Gather round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun,
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience.
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown.
"Ha, Nazi Schmazi," says Wernher von Braun.
Don't say that he's hypocritical,
Say rather that he's apolitical.
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown,
But some think our attitude
Should be one of gratitude,
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun.
You too may be a big hero,
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero.
"In German oder English I know how to count down,
Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
-- Tom Lehrer
...the bandwidth and infrastructure costs of transmitting and storing spam. Which you pay for in increased ISP/network fees or expenses. This is absolutely the biggest cost center for spam.
Which points up the weakness of the Internet which spam exploits. The Internet consists of a bunch of privately-owned networks that allow each other access on the assumption that people on one network won't abuse the resources of another. This assumption has been weakened over the years, but is still a fundamental of Internet architecture. As long as we assume that all users will be good citizens, we're going to have spammers, script kiddies, various kinds of griefers, and all the rest.
Very true. People used to complain that the Newton was too big to fit in your pocket. I would have liked it better if it had been just a little bigger.
Except that AOL didn't pay for TW with money. They paid for it with stock. AOL stock was worth a lot, but only based on promises of future profits. That dream is gone, and a lot of TW shareholders and execs are not happy. And that's why Case is gone.
The capacity of Mozilla true believers for hubristic fantasy never ceases to amaze me. Never mind that market share for Mozilla/Netscape has shrunk to almost nothing. Or that the Gecko development effort has been floundering for years. Now AOL has ended all Gecko development, and you're still talking about winning the browser wars! Unreal.
Yeah, I know, the "Free Software" community will keep Mozilla alive. Except where have they been up till now? Mozilla has been open-source for five years, and still almost all development has been done by Netscape employees.
Face it, Mozilla is dead. It's not the standard browser anywhere, except for a few zealots and the small number of people who do everything on Solaris or Irix. Not even Apple backs it.
Mind you, I'm not happy about this. I hate Microsoft being able to ignore web standards. I hate that you can only use SVG in plugin-based "objects". But fighting battles that were lost years ago is not going to change any of this.
Maybe, and I say maybe there is hope for the kHTML engine, which is the basis of Sonqueror and Safari. I've always like this engine, even when it was new and buggy. It's small, it's fast, and every time I look at it, it's drastically better.
I very much doubt if Internet Explorer will ever lose its supremacy. But if you just can't tolerate this, forget the bloated Gecko engine and start thinking about a Windows port of kHTML.
Isn't XP pretty good at resizing partitions? If not, there's always Partition Magic. Though if you don't mind the extra expense, running Linux and Windows side by side is a lot handier than dual booting.
I saw a TC1000 in a store, and totally fell in love with the physical design: it's a tablet and a laptop with an oversized swivel screen. But I was put off by the Crusoe processor. I had a Sony sub-laptop that used it, and there was a nasty delay starting new apps. Didn't seem very economical of power either, though maybe you can blame that on Sony featuritis.
Here's a guy who seems to think his is worth at least $85. But it has an 8 GB hard drive which is probably worth 40 bucks by itself. Still, no bids.
This guy is selling WordPerfect for the NextStep. The bidding's already up to $20, with several days to go yet. That's more than you'd pay for a recent version of WordPerfect Office!
Also, the original Berners-Lee web browser was pretty lame, even for that time, given the graphical abilities of the platform and toolkit.
So I always figured, inasmuch as I've never even heard a rumor of somebody actually using it. But at least all the money he spent on the NeXT Cube wasn't wasted!
The company I work for is considering outfitting a couple hundred field-service technicians with tablets to replace the clipboards and printouts they use now.
Which is exactly how new products get cheaper. It's not a law of nature. At first the product costs "too much" for most people, but if it's got any good points, some people buy a bunch of them because they have a process that justifies the cost. When this happens enough times, you get economies of scale and the price starts going down.
Of course if nobody buys it, the initial production run gets remaindered and you can buy the product real cheap. But that's not really a good sign!
Uh, you didn't say TabletPCs were overpriced, you said that that will fail. Overpriced tech does sometimes succeed -- consider Rolls Royce, Bulova, and Think Geek.
Besides which, new tech is always more expensive than comparable old tech. I mean, if price is the only issue, I'll sell you a Thinkpad 770 for fifty bucks!
There it is in the corner of the bar,
I tried to run but I didnt get far
Those weird little men I'll blow 'em away,
I'll sell my mom for a chance to play
He's hooked, he's hooked, his brain is cooked!
He's hooked, he's hooked, his brain is cooked!
Yes, FTP always works. But maybe you noticed that it's a pain to use? Even if you're not into GUIs, don't you prefer having one set of file manipulation commands that work with both local and network drives?
In my last job, I had a Win2K box and a Linux box, and both were on a Novell network. I did manage three-way communication without too much trouble. Windows-to-Netware has standard client software of course. Window-to-Linux was pretty easy, once I figured out how to configure Samba, though that figuring-out took longer than it should have.
Linux-to-Windows and Linux-to-Netware was quite a bit harder. The SMB and Netware clients that come with most Linux distros are pretty good, but the most obvious and well-documented way to set them up is an ugly kludge where you initialize the clients in a hand-rolled script. I insisted on figuring out how to do it "correctly" by editing the network config files. Took too much time, and I never got it working exactly right. But it was servicable.
I don't remember most of what I did, but I do have an important hint: on Win2K you almost always want to map a share to a drive, rather than accessing the share directly. Very slow otherwise. I think XP is a little better this way.
I haven't worked a lot with Macs, but from what I've seen, they're particulary good with file sharing.
Why are you so sure the tablet PC is doomed? It's just a slight evolution of the laptop concept -- and laptops are pretty popular. Sure tablets are overhyped and most of the "features" are useless, but that's true of a lot of products. Doesn't mean the basic idea isn't sound.
I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I can recline on my couch and surf the web or read an ebook with the same ease I now read a paperback. Yeah, you can do that with a laptop, but it's awkward. You don't always need a keyboard.
Bad:
Not grading them on their sources "Bob's Website of SuperFun Stats says that..."
This is a particularly important point. Some teachers who don't like the web as a research tool point to all the web sites with a conspicuous bias. But fact is that all sources have biases. It's just that the bias is a little less conspicuous in the Enclyclopedia Britannica than it is in, say, the Green Nazi web site.
That's one of the most exciting things about the web. When I was in K-12, it always bothered me to see my classmates accept everything they found in standard reference works as the purest gospel. Nobody recognized that dictionaries and encyclopedias are written by fallible humans, subject to peer and political pressure, cultural bias, and a permanent tendency to oversimplify. When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I envy them a lot
Your argument makes a lot of sense. Still, any geek can't help but be aware that Japan seems to get kewl technology long before it comes to the U.S. -- if it comes at all.
I don't follow Japanese affairs much, but I'm pretty sure that monster insurance is a secondary concern, at best. More basic expenses, like rent and food seem to be more of an issue.
It isn't so much lack of support (NTFS is actually pretty good with metadata) as the old command-line mentality that sticks with an ancient method of identifying file types out of pure inertia. You don't have to be a Mac or Be person (I'm neither) to wish for a more reliable and less ambiguous method of typing files. But how are you going to get all those Windows "Power Users" to change? Sure, extensions are error prone. And its a pain when two applications seize the same extension. (Even different Microsoft applications do this!) And newbies are always getting in trouble with them. But extensions are easy to understand. Case closed, alas.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't the actor, it's the lawman. Jeez, Slashdotters are so ignorant!
That would make sense if all spam were identified as such. Then people could choose to receive it (????) or not.
Which points up the weakness of the Internet which spam exploits. The Internet consists of a bunch of privately-owned networks that allow each other access on the assumption that people on one network won't abuse the resources of another. This assumption has been weakened over the years, but is still a fundamental of Internet architecture. As long as we assume that all users will be good citizens, we're going to have spammers, script kiddies, various kinds of griefers, and all the rest.
Very true. People used to complain that the Newton was too big to fit in your pocket. I would have liked it better if it had been just a little bigger.
Except that AOL didn't pay for TW with money. They paid for it with stock. AOL stock was worth a lot, but only based on promises of future profits. That dream is gone, and a lot of TW shareholders and execs are not happy. And that's why Case is gone.
Yeah, I know, the "Free Software" community will keep Mozilla alive. Except where have they been up till now? Mozilla has been open-source for five years, and still almost all development has been done by Netscape employees.
Face it, Mozilla is dead. It's not the standard browser anywhere, except for a few zealots and the small number of people who do everything on Solaris or Irix. Not even Apple backs it.
Mind you, I'm not happy about this. I hate Microsoft being able to ignore web standards. I hate that you can only use SVG in plugin-based "objects". But fighting battles that were lost years ago is not going to change any of this.
Maybe, and I say maybe there is hope for the kHTML engine, which is the basis of Sonqueror and Safari. I've always like this engine, even when it was new and buggy. It's small, it's fast, and every time I look at it, it's drastically better.
I very much doubt if Internet Explorer will ever lose its supremacy. But if you just can't tolerate this, forget the bloated Gecko engine and start thinking about a Windows port of kHTML.
Of course it doesn't include shipping. "Shipping and handling" is where the profit margin is!
Do you then try to explain to them why their sources are bad, or do you just wallow in your comfortable superiority?
I saw a TC1000 in a store, and totally fell in love with the physical design: it's a tablet and a laptop with an oversized swivel screen. But I was put off by the Crusoe processor. I had a Sony sub-laptop that used it, and there was a nasty delay starting new apps. Didn't seem very economical of power either, though maybe you can blame that on Sony featuritis.
Yeah, I've used WordPerfect. But it's had an upgrade or two since this version came out!
This guy is selling WordPerfect for the NextStep. The bidding's already up to $20, with several days to go yet. That's more than you'd pay for a recent version of WordPerfect Office!
Somehow I can't imagine doom on anything except a PC! But Tim Berners-Lee did write a particularly useless piece of software in order to justify the money he'd spent on a NeXT Cube.
Of course if nobody buys it, the initial production run gets remaindered and you can buy the product real cheap. But that's not really a good sign!
Besides which, new tech is always more expensive than comparable old tech. I mean, if price is the only issue, I'll sell you a Thinkpad 770 for fifty bucks!
Yes, FTP always works. But maybe you noticed that it's a pain to use? Even if you're not into GUIs, don't you prefer having one set of file manipulation commands that work with both local and network drives?
Linux-to-Windows and Linux-to-Netware was quite a bit harder. The SMB and Netware clients that come with most Linux distros are pretty good, but the most obvious and well-documented way to set them up is an ugly kludge where you initialize the clients in a hand-rolled script. I insisted on figuring out how to do it "correctly" by editing the network config files. Took too much time, and I never got it working exactly right. But it was servicable.
I don't remember most of what I did, but I do have an important hint: on Win2K you almost always want to map a share to a drive, rather than accessing the share directly. Very slow otherwise. I think XP is a little better this way.
I haven't worked a lot with Macs, but from what I've seen, they're particulary good with file sharing.
I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I can recline on my couch and surf the web or read an ebook with the same ease I now read a paperback. Yeah, you can do that with a laptop, but it's awkward. You don't always need a keyboard.
That's one of the most exciting things about the web. When I was in K-12, it always bothered me to see my classmates accept everything they found in standard reference works as the purest gospel. Nobody recognized that dictionaries and encyclopedias are written by fallible humans, subject to peer and political pressure, cultural bias, and a permanent tendency to oversimplify. When I see kids educating themselves via the discordant voices of the web, I envy them a lot
Your argument makes a lot of sense. Still, any geek can't help but be aware that Japan seems to get kewl technology long before it comes to the U.S. -- if it comes at all.
I don't follow Japanese affairs much, but I'm pretty sure that monster insurance is a secondary concern, at best. More basic expenses, like rent and food seem to be more of an issue.
Everybody's a fucking comedian. Rob, can we get rid of the damn "funny" mod already???!!!
It isn't so much lack of support (NTFS is actually pretty good with metadata) as the old command-line mentality that sticks with an ancient method of identifying file types out of pure inertia. You don't have to be a Mac or Be person (I'm neither) to wish for a more reliable and less ambiguous method of typing files. But how are you going to get all those Windows "Power Users" to change? Sure, extensions are error prone. And its a pain when two applications seize the same extension. (Even different Microsoft applications do this!) And newbies are always getting in trouble with them. But extensions are easy to understand. Case closed, alas.