I'm personally tired of hearing people defend upper management at the deliberate expense of the people doing the dirty work. Who truly works harder: an executive who, at best, is working insane hours doing something s/he really likes, or a register worker who works his/her ass off just to keep their mind off how soul-crushingly demeaning the work is.
As to ten years service, that's some serious fucking loyalty, and someone who would work in abjectly miserable conditions for that long deserves a huge helping of respect.
Thanks for pushing that button. And howdy, friend.
I agree with your post otherwise -- this is good news -- but I don't understand that first bit.
I think what Cmdr Trollco is pointing out is that the FSFE folks in WIPO will be the only people speaking out against the mainstream opinions, which will further the image of FOSS advocates as angst-ridden, head-in-the-clouds, delusional hippies. It's a variation on the same theme of discrediting dissent as misplaced discontent by labeling all dissenters as hippie/unpatriotic/out of touch/bad eggs/self-serving boat rockers/whatever.
What Trollco forgets to point out is that OSS people are already perceived as greasy hippies, and since the mainstream system has succeeded in painting them as such, having these hippie malcontents inducted into WIPO has the effect of legitimizing their positions. So dissent from those folks will be expected, whereas a "legit" organization (in the eyes of the mainstream proprietary biz world) that ends up behaving as dissenters would appear MORE hippie-ish than the hippies who are behaving as expected.
Being a greasy hippie myself, I welcome this chance for other hippies to express the views I advocate.
On a side note, TFA says: FSF (and FSFE) advocate the use of Libre software, also known as Free software or Open-Source software.
I'm a Cingular subscriber and I recently bought a Sony Ericsson T637, which is bluetooth enabled. I can sync it with my Mac and my bluetooth headset with no problem, as well as connect to other bluetooth phones. I'm not sure how Verizon cripples bluetooth, but from all outward appearances, Cingular does not cripple it all.
So don't come complaining to Slashdot when you get arrested and get sentenced to a couple years in federal "pound-me-in-the-@ss prison" for violating the law - I just hope you feel that the increased political awareness caused by your acts of "civil disobedience" was well worth it.
Heh, that conjures a pretty funny image. "Dammit, I got arrested and now I'm in jail! Who am I gonna call to complain? I know! Those guys at Slashdot will help me in a jiffy!!"
Seriously, though, I fully agree that anyone who breaks the law must suffer the consequences, and therefore must understand the consequences before setting out to break the law. Gandhi himself made that point very clear by insisting that the British judges follow the letter of the law when punishing him.
Personally, I do not plan to break the law and certainly do not plan to go to jail. That does not mean I don't appreciate the value of disobedience, I'm just not in a position (mentally or economically) to go to jail at the moment. When I am, I'll be sure to let the Slashdot community know so they can prepare to rescue me.;-)
Remember what happened in 1968 and 1999 when a small group of anarchists turned what was supposed to be peaceful protest into violent confrontations with the police and causing quite a lot of property damage?
I'd first like to point out that an anarchist is not automatically a violent person, and secondly, you are discounting the actions of the Chicago police and mayor Daley, which contributed greatly to the violence of the '68 protests. The cops were hungry for heads to crack, it wasn't like a bunch of strung out lefty whackos just started throwing bombs around (though that did happen elsewhere in the Haymarket). It's true there were plenty of protestors looking for a fight, but the police weren't exactly innocent bystanders.
Civil disobedience has a rightful place in getting a message across. When you have leaders blindly killing innocent people in other countries, including Americans, how does bringing down a few web sites compare? I don't necessarily believe bringing down the GOP web sites will be very effective, but at least there is no violence or phyiscal destruction involved. Seems to me that timing the disruption with the convention makes a pretty strong point (though we'll see how it gets spun in the media).
I do not advocate violence in any form. Civil disobedience is about drawing attention to an issue by inconveniencing a source related to the issue. Without it, great activists for peace like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have succeeded to the degrees that they did. This is in no way a comparison with those wanting to bring down the GOP sites, but it at least tells us something about the overall effectiveness of persistent, nonviolent disobedience.
I'm from Chicago and will be in NYC protesting the Bush administration. I truly hope the protests do not turn violent, and if given the chance I will do whatever I can to prevent it. But everyone seems focused on what the protestors will do, discounting the fact that there will be over 250,000 people, Americans, saying NO to Bush's policies, not to mention the thousands more protesting across the country, including those doing so in the virtual world. This must count for something!
I guess I'm a little late to this conversation, but just wanted to mention that I've seen these tours already happening. I was downtown, at Columbus and Monroe, on May 15th and saw a group of people on Segways wearing helmets. I overheard one of them telling the group what route they were going to take to complete their tour.
It'll be interesting to see how this affects pedestrian traffic downtown. Shouldn't be too bad as long as they stay close to the lakes and parks; I can't imagine how they'd get around in the Loop without creating huge pedstrian traffic delays.
I've also seen some cops using them. Gives me an ominous feeling when I see that and recall Steve Jobs's comment: "people will build cities around this thing."
I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta...I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!
Maybe this is Microsoft's new security paradigm. No one can steal your data, not even you!
We have just discovered real evidence of flowing water once existing on the planet, and this in turn could lead to evidence of fossilized microbes and other lifeforms that we would threaten with destruction if we were to introduce Earth microbes that the Martian microbes could not fight.
Doesn't it seem more likely that our microbial organisms wouldn't stand a chance against Martian organisms fighting on their own turf? What makes Earth organisms so tough?
Come to think of it, we should send well armed Earth bacteria to Mars in a preemptive assault against those mad, raving Martian microbes frothing at the mouth for their chance to dominate our culture. It's the patriotic duty of all Earth citizens to help liberate the Red Planet!
Of course it is nonsense... the russians barely have enough money to keep the country afloat, let alone spend on a manned trip to Mars.
Well, the company funding the project did say it "draws no resources from the state budget." This appears to be a completely privately funded operation.
Still ludicrous, though, considering the technical and logistical challenges. Although I do like the reality TV angle...who wants to start betting on which cosmonaut takes the first shot of vodka in the Mars atmosphere?
That's like shooting someone just to prove how unsafe firearms are.
I disagree. Shooting a person causes real harm to that person, but copying their credit card number harms no one at all. Using that card number to purchase stuff does cause financial harm to the owner of the card, but it appears Gray did not do this.
Punishment should fit the crime, and positive aspects to any action should be considered. Don't you think the sites he stole the numbers from will enact better security measures? You could almost argue that Gray is a martyr, going to jail for his noble pursuit of making the Internet a more secure place.
Even Apple don't mention AppleScript, I think they realise that the UNIX utils/languages have suceeded it. This book is already irrelevant.
That's because AppleScript is not a Unix utility. As someone else explained, it's a language for controlling applications, including shell scripts, not a part of the "Unix foundation."
AppleScript, as well as any books discussing the topic, is nowhere near irrelevant. For example, I use Retrospect to backup my various machines. Retrospect cannot be scripted except with AppleScript. It is integral to my business that I be able to have Retrospect send me e-mails and cell phone pages when something goes wrong as well as to make sure various volumes are mounted prior to running the backup. The ONLY way to do this is with AppleScript, so I was forced to learn it.
This also points to another problem, which is that OS X does not have a driver for controlling tape devices. Retrospect and BRU, the only backup programs I could find that work with tape drives, have tape controllers built in (BRU has a command-line tape control library, which is only useful for ejecting and erasing, not archiving). There are also no third party tape drivers, so I'm stuck with Retrospect and AppleScript.
AppleScript is by no means as useful for a programmer as, say, Perl or Python, but it definitely has its place. It sure makes mounting network drives simple, with its Rendezvous integration. Clumsy language? Yes. Irrelevant? No.
I've been working as a freelance web developer for about a year and a half. The first year was spent at home. The first couple months were great, but after a while I started going a bit stir crazy and it wasn't long until I was miserable. I was surprised to learn that I truly do need to be around other people once in a while. My worklife situation soon became intolerable, but I had no way out of it. I would sometimes go over a week without seeing ANYbody other than the food mart attendant across the street. I found myself going days without showering.
Eventually I realized I was slowing going mad, which I decided wasn't going to help my career. So I now share office space with a client. They're in a really cool part of town that's close enough for me to bike to. This lets me get out of the house as much as I want, plus I get some exercise, but I don't have to go to the office if something is better done at home. It's totally great. I feel so much better about work, not to mention myself.
You might get lucky if you have a good client with some extra office space. Whatever happens, try to get out of the house as much as possible. See other people often. Loneliness can really start to suck after a while.
Conspiracy theorists take note, Apple's sales in the UK are up 36%, so far, this year.
Which conspiracy theory should I be concerned with? The theory that the ITC is out to thwart Apple or the conspiracy between Apple and ITC to sell more Macs?
Glad to see the UK take a stand for integrity in advertising.
This article has been up far too long for me to expect anyone to read this, but I'm gonna have my say anyway since this is an important topic for me.
I'm one of the "lucky ones" whose metabolism allows me to be skinny without much effort. That is, I was that way in my 20s. Once I hit 30, however, I noticed my body going the way of my father...all the weight going straight to my belly. I was horrified at the thought of a big ol' pot belly, but I was also afraid of having to *gasp* actually diet or, even worse, exercise regularly!
Eventually, I started to do just that. Sit ups and push ups became a near daily regimen. I couldn't jog, though, because I have bad knees and hips, and I prefer on both personal principle and comfort not to go to a gym.
Then I discovered biking. If you're someone who is new to exercise, or are thinking about a nice, healthy way to give your body and mind a treat, get on a bike! Biking not only doesn't hurt my bad knees and hips, it actually strengthens them, which makes them hurt less. I also feel great after a bike ride, even (or especially!) if the ride itself was hard. Plus, as the parent noted, it has a nice geeky feel to it...especially if you wear your Homestar messenger bag on your back!
I live in Chicago and used to drive everywhere. Now I am an avid biker and public transporter, which makes me feel like I'm doing something good for the environment as well as keeping my sanity by not sitting in my car in mind-numbing traffic on the Kennedy or Addison Ave. before a Cubs game. I was surprised to learn that it takes just as long for me to ride my bike to work as it does to drive (about 2.5 miles, lucky me).
Plus, riding a bike gives you a much more intimate experience with the city you live in. I've had conversations with people, helped drunks out of the road, bought fresh fruit from street vendors, and have become far more familiar with the shops, not to mention the sights and smells (we're talking Milwaukee Ave. here...phew!). I feel much more in touch with my neighborhood than I ever did driving. This is one of the best benefits, in my opinion.
It's not always easy, especially in crappy weather, but it is very much worth the effort. Ride a bike! You won't regret it.
There were probably people like you saying the same thing about the toaster when it was first invented. And the car, noooo, what could the general public want with cars? Or phones? Or televisions?
Apart from the car, all of those devices (not including the networks that make phones work) are far simpler than a personal computer. Also, even with cars, their intended use is very simple. A toaster heats bread, a TV displays programs, and a car gets you around. They all have simple standard interfaces and while you should know terminology to purchase and service them, you don't need to know terminology to use them.
My gripe is not about elitism, or about being a "high priest" pushed off my "high horse." The frustration is about people who think computers are simple machines that work intuitively and magically, without realizing that using a computer requires a certain amount of education. Non-tech people are in general too lazy and/or impatient to learn about technology, so they get frustrated and pass that frustration on to those of us who are either related to them or are simply unlucky enough to have a job in tech support.
I think Microsoft and Apple share responsibility for this problem. Heck, I blame anyone who has marketed computers to the masses as appliances that are simple machines, but can do anything. To quote Martin Landau: "Poppycock!"
With all due respect to CmdrTaco, I find it difficult to see much humor in watching Gollum say "fsck!" and spew a bunch of banal insults. Call me a curmudgeon, but I don't think that speech was very clever OR funny.
Okay, I'll admit I might have let out a slight "heh".
especially if someone could replicate the Allaire Homesite file-management and tabbed editing interface on the Mac (why is this so hard? Does noone else find it annoying to have 15 windows open at the same time?)
I asked BBEdit about tabbed windows once. Here is the brief e-mail conversation:
Suffering Bastard:...a tabbed window interface would be REALLY nice, although BBEdit is the best of its kind on any platform.
Patrick Woolsey of BBEdit: As for a tabbed window interface, I will spare you the gory details:-), but we do not feel that this sort of presentation is approriate for editing windows under either the customary or current Mac interface guidelines, so are not likely to implement same.
SB: I'm coming from using Ultra Edit in a Windows dev. environment for a while, and while BBEdit is far more useful for me, I felt the tabbed window interface of Ultra Edit to be very natural as well as helpful toward the conservation of screen real estate.
PW: I like a tabbed window interface a la Mozilla or Chimera very much for browsing, but it raises a whole slew of different UI considerations when applied to editing windows. In fact, now that OS X does cross-application window layering, in some ways there may be even less reason to go with tabbed editing windows because this precludes easily setting up source-target window pairs, e.g. consider an HTML source window with a browser window behind/next to it.
If you can prevent Jerry Springer from cutting a hole in your house to tow you to his set, you will eventually have a gravity well large enough to accomplish your goal!
Oh yeah, then I'll be a big bloated sack of aaalllll man...
The observations were made by the Very Long Baseline Array
Sometimes also known as "my willy".
Seriously, though, what keeps this stuff going? Are all the existing stars around the same age? They must be constantly regenerating to cause all these big booms.
It would be cool if I could blow myself up, then have all my molecules whirl back together to regenerate me. That would be a trip.
There's something fascinating about explosive gaseous objects (sometimes also known as "my grandpa").
Slashdot Mirror
Then again, I imagine a lot of things.
Also, I think "Not that I expect the current administration to do anything about it" would make a great .sig
The same could be said about "Then again, I imagine a lot of things." :-)
Excellent post!
I'm personally tired of hearing people defend upper management at the deliberate expense of the people doing the dirty work. Who truly works harder: an executive who, at best, is working insane hours doing something s/he really likes, or a register worker who works his/her ass off just to keep their mind off how soul-crushingly demeaning the work is.
As to ten years service, that's some serious fucking loyalty, and someone who would work in abjectly miserable conditions for that long deserves a huge helping of respect.
Thanks for pushing that button. And howdy, friend.
I agree with your post otherwise -- this is good news -- but I don't understand that first bit.
I think what Cmdr Trollco is pointing out is that the FSFE folks in WIPO will be the only people speaking out against the mainstream opinions, which will further the image of FOSS advocates as angst-ridden, head-in-the-clouds, delusional hippies. It's a variation on the same theme of discrediting dissent as misplaced discontent by labeling all dissenters as hippie/unpatriotic/out of touch/bad eggs/self-serving boat rockers/whatever.
What Trollco forgets to point out is that OSS people are already perceived as greasy hippies, and since the mainstream system has succeeded in painting them as such, having these hippie malcontents inducted into WIPO has the effect of legitimizing their positions. So dissent from those folks will be expected, whereas a "legit" organization (in the eyes of the mainstream proprietary biz world) that ends up behaving as dissenters would appear MORE hippie-ish than the hippies who are behaving as expected.
Being a greasy hippie myself, I welcome this chance for other hippies to express the views I advocate.
On a side note, TFA says:
FSF (and FSFE) advocate the use of Libre software, also known as Free software or Open-Source software.
TFA was obviously not Stallman approved!
I'm a Cingular subscriber and I recently bought a Sony Ericsson T637, which is bluetooth enabled. I can sync it with my Mac and my bluetooth headset with no problem, as well as connect to other bluetooth phones. I'm not sure how Verizon cripples bluetooth, but from all outward appearances, Cingular does not cripple it all.
Mostly it's for Java but there's a .NET port too
Er, does this mean I should instead connect it up to my Java Lamp? Waxy chunks of gooey code, swimming in fire-red liquid.
Hey, maybe that's a new web hosting concept. Java LAMP!
Daily pun quota fulfilled.
So don't come complaining to Slashdot when you get arrested and get sentenced to a couple years in federal "pound-me-in-the-@ss prison" for violating the law - I just hope you feel that the increased political awareness caused by your acts of "civil disobedience" was well worth it.
Heh, that conjures a pretty funny image. "Dammit, I got arrested and now I'm in jail! Who am I gonna call to complain? I know! Those guys at Slashdot will help me in a jiffy!!"
Seriously, though, I fully agree that anyone who breaks the law must suffer the consequences, and therefore must understand the consequences before setting out to break the law. Gandhi himself made that point very clear by insisting that the British judges follow the letter of the law when punishing him.
Personally, I do not plan to break the law and certainly do not plan to go to jail. That does not mean I don't appreciate the value of disobedience, I'm just not in a position (mentally or economically) to go to jail at the moment. When I am, I'll be sure to let the Slashdot community know so they can prepare to rescue me. ;-)
Remember what happened in 1968 and 1999 when a small group of anarchists turned what was supposed to be peaceful protest into violent confrontations with the police and causing quite a lot of property damage?
I'd first like to point out that an anarchist is not automatically a violent person, and secondly, you are discounting the actions of the Chicago police and mayor Daley, which contributed greatly to the violence of the '68 protests. The cops were hungry for heads to crack, it wasn't like a bunch of strung out lefty whackos just started throwing bombs around (though that did happen elsewhere in the Haymarket). It's true there were plenty of protestors looking for a fight, but the police weren't exactly innocent bystanders.
Civil disobedience has a rightful place in getting a message across. When you have leaders blindly killing innocent people in other countries, including Americans, how does bringing down a few web sites compare? I don't necessarily believe bringing down the GOP web sites will be very effective, but at least there is no violence or phyiscal destruction involved. Seems to me that timing the disruption with the convention makes a pretty strong point (though we'll see how it gets spun in the media).
I do not advocate violence in any form. Civil disobedience is about drawing attention to an issue by inconveniencing a source related to the issue. Without it, great activists for peace like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. would not have succeeded to the degrees that they did. This is in no way a comparison with those wanting to bring down the GOP sites, but it at least tells us something about the overall effectiveness of persistent, nonviolent disobedience.
I'm from Chicago and will be in NYC protesting the Bush administration. I truly hope the protests do not turn violent, and if given the chance I will do whatever I can to prevent it. But everyone seems focused on what the protestors will do, discounting the fact that there will be over 250,000 people, Americans, saying NO to Bush's policies, not to mention the thousands more protesting across the country, including those doing so in the virtual world. This must count for something!
I guess I'm a little late to this conversation, but just wanted to mention that I've seen these tours already happening. I was downtown, at Columbus and Monroe, on May 15th and saw a group of people on Segways wearing helmets. I overheard one of them telling the group what route they were going to take to complete their tour.
It'll be interesting to see how this affects pedestrian traffic downtown. Shouldn't be too bad as long as they stay close to the lakes and parks; I can't imagine how they'd get around in the Loop without creating huge pedstrian traffic delays.
I've also seen some cops using them. Gives me an ominous feeling when I see that and recall Steve Jobs's comment: "people will build cities around this thing."
Dude...that was part of the joke. Is subtle sarcasm worth docking a point?
Sheesh. Well, at least you're honest about your moderation.
I downloaded the file in the hope that perhaps Microsoft had released some sort of public beta...I clicked on the installer file, and to my horror in 10 seconds the attachment had wiped my entire Home folder!
Maybe this is Microsoft's new security paradigm. No one can steal your data, not even you!
We have just discovered real evidence of flowing water once existing on the planet, and this in turn could lead to evidence of fossilized microbes and other lifeforms that we would threaten with destruction if we were to introduce Earth microbes that the Martian microbes could not fight.
Doesn't it seem more likely that our microbial organisms wouldn't stand a chance against Martian organisms fighting on their own turf? What makes Earth organisms so tough?
Come to think of it, we should send well armed Earth bacteria to Mars in a preemptive assault against those mad, raving Martian microbes frothing at the mouth for their chance to dominate our culture. It's the patriotic duty of all Earth citizens to help liberate the Red Planet!
Dramatic conflict is better for TV ratings.
Of course it is nonsense... the russians barely have enough money to keep the country afloat, let alone spend on a manned trip to Mars.
Well, the company funding the project did say it "draws no resources from the state budget." This appears to be a completely privately funded operation.
Still ludicrous, though, considering the technical and logistical challenges. Although I do like the reality TV angle...who wants to start betting on which cosmonaut takes the first shot of vodka in the Mars atmosphere?
That's like shooting someone just to prove how unsafe firearms are.
I disagree. Shooting a person causes real harm to that person, but copying their credit card number harms no one at all. Using that card number to purchase stuff does cause financial harm to the owner of the card, but it appears Gray did not do this.
Punishment should fit the crime, and positive aspects to any action should be considered. Don't you think the sites he stole the numbers from will enact better security measures? You could almost argue that Gray is a martyr, going to jail for his noble pursuit of making the Internet a more secure place.
Note I said "almost."
Will people now start referring to "digitician's butt"?
That's because AppleScript is not a Unix utility. As someone else explained, it's a language for controlling applications, including shell scripts, not a part of the "Unix foundation."
AppleScript, as well as any books discussing the topic, is nowhere near irrelevant. For example, I use Retrospect to backup my various machines. Retrospect cannot be scripted except with AppleScript. It is integral to my business that I be able to have Retrospect send me e-mails and cell phone pages when something goes wrong as well as to make sure various volumes are mounted prior to running the backup. The ONLY way to do this is with AppleScript, so I was forced to learn it.
This also points to another problem, which is that OS X does not have a driver for controlling tape devices. Retrospect and BRU, the only backup programs I could find that work with tape drives, have tape controllers built in (BRU has a command-line tape control library, which is only useful for ejecting and erasing, not archiving). There are also no third party tape drivers, so I'm stuck with Retrospect and AppleScript.
AppleScript is by no means as useful for a programmer as, say, Perl or Python, but it definitely has its place. It sure makes mounting network drives simple, with its Rendezvous integration. Clumsy language? Yes. Irrelevant? No.
I've been working as a freelance web developer for about a year and a half. The first year was spent at home. The first couple months were great, but after a while I started going a bit stir crazy and it wasn't long until I was miserable. I was surprised to learn that I truly do need to be around other people once in a while. My worklife situation soon became intolerable, but I had no way out of it. I would sometimes go over a week without seeing ANYbody other than the food mart attendant across the street. I found myself going days without showering.
Eventually I realized I was slowing going mad, which I decided wasn't going to help my career. So I now share office space with a client. They're in a really cool part of town that's close enough for me to bike to. This lets me get out of the house as much as I want, plus I get some exercise, but I don't have to go to the office if something is better done at home. It's totally great. I feel so much better about work, not to mention myself.
You might get lucky if you have a good client with some extra office space. Whatever happens, try to get out of the house as much as possible. See other people often. Loneliness can really start to suck after a while.
Conspiracy theorists take note, Apple's sales in the UK are up 36%, so far, this year.
Which conspiracy theory should I be concerned with? The theory that the ITC is out to thwart Apple or the conspiracy between Apple and ITC to sell more Macs?
Glad to see the UK take a stand for integrity in advertising.
This article has been up far too long for me to expect anyone to read this, but I'm gonna have my say anyway since this is an important topic for me.
I'm one of the "lucky ones" whose metabolism allows me to be skinny without much effort. That is, I was that way in my 20s. Once I hit 30, however, I noticed my body going the way of my father...all the weight going straight to my belly. I was horrified at the thought of a big ol' pot belly, but I was also afraid of having to *gasp* actually diet or, even worse, exercise regularly!
Eventually, I started to do just that. Sit ups and push ups became a near daily regimen. I couldn't jog, though, because I have bad knees and hips, and I prefer on both personal principle and comfort not to go to a gym.
Then I discovered biking. If you're someone who is new to exercise, or are thinking about a nice, healthy way to give your body and mind a treat, get on a bike! Biking not only doesn't hurt my bad knees and hips, it actually strengthens them, which makes them hurt less. I also feel great after a bike ride, even (or especially!) if the ride itself was hard. Plus, as the parent noted, it has a nice geeky feel to it...especially if you wear your Homestar messenger bag on your back!
I live in Chicago and used to drive everywhere. Now I am an avid biker and public transporter, which makes me feel like I'm doing something good for the environment as well as keeping my sanity by not sitting in my car in mind-numbing traffic on the Kennedy or Addison Ave. before a Cubs game. I was surprised to learn that it takes just as long for me to ride my bike to work as it does to drive (about 2.5 miles, lucky me).
Plus, riding a bike gives you a much more intimate experience with the city you live in. I've had conversations with people, helped drunks out of the road, bought fresh fruit from street vendors, and have become far more familiar with the shops, not to mention the sights and smells (we're talking Milwaukee Ave. here...phew!). I feel much more in touch with my neighborhood than I ever did driving. This is one of the best benefits, in my opinion.
It's not always easy, especially in crappy weather, but it is very much worth the effort. Ride a bike! You won't regret it.
P.S. - Remember to always wear a helmet!
You obviously have never heard of The Happy Sith.
There were probably people like you saying the same thing about the toaster when it was first invented. And the car, noooo, what could the general public want with cars? Or phones? Or televisions?
Apart from the car, all of those devices (not including the networks that make phones work) are far simpler than a personal computer. Also, even with cars, their intended use is very simple. A toaster heats bread, a TV displays programs, and a car gets you around. They all have simple standard interfaces and while you should know terminology to purchase and service them, you don't need to know terminology to use them.
My gripe is not about elitism, or about being a "high priest" pushed off my "high horse." The frustration is about people who think computers are simple machines that work intuitively and magically, without realizing that using a computer requires a certain amount of education. Non-tech people are in general too lazy and/or impatient to learn about technology, so they get frustrated and pass that frustration on to those of us who are either related to them or are simply unlucky enough to have a job in tech support.
I think Microsoft and Apple share responsibility for this problem. Heck, I blame anyone who has marketed computers to the masses as appliances that are simple machines, but can do anything. To quote Martin Landau: "Poppycock!"
With all due respect to CmdrTaco, I find it difficult to see much humor in watching Gollum say "fsck!" and spew a bunch of banal insults. Call me a curmudgeon, but I don't think that speech was very clever OR funny.
Okay, I'll admit I might have let out a slight "heh".
especially if someone could replicate the Allaire Homesite file-management and tabbed editing interface on the Mac (why is this so hard? Does noone else find it annoying to have 15 windows open at the same time?)
I asked BBEdit about tabbed windows once. Here is the brief e-mail conversation:
Suffering Bastard: ...a tabbed window interface would be REALLY nice, although BBEdit is the best of its kind on any platform.
Patrick Woolsey of BBEdit: As for a tabbed window interface, I will spare you the gory details :-), but we do not feel that this sort of presentation is approriate for editing windows under either the customary or current Mac interface guidelines, so are not likely to implement same.
SB: I'm coming from using Ultra Edit in a Windows dev. environment for a while, and while BBEdit is far more useful for me, I felt the tabbed window interface of Ultra Edit to be very natural as well as helpful toward the conservation of screen real estate.
PW: I like a tabbed window interface a la Mozilla or Chimera very much for browsing, but it raises a whole slew of different UI considerations when applied to editing windows. In fact, now that OS X does cross-application window layering, in some ways there may be even less reason to go with tabbed editing windows because this precludes easily setting up source-target window pairs, e.g. consider an HTML source window with a browser window behind/next to it.
So there ya go...straight from the horse's mouth!
If you can prevent Jerry Springer from cutting a hole in your house to tow you to his set, you will eventually have a gravity well large enough to accomplish your goal!
Oh yeah, then I'll be a big bloated sack of aaalllll man...
I'm too sexy for my gravity well!
Sometimes also known as "my willy".
Seriously, though, what keeps this stuff going? Are all the existing stars around the same age? They must be constantly regenerating to cause all these big booms.
It would be cool if I could blow myself up, then have all my molecules whirl back together to regenerate me. That would be a trip.
There's something fascinating about explosive gaseous objects (sometimes also known as "my grandpa").
Surely he now understands the English infinitive "to be Slashdotted".