I just happened to be researching Chinese TLDs today and had already been to the People's Daily site and the site of the registrar for.CN domain names. (The opther links seem to be Slashdotted.) The article merely announces the creation of a second-level domain, namely.mil.cn. This is not going to destroy the Internet. There are also second-level domains for numerous Chinese administrative districts such as.bj.cn for Bejing, as there are for US states and territories, and districts of some other countries.
China chafes at having to deal with ICANN because it is assciated with the US government, with which China is a competitor. Nonetheless, all the proposed naming seems to be of second-level domains, some of which will contain Chinese characters. (gratuitous nationalistic sentiment: Everybody is jealous of the big guy.) This doesn't seem to be any problem for the survival of the 'net.
Possibly, within China, the government will force their root servers to ignore the rest of the Internet, causing Chinese queries to.com to return what will look to the rest of us like.com.cn. This will be a bad thing for free access within China, but that isn't exactly new territory for China either.
I have recently hired on at a large corporation with a powerful IT department. There is a draconian, yet vague, policy forbidding nearly everything, especially "viewing of inappropriate material" and "use for personal gain". People have been known to be summarilly fired for "viewing of inappropriate material". At the bottom of this statement is the sentence: "Reasonable personal use is allowed." Whatever that might mean, it is certain that everything one does at a company computer is being watched by a hidden cadre of judgmental IT folks, who are never seen, and whose identity is unknown (they are at corporate headquarters, I presume). It is true, of course, that all the equipment belongs to the company, so the company can say what we can do with it. Nonetheless, if the "hostile work environment" catch phrase we hear frequently around here means anything, it must include this sort of thing.
A certain GPS-enabled mapping program I have been using for years has been re-written to eliminate the drop-down menus and substitute badly-done little whatever-they-are at the bottom of the screen. Navigation through this mess is suddenly rendered horrid and just about impossible while driving. The idea, apparently, is to force the user to use the goofy speech regonition business built-in to the program. It reeks, folks.
Watch out! This is either "sour grapes" over being unable to take control of Linux or it is some sort of marketing strategem. No good can come of this. Mark my words.
Using for college student friend to surf the net and send email. Still works great, but so old I can't update the BIOS any more. Too bad Red Hat and Mandrake refuse to install on it any more. (Earlier versions of both used to work.) Reluctantly, I put Windows98se on it, which still works fine. Running Mozilla and OpenOffice 1.1.
I know this is obvious and will be repeated here many, many times, but... What kind of people will run critical public-safety systems on Windows? Who in the Hell is that stupid and can still get into that kind of position of public trust? And then... And then... Connect it to the Internet? What?!! Wise the hell up, people!
You have hit the nail squarely and firmly. All those things and nearly anything else could be used for illegal purposes, and the time seems to be coming when some creature such as Homeland Security, or RIAA, or some asshat company's asshat lawyers may jump out of the bushes at any moment for any reason, real or contrived, and force you to defend yourself.
I told you so is right. I am torn between the desire to get one of these and the desire to strangle the inventor. There is absolutely no possibility this thing will be used responsibly. Marketers are unscrupulous and unmerciful, and this will be a powerful weapon in their hands. It will degrade the quality of all our lives.
Setting aside the oddness of "it's free, but it'll cost you to find out how to use it", would it not be wise to promote the idea that one, or a company, ought to be paid for what they do? Conversely, if they do nothing, is right to charge for it? In this case, if you ask this company to help you use the product, you might be expected to pay for the help. If they keep the instructions secret and demand that you do so too, are they not merely trying to fraudulently capitalize on the "feel good" properties of the words "open source"?
It would be a wonderous event if the deceit-driven market would implode. But that what I thought about the '90s hype-driven market,and look what... Hey!
Personally, I have been using a very old version of Quicken after Intuit pasted on that awful HTML front end and entered the vertical integration business. A real shame what was done to a promising product. Let's hear it for GNUCash!
Fortunately for me, this is right in line with my project to dump MS and everything that requires MS in favor of Linux. I hesitate to say this in public, but I would be willing to pay for some of those free programs that installed themselves with Red Hat Linux. I have lots of 'druthers for GNUCash, but I am surely glad it exists!
I'd go along with that, but also suggest that the typical (Windows and X both) GUI misses out out on something important.
It seems to me that the GUI usually is predicated on the notion that users are too dumb to figure out how the computer works. It is assumed that little pictures and a mousie-clickie interface is needed to overcome the users' innate stupidity. In fact, only a few users are actually dummies. Inexperienced users can be made to feel like dummies by an obtuse user interface.
The bad news is that a complicated set of menus and so on is just as hard to figure out as any command line. Instead of looking up options, the user spends his time figuring out which menu or pop-up contains the needed option.
May I suggest that a shift in design emphasis would improve things. I suggest that a designer might make education of the user the main goal of the mouse-and-GUI interface.
For instance, one might show the command line as it is built up in response to mouse clicks, so that the user can (if he is of a mind to) learn for himself how to do it. That way, when he graduates to that point where the mousie-clickie thing is more a hinderance than an aid, he will know the essential commands from (good!) example. That user who forgets or never learns the commands, can just keep on using the GUI.
I am sure others will have more and better ideas along those lines. Let's help the users advance toward the standard X interface: two Xterms and File Manager.
I hope they go forward with the lawsuit. Make a real public courthouse parody of it. Maybe something like this will draw enough attention to the absurd patents and copyrights being granted left and right. I say go get 'em. Make so much stink that the backlash cleans out the copyright office staff.
This article makes me feel much better about things. I had been worried about all the "dot-com" failures and such. The story suggests to me that some of those failures are of those companies that were doomed by incompetents in the attic from the start. These jerks seem able to gain access to OPM (other peoples' money) over and over, only to fail over and over. These morons should just go get jobs and quit messing with their employees' lives.
USNET makes me think of CB radio. You guys remenber CB don't you? It's practically unusable in some places/channels because of all the racist, profane, obnoxious, etc. boneheads. I've always thought it was because one could be anonymous on CB. Same with USENET. Jerks usualy love to be anonymous, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure I would change it, even so.
I recently made acquaintance with one who does not believe that Microsoft is the New Evil Empire. I shall present the Info World article to him tonight. That should do it.
As for the Warnock quotation: If I knew anyone who doesn't believe Adobe to be an enclave of overpaid, conceited, overpriced..... but I don't.
Is it possible there is too much money banging around Silicon Valley?
Slashdot Mirror
OK, somebody slap me with a clue here.
.CN domain names. (The opther links seem to be Slashdotted.) The article merely announces the creation of a second-level domain, namely .mil.cn. This is not going to destroy the Internet. There are also second-level domains for numerous Chinese administrative districts such as .bj.cn for Bejing, as there are for US states and territories, and districts of some other countries.
.com to return what will look to the rest of us like .com.cn. This will be a bad thing for free access within China, but that isn't exactly new territory for China either.
I just happened to be researching Chinese TLDs today and had already been to the People's Daily site and the site of the registrar for
China chafes at having to deal with ICANN because it is assciated with the US government, with which China is a competitor. Nonetheless, all the proposed naming seems to be of second-level domains, some of which will contain Chinese characters. (gratuitous nationalistic sentiment: Everybody is jealous of the big guy.) This doesn't seem to be any problem for the survival of the 'net.
Possibly, within China, the government will force their root servers to ignore the rest of the Internet, causing Chinese queries to
I have recently hired on at a large corporation with a powerful IT department. There is a draconian, yet vague, policy forbidding nearly everything, especially "viewing of inappropriate material" and "use for personal gain". People have been known to be summarilly fired for "viewing of inappropriate material". At the bottom of this statement is the sentence: "Reasonable personal use is allowed." Whatever that might mean, it is certain that everything one does at a company computer is being watched by a hidden cadre of judgmental IT folks, who are never seen, and whose identity is unknown (they are at corporate headquarters, I presume). It is true, of course, that all the equipment belongs to the company, so the company can say what we can do with it. Nonetheless, if the "hostile work environment" catch phrase we hear frequently around here means anything, it must include this sort of thing.
A certain GPS-enabled mapping program I have been using for years has been re-written to eliminate the drop-down menus and substitute badly-done little whatever-they-are at the bottom of the screen. Navigation through this mess is suddenly rendered horrid and just about impossible while driving. The idea, apparently, is to force the user to use the goofy speech regonition business built-in to the program. It reeks, folks.
Damned right. Well said.
Watch out! This is either "sour grapes" over being unable to take control of Linux or it is some sort of marketing strategem. No good can come of this. Mark my words.
Using for college student friend to surf the net and send email. Still works great, but so old I can't update the BIOS any more. Too bad Red Hat and Mandrake refuse to install on it any more. (Earlier versions of both used to work.) Reluctantly, I put Windows98se on it, which still works fine. Running Mozilla and OpenOffice 1.1.
...and don't forget to write the SOBs and tell them you are doing it.
I know this is obvious and will be repeated here many, many times, but... What kind of people will run critical public-safety systems on Windows? Who in the Hell is that stupid and can still get into that kind of position of public trust? And then... And then... Connect it to the Internet? What?!! Wise the hell up, people!
There is nothing like competition to make an overpriced perveyor of second-rate products see the light. Good work Open Source hackers. Keep it up!
You have hit the nail squarely and firmly. All those things and nearly anything else could be used for illegal purposes, and the time seems to be coming when some creature such as Homeland Security, or RIAA, or some asshat company's asshat lawyers may jump out of the bushes at any moment for any reason, real or contrived, and force you to defend yourself.
I told you so is right. I am torn between the desire to get one of these and the desire to strangle the inventor. There is absolutely no possibility this thing will be used responsibly. Marketers are unscrupulous and unmerciful, and this will be a powerful weapon in their hands. It will degrade the quality of all our lives.
Setting aside the oddness of "it's free, but it'll cost you to find out how to use it", would it not be wise to promote the idea that one, or a company, ought to be paid for what they do? Conversely, if they do nothing, is right to charge for it? In this case, if you ask this company to help you use the product, you might be expected to pay for the help. If they keep the instructions secret and demand that you do so too, are they not merely trying to fraudulently capitalize on the "feel good" properties of the words "open source"?
It would be a wonderous event if the deceit-driven market would implode. But that what I thought about the '90s hype-driven market,and look what... Hey!
Personally, I have been using a very old version of Quicken after Intuit pasted on that awful HTML front end and entered the vertical integration business. A real shame what was done to a promising product. Let's hear it for GNUCash!
Fortunately for me, this is right in line with my project to dump MS and everything that requires MS in favor of Linux. I hesitate to say this in public, but I would be willing to pay for some of those free programs that installed themselves with Red Hat Linux. I have lots of 'druthers for GNUCash, but I am surely glad it exists!
On the other hand, you can link to it without reading the legalese just as you can access the whole site without reading it.
i damn near died!
I'd go along with that, but also suggest that the typical (Windows and X both) GUI misses out out on something important.
It seems to me that the GUI usually is predicated on the notion that users are too dumb to figure out how the computer works. It is assumed that little pictures and a mousie-clickie interface is needed to overcome the users' innate stupidity. In fact, only a few users are actually dummies. Inexperienced users can be made to feel like dummies by an obtuse user interface.
The bad news is that a complicated set of menus and so on is just as hard to figure out as any command line. Instead of looking up options, the user spends his time figuring out which menu or pop-up contains the needed option.
May I suggest that a shift in design emphasis would improve things. I suggest that a designer might make education of the user the main goal of the mouse-and-GUI interface.
For instance, one might show the command line as it is built up in response to mouse clicks, so that the user can (if he is of a mind to) learn for himself how to do it. That way, when he graduates to that point where the mousie-clickie thing is more a hinderance than an aid, he will know the essential commands from (good!) example. That user who forgets or never learns the commands, can just keep on using the GUI.
I am sure others will have more and better ideas along those lines. Let's help the users advance toward the standard X interface: two Xterms and File Manager.
I hope they go forward with the lawsuit. Make a real public courthouse parody of it. Maybe something like this will draw enough attention to the absurd patents and copyrights being granted left and right. I say go get 'em. Make so much stink that the backlash cleans out the copyright office staff.
This article makes me feel much better about things. I had been worried about all the "dot-com" failures and such. The story suggests to me that some of those failures are of those companies that were doomed by incompetents in the attic from the start. These jerks seem able to gain access to OPM (other peoples' money) over and over, only to fail over and over. These morons should just go get jobs and quit messing with their employees' lives.
USNET makes me think of CB radio. You guys remenber CB don't you? It's practically unusable in some places/channels because of all the racist, profane, obnoxious, etc. boneheads. I've always thought it was because one could be anonymous on CB. Same with USENET. Jerks usualy love to be anonymous, for obvious reasons. I'm not sure I would change it, even so.
I recently made acquaintance with one who does not believe that Microsoft is the New Evil Empire. I shall present the Info World article to him tonight. That should do it.
As for the Warnock quotation: If I knew anyone who doesn't believe Adobe to be an enclave of overpaid, conceited, overpriced..... but I don't.
Is it possible there is too much money banging around Silicon Valley?