A couple of on-topic observations before I get to my real issue: 1) OSNews is a terrific site. Eugenia is really doing a great job with it. 2) I've tried GoBe on Be and found it usable, if hardly a replacement for MS Office. But $125? That seems to me to be conceding the don't-want-to-pay market to Sun and they're unlikely to derail Microsoft among people with money to spend.
And now a completely offtopic question.
StarOffice 6beta rocks my world (at least, those parts of it that deal with office productivity).
I've installed the Linux OpenOffice beta (638c) and have a really stupid question: how do I start it? I can't figure out what the executable is, and I haven't found any documentation on the site to answer that. If it installs something in your desktop menu, it doesn't know about WindowMaker.
My bad, although I had subsequently looked to see if the story had ever made it up and didn't find anything. Probably a Slashdot database disappearance thing that got fixed when Bender was installed.
CodeWeavers makes the CrossOver plugin to view QuickTime under Linux. It costs $20, but for all the complaining about the absence of a Linux viewer, I'm sure there'll be a healthy market, right? Right?
I submitted this as an article when it was announced but it was rejected. Apparently, weekly articles complaining about editors' inability to run QuickTime (while they're happily playing one Windows-only game after another) is News For Nerds, but a solution isn't.
The US seems to be going in the opposite direction, with American flags now being added to the logo. The worst offender is ESPN, which not only broadcasts games with the logo, flag, score statistics, out of town scores and the score ticker on the bottom but sets them all well in from the border wasting even more space.
On the other hand, with a zillion cable channels that I, at least, don't remember most of, it's useful to have a small logo. Anyway, it's not at all clear to me how this group expects to have any effect. A petition? "Demonstrate and calculate the cost of ignoring the problem logos."?
I'm skpetical about the claim that the logos are there to discourage piracy. Is anyone really trafficking bootleg C-Span or Weather Channel broadcasts or Dharma and Greg episodes? And if so, are they going to be deterred by a network logo?
What authors (in any genre, fiction or nonfiction) alive today will still be read (hard copy or online) in 2051?
The writers you mention are all dead, mostly long dead. They've all entered the canon already and there's no challenge in naming them. The question is who is the Hemingway or Joyce of today.
As long as I'm posting, a lot of people (including Cliff) seem to have misunderstood the question as "Who is your favorite sci-fi author?" I mean, C.J. Cherryh? Are you kidding?
Also, a number of posters who do deal with living authors seem to think George Orwell is alive. He's been dead over 50 years.
Stephen King: I think he's likely to fill the same niche in future centuries that Edgar Allen Poe does today. He also has the advantage of having written both god novels and short stories so he'll be easy to fit into an academic curriculum.
Dr. Seuss: This is limited to the English speaking world (although I've seen translations) but I'm sure kids will be reading his books for a long time. Perhaps J.K. Rowling for older kids. Maybe Tintin, also, given its international range.
On the science fiction front, I'd say Neal Stephenson, if only because I have a feeling that Snow Crash is going to seem really prescient.
As long as we're broadening the question, what about other fields? I'm thinking Bob Marley (musically and for sociopolitical significance), Roy Lichtenstein,...
3: He says in the interview, "Both Sleepycat and the Free Software Foundation have looked hard at the two licenses, and we agree that the Sleepycat license is compatible with the GPL."
Their plan seems to be a lot like TrollTech's -- they dual license their library under a GPL-like license and a for-money license. They reap the benefits of open source (wide distribution, many eyes, contributions back) but make money from companies that don't want to free their own products.
Now that the megalomania, greed and excess of the Linux boom days has disappeared, it's clear that raising a mountain of money from VC's and an IPO and overthrowing Microsoft and Oracle isn't the way to succeed for a free software developer. On the other hand, growing at a reasonable rate, living off revenues and (duh) making a really good product like Qt or BerkeleyDB can make you a nice living.
From the animal bite paper: The effect of the phases of the moon on human nature and behaviour is well documented; some studies show positive aspects of the association and some show negative aspects. Crime, crisis incidence, human aggression, human births, and traffic accidents are all positively correlated with the phases of the moon.2-6 Some articles have suggested that the full moon has no influence on human insanity, alcohol intake, drug overdose, trauma, or the volume of patients in emergency departments.
Translation -- studies on the effect of the lunar cycle on various things turn up contradictory results.
Nonetheless, the study linked here looks pretty sound to me, with fairly objective data measurement and P less than 0.001. I'd be interested to see a better breakdown of the animals involved but this sample seems to be so heavily weighted to dog bites that it probably doesn't matter.
Of course, the sort of people who style themselves "skeptics" confidently assert that the lunar cycle has no effect on anything. Those guys always rub me the wrong way, anyway, but if you're going to be a superior, sneering prick about other people's ideas, you should at least make sure that your "debunking" is accurate.
It's like how in college, your professors tell you that much of what you learned in high school is false. And then you discover that just about everything you were taught in college ws wrong.
It's a "SIT" tone. "Special Information Tone" or something similar. If you put it as the first thing on your answering machine, the telemarker's auto-calling devices will log your number as "out-of-service" and won't call you anymore.
Someone suggested that to me a few years ago. It sounded like a good idea for the first few seconds -- until I pictured {the job I just interviewed at / the chick I gave my number to at the bar last night / Ed McMahon with my prize money / all my friends} calling, hearing the tone and immediately hanging up and tearing up my number.
Yeah, that'll reduce the disruptions in your life.
A lot of users seem to think that they can sell off their no-longer-used software to subsidize upgrades, but that's just not what the EULAs say (at least with pre-installed MS software).
That may be true but that's not what the article is about:
Charmaine Gravning, a product manager for Microsoft's Windows XP, said the policy is clear that people cannot sell or even share the software that comes pre-loaded on computers. If a consumer buys a copy of Windows in a store, they can resell the software, provided they include the license agreement, and all other documentation and don't try to sell multiple copies.
The issue here is cutomers trying to resell their bundled system software when they upgrade. If you upgrade to Linux, you're still not allowed to resell the bundled OS.
I couldn't determine what device was my floppy drive (it wasn't fd0, like it should be) and was unable to mount floppies.
I had the same thing -- a post on Usenet explained that 8.1 (the download version, anyway) installs a broken/etc/fstab.
On the whole, I've been impressed with Mandrake. I recently built my first x86 box (need a dual boot with Windows on this one) and took the opportunity to try out Debian and Mandrake. The Debian install was just godawful. Could I have managed it? Sure, I've been installing Linux since Red Hat 4 / MkLinux DR2. But I have things to do with my time. Mandrake did a great job with hardware detection and setup. Windows 98, on the other hand, which I've used occasionally but never installed or admined just sucked. It correctly detected far fewer devices than did Mandrake and required a reinstall when I added a modem and again when I switched monitors.
Now, if only I could get that modem to work under Mandrake...
We're actually agreeing -- that is my point. Why is Slashdot valuable? Not, as Jon Katz would imagine, because of its poorly spelled, pointlessly inflammatory editorial content but because Rob has a) attracted a large, vocal readership with a lot of aggregate knowledge and b) put a moderation system in place that allows the best 5% of any discussion to float to the top. Frequently the linked article is wrong or the submitter completely misses the point and the editor doesn't bother to check it himself, the ensuing discussion will be filled with ignorance and flames -- but the best 5 posts will cut through the clutter and teach me something.
That's why I think both sides in Katz's debate are missing the point. Yes, the net is filled with garbage. Yes, it's still and important source of information.
Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot, but as an example of the independent news the Net has to offer, one can't help but come to the conclusion that CNN and its TV-based family will continue to be the norm for a long, long time.
Yeah, I think where Katz misses the boat is that he doesn't realize that the Net exceeds people's expectations because those expectations are so low. I browse with the expectation that 95% of what I read is nonsense and between trusted sources, my own judgement and some skepticism, learn an enormous amount. But which would you trust more for sold information on a given issue -- a single CNN or NYT piece or a single Slashdot or Usenet post.
September 11th was a great example of this. When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
A lot of us were at work without a TV or radio and got a steady stream of second-hand information through Slashdot.
Re:Does the Middle East get PBS?
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 1
Does Sesame Street even broadcast in the largely Islamic countries where these posters are popping up?
I've heard every theory about why Bert is on the posters, but (stick with me here) Maybe they don't know who Bert is? Most of us have grown up watching Sesame Street but I wonder if the same holds true in the Middle East.
There is an Israeli Sesame Street, with Bert and Ernie (called Benz and Arik), some other original muppets, some native ones and a mix of Jewish and Arab human cast members. I don't know if similar shows exist in any of the Islamic countries (I don't think so) but I'm sure it's available by satellite. I bet the typical Bangladeshi militant has no idea who Bert is, though.
Re:Google Image search strikes again
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yeah, a comment to the (now heavily/.'ed) Swedish site says:
Hey Nikke,
We reckon that four out of the 8 images used in the poster are from the very first page of results in Google for an image search on Osama Bin Laden. http://images.google.com/images?q=osama+bin+laden& hl=en&sa=N&tab=gi
Regards, Littleboy
Another person answers a question that had occurred to me -- in bin Ladin's TV appeareance, isn't he holding a bottle of Johnny Walker? Closer examination reveals it's a Yemini-style knife (jambia, the one poachers kill rhinos to get horn for the handles) that he started wearing after the Cole attack.
The older Mac OS's seem to have opened a file based on the software that created it, which has its own set of problems. (Just because I created a JPG in Photshop doesn't mean I want spend 90 seconds firing up Photoshop every time I want to see it).
That can be a nuisance (of course, you can still open the Photoshop file in JPEGView or drag it into an IE window, or you can change the creator code for the file). But it can be extremely useful to have different files of the same type associated with different applications: a tab-delimited data file opens in Excel, a large ASCII text document opens in Word instead of giving a SimpleText error, the README file for something I'm coding opens with the CodeWarrior editor I'll likely already have open, even though they're all.txt files .
Out of curiosity (since I've never before seen anyone offer an intellectual justification for criticizing things one knows nothing about) -- out of all the products that you haven't tried, how do you decide which ones you're going to criticize?
This may have been added to the article since you posted:
Postcript: Several readers have e-mailed me to outline what they feel are holes in my argument. They point out that in the most recent versions of Windows, a right click on file names will offer you an "Open with" option, and that if you navigate this properly you can check a box that says "Always open files of this type with this program," thus effectively changing the default option.
This is correct but irrelevant to the point I'm making. The power of "default" settings lies in users' ignorance and inertia. There are millions of Windows users who barely know what "right-clicking" is. These users may be disdained by some of my correspondents, but they constitute a critical mass in the marketplace.
That may be, but what's the likelihood that the people who don't know about right-clicking are likely to open a control panel to configure their own preferred handlers?
I dunno -- this level of government meddling in software design seems like just the kind of thing nobody in the industry wants.
(By the way, using Konqueror, no Salon cookies and no Flash installed, I'm getting a stream of new windows opening and respawning that looks like I'm on a porn site. Is that the correct behavior? Also, why is Slashcode ignoring my italic tags?)
There is a difference of course between a completely free person and a parolee's freedom being restricted. A parolee is still in the process of being punished - and therefore their rights are being curtailed in ways which are unacceptable for the rest of us.
You're right -- but I screwed up when describing the situation. As the links magnified_plaid provided explain, the guy was actually charged with additional crimes, not just accused of violating parole. Sorry about the confusion...
As for the virtual porn...It's just one step from saying an artistic rendering of a real act is illegal to saying writing about it is illegal...And then from there, who knows?
Oh, we're there already. There's a case being appealed now (can't find a link) where a paroled pedophile was found to have a manuscript in his home describing a fantasy of torturing and molesting children. He wrote it, and never distributed it, and is now accused of violating his parole.
Now, this is at best the kind of worst case scenario that tests your will to support civil rights -- the guy is blatantly evil and any inch you give him could easily turn into a nightmare for some poor kid. But criminalizing what you can write down and keep in your desk...?
I was just reading and rereading that paragraph trying to figure out what the hell his point is. Is it simply that he (and the ZD reporter) doesn't know that "opening Pandora's box" is a bad thing? Or is it that having opened Pandora's box, it'll then be necessary to take the measures he talks about? I'm mystified.
Let's say that's correct -- so what? The issue (as far as antitrust is concerned) isn't how much money MSFT makes, it's their monopoly. If they lose a significant chunk of users, their monopoly is gone regardless of whether or not profits are down.
Slashdot Mirror
1) OSNews is a terrific site. Eugenia is really doing a great job with it.
2) I've tried GoBe on Be and found it usable, if hardly a replacement for MS Office. But $125? That seems to me to be conceding the don't-want-to-pay market to Sun and they're unlikely to derail Microsoft among people with money to spend.
And now a completely offtopic question.
StarOffice 6beta rocks my world (at least, those parts of it that deal with office productivity).
I've installed the Linux OpenOffice beta (638c) and have a really stupid question: how do I start it? I can't figure out what the executable is, and I haven't found any documentation on the site to answer that. If it installs something in your desktop menu, it doesn't know about WindowMaker.
Heh. Here's a more representative example. And another.
My bad, although I had subsequently looked to see if the story had ever made it up and didn't find anything. Probably a Slashdot database disappearance thing that got fixed when Bender was installed.
I submitted this as an article when it was announced but it was rejected. Apparently, weekly articles complaining about editors' inability to run QuickTime (while they're happily playing one Windows-only game after another) is News For Nerds, but a solution isn't.
On the other hand, with a zillion cable channels that I, at least, don't remember most of, it's useful to have a small logo. Anyway, it's not at all clear to me how this group expects to have any effect. A petition? "Demonstrate and calculate the cost of ignoring the problem logos."?
I'm skpetical about the claim that the logos are there to discourage piracy. Is anyone really trafficking bootleg C-Span or Weather Channel broadcasts or Dharma and Greg episodes? And if so, are they going to be deterred by a network logo?
What authors (in any genre, fiction or nonfiction) alive today will still be read (hard copy or online) in 2051?
The writers you mention are all dead, mostly long dead. They've all entered the canon already and there's no challenge in naming them. The question is who is the Hemingway or Joyce of today.
As long as I'm posting, a lot of people (including Cliff) seem to have misunderstood the question as "Who is your favorite sci-fi author?" I mean, C.J. Cherryh? Are you kidding?
Also, a number of posters who do deal with living authors seem to think George Orwell is alive. He's been dead over 50 years.
Stephen King: I think he's likely to fill the same niche in future centuries that Edgar Allen Poe does today. He also has the advantage of having written both god novels and short stories so he'll be easy to fit into an academic curriculum.
Dr. Seuss: This is limited to the English speaking world (although I've seen translations) but I'm sure kids will be reading his books for a long time. Perhaps J.K. Rowling for older kids. Maybe Tintin, also, given its international range.
On the science fiction front, I'd say Neal Stephenson, if only because I have a feeling that Snow Crash is going to seem really prescient.
As long as we're broadening the question, what about other fields? I'm thinking Bob Marley (musically and for sociopolitical significance), Roy Lichtenstein,...
1: No, just like you can't reuse GPL code under the (less restrictive / more Free depending on which camp you belong to) BSD license.
2: Reading the license I don't see why not.
3: He says in the interview, "Both Sleepycat and the Free Software Foundation have looked hard at the two licenses, and we agree that the Sleepycat license is compatible with the GPL."
Now that the megalomania, greed and excess of the Linux boom days has disappeared, it's clear that raising a mountain of money from VC's and an IPO and overthrowing Microsoft and Oracle isn't the way to succeed for a free software developer. On the other hand, growing at a reasonable rate, living off revenues and (duh) making a really good product like Qt or BerkeleyDB can make you a nice living.
The effect of the phases of the moon on human nature and behaviour is well documented; some studies show positive aspects of the association and some show negative aspects. Crime, crisis incidence, human aggression, human births, and traffic accidents are all positively correlated with the phases of the moon.2-6 Some articles have suggested that the full moon has no influence on human insanity, alcohol intake, drug overdose, trauma, or the volume of patients in emergency departments.
Translation -- studies on the effect of the lunar cycle on various things turn up contradictory results.
Nonetheless, the study linked here looks pretty sound to me, with fairly objective data measurement and P less than 0.001. I'd be interested to see a better breakdown of the animals involved but this sample seems to be so heavily weighted to dog bites that it probably doesn't matter.
Of course, the sort of people who style themselves "skeptics" confidently assert that the lunar cycle has no effect on anything. Those guys always rub me the wrong way, anyway, but if you're going to be a superior, sneering prick about other people's ideas, you should at least make sure that your "debunking" is accurate.
It's like how in college, your professors tell you that much of what you learned in high school is false. And then you discover that just about everything you were taught in college ws wrong.
Someone suggested that to me a few years ago. It sounded like a good idea for the first few seconds -- until I pictured {the job I just interviewed at / the chick I gave my number to at the bar last night / Ed McMahon with my prize money / all my friends} calling, hearing the tone and immediately hanging up and tearing up my number.
Yeah, that'll reduce the disruptions in your life.
That may be true but that's not what the article is about:
Charmaine Gravning, a product manager for Microsoft's Windows XP, said the policy is clear that people cannot sell or even share the software that comes pre-loaded on computers. If a consumer buys a copy of Windows in a store, they can resell the software, provided they include the license agreement, and all other documentation and don't try to sell multiple copies.
The issue here is cutomers trying to resell their bundled system software when they upgrade. If you upgrade to Linux, you're still not allowed to resell the bundled OS.
I had the same thing -- a post on Usenet explained that 8.1 (the download version, anyway) installs a broken /etc/fstab.
On the whole, I've been impressed with Mandrake. I recently built my first x86 box (need a dual boot with Windows on this one) and took the opportunity to try out Debian and Mandrake. The Debian install was just godawful. Could I have managed it? Sure, I've been installing Linux since Red Hat 4 / MkLinux DR2. But I have things to do with my time. Mandrake did a great job with hardware detection and setup. Windows 98, on the other hand, which I've used occasionally but never installed or admined just sucked. It correctly detected far fewer devices than did Mandrake and required a reinstall when I added a modem and again when I switched monitors.
Now, if only I could get that modem to work under Mandrake...
That's why I think both sides in Katz's debate are missing the point. Yes, the net is filled with garbage. Yes, it's still and important source of information.
Yeah, I think where Katz misses the boat is that he doesn't realize that the Net exceeds people's expectations because those expectations are so low. I browse with the expectation that 95% of what I read is nonsense and between trusted sources, my own judgement and some skepticism, learn an enormous amount. But which would you trust more for sold information on a given issue -- a single CNN or NYT piece or a single Slashdot or Usenet post.
September 11th was a great example of this. When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
A lot of us were at work without a TV or radio and got a steady stream of second-hand information through Slashdot.
There is an Israeli Sesame Street, with Bert and Ernie (called Benz and Arik), some other original muppets, some native ones and a mix of Jewish and Arab human cast members. I don't know if similar shows exist in any of the Islamic countries (I don't think so) but I'm sure it's available by satellite. I bet the typical Bangladeshi militant has no idea who Bert is, though.
Hey Nikke,
We reckon that four out of the 8 images used in the poster are from the very first page of results in Google for an image search on Osama Bin Laden. http://images.google.com/images?q=osama+bin+laden& hl=en&sa=N&tab=gi
Regards, Littleboy
Another person answers a question that had occurred to me -- in bin Ladin's TV appeareance, isn't he holding a bottle of Johnny Walker? Closer examination reveals it's a Yemini-style knife (jambia, the one poachers kill rhinos to get horn for the handles) that he started wearing after the Cole attack.
That can be a nuisance (of course, you can still open the Photoshop file in JPEGView or drag it into an IE window, or you can change the creator code for the file). But it can be extremely useful to have different files of the same type associated with different applications: a tab-delimited data file opens in Excel, a large ASCII text document opens in Word instead of giving a SimpleText error, the README file for something I'm coding opens with the CodeWarrior editor I'll likely already have open, even though they're all .txt files .
Out of curiosity (since I've never before seen anyone offer an intellectual justification for criticizing things one knows nothing about) -- out of all the products that you haven't tried, how do you decide which ones you're going to criticize?
Postcript: Several readers have e-mailed me to outline what they feel are holes in my argument. They point out that in the most recent versions of Windows, a right click on file names will offer you an "Open with" option, and that if you navigate this properly you can check a box that says "Always open files of this type with this program," thus effectively changing the default option.
This is correct but irrelevant to the point I'm making. The power of "default" settings lies in users' ignorance and inertia. There are millions of Windows users who barely know what "right-clicking" is. These users may be disdained by some of my correspondents, but they constitute a critical mass in the marketplace.
That may be, but what's the likelihood that the people who don't know about right-clicking are likely to open a control panel to configure their own preferred handlers?
I dunno -- this level of government meddling in software design seems like just the kind of thing nobody in the industry wants.
(By the way, using Konqueror, no Salon cookies and no Flash installed, I'm getting a stream of new windows opening and respawning that looks like I'm on a porn site. Is that the correct behavior? Also, why is Slashcode ignoring my italic tags?)
We keep hearing these stories of massive deployments of Gnome desktops by the Mexican government.
- "Scholar Net, has decided to install GNU/Linux workstations with GNOME sofware. The software should be installed in every elementary and mid-level school in Mexico, he says. This means about 140,000 centers in the next five years."
- "ABCNews.com reports that the Mexican government chose Red Hat Linux to power their elementary and middle school computers.
- It's an interview with the Technical coordinator of the Distrito Federal goverment (Mexico's capital of the country) where they say why choose Linux over MSWindows and make the change of all their systems in a period of 2 years to Linux. All the money saved from the MSWindows licenses will be reallocated to programs for fighting poverty.
Has any of this ever actually happened? I've started to regard any story with "Linux" and "Mexico" in it the way I do Loch Ness Monster sightings.You're right -- but I screwed up when describing the situation. As the links magnified_plaid provided explain, the guy was actually charged with additional crimes, not just accused of violating parole. Sorry about the confusion...
Oh, we're there already. There's a case being appealed now (can't find a link) where a paroled pedophile was found to have a manuscript in his home describing a fantasy of torturing and molesting children. He wrote it, and never distributed it, and is now accused of violating his parole.
Now, this is at best the kind of worst case scenario that tests your will to support civil rights -- the guy is blatantly evil and any inch you give him could easily turn into a nightmare for some poor kid. But criminalizing what you can write down and keep in your desk...?
I was just reading and rereading that paragraph trying to figure out what the hell his point is. Is it simply that he (and the ZD reporter) doesn't know that "opening Pandora's box" is a bad thing? Or is it that having opened Pandora's box, it'll then be necessary to take the measures he talks about? I'm mystified.
Let's say that's correct -- so what? The issue (as far as antitrust is concerned) isn't how much money MSFT makes, it's their monopoly. If they lose a significant chunk of users, their monopoly is gone regardless of whether or not profits are down.