I get it now. Still don't you think that one of the reasons you (and me for that matter) find 80s music on the radio acceptable is that is has been culled significantly?
When I was in JHS/HS I mainly listened to classic rock.
Some ot if survived and became classic, but other stuff around the time was quite forgettable, i.e. spandau ballet, culture club, phil collins, madona, cindy lauper....
1. Stop listening to Britney Spears and other market driven crap. Trust me, when you are older you will have a hard time believing you ever liked that crap (disco music any one?)
2. Find indie bands that make their music available on the net and support them (tip jar, tell your friends, buy the t-shirt, go to their concerts when they come to town).
3. Short record labels' stock. They don't get it and will be left behind just like the old rail monopolies were left behind by highway trucking companies.
Actually this is pretty much what happened with gif. Before compuserve tried to enforce the patent gif was dominant on the web. Within a year there had been a rapid move to jpeg. Now it is not even close.
Plus, they are just damn convenient for when you want to move big stuff.
Actually, SUV's are not that big when it comes to haul space. They are made to look big by being placed dangerously high above the wheels (not unlike monster trucks. The cabins are no bigger than a regular pickup'a).
You young kids don't know that net.gods, as they used to be called, routinely dropped from Usenet to great concern of those involved. Yet usenet marched on.
This gave rise to the old joke: "imminent death of Usenet predicted, film at eleven".
Yes, usenet has deteriorated steadily since it's creation. No it is not dead. Traffic and users are still increasing, hard as it might be to believe. I call this the Groucho Marx effect, people confuse the drop in quality with a drop in popularity i.e. "nobody eats there anymore, its too crowded".
There are many reasons why usenet was/is sick. None of them were addressed by Spaf. Users are making the best of a really flawed medium (and by this I don't mean text, but the oddities of the group hierarchy, the difficulty of moderation, the lack of collective memory, and so on).
read the posts from the guys who took random manual labour after having been in IT for years or even management.
Isn't this precisely what I was talking about? He did get a job (random manual labour). OTOH a friend who is a non-techie, she truly has no job offers. Zero, zilch, not random manual, no nothing. Not even driving pizza in the bad part of town...
(1) users tend not to type as many regex as you would think
(2) it is too easy to create a query that matches half the words in the index, bogging down to a crawl your search
(3) in all likelihood what you want is a stemmer and something that allows typos, not a full fledged regular expression matcher
(4) the main problem with search engines is that they return too many results, not too few. Regex search capabilities further increase the size of the result set.
(5) let me repeat point (3). Regular expressions are not a natural operation when searching natural language.
Sure you adjust the car seat and the mirrors, you don't adjust the carburator and the timing belt. IMHO the default state of most *nix is to require the novice user to adjust down the carburator from "race mode" to "learning how to operate". If you think about it, these users are the ones that are less qualified to make the choice.
No, it should be your job to adapt the system to your needs.
No. It is not that either.
For example, in Windows it's quite likely that you change the screen resolution and font size to make it more comfortable to you.
Actually the vast majority of users never tinker wtih any setting whatsoever. So we better ship a system that would be useful for 95% of the users, and then the remaining 5% out will have to tinker with the system.
Now you tell me, what would the vast majority of users out there would find easier to comprehend cp or copy? mv or move?
Which also brings us to another problem with Unix. Default settings assume that you are super-advanced, know-unix-warts-and-all user. Whereas in practice, almost by definition, the average user won't be an expert (in contrast elm get's this right. It defaults to novice, and it is the expert who has to tweak the configuration to make elm more terse).
When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.
Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.
This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.
Toddlers might sometimes wonder why people need to learn so many words and learn to speak in complicated phrases, when it seems that all you really need to do is point and cry to get what you want. Then we grow up.
This is bullshit. Powerful command line functions does not mean they have to be named cp or mv instead of copy or move. Or that their powerful options have to be turned on using cryptic single character options (something that RMS fixed in GNU btw with long form "--" options).
It is typical of a unix ditto-head to come back with a lame "it's the user's fault" excuse for any sensible criticism of unix.
"UNIX is the best. PCs and Macs are just toys compared to the incredible power of UNIX."
It weren't always like this son. Back in the mid 80's people in academia were quite vocal about the shortcomings of Unix. Back then the fact that DOS was even worse was no excuse for the shortcomings of Unix.
It was only in the 90s that people started openly claiming that Unix was perfect and Linus was it's only prophet.
Things that used to be common knowledge such as "X windows sux rocks" and "Unix security is an oxymoron" were lost.
To be sure, there are many things that Unix got right, that is why we still use it today, but is far from perfect.
he is right about the innovation thing... for now. In fact he's simply paraphrasing Rob Pike (of Unix fame):
Linux's success may indeed be the single strongest argument for my thesis: The excitement generated by a clone of a decades-old operating system demonstrates the void that the systems software research community has failed to fill.
Besides, Linux's cleverness is not in the software, but in the development model, hardly a triumph of academic CS (especially software engineering) by any measure.
Indeed, up until very recently the Linux community was busy simply trying to catchup with other Unices.
However, over the last five years or so, Linux has slowly but surely started surpasing other Unices here and there. For example, KDE and GNOME are miles better than any of the commercial vendor unix-GUIs.
So if Ballmer is counting on the lack of Linux innovation thus far to keep Windows ahead, he is in for a surprise.
However at the same time it is important that Linux advocacy groups (such as/.) encourage and foster the environment for the development of an improved Linux. For that we need laundry lists a-la "let's make unix not suck" which Miguel de Icaza put out a long time ago. That is, identify its weakest points (X11, security model, cryptic commands, lack of decent word processing suite) and work on improving them as much as we can.
Early in Napster's life, the venture firm Draper Atlantic, which had expressed some interest in buying into Napster, did a round of "due diligence" on the company's model -- and Jason Grosfield, a hedge-fund investor, uncovered serious legal liabilities, finding that Napster could be ruled illegal under all existing copyright precedents.
If Draper Atlantic knew, then so must have Hummer Winblad...
Look, you keep coming back to slahsdot geeks. For the umpteenth time, this is not the people I have in mind.
You are the only one in this conversation equating sophisticated users with slashdotters.
I'm thinking about CIOs and CTOs who understand the technology. They are not religious about Open Source. They like because they can recompile the kernel if it turns out the TCP/IP stack does not support enough simultaneous connections. They care about X11 compatibility because they need to port existing applications...
Don't waste you breath. I've been telling this to MacZealots for ages... They have too much invested in the platform (monetarilly, emotionally, and knowledge-wise to be objective about it).
Slashdot Mirror
I get it now. Still don't you think that one of the reasons you (and me for that matter) find 80s music on the radio acceptable is that is has been culled significantly?
When I was in JHS/HS I mainly listened to classic rock.
Some ot if survived and became classic, but other stuff around the time was quite forgettable, i.e. spandau ballet, culture club, phil collins, madona, cindy lauper....
1. Stop listening to Britney Spears and other market driven crap. Trust me, when you are older you will have a hard time believing you ever liked that crap (disco music any one?)
2. Find indie bands that make their music available on the net and support them (tip jar, tell your friends, buy the t-shirt, go to their concerts when they come to town).
3. Short record labels' stock. They don't get it and will be left behind just like the old rail monopolies were left behind by highway trucking companies.
4. And this once for real: Enjoy and profit!
Actually this is pretty much what happened with gif. Before compuserve tried to enforce the patent gif was dominant on the web. Within a year there had been a rapid move to jpeg. Now it is not even close.
Plus, they are just damn convenient for when you want to move big stuff.
Actually, SUV's are not that big when it comes to haul space. They are made to look big by being placed dangerously high above the wheels (not unlike monster trucks. The cabins are no bigger than a regular pickup'a).
You seem to equate collapse with disappearance. Yes the Maya went on but never again to build a Peten or Chichen. Ditto for the Ananszi.
You young kids don't know that net.gods, as they used to be called, routinely dropped from Usenet to great concern of those involved. Yet usenet marched on.
This gave rise to the old joke: "imminent death of Usenet predicted, film at eleven".
Yes, usenet has deteriorated steadily since it's creation. No it is not dead. Traffic and users are still increasing, hard as it might be to believe. I call this the Groucho Marx effect, people confuse the drop in quality with a drop in popularity i.e. "nobody eats there anymore, its too crowded".
There are many reasons why usenet was/is sick. None of them were addressed by Spaf. Users are making the best of a really flawed medium (and by this I don't mean text, but the oddities of the group hierarchy, the difficulty of moderation, the lack of collective memory, and so on).
read the posts from the guys who took random manual labour after having been in IT for years or even management.
Isn't this precisely what I was talking about? He did get a job (random manual labour). OTOH a friend who is a non-techie, she truly has no job offers. Zero, zilch, not random manual, no nothing. Not even driving pizza in the bad part of town...
I declined most until I found what I was looking for.
I've seen other people say that: "there are no jobs!", when in reality they mean "there are jobs, but the pay sucks, and the job description stinks!"
(1) users tend not to type as many regex as you would think
(2) it is too easy to create a query that matches half the words in the index, bogging down to a crawl your search
(3) in all likelihood what you want is a stemmer and something that allows typos, not a full fledged regular expression matcher
(4) the main problem with search engines is that they return too many results, not too few. Regex search capabilities further increase the size of the result set.
(5) let me repeat point (3). Regular expressions are not a natural operation when searching natural language.
Sure you adjust the car seat and the mirrors, you don't adjust the carburator and the timing belt. IMHO the default state of most *nix is to require the novice user to adjust down the carburator from "race mode" to "learning how to operate". If you think about it, these users are the ones that are less qualified to make the choice.
No, it should be your job to adapt the system to your needs.
No. It is not that either.
For example, in Windows it's quite likely that you change the screen resolution and font size to make it more comfortable to you.
Actually the vast majority of users never tinker wtih any setting whatsoever. So we better ship a system that would be useful for 95% of the users, and then the remaining 5% out will have to tinker with the system.
Now you tell me, what would the vast majority of users out there would find easier to comprehend cp or copy? mv or move?
Which also brings us to another problem with Unix. Default settings assume that you are super-advanced, know-unix-warts-and-all user. Whereas in practice, almost by definition, the average user won't be an expert (in contrast elm get's this right. It defaults to novice, and it is the expert who has to tweak the configuration to make elm more terse).
When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.
Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.
This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.
That's the nice thing about Unix, if you don't like something you can fix it:
but you see, my job as a user shouldn't be to fix the operating system.
Toddlers might sometimes wonder why people need to learn so many words and learn to speak in complicated phrases, when it seems that all you really need to do is point and cry to get what you want. Then we grow up.
This is bullshit. Powerful command line functions does not mean they have to be named cp or mv instead of copy or move. Or that their powerful options have to be turned on using cryptic single character options (something that RMS fixed in GNU btw with long form "--" options).
It is typical of a unix ditto-head to come back with a lame "it's the user's fault" excuse for any sensible criticism of unix.
"UNIX is the best. PCs and Macs are just toys compared to the incredible power of UNIX."
It weren't always like this son. Back in the mid 80's people in academia were quite vocal about the shortcomings of Unix. Back then the fact that DOS was even worse was no excuse for the shortcomings of Unix.
It was only in the 90s that people started openly claiming that Unix was perfect and Linus was it's only prophet.
Things that used to be common knowledge such as "X windows sux rocks" and "Unix security is an oxymoron" were lost.
To be sure, there are many things that Unix got right, that is why we still use it today, but is far from perfect.
Money allows hiring programmer-whores
Just remember that the only difference between a salaried worker and a whore is the part of the body for sale in exchange for coin.
And yes, they both fsck the customer. Difference is: with the whore, the customer walks away happy.
Touche'
You are absolutely right. I was thinking of the old Unix box makers and forgot completely about the Mac.
Indeed, up until very recently the Linux community was busy simply trying to catchup with other Unices.
However, over the last five years or so, Linux has slowly but surely started surpasing other Unices here and there. For example, KDE and GNOME are miles better than any of the commercial vendor unix-GUIs.
So if Ballmer is counting on the lack of Linux innovation thus far to keep Windows ahead, he is in for a surprise.
However at the same time it is important that Linux advocacy groups (such as
From salon.com:
Early in Napster's life, the venture firm Draper Atlantic, which had expressed some interest in buying into Napster, did a round of "due diligence" on the company's model -- and Jason Grosfield, a hedge-fund investor, uncovered serious legal liabilities, finding that Napster could be ruled illegal under all existing copyright precedents.
If Draper Atlantic knew, then so must have Hummer Winblad...
Look, you keep coming back to slahsdot geeks. For the umpteenth time, this is not the people I have in mind.
You are the only one in this conversation equating sophisticated users with slashdotters.
I'm thinking about CIOs and CTOs who understand the technology. They are not religious about Open Source. They like because they can recompile the kernel if it turns out the TCP/IP stack does not support enough simultaneous connections. They care about X11 compatibility because they need to port existing applications...
Don't waste you breath. I've been telling this to MacZealots for ages... They have too much invested in the platform (monetarilly, emotionally, and knowledge-wise to be objective about it).
The fact that it holds any value only to "sophisticated" (read: smug) users,
No. This is where you are wrong.
A sophisticated user is the IT department of a large corporation.
Linuz is starting to be popular among those, hence the article from the Economist. They certainly don't care about smug slashdotters.
Of your impressive list, only 1 and possibly 5 mean anything to anyone who doesn't hang out at Slashdot.
It's funny to see how much you don't get. In practice Linux is only used by sophisticated users (who else can figure it out?).
pretty wild stretch to call basement hackers "third party support,"
Have you ever heard of Red Hat?
i didn't read the article, but i knew it was just a matter of time before we saw the first beowulf linux virus....