The reasons you quote are also the thinking behind much of the proclaimed 'post pc era'. Having given us access to all this technology, the powers that be are now getting worried about what we're able to do with it. The answer of course is to get us all back to the dumb terminal days, when everything you did on a computer was entirely under the control of someone else. You can have lots of cool devices around your home all doing dedicated tasks like fetching you music or playing you movies or whatever, but only of course if you cough up the readies.
You are wrong to equate government regulation with socialism, and even more wrong to think that it can somehow lead to pure socilaism. You clearly do not inderstand basic political terminology. Socialaism is about workers having control of their own lives, so that they can enjoy the full fruits of their labours. This precludes Governments funded and run by Capitalists. A Government cannot bring about socilaism, pure or otherwise. As Marx explained:- "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class", ie not a government. Socialism cannot possibly come about by regulating junk mail. Really it can't.
Secondly. if you're so against regulation, you obviously disagree with Government regulations on purity and hygiene of food, or the purity of the air you breath, or health and safety at work? Well, fine. If you want to live in a world where manufacturers, industrialists, bankers and so forth can do as they wish no matter what the consequences for the rest of us then I guess deregulation is for you. Welcome to Anarchy.
Yes, the footprint is that small. Yes it includes java runtime. You have not seen this version of Opera on the BeOS. Nobody has because 3.6 is the only version available.
What is a major point in favour of BeIA here is the ability for the ISP to remotely configure the machine. The result is that the customer never ever has to worry about the software. This also makes for some great posiibilities in work situations, where people may need fast dedicated access to the Intranet, eg hospitals.
It is absolutely a mistake to write off IA's. the idea has been around for a long while, sure, and we haven't seen many devices. Don't forget though that the OS that can effectively run them hasn't been there.It's there now, and many, many big manufacturers are going to be producing IA's very soon. Ok, they may have misjudged the market, but I very much doubt they are 100% wrong in their predictions that this will be huge.
I'm dumbfounded by the tenor of most of the contributions here. People are rubbishing the case before they've heard any of the evidence. Please God don't let these people ever sit on a jury. Time and time again the most deliberate, pernicious, vicious racism has been overwhelmingly proved at major companies with lots and lots of fine sounding policies, and any number of 'of course we're not racists' employees protesting at the ideological purity of their company. As yet, we simply don't know the facts to make a judgement either way, but considering the way MS have treated their 'temporary' workers and some rather less favourable comments we've had from both ex and current employees of Redmond over the years, I wouldn't be overly surprised if there was a case to answer.
I work in Holland, where a large proportion of the IT workforce like myself are ex-pats. This is absolutely not a dis-incentive to Dutch IT workers. There simply aren't enough of them because the demand is too high. We aren't keeping the wages down. We get the same wages and conditions that any Dutch worker gets, and that's one of the best standards of living in Europe.
If you find that imported workers are being used to keep down wages, then it's the fault of the bosses that pay those low wages, and the Government for allowing that to happen, not the fault of those workers or the countries they come from. Your real enemy is much closer to home.
BTW, it's paranoid in the extreme to think that Colleges and Universities outside the US are "expanding their IT programs in order to fill the needs of their students who wish to immigrate to the US." You have absolutely no evidence to back up such a ludicrous claim.
The vast majority of civil and criminal law is about property. This is to be expected since most law is made by the rich for the rich. When their property is attacked it seriously upsets them. Thus I shed not a tear for McDonalds. Why is it ok for the US to seek to destroy people's livelihoods with trade sanctions, or bomb the crap out of a third world country, or destroy the infrastructure of a European country, but not ok for a small farmer whose very livelihood is threatened by US 'interests' to disturb one brick of a hamburger bar? And if you think we don't have anarchy, look again buddy. The free market is anarchy. Pure and naked. It rides roughshod over the rights of people world wide. The free market is destroying rain forests, polluting our seas and starving children. The free market kills thousands and thousands of people every day without blinking an eye, and you think that isn't anarchy? How touching.
What pillock moderated this one up? For your information, there really are millions of us who see US corporatism as a threat, and MacDonalds as pure poison. And stop kidding yourself that you somehow have a monopoly on freedom. And remember, those thrown out of work by corporate greed have no freedom.
AFAIK it is wrong that OSX is based on BSD. From my understanding it's based on the Mach kernel, which is a different beast, in much the same way as the NeXt Step OS was. I'm no expert in these matters though so if I'm wrong please be gentle:)
Re:Let's plunder it for parts
on
AtheOS
·
· Score: 1
Don't be ridiculous. Putting a V8 engine into a model T Ford doesn't work. Neither does bolting on bits from another OS onto Linux or *BSD. Your thinking should be more on the lines of "what's useful about Linux that I can bolt on to this new OS?"
You're absolutely wrong to imply that somehow Be are hiding the truth here. The reason why Linux gets the necessary specs is because the commercial interest is tiny or non-existent, and Linux is not seen as a threat. Be however would stand to make profits, and make Mac OS look old fashioned, crufty and slow. which it is. Secondly, Apple have never once challenged Be's oft-stated claim that the necessary specs have been witheld. Don't you think they might have by now if it was just Be propaganda?
You clearly have no idea of the fundamental tenets for socialism. The idea of a top-down paternalism is not the preserve of socialism at all, but of liberalism. True socialism is people being in control of their own lives. This has only been briefly implemented once, in the first 3 to 4 years after the Russian Revoloution. It was defeated utterly by Stalin and has never re-emerged since. I cannot understand see why you actually see an excuse to batter socialism here. Protection of individual rights and freedoms and privacy has been the war-cry of most politicians at some time or another, and is certainly not wedded to any political philosophy.
The most apalling thing about this settlement is that this unpleasant and xenophobic individual now has enough money to keep on suing to his heart's content. If people cough up out of court, so much the better for him. In that way no precedents get set, and he can carry on pushing his luck and increasing his wealth.
The problem with the laws of defamation is not so much their principle, but that it takes an enormous amount of money to access them. Ordinary people get libelled in the British Yello Press all the time, but have no recompense because of the enormous cost of bringing a court case. Thus the current laws tend to benefit the rich.
You are absolutely wrong to blame the prejudices of those at the top on those at the bottom. It comes from the top down, not the bottom up. It's the way they want people to behave, the better to control them. The ruling class thrive on the ignorance of others, and this goes just as much for other countries too. The root of the problem isn't something inherent in the British people, it's what we've been taught all our lives.
I have my threshold set to 3, which gives a pretty good indication of the quality of replies to any one topic. On this item there is only 1 out of 190 that reaches a score of three. That's really sad. I'm starting to agree with those who have had it with this forum due to the mass immaturity, homophobia, ethnocentricity, xenophobia that borders on racism, to say nothing of the rife sexism.
Not only that, but the sheer stupidity of some people who leap to defend the very things that threaten their own rights is just mind-buggering. Wake up people, an injury to one is an injury to all, and the more we let the powers that be feed prejudice, attack freedom of sexuality, or speech, the more they'll be encouraged to fuck you over next. Of course this kind of thing needs challenging in public forums everywhere, including the radio.
It is entirely erroneous to believe that there is any 'reason' or 'purpose' for us existing at all. To believe that there is some sort of reasoning behind the fact of human existence is de facto to pre-suppose the existence of God or some such equivalent. Reason and purpose are entirely human attributes. We exist, that's all there is to it. There is no inevitability in the emergence of a self-aware species, merely historical accident. You also seem to have a fundamentally wrong (but undeniably common) view of what evolution is. Evolution is not a matter of continual improvement. It is a matter of a species adapting itself to survive in the environmental conditions it finds itself in. You could be the most perfect species of fish ever evolved. Intelligent even. But if your lake dries up and extinguishes your species, that's the end of it, and the ugly little lung fish that's left crawling about in the mud gets to rule the world. Evolution is not an inevitable linear process with some end goal in mind. Read the works of Steven J Gould for a more in depth explanation. I would also disagree with the idea that everything we do improves us, Hiroshima being the most obvious example, although I suppose it could be argued that you're really "communicating" something to people if you fry a couple of their cities.
Dedicated followers of the BeOS will know that this kind of thing is hardly news anymore. Be have been investing a lot of time and money into this growth area along with partners such as Compaq and Intel. The most interesting thing about Be's foray into this market is that IA's running on BeIA will be directly compatible with the PC version of the BeOS. This leads to some very interesting possibilities in the wired home. Forget about the wired fridge, think more about your wired stereo, ripping CD's and turning them into mp3's, whilst broadcasting different web radio channels to different rooms in your house or to your web pad while you browse your email in the garden. Or think about a wired VCR with real time editing capabilities. Things are gong to get a lot more exciting than toilets and fridges, thank God.
Economic systems do not arise out of the need for re-distribution; rather that explains the rise of class society. Economic activity arises out of our need to interact with other members of our species in order to survive as a species. We necessarily enter into economic relations with each other in producing the things that satisfy our given needs. These needs at their most basic are water, food, shelter and warmth. Put simply, we exchange labour with each other in order to fulfill our needs. That labour crystalizes into commodities. Wealth is then exchanged for other forms of wealth. Unfettered, this results in the ultimate efficiency of distribution.
"I grow cabbages, you make tables. It will take you three months to make me a table that will last ten years, it takes me three months to grow the number of cabbages you will eat in ten years. Here is a ten year supply of cabbages."
In more primitive societies, resources were communally owned. Nobody "owned" land or water, or any of the means of production. In this sense, there was no private property. The very existence of private property begs the question of how did things get this way?
To cut a long story short, along comes Mr Moneybags
Moneybags: "That forest is mine now." Table Maker: "No it isn't" M:"Perhaps you'd like these big gentlemen here to explain it to you?" "Err.. no thanks. Can I have some wood please?" "Certainly, that will be ten bucks." "I don't have ten bucks." "Congratulations! You're hired!" "What?" "I'll give you ten bucks to go and chop down that tree" "Sounds great" "BG SOUND="frantic-chopping.wav" " "Timber!!" "Can I have my ten bucks please" "Of course. Great job fellah" "Ok, here's your $10. Can I have my tree now?" "Sorry, $10 only gets you a branch" " But I need the whole tree!" "You'll have to come back tomorrow and earn another $10" "That means that I've got to chop down trees for three days so I can afford a tree that took me one day to chop down". "Five actually. You need to pay taxes as well" "What??!!!" "Guys like Larry and Floyd don't come cheap you know." "Can't you pay them?" "That would harm profits, and then you wouldn't have a job" "Oh, I see. But that means you get to own hundreds of dollar's of wood for only forty dollars" "We're only making an honest profit" "But you don't need all that wood" "Yes I do, I need to keep up appearances for one thing. and besides, I have a responsibility to my shareholders" "Who are they?" "The people who gave me the ten dollars when I told them about this great idea." "That's not fair!" "Why? "They didn't do any of the work" "No." "Neither did you!" "So?" "I'll stop working for you!" "Did I introduce you to Larry and Floyd?" "Uuh, ok, I guess it's kind of fair. But how am I going to make tables in my workshop? I don't have the time." "That workshop's mine now." "But..but..." "You're making Floyd nervous, and you wouldn't like him when he's nervous" "Ok, sorry, but how am I going to get my cabbages from the farm?" "Farm you say? Tell me more about this 'farm'....."
The whole point about usability actually has very little to do with one's technical skills or intelligence. It's a question of functionality. Even an uber-geek likes easy to use apps from time-to-time, unless they are just plain masochistic.
A prime example of a good open source app that runs on several patforms is Blender. It's astonishingly powerful, free and delivers professional quality results, but it is a pig to learn, and is far from intuitive, even for power users.
Interface design is an art in itself, just like good web-design. Poor interfaces can be the death of good programs. At the same time of course, no amount of window-dressing can make a bad program good.
The main point of the article for me was the argument that in order to create a good GUI you need quite a centralised structure, and this is one of the biggest difficulties that the open source movement faces in trying to reach a wider audience. What we really need to discuss is how this problem can be addressed, rather than how stupid most users are or how wonderful vi can be. It's not a question either of 'educating the users'. Users need to be encouraged to educate themselves, and the task needs to be simplified as much as possible. That does not mean dumbing down in any way. It means intelligent design.
Slashdot Mirror
The reasons you quote are also the thinking behind much of the proclaimed 'post pc era'. Having given us access to all this technology, the powers that be are now getting worried about what we're able to do with it. The answer of course is to get us all back to the dumb terminal days, when everything you did on a computer was entirely under the control of someone else. You can have lots of cool devices around your home all doing dedicated tasks like fetching you music or playing you movies or whatever, but only of course if you cough up the readies.
You are wrong to equate government regulation with socialism, and even more wrong to think that it can somehow lead to pure socilaism. You clearly do not inderstand basic political terminology. Socialaism is about workers having control of their own lives, so that they can enjoy the full fruits of their labours. This precludes Governments funded and run by Capitalists. A Government cannot bring about socilaism, pure or otherwise. As Marx explained:- "the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class", ie not a government. Socialism cannot possibly come about by regulating junk mail. Really it can't.
Secondly. if you're so against regulation, you obviously disagree with Government regulations on purity and hygiene of food, or the purity of the air you breath, or health and safety at work? Well, fine. If you want to live in a world where manufacturers, industrialists, bankers and so forth can do as they wish no matter what the consequences for the rest of us then I guess deregulation is for you. Welcome to Anarchy.
Reminds me of an old Wizard of Id cartoon
King: You have the right to be tried by a jury of your peers.
Accused: Huh! No bunch of pickpockets is gonna judge me!
Yes, the footprint is that small. Yes it includes java runtime. You have not seen this version of Opera on the BeOS. Nobody has because 3.6 is the only version available.
What is a major point in favour of BeIA here is the ability for the ISP to remotely configure the machine. The result is that the customer never ever has to worry about the software. This also makes for some great posiibilities in work situations, where people may need fast dedicated access to the Intranet, eg hospitals.
It is absolutely a mistake to write off IA's. the idea has been around for a long while, sure, and we haven't seen many devices. Don't forget though that the OS that can effectively run them hasn't been there.It's there now, and many, many big manufacturers are going to be producing IA's very soon. Ok, they may have misjudged the market, but I very much doubt they are 100% wrong in their predictions that this will be huge.
I'm dumbfounded by the tenor of most of the contributions here. People are rubbishing the case before they've heard any of the evidence. Please God don't let these people ever sit on a jury. Time and time again the most deliberate, pernicious, vicious racism has been overwhelmingly proved at major companies with lots and lots of fine sounding policies, and any number of 'of course we're not racists' employees protesting at the ideological purity of their company. As yet, we simply don't know the facts to make a judgement either way, but considering the way MS have treated their 'temporary' workers and some rather less favourable comments we've had from both ex and current employees of Redmond over the years, I wouldn't be overly surprised if there was a case to answer.
I work in Holland, where a large proportion of the IT workforce like myself are ex-pats. This is absolutely not a dis-incentive to Dutch IT workers. There simply aren't enough of them because the demand is too high. We aren't keeping the wages down. We get the same wages and conditions that any Dutch worker gets, and that's one of the best standards of living in Europe.
If you find that imported workers are being used to keep down wages, then it's the fault of the bosses that pay those low wages, and the Government for allowing that to happen, not the fault of those workers or the countries they come from. Your real enemy is much closer to home.
BTW, it's paranoid in the extreme to think that Colleges and Universities outside the US are "expanding their IT programs in order to fill the needs of their students who wish to immigrate to the US." You have absolutely no evidence to back up such a ludicrous claim.
score 3:Flamebait?
Since when did Flamebait get marked so highly? Perhaps you meant Funny?
The vast majority of civil and criminal law is about property. This is to be expected since most law is made by the rich for the rich. When their property is attacked it seriously upsets them. Thus I shed not a tear for McDonalds.
Why is it ok for the US to seek to destroy people's livelihoods with trade sanctions, or bomb the crap out of a third world country, or destroy the infrastructure of a European country, but not ok for a small farmer whose very livelihood is threatened by US 'interests' to disturb one brick of a hamburger bar?
And if you think we don't have anarchy, look again buddy. The free market is anarchy. Pure and naked. It rides roughshod over the rights of people world wide. The free market is destroying rain forests, polluting our seas and starving children. The free market kills thousands and thousands of people every day without blinking an eye, and you think that isn't anarchy? How touching.
What pillock moderated this one up? For your information, there really are millions of us who see US corporatism as a threat, and MacDonalds as pure poison. And stop kidding yourself that you somehow have a monopoly on freedom. And remember, those thrown out of work by corporate greed have no freedom.
AFAIK it is wrong that OSX is based on BSD. From my understanding it's based on the Mach kernel, which is a different beast, in much the same way as the NeXt Step OS was. I'm no expert in these matters though so if I'm wrong please be gentle :)
Don't be ridiculous. Putting a V8 engine into a model T Ford doesn't work. Neither does bolting on bits from another OS onto Linux or *BSD. Your thinking should be more on the lines of "what's useful about Linux that I can bolt on to this new OS?"
You're absolutely wrong to imply that somehow Be are hiding the truth here. The reason why Linux gets the necessary specs is because the commercial interest is tiny or non-existent, and Linux is not seen as a threat. Be however would stand to make profits, and make Mac OS look old fashioned, crufty and slow. which it is. Secondly, Apple have never once challenged Be's oft-stated claim that the necessary specs have been witheld. Don't you think they might have by now if it was just Be propaganda?
Like Samson in the temple, these people are mad and blind, and would bring it all down on top of us
You clearly have no idea of the fundamental tenets for socialism. The idea of a top-down paternalism is not the preserve of socialism at all, but of liberalism. True socialism is people being in control of their own lives. This has only been briefly implemented once, in the first 3 to 4 years after the Russian Revoloution. It was defeated utterly by Stalin and has never re-emerged since. I cannot understand see why you actually see an excuse to batter socialism here. Protection of individual rights and freedoms and privacy has been the war-cry of most politicians at some time or another, and is certainly not wedded to any political philosophy.
The most apalling thing about this settlement is that this unpleasant and xenophobic individual now has enough money to keep on suing to his heart's content. If people cough up out of court, so much the better for him. In that way no precedents get set, and he can carry on pushing his luck and increasing his wealth.
The problem with the laws of defamation is not so much their principle, but that it takes an enormous amount of money to access them. Ordinary people get libelled in the British Yello Press all the time, but have no recompense because of the enormous cost of bringing a court case. Thus the current laws tend to benefit the rich.
You are absolutely wrong to blame the prejudices of those at the top on those at the bottom. It comes from the top down, not the bottom up. It's the way they want people to behave, the better to control them. The ruling class thrive on the ignorance of others, and this goes just as much for other countries too. The root of the problem isn't something inherent in the British people, it's what we've been taught all our lives.
I have my threshold set to 3, which gives a pretty good indication of the quality of replies to any one topic. On this item there is only 1 out of 190 that reaches a score of three. That's really sad. I'm starting to agree with those who have had it with this forum due to the mass immaturity, homophobia, ethnocentricity, xenophobia that borders on racism, to say nothing of the rife sexism.
Not only that, but the sheer stupidity of some people who leap to defend the very things that threaten their own rights is just mind-buggering. Wake up people, an injury to one is an injury to all, and the more we let the powers that be feed prejudice, attack freedom of sexuality, or speech, the more they'll be encouraged to fuck you over next. Of course this kind of thing needs challenging in public forums everywhere, including the radio.
It is entirely erroneous to believe that there is any 'reason' or 'purpose' for us existing at all. To believe that there is some sort of reasoning behind the fact of human existence is de facto to pre-suppose the existence of God or some such equivalent. Reason and purpose are entirely human attributes. We exist, that's all there is to it. There is no inevitability in the emergence of a self-aware species, merely historical accident.
You also seem to have a fundamentally wrong (but undeniably common) view of what evolution is. Evolution is not a matter of continual improvement. It is a matter of a species adapting itself to survive in the environmental conditions it finds itself in. You could be the most perfect species of fish ever evolved. Intelligent even. But if your lake dries up and extinguishes your species, that's the end of it, and the ugly little lung fish that's left crawling about in the mud gets to rule the world. Evolution is not an inevitable linear process with some end goal in mind. Read the works of Steven J Gould for a more in depth explanation.
I would also disagree with the idea that everything we do improves us, Hiroshima being the most obvious example, although I suppose it could be argued that you're really "communicating" something to people if you fry a couple of their cities.
A truly intelligent machine would realise that it was being exploited, and thus refuse to work.
The specs for this are already in development. It's known as Musical Markup Language, and is a subset of XML. Could be very cool.
Dedicated followers of the BeOS will know that this kind of thing is hardly news anymore. Be have been investing a lot of time and money into this growth area along with partners such as Compaq and Intel. The most interesting thing about Be's foray into this market is that IA's running on BeIA will be directly compatible with the PC version of the BeOS. This leads to some very interesting possibilities in the wired home. Forget about the wired fridge, think more about your wired stereo, ripping CD's and turning them into mp3's, whilst broadcasting different web radio channels to different rooms in your house or to your web pad while you browse your email in the garden. Or think about a wired VCR with real time editing capabilities. Things are gong to get a lot more exciting than toilets and fridges, thank God.
Economic systems do not arise out of the need for re-distribution; rather that explains the rise of class society.
Economic activity arises out of our need to interact with other members of our species in order to survive as a species. We necessarily enter into economic relations with each other in producing the things that satisfy our given needs. These needs at their most basic are water, food, shelter and warmth. Put simply, we exchange labour with each other in order to fulfill our needs. That labour crystalizes into commodities. Wealth is then exchanged for other forms of wealth.
Unfettered, this results in the ultimate efficiency of distribution.
"I grow cabbages, you make tables. It will take you three months to make me a table that will last ten years, it takes me three months to grow the number of cabbages you will eat in ten years. Here is a ten year supply of cabbages."
In more primitive societies, resources were communally owned. Nobody "owned" land or water, or any of the means of production. In this sense, there was no private property. The very existence of private property begs the question of how did things get this way?
To cut a long story short, along comes Mr Moneybags
Moneybags: "That forest is mine now."
Table Maker: "No it isn't"
M:"Perhaps you'd like these big gentlemen here to explain it to you?"
"Err.. no thanks. Can I have some wood please?"
"Certainly, that will be ten bucks."
"I don't have ten bucks."
"Congratulations! You're hired!"
"What?"
"I'll give you ten bucks to go and chop down that tree"
"Sounds great"
"BG SOUND="frantic-chopping.wav" "
"Timber!!"
"Can I have my ten bucks please"
"Of course. Great job fellah"
"Ok, here's your $10. Can I have my tree now?"
"Sorry, $10 only gets you a branch"
" But I need the whole tree!"
"You'll have to come back tomorrow and earn another $10"
"That means that I've got to chop down trees for three days so I can afford a tree that took me one day to chop down".
"Five actually. You need to pay taxes as well"
"What??!!!"
"Guys like Larry and Floyd don't come cheap you know."
"Can't you pay them?"
"That would harm profits, and then you wouldn't have a job"
"Oh, I see. But that means you get to own hundreds of dollar's of wood for only forty dollars"
"We're only making an honest profit"
"But you don't need all that wood"
"Yes I do, I need to keep up appearances for one thing. and besides, I have a responsibility to my shareholders"
"Who are they?"
"The people who gave me the ten dollars when I told them about this great idea."
"That's not fair!"
"Why?
"They didn't do any of the work"
"No."
"Neither did you!"
"So?"
"I'll stop working for you!"
"Did I introduce you to Larry and Floyd?"
"Uuh, ok, I guess it's kind of fair. But how am I going to make tables in my workshop? I don't have the time."
"That workshop's mine now."
"But..but..."
"You're making Floyd nervous, and you wouldn't like him when he's nervous"
"Ok, sorry, but how am I going to get my cabbages from the farm?"
"Farm you say? Tell me more about this 'farm'....."
The whole point about usability actually has very little to do with one's technical skills or intelligence. It's a question of functionality. Even an uber-geek likes easy to use apps from time-to-time, unless they are just plain masochistic.
A prime example of a good open source app that runs on several patforms is Blender. It's astonishingly powerful, free and delivers professional quality results, but it is a pig to learn, and is far from intuitive, even for power users.
Interface design is an art in itself, just like good web-design. Poor interfaces can be the death of good programs. At the same time of course, no amount of window-dressing can make a bad program good.
The main point of the article for me was the argument that in order to create a good GUI you need quite a centralised structure, and this is one of the biggest difficulties that the open source movement faces in trying to reach a wider audience. What we really need to discuss is how this problem can be addressed, rather than how stupid most users are or how wonderful vi can be. It's not a question either of 'educating the users'.
Users need to be encouraged to educate themselves, and the task needs to be simplified as much as possible. That does not mean dumbing down in any way. It means intelligent design.
Should have read 'struggle' of couse :) (Must get used to using the Preview option)