The point being what so many Slashdot posters have said before:
People hate buying shit.
People love buying things they enjoy, because they want to see more of them made.
Or, to put it another way, consumers aren't stupid, they understand the power of their own dollars. People are just as smart as (if not smarter than) the RIAA/MPAA bosses: they won't waste their cash until they know their cash won't be wasted.
Solution to the problem: create a product that people WANT TO SUPPORT and that people WANT MORE OF and it will sell well FOR THOSE REASONS.
Anything else is just attempted blackmail and theft from consumers' pockets.
All of the specifics he comes up with are either unrelated to X (i.e. the core dump drag and drop "bomb", file managers that don't update their file lists, etc.) and related instead to poorly written applications, or they're just fscking WRONG... for example, the discussion of magic cookie exchange and the way this joker tries to accomplish it rather than just piping through rsh/ssh demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge about the guts of the system.
If the person doesn't know how to use it or how it works in the first place, I'm sure as hell not going to accept their criticism about what's wrong with it.
It's all about personal preferences. I find KDE's interface (once I've added a slave panel for a taskbar and made the main panel vertical, plus adding about ten additional menus to it) to be nice and usable, with everything in easy reach.
I find GNOME, on the other hand, to be uncomfortably light and clean, with nothing in easy reach, kind of like a one-button mouse or a one-button walkman... so simple that it's hard to get anything you want done, because the functionality's either missing, or requires extra steps to access.
I'd be interested in seeing research that compares peoples' living spaces to peoples' PC desktops. I wonder if you have a very empty, Zen-like living space. I myself have an incredibly cluttered (but orderly) living space; books, equipment, tools, etc. all tend to be within view on umpteen shelves, hooks, stacks, etc... bus and train schedules are posted on the wall... everything is easy to access, and easy to put away, requiring only one step ("reach").
Citibank can't do anything about it anyway; they're not law enforcement, and even if they were, what exactly do you see law enforcement doing about SPAM or phish emails? Nada.
I used to work at eBay and the phishing problem was terrible (though I didn't deal with it directly, that wasn't my department). When users would find out, they'd demand to know why eBay didn't do something about it. The people who worked on that floor would stand around in the smoking shed and bitch, "What do they want us to do, buy some guns and go to Romania and raid the guy's house wearing little eBay uniforms?"
I don't own an iMac. I'm a ThinkPad user. Personally, I think that the sleek black of the thin ThinkPads is the sexiest look ever in PCs, but I'm wise enough to know that many will disagree.
I'm pretty confident, though, that 90% of the population would prefer an iMac to this thing, at least in terms of looks.
My uncle is a Colonel in the airforce (retired). My grandfathers fought on opposing sides in World War II. My best friend's wife is in the Navy. Another friend has a daughter in Iraq right now.
Too many Americans are starry-eyed over the armed forces because they have allegiances only to the U.S. and U.S. soldiers, so they are convinced that somehow U.S. soldiers are heroes and all other soldiers are not.
Well, what about the Nazi soldiers? They fought for their homeland and got paid in rather the same way. The Japanese soldiers during World War II? The People's Army in China? Are they all heroes? Or is it only your soldiers that are heroes?
They are not heroes because they all have guns and tanks and bombs. There is nothing that will convince me that someone who goes around armed to the teeth with heavy metal, fully intending to kill anything that moves, is a hero. In the case of a volunteer army, they signed up, they are getting paid, and they know they are killing machines going in. In the case of a drafted/conscripted army, they just want out much of the time, and there is no way they would be doing it if they didn't have to (witness Vietnam, or for example Saddam's army in Desert Storm I); nothing soul-enlarging about that.
Americans just love war and love America and so any American soldier somehow becomes a hero.
Oh, I would say that the firefighters and police officers at WTC were definitely heroes, definitely. They knew they were going to die and didn't have to (they could have run.the.other.way), but they went in anyway to try to save lives. Heroes. Absolutely.
But too many people have said that all of the citizens who died that day were heroes, and that's just not true.
I've heard it said that "Those people at the WTC were heroes because they lived the American dream--they went to work every day and were a part of the American economy, just like the rest of us, and because of it, they died. That makes them heroes."
As far as I'm concerned, that's crap. It takes more than getting blown up at work without ever having a moment to know what hit you to be a hero. Otherwise, every drive-by victim is a hero. Every car accident victim is a hero. Everyone who chokes on a piece of food on his lunch break is a hero.
For years, any kind of expected death (cancer, AIDS, old age) was somehow enough to make someone a hero. Now in the post-9/11 world, any kind of unexpected death has become a badge of heroism, too.
Well, you Americans: people die. YOU WILL DIE TOO. The fact that Americans want to canonize anyone who dies in any way at all, young or old, expected or unexpected, as a hero... basically indicates that Americans haven't come to grips with their own mortality or the existential sadness of being as of yet.
You and I are exposed to the incompetence of MBAs and bean-counters in our day-to-day lives as well.
I have a very good personal friend who has been a civil engineer for a very long time, designing large-scale structures (think high-rises, bridges). Not only does he have to fight like a bastard at times to even get safety features past the budget people and on to the blueprints, but you would be shocked to hear him tell the sheer number of times in his career that he's gone to a building site and found that some manager somewhere in the chain with budget concerns and no formal engineering training has completely revamped the designs after the engineer had signed and submitted them, removing safeguards, scaling down beams and bolts to thinner or cheaper or lower-grade parts, reducing the number of welds or loosening the tolerances on grinds and matings by large factors... just "throwing in numbers that make things cheaper" as my friend is fond of saying.
They do this because the dollar rules; as managers, they are determined to come in under bid and early, so that the next time the firm bids for a job, they're more likely to get it based on good publicity and a track record of doing things on the cheap that are "just as good."
Only in most areas in the U.S., a large percentage of the structures we work and live in on a day-to-day basis are basically unsafe.
The political and budget concerns at NASA are probably 10x what the mid-level managers at engineering firm X or Y are dealing with; I wouldn't be surprised to find the engineers 10x more ignored.
But these people actually were heroes, like all early explorers who venture out into the great and deadly unknown (be it land, ocean, or space, depending on era and context) in the interest of making a better life for their fellow beings. Every astronaut takes his/her life into her hands as a matter of course just to better lives for everyone else, just like firefighters or police officers. Not just that, but astronauts do something fantastic and inspiring and educational that kids can really look up to without their parents being particularly down on it.
The people who are decidedly not heroes include:
- Sports figures - Politicians - The 3k or so people who died on September 11th
I'm also not set on calling the military "heroes" simply because their job danger comes from the fact that they are actively engaged to kill others, i.e. they're in the business of kill-or-get-killed and they know it; they're not out there trying to do something peaceful to better humanity, they're just violent mercenaries for whatever state they happen to have been born into.
But your point is well-taken: a lot of people call just about any corpose a "hero" anymore, and it's a bit silly.
Um... You obviously never used a Newton and just bought the negative hype (which was unfortunate).
I took all my upperclass notes as an undergrad on a Newton 2000. The thing would take handwriting and punctuation, and numbers as fast as I could write it, naturally, and without mistakes. My notes were the best in every class. And because the Newton didn't require me to write in just one area of the screen, but rather where I wanted the words to appear, there were no worn areas on the screen even after four years of heavy use.
And because the Newton could print directly to a LaserWriter, I could come home and instantly laser print my outline-formatted (i.e. w/bullets, numbers, indents, italics+boldface for headings, etc.) notes right away, same night... they became the "notes archive" for many of my classes, because people would borrow them and photocopy them.
And of course I got the best deal of all because I still had the electronic versions, so when test time came around and we all had to study, my notes were searchable.
But the point is that I could write on my Newton just as fast as I could write on a sheet of paper, using my normal handwriting, and get 99.95% accuracy.
I've used Palms, I've used Windows CE + Calligrapher/Transcriber, and now I've used a Sharp Zaurus 5500 as well, and none of them even comes close to the InkWell recognizer on the Newton.
My mom searched google for "red hat dvd" and found and installed VideoLan herself by download RPMs onto her desktop and pointy-clicking them somehow. I've never even used Red Hat's desktop RPM support, I just use RPM at the command line, but the rest of my family seems to have figured it all out without me. They tell me that RPMs show up as little "cardboard boxes" and you just double-click on them and then they're installed. She's thrilled also because VideoLan it seems to play her German (i.e. not-region-1) DVDs.
Resolution and color depth in Red Hat's current distros can be switched on the fly; there's a "Screen Resolution" icon in both the GNOME and KDE preference menus--right with all the other config stuff.
As much as I dislike current versions of GNOME, it's a bit rich for you to complain about GNOME 0.16-3 when GNOME 1.0 came out years ago already and we're now pushing 2.8.
Linux is ready. Yes it is.
on
Linux vs. Windows
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· Score: 5, Interesting
People keep saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, and they use examples of various ages of housebound women as examples of why.
Well, since Red Hat 8, the first distro where I called and encouraged all of the people (including women) in my life to try Linux, the following people have installed and begun to use Linux instead of Windows, and they all did it without my handholding, in all but one case surprising me with a "guess what I just installed!" phone call:
- My three sisters - My mother - My father - My best friend - His girlfriend - My cousin
None of them are computer professionals. Most of them weren't even computer "geeks" at all and had just complained enough to me about Windows 95/98/ME/2000 (none of them had XP, it's true, AFAIK) that I thought they might like a change. The first time I had seen Red Hat 8, I pretty much decided it was time for Linux+desktop. A couple of them are still running Red Hat 8, but my mom and sisters have actually run the "upgrades" (i.e. downloading and burning the next version, then running the "upgrade" install on it).
Red Hat 8-9 and Fedora Core 1-2 have very nice, clean, graphical, "click Next a lot" installers/updaters and autodetect pretty much every piece of hardware. Nearly all of the system services can be configured using their desktop tools in the GNOME menu, including things like print queues, wireless cards, modems, and other things that desktop users might want. These aren't IBM or Compaq PCs for the most part either, they're just white box PCs (there is one thinkpad in the group). One of my sisters even uses her Olympus digital camera with gphoto or some such application (I'm not even familiar with gphoto, I just mount a CF card in a card reader, but she found something in the menu that said "Digital Camera" or something like that and away she went...) to sell stuff on eBay.
With the state of the Linux desktop right now, they can listen to and burn CDs without needing to read anything or even launch an application, they can browse the Web, use OpenOffice to write stuff (they all set up their own printers, with one exception). The couple that have installed software from RPMs haven't had any trouble, they just downloaded the software to their home directories and double-clicked on it.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Maybe for some values of desktop. But for peope who just want:
- Web/Email - Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentations - Printing - Music - Burning CDs - Solitaire
it's there and it's been there for a long time already.
Oh, there has been one question, and it is a place where Red Hat's GNOME desktop falls over: every one of these people did end up calling me at some point and asking how to access their floppy. I don't know why Red Hat ships a KDE desktop that has a floppy drive icon, but doesn't do the same with their GNOME desktop?!
It's not about what Kerry will UNDO. The damage is DONE. It's about what Bush can still DO.
Do you think Kerry will invade Iran, Syria, and North Korea using troops gathered by a reinstated draft?
Do you think Kerry will finish the job of severing all diplomatic ties with Europe?
Do you think Kerry will Kerry will seek additional restrictions on speech and behavior among the citizenry?
Do you think Kerry will fight for an even greater "trickle-down" imbalance in economic policy?
Do you think Kerry will take every policy initiative championed by the evangelical right and make it a legislative priority?
Because Bush will do all of these things. If Kerry governs in exactly the same way that a rotten tree stump would, he's still twice the President G.W. is.
He is currently pushing for the DMRA (Digital Millenium Ray Act) that will dictate how and when you are allowed to use those rays, even though you have paid for them and even though they are broadcast into your own space regardless.
Technology is under development that will strictly govern the ways in which you are able to use his sun's rays, and will monitor your ray use for marketing purposes and of course to ensure that you aren't pirating rays.
Any circumvention of this control on your use of rays or any unauthorized use of rays, even those that filter through your windows uninvited, will be a federal solar system offense, punishable by up to 15 years in a federal solar system prison and a 1,000,000,000 fine.
Such stiff penalties are necessary because of the vast quantities of solar radiation involved, which, if totaled, represents a truly staggering amount of currency. In fact, the sun's owner estimates that he loses over $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 per year to unauthorized and unpaid for photon use, not to mention such black-hat practices as the storing of solar radiation using contraband such as solar cells or the growing of plants from pirated photon streams, which can then be consumed later for energy, with the net effect that the individual in question eventually gains solar energy without having licensed or paid for it.
"We're working hard to ensure that everyone is complying with the law and can enjoy the sun's rays safely and legally, while still supporting the sun," says the sun's owner. Privately, though, he hints that the loss of revenue due to unpaid for photon use may eventually destroy the giant, causing it to go red and eventually fade into a much smaller, more dense star.
There will of course be property "law" in space.
on
Lawyers In Space...
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It will be expressed using weapons, just as any other property "law" throughout history. "Law" is just an articulated metaphor for a self-legitimated monopoly on the use of deadly force.
There will be war(s) in space as soon as enough people get out there to try to claim it. Whoever wins these wars will write the first chapter in the case law and/or war history of space "property rights."
I'm a freelance writer/author/photographer. I've written a few books (nope, I'm not going to give my name here on Slashdot, people will just have to take my word for it) and was a columnist for several years.
Everyone has been responding about how writers spend most of their time thinking about what to write, but that's just not the case. 99.5% of the time when I have an idea that I've sold or been contracted to write, the first draft is already more or less complete in my head and just needs to be put down on paper. The deliberation and refinement is in the editorial and proofreading process, not in the writing process. A good 50% of anything you write gets filtered out by editors and functionaries, and sometimes the final product bears little resemblance to the original, but it's important just to get it down "on paper" before you lose your train of thought (or your motivation.;-)
Next, even if you count the portion of the writing that gets thrown out in the editorial process, I still spend a whole hell of a lot *more* time writing things that will *not* eventually be read by the public or in other cases are at least not a part of the main body of the text: proposals, transcripts of interviews, marketing and strategy reviews, detailed descriptions to go along with my lousy sketches so that graphics people can create meaningful and accurate diagrams that are actually suitable for publication, annotated bibliographies, detailed footnotes, blah, blah.
Finally, there are tons and tons of emails, sometimes twenty or thirty in a day to publishers, editors, press people, graphics people, product managers and engineers if I'm doing a review or something technical, and of course there's also tons of in-text commentary whenever you write professionally, i.e. "please insert the figure from pic5-diagramA.png here" or "please be sure not to edit the following text for grammar/punctuation, it's colloquial" or "left uncapitalized intentionally" or or "I know this got edited out in the last edition and I put it back in, DO NOT EDIT OUT AGAIN, my call as the author on this one, thanks kids" and tons of similar stuff.
As a longtime Unix user, my entire life is just about managed by shell scripts, too, so I type a lot just using the computer as well:
lookup jack smith
jukebox life/playlists/punkrock.m3u shuffle
archive_photo img_3276.jpg -caption "This is my caption" -bydate -categories event,candid,stock,performer,male
And yes, I do also play guitar, although more in the folk (i.e. accompaniment for singalongs with, every now and then, a nice bend for effect) rather than the Eddie Van Halen four-hundred-note-per-second style.:-)
Bullshit. The fact is that you never think nearly as fast as you can type- not if you want to put out well thought out, intelligent writing/code/whatever. You may be able to outspeed yourselfon instant messages, but never on real text. Even professionals- writers, journalists, programmers- are constantly sitting there staring at the screen thinking of what they want to type next.
As a working writer and author for the past eight years, I can tell you that you're wrong. An incredible amount of time, perhaps even the majority of it, is spent not composing new material, but cutting/pasting/retyping/editing already written material, writing supporting documents to satisfy editorial or managerial needs, preparing proposals (sometimes formal, sometimes not), informally (in email or in documents) defending, explaining, or hashing out what you're writing or how you're writing it with content editors, technical editors, product/marketing/publication reps, etc.
Probably only 15-20% of my time is spent typing content that consuming readers will actually see. The rest is spent changing words, shuffling paragraphs, rearraging sentences, chatting (whether in IM or email) with busybodies, explaining myself to editorial boards (yes, even this happens in email or in Word documents these days), communicating online or in letters with informants/contacts/etc., writing proposals, maintaining "roadmaps/outlines/toc's[table of contents]/bibliographies" and so on.
There really is a lot of "type it as fast as you can and pound it out for the bean counters" busywork involved in a career in journalism and writing, and there are a surprising number of instances in which I get FedEx'ed a document or two and need to be able to input them, fast, in some format or antoher, whether they happen to be numeric data or very juicy transcriptions of speeches with lots of usable quotes, or whatever.
Thought is not the bottleneck; rote communication with suits/functionaries and basic editing and data manipulation/input are usually the bottlenecks. Just as in every other field: busywork. Only in this field, if you type really fscking fast, you can get the busywork done faster.
People who are good and very experienced at the index-fingers method often say "I can type 40wpm easy" (or in your case, 60wpm), as though that's incredibly fast.
But computing professionals who touch-type can hit 110-130wpm (I get 110-120 on a good day). That's about twice as fast. When you're trying to hit a deadline, especially as a writer, it's a big deal to be able to type twice as fast, and that much closer to the speed of your thoughts, not to mention the fact that if you have to type for long periods of time, your accuracy won't suffer as much and your hands/arms won't get as tired if you touch-type, because there's less movement and fewer large muscles involved.
There's also the matter of keystrokes, something that most people aren't as familiar with. The number of keystrokes per minute is at least as important for a hardcore computer user (keystroke tests use additional keys like ctrl, alt, shift, Fn, etc. and also test for number and punctuation skill). The ability to perform ctrl, alt, or Fn keystrokes in the midst of a stream of text typing without pausing and without having to look at the keyboard provides an additional serious speed increase in real-world computer use.
And don't underestimate the drag of having to look at the keyboard, even a little. I can fill a spreadsheet at 110-120wpm, staring at a sheet of paper full of numbers the entire time, using tab and arrow keys for navigation, no pauses needed, just a continuous flow of keywork. I never once have to look at the screen and because I touch type, I know the minute I have made a typing error and can backspace and fix it, all without looking. I would guess that it would take you more than twice as long to enter a page full of numbers and formulae into a spreadsheet application, even if your measured typing speed is half of mine.
The patriotic one. You know, the one with the good hair. The one who was a member of Skull & Bones. The who's strong on defense, wants jobs for working Americans, has beautiful, intelligent daughters that love him, and still believes in the American dream.
Patents are useful in some fields like pharmaceuticals, but not in software.
I don't even like the idea of patents in medicine. Aside from the fact that the only possible use for patents in medicine is to limit the distribution of cures to those who can pay for it, thereby callously disregarding the value of human life, there's a deeper concern.
There are several arguments that run along the same thread, but all of them is a permutation of profits driving interest in further R&D:
- If we don't let them patent, and thereby profit, what's to encourage future cures being developed?
- If everyone can get the cure for cheap or free, why will anyone pay the prices necessary to help the developers recapture their investment?
These for me are just a bit to close to saying that we need to keep people dying so that the medical industry can keep making money. After all, isn't the ultimate goal to put the medical industry out of business? I'd like to think that the goal (however unrealistic) is a world in which people are so healthy that drugs and complex medical products are no longer needed for the most part.
So long as we continue to reason along the lines of, "But who will support the drug companies, and how will they make a buck?" we are espousing a mentality that needs continued suffering and death, because a) if people aren't suffering and dying of diseases, there's no impetus to develop drugs because there's no market, and if people aren't suffering and dying because a drug is b) so freely available, there's no motivation for the wealthy who can afford it to actually pay for it......and yet, I'd say that both (a) and (b) above are ideal cases: we don't want people to suffer and die prematurely, and if they have to, we'd prefer that everyone gets treatment, not just the wealthy, even though simplistic supply-and-demand wisdom would suggest that limiting drug access to the wealthy would be more likely to turn a profit and thereby enhance chances for future cures.
I'm just not sure patents in general are ever a good idea.
From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.
Linux distros are getting really good at supporting wireless, actually. Just make sure that your wireless card is supported by the kernel.
I got a Cisco card (uses the airo driver), and Fedora Core 2 works with it just fine. To configure the WEP, I just chose "Network Configuration" from the "System Settings" menu (it's in both the GNOME and K menus, depending on your desktop preference).
Up pops a GUI tool where you can enter an SSID or choose "auto" and where you can select key length and enter a WEP key. Entered it, clicked Apply, and voila, I was up and running with my wireless network.
All GUI tools, no hardware/driver issues, to a 128-bit WEP network.
Slashdot Mirror
The point being what so many Slashdot posters have said before:
People hate buying shit.
People love buying things they enjoy, because they want to see more of them made.
Or, to put it another way, consumers aren't stupid, they understand the power of their own dollars. People are just as smart as (if not smarter than) the RIAA/MPAA bosses: they won't waste their cash until they know their cash won't be wasted.
Solution to the problem: create a product that people WANT TO SUPPORT and that people WANT MORE OF and it will sell well FOR THOSE REASONS.
Anything else is just attempted blackmail and theft from consumers' pockets.
This link is written by a clueless individual.
All of the specifics he comes up with are either unrelated to X (i.e. the core dump drag and drop "bomb", file managers that don't update their file lists, etc.) and related instead to poorly written applications, or they're just fscking WRONG... for example, the discussion of magic cookie exchange and the way this joker tries to accomplish it rather than just piping through rsh/ssh demonstrates a serious lack of knowledge about the guts of the system.
If the person doesn't know how to use it or how it works in the first place, I'm sure as hell not going to accept their criticism about what's wrong with it.
It's all about personal preferences. I find KDE's interface (once I've added a slave panel for a taskbar and made the main panel vertical, plus adding about ten additional menus to it) to be nice and usable, with everything in easy reach.
I find GNOME, on the other hand, to be uncomfortably light and clean, with nothing in easy reach, kind of like a one-button mouse or a one-button walkman... so simple that it's hard to get anything you want done, because the functionality's either missing, or requires extra steps to access.
I'd be interested in seeing research that compares peoples' living spaces to peoples' PC desktops. I wonder if you have a very empty, Zen-like living space. I myself have an incredibly cluttered (but orderly) living space; books, equipment, tools, etc. all tend to be within view on umpteen shelves, hooks, stacks, etc... bus and train schedules are posted on the wall... everything is easy to access, and easy to put away, requiring only one step ("reach").
Citibank can't do anything about it anyway; they're not law enforcement, and even if they were, what exactly do you see law enforcement doing about SPAM or phish emails? Nada.
I used to work at eBay and the phishing problem was terrible (though I didn't deal with it directly, that wasn't my department). When users would find out, they'd demand to know why eBay didn't do something about it. The people who worked on that floor would stand around in the smoking shed and bitch, "What do they want us to do, buy some guns and go to Romania and raid the guy's house wearing little eBay uniforms?"
I don't own an iMac. I'm a ThinkPad user. Personally, I think that the sleek black of the thin ThinkPads is the sexiest look ever in PCs, but I'm wise enough to know that many will disagree.
I'm pretty confident, though, that 90% of the population would prefer an iMac to this thing, at least in terms of looks.
I was actually going to make the same post, only not as amusingly.
I think people are gonna end up with three pointless crapware items in their tray and then won't even be able to launch an application.
This thing is ass ugly and has that "don't touch me, I came from goodwill and you don't know where I've been" look to it.
I have no idea how anyone can compare this to an iMac. Hell, an average white box PC with a flat panel is about 10x more aesthetically pleasing.
My uncle is a Colonel in the airforce (retired). My grandfathers fought on opposing sides in World War II. My best friend's wife is in the Navy. Another friend has a daughter in Iraq right now.
Too many Americans are starry-eyed over the armed forces because they have allegiances only to the U.S. and U.S. soldiers, so they are convinced that somehow U.S. soldiers are heroes and all other soldiers are not.
Well, what about the Nazi soldiers? They fought for their homeland and got paid in rather the same way. The Japanese soldiers during World War II? The People's Army in China? Are they all heroes? Or is it only your soldiers that are heroes?
They are not heroes because they all have guns and tanks and bombs. There is nothing that will convince me that someone who goes around armed to the teeth with heavy metal, fully intending to kill anything that moves, is a hero. In the case of a volunteer army, they signed up, they are getting paid, and they know they are killing machines going in. In the case of a drafted/conscripted army, they just want out much of the time, and there is no way they would be doing it if they didn't have to (witness Vietnam, or for example Saddam's army in Desert Storm I); nothing soul-enlarging about that.
Americans just love war and love America and so any American soldier somehow becomes a hero.
Oh, I would say that the firefighters and police officers at WTC were definitely heroes, definitely. They knew they were going to die and didn't have to (they could have run.the.other.way), but they went in anyway to try to save lives. Heroes. Absolutely.
But too many people have said that all of the citizens who died that day were heroes, and that's just not true.
I've heard it said that "Those people at the WTC were heroes because they lived the American dream--they went to work every day and were a part of the American economy, just like the rest of us, and because of it, they died. That makes them heroes."
As far as I'm concerned, that's crap. It takes more than getting blown up at work without ever having a moment to know what hit you to be a hero. Otherwise, every drive-by victim is a hero. Every car accident victim is a hero. Everyone who chokes on a piece of food on his lunch break is a hero.
For years, any kind of expected death (cancer, AIDS, old age) was somehow enough to make someone a hero. Now in the post-9/11 world, any kind of unexpected death has become a badge of heroism, too.
Well, you Americans: people die. YOU WILL DIE TOO. The fact that Americans want to canonize anyone who dies in any way at all, young or old, expected or unexpected, as a hero... basically indicates that Americans haven't come to grips with their own mortality or the existential sadness of being as of yet.
You and I are exposed to the incompetence of MBAs and bean-counters in our day-to-day lives as well.
I have a very good personal friend who has been a civil engineer for a very long time, designing large-scale structures (think high-rises, bridges). Not only does he have to fight like a bastard at times to even get safety features past the budget people and on to the blueprints, but you would be shocked to hear him tell the sheer number of times in his career that he's gone to a building site and found that some manager somewhere in the chain with budget concerns and no formal engineering training has completely revamped the designs after the engineer had signed and submitted them, removing safeguards, scaling down beams and bolts to thinner or cheaper or lower-grade parts, reducing the number of welds or loosening the tolerances on grinds and matings by large factors... just "throwing in numbers that make things cheaper" as my friend is fond of saying.
They do this because the dollar rules; as managers, they are determined to come in under bid and early, so that the next time the firm bids for a job, they're more likely to get it based on good publicity and a track record of doing things on the cheap that are "just as good."
Only in most areas in the U.S., a large percentage of the structures we work and live in on a day-to-day basis are basically unsafe.
The political and budget concerns at NASA are probably 10x what the mid-level managers at engineering firm X or Y are dealing with; I wouldn't be surprised to find the engineers 10x more ignored.
But these people actually were heroes, like all early explorers who venture out into the great and deadly unknown (be it land, ocean, or space, depending on era and context) in the interest of making a better life for their fellow beings. Every astronaut takes his/her life into her hands as a matter of course just to better lives for everyone else, just like firefighters or police officers. Not just that, but astronauts do something fantastic and inspiring and educational that kids can really look up to without their parents being particularly down on it.
The people who are decidedly not heroes include:
- Sports figures
- Politicians
- The 3k or so people who died on September 11th
I'm also not set on calling the military "heroes" simply because their job danger comes from the fact that they are actively engaged to kill others, i.e. they're in the business of kill-or-get-killed and they know it; they're not out there trying to do something peaceful to better humanity, they're just violent mercenaries for whatever state they happen to have been born into.
But your point is well-taken: a lot of people call just about any corpose a "hero" anymore, and it's a bit silly.
Um... You obviously never used a Newton and just bought the negative hype (which was unfortunate).
I took all my upperclass notes as an undergrad on a Newton 2000. The thing would take handwriting and punctuation, and numbers as fast as I could write it, naturally, and without mistakes. My notes were the best in every class. And because the Newton didn't require me to write in just one area of the screen, but rather where I wanted the words to appear, there were no worn areas on the screen even after four years of heavy use.
And because the Newton could print directly to a LaserWriter, I could come home and instantly laser print my outline-formatted (i.e. w/bullets, numbers, indents, italics+boldface for headings, etc.) notes right away, same night... they became the "notes archive" for many of my classes, because people would borrow them and photocopy them.
And of course I got the best deal of all because I still had the electronic versions, so when test time came around and we all had to study, my notes were searchable.
But the point is that I could write on my Newton just as fast as I could write on a sheet of paper, using my normal handwriting, and get 99.95% accuracy.
I've used Palms, I've used Windows CE + Calligrapher/Transcriber, and now I've used a Sharp Zaurus 5500 as well, and none of them even comes close to the InkWell recognizer on the Newton.
My mom searched google for "red hat dvd" and found and installed VideoLan herself by download RPMs onto her desktop and pointy-clicking them somehow. I've never even used Red Hat's desktop RPM support, I just use RPM at the command line, but the rest of my family seems to have figured it all out without me. They tell me that RPMs show up as little "cardboard boxes" and you just double-click on them and then they're installed. She's thrilled also because VideoLan it seems to play her German (i.e. not-region-1) DVDs.
Resolution and color depth in Red Hat's current distros can be switched on the fly; there's a "Screen Resolution" icon in both the GNOME and KDE preference menus--right with all the other config stuff.
As much as I dislike current versions of GNOME, it's a bit rich for you to complain about GNOME 0.16-3 when GNOME 1.0 came out years ago already and we're now pushing 2.8.
People keep saying that Linux isn't ready for the desktop, and they use examples of various ages of housebound women as examples of why.
Well, since Red Hat 8, the first distro where I called and encouraged all of the people (including women) in my life to try Linux, the following people have installed and begun to use Linux instead of Windows, and they all did it without my handholding, in all but one case surprising me with a "guess what I just installed!" phone call:
- My three sisters
- My mother
- My father
- My best friend
- His girlfriend
- My cousin
None of them are computer professionals. Most of them weren't even computer "geeks" at all and had just complained enough to me about Windows 95/98/ME/2000 (none of them had XP, it's true, AFAIK) that I thought they might like a change. The first time I had seen Red Hat 8, I pretty much decided it was time for Linux+desktop. A couple of them are still running Red Hat 8, but my mom and sisters have actually run the "upgrades" (i.e. downloading and burning the next version, then running the "upgrade" install on it).
Red Hat 8-9 and Fedora Core 1-2 have very nice, clean, graphical, "click Next a lot" installers/updaters and autodetect pretty much every piece of hardware. Nearly all of the system services can be configured using their desktop tools in the GNOME menu, including things like print queues, wireless cards, modems, and other things that desktop users might want. These aren't IBM or Compaq PCs for the most part either, they're just white box PCs (there is one thinkpad in the group). One of my sisters even uses her Olympus digital camera with gphoto or some such application (I'm not even familiar with gphoto, I just mount a CF card in a card reader, but she found something in the menu that said "Digital Camera" or something like that and away she went...) to sell stuff on eBay.
With the state of the Linux desktop right now, they can listen to and burn CDs without needing to read anything or even launch an application, they can browse the Web, use OpenOffice to write stuff (they all set up their own printers, with one exception). The couple that have installed software from RPMs haven't had any trouble, they just downloaded the software to their home directories and double-clicked on it.
Linux isn't ready for the desktop? Maybe for some values of desktop. But for peope who just want:
- Web/Email
- Word Processing/Spreadsheet/Presentations
- Printing
- Music
- Burning CDs
- Solitaire
it's there and it's been there for a long time already.
Oh, there has been one question, and it is a place where Red Hat's GNOME desktop falls over: every one of these people did end up calling me at some point and asking how to access their floppy. I don't know why Red Hat ships a KDE desktop that has a floppy drive icon, but doesn't do the same with their GNOME desktop?!
It's not about what Kerry will UNDO. The damage is DONE. It's about what Bush can still DO.
Do you think Kerry will invade Iran, Syria, and North Korea using troops gathered by a reinstated draft?
Do you think Kerry will finish the job of severing all diplomatic ties with Europe?
Do you think Kerry will Kerry will seek additional restrictions on speech and behavior among the citizenry?
Do you think Kerry will fight for an even greater "trickle-down" imbalance in economic policy?
Do you think Kerry will take every policy initiative championed by the evangelical right and make it a legislative priority?
Because Bush will do all of these things. If Kerry governs in exactly the same way that a rotten tree stump would, he's still twice the President G.W. is.
He is currently pushing for the DMRA (Digital Millenium Ray Act) that will dictate how and when you are allowed to use those rays, even though you have paid for them and even though they are broadcast into your own space regardless.
0 ,000,000 per year to unauthorized and unpaid for photon use, not to mention such black-hat practices as the storing of solar radiation using contraband such as solar cells or the growing of plants from pirated photon streams, which can then be consumed later for energy, with the net effect that the individual in question eventually gains solar energy without having licensed or paid for it.
Technology is under development that will strictly govern the ways in which you are able to use his sun's rays, and will monitor your ray use for marketing purposes and of course to ensure that you aren't pirating rays.
Any circumvention of this control on your use of rays or any unauthorized use of rays, even those that filter through your windows uninvited, will be a federal solar system offense, punishable by up to 15 years in a federal solar system prison and a 1,000,000,000 fine.
Such stiff penalties are necessary because of the vast quantities of solar radiation involved, which, if totaled, represents a truly staggering amount of currency. In fact, the sun's owner estimates that he loses over $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00
"We're working hard to ensure that everyone is complying with the law and can enjoy the sun's rays safely and legally, while still supporting the sun," says the sun's owner. Privately, though, he hints that the loss of revenue due to unpaid for photon use may eventually destroy the giant, causing it to go red and eventually fade into a much smaller, more dense star.
It will be expressed using weapons, just as any other property "law" throughout history. "Law" is just an articulated metaphor for a self-legitimated monopoly on the use of deadly force.
There will be war(s) in space as soon as enough people get out there to try to claim it. Whoever wins these wars will write the first chapter in the case law and/or war history of space "property rights."
I'm a freelance writer/author/photographer. I've written a few books (nope, I'm not going to give my name here on Slashdot, people will just have to take my word for it) and was a columnist for several years.
;-)
:-)
Everyone has been responding about how writers spend most of their time thinking about what to write, but that's just not the case. 99.5% of the time when I have an idea that I've sold or been contracted to write, the first draft is already more or less complete in my head and just needs to be put down on paper. The deliberation and refinement is in the editorial and proofreading process, not in the writing process. A good 50% of anything you write gets filtered out by editors and functionaries, and sometimes the final product bears little resemblance to the original, but it's important just to get it down "on paper" before you lose your train of thought (or your motivation.
Next, even if you count the portion of the writing that gets thrown out in the editorial process, I still spend a whole hell of a lot *more* time writing things that will *not* eventually be read by the public or in other cases are at least not a part of the main body of the text: proposals, transcripts of interviews, marketing and strategy reviews, detailed descriptions to go along with my lousy sketches so that graphics people can create meaningful and accurate diagrams that are actually suitable for publication, annotated bibliographies, detailed footnotes, blah, blah.
Finally, there are tons and tons of emails, sometimes twenty or thirty in a day to publishers, editors, press people, graphics people, product managers and engineers if I'm doing a review or something technical, and of course there's also tons of in-text commentary whenever you write professionally, i.e. "please insert the figure from pic5-diagramA.png here" or "please be sure not to edit the following text for grammar/punctuation, it's colloquial" or "left uncapitalized intentionally" or or "I know this got edited out in the last edition and I put it back in, DO NOT EDIT OUT AGAIN, my call as the author on this one, thanks kids" and tons of similar stuff.
As a longtime Unix user, my entire life is just about managed by shell scripts, too, so I type a lot just using the computer as well:
lookup jack smith
jukebox life/playlists/punkrock.m3u shuffle
archive_photo img_3276.jpg -caption "This is my caption" -bydate -categories event,candid,stock,performer,male
And yes, I do also play guitar, although more in the folk (i.e. accompaniment for singalongs with, every now and then, a nice bend for effect) rather than the Eddie Van Halen four-hundred-note-per-second style.
Bullshit. The fact is that you never think nearly as fast as you can type- not if you want to put out well thought out, intelligent writing/code/whatever. You may be able to outspeed yourselfon instant messages, but never on real text. Even professionals- writers, journalists, programmers- are constantly sitting there staring at the screen thinking of what they want to type next.
As a working writer and author for the past eight years, I can tell you that you're wrong. An incredible amount of time, perhaps even the majority of it, is spent not composing new material, but cutting/pasting/retyping/editing already written material, writing supporting documents to satisfy editorial or managerial needs, preparing proposals (sometimes formal, sometimes not), informally (in email or in documents) defending, explaining, or hashing out what you're writing or how you're writing it with content editors, technical editors, product/marketing/publication reps, etc.
Probably only 15-20% of my time is spent typing content that consuming readers will actually see. The rest is spent changing words, shuffling paragraphs, rearraging sentences, chatting (whether in IM or email) with busybodies, explaining myself to editorial boards (yes, even this happens in email or in Word documents these days), communicating online or in letters with informants/contacts/etc., writing proposals, maintaining "roadmaps/outlines/toc's[table of contents]/bibliographies" and so on.
There really is a lot of "type it as fast as you can and pound it out for the bean counters" busywork involved in a career in journalism and writing, and there are a surprising number of instances in which I get FedEx'ed a document or two and need to be able to input them, fast, in some format or antoher, whether they happen to be numeric data or very juicy transcriptions of speeches with lots of usable quotes, or whatever.
Thought is not the bottleneck; rote communication with suits/functionaries and basic editing and data manipulation/input are usually the bottlenecks. Just as in every other field: busywork. Only in this field, if you type really fscking fast, you can get the busywork done faster.
Here's your reason to learn to touch-type: Speed.
People who are good and very experienced at the index-fingers method often say "I can type 40wpm easy" (or in your case, 60wpm), as though that's incredibly fast.
But computing professionals who touch-type can hit 110-130wpm (I get 110-120 on a good day). That's about twice as fast. When you're trying to hit a deadline, especially as a writer, it's a big deal to be able to type twice as fast, and that much closer to the speed of your thoughts, not to mention the fact that if you have to type for long periods of time, your accuracy won't suffer as much and your hands/arms won't get as tired if you touch-type, because there's less movement and fewer large muscles involved.
There's also the matter of keystrokes, something that most people aren't as familiar with. The number of keystrokes per minute is at least as important for a hardcore computer user (keystroke tests use additional keys like ctrl, alt, shift, Fn, etc. and also test for number and punctuation skill). The ability to perform ctrl, alt, or Fn keystrokes in the midst of a stream of text typing without pausing and without having to look at the keyboard provides an additional serious speed increase in real-world computer use.
And don't underestimate the drag of having to look at the keyboard, even a little. I can fill a spreadsheet at 110-120wpm, staring at a sheet of paper full of numbers the entire time, using tab and arrow keys for navigation, no pauses needed, just a continuous flow of keywork. I never once have to look at the screen and because I touch type, I know the minute I have made a typing error and can backspace and fix it, all without looking. I would guess that it would take you more than twice as long to enter a page full of numbers and formulae into a spreadsheet application, even if your measured typing speed is half of mine.
The patriotic one. You know, the one with the good hair. The one who was a member of Skull & Bones. The who's strong on defense, wants jobs for working Americans, has beautiful, intelligent daughters that love him, and still believes in the American dream.
Oh, wait...
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
And use up more trees, and create more waste, and consume more gasoline and pollute more air on your way there?
We have the technology for all information to be distributed with minimal damage to the world, let's use it.
Patents are useful in some fields like pharmaceuticals, but not in software.
...and yet, I'd say that both (a) and (b) above are ideal cases: we don't want people to suffer and die prematurely, and if they have to, we'd prefer that everyone gets treatment, not just the wealthy, even though simplistic supply-and-demand wisdom would suggest that limiting drug access to the wealthy would be more likely to turn a profit and thereby enhance chances for future cures.
I don't even like the idea of patents in medicine. Aside from the fact that the only possible use for patents in medicine is to limit the distribution of cures to those who can pay for it, thereby callously disregarding the value of human life, there's a deeper concern.
There are several arguments that run along the same thread, but all of them is a permutation of profits driving interest in further R&D:
- If we don't let them patent, and thereby profit, what's to encourage future cures being developed?
- If everyone can get the cure for cheap or free, why will anyone pay the prices necessary to help the developers recapture their investment?
These for me are just a bit to close to saying that we need to keep people dying so that the medical industry can keep making money. After all, isn't the ultimate goal to put the medical industry out of business? I'd like to think that the goal (however unrealistic) is a world in which people are so healthy that drugs and complex medical products are no longer needed for the most part.
So long as we continue to reason along the lines of, "But who will support the drug companies, and how will they make a buck?" we are espousing a mentality that needs continued suffering and death, because a) if people aren't suffering and dying of diseases, there's no impetus to develop drugs because there's no market, and if people aren't suffering and dying because a drug is b) so freely available, there's no motivation for the wealthy who can afford it to actually pay for it...
I'm just not sure patents in general are ever a good idea.
From the looks at it, the price is work it just for having wireless configured. It's a real PITA.
Linux distros are getting really good at supporting wireless, actually. Just make sure that your wireless card is supported by the kernel.
I got a Cisco card (uses the airo driver), and Fedora Core 2 works with it just fine. To configure the WEP, I just chose "Network Configuration" from the "System Settings" menu (it's in both the GNOME and K menus, depending on your desktop preference).
Up pops a GUI tool where you can enter an SSID or choose "auto" and where you can select key length and enter a WEP key. Entered it, clicked Apply, and voila, I was up and running with my wireless network.
All GUI tools, no hardware/driver issues, to a 128-bit WEP network.
Still running one, although now it's got Fedora Core 2 on it. :-)