I'd like to see all of the musicians selling through their own private websites, instead of going through the thieving pirating recording industry, which forces them to sign over their copyrights, decides for them what to promote and what not to, promotes garbage music, overcharges, and pays the artists they pretend to protect about five cents for every fifteen dollar album they sell.
The recording industry should not make artists sign over their copyrights. If the music execs purport to protect the poor artists, then they should do business with these artists without requiring that they sign over anything.
The music execs should stop promoting all the garbage music that they promote. This is the real cause of declining music sales. If the music execs would promote quality music instead of this garbage, they would most likely see increased sales. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
The music execs should stop overcharging for CDs. This is probably the second cause of declining music sales. People simply don't want to pay $20 for an album, and one that contains 1 or 2 good songs and 8 filler tracks to take up space. If the music execs would lower music prices instead of raising them and then wondering why sales decline, they would most likely see increased sales. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
The music execs should pay the artists the larger portion of the pie when it comes to music revenue. If the sale of a fifteen dollar album currently earns the artists about two cents, then that is a very sad situation, and it means that the music execs are the ones screwing the artists over, not those downloading MP3 tracks. The music execs should pay roughly 95% of the profits to the artists, and keep the 5% as their fees. Not the other way around. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
In other words, the pirates are the music execs. But they use P2P users as their scapegoat, blaming them for a reduction in music sales, when the evidence is highly questionable at best, and is probably nonexistant.
This is something even the greatest of technophobes could understand and use with ease.
I don't know... It sounds a lot like the way things were when most "Joe Users" used MS-DOS and knew only about 5 DOS commands. There was no such thing as "installing" software. If you had a hard drive (in the latter years of DOS, I suppose), you'd stick the program disk in your floppy drive and copy the files into a directory on your hard drive. Getting rid of the application was as simple as a few delete commands.
So why do we have DLL hell and all the other problems with installation and removal of applications? Code reuse might be the primary reason. The idea was that making lots of copies of the same code is wasteful on the hard drive, and I think that even now, when the cheapest drives are zillions of gigs in capacity, there is still the issue of RAM: The OS knows, when you load the same shared code from different programs, that it should employ a copy-on-write page for that code. But when you load exact copies of the same code stored in different locations on your enormous hard drive, the OS has no idea, and therefore, the RAM is being wasted. Multiply 20k here, 200k there by the number of programs you have running simultaneously (I usually have about 80 processes running at any one time on my desktop box, many more on my various servers), and you increase your memory requirements. "So buy more RAM" might seem like the solution, and it works, but it costs money.
What do I think about this Zero Install idea? If they do what I think they do with NFS, it's very innovative. Great idea for n00bies. I'll have to look into it a lot more to see if it's right for more "active" users as well.
Well if it doesn't work, I'll buy the gyroscopic equipment and use it to balance a cup of coffee inside my car, to avoid spills.
Did I mention that my car is a Maybach 62, which costs $380,000? With an expensive car like that, you want to make sure the upholstery doesn't get dirty.
Others have stated that the bogusness of nearly all of/.'s content today may harm the reputation of some people. BSDs on Gameboy? PDTP? Gateway shutting down all stores? Which of these is/are true, if any at all?
But what concerns me even more is this: Some people do not understand the/. community, and might not understand that much of the content here is bogus today. Therefore, there is the possibility of bogus information being propogated as correct information, and that has the potential to make a lot of people look bad.
The one about UML Dating Patterns or whatever was good. That could have been a good April Fool's joke. In fact, I think/. could have been more sophisticated by preparing, over the year since last April Fool's, a really killer story, something that will totally blow peoples' minds... but only ONE story. Make it simple enough that it seems legitimate, but just humorous enough that someone might question their sanity. Now, most of the stories are true, one of them is false (or partly based on truth)... Which one is it? This might drive people into reading the linked sites, in an effort to figure out if they're legitimate or not, and in the process, they might learn about some products, like PDTP, that could be useful in the future. April Fools could, therefore, have constructive results, in addition to being funny.
Or even funnier... make a story that looks TOTALLY BOGUS, but turns out to be 100% true.
But overdoing it the way/. did today was just ridiculous. I even got a little too excited this morning and inserted a lot of explitives in my garbage posts under the garbage stories... But after a few minutes, it got old and I regretted it.
I have been involved in many UI projects, and I can tell you that I *hate* working in that branch of software development.
The UI code is usually very long, cumbersome, and complex. In most of the projects that I've been a part of, most of the software's bugs were in the UI section. The software had to process many important things, but the STUPID UI kept it from doing its job.
But even worse is this: "Ease of use" really depends on what the user wants to do with the system. The problem is making a UI that is easy to use, but not so "easy" to use that it is demeaning to the user. Microsoft UIs are perfect examples of what I mean. Their software is set up for babies to use, with talking paperclips and whatnot, because it has to be "easy" to use. And in a constant effort to improve ease of use, they may make it easier for 1st time novice users, while making things longer, more cumbersome, and hence more difficult to use for normal users.
So how do you know if something is easy to use? When the customer uses it and you get feedback? Well, the problem is that 101% of the time, the customer thinks he knows what he wants, but he doesn't know what he wants. And herein lies the problem. You actually need experts in the field, not just those who are experts in modeling and programming the system, but also those who are experts in the psychology behind the system. In other words, the history of this type of system, why things were developed the way they were in this field, how users use the device, what goes through the user's head--what he expects to be the logical way to operate the device, rather than what actually is the logical way. And then you run into the problem that to each person, the logical way might be different, so applications end up having 100 different ways to do the same thing. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU NEED TO FIGURE OUT FOR THE USER WHAT HE WANTS.
But look at a car. If you know how to drive, you can operate any car in the world. Look at machinery, like lathes. If you are a machinist, chances are that you'll quickly figure out how to operate any lathe. If you've ever used a touchtone telephone, you'll figure out how to operate just about any well designed cellular phone within two minutes. Why is that? Because they follow certain principles? That may be part of it. The bigger part is that the designers of these systems understand not just what they do or how they operate; they understand the psychology behind these systems.
Everybody today is expected to know how to operate a computer. But when there are classes (expensive classes) on how to operate Microsoft Word, that's a big, big, big problem, and it is very deep. Deeper than any words I can formulate can explain. No talking paperclip, no amount of eye candy, no pretty (pretty ugly) menus that become a floating window when you accidently click the mouse in the wrong way, no idiotic icons that nobody can understand, will ever solve the problem. And the BIGGEST problem is this: Since computer applications can NEVER become like a car, they can never operate exactly the same way so that once you know one, you know them all. In other words, all cars on Earth fulfill the same purpose--to get you from point A to point B. But each computer program is designed to fulfill a different purpose, and sometimes, the purposes of two applications can be so different that their UIs will not have ANY similarity whatsoever. So how do you make it intuitive? How do you prevent it from becoming stupid but still difficult to use? And what if certain things cannot, by their nature, become "easy"?
Yes, UIs are extremely difficult to get right. Even Apple's UI, which I strongly feel is the best in the world right now, isn't quite right yet. I believe that with time, this situation will change. Obviously, user interfaces will continue to evolve. But more importantly, as more people are exposed to computers, they will feel more comfortable to experiment and learn. I remember in high school (back in the '9
On a related note, NetBSD now runs on those Casio watches that were popular in the mid 80's. And on another related note, Theo said he's going to re-join the NetBSD project, because now that OpenBSD is 100% secure, with only one remote hole in the default install in like 70 years, he needs to do the same for NetBSD. Yeah, and did I forget to mention... BSD is dying.
And all the above BS is coming from a dude who swears by FreeBSD and uses it on 34 computers to do everything from networking servers to desktops running X to a 6-node compile farm with ccache, distcc, and unsermake... But BSD is definitely dying.
Upon receipt of this news, Bill Gates ordered every lobbyist at Microsoft to stop whatever they're doing and lobby the government for a tax on GPL software in the U.S. as well.
IBM, Dell, Gateway, and HP recently had meetings about including explosives inside computers, along with a built-in wireless communication device that acts like the pagers that gangsters had in the early 90's did, except that instead of beeping and displaying the phone number of someone who called you, it will cause the explosives to go off, destroying the computer.
The idea is to prevent piracy of valuable intellectual property. Under U.S. law, all works are copyrighted by their creator upon creation, unless signed over to someone else through employment or some other agreement. Because of this, if you copy a file that YOU created from one directory to another in YOUR computer, it will inform the FBI and trigger the explosives... after all, you have just made a COPY of a COPYRIGHTED work.
Fuck the RIAA. Fuck the MPAA. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck SCO. Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!!!
ALL LIBERALS, LEFTISTS, AND/OR DEMOCRATS SHOULD BE SHOT!
Instead of wasting your time to develop open source defense (or offense) projects, you and all your liberal friends should lobby the government of your nation to open source all of its software, hardware, mechanical designs, and any other information that is needed to recreate these designs (or to find their weaknesses prior to an attack), and to release all of that information in open-standards file formats on the Internet for anybody to use and enjoy.
Furthermore, the government should be lobbied to tax away all the money of the rich business owners and the rich property owners and give that money to a newly organization called the Warfare Freedom Foundation. The WFF would essentially provide money to hostile states so they could produce weapons of equal or higher capabilities to those of your own country.
Finally, you should lobby your government to shut down all defense projects it has, so that your country will be a sitting duck when the aforementioned hostile nations show up with tanks, missiles, planes, aircraft carriers, and other weapons, to destroy your country for no reason at all, just because they felt like it, because your country was nicer than theirs and therefore they felt oppressed (instead of working to improve their country).
Yes, I think this is a wonderful idea.
And no, I don't think there are any legal issues whatsoever involved in doing this, either.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, you should go directly to the looney bin, if you even think this is a good idea.
Oh yeah, and yes, I knew all along that this was April Fools. SUCKER!!!
There is another program called SCO/Lint. It checks your entire network for any installations of any non-Microsoft operating system, and, if found, your bank account is debited $1399 for each installation. The best part? This program is run by a cron job every hour, which does not check if you've already paid for the computers it finds. So every hour, your bank account is charged these outrageous fees.
Finally, new government legislation makes it a federal felony, punishable by a minimum of 50 years in prison, to purchase, operate, sell, or traffic in any computer systems which do not utilize this technology, and which do not cause hourly payments of $1399 per Linux installation to SCO.
Oh yeah, and more legislation gives SCO higher-than-police authority to show up at your home or business for any reason or for no reason at all, break down the door without warning for any reason or for no reason at all, beat up any or all persons on the premises for any reason or for no reason at all, seize any persons or property they wish to seize for any reason or for no reason at all, and takes away any and all possible recourses that you might have had under the old evil capitalist system. Welcome to Soviet America. Darl McBride is your new president.
The artist formerly known as prince turned his legal name into a symbol. That's why they just call him "the artist" nowadays. It's like he doesn't have a name. So I guess that would make it cool to give your kid a '1337 h4x0r 5p33k name.
In fact, I thought of changing my legal name to r1c3_bu|2n3rz_suc|< (the < is supposed to be literally written out, NOT to appear as a less-than symbol).
The only thing I haven't figured out yet is where the underscores go when placing my last name first, would it read: _suc|<, r1c3_ b, or would it read suc|<, r1c3 _b_, or what? There ain't no capitals either.
And, no, this is NOT April Fools. This is extremely serious. I am GOING to do this.
And my first child will be named 1337. And my second child will be named h4x0rz. So when I yell "1337 h4x0rz!" they'll come running from their computers.
Want free food? (Yes, and I know this is an April Fools bullshit story, but I couldn't resist.) If there's a store called Costco in your area, get a membership there (like, 100 bucks a year) and go there on Sunday. They hand out free samples of all kinds of stuff. You can walk around for a few hours and basically get a full meal for free. If you consider 100 bucks a year free. But suppose you go there every weekend, that's like 100/50 or 100/52 or so, which makes it like 2 bucks for a meal, which isn't that bad of a deal and shit.
Interesting. I thought of a very similar idea about 7 years ago, when I was writing a text editor to fulfill specific purposes. I asked myself why all the programs out there with an "undo" feature are only able to go "backwards" (and those with a "redo" feature can only go "backwards" and "forwards").
Suppose you've written something. Then, you undid the last sentence or two. You wrote something else. By doing so, you've essentially deleted the "redo" information of the sentences you originally undid. Therefore, if you don't remember what you had written the first time, there is no way to "undo" this "branch" and go back to the other "branch" unless you had originally planned to do so and saved the file, or copied the original text into a buffer, or something along those lines.
I imagined that the undo/redo information would have to be structured somewhat as a tree, or hierarchy, of edits, much like CVS is structured with multiple branches and the ability to fork, merge, etc. To solve all the problems that I foresaw, the model became pretty darn complicated (about as complicated as re-implementing all of CVS inside of the undo/redo feature, plus supplying an interactive user interface for this mess), so I never implemented it.
I suppose that at some later point, when I began browsing the web, I thought that something similar should exist for browsers. Every time you go "back" and go on a different path, you basically create a branch. But eventually, I came to the conclusion that having just the simple "back" and "forward" feature has some advantages over a branch-enabled navigation feature. For one, it is much easier for non-tech-savvy users to understand (if they even know the feature exists--many people are really only aware of the "back" button). And furthermore, it allows you to cover up your tracks, to some extent. Say, you're at a public library, and you just used their web browser to find something. And suppose you can't delete the internet cache because of security settings on that machine. So you go "back" a few times, type in a new web address, and you've essentially erased your tracks, as far as any patron without administrator access will ever know. (I assume that if you can't erase the cache, another non-admin patron can't read it.)
I would still love to have this feature in my web browsers (and text editors), as I like to have lots of windows open all over the screen, and I juggle from one to another, and routinely go back and forth many times. With the ability to go back and open another "branch" in another window with a few keys, I think I could be a lot happier with my web browser.
In other words, if a slick interactive way to do this kind of stuff can be implemented, then I see at least two applications (browsers and undo) that would greatly benefit from such a thing.
You want "bad power" do ye? Back in high school, a few of my friends found it amusing to short the power sockets by trying to insert pieces of wire into them. I think the goal of their stupid game was to short the outlet without getting zapped.
Later, someone came up with the ingenius idea of folding a foil gum wrapper into the shape of a power plug, and using a pencil to push it into the socket in a photography class darkroom. The damn thing shorted, ignited, burned up, and left a big black spot all over the power outlet and the wall.
When I heard the story (and later saw the damaged outlet and wall), I thought it might be funny to cut the plug end off an old extension cord, leaving the cord about 2 inches long, soldering the wires together on the end, covering them with electrical tape (to prevent getting zapped) and simply plugging it into the wall. In case you're wondering, I never did that, because it would be incredibly stupid and would have gotten me kicked out of school, if not killed. Not to mention it would be a waste of a perfectly good extension chord. But I have a feeling that if I had produced such a device, my stupid friends would have been eager to try it out. Hey, their minds were reaching out for knowledge, like, "duh, what happens if I short the power outlet?" Idiots.
Someone I know said that anything is possible; that it's possible that some geek at MIT will invent a transporter like in Star Trek, and beam things around. But until he reads it on one of his "nerd websites" (I suppose he meant/.), he won't believe it.
Still, I think all of this has already been invented by the government, so they can get into any building anywhere, but they are keeping it an extreme secret because if the other world governments knew this, it would be really, really, really bad.
Probably (since I'm on the subject), the software for this transporter will be licensed under the GPL, and will be callable with a single function, kind of like this:
transport(&Matter, Location);
Yeah. All you gotta do is tell it what matter, and to where. (The location is a GPS coordinate.) Yes. I think this will work really good.
I was walking down the street in Autlan de Navarro the other day, wearing my fashionable white headphones, when a one of the locals came up and asked me, "Llevas un iPod?" (which means, "Are you carrying an iPod?") I said, "Si senor," (which means, "Yes, sir") and he proceeded to pull out a sawed off 12 gauge shotgun, and demanded that I hand over the iPod. I did, and he ran the other way.
Ok, I'm just kidding... I was visiting my aunt over there, and even if I had an iPod, they probably wouldn't know what it is down in Autlan de Navarro. (And they don't saw off perfectly good shotguns either.)
This story arrived with perfect timing, as I just finished reading the one about "Build From Source vs. Packages?", and there was some discussion about distcc and Gentoo there. It got me kind of interested, so I thought I'd look into it a bit more, and then this story arrived!
Hmmm... Ok, this makes perfect sense. Hardware, a physical item, of which each unit must be manufactured with physical materials, which must be mined, purchased, etc., will be free. But software, which must only be produced once and can then be copied at absolutely zero cost, is going to cost money.
Isn't this a little bit, uh, backwards?
I think Billy should get into the hardware business and leave us the fsck alone. Look at it this way: If he completely abandons the software business, then free and commercial software will appear to fill whatever gaps, if there be any, that his software currently fills. But all the software in the world, no matter how free, and no matter how easy to copy, is not worth Jack Q. Schitt if it doesn't have hardware to run on.
Therein lies the secret to Billy's failure as a a chief architect or whatever his title is. He should have realized that instead of fighting Linux, OOo, and whatever else he's spending billions on these days, he could put his people to work creating the next generation hardware, completely abandon software, and profit from the fact that nobody will "pirate" his PHYSICAL product, and instead will buy it to run the software they get for free!!!
It's an INGENIUS form of Microsoft Tax, and people won't even mind paying it because they'll receive a tangible product for the money. Not some copy that didn't cost Microsoft two pieces of shit of some operating system that doesn't work.
One couple, on finding their son who'd been missing for two days, '...was astonished that deputies failed to call them when their son was arrested -- though contact and medical information was in the young man's wallet -- yet managed to inform people who wanted his business.'"
I'd bet he politely asked to place a phone call, but the officer responded, "What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?" The rest, as they say, is history.
If you're a novice, I'd say use ports and packages. If you're pretty experienced, or a programmer, I'd say build from source.
I tend to build all my important stuff from source. In other words, server daemons and things that I really want control over. But when I feel like installing pretty much any GUI software on a desktop box, I tend to use packages. I would do it all from source, but the sources for these types of software are huge and, as I see it, hardly manageable. Also, it tends to take forever to compile them, as each source files relies on about 50,000,000 others in GUI applications. Finally, desktop boxes aren't so important to me that I'd need any serious degree of control over the installed software that ports or packages don't provide.
However, when it comes to anything non-GUI, I strongly prefer to build it for the specific application from sources. I like the ability to apply security (and other) patches directly to the source, so that I am able to stay as far ahead of '1337 h4x0rz as I can. There are also many fine patches out there to add various functionality to various software, and I don't see how installing from packages allows you to take advantage of those things (unless there is a version of the package that includes certain patches). So there's my two cents.
I can't stand pop ups, pop unders, and other forms of invasive garbage. Also, why would Bush want to do this? I thought the patent on this kind of campaign technology was owned by Al Gore, who happens to have invented the Internet.
Just kidding... I'm voting Bush in the next election.
One valid reason might be if you speak 15 non-English languages. (Now I feel like that C compiler that, upon certain syntax errors, would output snippets of the ANSI standard, followed by, "I know you don't care. I just want to annoy you.")
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The recording industry should not make artists sign over their copyrights. If the music execs purport to protect the poor artists, then they should do business with these artists without requiring that they sign over anything.
The music execs should stop promoting all the garbage music that they promote. This is the real cause of declining music sales. If the music execs would promote quality music instead of this garbage, they would most likely see increased sales. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
The music execs should stop overcharging for CDs. This is probably the second cause of declining music sales. People simply don't want to pay $20 for an album, and one that contains 1 or 2 good songs and 8 filler tracks to take up space. If the music execs would lower music prices instead of raising them and then wondering why sales decline, they would most likely see increased sales. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
The music execs should pay the artists the larger portion of the pie when it comes to music revenue. If the sale of a fifteen dollar album currently earns the artists about two cents, then that is a very sad situation, and it means that the music execs are the ones screwing the artists over, not those downloading MP3 tracks. The music execs should pay roughly 95% of the profits to the artists, and keep the 5% as their fees. Not the other way around. But instead of doing business wisely and increasing profits through smart management and marketing, they prefer to litigate.
In other words, the pirates are the music execs. But they use P2P users as their scapegoat, blaming them for a reduction in music sales, when the evidence is highly questionable at best, and is probably nonexistant.
MUSIC EXECS: *Y*O*U* ARE THE PIRATES!
This sounds like a question from some 5th grade social studies book... Brings back nightmares from those days. Please don't write like this again.
I don't know... It sounds a lot like the way things were when most "Joe Users" used MS-DOS and knew only about 5 DOS commands. There was no such thing as "installing" software. If you had a hard drive (in the latter years of DOS, I suppose), you'd stick the program disk in your floppy drive and copy the files into a directory on your hard drive. Getting rid of the application was as simple as a few delete commands.
So why do we have DLL hell and all the other problems with installation and removal of applications? Code reuse might be the primary reason. The idea was that making lots of copies of the same code is wasteful on the hard drive, and I think that even now, when the cheapest drives are zillions of gigs in capacity, there is still the issue of RAM: The OS knows, when you load the same shared code from different programs, that it should employ a copy-on-write page for that code. But when you load exact copies of the same code stored in different locations on your enormous hard drive, the OS has no idea, and therefore, the RAM is being wasted. Multiply 20k here, 200k there by the number of programs you have running simultaneously (I usually have about 80 processes running at any one time on my desktop box, many more on my various servers), and you increase your memory requirements. "So buy more RAM" might seem like the solution, and it works, but it costs money.
What do I think about this Zero Install idea? If they do what I think they do with NFS, it's very innovative. Great idea for n00bies. I'll have to look into it a lot more to see if it's right for more "active" users as well.
Did I mention that my car is a Maybach 62, which costs $380,000? With an expensive car like that, you want to make sure the upholstery doesn't get dirty.
Others have stated that the bogusness of nearly all of /.'s content today may harm the reputation of some people. BSDs on Gameboy? PDTP? Gateway shutting down all stores? Which of these is/are true, if any at all?
But what concerns me even more is this: Some people do not understand the /. community, and might not understand that much of the content here is bogus today. Therefore, there is the possibility of bogus information being propogated as correct information, and that has the potential to make a lot of people look bad.
The one about UML Dating Patterns or whatever was good. That could have been a good April Fool's joke. In fact, I think /. could have been more sophisticated by preparing, over the year since last April Fool's, a really killer story, something that will totally blow peoples' minds... but only ONE story. Make it simple enough that it seems legitimate, but just humorous enough that someone might question their sanity. Now, most of the stories are true, one of them is false (or partly based on truth)... Which one is it? This might drive people into reading the linked sites, in an effort to figure out if they're legitimate or not, and in the process, they might learn about some products, like PDTP, that could be useful in the future. April Fools could, therefore, have constructive results, in addition to being funny.
Or even funnier... make a story that looks TOTALLY BOGUS, but turns out to be 100% true.
But overdoing it the way /. did today was just ridiculous. I even got a little too excited this morning and inserted a lot of explitives in my garbage posts under the garbage stories... But after a few minutes, it got old and I regretted it.
The UI code is usually very long, cumbersome, and complex. In most of the projects that I've been a part of, most of the software's bugs were in the UI section. The software had to process many important things, but the STUPID UI kept it from doing its job.
But even worse is this: "Ease of use" really depends on what the user wants to do with the system. The problem is making a UI that is easy to use, but not so "easy" to use that it is demeaning to the user. Microsoft UIs are perfect examples of what I mean. Their software is set up for babies to use, with talking paperclips and whatnot, because it has to be "easy" to use. And in a constant effort to improve ease of use, they may make it easier for 1st time novice users, while making things longer, more cumbersome, and hence more difficult to use for normal users.
So how do you know if something is easy to use? When the customer uses it and you get feedback? Well, the problem is that 101% of the time, the customer thinks he knows what he wants, but he doesn't know what he wants. And herein lies the problem. You actually need experts in the field, not just those who are experts in modeling and programming the system, but also those who are experts in the psychology behind the system. In other words, the history of this type of system, why things were developed the way they were in this field, how users use the device, what goes through the user's head--what he expects to be the logical way to operate the device, rather than what actually is the logical way. And then you run into the problem that to each person, the logical way might be different, so applications end up having 100 different ways to do the same thing. IN OTHER WORDS, YOU NEED TO FIGURE OUT FOR THE USER WHAT HE WANTS.
But look at a car. If you know how to drive, you can operate any car in the world. Look at machinery, like lathes. If you are a machinist, chances are that you'll quickly figure out how to operate any lathe. If you've ever used a touchtone telephone, you'll figure out how to operate just about any well designed cellular phone within two minutes. Why is that? Because they follow certain principles? That may be part of it. The bigger part is that the designers of these systems understand not just what they do or how they operate; they understand the psychology behind these systems.
Everybody today is expected to know how to operate a computer. But when there are classes (expensive classes) on how to operate Microsoft Word, that's a big, big, big problem, and it is very deep. Deeper than any words I can formulate can explain. No talking paperclip, no amount of eye candy, no pretty (pretty ugly) menus that become a floating window when you accidently click the mouse in the wrong way, no idiotic icons that nobody can understand, will ever solve the problem. And the BIGGEST problem is this: Since computer applications can NEVER become like a car, they can never operate exactly the same way so that once you know one, you know them all. In other words, all cars on Earth fulfill the same purpose--to get you from point A to point B. But each computer program is designed to fulfill a different purpose, and sometimes, the purposes of two applications can be so different that their UIs will not have ANY similarity whatsoever. So how do you make it intuitive? How do you prevent it from becoming stupid but still difficult to use? And what if certain things cannot, by their nature, become "easy"?
Yes, UIs are extremely difficult to get right. Even Apple's UI, which I strongly feel is the best in the world right now, isn't quite right yet. I believe that with time, this situation will change. Obviously, user interfaces will continue to evolve. But more importantly, as more people are exposed to computers, they will feel more comfortable to experiment and learn. I remember in high school (back in the '9
And all the above BS is coming from a dude who swears by FreeBSD and uses it on 34 computers to do everything from networking servers to desktops running X to a 6-node compile farm with ccache, distcc, and unsermake... But BSD is definitely dying.
Upon receipt of this news, Bill Gates ordered every lobbyist at Microsoft to stop whatever they're doing and lobby the government for a tax on GPL software in the U.S. as well.
The idea is to prevent piracy of valuable intellectual property. Under U.S. law, all works are copyrighted by their creator upon creation, unless signed over to someone else through employment or some other agreement. Because of this, if you copy a file that YOU created from one directory to another in YOUR computer, it will inform the FBI and trigger the explosives... after all, you have just made a COPY of a COPYRIGHTED work.
Fuck the RIAA. Fuck the MPAA. Fuck Microsoft. Fuck SCO. Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!!!
Instead of wasting your time to develop open source defense (or offense) projects, you and all your liberal friends should lobby the government of your nation to open source all of its software, hardware, mechanical designs, and any other information that is needed to recreate these designs (or to find their weaknesses prior to an attack), and to release all of that information in open-standards file formats on the Internet for anybody to use and enjoy.
Furthermore, the government should be lobbied to tax away all the money of the rich business owners and the rich property owners and give that money to a newly organization called the Warfare Freedom Foundation. The WFF would essentially provide money to hostile states so they could produce weapons of equal or higher capabilities to those of your own country.
Finally, you should lobby your government to shut down all defense projects it has, so that your country will be a sitting duck when the aforementioned hostile nations show up with tanks, missiles, planes, aircraft carriers, and other weapons, to destroy your country for no reason at all, just because they felt like it, because your country was nicer than theirs and therefore they felt oppressed (instead of working to improve their country).
Yes, I think this is a wonderful idea.
And no, I don't think there are any legal issues whatsoever involved in doing this, either.
Oh yeah, and did I mention, you should go directly to the looney bin, if you even think this is a good idea.
Oh yeah, and yes, I knew all along that this was April Fools. SUCKER!!!
Finally, new government legislation makes it a federal felony, punishable by a minimum of 50 years in prison, to purchase, operate, sell, or traffic in any computer systems which do not utilize this technology, and which do not cause hourly payments of $1399 per Linux installation to SCO.
Oh yeah, and more legislation gives SCO higher-than-police authority to show up at your home or business for any reason or for no reason at all, break down the door without warning for any reason or for no reason at all, beat up any or all persons on the premises for any reason or for no reason at all, seize any persons or property they wish to seize for any reason or for no reason at all, and takes away any and all possible recourses that you might have had under the old evil capitalist system. Welcome to Soviet America. Darl McBride is your new president.
In my opinion, Darl's haircut is kind of ugly.
In fact, I thought of changing my legal name to r1c3_bu|2n3rz_suc|< (the < is supposed to be literally written out, NOT to appear as a less-than symbol).
The only thing I haven't figured out yet is where the underscores go when placing my last name first, would it read: _suc|<, r1c3_ b, or would it read suc|<, r1c3 _b_, or what? There ain't no capitals either.
And, no, this is NOT April Fools. This is extremely serious. I am GOING to do this.
And my first child will be named 1337. And my second child will be named h4x0rz. So when I yell "1337 h4x0rz!" they'll come running from their computers.
Want free food? (Yes, and I know this is an April Fools bullshit story, but I couldn't resist.) If there's a store called Costco in your area, get a membership there (like, 100 bucks a year) and go there on Sunday. They hand out free samples of all kinds of stuff. You can walk around for a few hours and basically get a full meal for free. If you consider 100 bucks a year free. But suppose you go there every weekend, that's like 100/50 or 100/52 or so, which makes it like 2 bucks for a meal, which isn't that bad of a deal and shit.
Suppose you've written something. Then, you undid the last sentence or two. You wrote something else. By doing so, you've essentially deleted the "redo" information of the sentences you originally undid. Therefore, if you don't remember what you had written the first time, there is no way to "undo" this "branch" and go back to the other "branch" unless you had originally planned to do so and saved the file, or copied the original text into a buffer, or something along those lines.
I imagined that the undo/redo information would have to be structured somewhat as a tree, or hierarchy, of edits, much like CVS is structured with multiple branches and the ability to fork, merge, etc. To solve all the problems that I foresaw, the model became pretty darn complicated (about as complicated as re-implementing all of CVS inside of the undo/redo feature, plus supplying an interactive user interface for this mess), so I never implemented it.
I suppose that at some later point, when I began browsing the web, I thought that something similar should exist for browsers. Every time you go "back" and go on a different path, you basically create a branch. But eventually, I came to the conclusion that having just the simple "back" and "forward" feature has some advantages over a branch-enabled navigation feature. For one, it is much easier for non-tech-savvy users to understand (if they even know the feature exists--many people are really only aware of the "back" button). And furthermore, it allows you to cover up your tracks, to some extent. Say, you're at a public library, and you just used their web browser to find something. And suppose you can't delete the internet cache because of security settings on that machine. So you go "back" a few times, type in a new web address, and you've essentially erased your tracks, as far as any patron without administrator access will ever know. (I assume that if you can't erase the cache, another non-admin patron can't read it.)
I would still love to have this feature in my web browsers (and text editors), as I like to have lots of windows open all over the screen, and I juggle from one to another, and routinely go back and forth many times. With the ability to go back and open another "branch" in another window with a few keys, I think I could be a lot happier with my web browser.
In other words, if a slick interactive way to do this kind of stuff can be implemented, then I see at least two applications (browsers and undo) that would greatly benefit from such a thing.
Linux iz the suxx0rz becau5e 0Oo doesn't run in Aqua mode in Mac OS X!!!!!!11111111111
Later, someone came up with the ingenius idea of folding a foil gum wrapper into the shape of a power plug, and using a pencil to push it into the socket in a photography class darkroom. The damn thing shorted, ignited, burned up, and left a big black spot all over the power outlet and the wall.
When I heard the story (and later saw the damaged outlet and wall), I thought it might be funny to cut the plug end off an old extension cord, leaving the cord about 2 inches long, soldering the wires together on the end, covering them with electrical tape (to prevent getting zapped) and simply plugging it into the wall. In case you're wondering, I never did that, because it would be incredibly stupid and would have gotten me kicked out of school, if not killed. Not to mention it would be a waste of a perfectly good extension chord. But I have a feeling that if I had produced such a device, my stupid friends would have been eager to try it out. Hey, their minds were reaching out for knowledge, like, "duh, what happens if I short the power outlet?" Idiots.
Still, I think all of this has already been invented by the government, so they can get into any building anywhere, but they are keeping it an extreme secret because if the other world governments knew this, it would be really, really, really bad.
Probably (since I'm on the subject), the software for this transporter will be licensed under the GPL, and will be callable with a single function, kind of like this:
Yeah. All you gotta do is tell it what matter, and to where. (The location is a GPS coordinate.) Yes. I think this will work really good.Ok, I'm just kidding... I was visiting my aunt over there, and even if I had an iPod, they probably wouldn't know what it is down in Autlan de Navarro. (And they don't saw off perfectly good shotguns either.)
Hell yeah!
Isn't this a little bit, uh, backwards?
I think Billy should get into the hardware business and leave us the fsck alone. Look at it this way: If he completely abandons the software business, then free and commercial software will appear to fill whatever gaps, if there be any, that his software currently fills. But all the software in the world, no matter how free, and no matter how easy to copy, is not worth Jack Q. Schitt if it doesn't have hardware to run on.
Therein lies the secret to Billy's failure as a a chief architect or whatever his title is. He should have realized that instead of fighting Linux, OOo, and whatever else he's spending billions on these days, he could put his people to work creating the next generation hardware, completely abandon software, and profit from the fact that nobody will "pirate" his PHYSICAL product, and instead will buy it to run the software they get for free!!!
It's an INGENIUS form of Microsoft Tax, and people won't even mind paying it because they'll receive a tangible product for the money. Not some copy that didn't cost Microsoft two pieces of shit of some operating system that doesn't work.
I'd bet he politely asked to place a phone call, but the officer responded, "What good is a phone call if you're unable to speak?" The rest, as they say, is history.
I tend to build all my important stuff from source. In other words, server daemons and things that I really want control over. But when I feel like installing pretty much any GUI software on a desktop box, I tend to use packages. I would do it all from source, but the sources for these types of software are huge and, as I see it, hardly manageable. Also, it tends to take forever to compile them, as each source files relies on about 50,000,000 others in GUI applications. Finally, desktop boxes aren't so important to me that I'd need any serious degree of control over the installed software that ports or packages don't provide.
However, when it comes to anything non-GUI, I strongly prefer to build it for the specific application from sources. I like the ability to apply security (and other) patches directly to the source, so that I am able to stay as far ahead of '1337 h4x0rz as I can. There are also many fine patches out there to add various functionality to various software, and I don't see how installing from packages allows you to take advantage of those things (unless there is a version of the package that includes certain patches). So there's my two cents.
Just kidding... I'm voting Bush in the next election.
One valid reason might be if you speak 15 non-English languages. (Now I feel like that C compiler that, upon certain syntax errors, would output snippets of the ANSI standard, followed by, "I know you don't care. I just want to annoy you.")
I can't wait until the price comes down to $49.95, and then I'll buy 100 of them and make a wonderful Linux cluster out of it.