Define poor. Is poor the absence of two cars per person, like we have in the United States?
If so, then the fact is we have no choice but to be poor. It's a poor planet. There is no way we're getting twelve billion cars out of this rock. Or enough for two televisions for every family around the globe.
We cannot all be wealthy. It simply doesn't work. Even if capitalism did raise the standard of living for everyone, equally, there simply is not enough of anything (food, land, etc.) for each one of six billion people to live in sixty rooms on two hundred acres with a classic corvette, a ferarri, and a diet of caviar. Not possible.
And more to the point, not needed. I live in one room, with no television, no car, very few appliances (outside of my PC and camera) and very little in the way of material goods. But am I poor? Hell no. There's a library that I can visit that's packed full of more knowledge than I can ever hope to gather in a lifetime, I can take walks with my girlfriend whenever I want, and the sunshine and air (no longer fresh air, but at least there's air) are free.
Americans are terrified of poverty, but they see a false dichotomy: either you own a suburban parcel of land with two cars, two televisions, washer, dryer, fridge, range, microwave, XBox, wide-screen TV and barbecue grill or you are "poor" and "poor" is somehow terrifying.
Well, most of the world's population lives without any of that stuff. And if you think that nobody in the former Soviet Union ever smiled once in their miserable, horrible lives or that the people in sub-saharan Africa all really wish they could just commit suicide and end it now, only they can't afford even a thread of string to do it with so they're trapped in this miserable existence, then you have another thing coming.
Companies for profit are morally a bad thing. These are not states of nature, they are socially constructed concepts.
Commodification of labor is fundamentally unethical and the real term, alienation, should be used whenever possible.
Farmers should farm to feed people, programmers should code to produce software, and automakers should assemble to produce cars, all of the above for people to use. Instead, each of famers farm for money (and the crops are merely another irritating step, much less the consumer), programmers code for money (and the code is merely a laborious inconvenience, much less the consumer), and automakers assemble cars for money (and the building a quality automobile is merely another tiresome stage in the process of acquiring money...)
You say "money is the root of all evil" and people treat you like you are saying something quaint and simple, but in reality, it's not far from the truth. Consider this analysis from one of the most preeminent social theorists of our era:
"Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving -- and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank... Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save -- the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour -- your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life -- the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power... All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice."
Face it, employees are a commodity and it's up to the smart employee to make him/herself valuable to the employer.
This is precisely the ethical problem with capitalism and precisely what the world's population must (and eventually will) change.
The commodification of man is not an inevitablility or some sort of a priori state. Humankind has not always lived this way. The commodification of man was created by the wealthy and powerful and sold to you as a fact of nature, most recently by Adam Smith.
Exactly. Capital has no nationality and no ethics, and it has no vested interest in seeing America prosper over India or over China. Those who own capital enjoy an obscenely high standard of living wherever they happen to sit at the moment. Capital itself will flow to wherever the profit potential is highest, and it will be equally happy to abandon India in favor America once again if someday the tables are turned.
Those who are capital (i.e. the top 1% of the world in terms of wealth) will continue to benefit by each new shift in the location of labor and each new round of layoffs; they will benefit year after year, decade after decade as capital continues to flow in its own self-interest, just as they have done for over a century. The rest of us are screwed.
The DOMESTIC US middle and lower classes had better wake the heck up -- only you will prevent the US plutocrats from extending their Empire over the world. If you dont, these (cluefull) foreign masses *will* eventually kick off their yokes.
As predicted by Marx.
What do you think the chances are that Americans will suddenly abandon Wal-Mart in droves to pay twice as much at the mom-and-pop shop while offering to take a pay cut and funnel the extra to those making less at their firm and going home on public transportation to a smaller apartment so as to increase the amount of space available for housing?
The chances are zero. March of history, here we come.
"Efficient" and "vicious bastard" are one and the same when you are talking about livelihood and quality of life.
Ultimate efficiency in global productivity would dictate:
1) That we euthanize the mentally retarded, amputees, people with below-functional IQs, and the elderly.
2) That we implement a strong eugenics program to continue to create stronger, faster, smarter, longer-lived humans who can remain so on fewer and fewer calories.
3) That we implement a rigid justice system that also takes into account one's potential usefulness to society. Brilliant Ph.D. in Physics commits murder? Strap an unremovable tracking device on him/her and put him/her right back to work in the lab. A high school dropout steals a bowl of soup? Death penalty; little potential for contribution to society, measurable economic impact of crime, high likelihood of recitivism.
Hitler was all about efficiency and we don't like him too much.
The world is a planet full of thinking, feeling people not a machine full of interchangable parts and high-grade lube.
There's an entire discussion on Corel's news server about this. Unfortunately, the dynamic linker from glibc 2.3.2 and later has a bug discussed here that prevents this from working with pre-2.3.2 versions of the library (on which the Corel software depends); of course, an old dynamic linker can be explicitly installed and called, but then you need an entirely separate set of libraries from glibc through X and termcap on donward, which has indeed been the fix to at least get the software to launch (i.e. maintain tens of megabytes of system libraries and an old linker in/usr/i586-libsforcorel or something).
Unfortunately, the resulting command line is quite long and because the process spins of a number of children without using this technique, the children processes don't launch properly, so things like printing don't work. And of course it eats memory, etc.
It's a mess.
Of course, all it would take from Corel is an update and recompile of their Wine fork against glibc-2.3.2, but they haven't released so much as a single service pack, ever, for Corel Draw 9 for Linux or Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, and both products are now discontinued.:-(
There are many ways in which WordPerfect is just a hell of a lot nicer for working in large text documents.
For example, WordPerfect has a different set of schema for dealing with text than OO, Word, or things like FrameMaker; WordPerect treats text in the way that we read it, associating a kind of chronological or sequential model with left->right, top->bottom and first_page->last_page progressions.
Word and others treat text spatially; they have no idea that the third paragraph on page 13 comes "after" the fifth paragraph on page 4, so you must explicitly demarkate what text should have/inherit what styles or properties. In WordPerfect, text can inherit styles/properties without your ever having to explicitly select and change it; the "reveal codes" functionality provides a kind of extension to this set of behaviors that's very powerful.
As someone who's (primarily) a writer by trade, I really appreciate WordPerfect and had a definite love/hate relationship with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. These days I've given up and am indeed using Word XP in Linux (with Crossover Office, which for some reason doesn't support the Windows version of WordPerfect Office).
But just as I shelled out $180 for the deluxe version of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, I'll shell out the $$$ immediately for a native version, and for a native version I'd probably be willing to pay twice as much!
There was a Corel Draw 9 for Linux that was built using the same Wine fork as Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. I know because I bought it, though I can no longer use it (the last round of Corel apps is incompatible with GLIBC 3.2 and later, and Corel has never released any updates).
So if they've done a native port for WPO, maybe it's not out of the question to think they might do a native port of Draw as well, if enough people pony up for Office.
If they had done that (linked against the libs), that would have solved some of the problems that the suite had.
Instead, they installed a complete Wine environment and commands like 'wordperfect' that started the word processor were really just scripts that called 'wine' to load the win32 binaries.
The trouble was that a) their version of wine was a hacked up fork and would ONLY work with their binaries, but b) they didn't change the components so as not to interfere with other wine incarnations (i.e. winehq, codeweavers). So, whenever WordPerfect for Linux was loaded, no other Wine applications would run because of things like wineserver conflicts.
There were innumerable problems with the suite, but that was one of them.
You can still give a child an interesting name, and indeed for some individuals, it can be a bonus. I have a very unusual name thanks to my parents (not printed on Slashdot for obvious reasons), and in the context of my own personality, it has suited me well.
The trick: Give them a boring first name and then have your parental fun with the middle name:
i.e. Jason H4rdc0re Richardson
As a young kid, there's no need for Jason to know what's on his birth certificate. But when he gets to be a teenager, he may enjoy being able to introduce himself, in all honesty, as someone whose name is 'H4rdc0re' to any new friends he makes.
But if he turns out to be a more traditional sort, no-one ever has to know him as anything other than Jason H. Richardson, or even just Jason Richardson.
There are all kinds of possibilities.
Annie Aphrodite Smith (a.k.a. Annie A. Smith) Jerem E4zyrider Morgan (a.k.a. Jerem E. Morgan)
Even though the article notes that 1GB per user will cost Google only about $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive!
The number of users who will actually use that much storage is very small. I have a large email volume, plus SPAM, which I save (but filter into another folder with spamassassin). My email archive goes all the way back to 1997 and is still not much larger than 1GB. Even with SPAM, I think most users will take months or even years to reach a 150-200MB, much less 1GB.
And of course, it's very likely that Google will aggressively filter SPAM in the same way that Yahoo! or the others do.
Thank God my real-world, emotion-having girlfriend is more concerned about feeding the hungry and stopping de-facro slavery and international economic imperalism than about impressing her friends with carbon rocks.
And she's not only ethical, she's hot!
Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer.
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GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
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· Score: 1
Hmmm... I use AA fonts (Arial is my default font) but on my system (RH9) the fonts look much better in Konqueror than they do in Mozilla, which tends to render them a little squat and fat.
There were one or two sites (i.e. ESPN) that didn't render properly in KDE 3.1, but in KDE 3.2, I have not come across a single site that doesn't render correctly in Konqueror, and I use it every day for Web browsing (among a hundred other things). In fact, both flash and java load faster when used with Konqueror than they do when used with Mozilla.
The render times in Konqueror on my PIII-900 are much faster than Mozilla and with the new preloading in KDE 3.2, the startup time is much faster as well.
The menus are much more responsive, the tabbed browsing is faster, scrolling is smoother... I can have Web site icons on my personal toolbar and split views into multiple frames in order to browse/copy/ftp all at once... Plus embedded applets (i.e. PDF viewer, editor, etc...)
I love Konqeuror. It's like the next generation of networked desktop computing.:-) By comparison, Windows and Mac OS are just an absolute drag... time consuming and awkward!
Re:GNOME 2.6 view from a software engineer.
on
GNOME 2.6 Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You think Konqueror sucks horribly?!?! I'm aghast!
As far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is KDE's killer app. It's the one thing I can't give up, the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows or Mac OS machine.
You don't get it. People are ridiculing Intel because they refuse to give credit where credit is due; Intel isn't compatible with other people, rather other people just happen to be compatible with Intel.
Instead of "Intel is now AMD-compatible!" which is the truth, we instead get "Intel has invented 64-bit extensions to x86! [p.s. unimportant competitors' extensions that may or may not predate our own just happen to be compatible with our standard.]"
Clearly this is convoluted marketspeak to avoid crediting the real inventor of 64-bit x86 extensions for their work.
Not always. Not this human. And I've been working in the technology industry off and on since the mid-1980's. I've worked as a consultant and a programmer and for a large part of my Internet life had a bang-path email address.
But these days, there are several occasions (one of them being the recent spate of eBay "Question for seller" messages) during which I've had to actually click the link to see if it was spam. And I worked for eBay for some time! I know what sorts of things they do and don't send, even!
Yes, I'm familiar with the easy replies to these sorts of things:
1) Don't click any links in email. Ever. Tell your friends that if it contains a link, you'll assume it's SPAM. 2) Don't accept any HTML mail. If it's HTML encoded, assume it's SPAM. 3) Dont' accept any mail with attachments. If it's got attachments, assume it's SPAM.
The problem is that these "easy" criteria filter out 90% of the people I need to communicate with. No, I will not drop that 90%. No, it's not such an easy thing to explain to them, either, how to turn off HTML encoding, etc. Some of them are very bright, even... Many of them are in the computer industry, just not in coding or in consulting or in some position that would require them to be very skilled at the nuances of sending/receiving email beyond "Compose, Type, Send."
I will not break off communication with 90% of my legitimate contacts in the interest of reducing SPAM. And I suspect that most people won't either. And I can't create a whitelist... because I just have too many necessary contacts. And I can't create one mailbox for each contact or for each aspect of my life... because there are too many of those as well and I don't want 66 mailboxes hanging around while I try to keep track of them all.
The point is that I also have increasing difficulty identifying SPAM myself until I actually follow a link and see where it leads. And of course by then it's too late. If I'm a human and a veteran in technology, and I can't figure it out, how is some SPAM filter going to figure it out?
I have received piles of these recently. The names, item, item number, and amount change randomly, but it is always structured like a legitimate eBay message. I'm nervous about adding them to my bayesian filtering because I don't want to miss any eBay messages. I, too, sell a lot on eBay...
All I see is Libertarian, Republican and Democrat. Where are the other parties? Green? Socialist Workers? Communist? Or any of those lesser-known parties on the right that I'm not familiar with but know are there because of their stench?
It seems a shame to create a potentially "democratic" contribution system like this wherein all the candidates appear side by side, yet return in the end to the flawed two-party (or at most three-party) set of limited choices...
1. Konqueror is better than Mozilla, IMHO. I only rarely start Mozilla; my browser of choice for all other occasions in Konqueror, which is fast, split-screen, lightweight, better integrated, has better bookmark management, better configurability...
2. OpenOffice is also soon to be KDE-ified so that's a moot point.
3. GIMP is no better integrated with GNOME than it is with KDE. I use it in KDE all the time.
4. KDevelop being clearly better means that in time, KDE apps will be clearly better.
If it was 20MHz, it wasn't a PC. The original PC was 4.77 MHz. The clone "turbo" PC/XTs from 3-4 years later only went to 6 or 8 MHz (8088-2/NEC V20), as did the IBM AT class (80286) PCs.
There were some 20MHz 80286 machines and some 31MHz XT clones (truly bastardized machines) but they were from the late '80s and were all in clone territory, not IBM machines.
I still have two Mac 128k machines in the garage and they still run. They were amazing machines in their day. Compared to the green-screen PC's running cumbersome software with manuals inches thick, the Mac was a beautiful machine to use. The sense of control and interaction was so immediate!
Does anyone remember the lovely tutorial disk that came with the Mac? I can't remember what it was called (i.e. what was on the label), but there was a disk that you booted from that just taught you how to use the machine. It walked you through a lovely animated tutorial with sound that went through use of the mouse, windows, menus, icons, files, etc. using little games -- a maze, an on-screen piano... and it provided feedback in how skilled you were with all of these things. It only took about 10 minutes to get through it, and then you could use the Mac like a pro! But it had graphics and sound! People take these things for granted today, but I had a steady stream of friends over who just wanted to go through that amazing tutorial over and over again and couldn't believe their eyes and ears.
I still remember seeing MacWrite/MacPaint for the first time, just after having set the machine up and gone through the tutorial. Without ever reading a single manual, I knew how to use this incredibly powerful (for its time) WYSIWYG text editor (unheard of on the PC) and paint program. I must have spent hours just doodling in MacPaint, and friends who owned PCs would come over to do the same and then to print out their doodles on the ImageWriter, which, as a graphics-oriented printer that printed fonts as they appeared on-screen, was about as wild an idea as the Mac itself was. To the friends, who had single-font dot-matrix or daisy wheel printers, even the idea of dot-matrix graphics from a printer seemed like a visit from the kool aid fairy.
The disks were a pain, it's true, but they stored more than the PC floppies and were much more compact and durable, and nobody else but mid-sized and large businesses at the time had any way to afford a hard drive. The 5MB (yes, 5 megabyte) full-height hard drives for PCs were prohibitively expensive, thousands of dollars... Not to mention 10MB (there were no 20MB PC drives yet, IIRC).
Even just the black-on-white display was stunning. Everyone was so accustomed to the notion that computer displays were by necessity some sort of harsh green... Even though Tandy had had a white-on-black display for their TRS-80 Model I some time earlier. I remember one of my friends commenting that if there was no technical reason for making green displays, he'd be happy never to have to see one again after seeing my Mac's display.
Even when Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 came out years later, the computing environment that they created was nowhere near as integrated or as usable as the original Finder 1.0 had been for the Mac. The Mac is quite a testament to the vision of Apple computers, the influence of Xerox notwithstanding... I mean, how often is the devil really in the details (look at Windows, for example), and yet Apple in a remarkable number of cases over the years seems to have gotten 95% of the details in their products right... more often than not when Steve Jobs has been around.
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Define poor. Is poor the absence of two cars per person, like we have in the United States?
If so, then the fact is we have no choice but to be poor. It's a poor planet. There is no way we're getting twelve billion cars out of this rock. Or enough for two televisions for every family around the globe.
We cannot all be wealthy. It simply doesn't work. Even if capitalism did raise the standard of living for everyone, equally, there simply is not enough of anything (food, land, etc.) for each one of six billion people to live in sixty rooms on two hundred acres with a classic corvette, a ferarri, and a diet of caviar. Not possible.
And more to the point, not needed. I live in one room, with no television, no car, very few appliances (outside of my PC and camera) and very little in the way of material goods. But am I poor? Hell no. There's a library that I can visit that's packed full of more knowledge than I can ever hope to gather in a lifetime, I can take walks with my girlfriend whenever I want, and the sunshine and air (no longer fresh air, but at least there's air) are free.
Americans are terrified of poverty, but they see a false dichotomy: either you own a suburban parcel of land with two cars, two televisions, washer, dryer, fridge, range, microwave, XBox, wide-screen TV and barbecue grill or you are "poor" and "poor" is somehow terrifying.
Well, most of the world's population lives without any of that stuff. And if you think that nobody in the former Soviet Union ever smiled once in their miserable, horrible lives or that the people in sub-saharan Africa all really wish they could just commit suicide and end it now, only they can't afford even a thread of string to do it with so they're trapped in this miserable existence, then you have another thing coming.
Companies for profit are morally a bad thing. These are not states of nature, they are socially constructed concepts.
Commodification of labor is fundamentally unethical and the real term, alienation, should be used whenever possible.
Farmers should farm to feed people, programmers should code to produce software, and automakers should assemble to produce cars, all of the above for people to use. Instead, each of famers farm for money (and the crops are merely another irritating step, much less the consumer), programmers code for money (and the code is merely a laborious inconvenience, much less the consumer), and automakers assemble cars for money (and the building a quality automobile is merely another tiresome stage in the process of acquiring money...)
You say "money is the root of all evil" and people treat you like you are saying something quaint and simple, but in reality, it's not far from the truth. Consider this analysis from one of the most preeminent social theorists of our era:
"Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of denial, of want, of thrift, of saving -- and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank... Self-denial, the denial of life and of all human needs, is its cardinal doctrine. The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save -- the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour -- your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life -- the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power... All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice."
Face it, employees are a commodity and it's up to the smart employee to make him/herself valuable to the employer.
This is precisely the ethical problem with capitalism and precisely what the world's population must (and eventually will) change.
The commodification of man is not an inevitablility or some sort of a priori state. Humankind has not always lived this way. The commodification of man was created by the wealthy and powerful and sold to you as a fact of nature, most recently by Adam Smith.
Exactly. Capital has no nationality and no ethics, and it has no vested interest in seeing America prosper over India or over China. Those who own capital enjoy an obscenely high standard of living wherever they happen to sit at the moment. Capital itself will flow to wherever the profit potential is highest, and it will be equally happy to abandon India in favor America once again if someday the tables are turned.
Those who are capital (i.e. the top 1% of the world in terms of wealth) will continue to benefit by each new shift in the location of labor and each new round of layoffs; they will benefit year after year, decade after decade as capital continues to flow in its own self-interest, just as they have done for over a century. The rest of us are screwed.
The DOMESTIC US middle and lower classes had better wake the heck up -- only you will prevent the US plutocrats from extending their Empire over the world. If you dont, these (cluefull) foreign masses *will* eventually kick off their yokes.
As predicted by Marx.
What do you think the chances are that Americans will suddenly abandon Wal-Mart in droves to pay twice as much at the mom-and-pop shop while offering to take a pay cut and funnel the extra to those making less at their firm and going home on public transportation to a smaller apartment so as to increase the amount of space available for housing?
The chances are zero. March of history, here we come.
"Efficient" and "vicious bastard" are one and the same when you are talking about livelihood and quality of life.
Ultimate efficiency in global productivity would dictate:
1) That we euthanize the mentally retarded, amputees, people with below-functional IQs, and the elderly.
2) That we implement a strong eugenics program to continue to create stronger, faster, smarter, longer-lived humans who can remain so on fewer and fewer calories.
3) That we implement a rigid justice system that also takes into account one's potential usefulness to society. Brilliant Ph.D. in Physics commits murder? Strap an unremovable tracking device on him/her and put him/her right back to work in the lab. A high school dropout steals a bowl of soup? Death penalty; little potential for contribution to society, measurable economic impact of crime, high likelihood of recitivism.
Hitler was all about efficiency and we don't like him too much.
The world is a planet full of thinking, feeling people not a machine full of interchangable parts and high-grade lube.
There's an entire discussion on Corel's news server about this. Unfortunately, the dynamic linker from glibc 2.3.2 and later has a bug discussed here that prevents this from working with pre-2.3.2 versions of the library (on which the Corel software depends); of course, an old dynamic linker can be explicitly installed and called, but then you need an entirely separate set of libraries from glibc through X and termcap on donward, which has indeed been the fix to at least get the software to launch (i.e. maintain tens of megabytes of system libraries and an old linker in /usr/i586-libsforcorel or something).
:-(
Unfortunately, the resulting command line is quite long and because the process spins of a number of children without using this technique, the children processes don't launch properly, so things like printing don't work. And of course it eats memory, etc.
It's a mess.
Of course, all it would take from Corel is an update and recompile of their Wine fork against glibc-2.3.2, but they haven't released so much as a single service pack, ever, for Corel Draw 9 for Linux or Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, and both products are now discontinued.
There are many ways in which WordPerfect is just a hell of a lot nicer for working in large text documents.
For example, WordPerfect has a different set of schema for dealing with text than OO, Word, or things like FrameMaker; WordPerect treats text in the way that we read it, associating a kind of chronological or sequential model with left->right, top->bottom and first_page->last_page progressions.
Word and others treat text spatially; they have no idea that the third paragraph on page 13 comes "after" the fifth paragraph on page 4, so you must explicitly demarkate what text should have/inherit what styles or properties. In WordPerfect, text can inherit styles/properties without your ever having to explicitly select and change it; the "reveal codes" functionality provides a kind of extension to this set of behaviors that's very powerful.
As someone who's (primarily) a writer by trade, I really appreciate WordPerfect and had a definite love/hate relationship with WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. These days I've given up and am indeed using Word XP in Linux (with Crossover Office, which for some reason doesn't support the Windows version of WordPerfect Office).
But just as I shelled out $180 for the deluxe version of WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux, I'll shell out the $$$ immediately for a native version, and for a native version I'd probably be willing to pay twice as much!
There was a Corel Draw 9 for Linux that was built using the same Wine fork as Corel WordPerfect Office 2000 for Linux. I know because I bought it, though I can no longer use it (the last round of Corel apps is incompatible with GLIBC 3.2 and later, and Corel has never released any updates).
So if they've done a native port for WPO, maybe it's not out of the question to think they might do a native port of Draw as well, if enough people pony up for Office.
If they had done that (linked against the libs), that would have solved some of the problems that the suite had.
Instead, they installed a complete Wine environment and commands like 'wordperfect' that started the word processor were really just scripts that called 'wine' to load the win32 binaries.
The trouble was that a) their version of wine was a hacked up fork and would ONLY work with their binaries, but b) they didn't change the components so as not to interfere with other wine incarnations (i.e. winehq, codeweavers). So, whenever WordPerfect for Linux was loaded, no other Wine applications would run because of things like wineserver conflicts.
There were innumerable problems with the suite, but that was one of them.
You can still give a child an interesting name, and indeed for some individuals, it can be a bonus. I have a very unusual name thanks to my parents (not printed on Slashdot for obvious reasons), and in the context of my own personality, it has suited me well.
The trick: Give them a boring first name and then have your parental fun with the middle name:
i.e. Jason H4rdc0re Richardson
As a young kid, there's no need for Jason to know what's on his birth certificate. But when he gets to be a teenager, he may enjoy being able to introduce himself, in all honesty, as someone whose name is 'H4rdc0re' to any new friends he makes.
But if he turns out to be a more traditional sort, no-one ever has to know him as anything other than Jason H. Richardson, or even just Jason Richardson.
There are all kinds of possibilities.
Annie Aphrodite Smith (a.k.a. Annie A. Smith)
Jerem E4zyrider Morgan (a.k.a. Jerem E. Morgan)
and on and on.
Even though the article notes that 1GB per user will cost Google only about $2 to maintain (they didn't say if that was a annual cost or what), if they did get 100M users that would be pretty expensive!
The number of users who will actually use that much storage is very small. I have a large email volume, plus SPAM, which I save (but filter into another folder with spamassassin). My email archive goes all the way back to 1997 and is still not much larger than 1GB. Even with SPAM, I think most users will take months or even years to reach a 150-200MB, much less 1GB.
And of course, it's very likely that Google will aggressively filter SPAM in the same way that Yahoo! or the others do.
Do you work?
Do you commute into "downtown" to do it?
If so, congratulations. You are contributing measurably to global warming.
Thank God my real-world, emotion-having girlfriend is more concerned about feeding the hungry and stopping de-facro slavery and international economic imperalism than about impressing her friends with carbon rocks.
And she's not only ethical, she's hot!
Hmmm... I use AA fonts (Arial is my default font) but on my system (RH9) the fonts look much better in Konqueror than they do in Mozilla, which tends to render them a little squat and fat.
:-) By comparison, Windows and Mac OS are just an absolute drag... time consuming and awkward!
There were one or two sites (i.e. ESPN) that didn't render properly in KDE 3.1, but in KDE 3.2, I have not come across a single site that doesn't render correctly in Konqueror, and I use it every day for Web browsing (among a hundred other things). In fact, both flash and java load faster when used with Konqueror than they do when used with Mozilla.
The render times in Konqueror on my PIII-900 are much faster than Mozilla and with the new preloading in KDE 3.2, the startup time is much faster as well.
The menus are much more responsive, the tabbed browsing is faster, scrolling is smoother... I can have Web site icons on my personal toolbar and split views into multiple frames in order to browse/copy/ftp all at once... Plus embedded applets (i.e. PDF viewer, editor, etc...)
I love Konqeuror. It's like the next generation of networked desktop computing.
You think Konqueror sucks horribly?!?! I'm aghast!
As far as I'm concerned, Konqueror is KDE's killer app. It's the one thing I can't give up, the thing I miss most when I have to use a Windows or Mac OS machine.
I can't imagine anyone disliking it!
You don't get it. People are ridiculing Intel because they refuse to give credit where credit is due; Intel isn't compatible with other people, rather other people just happen to be compatible with Intel.
Instead of "Intel is now AMD-compatible!" which is the truth, we instead get "Intel has invented 64-bit extensions to x86! [p.s. unimportant competitors' extensions that may or may not predate our own just happen to be compatible with our standard.]"
Clearly this is convoluted marketspeak to avoid crediting the real inventor of 64-bit x86 extensions for their work.
A human can filter spam.
Not always. Not this human. And I've been working in the technology industry off and on since the mid-1980's. I've worked as a consultant and a programmer and for a large part of my Internet life had a bang-path email address.
But these days, there are several occasions (one of them being the recent spate of eBay "Question for seller" messages) during which I've had to actually click the link to see if it was spam. And I worked for eBay for some time! I know what sorts of things they do and don't send, even!
Yes, I'm familiar with the easy replies to these sorts of things:
1) Don't click any links in email. Ever. Tell your friends that if it contains a link, you'll assume it's SPAM.
2) Don't accept any HTML mail. If it's HTML encoded, assume it's SPAM.
3) Dont' accept any mail with attachments. If it's got attachments, assume it's SPAM.
The problem is that these "easy" criteria filter out 90% of the people I need to communicate with. No, I will not drop that 90%. No, it's not such an easy thing to explain to them, either, how to turn off HTML encoding, etc. Some of them are very bright, even... Many of them are in the computer industry, just not in coding or in consulting or in some position that would require them to be very skilled at the nuances of sending/receiving email beyond "Compose, Type, Send."
I will not break off communication with 90% of my legitimate contacts in the interest of reducing SPAM. And I suspect that most people won't either. And I can't create a whitelist... because I just have too many necessary contacts. And I can't create one mailbox for each contact or for each aspect of my life... because there are too many of those as well and I don't want 66 mailboxes hanging around while I try to keep track of them all.
The point is that I also have increasing difficulty identifying SPAM myself until I actually follow a link and see where it leads. And of course by then it's too late. If I'm a human and a veteran in technology, and I can't figure it out, how is some SPAM filter going to figure it out?
I have received piles of these recently. The names, item, item number, and amount change randomly, but it is always structured like a legitimate eBay message. I'm nervous about adding them to my bayesian filtering because I don't want to miss any eBay messages. I, too, sell a lot on eBay...
All I see is Libertarian, Republican and Democrat. Where are the other parties? Green? Socialist Workers? Communist? Or any of those lesser-known parties on the right that I'm not familiar with but know are there because of their stench?
It seems a shame to create a potentially "democratic" contribution system like this wherein all the candidates appear side by side, yet return in the end to the flawed two-party (or at most three-party) set of limited choices...
You forget that they are senators and not subject to US laws.
Um... No, it doesn't. GNOME uses GTK. GIMP uses GTK. That's how they're related.
/usr/lib/libgtk-1.2.so.0 (0x4002e000) /usr/lib/libgdk-1.2.so.0 (0x40139000) /usr/lib/libgmodule-1.2.so.0 (0x40169000) /usr/lib/libglib-1.2.so.0 (0x4016c000) /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x40191000) /usr/X11R6/lib/libXi.so.6 (0x40195000) /usr/X11R6/lib/libXext.so.6 (0x4019d000) /usr/X11R6/lib/libX11.so.6 (0x401ac000) /lib/i686/libm.so.6 (0x4028b000) /lib/i686/libc.so.6 (0x402ad000)
/lib/ld-linux.so.2 => /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0x40000000)
$ ldd `which gimp`
libgtk-1.2.so.0 =>
libgdk-1.2.so.0 =>
libgmodule-1.2.so.0 =>
libglib-1.2.so.0 =>
libdl.so.2 =>
libXi.so.6 =>
libXext.so.6 =>
libX11.so.6 =>
libm.so.6 =>
libc.so.6 =>
$
No GNOME libraries there. Compare it to the output of:
ldd `which gedit`
and you'll see what I'm talking about.
1. Konqueror is better than Mozilla, IMHO. I only rarely start Mozilla; my browser of choice for all other occasions in Konqueror, which is fast, split-screen, lightweight, better integrated, has better bookmark management, better configurability...
2. OpenOffice is also soon to be KDE-ified so that's a moot point.
3. GIMP is no better integrated with GNOME than it is with KDE. I use it in KDE all the time.
4. KDevelop being clearly better means that in time, KDE apps will be clearly better.
If it was 20MHz, it wasn't a PC. The original PC was 4.77 MHz. The clone "turbo" PC/XTs from 3-4 years later only went to 6 or 8 MHz (8088-2/NEC V20), as did the IBM AT class (80286) PCs.
There were some 20MHz 80286 machines and some 31MHz XT clones (truly bastardized machines) but they were from the late '80s and were all in clone territory, not IBM machines.
I still have two Mac 128k machines in the garage and they still run. They were amazing machines in their day. Compared to the green-screen PC's running cumbersome software with manuals inches thick, the Mac was a beautiful machine to use. The sense of control and interaction was so immediate!
Does anyone remember the lovely tutorial disk that came with the Mac? I can't remember what it was called (i.e. what was on the label), but there was a disk that you booted from that just taught you how to use the machine. It walked you through a lovely animated tutorial with sound that went through use of the mouse, windows, menus, icons, files, etc. using little games -- a maze, an on-screen piano... and it provided feedback in how skilled you were with all of these things. It only took about 10 minutes to get through it, and then you could use the Mac like a pro! But it had graphics and sound! People take these things for granted today, but I had a steady stream of friends over who just wanted to go through that amazing tutorial over and over again and couldn't believe their eyes and ears.
I still remember seeing MacWrite/MacPaint for the first time, just after having set the machine up and gone through the tutorial. Without ever reading a single manual, I knew how to use this incredibly powerful (for its time) WYSIWYG text editor (unheard of on the PC) and paint program. I must have spent hours just doodling in MacPaint, and friends who owned PCs would come over to do the same and then to print out their doodles on the ImageWriter, which, as a graphics-oriented printer that printed fonts as they appeared on-screen, was about as wild an idea as the Mac itself was. To the friends, who had single-font dot-matrix or daisy wheel printers, even the idea of dot-matrix graphics from a printer seemed like a visit from the kool aid fairy.
The disks were a pain, it's true, but they stored more than the PC floppies and were much more compact and durable, and nobody else but mid-sized and large businesses at the time had any way to afford a hard drive. The 5MB (yes, 5 megabyte) full-height hard drives for PCs were prohibitively expensive, thousands of dollars... Not to mention 10MB (there were no 20MB PC drives yet, IIRC).
Even just the black-on-white display was stunning. Everyone was so accustomed to the notion that computer displays were by necessity some sort of harsh green... Even though Tandy had had a white-on-black display for their TRS-80 Model I some time earlier. I remember one of my friends commenting that if there was no technical reason for making green displays, he'd be happy never to have to see one again after seeing my Mac's display.
Even when Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 came out years later, the computing environment that they created was nowhere near as integrated or as usable as the original Finder 1.0 had been for the Mac. The Mac is quite a testament to the vision of Apple computers, the influence of Xerox notwithstanding... I mean, how often is the devil really in the details (look at Windows, for example), and yet Apple in a remarkable number of cases over the years seems to have gotten 95% of the details in their products right... more often than not when Steve Jobs has been around.