Just for the record, RSI != carpal tunnel syndrome
I have occasional problems with RSI in my hands and wrists, but I do not have the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. I found squeezing on one of those squeezie balls you can pick up at the sports store helps, as does varying the position of my hands (and using different pointing devices), and especially, not playing games too long at any time. In my experience, that's the worst cause of problems for me.
Still even though my hands work fine, I'd love to check out the voice recognition software. I can think of times where that could be very useful.
Why does the entire world have to look like a scripting language from an OS designed four decades ago?
So instead the whole world looks like stupid design decisions from three decades ago...
Still Nonad, or whatever they are going to call it sounds interesting, but I will need someone to explain to me why I should care... and Microsoft is almost never capable of that.
Which is why we need to tell those 10 people to go to Hell and build some damn power plants!
Really, there is a small but significant subset of environmentalists that literally wouldn't be happy until humans are extinct. We need to ignore those people and try to inject some common sense into our environmental discussions.
Inability to compromise at all is what defines a zealot.
There's a big difference. Wine is being reverse engineered. Cringely is asserting that through the cross-licensing deal between MS and Apple that Apple could have had access to Win32.
Wine is an incredible acheivement, but compared to a real implementation of Win32 based on having access to the source, it would be a joke. You would get near-100% compatibility right out of the box and not the hit-and-miss level of compatibility that Wine has. You wouldn't need things like CrossOver Office. You wouldn't need the sheer amount of effort it takes to get more than a few apps to actually run in Wine, assuming they can run at all.
And this implementation would presumably have the full support of Apple, who unlike Microsoft, actually seem to be making real progress in evolving their OS.
I have to imagine that porting Win32 to run on top of Mach would be an order of magnitude easier than writing one from scratch. Windows NT originally had several layers that could run on top of it, Win32 was one obviously, there was an OS/2 layer, and a POSIX layer, neither of which exist any more, AFAIK.
Fortunatly (sic), someone driving a car has to pay attention fairly routinely just to stay in the lane and on the road, so 'awake == aware' (generally) in that situation.
Re:Mr. Thurrott forgives Microsoft
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the biggest problem with Vista is that it doesn't really give us anything new. Just mild improvements (or not based on your comment) to what's there now. From what I've read, it sounds like Windows NT 5.3... some performance improvements (much needed, but will they be overshadowed by the inevitable additional bloat?)... lots of eye candy (wild monkeys must have designed much of XP's look... I hope Vista isn't so hideous)... and improved security (something we've been promised, and were owed, for many years).
I'm sorry. I don't see any compelling reason (or hardly any reason at all) to move from Windows 2000 or (for those couple of laptops of mine that have it) XP.
Depends on which President you ask and when. Clinton was handing 'em out like candy in 2001.
On both/. and Digg, I find a huge level of arrogance coming from the editors, who, in many cases, aren't doing anything to "merit" arrogance, if you know what I mean. Both forums also suffer from a surfeit of immature, ignorant or downright stupid comments. I think both are great experiments in collaborative communication, but there is room (IMO) for much more radical ideas.
Digg tends to have more interesting "fluffy" or "neat" articles,/. has more substance, and/.'s forums, however low-tech and old-school they might be, have 10 times the good content than any Digg forum. The best feature/. ever added was the ability to be notified when someone replies to your post.
I think an interesting comparison would be to study the effects of/.'s rather limited moderation compared to those of Digg where you can mod comments up and down till you're blue in the face (and the comment has dozens of + or - points).
I find it rather odd that a score of +5 for a commment (given I have the karma bonus) means only 3 people out of hundreds of thousands of potential readers thought it worth modding up. What happens when 10 times as many people can mod and the mods can go 10 times as high or low? Will a better meritocracy of discussion emerge are will be just be giving the frost pisters and other morons more free reign to be infantile?
In the end, both sites are run by, and largely populated by, a bunch of know-it-all computer geeks, nerds, posers and wannabes, and this ultimately might be their biggest problem.
Now excuse me, I have some socket code to debug.:-)
I've been wondering why those kinds of ideas weren't being discussed. Now I know they are.
Thanks for the info.
I still think we should just slam a big icy comet into the North Pole. That'll cool us down a lot.;-)
Seriously, though, the reminds me of that bigwig in the environmentalist movement* who was intelligent and objective enough to admit that nuclear power is something we should be pursuing, because despite its problems, it does not contribute to the Global Warming effect. That's the kind of objective, thoughtful and most of all realistic kind of thinking we all need to be exercising. Nothing is absolute, solutions or problems, and tradeoffs are the only answer. The problem can be addressed without resorting to the kind of heavy-handed scare tactics on one side, who would destroy the world economy for an unquantifiable channce of benefit, and the complete arrogance of the other side who refuse to admit there might be something we can (and should) do about the problem. Again and again I am reminded that there are problems for which a Kennedyesque call-to-arms could solve... if only we had the leadership to do so. After all, if we could land a man on the moon just to make the Russkies look bad (Yes, I realize the huge scientific and technological advances it brought us), couldn't we apply the same approach to cutting our dependence on oil, or preventing possible environmental calamities. But I suppose I'm a dreamer if I expect the U.S. to invest some of the trillions it spends domestically on something useful and productive.
Ummm... comparing the right of First Sale to contributing to the delinquency of a minor... Comparing artificial restictions created by a corporation, which probably aren't enforceable to laws to protect the safety and health of children...
Interesting quote, the DCMA does indeed harm those legitimate examples of Fair Use, except ultimately, the DCMA _doesn't_ stop piracy. It is my impression that the real net effect is that it only harms the law-abiding. Hence my sig...
What I'm trying to say is that the recording industry as in "big music labels" are becoming more and more obsolete. The _only_ thing that they can give that you can't do yourself for a modest sum, is exposure... and unless you are a cog in the industrial bilge machine that is big music, you won't get that anyway... and even if you do, you sign away 99.9% of your chance to personally end up in the black.
As big music continues to increasingly homogenize itself, independent labels, and even independent artists, are, and will continue, becoming more and more relevant as a means to create, promote and distribute music and actually have a chance of making a living out of it.
Everyone complains on/., when the topic comes up, how they are sick of buying a CD full of crap just to get one song. Of the thousand or so CDs that I have, that's happened to me maybe once. I buy a ton of music and except for one label (Inside/Out) primarily, most of it comes from non-RIAA members, and NONE of it ever gets any airplay aside from the rapidly diminishing esoteric channels on satellite. While most people complain of the dearth of good new music to buy, and sales are down, I find more new stuff than I can afford on a comfortable software developer's salary. Thanks to places like Kinesis, The End Records, and a ton of other places, I can't swing a dead cat without finding something new and fascinating to sample... and the vast majority of what I choose to buy ends up being really good stuff (even if I don't like it, which happens occasionally).
To me, the music industry is better than ever. How about you?
And the biggest cause of problematic hardware drivers is the closed-source nature of Windows.
Well, that will never change. Overall, I would suggest that this new system of signed drivers will probably help the end-users. Of course, that's against the million things that MS does to hurt the end-users, but that's another thing.
"New technology threatens now-obsolete business models."
This has been happening since the Industrial Revolution. The big difference is that now the old dinosaurs have enough sway in Congress that they can throw a wrench in the machine of the free market in order to sustain their existence without having to adapt to the new realities of the market.
Companies whose existence rely on a 19th century means of distribution, which include all the media companies (books, newspapers, magazines, music, movies, even software), are being made obsolete. This will soon transform the music industry in a hugely positive way by allowing a more democratic method of distribution ("Down with Clear Channel!") which I think will revitalize a stale and non-innovate industry. Other media will follow.
Right now you and your buddies playing music in a garage can, with a small investment of a few hundred dollars or so, record, master and produce music for sale. What happens when the same will be true for video... on-demand video... the blogosphere revolution hits television(?) This is asteroid hurtling towards the prehistoric-Earth of the media dinosaurs and they are scared stiff, because for the first time in decades, they will be forced to compete, innovate and adapt.
they're effectively forcing everybody to pay them an "extortion fee" in order for other companies to be able to make hardware for users to run their systems. Doesn't this present problems for Microsoft? How can they be allowed to do this, considering their monopoly status?
In defense of MS (something rarely heard around here, including from me), the biggest cause, by far, of instability in Microsoft's recent OS releases is problematic hardware drivers. Antitrust questions aside, I have to think this will help improve the quality and stability of the OS by forcing drivers to be more thoroughly examined and tested.
OK, I'm going to Spell Nazi myself... that's "too quickly".
Digg has edit, but they can't compete with/. as a forum. I wish/. had edit, but I'm guessing that it wants to remain state-of-the-art 1998.
And here's another one for the editors and others in charge: 1 minute is plenty of time to delay people between posts. 2 minutes is absurd. I spend more time sitting around waiting for some moronic timer to run out. Stop penalizing me because I can type fast!
It doesn't explain my usual experience with Real in that it worked.
My biggest problem with Real over the years was not their horrible eye-assautingly ugly interface (really, it's not much worse that WMP), or their evil spyware and other deceitful practices, it's that most of the time I could never get their stuff to work at all.
Add all the other things in an there's a company that can't die to quickly.
I think the OP's post is that if you compare Clinton's and Bush's administrations against what the Republicans purport to stand for you will see that the difference between the parties is far less than the difference between either party and the traditional small-government, pro-individual-rights, pro-individual-responsibility ideals that Republicans used to stand for. In that respect, I would agree with the OP.
Aside from being proactive (although not very competently) in foreign policy and passing a tax cut, I haven't seen anything "Republican" coming out of the White House or Congress in years. Oh, wait, some good Supreme Court judges got appointed. OK, that's 3 things in 6 years, compared to spending that makes the Democrats in the mid 60's look tame, passing huge entitlements to everyone who can rent a lobbyist and treating Mexico as the 51st state (or more accurately, the U.S. as the new Mexican state), the so-called "Republicans" in charge aren't something I would recognize as such, and completely failing to reform anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Just for the record, RSI != carpal tunnel syndrome
I have occasional problems with RSI in my hands and wrists, but I do not have the symptoms of carpal tunnel syndrome. I found squeezing on one of those squeezie balls you can pick up at the sports store helps, as does varying the position of my hands (and using different pointing devices), and especially, not playing games too long at any time. In my experience, that's the worst cause of problems for me.
Still even though my hands work fine, I'd love to check out the voice recognition software. I can think of times where that could be very useful.
I once had a five-digit uid but I lost it
Back off, man. This one is mine. Always has been.
Why does the entire world have to look like a scripting language from an OS designed four decades ago?
So instead the whole world looks like stupid design decisions from three decades ago...
Still Nonad, or whatever they are going to call it sounds interesting, but I will need someone to explain to me why I should care... and Microsoft is almost never capable of that.
When it comes to computers, and modern electronic media, ANYTHING that "just works" is a pipe dream.
Which is why we need to tell those 10 people to go to Hell and build some damn power plants!
Really, there is a small but significant subset of environmentalists that literally wouldn't be happy until humans are extinct. We need to ignore those people and try to inject some common sense into our environmental discussions.
Inability to compromise at all is what defines a zealot.
There's a big difference. Wine is being reverse engineered. Cringely is asserting that through the cross-licensing deal between MS and Apple that Apple could have had access to Win32.
Wine is an incredible acheivement, but compared to a real implementation of Win32 based on having access to the source, it would be a joke. You would get near-100% compatibility right out of the box and not the hit-and-miss level of compatibility that Wine has. You wouldn't need things like CrossOver Office. You wouldn't need the sheer amount of effort it takes to get more than a few apps to actually run in Wine, assuming they can run at all.
And this implementation would presumably have the full support of Apple, who unlike Microsoft, actually seem to be making real progress in evolving their OS.
I have to imagine that porting Win32 to run on top of Mach would be an order of magnitude easier than writing one from scratch. Windows NT originally had several layers that could run on top of it, Win32 was one obviously, there was an OS/2 layer, and a POSIX layer, neither of which exist any more, AFAIK.
Fortunatly (sic), someone driving a car has to pay attention fairly routinely just to stay in the lane and on the road, so 'awake == aware' (generally) in that situation.
You obviously don't drive very much, do you?
The peak was at The Best of Both Worlds, part 1.
And it jumped the shark at "The Best of Both Worlds, part 2"
There were plenty of good episodes after season 4, but by the end they were really running dry.
Of course, DS9 took the mantle of _the_ Star Trek show to watch, but that was it.
And from what I've seen (which isn't much, granted), the American Idol singers really aren't that good.
No, I think that would be:
", Worst Comma Placement Ever!"
I think the biggest problem with Vista is that it doesn't really give us anything new. Just mild improvements (or not based on your comment) to what's there now. From what I've read, it sounds like Windows NT 5.3... some performance improvements (much needed, but will they be overshadowed by the inevitable additional bloat?)... lots of eye candy (wild monkeys must have designed much of XP's look... I hope Vista isn't so hideous)... and improved security (something we've been promised, and were owed, for many years).
I'm sorry. I don't see any compelling reason (or hardly any reason at all) to move from Windows 2000 or (for those couple of laptops of mine that have it) XP.
Depends on which President you ask and when. Clinton was handing 'em out like candy in 2001.
/. and Digg, I find a huge level of arrogance coming from the editors, who, in many cases, aren't doing anything to "merit" arrogance, if you know what I mean. Both forums also suffer from a surfeit of immature, ignorant or downright stupid comments. I think both are great experiments in collaborative communication, but there is room (IMO) for much more radical ideas.
/. has more substance, and /.'s forums, however low-tech and old-school they might be, have 10 times the good content than any Digg forum. The best feature /. ever added was the ability to be notified when someone replies to your post.
/.'s rather limited moderation compared to those of Digg where you can mod comments up and down till you're blue in the face (and the comment has dozens of + or - points).
:-)
On both
Digg tends to have more interesting "fluffy" or "neat" articles,
I think an interesting comparison would be to study the effects of
I find it rather odd that a score of +5 for a commment (given I have the karma bonus) means only 3 people out of hundreds of thousands of potential readers thought it worth modding up. What happens when 10 times as many people can mod and the mods can go 10 times as high or low? Will a better meritocracy of discussion emerge are will be just be giving the frost pisters and other morons more free reign to be infantile?
In the end, both sites are run by, and largely populated by, a bunch of know-it-all computer geeks, nerds, posers and wannabes, and this ultimately might be their biggest problem.
Now excuse me, I have some socket code to debug.
I've been wondering why those kinds of ideas weren't being discussed. Now I know they are.
;-)
Thanks for the info.
I still think we should just slam a big icy comet into the North Pole. That'll cool us down a lot.
Seriously, though, the reminds me of that bigwig in the environmentalist movement* who was intelligent and objective enough to admit that nuclear power is something we should be pursuing, because despite its problems, it does not contribute to the Global Warming effect. That's the kind of objective, thoughtful and most of all realistic kind of thinking we all need to be exercising. Nothing is absolute, solutions or problems, and tradeoffs are the only answer. The problem can be addressed without resorting to the kind of heavy-handed scare tactics on one side, who would destroy the world economy for an unquantifiable channce of benefit, and the complete arrogance of the other side who refuse to admit there might be something we can (and should) do about the problem. Again and again I am reminded that there are problems for which a Kennedyesque call-to-arms could solve... if only we had the leadership to do so. After all, if we could land a man on the moon just to make the Russkies look bad (Yes, I realize the huge scientific and technological advances it brought us), couldn't we apply the same approach to cutting our dependence on oil, or preventing possible environmental calamities. But I suppose I'm a dreamer if I expect the U.S. to invest some of the trillions it spends domestically on something useful and productive.
* Google his name yourself, I'm too lazy.
"software glitch"? Right. That's the most pathetic attempt at damage control I've seen in quite a while.
Come on, this is AOL we're talking about. I could actually believe it is a software glitch.
Note, I said "could".
Ummm... comparing the right of First Sale to contributing to the delinquency of a minor... Comparing artificial restictions created by a corporation, which probably aren't enforceable to laws to protect the safety and health of children...
Now there's a cogent argument.
Interesting quote, the DCMA does indeed harm those legitimate examples of Fair Use, except ultimately, the DCMA _doesn't_ stop piracy. It is my impression that the real net effect is that it only harms the law-abiding. Hence my sig...
What I'm trying to say is that the recording industry as in "big music labels" are becoming more and more obsolete. The _only_ thing that they can give that you can't do yourself for a modest sum, is exposure... and unless you are a cog in the industrial bilge machine that is big music, you won't get that anyway... and even if you do, you sign away 99.9% of your chance to personally end up in the black.
/., when the topic comes up, how they are sick of buying a CD full of crap just to get one song. Of the thousand or so CDs that I have, that's happened to me maybe once. I buy a ton of music and except for one label (Inside/Out) primarily, most of it comes from non-RIAA members, and NONE of it ever gets any airplay aside from the rapidly diminishing esoteric channels on satellite. While most people complain of the dearth of good new music to buy, and sales are down, I find more new stuff than I can afford on a comfortable software developer's salary. Thanks to places like Kinesis, The End Records, and a ton of other places, I can't swing a dead cat without finding something new and fascinating to sample... and the vast majority of what I choose to buy ends up being really good stuff (even if I don't like it, which happens occasionally).
As big music continues to increasingly homogenize itself, independent labels, and even independent artists, are, and will continue, becoming more and more relevant as a means to create, promote and distribute music and actually have a chance of making a living out of it.
Everyone complains on
To me, the music industry is better than ever. How about you?
And the biggest cause of problematic hardware drivers is the closed-source nature of Windows.
Well, that will never change. Overall, I would suggest that this new system of signed drivers will probably help the end-users. Of course, that's against the million things that MS does to hurt the end-users, but that's another thing.
Or more simply,
"New technology threatens now-obsolete business models."
This has been happening since the Industrial Revolution. The big difference is that now the old dinosaurs have enough sway in Congress that they can throw a wrench in the machine of the free market in order to sustain their existence without having to adapt to the new realities of the market.
Companies whose existence rely on a 19th century means of distribution, which include all the media companies (books, newspapers, magazines, music, movies, even software), are being made obsolete. This will soon transform the music industry in a hugely positive way by allowing a more democratic method of distribution ("Down with Clear Channel!") which I think will revitalize a stale and non-innovate industry. Other media will follow.
Right now you and your buddies playing music in a garage can, with a small investment of a few hundred dollars or so, record, master and produce music for sale. What happens when the same will be true for video... on-demand video... the blogosphere revolution hits television(?) This is asteroid hurtling towards the prehistoric-Earth of the media dinosaurs and they are scared stiff, because for the first time in decades, they will be forced to compete, innovate and adapt.
they're effectively forcing everybody to pay them an "extortion fee" in order for other companies to be able to make hardware for users to run their systems. Doesn't this present problems for Microsoft? How can they be allowed to do this, considering their monopoly status?
In defense of MS (something rarely heard around here, including from me), the biggest cause, by far, of instability in Microsoft's recent OS releases is problematic hardware drivers. Antitrust questions aside, I have to think this will help improve the quality and stability of the OS by forcing drivers to be more thoroughly examined and tested.
At least in theory.
OK, I'm going to Spell Nazi myself... that's "too quickly".
/. as a forum. I wish /. had edit, but I'm guessing that it wants to remain state-of-the-art 1998.
Digg has edit, but they can't compete with
And here's another one for the editors and others in charge: 1 minute is plenty of time to delay people between posts. 2 minutes is absurd. I spend more time sitting around waiting for some moronic timer to run out. Stop penalizing me because I can type fast!
It doesn't explain my usual experience with Real in that it worked.
My biggest problem with Real over the years was not their horrible eye-assautingly ugly interface (really, it's not much worse that WMP), or their evil spyware and other deceitful practices, it's that most of the time I could never get their stuff to work at all.
Add all the other things in an there's a company that can't die to quickly.
Jobs and Gates had different visions. Jobs wanted to transform the world and Gates wanted to be rich enough so women would talk to him.
But I kid the richest man in the world.
Both had that rare combination of a certain amount of technical skill, a type A personality (A+ is more like it) and a whole lotta luck.
Oh, so it's important to you that a PERSON wrote this algorithm?
Speciesist!
I think the OP's post is that if you compare Clinton's and Bush's administrations against what the Republicans purport to stand for you will see that the difference between the parties is far less than the difference between either party and the traditional small-government, pro-individual-rights, pro-individual-responsibility ideals that Republicans used to stand for. In that respect, I would agree with the OP.
Aside from being proactive (although not very competently) in foreign policy and passing a tax cut, I haven't seen anything "Republican" coming out of the White House or Congress in years. Oh, wait, some good Supreme Court judges got appointed. OK, that's 3 things in 6 years, compared to spending that makes the Democrats in the mid 60's look tame, passing huge entitlements to everyone who can rent a lobbyist and treating Mexico as the 51st state (or more accurately, the U.S. as the new Mexican state), the so-called "Republicans" in charge aren't something I would recognize as such, and completely failing to reform anything.