Did they put hard work and intellectual value into a randomly generated hexadecimal string? I don't think so either.
I think the point I'm making is valid -- if they want to claim copyright on a NUMBER, I should be able to claim copyright on my NAME (and trust me, my name is pretty unique). I'm tired of other people buying and selling my NAME. My NAME is my property. And since my parents are dead, that property is mine by proxy.
Either that, or I'll run out right now and copyright the number 12. And then issue DMCA takedown notices to every website, piece of software, TV show, and building elevator that uses the number which is my property.
Excuse me, but there are companies out there that buy and sell information about you, me and everyone else. Can I go out and have all that information suppressed? That's *my* information, and yet, every supermarket, potential employer, car dealership, hospital, etc., gets to profit and make use about information about ME, and yet, I don't see a dime of that money.
Tell ya what. I'll agree not to pass around that NUMBER if every company agrees never to pass around my NAME, particularly to junk mail vendors and telephone marketeers.
Why can't *you* see that it's exactly the same thing?
I guess that would work out to 1 complaint. One one thousandth of one percent would need to assume 1 complaint for every 10 million copies sold, right?
Does anybody believe that Sony sold 10 million copies of Casino Royale? Personally, I have a hard time believing they even pressed 10 million copies of that.
This is like their inflated Blue-Ray numbers as well.
You can't trust what Sony says. They are a bunch of... not nice people....
As a collector of some of this old hardware (See my website, http://www.obsolyte.com/ ), I can tell you that for every "gem" you find, you also aquire about 2.5 tons of useless crap. It's very difficult to figure what machines will become the iconic collectables, and which ones will just be considered trash.
The Apple Lisa is highly prized (although at one point, Apple was filling landfills with 'em and Sun Remarketing was selling what remained for $200 a pop), but the Mac 512k is pretty much ignored (although the original 128k Mac is valuable).
I have no idea what my old NeXT-Station is worth, but, it'll never be worth what the original Cube is. I have a pretty decent collection of SGI gear, but, does anyone care about SGI at this point? If you look on ebay, people can't even give that stuff away.
And while the Amiga may be the greatest computer ever made, you'd have trouble these days selling your A2000, no matter how tricked out it is (free Video toaster!). The Amiga collector market is saturated, anybody that wants an Amiga probably already has more than 2.
And you'll still find the venerable C=64 and Apple// at garage sales across the country, although, very likely missing key components.
Of course, should you have an original Altair in your basement, that's another story entirely.
You know, I'm really sick of the whole "Guess your personal needs based on browsing habits". I get this enough from Amazon, recommending crap to me that I don't want, but that I sell to others.
I run a website which sells stuff. Now, it may not be stuff I personally want, but obviously other people do. So, I go through Amazon looking for products to sell. Of course, the advantage is that Amazon recommends items to me that I might sell to the other people reading my site, so it works out, but still, Amazon has a screwed up image of what I want as an individual.
Now imagine all these people who do searches online to find crap to feed their blogs. All the people who scour the internet in search of material for websites, stuff they are going to mention in passing, and then move on.
All the marketing people are going to get is that 50% of the people who surf the web want to see dismemberments via locomotive accidents on YouTube. That's the "vector".
The point I'm trying to make is that only half the people on the internet are the passive surfers this technology would work with. The other half are people who create the content online via looking for content online. (and then there's a small percentage who actually create content, but they don't surf as much).
So, the entire concept to start with is screwed because it assumes that the web is TV.
Yeah, their software selections seem pretty random too. For example, they list hardware (Apple II) and then explain that it ran Visicalc in the description for the Apple II. But they list the IPOD and ITUNES as seperate items. WTF? Would the iPod have ever caught on without iTunes? Ugh.
Then of course, they list email programs, but they completely ignore Adobe Acrobat and the PDF file format, arguably more important than Macafee Virus Scan or Spybot.
In all, I find this list to be really, really bad. I could have come up with better choices and written it in one evening.
Isn't it odd that they list applications as "tech products", as things we couldn't live without, but they completely miss software that we can't live without such as MP3, ZIP, TCP/IP, and instead list ipods, email, chatting software, etc., all of which couldn't exist without the underlying "tech products".
I hate lists like this, because they are usually revisionist history. Again, there's a heavy West Coast Bias, as if the IBM PC and Apple and Microsoft were the only tech companies that ever existed.
Where for example (as others have pointed out) is the Commodore 64, the "Model T" of computers? It's simply the single most successful computer of all time, selling more than 33 million units of a single "model" of machine, more than any other single model of machine.
And while they mention the Amiga 1000, where's the Video Toaster and Lightwave 3-D, the software that revolutionized 3-D animation on reltively cheap low-power machines? Oh sorry, that technological marvel came out of Kansas, and nothing high-tech comes out of Kansas, right?
And here's something that was developed on the west coast that deserves praise (is it on the list?) The Palm Pilot -- without which, we'd probably not have half of the other items that *are* on the list.
It always seems to me that the editors of such "lists" only remember what they themselves "played with", and if they didn't touch it with their own hands, it didn't exist and therefore isn't worth mentioning.
Also, exciting innovations such as the mouse which are made at academic think-tanks or research departments of large companies are also not worth mentioning. Do you think these editors bothered to research anything happening at MIT's media lab? Of course not. MIT after all, is on the EAST coast.
This list makes me sad that we're already forgetting important history from just a few years ago. In twenty years, people will be saying the Bill Gates invented the computer and taking that as fact.
Sure and while we're at it, let's also post an armed soldier on every streetcorner to make everyone "safe", let's commence widespread surveilance on all people within our borders to make sure none of them are out to harm us, and let's inject everyone with GPS tracking RFID so we can know their movements and make sure everyone is doing just what they are supposed to.
It's only one step down that slipperly slope to an Orwellian Police State. King George W. Bush the Dictator would approve. Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm all for making this a nice quiet nightmare of unbridled government power -- maybe people will finally get the hint and we'll have a true American Revolution so that people finally get to appreciate their freedom.
It seems to me that this country is wallowing in corruption, is totally controlled by large corporations and is badly in need of correction. And the only way to get that is to clamp down so hard on the people that they revolt.
We *need* to have a few cities burn down and few million killed in riots. It's actually the only way I see to restore the freedoms we are supposed to have and again have a government of the people, for the people.
Otherwise we're just kidding ourselves about what kind of country we are living in.
Hah, there are FOUR, or at least four that get that joke... FLCL rules! Definitely one of the best anime series ever made (and only 6 episodes, how Police Squad is that?)...
Seems to me that America has a greater problem with literacy than some developing nations.
We're 12th in providing Broadband access, and frankly, New Orleans looks more impoverished than some third world areas. I think the OLPC program is needed here in the USA, where half the schools have kids who can't read or do math and this is part of Bush's No Child Left Behind program. And yet we call ourselves a first world nation, an economic superpower, and the leader of the free world. And yet, in a small village in some other nation, you'll probably find a greater proportion of educated children. It seems to me that if you visit the rural areas of Arkansas, you'll find nearly the same conditions as some of the poorest regions of any third world nation.
Nah, the spammers would sell "Bird Flu Cure" via spam.
Or you'd find out via thousands of spam messages that the Prime Minister of Nigeria has declared that enlarging the size of your penis protects you from Bird Flu. And if you just send him the number to your bank account, so he can use it transfer his monies, you'll recieve a FREE SAMPLE plus a 10% gratuitiy from all samples sold.
I can see it now...
Subject: Re: Hey Dude; Be a batter bird flu lover by incresing the sise of your one eyed monster....
I don't think I'd mind spam as much if their grammer and spelling was better....
Ouch; can you imagine if that law had been upheld? It would have essentially wiped out the entire Anime industry in the USA. When you consider that just about all anime women look about twelve, and then there's at least a nude scene, if not outright sex and rape in your average anime film, then anyone owning anime in the USA would be a felon.
And given the right-wing's propensity for such abuse of power, I fear this may be reality in the USA in a few more years.
Think back to the 80's when Microsoft wasn't the 8000 pound gorilla they are now. Computing was making giant steps, hell, giant leaps forward as the Macintosh and the Amiga started to gain ground and entirely new paradigms of computing were created. There was hope that the future would be as envisioned in Apple's "Magilla" project, where you would talk to your computer and it would talk back using an "Agent" that essentially interpreted what you wanted and all was seamlessly integrated into the way you wanted to do things.
Now enter Microsoft, who decided that computing wasn't about what you wanted to do, but the way they wanted you to do it. Windows, to this day, makes you jump through one hoop after the next to even get the simplest tasks done.
Even John Dvorak has pointed out that in simply copying a file from one place to the next, you, the user, have NO IDEA what Windows is doing, and why it does it that way. For a company that supposedly hires the best and the brightest programmers, they have a backwards way of looking at the world and don't understand their user base at all.
Why, for example, when copying multiple large files over a network does it prompt you in the middle of the copy when one file has the same name in the target destination? Couldn't it check for duplicate names before starting the copy process? If you've started this file copy and it takes hours and you walk away, you come back to find the computer has done NOTHING in that time because it's waiting for you to answer a question that should have been asked before the copy process started. This isn't rocket science. It's a very simple programming fix and yet, Microsoft gets it horribly, horribly wrong.
Instead of computing your way, you are forced to use your computer the Microsoft way, which is counter-intuitive to the way people would like to work. Windows is still a application-oriented OS instead of a document oriented OS, and it's still a hodge-podge of DLL-hell and a file-system that isn't much better than FAT-16, and yet, here it is, 2006 and we still don't have those Agents we can talk to.
Hell, the Amiga did things in 1986 Windows still can't do, and you wonder why we hate Microsoft? Microsoft essentially killed the forward-moving trend I saw in the late-80's/early 90's, and sent computing back into the dark ages. Almost 20 years later, and MS is still playing catch-up to what was happening in R&D back then. And, if Vista is any indication, it's clear they have no plan for the future. The next version of Windows will contain the same basic flaws as Version 1.0 did -- I'm sure the file-copy bug will still be there as will many other basic miscalculations regarding how people use computers.
That's why I hate Microsoft -- because they lack a basic understanding of they how and why of people interacting with machines. Instead, we're forced to deal with how they want us to use it. People have to train themselves to think backwards in order to use a computer -- which is probably why businesses that depend upon computers now do less then they did before the PC invaded the workspace.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the One Laptop Per Child would be better served if the OS running that laptop was GEOS (renamed Geoworks, renamed NewDeal, renamed Breadbox)... Then the OLPC machine would really be the C=64 of it's generation and bring computing to millions who never had it before.
It seems to me that Commodore had it "right" from the start, making a low-cost, simple to use, easy to operate, durable, hackable, expandable system that started off as a toy and had nearly unlimited potential to be a serious computer.
If it were me, I'd just take the guts of the C=64, condense it down to a few small chips, make it run off batteries/solar power/handcrank, add some flash storage and a few other goodies, internet capability, and have the whole thing run GEOS. And you could make that for well under $100 and still make a profit doing it, as the C=64 gamestick sold 2 Xmas's ago for, like $20 a pop, and that probably had more usefulness than that un-usable laptop concept.
Yeah, used to be (BEFORE THE NEW CSS REDESIGN), I would get mod points once every two weeks or so -- these days, I haven't seen a single invite to moderate. I think there are a lot of people like me who have been "forgotten' buy the new slashcode, and we don't get to moderate anymore.
Maybe someone should do an "ask slashdot" story for that one!
Is it just me, or is there a sneaker footprint on Mars in the lower left third of the image? Hrmmm. More proof that the whole thing is faked. "And cattle mutilations are up." (sneakers).
If you're concerned about privacy; then make sure you collect as much information as you can about your senators, congressmen, presidents, prime minsters, and other governmental lackeys. Post it all publically and advertise the fact that you have such information available to anyone that wants it.
Once the government understands that a glass house is transparent in both directions, perhaps they will enact laws to at least protect themselves. Eventually that will lead to a greater expansion of privacy after the inevitable revolution that will follow.
And if you're concerned about being arrested/sued for posting information about government officials, then incorporate first. Hey, other businesses can sell information about you, then as a business, you should be able to sell information about THEM.
Show them what it's like to live in their own mousetrap.
then that light XP system will run fast, and it will run clean, and it will run like a dream, and stay that way, if *no* internet is used on it webbrowsing is done on it.
So basically, you're saying that if you install XP on a computer, and then never touch it again, it will remain stable? Great. I have a better idea. Install XP on a computer and then never power it up again and it will be stable too.
The point of having a computer is to USE it. If you can't use XP, then it's valueless.
Anyone comparing a modern machine with a 10 year old one obviously has an agenda.
Sorry, but sometimes there are valid reasons for comparing modern equipment to a 10-year old machine, and one of those valid reasons may be to remind people that, in some cases, it seems like we had more advanced technology years ago.
As another poster pointed out, on the Newton, you could write "lunch john", and the system would be able to guess what you meant, and file an appointment with John at 12pm, by "learning" that lunch meant noon and John meant "john" from your address book. More modern, suppoedly more advanced systems don't seem to be able to do this.
Also consider another antique relic, the Amiga Personal Computer... a system with a variable size "ram disk" that emulated another drive, and was able to constantly vary it's size to whatever was in it, freeing up available RAM when you deleted something from the ramdisk -- why can't modern systems do this? The amiga also had several other advanced features I still don't see being implemented on so-called "modern" systems.
It's almost as if the dominence of Windows has sent us backwards in terms of where we should be with computers these days. The wildly innovative ideas and experimentation of the industry have given way to dull, plodding bloat and garbage.
As another poster commented "where are the brilliant programmers?". Indeed.
Sometimes we need to be reminded of where we were, to see that we have been going in circles, and innovation is NOT moving forward. Regardless of whether or not the author had an "agenda", I think it's good to point out that today's technology isn't necessarily any better than yesterdays.
As for the Model-T, well, it got pretty good gas mileage. And after almost 100 years of development on the modern internal combustion engine, we're still getting about the same miles per gallon. This isn't to say that the Model-T is as good a car as modern ones in every way, but, in some ways, it can hold it's own despite being a 100-year old design. Old doesn't mean useless.
Once upon a time, this nation was comitted to putting the best and the brightest forward, and creating the most we could with the technology available to us at the time.
Sadly, those days are behind us.
Now it seems, every project is a bad compromise, and it seems to have started with the Shuttle Program. Originally intended as a fully reuseable system that took off like a plane and landed like a plane, it then became a boondoggle of wildly incompatible systems that culminated in a bad hack where you strap the orbiter/glider to a fuel tank and two sticks of TNT and cross your fingers.
NASA still had high hopes for a full resuable system with the VentureStar, which sadly, never got beyond computer animations and little plastic models. The DCX, which had a 1/3 scale flying prototype, was scrapped after a few tests.
And now here they are again, with a bad compromise, using existing parts from the shuttle program and haphazardly slapping them together and crossing their fingers.
It would save a ton of money to design a good system from the start, even if it's more expensive up-front, than to build a system that's awful to start with and hope you can improve upon it with time.
It's funny that sci-fi from the 60's and 70's was so hopeful about where we'd be by this time, because we were making so much progress back then. If only they could have forseen how much time we'd wasted by going backwards, and designing lousy systems that can never really fulfull their mission requirements.
It's hard to believe that even before Yuri Gagarin was launched, America was reaching the edge of space in a rocketplane called the X-15, a simple, durable design that worked stunningly well, and, had we continued along that path, we'd all probably be living in space right now.
But no, we took two steps backwards with "spam in a can", sticking a capsule on top of a missile, and we've been making the same mistakes since then. And now, here we are in 2006, talking about using essentially the same technology from the 60's, when we should have already been reaching the outer planets in long-distance exploration vessels as seen in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" film.
America no longer puts its best and its brightest on top. America no longer prizes doing the best it can do. It's embarassing, that's what it is.
Wasn't Apollo redesigned AFTER THE FIRE of Apollo 1 to not use a pure O2 environment? If I recall correctly, pure O2 was used for Mercury and Gemini and only for Apollo 1. Only then did NASA realize that they'd simply been getting lucky those past flights, and start to build in safety equipment.
Besides, it's not too difficult to rebuild Apollo to use 12-15psi and have the appropriate docking module. The Russians did it with Souyez. You'd have to redesign the entire capsule and service module anyhow to take advantage of better materials technology/smaller computers/fly by wire/"glass cockpit" and other modern technologies available today that were not in 1967.
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Did they put hard work and intellectual value into a randomly generated hexadecimal string? I don't think so either.
I think the point I'm making is valid -- if they want to claim copyright on a NUMBER, I should be able to claim copyright on my NAME (and trust me, my name is pretty unique). I'm tired of other people buying and selling my NAME. My NAME is my property. And since my parents are dead, that property is mine by proxy.
Either that, or I'll run out right now and copyright the number 12. And then issue DMCA takedown notices to every website, piece of software, TV show, and building elevator that uses the number which is my property.
Excuse me, but there are companies out there that buy and sell information about you, me and everyone else. Can I go out and have all that information suppressed? That's *my* information, and yet, every supermarket, potential employer, car dealership, hospital, etc., gets to profit and make use about information about ME, and yet, I don't see a dime of that money.
Tell ya what. I'll agree not to pass around that NUMBER if every company agrees never to pass around my NAME, particularly to junk mail vendors and telephone marketeers.
Why can't *you* see that it's exactly the same thing?
I guess that would work out to 1 complaint. One one thousandth of one percent would need to assume 1 complaint for every 10 million copies sold, right?
... not nice people....
Does anybody believe that Sony sold 10 million copies of Casino Royale? Personally, I have a hard time believing they even pressed 10 million copies of that.
This is like their inflated Blue-Ray numbers as well.
You can't trust what Sony says. They are a bunch of
As a collector of some of this old hardware (See my website, http://www.obsolyte.com/ ), I can tell you that for every "gem" you find, you also aquire about 2.5 tons of useless crap. It's very difficult to figure what machines will become the iconic collectables, and which ones will just be considered trash.
// at garage sales across the country, although, very likely missing key components.
The Apple Lisa is highly prized (although at one point, Apple was filling landfills with 'em and Sun Remarketing was selling what remained for $200 a pop), but the Mac 512k is pretty much ignored (although the original 128k Mac is valuable).
I have no idea what my old NeXT-Station is worth, but, it'll never be worth what the original Cube is. I have a pretty decent collection of SGI gear, but, does anyone care about SGI at this point? If you look on ebay, people can't even give that stuff away.
And while the Amiga may be the greatest computer ever made, you'd have trouble these days selling your A2000, no matter how tricked out it is (free Video toaster!). The Amiga collector market is saturated, anybody that wants an Amiga probably already has more than 2.
And you'll still find the venerable C=64 and Apple
Of course, should you have an original Altair in your basement, that's another story entirely.
TTYL
Brian Cirulnick
You know, I'm really sick of the whole "Guess your personal needs based on browsing habits". I get this enough from Amazon, recommending crap to me that I don't want, but that I sell to others.
I run a website which sells stuff. Now, it may not be stuff I personally want, but obviously other people do. So, I go through Amazon looking for products to sell. Of course, the advantage is that Amazon recommends items to me that I might sell to the other people reading my site, so it works out, but still, Amazon has a screwed up image of what I want as an individual.
Now imagine all these people who do searches online to find crap to feed their blogs. All the people who scour the internet in search of material for websites, stuff they are going to mention in passing, and then move on.
All the marketing people are going to get is that 50% of the people who surf the web want to see dismemberments via locomotive accidents on YouTube. That's the "vector".
The point I'm trying to make is that only half the people on the internet are the passive surfers this technology would work with. The other half are people who create the content online via looking for content online. (and then there's a small percentage who actually create content, but they don't surf as much).
So, the entire concept to start with is screwed because it assumes that the web is TV.
Yeah, their software selections seem pretty random too. For example, they list hardware (Apple II) and then explain that it ran Visicalc in the description for the Apple II. But they list the IPOD and ITUNES as seperate items. WTF? Would the iPod have ever caught on without iTunes? Ugh.
Then of course, they list email programs, but they completely ignore Adobe Acrobat and the PDF file format, arguably more important than Macafee Virus Scan or Spybot.
In all, I find this list to be really, really bad.
I could have come up with better choices and written it in one evening.
Isn't it odd that they list applications as "tech products", as things we couldn't live without, but they completely miss software that we can't live without such as MP3, ZIP, TCP/IP, and instead list ipods, email, chatting software, etc., all of which couldn't exist without the underlying "tech products".
I hate lists like this, because they are usually revisionist history. Again, there's a heavy West Coast Bias, as if the IBM PC and Apple and Microsoft were the only tech companies that ever existed.
Where for example (as others have pointed out) is the Commodore 64, the "Model T" of computers? It's simply the single most successful computer of all time, selling more than 33 million units of a single "model" of machine, more than any other single model of machine.
And while they mention the Amiga 1000, where's the Video Toaster and Lightwave 3-D, the software that revolutionized 3-D animation on reltively cheap low-power machines? Oh sorry, that technological marvel came out of Kansas, and nothing high-tech comes out of Kansas, right?
And here's something that was developed on the west coast that deserves praise (is it on the list?) The Palm Pilot -- without which, we'd probably not have half of the other items that *are* on the list.
It always seems to me that the editors of such "lists" only remember what they themselves "played with", and if they didn't touch it with their own hands, it didn't exist and therefore isn't worth mentioning.
Also, exciting innovations such as the mouse which are made at academic think-tanks or research departments of large companies are also not worth mentioning. Do you think these editors bothered to research anything happening at MIT's media lab? Of course not. MIT after all, is on the EAST coast.
This list makes me sad that we're already forgetting important history from just a few years ago. In twenty years, people will be saying the Bill Gates invented the computer and taking that as fact.
Sure and while we're at it, let's also post an armed soldier on every streetcorner to make everyone "safe", let's commence widespread surveilance on all people within our borders to make sure none of them are out to harm us, and let's inject everyone with GPS tracking RFID so we can know their movements and make sure everyone is doing just what they are supposed to.
It's only one step down that slipperly slope to an Orwellian Police State. King George W. Bush the Dictator would approve. Hey, don't get me wrong, I'm all for making this a nice quiet nightmare of unbridled government power -- maybe people will finally get the hint and we'll have a true American Revolution so that people finally get to appreciate their freedom.
It seems to me that this country is wallowing in corruption, is totally controlled by large corporations and is badly in need of correction. And the only way to get that is to clamp down so hard on the people that they revolt.
We *need* to have a few cities burn down and few million killed in riots. It's actually the only way I see to restore the freedoms we are supposed to have and again have a government of the people, for the people.
Otherwise we're just kidding ourselves about what kind of country we are living in.
Hah, there are FOUR, or at least four that get that joke... FLCL rules! Definitely one of the best anime series ever made (and only 6 episodes, how Police Squad is that?)...
Vespas are cool.
Seems to me that America has a greater problem with literacy than some developing nations.
We're 12th in providing Broadband access, and frankly, New Orleans looks more impoverished than some third world areas. I think the OLPC program is needed here in the USA, where half the schools have kids who can't read or do math and this is part of Bush's No Child Left Behind program. And yet we call ourselves a first world nation, an economic superpower, and the leader of the free world. And yet, in a small village in some other nation, you'll probably find a greater proportion of educated children. It seems to me that if you visit the rural areas of Arkansas, you'll find nearly the same conditions as some of the poorest regions of any third world nation.
Nah, the spammers would sell "Bird Flu Cure" via spam.
Or you'd find out via thousands of spam messages that the Prime Minister of Nigeria has declared that enlarging the size of your penis protects you from Bird Flu. And if you just send him the number to your bank account, so he can use it transfer his monies, you'll recieve a FREE SAMPLE plus a 10% gratuitiy from all samples sold.
I can see it now...
Subject: Re:
Hey Dude;
Be a batter bird flu lover by incresing the sise of your one eyed monster....
I don't think I'd mind spam as much if their grammer and spelling was better....
TTYL
Brian C.
I hope Ellen Muth wasn't in the area..
(For reference, her character (George) was killed by a piece of debris from the de-orbiting of Mir)...
Oh man, you are so lucky I wasn't drinking coke when I saw that.
I would have had to bill you for a replacement keyboard!
Ouch; can you imagine if that law had been upheld? It would have essentially wiped out the entire Anime industry in the USA. When you consider that just about all anime women look about twelve, and then there's at least a nude scene, if not outright sex and rape in your average anime film, then anyone owning anime in the USA would be a felon.
And given the right-wing's propensity for such abuse of power, I fear this may be reality in the USA in a few more years.
Think back to the 80's when Microsoft wasn't the 8000 pound gorilla they are now. Computing was making giant steps, hell, giant leaps forward as the Macintosh and the Amiga started to gain ground and entirely new paradigms of computing were created. There was hope that the future would be as envisioned in Apple's "Magilla" project, where you would talk to your computer and it would talk back using an "Agent" that essentially interpreted what you wanted and all was seamlessly integrated into the way you wanted to do things.
Now enter Microsoft, who decided that computing wasn't about what you wanted to do, but the way they wanted you to do it. Windows, to this day, makes you jump through one hoop after the next to even get the simplest tasks done.
Even John Dvorak has pointed out that in simply copying a file from one place to the next, you, the user, have NO IDEA what Windows is doing, and why it does it that way. For a company that supposedly hires the best and the brightest programmers, they have a backwards way of looking at the world and don't understand their user base at all.
Why, for example, when copying multiple large files over a network does it prompt you in the middle of the copy when one file has the same name in the target destination? Couldn't it check for duplicate names before starting the copy process? If you've started this file copy and it takes hours and you walk away, you come back to find the computer has done NOTHING in that time because it's waiting for you to answer a question that should have been asked before the copy process started. This isn't rocket science. It's a very simple programming fix and yet, Microsoft gets it horribly, horribly wrong.
Instead of computing your way, you are forced to use your computer the Microsoft way, which is counter-intuitive to the way people would like to work. Windows is still a application-oriented OS instead of a document oriented OS, and it's still a hodge-podge of DLL-hell and a file-system that isn't much better than FAT-16, and yet, here it is, 2006 and we still don't have those Agents we can talk to.
Hell, the Amiga did things in 1986 Windows still can't do, and you wonder why we hate Microsoft? Microsoft essentially killed the forward-moving trend I saw in the late-80's/early 90's, and sent computing back into the dark ages. Almost 20 years later, and MS is still playing catch-up to what was happening in R&D back then. And, if Vista is any indication, it's clear they have no plan for the future. The next version of Windows will contain the same basic flaws as Version 1.0 did -- I'm sure the file-copy bug will still be there as will many other basic miscalculations regarding how people use computers.
That's why I hate Microsoft -- because they lack a basic understanding of they how and why of people interacting with machines. Instead, we're forced to deal with how they want us to use it. People have to train themselves to think backwards in order to use a computer -- which is probably why businesses that depend upon computers now do less then they did before the PC invaded the workspace.
Is it just me, or does anyone else think that the One Laptop Per Child would be better served if the OS running that laptop was GEOS (renamed Geoworks, renamed NewDeal, renamed Breadbox)... Then the OLPC machine would really be the C=64 of it's generation and bring computing to millions who never had it before.
It seems to me that Commodore had it "right" from the start, making a low-cost, simple to use, easy to operate, durable, hackable, expandable system that started off as a toy and had nearly unlimited potential to be a serious computer.
If it were me, I'd just take the guts of the C=64, condense it down to a few small chips, make it run off batteries/solar power/handcrank, add some flash storage and a few other goodies, internet capability, and have the whole thing run GEOS. And you could make that for well under $100 and still make a profit doing it, as the C=64 gamestick sold 2 Xmas's ago for, like $20 a pop, and that probably had more usefulness than that un-usable laptop concept.
Okay, so, he's got the hot grits...
I'm sure we've run this joke into the ground by now.
Yeah, used to be (BEFORE THE NEW CSS REDESIGN), I would get mod points once every two weeks or so -- these days, I haven't seen a single invite to moderate. I think there are a lot of people like me who have been "forgotten' buy the new slashcode, and we don't get to moderate anymore.
Maybe someone should do an "ask slashdot" story for that one!
Is it just me, or is there a sneaker footprint on Mars in the lower left third of the image? Hrmmm. More proof that the whole thing is faked. "And cattle mutilations are up." (sneakers).
TTYL
If you're concerned about privacy; then make sure you collect as much information as you can about your senators, congressmen, presidents, prime minsters, and other governmental lackeys. Post it all publically and advertise the fact that you have such information available to anyone that wants it.
Once the government understands that a glass house is transparent in both directions, perhaps they will enact laws to at least protect themselves. Eventually that will lead to a greater expansion of privacy after the inevitable revolution that will follow.
And if you're concerned about being arrested/sued for posting information about government officials, then incorporate first. Hey, other businesses can sell information about you, then as a business, you should be able to sell information about THEM.
Show them what it's like to live in their own mousetrap.
TTYL
Brian C.
then that light XP system will run fast, and it will run clean, and it will run like a dream, and stay that way, if *no* internet is used on it webbrowsing is done on it.
So basically, you're saying that if you install XP on a computer, and then never touch it again, it will remain stable? Great. I have a better idea. Install XP on a computer and then never power it up again and it will be stable too.
The point of having a computer is to USE it. If you can't use XP, then it's valueless.
Anyone comparing a modern machine with a 10 year old one obviously has an agenda.
Sorry, but sometimes there are valid reasons for comparing modern equipment to a 10-year old machine, and one of those valid reasons may be to remind people that, in some cases, it seems like we had more advanced technology years ago.
As another poster pointed out, on the Newton, you could write "lunch john", and the system would be able to guess what you meant, and file an appointment with John at 12pm, by "learning" that lunch meant noon and John meant "john" from your address book. More modern, suppoedly more advanced systems don't seem to be able to do this.
Also consider another antique relic, the Amiga Personal Computer... a system with a variable size "ram disk" that emulated another drive, and was able to constantly vary it's size to whatever was in it, freeing up available RAM when you deleted something from the ramdisk -- why can't modern systems do this? The amiga also had several other advanced features I still don't see being implemented on so-called "modern" systems.
It's almost as if the dominence of Windows has sent us backwards in terms of where we should be with computers these days. The wildly innovative ideas and experimentation of the industry have given way to dull, plodding bloat and garbage.
As another poster commented "where are the brilliant programmers?". Indeed.
Sometimes we need to be reminded of where we were, to see that we have been going in circles, and innovation is NOT moving forward. Regardless of whether or not the author had an "agenda", I think it's good to point out that today's technology isn't necessarily any better than yesterdays.
As for the Model-T, well, it got pretty good gas mileage. And after almost 100 years of development on the modern internal combustion engine, we're still getting about the same miles per gallon. This isn't to say that the Model-T is as good a car as modern ones in every way, but, in some ways, it can hold it's own despite being a 100-year old design. Old doesn't mean useless.
Once upon a time, this nation was comitted to putting the best and the brightest forward, and creating the most we could with the technology available to us at the time.
Sadly, those days are behind us.
Now it seems, every project is a bad compromise, and it seems to have started with the Shuttle Program. Originally intended as a fully reuseable system that took off like a plane and landed like a plane, it then became a boondoggle of wildly incompatible systems that culminated in a bad hack where you strap the orbiter/glider to a fuel tank and two sticks of TNT and cross your fingers.
NASA still had high hopes for a full resuable system with the VentureStar, which sadly, never got beyond computer animations and little plastic models. The DCX, which had a 1/3 scale flying prototype, was scrapped after a few tests.
And now here they are again, with a bad compromise, using existing parts from the shuttle program and haphazardly slapping them together and crossing their fingers.
It would save a ton of money to design a good system from the start, even if it's more expensive up-front, than to build a system that's awful to start with and hope you can improve upon it with time.
It's funny that sci-fi from the 60's and 70's was so hopeful about where we'd be by this time, because we were making so much progress back then. If only they could have forseen how much time we'd wasted by going backwards, and designing lousy systems that can never really fulfull their mission requirements.
It's hard to believe that even before Yuri Gagarin was launched, America was reaching the edge of space in a rocketplane called the X-15, a simple, durable design that worked stunningly well, and, had we continued along that path, we'd all probably be living in space right now.
But no, we took two steps backwards with "spam in a can", sticking a capsule on top of a missile, and we've been making the same mistakes since then. And now, here we are in 2006, talking about using essentially the same technology from the 60's, when we should have already been reaching the outer planets in long-distance exploration vessels as seen in Stanley Kubrick's "2001" film.
America no longer puts its best and its brightest on top. America no longer prizes doing the best it can do. It's embarassing, that's what it is.
Wasn't Apollo redesigned AFTER THE FIRE of Apollo 1 to not use a pure O2 environment? If I recall correctly, pure O2 was used for Mercury and Gemini and only for Apollo 1. Only then did NASA realize that they'd simply been getting lucky those past flights, and start to build in safety equipment.
Besides, it's not too difficult to rebuild Apollo to use 12-15psi and have the appropriate docking module. The Russians did it with Souyez. You'd have to redesign the entire capsule and service module anyhow to take advantage of better materials technology/smaller computers/fly by wire/"glass cockpit" and other modern technologies available today that were not in 1967.