Is it just me, or did he avoid answering the question about whether Google had itself become a point of failure for the internet. His answer basically was that the fact we need Google to find things implies a decentralized net. Yet the question was whether Google replacing other search engines implies that if Google fails the net fails. i.e. we have the de-facto rise of a centralized interface to the net.
Let me put it an other way. Consider that some terrorist manages to destroy all the Google servers. What happens to practical day to day work that uses the Internet?
Why would Slashdot put this as news when it happened years ago and most of us remember it? I mean I'd be all for this story if it was new - but a magazine from 1998? What happened? Find a Harper's while at the doctor's office? Next up: a Slashdot story on the WTC bombing.
I wonder if these aren't an even better match for Pixar than they are Apple. Yeah Jobs is behind both. But he also seems to be trying to leverage each towards the other. (Witness his moving Apple servers into Pixar)
If they could only get better hardware for the high end market I think Apple would be in a killer position to be what SGI used to be. However that hardware issue with PowerPC chips is a huge one.
I don't think it is quite comparable. There are authors who sell *tons* of books. Think of Silence of the Lambs which has sold millions upon millions of copies. Likewise the literary equivalent of the Beatles are books like Catcher in the Rye.
The news organizations are doing this. (Damn I hate those cluttered screens on CNN Headline news) Worst yet is TNN which blocks a black bar along the bottom of the screen to put various information during all their shows. (Except for commercials, of course -- those are sancrosanct)
Also notice that those @#$%ing network identification icons every station has aren't put on any commercials. Yeah. They *don't* affect your viewing "pleasure" they say. If that's true, why aren't they on the commercials?
When you switch between application windows and Finder windows a lot there is a slight 1-4 second delay while the spinning cursor appears. This is even if nothing has changed in the Finder window. I do this a lot and it is so annoying that I can't deal with it.
Whether you find it annoying or not really depends upon how you use the Finder. I use it a lot while programming and it is unusable to me. As I mentioned elsewhere I've switched over to Coela. (Great product, horrible page to download it from -- it's all in Japanese!) Even Coela isn't as good as Windows Explorer, in my opinion though.
Rightfully slam Microsoft all you want. But that simply works better than any alternative you can suggest.
Personally I like Coela far better than SNAX. However I'll be happy when 10.2 comes out and we see the spinning CD of annoyance less. The Finder is the main reason I've not switched over to the the Mac from my PC.
The "snappiness" of OS9 vs. OS10 is more for interface elements. Purprotedly Jaguar fixes a lot of this. The things discussed in this article about AfterEffects are much more tied to Adobe's coding and the speed of the processor and thus are quite separate from "snappiness."
I think most informed people have always known Apple's hardware has speed problems. It isn't exactlly parallel to MHz, of course. But it does show the problems with Motorola. I think Apple has to fix this or all their wonderful OSX fixes will be of little help.
Having said that, most computers today have far more power than people need. Network speed is almost always the problem. So unless you are doing computationally intensive work (i.e. heavy graphics) it is all moot. Any computer today is powerful enough. (Except perhaps a weak G3 with OSX, due to the UI elements)
Actually with regards to Visual Basic.Net and C# I think you are correct. If Microsoft wants to help promote.NET they should downplay or even stop supporting earlier technologies.
However so far as I can tell no one has complained when Microsoft does this. They might complain about some of the design decisions and security of.NET, but not some of the things you suggest they complain about. Further I think that the WindowsXP "breaking" with some of the older Window3.1 and Windows95 "features" is pretty similar to what Apple is doing with MacOS 9. But I don't hear anyone here on slashdot complaining about forcing gamers and other groups to a more NT OS foundation. I typically hear praise.
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to complain about with MS. But it is usually their anti-competitive strategies and their downplaying of security in the past that are the problems.
So I think your hypocrisy charge is itself a bit misplaced.
Natural versus unnatural RF? Exactly what is the difference - and don't say whether they occur naturally. If RF is bad it is bad *regardless* of the source.
Please lets stop the natural vs. unnatural mysticism that is starting to plague our society.
I thought that Mathlab game with a crippled version of Maple and could interface with Maple. I seem to recall *way* back about 8 years ago it had this. I've only used Mathematica and not Maple, but my friends who use both generally prefer Maple.
This is just an other clever way to charge a tax by tying it to something that sounds good on the surface but which in practice will be completely unrelated to the tax. I hate it when the government does this.
The reason I think this "just an other tax" is because there appears to be nothing tied to recycling, to keeping computers out of landfills or anything else. The money isn't clearly earmarked for such ventures either. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for computer recycling and recognize the problem of lead and other such things. Yet this will, despite some claims, do nothing to address the problem.
For real effect we need the tax combined with some sort of recycling payment for when you dispose of your computer properly. A lot here have mentioned that, but I want to emphasize that without this we have nothing more than a new way to add to the cost of a computer.
While there is some truth to that, the basic desktop of OSX is very, very different from the desktop of NeXT. Further Quartz is different from the display postscript that NeXT used. So while a lot of the basic class library of NeXTstep gave Apple some help, most of it was new.
Languages remain in demand based upon the applications that use them. There's a lot of business programs written in Cobol that need support. Thus Cobol is still around, albeit not taken that seriously. Same with Fortran. Lots of legacy code.
The same would be true with Java, but that depends upon what major products use it. I think that right now there are enough programs written with it, especially enterprise based XML programs, that it will be here for quite some time.
Just look at Obj-C. Everyone thought it was dead and there was far more reason for it to die than Java. Yet Apple bought NeXT and made their primary UI development with it. Thus it fended off death.
With Java there is even more reason for it to survive since there isn't full C# for Macs, Solaris, and Linux yet. Yeah there are announcements or attempts at something like an opensource C#. But right now it isn't there yet. Thus we can't even say that C# offers everything Java does plus more.
The control that media conglomerates have on the press is vastly overstated. Generally I think the press does an adequate job. The superficiality of the press' reporting is due more to the time constraints we, the readers, put them under. You try to gather a huge amount of interviews and information in a few hours. I'm not saying the press is fully accurate, but the problem is that accuracy takes time. By the time that thoughtful analysis can be done, most people no longer care. Further if the press tends towards sensationalism (including in these copyright issues) it is because we the readers tend to go for that angle more.
i.e. quit the gripping about the press only reporting what MS or so forth want.
Isn't the "Bible" aspects of this more limited to certain fundamentalists groups who have this tradition of 666 being something like a bar code you need to buy or sell? Thus anything even remotely like labeling a human they freak out about. Presumably they think that if such things become available it will be just a short hop skip and a jump to "implanted credit cards" and then the ban on real credit cards and cash.
Personally I put that right up with worrying about black helicopters, but that's me.
Most porn sites try to entice you by giving some free porn and then getting you to pay for more. Don't you get those annoying emails and so forth? Perhaps I get them because I posed (with my real email address) to a few USENET groups. (Although none remotely dealt with anything sexual, unless alt.fan.davidlynch or alt.postmodern are porn).
Anyway, this is one area I think the government should step in. The fact is that these spammers not only target you unwantedly - they target you with active pornography. If I had kids I'd be very pissed about all that.
As Bush showed with his "free trade" (i.e. tarrifs on steel, textiles, and lumber) a treaty is just an agreement. It has no real teeth. If some treaty tried to in a real way violate constitutional rights of Americans in America it would be ignored. The Constitution trumps all.
However as someone else said, if you are going to an other country and have been violating that country's laws in our country you may be in trouble. But that goes both ways as the adventures of a certain Russian programmer found with Adobe.
However the government is not saying what communication is acceptable. It is saying what kind of communication can be done in public before children. The government is not saying that you can't read goatsex.com or whatever drops your socks on your own computers. Just that in a public government funded facility with children you can't do this.
(Personally I'm not convinced that libraries ought to be offering Internet connections at all, but that's me. It seems too much like offering free cable TV at a library)
Why would you need to re-rip them to OGG? I believe most players that handle OGG also handle MP3s. Further none of the MP3s you ripped were watermarked, so where's the problem?
The reason why people still use Kazaa over alternatives is that the Gnutella network tends to have poor selection, is slower, etc. etc. Personally I think AudioGalaxy is better than both, but then I prefer to less mainstream music it caters to.
As with all annoying advertisements the consumer has to balance the cost versus the benefit. Personally while I'd hate to have more ads, are they really using up that much more bandwidth than sharing my songs? Probably not. So long as there aren't pop-ups that my popup killer can't handle I don't really care. Besides which when I'm not looking for music I don't have Kazaa (or Morpheus or AudioGalaxy) running on my system.
Remember those light switches that were computer controlled back in the Apple II days? I think that the x-10 folks sell them now. But I refuse to purchase anything from anyone who advertises like they do. Anyway, how hard *would* it be to have a stove, microwave, etc. controlled by those? VCR's and the like can already be controlled by recording the IR stuff. But I think setting things up so you can send an email and start the cooking before you get home would be great.
You know, I know that is a joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is what they did. Remember that Enron did something very similar with their faked trading floor. Iraq did something like that in the Gulf War as I recall. They had inflatable fake tanks that they would set up so we'd go after those instead of the real target. Bait and switch is a great tactic. Gives the Terrorists something to go after without really taking anything down.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it just me, or did he avoid answering the question about whether Google had itself become a point of failure for the internet. His answer basically was that the fact we need Google to find things implies a decentralized net. Yet the question was whether Google replacing other search engines implies that if Google fails the net fails. i.e. we have the de-facto rise of a centralized interface to the net.
Let me put it an other way. Consider that some terrorist manages to destroy all the Google servers. What happens to practical day to day work that uses the Internet?
Why would Slashdot put this as news when it happened years ago and most of us remember it? I mean I'd be all for this story if it was new - but a magazine from 1998? What happened? Find a Harper's while at the doctor's office? Next up: a Slashdot story on the WTC bombing.
I wonder if these aren't an even better match for Pixar than they are Apple. Yeah Jobs is behind both. But he also seems to be trying to leverage each towards the other. (Witness his moving Apple servers into Pixar)
If they could only get better hardware for the high end market I think Apple would be in a killer position to be what SGI used to be. However that hardware issue with PowerPC chips is a huge one.
The Lisa had a 5MHz clock while the Mac had a 8MHz clock, didn't it? Yeah the Lisa had more RAM, but that speed difference is pretty hefty.
(Ah - for the days when that seemed fast!)
I don't think it is quite comparable. There are authors who sell *tons* of books. Think of Silence of the Lambs which has sold millions upon millions of copies. Likewise the literary equivalent of the Beatles are books like Catcher in the Rye.
The news organizations are doing this. (Damn I hate those cluttered screens on CNN Headline news) Worst yet is TNN which blocks a black bar along the bottom of the screen to put various information during all their shows. (Except for commercials, of course -- those are sancrosanct)
Also notice that those @#$%ing network identification icons every station has aren't put on any commercials. Yeah. They *don't* affect your viewing "pleasure" they say. If that's true, why aren't they on the commercials?
When you switch between application windows and Finder windows a lot there is a slight 1-4 second delay while the spinning cursor appears. This is even if nothing has changed in the Finder window. I do this a lot and it is so annoying that I can't deal with it.
Whether you find it annoying or not really depends upon how you use the Finder. I use it a lot while programming and it is unusable to me. As I mentioned elsewhere I've switched over to Coela. (Great product, horrible page to download it from -- it's all in Japanese!) Even Coela isn't as good as Windows Explorer, in my opinion though.
Rightfully slam Microsoft all you want. But that simply works better than any alternative you can suggest.
Personally I like Coela far better than SNAX. However I'll be happy when 10.2 comes out and we see the spinning CD of annoyance less. The Finder is the main reason I've not switched over to the the Mac from my PC.
The "snappiness" of OS9 vs. OS10 is more for interface elements. Purprotedly Jaguar fixes a lot of this. The things discussed in this article about AfterEffects are much more tied to Adobe's coding and the speed of the processor and thus are quite separate from "snappiness."
I think most informed people have always known Apple's hardware has speed problems. It isn't exactlly parallel to MHz, of course. But it does show the problems with Motorola. I think Apple has to fix this or all their wonderful OSX fixes will be of little help.
Having said that, most computers today have far more power than people need. Network speed is almost always the problem. So unless you are doing computationally intensive work (i.e. heavy graphics) it is all moot. Any computer today is powerful enough. (Except perhaps a weak G3 with OSX, due to the UI elements)
Actually with regards to Visual Basic.Net and C# I think you are correct. If Microsoft wants to help promote .NET they should downplay or even stop supporting earlier technologies.
.NET, but not some of the things you suggest they complain about. Further I think that the WindowsXP "breaking" with some of the older Window3.1 and Windows95 "features" is pretty similar to what Apple is doing with MacOS 9. But I don't hear anyone here on slashdot complaining about forcing gamers and other groups to a more NT OS foundation. I typically hear praise.
However so far as I can tell no one has complained when Microsoft does this. They might complain about some of the design decisions and security of
Don't get me wrong, there is plenty to complain about with MS. But it is usually their anti-competitive strategies and their downplaying of security in the past that are the problems.
So I think your hypocrisy charge is itself a bit misplaced.
Natural versus unnatural RF? Exactly what is the difference - and don't say whether they occur naturally. If RF is bad it is bad *regardless* of the source.
Please lets stop the natural vs. unnatural mysticism that is starting to plague our society.
I thought that Mathlab game with a crippled version of Maple and could interface with Maple. I seem to recall *way* back about 8 years ago it had this. I've only used Mathematica and not Maple, but my friends who use both generally prefer Maple.
This is just an other clever way to charge a tax by tying it to something that sounds good on the surface but which in practice will be completely unrelated to the tax. I hate it when the government does this.
The reason I think this "just an other tax" is because there appears to be nothing tied to recycling, to keeping computers out of landfills or anything else. The money isn't clearly earmarked for such ventures either. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for computer recycling and recognize the problem of lead and other such things. Yet this will, despite some claims, do nothing to address the problem.
For real effect we need the tax combined with some sort of recycling payment for when you dispose of your computer properly. A lot here have mentioned that, but I want to emphasize that without this we have nothing more than a new way to add to the cost of a computer.
While there is some truth to that, the basic desktop of OSX is very, very different from the desktop of NeXT. Further Quartz is different from the display postscript that NeXT used. So while a lot of the basic class library of NeXTstep gave Apple some help, most of it was new.
Languages remain in demand based upon the applications that use them. There's a lot of business programs written in Cobol that need support. Thus Cobol is still around, albeit not taken that seriously. Same with Fortran. Lots of legacy code.
The same would be true with Java, but that depends upon what major products use it. I think that right now there are enough programs written with it, especially enterprise based XML programs, that it will be here for quite some time.
Just look at Obj-C. Everyone thought it was dead and there was far more reason for it to die than Java. Yet Apple bought NeXT and made their primary UI development with it. Thus it fended off death.
With Java there is even more reason for it to survive since there isn't full C# for Macs, Solaris, and Linux yet. Yeah there are announcements or attempts at something like an opensource C#. But right now it isn't there yet. Thus we can't even say that C# offers everything Java does plus more.
Are there any soundcard that produce good sound through your soundsystem with a digital port?
The control that media conglomerates have on the press is vastly overstated. Generally I think the press does an adequate job. The superficiality of the press' reporting is due more to the time constraints we, the readers, put them under. You try to gather a huge amount of interviews and information in a few hours. I'm not saying the press is fully accurate, but the problem is that accuracy takes time. By the time that thoughtful analysis can be done, most people no longer care. Further if the press tends towards sensationalism (including in these copyright issues) it is because we the readers tend to go for that angle more.
i.e. quit the gripping about the press only reporting what MS or so forth want.
Isn't the "Bible" aspects of this more limited to certain fundamentalists groups who have this tradition of 666 being something like a bar code you need to buy or sell? Thus anything even remotely like labeling a human they freak out about. Presumably they think that if such things become available it will be just a short hop skip and a jump to "implanted credit cards" and then the ban on real credit cards and cash.
Personally I put that right up with worrying about black helicopters, but that's me.
Most porn sites try to entice you by giving some free porn and then getting you to pay for more. Don't you get those annoying emails and so forth? Perhaps I get them because I posed (with my real email address) to a few USENET groups. (Although none remotely dealt with anything sexual, unless alt.fan.davidlynch or alt.postmodern are porn).
Anyway, this is one area I think the government should step in. The fact is that these spammers not only target you unwantedly - they target you with active pornography. If I had kids I'd be very pissed about all that.
As Bush showed with his "free trade" (i.e. tarrifs on steel, textiles, and lumber) a treaty is just an agreement. It has no real teeth. If some treaty tried to in a real way violate constitutional rights of Americans in America it would be ignored. The Constitution trumps all.
However as someone else said, if you are going to an other country and have been violating that country's laws in our country you may be in trouble. But that goes both ways as the adventures of a certain Russian programmer found with Adobe.
However the government is not saying what communication is acceptable. It is saying what kind of communication can be done in public before children. The government is not saying that you can't read goatsex.com or whatever drops your socks on your own computers. Just that in a public government funded facility with children you can't do this.
(Personally I'm not convinced that libraries ought to be offering Internet connections at all, but that's me. It seems too much like offering free cable TV at a library)
Why would you need to re-rip them to OGG? I believe most players that handle OGG also handle MP3s. Further none of the MP3s you ripped were watermarked, so where's the problem?
The reason why people still use Kazaa over alternatives is that the Gnutella network tends to have poor selection, is slower, etc. etc. Personally I think AudioGalaxy is better than both, but then I prefer to less mainstream music it caters to.
As with all annoying advertisements the consumer has to balance the cost versus the benefit. Personally while I'd hate to have more ads, are they really using up that much more bandwidth than sharing my songs? Probably not. So long as there aren't pop-ups that my popup killer can't handle I don't really care. Besides which when I'm not looking for music I don't have Kazaa (or Morpheus or AudioGalaxy) running on my system.
Remember those light switches that were computer controlled back in the Apple II days? I think that the x-10 folks sell them now. But I refuse to purchase anything from anyone who advertises like they do. Anyway, how hard *would* it be to have a stove, microwave, etc. controlled by those? VCR's and the like can already be controlled by recording the IR stuff. But I think setting things up so you can send an email and start the cooking before you get home would be great.
You know, I know that is a joke, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is what they did. Remember that Enron did something very similar with their faked trading floor. Iraq did something like that in the Gulf War as I recall. They had inflatable fake tanks that they would set up so we'd go after those instead of the real target. Bait and switch is a great tactic. Gives the Terrorists something to go after without really taking anything down.