You're right. 100,000 hits a day means they're serving out a bit more than one page per second. It takes seven or eight boxes to do that?
Re:Apples vs Oranges
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Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Think of it as owning a book. You buy a book, you own the book. You can set fire to it, cut it up into individual sentences and rearrange it for humorous results, use the pages to wipe up fruit juice spills, sell it on eBay, or use it in a papier mache project.
But you don't own the ideas that the book conveys. Someone else has copyright over it. You cannot republish it, claim it as your own work, or write a sequel using the characters from the book (parodies excluded).
As a previous poster pointed out, there are also things you cannot do with it because the acts themselves are illegal.
When you download Linux, you own the software. You own the source. What you do not own is the copyright. If you accept the GPL, the copyright holder authorizes you to distribute the source under those terms. If you reject the GPL, you have the sort of rights that the owner of a book has.
If this is counterintuitive, it's only because Linux is distributed in a format that makes redistribution easy, while a book is not.
You've forgotten three important parts of the equation:
1) The cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the TCO.
2) The cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the TCO.
3) Pizza and beer for the people working out 1 and 2.
Re:Price is not everything...
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Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
Re:Price is not everything...
on
Linux Is Cheaper
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· Score: 3, Insightful
But the Apache web server is available today. Since the TCO study was all about mission-critical web setups, Lightwave availability strikes me as a pointless digression.
See, that's the difference between our countries. We Americans are more interested in getting the money first, figuring we'll have time to enjoy it later.
Ironically, we're not very big on saving either, so most of us end up spending the money in absurd ways. Big apartments that we never see because we're always at work. Sportscars that max out at 180 mph (300 kph, in Britishian), but only serve to slog us through the gridlock on the way to and from work. Children we don't have time to raise.
Could somebody over there come over and throw a bucket of cold water on our economy? Before we go crazy and start invading obscure third world countries or something.
I guess this post just proves the maxim, "Sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from trolling."
Man, I still play Super Street Fighter 2 with my younger cousins, and have a great time doing it. Of course, I never played the arcade version, so I don't have a frame of reference.
Okay, absolutely loathsome games. . . I think I'll nominate:...any MegaMan game after IV. III was the best ever, IV was a bit of a letdown, and everything after that was just a painful rehash of what came before. I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the MegaMan X series either, even though the graphics were okay....Battle of Olympus II. Why couldn't they have made a Battle of Olympus II? Why? Why? It's not fair. Every other game I really liked as a kid spawned about a dozen sequels....Betrayal in Antara. Three CDs of unexpurgated crap....Kai's PhotoSOAP. Not technically a game, but one of the most useless pieces of software ever to rip me off....Every Sims game after the original. The first one was almost unconscionably addictive. Every game thereafter was basically the original game, but with one or two features that either should have been put in the original, or was left out for a very good reason. Maybe if they sold the "sequels" as $5 add-on packs, I wouldn't feel so blatantly insulted. But they didn't, and I do.
For the love of God, think before you try and refute a collection of (not actually) statistics by dragging out a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is worth less than the IP packets you used to post it.
This is a good point. Not all early memories are necessarily false ones, but false memories can happen.
I have a very strong, very real recollection of playing with my brother in my Mom's blue Champ*. I was probably about two or three. My brother was playing with the release brake, and accidentally released it. We panicked and bailed out of the car, and the wheels rolled over my legs. Then my mom came running out, and discovered that I was basically uninjured. She yelled at me.
I asked her about it a couple of years ago. Of course, I had a lot of questions. Why had she let us play around in the car? How did I manage to have a car roll over my legs without breaking anything? How did the car get rolling so fast, when the driveway at the Starcrest house wasn't that steep?
My mom looked very confused for a few seconds, then explained to me that I'd never been run over. Which explains why I don't associate any pain with the memory.
My theory about the incident relates back to a memory I have about that memory. In first grade, somebody brought in a show and tell picture of some daredevil guy letting a car roll over his stomach. I told the kid who brought it in that something like that had happened to me. So that may be when I first "invented" the memory.
Don't like what your country is doing? Go to another country. Don't like what your ISP is doing? Switch to a different ISP. Don't like your college's software licensing agreements? Go to a different college.
This is about the most useless advice you could possibly give. First, there are few people who are likely to take it, because the proposed solution requires so much effort. Second, if you don't tell the college precisely why you decided to make the move, you haven't contributed at all to the solution. The administration will most likely decide that the best way to increase sagging attendance is to redesign the college logo. Finally, by leaving the college, you stop being one of their students, so they really don't have any reason to listen to you anymore.
There is a solution: It's called feedback, and you can do it without finding a new apartment.
You talk as though the Windows GUI is to a Rembrandt as Gnome|KDE is to a fake Rembrandt. Sure, why buy a cheap copy when you can have The Original(TM).
It's a totally bogus comparison. It would be better to compare two implementations of the same general idea. For example, it would be technologically feasible to build a car that could be controlled by a single joystick-like interface by your left arm. For example, use forward to speed up, left and right to turn, pull back to brake. Even though this might be a much more natural feeling system, nobody is building it any time soon. Why? Because the steering wheel/pedals concept is firmly entrenched in the user's mind. To most people, that's just what a car *is*.
So KDE and Gnome have reimplemented many of the best ideas from Windows (and some bad ones besides). I wouldn't call them "cheap copies"; just variations on a theme.
And to those who are demanding something new and innovative and paradigm-shifting, I have two words for you: Microsoft Bob.
I remember what my ol' Pappy used to tell me. "Just because it gets people mad doesn't mean you're wrong." I took this to heart; probably a little too well, because ten years later he started telling me, "Just because it gets people mad doesn't mean you're right."
Dvorak says that "Linux isn't innovating." It's just playing catch-up to the far superior Windows GUI. Of course, that's not what Linux fanboys like myself want to hear. But it's also wrong. Dvorak's criticism should be directed solely towards KDE and Gnome, and even then they strike me as off the mark.
KDE and Gnome are, admittedly, not breaking much ground in terms of GUI innovation. But, come to think of it, what revolutionary GUI innovation has Microsoft added since Windows 95? I can't think of any. And aside from the start menu and taskbar, I don't recall much difference between Windows 95 and Windows 3.1.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The "WIMP"* system is popular because it's effective without requiring a fundamental shift in the technology driving the interface (mouse, screen, keyboard). If new technology became affordable (heads up displays, VR gloves, 3D monitors, eye-tracking sensors, neural interfaces, tactile feedback meshes, whatever), then a lot of new interface designs would be possible. But right now, MSK** is cheap and ubiquitous, and you have to work within those design limits or risk alienating 99.9% of your user base.
But within those design limits, you still have a lot of room to work, right? Arguably, yes. But you have to choose between making your interface act a lot like the ones that have come before, or risk alienating the vast majority of potential customers.
The alternative, of course, is to write something that acts nothing like the standard desktop, while being just as functional but more intuitive. It's not impossible, but would require an almost preternaturally deep understanding of what is and isn't intuitive, the ability to put that vision into code, and the ability to win enough converts to get the ideas into common usage.
The preceding paragraph, to me, reads "you may as well give up." Others may read it as, "Oh, that's easy!" At least under Linux, those people have a way to put their ideas into action. The big advantage that Linux has lies in the openness and modularity of the code. Anyone who wants to write a window manager--or some ambitious alternative--from scratch is free to do so, and can do so without blowing up the rest of the system.
IOW, Linux may not have a dream UI yet. But at least it's a system where new dreams have a fighting chance.
* Dvorak's term for the "Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer" paradigm.
** Mouse/Screen/Keyboard. If Dvorak can coin acronyms, so can I.
I was going to point this out, but then realized that I didn't want to give away how little of a life I had, or just how much of my brain is filled with obnixiously useless trivia.
I would love, more than anyone I know, to be sucked into your rhetoric about how we're all enslaved by a soulless system. But when it comes to matters historical, you're a bit off.
Think about it. Have you ever gone to a neighboorhood in the US which was constructed in the 19th century? How is it houses were constructed to be not only durable, but beautiful as well? The parks, museums, sculptures... All built long before public schools. Have you ever read civil war letters? The average 15 year old infantryman in the civil war writes far better than 99% of the people who post on slashdot.
The problem here is, you're browsing society at +5. The average 19th century house was built with the same surly, I-could-give-a-rat attitude that you find in many modern subcontractors. Or it was a bunch of logs thrown together, or even a construction based primarily on dirt. Not surprisingly, the average 19th century house is now rubble.
The houses you describe were generally the houses of the relatively wealthy. They would be the ones with the money to hire the best builders, and to maintain those houses properly. The amazing quality of the construction you're claiming is most likely a myth.
Similar things could be said about your "average" fifteen year old infantryman. I doubt there were many to begin with. Even at the very end of the war, I don't believe they were drafting anyone under the age of 17. Since few people who were fifteen when the Civil War started even have grandchildren still living today, any letters you find were probably saved because they were particularly impressive.
Nor did literacy always imply fluency. I've had reason to read over quite a few nineteenth century documents. These people were, to put it mildly, not a generation of Edgar Allen Poes. For every person who could dash off a clear, insightful set of coherent sentences, there were a dozen who could just barely get the point across. Don't tell me that any fifteen year old in the nineteenth century could write better than 99% of Slashdot, because reading their journals is *exactly* like reading Slashdot.*
Between my name and my e-mail address, I found a lot of information available that doesn't look good. No illegal activities, but stuff that would make for lively gossip at family reunions. Especially being an avowed athiest amid a family of devout Mormons.
And let's not even get started on my Slashdot history. If they bothered to set up a decent search engine around here, I'd be hosed.
I'm constantly getting "Undeliverable Mail" notifications for spam that has me listed as the sender. Were I actually sending people these e-mails, I would absolutely deserve whatever bitch-slapping my recipients decided to inflict. But I'm not.
Reverse harassment is a dangerous game, because the person you harass may be just as much a victim as you are.
BTW, can anyone give me advice on how to track down the guy who is sending these things on my behalf?
It's like the old Usenet adage, "In any sufficiently long exchange of posts, the likelihood of one side comparing the other to the Nazis approaches unity." The Slashdot version of this might be, "Whatever the topic of the original story, there is zero probability that Microsoft will not be brought into the conversation."
I am pro-life in the case of the unborn children primarily because it is impossible to determine when human life begins, scientifically. The only reasonable boundaries are conception, and birth.
Why is a "boundary" necessary? And why are birth and conception the only two "reasonable" boundaries?
The tragedy of the whole abortion debate is that so much time and energy is wasted on the idea of "ensoulment." Even for those who don't believe in a supernatural "soul", the debate has been clouded by the idea that there has to be a single defining moment when inanimate matter is suddenly imprinted with all the things necessary to make it a valuable human being. As much as this idea may gratify our egos, it's nonsensical.
Given that the conditions for sustainable life keep getting pushed further and further back in the gestational life of the fetus, birth is an obsolete boundary for determining human life. Therefore, conception is the benchmark I find the most reasonable, given that human life is sacred.
"Given that human life is sacred" is to presume a great deal. I'll agree that ability to survive outside the womb is a totally arbitrary signal. But you've failed to eliminate other boundaries on any grounds but convenience to outside observers.
Recognizing that not all the most important things are easy to pin down, what other criteria could we use? The first heartbeat? The first firing of neurons? The ability to feel pain? Or maybe the first abstract thought, or the recognition of the self? The first word? The ability to produce more than you consume? Comprehension of the world sufficient to vote intelligently in the next election? Which of these things makes a developing human being valuable and worthy of legal protection?
My answer would have to be, all of them. And none of them. There's no one point, visible or invisible, which we can point to as a state transition between pointless protoplasm and worthwhile human being. "Human" isn't something we are, it's something we become. It's an ongoing process of picking up memories, facts, sensations, and other bits of trivia, and fitting them into the model of the universe that each of us carry in our heads.
Ultimately, if there's anything that makes us human, that's it. If you could destroy my body, but preserve that pattern in, then it's impossible to claim that I died. Destroy the model, and keep my heart beating, and I'm worse than dead.
For me, this is the only criteria that makes sense. A four celled zygote doesn't have a memory. It can't interact with the world around it except in the most mundanely biochemical way. Hence, there's nothing to protect but future potential. You can say a bit more about a just-born child. But let's face it, babies are stupid; still at the very beginning of a boot process that will span two decades.
You could say that humans collect a soul the way barnacles collected on the Titanic's hull.
The fact that many concieved embryos never implant, or spontaneously abort without the mother ever knowing about it is outside the ability of anyone to regulate.
But not outside the ability to say something about the sanity of clinging to the extreme pro-life position, especially for religious reasons. If God felt that embryos were so valuable, why does He allow so many of those valuable embryos to go to waste? Why does He allow miscarriages to happen to women who are ready and eager to have a baby? There's no free will defense to fall back on here.
Another inconsistency I see in some of their rhetoric: Why some pro-lifers mock the idea of "animal rights" because animals are unable to fulfill any of the duties that they say come with those rights, yet humans have a "right to life" from the moment of conception, with no more than the expectation that they may be able to fulfill the attached duties at some point in the future?
I am prolife in regards to assisted suicide and euthanasia for many reasons, not the least of which is self-preservation. By legislating ways in which the medical profession can legally kill a patient who has become 'burdensome', we open the door to a world where the state may decide who is burdensome, and may make euthanasia mandatory, for the elderly, the infirm, the retarded, the undesirable.
And we don't dare legalize marijuana because it's a gateway drug to cocaine and heroin. Slippery slope reasoning isn't always invalid, but it's always suspect.
For the record, marijuana is a gateway to junk food.
The other problem I have, especially with assisted suicide, is the root cause. Most people promoting assisted suicide talk about the suffering of the terminally ill. There are a number of problems with this, but the primary one is that the problem is the pain and difficulty with a terminal illness. There are humane, caring ways of dealing with this, in a way which maintains the dignity of the dying.
At best you've claimed--not demonstrated--that there are humane alternatives to assisted suicide. Even then, you haven't shown that assisted suicide is inhumane, immoral, or otherwise an inferior choice to these alternatives.
Remember, though. Juries don't have complete control over the fate of the accused. First, they're only allowed to decide whether the defendant is guilty or not. Usually they don't have anything to do with the penalty phase. Second, in a capital murder case, those who might use their dislike of the death penalty to decide against conviction are generally weeded out before the trial commences. Finally, the jury must make its decision based entirely on what has been presented to them. They can't ask questions, and if one side or the other is hiding evidence, the jury itself has no way of knowing it.
So, a lot depends on the lawyers (who can't be expected to be unbiased), and on the judge (who, technically, is part of the government). Then there's the lengthy appeals process, which is an important safeguard, but I don't believe that it makes use of juries.
Brett, why do you keep trying to push this line of reasoning? The GPL doesn't discriminate against commercial developers any more than any other license does. How could a developer build a successful commercial program through, say, Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative?" They can't. They can't create commercial software with Windows code.
As to the claim that the GPL's "intent is to destroy, or preclude the formation or success of, software businesses," Red Hat seems to be doing well enough. Therefore, the GPL has failed in furthering its own intent, and you have nothing to complain about.
Calling the GPL a "human rights violation" is a first for you, and smacks of trollish intentions. But this is/., so I'm down with that. But if you're being serious, I'd really like to hear your concerns about the GPL, without the flamebait.
Frankly, you are a troll, and no it's not the truth. Not entirely.
Welcome to the world of extreme interdependence. Society is a complex system where *every* function is absolutely vital to the functioning of the whole. The programmers walk out? You can't ship any more product, and the company dies. Nobody maintains the corporate network? Your communications are cut off, and the company dies. The salesmen stop drumming business? Money stops coming in, and the company dies. Management, the legal department, the secretaries, the janitors? Every one of these groups could hamstring the company if they decided to make a fuss until they got paid "what they're worth."
Imagine if your internal organs started pulling the same shenanigans: Your heart wants more resources because the body would collapse without it. The kidneys demand two weeks vacation a year because you'd be poisoned without them. The brain thinks it wants more oxygen. And why not? After all, without the brain there's not a whole lot of point to the rest of the system.
Or ask yourself which functions in society could be used as leverage if the people fulfilling them decided to get greedy. Doctors? Lawyers? Auto mechanics? Construction workers? Garbage disposal? Coal miners?
I'm not saying that the current pay structure is perfect, or even sane. But your rationale for getting yourself higher wages is guaranteed to be turned back on you. Find another one.
You can start this war, but I guarantee you it's the janitors who will finish it.
You think you're being funny. But EMACS has become my editor of choice over the last few months, and suddenly my fingers are under the delusion that Ctrl-N means "scroll down," no matter what application I'm using. Worse, whenever I try and scroll upwards, I end up printing something. I have to think about C-x and C-v, when it used to be instantaneous.
So I'm now trying to do move all my daily activities to EMACS because the alternatives just feel "wrong." Dear Lord, I'm even considering learning Lisp. I'm a sick and twisted individual, who needs to be brought down with tranquilizer darts.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite. Starting from the twelfth position, you find "!seineew era sreenigne epacsteN". But the rest of the key is valid.
:)
When do I get my prize?
You're right. 100,000 hits a day means they're serving out a bit more than one page per second. It takes seven or eight boxes to do that?
Think of it as owning a book. You buy a book, you own the book. You can set fire to it, cut it up into individual sentences and rearrange it for humorous results, use the pages to wipe up fruit juice spills, sell it on eBay, or use it in a papier mache project.
But you don't own the ideas that the book conveys. Someone else has copyright over it. You cannot republish it, claim it as your own work, or write a sequel using the characters from the book (parodies excluded).
As a previous poster pointed out, there are also things you cannot do with it because the acts themselves are illegal.
When you download Linux, you own the software. You own the source. What you do not own is the copyright. If you accept the GPL, the copyright holder authorizes you to distribute the source under those terms. If you reject the GPL, you have the sort of rights that the owner of a book has.
If this is counterintuitive, it's only because Linux is distributed in a format that makes redistribution easy, while a book is not.
You've forgotten three important parts of the equation:
1) The cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the TCO.
2) The cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the cost of working out the TCO.
3) Pizza and beer for the people working out 1 and 2.
Yes, pointless. The article is discussing the TCO of Linux vs. Windows (vs. Solaris) in a specific sort of web serving environment. The guy was claiming that he was unconvinced by the argument, which shows only that he didn't understand the scope of the argument. In short, he's not responding to the article, but to the somewhat misleading story title.
If you cannot run Lightwave on anything other than Windows, then Windows has the lowest TCO for that application. I get that. My advice still stands: Read the articles before posting. It's hard to hold a useful discussion when clueless folk who see "TCO" in the posting, and decide they already know both what the story will say and what their opinion is.
C'mon, folks. It's simple:
See, that's the difference between our countries. We Americans are more interested in getting the money first, figuring we'll have time to enjoy it later.
Ironically, we're not very big on saving either, so most of us end up spending the money in absurd ways. Big apartments that we never see because we're always at work. Sportscars that max out at 180 mph (300 kph, in Britishian), but only serve to slog us through the gridlock on the way to and from work. Children we don't have time to raise.
Could somebody over there come over and throw a bucket of cold water on our economy? Before we go crazy and start invading obscure third world countries or something.
I guess this post just proves the maxim, "Sufficiently advanced cynicism is indistinguishable from trolling."
Man, I still play Super Street Fighter 2 with my younger cousins, and have a great time doing it. Of course, I never played the arcade version, so I don't have a frame of reference.
...any MegaMan game after IV. III was the best ever, IV was a bit of a letdown, and everything after that was just a painful rehash of what came before. I couldn't bring myself to enjoy the MegaMan X series either, even though the graphics were okay. ...Battle of Olympus II. Why couldn't they have made a Battle of Olympus II? Why? Why? It's not fair. Every other game I really liked as a kid spawned about a dozen sequels. ...Betrayal in Antara. Three CDs of unexpurgated crap. ...Kai's PhotoSOAP. Not technically a game, but one of the most useless pieces of software ever to rip me off. ...Every Sims game after the original. The first one was almost unconscionably addictive. Every game thereafter was basically the original game, but with one or two features that either should have been put in the original, or was left out for a very good reason. Maybe if they sold the "sequels" as $5 add-on packs, I wouldn't feel so blatantly insulted. But they didn't, and I do.
Okay, absolutely loathsome games. . . I think I'll nominate:
For the love of God, think before you try and refute a collection of (not actually) statistics by dragging out a bunch of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is worth less than the IP packets you used to post it.
This is a good point. Not all early memories are necessarily false ones, but false memories can happen.
:)
I have a very strong, very real recollection of playing with my brother in my Mom's blue Champ*. I was probably about two or three. My brother was playing with the release brake, and accidentally released it. We panicked and bailed out of the car, and the wheels rolled over my legs. Then my mom came running out, and discovered that I was basically uninjured. She yelled at me.
I asked her about it a couple of years ago. Of course, I had a lot of questions. Why had she let us play around in the car? How did I manage to have a car roll over my legs without breaking anything? How did the car get rolling so fast, when the driveway at the Starcrest house wasn't that steep?
My mom looked very confused for a few seconds, then explained to me that I'd never been run over. Which explains why I don't associate any pain with the memory.
My theory about the incident relates back to a memory I have about that memory. In first grade, somebody brought in a show and tell picture of some daredevil guy letting a car roll over his stomach. I told the kid who brought it in that something like that had happened to me. So that may be when I first "invented" the memory.
Or maybe Mom is just blocking it out.
* A little car from the 1970s.
Don't like what your country is doing? Go to another country. Don't like what your ISP is doing? Switch to a different ISP. Don't like your college's software licensing agreements? Go to a different college.
This is about the most useless advice you could possibly give. First, there are few people who are likely to take it, because the proposed solution requires so much effort. Second, if you don't tell the college precisely why you decided to make the move, you haven't contributed at all to the solution. The administration will most likely decide that the best way to increase sagging attendance is to redesign the college logo. Finally, by leaving the college, you stop being one of their students, so they really don't have any reason to listen to you anymore.
There is a solution: It's called feedback, and you can do it without finding a new apartment.
This is just silly.
You talk as though the Windows GUI is to a Rembrandt as Gnome|KDE is to a fake Rembrandt. Sure, why buy a cheap copy when you can have The Original(TM).
It's a totally bogus comparison. It would be better to compare two implementations of the same general idea. For example, it would be technologically feasible to build a car that could be controlled by a single joystick-like interface by your left arm. For example, use forward to speed up, left and right to turn, pull back to brake. Even though this might be a much more natural feeling system, nobody is building it any time soon. Why? Because the steering wheel/pedals concept is firmly entrenched in the user's mind. To most people, that's just what a car *is*.
So KDE and Gnome have reimplemented many of the best ideas from Windows (and some bad ones besides). I wouldn't call them "cheap copies"; just variations on a theme.
And to those who are demanding something new and innovative and paradigm-shifting, I have two words for you: Microsoft Bob.
I was surprised at how many results Google found for emacs video editing.
I remember what my ol' Pappy used to tell me. "Just because it gets people mad doesn't mean you're wrong." I took this to heart; probably a little too well, because ten years later he started telling me, "Just because it gets people mad doesn't mean you're right."
Dvorak says that "Linux isn't innovating." It's just playing catch-up to the far superior Windows GUI. Of course, that's not what Linux fanboys like myself want to hear. But it's also wrong. Dvorak's criticism should be directed solely towards KDE and Gnome, and even then they strike me as off the mark.
KDE and Gnome are, admittedly, not breaking much ground in terms of GUI innovation. But, come to think of it, what revolutionary GUI innovation has Microsoft added since Windows 95? I can't think of any. And aside from the start menu and taskbar, I don't recall much difference between Windows 95 and Windows 3.1.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The "WIMP"* system is popular because it's effective without requiring a fundamental shift in the technology driving the interface (mouse, screen, keyboard). If new technology became affordable (heads up displays, VR gloves, 3D monitors, eye-tracking sensors, neural interfaces, tactile feedback meshes, whatever), then a lot of new interface designs would be possible. But right now, MSK** is cheap and ubiquitous, and you have to work within those design limits or risk alienating 99.9% of your user base.
But within those design limits, you still have a lot of room to work, right? Arguably, yes. But you have to choose between making your interface act a lot like the ones that have come before, or risk alienating the vast majority of potential customers.
The alternative, of course, is to write something that acts nothing like the standard desktop, while being just as functional but more intuitive. It's not impossible, but would require an almost preternaturally deep understanding of what is and isn't intuitive, the ability to put that vision into code, and the ability to win enough converts to get the ideas into common usage.
The preceding paragraph, to me, reads "you may as well give up." Others may read it as, "Oh, that's easy!" At least under Linux, those people have a way to put their ideas into action. The big advantage that Linux has lies in the openness and modularity of the code. Anyone who wants to write a window manager--or some ambitious alternative--from scratch is free to do so, and can do so without blowing up the rest of the system.
IOW, Linux may not have a dream UI yet. But at least it's a system where new dreams have a fighting chance.
* Dvorak's term for the "Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer" paradigm.
** Mouse/Screen/Keyboard. If Dvorak can coin acronyms, so can I.
I was going to point this out, but then realized that I didn't want to give away how little of a life I had, or just how much of my brain is filled with obnixiously useless trivia.
You've blown both our covers. Thanks.
The problem here is, you're browsing society at +5. The average 19th century house was built with the same surly, I-could-give-a-rat attitude that you find in many modern subcontractors. Or it was a bunch of logs thrown together, or even a construction based primarily on dirt. Not surprisingly, the average 19th century house is now rubble.
The houses you describe were generally the houses of the relatively wealthy. They would be the ones with the money to hire the best builders, and to maintain those houses properly. The amazing quality of the construction you're claiming is most likely a myth.
Similar things could be said about your "average" fifteen year old infantryman. I doubt there were many to begin with. Even at the very end of the war, I don't believe they were drafting anyone under the age of 17. Since few people who were fifteen when the Civil War started even have grandchildren still living today, any letters you find were probably saved because they were particularly impressive.
Nor did literacy always imply fluency. I've had reason to read over quite a few nineteenth century documents. These people were, to put it mildly, not a generation of Edgar Allen Poes. For every person who could dash off a clear, insightful set of coherent sentences, there were a dozen who could just barely get the point across. Don't tell me that any fifteen year old in the nineteenth century could write better than 99% of Slashdot, because reading their journals is *exactly* like reading Slashdot.*
* Minus the obligatory fRist ps0t!
Eek.
Between my name and my e-mail address, I found a lot of information available that doesn't look good. No illegal activities, but stuff that would make for lively gossip at family reunions. Especially being an avowed athiest amid a family of devout Mormons.
And let's not even get started on my Slashdot history. If they bothered to set up a decent search engine around here, I'd be hosed.
I'm constantly getting "Undeliverable Mail" notifications for spam that has me listed as the sender. Were I actually sending people these e-mails, I would absolutely deserve whatever bitch-slapping my recipients decided to inflict. But I'm not.
Reverse harassment is a dangerous game, because the person you harass may be just as much a victim as you are.
BTW, can anyone give me advice on how to track down the guy who is sending these things on my behalf?
It's like the old Usenet adage, "In any sufficiently long exchange of posts, the likelihood of one side comparing the other to the Nazis approaches unity." The Slashdot version of this might be, "Whatever the topic of the original story, there is zero probability that Microsoft will not be brought into the conversation."
The tragedy of the whole abortion debate is that so much time and energy is wasted on the idea of "ensoulment." Even for those who don't believe in a supernatural "soul", the debate has been clouded by the idea that there has to be a single defining moment when inanimate matter is suddenly imprinted with all the things necessary to make it a valuable human being. As much as this idea may gratify our egos, it's nonsensical.
"Given that human life is sacred" is to presume a great deal. I'll agree that ability to survive outside the womb is a totally arbitrary signal. But you've failed to eliminate other boundaries on any grounds but convenience to outside observers.
Recognizing that not all the most important things are easy to pin down, what other criteria could we use? The first heartbeat? The first firing of neurons? The ability to feel pain? Or maybe the first abstract thought, or the recognition of the self? The first word? The ability to produce more than you consume? Comprehension of the world sufficient to vote intelligently in the next election? Which of these things makes a developing human being valuable and worthy of legal protection?
My answer would have to be, all of them. And none of them. There's no one point, visible or invisible, which we can point to as a state transition between pointless protoplasm and worthwhile human being. "Human" isn't something we are, it's something we become. It's an ongoing process of picking up memories, facts, sensations, and other bits of trivia, and fitting them into the model of the universe that each of us carry in our heads.
Ultimately, if there's anything that makes us human, that's it. If you could destroy my body, but preserve that pattern in, then it's impossible to claim that I died. Destroy the model, and keep my heart beating, and I'm worse than dead.
For me, this is the only criteria that makes sense. A four celled zygote doesn't have a memory. It can't interact with the world around it except in the most mundanely biochemical way. Hence, there's nothing to protect but future potential. You can say a bit more about a just-born child. But let's face it, babies are stupid; still at the very beginning of a boot process that will span two decades.
You could say that humans collect a soul the way barnacles collected on the Titanic's hull.
But not outside the ability to say something about the sanity of clinging to the extreme pro-life position, especially for religious reasons. If God felt that embryos were so valuable, why does He allow so many of those valuable embryos to go to waste? Why does He allow miscarriages to happen to women who are ready and eager to have a baby? There's no free will defense to fall back on here.
Another inconsistency I see in some of their rhetoric: Why some pro-lifers mock the idea of "animal rights" because animals are unable to fulfill any of the duties that they say come with those rights, yet humans have a "right to life" from the moment of conception, with no more than the expectation that they may be able to fulfill the attached duties at some point in the future?
And we don't dare legalize marijuana because it's a gateway drug to cocaine and heroin. Slippery slope reasoning isn't always invalid, but it's always suspect.
For the record, marijuana is a gateway to junk food.
At best you've claimed--not demonstrated--that there are humane alternatives to assisted suicide. Even then, you haven't shown that assisted suicide is inhumane, immoral, or otherwise an inferior choice to these alternatives.
So, a lot depends on the lawyers (who can't be expected to be unbiased), and on the judge (who, technically, is part of the government). Then there's the lengthy appeals process, which is an important safeguard, but I don't believe that it makes use of juries.
Brett, why do you keep trying to push this line of reasoning? The GPL doesn't discriminate against commercial developers any more than any other license does. How could a developer build a successful commercial program through, say, Microsoft's "Shared Source Initiative?" They can't. They can't create commercial software with Windows code.
/., so I'm down with that. But if you're being serious, I'd really like to hear your concerns about the GPL, without the flamebait.
As to the claim that the GPL's "intent is to destroy, or preclude the formation or success of, software businesses," Red Hat seems to be doing well enough. Therefore, the GPL has failed in furthering its own intent, and you have nothing to complain about.
Calling the GPL a "human rights violation" is a first for you, and smacks of trollish intentions. But this is
Frankly, you are a troll, and no it's not the truth. Not entirely.
Welcome to the world of extreme interdependence. Society is a complex system where *every* function is absolutely vital to the functioning of the whole. The programmers walk out? You can't ship any more product, and the company dies. Nobody maintains the corporate network? Your communications are cut off, and the company dies. The salesmen stop drumming business? Money stops coming in, and the company dies. Management, the legal department, the secretaries, the janitors? Every one of these groups could hamstring the company if they decided to make a fuss until they got paid "what they're worth."
Imagine if your internal organs started pulling the same shenanigans: Your heart wants more resources because the body would collapse without it. The kidneys demand two weeks vacation a year because you'd be poisoned without them. The brain thinks it wants more oxygen. And why not? After all, without the brain there's not a whole lot of point to the rest of the system.
Or ask yourself which functions in society could be used as leverage if the people fulfilling them decided to get greedy. Doctors? Lawyers? Auto mechanics? Construction workers? Garbage disposal? Coal miners?
I'm not saying that the current pay structure is perfect, or even sane. But your rationale for getting yourself higher wages is guaranteed to be turned back on you. Find another one.
You can start this war, but I guarantee you it's the janitors who will finish it.
You think you're being funny. But EMACS has become my editor of choice over the last few months, and suddenly my fingers are under the delusion that Ctrl-N means "scroll down," no matter what application I'm using. Worse, whenever I try and scroll upwards, I end up printing something. I have to think about C-x and C-v, when it used to be instantaneous.
So I'm now trying to do move all my daily activities to EMACS because the alternatives just feel "wrong." Dear Lord, I'm even considering learning Lisp. I'm a sick and twisted individual, who needs to be brought down with tranquilizer darts.
Curse you, Stallman. Curse you.
P2P itself isn't any of these things. It's just a way of moving data about. As to the files being moved about via P2P, the question is a bit hairier.
C'mon, moderators! +3 insightful? For a comment where people have to guess as to what the poster is actually trying to say?