I guess your point is now that you'd prefer that I had written something that was easier to skim.
No, I'd prefer that you were easier to read. Good prose is more skimmable, but that's a side effect. The purpose of good prose is accesibility. That means structure. Not unlike well written software.
The statement culled in the slashdot summary wasn't buried, it was surrounded by context.
That's like saying Blackbeard's Treasure Chest isn't buried, it's just surrounded by dirt. If you want somebody to find something, you don't make it hard for them to find it.
Am am unsurprised that people exist, such as yourself, who couldn't be bothered to read the post. It was long and didn't have many pictures. I did think you overstepped your case a bit with the invective, however.
Now you're just being childish. I'm simply repeating what any writing instructor would tell you.
Speaking of books with pictures, I just finished reading Simon Schama's Citizens. There were a lot of pictures, but not enough to make up for the fact that the book was over 900 pages long! But it was fun to read, because Schama know how to make a complicated argument accessible and entertaining.
Uh, did you notice that they also listed the PDP-1 on which the first video game was developed. At $0.75 million, that was hardly a "game machine" either -- as the author was surely aware. The whole thing is tongue-in-cheek.
Let me answer your question by asking two of my own. (1) Briefly, what were you trying to say? What point were you trying to make. Boil it down to a sentence or two. (2) Precisely where in your piece did you state this idea?
Sure, Dvorak's an idiot -- but at least he pretends to be a real journalist. Nugget may be smarter than Dvorak -- but there's no way to tell, because he doesn't write to be read. Like many bloggers, he just dumps out his thoughts as the appear into his consciousness, without trying to make a point or a coherent argument.
Usually it's a big no-no to comment without reading TFA. But in this case, there is no FA. There's just a statement buried in a blogrant that says the same thing as the submission. It would have been more productive to submit the story without any link at all, just the thesis "Google talk doesn't support S2S! Uncool!"
Of course, that's not how Slashdot works -- you have to provide a link to an actual story. But something like this is a waste of everybody's time. The editor should have rejected the story and waited for somebody to submit a more thoughtful statement on the same topic. One wonders if the editor even followed the link. In any case, Slashdot editors have gotten terminally lazy -- as the link in my sig verifies.
Bite your tongue! Two companies with fair-to-excellent software combining with a company that produces crap. Plus they rely too much on ethically questionable marketing.
Besides, competing with Microsoft isn't a matter of size. It's a matter of getting past Microsoft's control of the basic desktop.
There's more to podcasting than mp3 file downloading. There's an RSS-based syndication mechanism, so that your favorite programs get automatically copied to your audio player. Online "broadcasting" has been around for years now, but it never attracted so many avid listeners -- and amateur producers -- before the podcast mechanism was invented. So a new name is called for, even if the name is just a little lame.
In other words, exactly what happened with Windows XP. There are millions of users out there running Windows 98 simply because it's what came on their machines, Even though there are benefits to upgrading to XP, people just can't be bothered. Win98 gets the job done, and that's all they care about.
(Yes, I know, plenty of people don't have the hardware to run XP. But any machine sold in the last five years can run it.)
The premise of the article is that Microsoft OSs are sold on the basis of their features. That's never been true. They're sold as the de facto standard OS for PCs. That's been true since IBM offered it as the cheapest bundled OS for the first PC. Computer geeks like to have the latest and greatest, and Microsoft doesn't like to support old OSs. But ours is the minority viewpoint.
Now all we need to do is make fighter jets space worthy for that true Star Wars feel.
In Star Wars, fighters turn and bank as if they had working airfoils, instead of being in a vacuum. So to get that "Star Wars Feel" you have to stay in atmosphere!
Re:spammer's low-tech way
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I saw a story earlier this week. And if you google for "free porn" you find many examples.
the focus needs to be taken AWAY from trying to substitute real teaching with toys like this.
Everytime we talk about educational technology, we get the same kneejerk crap. Who said anything about this pen replacing teachers? Sure kids need good teachers. But they also need to be able to learn on their own. And good educational tech helps with that.
Corporations certainly have a lot to answer for. But they don't drive public opinion the way politicians and other social leaders do. And right now our social leaders are conservative who are on an elite-bashing binge, and have been for about 25 years. Usually it's the "liberals", but they've also had it in for scientific elites.
I remember back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan making fun of scientists who did studies of the effect of alcohol on goldfish, and William Rusher insisting that the proliferation of subatomic particles was proof that particle physics was a joke. You can debunk that stuff, but nobody pays attention -- they just want to be told how they're being taken advantage of.
So for a generation we've lived with the comfortable myth that science is just bunch of grant-grubbing con artists, and that all the matters is "leadership" and "enterprising spirit" and a lot of other cozy-sounding BS. In that context, is it any suprise that corporations have neglected basic research? It's an effect, not a cause.
More likely, however, is that it's being done for bragging rights. Dodge, for example, put the Viper into production, even though....
I think bragging rights are more important from the consumer end. Look at all the people who drive cars designed for offroading in the city. By the same token, lots of people will spend extra for extra power capacity they'll never use.
Besides, most mac users on slashdot DON'T complain about lack of platform support.
You must be new around here. (Now that was sarcasm.)
Why else would they be using the platform if they thought it had bad support?
Because they just plain like the platform. Nowadays, Macs are purchased for their coolness factor and for their ease of use. That's it.
Besides, the Mac does have all the apps that are all most people ever use. Still, I hear a lot of complaints from Mac and Linux users when some popular app or game isn't available except on Windows.
I think anybody who frequents Slashdot knows what sarcasm is. But Mac users whining about lack of support for their platform is too common to rate as real sarcasm.
Since you're actually creating content, you know as much as anybody who hangs out at Slashdot. We mostly sit around bitching about the quality of content that's out there.
Let's run through the funding options again. Oddly enough, these are the same as for traditional media:
Advertising. Online advertising can work, as any Google stockholder will tell you. But there's a finite number of advertising dollars. Clearly not enough for everybody who would like to sell ads.
Subscriptions.I keep hearing people say, "people won't subscribe for online content because they're used to getting it free." Nonsense. If you have the kind of content where people spend a lot of time at your site, you can get away with charging a subscription. But most sites only have a few items that are of interest to any given user. Online readers are mostly grazers -- they follow dozens of sites, and aren't about to pay subscriptions each one.
Fund drives. Only works if you have a really rabid following. Public broadcasting has the additional advantage of being able to hold its shows hostage until people pay up. Hard to do with a web site.
Micropayments.. People keep telling me this won't work. But I don't know of a single major web site that's really tried selling little bits of content for a few cents a peek. It's the payment model I'd most like to use, but have never had a chance to.
There aren't any options that don't fit into one of the above categories. So you need to look at them and find one that you can modify to fit your needs.
The books you cite are about the history and philosophy of navigation, chaos, etc. If this book pretended to be along those lines, you'd have a point. But it doesn't. It's an NTP handbook, supposedly written for people who want to use the NTP protocol.
I read about the H&P of various obscure subjects myself. (And watch people's eyes glaze over when I talk about what I've read!) But I read about them in books that are about, not technical manuals that need filler. And yes, they're filler, because they're not useful to the intended audience.
There's this protocal called NTP that's used to synchronize computer clocks. That's not enough to fill out a book, so the author padded it out with a lot of stuff from history and philosophy. At least, that's my summary of the review.
Really, all most of us need to know about NTP can be found on Ntp.org.. Particularly useful is their NTP Pool project, which uses DNS aliasing to allow you to sync from random servers, and avoid placing a burden on any one server.
The whole fact you're able to mug someone in-game makes this a non-crime.
Nonsense. The game designers can allow some muggings and not others. If the player agreed not to operate a bot when he signed up for the game, then using a bot to mug other players is a no-no. Not because mugging is illegal in the real world, but because he broke the rule against bots.
The fact remains, software that relies on these features will cease to work. It may well be that RSS 3 is sufficiently backward compatible to support 99% of the software out there. That's still not the same thing as fully backward compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking of books with pictures, I just finished reading Simon Schama's Citizens. There were a lot of pictures, but not enough to make up for the fact that the book was over 900 pages long! But it was fun to read, because Schama know how to make a complicated argument accessible and entertaining.
Which makes your argument really hard to find. Is it so suprising I thought you didn't have one?
Let me answer your question by asking two of my own. (1) Briefly, what were you trying to say? What point were you trying to make. Boil it down to a sentence or two. (2) Precisely where in your piece did you state this idea?
Usually it's a big no-no to comment without reading TFA. But in this case, there is no FA. There's just a statement buried in a blogrant that says the same thing as the submission. It would have been more productive to submit the story without any link at all, just the thesis "Google talk doesn't support S2S! Uncool!"
Of course, that's not how Slashdot works -- you have to provide a link to an actual story. But something like this is a waste of everybody's time. The editor should have rejected the story and waited for somebody to submit a more thoughtful statement on the same topic. One wonders if the editor even followed the link. In any case, Slashdot editors have gotten terminally lazy -- as the link in my sig verifies.
I can't believe it took somebody a whole two minutes to make such an obvious joke!
I was wondering where the Star Trek "dark universe" came from!
Besides, competing with Microsoft isn't a matter of size. It's a matter of getting past Microsoft's control of the basic desktop.
Google is many things, but Santa Claus is not one of them.
There's more to podcasting than mp3 file downloading. There's an RSS-based syndication mechanism, so that your favorite programs get automatically copied to your audio player. Online "broadcasting" has been around for years now, but it never attracted so many avid listeners -- and amateur producers -- before the podcast mechanism was invented. So a new name is called for, even if the name is just a little lame.
Yes, you are.
(Yes, I know, plenty of people don't have the hardware to run XP. But any machine sold in the last five years can run it.)
The premise of the article is that Microsoft OSs are sold on the basis of their features. That's never been true. They're sold as the de facto standard OS for PCs. That's been true since IBM offered it as the cheapest bundled OS for the first PC. Computer geeks like to have the latest and greatest, and Microsoft doesn't like to support old OSs. But ours is the minority viewpoint.
But how do you bank, when you have no air to bank with?
I saw a story earlier this week. And if you google for "free porn" you find many examples.
I remember back in the 80s, Ronald Reagan making fun of scientists who did studies of the effect of alcohol on goldfish, and William Rusher insisting that the proliferation of subatomic particles was proof that particle physics was a joke. You can debunk that stuff, but nobody pays attention -- they just want to be told how they're being taken advantage of.
So for a generation we've lived with the comfortable myth that science is just bunch of grant-grubbing con artists, and that all the matters is "leadership" and "enterprising spirit" and a lot of other cozy-sounding BS. In that context, is it any suprise that corporations have neglected basic research? It's an effect, not a cause.
Besides, the Mac does have all the apps that are all most people ever use. Still, I hear a lot of complaints from Mac and Linux users when some popular app or game isn't available except on Windows.
I think anybody who frequents Slashdot knows what sarcasm is. But Mac users whining about lack of support for their platform is too common to rate as real sarcasm.
Let's run through the funding options again. Oddly enough, these are the same as for traditional media:
- Advertising. Online advertising can work, as any Google stockholder will tell you. But there's a finite number of advertising dollars. Clearly not enough for everybody who would like to sell ads.
- Subscriptions.I keep hearing people say, "people won't subscribe for online content because they're used to getting it free." Nonsense. If you have the kind of content where people spend a lot of time at your site, you can get away with charging a subscription. But most sites only have a few items that are of interest to any given user. Online readers are mostly grazers -- they follow dozens of sites, and aren't about to pay subscriptions each one.
- Fund drives. Only works if you have a really rabid following. Public broadcasting has the additional advantage of being able to hold its shows hostage until people pay up. Hard to do with a web site.
- Micropayments.. People keep telling me this won't work. But I don't know of a single major web site that's really tried selling little bits of content for a few cents a peek. It's the payment model I'd most like to use, but have never had a chance to.
There aren't any options that don't fit into one of the above categories. So you need to look at them and find one that you can modify to fit your needs.I read about the H&P of various obscure subjects myself. (And watch people's eyes glaze over when I talk about what I've read!) But I read about them in books that are about, not technical manuals that need filler. And yes, they're filler, because they're not useful to the intended audience.
Really, all most of us need to know about NTP can be found on Ntp.org.. Particularly useful is their NTP Pool project, which uses DNS aliasing to allow you to sync from random servers, and avoid placing a burden on any one server.
The fact remains, software that relies on these features will cease to work. It may well be that RSS 3 is sufficiently backward compatible to support 99% of the software out there. That's still not the same thing as fully backward compatible.