The English did nothing to help the them during this time.
I seem to recall that the Queen donated 10 pounds to Irish Famine Relief. Of course, that was also how much she gave to her favorite animal shelter...
Your point is well-taken, but it has some uncomfortable consequences. Consider that most people on this planet don't get enough to eat. They're not as badly off as the potato-dependent Irish, but they're still pretty badly off. And, like the Irish, they're not starving because there's no food to feed them. They're starving because the economic deck is stacked against them.
There is a difference in that the Irish lived on the very land that could have fed them, and even grew the crops they weren't allowed to eat. But I'm not sure that's a difference with any moral value. It certainly isn't a difference that matters to the millions who hate and envy us for our full bellies.
You can have your fancy dot matrix. The only good way to print is an actual type element, like the one on my reliable old teletype machine.
I guess laser printers are OK, for letters and stuff. But they have to run Postscript. That way you don't need a word processor! You just hack out Postscript files (using ed, of course) and dump them to the printer.
Which just goes to show you that all this video stuff is just a gimmick that they sell to lazy people. Now if you'll excuse me, I got a program to finish. It takes longer without a compiler or assembler, but I like knowing exactly what's in my code!
I used to work with a guy who had just finished a Physics PhD. He hated Fortran, and had insisted on using C++ all through school. But he admitted to being the only person in his program who did so. Proof that programming languages are as about the community they serve as the technology they encompass.
From what I've heard, software companies hate selling Fortran compilers. You'll notice that Microsoft no longer has one. Not enough people use the language to make it worth the development and support costs.
So why are you still able to buy Fortran compilers? Because the people who use the language tend to be engineers (the physical kind) and scientists, and thus spend a lot of money on high-end computers. No Fortran compiler, not fat contracts for your Starfire and Origin boxes. Which is why Sun and SGI both sell Fortran. And whose the leading vendor of Fortran for the Itanium? Good guess.
So is IBM trying to help Apple sell more Macs? Probably not. They'd make a little money from the extra CPU sales, but not enough to justify something like this. More likely they have this compiler to help them sell more high-performance PPC systems. As long as they have it, not that much extra effort to port it to the Mac.
Interesting, except no sane person buys LaCie stuff. The quality of their merchandise, their non-existant warantees, and their invisible tech support is, well, a lame joke.
You can make a Word document read-only. And you can make a PDF editable. Which I guess is a pretty tiny nit to pick, since nobody ever does.
People pass around Word documents because its what they know how to do. I know people who put even very short memos in Word files, then attach them to email to distribute them!
We've been talking about the paperless office for a couple of decades now, but we're actually further away from it than we've ever been -- PCs seem to create new kinds of paperwork. If we're ever going to change that, we need to get away from word processor formats (Word, FrameMaker, etc.) and page description languages (PDF, PostScript TeX) that simply reproduce the physical page on a computer screen. That means training people to change their way of thinking and stop thinking purely in terms of how a document looks. It's more imporant how a document is structured. And yeah, I'm talking the XML Party Line.
Oddly enough, Microsoft seems to be moving precisely to this model -- all the Office 2003 apps emphasize using XML to share information instead of the traditional RTF. When I went to the Office 2003 launch D&S show, one of the demos had a user writing a purchase order in MS Word. But the document wasn't DOC or RTF or even HTML -- it was an XML purchase order document type, defined in an XML Schema. Violations of the schema were flagged with those little squiggles, like for grammar and spelling errors.
This is cool because it allows people to migrate to XML document types without changing their tool set. Of course, you can't just sit down and create a random XML document -- an XML expert has to have designed the workflow, programmed the business logic, and defined the document types.
I have to wonder if Microsoft sees the full implications of this approach. I rather doubt it. Because eliminating the messiness of Microsoft proprietary formats also eliminates the need to standardize on Microsoft tools. Given a well-designed schema, that PO could have been written in any XML editor.
I especially don't think that Redmond has considered that schemas can describe ordinary word processor files too, provided only that the format is well-structured and well-documented. So if you were to just tell all your Word users to use a schema that defines the XML document type used by a competing product, then there's no longer any format-gap between the two products.
If these things happen, Microsoft's could blunder away from OS dominance in much the same way they blundered into it!
Cygwin takes some of the work out of making Unix stuff work on Windows, but it's still pretty hard.
Also, there are a lot of practical issues with X under Cygwin. It's flaky, and your X desktop runs in its own window. Windows users aren't going to be running a lot of X apps until support for X becomes more reliable and more integrated.
I don't want to just know who these guys are. I want to know how they do what they do. They're obviously doing something right. As I said, we need some Slashdot interviews.
I'm sure some of these guys are high profile. But they don't have enough exposure on Slashdot. They're all prime candidates for a Slashdot interview. I'm sure we could all learn something from them.
That's kind of inevitable. People, especially people in the mass media, like nice simple tags. Hence the story we had a couple days ago that described Tim Bray as "inventor of XML", a title Bray himself doesn't care for, but which makes it easier to remember who he is. But Bray didn't "lead" the XML effort, he was just conspicuous by his efforts to explain it.
I do consider ESR and RMS to be grossly overrated. They have accomplished things, but they're both too much in love with their own ideas, and too short on followthrough.
On the other hand, there's Linus Thorvald. His fame is largely accidental, but he seems to be smart and humble enough to see that. Individualism works much better for him, because he knows his limitations, and understands that intelligent people can disagree with him.
Heros can be useful, but their efforts don't scale. Hence the absence of heros is the huge Apache project -- which is really a collection of projects.
The implied question was rhetorical and humorous, but I feel the need to answer it. What Bray did was write some very useful annotations to the XML spec. They're sort of dated now, but they were damned useful when we were all running around asking each other WTF XML was. So Bray's name became synonmymous with XML for most people.
If anybody rates as TIoX, it has to be Jon Bosak, who was the first to understand the shortcomings of SGML, and managed to persuade the world at large that the XML effort was necessary. But then, Jon was also smart enough to see that he couldn't do it all himself, and drafted a bunch of people, including Bray, to help him. So he'd probably reject the title too.
You have to do more than read the article. You have to get past the mistaken assumption (made by "officials" quoted in the article, and not questioned by the article's authors) that a chance of a false positive for a group is the same as the chance of a false positive for each individual group member. Alas, most people don't know that much probablity theory.
If you have a tax situation of any complexity, using the right software makes financial difference. If all you've got is a W2 then you're probably OK using any of them.
If you have a tax situation of any complexity, you should consider hiring somebody to prepare your taxes. And I mean somebody with some serious training, not one of those H&R Block idiots. It won't pay for everybody, but if you miss a lot of legitimate deductions, not hiring a good preparer is false economy. And if you're self-employed, you shouldn't trust some piece of software to find all your deductions.
So why didn't you install Linux from the start? I'm guessing because they didn't want to make the change. And why did they finally make the change? Because of problems with NT. That's more or less what I said.
It's not just that they make good stuff. What impresses me (and makes me want to know more about them) is that they make so much good stuff. And so little bad stuff.
I very much doubt it. People who dislike IIS probably aren't fans of Windows either. If they have a choice, they'll run Apache under Linux or Unix. If they don't have a choice, it's probably because the system is a personal workstation or a workgroup server. Which don't figure into the Netcraft numbers.
I think it's the other way around -- people choose Apache so they don't have to run Windows. It's probably not a coincidence that 2003 was also the year of the Windows Security Patch.
This is redundant and offtopic, but I have to make the point again: Sections and Topics in Slashdot are an unholy mess. The list of topics is too long, has an obscene amount of overlap, has multiple topics for narrow areas of interest, and is generally illogical. It's never been clear to me what kind of subjects rate Sections and which ones have to settle for Topics.
Currently, the T&S setups has the following purposes/effects/unintended consquences:
Sections hold section-only stories that the editors think aren't of general interest. (So there's no really good reason to put general-interest Apache stories in the Apache section.)
Topics associate stories with icons (I have to admit that the icons are really good).
Since each section has its own second-level domain, Googling Slashdot is slightly more tricky.
The topic icons link to lists of topic stories, which provide the illusion of a drill-down feature. But since it's never obvious which topic a story belongs to, this is just plain useless.
We need to a series -- a long series -- of Slashdot interviews with key Apache people. I mean, look at all the stuff they're into. And the list doesn't seem to have any vaporware or bogged-down projects -- which is damned remarkable in the Open Source community, where people tend to be big on ideas and short on followthrough. Let's get these people under the microscope and find out what they're doing right!
Seriously though, we all know that you can use boot a PC from an old MS-DOS diskette. But it's hardly the easiest way to do it. It means totally shutting down whatever you were doing. Some of us just want to take a break from serious computing for a few minutes. So being able to quickly fire up and shut down a game environment is darned handy. Even if you don't have a game-hating boss hanging over your shoulder!
Very impressive bit of software. Runs VGA programs in a window, something Microsoft never figured out how to do. Does a great job of emulating old sound cards. But it's a bit scary to see it gobble up more than half the cycles on my 1 GHz machine when I'm playing Sword of the Samurai!
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is well-taken, but it has some uncomfortable consequences. Consider that most people on this planet don't get enough to eat. They're not as badly off as the potato-dependent Irish, but they're still pretty badly off. And, like the Irish, they're not starving because there's no food to feed them. They're starving because the economic deck is stacked against them.
There is a difference in that the Irish lived on the very land that could have fed them, and even grew the crops they weren't allowed to eat. But I'm not sure that's a difference with any moral value. It certainly isn't a difference that matters to the millions who hate and envy us for our full bellies.
I guess laser printers are OK, for letters and stuff. But they have to run Postscript. That way you don't need a word processor! You just hack out Postscript files (using ed, of course) and dump them to the printer.
Which just goes to show you that all this video stuff is just a gimmick that they sell to lazy people. Now if you'll excuse me, I got a program to finish. It takes longer without a compiler or assembler, but I like knowing exactly what's in my code!
I used to work with a guy who had just finished a Physics PhD. He hated Fortran, and had insisted on using C++ all through school. But he admitted to being the only person in his program who did so. Proof that programming languages are as about the community they serve as the technology they encompass.
So why are you still able to buy Fortran compilers? Because the people who use the language tend to be engineers (the physical kind) and scientists, and thus spend a lot of money on high-end computers. No Fortran compiler, not fat contracts for your Starfire and Origin boxes. Which is why Sun and SGI both sell Fortran. And whose the leading vendor of Fortran for the Itanium? Good guess.
So is IBM trying to help Apple sell more Macs? Probably not. They'd make a little money from the extra CPU sales, but not enough to justify something like this. More likely they have this compiler to help them sell more high-performance PPC systems. As long as they have it, not that much extra effort to port it to the Mac.
All right, I lied.
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So it's a good TV and a lousy monitor. Weren't we talking about monitors?
People pass around Word documents because its what they know how to do. I know people who put even very short memos in Word files, then attach them to email to distribute them!
We've been talking about the paperless office for a couple of decades now, but we're actually further away from it than we've ever been -- PCs seem to create new kinds of paperwork. If we're ever going to change that, we need to get away from word processor formats (Word, FrameMaker, etc.) and page description languages (PDF, PostScript TeX) that simply reproduce the physical page on a computer screen. That means training people to change their way of thinking and stop thinking purely in terms of how a document looks. It's more imporant how a document is structured. And yeah, I'm talking the XML Party Line.
Oddly enough, Microsoft seems to be moving precisely to this model -- all the Office 2003 apps emphasize using XML to share information instead of the traditional RTF. When I went to the Office 2003 launch D&S show, one of the demos had a user writing a purchase order in MS Word. But the document wasn't DOC or RTF or even HTML -- it was an XML purchase order document type, defined in an XML Schema. Violations of the schema were flagged with those little squiggles, like for grammar and spelling errors.
This is cool because it allows people to migrate to XML document types without changing their tool set. Of course, you can't just sit down and create a random XML document -- an XML expert has to have designed the workflow, programmed the business logic, and defined the document types.
I have to wonder if Microsoft sees the full implications of this approach. I rather doubt it. Because eliminating the messiness of Microsoft proprietary formats also eliminates the need to standardize on Microsoft tools. Given a well-designed schema, that PO could have been written in any XML editor.
I especially don't think that Redmond has considered that schemas can describe ordinary word processor files too, provided only that the format is well-structured and well-documented. So if you were to just tell all your Word users to use a schema that defines the XML document type used by a competing product, then there's no longer any format-gap between the two products.
If these things happen, Microsoft's could blunder away from OS dominance in much the same way they blundered into it!
Also, there are a lot of practical issues with X under Cygwin. It's flaky, and your X desktop runs in its own window. Windows users aren't going to be running a lot of X apps until support for X becomes more reliable and more integrated.
To each his own!
I don't want to just know who these guys are. I want to know how they do what they do. They're obviously doing something right. As I said, we need some Slashdot interviews.
I'm sure some of these guys are high profile. But they don't have enough exposure on Slashdot. They're all prime candidates for a Slashdot interview. I'm sure we could all learn something from them.
If by "writing and philosophizing" you mean spewing incoherent nonsense that no intelligent person should take seriously, than I agree.
I do consider ESR and RMS to be grossly overrated. They have accomplished things, but they're both too much in love with their own ideas, and too short on followthrough.
On the other hand, there's Linus Thorvald. His fame is largely accidental, but he seems to be smart and humble enough to see that. Individualism works much better for him, because he knows his limitations, and understands that intelligent people can disagree with him.
Heros can be useful, but their efforts don't scale. Hence the absence of heros is the huge Apache project -- which is really a collection of projects.
If anybody rates as TIoX, it has to be Jon Bosak, who was the first to understand the shortcomings of SGML, and managed to persuade the world at large that the XML effort was necessary. But then, Jon was also smart enough to see that he couldn't do it all himself, and drafted a bunch of people, including Bray, to help him. So he'd probably reject the title too.
You have to do more than read the article. You have to get past the mistaken assumption (made by "officials" quoted in the article, and not questioned by the article's authors) that a chance of a false positive for a group is the same as the chance of a false positive for each individual group member. Alas, most people don't know that much probablity theory.
So why didn't you install Linux from the start? I'm guessing because they didn't want to make the change. And why did they finally make the change? Because of problems with NT. That's more or less what I said.
Yes, I know that. That comes under "Making the site harder to search".
It's not just that they make good stuff. What impresses me (and makes me want to know more about them) is that they make so much good stuff. And so little bad stuff.
I think it's the other way around -- people choose Apache so they don't have to run Windows. It's probably not a coincidence that 2003 was also the year of the Windows Security Patch.
Currently, the T&S setups has the following purposes/effects/unintended consquences:
We need to a series -- a long series -- of Slashdot interviews with key Apache people. I mean, look at all the stuff they're into. And the list doesn't seem to have any vaporware or bogged-down projects -- which is damned remarkable in the Open Source community, where people tend to be big on ideas and short on followthrough. Let's get these people under the microscope and find out what they're doing right!
Seriously though, we all know that you can use boot a PC from an old MS-DOS diskette. But it's hardly the easiest way to do it. It means totally shutting down whatever you were doing. Some of us just want to take a break from serious computing for a few minutes. So being able to quickly fire up and shut down a game environment is darned handy. Even if you don't have a game-hating boss hanging over your shoulder!
Very impressive bit of software. Runs VGA programs in a window, something Microsoft never figured out how to do. Does a great job of emulating old sound cards. But it's a bit scary to see it gobble up more than half the cycles on my 1 GHz machine when I'm playing Sword of the Samurai!