Everything, and I mean everything AT&T has done since they spun off their operating companies has turned to shit. Computers. exchange equipment, long distance service, broadband, and of course cellular service. The final humiliation was when they were booted from the DJIA to make a place for one of their own spinoffs!
I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.
In other words, have X-Windows on top of an NT kernel and Windows GUI on top of a Linux kernel. There's no technical reason why not. NT is (in theory) even designed to support this, with it's "Posix-compliant" APIs.
But vendors don't sell kernels and libraries. They sell complete systems. Getting all the pieces to interoperate would be like insisting that all the car companies sell cars that use each others parts. In both OSs and cars, it's technical feasible, it would very nice for users, it would lower the cost of the technology drastically -- and the vendors have no incentive to support it.
I suppose if free/open software ever took over the marketplace, this kind of interoperability would happen all by itself. But I don't see that happening any time soon.
That's the first intelligent suggestion I've heard in this discussion. (Did anybody else hear me when I said I'd checked all start-on-boot lists?) But I think I'll let things stand, since this is only an issue when I need to reboot. I just hate not knowing exactly where this trojan is hiding!
Tracking cookies can be intrusive, but that doesn't make them spyware. Spyware is active software that reports back on its own. Cookies are just data that doesn't get used unless the browser is configured to use it.
The way you deal with tracking cookies is to configure your browser not to use third-party cookies, or (if you're totally paranoid) not use cookies at all. But whether you use cookies in your browser or not, having an adware program scan for them accomplishes nothing. All the scanner can do is remove the cookies after they've already done their damage.
You're right, cookies are not spyware. But you'll still get lots of flames from the Cookies-Are-Evil kneejerkers. And all spyware scanners look for cookies from known spyware companies. Stupid, but there you are.
Plus some spyware scanners flag any kind of push technology as spyware. The theory is that vendors can use push software to force you to download stuff. Well duh -- any network-aware software runs that risk.
Spyware has gotten so bad I never download closed-source software except from certain extremely reputable sources. And even so (I'm ashamed to admit) there's a bit of spyware that I can't seem to track down. Fortunately it only runs when I reboot (no it's not in any startup lists) and all it does is re-install a program called "readme shim.exe" (yes, that's a blank in the name) which itself is just a stealth spyware downloader. Fortunately, I can simply terminate "readme shim.exe", and not worry about it until I have to reboot (I hibernate when I'm not using the machine). No point in deleting the file -- it'll just come back. Scary that spyware vendors can get that clever!
I can't remember all the different search engines Yahoo has tried. But if you want to know which one they're using currently, just run the same search on Yahoo and Google.
And so what? Everybody knows the Pentium is designed for backward-compatibility, not performance. Searching for better benchmarks to prove this fact is beating a dead horse.
Except you still need a hub. Maybe you have an extra one lying around, but if you don't, you have to buy one. And if you're gonna do that, might as well spend an extra $10 and get a router. Which uses even less power than an old laptop.
Google built on top of Yahoo? What? They both use two different ways to search the internet
But who uses "Yahoo's method"? Nobody that I know.
We're talking about two different things called "Yahoo" here. The first thing is the original Yahoo web directory. Which is totally useless, 'cause it's just not possible to track the web with any kind of manually-maintained system. So Yahoo the Web Directory lasted only long enough to attract the venture capital they needed to become Yahoo the Portal. And a Yahoo search is just a rebranded Google search.
Re:Really how fast is this 1.25GHz machine
on
Apple Revises eMac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Note that cross-system/OS comparisons must always be taken with a large dose of salt!
And are irrelevent to anybody who'd consider buying an eMac. These are people who just want to run basic Mac stuff and don't care about performance -- if they did, they'd look at something fancier.
The Mac-versus-PC performance debate has always been kind of pointless. People buy Macs because they like them, or because they think they're more usable, not because they care about the architectural superiority of the PowerPC chip. People buy PCs because they're cheaper, or because they need low-level compatibility, not because they have a misguided love of Intel technology.
The issue is particularly irrelevent for people who aren't performance conscious. A 1Ghz PC may have a lot less computing power than a 1Ghz Mac, but it still has a lot more than most people need.
Groff and troff do a very poor job of separating presentation from content. Even worse than TeX. Which may not matter to you, but does matter to the person asking the question.
So, when it comes down to it, the bottom line question is, do you trust Google to do what they say they're going to do? If you don't... just who are you going to trust to handle your e-mail?
That's a sound application of some basic security concepts. But there's no getting away from the fact that Google is uniquely qualified to abuse their trust, if they choose to do so. They have a well-earned reputation as the best search technologists on the planet, so nobody can forget what they can do if they choose to.
This is another case of people fastening on a particular technology's capability to be abused. What people just don't get is that it's not a matter of tech, but who controls it.
Require? Sure, DocBook has a lot of tags, but very few are required. DocBook is designed so you can use a small subset and ignore the rest, if you choose.
Another approach is simply to define your own markup language. Since your needs are simple, you probably don't need to validate your documents, so an informal description of a well-formed XML document is all the design you need to do. You'll also need to write transform software that creates HTML or whatever other deviverables you're trying to create. That's easy enough to do in XSLT.
One last suggestion: if you're serious about using markup that separates content and presentation (an attitude I heartily applaud) Slashdot is probably not the best place to get advice. You're inviting criticism and trolls from people who think that TeX, or even "Plain ASCII" is all anybody really needs. Try some of the XML forums, like XML doc
...convince me about the middle ages were a time when tech was taken seriously.
When you put it like that, it's impossible to view the middle ages as anything but a regression in human progress. But when you do put it like that, you're reducing 1,000 years to a simplistic idea. That's a lot of history. Consider how much change the Western world has gone through in just the last couple of centuries, and how many different attitudes there were towards these changes.
The right way to think about the middle ages is as a long period of history shared by a many diverse peoples. Their scientific and technological accomplishments may seem puny by our standards, but they were crucial to human progress. Improved crop rotation, use of wind and water power, the beginnings of chemistry... it's a long list.
You want sources? Well, I'm reading Western Europe in the Middle Ages, by Joseph Strayer. This book argues a lot of the things I just said, but it's not primarily about science or technology. I think you'll find the arguments I just made in any history of the middle ages written in the last 20 years. I mean serious history, not the watered-down nonsense they put in standard secondary-school textbooks.
That only works as long as you don't have to compete with another country that uses more modern methods. The last major power to abandon slavery discovered this the hard way.
The party line in all the history books I've read is that the Romans had water mill tech, but it only accounted for a tiny portion of their flour production. The Roman economy was based on plentiful slave labor, so finding way to do things with fewer people (in this case, hand-powered versus water-powered mills) was not a big priority.
If you know of references that rebut the standard historical theory (wouldn't be the first time), please post links or titles. I'd want to read them
Anyway, it's my understanding that water mills began serious development during the "Middle Ages". Modern Western culture is descended from the great cultural renaissance of the 15th century, and we've inherited their prejudice against the "Middle Ages", that 1000-year period after the fall of Rome where Western progress supposedly ground to a halt. But this period was when people started playing with technology seriously, and thinking about ways to use it to make life easier -- and to get rich. In short, it was the period that gave birth to the techno-geek!
If you're a Sun zealot who believes that everything relating to Microsoft is unclean, then yeah, Sun debased itself for a few bucks. But if you're a Sun stockholder or customer who's tired of the way Sun wastes its energies fighting wars that Microsoft won years ago, it's Sun's management finally facing reality.
Slashdot Mirror
...would seem to be a major survival skill at many corporate offices.
I'm convinced that some companies just have a dysfunctional corporate culture that's immune to real reform. Their only hope is that things get so bad that all the top idiots lose their jobs -- and they're very, very lucky in choosing their new management. (That's basically what saved IBM.) But AT&T's so far gone, not even a total shakeout can save them.
But vendors don't sell kernels and libraries. They sell complete systems. Getting all the pieces to interoperate would be like insisting that all the car companies sell cars that use each others parts. In both OSs and cars, it's technical feasible, it would very nice for users, it would lower the cost of the technology drastically -- and the vendors have no incentive to support it.
I suppose if free/open software ever took over the marketplace, this kind of interoperability would happen all by itself. But I don't see that happening any time soon.
Obviously the "Windows only" thing at Yahoo is just to avoid hiring tech support people for other platforms.
That's the first intelligent suggestion I've heard in this discussion. (Did anybody else hear me when I said I'd checked all start-on-boot lists?) But I think I'll let things stand, since this is only an issue when I need to reboot. I just hate not knowing exactly where this trojan is hiding!
The way you deal with tracking cookies is to configure your browser not to use third-party cookies, or (if you're totally paranoid) not use cookies at all. But whether you use cookies in your browser or not, having an adware program scan for them accomplishes nothing. All the scanner can do is remove the cookies after they've already done their damage.
Plus some spyware scanners flag any kind of push technology as spyware. The theory is that vendors can use push software to force you to download stuff. Well duh -- any network-aware software runs that risk.
Spyware has gotten so bad I never download closed-source software except from certain extremely reputable sources. And even so (I'm ashamed to admit) there's a bit of spyware that I can't seem to track down. Fortunately it only runs when I reboot (no it's not in any startup lists) and all it does is re-install a program called "readme shim.exe" (yes, that's a blank in the name) which itself is just a stealth spyware downloader. Fortunately, I can simply terminate "readme shim.exe", and not worry about it until I have to reboot (I hibernate when I'm not using the machine). No point in deleting the file -- it'll just come back. Scary that spyware vendors can get that clever!
I can't remember all the different search engines Yahoo has tried. But if you want to know which one they're using currently, just run the same search on Yahoo and Google.
This is why we need to do away with the funny mod -- to stop encouraging all these lame Monty Python, Simpsons, and Zero Wing references!
And so what? Everybody knows the Pentium is designed for backward-compatibility, not performance. Searching for better benchmarks to prove this fact is beating a dead horse.
Except you still need a hub. Maybe you have an extra one lying around, but if you don't, you have to buy one. And if you're gonna do that, might as well spend an extra $10 and get a router. Which uses even less power than an old laptop.
We're talking about two different things called "Yahoo" here. The first thing is the original Yahoo web directory. Which is totally useless, 'cause it's just not possible to track the web with any kind of manually-maintained system. So Yahoo the Web Directory lasted only long enough to attract the venture capital they needed to become Yahoo the Portal. And a Yahoo search is just a rebranded Google search.
The Mac-versus-PC performance debate has always been kind of pointless. People buy Macs because they like them, or because they think they're more usable, not because they care about the architectural superiority of the PowerPC chip. People buy PCs because they're cheaper, or because they need low-level compatibility, not because they have a misguided love of Intel technology.
The issue is particularly irrelevent for people who aren't performance conscious. A 1Ghz PC may have a lot less computing power than a 1Ghz Mac, but it still has a lot more than most people need.
Agreed, the argument is outrageous. Doesn't mean it's not constitutionally valid.
Groff and troff do a very poor job of separating presentation from content. Even worse than TeX. Which may not matter to you, but does matter to the person asking the question.
This is another case of people fastening on a particular technology's capability to be abused. What people just don't get is that it's not a matter of tech, but who controls it.
Another approach is simply to define your own markup language. Since your needs are simple, you probably don't need to validate your documents, so an informal description of a well-formed XML document is all the design you need to do. You'll also need to write transform software that creates HTML or whatever other deviverables you're trying to create. That's easy enough to do in XSLT.
One last suggestion: if you're serious about using markup that separates content and presentation (an attitude I heartily applaud) Slashdot is probably not the best place to get advice. You're inviting criticism and trolls from people who think that TeX, or even "Plain ASCII" is all anybody really needs. Try some of the XML forums, like XML doc
Irony is not always funny. It certainly wasn't funny to African-Americans.
That's the authoritative labelling of the Ages? By the Age Certification Agency?
The right way to think about the middle ages is as a long period of history shared by a many diverse peoples. Their scientific and technological accomplishments may seem puny by our standards, but they were crucial to human progress. Improved crop rotation, use of wind and water power, the beginnings of chemistry... it's a long list.
You want sources? Well, I'm reading Western Europe in the Middle Ages, by Joseph Strayer. This book argues a lot of the things I just said, but it's not primarily about science or technology. I think you'll find the arguments I just made in any history of the middle ages written in the last 20 years. I mean serious history, not the watered-down nonsense they put in standard secondary-school textbooks.
That only works as long as you don't have to compete with another country that uses more modern methods. The last major power to abandon slavery discovered this the hard way.
In theory, yes, the local power company often has to buy your surplus. In practice, though, it's often less simple.
If you know of references that rebut the standard historical theory (wouldn't be the first time), please post links or titles. I'd want to read them
Anyway, it's my understanding that water mills began serious development during the "Middle Ages". Modern Western culture is descended from the great cultural renaissance of the 15th century, and we've inherited their prejudice against the "Middle Ages", that 1000-year period after the fall of Rome where Western progress supposedly ground to a halt. But this period was when people started playing with technology seriously, and thinking about ways to use it to make life easier -- and to get rich. In short, it was the period that gave birth to the techno-geek!
If you're a Sun zealot who believes that everything relating to Microsoft is unclean, then yeah, Sun debased itself for a few bucks. But if you're a Sun stockholder or customer who's tired of the way Sun wastes its energies fighting wars that Microsoft won years ago, it's Sun's management finally facing reality.