But what's wrong with having web browsers incorporate a read-only history of the last 100 sites visited? This doesn't place a burden on ISPs or any other large entity, and no speech is being restricted. Want to surf porn? Go right ahead! But if you're a kid, keep in mind that your click trail is being recorded. It doesn't pre-emptively stop children from viewing "bad things" (like Slashdot trolls) but it does give parents a tool to help raise their children.
What's wrong with it is that it is impossible. What are you going to do, mandate that every computer come with a CD-R burner and that there must be a disk in the drive while a browser is running, recording every site? Of course, severe penalties would exist for destroying this CD.
And how do you know which child was using the computer and looking at porno and hate sites? Do we mandate that every computer require multiple logins and any child sharing their login goes to juvie hall?
Please. Irresponsible parents can't even keep their kids from watching TV shows they don't approve of, and a TV is a relatively simple device. Getting these same yammerheads to understand secure computer logging (digital signatures and logins for everyone!) would be impossible. You'd have better luck teaching calculus to a pig.
The debt (not dept) grew to astronomical proportions under the presidency of a Mr. Ronald Wilson Reagan. He spent that money on the military and on cutting taxes for rich people. Despite claiming that he loved balanced budgets, he never submitted one to the House in 8 years. Despite claims by Reagan apologists that it was the evil Democrats in Congress who kept on loading up his budgets with those Commie programs you were talking about, several of the budgets which Congress sent back to him to sign were SMALLER than the budgets that Reagan sent to the House in the first place.
Now go and put back on your tin foil helmet. It'll keep out those evil Commie mind rays.
Well, if cell phones not only caused cancer, but contained other drugs which cause you to be chemically dependant on the cell phone, and the CEOs of the cell phone companies lied before Congress about the addictive properties of the carcinogen they were selling, then yeah.
hope that deprecation hasn't removed anything you need to run an older applet.
No part of the Java API has actually been REMOVED yet (except for the "private protected" visibility modifier, and I don't think that even survived beta). An applet written for JDK 1.0 will work just fine under JDK1.3.
I didn't know about the 22 VMs. Where did you learn that?
There were something like 22 different versions of Netscape for the different OSes (Solaris, AIX, Linux, Mac OS, Win16, Win32, xBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, I'm forgetting a few) and different hardware (Sparc, x86, MIPS, 68K, PowerPC, Alpha) Netscape ran on. There was no way to use any other JVM except for the Netscape one until the Java Plug-in.
Apple still gets complaints about the poor quality of Java under Netscape, even though Apple had NOTHING to do with the JVM, and has no way to fix it.
The world is not gonna communicate in pure java. Its not about one language, its all about interoperability across platforms. The Framework is pretty flexible so as to allow anyone to write the same framework for any platform and it wouldnt be too late before someone does.
Java's got pretty good CORBA support, and if you need to talk COM/DCOM, look at J/Integra from Linar Systems. It's hard to say that working in Java means being cut off from the rest of the programming world.
Suppose they wrote a VM that doesn't use a stack for the registers and everything else. Wouldn't it scream? Stacks are actually kinda slow...
The stack architecture in the JVM is an abstraction; when the JVM compiles to native code, values that should be in registers are in registers (and register coloring and other optimizations are probably easier to do with live profiling information). If you think of the stack as an infinite suppy of registers, then it starts to make more sense. Using a stack-based architecture lets the VM pretend it has infinite registers, and then the native compilation step does the Right Thing.
Here's a quick question for you: How many broken Java applets have you seen? How many have you seen that work perfectly? I almost never see Java applets that work perfectly (may be my JVM, but what good is the cross-platformness of Java if you can only get a working JVM for one platform?). In comparison to.NET, Java is a mature technology, yet it's still not very good. I'd rather see developers put their energy into making Java mature and bug-free, even if.NET is technically superior (not saying that it is).
The reasons for the lack of working Java applets are simple: hubris on the part of Netscape and malice on the part of MS. When Java first appeared, Netscape thought they could write 22(!) different JVMs and have them all stay compatible, and easily updated when Sun updated the Java spec. Didn't happen. Then MS tried to hijack Java and basically killed the idea of easy applet portability.
Now that there are teams specializing in Java for different platforms (Sun does Win32, Solaris, and Linux/x86, IBM does IBM operating systems, Win32, and Linux, Apple does Mac OS and Mac OS X, etc.), the problems will sort themselves out. But the damage that Netscape did with their crappy implementations and MS did with their deliberate wrench in the works won't be undone for a long time, if ever. Java on the client is not doing so well, outside of in-house corporate applications.
Meanwhile, server-side Java is very, very portable. So, just start working on server-side Java and you'll see how good JVMs can be;-)
So, there's a cross-platform (and cross-language) VM at the heart of.NET. That's all well and good; IBM was doing research on a Universal Virtual Machine back in the mid 90's.
But that cross-platform bit makes me wonder how any of this is an improvement over the JVM. Code for the JVM compiles to JVM bytecodes which are turned at runtime into native code. How and when this happens depends on the JVM (HotSpot, JIT, TowerJ, etc.), but the net result is the same.
People have ported other languages to the JVM (JPython being the best known example), and it's pretty easy to hook Java code up to DCOM (Take a look at J/Integra from Linar Systems). Granted, it sounds like MS added VM opcodes to.NET's VM to improve performance for languages besides C#, but that's just a nice addition.
So, can anyone give me an objective reason why this is better than the JVM? Or is.NET only MS' version of the JVM with C# being its version of Java?
Contrast that with installing the same drive on the Mac. The system does *not* have the drivers available. Heck, it doesn't even know the thing is a mountable volume.
Bzzzt! Would you care to try again?
I've got a USB Zip drive plugged into my Mac right now, with no Iomega drivers. Apple's USB support includes any device which supports the Mass Storage standard for USB (like the USB Zip). Iomega's Mac drivers are universally acknowledged to be awful and are thrown away by virtually everyone in favor of the built-in Mac OS driver.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
Well, let's see. I've got a USB Zip, PDA Adapter, two-button scroll mouse, GamePad Pro USB, USB Printer, a digital camera with a USB connection, and a USB hub to hook all this stuff up to my iMac (along with the Apple-supplied keyboard).
The hub, Zip, mouse and GamePad Pro work with the built-in Mac OS support (with the shareware USB Overdrive providing some EXCELLENT features for the mouse and gamepad to address some limitations in the Mac OS). The printer, PDA adapter, and camera came with the drivers to make them work.
If you plug an unrecognized USB device into a Mac running OS 9, it tells you, and prompts you to go online to download the correct driver. So Apple is just putting the drivers on-line rather than putting them on the CD. BFD, in this Internet-delivered age.
Gee, sounds like no 3rd-party support for my poor, isolated iMac. When I get my FireWire CD-RW, I'll probably just be hallucinating that it works as soon as I install Toast and plug in the drive.
Pardon my ignorance, but what do riots at a RATM concert have to do with the protests against the WTO?
The concert was held at a protest rally outside the Democratic National Convention. The same people who organized the WTO and World Bank protests in Seattle and Washington, DC organized this protest as well. Same people, same topic, different venue.
The removal of import controls and tariffs on the entry of cheap agricultural products has undermined indigenous subsistence agriculture and led to the bankruptcy of small-scale indigenous farmers.
BFD. Small-scale indigenous farming is a good way to starve a country to death. How is this for an idea? Rather than having children working the fields on the family farm, they could be in school, learning to read and write. They could probably find SOMETHING they make better than other people and sell it. Or they can keep pissing and moaning that 5,000 year old agriculture techniques are losing out to more efficient techniques that can feed more people using less land.
The destruction of the traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples because of the appropriation of their lands and resources, has resulted not only in the degradation of the environment but also in ill health, and high levels of stress manifested in alcoholism and suicides. This is a conclusion reached in the "International Consultation of the World Health Organization with Indigenous Peoples"
This is because losers like you would rather give people a handout (or keep them in an undeveloped state) so you feel better. Teaching them to fish is so much more useful than giving them fish to eat.
You could be working towards, oh, building roads, starting businesses, teaching computer skills, setting up civil organizations, but you'd rather bitch on the Internet and throw things at cops. It makes you feel morally superior, which is far more important than actually doing something.
I could go on with the rest of your quotes, but it's not worth the bother. But this one was just too much:
Aside from the reality of the severe effects of the WTO on the world, I really have to wonder how when people protest and are met by tear gas and billy clubs how the people doing the protesting are the 'fascists.'
Well, gee, when those shitheads at the riot following the Rage Against the Machine concert in LA started throwing concrete blocks at the police, they were lucky they only got tear gas. And considering that RATM is on SONY, for crying out loud, what kind of a corporate tool are they?
BTW, how many of those third-world children you want to save starved to death while you wrote your message? How much did your message help? That's what I thought.
I agree very much with your comments. Most people don't get what the luddite movement was all about. The folks protesting the WTO meetings held all over the world are much closer in spirit and tactics to the followers of Ned Ludd than most who profess luddism today.
No, the people protesting the WTO, World Bank, and IMF (and the Republican and Democrat Conventions) are spoiled, self-important, ignorant facsists. They don't believe that anyone they disagree with has the right to assembly or speech. They don't know how to actually accomplish any of the goals they claim (end world hunger, end poverty), but when someone else has a solution that has been proven effective (genetically engineered foods, capitalism, low trade barriers), they throw things at them. Given their way, they'd impose a system which is far more repressive and intrusive than anything we've seen yet, all for "our own benefit."
You are making the assumption that mechanized looms were somehow progressive or positive, which was clearly not the case. People lost their livelihoods and even their lives from the mass-displacement in the workforce perpetuated by mechanization. Remember, this was long before minimum wages, social welfare, and broad unionization, and every fewer person working the looms was one fewer person living to see tomorrow.
Mechanized looms were great inventions. They made clothes far more affordable. They freed people from having to spend time making their own clothes so they could do something else (do you want to make your own clothes? How good would they come out? Or do you want to pay someone to make your clothes by hand? Any idea what that costs? Figure in 200 years of inflation, and you'll see that the price hasn't changed...). Complaining that Joquard looms put people out of business is like complaining that the automobile put the horse-drawn buggy makers out of business.
If you don't like technology, move your sorry ass out to the middle of nowhere and try to live for month without it. No machine-made anything. No metal that you didn't personally extract from the ground and smelt. No food that you didn't grow. No dwelling that you didn't build yourself out of completely natural materials. I'd give you about 24 hours before you are back in your nice, comfortable house/apartment, under an electric blanket and sucking down Twinkies while watching TV. And, of course, logging on to the Internet to complain about how awful progress is.
Trying to explain to someone as dense and spoiled as you that specialization of labor (and mechanization of labor which resulted in specialization) is a good thing would be a waste of breath.
Most of the now-famous artists survived based on the patronage of rich people (the 16th century version of the record company;-). They made the things that rich people wanted. If they were extremely lucky, people would pay for the work the artist wanted to create.
And in the case of the musicians, many of the great ones around the time that recording technology was being developed didn't want to record their stuff, so the "competition" (other musicians) couldn't steal their style. Django Reinhardt's work is mostly lost because of this attitude.
Do they not teach math at the University of Kansas? Try looking up the distance to Mars next time you toss around your useless anecdotes.
By the way, Columbus was not the first European to reach America (but I wouldn't expect you to know that either).
OK, pop quiz:
1. How long did it take to get from Europe to North America?
2.How long will it take to get to Mars from Earth, using CURRENT rocket technology?
Answer those questions and you'll be quite surprised. Getting to Mars today is no harder than getting to America was 400 years ago (and a hell of a lot easier than it was when the Vikings did it 900 years ago).
I was just going to moderate your dumb ass down, but I thought I'd respond instead...
Remember the powerbook 1400 series? Or the powerbook 5300's that could catch fire when you charged the battery?
Sigh...
The 1400 was a _great_ computer. Still is, in fact. Highly upgradable, relatively light, good feature set. I just popped a wireless PC card into it, and now it's my WebPad for the times I don't need my iMac (or don't want to sit at a desk). With the upgraded CPU (you can buy a 400MHz G3 w/1MB of L2 cache for a PowerBook 1400 for $400. I put a 250MHz G3 into it two years ago.), it'll last me for years more.
The 5300 was poorly designed (the original system software was so crappy that Apple posted a complete set of replacement system software for the 5300 and 190 in January 1996, the plastics were cheap and tended to break on the hinge and trackpad button, and the AC adapter connector was so tiny that it would crack off), but don't blame the battery problems on Apple.
First of all, no 5300s in the field caught fire (unlike several Compaq laptop models where this did indeed happen).
Secondly, the problem was traced to some charging circuits from SONY that Apple had licensed. Apple tried to use a relatively new technology (Lithium-Ion batteries in 1995), and got bit by a bad supplier. C'est la vie.
The thing is, the people who actually ARE contributing to mozilla are still strongly tied to netscape (okay not all of 'em), and they have wide acceptance as a goal
If they've got "wide acceptance" as a goal, rolling their own Mail/IM/Calendar/etc client is a big mistake.
I want a browser that has Java2 support, up-to-date JavaScript/ECMAScript, CSS, XML, etc.
I want a browser that when I click a maito link, launches the mail program which has all of my mail and address book(Outlook Express on my home Mac and Outlook on my work PC).
I want to keep using my calendar software.
I want to keep using my AIM client.
I do NOT want a bloated piece of crap that refuses to play nicely with others. And here's a hint: neither does virtually anyone else.
Do you want to know the sick thing? The browser that most closely matches this description is IE.
Mozilla is dead. Luckily, the useful bits of the carcass are showing up in usable programs (yay open source). But I can't see any sort of situation where I'd switch (or my company would switch) to the entire Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 environment.
I think that it's pretty clear what will be done: SDMI _will_ be hacked and the secret of how it is done won't be given to RIAA. It'll be given to everyone.
Post the information on a server in a country which doesn't have an analogue to the DCMA, and let the wackiness ensue.
So Ford should stop advertising in Time because they are making Ford look bad?
Pardon the pun, but you're talking apples and oranges.
It's not that rumors make the Mac look bad. It's that rumors (a) kill current sales while everyone waits for "the next big thing" and (b) tells competitors what's coming up so they can pre-announce it.
Not that I don't think this is a dumb policy, but there is a method to the madness.
I don't think you're understanding it at all. Palm also bought AnyDay!, which keeps calendar/note pad/to do/phone lists on-line. It can sync with your palm today, so you can check your schedule (and others) over the WWW. Now they've bought a company which can use voice recognition to access that data.
No one is going to wire their Palm to their phone just in case they forget it.
the only people that care are the ones who are doing something illegal. if you were searching for "cute puppies" would you care if anyone knew? if you were searching for "how to grow your own pot" or "methlabs for dummies" you might get a bit more worried..
The problem is who defines "Illegal?" If you're in China and you search for "Falun Gong," do you want the secret police showing up at your door?
If you think that sort of thing couldn't happen in the Free World, try this example: What if you were searching for "DeCSS" in the good ol' US of A and visited a WWW site owned by some company which is associated with the MPAA? Wouldn't they like to know about that?
I support the Precautionary Principle:
"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof."
Oh, lord. You would have been against the invention of fire.
For 20 years, there was never a direct link between smoking and lung cancer.
Oh, horseshit.
It was public knowledge in the middle of the 20th century that smoking was dangerous to your health. In a Heinlein short story written in the 40's ("If This Goes On..."), there's a reference to smoking being bad for you (followed by a defense straight from the Tobacco industry's future playbook, where the character states it is his RIGHT to choose to smoke and kill himself if he wants to).
In fact, according to http://www.tobacco.org/History/Tobacco_History.htm l:
1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: John Hill performs perhaps first clinical study of tobacco effects, warns snuff users they are vulnerable to cancers of the nose.
17-freaking-61! Was that 20 years ago? How about this one?
1912: HEALTH: First strong connection made between lung cancer and smoking. Dr. I. Adler is the first to strongly suggest that lung cancer is related to smoking in a monograph.
It's been known for a VERY long time that smoking causes cancer. The reason for the mealy-mouthed warnings wasn't lack of proof, it was lack of willpower on the part of the government.
And, to get back on topic, if cell phones were even a hundredth as dangerous as tobacco, it would have been obvious LONG ago. For example, when there were relatively few cell phone users out there. It's pretty clear that they aren't.
MacOS 7 was like some sort of bad joke perpetrated by Apple on its customers. 8 was just strapping the OS up for a little more runtime. 9 is almost realistic, and X is where it's at.
I'd disagree pretty strongly about OS 7. It was a very nice upgrade from 6.0.x. The new Finder was leagues better than the old one. What happened was Apple started to lose focus on 7, and started working on various never-shipped next generation OSes. By the time 7.5 came out, there were all of 2 software engineers working on 7; the rest were working on Copland.
When Apple refocused on the old Mac OS, things got better. 7.6 was nice and stable on my PowerBook 1400, even though it left my 32-bit dirty SE/30 behind.
I'm not saying that I'm not drooling over OS X, but 7.0 wasn't quite a joke.
$50K a year is a bullshit job for a family of 4 in San Jose.
I don't think people who don't live in the Bay Area realize how bad things are out here.
A friend of mine who is a post-doc at Stanford found out that $50K/year qualifies you for SUBSIDIZED housing at Stanford. Being a lowly post-doc, my friend makes far less than $50K.
Subsidized housing, BTW, is around $1000/month for a one bed/one bath.
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What's wrong with it is that it is impossible. What are you going to do, mandate that every computer come with a CD-R burner and that there must be a disk in the drive while a browser is running, recording every site? Of course, severe penalties would exist for destroying this CD.
And how do you know which child was using the computer and looking at porno and hate sites? Do we mandate that every computer require multiple logins and any child sharing their login goes to juvie hall?
Please. Irresponsible parents can't even keep their kids from watching TV shows they don't approve of, and a TV is a relatively simple device. Getting these same yammerheads to understand secure computer logging (digital signatures and logins for everyone!) would be impossible. You'd have better luck teaching calculus to a pig.
-jon
The debt (not dept) grew to astronomical proportions under the presidency of a Mr. Ronald Wilson Reagan. He spent that money on the military and on cutting taxes for rich people. Despite claiming that he loved balanced budgets, he never submitted one to the House in 8 years. Despite claims by Reagan apologists that it was the evil Democrats in Congress who kept on loading up his budgets with those Commie programs you were talking about, several of the budgets which Congress sent back to him to sign were SMALLER than the budgets that Reagan sent to the House in the first place.
Now go and put back on your tin foil helmet. It'll keep out those evil Commie mind rays.
-jon
-jon
No part of the Java API has actually been REMOVED yet (except for the "private protected" visibility modifier, and I don't think that even survived beta). An applet written for JDK 1.0 will work just fine under JDK1.3.
I didn't know about the 22 VMs. Where did you learn that?
There were something like 22 different versions of Netscape for the different OSes (Solaris, AIX, Linux, Mac OS, Win16, Win32, xBSD, IRIX, HP-UX, I'm forgetting a few) and different hardware (Sparc, x86, MIPS, 68K, PowerPC, Alpha) Netscape ran on. There was no way to use any other JVM except for the Netscape one until the Java Plug-in.
Apple still gets complaints about the poor quality of Java under Netscape, even though Apple had NOTHING to do with the JVM, and has no way to fix it.
-jon
Java's got pretty good CORBA support, and if you need to talk COM/DCOM, look at J/Integra from Linar Systems. It's hard to say that working in Java means being cut off from the rest of the programming world.
-jon
The stack architecture in the JVM is an abstraction; when the JVM compiles to native code, values that should be in registers are in registers (and register coloring and other optimizations are probably easier to do with live profiling information). If you think of the stack as an infinite suppy of registers, then it starts to make more sense. Using a stack-based architecture lets the VM pretend it has infinite registers, and then the native compilation step does the Right Thing.
-jon
The reasons for the lack of working Java applets are simple: hubris on the part of Netscape and malice on the part of MS. When Java first appeared, Netscape thought they could write 22(!) different JVMs and have them all stay compatible, and easily updated when Sun updated the Java spec. Didn't happen. Then MS tried to hijack Java and basically killed the idea of easy applet portability.
Now that there are teams specializing in Java for different platforms (Sun does Win32, Solaris, and Linux/x86, IBM does IBM operating systems, Win32, and Linux, Apple does Mac OS and Mac OS X, etc.), the problems will sort themselves out. But the damage that Netscape did with their crappy implementations and MS did with their deliberate wrench in the works won't be undone for a long time, if ever. Java on the client is not doing so well, outside of in-house corporate applications.
Meanwhile, server-side Java is very, very portable. So, just start working on server-side Java and you'll see how good JVMs can be ;-)
-jon
But that cross-platform bit makes me wonder how any of this is an improvement over the JVM. Code for the JVM compiles to JVM bytecodes which are turned at runtime into native code. How and when this happens depends on the JVM (HotSpot, JIT, TowerJ, etc.), but the net result is the same.
People have ported other languages to the JVM (JPython being the best known example), and it's pretty easy to hook Java code up to DCOM (Take a look at J/Integra from Linar Systems). Granted, it sounds like MS added VM opcodes to .NET's VM to improve performance for languages besides C#, but that's just a nice addition.
So, can anyone give me an objective reason why this is better than the JVM? Or is .NET only MS' version of the JVM with C# being its version of Java?
-jon
Bzzzt! Would you care to try again?
I've got a USB Zip drive plugged into my Mac right now, with no Iomega drivers. Apple's USB support includes any device which supports the Mass Storage standard for USB (like the USB Zip). Iomega's Mac drivers are universally acknowledged to be awful and are thrown away by virtually everyone in favor of the built-in Mac OS driver.
Mac is more plug-and-play friendly, but *only* to its hardware. 3rd party hardware support is the same, if not worse, than on Wintel machines.
Well, let's see. I've got a USB Zip, PDA Adapter, two-button scroll mouse, GamePad Pro USB, USB Printer, a digital camera with a USB connection, and a USB hub to hook all this stuff up to my iMac (along with the Apple-supplied keyboard).
The hub, Zip, mouse and GamePad Pro work with the built-in Mac OS support (with the shareware USB Overdrive providing some EXCELLENT features for the mouse and gamepad to address some limitations in the Mac OS). The printer, PDA adapter, and camera came with the drivers to make them work.
If you plug an unrecognized USB device into a Mac running OS 9, it tells you, and prompts you to go online to download the correct driver. So Apple is just putting the drivers on-line rather than putting them on the CD. BFD, in this Internet-delivered age.
Gee, sounds like no 3rd-party support for my poor, isolated iMac. When I get my FireWire CD-RW, I'll probably just be hallucinating that it works as soon as I install Toast and plug in the drive.
-jon
The concert was held at a protest rally outside the Democratic National Convention. The same people who organized the WTO and World Bank protests in Seattle and Washington, DC organized this protest as well. Same people, same topic, different venue.
-jon
BFD. Small-scale indigenous farming is a good way to starve a country to death. How is this for an idea? Rather than having children working the fields on the family farm, they could be in school, learning to read and write. They could probably find SOMETHING they make better than other people and sell it. Or they can keep pissing and moaning that 5,000 year old agriculture techniques are losing out to more efficient techniques that can feed more people using less land.
The destruction of the traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples because of the appropriation of their lands and resources, has resulted not only in the degradation of the environment but also in ill health, and high levels of stress manifested in alcoholism and suicides. This is a conclusion reached in the "International Consultation of the World Health Organization with Indigenous Peoples"
This is because losers like you would rather give people a handout (or keep them in an undeveloped state) so you feel better. Teaching them to fish is so much more useful than giving them fish to eat.
You could be working towards, oh, building roads, starting businesses, teaching computer skills, setting up civil organizations, but you'd rather bitch on the Internet and throw things at cops. It makes you feel morally superior, which is far more important than actually doing something.
I could go on with the rest of your quotes, but it's not worth the bother. But this one was just too much:
Aside from the reality of the severe effects of the WTO on the world, I really have to wonder how when people protest and are met by tear gas and billy clubs how the people doing the protesting are the 'fascists.'
Well, gee, when those shitheads at the riot following the Rage Against the Machine concert in LA started throwing concrete blocks at the police, they were lucky they only got tear gas. And considering that RATM is on SONY, for crying out loud, what kind of a corporate tool are they?
BTW, how many of those third-world children you want to save starved to death while you wrote your message? How much did your message help? That's what I thought.
-jon
No, the people protesting the WTO, World Bank, and IMF (and the Republican and Democrat Conventions) are spoiled, self-important, ignorant facsists. They don't believe that anyone they disagree with has the right to assembly or speech. They don't know how to actually accomplish any of the goals they claim (end world hunger, end poverty), but when someone else has a solution that has been proven effective (genetically engineered foods, capitalism, low trade barriers), they throw things at them. Given their way, they'd impose a system which is far more repressive and intrusive than anything we've seen yet, all for "our own benefit."
-jon
Mechanized looms were great inventions. They made clothes far more affordable. They freed people from having to spend time making their own clothes so they could do something else (do you want to make your own clothes? How good would they come out? Or do you want to pay someone to make your clothes by hand? Any idea what that costs? Figure in 200 years of inflation, and you'll see that the price hasn't changed...). Complaining that Joquard looms put people out of business is like complaining that the automobile put the horse-drawn buggy makers out of business.
If you don't like technology, move your sorry ass out to the middle of nowhere and try to live for month without it. No machine-made anything. No metal that you didn't personally extract from the ground and smelt. No food that you didn't grow. No dwelling that you didn't build yourself out of completely natural materials. I'd give you about 24 hours before you are back in your nice, comfortable house/apartment, under an electric blanket and sucking down Twinkies while watching TV. And, of course, logging on to the Internet to complain about how awful progress is.
Trying to explain to someone as dense and spoiled as you that specialization of labor (and mechanization of labor which resulted in specialization) is a good thing would be a waste of breath.
-jon
And in the case of the musicians, many of the great ones around the time that recording technology was being developed didn't want to record their stuff, so the "competition" (other musicians) couldn't steal their style. Django Reinhardt's work is mostly lost because of this attitude.
-jon
By the way, Columbus was not the first European to reach America (but I wouldn't expect you to know that either).
OK, pop quiz:
1. How long did it take to get from Europe to North America?
2.How long will it take to get to Mars from Earth, using CURRENT rocket technology?
Answer those questions and you'll be quite surprised. Getting to Mars today is no harder than getting to America was 400 years ago (and a hell of a lot easier than it was when the Vikings did it 900 years ago).
-jon
Remember the powerbook 1400 series? Or the powerbook 5300's that could catch fire when you charged the battery?
Sigh...
The 1400 was a _great_ computer. Still is, in fact. Highly upgradable, relatively light, good feature set. I just popped a wireless PC card into it, and now it's my WebPad for the times I don't need my iMac (or don't want to sit at a desk). With the upgraded CPU (you can buy a 400MHz G3 w/1MB of L2 cache for a PowerBook 1400 for $400. I put a 250MHz G3 into it two years ago.), it'll last me for years more.
The 5300 was poorly designed (the original system software was so crappy that Apple posted a complete set of replacement system software for the 5300 and 190 in January 1996, the plastics were cheap and tended to break on the hinge and trackpad button, and the AC adapter connector was so tiny that it would crack off), but don't blame the battery problems on Apple.
First of all, no 5300s in the field caught fire (unlike several Compaq laptop models where this did indeed happen).
Secondly, the problem was traced to some charging circuits from SONY that Apple had licensed. Apple tried to use a relatively new technology (Lithium-Ion batteries in 1995), and got bit by a bad supplier. C'est la vie.
-jon
If they've got "wide acceptance" as a goal, rolling their own Mail/IM/Calendar/etc client is a big mistake.
I want a browser that has Java2 support, up-to-date JavaScript/ECMAScript, CSS, XML, etc.
I want a browser that when I click a maito link, launches the mail program which has all of my mail and address book(Outlook Express on my home Mac and Outlook on my work PC).
I want to keep using my calendar software.
I want to keep using my AIM client.
I do NOT want a bloated piece of crap that refuses to play nicely with others. And here's a hint: neither does virtually anyone else.
Do you want to know the sick thing? The browser that most closely matches this description is IE.
Mozilla is dead. Luckily, the useful bits of the carcass are showing up in usable programs (yay open source). But I can't see any sort of situation where I'd switch (or my company would switch) to the entire Mozilla/Netscape 6.0 environment.
-jon
Post the information on a server in a country which doesn't have an analogue to the DCMA, and let the wackiness ensue.
-jon
Pardon the pun, but you're talking apples and oranges.
It's not that rumors make the Mac look bad. It's that rumors (a) kill current sales while everyone waits for "the next big thing" and (b) tells competitors what's coming up so they can pre-announce it.
Not that I don't think this is a dumb policy, but there is a method to the madness.
-jon
No one is going to wire their Palm to their phone just in case they forget it.
-jon
The problem is who defines "Illegal?" If you're in China and you search for "Falun Gong," do you want the secret police showing up at your door?
If you think that sort of thing couldn't happen in the Free World, try this example: What if you were searching for "DeCSS" in the good ol' US of A and visited a WWW site owned by some company which is associated with the MPAA? Wouldn't they like to know about that?
-jon
Oh, lord. You would have been against the invention of fire.
-jon
Oh, horseshit.
It was public knowledge in the middle of the 20th century that smoking was dangerous to your health. In a Heinlein short story written in the 40's ("If This Goes On..."), there's a reference to smoking being bad for you (followed by a defense straight from the Tobacco industry's future playbook, where the character states it is his RIGHT to choose to smoke and kill himself if he wants to). In fact, according to http://www.tobacco.org/History/Tobacco_History.htm l:
1761: HEALTH: ENGLAND: John Hill performs perhaps first clinical study of tobacco effects, warns snuff users they are vulnerable to cancers of the nose.
17-freaking-61! Was that 20 years ago? How about this one?
1912: HEALTH: First strong connection made between lung cancer and smoking. Dr. I. Adler is the first to strongly suggest that lung cancer is related to smoking in a monograph.
It's been known for a VERY long time that smoking causes cancer. The reason for the mealy-mouthed warnings wasn't lack of proof, it was lack of willpower on the part of the government.
And, to get back on topic, if cell phones were even a hundredth as dangerous as tobacco, it would have been obvious LONG ago. For example, when there were relatively few cell phone users out there. It's pretty clear that they aren't.
-jon
I'd disagree pretty strongly about OS 7. It was a very nice upgrade from 6.0.x. The new Finder was leagues better than the old one. What happened was Apple started to lose focus on 7, and started working on various never-shipped next generation OSes. By the time 7.5 came out, there were all of 2 software engineers working on 7; the rest were working on Copland.
When Apple refocused on the old Mac OS, things got better. 7.6 was nice and stable on my PowerBook 1400, even though it left my 32-bit dirty SE/30 behind.
I'm not saying that I'm not drooling over OS X, but 7.0 wasn't quite a joke.
-jon
I don't think people who don't live in the Bay Area realize how bad things are out here.
A friend of mine who is a post-doc at Stanford found out that $50K/year qualifies you for SUBSIDIZED housing at Stanford. Being a lowly post-doc, my friend makes far less than $50K.
Subsidized housing, BTW, is around $1000/month for a one bed/one bath.
-jon