No, I don't think "publishers did it for the students."
That is not the same, however, as saying "students might want it."
If you think "the index" is the same as "the search button," you haven't used either recently. The index names a few headwords chosen by editors and an indexer. 95% of the other words in a book don't turn up in it. It references the most critical pages, not necessarily all pages that refer to the headword in question. It typically omits statistics, names and organizations, and sources, which you often don't get in a textbook in easily reference form since most undergrad textbooks include no footnotes or endnotes.
Search is HUGE for a studying undergrad, especially during junior and sophomore years when the exams are getting harder and knowing the books inside and out more critical.
Perhaps this is not the case in computer science or mathematics, but anywhere across the arts, humanities, social sciences, history, area studies, management and policy, etc., it will be more than a boon.
I used my little Kindle 1.0 to study for a comprehensive Ph.D. written examination for just that reason; I accumulated 20-30 reference works and then could search for names and critical phrases across the entire contents of my kindle and save those search results for easy recall.
And the way that Kindle saves the search results, it aggregates the surrounding sentences into lists:
Result 1: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
Result 2: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
etc.
And you can click on each one if you want more. The end result was that I could study using just my "saved searches" referencing dozens of books at once, without having to flip through them endlessly and stick paperclips and post-it notes in each volume on "important pages."
The massive juxtaposition of directly relevant paragraphs as "you created 'em" pages that were directly on point for me was amazing.
I was the only person in some years to pass with honors, after several faculty and other students had made fun of me for studying on my Kindle.
1. Yes, you can read non-DRM eBooks on Kindle in several formats, includint text and PDF 2. No, your Kindle does not die if you close your Amazon account 3. No, Amazon does not remotely kill your Kindle if this happens 4. And all of your books (including DRM) remain readable if this happens 5. And Kindle DOES have a USB port so you CAN copy files to and from it 6. And this USB port DOES work just like a flash drive so it's not Windows-only
and I was looking for some version of UNIX that I could afford to use at home as a computer science student. Someone pointed me to a thing called "Linix" posted on one of our departmental NFS servers. Turns out it was just kernel source... but it was like a light bulb going off and I asked around for more information.
Soon enough I'd picked up a 386 machine from the university's surplus department and fitted it with 4MB RAM, 2MB of it on an ISA-bus memory expander card, and I was downloading floppy images from a local BBS. As I recall it was only a few boxes worth, not the hundreds of floppies that were required by the Slackware 3/4 era, when it was literally an all-day, all-night project to install linux, one floppy image at a time.
My system had a 160MB ESDI hard drive that cost me a fortune, 4MB i386, with a 640x480 Tseng Labs VGA card and an old, square, super-clicky Logitech serial mouse. The satisfaction of seeing X+TWM+Emacs on my home display was sooooo immense I thought I'd faint.
Within a number of months I'd expanded to a 640x480x256-capable card and gotten ahold of Mosaic and was using Term from a shell login to create an RFC1918 IP address for myself and connect to the interweb... where almost nothing existed, so mostly I still used Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, etc. and used Linux mainly for the "work" of getting a VT100 login session to my school, so that I could code and test my code on their superfast supernew Sparc 10 machines.:-D
They were fun days.
I still have the Sun3 pizza box that was *meant* to be my first home UNIX box, before I heard about this "Linix" thing.
I live in NYC (Astoria, Queens) and we often have our mail lost or damaged (they'll simply snap a CD in two or fold a book in half to fit it into our mailbox). At times, especially with packages, our postman doesn't even try. We'll have a tracking number to check the status and the system will show three "Delivery attempt" notices and we won't get a slip OR a package, and it will simply disappear into the ether.
And both I and my wife teach at the university level, with alternating schedules, so one of us is almost always home.
We've complained to our local post office (the Long Island City office at 11105) about losses and damage and the manager told us it was a "problem they were aware of" and that there were "investigations" and people would be laid off. A year later, no change. Last thing was a reasonably expensive wristwatch (not a Rolex or anything, just a garden variety $150 or so mechanical watch with a Citizen/Miyota movement that I hope will last a long time) and the company would only deliver USPS, so I took a chance.
Sure enough, it was "lost" without any delivery attempts the first time around and the shipper, happily, agreed to ship an alternate via UPS and to pursue USPS themselves for reimbursement. UPS, of course, had it here two days later, no problems.
Lesson: this is the age of email and global shipping services that actually work. There is no need for USPS. I wish we could do away with piracy controls already so that we could avoid this hassle and have all things like communications and games delivered electronically as should be the case naturally. For solid goods, everybody should just use UPS and/or FedEx. Yes, they have their own problems, but they're not as notoriously shitty as USPS, which has been the butt of jokes in major cities in the U.S. stretching back to the mid-'20th century, and which only got tracking capability for regular mail a decade or more after everyone else on the planet did.
I hate owning a car. Cars are a pain in the ass. They burn fuel, need repairs, require me to get them inspected, cost tons of money to clean, dirty easily, have to be parked, etc.
I have been to nearly every state in the U.S. either by car or by plane. I've crossed the country four times from end to end by road. In nearly every one of these cases, rail would have been my first choice, but Amtrak always costs significantly more than plane or car.
I LOVE the rail systems in Europe. I LOVE the relaxation, the space, the reasonable air and relaxed rules (unlike plane travel) and the fact that I get to see lots of places without having to be stuck in traffic in them. It's damn nice to go by rail.
Within cities, I love commuter and transit rail systems. I took the BART when I lived in San Francisco and I took the TRAX when I lived in Salt Lake City and I took the TriMet when I lived in Portland and I took the El when I lived in Chicago and I now use the MTA Subway system heavily in NYC.
I love, love, love rail and it would be a dream come true if someone at the top of this country could put together a working rail system that's affordable between major cities in the way that Europe's rail system is.
If the price can even match the actual purchase price of air travel, I'd take rail instead at least 75% of the time.
If rail ends up being 2x or 3x more than air, as it has been, though, I'll still end up driving or flying. Right now in the U.S. long-distance and inter-city train is a luxury mode of transportation.
I'm a Linux user. I don't want more Linux users. I don't want users at all. I don't have space in my house for them. What I want is Linux.
I want an operating system that does what I tell it to and offers tools for facilitating this such that each new task does not require a new application.
That is Linux/UNIX.
Point: Operating systems don't want anything. That's anthropomorphism. People want things. Linux users don't want other Linux users. Linux users want Linux. That's why it looks like it does after Linux users built it. They built what they want. And it serves them well.
Somewhere this "Linux wants users" meme got blown out of all realistic proportion. Red Hat may want users, or Ubuntu, but again, those are people: CEOs, employees, marketers, etc., and they want users because they want revenue.
But Linux? Linux doesn't want anything. And Linux users? Linux users want Linux. That's why they're LINUX USERS.
I want an operating system that does what I tell it to and offers tools for facilitating this such that each new task does not require a new application.
That is Linux/UNIX.
Point: Operating systems don't want anything. That's anthropomorphism. People want things. Linux users don't want other Linux users. Linux users want Linux. That's why it looks like it does after Linux users built it. They built what they want. And it serves them well.
Somewhere this "Linux wants users" meme got blown out of all realistic proportion. Red Hat may want users, or Ubuntu, but again, those are people: CEOs, employees, marketers, etc., and they want users because they want revenue.
But Linux? Linux doesn't want anything. And Linux users? Linux users want Linux. That's why they're LINUX USERS.
I'm the "tech neighbor" in my rather large apartment building in New York. Word has gotten around that the guy in 12C "knows about computers," and I'm a reasonably nice guy so I do my share of silly stuff like helping with missing driver installs, helping people figure out how to shut down or reboot, helping people try to delete a file, helping people to get their flash plugin working again, or helping people to find programs that are "missing" while still installed, etc.
Note that all of the things that I just mentioned are recent problems (last couple of weeks) with Vista that I've helped people to solve.
In all cases, the problem was user confusion, user error, or simple lack of user knowledge about how to use the feature, enable the feature, find the feature, etc.
It's not that people were completely in love with XP. They bitched about "Windows" all the time, as they've done for years, sometimes seriously, sometimes half in jest. But Vista changed nearly every aspect of "how to get things done" for the average user.
I don't mean in the "flowchart by a UI designer way," in which the structures of many charts are the same. I mean in the "regular human way," which includes steps like:
- Look for icon I recognize - Right click to find specific text - Follow my nose intuitively through a process I've never really remembered well
Vista changed nearly all the icons, nearly all the text, replaced icons with text and text with icons, placed options in physically different locations relative to window edges, screen edges, or the shapes and levels of menus, and changed policies on some simple stuff like program installs, file renames and deletions, adding things to the start menu, what appears on the start menu, and whether prominent start menu options shut down/reboot or simply sleep/hibernate.
This stuff didn't just break software that made bad assumptions and finds itself no longer working when it was fine in XP, and it's not just a matter of drivers that are missing so that peoples hardware won't work.
It's a matter of changes silently having been made to the ways that users imagine basic things like context menus, the control panel, file behavior, and the start menu to work. I don't know how many times I've helped someone to shut down or reboot Vista after they've tried for days and only managed to sleep/hibernate repeatedly.
Basically, Microsoft made Vista a 100% learning curve for any non-technical person, and people are finding they can't get stuff done. All the cognitive maps they'd made about how "computers" operate, and all the little tricks that had evolved in their computing practices on an ad-hoc basis to get along with Windows over the previous decade were suddenly worthless, and they found themselves in many cases re-living their "first time I used a computer" experience, with all the bewilderment, time wasting, missteps, and unrealized desire to get task X or step Y done that that entailed.
They want XP rather than Vista because they are able to productively use XP in ways that they can't productively use Vista. It's not just a matter of slowness vs. fastness, it's a matter of people literally not being able to figure out how to do the things that they want to do in Vista, whether the thing that they want to do is simply shutting the computer down, visiting YouTube, or making their scanner or printer work again.
Dumbest revision by Microsoft ever; they basically negated the advantages that their massive installed userbase gave them in terms of product preferences.
have "interests." Or at least, companies can't act on them. Companies are made of individuals, and those individuals (amongst them management) have interests and *can* act on them.
Individual interests do not always meet with company interests, for example, when someone can choose do either (a) act in a completely self-serving manner to maximize bonuses and income for as long as possible, or (b) act with the best interests of the company at heart, even if sometimes this means taking less money or having to do more work for it, most of the time people choose (a).
That's basically the source of our entire "economic collapse" right now; the marketoids assume that corporations act in a self interested manner, making the mistake of believing that corporations are individuals with a consciousness that can act. They aren't and they can't. The *individuals* inside them *did* act in a perfectly self-interested manner. But that doesn't get us what's best for the economy, that gets us what's best for those individuals.
Same thing in the game dev world, and indeed, across most of capitalism. Why people continue to think that the people at the top *won't* act in a self interested manner is the thing that's beyond me.
Sad is that if you enforce/support copyright it doesn't go to the artists, but rather to major corporations and PHB's.
And sadder is that if don't enforce/support copyright, then the major corporations and PHB's simply rob artists blind, corporations being "more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
Copyright basically does jack shit, like everything in our society. Heads the corporations win, tails you lose to the corporations.
Why not just accumulate all disk changes in cached RAM and wait until the next shutdown to sync it all. The maximum time spent writing to the hard disk no matter what the computer did while it was on or how long it was on would then be O(1) (no more than the total size of the disk) and write performance would be astronomical!
People keep making arguments about the spec, but this seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The spec is intended to serve the interest of robustness, not the other way around; demolishing robustness and then citing the spec is forgetting why there is a spec in the first place.
Yes, you can design something that's intentionally brain-dead, but still true to spec as a kind of intellectual exercise about extremes, but in the real world, the idea should be the opposite:
Stay true to the spec and try to robustly handle as many contingencies as is possible. Both developers should do this, filesystem and application, not "just" one or the other.
It's not enough just to be true to spec; the idea is to get something that works as well, not jump through hoops to cleverly demonstrate that the spec does not protect against all possible bad outcomes.
It's the bad outcomes that we're trying to mitigate by having a spec in the first place!
So my point: what exactly is wrong with meeting the spec and trying to prevent serious problems by other coders from affecting your own code? I thought this was a basic part of coding: even if someone else is an idiot programmer, that doesn't make it okay to let the whole system fall down. Or did we all miss the part where we went for protected memory access and pre-emptive multitasking? Hell, if everybody had just been a great programmer, none of that would have been needed.
The point is to have a working system by following the spec and to try to clean up behind other programmers when they don't as much as possible within your own spec-compliant code. The point is not simply to "meet spec" and the actual utility of the system or vulnerability to the mistakes of others be damned.
TV lost because usually you can't get it.
on
Why TV Lost
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· Score: 1
TV for anyone = the shows they watch.
Most of the time, therefore, TV is not actually "on" for most people.
You can tape or DVD, but you have to 1) Operate a clumsy machine that does nothing else 2) Buy tapes/DVDs, not too cheap 3) Know in advance exactly what you want to see 4) Go to effort to record #3
With computernet, TV is always on, and these problems all go away:
1) You're using the computermachine often anyway 2) No extra stuff to buy, computerTV is included 3) You don't have to think ahead, watch anytime! 4) Thus, no extra effort; you're online anyway, just pop in a new URL/search term and away you go!
Computernet won because it's TV+, not because TV itself is a bad idea. Computernet just gives it to us faster, cheaper, and easier. It's like a microwave compared to a propane grill. No comparison in convenience, speed, or unobtrusiveness.
sue the pants off of anyone who posts information about them online and actively investigate to determine the identities of anyone posting online about them that turns up in a Google search.
Unlike us, they have deep pockets and legal departments.
As an academic, an author, and an editor, I basically spend most of my life reading. I'm probably as close as you can get to a professional reader.
And I have fallen in love with the ugly, locked-down device that is the Kindle. I know this empirically because I am reading much more on my Kindle than I off of it. The experience of reading in modern society overflows the mere pages of a book and includes things like transportability, capacity, and cost.
Kindle wins hands-down on all three. Kindle books are damned cheap in comparison to print and even to other e-book formats and Kindle's capacity is more than enough to carry an unwieldy library with you at all times. It's also very thin and very light, much moreso than most serious books of any heft.
In comparison to other devices, Kindle offers unique benefits. I am amongst those that have read serious works on my smartphone, anything from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Journal of Housing Economics.
Reading on a smartphone always feels as though it is a matter of necessity. "I am reading this here because at the moment my mobility needs ensure that there are no other options." The moment it is possible to put down the phone and "switch" to the print copy, you do; you don't stare at that tiny screen any longer than is necessary.
Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches.
Finally, the problem of the book. Yes, books are substantively different from e-readers. At the same time, I think that the advantages of the book address a need beyond mere reading. There are certain books that one wants on one's shelf, as a presence, a kind of authority that descends from materiality. A book is not virtual, not ephemeral; it doesn't feel as though it can be deleted. Books that are thus very important to one's identity or to one's very life practices are likely always to be bought and kept as books, so that they're present, visible, can be experienced bodily, with a kind of tactility that encompasses all of the senses, that makes the book more a part of you.
Not all kinds of reading imply this level of commitment, though. In fact, I'd suggest that for most professional readers like myself, most don't. You don't particularly care whether you ever see a given nonfiction paperback again in your life; your goal is merely to read it, ingest what you can, and move on. If it turns out to revolutionize your life by the time you've arrived at the last page, you'll buy it in hardcover, I suspect.
But in the meantime, for the rest, you get them for a fraction of the cost on Kindle and read them on the move in a way and at a level of comfort and convenience that's otherwise impossible.
Some time ago they were apparently (I didn't ever bother to check for myself, but there was an uproar about it) distributing the stock Firefox source rather than the source to their builds, which they apparently wouldn't release or something, leading to claims about licensing violations.
I don't know if that was ever resolved and there were some websites dedicated to talking you out of using swiftfox for being anti-OSS or some such, but I continued always to use it because it was either that or browse twice as slowly.
happy for non-technical reasons, but I continue to use Swiftfox on Linux because it is so damned much faster than Fedora's Firefox build.
I know that there is a CPU optimization difference, but I haven't looked into other differences. Someone who has looked at the buildconfig for both and/or who knows about the build processes and configurations of both: is the reason for the slowness in the comparison referenced in this post related at all to something that Swiftfox is fixing?
That's exactly the problem with OO that doesn't exist in real life; in OO, there is no "application" that gives a list of tasks that can be applied to any object, but rather each object has inherent properties and no others can be applied.
Think of a beach ball. In real life you can beachball.bounce and you ban beachball.inflate and you can beachball.deflate, so these are the sorts of things that an OO programmer would implement. But in real life if you wanted to you could also beachball.boil_in_a_pot or beachball.fold_into_floppy_airplane and beachball.write_note_and_stick_deflated_on_wall.
These last few are things that a programmer would _never_ likely implement for an object called beachball, and because properties are inherent to the object, you'll have a hell of a time trying to turn one object into another, especially (again) if no properties have been coded for doing so.
So your image is a JPG, or it is a PNG, or it is an SVG and that's basically it; you don't switch between because each has its own properties. You certainly don't get to open them as a stream of bytes (as you can do in emacs) and change a single one, or play them out to the audio device and see what JPG data "sounds" like. Though most people probably wouldn't care to do this, in a truly OO system, it's impossible unless someone implements an entire method. You have to _code_ every novel thing you ever want to do. No experimentation or "unusual" operations.
I came to Linux from SunOS in '93, switched from FVWM2 to KDE during the betas for KDE 1.0 in 1998 and used KDE all the way until last year, 2008.
I suffered as a reviewer through the truly horrible GNOME 1.0 release and the flames that resulted from my negative review and tried GNOME over and over again through the years, always strongly preferring KDE.
Then last year I finally upgraded from Fedora 5 to Fedora 9 and with it came KDE 4. I found it to be nearly unusable but used it nonetheless, still biased against GNOME for various reasons (including nonconfigurability). 4.1 came out and it was just as unusable.
The thing that finally made me switch are the molasses-slow file previews in Dolphin/Konqueror. In combination with everything else (compatibility, slowness, problems with the nvidia drivers, instability, lack of functionality in comparison to KDE 3.x) it just pushed me over the edge. In 1991 I would never have dreamed of using a "file manager" of any kind on my SunOS+X11 desktops, but this is 2009, not 1991, and when even the file manager is too slow to use (a 5-second preview of a folder in GNOME vs a 1-hour preview of a folder in KDE) then there's just no hope.
So I switched to GNOME last year, stuck with GNOME when upgrading to Fedora 10 this year. I've continued to "check in" on KDE, but despite repeated rounds of updated packages through yum, none of the problems that drove me away appear to have been solved.:-(
Then I switched fields entirely, actually, and went into publishing because I burned out my driving interest in computing and technology, thanks largely to corporate software development environments. But I suppose it amounts to the same thing.;-)
Anything cooperative is hurting society and clearly illegal. Individuals producing for free are breaking the law; only corporations are legitimate suppliers/producers, and only those who pay should have access to society's production.
I had the experience in high school way back in the late '80s and early '90s before "OSS" was a term.
I was suspended for writing software and sharing it with my friends. My own source code. The administration of my school told myself and my parents in no uncertain terms that I was breaking the law by writing software and giving it to others, and they were having none of it on school property.
They suggested that to be "constructive," my dad could help me to "start a company" and sell the software to my friends in the computer club, which would be legal, and, they suggested, if priced properly ($5-10 was what they suggested), still affordable to other students and not in violation of the "law," which forbids giving away goods for free. They mixed up anti-socialism/communitarianism in their heads with some kind of Sherman anti-trustiness and applied it to a 13-year-old kid.
My parents allowed me to leave school immediately and I finished my education as a home schooled student, went to a university CS department at 15 and eventually to the University of Chicago for grad school.
Those same administrators still run the local high school, which has 5,000 students and is an inner city campus.
PeTA directly bankrolls and is repeatedly under investigation for their links to/shared members with ALF (Animal Liberation Front) actions, including arson, theft, vandalism, assault, and other similar crimes.
Their position is that meat-eating is equivalent to Hitler's holocaust and that they must wage a multi-pronged war (PR, violence, resistance ala French Resistance) to fight it by any means necessary.
I dated someone very much on the inside of this organization who was inside their organizational structure as a paid regional administrator.
They are not only not nice, they are quite simply dangerous. They don't just want to convince your teenagers to not eat meat; they want to sign them up to "volunteer" at local rock concerts and fairs passing out flyers, and once they volunteer and arrive, they will spend the day (or days) trying to convince them that it is their moral duty to get involved in "actions" in the middle of the night wearing balaclavas and committing crimes.
Teens tend to get involved because it makes them feel important, like warriors or secret agents or something... and then when they get arrested and deny any instructions from PeTA it's easy to have them written off as overenthusiastic radical loose-nut juvenilles in need of better parental supervision, etc.
It's domestic terrorism, and inside the organization amongst "friends," they're rather proud of that. They honestly feel that they'll be seen in the future as the French Resistance is seen today.
Aside: I broke up with the person in question some years ago now. She had started to question my trustability and loyalty on the one hand and I started to get questions from law enforcement on the other. I began to fear for my personal safety, from both directions and decided I was nuts to get any more involved with the person in question. I broke all ties and moved across the country.
Certain games in the Myst/Riven series, for example, have been challenging in an intellectually stimulating way, most notably Riven and Uru.
Many strategy games, particularly turn-based strategy games, also fit the bill.
I don't think games will ever become "educational" at the adult level, because in large part pedagogical concerns are part of the world of work for adults (stuff you have to learn for work, stuff you have to learn for this project or that one, etc.) and the point of gaming is to escape the world of work... unless we begin to transition to a society in which regular user interfaces for work-style tasks are constructed with game-like interfaces and metaphors, but I dont' see that happening.
The point for an "adult" game is to keep it from being utterly mindless and/or adolescent, to provide intellectual stimulation by requiring the juxtaposition and analytical processing of facts and information, even if these are fictional and appear in the context of a game.
To that end, my vote goes to the best of the puzzle/adventure games (the good ones with "puzzles" the scale of the entire game stretchign across contexts, not the shitty ones which have tended to be truly horrible an mind-numbing) and the turn-based strategy games.
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No, I don't think "publishers did it for the students."
That is not the same, however, as saying "students might want it."
If you think "the index" is the same as "the search button," you haven't used either recently. The index names a few headwords chosen by editors and an indexer. 95% of the other words in a book don't turn up in it. It references the most critical pages, not necessarily all pages that refer to the headword in question. It typically omits statistics, names and organizations, and sources, which you often don't get in a textbook in easily reference form since most undergrad textbooks include no footnotes or endnotes.
Search is HUGE for a studying undergrad, especially during junior and sophomore years when the exams are getting harder and knowing the books inside and out more critical.
Perhaps this is not the case in computer science or mathematics, but anywhere across the arts, humanities, social sciences, history, area studies, management and policy, etc., it will be more than a boon.
I used my little Kindle 1.0 to study for a comprehensive Ph.D. written examination for just that reason; I accumulated 20-30 reference works and then could search for names and critical phrases across the entire contents of my kindle and save those search results for easy recall.
And the way that Kindle saves the search results, it aggregates the surrounding sentences into lists:
Result 1: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
Result 2: From Book Title: Surrounding context and keywords here.
etc.
And you can click on each one if you want more. The end result was that I could study using just my "saved searches" referencing dozens of books at once, without having to flip through them endlessly and stick paperclips and post-it notes in each volume on "important pages."
The massive juxtaposition of directly relevant paragraphs as "you created 'em" pages that were directly on point for me was amazing.
I was the only person in some years to pass with honors, after several faculty and other students had made fun of me for studying on my Kindle.
1. Searchable (wooohoo!)
2. Carry one thin device, not 20lbs of books
Those alone might have caused me to buy it as an undergrad.
1. Yes, you can read non-DRM eBooks on Kindle in several formats, includint text and PDF
2. No, your Kindle does not die if you close your Amazon account
3. No, Amazon does not remotely kill your Kindle if this happens
4. And all of your books (including DRM) remain readable if this happens
5. And Kindle DOES have a USB port so you CAN copy files to and from it
6. And this USB port DOES work just like a flash drive so it's not Windows-only
and I was looking for some version of UNIX that I could afford to use at home as a computer science student. Someone pointed me to a thing called "Linix" posted on one of our departmental NFS servers. Turns out it was just kernel source... but it was like a light bulb going off and I asked around for more information.
Soon enough I'd picked up a 386 machine from the university's surplus department and fitted it with 4MB RAM, 2MB of it on an ISA-bus memory expander card, and I was downloading floppy images from a local BBS. As I recall it was only a few boxes worth, not the hundreds of floppies that were required by the Slackware 3/4 era, when it was literally an all-day, all-night project to install linux, one floppy image at a time.
My system had a 160MB ESDI hard drive that cost me a fortune, 4MB i386, with a 640x480 Tseng Labs VGA card and an old, square, super-clicky Logitech serial mouse. The satisfaction of seeing X+TWM+Emacs on my home display was sooooo immense I thought I'd faint.
Within a number of months I'd expanded to a 640x480x256-capable card and gotten ahold of Mosaic and was using Term from a shell login to create an RFC1918 IP address for myself and connect to the interweb... where almost nothing existed, so mostly I still used Gopher, Archie, Veronica, Jughead, etc. and used Linux mainly for the "work" of getting a VT100 login session to my school, so that I could code and test my code on their superfast supernew Sparc 10 machines. :-D
They were fun days.
I still have the Sun3 pizza box that was *meant* to be my first home UNIX box, before I heard about this "Linix" thing.
I live in NYC (Astoria, Queens) and we often have our mail lost or damaged (they'll simply snap a CD in two or fold a book in half to fit it into our mailbox). At times, especially with packages, our postman doesn't even try. We'll have a tracking number to check the status and the system will show three "Delivery attempt" notices and we won't get a slip OR a package, and it will simply disappear into the ether.
And both I and my wife teach at the university level, with alternating schedules, so one of us is almost always home.
We've complained to our local post office (the Long Island City office at 11105) about losses and damage and the manager told us it was a "problem they were aware of" and that there were "investigations" and people would be laid off. A year later, no change. Last thing was a reasonably expensive wristwatch (not a Rolex or anything, just a garden variety $150 or so mechanical watch with a Citizen/Miyota movement that I hope will last a long time) and the company would only deliver USPS, so I took a chance.
Sure enough, it was "lost" without any delivery attempts the first time around and the shipper, happily, agreed to ship an alternate via UPS and to pursue USPS themselves for reimbursement. UPS, of course, had it here two days later, no problems.
Lesson: this is the age of email and global shipping services that actually work. There is no need for USPS. I wish we could do away with piracy controls already so that we could avoid this hassle and have all things like communications and games delivered electronically as should be the case naturally. For solid goods, everybody should just use UPS and/or FedEx. Yes, they have their own problems, but they're not as notoriously shitty as USPS, which has been the butt of jokes in major cities in the U.S. stretching back to the mid-'20th century, and which only got tracking capability for regular mail a decade or more after everyone else on the planet did.
I hate owning a car. Cars are a pain in the ass. They burn fuel, need repairs, require me to get them inspected, cost tons of money to clean, dirty easily, have to be parked, etc.
I have been to nearly every state in the U.S. either by car or by plane. I've crossed the country four times from end to end by road. In nearly every one of these cases, rail would have been my first choice, but Amtrak always costs significantly more than plane or car.
I LOVE the rail systems in Europe. I LOVE the relaxation, the space, the reasonable air and relaxed rules (unlike plane travel) and the fact that I get to see lots of places without having to be stuck in traffic in them. It's damn nice to go by rail.
Within cities, I love commuter and transit rail systems. I took the BART when I lived in San Francisco and I took the TRAX when I lived in Salt Lake City and I took the TriMet when I lived in Portland and I took the El when I lived in Chicago and I now use the MTA Subway system heavily in NYC.
I love, love, love rail and it would be a dream come true if someone at the top of this country could put together a working rail system that's affordable between major cities in the way that Europe's rail system is.
If the price can even match the actual purchase price of air travel, I'd take rail instead at least 75% of the time.
If rail ends up being 2x or 3x more than air, as it has been, though, I'll still end up driving or flying. Right now in the U.S. long-distance and inter-city train is a luxury mode of transportation.
I'm a Linux user. I don't want more Linux users. I don't want users at all. I don't have space in my house for them. What I want is Linux.
I want an operating system that does what I tell it to and offers tools for facilitating this such that each new task does not require a new application.
That is Linux/UNIX.
Point: Operating systems don't want anything. That's anthropomorphism. People want things. Linux users don't want other Linux users. Linux users want Linux. That's why it looks like it does after Linux users built it. They built what they want. And it serves them well.
Somewhere this "Linux wants users" meme got blown out of all realistic proportion. Red Hat may want users, or Ubuntu, but again, those are people: CEOs, employees, marketers, etc., and they want users because they want revenue.
But Linux? Linux doesn't want anything. And Linux users? Linux users want Linux. That's why they're LINUX USERS.
I want an operating system that does what I tell it to and offers tools for facilitating this such that each new task does not require a new application.
That is Linux/UNIX.
Point: Operating systems don't want anything. That's anthropomorphism. People want things. Linux users don't want other Linux users. Linux users want Linux. That's why it looks like it does after Linux users built it. They built what they want. And it serves them well.
Somewhere this "Linux wants users" meme got blown out of all realistic proportion. Red Hat may want users, or Ubuntu, but again, those are people: CEOs, employees, marketers, etc., and they want users because they want revenue.
But Linux? Linux doesn't want anything. And Linux users? Linux users want Linux. That's why they're LINUX USERS.
I'm the "tech neighbor" in my rather large apartment building in New York. Word has gotten around that the guy in 12C "knows about computers," and I'm a reasonably nice guy so I do my share of silly stuff like helping with missing driver installs, helping people figure out how to shut down or reboot, helping people try to delete a file, helping people to get their flash plugin working again, or helping people to find programs that are "missing" while still installed, etc.
Note that all of the things that I just mentioned are recent problems (last couple of weeks) with Vista that I've helped people to solve.
In all cases, the problem was user confusion, user error, or simple lack of user knowledge about how to use the feature, enable the feature, find the feature, etc.
It's not that people were completely in love with XP. They bitched about "Windows" all the time, as they've done for years, sometimes seriously, sometimes half in jest. But Vista changed nearly every aspect of "how to get things done" for the average user.
I don't mean in the "flowchart by a UI designer way," in which the structures of many charts are the same. I mean in the "regular human way," which includes steps like:
- Look for icon I recognize
- Right click to find specific text
- Follow my nose intuitively through a process I've never really remembered well
Vista changed nearly all the icons, nearly all the text, replaced icons with text and text with icons, placed options in physically different locations relative to window edges, screen edges, or the shapes and levels of menus, and changed policies on some simple stuff like program installs, file renames and deletions, adding things to the start menu, what appears on the start menu, and whether prominent start menu options shut down/reboot or simply sleep/hibernate.
This stuff didn't just break software that made bad assumptions and finds itself no longer working when it was fine in XP, and it's not just a matter of drivers that are missing so that peoples hardware won't work.
It's a matter of changes silently having been made to the ways that users imagine basic things like context menus, the control panel, file behavior, and the start menu to work. I don't know how many times I've helped someone to shut down or reboot Vista after they've tried for days and only managed to sleep/hibernate repeatedly.
Basically, Microsoft made Vista a 100% learning curve for any non-technical person, and people are finding they can't get stuff done. All the cognitive maps they'd made about how "computers" operate, and all the little tricks that had evolved in their computing practices on an ad-hoc basis to get along with Windows over the previous decade were suddenly worthless, and they found themselves in many cases re-living their "first time I used a computer" experience, with all the bewilderment, time wasting, missteps, and unrealized desire to get task X or step Y done that that entailed.
They want XP rather than Vista because they are able to productively use XP in ways that they can't productively use Vista. It's not just a matter of slowness vs. fastness, it's a matter of people literally not being able to figure out how to do the things that they want to do in Vista, whether the thing that they want to do is simply shutting the computer down, visiting YouTube, or making their scanner or printer work again.
Dumbest revision by Microsoft ever; they basically negated the advantages that their massive installed userbase gave them in terms of product preferences.
have "interests." Or at least, companies can't act on them. Companies are made of individuals, and those individuals (amongst them management) have interests and *can* act on them.
Individual interests do not always meet with company interests, for example, when someone can choose do either (a) act in a completely self-serving manner to maximize bonuses and income for as long as possible, or (b) act with the best interests of the company at heart, even if sometimes this means taking less money or having to do more work for it, most of the time people choose (a).
That's basically the source of our entire "economic collapse" right now; the marketoids assume that corporations act in a self interested manner, making the mistake of believing that corporations are individuals with a consciousness that can act. They aren't and they can't. The *individuals* inside them *did* act in a perfectly self-interested manner. But that doesn't get us what's best for the economy, that gets us what's best for those individuals.
Same thing in the game dev world, and indeed, across most of capitalism. Why people continue to think that the people at the top *won't* act in a self interested manner is the thing that's beyond me.
Mr. Crab: "Cogito ergo sum!"
Most humans aren't even conscious. A good 60% of the human race is too stupid to "feel" pain.
Sad is that if you enforce/support copyright it doesn't go to the artists, but rather to major corporations and PHB's.
And sadder is that if don't enforce/support copyright, then the major corporations and PHB's simply rob artists blind, corporations being "more powerful than you can possibly imagine."
Copyright basically does jack shit, like everything in our society. Heads the corporations win, tails you lose to the corporations.
Why not just accumulate all disk changes in cached RAM and wait until the next shutdown to sync it all. The maximum time spent writing to the hard disk no matter what the computer did while it was on or how long it was on would then be O(1) (no more than the total size of the disk) and write performance would be astronomical!
Of course, reliability would suffer...
People keep making arguments about the spec, but this seems like a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The spec is intended to serve the interest of robustness, not the other way around; demolishing robustness and then citing the spec is forgetting why there is a spec in the first place.
Yes, you can design something that's intentionally brain-dead, but still true to spec as a kind of intellectual exercise about extremes, but in the real world, the idea should be the opposite:
Stay true to the spec and try to robustly handle as many contingencies as is possible. Both developers should do this, filesystem and application, not "just" one or the other.
It's not enough just to be true to spec; the idea is to get something that works as well, not jump through hoops to cleverly demonstrate that the spec does not protect against all possible bad outcomes.
It's the bad outcomes that we're trying to mitigate by having a spec in the first place!
So my point: what exactly is wrong with meeting the spec and trying to prevent serious problems by other coders from affecting your own code? I thought this was a basic part of coding: even if someone else is an idiot programmer, that doesn't make it okay to let the whole system fall down. Or did we all miss the part where we went for protected memory access and pre-emptive multitasking? Hell, if everybody had just been a great programmer, none of that would have been needed.
The point is to have a working system by following the spec and to try to clean up behind other programmers when they don't as much as possible within your own spec-compliant code. The point is not simply to "meet spec" and the actual utility of the system or vulnerability to the mistakes of others be damned.
TV for anyone = the shows they watch.
Most of the time, therefore, TV is not actually "on" for most people.
You can tape or DVD, but you have to
1) Operate a clumsy machine that does nothing else
2) Buy tapes/DVDs, not too cheap
3) Know in advance exactly what you want to see
4) Go to effort to record #3
With computernet, TV is always on, and these problems all go away:
1) You're using the computermachine often anyway
2) No extra stuff to buy, computerTV is included
3) You don't have to think ahead, watch anytime!
4) Thus, no extra effort; you're online anyway, just pop in a new URL/search term and away you go!
Computernet won because it's TV+, not because TV itself is a bad idea. Computernet just gives it to us faster, cheaper, and easier. It's like a microwave compared to a propane grill. No comparison in convenience, speed, or unobtrusiveness.
sue the pants off of anyone who posts information about them online and actively investigate to determine the identities of anyone posting online about them that turns up in a Google search.
Unlike us, they have deep pockets and legal departments.
As an academic, an author, and an editor, I basically spend most of my life reading. I'm probably as close as you can get to a professional reader.
And I have fallen in love with the ugly, locked-down device that is the Kindle. I know this empirically because I am reading much more on my Kindle than I off of it. The experience of reading in modern society overflows the mere pages of a book and includes things like transportability, capacity, and cost.
Kindle wins hands-down on all three. Kindle books are damned cheap in comparison to print and even to other e-book formats and Kindle's capacity is more than enough to carry an unwieldy library with you at all times. It's also very thin and very light, much moreso than most serious books of any heft.
In comparison to other devices, Kindle offers unique benefits. I am amongst those that have read serious works on my smartphone, anything from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls to the Journal of Housing Economics.
Reading on a smartphone always feels as though it is a matter of necessity. "I am reading this here because at the moment my mobility needs ensure that there are no other options." The moment it is possible to put down the phone and "switch" to the print copy, you do; you don't stare at that tiny screen any longer than is necessary.
Laptops require more physical interaction than you want to engage in when you're reading a 1,000 page tome. To read on a laptop you have to sit up, stare in one direction, operate a scroll wheel each time you want to see the next page (or click, or drag, or reach out and press a key). You can't "lounge about" on large pieces of soft furniture, adjusting your position as bits of you become overcompressed or uncomfortable. Laptops are fine for a little light reading, but they fail miserably for long stretches.
Finally, the problem of the book. Yes, books are substantively different from e-readers. At the same time, I think that the advantages of the book address a need beyond mere reading. There are certain books that one wants on one's shelf, as a presence, a kind of authority that descends from materiality. A book is not virtual, not ephemeral; it doesn't feel as though it can be deleted. Books that are thus very important to one's identity or to one's very life practices are likely always to be bought and kept as books, so that they're present, visible, can be experienced bodily, with a kind of tactility that encompasses all of the senses, that makes the book more a part of you.
Not all kinds of reading imply this level of commitment, though. In fact, I'd suggest that for most professional readers like myself, most don't. You don't particularly care whether you ever see a given nonfiction paperback again in your life; your goal is merely to read it, ingest what you can, and move on. If it turns out to revolutionize your life by the time you've arrived at the last page, you'll buy it in hardcover, I suspect.
But in the meantime, for the rest, you get them for a fraction of the cost on Kindle and read them on the move in a way and at a level of comfort and convenience that's otherwise impossible.
Some time ago they were apparently (I didn't ever bother to check for myself, but there was an uproar about it) distributing the stock Firefox source rather than the source to their builds, which they apparently wouldn't release or something, leading to claims about licensing violations.
I don't know if that was ever resolved and there were some websites dedicated to talking you out of using swiftfox for being anti-OSS or some such, but I continued always to use it because it was either that or browse twice as slowly.
happy for non-technical reasons, but I continue to use Swiftfox on Linux because it is so damned much faster than Fedora's Firefox build.
I know that there is a CPU optimization difference, but I haven't looked into other differences. Someone who has looked at the buildconfig for both and/or who knows about the build processes and configurations of both: is the reason for the slowness in the comparison referenced in this post related at all to something that Swiftfox is fixing?
That's exactly the problem with OO that doesn't exist in real life; in OO, there is no "application" that gives a list of tasks that can be applied to any object, but rather each object has inherent properties and no others can be applied.
Think of a beach ball. In real life you can beachball.bounce and you ban beachball.inflate and you can beachball.deflate, so these are the sorts of things that an OO programmer would implement. But in real life if you wanted to you could also beachball.boil_in_a_pot or beachball.fold_into_floppy_airplane and beachball.write_note_and_stick_deflated_on_wall.
These last few are things that a programmer would _never_ likely implement for an object called beachball, and because properties are inherent to the object, you'll have a hell of a time trying to turn one object into another, especially (again) if no properties have been coded for doing so.
So your image is a JPG, or it is a PNG, or it is an SVG and that's basically it; you don't switch between because each has its own properties. You certainly don't get to open them as a stream of bytes (as you can do in emacs) and change a single one, or play them out to the audio device and see what JPG data "sounds" like. Though most people probably wouldn't care to do this, in a truly OO system, it's impossible unless someone implements an entire method. You have to _code_ every novel thing you ever want to do. No experimentation or "unusual" operations.
I came to Linux from SunOS in '93, switched from FVWM2 to KDE during the betas for KDE 1.0 in 1998 and used KDE all the way until last year, 2008.
I suffered as a reviewer through the truly horrible GNOME 1.0 release and the flames that resulted from my negative review and tried GNOME over and over again through the years, always strongly preferring KDE.
Then last year I finally upgraded from Fedora 5 to Fedora 9 and with it came KDE 4. I found it to be nearly unusable but used it nonetheless, still biased against GNOME for various reasons (including nonconfigurability). 4.1 came out and it was just as unusable.
The thing that finally made me switch are the molasses-slow file previews in Dolphin/Konqueror. In combination with everything else (compatibility, slowness, problems with the nvidia drivers, instability, lack of functionality in comparison to KDE 3.x) it just pushed me over the edge. In 1991 I would never have dreamed of using a "file manager" of any kind on my SunOS+X11 desktops, but this is 2009, not 1991, and when even the file manager is too slow to use (a 5-second preview of a folder in GNOME vs a 1-hour preview of a folder in KDE) then there's just no hope.
So I switched to GNOME last year, stuck with GNOME when upgrading to Fedora 10 this year. I've continued to "check in" on KDE, but despite repeated rounds of updated packages through yum, none of the problems that drove me away appear to have been solved. :-(
Then I switched fields entirely, actually, and went into publishing because I burned out my driving interest in computing and technology, thanks largely to corporate software development environments. But I suppose it amounts to the same thing. ;-)
Anything cooperative is hurting society and clearly illegal. Individuals producing for free are breaking the law; only corporations are legitimate suppliers/producers, and only those who pay should have access to society's production.
I had the experience in high school way back in the late '80s and early '90s before "OSS" was a term.
I was suspended for writing software and sharing it with my friends. My own source code. The administration of my school told myself and my parents in no uncertain terms that I was breaking the law by writing software and giving it to others, and they were having none of it on school property.
They suggested that to be "constructive," my dad could help me to "start a company" and sell the software to my friends in the computer club, which would be legal, and, they suggested, if priced properly ($5-10 was what they suggested), still affordable to other students and not in violation of the "law," which forbids giving away goods for free. They mixed up anti-socialism/communitarianism in their heads with some kind of Sherman anti-trustiness and applied it to a 13-year-old kid.
My parents allowed me to leave school immediately and I finished my education as a home schooled student, went to a university CS department at 15 and eventually to the University of Chicago for grad school.
Those same administrators still run the local high school, which has 5,000 students and is an inner city campus.
PeTA directly bankrolls and is repeatedly under investigation for their links to/shared members with ALF (Animal Liberation Front) actions, including arson, theft, vandalism, assault, and other similar crimes.
Their position is that meat-eating is equivalent to Hitler's holocaust and that they must wage a multi-pronged war (PR, violence, resistance ala French Resistance) to fight it by any means necessary.
I dated someone very much on the inside of this organization who was inside their organizational structure as a paid regional administrator.
They are not only not nice, they are quite simply dangerous. They don't just want to convince your teenagers to not eat meat; they want to sign them up to "volunteer" at local rock concerts and fairs passing out flyers, and once they volunteer and arrive, they will spend the day (or days) trying to convince them that it is their moral duty to get involved in "actions" in the middle of the night wearing balaclavas and committing crimes.
Teens tend to get involved because it makes them feel important, like warriors or secret agents or something... and then when they get arrested and deny any instructions from PeTA it's easy to have them written off as overenthusiastic radical loose-nut juvenilles in need of better parental supervision, etc.
It's domestic terrorism, and inside the organization amongst "friends," they're rather proud of that. They honestly feel that they'll be seen in the future as the French Resistance is seen today.
Aside: I broke up with the person in question some years ago now. She had started to question my trustability and loyalty on the one hand and I started to get questions from law enforcement on the other. I began to fear for my personal safety, from both directions and decided I was nuts to get any more involved with the person in question. I broke all ties and moved across the country.
Certain games in the Myst/Riven series, for example, have been challenging in an intellectually stimulating way, most notably Riven and Uru.
Many strategy games, particularly turn-based strategy games, also fit the bill.
I don't think games will ever become "educational" at the adult level, because in large part pedagogical concerns are part of the world of work for adults (stuff you have to learn for work, stuff you have to learn for this project or that one, etc.) and the point of gaming is to escape the world of work... unless we begin to transition to a society in which regular user interfaces for work-style tasks are constructed with game-like interfaces and metaphors, but I dont' see that happening.
The point for an "adult" game is to keep it from being utterly mindless and/or adolescent, to provide intellectual stimulation by requiring the juxtaposition and analytical processing of facts and information, even if these are fictional and appear in the context of a game.
To that end, my vote goes to the best of the puzzle/adventure games (the good ones with "puzzles" the scale of the entire game stretchign across contexts, not the shitty ones which have tended to be truly horrible an mind-numbing) and the turn-based strategy games.