voting Republican and wondering why the people you put in office are ruining the country
No, it's not that. It's that they aren't doing what they said they would do. Reduce the government, stop the judicial meta-legislation, restore the Bill of Rights (face it, the only one that isn't routinely violated is the housing of soldiers). I want the country that was founded by our Constitution. What we have now bears only superficial resemeblance. At least the Democrats are honest that they want to radically alter how this country works (or at least once worked) and turn it into some kind of Euro-quasi-socialist-nanny-state. Or at least we all know that's what they want even though most of them *cough*Hillary*cough* try to hide it. But the Republicans' platform has been smaller government, less interference, more accountability, which is what most people (even a lot of liberals I would bet) want. But with the sole exception of the tax cut, they haven't done thing 1 towards those ends.
Congress is so in the pocket of the big companies, it doesn't seem like we voters even matter any more. I voted Republican and generally support them, and they won. But it still feels like "we" lost the election. That's because "we" don't matter. "They" will always win, but "they" have the money. Party is irrelevant. The courts run the country, the state legislatures are irrelevant and Congress is just the public relations arm of the big corporations.
Isn't that a cheerful comment on the state of our nation?
'I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something,...
And Congress will pass laws with ambitious and sweeping names that will, at best, have no net positive effect on the problem, but the public will be appeased, thinking It Was Taken Care Of and the incumbents will be re-elected Because They Did the Right Thing(TM).
That is an interesting concept, although I have to wonder if it would work in the real world where for most people music is something you enjoy but isn't really a big deal.
"Yeah, I like it, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it."
I do know that on online communities, there are plenty of fans of groups (I belong to groups devoted to The Flower Kings and Spock's Beard), where the people who participate wouldn't dream of cheating their musical heroes out of money (however small their cut is), and in fact are far more likely to purchase _more_ material in part because it does support these artists.
I believe the common word to describe these kinds of folks is "fanatic". I am fanatical about several artists, and being part of a community associated with them is a lot of fun (especially those groups like TFK, mentioned above, where members of the group actually participate too). It's a real treat to ask a question about an obscure solo album and have the artist himself respond.
However, that level of community is not going to be very common because most people don't care that much. For instance, I'm a huge fan of the TV show "24", but I haven't the slightest interest in discussing it on-line or being part of any kind of "community" relating to the show. It's just a show. I watch it every week (when it's on), I enjoy it immensely, but that's it. However, when a new CD comes out by an artist I've mentioned above, or one of many others, I'm online discussing it that very day with friends from all around the world.
Is this relevant to what you're talking about? I'm not sure. But my point is that any sense of "community" is only going to matter to a small portion of your audience. Of course, your assertion that the music itself is a means to an end is flawed too. If I didn't deeply enjoy the music, I wouldn't care about the community. The community is a means to an end. The end is enjoying the music, the community enhances that because you can share your throughts with like-minded people. If you really want to see what community-based music marketing is all about, check out the group Marillion. Of course, this came about from the fact that these poor guys can't make ends meet because there just isn't a big market for the kind of introspective and sophisticated prog that they make (e.g., I lost interest when Fish left). But they have done some very interesting and innovative (or desperate depending on your point of view) things to sell music.
If someone can manuever that into a business model, more power to them, but I don't think it will work for the vast majority of people.
That's the problem with paranoia. If you find out you were too paranoid, it doesn't matter, but if you find out you weren't paranoid enough, it's too late.
Because locking things up requires manpower. Stores would rather not pay for it if they can avoid it. In all marketing and retail decisions, "additional packaging" as a solution seems to trump just about everything else.
Remember when laundry detergent came in those suitcase-sized boxes? Remember the great "innovation" of concentrated detergent which is now the norm? All they did was simply not put in so much filler.
When was the last time you opened a box of food, say a Rice-a-roni type product only to see the box is almost half empty. With the case of "yellow rice", which my family loves, I found you can buy the boxes, but for much cheaper you can buy the little foil packets that contain the same amount of product. Isn't that amazing?
Of course, it's best to make these dishes yourself, but I don't have much time to cook these days and my wife hates it. Regardless, I'm not a greenie freak or anything, but I would be more than happy to be able to cut down on the amount of packaging I consume. Unfortunately, it's often very hard to do so.
I love the kid size packages of food, you know, two ounces of yogurt or "Lunchables" which compress your maximum daily allotment of sodium into two crackers and a little wafer lunchmeat and bit of cheese. Those kinds of products are like 2/3 packaging by weight (and often much more by volume) and are priced at about $8/pound. But apparently people are foolish enough to buy them because they seem to sell well.
Watcha gonna do? Moving to a shack in the woods and writing long screeds against technology has been done already. I guess I'll just sit here and eat my fresh-a-licious individually wrapped Oreos.
And don't get me started on consumer electronics...
I bet the only reason half the businesses are running XP is because it came with new computers. What I'd like to see is a measure of how many businesses went out of their way to upgrade.
I bet very few. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and overall, Windows 2000 ain't broke.
To be honest, as a Windows user I can't imagine ever having a reason to upgrade my Microsoft OS again. Sure, I've bought laptops with XP and I like using it, and I upgraded the family PC from the nightmarish Windows 98 to XP Home so my kids could still play all their Windows 9x games and I didn't have to fix the *#&^ thing every other day. But here at work we run mostly Windows 2000 and I can't imagine why we'll ever change.
Victims of their own success. Maybe Microsoft Research should finish up that time machine so they can go back and sabotage Windows 2000 so more people will buy XP.;-)
Re:Only going to work if it became standard
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
There's a free version that doesn't require installation. It's called/., but it works more like a 10-minute break every 10 minutes.
And how much more can you really do. I'm not talking people who are doing hardcore desktop publishing... I'm talking the average user of, say, Word. 95% of Office is probably never used by 95% of the users. There's nothing wrong with MS providing all this extra stuff, the problem comes when it results in a system that requires what would have been a supercomputer just a decade ago to use adequately. There is no discpline to make software run efficiently, since you could always just throw more hardware at it. In fact, I think one of the big forces in Office development was probably to have it require more hardware thrown at it. Let's face it, 95% of computer users could do everything they would ever need to do with a 100MHz Pentium.
Almost everything that would need more is either a multimedia application or a game. A my very first job, the boss's secrtary used a '386 for word processing, while I was developing software on an 8088 machine (for a few months anyway) and for the rest of my time there on a '286.
The problem wasn't that I was being shorted, but rather the quote-unquote important people had more hardware than they could possibly ever use or need.
The same is still true. My Dad periodically wonders if he should consider upgrading his ~300MHz machine. When I ask him what he needs that he can't already do, he replies that there's nothing really. More powerful machines are as cheap as water, but he realizes he doesn't need it for anything and is happy to save his money for other cool things (like a bitchin' flat screen TV and lots of vacations... ah, retired life).
Yes, but getting _something_ means getting the initial chunks of a file. Unless the file is very small, the system could (and presumably would) shut you out before you got enough to be useful to you (i.e., complete files).
I've seen uploading start within minutes of downloading. As soon as you're in the system, it will take advantage of you if it needs to. If it doesn't, then you might get something for nothing (like a new Bitorrent release, with thousands of seeds, it'll sometimes get downloaded without any uploading being necessary or happening, but of course, that's a small file).
The system seems very effective at letting new people in. I never tried to leech, so I don't know if it's possible.
Congrats for you. Being married is fun. Then come kids. It's still fun, but you're usually too insane to notice.
I was the same way in college (and afterwards until most of my gamer friends moved away). The worst thing I did was stay up all night, and maybe my grades suffered some too, but I didn't do things like, I dunno, pass out, pick up diseases, destroy property, get someone pregnant...
I'm no saint, but compared to the typical "party animal" idiot, I don't think I look too bad.
No matter the temptation...
on
Drafting GPL3
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· Score: -1, Redundant
... when drafting the new GPL, I strongly recommend resisting the urge to include the phrase:
Wow. I find most tasks are easier to automate and generally require less work when done from the CLI. But that's fine, different styles of working. I'm definitely old-school in that regard. I was using PC's for about 8 years before I had any option BUT the CLI.
A proper smart-ass would be able to answer that question before busting on a commercial product.
The fact is that I don't know of any shells that are a superset of the CMD shell that are free and/or open-source.
You can install Cygwin and use any of the various shells it comes with (bash by default). But the big advantage of 4NT is that you don't have to learn it from scratch if you are used to Micrsoft's shell. You also don't have to rewrite existing batch files. Another big advantage of the product was that it was around in the 80's when the closest you could come to an open-source alternative was Minix.
No matter how hard I tried to get that same youthful fun, I could never quite get what I saw a lot of my peers getting. I feel I missed out of something.
Here's the way I see it. I might have missed out on some fun, and also probably a lot of stupid and self-destructive things too, but I have the rest of my life to enjoy being with my wife (12 years so far), while many of those party animal types will end up divorced and bitter.
Actually, it's quite reasonable to compare CMD to COMMAND.COM. It's changes and improvements over the former have been minimal.
Of course, I've been using 4DOS (now 4NT) for something like 15 years. I can't imagine any power user who wouldn't use something like 4NT or bash or any of number of shells with real functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
voting Republican and wondering why the people you put in office are ruining the country
No, it's not that. It's that they aren't doing what they said they would do. Reduce the government, stop the judicial meta-legislation, restore the Bill of Rights (face it, the only one that isn't routinely violated is the housing of soldiers). I want the country that was founded by our Constitution. What we have now bears only superficial resemeblance. At least the Democrats are honest that they want to radically alter how this country works (or at least once worked) and turn it into some kind of Euro-quasi-socialist-nanny-state. Or at least we all know that's what they want even though most of them *cough*Hillary*cough* try to hide it. But the Republicans' platform has been smaller government, less interference, more accountability, which is what most people (even a lot of liberals I would bet) want. But with the sole exception of the tax cut, they haven't done thing 1 towards those ends.
Congress is so in the pocket of the big companies, it doesn't seem like we voters even matter any more. I voted Republican and generally support them, and they won. But it still feels like "we" lost the election. That's because "we" don't matter. "They" will always win, but "they" have the money. Party is irrelevant. The courts run the country, the state legislatures are irrelevant and Congress is just the public relations arm of the big corporations.
Isn't that a cheerful comment on the state of our nation?
Maybe the parent was smarter than you think. Maybe he or she was implying that MS would own Apple by the time there's a 10GHz P6.
'I don't think the public knows what it wants Congress to do, but it wants Congress to do something,...
And Congress will pass laws with ambitious and sweeping names that will, at best, have no net positive effect on the problem, but the public will be appeased, thinking It Was Taken Care Of and the incumbents will be re-elected Because They Did the Right Thing(TM).
... about a year ago.
So first it was: Phoenix.
Then it became: Firebird.
Now, it's: Firefox.
So let's see. In a few weeks it will become: Starfox.
Then:
StarCastle, StarChild, StarTrek, StarWars, CoreWars, CoreDump, RageDump, SpeedBump, SpeedFreak, PhonePhreak, PhoneCall, BootyCall, RollCall, RolePlay, DoublePlay, StrikeOut, StrikeForce, DeltaForce, DeltaVee, SpeedingTicket, RecklessDriving, DrunkAndDisorderly, AssaultAndBattery, AlkalineBattery, DoubleABattery, DCell, FuelCell, JailCell, JailBreak, JailBird, StoolPigeon,
SafeCracker, BankRobber, BankVault, PoleVault, PolePosition, FishingPole, FlagPole, FlagStaff
and, ultimately, Phoenix.
That is an interesting concept, although I have to wonder if it would work in the real world where for most people music is something you enjoy but isn't really a big deal.
"Yeah, I like it, it's got a good beat and you can dance to it."
I do know that on online communities, there are plenty of fans of groups (I belong to groups devoted to The Flower Kings and Spock's Beard), where the people who participate wouldn't dream of cheating their musical heroes out of money (however small their cut is), and in fact are far more likely to purchase _more_ material in part because it does support these artists.
I believe the common word to describe these kinds of folks is "fanatic". I am fanatical about several artists, and being part of a community associated with them is a lot of fun (especially those groups like TFK, mentioned above, where members of the group actually participate too). It's a real treat to ask a question about an obscure solo album and have the artist himself respond.
However, that level of community is not going to be very common because most people don't care that much. For instance, I'm a huge fan of the TV show "24", but I haven't the slightest interest in discussing it on-line or being part of any kind of "community" relating to the show. It's just a show. I watch it every week (when it's on), I enjoy it immensely, but that's it. However, when a new CD comes out by an artist I've mentioned above, or one of many others, I'm online discussing it that very day with friends from all around the world.
Is this relevant to what you're talking about? I'm not sure. But my point is that any sense of "community" is only going to matter to a small portion of your audience. Of course, your assertion that the music itself is a means to an end is flawed too. If I didn't deeply enjoy the music, I wouldn't care about the community. The community is a means to an end. The end is enjoying the music, the community enhances that because you can share your throughts with like-minded people. If you really want to see what community-based music marketing is all about, check out the group Marillion. Of course, this came about from the fact that these poor guys can't make ends meet because there just isn't a big market for the kind of introspective and sophisticated prog that they make (e.g., I lost interest when Fish left). But they have done some very interesting and innovative (or desperate depending on your point of view) things to sell music.
If someone can manuever that into a business model, more power to them, but I don't think it will work for the vast majority of people.
That's the problem with paranoia. If you find out you were too paranoid, it doesn't matter, but if you find out you weren't paranoid enough, it's too late.
Hey, I use Windows and I resent the implication that I drive an SUV.
Proud member of the American Non Sequiter Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
You might not be able to spell "non sequitur" but I think I need another Mountain Dew.
Good idea. I bet they have 'em in Japan.
Because locking things up requires manpower. Stores would rather not pay for it if they can avoid it. In all marketing and retail decisions, "additional packaging" as a solution seems to trump just about everything else.
Remember when laundry detergent came in those suitcase-sized boxes? Remember the great "innovation" of concentrated detergent which is now the norm? All they did was simply not put in so much filler.
When was the last time you opened a box of food, say a Rice-a-roni type product only to see the box is almost half empty. With the case of "yellow rice", which my family loves, I found you can buy the boxes, but for much cheaper you can buy the little foil packets that contain the same amount of product. Isn't that amazing?
Of course, it's best to make these dishes yourself, but I don't have much time to cook these days and my wife hates it. Regardless, I'm not a greenie freak or anything, but I would be more than happy to be able to cut down on the amount of packaging I consume. Unfortunately, it's often very hard to do so.
I love the kid size packages of food, you know, two ounces of yogurt or "Lunchables" which compress your maximum daily allotment of sodium into two crackers and a little wafer lunchmeat and bit of cheese. Those kinds of products are like 2/3 packaging by weight (and often much more by volume) and are priced at about $8/pound. But apparently people are foolish enough to buy them because they seem to sell well.
Watcha gonna do? Moving to a shack in the woods and writing long screeds against technology has been done already. I guess I'll just sit here and eat my fresh-a-licious individually wrapped Oreos.
And don't get me started on consumer electronics...
Blame the shop-lifters, not the manufacturers.
I'm insulted by this constant abuse of the word "eye candy". I love eye candy.
The default Windows XP theme is eye ipecac.
I bet the only reason half the businesses are running XP is because it came with new computers. What I'd like to see is a measure of how many businesses went out of their way to upgrade.
;-)
I bet very few. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and overall, Windows 2000 ain't broke.
To be honest, as a Windows user I can't imagine ever having a reason to upgrade my Microsoft OS again. Sure, I've bought laptops with XP and I like using it, and I upgraded the family PC from the nightmarish Windows 98 to XP Home so my kids could still play all their Windows 9x games and I didn't have to fix the *#&^ thing every other day. But here at work we run mostly Windows 2000 and I can't imagine why we'll ever change.
Victims of their own success. Maybe Microsoft Research should finish up that time machine so they can go back and sabotage Windows 2000 so more people will buy XP.
There's a free version that doesn't require installation. It's called /., but it works more like a 10-minute break every 10 minutes.
That's innovation for you.
And how much more can you really do. I'm not talking people who are doing hardcore desktop publishing... I'm talking the average user of, say, Word. 95% of Office is probably never used by 95% of the users. There's nothing wrong with MS providing all this extra stuff, the problem comes when it results in a system that requires what would have been a supercomputer just a decade ago to use adequately. There is no discpline to make software run efficiently, since you could always just throw more hardware at it. In fact, I think one of the big forces in Office development was probably to have it require more hardware thrown at it. Let's face it, 95% of computer users could do everything they would ever need to do with a 100MHz Pentium.
Almost everything that would need more is either a multimedia application or a game. A my very first job, the boss's secrtary used a '386 for word processing, while I was developing software on an 8088 machine (for a few months anyway) and for the rest of my time there on a '286.
The problem wasn't that I was being shorted, but rather the quote-unquote important people had more hardware than they could possibly ever use or need.
The same is still true. My Dad periodically wonders if he should consider upgrading his ~300MHz machine. When I ask him what he needs that he can't already do, he replies that there's nothing really. More powerful machines are as cheap as water, but he realizes he doesn't need it for anything and is happy to save his money for other cool things (like a bitchin' flat screen TV and lots of vacations... ah, retired life).
Yes, but getting _something_ means getting the initial chunks of a file. Unless the file is very small, the system could (and presumably would) shut you out before you got enough to be useful to you (i.e., complete files).
I've seen uploading start within minutes of downloading. As soon as you're in the system, it will take advantage of you if it needs to. If it doesn't, then you might get something for nothing (like a new Bitorrent release, with thousands of seeds, it'll sometimes get downloaded without any uploading being necessary or happening, but of course, that's a small file).
The system seems very effective at letting new people in. I never tried to leech, so I don't know if it's possible.
Congrats for you. Being married is fun. Then come kids. It's still fun, but you're usually too insane to notice.
I was the same way in college (and afterwards until most of my gamer friends moved away). The worst thing I did was stay up all night, and maybe my grades suffered some too, but I didn't do things like, I dunno, pass out, pick up diseases, destroy property, get someone pregnant...
I'm no saint, but compared to the typical "party animal" idiot, I don't think I look too bad.
... when drafting the new GPL, I strongly recommend resisting the urge to include the phrase:
ALL YOUR CODE ARE BELONG TO US
Wow. I find most tasks are easier to automate and generally require less work when done from the CLI. But that's fine, different styles of working. I'm definitely old-school in that regard. I was using PC's for about 8 years before I had any option BUT the CLI.
A proper smart-ass would be able to answer that question before busting on a commercial product.
The fact is that I don't know of any shells that are a superset of the CMD shell that are free and/or open-source.
You can install Cygwin and use any of the various shells it comes with (bash by default). But the big advantage of 4NT is that you don't have to learn it from scratch if you are used to Micrsoft's shell. You also don't have to rewrite existing batch files. Another big advantage of the product was that it was around in the 80's when the closest you could come to an open-source alternative was Minix.
No matter how hard I tried to get that same youthful fun, I could never quite get what I saw a lot of my peers getting. I feel I missed out of something.
Here's the way I see it. I might have missed out on some fun, and also probably a lot of stupid and self-destructive things too, but I have the rest of my life to enjoy being with my wife (12 years so far), while many of those party animal types will end up divorced and bitter.
Did I miss out? Sure. Do I care? Heck no.
Actually, it's quite reasonable to compare CMD to COMMAND.COM. It's changes and improvements over the former have been minimal.
Of course, I've been using 4DOS (now 4NT) for something like 15 years. I can't imagine any power user who wouldn't use something like 4NT or bash or any of number of shells with real functionality.
Monad? Monad? What the hell kinda name is "Monad"?
Sounds like what they call when one of your testicles hasn't descended.
And we all know the biggest crime is proving to the world that someone in the government is stupid and incompetant.