Except the analogy doesn't work.
If you didn't want hyperlinked documents why are you on the web with a browser?
I'd say you have the analogy completely backwards. The question you should be asking is, "If I didn't want hyperlinks in my document, why should Microsoft feel the need to add them for me?"
Eventually, they hope e-paper will be flexible enough to be a paper substitute. Meanwhile, E Ink expects it to rival liquid crystal displays and the emerging organic LED displays (New Scientist, 21 October 2000, p 48).
So at present, the real value to this stuff is that it doesn't have to be backlit (and, I suspect, uses less power as a result), not that you can make paper airplanes out of it, as alumnniac writes.
Apology accepted. As long as we're on the subject, I apologize on behalf of the US for, um... uh... jeez. Just about everything else wrong with popular music.
Last year, after the L.A. Times turned up some evidence, Clear Channel Communications paid an $8,000 fine for promoting a Bryan Adams single and billing his label.
Those utter bastards! Why can't they just let poor Bryan die a natural death, like he should have at the end of the eighties?
I made the assumption that the guy buying a PS2 is much more likely to have a TV than a monitor, so I felt like I could get away with that little slight of hand. But I wasn't aware that you could get a system with a TV-out that cheap, so I'll just shut up now.:)
Except - the gameplay on the PS2 will blow your cheapie computer out of the water. Okay. Now I'll shut up.:)
No monitor, keyboard, mouse, or hard drive (or any network connectivity out of the box, iirc).
Except that your box is lacking TV-out, something the PS2 has, and you neglected to buy a monitor. Figure about $100 for a monitor, and suddenly you're looking much closer to the PS2's price point. Unless you plan on enjoying those state-of-the-art on-board video graphics by plugging the VGA cable right into your optic nerve...
Are you kidding? This makes the movie for me. If it sucks, at least we'll be able to entertain ourselves by singing "Tequila" whenever he's in a scene.
Could be. Of course, considering that CmdrTaco's contribution to this story consisted of the words "random," "walk," and "writes," I'd suggest that the shell script theory might be somewhat flawed in this case.
"Lens flare" - does nothing useful, but hey, you can't be a l33T web designer without it.
Re:Linux advocacy: VR3 framework for the Desktop?
on
Agenda, Not Hidden
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· Score: 2
Is it really that hard to type "dpkg -i foo.deb" (or whatever the rpm equivalent is)? Or use a GUI frontend that does the equivalent?
Maybe not to the latter, but a hearty yes to the former. (Shouldn't this thread have been posted under the "Linux Desktop Obituary" story?)
It is no longer considered reasonable to ask the average user to memorize console commands. Joe Blow shouldn't have to remember the various arguments to dpkg (or apt-get, or rpm). The package management software should handle it for him, which is why I continue to hold high hopes for dselect and Red Carpet.
Sooner or later, two things will come to pass. First, there will be an open source office suite worth the hard drive space it occupies. Second, some distribution will have the balls to do an "express, idiot-proof" install, which dumbs the interface down to something like a net kiosk. When that happens, everyone who claimed that desktop Linux is dead will stand around blinking for a few minutes, wondering what just happened, while the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief and go to install the damn thing on our grandmothers' computers.
I'm inclined to think that this is a troll, but it looks close enough to the real thing that I'll take the risk.
All she's saying is, she sees no difference between homosexuality, bestiality and incest, on a moral basis.
That's not all that she's saying, and shame on you for intimating that it is. She also makes the claim that homosexuality is a result of "biological error," and publicly denounced the American Psychiatric Association for removing homosexuality from its list of disorders.
Elsewhere, Schlessinger denies that her attitudes are in any way discriminatory:
In other words, AB 222 suggested that sexual orientation discrimination was the same and equal to racial and gender discrimination? How can that be? A behavior, the same as a born gender and a born race? - Schlessinger, June 3 1999
In other words, homosexuality is a result of biological error, like, say, Tourette's Syndrome. Yet while we're taught to feel pity towards victims of the latter for their tendency to shout socially awkward things, homosexuality is somehow evil, and denying them rights and privileges available to straight people isn't discrimination. That's doublethink.
Yet, we are supposed to consider the second two deviant and evil, but the first is now a right, and is holy and pure. Why? It's absolute doublethink. - Galvatron
Is it? Let's use Schlessinger's actual words here. She says that she's afraid of rights for homosexuals - wait, sorry, "sexual deviants" - because it may lead to other "rights" as well, specifically, rights for pedophiles (see the quote in my previous post). Maybe you don't see a fundamental moral difference between pedophilia and homosexuality, but I do: most people that I know do not hold pedophilia to be on an equal moral footing with sex between two consenting adults, regardless of their gender.
All this aside, however, it is ultimately uninteresting to me what Dr. Laura's opinion is on holiness or purity. If she wants to say that homosexuality is a sin, fine: I'm not going to dispute religious doctrine with her. Let her speak out against pedophilia, bestiality, pre-marital sex - fuck, I don't care if she wants to badmouth philately. But she shouldn't try to cloak her hatred of homosexuality in quasi-scientific justifications. She can have that damn cake, as far as I'm concerned: she just can't eat it too.
Similarly, one should not compare the number of burglars or other intruders and civilians killed by domestic firearms, but rather ask how many burglars or other intruders were driven away or deterred by the firearm.
I don't disagree that the proper way to view this type of statisics is in terms of risk management (which seems to be where you're headed with this). However, I disagree that the "how many burglars" question is the only one we should be asking.
Statistics like these can be used to address any number of questions, but matching the right statistic to the right question is a tricky one. It is not at all far-fetched to predict that many people would consider a gun fatality to be the worst possible outcome of purchasing a handgun. In this event, asking questions like "what is the probability, based on the national average, of someone being wounded/killed with a firearm in my home if I purchase one," or "who is the person most likely to be wounded or killed," is perfectly rational.
First, I need to start by saying that I agree with your point that it's important to conisder people's arguments for what they are, rather than to reject them out of hand because of who espoused them. In logic/rhetoric, this is called "poisoning the well," where you forego attacking an argument because its proponent makes an easier/more attractive target.
It's kind of a shame, really, because this is one nasty, funky well. Dr. Laura is a bigoted creep who is fond of referring to gays and lesbians as "biological errors," and refers to the practice of homosexuality as destructive. Her justification for doing so isn't rooted in scientific research, but in her personal religious convictions. An example:
Let me just read a bit of this [news story] to you: "The debate over gay rights..." Rights. RIGHTS! RIGHTS? For sexual deviant . . . sexual behavior there are now rights. That's what I'm worried about with the pedophilia and the bestiality and the sadomasochism and the cross-dressing. Is this all going to be "rights" too, to deviant sexual behavior? It's deviant sexual behavior. Why does deviant sexual behavior get rights? Don't understand that to start out with.
- Schlessinger, June 9, 1999.
I don't have a problem with differing points of view. I do have a problem when people take their own personal moral decisions, thinly cloak them under a veil of pseudo-logic, and try to ram them down everyone's throat.
Time and again the Linux crowd forget that normal people DO NOT USE LINUX BECAUSE IT HAS A COMMAND LINE. The sooner you get rid of xterm and kterm and the like, then we can consider Linux an OS for 'the rest of us'. Until then like the stick-shift automobile, it will remain strictly a specialist interest.
Oh, for chrissake.
In the few dozen posts that were up at the time, I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever. Mostly, when they've suggested anything, they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange. And the majority of those criticizing the move aren't suggesting a specific alternative: they're just saying that AOL sucks.
And at some level, it's hard to argue with that. In the spectrum of features vs. usability, AOL mail is slanted pretty far towards the latter. That's great for people who don't know anything about applications, but at the corporate level, one hopes (perhaps against hope) that folks can at least, you know, use Office.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro-linux, just not for non-tech savvy people who do not understand what they are getting themselves into. Let them stick with their stupid windoze and Mircro$oft.
You don't have to be a Linux zealot to think that using AOL for corporate e-mail is a dumb-ass move.
I wasn't aware (read: didn't care) that RedHat was involved in any hullabaloo regarding qmail & djbdns. However:
Qmail and djbdns are each distributed under licenses which basically prohibit you from distributing modified binaries. You can redistribute the source, you can write patches for (and redistribute) it, you can distribute binaries. You may not redistribute patched binaries or directly modified source. The full text is here
This makes GPL die-hards pretty upset. If I'm reading this correctly, some folks petitioned RedHat to include both qmail and djbdns in their distribution, and RedHat balked because of license issues. The thing is, they already were distributing Netscape, so the license argument sounded kind of lame.
Furthermore, the firms that make DVDs do not, for the most part, make DVD players, so the use of the term "tying" is somewhat inappropriate.
I think the argument was that the firms that make DVD players also make VHS recorders: hence, requiring the purchase of a VHS recorder would be "tying".
Mind, I'm not sure how well this holds up from a legal standpoint, but I see where he's coming from.
Courtney Love gave a speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference almost exactly one year ago in which she defended Napster and excoriated the recording industry. It's shockingly articulate. The full transcript is available at Salon.com.
Re:Valley startup syndrome. My life in a bucket.
on
Coder on the Cross
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· Score: 2
Apparently "drop everything" has a different meaning for different people.
I used to have this problem all the time. Poorly planned projects were dropped on my desk, and a meeting with the uberstaff would produce a list seven to ten items long which were absolutely, positively, top priority. Each and every one.
The management refused to go into further detail as to what the real priorities were. So finally, deciding that it would be better to take a stand and risk a little job security, I shook my head. "Which one do you want me to do first?" The uberboss shook his head. "They're all top priority." And, at that point, I had a too fleeting moment where I actually connected with the boss, and uttered the following words:
"Making everything top priority doesn't mean it all gets done faster."
When I repeated my original question, I got a real answer, and things have been (somewhat) better ever since.
BTW - I hate the fluorescent lights too. As I'm lucky enough to have my own office, I turn them off, and use desk lamps only. It got to the point where my coworkers referred to my office as "The Grotto" because of the groovy mood lighting.
The core problem here was that of a rapidly shrinking namespace: there are only 17576 possible combinations of the 26 letters that form our alphabet. In many ways, this predicted the same sort of problem that we're now experiencing with IPv4. Fortunately, the problem has been mitigated in a similar method, thanks to those lovely FLEAs (as mentioned by dead_penguin).
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say you have the analogy completely backwards. The question you should be asking is, "If I didn't want hyperlinks in my document, why should Microsoft feel the need to add them for me?"
Can you imagine how cool the phones will be when this technology is deployed?
Not nearly as well, by the sound of it.
So at present, the real value to this stuff is that it doesn't have to be backlit (and, I suspect, uses less power as a result), not that you can make paper airplanes out of it, as alumnniac writes.
Piffle. But, as he himself once put it, "You may be a doctor, but I am The Doctor. The definite article, one might say."
Apology accepted. As long as we're on the subject, I apologize on behalf of the US for, um... uh... jeez. Just about everything else wrong with popular music.
Those utter bastards! Why can't they just let poor Bryan die a natural death, like he should have at the end of the eighties?
I made the assumption that the guy buying a PS2 is much more likely to have a TV than a monitor, so I felt like I could get away with that little slight of hand. But I wasn't aware that you could get a system with a TV-out that cheap, so I'll just shut up now. :)
Except - the gameplay on the PS2 will blow your cheapie computer out of the water. Okay. Now I'll shut up. :)
Except that your box is lacking TV-out, something the PS2 has, and you neglected to buy a monitor. Figure about $100 for a monitor, and suddenly you're looking much closer to the PS2's price point. Unless you plan on enjoying those state-of-the-art on-board video graphics by plugging the VGA cable right into your optic nerve...
On the other hand, it might just have a Network Solutions placeholder there. Don't waste your time.
Are you kidding? This makes the movie for me. If it sucks, at least we'll be able to entertain ourselves by singing "Tequila" whenever he's in a scene.
Side note - when "The Matrix" came out, we'd break into a bad southern drawl every time Morpheus came onscreen. "Y'all can't be told what the Matrix is, Pee Wee!"
Could be. Of course, considering that CmdrTaco's contribution to this story consisted of the words "random," "walk," and "writes," I'd suggest that the shell script theory might be somewhat flawed in this case.
"Lens flare" - does nothing useful, but hey, you can't be a l33T web designer without it.
Maybe not to the latter, but a hearty yes to the former. (Shouldn't this thread have been posted under the "Linux Desktop Obituary" story?)
It is no longer considered reasonable to ask the average user to memorize console commands. Joe Blow shouldn't have to remember the various arguments to dpkg (or apt-get, or rpm). The package management software should handle it for him, which is why I continue to hold high hopes for dselect and Red Carpet.
Sooner or later, two things will come to pass. First, there will be an open source office suite worth the hard drive space it occupies. Second, some distribution will have the balls to do an "express, idiot-proof" install, which dumbs the interface down to something like a net kiosk. When that happens, everyone who claimed that desktop Linux is dead will stand around blinking for a few minutes, wondering what just happened, while the rest of us breathe a sigh of relief and go to install the damn thing on our grandmothers' computers.
I'm inclined to think that this is a troll, but it looks close enough to the real thing that I'll take the risk.
That's not all that she's saying, and shame on you for intimating that it is. She also makes the claim that homosexuality is a result of "biological error," and publicly denounced the American Psychiatric Association for removing homosexuality from its list of disorders.
Elsewhere, Schlessinger denies that her attitudes are in any way discriminatory:
In other words, homosexuality is a result of biological error, like, say, Tourette's Syndrome. Yet while we're taught to feel pity towards victims of the latter for their tendency to shout socially awkward things, homosexuality is somehow evil, and denying them rights and privileges available to straight people isn't discrimination. That's doublethink.
Is it? Let's use Schlessinger's actual words here. She says that she's afraid of rights for homosexuals - wait, sorry, "sexual deviants" - because it may lead to other "rights" as well, specifically, rights for pedophiles (see the quote in my previous post). Maybe you don't see a fundamental moral difference between pedophilia and homosexuality, but I do: most people that I know do not hold pedophilia to be on an equal moral footing with sex between two consenting adults, regardless of their gender.
All this aside, however, it is ultimately uninteresting to me what Dr. Laura's opinion is on holiness or purity. If she wants to say that homosexuality is a sin, fine: I'm not going to dispute religious doctrine with her. Let her speak out against pedophilia, bestiality, pre-marital sex - fuck, I don't care if she wants to badmouth philately. But she shouldn't try to cloak her hatred of homosexuality in quasi-scientific justifications. She can have that damn cake, as far as I'm concerned: she just can't eat it too.
I don't disagree that the proper way to view this type of statisics is in terms of risk management (which seems to be where you're headed with this). However, I disagree that the "how many burglars" question is the only one we should be asking.
Statistics like these can be used to address any number of questions, but matching the right statistic to the right question is a tricky one. It is not at all far-fetched to predict that many people would consider a gun fatality to be the worst possible outcome of purchasing a handgun. In this event, asking questions like "what is the probability, based on the national average, of someone being wounded/killed with a firearm in my home if I purchase one," or "who is the person most likely to be wounded or killed," is perfectly rational.
Ugh.
First, I need to start by saying that I agree with your point that it's important to conisder people's arguments for what they are, rather than to reject them out of hand because of who espoused them. In logic/rhetoric, this is called "poisoning the well," where you forego attacking an argument because its proponent makes an easier/more attractive target.
It's kind of a shame, really, because this is one nasty, funky well. Dr. Laura is a bigoted creep who is fond of referring to gays and lesbians as "biological errors," and refers to the practice of homosexuality as destructive. Her justification for doing so isn't rooted in scientific research, but in her personal religious convictions. An example:
I don't have a problem with differing points of view. I do have a problem when people take their own personal moral decisions, thinly cloak them under a veil of pseudo-logic, and try to ram them down everyone's throat.
Oh, for chrissake.
In the few dozen posts that were up at the time, I didn't see a single suggestion that TW employees should be using pine, or elm, or kmail, or whatever. Mostly, when they've suggested anything, they're suggesting that they should use Outlook & Exchange. And the majority of those criticizing the move aren't suggesting a specific alternative: they're just saying that AOL sucks.
And at some level, it's hard to argue with that. In the spectrum of features vs. usability, AOL mail is slanted pretty far towards the latter. That's great for people who don't know anything about applications, but at the corporate level, one hopes (perhaps against hope) that folks can at least, you know, use Office.
You don't have to be a Linux zealot to think that using AOL for corporate e-mail is a dumb-ass move.
No - the next generation muppetshow would have to be Farscape, which is, after all, co-produced by The Jim Henson Company
You know, I was all set to jump on here and yell "Blasphemer! How dare you suggest such a terrible thing!"
Then I went and checked on IMDB. That really was Tom Baker, wasn't it?
God help us all.
I wasn't aware (read: didn't care) that RedHat was involved in any hullabaloo regarding qmail & djbdns. However:
Qmail and djbdns are each distributed under licenses which basically prohibit you from distributing modified binaries. You can redistribute the source, you can write patches for (and redistribute) it, you can distribute binaries. You may not redistribute patched binaries or directly modified source. The full text is here
This makes GPL die-hards pretty upset. If I'm reading this correctly, some folks petitioned RedHat to include both qmail and djbdns in their distribution, and RedHat balked because of license issues. The thing is, they already were distributing Netscape, so the license argument sounded kind of lame.
I think the argument was that the firms that make DVD players also make VHS recorders: hence, requiring the purchase of a VHS recorder would be "tying".
Mind, I'm not sure how well this holds up from a legal standpoint, but I see where he's coming from.
Courtney Love gave a speech to the Digital Hollywood online entertainment conference almost exactly one year ago in which she defended Napster and excoriated the recording industry. It's shockingly articulate. The full transcript is available at Salon.com.
I used to have this problem all the time. Poorly planned projects were dropped on my desk, and a meeting with the uberstaff would produce a list seven to ten items long which were absolutely, positively, top priority. Each and every one.
The management refused to go into further detail as to what the real priorities were. So finally, deciding that it would be better to take a stand and risk a little job security, I shook my head. "Which one do you want me to do first?" The uberboss shook his head. "They're all top priority." And, at that point, I had a too fleeting moment where I actually connected with the boss, and uttered the following words:
"Making everything top priority doesn't mean it all gets done faster."
When I repeated my original question, I got a real answer, and things have been (somewhat) better ever since.
BTW - I hate the fluorescent lights too. As I'm lucky enough to have my own office, I turn them off, and use desk lamps only. It got to the point where my coworkers referred to my office as "The Grotto" because of the groovy mood lighting.
The core problem here was that of a rapidly shrinking namespace: there are only 17576 possible combinations of the 26 letters that form our alphabet. In many ways, this predicted the same sort of problem that we're now experiencing with IPv4. Fortunately, the problem has been mitigated in a similar method, thanks to those lovely FLEAs (as mentioned by dead_penguin).