Diet Rockstar is a particular favorite, and the classic Red Bull diet version is good too. They both lack any chemical diet aftertaste, which I suppose is masked by the taurine and other energy drink components. It should go without saying that both pack quite a caffeine punch as well. Of course, if you can't stand the flavor of this kind of drink, the diet versions won't be any better.
Best to try the diet version of whichever one you like best with regular sugar. For instance, I think the Monster-branded drinks are terrible in both versions, but your tastes may be different.
Well, granted, some editing would probably need to be done, ideally by people who also worked in the same field and part of the world. Wikipedia seems to do okay, even with thousands of annonymous submittors.
I would really appreciate a site or two where people could enter their current salaries along with their zip code, title, and experience level. Realistically, this would have to be done anonymously both on the part of the employee and their employer to keep political problems to the minimum. The end result would be a transparent database of salary ranges that employees could use to bargain with, instead of being stuck with salary.com's completely opaque and often erroneous numbers.
Perhaps one of the large employment sites could create this service, though it might be seen as a hostile move toward the companies which pay their bills. The alternative is running it as an independent website, though convincing the first thousand people (or however many you need) to fill in enough information to start the database seems like a hard problem to solve.
This isn't the first time Nintendo has used the over-under screen combination for a portable game. In fact, the first time this layout was used was in 1982 in one of the old Game & Watchgames. Amusingly, a version of Zelda was even released in this configuration.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that a multi-screen G&W was also the first Nintendo system to debut the d-pad, the little cross-shaped directional control that replaces an un-thumbable joystick. More than 20 years later it has been copied by everybody and is still used on every console you can buy at SuperTarget.
>(3) I think that the thing that most frightens >people about cloning is not cloning per se, but >rather the ease of genetic manipulation that >cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem >s how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I >would like my child to have blond hair and blue >eyes, be tall and not chunky,... have breast >size YYY / dick size XXX... ".
[snip]
>Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you >can go to pick the genes of your child when you >can check out how these genes turned out in real >people.
Consider social forces a bit and these things don't seem quite so scary.
Here's how I look at it:
For society to exist and prosper, there need to be people who do the less desireable jobs, of which there are many. The "designer genes issue" posits that if everyone is shapely and beautiful and has a 160 IQ, there will be nobody to do those jobs, and society will collapse.
The thing is, most people would never, ever take the designer genes route. There was a Time phone poll (admittedly not the most accurate barometer) which said something like less than 10% of the population would want their genetic code changed. Almost nobody would *want* this process, so having a few people use it isn't going to hurt anything.
Of course, a small problem might arise due to social stratification between "dids" and "did nots," but anyone who tries to tell you that stratification isn't already one of society's largest problems (so adding a little bit more isn't really going to change anything) is full of it.
This is a link to a piece I wrote while still in high school, describing the groups (castes, my terminology) in its little society. It is dirt poor writing, but got an A anyway, and was fun to talk to people about. Outcasts are the primary focus, and it is they who (IMHO) need to take responsibility in righting the wrongs of the popular kids.
Note, however, that it was written in the style of propaganda, and meant to call people to action in the cause of fixing the school's social system. It is not a call to violence, though, so I thought it to be in good enough taste (and with good enough relevance) to post it to this conversation.
I graduated 1998 from a school which had around 500 students, in a town with about 6400 inhabitants. It was in Kansas, a state not well known for tolerance (or much of anything else:-). I, also, speak from experience.
Our tools didn't accept anyone who didn't fit one of their molds, they instead ridiculed them and cast them out. If you didn't play a sport, go to one of their churches, and agree with most of what they agreed to be truth, then you were only barely acceptable as a person, and you certainly weren't invited to be *friends* with them.
Also, there was more than one operative clique in the school. We also had this group who liked to feel different -- they listened to NIN and wore either black leather or flowers in their hair -- but had nearly the same rules as the preps. The significant change was that you didn't have to play a sport, but you had to have some feature that let them know how different you were.
My point is that stratification is going to happen no matter what the size of the student population is, but if it's bigger instead of smaller you don't get as many strata with only one person on them. My point is NOT that people only get along with people from their own strata, and should be closed minded to all others, please don't read it that way; I had friends and acquaintances that were totally nothing like me.
If you think that your small school is special, and that it's not like that where you're from, you might try a little ad hoc experiment of mine. Look around a crowded room, like your lunch room or some such, and pick out five people that you don't know very well or don't like. Tally all of the parties you've been at and they were there, all of the clubs/teams that you're both on, and all of your mutual friends. Now pick out five people you like and hang out with. Not your best friend or anything that might throw off the numbers, but friends. Add up the same number for them.
LOOK! The number for the strangers is far, far less than the number for the friends, because you are on different social strata! You might not consider those strangers bad people or worthless people, but they certainly aren't nearly as close as the people in your clique. Don't be ashamed of being in a group, be happy, you are cool enough, and a good enough person that you were able to go this long without even noticing the strata!
I've actually done a lot more thought and writing about high-school stratification than I want to express in this little tiny slashdot box. Email me (blaze@sunflower.com) and we can talk about it at greater length if you please.
> Could having smaller schools with a closer > student body help prevent the allienation that > seems to be a common factor in the many school > shooting's?
No, no, no. The smaller your school is, the more likely people won't be able to find a group they can be part of, be comfortable with. If I go to a school with, say, 100 people, and 99 of them are total tools -- sports, pop music, GAP jeans, the whole nine yards -- am I, as a nonconformist, more likely to turn into a conformist and join your "closer student body" or am I more likely to just hate and fear all of the tools?
Or, conversely, if I'm in a school with 10,000 people in it, am I more likely to be an outcast and never find anyone that agrees with me or thinks like me, or am I more likely to find twenty kids who know where I'm coming from and like me?
Don't force us to be "close" to each other and therefore just like each other, like tools on a shelf. Let us be as dissimilar as the myriad flakes in a snowstorm, and as beautiful.
A good argument, but remember the fact that 3dfx's glide implementation is 100% faster than their Direct3D implementation, and their OpenGL ICD is nonexistant. That means that for any company that wants to really support 3dfx -- and every company should as 3dfx has ~50% of the hardcore gaming market -- must use glide to get realistic performance. This amounts to shoving glide down their throats, as they have no other means of getting fast and nice 3D to 50% of their audience than glide.
Of course, a counter argument would be id software, who were powerful enough to make 3dfx write a wrapper to map certain OpenGL calls onto glide. Counter counter argument is easy: many many developers aren't as powerful as id, and couldn't do such a thing. Even if they could, if 3dfx weren't evil they wouldn't have to:-)
I wrote this around a month ago in response to some 3dfx reccomendation/defense that was going on on slashdot a month or so ago. It is a repost, but since I posted it late (so nobody read it) I think it is worthwhile to repost, and not spam. Here goes:
3dfx seems to do the same kind of thing that pisses everyone off about Microsoft. That is, they invent something non-standard and substandard -- the glide library -- and force developers to use it if they want valid performance from 3dfx chipsets. And since they have a huge userbase, as they were the only realistic choice for 3d acceleration just a few years ago, they can do it with impudence and a self-assured snigger directed to users of other accelerators.
Sense a pattern here, Slashdotters? That's right, they've embraced modern 3D technology (to the extent that you can call their brain-damaged color depth limit and other bad design 'modern'), and extended it to the point where you have to buy their trash to get said technology in some games. They are, therefore, evil.
As even more proof, take into account this latest thing where they are assaulting makers of Glide wrappers. Remember, these wrapper libraries would only be used by people who ALREADY HAD a 3D accelerator, and therefore wouldn't have affected 3dfx's market share one whit.
This, when combined with the 30% share of slashdot that uses 3dfx trash (via a slashdot poll some months in the past), goes to show how how hypocritical some people can be about issues like "open/free design" and "unfair business practices."
>Well isn't that too bad, we hackers won't be able >to buy our PCs at ridiculously low prices. We'll >actually have to use our PCs for five years >instead of trading up every eighteen months.
This is way less OK than you seem to think it is. First of all, fewer people outgrowing their PCs means fewer used PCs in the marketplace, and therefore used PCs go way up in price too. That means poor power users (read: myself) will have a harder time of getting any power. This is bad for both me and the two million or so other students and assd other poor folk just like myself. Once again, remember the eighties, where a power user HAD TO BE either rich or in a university to even be power users. Otherwise they were wannabes with super-keen C-64s. I was poor, so I was a wannabe. I don't want to see this come back, even if I do get rich with my CS degree:-)
>If the market shrinks, yes, prices might go up a >bit, but (for a few years at least) the research >and investment that drove the prices down is >already sunk, and it will to a large extent >continue.
Key words: for a few years at least. After that, after the market at large has forgotten that cheap power once existed, and their brains have been destroyed by the non-interactivity of NCs, then the gouging will begin. Two things will happen: PCs will go up a great deal in price, and their respective price/power ratio will go into the toilet. There's no way around it, if there are only, say, one million power users in the US willing to pay for studly machinery, said machinery will be darned expensive and much less research will go into it. Not to mention that the manufacturers will start to just make crap, because there's not enough market for there to be competition.
>I wouldn't really mind paying twice as much for >my "hacker" PC if I knew the extra cost was >subsidising low-end information appliances that >give one more grade-school kid or grandmother >access to the Internet.
That means that you're more than likely rich. More power to you, I'm all about capitalism, but don't let it cloud your judgement on the issue at hand. Grandmothers have access to libraries, which can buy real, high tech PCs. They also have the cashflow from retirement benifits, in many cases, to buy themselves a PC if they really want to. Those kids that you mention, what would you rather they be able to do: use their NCs from home, comprehending but never creating; or use real PCs at school, being able to do anything and everything available in the infosphere from them?
I know if I were still in school, I would take the latter any time. But then, I would know what I was missing. If we let NCs proliferate, than nobody will know that all of that pretty WWW that they see on their AOL machines had to be crafted, had to be built and loved by someone. Those people will all just see it like TV, pretty pictures to watch interspersed with the occasional ads. What a waste of that which made so many people better thinkers in the mid to late 1990s.
>Get off your high horse and realize that this >next step, if it comes about, is just the >continued democratization of technology.
Wrong. Dead wrong. MY way is about the democratization of technology, the NC way is about the democratization of crap.
If we continue down the path of power on the desktops of the people, than eventually we will have really slick, nice computers (slicker than the ones we have now) available for $500 or less. This won't just be non-interactive "appliances" in the hands of the people, this will be true creative power, and it will be good. If we let Moore's law continue at the speed it is at now, just immagine what will be available to THE COMMON PEOPLE (read: not just us hackers) in the year 2005. There will be speeds on everyone's desk almost as fast as mainframes are today. That is true democritization of technology, giving everyone access to raw, unadulterated, shocking power.
Of course if NCs take over tomorrow, nobody will care that they could have had power in five years for the same price. That's the way people are, if they're not educated about the possibilities, then 90% of them will stick with what they have and what they know. In 2005 we could see the same pretty translucent blue NC on the desk of everybody in the world, and still have to know that if they had waited just a little bit longer, just a matter of four years or so, they could have been almost infinitely better off, for the same price.
Could you live with yourself and your proselyzation (sp?) of NC technology? If so, how?
Does this just scare the heck out of anyone else? Part of the slashdot article -- I think it was erased, not sure -- was that the adoption of network appliances by the masses would lead to a great deal fewer PC class machines bought. This would lead to the price for PCs going way up, and the advancement in their technology going way down. A frightening prospect for everyone reading this, I hope.
Doesn't anyone else remember what it was like in 1986, with VIC-20s available for $99, but to get any real computer power one had to pay upwards of $5000. A horrible time for anyone who loved power and didn't have the cashflow to afford it.
Compare that to the situation we're in today. A fairly awesome computer can be had for $1500, and a respectable one for $1000. This is nice, this is what makes it so someone like me (student, and no rich folks either) can afford the power needed by compilers and the power needed by unices (and the power needed by Quake, but I probably shouldn't mention that:-).
If we had things the dangerous network appliance way, there would be whole generations of people who could be power users and discover the world but can only afford brain-damaged $200 NA's because real computers are $5000 again. There would also be whole generations of people who never new any of the power of creation -- from the little stuff like a HTML doc or a Visual Basic program to the big stuff like installing Debian or compiling the 10k line C program they've been working on. This would be a horrible future for anyone. The internet would become effectively as read-only as television, and likely just as vacuous.
So the way I see it, we as the power users have a duty to stop the spread of NA's as fast and soon as we can. They must appear ugly and innefectual and a bad idea, and they must dissapear into the past of computing fads faster than the touch screen. We need to keep Moore's law going as hard and fast as it possibly can, and advance the future *despite* of people too stupid to keep up with it.
>Harmony (once finished) would also end the >GNOME/KDE war for good... or would it?:)
Well, don't forget that there will always be interface and programming language issues to worry about. And don't forget the OpenDesktop (is that what it's called?) project, and its various and sundry supporters.
Really though, I think what's really needed is a thunking layer to make QT using apps use the gtk+ library without knowing it. That would give the KDE folks the advantages of: studly themability ala Gnome, no more pissy anti-KDE people, programmers being able to use QT or gtk+ at their discretion, etc. And since both projects are largely GPLed, my way would allow the two desktops to be rolled into one ultimate distribution with all the best parts of both. Everyone wins.
Alas, I don't come close to being able to code this (I know, I bitch about stuff and can't fix it, blah), so it would need people who can. I don't care if I get zero credit for the idea, I just want to see it happen and see everyone win.
e is shorter? What? They both have a (denumerable (aleph zero)) infinite quantity of digits after the decimal, right? Now, e is *less* than pi, if that's what you meant...
Also, you can (read: must) model nature with pi, look at what happens with waves on water and their interaction/interference, and tell me you could model any of that for a realistic amount of time w/o using an accurate value of pi.
used to hate the panel - needed autohide
on
GNOME 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Autohide is a relatively little known feature of the win9x taskbar, which makes it sort dissapear when the mouse pointer isn't at the bottom of the screen. When it is in dissapear mode there is a line of like two pixels where the taskbar would be, and when you move mouse over that area the taskbar pops up over applications in front view so you can use it. Very intuitive and gives me, when I use win9x, that is, another 15 in^2 over the regular (non-hiding) taskbar.
My question is, why isn't this elegant and wonderful design coppied by the KDE or prefferably GNOME camps? I would totally dig a panel that was invisible until I needed it, and then it was right there. And don't tell me that it can slide into a corner, I already know that. The problem with that is that you have to click a bunch to get it to do that -- once for in and once later for out. A good deal worse than no clicks, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
Diet Rockstar is a particular favorite, and the classic Red Bull diet version is good too. They both lack any chemical diet aftertaste, which I suppose is masked by the taurine and other energy drink components. It should go without saying that both pack quite a caffeine punch as well. Of course, if you can't stand the flavor of this kind of drink, the diet versions won't be any better.
Best to try the diet version of whichever one you like best with regular sugar. For instance, I think the Monster-branded drinks are terrible in both versions, but your tastes may be different.
Well, granted, some editing would probably need to be done, ideally by people who also worked in the same field and part of the world. Wikipedia seems to do okay, even with thousands of annonymous submittors.
I would really appreciate a site or two where people could enter their current salaries along with their zip code, title, and experience level. Realistically, this would have to be done anonymously both on the part of the employee and their employer to keep political problems to the minimum. The end result would be a transparent database of salary ranges that employees could use to bargain with, instead of being stuck with salary.com's completely opaque and often erroneous numbers.
Perhaps one of the large employment sites could create this service, though it might be seen as a hostile move toward the companies which pay their bills. The alternative is running it as an independent website, though convincing the first thousand people (or however many you need) to fill in enough information to start the database seems like a hard problem to solve.
This isn't the first time Nintendo has used the over-under screen combination for a portable game. In fact, the first time this layout was used was in 1982 in one of the old Game & Watch games. Amusingly, a version of Zelda was even released in this configuration.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that a multi-screen G&W was also the first Nintendo system to debut the d-pad, the little cross-shaped directional control that replaces an un-thumbable joystick. More than 20 years later it has been copied by everybody and is still used on every console you can buy at SuperTarget.
>(3) I think that the thing that most frightens ... have breast ... ".
>people about cloning is not cloning per se, but
>rather the ease of genetic manipulation that
>cloning provides. What is a big ethical problem
>s how to treat designing humans. "Hmm... I
>would like my child to have blond hair and blue
>eyes, be tall and not chunky,
>size YYY / dick size XXX
[snip]
>Or, alternatively, imagine clone banks where you
>can go to pick the genes of your child when you
>can check out how these genes turned out in real
>people.
Consider social forces a bit and these things don't seem quite so scary.
Here's how I look at it:
For society to exist and prosper, there need to be people who do the less desireable jobs, of which there are many. The "designer genes issue" posits that if everyone is shapely and beautiful and has a 160 IQ, there will be nobody to do those jobs, and society will collapse.
The thing is, most people would never, ever take the designer genes route. There was a Time phone poll (admittedly not the most accurate barometer) which said something like less than 10% of the population would want their genetic code changed. Almost nobody would *want* this process, so having a few people use it isn't going to hurt anything.
Of course, a small problem might arise due to social stratification between "dids" and "did nots," but anyone who tries to tell you that stratification isn't already one of society's largest problems (so adding a little bit more isn't really going to change anything) is full of it.
This is a link to a piece I wrote while still in high school, describing the groups (castes, my terminology) in its little society. It is dirt poor writing, but got an A anyway, and was fun to talk to people about. Outcasts are the primary focus, and it is they who (IMHO) need to take responsibility in righting the wrongs of the popular kids.
t e20.html
Note, however, that it was written in the style of propaganda, and meant to call people to action in the cause of fixing the school's social system. It is not a call to violence, though, so I thought it to be in good enough taste (and with good enough relevance) to post it to this conversation.
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/7209/cas
I graduated 1998 from a school which had around 500 students, in a town with about 6400 inhabitants. It was in Kansas, a state not well known for tolerance (or much of anything else :-). I, also, speak from experience.
Our tools didn't accept anyone who didn't fit one of their molds, they instead ridiculed them and cast them out. If you didn't play a sport, go to one of their churches, and agree with most of what they agreed to be truth, then you were only barely acceptable as a person, and you certainly weren't invited to be *friends* with them.
Also, there was more than one operative clique in the school. We also had this group who liked to feel different -- they listened to NIN and wore either black leather or flowers in their hair -- but had nearly the same rules as the preps. The significant change was that you didn't have to play a sport, but you had to have some feature that let them know how different you were.
My point is that stratification is going to happen no matter what the size of the student population is, but if it's bigger instead of smaller you don't get as many strata with only one person on them. My point is NOT that people only get along with people from their own strata, and should be closed minded to all others, please don't read it that way; I had friends and acquaintances that were totally nothing like me.
If you think that your small school is special, and that it's not like that where you're from, you might try a little ad hoc experiment of mine. Look around a crowded room, like your lunch room or some such, and pick out five people that you don't know very well or don't like. Tally all of the parties you've been at and they were there, all of the clubs/teams that you're both on, and all of your mutual friends. Now pick out five people you like and hang out with. Not your best friend or anything that might throw off the numbers, but friends. Add up the same number for them.
LOOK! The number for the strangers is far, far less than the number for the friends, because you are on different social strata! You might not consider those strangers bad people or worthless people, but they certainly aren't nearly as close as the people in your clique. Don't be ashamed of being in a group, be happy, you are cool enough, and a good enough person that you were able to go this long without even noticing the strata!
I've actually done a lot more thought and writing about high-school stratification than I want to express in this little tiny slashdot box. Email me (blaze@sunflower.com) and we can talk about it at greater length if you please.
> Could having smaller schools with a closer
> student body help prevent the allienation that
> seems to be a common factor in the many school
> shooting's?
No, no, no. The smaller your school is, the more likely people won't be able to find a group they can be part of, be comfortable with. If I go to a school with, say, 100 people, and 99 of them are total tools -- sports, pop music, GAP jeans, the whole nine yards -- am I, as a nonconformist, more likely to turn into a conformist and join your "closer student body" or am I more likely to just hate and fear all of the tools?
Or, conversely, if I'm in a school with 10,000 people in it, am I more likely to be an outcast and never find anyone that agrees with me or thinks like me, or am I more likely to find twenty kids who know where I'm coming from and like me?
Don't force us to be "close" to each other and therefore just like each other, like tools on a shelf. Let us be as dissimilar as the myriad flakes in a snowstorm, and as beautiful.
A good argument, but remember the fact that 3dfx's glide implementation is 100% faster than their Direct3D implementation, and their OpenGL ICD is nonexistant. That means that for any company that wants to really support 3dfx -- and every company should as 3dfx has ~50% of the hardcore gaming market -- must use glide to get realistic performance. This amounts to shoving glide down their throats, as they have no other means of getting fast and nice 3D to 50% of their audience than glide.
:-)
Of course, a counter argument would be id software, who were powerful enough to make 3dfx write a wrapper to map certain OpenGL calls onto glide. Counter counter argument is easy: many many developers aren't as powerful as id, and couldn't do such a thing. Even if they could, if 3dfx weren't evil they wouldn't have to
I wrote this around a month ago in response to some 3dfx reccomendation/defense that was going on on slashdot a month or so ago. It is a repost, but since I posted it late (so nobody read it) I think it is worthwhile to repost, and not spam. Here goes:
3dfx seems to do the same kind of thing that pisses everyone off about Microsoft. That is, they invent something non-standard and substandard -- the glide library -- and force developers to use it if they want valid performance from 3dfx chipsets. And since they have a huge userbase, as they were the only realistic choice for 3d acceleration just a few years ago, they can do it with impudence and a self-assured snigger directed to users of other accelerators.
Sense a pattern here, Slashdotters? That's right, they've embraced modern 3D technology (to the extent that you can call their brain-damaged color depth limit and other bad design 'modern'), and extended it to the point where you have to buy their trash to get said technology in some games. They are, therefore, evil.
As even more proof, take into account this latest thing where they are assaulting makers of Glide wrappers. Remember, these wrapper libraries would only be used by people who ALREADY HAD a 3D accelerator, and therefore wouldn't have affected 3dfx's market share one whit.
This, when combined with the 30% share of slashdot that uses 3dfx trash (via a slashdot poll some months in the past), goes to show how how hypocritical some people can be about issues like "open/free design" and "unfair business practices."
Just something to think about, 3dfx supporters.
>Well isn't that too bad, we hackers won't be able
:-)
>to buy our PCs at ridiculously low prices. We'll
>actually have to use our PCs for five years
>instead of trading up every eighteen months.
This is way less OK than you seem to think it is. First of all, fewer people outgrowing their PCs means fewer used PCs in the marketplace, and therefore used PCs go way up in price too. That means poor power users (read: myself) will have a harder time of getting any power. This is bad for both me and the two million or so other students and assd other poor folk just like myself. Once again, remember the eighties, where a power user HAD TO BE either rich or in a university to even be power users. Otherwise they were wannabes with super-keen C-64s. I was poor, so I was a wannabe. I don't want to see this come back, even if I do get rich with my CS degree
>If the market shrinks, yes, prices might go up a
>bit, but (for a few years at least) the research
>and investment that drove the prices down is
>already sunk, and it will to a large extent
>continue.
Key words: for a few years at least. After that, after the market at large has forgotten that cheap power once existed, and their brains have been destroyed by the non-interactivity of NCs, then the gouging will begin. Two things will happen: PCs will go up a great deal in price, and their respective price/power ratio will go into the toilet. There's no way around it, if there are only, say, one million power users in the US willing to pay for studly machinery, said machinery will be darned expensive and much less research will go into it. Not to mention that the manufacturers will start to just make crap, because there's not enough market for there to be competition.
>I wouldn't really mind paying twice as much for
>my "hacker" PC if I knew the extra cost was
>subsidising low-end information appliances that
>give one more grade-school kid or grandmother
>access to the Internet.
That means that you're more than likely rich. More power to you, I'm all about capitalism, but don't let it cloud your judgement on the issue at hand. Grandmothers have access to libraries, which can buy real, high tech PCs. They also have the cashflow from retirement benifits, in many cases, to buy themselves a PC if they really want to. Those kids that you mention, what would you rather they be able to do: use their NCs from home, comprehending but never creating; or use real PCs at school, being able to do anything and everything available in the infosphere from them?
I know if I were still in school, I would take the latter any time. But then, I would know what I was missing. If we let NCs proliferate, than nobody will know that all of that pretty WWW that they see on their AOL machines had to be crafted, had to be built and loved by someone. Those people will all just see it like TV, pretty pictures to watch interspersed with the occasional ads. What a waste of that which made so many people better thinkers in the mid to late 1990s.
>Get off your high horse and realize that this
>next step, if it comes about, is just the
>continued democratization of technology.
Wrong. Dead wrong. MY way is about the democratization of technology, the NC way is about the democratization of crap.
If we continue down the path of power on the desktops of the people, than eventually we will have really slick, nice computers (slicker than the ones we have now) available for $500 or less. This won't just be non-interactive "appliances" in the hands of the people, this will be true creative power, and it will be good. If we let Moore's law continue at the speed it is at now, just immagine what will be available to THE COMMON PEOPLE (read: not just us hackers) in the year 2005. There will be speeds on everyone's desk almost as fast as mainframes are today. That is true democritization of technology, giving everyone access to raw, unadulterated, shocking power.
Of course if NCs take over tomorrow, nobody will care that they could have had power in five years for the same price. That's the way people are, if they're not educated about the possibilities, then 90% of them will stick with what they have and what they know. In 2005 we could see the same pretty translucent blue NC on the desk of everybody in the world, and still have to know that if they had waited just a little bit longer, just a matter of four years or so, they could have been almost infinitely better off, for the same price.
Could you live with yourself and your proselyzation (sp?) of NC technology? If so, how?
Does this just scare the heck out of anyone else? Part of the slashdot article -- I think it was erased, not sure -- was that the adoption of network appliances by the masses would lead to a great deal fewer PC class machines bought. This would lead to the price for PCs going way up, and the advancement in their technology going way down. A frightening prospect for everyone reading this, I hope.
:-).
Doesn't anyone else remember what it was like in 1986, with VIC-20s available for $99, but to get any real computer power one had to pay upwards of $5000. A horrible time for anyone who loved power and didn't have the cashflow to afford it.
Compare that to the situation we're in today. A fairly awesome computer can be had for $1500, and a respectable one for $1000. This is nice, this is what makes it so someone like me (student, and no rich folks either) can afford the power needed by compilers and the power needed by unices (and the power needed by Quake, but I probably shouldn't mention that
If we had things the dangerous network appliance way, there would be whole generations of people who could be power users and discover the world but can only afford brain-damaged $200 NA's because real computers are $5000 again. There would also be whole generations of people who never new any of the power of creation -- from the little stuff like a HTML doc or a Visual Basic program to the big stuff like installing Debian or compiling the 10k line C program they've been working on. This would be a horrible future for anyone. The internet would become effectively as read-only as television, and likely just as vacuous.
So the way I see it, we as the power users have a duty to stop the spread of NA's as fast and soon as we can. They must appear ugly and innefectual and a bad idea, and they must dissapear into the past of computing fads faster than the touch screen. We need to keep Moore's law going as hard and fast as it possibly can, and advance the future *despite* of people too stupid to keep up with it.
>Harmony (once finished) would also end the >GNOME/KDE war for good... or would it? :)
Well, don't forget that there will always be interface and programming language issues to worry about. And don't forget the OpenDesktop (is that what it's called?) project, and its various and sundry supporters.
Really though, I think what's really needed is a thunking layer to make QT using apps use the gtk+ library without knowing it. That would give the KDE folks the advantages of: studly themability ala Gnome, no more pissy anti-KDE people, programmers being able to use QT or gtk+ at their discretion, etc. And since both projects are largely GPLed, my way would allow the two desktops to be rolled into one ultimate distribution with all the best parts of both. Everyone wins.
Alas, I don't come close to being able to code this (I know, I bitch about stuff and can't fix it, blah), so it would need people who can. I don't care if I get zero credit for the idea, I just want to see it happen and see everyone win.
Jack
e is shorter? What? They both have a (denumerable (aleph zero)) infinite quantity of digits after the decimal, right? Now, e is *less* than pi, if that's what you meant...
Also, you can (read: must) model nature with pi, look at what happens with waves on water and their interaction/interference, and tell me you could model any of that for a realistic amount of time w/o using an accurate value of pi.
I stand corrected. Thanks.
Autohide is a relatively little known feature of the win9x taskbar, which makes it sort dissapear when the mouse pointer isn't at the bottom of the screen. When it is in dissapear mode there is a line of like two pixels where the taskbar would be, and when you move mouse over that area the taskbar pops up over applications in front view so you can use it. Very intuitive and gives me, when I use win9x, that is, another 15 in^2 over the regular (non-hiding) taskbar.
My question is, why isn't this elegant and wonderful design coppied by the KDE or prefferably GNOME camps? I would totally dig a panel that was invisible until I needed it, and then it was right there. And don't tell me that it can slide into a corner, I already know that. The problem with that is that you have to click a bunch to get it to do that -- once for in and once later for out. A good deal worse than no clicks, eh?