1. Writer seems to be bemoaning their age. I have four words for the writer, IM-style: STFU.
2. Shiny new tech (IM) is actually gussied up old tech (IRC), with some new makeup, red dress, pump heels and matching faux p2p protocol. Not that there's anything wrong with IM, it's just that, um, it's been around a bit longer than people might realize. It's looking younger, but its at least several decades old.
3. Email is older still. It's showing it's age, and it's been to the doc's office a few times to get a physical (damn spam rash keeps showing up in my queues doc, canya give me a bayesian ointment to treat it?)
4. People who are not working full-time and/or in a domestic setting frankly have lots and lots of time for this. People who have been working for years and have a spouse and mortgage/rent and 2.5 kids and all the other claptrap of middle age frankly don't have alot of time for things, so it's really nice to have the message waiting for me for when I'm ready for it.
IM isn't a generational/age thing, it's a "stage of my life" thing. In a nutshell: it has nothing to do with age, get the elitist ageism out of the picture, no-one gives a crap if you use email, IM, or even smoke signals. Just get the f'n message out the door, that's all that matters.
5. Keeping email for future reference is comparatively easy. I have several people in the company I work for that have emails going back 3, 4, 5+ years (yes, their mailboxes have message counts in the 6-digit range). Keeping ongoing records for business, personal, or legal needs with an IM client is just asking for trouble. Yeah, you can save your dialogs - but can you sift through them and pick out that one message from 3 years ago? Do you even HAVE messages from 3 years ago? Do you really care to store those messages that said "I hngry lts eat"?
As far as your statement about us not being like the USSR yet, well, the political left is working on it, just be patient.
Erm, you need a little correction:
As far as your statement about us not being like the USSR yet, well, the political right and left are working on it, just be patient.
It has nothing to do with ideology. It has everything to do with power, money, and human stupidity. I've seen more asshats emerge from both political parties in the last decade than I've seen in the rest of my life. Just as much as Diane Feinstein is a fearmonger, I hate to tell you this but George W is still Dick Chaney's sock puppet.
Except I'm not. I'm in a much smaller corp. I mine, I build, I sell. I fight if I have to. And still, the game grinds on - not because I'm trying to grind for the "leet" gear, but because it takes forever to do anything. Eve rapidly devolves into a time (and money) sink that has you snoozing on a late night at the keyboard, because drilling a 'roid in a 0.7 belt is boring enough to peel paint.
You still didn't give me a reason. Yes, I realize that it's a game, and game economies should be fun - and that's kinda my point. Eve's economy isn't in any way, shape or form fun. Now if there were 10-20 miners during a mining op, or a guild of builders that work with each other, then that would bring some kind of social interaction, ie. "fun", even if it was just shooting the breeze about nothing in peticular. But no...it's just you, your mining barge, and some floating rock. Wake me when we need to run the jetcan back to the station (yawn).
There is no functional economy in Eve, because current real-world economic models are based on the concept of scarcity. Given that there are (theoretically) infinite resources in the form of mineable asteroids that respawn twice a week, infinite pirate bounties that spawn ala-WoW-like into existance from nothing, and other ludicrist ideas, I find it difficult to understand how there can be any scarcity whatsoever.
Eve's economy is capitalism at its finest - the people at the "bottom" subsidize the people at the "top" through first-mover advantage, monopoly practices (having done reporting on mineral pricing, I know it exists), scams, etc. So long time-players keep making a mint (and playing the game for free, given that they can trade all of that easily-made ISK into game time via GTC's), and new players end up subsidizing them in the process.
Get the developers out of the game. It's one thing to have a WoW game master pull you aside to see if you are running macros for farming, its another to have them actually interact in-game. There is NO reason for this kind of interference. CCP even condones this practice by turning a blind eye. I have seen it, and many other abuses, that have completely turned me off of the game. Couple this with the near-impossibility to get into any kind of social interaction (all corporations want 3 or more months experience, and while I easily have more than that, many mistreat their members and are demanding) and you can see why such a good idea has gone bad. Eve was a great attempt, and had many innovations that I wish I could see elsewhere, but at the end of the day, CCP has decided to condemn the game to a slow, painful death by apathy of its players. Being logged into the server and not seeing a single person in a system is a sure sign that a MMO is dying.
CCP, fix the game, admit error, remove your devs from interference, get rid of the "infinite economy", and we'll talk, and who knows, I might even sign up for a year. Keep up the errors, and, well, it was nice knowing you.
By the way, your tools for allowing players to perform economic analysis suck donkey. Really, I mean having to dump the data from a CSV into a homemade MySQL databases so that I can do aggregates over ore pricing was a painful, 3-hour ordeal. Not because it was hard to pull the data out, but rather, it took 3 hours of "flying around" to collect all of the necessary data. You want real economics? Fix your data collection. And make a stock market that REALLY works, not this "you can buy 100 shares of a corp at 1,000,000 ISK each" crap.
And for those current players who think I don't know what I'm doing, I have a 9-month-old character with 9 million SP, a niche market based out of Hek, I have run mineral pricing on 9 regions over 5 weeks with composite pricing (and got paid for it by real subscribers), and I am also an experienced builder, with only capital ship parts being beyond my skills. All of this only playing two nights a week for 4 hours a night. In that short time, I have been through two corps, one of which is one of the oldest in-game. I have seen auction and escrow scams, I have seen pirates skirt high-sec systems with loopholes in the game, and many other things that have convinced me that the game is fundementally broken from the start. Tell me how what I have said is NOT true - and I mean in a real, quantifiable way - and I'll consider coming back.
I'll even give you a name - my game name - if you feel like you need someone who can run factory slots at maximum build efficiency from 10 jumps out. Give a real reason to come back... crass answers will only indicate that there is no reason to come back, and verify what I say is true - and indicate that the game should die a slow death anyways. No social interaction = death of an MMO, and smartasses need not apply.
>>>That is the facts of the matter. Linux may be a good copy of server room Unix but it is a poor copy of windows.
Right here you've pretty much fallen off the turnip truck. If it wanted to be Windows, it would have been ReactOS, not Linux-as-a-distro.
>>>All the things that Windows works hard at are actively avoided by Linux users and developers: Backwards compatability, working with all available hardware, installing easily, requiring no configuration.
Another indication that you haven't done a serious day's work with a modern Linux distro - ever. As someone who oversees a production server running Linux, and has been "in the trenches" for 10 years now, I can say that most of your objections are current - for 1995. I've run 4-year-old software on new distros (backwards compatibility), used hardware new-out-of-the-box with no problems (works on available hardware), done 7-click installs (easy installs), and had all my hardware detected on a first run (no config).
>>>Ok, and after we give up on all that what do we get.
Um, a functional system?
>>>Buggy software, source code that won't compile, rpms that still need another package (that usually doesn't exist, or else needs another package itself), driver installation that requires you to know exactly which processor you have and to compile against kernel source and ugly fonts.
All software, having been written by imperfect human beings with imperfect languages of expression, have bugs. As far as one having bugs and not another, that's the pot calling the kettle black-with-shades-of-chartruse. The implication that Windows somehow passes a "sniff test" for no bugs implies that you really, really haven't worked with it in a production environment, or if you have, not for more than a few weeks. Don't go there - really - it's dark, and a grue might eat you.
I suppose you download your source code for Windows applications and build from scratch? This is a complete strawman argument.
Yup, Windows DLL hell... erm... wait... RPM dependencies...were fixed, a few years back, with dependency-resolving installers. I'm sure that Windows has fixed this issue as well - doesn't it run out to the internet and download any missing software that is needed by another 3rd party software install (yes, I know it will download drivers and patches, but I'm talking about full dependency resolution, right)?
Must be some good glue you're sniffing there. Of course, we both know that distros come with pre-compiled drivers ready-to-go out of the box. Um, you did know that, right?
You know, the fonts kinda do look ugly on my Windows 2000 install at home...wait...sorry, wrong software. I forgot, we're talking about Linux fonts, you know, the ones that end in TTF on the filename? And there's all these other font systems I've never heard of, but they seem to work fine with those pesky TTF fonts, you know the ones I'm talking about, the ones that don't scale past 1200dpi on professional printing presses by design. I guess my eyesight is failing, because now they look a little fuzzier and softer, not so harsh. I wish my Windows 2000 install would look that way.
>>>Oh and don't forget that the UI looks exactly the same as all the other UIs, there is no innovation, and the whole thing is a total copy.
So, fluxbox looks like enlightenment, which looks like gnome, which looks like KDE, which looks like ratpoison, which looks like twm/motif? Microsoft's "innovation" is fairly overrated, given that the vast majority of their products come from 3rd party vendors they have bought out and rebadged. And yes, it's a copy - that's the whole point of it, dumbass.
>>>And at the end of all this, when the user complains about the crapness, they are told if they stopped complaining and started developing then maybe the world would be a better place. Well guess wha
(sigh) if you RTFA and think that way...
on
'Til Tech Do Us Part
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Sometimes, I see how the industry is dying. All of the "smart techies" never reproduce. Because they were to dumb to figure out a simple issue.
I've had 15 years of marriage (and have two kids). Judging by the character of the posts, I'm pretty much a senior citizen by slashdot standards, because apparently I'm about 13-15 years older than the majority of posters here. I can tell you now, the writer of the original aritcle has their head up their ass. For that matter, anyone who thinks in the terms listed in the article really DO have their head up their ass, and shouldn't even bother getting married.
There are lots of solutions to the issues in the article, but none of them work as well as "here, just borrow my account to browse instead of me logging out" or "honey, whatcha reading in your email?" or any other form of give-and-take, which needs a foundation in TRUST. It's not "boyfriend-girlfriend on the playground at recess". It's a marriage. There is a simple solution: FOR SHIT'S SAKE, GROW THE FUCK UP.
Marriage is like a bridge, and each spouse holds one side of the bridge up. It takes both sides to keep it up and going. Sometimes, one of the two has to put the bridge down (for rest, health reasons, "me-time", family emergencies, whatever...doesn't matter, it happens), for just a breather - and the other one has to carry the load. If the marriage is working, that person comes back and picks up their end of the bridge. But the bridge won't stand up forever if only one is left holding everything up, or if both spouses can't agree to share the load and the bridge never goes up to begin with.
Guess what? Marriage takes an EFFORT. You will do HARD INTERPERSONAL WORK. Work that requires you hold up your end of the situation. It's you and your spouse choosing to share life - all of life - and all of each other, the good parts, and all the bad parts. If she can't deal with those things in you that are a part of you, or you can't deal with those things in her that drive you crazy, then it's just not gonna work. Ever. You need to find - gasp! - compromise. And it seems that the younger groups of today seem to have less and less of this critical quality that's needed for marriage.
This isn't me trying to troll. It's me trying to slap some sense into someone's thick skull. Seriously. No fool'in. If you have a friend that's about to get married, and they think they way they do in the article, you need to print this out, roll it up, walk up to them, and slap them upside the head - repeatedly. They need to really think about something as serious as this before just waltzing off to the land of eternal Tivo replays and iPod picks. Because it has nothing to do with tech. It has everything to do with "these people need to seriously grow the hell up".
I was speaking of the populace, not the government. A round-about way of saying "the people determine the form of government, for better or worse". In this case, I have personally observed such behaviors in the public at large, unfortunately.
Bah, getting late, and I'm tired. Ignore the prior incomplete post. I read the reply to the other one, and I have to say, I find it refreshingly reasonable.
There is no state ordained church, and we still have freedom of speech pretty clearly. I work for a newspaper that rips the President pretty frequently so I think freedom of press is still intact.
Hm, this one is 50-50. Yeah, there are no state ordained churches, but recently, society sure seems to be an issue with a specific religion being practiced. Freedom of speech? Well, I guess those "free speech" zones for anyone who disagrees with the current administration address that one. And the newspapers weren't always ripping the President a new one, I clearly recall alot of the opposite being published within recent memory.
People can still buy guns and form militias.
Buying Guns: show me where I can publicly buy a Barret.50 caliber semi-automatic assault rifle. Oh, that's right - I can't, only police or military can, and again with specific paperwork. Ok, something a little more tame - how about a Glock 19, a pretty common pistol. Well, as long as I use a clip of 9 or less rounds, that's ok. I guess. Kinda.
Form Militias: the last ones I heard about burn to death, or were shot to death. Um, can you find a recent example that's alive and well-known? It would help to disprove me, and I would really REALLY like to be wrong about this one. Because it seems to me that it just isn't going to happen.
The government is not forcing me to house soldiers.
Interesting, it's not so much as they are forcing you to house soldiers, as they can now do it without your permission, whenever they like. It's not a "it doesn't affect me" thing, it's a "I'm pretty much screwed, not if, but when, they decide to" thing.
..."against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause". I have little doubt that people have made poor decisions from time to time in deciding what is unreasonable or protected by probable cause. However, the very fact that these warrants and searches are being reviewed and questioned by other members of our government demonstrates that someone is attempting to enforce this.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Looks like there's a little tidbit in there that also says "supported by oath or affirmation"...oh well, 50-50 on this one, how's that sound?
You could argue that this one is currently being bent. It said no person, not citizen. So everyone human on US soil should be protected. They should all get due process. What about prisoners of war captured on foreign soil? Well, the Constitution doesn't actually make any provision about them. If someone is picked up off US soil however and thrown in a hole without due process, you could argue wrong doing.
I think you shoud have a tiny little clarification - not trying to argue further, but I think we need to separate "hating govt employees who are corrupt" from "hating the USA". They are not one and the same. This isn't opinion, it is simple logic, and can be demonstrated as such.
First off, the Constitution can only be altered through a clearly defined Amendment process. It has not been Amended. Thusly, the rights guaranteed in the Constitution are valid. Any lawyer or judge with any sense of decency shouldn't have trouble upholding basic Constitutional rights.
I think therein lies the problem. Many judges are turning a blind eye; and those judges that tend to pursue it do seem to have a problem upholding those rights. Here is a fine example of what I am trying to describe: the recent(!) Supreme Court decision to allow arbitrary seizure of property by private entities, a right once entitled to governments alone for the sole purpose of improvements for the public good. Clearly, someone was NOT thinking when they allowed this one through.
Secondly, both the office of the President and Congress under many different administrations have failed to uphold the liberties the Constitution is supposed to protect. The failures lie both with the President and Congress. These should be brought to light, but not as a means of partisan politics, but rather as a means of upholding civil liberties.
Agreed about the "failure to uphold".... But given that this kind of activity goes back decades and decades, and the American voter base seems included to do...well...nothing about it, it is for all effective purposes, worthless, as the public refuses to enforce it. Why does the public turn such a blind eye to something easily fixed? Why are they content to continue on? I highly doubt it's some form of partisan politics, as this has occurred on the watch of BOTH parties - maybe it has something to do with the stench of corruption and money?
Thirdly, the Constitution could use a good Amendment clarifying our rights to privacy. Currently, they aren't really defined. The Constitution states that we can't be forced to self-incriminate, and that is where unlawful searches and such come from. But there have always been exceptions. For instance, if you have reason to suggest that evidence is time sensitive, or will be destroyed, you can search without a warrant. If you have probable cause, you can search without a warrant. Warrant-less searches have occurred for ages, and should not be made to be appear as a recent or partisan issue. Again, this is an issue that should be more clearly defined in legislation and hasn't been.
Yes, the 5th Amendment allows for non-self-incrimination, but I think you're entirely missing a little gem that is relevant to your discussion...Hm, time to haul out a copy of the US Constitution....lessee here...(adjusts glasses for reading) ah yes...
Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Emphasis is mine.
So this whole "warrantless" concept is without...warrant? I guess you could really stretch the part about "unreasonable searches and seizures" in an attempt to justify it but the next part is pretty clear to me, "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...." Really, pretty plain English as far as I can tell. So, this warrantless search and seizure bit - just how far back are we talking about? I would like to hear your information on this, as it seems there is a bit of a conflict as to "what source is correct". I'm not so much trying to argue as I am trying to point out another example of "bending the rules" again.
The things that make MS office superior are, off the top of my head:
1. Breadth of features. OOo Write doesn't do list view, "full screen" view, or even the "normal" view. Last time I checked, calc has no "alt +;" shortcut to insert the current time. And OOo's bugzilla is filled with other missing features. What OOo does and MS doesn't (word auto-complete) doesn't outshadow the inverse.
Huh? Do average users care? Do non-average users even care? I'm sure it's a useful utility to some people, and knowledge of such "esoterica" may be important for someone's livelyhood, but it has the faint reek of "bloatware". I guess it's one person's water is another's poison on this one.
2. Easy of extensibility: Anyone can fire up Office, "record" a macro, and see a native-VBA representation of how to do that in code. Do the same thing in OOo, and you get a series of function calls to an obscure "SunOffice" object model, in the language of your choice. Try and write a macro yourself, and MS gives you practially the full Visual Studio treatment: OOo gives you, well, code highlighting in the language of your choice.
An interesting point, which neatly avoids the real issue - that while it is reasonable for most users to want to record a macro, those users that want to write their own macros are more likely to be familiar with programming constructs to begin with - hence, different programming languages. It's a red herring from my vantage point, and while MS Office macros won't directly translate into something that OOo uses (touche') it's still not a showstopper for many people.
3. Usability: MS spends a few million dollars a year on their interface, and everything from the help files to the control layouts is chosen, adjusted, and re-chosen do suit the customers. OOo's interface is somewhat haphazardly thrown together, with part being a new plan, part being a copy of MS Office, and part just whatever the designer thought would work for now. ("Word Count", a rather frequently used metric, is hard to find in OOo. In MS Word, it's a single menu command or less away.)
Oh, by the way, in OOo, from the Writer menu, it's 'Tools' > 'Word Count'. One click, and one selection. Hardly a hard-to-find command. Must be a REALLY OLD version of OOo that you're remembering.
A few years back I peppered my journal with things that OOo did well and did not do well. A few months ago I tried recreating a custom spreadsheet from Excel in OOo. I paid $160 for the home version of Office, and I don't even have OOo on my PC anymore because using it is such a pain.
That was a few years ago, and 1.x series of OOo is, well, archaic compared to 2.2 IMHO. Give it a spin, you have nothing to loose, unlike the $160 you paid for MS Office.
And let's not even get into the pain I suffered when I tried to get my friends & family to use OOo. Anything more than "here, it's free and legal" falls flat. If they aren't a Linux geek or aren't poor but honest, they don't use OOo -- because they have a superior product.
Um, let's see, my wife is not a Linux geek, we're not poor, and we're honest; and she uses OOo 2.2 for our office suite. Because we have better things to spend our money on, like, our children, or us...at the end of the day, different people have different needs. Just because it's not a commercial product doesn't mean it's worthless. I can appreciate what you are trying to say, but I don't think you have a full appreciation for what the OOo folks are trying to do. Put another way: you're not OOo's target market. Make sense now?
1st, a note to other readers with bad intentions: if you are planning on some kind of crass flame-fest because you have decided to show a complete lack of planning in your own personal lifestyle, skip this long-winded post. I don't care that you think it's old skool or some other crap. The original poster asked for an opinion, I gave it. Short version: Trolls, go put your head up your ass. IMHO, when the fit hits the shan, you'll be dead anyways due to stupidity, and I don't have conversations with dead people.
To the poster and interested, open-minded readers: Sorry about that, let's get on with this:
The high-tech-toy approach is great for entertaining and informing, but when it comes down to it, I think you really should be thinking long-term. Don't develop the kind of myopia that runs rampant through the industry when it comes to long-term planning. Focus on what will happen in the next 20-30 years, if you are really planning on living there long-term.
Given that the area is well-known for hurricanes, building a housing structure that can take some punishment might be a good idea. I know people will poo-poo this, but, a geodesic dome, or earth berm house, or some other structure that can take severe damage and still be intact would be a really good idea. Nothing says short-sighted than to have another hurricane come along and raze your house - and the computers in it - to the ground. I'm not saying domes are the absolute way to go, go out and do some research, there are other structures as well. But domes are well-noted for their structural integrity.
Next, given that the ACoE probably will continue to be underfunded and floods WILL continue to occur, you might want to make sure it's property on a hillside, and not down in the floodplain. If it is, why are you bothering to buy it? You're just buying into someone else's grief - give it enough time, and you'll share that grief.
Having some kind of emergency facilities would be far more geekier than a bunch of networked Macs. Imagine, your home, the only one around with working emergency electricity, working stoves (some kind of outside firepit or fireplace made with masonry would be ideal), and drinkable water. Put some thought into having the home in a working state off-grid, it will go a long ways towards keeping it going - and towards preparations for future issues the country faces, like an overworked and overloaded electrical grid on the east coast. At a minimum, spring for a 1000 Watt generator, one that is durable and long-lasting, pay the electrician for a temporary hookup into your mains, and you're still in better shape. If you want a cheesy way to picture this, think "Jurassic Park Emergency Power Station", sans CGI dinos and wonky, stupid, plot-device-necessity placement. (sorry, couldn't resist the cheese!)
As an extension of the "facilities" concept, a small workshop, one big enough to house a motorcyle or ATV in for work, would be another great idea. Make sure it's as structurally sturdy as your house. It also means that, when you're not using it to service your computers, you can be using it to service motorcycles, ATV's, small generators (see above), etc. and not worry about a mechanical breakdown when things might be difficult to get to a mechanic.
A septic system may be so 19th-century, but it also doesn't require a working sewer hookup. If you don't think taking a dump is serious business, try holding it in for several DAYS, and see if you change your tune. Working waste facilities means not having to worry, and worrying about where you're going to go relieve yourself after a potential hurricane/flood doesn't help much. Remember, there were people stuck in confined spaces for days or weeks, can you imagine what they had to do? If you get really ambitious, find a way to be able to switch between the two at will, so you can have septic as a backup system rather than your full-time system.
So, now that location, structure, energy, water, sewer, and facilities are squared away
Openning Scene: Two commentators and a Troll under a bridge
Commentator 1: "Oh! Look! Another nasty law and/or activity has been passed/been greenlighted!"
Commentator 2: "Let's Debate It!"
Commentator 1: "It's nasty, don't you think?"
Forum Troll: "I'm a troll! Snarf gurgle gurgle!"
Commentator 1: "STFU Troll, go back to your bridge."
Commentator 2: "It's nasty but it has nuances to it."
Commentator 1: "I disagree about the nuance, but we both agree it's nasty, right?"
Commentator 2: "Agreed."
Commentator 1: "Oh! Look! Shiny distraction made with AJAX! Erm, let's debate the market dominance of a convicted monopolist."
(Exit Scene)
Ok, folks, let's do a little recent history, given that our national attention spans rival hummingbirds. Lessee, things that HAVE passed and/or done:
No-Fly List
Patriot Act
Ability to declare anyone an enemy combatant
Detainment without a speedy trial for enemy combatant
Denial of existance of enemy combatant
(Documented) Torture of enemy comantants
Real ID Act
Things that are pending and haven't passed - yet.
No-Work List
Things likely to show up in our lifetimes (not necessarily in this order):
Compulsory Advertising Act - No advertisement can be blocked or unviewed. Penalties for ownership of old equipment, or any personal activity that "knowingly or with intent, engages in the criminal act of not viewing advertising that was paid for, regardless of venue or location."
Mandatory DRM Act - Originally written to "give more teeth" to the Compulsory Advertising Act and to do an end-run on Piracy by making it impossible to own an unlicensed recording device, like a movie camera, camcorder, camera, or digital camera. All equipment used for media playback must have built-in DRM. All existing equipment given a 3-year phaseout. After that time, ownership of non-DRM capable equipment is a felony. The net effect is to make independent documentation of atrocities impossible due to the ownership of "criminal camcorders", etc.
Retail Security Act - All purchases are tracked. Wording will be something like "All purchases not made by a licensed business will be electronically recorded and submitted to the DHS for permanent archives."
Homeland Credit Check Act - All purchases now made with electronic credit. End of cash as we know it. Merged with RealID card. Certain bank accounts mysteriously are depleted of funds through suspicious purchases. Said suspicious purchases are passed back under the Retail Security Act and recorded.
National Housing Protection Act - Another misnomer. "No individual or group shall be granted domicile access, or land ownership, if they fail to pass a national database check under the Consolidated Ban List of the DHS." If you land on this list, you're homeless.
Homeland Omnibus Ban List Act - Written as an extension to the No-Land-Ownership List"All no-access lists previously passed by Congress or created by DHS will be merged into a single list, for the express purpose of protecting the citizenry."
Consumer Mandatory Consumption Act - Passed as a way to regulate the economy. "All necessities will automatically be deducted from your National RealID credit account, regardless if they are used or not." No waivers for such purchases that are normally bocked under the No-Land-Ownership List, resulting in permanent poverty for anyone who lands on that list (or any other block list that deals with economic transactions)
National Birth Control Act - would made manditory sterilization for all citizens over the age of 25, "to prevent overpopulation", unless licensed by the Federal Government with a waiver. Contraception declared illegal; poss
Actually, IE is an offshoot of a web browser product called Spry, which was a modified version of NCSA Mosaic. The Owner of the company originally built it to publish and distribute the pricelists for his fish business in Seattle..... As I remember it, he was well paid for Spry... Enough to live comfortably and pretty much do whatever he wanted... Don't know the settlement sum for sure, but I was there when it happened.
Huh?
Um, I would like to see your reference material; yes, IE was an offshoot of Mosaic, but it's been established that IEcamefrom
Spyglass.
MS was to give a percentage of the revenue of sales of IE back to Spyglass, and that they screwed Spyglass over by charging nothing for the use of IE, resulting in as little money as possible going back to the original developers. Spyglass of course, tanked.
Please, try to take the 4 minutes it took me to search, vet, and link material for your claims - it'll help everyone out, including you.
Such a fucking loser. Get out. Look outside the US. You're living a fucking police state and you don't even know it.
Not all of us are sleepwalking. Some of us are still awake, but lack the ability (funds?) to get out of the country in one piece. Keep in mind that we're not entirely made of "uniformly thinking" people - yet.
Of course, it doesn't help that the voting process has been rigged, and that the populace really doesn't have a choice or say in the matter.
Given that I had initially written my response/diatribe in the wee hours of the morning, I appreciate your direct and un-judging response. You have managed to describe what I could not, in my sleep-deprived mind, conjure forth for review - that the word "spectrum" has more emphasis on the individuality of each person in that situation, more so than the unifying label that people are "catagorized" into. I was also trying to convey that the research and effort into autism that has been made generally seems piecemeal, and I think it stems from the fact that no-one has a clear understanding of what is really happening.
Lots of sound and fury, but also lots of grief, denial, misinformation, "not me"s, and other nonsense.
Aspergers is NOT autism. Having a son with autism, and having met the neighbor's son with Aspergers, I can definitively tell you, through emperical experience, there is a fucking difference. Stop lumping them.
Autism is not a personality disorder. It is a SENSORY DISORDER. Stop saying "people with autism will have their personality changed, they won't be the same", yada yada yada. So much noise, and it's not even true.
Autistic disorders are being "lumped" to get treatment (dollars) but not to cure the issue at hand. People complaining that there are snakeoil treatments need to take another look. Some of it really is snakeoil - just folks out to make a quick buck on grief - but some of it is effective, DEPENDING ON THE CHILD. I have seen children respond to gluten/casin therapy, and I have seen children where it didn't make one iota of difference. There is no universal "cure" or "therapy" because there is no ONE AUTISTIC HEALTH CONDITION, but several, all lumped together by diagnosis so that people receive help "as a group". The problem is, that the "group" really doesn't have the same problem - so when we perform research to see "what the cause is", nothing adds up.
Scientists need to delve deeper into the cause of each individual case, and determine if there are similar groupings, no groupings, or a single grouping of individuals that exhibit the same symptoms, responses, etc. It's like they're doing autistic research by shining a small flashlight into an unlit gymnasium - they see glimses of things here and there, and from these fleeting images before them they can proclaim "this and that provides great hope", but the real hope lies in seeing the entire picture. How can you cure a disease or disorder, when you don't know what causes the same? We need to turn on those high-power lights in the gymnasium, and all will be made clear that way. And we can stop fumbling around in the dark, groping for this or that.
My son is very loving, kind-hearted, and middle-functioning. He will struggle with his condition for his lifetime, and I fear not what will happen to him as an adult, but what will happen when my wife and I are deceased, and there is no-one around to help him.
Just as a side note, I find it interesting that even with a stricter criteria for diagnosis of autism, one would find a marked increase in the number of people diagnosed with it. I can't say if this is a proportional increase due to an increase in the general population, if it is truly an environmental factor (industrial polution, increased use of synthetically generated food additives, or some other change in the general environment) or who knows what...again, like research scientists, I'm left holding a small flashlight in a huge, dark room.
I can tell you WTF. Britain is marching full steam ahead into a big recession and the only thing that has prevented it from doing it this year was influx of cheap Polish labour. Unfortunately this only delays the inevitable as it does not change the underlying overheated housing market, phenomenal internal debt and other major economical metrics.
Wow, replace Polish with Indian and Mexican and you suddenly sound exactly like the US about a year ago.
What do you mean a year ago? It's still happening.
G.B. and the USA are pretty much walking in lock-step, when it comes to economics. The housing bubble is just starting to burst country-wide. It's not that this was unexpected, this has been known for about 2 years now that we're headed to the deepest, darkest do-do.
People are way over-mortgaged on their homes. I fully expect there to be record foreclosures in about 2 years, barring some kind of economic turn-around. $375,000 over 50 years(!) for a 1,500 sq. ft. ranch house is absurd, when less than 4 years ago it used to cost just $150,000 over 30 years.
You know we're in trouble when they start hiding the M3 index, because that index is a relative indication of how much debt (ie. national debt) is being sold overseas to suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestors. The fact that we rely heavily on overseas investors for propping up the economy^W^W^W^Wmaking investments in this great country should ring some bells.
Seems like a lot of people in the FOSS community are completely blind to this threat. They go around acting like just because it is baseless means it doesn't exist. I have direct knowledge of a very large bank and indirect of several other companies here in the states, not to mention several big European companies (UK Stock Exchange for one) who refuse to deploy Linux specifically because of this imaginary IP problem. Real or not these CEO's and Boards only need to buy the M$ FUD and Linux loses yet again.
You're co-mingling several things here. First, the community is just that, a "community". It is not a coherent group of people but rather several groups of people drawn together for a common cause or belief. The community is not blind to this threat in any way, shape, or form. They are very aware of the issues surrounding so-called IP, and Software Patents in general. RMS wanted to revise the GPL 2, and created the GPL 3 specifically for this reason. If you think it's perfectly fine for you to not really own any kind of media or concept, and that all ideas should be leased and controlled, then by all means support DRM and its sister technologies, along with the DMCA and other legislative moves that are spurned on by companies that fear loosing their business. This is where things are headed, and believe me, people are watching closely. As for the situation with Banks, well, that's their choice, based on their opinion. No-one forced them to run Microsoft's software. As someone who has to maintain and operate that same software, I have grave misgivings concerning the viability of any Bank that trust their operations to a company that can't even properly submit sercurity patches without breaking their own code. That is my opinion. As for "win or lose", no-one really cares on the Linux side of things about "wins", but on the Microsoft side, this is the only way to think about things. I can only wonder which of these two groups you feel more at home with.
Red Hat has been doing a great job taking market away from the old Unix and Solaris shops but really they haven't done shit against M$ in their neighborhood.
This comes as a suprise to you?
Novell is going head to head with M$ in the business sectors where they rule, like the corporate desktop. Until some damage is done to the FOSS community by this deal I still believe it was a smart business move for them. Apparently IBM and HP do too.
This was a horrid business deal for them. In essence, they went to their competitor and said, "I can't really compete with you, but I have something that you want, really bad. I have the keys to the kingdom of your arch-enemy (note: nevermind that this isn't true, Microsoft still perceives things in this fashion so from their point of view, it is true). So I'll make you a deal, you give us a bit of cash, cut us some slack, and we'll support your product. You'll also have a chance to take pot-shots at your sworn enemy and that will hurt them more that it hurts us." Miss anything in the translation? Becuase it's pretty goddamn clear to everyone else.
Linux made a deal with the devil a long time ago by letting corporate america become so involved in the community.
Cutting a deal with the devil? More like opening the gates of hell and escorting the damned out as fast as possible, before Lucifier's lackies show up and start a fist-fight. News flash: the Linux community really doesn't give a rat's rear end what happens to commercial software vendors, because the old software business model of "magic secret bits in a bag that does wonderful things but you have to trust us" runs against how things are done in OSS.
Now we are seeing the results.
Tell me, who made this deal? Who speaks for the community? Who is the central authority that you can point to and say, "this person said it will be so"? The person responsible for this "deal" basically has told thousands of programmers to F'sck off, and that
The worst part is, at least in my neck of the woods, they provide ridiculous amounts of support to the "special-needs" children, but have absolutely nothing in place for "gifted" or above-average kids. I thought maybe things had improved since I went through school, but some recent local events have proven me sadly mistaken.
Don't get me wrong, I feel for the special-needs kids who require the extra attention, but the burden they pose on the educational system cannot be overlooked.
That's my 10-year-old autistic son you're talking about. My son is not a burden, he is a kind, decent human being. If you want to start fixing education, stop treating him like some goddamn balance sheet liability or a sack of coal or something equally undesirable, and start thinking of him as a person. How would you like it if I thought of you as a "blight on society that should be expelled"? Because if we follow your train of thought - children with special needs are burdens, burdens are wasteful, wasteful means wasted money, money is more important than some person, so stop spending money on burden children, because they're a waste - you are advocating this same concept.
Tell you what - let's see what happens when you have a child, your child, and they have a "special need"; not just special education, but any kind of uncommon need. Let's see if it's all about you, or if it's all about your child. What's your answer? You going to stand by your proposition - which DIRECTLY implies you're an unfit parent - or are you going to eat your words, and realize that your child is a human being, a person?
That's what I thought. So have a nice hot piping cup of STFU. Because I know for a fact you don't know jack shit about what you're talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Writer seems to be bemoaning their age. I have four words for the writer, IM-style: STFU.
2. Shiny new tech (IM) is actually gussied up old tech (IRC), with some new makeup, red dress, pump heels and matching faux p2p protocol. Not that there's anything wrong with IM, it's just that, um, it's been around a bit longer than people might realize. It's looking younger, but its at least several decades old.
3. Email is older still. It's showing it's age, and it's been to the doc's office a few times to get a physical (damn spam rash keeps showing up in my queues doc, canya give me a bayesian ointment to treat it?)
4. People who are not working full-time and/or in a domestic setting frankly have lots and lots of time for this. People who have been working for years and have a spouse and mortgage/rent and 2.5 kids and all the other claptrap of middle age frankly don't have alot of time for things, so it's really nice to have the message waiting for me for when I'm ready for it.
IM isn't a generational/age thing, it's a "stage of my life" thing. In a nutshell: it has nothing to do with age, get the elitist ageism out of the picture, no-one gives a crap if you use email, IM, or even smoke signals. Just get the f'n message out the door, that's all that matters.
5. Keeping email for future reference is comparatively easy. I have several people in the company I work for that have emails going back 3, 4, 5+ years (yes, their mailboxes have message counts in the 6-digit range). Keeping ongoing records for business, personal, or legal needs with an IM client is just asking for trouble. Yeah, you can save your dialogs - but can you sift through them and pick out that one message from 3 years ago? Do you even HAVE messages from 3 years ago? Do you really care to store those messages that said "I hngry lts eat"?
Move along folks, nothing to see here....
Anyone care for a game of thermonuclear war?
Erm, you need a little correction:
As far as your statement about us not being like the USSR yet, well, the political right and left are working on it, just be patient.
It has nothing to do with ideology. It has everything to do with power, money, and human stupidity. I've seen more asshats emerge from both political parties in the last decade than I've seen in the rest of my life. Just as much as Diane Feinstein is a fearmonger, I hate to tell you this but George W is still Dick Chaney's sock puppet.
Except I'm not. I'm in a much smaller corp. I mine, I build, I sell. I fight if I have to. And still, the game grinds on - not because I'm trying to grind for the "leet" gear, but because it takes forever to do anything. Eve rapidly devolves into a time (and money) sink that has you snoozing on a late night at the keyboard, because drilling a 'roid in a 0.7 belt is boring enough to peel paint. You still didn't give me a reason. Yes, I realize that it's a game, and game economies should be fun - and that's kinda my point. Eve's economy isn't in any way, shape or form fun. Now if there were 10-20 miners during a mining op, or a guild of builders that work with each other, then that would bring some kind of social interaction, ie. "fun", even if it was just shooting the breeze about nothing in peticular. But no...it's just you, your mining barge, and some floating rock. Wake me when we need to run the jetcan back to the station (yawn).
There is no functional economy in Eve, because current real-world economic models are based on the concept of scarcity. Given that there are (theoretically) infinite resources in the form of mineable asteroids that respawn twice a week, infinite pirate bounties that spawn ala-WoW-like into existance from nothing, and other ludicrist ideas, I find it difficult to understand how there can be any scarcity whatsoever.
Eve's economy is capitalism at its finest - the people at the "bottom" subsidize the people at the "top" through first-mover advantage, monopoly practices (having done reporting on mineral pricing, I know it exists), scams, etc. So long time-players keep making a mint (and playing the game for free, given that they can trade all of that easily-made ISK into game time via GTC's), and new players end up subsidizing them in the process.
Get the developers out of the game. It's one thing to have a WoW game master pull you aside to see if you are running macros for farming, its another to have them actually interact in-game. There is NO reason for this kind of interference. CCP even condones this practice by turning a blind eye. I have seen it, and many other abuses, that have completely turned me off of the game. Couple this with the near-impossibility to get into any kind of social interaction (all corporations want 3 or more months experience, and while I easily have more than that, many mistreat their members and are demanding) and you can see why such a good idea has gone bad. Eve was a great attempt, and had many innovations that I wish I could see elsewhere, but at the end of the day, CCP has decided to condemn the game to a slow, painful death by apathy of its players. Being logged into the server and not seeing a single person in a system is a sure sign that a MMO is dying.
CCP, fix the game, admit error, remove your devs from interference, get rid of the "infinite economy", and we'll talk, and who knows, I might even sign up for a year. Keep up the errors, and, well, it was nice knowing you.
By the way, your tools for allowing players to perform economic analysis suck donkey. Really, I mean having to dump the data from a CSV into a homemade MySQL databases so that I can do aggregates over ore pricing was a painful, 3-hour ordeal. Not because it was hard to pull the data out, but rather, it took 3 hours of "flying around" to collect all of the necessary data. You want real economics? Fix your data collection. And make a stock market that REALLY works, not this "you can buy 100 shares of a corp at 1,000,000 ISK each" crap.
And for those current players who think I don't know what I'm doing, I have a 9-month-old character with 9 million SP, a niche market based out of Hek, I have run mineral pricing on 9 regions over 5 weeks with composite pricing (and got paid for it by real subscribers), and I am also an experienced builder, with only capital ship parts being beyond my skills. All of this only playing two nights a week for 4 hours a night. In that short time, I have been through two corps, one of which is one of the oldest in-game. I have seen auction and escrow scams, I have seen pirates skirt high-sec systems with loopholes in the game, and many other things that have convinced me that the game is fundementally broken from the start. Tell me how what I have said is NOT true - and I mean in a real, quantifiable way - and I'll consider coming back.
I'll even give you a name - my game name - if you feel like you need someone who can run factory slots at maximum build efficiency from 10 jumps out. Give a real reason to come back... crass answers will only indicate that there is no reason to come back, and verify what I say is true - and indicate that the game should die a slow death anyways. No social interaction = death of an MMO, and smartasses need not apply.
Right here you've pretty much fallen off the turnip truck. If it wanted to be Windows, it would have been ReactOS, not Linux-as-a-distro.
>>>All the things that Windows works hard at are actively avoided by Linux users and developers: Backwards compatability, working with all available hardware, installing easily, requiring no configuration.
Another indication that you haven't done a serious day's work with a modern Linux distro - ever. As someone who oversees a production server running Linux, and has been "in the trenches" for 10 years now, I can say that most of your objections are current - for 1995. I've run 4-year-old software on new distros (backwards compatibility), used hardware new-out-of-the-box with no problems (works on available hardware), done 7-click installs (easy installs), and had all my hardware detected on a first run (no config).
>>>Ok, and after we give up on all that what do we get.
Um, a functional system?
>>>Buggy software, source code that won't compile, rpms that still need another package (that usually doesn't exist, or else needs another package itself), driver installation that requires you to know exactly which processor you have and to compile against kernel source and ugly fonts.
All software, having been written by imperfect human beings with imperfect languages of expression, have bugs. As far as one having bugs and not another, that's the pot calling the kettle black-with-shades-of-chartruse. The implication that Windows somehow passes a "sniff test" for no bugs implies that you really, really haven't worked with it in a production environment, or if you have, not for more than a few weeks. Don't go there - really - it's dark, and a grue might eat you.
I suppose you download your source code for Windows applications and build from scratch? This is a complete strawman argument.
Yup, Windows DLL hell ... erm... wait... RPM dependencies...were fixed, a few years back, with dependency-resolving installers. I'm sure that Windows has fixed this issue as well - doesn't it run out to the internet and download any missing software that is needed by another 3rd party software install (yes, I know it will download drivers and patches, but I'm talking about full dependency resolution, right)?
Must be some good glue you're sniffing there. Of course, we both know that distros come with pre-compiled drivers ready-to-go out of the box. Um, you did know that, right?
You know, the fonts kinda do look ugly on my Windows 2000 install at home...wait...sorry, wrong software. I forgot, we're talking about Linux fonts, you know, the ones that end in TTF on the filename? And there's all these other font systems I've never heard of, but they seem to work fine with those pesky TTF fonts, you know the ones I'm talking about, the ones that don't scale past 1200dpi on professional printing presses by design. I guess my eyesight is failing, because now they look a little fuzzier and softer, not so harsh. I wish my Windows 2000 install would look that way.
>>>Oh and don't forget that the UI looks exactly the same as all the other UIs, there is no innovation, and the whole thing is a total copy.
So, fluxbox looks like enlightenment, which looks like gnome, which looks like KDE, which looks like ratpoison, which looks like twm/motif? Microsoft's "innovation" is fairly overrated, given that the vast majority of their products come from 3rd party vendors they have bought out and rebadged. And yes, it's a copy - that's the whole point of it, dumbass.
>>>And at the end of all this, when the user complains about the crapness, they are told if they stopped complaining and started developing then maybe the world would be a better place. Well guess wha
Sometimes, I see how the industry is dying. All of the "smart techies" never reproduce. Because they were to dumb to figure out a simple issue.
I've had 15 years of marriage (and have two kids). Judging by the character of the posts, I'm pretty much a senior citizen by slashdot standards, because apparently I'm about 13-15 years older than the majority of posters here. I can tell you now, the writer of the original aritcle has their head up their ass. For that matter, anyone who thinks in the terms listed in the article really DO have their head up their ass, and shouldn't even bother getting married.
There are lots of solutions to the issues in the article, but none of them work as well as "here, just borrow my account to browse instead of me logging out" or "honey, whatcha reading in your email?" or any other form of give-and-take, which needs a foundation in TRUST. It's not "boyfriend-girlfriend on the playground at recess". It's a marriage. There is a simple solution: FOR SHIT'S SAKE, GROW THE FUCK UP.
Marriage is like a bridge, and each spouse holds one side of the bridge up. It takes both sides to keep it up and going. Sometimes, one of the two has to put the bridge down (for rest, health reasons, "me-time", family emergencies, whatever...doesn't matter, it happens), for just a breather - and the other one has to carry the load. If the marriage is working, that person comes back and picks up their end of the bridge. But the bridge won't stand up forever if only one is left holding everything up, or if both spouses can't agree to share the load and the bridge never goes up to begin with.
Guess what? Marriage takes an EFFORT. You will do HARD INTERPERSONAL WORK. Work that requires you hold up your end of the situation. It's you and your spouse choosing to share life - all of life - and all of each other, the good parts, and all the bad parts. If she can't deal with those things in you that are a part of you, or you can't deal with those things in her that drive you crazy, then it's just not gonna work. Ever. You need to find - gasp! - compromise. And it seems that the younger groups of today seem to have less and less of this critical quality that's needed for marriage.
This isn't me trying to troll. It's me trying to slap some sense into someone's thick skull. Seriously. No fool'in. If you have a friend that's about to get married, and they think they way they do in the article, you need to print this out, roll it up, walk up to them, and slap them upside the head - repeatedly. They need to really think about something as serious as this before just waltzing off to the land of eternal Tivo replays and iPod picks. Because it has nothing to do with tech. It has everything to do with "these people need to seriously grow the hell up".
I was speaking of the populace, not the government. A round-about way of saying "the people determine the form of government, for better or worse". In this case, I have personally observed such behaviors in the public at large, unfortunately.
Bah, getting late, and I'm tired. Ignore the prior incomplete post. I read the reply to the other one, and I have to say, I find it refreshingly reasonable.
Form Militias: the last ones I heard about burn to death, or were shot to death. Um, can you find a recent example that's alive and well-known? It would help to disprove me, and I would really REALLY like to be wrong about this one. Because it seems to me that it just isn't going to happen.
Interesting, it's not so much as they are forcing you to house soldiers, as they can now do it without your permission, whenever they like. It's not a "it doesn't affect me" thing, it's a "I'm pretty much screwed, not if, but when, they decide to" thing. Um, ah, what about that little bit in there that says "shall not be violated"? Here's the full text from http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitutAmendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Looks like there's a little tidbit in there that also says "supported by oath or affirmation"...oh well, 50-50 on this one, how's that sound?
I think therein lies the problem. Many judges are turning a blind eye; and those judges that tend to pursue it do seem to have a problem upholding those rights. Here is a fine example of what I am trying to describe: the recent(!) Supreme Court decision to allow arbitrary seizure of property by private entities, a right once entitled to governments alone for the sole purpose of improvements for the public good. Clearly, someone was NOT thinking when they allowed this one through.
Agreed about the "failure to uphold".... But given that this kind of activity goes back decades and decades, and the American voter base seems included to do...well...nothing about it, it is for all effective purposes, worthless, as the public refuses to enforce it. Why does the public turn such a blind eye to something easily fixed? Why are they content to continue on? I highly doubt it's some form of partisan politics, as this has occurred on the watch of BOTH parties - maybe it has something to do with the stench of corruption and money?
Yes, the 5th Amendment allows for non-self-incrimination, but I think you're entirely missing a little gem that is relevant to your discussion...Hm, time to haul out a copy of the US Constitution....lessee here...(adjusts glasses for reading) ah yes...
Amendment 4: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Emphasis is mine.
So this whole "warrantless" concept is without...warrant? I guess you could really stretch the part about "unreasonable searches and seizures" in an attempt to justify it but the next part is pretty clear to me, "no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause...." Really, pretty plain English as far as I can tell. So, this warrantless search and seizure bit - just how far back are we talking about? I would like to hear your information on this, as it seems there is a bit of a conflict as to "what source is correct". I'm not so much trying to argue as I am trying to point out another example of "bending the rules" again.
1. Breadth of features. OOo Write doesn't do list view, "full screen" view, or even the "normal" view. Last time I checked, calc has no "alt + ;" shortcut to insert the current time. And OOo's bugzilla is filled with other missing features. What OOo does and MS doesn't (word auto-complete) doesn't outshadow the inverse.
Huh? Do average users care? Do non-average users even care? I'm sure it's a useful utility to some people, and knowledge of such "esoterica" may be important for someone's livelyhood, but it has the faint reek of "bloatware". I guess it's one person's water is another's poison on this one.
2. Easy of extensibility: Anyone can fire up Office, "record" a macro, and see a native-VBA representation of how to do that in code. Do the same thing in OOo, and you get a series of function calls to an obscure "SunOffice" object model, in the language of your choice. Try and write a macro yourself, and MS gives you practially the full Visual Studio treatment: OOo gives you, well, code highlighting in the language of your choice.
An interesting point, which neatly avoids the real issue - that while it is reasonable for most users to want to record a macro, those users that want to write their own macros are more likely to be familiar with programming constructs to begin with - hence, different programming languages. It's a red herring from my vantage point, and while MS Office macros won't directly translate into something that OOo uses (touche') it's still not a showstopper for many people.
3. Usability: MS spends a few million dollars a year on their interface, and everything from the help files to the control layouts is chosen, adjusted, and re-chosen do suit the customers. OOo's interface is somewhat haphazardly thrown together, with part being a new plan, part being a copy of MS Office, and part just whatever the designer thought would work for now. ("Word Count", a rather frequently used metric, is hard to find in OOo. In MS Word, it's a single menu command or less away.)
Oh, by the way, in OOo, from the Writer menu, it's 'Tools' > 'Word Count'. One click, and one selection. Hardly a hard-to-find command. Must be a REALLY OLD version of OOo that you're remembering.
A few years back I peppered my journal with things that OOo did well and did not do well. A few months ago I tried recreating a custom spreadsheet from Excel in OOo. I paid $160 for the home version of Office, and I don't even have OOo on my PC anymore because using it is such a pain.
That was a few years ago, and 1.x series of OOo is, well, archaic compared to 2.2 IMHO. Give it a spin, you have nothing to loose, unlike the $160 you paid for MS Office.
And let's not even get into the pain I suffered when I tried to get my friends & family to use OOo. Anything more than "here, it's free and legal" falls flat. If they aren't a Linux geek or aren't poor but honest, they don't use OOo -- because they have a superior product.
Um, let's see, my wife is not a Linux geek, we're not poor, and we're honest; and she uses OOo 2.2 for our office suite. Because we have better things to spend our money on, like, our children, or us...at the end of the day, different people have different needs. Just because it's not a commercial product doesn't mean it's worthless. I can appreciate what you are trying to say, but I don't think you have a full appreciation for what the OOo folks are trying to do. Put another way: you're not OOo's target market. Make sense now?
1st, a note to other readers with bad intentions: if you are planning on some kind of crass flame-fest because you have decided to show a complete lack of planning in your own personal lifestyle, skip this long-winded post. I don't care that you think it's old skool or some other crap. The original poster asked for an opinion, I gave it. Short version: Trolls, go put your head up your ass. IMHO, when the fit hits the shan, you'll be dead anyways due to stupidity, and I don't have conversations with dead people.
To the poster and interested, open-minded readers: Sorry about that, let's get on with this:
The high-tech-toy approach is great for entertaining and informing, but when it comes down to it, I think you really should be thinking long-term. Don't develop the kind of myopia that runs rampant through the industry when it comes to long-term planning. Focus on what will happen in the next 20-30 years, if you are really planning on living there long-term.
Given that the area is well-known for hurricanes, building a housing structure that can take some punishment might be a good idea. I know people will poo-poo this, but, a geodesic dome, or earth berm house, or some other structure that can take severe damage and still be intact would be a really good idea. Nothing says short-sighted than to have another hurricane come along and raze your house - and the computers in it - to the ground. I'm not saying domes are the absolute way to go, go out and do some research, there are other structures as well. But domes are well-noted for their structural integrity.
Next, given that the ACoE probably will continue to be underfunded and floods WILL continue to occur, you might want to make sure it's property on a hillside, and not down in the floodplain. If it is, why are you bothering to buy it? You're just buying into someone else's grief - give it enough time, and you'll share that grief.
Having some kind of emergency facilities would be far more geekier than a bunch of networked Macs. Imagine, your home, the only one around with working emergency electricity, working stoves (some kind of outside firepit or fireplace made with masonry would be ideal), and drinkable water. Put some thought into having the home in a working state off-grid, it will go a long ways towards keeping it going - and towards preparations for future issues the country faces, like an overworked and overloaded electrical grid on the east coast. At a minimum, spring for a 1000 Watt generator, one that is durable and long-lasting, pay the electrician for a temporary hookup into your mains, and you're still in better shape. If you want a cheesy way to picture this, think "Jurassic Park Emergency Power Station", sans CGI dinos and wonky, stupid, plot-device-necessity placement. (sorry, couldn't resist the cheese!)
As an extension of the "facilities" concept, a small workshop, one big enough to house a motorcyle or ATV in for work, would be another great idea. Make sure it's as structurally sturdy as your house. It also means that, when you're not using it to service your computers, you can be using it to service motorcycles, ATV's, small generators (see above), etc. and not worry about a mechanical breakdown when things might be difficult to get to a mechanic.
A septic system may be so 19th-century, but it also doesn't require a working sewer hookup. If you don't think taking a dump is serious business, try holding it in for several DAYS, and see if you change your tune. Working waste facilities means not having to worry, and worrying about where you're going to go relieve yourself after a potential hurricane/flood doesn't help much. Remember, there were people stuck in confined spaces for days or weeks, can you imagine what they had to do? If you get really ambitious, find a way to be able to switch between the two at will, so you can have septic as a backup system rather than your full-time system.
So, now that location, structure, energy, water, sewer, and facilities are squared away
Commentator 1: "Oh! Look! Another nasty law and/or activity has been passed/been greenlighted!"
Commentator 2: "Let's Debate It!"
Commentator 1: "It's nasty, don't you think?"
Forum Troll: "I'm a troll! Snarf gurgle gurgle!"
Commentator 1: "STFU Troll, go back to your bridge."
Commentator 2: "It's nasty but it has nuances to it."
Commentator 1: "I disagree about the nuance, but we both agree it's nasty, right?"
Commentator 2: "Agreed."
Commentator 1: "Oh! Look! Shiny distraction made with AJAX! Erm, let's debate the market dominance of a convicted monopolist."
(Exit Scene)
Ok, folks, let's do a little recent history, given that our national attention spans rival hummingbirds. Lessee, things that HAVE passed and/or done:
Things that are pending and haven't passed - yet.
Things likely to show up in our lifetimes (not necessarily in this order):
Huh?
Um, I would like to see your reference material; yes, IE was an offshoot of Mosaic, but it's been established that IE came from Spyglass. MS was to give a percentage of the revenue of sales of IE back to Spyglass, and that they screwed Spyglass over by charging nothing for the use of IE, resulting in as little money as possible going back to the original developers. Spyglass of course, tanked.
Please, try to take the 4 minutes it took me to search, vet, and link material for your claims - it'll help everyone out, including you.
Not all of us are sleepwalking. Some of us are still awake, but lack the ability (funds?) to get out of the country in one piece. Keep in mind that we're not entirely made of "uniformly thinking" people - yet.
Of course, it doesn't help that the voting process has been rigged, and that the populace really doesn't have a choice or say in the matter.
Given that I had initially written my response/diatribe in the wee hours of the morning, I appreciate your direct and un-judging response. You have managed to describe what I could not, in my sleep-deprived mind, conjure forth for review - that the word "spectrum" has more emphasis on the individuality of each person in that situation, more so than the unifying label that people are "catagorized" into. I was also trying to convey that the research and effort into autism that has been made generally seems piecemeal, and I think it stems from the fact that no-one has a clear understanding of what is really happening.
Actually, Keiser Permanente continues to use thimerisol in thier vaccinations. In fact, there's alot of MMR vaccinations occuing with it to this day.
Lots of sound and fury, but also lots of grief, denial, misinformation, "not me"s, and other nonsense.
Aspergers is NOT autism. Having a son with autism, and having met the neighbor's son with Aspergers, I can definitively tell you, through emperical experience, there is a fucking difference. Stop lumping them.
Autism is not a personality disorder. It is a SENSORY DISORDER. Stop saying "people with autism will have their personality changed, they won't be the same", yada yada yada. So much noise, and it's not even true.
Autistic disorders are being "lumped" to get treatment (dollars) but not to cure the issue at hand. People complaining that there are snakeoil treatments need to take another look. Some of it really is snakeoil - just folks out to make a quick buck on grief - but some of it is effective, DEPENDING ON THE CHILD. I have seen children respond to gluten/casin therapy, and I have seen children where it didn't make one iota of difference. There is no universal "cure" or "therapy" because there is no ONE AUTISTIC HEALTH CONDITION, but several, all lumped together by diagnosis so that people receive help "as a group". The problem is, that the "group" really doesn't have the same problem - so when we perform research to see "what the cause is", nothing adds up.
Scientists need to delve deeper into the cause of each individual case, and determine if there are similar groupings, no groupings, or a single grouping of individuals that exhibit the same symptoms, responses, etc. It's like they're doing autistic research by shining a small flashlight into an unlit gymnasium - they see glimses of things here and there, and from these fleeting images before them they can proclaim "this and that provides great hope", but the real hope lies in seeing the entire picture. How can you cure a disease or disorder, when you don't know what causes the same? We need to turn on those high-power lights in the gymnasium, and all will be made clear that way. And we can stop fumbling around in the dark, groping for this or that.
My son is very loving, kind-hearted, and middle-functioning. He will struggle with his condition for his lifetime, and I fear not what will happen to him as an adult, but what will happen when my wife and I are deceased, and there is no-one around to help him.
Just as a side note, I find it interesting that even with a stricter criteria for diagnosis of autism, one would find a marked increase in the number of people diagnosed with it. I can't say if this is a proportional increase due to an increase in the general population, if it is truly an environmental factor (industrial polution, increased use of synthetically generated food additives, or some other change in the general environment) or who knows what...again, like research scientists, I'm left holding a small flashlight in a huge, dark room.
Someone turn the light on, please?
Except they all uniformly weigh in at 200kg. Looks like the universe of Eve needs to go on a diet.
Wow, replace Polish with Indian and Mexican and you suddenly sound exactly like the US about a year ago.
What do you mean a year ago? It's still happening.
G.B. and the USA are pretty much walking in lock-step, when it comes to economics. The housing bubble is just starting to burst country-wide. It's not that this was unexpected, this has been known for about 2 years now that we're headed to the deepest, darkest do-do.
People are way over-mortgaged on their homes. I fully expect there to be record foreclosures in about 2 years, barring some kind of economic turn-around. $375,000 over 50 years(!) for a 1,500 sq. ft. ranch house is absurd, when less than 4 years ago it used to cost just $150,000 over 30 years.
You know we're in trouble when they start hiding the M3 index, because that index is a relative indication of how much debt (ie. national debt) is being sold overseas to suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hinvestors. The fact that we rely heavily on overseas investors for propping up the economy^W^W^W^Wmaking investments in this great country should ring some bells.
You're co-mingling several things here. First, the community is just that, a "community". It is not a coherent group of people but rather several groups of people drawn together for a common cause or belief. The community is not blind to this threat in any way, shape, or form. They are very aware of the issues surrounding so-called IP, and Software Patents in general. RMS wanted to revise the GPL 2, and created the GPL 3 specifically for this reason. If you think it's perfectly fine for you to not really own any kind of media or concept, and that all ideas should be leased and controlled, then by all means support DRM and its sister technologies, along with the DMCA and other legislative moves that are spurned on by companies that fear loosing their business. This is where things are headed, and believe me, people are watching closely. As for the situation with Banks, well, that's their choice, based on their opinion. No-one forced them to run Microsoft's software. As someone who has to maintain and operate that same software, I have grave misgivings concerning the viability of any Bank that trust their operations to a company that can't even properly submit sercurity patches without breaking their own code. That is my opinion. As for "win or lose", no-one really cares on the Linux side of things about "wins", but on the Microsoft side, this is the only way to think about things. I can only wonder which of these two groups you feel more at home with.
Red Hat has been doing a great job taking market away from the old Unix and Solaris shops but really they haven't done shit against M$ in their neighborhood.
This comes as a suprise to you?
Novell is going head to head with M$ in the business sectors where they rule, like the corporate desktop. Until some damage is done to the FOSS community by this deal I still believe it was a smart business move for them. Apparently IBM and HP do too.
This was a horrid business deal for them. In essence, they went to their competitor and said, "I can't really compete with you, but I have something that you want, really bad. I have the keys to the kingdom of your arch-enemy (note: nevermind that this isn't true, Microsoft still perceives things in this fashion so from their point of view, it is true). So I'll make you a deal, you give us a bit of cash, cut us some slack, and we'll support your product. You'll also have a chance to take pot-shots at your sworn enemy and that will hurt them more that it hurts us." Miss anything in the translation? Becuase it's pretty goddamn clear to everyone else.
Linux made a deal with the devil a long time ago by letting corporate america become so involved in the community.
Cutting a deal with the devil? More like opening the gates of hell and escorting the damned out as fast as possible, before Lucifier's lackies show up and start a fist-fight. News flash: the Linux community really doesn't give a rat's rear end what happens to commercial software vendors, because the old software business model of "magic secret bits in a bag that does wonderful things but you have to trust us" runs against how things are done in OSS.
Now we are seeing the results.
Tell me, who made this deal? Who speaks for the community? Who is the central authority that you can point to and say, "this person said it will be so"? The person responsible for this "deal" basically has told thousands of programmers to F'sck off, and that
Don't get me wrong, I feel for the special-needs kids who require the extra attention, but the burden they pose on the educational system cannot be overlooked.
That's my 10-year-old autistic son you're talking about. My son is not a burden, he is a kind, decent human being. If you want to start fixing education, stop treating him like some goddamn balance sheet liability or a sack of coal or something equally undesirable, and start thinking of him as a person. How would you like it if I thought of you as a "blight on society that should be expelled"? Because if we follow your train of thought - children with special needs are burdens, burdens are wasteful, wasteful means wasted money, money is more important than some person, so stop spending money on burden children, because they're a waste - you are advocating this same concept.
Tell you what - let's see what happens when you have a child, your child, and they have a "special need"; not just special education, but any kind of uncommon need. Let's see if it's all about you, or if it's all about your child. What's your answer? You going to stand by your proposition - which DIRECTLY implies you're an unfit parent - or are you going to eat your words, and realize that your child is a human being, a person?
That's what I thought. So have a nice hot piping cup of STFU. Because I know for a fact you don't know jack shit about what you're talking about.
Get an axe.
(Seriously, you expect me to believe that they don't have something planned?)
I oppose Bush. I am also what you would call liberal. I also support gun control.
Hitting your target and killing it with one shot is my definition of gun control.
Questions, dumbass?