I'm not going to type it again, nor be dragged off and beaten by people who get the wrong impression, read my response to the AC here I go into detail and I'm sure it addresses your concerns. I'm not some ogre intellectually opressing people, I even have very limited time to learn the great many things I'm required to, including the new system we're transitioning to. Fortunately for me and my employer I've worked with some things somewhere in the murky past and have enough familiarity to be able to get back into them, but I'm pulled a lot of directions, too, and though building a PC from scratch (over the next couple months, see journal) I get to learn more technical stuff, which will take hours or days of research only to help make the right decision or draw the right conclusion, then to be promptly forgotten. I'd rather the days were longer and I could just amuse myself riding my bike.
1. You're blinded by bias and draw the wrong conclusion.
2. You're blinded by bias, again, and draw the wrong conclustion.
In your narrow (and anti all-slashdotters hate microsoft/love linux and wallow in tech) view you utterly miss the point, this is not a pro-Linux, or anti-M$ GUI thread, it's not even about how big and successful M$ is, it's about how M$ offerings are what is in common use. Microsoft didn't create the monopoly, business did, big business. Home users followed, because, despite even learning on a Mac in school, they wanted to use the same interface and tools they use at work. With such acceptance behind them, Microsoft set out to leverage their market with the goal of creating operating system, applications, everything to be so intuitive that the user wouldn't even need a manual. This makes users expect everything to be simple.
Remember the days before microwaves and instant dinners in a plastic wrap, or even McDonalds? Preparing food was a technical achievment, particularly if highly palatable and even presented well with a garnish. So instant or fast food makes it easy to just bypass all that learning and practice, just press a button or hand over a ten-spot.
Societal ill? How so?
Manufacturer's fault? Not entirely.
A product which fills a need, yet through dependence on, reduces the need for technical knowledge is a problem waiting to happen.
The problem is when it breaks down. Word locks up and eats a document, the microwave breaks down, or McDonalds is closed, what is the user who only knows how to function in one paradigm to function?
Call the helpdesk. Maybe they even have a powerbar they can lend you.
After many years of varied experience I'm of the opinion we each have the mental energy (actaully chemical/physiological) to kkeep track of so many details and perform so many skills. As one area increases it does so at the atrophy of another. Use it or lose it, as they say. Don't waste your energy being biased, there's no payoff.
What it is, IMHO, is simply the city attempting to find a method of collecting revenues to cover budget items. It's a ridiculous, attempting to capitalize on M$ success and creates a Byzantine taxcode which would discourage other business from setting up there. If the existing taxcode for Seattle doesn't gather enough from office space (property tax), income tax, use fees and service fees, they should modify those. Either cut services or increase taxes in a fair and appropriate manner.
No, I blame M$ for their goal of handing everyone such an easy interface and set of intuitive applications (albeit, still frustrating in how little attention they put into locating items on the right menu, items on related menus, and help, which generally ensures book authors a gravy train, but I digress) that they now expect everything to be the very essence of simplicity. If it can't be made simple, it's not worth bothering with, ergo, if M$ doesn't make it, it's not worth bothering with.
Thanks for taking the time to jump to the wrong conclusion and running with it, you show there is some ability to think outside the paradigm, even it it is the counter-paradigm.
I thought the gap was narrowing thanks to the Dummies series.
Makes you wonder how come their offerings have expanded so much and why they sell so well. IIRC they even have Sex for Dummies... that's truly worrying, no?
"Congratulations, it's a boy, now here's all he'll need to get through life, a full library of Dummies books."
I find it disheartening the number of people who can't even conceive ideas. They expect instant solutions. I blame part of it on M$ which, for all their warts fits well a set of needs, but makes people ignorant of what can really be done.
In retrospect, it's similar to the criticism of TV people once voiced, you'll become so addicted to instant entertainment that you won't be able to think for yourself. Contrary to that assumption I read about 30 books over the last year and rarely watch TV anymore. Maybe people do change, when it becomes important for them to.
Idle thought: I wonder what the ratio is of tech savvy people to the number who drive manual transmission vehicles.
Having worked for a company that died a long and painful death (a logistics and trucking company) it's remarkable when coming to terms with the end of a company you enjoyed working for, comiseration with fellow employees (many of whom remain close friends), and what you eventually find when on in the finance department.
The endgame, where questionable accounting practices and behaviour become clear, is perhaps a last, grim fascination, like watching a reckless driver plow into a schoolbus full of children, then rationalize it all away, and even go so far as to extend blame to the victims.
In our case, the VC's had been skimming millions off the top, each month, as they clamined the company was continuing to lose money and cut staff. Checks were kept in drawers until vendors refused to deliver freight in their care, until paid. Benefits vendors weren't paid, some were signed on with known problems meeting their own bills, because they were cheaper (no kidding.)
Watching round after round of layoffs and then ripple effect waves of departures of those who couldn't stand it any longer. And amazingly, the execs always seem to have a golden parachute contract and get away relatively unscathed.
"But don't worry about it happening again anytime soon. The next expected supernova is nearly 500,000 light-years away and is too far from the earth to cause any damage."
Bah! That's what they said LAST TIME!
Civilizations come and go, usually the come with a purpose, they go with a lack of it.
I'm not ready to let go of the boxes yet. CRTs, yes, the NEC 1700+ looks like a winner to replace the bulky monitor which occupies 40% of the desk, but they can take my boxen when they pry them from my cold, dead arms.
BTW: What's with the redirection of www.slashdot.org to freakydots? I thought there were going to be no pop-under or basically dirty trick ads.
DJ's already do it, despite complaints from listeners for decades, I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA doesn't encourage it to reduce likelihood of people taping radio.
Easy way to prevent capture and redistribution of streamed music: Require DJ's to talk over the music, like they already do on radio stations. Problem solved.
What is going on? Why is the RIAA hellbent on staying in the 20th century? Seriously... if anyone can answer that for me
without being flippant, I'd love it.
Some observations:
The RIAA does payola to get the manufacutred 'hit' music air.
The RIAA doesn't give a damn about independent minded station, so long as they pay the royalties, to them of course
The internet comes along and viola, listeners can actually select what they want to listen to, give immediate feedback to stations, and usurp control from the highly engineered controls the RIAA has spent decades putting in place, as the number of outlets mushrooms (remember for a moment how the Congress protected local TV stations in cable markets?)
The RIAA resists, makes it painful to broadcast over internet, download music listeners actually want, in effect trying to maintain control
Rather than find and develop talent, the RIAA, if not already, will probably develop computer generated 'hits', hire professional actors and dancers to just mouth the words and so on (it has actually been the case for decades that companies assemble writers, peformers and studio musicians for manufactured pop, now imagine it without the studio musicians and writers, just a fine tuned program)
Technology being as advanced as it is, home users or small groups of interested parties can manufacture thier own music and distribute, even sell MP3's, bypassing RIAA altogether
RIAA becomes less relevent if they lose control. As those who hold stake in such companies apply pressure to maintain profit and share value, the battle intensifies to maintain control, pushing legislation to cripple technology and make fair-use rights moot
Pundits and forum posters lament the seeming idiocy of the RIAA in the face of a new fronteer
There are only about 17 000 three-letter acronyms, sooner or later they will have to be reused.
It's not the first time I've had an issue with Microsoft re-naming or re-defining universally known concepts, kind of another aspect of their monopoly. It's caused some confusion at work when I say apples and someone else who read a M$ book says bananas.
To thoroughly piss-off geeks, I fully expect them to appropriate XYZZY and PLUGH into some gawd-awful inappropriate manner.
I like Microsoft's argument that without Explorer Windows would be unstable or wouldn't work.
...well, a few times at home and a few times at work, twice today actually, Explorer commited some act of sin and was terminated, then the BSoD faerie showed up and whacked everything with her wand. Hard to say which is unstable without what, Explorer or the OS.
We got new PCs at work about 6 mos. ago, with 512Meg RAM. I thought, wow, I should have a hard time filling that up, forgetting for a moment what OS we use at work. The funny thing is booting up and running the performance monitors and watching Windows fill that RAM up with just about everything, until it's about 50% full. Ok, so your M$ apps come up fast when you launch them, as opposed to how long it takes to load Netscape or any of the Adobe tools I use. You can tell who holds the reins on the OS, eh?
The ugly part is when I start loading in large amounts of data, rather than empty out all that unused code, it starts paging it. Beautiful. Way to manage memory. It's fun to load about 180Meg of data into memory, when you have 512Meg and then get messages that you now have insufficient memory to open new application windows.
While this was two weeks ago I dunno if you'll get to it, but you need to learn something about Shill Bidders. There's a few usenet newsgroups where this often comes up and the people on rec.collecting.coins regularly hunt down and report shills. A shill is another bidder or account set up by the seller, if they see it work once on you, they'll try it again. Look for bidders who always seem to bid on one sellers auctions and occasionally cancel bids. If their shill fails and they keep the item and pay the fees, they more than make up for those if they get you, i.e. $15 game for $96
Too many of these people are still stuck in the concepts of what the average man on the street had of computers back in the 50's and earlier. Take a good look at some really old comic books, like Captain Marvel or Batman and you get some idea. The were boxes that did amazing things. Problem is as more people have PCs the average man on the street is going to look at this view and go "whaaaaat?" The least that they could do is stop calling these things computers and call them something else. But at the rate stupid ideas get turned into $100 million movies, I don't expect them to take a sip from the fountain of reality anytime soon.
Back before you were born, computer movies were about real computer components with real terms;
I dunno, I can remember a lot of movies depicting computers completely wrong back in the 70's. Tron at least used some correct terminology, but I still thought it was tommyrot when I saw it. IMHO the arcade game was better than the movie.
Think about making a movie like that today, where you have to get past the Firewall, or dodging packets, or taking a fast ride on the AGP, or heck, going to meet the Kernel!:)
There's a 1 1/2 hour "making of" feature
Think of this as "History", since you could probably do a lot better now with the PC you are sitting at.
By installing and using this software the user, you, grant exclusive rights superceding your own to the software provider, us, not limited to the following on the installed computer:
Record of all activity and communication through the use of
All content created or transmitted
The ability to remove bookmarks to links of our choosing
Unused CPU capacity
Unused fixed storage capacity
The ability to on-the-fly derogatory references to the software provider at any point
The ability to enter your dwelling and verify all software and content stored on fixed media is legal and that no decryption, nor software for the breaking of copy protection or reverse engineering of such exists
All your base
Signify your acceptance of these terms by remaining silent and clicking Here [] like a good sheep.
I do wish the JD and GWB would actually DO somthing about MS, but it appears that they won't.
For ages I've been hearing how the GOP wants to curb frivoless lawsuits, claiming they clog up the courts. Then along comes DoJ v. M$ and, rather than spank them hard, like they deserve, decide to give them a lame lecture and let them off with their ill-gotten lucre and the ability to commit further crimes.
What's left, is civil suits, by everyone in the industry. I'll argue that the conspiracy between the DoJ and M$ has left competitors no other choice. Hence the courts will be clogged with suit after suit, to bring M$ to reckoning.
The problem for Sun is that they got what they asked for, and had to be blinded by winning a suit against M$ for not seeing this coming.
It can still be argued, though, since many sites employ Java, that Microsoft is stripping consumers of a choice. By a round-about way, that does hurt Sun, but looks on the surface as the result of their own lack of attention.
Last, but not least, $1B? That's chump-change, M$ probably spends that much on their legal team each year, why so little?
But I'm be embarrassed to have people see my bad penmanship and spelling in presentations... But I could justify one for the fridge at home, to jot down what I need from the store and then maybe email it to Safeway to pick up later...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to type it again, nor be dragged off and beaten by people who get the wrong impression, read my response to the AC here I go into detail and I'm sure it addresses your concerns. I'm not some ogre intellectually opressing people, I even have very limited time to learn the great many things I'm required to, including the new system we're transitioning to. Fortunately for me and my employer I've worked with some things somewhere in the murky past and have enough familiarity to be able to get back into them, but I'm pulled a lot of directions, too, and though building a PC from scratch (over the next couple months, see journal) I get to learn more technical stuff, which will take hours or days of research only to help make the right decision or draw the right conclusion, then to be promptly forgotten. I'd rather the days were longer and I could just amuse myself riding my bike.
2. You're blinded by bias, again, and draw the wrong conclustion.
In your narrow (and anti all-slashdotters hate microsoft/love linux and wallow in tech) view you utterly miss the point, this is not a pro-Linux, or anti-M$ GUI thread, it's not even about how big and successful M$ is, it's about how M$ offerings are what is in common use. Microsoft didn't create the monopoly, business did, big business. Home users followed, because, despite even learning on a Mac in school, they wanted to use the same interface and tools they use at work. With such acceptance behind them, Microsoft set out to leverage their market with the goal of creating operating system, applications, everything to be so intuitive that the user wouldn't even need a manual. This makes users expect everything to be simple.
Remember the days before microwaves and instant dinners in a plastic wrap, or even McDonalds? Preparing food was a technical achievment, particularly if highly palatable and even presented well with a garnish. So instant or fast food makes it easy to just bypass all that learning and practice, just press a button or hand over a ten-spot.
Societal ill? How so?
Manufacturer's fault? Not entirely.
A product which fills a need, yet through dependence on, reduces the need for technical knowledge is a problem waiting to happen.
The problem is when it breaks down. Word locks up and eats a document, the microwave breaks down, or McDonalds is closed, what is the user who only knows how to function in one paradigm to function?
Call the helpdesk. Maybe they even have a powerbar they can lend you.
After many years of varied experience I'm of the opinion we each have the mental energy (actaully chemical/physiological) to kkeep track of so many details and perform so many skills. As one area increases it does so at the atrophy of another. Use it or lose it, as they say. Don't waste your energy being biased, there's no payoff.
What it is, IMHO, is simply the city attempting to find a method of collecting revenues to cover budget items. It's a ridiculous, attempting to capitalize on M$ success and creates a Byzantine taxcode which would discourage other business from setting up there. If the existing taxcode for Seattle doesn't gather enough from office space (property tax), income tax, use fees and service fees, they should modify those. Either cut services or increase taxes in a fair and appropriate manner.
No, I blame M$ for their goal of handing everyone such an easy interface and set of intuitive applications (albeit, still frustrating in how little attention they put into locating items on the right menu, items on related menus, and help, which generally ensures book authors a gravy train, but I digress) that they now expect everything to be the very essence of simplicity. If it can't be made simple, it's not worth bothering with, ergo, if M$ doesn't make it, it's not worth bothering with.
Thanks for taking the time to jump to the wrong conclusion and running with it, you show there is some ability to think outside the paradigm, even it it is the counter-paradigm.
Makes you wonder how come their offerings have expanded so much and why they sell so well. IIRC they even have Sex for Dummies... that's truly worrying, no?
"Congratulations, it's a boy, now here's all he'll need to get through life, a full library of Dummies books."
In retrospect, it's similar to the criticism of TV people once voiced, you'll become so addicted to instant entertainment that you won't be able to think for yourself. Contrary to that assumption I read about 30 books over the last year and rarely watch TV anymore. Maybe people do change, when it becomes important for them to.
Idle thought: I wonder what the ratio is of tech savvy people to the number who drive manual transmission vehicles.
The endgame, where questionable accounting practices and behaviour become clear, is perhaps a last, grim fascination, like watching a reckless driver plow into a schoolbus full of children, then rationalize it all away, and even go so far as to extend blame to the victims.
In our case, the VC's had been skimming millions off the top, each month, as they clamined the company was continuing to lose money and cut staff. Checks were kept in drawers until vendors refused to deliver freight in their care, until paid. Benefits vendors weren't paid, some were signed on with known problems meeting their own bills, because they were cheaper (no kidding.)
Watching round after round of layoffs and then ripple effect waves of departures of those who couldn't stand it any longer. And amazingly, the execs always seem to have a golden parachute contract and get away relatively unscathed.
Bah! That's what they said LAST TIME!
Civilizations come and go, usually the come with a purpose, they go with a lack of it.
BTW: What's with the redirection of www.slashdot.org to freakydots? I thought there were going to be no pop-under or basically dirty trick ads.
DJ's already do it, despite complaints from listeners for decades, I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA doesn't encourage it to reduce likelihood of people taping radio.
Easy way to prevent capture and redistribution of streamed music: Require DJ's to talk over the music, like they already do on radio stations. Problem solved.
Some observations:
The RIAA does payola to get the manufacutred 'hit' music air.
The RIAA doesn't give a damn about independent minded station, so long as they pay the royalties, to them of course
The internet comes along and viola, listeners can actually select what they want to listen to, give immediate feedback to stations, and usurp control from the highly engineered controls the RIAA has spent decades putting in place, as the number of outlets mushrooms (remember for a moment how the Congress protected local TV stations in cable markets?)
The RIAA resists, makes it painful to broadcast over internet, download music listeners actually want, in effect trying to maintain control
Rather than find and develop talent, the RIAA, if not already, will probably develop computer generated 'hits', hire professional actors and dancers to just mouth the words and so on (it has actually been the case for decades that companies assemble writers, peformers and studio musicians for manufactured pop, now imagine it without the studio musicians and writers, just a fine tuned program)
Technology being as advanced as it is, home users or small groups of interested parties can manufacture thier own music and distribute, even sell MP3's, bypassing RIAA altogether
RIAA becomes less relevent if they lose control. As those who hold stake in such companies apply pressure to maintain profit and share value, the battle intensifies to maintain control, pushing legislation to cripple technology and make fair-use rights moot
Pundits and forum posters lament the seeming idiocy of the RIAA in the face of a new fronteer
It's not the first time I've had an issue with Microsoft re-naming or re-defining universally known concepts, kind of another aspect of their monopoly. It's caused some confusion at work when I say apples and someone else who read a M$ book says bananas.
To thoroughly piss-off geeks, I fully expect them to appropriate XYZZY and PLUGH into some gawd-awful inappropriate manner.
wtf is wrong with these people, reusing existing acronyms?
The ugly part is when I start loading in large amounts of data, rather than empty out all that unused code, it starts paging it. Beautiful. Way to manage memory. It's fun to load about 180Meg of data into memory, when you have 512Meg and then get messages that you now have insufficient memory to open new application windows.
While this was two weeks ago I dunno if you'll get to it, but you need to learn something about Shill Bidders. There's a few usenet newsgroups where this often comes up and the people on rec.collecting.coins regularly hunt down and report shills. A shill is another bidder or account set up by the seller, if they see it work once on you, they'll try it again. Look for bidders who always seem to bid on one sellers auctions and occasionally cancel bids. If their shill fails and they keep the item and pay the fees, they more than make up for those if they get you, i.e. $15 game for $96
Too many of these people are still stuck in the concepts of what the average man on the street had of computers back in the 50's and earlier. Take a good look at some really old comic books, like Captain Marvel or Batman and you get some idea. The were boxes that did amazing things. Problem is as more people have PCs the average man on the street is going to look at this view and go "whaaaaat?" The least that they could do is stop calling these things computers and call them something else. But at the rate stupid ideas get turned into $100 million movies, I don't expect them to take a sip from the fountain of reality anytime soon.
I dunno, I can remember a lot of movies depicting computers completely wrong back in the 70's. Tron at least used some correct terminology, but I still thought it was tommyrot when I saw it. IMHO the arcade game was better than the movie.
Think about making a movie like that today, where you have to get past the Firewall, or dodging packets, or taking a fast ride on the AGP, or heck, going to meet the Kernel! :)
There's a 1 1/2 hour "making of" feature
Think of this as "History", since you could probably do a lot better now with the PC you are sitting at.
True, Disney's Michael Eisner is behind the SSSCA all the way.
Now, can you watch it on your computer?
Enquiring minds might want to know.
Record of all activity and communication through the use of
All content created or transmitted
The ability to remove bookmarks to links of our choosing
Unused CPU capacity
Unused fixed storage capacity
The ability to on-the-fly derogatory references to the software provider at any point
The ability to enter your dwelling and verify all software and content stored on fixed media is legal and that no decryption, nor software for the breaking of copy protection or reverse engineering of such exists
All your base
Signify your acceptance of these terms by remaining silent and clicking Here [] like a good sheep.
For ages I've been hearing how the GOP wants to curb frivoless lawsuits, claiming they clog up the courts. Then along comes DoJ v. M$ and, rather than spank them hard, like they deserve, decide to give them a lame lecture and let them off with their ill-gotten lucre and the ability to commit further crimes.
What's left, is civil suits, by everyone in the industry. I'll argue that the conspiracy between the DoJ and M$ has left competitors no other choice. Hence the courts will be clogged with suit after suit, to bring M$ to reckoning.
The problem for Sun is that they got what they asked for, and had to be blinded by winning a suit against M$ for not seeing this coming.
It can still be argued, though, since many sites employ Java, that Microsoft is stripping consumers of a choice. By a round-about way, that does hurt Sun, but looks on the surface as the result of their own lack of attention.
Last, but not least, $1B? That's chump-change, M$ probably spends that much on their legal team each year, why so little?
But I'm be embarrassed to have people see my bad penmanship and spelling in presentations... But I could justify one for the fridge at home, to jot down what I need from the store and then maybe email it to Safeway to pick up later...
It's a sodium lamp at the end of the tunnel, not a mercury vapor lamp.