it was much better, and it was time to ditch 98.
Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers.
Windows was really never even meant for the server space. Windows on servers has been a long standing joke for more than a decade now. It's something only marketing types can understand the reason for. Linux is and should be replacing proprietary Unix boxes in server space. Windows never even belonged there, and should simply be pushed out of the server room. Unless the admins need a box in the corner to play Minesweeper on, of course.
In Windows Granny would have to hunt the net to find the software she wants... In a modern Linux, she just fires up the software installer, searches for what she wants, ticks a box and clicks install, and she's done.
So what you're saying is that Granny is limited to a single repository of software from which to choose what she wants to install. Whereas with the 'doze system, she can 'hunt the network to find the software she wants,' in other words there are multiple places to get software.
Ummm, that actually sounds considerably more limiting. How many Windows users would be happy if there was only one place, say a site like Shareware.com, to download Windows apps from??
What you say about dependency issues has a little merit, but 'dependency hell' is much MUCH worse between the plethora of Linux versions and variants out there than it is with Windows. That's why Granny is forced to get her Linux apps from a single site.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't 'VPN' in and of itself a broken concept based on the Microsoft view of networking? Why wouldn't it be better to run a SSH pipe to and from your Ubuntu box? And if it's interoperability with 'Doze boxes you're concerned with, why blame it on Ubuntu?
Most of the top 25 requested apps for wine are games
That just reinforces the feeling that Linux is not ready for the desktop. Games are trivial and irrelevant for 'desktop' usage. Hell, even in the classic Unix directory tree, they stuff games off by themselves in/usr/games.
When people are clamoring for actual useful apps to run on Wine is when Linux on the desktop will become relevant.
Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated.
So in your world, every time you need a new feature, or more storage or a different kind of drive on your system, you drape another cord-attached dongle across your desk.
Translation: The resource is wherever the thieve is, now that he's stolen your laptop.
I'm sorry. I don't buy into the idea of carrying my whole data world around with me. For one thing, I'm not a shiftless drifter who has no place to sit down. For another, there is no NEED to have everything, all the time, at your disposal.
One of my near-term projects to get going is to take one of the cheap toy 'cellphones' they sell at the drugstore with candy in them and retrofit it. I want it to have annoying-as-fuck 'ringtone' music in it, so when one of those dingers with the annoying ringtone-phones is in my space, I can pull it out and blast back. I've already checked, and a pocket sized cellphone jammer is too expensive to suit me.
Go ahead and stay on my fucking lawn. Over there, by the poison ivy patch.
'Network Computers' have been hyped for over a decade now.
I predict they will come into being, because all the money is now squeezed out of 'desktop PC' things, and places like Microsoft have come to recognize that they've sold Windows and Office to everybody who they're going to, and they need a 'subscription' model now to obsolete the install base of people who've already paid, so they can pay again.
The two word synopsis is: fuck that.
Compliant ninnies and 'good consumers' will eagerly grasp the idea of going back to dumb terminals. It's surprising that anybody on Slashdot buys into it, though.
Unless you need color, the best Compact Macintosh is the SE/30. It far outshines the Classic II. The SE/30 can easily hold 32 MB of ram (8 4MB SIMMS,) and even 128 MB if you are fanatical enough to chase down 16MB 30 pin SIMMs for it. The Classics have ridiculously crippled memory capacities.
When it comes to vendor subsidized phones, there should be some lock in involved so that the carrier with the best rebate doesn't end up screwed.
I have to ask: why?
Does the legal structure have to be maintained in a way that insures that various marketing gymmicks remain viable? What 'natural rule' exists that turns 'subsidized phone sales' a feature of nature? If 'subsidized phones' and 'best rebate choices' go away, would anybody miss them except for the marketing people who distort the virtues of such gymmicks to sell? It seems to me that instead the market would become more truthful. Why should the law establish a playground with arbitrary rules, for marketers to bully people in?
The cool approach to take, and I haven't seen it done in a good way yet, would be to get kids involved in some projects that leverage old electronics with robotics. There are stepper motors and actuators and all kinds of good stuff in discarded disk drives from old PCs. Each old floppy drive has at least one stepper motor in it. CDROM drives likewise all have good bits just waiting to be pulled out and turned into neat stuff. A whole lot can be done with some $10 PIC controllers, a little homebrew hardware to program them, and someone to pull it all together in a way that kids would really get a lot out of.
What does OS X have to do with Unix, other than the fact that it's based on NeXTStep, and NeXTStep happens to use a POSIX based API as it's primary interface?
No, it can be said that Apple's new OS is even more formed on a proprietary base because of it's direct lineage to NeXT's OS. They could have based it on Linux or a BSD Unix if they'd wanted. Or even the 'real' Unix codebase. They chose none of these.
"Open Source" was a popular buzzword during the launch period for OS X, so they chose to borrow components from the OSS community, and launch forth a brouhaha marketing blitz. That's typical for Apple. They leveraged the hype (while ignoring the substance) behind RISC in a similar fashion about a decade earlier.
Slashdot Mirror
I might say that I'd personally like to see more of the different types of craft in the Trek universe, less emphasis on Enterprise and it's sisters, but that would make me sound like a geek.
And I suppose I could say that I'd personally like to see more of the different garbage dumps that just the one we saw in Sanford and Sons . But that would make me sound like a geek.
Even if you didn't believe the characters were going to die in the main show, you couldn't be positive.
Well, that would have been true when people were watching the original airing of Star Trek. But few of us here watched the entire original series. I for onc only remember watching one episode live, when it was first telecast.
It is like any other series of the time. We all knew the castaways were never going to get off Gilligan's Island. Even though they did in an episode where they ended up back on the island.
People today who weren't there don't realize what Television was like back in the 60's. It was a live, instantaneous experience when new episodes of a program came out. But that is such a small, small fragment of the eventual Star Trek audience.
as a society, we have often failed miserably in managing the factors which really cause death and suffering: diet, exercise, and environmental quality.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a country that 'manages my diet.' Similarly, I don't want to live in a country that 'manages my exercise.'
I could see there being some social movement to encourage a better diet and more exercise, but I am not keen on government being the mechanism to 'manage' either of these.
I suppose in the future, when we all live in high rise apartment buildings along light rail transit corridors, possibly the government will be 'managing' our exercise by lining us up twice daily for sit-ups. While there are doubtless social planners looking forward to wielding that level of power over people 'for their own good' I don't think it will be accepted.
It is also conceivable that this is because the manipulation being foisted off on me and many other people DOES affect us directly. It detracts, influences choices in negative ways, and is an intrusion. 'More relevant' ads will just do so more.
I'm sorry. I don't need a bunch of 'smart thinkers' pushing their thoughts at me. That's called propaganda.
Advertising sucks. It really, really does.
There used to be a nerd meme on the internet that advertising was BAD. Sadly, there are a lot of people in eye-tee who are now working full time for the hucksters. The 'ad supported' meme has taken over.
Uh, fuck that.
Any kid can assemble a PC from parts.
Careful, there. You'll hit the nerve of a whole passel of 'hardware experts' here. They'll grip their phillips screwdriver in one hand and mod you down to oblivion.
Whoa, slow down there cowboy. Any webmail service has to "read" email that it relays through the system.
Wrong. The service has to 'process' the email. It does not need to run cognitive pattern recognition algorithms against it. If the CIA was doing this as routinely as google, people would be peeing their britches.
There is a big difference between something 'reading' your mail and equipment that processes it. Otherwise, it could be said that a typewriter 'reads' the writing of what somebody types on it. All those whirring mechanical gears must be getting smart.
The difference, and it is a big one, is that google is processing the text you transport through their mechanism to discern information to use against you. Yes, I view advertisers and advertising as primarily being targeted to be used against the consumer. It isn't uncommon for people to view advertising as intrusive and a bad thing. Even in this new world of google-worship.
It's kind of shocking, to be frank, how much some people lick the boots of the advertisers these days.
no matter how much you'd like to dramatize it, a bot collecting statistics from your email (which you knowingly agreed to if your using gmail) is not a criminal offense.
And technically, it's not spyware, since spyware usually resides on the client's machine.
if google wants to collect data on my account and throw up targeted ads for me why should i give 2 shakes of a donkey's dick about it?
I dunno. Some of us do care. We do not approve of our communications being 'harvested' and used to direct targeted advertising (propaganda) against us.
The whole 'they came for the gypsies...' bromide could be rattled off here.
The blackberries out in our field have gone to seed and the birds are eating them. And there's poision ivy in the midst of the patch. And last time my wife went out into it to pick blackberries she found four or five ticks afterwards. ;)
If by Native Apps you mean OpenOffice, yes, OpenOffice is as robust and powerful as Microsoft Works. Part of what turned me off, awhile back, to Linux-desktop evangelism was when I found myself excited to be running a vector-based drawing package. I got to thinking "wow, this is pretty good." But then I reflected on it a bit, kicked the tires some, and had to acknowledge it was about as good as Micrografx In*A*Vision was on Windows 2.1.
a standard, central, and above all trusted source of software, that contains properly tested and fully supported programs to do most of the things a user will ever need.
./config; make; make install' from a source tarball, or downloading binaries I judiciously select for Windows.
Central control can get rather prescriptive. Granted, anybody can start up any kind of software project they like. However, for it to be part of the 'package system' for a Linux-based OS, it has to be Open Source, or it doesn't make it into said 'central source.'
It's rather frightening to think that all software comes down from on high, from a coordinated 'package' system. Clearly 'The Committee' must approve. What if I am declared 'Unmutual?' I prefer things a little more chaotic, whether it means 'sh
I doubt anyone would care. People don't want choice for choice's sake, they just want it to be easy to find the damn software.
People just want the trains to run on time.
I used Windows back when using Windows wasn't cool.
You mean, you used Windows back before Windows 3.0?? I used it for a few things, too. I had Micrografx In-A-Vision and it was an amazingly nice vector based drawing program that I ran on Windows 2.1.
When Works was what people used and I was being different by using Word.
I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about now. Before people used Word widely, the popular choice was WordPerfect or Wordstar. Now, I used WordStar and occasional loaded up Microsoft Works for DOS, too. But I switched to Microsoft Word for DOS for most purposes fairly early.
I don't understand where it was that you were, that people were using 'Works' and you were being different by using 'Word'? There are too many possible 'spheres' that you could be referring to. Claris Works versus Microsoft Word on the Macintosh? On DOS? I have NEVER seen many people using Microsoft Works for Windows anywhere.... Maybe you hearken from a different universe.
I migrated from Windows 98 to Windows XP quite happily because of one very important feature: the damn thing stopped crashing.
A bunch of us, on our Windows boxes, switched from NT 4.0 (or 3.51, which was better) to Windows 2000. Many of us still haven't switched to XP. Because we don't want the damn thing to start crashing again and/or we frown on the 'phone home' features Microsoft puts in everything now. I've never seen anybody who made the jump from Windows 98 directly to XP who I didn't consider a 'lightweight' type computer user. I mean, get real. Windows 2000 came out, it was much better, and it was time to ditch 98.
Now, cue over to the server arena, and Linux is certainly replacing Windows boxes for all standard day-to-day servers.
Windows was really never even meant for the server space. Windows on servers has been a long standing joke for more than a decade now. It's something only marketing types can understand the reason for. Linux is and should be replacing proprietary Unix boxes in server space. Windows never even belonged there, and should simply be pushed out of the server room. Unless the admins need a box in the corner to play Minesweeper on, of course.
In Windows Granny would have to hunt the net to find the software she wants... In a modern Linux, she just fires up the software installer, searches for what she wants, ticks a box and clicks install, and she's done.
So what you're saying is that Granny is limited to a single repository of software from which to choose what she wants to install. Whereas with the 'doze system, she can 'hunt the network to find the software she wants,' in other words there are multiple places to get software.
Ummm, that actually sounds considerably more limiting. How many Windows users would be happy if there was only one place, say a site like Shareware.com, to download Windows apps from??
What you say about dependency issues has a little merit, but 'dependency hell' is much MUCH worse between the plethora of Linux versions and variants out there than it is with Windows. That's why Granny is forced to get her Linux apps from a single site.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't 'VPN' in and of itself a broken concept based on the Microsoft view of networking? Why wouldn't it be better to run a SSH pipe to and from your Ubuntu box? And if it's interoperability with 'Doze boxes you're concerned with, why blame it on Ubuntu?
Yes, we now know, twice over, that you're a fan of The Who.
It's time to get over the idea that 'The Man' wants you to run 'doze.
It's actually time to just get over the whole 'The Man' thing, really. Nobody cares what software you run on a PC in your home.
Most of the top 25 requested apps for wine are games
/usr/games.
That just reinforces the feeling that Linux is not ready for the desktop. Games are trivial and irrelevant for 'desktop' usage. Hell, even in the classic Unix directory tree, they stuff games off by themselves in
When people are clamoring for actual useful apps to run on Wine is when Linux on the desktop will become relevant.
Considering that technology has become relatively stable, along with the advent of USB and Firewire, the need for an expandable system is pretty much negated.
So in your world, every time you need a new feature, or more storage or a different kind of drive on your system, you drape another cord-attached dongle across your desk.
the resource is where I am, wherever I am.
Translation: The resource is wherever the thieve is, now that he's stolen your laptop.
I'm sorry. I don't buy into the idea of carrying my whole data world around with me. For one thing, I'm not a shiftless drifter who has no place to sit down. For another, there is no NEED to have everything, all the time, at your disposal.
One of my near-term projects to get going is to take one of the cheap toy 'cellphones' they sell at the drugstore with candy in them and retrofit it. I want it to have annoying-as-fuck 'ringtone' music in it, so when one of those dingers with the annoying ringtone-phones is in my space, I can pull it out and blast back. I've already checked, and a pocket sized cellphone jammer is too expensive to suit me.
Go ahead and stay on my fucking lawn. Over there, by the poison ivy patch.
'Network Computers' have been hyped for over a decade now.
I predict they will come into being, because all the money is now squeezed out of 'desktop PC' things, and places like Microsoft have come to recognize that they've sold Windows and Office to everybody who they're going to, and they need a 'subscription' model now to obsolete the install base of people who've already paid, so they can pay again.
The two word synopsis is: fuck that.
Compliant ninnies and 'good consumers' will eagerly grasp the idea of going back to dumb terminals. It's surprising that anybody on Slashdot buys into it, though.
Unless you need color, the best Compact Macintosh is the SE/30. It far outshines the Classic II. The SE/30 can easily hold 32 MB of ram (8 4MB SIMMS,) and even 128 MB if you are fanatical enough to chase down 16MB 30 pin SIMMs for it. The Classics have ridiculously crippled memory capacities.
The SE/30 rules. You can even run NetBSD on it.
My RCA portable MP3 player does a good job of that for $20. I don't need to, nor want to, bog down my PC with tasks like that.
Really.
When it comes to vendor subsidized phones, there should be some lock in involved so that the carrier with the best rebate doesn't end up screwed.
I have to ask: why?
Does the legal structure have to be maintained in a way that insures that various marketing gymmicks remain viable? What 'natural rule' exists that turns 'subsidized phone sales' a feature of nature? If 'subsidized phones' and 'best rebate choices' go away, would anybody miss them except for the marketing people who distort the virtues of such gymmicks to sell? It seems to me that instead the market would become more truthful. Why should the law establish a playground with arbitrary rules, for marketers to bully people in?
The cool approach to take, and I haven't seen it done in a good way yet, would be to get kids involved in some projects that leverage old electronics with robotics. There are stepper motors and actuators and all kinds of good stuff in discarded disk drives from old PCs. Each old floppy drive has at least one stepper motor in it. CDROM drives likewise all have good bits just waiting to be pulled out and turned into neat stuff. A whole lot can be done with some $10 PIC controllers, a little homebrew hardware to program them, and someone to pull it all together in a way that kids would really get a lot out of.
What does OS X have to do with Unix, other than the fact that it's based on NeXTStep, and NeXTStep happens to use a POSIX based API as it's primary interface?
No, it can be said that Apple's new OS is even more formed on a proprietary base because of it's direct lineage to NeXT's OS. They could have based it on Linux or a BSD Unix if they'd wanted. Or even the 'real' Unix codebase. They chose none of these.
"Open Source" was a popular buzzword during the launch period for OS X, so they chose to borrow components from the OSS community, and launch forth a brouhaha marketing blitz. That's typical for Apple. They leveraged the hype (while ignoring the substance) behind RISC in a similar fashion about a decade earlier.