I've argued elsewhere that the browser turned the net into a medium.
No medium exists unless someone or something pays for it. In the West, advertising typically supports a medium. Those that don't contain open advertising must solicit money in other ways, or increase the price of their product. In other parts of the world, governments own and control the media and their content.
I say that with tongue only partially in cheek. Consider that the Internet had been around for some years prior to Mosiac and, more importantly, Netscape, opening the net to a profliferating number of Windows users. Prior to that, the net was a relatively small community with high barriers to entry. Those barriers -- essentially, the skills necessary to use Unix --blocked the net's development into a populist medium with enormous financial potential.
The browser, of course, changed all that. Browsers drastically lowered the barriers of entry, allowing people wiht little of no computer skills to move files across the net, send and receive email, chat online, search archives, etc., while avoiding Unix tools like ftp, mail, gopher, and the rest.
Whatever the net was before the browser, it wasn't considered a medium. People actively participated in the pre-browser net, as tool users and community members. They did not passively view content via a device that has more in common with television than anything else. The browser made the net a medium. A medium with billions of potential consumers.
The shifting of the popular frame of reference from "community" and "users" to "viewers" and "consumers" marks the awareness that money could be made by creating net content and controlling access to it. Once that happened, the net became subject to the same economic forces that, absent government regulation, have fostered the increasing concentration of media ownership across the spectrum. Without countervailing action by the government, media ownership will concentrate in inverse relation to the size of a given medium's audience. I.e., the larger the potential market, the greater the tendency for an ownership oligarchy to develop and control that market.
Still wrong. Acquiring and using knowledge does not raise a person's intelligence.
Intelligence is an inate attribute. In other words, we're born with as much intelligence as we are ever going to have. Everything you mention is a worthy goal, but none of it will make anyone more intelligent.
Sorry. Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge, applied or acquired.
Intelligence has to do with the ability to reason, comprehend, conceptualize and understand. A baby born with a high IQ doesn't get any smarter by getting a doctorate in quantum mechanics, or grow any less intelligent by living alone in the woods.
(Probably due to being brainwashed by pompous guilt-ridden and arrogantly bigoted academic types. Haven't been in the Bay Area lately, by any chance?)
Western technology, culture, commerce and government means Westerners are healthier, better educated, longer lived, and more independent than people trapped in Third World countries. That's a simple truth.
As for myself, I am offended by the anti-Western, anti-globalization know-nothing racist rhetoric spouted by pampered self-loathing white Westerners who blithely deny the value of eveything accomplished in the last 500 years and assume that only they know what's best for their poor non-white Third World brethern. Most of this crowd hates progress so much that they'd prefer to keep their "brothers" in their place tied to subsistence farming, poking sticks in the gorund, so long as they and their buddies can put on their Birkenstocks and fire up the BMW.
>> Then, you mean the First World industrialized nations should completely ignore the Third World and their problems - let the Third World decide and solve their own problems by themselves?
No, that's not what I said and it is not what I mean.
What I mean is that Westerners should not imagine they have a clue about what the Third World is like unless they've spent some time there. Westerners should not parachute into some country with a magic answer bag full of aid and force feed it down the throats of the locals. Westerners should not be surprised when poor people decide they want to be prosperous and happy, just like Westerners.
Westerners should not imagine that only Westerners can develop ways of helping the Third World.
>> I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features./I.
Nuts. This is just one more retread of the old line "There's nothing wrong except the user."
After running X on Linux for seveal years, I switched to OS X because it looks a whole lote better. Network transparency, 3d support, zillions of fonts and all the rest do me no good if I have no reason to use them orget a headache reading what's on the screen.
A little competition never hurt anyone.
Fear of "Cultural homogenization"=Western Bigotry
on
Geeking in the Third World
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
>>,,, cultural homogenization!
The 21st Century's version of White Man's Burden.
It takes a fair amount of Western arrogance and bigotry to decide what's best for someone else. Let people decide for themselves what they want.
And, I know that's difficult for people who think that non-Westerners aren't really up to the job and have to be protected by "enlightened" anti-corporate well-fed Westerners.
>> I see a great benifit of raising the global I.Q. of a planet of roughly 6 billion people.
Why do so many posters insist on equating geek knowledge with higher IQ? IQ has nothing to do with how much you've stuffed in your head. Slogging through a dozen computer science courses won't raise your IQ anymore than a dozen English lit courses.
The Third World needs a lot of things. But, what it really does not need is naive Westerners deciding what's good for it.
In a more specific note, consider the role that IT plays in delivering food, medicine and clean water. Yes, some people get their water by walking to a village with a pipe sticking out of the ground. And other people don't have safe water because the equipment that runs the municipal filtration system broke last year and no one in country knows how to repair it. Or that doctors can make mistakes prescibing drugs because they lack access to online pharmaceutical docmentation.
The Third World is a big and varied place.
If You Don't Know How to Butcher a Cow...
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 3, Funny
...you're too dumb to eat at McDonald's.
Makes as much sense as this review.
Along those lines, why do so many book reviews here read like a vegetarian reviewing a a steak house?
Re:Reminds me of Linux circa 1994
on
OS X Hacks
·
· Score: 0
Of course it's elitism. "Smart" equates to "intelligence", not education, background, training, interest and aptitude. This is just unwarranted geek ego tripping.
It is getting difficult for me to get animated about state taxes, one way or another. In my experience, states with low or no state income tax typically feature higher taxes on property, sales, etc. In the long run, people want the services they want, and tend to ignore the fact that their taxes pay for it all. (And sometimes it's a disguised tax: I used to live in a small city where each car garaged within city limits had to be festooned with a city decal. No benefits accrued when you bought the annual tag, but you'd be fined for not having one. The town's population had doubled in the last decade, and long-time residents were already ticked off about skyrocketing property assessments.)
States like Nevada are, I think, exceptions: one large metro area, a few other cities, lots and lots of empty space, of which the feds own great chunks. Here's hoping tourism and gambling revenues keep pace with an increasing population's demand for services.
>> I have never seen consitant/existing font-AA across the desktop (Motif/QT/GTK/whatever/etc.) on Linux.
Neither have I, and that's why I bought a Mac when it was time to put my Intel box out to pasture.
Many posters here equate legible screen fonts to "candy" or "useless crap", but how many of them would spend hours every day watching a television that was just slightly out of focus? Or reading a newspaper that was just a tad blurry?
There's nothing in the GPL that prohibits selling software. Stop whining. The free software movement does not exist to keep money from leaving your pockets.
So, you go to the grocery and the kid puts the 12 things you bought in 13 plastic bags. You put the bags in your car and, of course, everything you bought rolls out of the bags as soon as you brake or turn a corner.
Or, the kid puts that gallon of milk into one little bag. Of course, the bottom of the bag breaches on your way out.
Or, the cute little handle breaks as you walk out of the store, dumping the contents.
Or, you say "Paper, please" and the kid says "We're out". You look 5 feet to the right and see hundreds of paper bags stacked up at the adjoining checkout line.
Well, yeah, even easier than learning HTML. For a business, the web is just another tool. I don't have to learn typography to put an ad in a newspaper; why should I have to take the time to learn HTML to get on the web?
Besides, "learning" HTML (otherwise known as memorizing the syntax) doesn't make you any more able to build a decent web site than does memorizing C syntax make you a programmer. HTML has as little to do with building good web sites as C does with building good programs. Or a hammer does with building a house.
Maybe, for a tiny shop that can't afford an onsite 24/7 staff. (And even then I doubt you'd need perl on Linux to do that. In any case, perl for Windows has been around for years.)
And that's assuming "the system" has been so messed up that you can't telnet in without that magic script.
I'm not discounting the effectiveness of Unix-based privileges and file protection for an OS like Unix. In other words, for a multi-user, multi-tasking system. If you have multiple users simultaneously accessing the same files on the same hardware in an untrusted environment -- something UNIX was designed to do -- all that is necessary. But it's all a bit of overkill for a machine that will never be used by more than one person at one time.
If all you need to do is set up a single machine in a trusted environment to create individual logon accounts, allow each user some freedom in controlling the appearance of their own "desktop", etc., you don't need to drag along all that Unix stuff.
Unix is great software, but it isn't always the best answer for everything.
Isn't it about time to ask if the very notion of a "root" user is baggage from Unix that, just maybe, doesn't fit well into a single-user desktop paradigm? Or, the whole concept of mapping privilege levels to different groups of users?
A single-user machine has, (ahem) a single user. Surely, we can keep these machines secure without bolting on concepts developed to resolve other problems?
The Orbiter has wings so it can land and fly again. Sounds great re: reuse, but getting it ready to fly again takes months of effort and millions of dollars. The external tank burns up on re-entry and is a comlete loss. The solid fuel strapons are recoverable, after bobbing around in the Atlantic.
In other words, the Shuttle is "reused" only in the broadest meaning of that word, and only after significant, expensive and timeconsuming work is done on the Orbiter.
The shuttle achieves its limited degree of reuse only by virture of a complexity that drives up cost. Vehicles that repeatedly can make the trip to low-Earth orbit and return do not necessarily need wings. What's wrong with using large, 'dumb" capsules? As early as the mid-sixties, designs were afoot to build an expanded Gemini vehicle to carry several passengers, or equivalent cargo capacity, to orbit. The craft returned to land at Edwards AFB on skids. Similiar proposals were made vis-a-vis Apollo. Absent the heat shield (which would need replacement), is there a technological reason why -- 40 years later -- we can design and build fully recoverable and reusable versions of these proposed capsules?
Slashdot Mirror
I've argued elsewhere that the browser turned the net into a medium.
No medium exists unless someone or something pays for it. In the West, advertising typically supports a medium. Those that don't contain open advertising must solicit money in other ways, or increase the price of their product. In other parts of the world, governments own and control the media and their content.
The net is not immune to all this.
..and Netscape, too.
I say that with tongue only partially in cheek. Consider that the Internet had been around for some years prior to Mosiac and, more importantly, Netscape, opening the net to a profliferating number of Windows users. Prior to that, the net was a relatively small community with high barriers to entry. Those barriers -- essentially, the skills necessary to use Unix --blocked the net's development into a populist medium with enormous financial potential.
The browser, of course, changed all that. Browsers drastically lowered the barriers of entry, allowing people wiht little of no computer skills to move files across the net, send and receive email, chat online, search archives, etc., while avoiding Unix tools like ftp, mail, gopher, and the rest.
Whatever the net was before the browser, it wasn't considered a medium. People actively participated in the pre-browser net, as tool users and community members. They did not passively view content via a device that has more in common with television than anything else. The browser made the net a medium. A medium with billions of potential consumers.
The shifting of the popular frame of reference from "community" and "users" to "viewers" and "consumers" marks the awareness that money could be made by creating net content and controlling access to it. Once that happened, the net became subject to the same economic forces that, absent government regulation, have fostered the increasing concentration of media ownership across the spectrum. Without countervailing action by the government, media ownership will concentrate in inverse relation to the size of a given medium's audience. I.e., the larger the potential market, the greater the tendency for an ownership oligarchy to develop and control that market.
Still wrong. Acquiring and using knowledge does not raise a person's intelligence.
Intelligence is an inate attribute. In other words, we're born with as much intelligence as we are ever going to have. Everything you mention is a worthy goal, but none of it will make anyone more intelligent.
Sorry. Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge, applied or acquired.
Intelligence has to do with the ability to reason, comprehend, conceptualize and understand. A baby born with a high IQ doesn't get any smarter by getting a doctorate in quantum mechanics, or grow any less intelligent by living alone in the woods.
Then you offended by things that don't exist.
(Probably due to being brainwashed by pompous guilt-ridden and arrogantly bigoted academic types. Haven't been in the Bay Area lately, by any chance?)
Western technology, culture, commerce and government means Westerners are healthier, better educated, longer lived, and more independent than people trapped in Third World countries. That's a simple truth.
As for myself, I am offended by the anti-Western, anti-globalization know-nothing racist rhetoric spouted by pampered self-loathing white Westerners who blithely deny the value of eveything accomplished in the last 500 years and assume that only they know what's best for their poor non-white Third World brethern. Most of this crowd hates progress so much that they'd prefer to keep their "brothers" in their place tied to subsistence farming, poking sticks in the gorund, so long as they and their buddies can put on their Birkenstocks and fire up the BMW.
It is all founded in racism.
>> Then, you mean the First World industrialized nations should completely ignore the Third World and their problems - let the Third World decide and solve their own problems by themselves?
No, that's not what I said and it is not what I mean.
What I mean is that Westerners should not imagine they have a clue about what the Third World is like unless they've spent some time there. Westerners should not parachute into some country with a magic answer bag full of aid and force feed it down the throats of the locals. Westerners should not be surprised when poor people decide they want to be prosperous and happy, just like Westerners.
Westerners should not imagine that only Westerners can develop ways of helping the Third World.
>> I wish people would stop complaining about and learn to use X's features./I.
Nuts. This is just one more retread of the old line "There's nothing wrong except the user."
After running X on Linux for seveal years, I switched to OS X because it looks a whole lote better. Network transparency, 3d support, zillions of fonts and all the rest do me no good if I have no reason to use them orget a headache reading what's on the screen.
A little competition never hurt anyone.
>> ,,, cultural homogenization!
The 21st Century's version of White Man's Burden.
It takes a fair amount of Western arrogance and bigotry to decide what's best for someone else. Let people decide for themselves what they want.
And, I know that's difficult for people who think that non-Westerners aren't really up to the job and have to be protected by "enlightened" anti-corporate well-fed Westerners.
>> I see a great benifit of raising the global I.Q. of a planet of roughly 6 billion people.
Why do so many posters insist on equating geek knowledge with higher IQ? IQ has nothing to do with how much you've stuffed in your head. Slogging through a dozen computer science courses won't raise your IQ anymore than a dozen English lit courses.
The Third World needs a lot of things. But, what it really does not need is naive Westerners deciding what's good for it.
In a more specific note, consider the role that IT plays in delivering food, medicine and clean water. Yes, some people get their water by walking to a village with a pipe sticking out of the ground. And other people don't have safe water because the equipment that runs the municipal filtration system broke last year and no one in country knows how to repair it. Or that doctors can make mistakes prescibing drugs because they lack access to online pharmaceutical docmentation.
The Third World is a big and varied place.
...you're too dumb to eat at McDonald's.
Makes as much sense as this review.
Along those lines, why do so many book reviews here read like a vegetarian reviewing a a steak house?
Of course it's elitism. "Smart" equates to "intelligence", not education, background, training, interest and aptitude. This is just unwarranted geek ego tripping.
It is getting difficult for me to get animated about state taxes, one way or another. In my experience, states with low or no state income tax typically feature higher taxes on property, sales, etc. In the long run, people want the services they want, and tend to ignore the fact that their taxes pay for it all. (And sometimes it's a disguised tax: I used to live in a small city where each car garaged within city limits had to be festooned with a city decal. No benefits accrued when you bought the annual tag, but you'd be fined for not having one. The town's population had doubled in the last decade, and long-time residents were already ticked off about skyrocketing property assessments.)
States like Nevada are, I think, exceptions: one large metro area, a few other cities, lots and lots of empty space, of which the feds own great chunks. Here's hoping tourism and gambling revenues keep pace with an increasing population's demand for services.
>> In Nevada...
.
:-)
there's no state income tax...
But, isn't there a place or two where touristas go to throw away money?
and there are places where you can walk down the street with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
Ummm, now there's a reason not to be in Nevada.
>> I have never seen consitant/existing font-AA across the desktop (Motif/QT/GTK/whatever/etc.) on Linux.
Neither have I, and that's why I bought a Mac when it was time to put my Intel box out to pasture.
Many posters here equate legible screen fonts to "candy" or "useless crap", but how many of them would spend hours every day watching a television that was just slightly out of focus? Or reading a newspaper that was just a tad blurry?
There's nothing in the GPL that prohibits selling software. Stop whining. The free software movement does not exist to keep money from leaving your pockets.
So, you go to the grocery and the kid puts the 12 things you bought in 13 plastic bags. You put the bags in your car and, of course, everything you bought rolls out of the bags as soon as you brake or turn a corner.
Or, the kid puts that gallon of milk into one little bag. Of course, the bottom of the bag breaches on your way out.
Or, the cute little handle breaks as you walk out of the store, dumping the contents.
Or, you say "Paper, please" and the kid says "We're out". You look 5 feet to the right and see hundreds of paper bags stacked up at the adjoining checkout line.
Evil, evil, evil!
>> ...to test for the presence of life, you only need to determine whether the atmosphere is in chemical equilibrium...
What the hell does that mean?
Chemists, meteorologists, and others who actually know what they're talking about are invited to comment.
I Am Not A Chemist...thank God.
...creating something worth looking at is hard.
Well, yeah, even easier than learning HTML. For a business, the web is just another tool. I don't have to learn typography to put an ad in a newspaper; why should I have to take the time to learn HTML to get on the web?
Besides, "learning" HTML (otherwise known as memorizing the syntax) doesn't make you any more able to build a decent web site than does memorizing C syntax make you a programmer. HTML has as little to do with building good web sites as C does with building good programs. Or a hammer does with building a house.
Maybe, for a tiny shop that can't afford an onsite 24/7 staff. (And even then I doubt you'd need perl on Linux to do that. In any case, perl for Windows has been around for years.)
And that's assuming "the system" has been so messed up that you can't telnet in without that magic script.
So, again, what does perl have to do with it?
>> I would like to see some Win MCSE write a .bat script that could perform half the tasks my bash/perl script foo could handle.
This is only important if you can show a corporate manager that moving to Linux because it supports bash/perl will save him X dollars per year.
And you have to do it before his eyes glaze over.
Unix might be all kinds of flexible, but how do you answer the question: "OK, so how often will I need that perl script?"
Buying capability without knowing if you need it is bad business.
I'm not discounting the effectiveness of Unix-based privileges and file protection for an OS like Unix. In other words, for a multi-user, multi-tasking system. If you have multiple users simultaneously accessing the same files on the same hardware in an untrusted environment -- something UNIX was designed to do -- all that is necessary. But it's all a bit of overkill for a machine that will never be used by more than one person at one time.
If all you need to do is set up a single machine in a trusted environment to create individual logon accounts, allow each user some freedom in controlling the appearance of their own "desktop", etc., you don't need to drag along all that Unix stuff.
Unix is great software, but it isn't always the best answer for everything.
Isn't it about time to ask if the very notion of a "root" user is baggage from Unix that, just maybe, doesn't fit well into a single-user desktop paradigm? Or, the whole concept of mapping privilege levels to different groups of users?
A single-user machine has, (ahem) a single user. Surely, we can keep these machines secure without bolting on concepts developed to resolve other problems?
The Orbiter has wings so it can land and fly again. Sounds great re: reuse, but getting it ready to fly again takes months of effort and millions of dollars. The external tank burns up on re-entry and is a comlete loss. The solid fuel strapons are recoverable, after bobbing around in the Atlantic.
In other words, the Shuttle is "reused" only in the broadest meaning of that word, and only after significant, expensive and timeconsuming work is done on the Orbiter.
The shuttle achieves its limited degree of reuse only by virture of a complexity that drives up cost. Vehicles that repeatedly can make the trip to low-Earth orbit and return do not necessarily need wings. What's wrong with using large, 'dumb" capsules? As early as the mid-sixties, designs were afoot to build an expanded Gemini vehicle to carry several passengers, or equivalent cargo capacity, to orbit. The craft returned to land at Edwards AFB on skids. Similiar proposals were made vis-a-vis Apollo. Absent the heat shield (which would need replacement), is there a technological reason why -- 40 years later -- we can design and build fully recoverable and reusable versions of these proposed capsules?