Xmas has it's origin the great Yule feast of the Norsemen and Roman Saturnalia. It didn't have anything to do with gift giving until the Victorians got ahold of it. It wasn't really until 1890 that Santa Claus got twisted into the tool of unbridled consumerism that he is today. The majority of current Xmas traditions are less than 100 years old.
What's wrong with all the giving? I like to give presents to people who need them or are particularly suited to them. So now once a year I'm supposed to go out and do it for everyone I know all at once. A near impossible feat to do.
This summer I was eating steak at my Uncle's house. He didn't have a decent steak knife in his house. I went out and bought him a set of steak knives that day. Xmas rolls around, and I don't know what he needs and I haven't seen anything that suits his character, but I'm coerced by a capitalist society to go and do the american thing and "buy" him something.
Point is I buy my friends and family things all through the year, when I see the need or find something particularly suited to them. Should I hoarde it till Xmas? Odds are my Uncle would have gone and bought some steak knifes before Xmas or he wouldn't have got to use the ones I got him for 6 months.
Also about half the stuff I get is worthless to me and of no value but the occupation of space. What's the point in that? Objects that don't work as advertised that people bought in haste to complete some ritual developed by industrial marketing.
Same for Xmas cards. If you don't have time to write me a letter, don't bother. In eastern Europe it's considered insulting to send a card that's just signed without a long letter. Let's people know how little you think of them. A bunch of cards with signatures is interesting decoration, but worthless to me in terms of contact. More fodder for the card industry.
I moved recently and inventoried everything I own. Many items I still hang onto as momentos of old friendships and times long gone. Almost none of those items with sentimental attachment came at Xmas.
It's fun as a kid to get a bunch of toys under a tree and I have nothing against this whole Santa Claus thing for a bit of play and fun. But as adults, this exhange before receipt is just another wake up call to the bogusness of this holiday tradition of "giving."
Xmas is about having a big feast with your family and recapping the year. You get to watch children get overstimulated by too much excitement and toys.
P.S. Xmas was considered so pagan that it didn't become a legal holiday in the U.S. until 1836. In the 1600's armies were sent around to pull down the pagan Xmas trees.
I'd love to have Linux running everywhere if it didn't require massive hardware to run smoothly.
I noticed a similar thing. Then I killed all unnecessary daemons (sounds like a book title). Then I installed a startup script to use 'hdparm' to speed up disk access. Then I discovered Blackbox for a window manager. Now my Linux install runs circles around my Windows install.
Once upon a time I had just got hired at a new job. There was intense pressure to ship the prototype to the customer. Engineering kept saying it's not ready (i.e. it didn't work at all and was likely to smoke when plugged in), but management insisted that it must be shipped, something about a silly contract. So it was. UPS in fact.
UPS saved the day by going even further than the reference story. They delivered an empty box with tire tracks all over it. Now the original was in a plant-hardened enclosure. So UPS eventually found it. Rumor from the UPS representative on the phone that it caused problems on the airport tarmac was how it was discovered. Well the unit finally arrived at the customer destination, scratched, dented, crushed and not a single circuit board inside in one piece.
The shipping manager had insured it for the estimated value of that part of the contract. So our company got paid a handsome check and we got a major extension. Customer was happy, he didn't have to pay for a non-delivery and we all had an excuse for a non-working prototype. It was a win-win-win scenario.
After that we used UPS for vibration and drop testing of units. It was much cheaper than actually hiring a stress testing engineer.
Most users out there like the safety (or feel good) that a familiar environment provides.
I don't know, but I like the safety that my PalmOS has never crashed and is so intuitively easy to use that I have never looked at a manual for it. It just works.
I hope the market savvy enough to reward such things.
Since you guys liked my airport search solution. I worked for some time as an embedded browser developer. Microsoft's filtering of other browsers really irritated me, because it makes the concept of an embedded browser near unworkable and I was making trying to make a living off of embedded browsers.
So everytime I ran across such a web site I would send a letter to the web site adminstrator describing how locking customers out was bad for business. I would also describe how writing Javascript that had to test for the browser was a bad idea as well, because everytime a new browser would come along, the web page would have to be rewritten again. I included a list of all known browsers. Also a description of how using Microsoft products and methods insured incompatibily, and could they please use standards and not cater to giving in to Bill Gate's Monopoly.
Then I would also call up the company in question and try to get through to the marketing department and tell them the same diatribe. I would settle for the complaints department. Sometimes I would get my wife to send an email as well complaining.
I actually made progress in my compaign. I got two websites to switch (out of about twenty I've done this to). One of the one's that switched was a bank.
Now what would happen if everyone who got burned by this wrote in and complained in a similar manner. Enough irritate potential customers and you'd be surprised what changes will happen. Just one irritated customer was enough for 10% of the companies I encoutered to change.
Be vocal and express your displeasure to the company responsible for the website.
It was more than just "legacy" software. I was a newbie developer when the Macintosh was introduced. Apple wanted money to be a certified developer. I didn't have any. So I got my jollies off hacking on this crappy PC, it had easily obtained tools with no "certification board". I did all my word processing needs on the Mac I had access too. When I got cash together to buy a box, I bought the one I new the inards of (the PC) and also the only one I could afford. I ended up developing for it. I thought the Mac was superior technically in every way and figured someday I'd have more money and jump over.
Turns out a lot of other hackers made the same choice and Apple was left in the dirt. This lockin you describe started back in 1985 and just deepens every year.
P.S. OS/2 was a hell of a lot better, once you got past the insane install. That is, if you got past the insane install. I personally think the install of OS/2 was one of the nails in it's coffin.
I used to fly around the country on business non-stop for months at a time. I got sick of the "heightened" security searches after TWA800. Fat lot of good those did, look where we are today.
So anyway, in New York I stopped in a store that sold plastic crap made in Taiwan. I bought a ton of it (you know, plastic apples, plastic toys, plastic nick-nacks) and even bought some expanding foam fruit and bunnies. Then I packed my brief case till it was completely overloaded and had to sit on it close it.
Then when the airport search came. They ask to see my carry on bag. I said "you don't want to see my carry on bag." They said, "Sir, if you don't hand me that bag, you're not getting on your plane." So I did. When opened it and plastic toys exploded out in all directions. I said, "Happy now, look at the mess you made." While the security guard was still in shock. I closed my briefcase and walked on through. The other guards just started laughing.
Yes, but the fact that they are required to document even "all future API's, etc." doesn't change the fact that they are defining the playing field. As long as they have that advantage, they can switch the field as quickly as others can adapt. Even though it's more costly for them, it's still a wonderful monopolizing advantage.
They won't compete on a level field as long as they have any control over the field. I certainly wouldn't in their position. They don't view the market as a sport, they view it as a battle.
Force MS to open up and document all APIs which they themselves use in any application
Force MS to open up and document all file formats
Force MS to open up and document all protocols
And where does this lead? Microsoft goes of and grudgingly does this. A round of competition starts. Microsoft then releases a new OS with a revised tool set and a new set of "standards." And they make any use of the old "standards" heavily penalized in the new OS. The industry cries FOUL and the whole thing ends up back in court.
I heard a historical account of one of the first anti-trust lawsuits in us courts. It was about some shoe company that had monopolized the industry. It took the courts almost 20 years to get around to breaking up the shoe monopoly, with plenty of shennagians like this along the way.
So Jambie gives a prediction: Court comes out with ruling, Microsoft complies and then subverts intentions of ruling and twists it to their advantage, thus ending them in court again. Repeat this cycle until the courts get miffed enough to take severe action.
Great I can't keep my lawnmower working more than half a season. I hate small gasoline motors. It's also wonderful how you can't get the smell off your hands when you spill some.
Since only hackers will copy music and under new proposed guidelines. Violation of the DCMA by circumventing the copy protection to make a backup copy, fair use is punishable by life imprisonment. Also the new proposed rules are retroactive, so being on that Napster user list could be used as evidence against you.
The Gimp is a wonderful tool and should be able to handle it. If it doesn't then I'm sure someone can come up with some script-fu to make it do it. Try the Gimp mailing list, http://www.gimp.org
I worked on a system that had a "hibernate" feature back in 1990. Every minute it would save the current state of the computer to disk to the "hibernate" file so that it could return to it's current state after a reboot. The code that ran on it was attrociously horrible. So it would get into a state that would cause a crash and reboot back to the last state it was in, ~30 seconds back on average. What happened next, well it rebooted again and again and again and again and again and again, add in-finitum. They would have to reinstall the software to get it to stop.
My first task at getting my hands on it was deleting all "hiberation" features and then rewriting the main system using a methodology. Worked much better, there were no reboots except during lightning strikes. And "hiberation" was completely unnecessary in a properly designed system. Turned out the "hiberation" feature was added because there were too many reboots and loss of computations.
So now Windoze has adopted this wonderful brain fart of logic. Screw your system and make it permanenent. You gotta love it, Bill told you so.
"... after passing the cavity inspection, you'll be issued fine high quality orange jumpsuits at preboarding. Make sure you specify the correct size to prevent boarding delays. If during the flight you'd like to make notes, felt-tipped markers and paper will be provided free of charge...."
"... The pilot will be hermetically sealed in a seperate forward compartment to ensure you safety...."
How about a class action lawsuit against the Patent Office for failing to protect the public interest in being too lax in approving patents? They have unduly burdened the court system and puts ideas in the hands of who can afford the biggest lawyers, hence failing the goal of the patent system in protecting the someone with a good idea.
Here's a story of lore from the local university...
There was trouble down the line, somewhere off in the rat's nest morass of ethernet wiring, one of the main lines was dropping packets like Clinton drops his pants. Tech services got the call and was right on the case.
After hours of scrambling around rat infested crawl spaces and poking around in basements, the problem was found. The line was cut cleanly in two and piled into coils on the floor. Apparently the packets that were getting through was solely by induction from the nice neat coils someone had left the wire in. There was no physical connection... yet eerily enough some packets still man to get through.
We control the horizontal.
We control the vertical.
No Weaseling, yeah right. Just go back and reread his answer to Number 9. He didn't answer the question, he just gave the MS standard XML lecture.
There's also plenty of examples of standards that work and are fully implemented, i.e. ftp, telnet, NFS, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. Microsoft extends and then RELIES on those extensions thus breaking all interoperability. Only in the face of consumer pressure to actually work with standards, like TCP/IP has Microsoft caved into demands.
Garp
The distortion introduced into any audio system is primarily the speakers. A good clean amp helps, but the speakers usually are an order of magnitude higher in distortion than the amp.
For the best sound, reduce the biggest source of distortion by getting the best speakers you can.
Speakers should be chosen based upon room size and positioned carefully for optimum sound.
I recommend Boston Acoustics for the bargain hunter and Klipsh for someone who demands the best.
For the amp, most on the market are the same (AB), unless you're a purist. For the purist get a Linear A amplifier.
Just what the subject says. Collect enough and practice your shooting skills all afternoon long. They really look much better than a clay pigeon when shot. The reflective surface just kinda shimmers on the the way down.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just waiting for a laptop I can power off my venting ass.
Xmas has it's origin the great Yule feast of the Norsemen and Roman Saturnalia. It didn't have anything to do with gift giving until the Victorians got ahold of it. It wasn't really until 1890 that Santa Claus got twisted into the tool of unbridled consumerism that he is today. The majority of current Xmas traditions are less than 100 years old.
What's wrong with all the giving? I like to give presents to people who need them or are particularly suited to them. So now once a year I'm supposed to go out and do it for everyone I know all at once. A near impossible feat to do.
This summer I was eating steak at my Uncle's house. He didn't have a decent steak knife in his house. I went out and bought him a set of steak knives that day. Xmas rolls around, and I don't know what he needs and I haven't seen anything that suits his character, but I'm coerced by a capitalist society to go and do the american thing and "buy" him something.
Point is I buy my friends and family things all through the year, when I see the need or find something particularly suited to them. Should I hoarde it till Xmas? Odds are my Uncle would have gone and bought some steak knifes before Xmas or he wouldn't have got to use the ones I got him for 6 months.
Also about half the stuff I get is worthless to me and of no value but the occupation of space. What's the point in that? Objects that don't work as advertised that people bought in haste to complete some ritual developed by industrial marketing.
Same for Xmas cards. If you don't have time to write me a letter, don't bother. In eastern Europe it's considered insulting to send a card that's just signed without a long letter. Let's people know how little you think of them. A bunch of cards with signatures is interesting decoration, but worthless to me in terms of contact. More fodder for the card industry.
I moved recently and inventoried everything I own. Many items I still hang onto as momentos of old friendships and times long gone. Almost none of those items with sentimental attachment came at Xmas.
It's fun as a kid to get a bunch of toys under a tree and I have nothing against this whole Santa Claus thing for a bit of play and fun. But as adults, this exhange before receipt is just another wake up call to the bogusness of this holiday tradition of "giving."
Xmas is about having a big feast with your family and recapping the year. You get to watch children get overstimulated by too much excitement and toys.
P.S. Xmas was considered so pagan that it didn't become a legal holiday in the U.S. until 1836. In the 1600's armies were sent around to pull down the pagan Xmas trees.
If linux was good enough for Bilbo it's good enough for me.
I noticed a similar thing. Then I killed all unnecessary daemons (sounds like a book title). Then I installed a startup script to use 'hdparm' to speed up disk access. Then I discovered Blackbox for a window manager. Now my Linux install runs circles around my Windows install.
UPS saved the day by going even further than the reference story. They delivered an empty box with tire tracks all over it. Now the original was in a plant-hardened enclosure. So UPS eventually found it. Rumor from the UPS representative on the phone that it caused problems on the airport tarmac was how it was discovered. Well the unit finally arrived at the customer destination, scratched, dented, crushed and not a single circuit board inside in one piece.
The shipping manager had insured it for the estimated value of that part of the contract. So our company got paid a handsome check and we got a major extension. Customer was happy, he didn't have to pay for a non-delivery and we all had an excuse for a non-working prototype. It was a win-win-win scenario.
After that we used UPS for vibration and drop testing of units. It was much cheaper than actually hiring a stress testing engineer.
I don't know, but I like the safety that my PalmOS has never crashed and is so intuitively easy to use that I have never looked at a manual for it. It just works.
I hope the market savvy enough to reward such things.
Since you guys liked my airport search solution. I worked for some time as an embedded browser developer. Microsoft's filtering of other browsers really irritated me, because it makes the concept of an embedded browser near unworkable and I was making trying to make a living off of embedded browsers.
So everytime I ran across such a web site I would send a letter to the web site adminstrator describing how locking customers out was bad for business. I would also describe how writing Javascript that had to test for the browser was a bad idea as well, because everytime a new browser would come along, the web page would have to be rewritten again. I included a list of all known browsers. Also a description of how using Microsoft products and methods insured incompatibily, and could they please use standards and not cater to giving in to Bill Gate's Monopoly.
Then I would also call up the company in question and try to get through to the marketing department and tell them the same diatribe. I would settle for the complaints department. Sometimes I would get my wife to send an email as well complaining.
I actually made progress in my compaign. I got two websites to switch (out of about twenty I've done this to). One of the one's that switched was a bank.
Now what would happen if everyone who got burned by this wrote in and complained in a similar manner. Enough irritate potential customers and you'd be surprised what changes will happen. Just one irritated customer was enough for 10% of the companies I encoutered to change.
Be vocal and express your displeasure to the company responsible for the website.
It was more than just "legacy" software. I was a newbie developer when the Macintosh was introduced. Apple wanted money to be a certified developer. I didn't have any. So I got my jollies off hacking on this crappy PC, it had easily obtained tools with no "certification board". I did all my word processing needs on the Mac I had access too. When I got cash together to buy a box, I bought the one I new the inards of (the PC) and also the only one I could afford. I ended up developing for it. I thought the Mac was superior technically in every way and figured someday I'd have more money and jump over.
Turns out a lot of other hackers made the same choice and Apple was left in the dirt. This lockin you describe started back in 1985 and just deepens every year.
P.S. OS/2 was a hell of a lot better, once you got past the insane install. That is, if you got past the insane install. I personally think the install of OS/2 was one of the nails in it's coffin.
I used to fly around the country on business non-stop for months at a time. I got sick of the "heightened" security searches after TWA800. Fat lot of good those did, look where we are today.
So anyway, in New York I stopped in a store that sold plastic crap made in Taiwan. I bought a ton of it (you know, plastic apples, plastic toys, plastic nick-nacks) and even bought some expanding foam fruit and bunnies. Then I packed my brief case till it was completely overloaded and had to sit on it close it.
Then when the airport search came. They ask to see my carry on bag. I said "you don't want to see my carry on bag." They said, "Sir, if you don't hand me that bag, you're not getting on your plane." So I did. When opened it and plastic toys exploded out in all directions. I said, "Happy now, look at the mess you made." While the security guard was still in shock. I closed my briefcase and walked on through. The other guards just started laughing.
If people wanted easy to use GUIs how come the Macintosh platform didn't tromp BillyWorld?
Yes, but the fact that they are required to document even "all future API's, etc." doesn't change the fact that they are defining the playing field. As long as they have that advantage, they can switch the field as quickly as others can adapt. Even though it's more costly for them, it's still a wonderful monopolizing advantage.
They won't compete on a level field as long as they have any control over the field. I certainly wouldn't in their position. They don't view the market as a sport, they view it as a battle.
And where does this lead? Microsoft goes of and grudgingly does this. A round of competition starts. Microsoft then releases a new OS with a revised tool set and a new set of "standards." And they make any use of the old "standards" heavily penalized in the new OS. The industry cries FOUL and the whole thing ends up back in court.
I heard a historical account of one of the first anti-trust lawsuits in us courts. It was about some shoe company that had monopolized the industry. It took the courts almost 20 years to get around to breaking up the shoe monopoly, with plenty of shennagians like this along the way.
So Jambie gives a prediction: Court comes out with ruling, Microsoft complies and then subverts intentions of ruling and twists it to their advantage, thus ending them in court again. Repeat this cycle until the courts get miffed enough to take severe action.
Great I can't keep my lawnmower working more than half a season. I hate small gasoline motors. It's also wonderful how you can't get the smell off your hands when you spill some.
Since only hackers will copy music and under new proposed guidelines. Violation of the DCMA by circumventing the copy protection to make a backup copy, fair use is punishable by life imprisonment. Also the new proposed rules are retroactive, so being on that Napster user list could be used as evidence against you.
Welcome to the fourth reich.
"Still, consumers have not warmed up to the idea of copy-protected CDs."
Hmmmm. I thought we were flaming this idea pretty heavy. Need to switch to Thermite.
And thus another round of Emacs Versus Vi begins.
>
The Gimp is a wonderful tool and should be able to handle it. If it doesn't then I'm sure someone can come up with some script-fu to make it do it. Try the Gimp mailing list, http://www.gimp.org
I worked on a system that had a "hibernate" feature back in 1990. Every minute it would save the current state of the computer to disk to the "hibernate" file so that it could return to it's current state after a reboot. The code that ran on it was attrociously horrible. So it would get into a state that would cause a crash and reboot back to the last state it was in, ~30 seconds back on average. What happened next, well it rebooted again and again and again and again and again and again, add in-finitum. They would have to reinstall the software to get it to stop.
My first task at getting my hands on it was deleting all "hiberation" features and then rewriting the main system using a methodology. Worked much better, there were no reboots except during lightning strikes. And "hiberation" was completely unnecessary in a properly designed system. Turned out the "hiberation" feature was added because there were too many reboots and loss of computations.
So now Windoze has adopted this wonderful brain fart of logic. Screw your system and make it permanenent. You gotta love it, Bill told you so.
From a brochure dropped out a worehole:
..."
..."
"... after passing the cavity inspection, you'll be issued fine high quality orange jumpsuits at preboarding. Make sure you specify the correct size to prevent boarding delays. If during the flight you'd like to make notes, felt-tipped markers and paper will be provided free of charge.
"... The pilot will be hermetically sealed in a seperate forward compartment to ensure you safety.
How about a class action lawsuit against the Patent Office for failing to protect the public interest in being too lax in approving patents?
They have unduly burdened the court system and puts ideas in the hands of who can afford the biggest lawyers, hence failing the goal of the patent system in protecting the someone with a good idea.
I think they said it best, Lock them away in the Fletcher Memorial and they could appear to themselves on closed circuit tv.
Here's a story of lore from the local university...
There was trouble down the line, somewhere off in the rat's nest morass of ethernet wiring, one of the main lines was dropping packets like Clinton drops his pants. Tech services got the call and was right on the case.
After hours of scrambling around rat infested crawl spaces and poking around in basements, the problem was found. The line was cut cleanly in two and piled into coils on the floor. Apparently the packets that were getting through was solely by induction from the nice neat coils someone had left the wire in. There was no physical connection... yet eerily enough some packets still man to get through.
We control the horizontal.
We control the vertical.
No Weaseling, yeah right. Just go back and reread his answer to Number 9. He didn't answer the question, he just gave the MS standard XML lecture. There's also plenty of examples of standards that work and are fully implemented, i.e. ftp, telnet, NFS, HTTP, TCP/IP, etc. Microsoft extends and then RELIES on those extensions thus breaking all interoperability. Only in the face of consumer pressure to actually work with standards, like TCP/IP has Microsoft caved into demands. Garp
The distortion introduced into any audio system is primarily the speakers. A good clean amp helps, but the speakers usually are an order of magnitude higher in distortion than the amp.
For the best sound, reduce the biggest source of distortion by getting the best speakers you can.
Speakers should be chosen based upon room size and positioned carefully for optimum sound.
I recommend Boston Acoustics for the bargain hunter and Klipsh for someone who demands the best.
For the amp, most on the market are the same (AB), unless you're a purist. For the purist get a Linear A amplifier.
Just what the subject says. Collect enough and practice your shooting skills all afternoon long. They really look much better than a clay pigeon when shot. The reflective surface just kinda shimmers on the the way down.