I'm not one to blindly copy Windows, but neither am I one to change simply for the sake of change. I've grown rather accustomed to the buttons on the title bar, and they've been pretty common through a lot of UIs, WMs, etc, and that even predates the "copy Win95 era".
I'd like to see someone "do the OS/2 WPS UI right" some time, even though everyone seems intent on "doing Windows right." The OS/2 WPS was the one GUI that managed to attract me away from the command line more of the time than any other. I'm using GNOME because that's the "standard platform" at work, but I spend almost all of my time at a command line. (In multiple xterms on multiple desktops) By the way, the WPS used the "standard" menu bar button placements, and that was legacy predating Win95.
You missed my point. I wasn't arguing in favor of US aggression, nor arguing that it isn't sticking its fingers in others' pies.
I was simply arguing that simply because the US IS doing naughty things doesn't by any means imply that others aren't. In fact, it's more likely for more than one nation to be wrong in it's international pursuits than for only one to be wrong.
I'm just waiting for China and the Islamic world to finally notice that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," may not always be true, and indeed may be masking a greater enemy. The US often tends to fall short on its practice of religious tolerance, but at some time and level there was an attempt to bake it in. I don't believe the same is true of China.
I wasn't saying that America was lily-white in this, nor was I saying that Iran didn't have the right to down the drone. I was merely saying that their first reports had just a bit of histrionic nature to them that is denied by the careful, considered nature of their response.
When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
The PC-XT-286 was an oddity, designed to use up some surplus 80286 processors. They had a bunch of 80286 CPUs spec'ed at 6MHz, which wouldn't go in the PC-AT, which required 8MHz. They had enough that they didn't want to throw them away, so they made up this special model. It was clocked at 6MHz and came with 640MB on the motherboard that was run at zero wait states, which recovered most of the speed lost by the 2MHz clock reduction. It was also packaged in a regular XT case, which meant that it couldn't take the "tall" AT cards, which turned out to not be much of a limitation.
There were only a limited number built, because it was meant to use up a fixed stock of CPU chips. It also never sold well on the regular marketplace, being something of an oddity. Shortly after it ended up being sold on an "employee firesale", which is how I got mine. Shortly after that there were BIOS images made available that bypassed the "speed trap" that prevented overclocking. I ran mine happily at 8MHz, and many people ran theirs at 9MHz.
This response is being typed on a 1987 vintage keyboard that came with an IBM PC-XT-286. It's still going strong, and as long as I never drink coffee in this room, expect it to keep going.
Of course that takes it out of the "stuff nowadays" category. Remember way back when solid state electronics were being sold as being more reliable?
I wonder what the net environmental impact is of removing all lead from solder, once you factor in the shortened lifetimes of electronic equipment, and the percentage of dead stuff that doesn't get properly recycled. I wonder exactly how much lead it really takes to avoid tin whiskers.
This is a FOAF story... A company outsourced production to (Far East country) and wanted FOAF to go look over their facilities and operations, to see that all was being done correctly. His handlers took him on the tour, and everything was spot-on. Procedures were being followed, quality was being assured, etc, etc, etc.
Then he got away from his handlers for a little bit, and did some looking around on his own. He went around to the other side of the factory building where his products were being produced, and since he was an American, the tenants of that part of the building were happy to give him a tour, as a prelude to a potential outsourcing deal. (They didn't know he was already in such a deal with other tenants in the same building.) He went through their production lines and saw his very own product being built, with a different label being slapped on the front. Had he not already been an insider, he wouldn't have known that procedures weren't being followed and quality not being properly assured. He was touring a knockoff factory.
His "Intellectual Property had escaped," his company's crown jewels were out.
As an aside and example, China makes it a condition for entry into their market that companies open up their IP. In this case, it's no longer "escape" as above, it's coerced out.
Seems to me that some number of years/decades back, most of Corporate America lost its sense of direction/balance/mission. Today it's "all about the money," and personally I believe that's wrong. If you're a car company, and you're "all about the money" instead of "all about cars" you may not have failed yet, but you're clearly on the road there.
Obviously you can't ignore the money. By the same token it's probably handy to have some MBAs around. But you need to keep track of who's in charge and what's the mission, and that shouldn't be the MBAs - it should be somebody experienced in the company's products.
To switch from the car company analogy to the software company analogy, would you rather buy your software from a company that's "all about software" while managing to make a profit, or from a company that's "all about profit" while managing to make software? Which company do you think will produce better software? (or better cars, to switch the analogy back.)
I started looking at the cablecard capture cards a few months back, when they first popped up on the MythTV mailing list. It's an intriguing idea, but I have no idea how Comcast has (mis)used the broadcast flag in my area. It's entirely possible that I could spend a few hundred bucks on the capture card, then get one or two cablecards, go through the activation hassle, and discover that I get no new channels over what ClearQAM already offers. Nor do I have any idea what they're going to charge me for cablecards - it's in their best interest to charge as much as they do for a set-top box - or more.
I was under the impression that Silicon Dust was going to be adding channel listings for cablecard as well as ATSC and ClearQAM, but so far see nothing for my zip code. I presume that's because nobody has tried it, yet.
The thing most broken about TVs today is the blasted set-top box.
Maybe in the living room it's ok to have an "entertainment center" with all sorts of electronic boxes wired together, and to have multiple remote controls, or spend $$ to buy something like a Logitech Harmony. But for every TV you've got?
For the past few weeks Comcast has been putting the "You're not doing this right." messages on some channels on my TV. It looked like it might be merely "going digital", but last week I did a rescan on a digital TV, and didn't find the channels that warn. I'll rescan again Wednesday, after the switchover, but I'm not optimistic. So now the second TV (which actually is digital, unlike the "first TV") is about to need some sort of extra box, extra remote, and of course when the extra box is active we won't be able to get the broadcast HD channels without extra fiddling, etc. (Or we could spend more $$$ for an HD set-top box, etc.)
THAT's what's broken about TV - and I don't see Apple TV or any of these other gizmos fixing that, unless they accept CableCard.
Oh yeah, this upcoming change is going to break MythTV, or at least badly decrease its usefulness.
At the core of "censorship" efforts like PROTECT-IP and the like is a world-view that considers the internet to be a content distribution means.
Thinking in those terms they're trying to solve content distribution problems without even considering side-effects. Sometimes I wonder if they even realize that content distribution is only a tiny portion of what the internet is capable of, or how much their ham-fisted efforts are causing trouble for those other uses.
My wife and I were recently on Hawaii's Big Island, where they take light pollution very seriously. (Keck and more are up on top of Mauna Kea.) Between the fast sunsets near the equator and the general care about light pollution, the place got really dark really early.
I was looking a while back at the National Broadband Map, and it indicated that I had choices in my area. I currently have Comcast, but DSL is available. My big beef is over the Terms Of Service, and all that is implied there. According to the National Broadband Map there was service from a local CLEC available to me. I looked at their website, and not only were their TOS fine, they actually provide support services to people who want their own domains, servers, etc.
Enter the fiber loophole...
I emailed them, inquiring about availability of their service. I received a negative response. My response was asking if this was a matter of waiting for DSLAM availability, or if there was some more fundamental problem.
Their response was that my service, somewhere on the way to my house, went through some fiber. That mere fact meant that the ILEC no longer has to be an ILEC and provide for CLECs. They have a legal monopoly on any potential ISP service to me.
For every proposed solution or reform, people come up with a thousand reasons why it can't possibly work, and why we can't change the status quo.
I guess the implications of that are obvious - We're living in something approaching the best of all possible worlds.
Therefore we shouldn't change anything.
On our current course, we're set to virtually eliminate the middle class in several more decades, so I guess that makes the world a better place. I guess that makes it sound like my status as a member of the middle class is making the world a worse place, but I guess I'll go on being "evil" as long as I can mange.
But let's look at the bright side...
Without a middle class, we won't need as much infrastructure, since most of us will be walking or taking a bus, since we won't be able to afford cars any more. We don't need to bother fixing that aging infrastructure, we can just decommission it. Decaying infrastructure problem solved.
As our income sinks lower and lower, even those low-paying jobs currently taken by illegal immigrants will start to look attractive. Americans will take the low-paying jobs. Illegal immigration problem solved.
Once there is no middle class and the wealthy are safe in their gated communities, drug addicts won't be able to find easy victims to support their habits. They'll wind up going cold-turkey simply because they can't afford the drugs on their own, and are no longer able to steal enough. Drug problem solved.
The military becomes the only reliable employer, since all other decent-paying jobs have been sent overseas. There are so many people trying to get in that the military can raise their standards back up to where they ought to be. Recruiting problem solved.
As we quite being able to afford to travel, we can take the national parks and either mothball them to eliminate cost, or out-and-out sell them as resorts, generating revenue. Not a solution, but certainly an assist to the deficit/debt problem.
It's lock-in. Once you've gone IPV6, who's going to want to go back. You'll be a Comcast customer until FIOS, DSL or whatever other competition might actually exist catches up.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I'm using "xterm" as a generic class of "X-window with a command line."
Now why does this post bring back a chuckle about Timecube?
I'm not one to blindly copy Windows, but neither am I one to change simply for the sake of change. I've grown rather accustomed to the buttons on the title bar, and they've been pretty common through a lot of UIs, WMs, etc, and that even predates the "copy Win95 era".
I'd like to see someone "do the OS/2 WPS UI right" some time, even though everyone seems intent on "doing Windows right." The OS/2 WPS was the one GUI that managed to attract me away from the command line more of the time than any other. I'm using GNOME because that's the "standard platform" at work, but I spend almost all of my time at a command line. (In multiple xterms on multiple desktops) By the way, the WPS used the "standard" menu bar button placements, and that was legacy predating Win95.
You missed my point. I wasn't arguing in favor of US aggression, nor arguing that it isn't sticking its fingers in others' pies.
I was simply arguing that simply because the US IS doing naughty things doesn't by any means imply that others aren't. In fact, it's more likely for more than one nation to be wrong in it's international pursuits than for only one to be wrong.
I'm just waiting for China and the Islamic world to finally notice that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," may not always be true, and indeed may be masking a greater enemy. The US often tends to fall short on its practice of religious tolerance, but at some time and level there was an attempt to bake it in. I don't believe the same is true of China.
Stop that. Only the US can be EVIL around this planet. It's black and white, and if the US is black, then everyone else MUST be lily white.
I wasn't saying that America was lily-white in this, nor was I saying that Iran didn't have the right to down the drone. I was merely saying that their first reports had just a bit of histrionic nature to them that is denied by the careful, considered nature of their response.
When this story first broke, it was cited as response to an American act of aggression. Now we hear that they overrode communications and forced the drone to land. At the very least, the latter seems to me to be something that you'd have to be well prepared to do, in advance. So perhaps the drone was deliberately encroaching on Iranian airspace, but they must have been patiently waiting for their opportunity to pounce.
It's also possible that the drone was patrolling the border from inside Iraq or Afghanistan, and Iran sent radio waves across the border to make the intercept. That's unknown. But by pateience and pouncing or by cross-border override, in either case it seems to me that they've given up the right to shriek in righteous indignation about being violated. The proper response to "Oh No!! Our airspace is being violated!!" would have been to shoot the thing down. There's an air of deliberation here that doesn't square.
The PC-XT-286 was an oddity, designed to use up some surplus 80286 processors. They had a bunch of 80286 CPUs spec'ed at 6MHz, which wouldn't go in the PC-AT, which required 8MHz. They had enough that they didn't want to throw them away, so they made up this special model. It was clocked at 6MHz and came with 640MB on the motherboard that was run at zero wait states, which recovered most of the speed lost by the 2MHz clock reduction. It was also packaged in a regular XT case, which meant that it couldn't take the "tall" AT cards, which turned out to not be much of a limitation.
There were only a limited number built, because it was meant to use up a fixed stock of CPU chips. It also never sold well on the regular marketplace, being something of an oddity. Shortly after it ended up being sold on an "employee firesale", which is how I got mine. Shortly after that there were BIOS images made available that bypassed the "speed trap" that prevented overclocking. I ran mine happily at 8MHz, and many people ran theirs at 9MHz.
This response is being typed on a 1987 vintage keyboard that came with an IBM PC-XT-286. It's still going strong, and as long as I never drink coffee in this room, expect it to keep going.
Of course that takes it out of the "stuff nowadays" category. Remember way back when solid state electronics were being sold as being more reliable?
I wonder what the net environmental impact is of removing all lead from solder, once you factor in the shortened lifetimes of electronic equipment, and the percentage of dead stuff that doesn't get properly recycled.
I wonder exactly how much lead it really takes to avoid tin whiskers.
You give up your business...
This is a FOAF story... A company outsourced production to (Far East country) and wanted FOAF to go look over their facilities and operations, to see that all was being done correctly. His handlers took him on the tour, and everything was spot-on. Procedures were being followed, quality was being assured, etc, etc, etc.
Then he got away from his handlers for a little bit, and did some looking around on his own. He went around to the other side of the factory building where his products were being produced, and since he was an American, the tenants of that part of the building were happy to give him a tour, as a prelude to a potential outsourcing deal. (They didn't know he was already in such a deal with other tenants in the same building.) He went through their production lines and saw his very own product being built, with a different label being slapped on the front. Had he not already been an insider, he wouldn't have known that procedures weren't being followed and quality not being properly assured. He was touring a knockoff factory.
His "Intellectual Property had escaped," his company's crown jewels were out.
As an aside and example, China makes it a condition for entry into their market that companies open up their IP. In this case, it's no longer "escape" as above, it's coerced out.
Seems to me that some number of years/decades back, most of Corporate America lost its sense of direction/balance/mission. Today it's "all about the money," and personally I believe that's wrong. If you're a car company, and you're "all about the money" instead of "all about cars" you may not have failed yet, but you're clearly on the road there.
Obviously you can't ignore the money. By the same token it's probably handy to have some MBAs around. But you need to keep track of who's in charge and what's the mission, and that shouldn't be the MBAs - it should be somebody experienced in the company's products.
To switch from the car company analogy to the software company analogy, would you rather buy your software from a company that's "all about software" while managing to make a profit, or from a company that's "all about profit" while managing to make software? Which company do you think will produce better software? (or better cars, to switch the analogy back.)
I started looking at the cablecard capture cards a few months back, when they first popped up on the MythTV mailing list. It's an intriguing idea, but I have no idea how Comcast has (mis)used the broadcast flag in my area. It's entirely possible that I could spend a few hundred bucks on the capture card, then get one or two cablecards, go through the activation hassle, and discover that I get no new channels over what ClearQAM already offers. Nor do I have any idea what they're going to charge me for cablecards - it's in their best interest to charge as much as they do for a set-top box - or more.
I was under the impression that Silicon Dust was going to be adding channel listings for cablecard as well as ATSC and ClearQAM, but so far see nothing for my zip code. I presume that's because nobody has tried it, yet.
The thing most broken about TVs today is the blasted set-top box.
Maybe in the living room it's ok to have an "entertainment center" with all sorts of electronic boxes wired together, and to have multiple remote controls, or spend $$ to buy something like a Logitech Harmony. But for every TV you've got?
For the past few weeks Comcast has been putting the "You're not doing this right." messages on some channels on my TV. It looked like it might be merely "going digital", but last week I did a rescan on a digital TV, and didn't find the channels that warn. I'll rescan again Wednesday, after the switchover, but I'm not optimistic. So now the second TV (which actually is digital, unlike the "first TV") is about to need some sort of extra box, extra remote, and of course when the extra box is active we won't be able to get the broadcast HD channels without extra fiddling, etc. (Or we could spend more $$$ for an HD set-top box, etc.)
THAT's what's broken about TV - and I don't see Apple TV or any of these other gizmos fixing that, unless they accept CableCard.
Oh yeah, this upcoming change is going to break MythTV, or at least badly decrease its usefulness.
At the core of "censorship" efforts like PROTECT-IP and the like is a world-view that considers the internet to be a content distribution means.
Thinking in those terms they're trying to solve content distribution problems without even considering side-effects. Sometimes I wonder if they even realize that content distribution is only a tiny portion of what the internet is capable of, or how much their ham-fisted efforts are causing trouble for those other uses.
Amazing how less regulation and lower taxes are always the answer to any problem, isn't it?
No need to seize them, just crack our command and control network, and control them.
> The US Military is hoping that this is a LAST Strike weapon.
Didn't Stanley Kubrick already make this movie, long, long ago?
(I know the weapon specifics were different.)
One of the greatest Slim Pickin's movie moments, ever!
I don't think Yamamoto was surprised, but I don't think his superiors were listening to him.
My wife and I were recently on Hawaii's Big Island, where they take light pollution very seriously. (Keck and more are up on top of Mauna Kea.) Between the fast sunsets near the equator and the general care about light pollution, the place got really dark really early.
How about "vi - R - us" - for emacs haters.
Nope, can't do it. I tried, I failed.
I was looking a while back at the National Broadband Map, and it indicated that I had choices in my area. I currently have Comcast, but DSL is available. My big beef is over the Terms Of Service, and all that is implied there. According to the National Broadband Map there was service from a local CLEC available to me. I looked at their website, and not only were their TOS fine, they actually provide support services to people who want their own domains, servers, etc.
Enter the fiber loophole...
I emailed them, inquiring about availability of their service. I received a negative response. My response was asking if this was a matter of waiting for DSLAM availability, or if there was some more fundamental problem.
Their response was that my service, somewhere on the way to my house, went through some fiber. That mere fact meant that the ILEC no longer has to be an ILEC and provide for CLECs. They have a legal monopoly on any potential ISP service to me.
For every proposed solution or reform, people come up with a thousand reasons why it can't possibly work, and why we can't change the status quo.
I guess the implications of that are obvious - We're living in something approaching the best of all possible worlds.
Therefore we shouldn't change anything.
On our current course, we're set to virtually eliminate the middle class in several more decades, so I guess that makes the world a better place. I guess that makes it sound like my status as a member of the middle class is making the world a worse place, but I guess I'll go on being "evil" as long as I can mange.
But let's look at the bright side...
Without a middle class, we won't need as much infrastructure, since most of us will be walking or taking a bus, since we won't be able to afford cars any more. We don't need to bother fixing that aging infrastructure, we can just decommission it. Decaying infrastructure problem solved.
As our income sinks lower and lower, even those low-paying jobs currently taken by illegal immigrants will start to look attractive. Americans will take the low-paying jobs. Illegal immigration problem solved.
Once there is no middle class and the wealthy are safe in their gated communities, drug addicts won't be able to find easy victims to support their habits. They'll wind up going cold-turkey simply because they can't afford the drugs on their own, and are no longer able to steal enough. Drug problem solved.
The military becomes the only reliable employer, since all other decent-paying jobs have been sent overseas. There are so many people trying to get in that the military can raise their standards back up to where they ought to be. Recruiting problem solved.
As we quite being able to afford to travel, we can take the national parks and either mothball them to eliminate cost, or out-and-out sell them as resorts, generating revenue. Not a solution, but certainly an assist to the deficit/debt problem.
True, it's kind of like trapping oneself, really.
If they neither know nor care, they never would have signed up for the pilot.
It's lock-in. Once you've gone IPV6, who's going to want to go back. You'll be a Comcast customer until FIOS, DSL or whatever other competition might actually exist catches up.