What can you say about a week in which the most entertaining movie was Legally Blonde?
Well, that's because you didn't see Ghost World. Anyone coulda told you that all the movies you reviewed would suck, except for The Score. I was disappointed to see that every single review of it has trashed it, because De Niro and Brando are two of the best living American actors. But even though I sometimes disagree with reviewers, it's rare that I disagree with everyone. So I'll skip it. But as for the others, it was pretty obvious they were going to be shallow, by looking at the trailers, who was in them, and what they were about. What was he last "romantic comedy" that had any redeeming value? Probably Chasing Amy, and that one doesn't even count. And Legally Blonde is such a tip-off summer-movie lame-pun name that you didn't even need to see the retarded trailer to know it would be terrible. Ghost World, though, was a subtle movie that actually contained (gasp!) beauty, and perceptive observations, and acting, and all that stuff! Plus, Steve Buscemi is my hero.
You may have noticed that I haven't given a lot of evidence for my opinions. Well, tough. I'm too lazy.
Mae West has been unresponsive to the west of the world for several years. She died in 1980, so that's a bit more than 36 hours. Seriously, though, what are you referring to by Mae West?
I know there isn't a legal requirement to post binaries or source under the GPL (it just requires that if you give someone the binary, you have to give them the source, too), but it would be awfully nice if Mandrake would be nice about their programs. I use Debian, but I used to use Mandrake. When I installed Debian, I kept my Mandrake installation, too, just in case Debian didn't work out. Turned out, I wanted to use DrakX. No problem, right? Just copy the files. Well, no, that didn't work, even after doing various complicated things. Eventually, I got it working long enough to do what I wanted, but I had to edit a bunch of scripts and stuff. Now, that's Mandrake's prerogative, if they want to make their programs only work with their distro. But it would be very nice, and would lend credence to their claims of "giving back to the community," if they would release their programs in the usual way, with a reference on Freshmeat, with tarballs and RPMs, so that they would run on normal; Linux systems. Or at least have it on their site so people could find it. Similarly, Corel (a Debian-based distro) refuses to release.debs for WordPerfect. I know it's not Free, but it's free-as-in-beer, and anyone can get the tarballs. If they do, though, they will find that WP doesn't work on a Debian or Storm system, and as far as I can tell, you can't get it to. So why can't we non-Corel users get in on that WP-lovin' action? Not fair, sez I.
Not to be too pedantic, but Parens is a Latin word, meaning parent (it also means obeying). I don't see any word in my dictionary that could become perens, and Whitaker's Words also says that perens isn't a word. Of course, it could be wrong, but the only thing I could think of that could look like perens and mean traveling is periens, which you might think would mean traveling (because per=through and eo, ire, ivi, itus sum=go) in fact means dying. I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think this is valid.
Well, the original was, "What do you get if you multibly six by nine?" So DNA explained the answer by saying it was in base 13. But 49base13=61base10>, and 61 is prime. So apparently there is no question.
Yeah, and when I upgraded to 1.4 with that greatest of all programs, apt-get, it didn't work. It had all kinds of stupid conflicts with my previous files (which had been Ximian, too) that I had to resolve by hand by downloading the.debs and dpkg-ing them with --force-depends and --force-overwrite. Not so slick, if you ask me.
No, open source is as old as computing. Nobody even thought of keeping other people from seeing the source for quite some time. After all, most early computing was academic, except for the military (which I guess is an exception, but it's a little different from closing the source for commercial reasons). The scientific culture, which is, as you say, much older than computing, transferred naturally to computers. Freedom is the basis of learning, so it didn't occur to anyone to keep knowledge away from others.
Yeah, and the video (which I realize wasn't part of the original thing) has a distinct anti-MS message. So Microsoft is catching onto the whole 90s irony thing. Which was old and lame even before Microsoft got into it. Remember those Sprite ads with celebrities saying how it didn't matter which celebrities endorsed a soda? You think if they believed that they would have run the ads? Madison Ave.'s taking over of the entire range of human expression is starting to get a bit depressing. Now you can't say anything if it's not ironic.
Although this is not a particularly unpredictable thing, Greenspun did predict it, and more to the point, explained why it would happen, about halfway down this page:
As I have hinted, I think that companies such as GE will start to put Internet interfaces into their appliances as soon as about 20 percent of American households are wired for full-time Internet, for example with cable modems (see Chapter 6). But they won't do it because they think it is cool for your GE fridge to talk to your Whirlpool dishwasher. They'll do it because it will cut the cost of tech support for them. Instead of paying someone to wait on the 800 line while you poke around with your head underneath the fridge looking for the serial number, they'll want to ping your fridge across the Internet and find out the model, its current temperature, and whether there are any compressor failures.
Yeah, but only MusicCity doesn't suck. At this moment, the biggest server after MusicCity listed on napigator.com has 240607 files, compared to each MusicCity's 3,960,000+ files, plust hte fact that MusicCity servers are linked. So all they have to do is take down MC and opennap dies.
Once Bonobo support comes along, can't they farm out table support to Gnumeric? Or include basic support natively and have some context-menu option to do more sophisticated stuff with Gnumeric? Because Gnumeric is really excellent.
I think the current use of ASCII is an impediment to the usefulness of PG for works that are not in English. Whether in plain ASCII, XML or another text-based format, the texts do not have accents available to them, which makes foreign languages difficult. For instance, a couple of years ago I used the PG version of Vergil's Aeneid, before I could really read Latin well enough for the macrons (long vowel marks) to matter. However, now I am a serious Latin student, and am translating the Aeneid as part of an AP Latin course, and the lack of macrons makes translation much more difficult. In classical Latin, admittedly, macrons were not written, but they existed nonetheless and are vitally important in determining the meaning of a word. Similarly, French and Spanish are made difficult without accents. So in cases like these, where it matters, why does someone go to so much OCR and typing work to just create a digital version that has a fundamental inadequacy? Why not use Unicode from the ground up on foreign-language documents?
Now, you raise a good point. I certainly agree that principled opposition is important on many issues. The Democrats have been coddling the Republicans since the Resident was sworn in, and it's time for that to change. That's not what I meant in my post, though.
Debate, not argument, is the essence of politics. Constructive conflict is good; shouting is not, except when it's necessary, as in the Ashcroft controversy--there, even the antidemocratic tactic of filibustering was warranted on account of the Republicans' absolute dereliction of their responsibilites. Bush was acting as if he'd won the Presidency by a landslide, and he still seems to think that, and that's not OK.
In general, though, politics is best approached with a constructive mindset. Since this article is about the FCC, I might take the example of media regulation. Clearly, allowing one company to own too many media outlets in one region is strongly against the interests of the residents of that region, because doing so diminishes the range of voices they may hear. Since at least some Republicans are not in the pockets of the News Corp. and Time Warner, it is their responsibility and that of all principled people to act as their conscience dictates and act constructively, instead of shouting at the top of their lungs about "an out-of-control regulatory machine" or some such nonsense as their party line demands.
When our elected representatives are
off-mike and off-camera, they show a genuine interest in the issues they
deal with and a bipartisan spirit that I had not expected to see.
I think this is interesting. So much posturing and counterproductive argument goes on in Washington these days (and almost always has, I guess) that it's depressing, especialy for politics nerds like me who think that politics is not inherently evil, but can be a force of good. It's good to hear that some politicians are earnest and wish for progress, but it's unfortunate that most of them do not extend this spirit to their public personae.
That's a pretty nonsensical proposition. The only thing to be gained by buying Yahoo and then making it a walled garden would be the name. And after about 7 minutes, even newbies would realize that if Yahoo doesn't have its index anymore, it's totally pointless. So the only reason AOL or whoever would do that would be to kill the competition, which is stupid, since there are cheaper ways of making money.
Uh, companies are as violent. You clearly haven't read much early-20th century American history. The employers beat the living shit out of union members every chance they got. And you wanna find a citation for your assertion of "special legal protections"?
How is it good for the economy? Because it's good for workers. The economy is not purely measured in the size of the GNP, the Dow and the NASDAQ. It's also measured in quality of life.
I think it's interesting that your description of extortion, "either you give me this, or we [sic] wont work," is in fact a description of a market economy, which can be summarized as "either you give me a better price or I won't buy your gizmo." Unions are not extortionist. What's extortionist is when an employer says, "We're employing you for $2 a day with no health benefits and no recourse if you get injured. You'd better keep working here because if you don't, we'll fire you and be deprived even that $2. And if you try to unionize, we'll fire you, also."
Adam Smith, the idol of capitalists, would in fact have approved of unions, in my opinion. He believed in unfettered bargaining for goods and services, in a free marketplace. It's disingenuous at best to assert that a nonunionized job is equivalent to a marketplace. The employer has control over everything, and the worker only has control over whether he works there or not. If he decides to go somewhere else, he is unlikely to find anything better if employers are left to their own devices. Only with collective bargaining can labor be put on an equal footing with management. I could cite lots of cases of employee exploitation, but I'm sure you're aware of them, too.
The tech world is no different from other industries. Simply because there arent's any knives or swinging cattle carcasses doesn't mean that there aren't hazards, or that employers don't exploit their (often easily-replaced) employees.
How does wanting a song create supply of it on Napster? Once you get the song, I get it, because in the future you will supply the song. But if there are k songs available on Napster and you add your m songs, there are still k songs available to you, not k + m, because you already have the songs on our computer.
Maybe their next version will be better than 0.16 in this regard, but aside from speed, one of the things I really don't like about E is its desire to controll all aspects of my life. For instance, its background selector is very ungainly, but it wants to use it instead of using the perfectly-good Gnome Control Center. And so on. I see no need to replace Gnome, when it's pretty good already and E is mostly reproducing its capabilities, but prettier.
My best teacher ever was Bruce Saunders, whom I had for history in 7th and 8th grades. I went to this middle school with a quasi-magnet program for highly gifted kids, called the IHP, so part of the experience was being surrounded by other smart people. Anyway, Saunders challenged us and talked to us like adults. I was a math-and-science nerd before then, which I know is what people here think of as being a real nerd. After his class, although I still am a nerd in that way, I'm more interested in history and politics. Saunders was the only teacher I ever had who totally changed my focus in that way.
It never crashes? Whoa, there, buddy. I'm an editor on my school paper, and every other week we lay out the paper using PageMaker, which is an unforgivably-shoddy program, considering it costs an obscene amount, crashes nonstop and has a lame interface. Anyway, when PageMaker crashes, it takes the OS with it half the time. Netscape, IE and Word crash with similar frequency and similar consequences. Back in the day when all software and peripherals were made by Apple, it was true that it never crashed. Now, though, that's a total fiction. The best thing you can say for it in that department is that it's more stable than Windows, but that's not saying too much.
Slashdot Mirror
Even several hundred "1000ths of hours" don't really add up to all that much.
Well, that's because you didn't see Ghost World. Anyone coulda told you that all the movies you reviewed would suck, except for The Score. I was disappointed to see that every single review of it has trashed it, because De Niro and Brando are two of the best living American actors. But even though I sometimes disagree with reviewers, it's rare that I disagree with everyone. So I'll skip it. But as for the others, it was pretty obvious they were going to be shallow, by looking at the trailers, who was in them, and what they were about. What was he last "romantic comedy" that had any redeeming value? Probably Chasing Amy, and that one doesn't even count. And Legally Blonde is such a tip-off summer-movie lame-pun name that you didn't even need to see the retarded trailer to know it would be terrible. Ghost World, though, was a subtle movie that actually contained (gasp!) beauty, and perceptive observations, and acting, and all that stuff! Plus, Steve Buscemi is my hero.
You may have noticed that I haven't given a lot of evidence for my opinions. Well, tough. I'm too lazy.
Mae West has been unresponsive to the west of the world for several years. She died in 1980, so that's a bit more than 36 hours. Seriously, though, what are you referring to by Mae West?
I know there isn't a legal requirement to post binaries or source under the GPL (it just requires that if you give someone the binary, you have to give them the source, too), but it would be awfully nice if Mandrake would be nice about their programs. I use Debian, but I used to use Mandrake. When I installed Debian, I kept my Mandrake installation, too, just in case Debian didn't work out. Turned out, I wanted to use DrakX. No problem, right? Just copy the files. Well, no, that didn't work, even after doing various complicated things. Eventually, I got it working long enough to do what I wanted, but I had to edit a bunch of scripts and stuff. Now, that's Mandrake's prerogative, if they want to make their programs only work with their distro. But it would be very nice, and would lend credence to their claims of "giving back to the community," if they would release their programs in the usual way, with a reference on Freshmeat, with tarballs and RPMs, so that they would run on normal; Linux systems. Or at least have it on their site so people could find it. Similarly, Corel (a Debian-based distro) refuses to release .debs for WordPerfect. I know it's not Free, but it's free-as-in-beer, and anyone can get the tarballs. If they do, though, they will find that WP doesn't work on a Debian or Storm system, and as far as I can tell, you can't get it to. So why can't we non-Corel users get in on that WP-lovin' action? Not fair, sez I.
Not to be too pedantic, but Parens is a Latin word, meaning parent (it also means obeying). I don't see any word in my dictionary that could become perens, and Whitaker's Words also says that perens isn't a word. Of course, it could be wrong, but the only thing I could think of that could look like perens and mean traveling is periens, which you might think would mean traveling (because per=through and eo, ire, ivi, itus sum=go) in fact means dying. I'm ready to be corrected, but I don't think this is valid.
As did the Babylonians before them. They found some containers with residue left in them a couple years ago, I remember.
Well, the original was, "What do you get if you multibly six by nine?" So DNA explained the answer by saying it was in base 13. But 49base13=61base10>, and 61 is prime. So apparently there is no question.
Yeah, and when I upgraded to 1.4 with that greatest of all programs, apt-get, it didn't work. It had all kinds of stupid conflicts with my previous files (which had been Ximian, too) that I had to resolve by hand by downloading the .debs and dpkg-ing them with --force-depends and --force-overwrite. Not so slick, if you ask me.
If one knew the Latin language, he would know your news not to be deep.
Farewell,
Ambrosius.
Always thinking, always fascinated.
No, open source is as old as computing. Nobody even thought of keeping other people from seeing the source for quite some time. After all, most early computing was academic, except for the military (which I guess is an exception, but it's a little different from closing the source for commercial reasons). The scientific culture, which is, as you say, much older than computing, transferred naturally to computers. Freedom is the basis of learning, so it didn't occur to anyone to keep knowledge away from others.
Yeah, and the video (which I realize wasn't part of the original thing) has a distinct anti-MS message. So Microsoft is catching onto the whole 90s irony thing. Which was old and lame even before Microsoft got into it. Remember those Sprite ads with celebrities saying how it didn't matter which celebrities endorsed a soda? You think if they believed that they would have run the ads? Madison Ave.'s taking over of the entire range of human expression is starting to get a bit depressing. Now you can't say anything if it's not ironic.
Yeah, but only MusicCity doesn't suck. At this moment, the biggest server after MusicCity listed on napigator.com has 240607 files, compared to each MusicCity's 3,960,000+ files, plust hte fact that MusicCity servers are linked. So all they have to do is take down MC and opennap dies.
Once Bonobo support comes along, can't they farm out table support to Gnumeric? Or include basic support natively and have some context-menu option to do more sophisticated stuff with Gnumeric? Because Gnumeric is really excellent.
But I didn't.
I think the current use of ASCII is an impediment to the usefulness of PG for works that are not in English. Whether in plain ASCII, XML or another text-based format, the texts do not have accents available to them, which makes foreign languages difficult. For instance, a couple of years ago I used the PG version of Vergil's Aeneid, before I could really read Latin well enough for the macrons (long vowel marks) to matter. However, now I am a serious Latin student, and am translating the Aeneid as part of an AP Latin course, and the lack of macrons makes translation much more difficult. In classical Latin, admittedly, macrons were not written, but they existed nonetheless and are vitally important in determining the meaning of a word. Similarly, French and Spanish are made difficult without accents. So in cases like these, where it matters, why does someone go to so much OCR and typing work to just create a digital version that has a fundamental inadequacy? Why not use Unicode from the ground up on foreign-language documents?
Debate, not argument, is the essence of politics. Constructive conflict is good; shouting is not, except when it's necessary, as in the Ashcroft controversy--there, even the antidemocratic tactic of filibustering was warranted on account of the Republicans' absolute dereliction of their responsibilites. Bush was acting as if he'd won the Presidency by a landslide, and he still seems to think that, and that's not OK.
In general, though, politics is best approached with a constructive mindset. Since this article is about the FCC, I might take the example of media regulation. Clearly, allowing one company to own too many media outlets in one region is strongly against the interests of the residents of that region, because doing so diminishes the range of voices they may hear. Since at least some Republicans are not in the pockets of the News Corp. and Time Warner, it is their responsibility and that of all principled people to act as their conscience dictates and act constructively, instead of shouting at the top of their lungs about "an out-of-control regulatory machine" or some such nonsense as their party line demands.
I think this is interesting. So much posturing and counterproductive argument goes on in Washington these days (and almost always has, I guess) that it's depressing, especialy for politics nerds like me who think that politics is not inherently evil, but can be a force of good. It's good to hear that some politicians are earnest and wish for progress, but it's unfortunate that most of them do not extend this spirit to their public personae.
That's a pretty nonsensical proposition. The only thing to be gained by buying Yahoo and then making it a walled garden would be the name. And after about 7 minutes, even newbies would realize that if Yahoo doesn't have its index anymore, it's totally pointless. So the only reason AOL or whoever would do that would be to kill the competition, which is stupid, since there are cheaper ways of making money.
Uh, companies are as violent. You clearly haven't read much early-20th century American history. The employers beat the living shit out of union members every chance they got. And you wanna find a citation for your assertion of "special legal protections"?
How is it good for the economy? Because it's good for workers. The economy is not purely measured in the size of the GNP, the Dow and the NASDAQ. It's also measured in quality of life.
I think it's interesting that your description of extortion, "either you give me this, or we [sic] wont work," is in fact a description of a market economy, which can be summarized as "either you give me a better price or I won't buy your gizmo." Unions are not extortionist. What's extortionist is when an employer says, "We're employing you for $2 a day with no health benefits and no recourse if you get injured. You'd better keep working here because if you don't, we'll fire you and be deprived even that $2. And if you try to unionize, we'll fire you, also."
Adam Smith, the idol of capitalists, would in fact have approved of unions, in my opinion. He believed in unfettered bargaining for goods and services, in a free marketplace. It's disingenuous at best to assert that a nonunionized job is equivalent to a marketplace. The employer has control over everything, and the worker only has control over whether he works there or not. If he decides to go somewhere else, he is unlikely to find anything better if employers are left to their own devices. Only with collective bargaining can labor be put on an equal footing with management. I could cite lots of cases of employee exploitation, but I'm sure you're aware of them, too.
The tech world is no different from other industries. Simply because there arent's any knives or swinging cattle carcasses doesn't mean that there aren't hazards, or that employers don't exploit their (often easily-replaced) employees.
How does wanting a song create supply of it on Napster? Once you get the song, I get it, because in the future you will supply the song. But if there are k songs available on Napster and you add your m songs, there are still k songs available to you, not k + m, because you already have the songs on our computer.
Maybe their next version will be better than 0.16 in this regard, but aside from speed, one of the things I really don't like about E is its desire to controll all aspects of my life. For instance, its background selector is very ungainly, but it wants to use it instead of using the perfectly-good Gnome Control Center. And so on. I see no need to replace Gnome, when it's pretty good already and E is mostly reproducing its capabilities, but prettier.
My best teacher ever was Bruce Saunders, whom I had for history in 7th and 8th grades. I went to this middle school with a quasi-magnet program for highly gifted kids, called the IHP, so part of the experience was being surrounded by other smart people. Anyway, Saunders challenged us and talked to us like adults. I was a math-and-science nerd before then, which I know is what people here think of as being a real nerd. After his class, although I still am a nerd in that way, I'm more interested in history and politics. Saunders was the only teacher I ever had who totally changed my focus in that way.
It never crashes? Whoa, there, buddy. I'm an editor on my school paper, and every other week we lay out the paper using PageMaker, which is an unforgivably-shoddy program, considering it costs an obscene amount, crashes nonstop and has a lame interface. Anyway, when PageMaker crashes, it takes the OS with it half the time. Netscape, IE and Word crash with similar frequency and similar consequences. Back in the day when all software and peripherals were made by Apple, it was true that it never crashed. Now, though, that's a total fiction. The best thing you can say for it in that department is that it's more stable than Windows, but that's not saying too much.