The OSI was created with Parens and probably would have come about if ESR never existed.
Are you trying to say they used Emacs?
Re:So let me get this straight...
on
SCO SCO SCO!
·
· Score: 1
What's next? I have to sign and NDA and wear a tin foil hat so Linus can't suck the super-double-secret code directly from my head and add it to the source?
Geez, I wish Linus would do the sucking-from-my-head thing. As it is, I have to send him the same damn patch about 3 billion times before he applies it...
I think the problem is that, at least in the photos linked to earlier in this story, she's posed in all these silly mullet-head cheesecake poses, which basically make anyone look pretty bad unless they have the cheesecake look -- which she doesn't.
However, we don't know how long ago this issue was brought to their attention, and how long they've had to act on it.
Keep in mind that the sort of `inadvertant violation' you describe has happened many times, and the FSF has always tried hard to resolve things in a friendly manner first, without involving a court, and without public statements.
So I think it's reasonable to give the FSF the benefit of the doubt in this case.
I'm not saying that somehow suburbia was created by the government against the will of the people -- clearly what suburbia promises appeals to the desires of many, even if it often falls (very) short in practice. Dreams are very strong, and often by the time you wake up, it's too late.
However, as a previous poster pointed out, there's often a conflict between the desires of suburb dwellers, city residents, and those who live in rural areas, and governments' tendency to massively subsize what was viewed as the `next big thing' (suburbs, highways, etc) with little real idea of the consequences, had a big influence over the course of development in this century.
In other countries that often have less space, and longer histories of urban living, there's sometimes less conflict between the three, but it's always a touchy thing.
Cities are clogged with cars because nobody actually wants to live in the city
Note that this is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy -- many (mostly non-american) cities are wonderful places to live, and a rather large part of this is the sort of small-scale (yes, even inside a big city), lively, people-friendly neighborhoods which are basically incompatible with car-culture. Cars require lots of space...
what happens when you have to bring home something that's 500 pounds? How do you get it delivered?
How about:
Ask the store to deliver it
Rent a car
If the U.S. car-culture were toned down a bit, there'd probably be even more options.
Of course some people move giant appliances daily, and maybe they'd be better off with a big ol' truck, but I think for most people it's more of a twice-a-year sort of thing...
I don't have a car, and I simply had all my various large appliances delivered; pretty damn convenient actually, since the delivery guy usually also does the carrying up the stairs (in fact, the guy delivering my washing machine came up the stairs with it on his back, while I stood there staring stupidly in amazement...).
Have you been to Tokyo? Try getting from Shinjuku to Akihabara by walking or anything less than trains.
Heh, I've walked from Akihabara to Shinjuku; it took quite a few hours, but it's possible (and indeed rather a pleasant outing)...:-)
There isn't the busses and other stuff around Tokyo
Huh? Tokyo certainly has lots of buses, though the traffic often sucks so much that they're much more annoying than trains (and more expensive for many trips).
[Mass-transit in Tokyo includes at least local trains, subways, buses, monorails, streetcars, and small commuter ferries. Unlike the systems in many U.S. cities, it's clean, convenient, and efficiently run, and goes almost everywhere you'd care to go, but the rush-hour crowding can be a wee bit of an annoyance if you've got a rigid work schedule.]
Re:Techincal Lords...
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
However, when they chucked out (most of) the hereditaries, they appointed a whole raft of fourty-ish, reasonably dynamic, people.
Weren't most of them appointed for rather dodgy reasons though, e.g., giving lots of money to the party in power (hey, it's buy-a-seat-for-life!)?
BTW, if some of you don't see the referred-to post (because it was incorrectly modded down), you should read it -- it gets right to the heart of the matter: despite any technical whiz-bangery, is what Sony's producing really what people want in a handheld gaming system, and are the extra features worth the inevitable costs (price, battery life, size, reliability)?
Just FYI folks, this guy is a troll. Check out his posting history.
What are you talking about? I checked out his (Samir Gupta's) history and it seems like everything he's ever posted here has been well-written and thoughtful; the fact that so many of those posts got modded as `troll' is rather bizarre.
Who know if he really works at Nintendo, and maybe you don't agree with what he says, but his contributions are definitely not troll material; some of you mods out there should be ashamed...
It would seem to me that as the technologies become more and more similar we are going to see a lot more of this style of integration.
Sure, but given the general suckiness of all the attempts so far, it seems that technology hasn't progressed quite far enough....
In addition there are issue with interfaces -- a good interface for a cell phone isn't necessarily very good for playing games and vice-versa (note all the complaints about the ngage's excess of buttons and general fiddliness) Remember the old phrase `Jack of all trades, master of none.'
Sony has -- in my opinion -- a far better record with ergonomics than Nintendo.
Um, based on what? The PS1? Lousy (the SNES was kinda clunky, but was better than the PS1 for ergonomics, and the N64 was much better). The PS2? Better, but basically just OK (the gamecube's certainly better). So not much evidence from SCE.
If you mean Sony in general (as opposed to SCE), that's also a rather weak bet. Sony has great industrial design in some ways -- their stuff generally looks very cool -- but their usability record is fairly spotty at best. They've turned out some awesome stuff (e.g., walkman), but they've also produced an awful lot of crap; to some degree this is excusable as a way of testing new ideas, but they have a tendency to keep pushing the crap for a long time in hopes that it will catch on.
For instance, consider electronic dictionaries: most companies quickly settled on a fairly simple design, a clamshell with a little keyboard and LCD, and the dictionary in ROM. Sony's been trying for many many years to break into this market, with many wacky products that were truly awful. They pushed `book on a CD' models for ages, which were huge, clunky, slow, and had terrible user-interfaces. More recently they've given up that, but they've kept some of the bad UI from the disk book models, and most of the good points about their new models are ones they simply copied from their competitors! Some other examples include memory sticks and jog wheels -- these are truly cool in some applications, but Sony seems to try to stick them everywhere, even when the result sucks, and because they can afford to lose lots of money, they keeeeep trying.
Well, anyway, the point is that Sony ain't no magician, maybe their new handheld will succeed where others failed, but I'm not betting huge amounts of money on it...
Because there are many other relevant issues besides price (well maybe not for the Walmart hordes, but they're a lost cause anyway).
For instance, when I buy something I'd like a supplier that's reliable, allows convenient ordering, deals well with problems, etc., and I'm certainly willing to pay more for them. All of these are things you can advertise, and are more resistant to simple ranking than prices are.
Even when using external ranking services, when presented with a list of offers at similar prices, it's pretty natural to choose one for which you previously saw an ad you liked (and call me silly, but I'll even consciously spend a little bit more to buy from a company with interesting and amusing ads). This is one reason that the apparent obsession with click-throughs seems so stupid -- I think for most products, the best you can do is to nudge the consumer towards your product, not drag him kicking and screaming.
The world is NOT dominated by a ProCorporate, ProCompetition, ProSelfishness Worldview that is commonplace in America.
Er, yeah, well I guess in most other places they throw out the `ProCompetition' part and mostly stick with `ProSelfishness.'
I'm left-wing, I hate bush and his gang, and I think much of what's happening now stinks, but this wacky attitude that the rest of the world is somehow on average more enlightened than the U.S. is just laughable. There are certainly places that I'd call `better' than the U.S. -- but they're the exception, not the rule, and they inevitably have a full sheaf of their own hypocrisies.
Or are you trying to convince me that the west celebrates Easter because it's knowingly celebrating the Spring solstice?
Well personally I've always celebrated because of the candy eggs and chocolate -- and the same is true of most people I know.
My point is only that these holidays, which in recent history have been pretty well strictly attached to Christianity, have been warped by commercial interests.
It seems a bit rich to complain given that the interpretation you're trying to preserve was itself just something else warped by `christian interests.'
OS X is a fine OS, and for many people it's the best thing. But it's not for me.
I like an OS where I can modify and redistribute any part at will, and where the development process is (largely) a public one. Linux, GNU, and friends do a pretty good job of providing this.
On the other hand, I'm a sucker for slick smoothly functioning interfaces. So I'd certainly love a distro that lacked the rough edges but retained the advantages of entirely free software; surely I'm not the only one? [Though to tell the truth, lately Gnome 2 seems to be doing a great job of smashing many of them; for instance, the fonts in most apps I use now look great, even better than windows.]
p.s. I hope this guy doesn't get his own distribution any time soon though, 'cause he doesn't actually seem to understand the technical details very well (this is obvious even just skimming over his article)...
I agree 100% -- `firebird' might have been cool 30 years ago, but I think these days it's usually associated with the mullet-head car of the same name. It also sounds sort of... generic to me, just not inspired.
I like someone else's suggestion of `freebird'; still a vaguely mullet-head name, but somehow a bit more fanciful and light-hearted...
I'm using Mozilla 1.2, so I don't think it's an `obsolete browser' problem.
I suspect that your taste simply differs from mine, but care to describe what you're seeing that makes it an improvement over the current page?
What I see is that they both have the same basic layout -- a title, a minimal navigation header, and 3 columns, with articles in the center one and useful links in the two side columns. The only real differences seem to be color and icon changes, little boxes around everything (in the remix page), and a bit of javascripty mouseover highlighting. But given that the old page was really pretty reasonably designed, none of the changes seem to actually mean anything; for instance, adding the boxes doesn't help much because the old page did a good job of using whitespace and color to make sure boundaries were clear and to focus the eye.
Is it really anything more than `this guy likes grey and boxes'?
It must be something hidden like standards conformance, because the `remixed' home-page looks pretty exactly the same as the old home-page, except that the remix seems vaguely more depressing. To be honest, I rather like the old home-page; it's clean, straight-forward, and even kind of cheerful...
Slashdot Mirror
The OSI was created with Parens and probably would have come about if ESR never existed.
Are you trying to say they used Emacs?
What's next? I have to sign and NDA and wear a tin foil hat so Linus can't suck the super-double-secret code directly from my head and add it to the source?
Geez, I wish Linus would do the sucking-from-my-head thing. As it is, I have to send him the same damn patch about 3 billion times before he applies it...
I think the problem is that, at least in the photos linked to earlier in this story, she's posed in all these silly mullet-head cheesecake poses, which basically make anyone look pretty bad unless they have the cheesecake look -- which she doesn't.
However, we don't know how long ago this issue was brought to their attention, and how long they've had to act on it.
Keep in mind that the sort of `inadvertant violation' you describe has happened many times, and the FSF has always tried hard to resolve things in a friendly manner first, without involving a court, and without public statements.
So I think it's reasonable to give the FSF the benefit of the doubt in this case.
BTW, a followup to myself, to clarify a bit.
I'm not saying that somehow suburbia was created by the government against the will of the people -- clearly what suburbia promises appeals to the desires of many, even if it often falls (very) short in practice. Dreams are very strong, and often by the time you wake up, it's too late.
However, as a previous poster pointed out, there's often a conflict between the desires of suburb dwellers, city residents, and those who live in rural areas, and governments' tendency to massively subsize what was viewed as the `next big thing' (suburbs, highways, etc) with little real idea of the consequences, had a big influence over the course of development in this century.
In other countries that often have less space, and longer histories of urban living, there's sometimes less conflict between the three, but it's always a touchy thing.
I did not tell that fellow to stay in the city and nobody is marching him out to the suburbs at the point of a gun, 1950's style China.
No, but quite a bit of government funding has gone into subsidizing `car oriented' development. That's all people are saying.
It is quite amazing that some of you folks wish to turn any disagreement into some imposition on your "rights".
Heh, you say, after whining in exactly the same way yourself...
BTW, if suburbs are so roundly hated, why do so many people live there by choice?
Because, in fact, there is little choice in many places.
Please, run along with your Communistic ideals. Individuals do not need a central committee to make their housing arrangements.
Rant much?
Cities are clogged with cars because nobody actually wants to live in the city
Note that this is largely a self-fulfilling prophecy -- many (mostly non-american) cities are wonderful places to live, and a rather large part of this is the sort of small-scale (yes, even inside a big city), lively, people-friendly neighborhoods which are basically incompatible with car-culture. Cars require lots of space...
How about:
- Ask the store to deliver it
- Rent a car
If the U.S. car-culture were toned down a bit, there'd probably be even more options.Of course some people move giant appliances daily, and maybe they'd be better off with a big ol' truck, but I think for most people it's more of a twice-a-year sort of thing...
I don't have a car, and I simply had all my various large appliances delivered; pretty damn convenient actually, since the delivery guy usually also does the carrying up the stairs (in fact, the guy delivering my washing machine came up the stairs with it on his back, while I stood there staring stupidly in amazement...).
Have you been to Tokyo? Try getting from Shinjuku to Akihabara by walking or anything less than trains.
:-)
Heh, I've walked from Akihabara to Shinjuku; it took quite a few hours, but it's possible (and indeed rather a pleasant outing)...
There isn't the busses and other stuff around Tokyo
Huh? Tokyo certainly has lots of buses, though the traffic often sucks so much that they're much more annoying than trains (and more expensive for many trips).
[Mass-transit in Tokyo includes at least local trains, subways, buses, monorails, streetcars, and small commuter ferries. Unlike the systems in many U.S. cities, it's clean, convenient, and efficiently run, and goes almost everywhere you'd care to go, but the rush-hour crowding can be a wee bit of an annoyance if you've got a rigid work schedule.]
However, when they chucked out (most of) the hereditaries, they appointed a whole raft of fourty-ish, reasonably dynamic, people.
Weren't most of them appointed for rather dodgy reasons though, e.g., giving lots of money to the party in power (hey, it's buy-a-seat-for-life!)?
Coffee not strong enough? Salt Lake City is the only place I've ever had espresso that tasted watered-down; I didn't even know that was possible...
[BTW, a bunch of the uClinux hackers seem to be in Utah]
BTW, if some of you don't see the referred-to post (because it was incorrectly modded down), you should read it -- it gets right to the heart of the matter: despite any technical whiz-bangery, is what Sony's producing really what people want in a handheld gaming system, and are the extra features worth the inevitable costs (price, battery life, size, reliability)?
What are you talking about? I checked out his (Samir Gupta's) history and it seems like everything he's ever posted here has been well-written and thoughtful; the fact that so many of those posts got modded as `troll' is rather bizarre.
Who know if he really works at Nintendo, and maybe you don't agree with what he says, but his contributions are definitely not troll material; some of you mods out there should be ashamed...
It would seem to me that as the technologies become more and more similar we are going to see a lot more of this style of integration.
Sure, but given the general suckiness of all the attempts so far, it seems that technology hasn't progressed quite far enough....
In addition there are issue with interfaces -- a good interface for a cell phone isn't necessarily very good for playing games and vice-versa (note all the complaints about the ngage's excess of buttons and general fiddliness) Remember the old phrase `Jack of all trades, master of none.'
Um, based on what? The PS1? Lousy (the SNES was kinda clunky, but was better than the PS1 for ergonomics, and the N64 was much better). The PS2? Better, but basically just OK (the gamecube's certainly better). So not much evidence from SCE.
If you mean Sony in general (as opposed to SCE), that's also a rather weak bet. Sony has great industrial design in some ways -- their stuff generally looks very cool -- but their usability record is fairly spotty at best. They've turned out some awesome stuff (e.g., walkman), but they've also produced an awful lot of crap; to some degree this is excusable as a way of testing new ideas, but they have a tendency to keep pushing the crap for a long time in hopes that it will catch on.
For instance, consider electronic dictionaries: most companies quickly settled on a fairly simple design, a clamshell with a little keyboard and LCD, and the dictionary in ROM. Sony's been trying for many many years to break into this market, with many wacky products that were truly awful. They pushed `book on a CD' models for ages, which were huge, clunky, slow, and had terrible user-interfaces. More recently they've given up that, but they've kept some of the bad UI from the disk book models, and most of the good points about their new models are ones they simply copied from their competitors! Some other examples include memory sticks and jog wheels -- these are truly cool in some applications, but Sony seems to try to stick them everywhere, even when the result sucks, and because they can afford to lose lots of money, they keeeeep trying.
Well, anyway, the point is that Sony ain't no magician, maybe their new handheld will succeed where others failed, but I'm not betting huge amounts of money on it...
Because there are many other relevant issues besides price (well maybe not for the Walmart hordes, but they're a lost cause anyway).
For instance, when I buy something I'd like a supplier that's reliable, allows convenient ordering, deals well with problems, etc., and I'm certainly willing to pay more for them. All of these are things you can advertise, and are more resistant to simple ranking than prices are.
Even when using external ranking services, when presented with a list of offers at similar prices, it's pretty natural to choose one for which you previously saw an ad you liked (and call me silly, but I'll even consciously spend a little bit more to buy from a company with interesting and amusing ads). This is one reason that the apparent obsession with click-throughs seems so stupid -- I think for most products, the best you can do is to nudge the consumer towards your product, not drag him kicking and screaming.
The world is NOT dominated by a ProCorporate, ProCompetition, ProSelfishness Worldview that is commonplace in America.
Er, yeah, well I guess in most other places they throw out the `ProCompetition' part and mostly stick with `ProSelfishness.'
I'm left-wing, I hate bush and his gang, and I think much of what's happening now stinks, but this wacky attitude that the rest of the world is somehow on average more enlightened than the U.S. is just laughable. There are certainly places that I'd call `better' than the U.S. -- but they're the exception, not the rule, and they inevitably have a full sheaf of their own hypocrisies.
Or are you trying to convince me that the west celebrates Easter because it's knowingly celebrating the Spring solstice?
Well personally I've always celebrated because of the candy eggs and chocolate -- and the same is true of most people I know.
My point is only that these holidays, which in recent history have been pretty well strictly attached to Christianity, have been warped by commercial interests.
It seems a bit rich to complain given that the interpretation you're trying to preserve was itself just something else warped by `christian interests.'
Speak for yourself.
OS X is a fine OS, and for many people it's the best thing. But it's not for me.
I like an OS where I can modify and redistribute any part at will, and where the development process is (largely) a public one. Linux, GNU, and friends do a pretty good job of providing this.
On the other hand, I'm a sucker for slick smoothly functioning interfaces. So I'd certainly love a distro that lacked the rough edges but retained the advantages of entirely free software; surely I'm not the only one? [Though to tell the truth, lately Gnome 2 seems to be doing a great job of smashing many of them; for instance, the fonts in most apps I use now look great, even better than windows.]
p.s. I hope this guy doesn't get his own distribution any time soon though, 'cause he doesn't actually seem to understand the technical details very well (this is obvious even just skimming over his article)...
Exactly what is the problem?
Too Microsoftish.
Better than `My Mozilla Browser' though...
I agree 100% -- `firebird' might have been cool 30 years ago, but I think these days it's usually associated with the mullet-head car of the same name. It also sounds sort of ... generic to me, just not inspired.
I like someone else's suggestion of `freebird'; still a vaguely mullet-head name, but somehow a bit more fanciful and light-hearted...
I'm using Mozilla 1.2, so I don't think it's an `obsolete browser' problem.
I suspect that your taste simply differs from mine, but care to describe what you're seeing that makes it an improvement over the current page?
What I see is that they both have the same basic layout -- a title, a minimal navigation header, and 3 columns, with articles in the center one and useful links in the two side columns. The only real differences seem to be color and icon changes, little boxes around everything (in the remix page), and a bit of javascripty mouseover highlighting. But given that the old page was really pretty reasonably designed, none of the changes seem to actually mean anything; for instance, adding the boxes doesn't help much because the old page did a good job of using whitespace and color to make sure boundaries were clear and to focus the eye.
Is it really anything more than `this guy likes grey and boxes'?
It must be something hidden like standards conformance, because the `remixed' home-page looks pretty exactly the same as the old home-page, except that the remix seems vaguely more depressing. To be honest, I rather like the old home-page; it's clean, straight-forward, and even kind of cheerful...
this was a HBOC type of guy
Hunchback of Cleveland?
HoverBot Overlord Class?
Hairy Back Oiled Chest?