sic('You cant fix a situation hat when ppl get a message onthe screen instead of readin it they clickthe cancel button and pretend it didnt happen.')
That is the most frigging brilliant observation of typical user technique I have ever read - and I do read a lot. That's it, right there. Perfect.
This is not only why most Linux configs are not ready for the masses, but also why most Windows configs break so goddamn fast. Classic MacOS generally only threw a modal when the above characterization was basically a rational response, because it probably wasn't going to give you a second chance. It was going to crash hard. Soon.
It seems to me that most people simply don't even begin to think that they could pay attention to all these strange little things their computer does "on its own" and start to see a pattern... and that 90% of the time that pattern would point to user error (whether the user is really at fault or not).
The scary, important part is that they shouldn't have to.
Re:music shouldn't be *that* expensive to make
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 1
Music recorded in a studio with decent gear sounds better than the same music recorded in Phil's garage with a couple of $40 mics and a four-track mixer.
I agree. I also know that you can put that studio together for less than you might expect (depending, of course, on the application).
Sure, you can go overboard, spending hundreds of thousands on take after take and track upon track. But sometimes the results of that work pay off and you get something really terrific. Would you want to live in a world where no music like that ever gets made because nobody can afford to make it?
90% of the time though, all that money is being spent on shitty-ass music that in reality is nothing more than an marketing-engineered product, not somebody's inspired work. and i think that really is a waste of money. the people listening to it don't care that much, and would happily listen to something else without a second thought if it were presented that way.
On the other side of the spectrum, we've got orchestral music. That stuff is pretty slim as audio engineering goes, but you've still gotta get a hundred musicians or more together in an acoustically neutral room for several hours. There's no way to do that for pocket change, period.
that's true, though acoustic neutrality is often less preferable than *good* acoustics (ie a nice location). some music will always be more expensive, for various reasons. i'm not arguing that all music should be produced on home pc's by amateurs, or that all music should be cheap - i am arguing that there's a lot of waste if we continue to do things the RIAA way. and i refuse to even discuss quality issues, since past a certain point it simply depends on the content. to rephrase, there is a point at which the quality of the engineering is good enough that it is not at all an issue. (certainly the vast majority of recordings do not reach this point.)
good music does not always have to be expensive to make! it can be, and often it is, and sometimes it has to be - but not always. and, i think, not most of the time. it all comes down to listening pleasure, as you point out, and that means very different things in different contexts.
absolutely. that's a much bigger problem, but it wasn't my point.:)
music shouldn't be *that* expensive to make
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 1
music shouldn't be expensive to make and it doesn't have to be. it gets expensive when you hire a studio at $400/hr, add a $200/hr engineer on top, spend millions on marketing, etc.
the alternative is to let the grassroots "i'm empowered by my pc" thing work. *it is working now*, and it will continue to work more and more often.
emagic is only insignificant if you don't know anything about the various industries that work with audio. this is *pro* software, regardless of whether your neighbor's kid uses it. emagic is a big deal.
think about it this way. apple wants everyone on OS X. i think a lot of people want to be using OS X. the audio community *cannot* migrate yet because Core Audio just isn't finished... and ll the vendors are waiting on that. to really get moving on their work.
apple just hired James McCartney, the author of supercollider, which is arguably the best optimized, most elegantly designed piece of audio code out there. now they've acquired emagic. apple is sending a very clear signal to the pro audio crowd.
(i doubt that any successor to logic will be free, or even cheap. apple also gets a bunch of hardware development through this deal.)
It might have been a better idea to rework the Window's software with a Mac-ish look and feel
uh, no... the windows version is already a bad (from a UI perspective) port of the mac version. logic is very similar cross-platform, and they preserve their *own* UI conventions. these happen to be a bit closer to mac than windows. logic users won't have too much trouble switching platforms.
i think the real point here is apple basically saying that there will be an OS X DAW in no uncertain terms.
What, you want to use *computers* to do something useful? What are you, a *programmer*?
Seriously folks, in a field that *exists* to let humans do things humans are good at, and machines do things machines are good at, it does seem a bit stupid not to take advantage of the very tools you're working with.
It's possible that you are misinterpreting what I wrote, and also that what I wrote wasn't clear. My statements make absolutely no restrictions on the number of theorems possible under mathematics - to the contrary, it would support my statements (rhetorically) to assert that the possible number of theorems is boundless.
"We" in my post means any "we" you can think of - I'm letting that be as broad as possible intentionally. I also don't think this matters, as my statements apply at any scope of "we".
I am following a very strict definition of mathematics, but it is not a restricted definition. It is a definition based on the formal identity of mathematics, which is really indisputable... and that does mean "less" that most people intend it to. The point of my post was that most people are wrong to assume a necessary correspondence between mathematics and reality.
Mathematics is a logical system. It is entirely self-referential. Its validates assertions by verifying the internal consistency of the system. While in reference to itself mathematics may provide truth with absolute clarity, it does not provide Truth beyond its own bounds. It's simply can't. This is a tautology.
The point is that logical systems in general do not necessarily have any relation to the actuality of existence. They can be extremely useful tools because they allow us to draw conclusions from models which may be infinitely refined. On the other hand, these conclusions are never necessarily "correct". They might be, but they might not be.
I get very frustrated with our tendency to think that our symbolic representations are the Cause and the State Of Things is the effect. Even if that is the case, we have no way to verify it. When I say that the existence of mathematics as we know it is limited to our formulation, I'm right: mathematics is a closed system which can be very large (to put it mildly), but it is at best a description of reality, not reality itself.
If you can argue me down, I'm all for it because I'll have to gain quite a bit along the way. As it is, I'm pretty sure my assessment is a valid one. It limits itself in a cute post-modern way, but I think that also serves as a sort of recursive validation.
what came first? Math, or the universe? Almost all mathematicians nowadays think that math came first
Apparently a lot of mathematicians haven't done much philosophy. This kind of thinking was best expressed way, way back by Plato. Basically, you've got the world of real instances, and then you've got the world of the concepts that relate those instances.
The Really Big Problem with this view of reality is that there are not necessarily any concepts without us to imagine them. While they're beautiful and useful, concepts are a *simplification* of our experience. Mathematics (as we know it) did not exist before we formulated it. It's a concept, not a thing. The universe, as far as we know, is a thing. There is no necessary correlation. And if you can find someone who disagrees with that, you've found someone who doesn't appreciate the magnitude of what they're talking about, isn't qualified to talk about it.
Mathematics can be used to compute all of the universe's gyrations with great accuracy
But not perfect accuracy, not perfect precision - not yet. And as much as it may hurt to hear it, unless it's perfect, it's not right. And you're not going to achieve perfect through conveniences - which is what mathematics is.
It's like having finer sensibilities than your peers, noticing how much less your shit stinks than everyone else's.
i love replying to ac's.
yes. it's like having finer sensibilities than your peers. exactly. you're right. you notice things other people either don't notice or don't give a shit about.
that goes hand in hand with really experiencing the stink of shit intensely. your own included.
they're informal, presented in aaron's shared (and imho gorgeous) loft. the one i went to had a very nice PA (short problem with ground loop, eventually corrected), and cookies and cider and stuff were available. they eventually turned off the lights, which was quite nice (large windows provided enough to get around).
basically the artist would sit in the center and do their thing, with the audience comfortably scattered around. cushions provided. really nice vibe.
How do you make field recordings live?
short answer - you don't.:) some of the 'performers' just pressed play, but interestingly (and unexpectedly) the experience of listening to their music/sound *with them* was more than just doing it myself. there is a difference, to me. others took advantage of the mixer and did a bit more. still not what i'd normally think of as a performance, but totally worthwhile nonetheless.
this one also wasn't totally field recordings, though all the performers at least featured them.
either that or it's just another abstraction towards appreciating everything you hear, all the time. i don't think it's sad at all.
it's kind of like a really fine scotch. you probably won't appreciate it as a kid when all you know is fruit juice and soda and water and milk. you'll think it's horrid. (i didn't, but i think i'm not average that way.) but you could end up really enjoying it later in life *as your tastes mature*.
interpreting your post a different way, yes, it's pretty sad that it takes a formal education in music for people to realize that there is much more to 'musical' than stuff we create. musicality is in the *perception*.
microsound and lowercase are not necessarily the same thing, though they can be. they both focus on the details of sound. microsound tends towards a 'digital aesthetic' (ref. kim cascone, microsound.org) and fine manipulation of very small particles of sound... i personally think the aesthetic is due in large part to people getting proficient with granular synthesis. lowercase can be different, in that the emphasis is on testing the limits of perception... though that's often not the artistic aim.
that could sound lame (and i'm sure it often is - that's art for you), but think about it this way: it takes advantage of a much greater dynamic range, in much the same way classical music can (or any other typically uncompressed sound). it gets closer to what we actually hear, not what sounds 'best' (ie loudest) on the radio. and the really cool thing is that in many cases it gives us super-hearing, whether that's through contact-mic'ed field recordings or just very meticulous technique in the production environment.
aside from my personal efforts in similar areas, i think this is a great development. people forget that hearing is a full-fledged sense. people forget to listen to what they're hearing, and they miss a lot. and i'm really, incredibly sick of everything being compressed to within an inch of its life. if we hadn't been conditioned to it, we'd realize how much more it doesn't add to the music.
if you're in san francisco, check out quietamerican.org and see when the next "field effects" will happen. at #3, aaron brought steve roden up from LA (his personal hero). the space is wonderful and the atmosphere perfect, filled with peple that listen. highly recommended. not too pretentious, either. (!)
We are here because, of everywhere in the universe, here is where we can be best.
If we're even going to pretend to go about this scientifically, there is no "because" unless you count tautologies (which isn't exactly useful). We seem to be here. That's about all we know. This is exactly the same as the concept of evolution: lots of things interacted and stuff came out. Some stuff lasts longer than other stuff. Some stuff seems to exert more influence over time than other stuff. Some of the stuff might notice this.
It may look like a chicken-and-egg problem, but it isn't any more of a chicken-and-egg problem than the actual problem of chickens and eggs and which came first.
None of this means it's not absolutely mind-blowingly neat that we're here. None of this even means that there isn't a g0d. What it *does* mean is that while we may have the ability to sit here and postulate answers to the question "why?", we're asking because we don't know the answer.
Environmental Activism is about removing our influence from the world. Environmentalists seem to think that it's not fair that we evolved to have larger, more complex brains and more supple fingers than other creatures, and so we should re-level the playing field by making special concessions.
You're only correct in regard to the simplistic interpretation of environmentalism - an interpretation that I think is doing more harm than good, because it is so easily ignored. As it should be.
Environmentalism is really an activist viewpoint on ecological balance. The idea is to keep in mind that the function of our environment - and therefore our own function - is extremely complex. It's far too complex for us to model. In this way, environmentalism is a very *conservative* (hey, conservation!) position. "Better safe than sorry" could be the primary mission statement.
The point is just that we really don't know what's going to result from our actions, and so we'd best come at the whole problem scientifically, carefully. Knee-jerk, reactionary thought is as big a problem within the environmental movement as it is without.
So, repetitively: environmentalism is a logical extension of scientific method.
I'm really getting sick of otherwise intelligent people assuming that there is no logical basis for environmentalism simply because they associate it with stupid and often quite stinky people.
Credit to the kids and to Spider-Man PR
on
The Empire Stumbles
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Spider-Man wasn't exactly devoid of hype, either. I mean, just how many sponsorships does this movie have? How many promotional tie-ins? I've seen far more hype for Spider-Man than I've seen for the painfully titled AotC. Granted, I live in a hole, but still...
It's ridiculous to imply that one massively budgeted Hollywood movie is some kind of underdog to another massively budgeted Hollywood movie.
on top of that, pro audio equipment manufacturers, etc. - many of which are outside the US - will never, ever stand for this crap. it would hamper their customers *way* too much. if a big part of your living is AD/DA converters - and it's a big part of your supplier's living - you can bet there will be no support for this.
on top of that, you'll always need to be able to buy component converters, even if only because you need to test some new rights-violation measure.;)
and this, my dear, is why the api's need to be fully documented, fully public, fully free. i don't care about the code in this case, but if somebody wants to be able to write a nice little rendering engine to replace ie, that should be *possible*.
yes, that means trying to keep up with microsoft. but then you do get to use their own tactics against them, which no one can do right now. embrace and extend ie, what do you lose? what does microsoft lose? what do you lose if you're just embracing and extending ie's api?;)
It's faster than IE, at least on my not-terribly-tweaked system.
It looks like Mozilla everywhere else - I don't mind this since I use Windows for job-defined stuff, Mac for everything else.
It's way more standards-compliant than anything else comparable (and more usable than Amaya).
I haven't checked out the Netscape rebrand, but I can't say I have any problem with the latest release of Mozilla. Your point 1.1 is the most convincing argument. Your point 3 may be addressed with a simple edit to your preferences file, found elsewhere in this article. I wouldn't be surprised if someone scripted that edit and published it, either. Maybe I'll do it.;)
-j
and then there's the lawyerly way to look at this: your job is to do the best you can in supporting your clients aims. if you are working for someone you consider evil, it is still your job to give them the best representation. the way the legal system is supposed to work: when bad results happen, the laws get changed because people don't like it. the only way you'll ever notice the bad laws, considering the sheer volume of law, is if some (asshole?) lawyer tries to take advantage of them.
yes, it's a dirty job. yes, somebody has to do it. or else we need to change the entire system.
The analogy used by the super math junkie of the group was that you can describe all physics with 2 equations; it doesn't mean that sheds any insight to anything though.
The proposition that reality can be described completely in quantitative terms is a big one on its own, regardless of practical insight.
no kidding - and if they know the application, they'll pick up the OS much more easily, because they won't feel that they can't get any work done "with this Linux stuff". after the apps are known, the OS can be as simple as it needs to be: "push the button, wait, then click on this pretty icon and off you go!"
it sounds to me like the project management was the real fault here. IBM obviously didn't want to be associated with it way back in '94, they *sold* it... and from the description, they were in the position of making something prespecified, not consulting on the project. seems like somebody realized that they weren't making the right thing.
i think it's more than just a software engineering issue - it really appears that they couldn't define their problem space adequately, everything points to a basic misunderstanding of what needed to be done. monumental botch. this is the sort of thing i expect from the US government.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
That is the most frigging brilliant observation of typical user technique I have ever read - and I do read a lot. That's it, right there. Perfect.
This is not only why most Linux configs are not ready for the masses, but also why most Windows configs break so goddamn fast. Classic MacOS generally only threw a modal when the above characterization was basically a rational response, because it probably wasn't going to give you a second chance. It was going to crash hard. Soon.
It seems to me that most people simply don't even begin to think that they could pay attention to all these strange little things their computer does "on its own" and start to see a pattern... and that 90% of the time that pattern would point to user error (whether the user is really at fault or not).
The scary, important part is that they shouldn't have to.
I agree. I also know that you can put that studio together for less than you might expect (depending, of course, on the application).
Sure, you can go overboard, spending hundreds of thousands on take after take and track upon track. But sometimes the results of that work pay off and you get something really terrific. Would you want to live in a world where no music like that ever gets made because nobody can afford to make it?
90% of the time though, all that money is being spent on shitty-ass music that in reality is nothing more than an marketing-engineered product, not somebody's inspired work. and i think that really is a waste of money. the people listening to it don't care that much, and would happily listen to something else without a second thought if it were presented that way.
On the other side of the spectrum, we've got orchestral music. That stuff is pretty slim as audio engineering goes, but you've still gotta get a hundred musicians or more together in an acoustically neutral room for several hours. There's no way to do that for pocket change, period.
that's true, though acoustic neutrality is often less preferable than *good* acoustics (ie a nice location). some music will always be more expensive, for various reasons. i'm not arguing that all music should be produced on home pc's by amateurs, or that all music should be cheap - i am arguing that there's a lot of waste if we continue to do things the RIAA way. and i refuse to even discuss quality issues, since past a certain point it simply depends on the content. to rephrase, there is a point at which the quality of the engineering is good enough that it is not at all an issue. (certainly the vast majority of recordings do not reach this point.)
good music does not always have to be expensive to make! it can be, and often it is, and sometimes it has to be - but not always. and, i think, not most of the time. it all comes down to listening pleasure, as you point out, and that means very different things in different contexts.
absolutely. that's a much bigger problem, but it wasn't my point. :)
the alternative is to let the grassroots "i'm empowered by my pc" thing work. *it is working now*, and it will continue to work more and more often.
think about it this way. apple wants everyone on OS X. i think a lot of people want to be using OS X. the audio community *cannot* migrate yet because Core Audio just isn't finished... and ll the vendors are waiting on that. to really get moving on their work.
apple just hired James McCartney, the author of supercollider, which is arguably the best optimized, most elegantly designed piece of audio code out there. now they've acquired emagic. apple is sending a very clear signal to the pro audio crowd.
(i doubt that any successor to logic will be free, or even cheap. apple also gets a bunch of hardware development through this deal.)
uh, no... the windows version is already a bad (from a UI perspective) port of the mac version. logic is very similar cross-platform, and they preserve their *own* UI conventions. these happen to be a bit closer to mac than windows. logic users won't have too much trouble switching platforms.
i think the real point here is apple basically saying that there will be an OS X DAW in no uncertain terms.
it's not the looks of the s2000 that you want. it's the rotations per minute. holy shit.
What, you want to use *computers* to do something useful? What are you, a *programmer*?
Seriously folks, in a field that *exists* to let humans do things humans are good at, and machines do things machines are good at, it does seem a bit stupid not to take advantage of the very tools you're working with.
:) (Yes, I'm agreeing.)
"We" in my post means any "we" you can think of - I'm letting that be as broad as possible intentionally. I also don't think this matters, as my statements apply at any scope of "we".
I am following a very strict definition of mathematics, but it is not a restricted definition. It is a definition based on the formal identity of mathematics, which is really indisputable... and that does mean "less" that most people intend it to. The point of my post was that most people are wrong to assume a necessary correspondence between mathematics and reality.
Mathematics is a logical system. It is entirely self-referential. Its validates assertions by verifying the internal consistency of the system. While in reference to itself mathematics may provide truth with absolute clarity, it does not provide Truth beyond its own bounds. It's simply can't. This is a tautology.
The point is that logical systems in general do not necessarily have any relation to the actuality of existence. They can be extremely useful tools because they allow us to draw conclusions from models which may be infinitely refined. On the other hand, these conclusions are never necessarily "correct". They might be, but they might not be.
I get very frustrated with our tendency to think that our symbolic representations are the Cause and the State Of Things is the effect. Even if that is the case, we have no way to verify it. When I say that the existence of mathematics as we know it is limited to our formulation, I'm right: mathematics is a closed system which can be very large (to put it mildly), but it is at best a description of reality, not reality itself.
If you can argue me down, I'm all for it because I'll have to gain quite a bit along the way. As it is, I'm pretty sure my assessment is a valid one. It limits itself in a cute post-modern way, but I think that also serves as a sort of recursive validation.
Apparently a lot of mathematicians haven't done much philosophy. This kind of thinking was best expressed way, way back by Plato. Basically, you've got the world of real instances, and then you've got the world of the concepts that relate those instances.
The Really Big Problem with this view of reality is that there are not necessarily any concepts without us to imagine them. While they're beautiful and useful, concepts are a *simplification* of our experience. Mathematics (as we know it) did not exist before we formulated it. It's a concept, not a thing. The universe, as far as we know, is a thing. There is no necessary correlation. And if you can find someone who disagrees with that, you've found someone who doesn't appreciate the magnitude of what they're talking about, isn't qualified to talk about it.
Mathematics can be used to compute all of the universe's gyrations with great accuracy
But not perfect accuracy, not perfect precision - not yet. And as much as it may hurt to hear it, unless it's perfect, it's not right. And you're not going to achieve perfect through conveniences - which is what mathematics is.
i love replying to ac's.
yes. it's like having finer sensibilities than your peers. exactly. you're right. you notice things other people either don't notice or don't give a shit about.
that goes hand in hand with really experiencing the stink of shit intensely. your own included.
they're informal, presented in aaron's shared (and imho gorgeous) loft. the one i went to had a very nice PA (short problem with ground loop, eventually corrected), and cookies and cider and stuff were available. they eventually turned off the lights, which was quite nice (large windows provided enough to get around).
basically the artist would sit in the center and do their thing, with the audience comfortably scattered around. cushions provided. really nice vibe.
How do you make field recordings live?
short answer - you don't. :) some of the 'performers' just pressed play, but interestingly (and unexpectedly) the experience of listening to their music/sound *with them* was more than just doing it myself. there is a difference, to me. others took advantage of the mixer and did a bit more. still not what i'd normally think of as a performance, but totally worthwhile nonetheless.
this one also wasn't totally field recordings, though all the performers at least featured them.
either that or it's just another abstraction towards appreciating everything you hear, all the time. i don't think it's sad at all.
it's kind of like a really fine scotch. you probably won't appreciate it as a kid when all you know is fruit juice and soda and water and milk. you'll think it's horrid. (i didn't, but i think i'm not average that way.) but you could end up really enjoying it later in life *as your tastes mature*.
interpreting your post a different way, yes, it's pretty sad that it takes a formal education in music for people to realize that there is much more to 'musical' than stuff we create. musicality is in the *perception*.
that could sound lame (and i'm sure it often is - that's art for you), but think about it this way: it takes advantage of a much greater dynamic range, in much the same way classical music can (or any other typically uncompressed sound). it gets closer to what we actually hear, not what sounds 'best' (ie loudest) on the radio. and the really cool thing is that in many cases it gives us super-hearing, whether that's through contact-mic'ed field recordings or just very meticulous technique in the production environment.
aside from my personal efforts in similar areas, i think this is a great development. people forget that hearing is a full-fledged sense. people forget to listen to what they're hearing, and they miss a lot. and i'm really, incredibly sick of everything being compressed to within an inch of its life. if we hadn't been conditioned to it, we'd realize how much more it doesn't add to the music.
if you're in san francisco, check out quietamerican.org and see when the next "field effects" will happen. at #3, aaron brought steve roden up from LA (his personal hero). the space is wonderful and the atmosphere perfect, filled with peple that listen. highly recommended. not too pretentious, either. (!)
If we're even going to pretend to go about this scientifically, there is no "because" unless you count tautologies (which isn't exactly useful). We seem to be here. That's about all we know. This is exactly the same as the concept of evolution: lots of things interacted and stuff came out. Some stuff lasts longer than other stuff. Some stuff seems to exert more influence over time than other stuff. Some of the stuff might notice this.
It may look like a chicken-and-egg problem, but it isn't any more of a chicken-and-egg problem than the actual problem of chickens and eggs and which came first.
None of this means it's not absolutely mind-blowingly neat that we're here. None of this even means that there isn't a g0d. What it *does* mean is that while we may have the ability to sit here and postulate answers to the question "why?", we're asking because we don't know the answer.
You're only correct in regard to the simplistic interpretation of environmentalism - an interpretation that I think is doing more harm than good, because it is so easily ignored. As it should be.
Environmentalism is really an activist viewpoint on ecological balance. The idea is to keep in mind that the function of our environment - and therefore our own function - is extremely complex. It's far too complex for us to model. In this way, environmentalism is a very *conservative* (hey, conservation!) position. "Better safe than sorry" could be the primary mission statement.
The point is just that we really don't know what's going to result from our actions, and so we'd best come at the whole problem scientifically, carefully. Knee-jerk, reactionary thought is as big a problem within the environmental movement as it is without.
So, repetitively: environmentalism is a logical extension of scientific method.
I'm really getting sick of otherwise intelligent people assuming that there is no logical basis for environmentalism simply because they associate it with stupid and often quite stinky people.
Spider-Man wasn't exactly devoid of hype, either. I mean, just how many sponsorships does this movie have? How many promotional tie-ins? I've seen far more hype for Spider-Man than I've seen for the painfully titled AotC. Granted, I live in a hole, but still...
It's ridiculous to imply that one massively budgeted Hollywood movie is some kind of underdog to another massively budgeted Hollywood movie.
on top of that, pro audio equipment manufacturers, etc. - many of which are outside the US - will never, ever stand for this crap. it would hamper their customers *way* too much. if a big part of your living is AD/DA converters - and it's a big part of your supplier's living - you can bet there will be no support for this.
;)
on top of that, you'll always need to be able to buy component converters, even if only because you need to test some new rights-violation measure.
and this, my dear, is why the api's need to be fully documented, fully public, fully free. i don't care about the code in this case, but if somebody wants to be able to write a nice little rendering engine to replace ie, that should be *possible*. yes, that means trying to keep up with microsoft. but then you do get to use their own tactics against them, which no one can do right now. embrace and extend ie, what do you lose? what does microsoft lose? what do you lose if you're just embracing and extending ie's api? ;)
- It's faster than IE, at least on my not-terribly-tweaked system.
- It looks like Mozilla everywhere else - I don't mind this since I use Windows for job-defined stuff, Mac for everything else.
- It's way more standards-compliant than anything else comparable (and more usable than Amaya).
I haven't checked out the Netscape rebrand, but I can't say I have any problem with the latest release of Mozilla. Your point 1.1 is the most convincing argument. Your point 3 may be addressed with a simple edit to your preferences file, found elsewhere in this article. I wouldn't be surprised if someone scripted that edit and published it, either. Maybe I'll do it.yes, it's a dirty job. yes, somebody has to do it. or else we need to change the entire system.
Maybe options are *always* finite. :)
The proposition that reality can be described completely in quantitative terms is a big one on its own, regardless of practical insight.
no kidding - and if they know the application, they'll pick up the OS much more easily, because they won't feel that they can't get any work done "with this Linux stuff". after the apps are known, the OS can be as simple as it needs to be: "push the button, wait, then click on this pretty icon and off you go!"
it sounds to me like the project management was the real fault here. IBM obviously didn't want to be associated with it way back in '94, they *sold* it... and from the description, they were in the position of making something prespecified, not consulting on the project. seems like somebody realized that they weren't making the right thing.
;-)
i think it's more than just a software engineering issue - it really appears that they couldn't define their problem space adequately, everything points to a basic misunderstanding of what needed to be done. monumental botch. this is the sort of thing i expect from the US government.