Consumer boycotts may not work on a mass scale, but B2B "boycotts" are still somewhat effective. Stigmatizing companies that did business in aparthied South Africa and Burma helped bring down those regimes. Also, the anti-sweatshop movement has been fairly successful in their efforts to pressure Universities and Colleges not to purchase gear from companies that use sweatshops.
Cultural relativism is a classic argument that repressive regimes use to try and exempt themselves from international human rights standards. The argument usually holds "social order" over the needs of the individual. How is this "social control" not political?
I can't wait until LinuxPPC starts using apt-get instead of RPM. Installing things that are off the beaten path often turns into a nightmare of tracking down current drivers, etc., some of which inevitably turn out not to run or compile on LinuxPPC. What a royal pain in the ass. Raise your glasses to architecture agnostic code!
In the spirit of the brilliant mind that gave us the title of the Episode 1, we propose the following working titles for Episode 2:
Revenge of the Phantom Menace
Bride of the Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace Returns
The Phantom Menace II
Son of the Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace and the Great Space Caper
The Phantom Menace... Again!
The Phantom Menace Goes to Japan
The Trouble with Alderon
The Phantom Menace Returns
Phantom Menaced
The Phantom Menace Goes Bananas
Curse of the Phantom Menace
A New Hope
The Phantom Menace on Vacation
The Phantom Menace Takes Manhattan
Still Smokin'
What's Up, Phantom Menace?
The Phantom Menace and the Planet of Doom
The Phantom Menace Goes to Camp
Meet The Phantom Menace
The Best Little Phantom Menace in Texas
The Bingo Long Travelling Phantom Menace
Smokey and the Phantom Menace
Bang the Phantom Menace Slowly
Nurse Phantom Menace
A.I.: Phantom Menace
Midnight Phantom Menace
Crouching Phantom, Hidden Menace
Hush Hush, Sweet Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace Got the Hookup
New Jack Phantom Menace
Daddy's Dyin', Who's Got the Phantom Menace?
The Man Who Would Be Phantom Menace
Who Is Phantom Menace And Why Is He Saying All Those
Things About Me?
O Phantom Menace, WHere Art Thou?
Who Framed The Phantom Menace?
Phantom Menace in Love
The Phantom Menace Who Loved Me
The Man in the Phantom Menace
The Neverending Phantom Menace
When We Were Phantom Menaces
The Sorrow and the Phantom Menace
Whatever Happened to Phantom Menace?
Phantom Menace's Choice
The French Lieutenant's Phantom Menace
Ali: Fear Eats the Phantom Menace
Don't Tell Mom the Phantom Menace is Dead
Stop or My Phantom Menace Will Shoot
I Never Sang for My Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace: Male Gigolo
Anna and the Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace, Interrupted
For love of The Phantom Menace
The Talented Mr. Phantom Menace
Don't Drink the Phantom Menace
The Discreet Charm of the Phantom Menace
Butch Cassidy and the Phatnom Menace
The Sweet Smell of Phantom Menace
One individual probably doesn't make much difference, but helping turn out a large number of people probably does. What if the Slashdot "community" ever got organized? It would be interesting if a consituency as large as Slashdot readers decided to vote as a bloc... like a union or say, the Cubans in Miami or the Hassidic community in New York City. To have the community endorse a candidate would be a prize to be vied. Imagine how seriously the candidates would take questions from geeks if they knew that the right answers, right promises, and a record of passing good, geek-friendly laws would guarantee hundreds of thousands of votes and a bit of soft money. And if they knew they would lose that if they crossed us.
Now just at to that a GNU PAC to lobby The Hill and we're in business.
In his foot note, the author even states, "The best known license for applying the open-source concept to other forms of expression besides computer code is the OPL." He does not explain why.
This is slightly off-topic, but I find that there is definitely a pattern of among Slashdot users who frequently take comments or proposals like this for declarations of fascist rule: "this what we should only be doing." Like the RMS vs. KDE/QT exchange. It was not what I would call a flamewar, but was interpreted as such by more than one user. I don't know what this phenomena is. Is it that certain Slashdot users lack a sense of proportion? Perspective? Or grant a kind of urgency to what they read? Are they extremely sensitive to alternative viewpoints? Or just disagreement? Surely discussion and debate are possible without resorting to flame.
Right on. That Nielson guy has some "law" that states that Web surfers spend most of their time on other sites. No disbuting that. Most users have come to expect that clicking on a logo at the top left corner of the page will take you back to the front, home page of the site. Other Web design conventions have also started to emerge -- like a colored navigation rail down the left side of the page or the Yahoo! style layout of information categories. Using layout conventions that are familiar to the user just makes good sense.
Personally, I much prefer the freelance life to full-time employment... that is "renting" my time to an employer rather than "being owned" as full-time staff or management.
One of the things I enjoy as a freelancer who does contract work is some semblance of ownership of my time. At least I get to choose who I sell it too.
Whenever I take a staff position, after many months I start to feel trapped, at the mercy of my situation.. like the job owns me. As a freelancer I at least have a menu of possibilities and there is always an end of the project in site. I could always go out and start my own company, too.
But then I have no illusions that this is a result of a peculiar time in a peculiar marketplace. I just happen to have a couple of skills that are in short supply in the particular place where I live and work. This does make my situation and future uncertain, but I'm still relatively young and am enjoying the flexibility it allows me right now.
Re:Did they buy the techs, or just the network?
on
Iridium Saved?
·
· Score: 1
Needless to say, this kind of wireless is the way to go in extremely remote places and places with extremely poor infrastructure like the developing countries.
A fine point. So then what do we need to grow trees on Mars? Are there enough nutrients in the soil? I guess there is a little matter of water...
Come to think of it, I seem to remember reading somewhere that most of the O2 on earth is produced not by trees, but by algae. Does this ring any bells for anyone? Maybe we need to start shooting algae bombs up to Mars to be cultivated into farms by little robots. Oh wait... algae needs water too...
What I really want to know is if we'll be able to write shell scripts (or perl!) to script Mac apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark XPress, or Final Cut.
Applescript is OK for some tasks, but not all apps respond to it and most have their own individual commands you have to discover.
It would be great if there were a standard library to interface with these things. Now imagine being able to run these apps via telnet, or a Web based interface...
It seems to me that the best way to fight bad law is not just with software and a license, but through political action.
RMS always seems to stop short. Maybe he doesn't see the use? Or maybe he's just not interested?
There's quite a bit on the GNU site about what's wrong with the legal system but almost nothing about how to change it. In a way, free software kind of side-steps the issue. Why change bad copyright law if you can just help write a patch for your own free software system?
There is political power in community, but not if the community only sticks to its own. Free software is about serving the public interest.
It's all well and good to identify the issues and express your moral outrage, but you really should also be talking to your elected representatives. I used to work with Amnesty International and I've seen high school kids help pass good laws at the state level. It can be done!
Everyone seems very aware that big money influences the hill to push through laws that protect commercial interests. Why not join the fight to regulate soft money? The GNU/geek community would find broad support among the general public.
There are sparks of activity around the nation with Linux users groups staging demos and protests against UCITA and the DMCA, but we need to be pro-active, not just reactive. Call up your rep.'s office and set up a meeting! Start a dialogue! Maybe someone needs start political action mini-HOWTO... Maybe I'll take a crack at it..
I bought this book and read through it. Good stuff, but Nielson is something of a crank -- always complaining, but short on actual advice. Many of his recommendations are dead on, but he just never has anything nice to say.
His own site is rather poorly designed, too. It just doesn't make sense to ONLY organize the archive of columns chronologically. Why not thematically? All those areas of text on the home page could be better separated and organized.
Also, though some of his columns cover some of the territory of the book, it's enlightening that a self-proclaimed "usability advocate" would fail to release this book online. His argument that books are better for "straight narratives" than Web sites doesn't wash. (Particularly given the numerous side-bars of the book.) He also claims the large number of screen shots "would have been difficult to present on the Web and preserve the ultra-fast response times I believe in." Maybe so, but I've never heard him acknowledge the business model: it's much easier to make a buck off of selling paper. There's nothing wrong with trying to earn a living, it's just the more you deny it the more your schtick looks like posturing and self-promotion.
I heard a funny story about this: the reason is computing power, the difference similar to the gulf between Playstaion 1 and 2. The science of modern stealth topology comes out of an old book by a Russian scientist who studied the effects of radar on simple polygons. The early designers of the stealth fighter used this book as their bible and created a computer simulation to generate the profile of the plane. The computer and program were very crude (by today's standards) and could only model a small number of primitive polygons.
Later versions of the software and hardware have become much more sophistiacted so we end up with profiles like that of the stealth bomber. Sleek and smooth.
Aside from the processor info, this article and doesn't really say much. Is it just to steal some of the spotlight from the PocketPC?
For its part, Palm says it will gain popularity through its design, which executives say is better and more stylish than the offerings from competitors.
It's always astounding how clueless executives can be. The cases are nice, but nothing special given the form factor of the many WinCE devices. I would argue that the popularity of the Palm is the relative ease of use of the OS, how easy it is for folks to write apps for it, and how cross-platform it is.
"I think we all know that the screen sizes suck, and that the drop-down menus are the road to hell," Yankowski said.
Yeah, so what is Palm going to do about it? Double the screen size? Replace drop-down menus with voice commands? *shudder*
...by the end of the year, all of the company's handhelds will be able to connect to the Internet.
So when should we see these? In 6 months?
Incidentally, I wonder about the use of Transmeta processors in these. Surely someone who reads Slashdot on the inside must know someone who's toying around..
This article "They Write the Right Stuff" appeared in the December 1996 issue of Fast Company. It paints an interesting picture of the requirements and culture of NASA's on-board shuttle programming team (circa 1996.)
The article's main trope pits the discipline and insanely controlled, methodical management of the team and its product against the stereotype of the undisciplined, unruly geeks pounding mountain dews and hammering out bug-riddled code at all hours.
I'm surprised that neither Palm nor Microsoft has added cellphone capability onto their devices. Palm announced wireless Web and/or Bluetooth will be part of the next generation of devices, but it seems to me the competition is not just from Microsoft, but from those Web surfing cell-phones. (Sorry, that Qualcomm frankenstein thing just doesn't cut it just yet.)
It won't be too long before the little PDA becomes yet another object of convergence: cellphone, voicemail, and wireless Web + address book, organizer stuff + fax + MP3 radio + games, games. (Plus IrDA and Bluetooth.) I hear in Japan they already have point-to-point video via their cell-phones.
Now just add extended battery life, a screaming processor, and Linux...
Slashdot Mirror
> 3d videos that you can see from every point of view
Maybe not, but I heard there were some hot and heavy DVD's with this little feature.
Not that I'd know or anything..
Consumer boycotts may not work on a mass scale, but B2B "boycotts" are still somewhat effective. Stigmatizing companies that did business in aparthied South Africa and Burma helped bring down those regimes. Also, the anti-sweatshop movement has been fairly successful in their efforts to pressure Universities and Colleges not to purchase gear from companies that use sweatshops.
Cultural relativism is a classic argument that repressive regimes use to try and exempt themselves from international human rights standards. The argument usually holds "social order" over the needs of the individual. How is this "social control" not political?
I can't wait until LinuxPPC starts using apt-get instead of RPM. Installing things that are off the beaten path often turns into a nightmare of tracking down current drivers, etc., some of which inevitably turn out not to run or compile on LinuxPPC. What a royal pain in the ass. Raise your glasses to architecture agnostic code!
In the spirit of the brilliant mind that gave us the title of the Episode 1, we propose the following working titles for Episode 2:
Revenge of the Phantom Menace
Bride of the Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace Returns
The Phantom Menace II
Son of the Phantom Menace
The Phantom Menace and the Great Space Caper
The Phantom Menace... Again!
The Phantom Menace Goes to Japan
The Trouble with Alderon
The Phantom Menace Returns
Phantom Menaced
The Phantom Menace Goes Bananas
Curse of the Phantom Menace
A New Hope
The Phantom Menace on Vacation
The Phantom Menace Takes Manhattan
Still Smokin'
What's Up, Phantom Menace?
The Phantom Menace and the Planet of Doom
The Phantom Menace Goes to Camp
Meet The Phantom Menace
The Best Little Phantom Menace in Texas
The Bingo Long Travelling Phantom Menace
Smokey and the Phantom Menace
Bang the Phantom Menace Slowly
Nurse Phantom Menace
A.I.: Phantom Menace
Midnight Phantom Menace
Crouching Phantom, Hidden Menace
Hush Hush, Sweet Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace Got the Hookup
New Jack Phantom Menace
Daddy's Dyin', Who's Got the Phantom Menace?
The Man Who Would Be Phantom Menace
Who Is Phantom Menace And Why Is He Saying All Those Things About Me?
O Phantom Menace, WHere Art Thou?
Who Framed The Phantom Menace?
Phantom Menace in Love
The Phantom Menace Who Loved Me
The Man in the Phantom Menace
The Neverending Phantom Menace
When We Were Phantom Menaces
The Sorrow and the Phantom Menace
Whatever Happened to Phantom Menace?
Phantom Menace's Choice
The French Lieutenant's Phantom Menace
Ali: Fear Eats the Phantom Menace
Don't Tell Mom the Phantom Menace is Dead
Stop or My Phantom Menace Will Shoot
I Never Sang for My Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace: Male Gigolo
Anna and the Phantom Menace
Phantom Menace, Interrupted
For love of The Phantom Menace
The Talented Mr. Phantom Menace
Don't Drink the Phantom Menace
The Discreet Charm of the Phantom Menace
Butch Cassidy and the Phatnom Menace
The Sweet Smell of Phantom Menace
Yeah, then Oracle gets power of discovery to rifle through MS internal documents... and then the benchmarks become part of the public court record.
Shrewd move, Bill.
One individual probably doesn't make much difference, but helping turn out a large number of people probably does. What if the Slashdot "community" ever got organized? It would be interesting if a consituency as large as Slashdot readers decided to vote as a bloc... like a union or say, the Cubans in Miami or the Hassidic community in New York City. To have the community endorse a candidate would be a prize to be vied. Imagine how seriously the candidates would take questions from geeks if they knew that the right answers, right promises, and a record of passing good, geek-friendly laws would guarantee hundreds of thousands of votes and a bit of soft money. And if they knew they would lose that if they crossed us.
Now just at to that a GNU PAC to lobby The Hill and we're in business.
For packing distress calls into innocent looking droids.
Why, what were you thinking of? Quake? Slashdot icons?
It's worth noting that the author is publishing this under the Open Content Publication License as opposed to the GNU Free Documentation License which seems just as adequate.
In his foot note, the author even states, "The best known license for applying the open-source concept to other forms of expression besides computer code is the OPL." He does not explain why.
This is slightly off-topic, but I find that there is definitely a pattern of among Slashdot users who frequently take comments or proposals like this for declarations of fascist rule: "this what we should only be doing." Like the RMS vs. KDE/QT exchange. It was not what I would call a flamewar, but was interpreted as such by more than one user. I don't know what this phenomena is. Is it that certain Slashdot users lack a sense of proportion? Perspective? Or grant a kind of urgency to what they read? Are they extremely sensitive to alternative viewpoints? Or just disagreement? Surely discussion and debate are possible without resorting to flame.
Right on. That Nielson guy has some "law" that states that Web surfers spend most of their time on other sites. No disbuting that. Most users have come to expect that clicking on a logo at the top left corner of the page will take you back to the front, home page of the site. Other Web design conventions have also started to emerge -- like a colored navigation rail down the left side of the page or the Yahoo! style layout of information categories. Using layout conventions that are familiar to the user just makes good sense.
Let the man speak for himself. You'll find lots of fabulous Bush quotations here.
Enjoy.
Maybe Adobe will start porting their products...
Personally, I much prefer the freelance life to full-time employment... that is "renting" my time to an employer rather than "being owned" as full-time staff or management.
One of the things I enjoy as a freelancer who does contract work is some semblance of ownership of my time. At least I get to choose who I sell it too.
Whenever I take a staff position, after many months I start to feel trapped, at the mercy of my situation.. like the job owns me. As a freelancer I at least have a menu of possibilities and there is always an end of the project in site. I could always go out and start my own company, too.
But then I have no illusions that this is a result of a peculiar time in a peculiar marketplace. I just happen to have a couple of skills that are in short supply in the particular place where I live and work. This does make my situation and future uncertain, but I'm still relatively young and am enjoying the flexibility it allows me right now.
Needless to say, this kind of wireless is the way to go in extremely remote places and places with extremely poor infrastructure like the developing countries.
A fine point. So then what do we need to grow trees on Mars? Are there enough nutrients in the soil? I guess there is a little matter of water...
Come to think of it, I seem to remember reading somewhere that most of the O2 on earth is produced not by trees, but by algae. Does this ring any bells for anyone? Maybe we need to start shooting algae bombs up to Mars to be cultivated into farms by little robots. Oh wait... algae needs water too...
What I really want to know is if we'll be able to write shell scripts (or perl!) to script Mac apps like Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark XPress, or Final Cut.
Applescript is OK for some tasks, but not all apps respond to it and most have their own individual commands you have to discover.
It would be great if there were a standard library to interface with these things. Now imagine being able to run these apps via telnet, or a Web based interface...
Good thing that code is finally available so you can start rolling your own... one with REAL news for REAL people with comments that matter.
Or better yet, dig us up some REAL stories so we can all get down and dirty for some serious comment-ating.
It seems to me that the best way to fight bad law is not just with software and a license, but through political action.
RMS always seems to stop short. Maybe he doesn't see the use? Or maybe he's just not interested?
There's quite a bit on the GNU site about what's wrong with the legal system but almost nothing about how to change it. In a way, free software kind of side-steps the issue. Why change bad copyright law if you can just help write a patch for your own free software system?
There is political power in community, but not if the community only sticks to its own. Free software is about serving the public interest.
It's all well and good to identify the issues and express your moral outrage, but you really should also be talking to your elected representatives. I used to work with Amnesty International and I've seen high school kids help pass good laws at the state level. It can be done!
Everyone seems very aware that big money influences the hill to push through laws that protect commercial interests. Why not join the fight to regulate soft money? The GNU/geek community would find broad support among the general public.
There are sparks of activity around the nation with Linux users groups staging demos and protests against UCITA and the DMCA, but we need to be pro-active, not just reactive. Call up your rep.'s office and set up a meeting! Start a dialogue! Maybe someone needs start political action mini-HOWTO... Maybe I'll take a crack at it..
After you've read the article and its soundbites, go read Lessig's own writing at: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessig.html
Good stuff.
I bought this book and read through it. Good stuff, but Nielson is something of a crank -- always complaining, but short on actual advice. Many of his recommendations are dead on, but he just never has anything nice to say.
His own site is rather poorly designed, too. It just doesn't make sense to ONLY organize the archive of columns chronologically. Why not thematically? All those areas of text on the home page could be better separated and organized.
Also, though some of his columns cover some of the territory of the book, it's enlightening that a self-proclaimed "usability advocate" would fail to release this book online. His argument that books are better for "straight narratives" than Web sites doesn't wash. (Particularly given the numerous side-bars of the book.) He also claims the large number of screen shots "would have been difficult to present on the Web and preserve the ultra-fast response times I believe in." Maybe so, but I've never heard him acknowledge the business model: it's much easier to make a buck off of selling paper. There's nothing wrong with trying to earn a living, it's just the more you deny it the more your schtick looks like posturing and self-promotion.
I heard a funny story about this: the reason is computing power, the difference similar to the gulf between Playstaion 1 and 2. The science of modern stealth topology comes out of an old book by a Russian scientist who studied the effects of radar on simple polygons. The early designers of the stealth fighter used this book as their bible and created a computer simulation to generate the profile of the plane. The computer and program were very crude (by today's standards) and could only model a small number of primitive polygons.
Later versions of the software and hardware have become much more sophistiacted so we end up with profiles like that of the stealth bomber. Sleek and smooth.
Aside from the processor info, this article and doesn't really say much. Is it just to steal some of the spotlight from the PocketPC?
-
For its part, Palm says it will gain popularity through its design, which executives say is better and more stylish than the offerings from competitors.
It's always astounding how clueless executives can be. The cases are nice, but nothing special given the form factor of the many WinCE devices. I would argue that the popularity of the Palm is the relative ease of use of the OS, how easy it is for folks to write apps for it, and how cross-platform it is.- "I think we all know that the screen sizes suck, and that the drop-down menus are the road to hell," Yankowski said.
Yeah, so what is Palm going to do about it? Double the screen size? Replace drop-down menus with voice commands? *shudder* - ...by the end of the year, all of the company's handhelds will be able to connect to the Internet.
So when should we see these? In 6 months?Incidentally, I wonder about the use of Transmeta processors in these. Surely someone who reads Slashdot on the inside must know someone who's toying around..
This article "They Write the Right Stuff" appeared in the December 1996 issue of Fast Company. It paints an interesting picture of the requirements and culture of NASA's on-board shuttle programming team (circa 1996.)
The article's main trope pits the discipline and insanely controlled, methodical management of the team and its product against the stereotype of the undisciplined, unruly geeks pounding mountain dews and hammering out bug-riddled code at all hours.
It's still worth a look, though.
I'm surprised that neither Palm nor Microsoft has added cellphone capability onto their devices. Palm announced wireless Web and/or Bluetooth will be part of the next generation of devices, but it seems to me the competition is not just from Microsoft, but from those Web surfing cell-phones. (Sorry, that Qualcomm frankenstein thing just doesn't cut it just yet.)
It won't be too long before the little PDA becomes yet another object of convergence: cellphone, voicemail, and wireless Web + address book, organizer stuff + fax + MP3 radio + games, games. (Plus IrDA and Bluetooth.) I hear in Japan they already have point-to-point video via their cell-phones.
Now just add extended battery life, a screaming processor, and Linux...