The browser is another story. But Microsoft has had one of the industry's most forward approaches with respect to handicap accessibility since day 1.
I'll give a recent example; in Windows XP, press Windows Key-U. Here we find Narrator, Magnifier, and On Screen Keyboard. Narrator is a very simple screen reader that is able to read dialogs and other alerts aloud. Magnifier is self-descriptive. On-screen keyboard has a fair amount of configurability. If you go to Settings>Typing Mode, it can actually be configured in a "scan and pick" mode much like the input method used by Stephen Hawking, so that a person with limited mobility can type using a single joystick button press, or any sort of "sip and puff" device connected to the gameport.
These are just a few new features, in addition to the obvious ones listed in the Control Panel under Accessibility, and the general configurability of interface which allows people to customize in whatever way is necessary for their disability (change colors for Red-Green color perception issues, link sounds to events, etc)
As far as the whole Standard-Compliance "Endian" battle goes, I would submit that if one looks further than IE 4 (which is only 5 years old, for chrissake) one would find that this is no longer an issue, but for anal-retentive knit-pickers. IE6 has a standards-compliant CSS2 rendering engine, which can be toggled by the HTML author by use of the DOCTYPE directive, as opposed to Nutscrape 6 which completely destroyed rendering of most web-pages by not remaining backwards-compatible.
I would further submit that at present in the "browser market", there is NO single product which "has it all" (If you mention Opera, I have 3 letters for you - DOM). Everyone has a distinct subset of "feature nirvana", and the idea that Microsoft is culpably negligent for failing to hit the moving target of "Full W3C compliance" when nobody else can is just plain old flame-throwing.
At present the 'official' penetration of Linux into the desktop market is something around 1%. The writer of this article doesn't give figures, but it sounds like he may have stumbled on several times that percentage of desktop Linux installations.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Has the author examined 5% of the PCs in the entire world? Or is he saying "1 out of 20 PCs in this department are Lunix, therefore the statistics are all wrong!!!"
Just to stay on topic, I happen to be employed at a Fortune 100 company with about 2.5 billion in revenue yearly. Several months ago, our Sr. VP and CIO was on the "Lunix buzzword kick".
He wanted us to consider using the Lunix wherever possible and feasible in the enterprise, because he had recently told an interviewer that we were using Lunix (We don't really even have any Unix, unless you count a z/OS mainframe).
So anyways, we were trying to get him to realize that there are certain places where Lunix is a good fit, and it's not like we were going to drop it on people's desktops and suddenly erase our licensing costs (well we would, but the business would be well-fucked since it depends on a lot of custom VB stuff, as well as some items which I could not find a good open soarce alternative for--trust me, Wine wouldn't help)
Just the other day I heard that Mr. CIO had heard something about the SCO lawsuit, and got cold feet altogether. The Lunix enthusiasm was on hold until further notice. As a matter of fact, don't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Although the price tag may sound steep, especially if you're like me and have most of the parts (hard drive, USB keyboard, etc.) left over from your former dot-com job, third-party vendors are hard at work to make your PS2 Linux experience more pleasurable and cost-effective. Some of the PS2 hardware that I've seen on sale at eBay and on Usenet are: VGA monitor adaptor: $7. There's no logic in the thing; it's just a cable with two connectors. USB keyboard and mouse kit: $15. It's no "Microsoft Natural" keyboard but a cheap Taiwanese knockoff will do the job just fine. Linux CD-ROMs: $2 - $23. One was a prerelease of the Sony distribution, and one was a hacked up version of Debian, complete with a Playstation apt source preinstalled. Network adaptor: $22. It uses the Xircom adaptor, IIRC. Used 20GB hard drive: $47. It's even a 7200rpm ATA-66 dealie. The point being, of course, that Sony is being very opportunistic with its Linux release. All of the hardware can be had for well under $100, and the software is Free as in GPL and can't legally be sold at a profit. But what else did you expect from a member of the RIAA cartel?
Sorry, I seem to have put the two words in the wrong order, that's all. But the point still stands; before all, the article's title is misleading. Apparently, the ability to disable ACPI is disabled. Thus, ACPI must be enabled. The remainder of my argument is valid; if people cannot be coerced to embrace new standards by use of the carrot, then we must resort to the stick.
Just wait until one of the editors notices that people are actually TALKING about Slashdot on Slashdot and bitchslaps the entire thread into limbo. Can you say The First Slashdot Troll Post Investigation?
A lot of people say that Jobs "stole" the Macintosh from Raskin.
They say that Jobs, disappointed with the progress on his pet Lisa project, commandeered the Macintosh team and "rode" it to victory. I've read the good, bad, and ugly biographies of Steve Jobs, and it seems to me that Raskin had a few good ideas in his "Macintosh Bible" that would have been pulled down by all his bad ideas if Jobs hadn't gotten involved and imposed his own brand of anal-retentive design fascism.
IIRC, Raskin wanted a pitiful 256x256 resolution, Jobs insisted on higher (512x384), which was one of the features which made the Mac Classic unique. He wanted white on black, Jobs wanted the paper look (black on white). Again, part of the original Mac's charm.
It seems like they both started out somewhat geeky, anal-retentive, and anti-social; however, Jobs has mellowed somewhat since he got booted from Apple for being so mercuric. Raskin still seems to be growing up.
"We can have a personal assistant, a slave, a friend who doesn't really suffer by being delegated these tasks," he said
That's what you think. We must doubt the ethics of scientific research whose stated purpose is "creating a slave" to take care of all those messy little details humans can't be bothered with.
Even if we can set aside all debate on whether the machine "suffer[s] by being delegated these tasks", the fact is that jobs traditionally delegated to humans will be eliminated by these advances.
First artificial intelligences will book your travel, arrange for your hotel and rental car, then an intelligent robot skycap will pick up your luggage and load the car for you.
Eventually, we will become little more than soft, pink, vulnerable infants dependant on our invincible metal robotic nursemaids for everything. What happens then? Well, let me just remind you that in Ancient Greece, slaves outnumbered freed men by seven to one. That is, at one point they did...
This is like the Zapruder film to 35 year old virgins who obsess about the anti-aliasing formulas being used in the next generation game box. CHRIST, inset zoom-ins, "Type 1, 2, and 3 edges"... get a fucking life you losers.
Here's what happened:
Advertising/PR department asks development for some screenshots.
Developers deliver some of the best stuff they have technically, but not necessarily stuff that makes good glossies.
PR flack decides "well, maybe that man's head would look good in front of a snowy background; and wouldn't it be nifty if I added this little Photoshop lens flare that I used 150 times on my geocities home page! LOL
PR flack releases screenshots to gaming mags, technologically obsessed losers salivate, Joe Consumer says "Wow, dem computers shure are sometin', ain't dey!!!"
Exceptionally sharp-eyed technologically obsessed loser notes two pixels that are not properly anti-aliased
Geek community (also known as "every kid who got beat up in the bike rack in middle school") treats it like they found an undoctored image of E. Howard Hunt holding a.30 06 in the Texas School Book Depository while getting buttfucked by Lyndon Johnson, and reading the November 22, 1963 Dallas newspaper.
If you can justify spending a femtosecond of your time obsessing, gloating, or jerking off over this, please report to the gas chambers immediately. You're using up enough of my oxygen as is.
This story has been denied as patently false by all players involved. Please see this post and the Bloomberg article here. I am posting this specifically because the above post is languishing at 0 while 10,000 idiots are either celebrating or frothing and foaming about a news story which isn't even true.
Information does not want to be free. It does not want anything. Technophiles want everything to be free in order to prove some insane ideological point, economics be damned.
I can't understand the geek viewpoint of corporations; it's as if at the heart of every corporate headquarters, there is a multi-tentacled alien entity that eats souls. Corporations are made up of people, corporate assets, and the organizational structure that binds them together. Profits are split between shareholders, employees, (which includes the Board) and reinvestment in the corporation. In other words, individual people control the corporation at every point, and individuals profit from the corporation's acts. If you think a corporation is grubbing money, then maybe you should buy some stock and get your piece of the pie too. If you think that they are doing something morally wrong, then don't buy their stock or their product, and don't feed into their profits. Very simple.
Stop believing that you are helpless before Corporate America, which is basically a house of cards built on the faith of investors. If "we the people" feel threatened by corporate government, we don't need to fight a gun battle; convince everybody you know to dump their stocks, bonds, and mutual funds on the market. Within months we'll be back to the days of the Mom and Pop General Store.
Why? So they don't get sued because you decide to pirate some piece of software they pay for and provide for your use. If they didn't inform you, they would be aiding and abetting you. The admin was just dealing simply with the fact that you were being obstinate and demanding to read the licenses. Why should he go out of his way, and waste time because you feel the need to be different? Regardless, he got you to sign, and you both got what you wanted. BTW, that amendment on the TOS won't mean jack shit in court unless a representative of the other side of the agreement (the university) initialed it, so you might as well have just signed.
A prerequisite for being a geek is a high degree of interest in a technical field (electronics, programming) at a young age. This is both the cause and effect of a rather introverted personality. Hence, as JonKatz will tell you, geeks are poorly socialized in their early formative years, and feel outcast and rejected from society.
Since they are poorly socialized, they do not learn the necessity of civic behaviour, and as a result consider economics and law to be irrelevant, compared to raw technical knowledge.
Therefore, as a geek matures, they feel that they are owed something by society, as retribution for some perceived mistreatment in their youth. Combined with the lack of knowledge of and respect for the basic principals that society works on, this leads them to dabble in illegal or marginally legal areas.
Since geeks are generally of high intellect, they are able to construct arguments to justify this behaviour to themselves and others through a little spurious logic and idealism. ("Information wants to be free", etc.) Thus they illogically draw a line of distinction between what they are doing (Software and DSS piracy, cracking, file sharing) and the acts of "real criminals." (Thieves, murderers, rapists)
If you can find the flaw in geek logic and air it in a public forum such as this, you will be attacked as either a troll, or an unwitting tool of the man.
So in short, yes, geeks honestly believe that anything they own is legitimate property, whereas corporations, Bill Gates, and pretty much anyone else who they choose to attack because of their personal insecurities deserve to own nothing.
It's pretty much an immature life philosophy which is reinforced by the mob "slashbot" mentality seen on fora such as these, and the arrogance a geek develops soon after entering the job market, when they learn that they can make $15-20 and hour sitting on their ass because of their technical knowledge, whereas their peers who spent time in their youth socializing and gaining life skills have to bust their hump for minimum wage initially.
sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically.
Shut up can be as clear a signal of disapproval as a 500 page dissertation. Granted, it is not constructive, but when arguing with a zealot, one can rarely find common ground. What's better: starting a 30 page long thread that goes nowhere, with logical fallacies on both sides, or just voicing your dissent in two short words? I would argue that they are equal from a "community" standpoint; an opinion is stated, and the opposition is heard. Since you were talking about wasted cycles, "shut up" would keep that waste to a minimum.
And since you're so concerned about that waste, why don't you just shut up now? After all, you aren't going to convince me that I'm wrong. (Yes, you can call me a zealot, on this point.)
Fuck you you arrogant asshole. The belief that a "virtual community" can only be home to warm, fuzzy thoughts and constructive criticism is tantamount to soft censorship. dismissing legitimate criticism as "adolescent flamers" is an ostrich technique; when you can't come up with a good response, bury your head in the sand and reply with an ad-hominem.
It stands to reason that in any diverse community, opinions will differ, and the difference will not always be friendly. So long as nobody takes the moral high ground and cries "troll" or "flamebait", the community will survive it, and benefit from the exchange of ideas.
The point is, it isn't all warm, fuzzy, here-check-out-these-pictures-of-my-kids-and-my-do g. There are disagreements, and sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically. Sometimes you just have to say "shut up" or "fuck off" or "here, click on this link". i for one am sick of all these arrogant fucking EEs that try to apply electronic terms like signal to noise ratio to discussions. As long as a human took the time to type it in, it's signal. If/.'s server HD gets corrupted and we get a bunch of garbage text, that's noise. The distinction between good signal and bad signal is all subjective; one mans mead is another's poison.
Mod this down as flamebait, and prove my point, cunt.
If burglars, murderers and rapists would have access to some kind of a system that would make them invisible
You are being redundant. Since all linux users are criminals, either term could be substituted in place of "burglars, murderers, and rapists."
Moreover, the legislation would be greatly helped by simply criminalizing use of Linux and other Open Source software. The spectre of "wiretapping" is likely to raise the hackles of citizens who may not even care about the use of encryption, so long as the linux users/criminals who set loose computer virii are stopped. The only persons who have a "need" for encryption are criminals/linux users, so they can hide their sordid acts. Others would not have to worry about encrypting sensitive information, if it were not for the linux users/criminals constantly scanning ports and sniffing packets and generally invading the privacy of decent, law abiding citizens.
In short, I think a law making Linux use, and possibly all Open Source software a criminal act would really nip the problem in the bud. Not only would it force linux users/criminals to pay for their software, like other law abiding citizens, but it would lead to eliminating the vast majority of cybercrime as we know it, by putting criminals/linux users behind bars where they belong.
I will contact my congressman, and I suggest you do as well, to reintroduce HR 65, including legislation to criminalize use of open source software.
If it shows up on radar, then this is obviously conclusive proof of its existence. On the other hand, other sightings have not been confirmed by radar, because of the unknown creatures' vastly superior technology, which the U.S. government obviously derived stealth technology from.
The civilization of these beings has existed for far longer than any human civilization, for so long that they have managed to create technologies enabling faster-than-light travel, incredibly resilient materials, and apparent contradictions of the laws of conservation we know of, and they choose to use it to hide from us constantly and pick up Billy Bob Hick from Buttfuck, Tennessee every couple months to take him for a ride and poke at his innards a bit.
Most of us humans are obviously too unevolved to understand their motivations. Only those few who are willing to believe, have the capacity to understand, and are wily enough to avoid being killed off by the U.S. government can possibly tell the truth. Amazingly, most of these persons have little beyond a high school education, live in trailer parks in Middle America, and have never seen much outside the city limits where they were born. It is probably only due to this isolation that they are able to avoid the tainting influence of the doubting Thomases and the talking heads of the military-industrial complex in the scientific community. That and their tin-foil hats.
If you can explain away a sighting, can you explain the face on Mars? If you can explain the face on Mars, can you explain crop circles? If you can explain crop circles, can you explain these marks on my lawn? The bump on my head? The mark on my stomach?
All evidence works in favour of the hypothesis, and any lack of evidence can be explained by conspiracy theory. There is no contradiction.
Sometimes unwittingly, "The Renaissance" connects the flowering of that period with the extraordinary outpouring of ideas, stories and culture made possible by the invention of the Net and the Web. Future historians may be writing about the history of this period in much the way Johnson takes on that one. It's always nice to know where we come from, as well as where we might be headed.
I haven't seen anything good enough to write home about. There is a vast difference between some page that comes up with some new bit of Flash or DHTML eye candy and Michaelangelo, or Da Vinci. Some person's misspelled Geocities page with 15 pictures of their Pekignese and neon green on purple text does not make for an outpouring of stories or ideas. There has been no art created as a result of the Web that could not be created without.
Check your pants, JonKatz. You might have spooged a bit when you found this book in your search for another reason to step up on the soapbox and proclaim technology our new god.
The prophet has already spoken, the people were too busy with their bread and circuses, and the band played on. I'm talking about R. Buckminster Fuller's global power grid.
It will never work, because people are trained from birth to understand the economics of enforced scarcity rather than the truth, that wealth is infinite.
Scarcity is at the heart of capitalism; in the tradeoff between supply and demand, since demand will always increase over time, (barring a disaster which reverses the growth of population) the owners have a vested interest in controlling supply to maximize profit. This explains why energy efficiency and use of renewable resources is achieved only after an uphill battle of regulation or public protest.
Regardless of the asking price, no power company will voluntarily rely on another party to meet the demand in its area. To rely on a competitor is tantamount to admitting defeat, and to rely on a non-competitor in another country is to undermine the foundation of the cathedral of capitalism, enforced scarcity.
The company will complain just long enough to get the public finger of blame pointed at a certain party (Silicon Valley, Intel, etc.) and then hike rates on everyone, citing the costs of adding capacity to existing plants and building new ones. Powers keep on lyin', people keep on dyin', world keep on turnin'.
So what's the answer? Change human nature, or at least several thousand years worth of learned behaviour. Might as well try to kick a hole in the sky.
glad you mention BG's charitable contributions; I believe it was $7 billion in the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation? I'm still waiting to see what the net effect of that is. $7B should go a long way towards solving ANY social problem it is applied to.
That is, unless it is just a complex tax shelter to provide for King Bill the XIIIth's retirement in the year 2300. Or maybe funding a secret project to download Gates's brain onto a Zip disk and freeze his body when he kicks it, so he can be revived to celebrate when the first bug-free Microsoft software is released.
To splurge on oneself is one thing. To behave like 21st century royalty is another. We rejected a king in 1776, and ever since then the "owners" have constantly tried to set themselves back in the throne, by buying up political power and buying or building their 'castles.'
IIRC William Randolph Hearst was vacationing around Europe when he saw a monastery that he particularly liked the looks of. He bought it from the monks, and built them a new one worth 10x the paper value of the old one. He then had the old monastery torn down, crated up, and stored. It remained in a warehouse until Hearst's estate was auctioned off. Also I believe there was some story about how Hearst once circled a picture of an art piece in a catalogue or newspaper, and wrote a memo to his assistant; "Do I own this? If not, buy it." In a word, pointless.
In a capitalist system, money becomes what blue blood is in a monarchy; license to behave like a god on earth. Being in the right place at the right time is the Divine Mandate.
It stands to reason that the wheel of fortune turns for everyone; the phrase "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations" comes to mind. The names Astor, Morgan, or Gould don't necessarily mean much any more, but at one time these people were powerful enough to play hardball with the entire government.
However, just wait until life extension technology comes to market. Bill doesn't have to worry about his great great grandchildren frittering away their inheritance, if he's still alive to shake his finger at them. And at that time, Ol' Bill can order President George W.W.W. Bush IV to change his soiled diaper, since he already bought and sold the government several times over.
The original TW2002 was great fun, but this reverse-engineered knock off pales in comparison. I tried playing it a month or so ago when I saw it mentioned in someone's.sig, and was unable to do anything due to the bugs. Not to mention that it didn't have the same look, feel, or even features.
The author should concentrate on an original idea, rather than trying to recreate this great game by guesswork. It comes off looking like a real hatchet-job.
That's all very interesting, but I don't think you understand the Free Software Movement. Software that is free, but not open source, and not protected solely by the GNU Public License is not Free Software. What you are offering to provide is not open source. I quote OSI's definition of open source, in part:
source code must be the preferred form in which a programmer would modify the program. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. Intermediate forms such as the output of a preprocessor or translator are not allowed.
I would prefer to have this program written in Visual Basic, rather than fortran. Also, providing the program only in punch card form is "deliberate obfuscation" and it is also the "output of a preprocessor"; namely a card punch.
Unless I have the right to run this program under Windows 2000 (for stability) and to ftp these "punch cards" to my friend in Holland for free, it does not meet RMS's definition of free software.
I propose that you either port your "punch card" software to Visual Basic, GW-Basic, QuickBasic, and perl, and release it under the GPL, or withdraw your offer of "closed-source" software, which is not welcome on this forum.
Wasn't any quality control involved there, it was just a cost calculation, like the Pinto controversy in the 1970s. Think about it this way, any product you own might have been found in testing to be dangerous or deadly, but with such a low probability of occurrence that the product was just pushed out the door. Sometimes paying off a few lawsuits is cheaper than fixing the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
So sad to see an old adversary go.
I wrote a poem for the occasion....
Though I've belted you and flayed you
By the livin' god that made you
You're a better man than I am, Commander Faggot...
Almost.
Next up, a kit to make your Ferrari look just like a Pontiac Fiero!
The browser is another story. But Microsoft has had one of the industry's most forward approaches with respect to handicap accessibility since day 1.
I'll give a recent example; in Windows XP, press Windows Key-U. Here we find Narrator, Magnifier, and On Screen Keyboard. Narrator is a very simple screen reader that is able to read dialogs and other alerts aloud. Magnifier is self-descriptive. On-screen keyboard has a fair amount of configurability. If you go to Settings>Typing Mode, it can actually be configured in a "scan and pick" mode much like the input method used by Stephen Hawking, so that a person with limited mobility can type using a single joystick button press, or any sort of "sip and puff" device connected to the gameport.
These are just a few new features, in addition to the obvious ones listed in the Control Panel under Accessibility, and the general configurability of interface which allows people to customize in whatever way is necessary for their disability (change colors for Red-Green color perception issues, link sounds to events, etc)
As far as the whole Standard-Compliance "Endian" battle goes, I would submit that if one looks further than IE 4 (which is only 5 years old, for chrissake) one would find that this is no longer an issue, but for anal-retentive knit-pickers. IE6 has a standards-compliant CSS2 rendering engine, which can be toggled by the HTML author by use of the DOCTYPE directive, as opposed to Nutscrape 6 which completely destroyed rendering of most web-pages by not remaining backwards-compatible.
I would further submit that at present in the "browser market", there is NO single product which "has it all" (If you mention Opera, I have 3 letters for you - DOM). Everyone has a distinct subset of "feature nirvana", and the idea that Microsoft is culpably negligent for failing to hit the moving target of "Full W3C compliance" when nobody else can is just plain old flame-throwing.
At present the 'official' penetration of Linux into the desktop market is something around 1%. The writer of this article doesn't give figures, but it sounds like he may have stumbled on several times that percentage of desktop Linux installations.
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Has the author examined 5% of the PCs in the entire world? Or is he saying "1 out of 20 PCs in this department are Lunix, therefore the statistics are all wrong!!!"
Just to stay on topic, I happen to be employed at a Fortune 100 company with about 2.5 billion in revenue yearly. Several months ago, our Sr. VP and CIO was on the "Lunix buzzword kick".
He wanted us to consider using the Lunix wherever possible and feasible in the enterprise, because he had recently told an interviewer that we were using Lunix (We don't really even have any Unix, unless you count a z/OS mainframe).
So anyways, we were trying to get him to realize that there are certain places where Lunix is a good fit, and it's not like we were going to drop it on people's desktops and suddenly erase our licensing costs (well we would, but the business would be well-fucked since it depends on a lot of custom VB stuff, as well as some items which I could not find a good open soarce alternative for--trust me, Wine wouldn't help)
Just the other day I heard that Mr. CIO had heard something about the SCO lawsuit, and got cold feet altogether. The Lunix enthusiasm was on hold until further notice. As a matter of fact, don't touch it with a 10 foot pole.
Amazing how this industry works.
Although the price tag may sound steep, especially if you're like me and have most of the parts (hard drive, USB keyboard, etc.) left over from your former dot-com job, third-party vendors are hard at work to make your PS2 Linux experience more pleasurable and cost-effective. Some of the PS2 hardware that I've seen on sale at eBay and on Usenet are:
VGA monitor adaptor: $7. There's no logic in the thing; it's just a cable with two connectors.
USB keyboard and mouse kit: $15. It's no "Microsoft Natural" keyboard but a cheap Taiwanese knockoff will do the job just fine.
Linux CD-ROMs: $2 - $23. One was a prerelease of the Sony distribution, and one was a hacked up version of Debian, complete with a Playstation apt source preinstalled.
Network adaptor: $22. It uses the Xircom adaptor, IIRC.
Used 20GB hard drive: $47. It's even a 7200rpm ATA-66 dealie.
The point being, of course, that Sony is being very opportunistic with its Linux release. All of the hardware can be had for well under $100, and the software is Free as in GPL and can't legally be sold at a profit.
But what else did you expect from a member of the RIAA cartel?
Sorry, I seem to have put the two words in the wrong order, that's all. But the point still stands; before all, the article's title is misleading. Apparently, the ability to disable ACPI is disabled. Thus, ACPI must be enabled. The remainder of my argument is valid; if people cannot be coerced to embrace new standards by use of the carrot, then we must resort to the stick.
Because ACPI is deprecated, in favour of APM. Is that a good enough reason? God forbid we should actually move forward and embrace new standards.
Just wait until one of the editors notices that people are actually TALKING about Slashdot on Slashdot and bitchslaps the entire thread into limbo. Can you say The First Slashdot Troll Post Investigation?
They say that Jobs, disappointed with the progress on his pet Lisa project, commandeered the Macintosh team and "rode" it to victory. I've read the good, bad, and ugly biographies of Steve Jobs, and it seems to me that Raskin had a few good ideas in his "Macintosh Bible" that would have been pulled down by all his bad ideas if Jobs hadn't gotten involved and imposed his own brand of anal-retentive design fascism.
IIRC, Raskin wanted a pitiful 256x256 resolution, Jobs insisted on higher (512x384), which was one of the features which made the Mac Classic unique. He wanted white on black, Jobs wanted the paper look (black on white). Again, part of the original Mac's charm.
It seems like they both started out somewhat geeky, anal-retentive, and anti-social; however, Jobs has mellowed somewhat since he got booted from Apple for being so mercuric. Raskin still seems to be growing up.
That's what you think. We must doubt the ethics of scientific research whose stated purpose is "creating a slave" to take care of all those messy little details humans can't be bothered with.
Even if we can set aside all debate on whether the machine "suffer[s] by being delegated these tasks", the fact is that jobs traditionally delegated to humans will be eliminated by these advances.
First artificial intelligences will book your travel, arrange for your hotel and rental car, then an intelligent robot skycap will pick up your luggage and load the car for you.
Eventually, we will become little more than soft, pink, vulnerable infants dependant on our invincible metal robotic nursemaids for everything. What happens then? Well, let me just remind you that in Ancient Greece, slaves outnumbered freed men by seven to one. That is, at one point they did...
Love,
Slashfucker
Here's what happened:
- Advertising/PR department asks development for some screenshots.
- Developers deliver some of the best stuff they have technically, but not necessarily stuff that makes good glossies.
- PR flack decides "well, maybe that man's head would look good in front of a snowy background; and wouldn't it be nifty if I added this little Photoshop lens flare that I used 150 times on my geocities home page! LOL
- PR flack releases screenshots to gaming mags, technologically obsessed losers salivate, Joe Consumer says "Wow, dem computers shure are sometin', ain't dey!!!"
- Exceptionally sharp-eyed technologically obsessed loser notes two pixels that are not properly anti-aliased
- Geek community (also known as "every kid who got beat up in the bike rack in middle school") treats it like they found an undoctored image of E. Howard Hunt holding a
.30 06 in the Texas School Book Depository while getting buttfucked by Lyndon Johnson, and reading the November 22, 1963 Dallas newspaper.
If you can justify spending a femtosecond of your time obsessing, gloating, or jerking off over this, please report to the gas chambers immediately. You're using up enough of my oxygen as is.Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker
This story has been denied as patently false by all players involved. Please see this post and the Bloomberg article here. I am posting this specifically because the above post is languishing at 0 while 10,000 idiots are either celebrating or frothing and foaming about a news story which isn't even true.
Thanks, cunts!
Love,
Slashfucker
I can't understand the geek viewpoint of corporations; it's as if at the heart of every corporate headquarters, there is a multi-tentacled alien entity that eats souls. Corporations are made up of people, corporate assets, and the organizational structure that binds them together. Profits are split between shareholders, employees, (which includes the Board) and reinvestment in the corporation. In other words, individual people control the corporation at every point, and individuals profit from the corporation's acts. If you think a corporation is grubbing money, then maybe you should buy some stock and get your piece of the pie too. If you think that they are doing something morally wrong, then don't buy their stock or their product, and don't feed into their profits. Very simple.
Stop believing that you are helpless before Corporate America, which is basically a house of cards built on the faith of investors. If "we the people" feel threatened by corporate government, we don't need to fight a gun battle; convince everybody you know to dump their stocks, bonds, and mutual funds on the market. Within months we'll be back to the days of the Mom and Pop General Store.
Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker
Why? So they don't get sued because you decide to pirate some piece of software they pay for and provide for your use. If they didn't inform you, they would be aiding and abetting you. The admin was just dealing simply with the fact that you were being obstinate and demanding to read the licenses. Why should he go out of his way, and waste time because you feel the need to be different? Regardless, he got you to sign, and you both got what you wanted. BTW, that amendment on the TOS won't mean jack shit in court unless a representative of the other side of the agreement (the university) initialed it, so you might as well have just signed.
A prerequisite for being a geek is a high degree of interest in a technical field (electronics, programming) at a young age. This is both the cause and effect of a rather introverted personality. Hence, as JonKatz will tell you, geeks are poorly socialized in their early formative years, and feel outcast and rejected from society.
Since they are poorly socialized, they do not learn the necessity of civic behaviour, and as a result consider economics and law to be irrelevant, compared to raw technical knowledge.
Therefore, as a geek matures, they feel that they are owed something by society, as retribution for some perceived mistreatment in their youth. Combined with the lack of knowledge of and respect for the basic principals that society works on, this leads them to dabble in illegal or marginally legal areas.
Since geeks are generally of high intellect, they are able to construct arguments to justify this behaviour to themselves and others through a little spurious logic and idealism. ("Information wants to be free", etc.) Thus they illogically draw a line of distinction between what they are doing (Software and DSS piracy, cracking, file sharing) and the acts of "real criminals." (Thieves, murderers, rapists)
If you can find the flaw in geek logic and air it in a public forum such as this, you will be attacked as either a troll, or an unwitting tool of the man.
So in short, yes, geeks honestly believe that anything they own is legitimate property, whereas corporations, Bill Gates, and pretty much anyone else who they choose to attack because of their personal insecurities deserve to own nothing.
It's pretty much an immature life philosophy which is reinforced by the mob "slashbot" mentality seen on fora such as these, and the arrogance a geek develops soon after entering the job market, when they learn that they can make $15-20 and hour sitting on their ass because of their technical knowledge, whereas their peers who spent time in their youth socializing and gaining life skills have to bust their hump for minimum wage initially.
Does that explain it, cunt?
Love,
Slashfucker
And since you're so concerned about that waste, why don't you just shut up now? After all, you aren't going to convince me that I'm wrong. (Yes, you can call me a zealot, on this point.)
Love,
Slashfucker
P.S.: Thanks, cunt.
It stands to reason that in any diverse community, opinions will differ, and the difference will not always be friendly. So long as nobody takes the moral high ground and cries "troll" or "flamebait", the community will survive it, and benefit from the exchange of ideas.
The point is, it isn't all warm, fuzzy, here-check-out-these-pictures-of-my-kids-and-my-do g. There are disagreements, and sometimes, as in RL relationships, it isn't worth the time to argue logically. Sometimes you just have to say "shut up" or "fuck off" or "here, click on this link". i for one am sick of all these arrogant fucking EEs that try to apply electronic terms like signal to noise ratio to discussions. As long as a human took the time to type it in, it's signal. If /.'s server HD gets corrupted and we get a bunch of garbage text, that's noise. The distinction between good signal and bad signal is all subjective; one mans mead is another's poison.
Mod this down as flamebait, and prove my point, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
Moreover, the legislation would be greatly helped by simply criminalizing use of Linux and other Open Source software. The spectre of "wiretapping" is likely to raise the hackles of citizens who may not even care about the use of encryption, so long as the linux users/criminals who set loose computer virii are stopped. The only persons who have a "need" for encryption are criminals/linux users, so they can hide their sordid acts. Others would not have to worry about encrypting sensitive information, if it were not for the linux users/criminals constantly scanning ports and sniffing packets and generally invading the privacy of decent, law abiding citizens.
In short, I think a law making Linux use, and possibly all Open Source software a criminal act would really nip the problem in the bud. Not only would it force linux users/criminals to pay for their software, like other law abiding citizens, but it would lead to eliminating the vast majority of cybercrime as we know it, by putting criminals/linux users behind bars where they belong.
I will contact my congressman, and I suggest you do as well, to reintroduce HR 65, including legislation to criminalize use of open source software.
Thank you.
Cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
The civilization of these beings has existed for far longer than any human civilization, for so long that they have managed to create technologies enabling faster-than-light travel, incredibly resilient materials, and apparent contradictions of the laws of conservation we know of, and they choose to use it to hide from us constantly and pick up Billy Bob Hick from Buttfuck, Tennessee every couple months to take him for a ride and poke at his innards a bit.
Most of us humans are obviously too unevolved to understand their motivations. Only those few who are willing to believe, have the capacity to understand, and are wily enough to avoid being killed off by the U.S. government can possibly tell the truth. Amazingly, most of these persons have little beyond a high school education, live in trailer parks in Middle America, and have never seen much outside the city limits where they were born. It is probably only due to this isolation that they are able to avoid the tainting influence of the doubting Thomases and the talking heads of the military-industrial complex in the scientific community. That and their tin-foil hats.
If you can explain away a sighting, can you explain the face on Mars? If you can explain the face on Mars, can you explain crop circles? If you can explain crop circles, can you explain these marks on my lawn? The bump on my head? The mark on my stomach?
All evidence works in favour of the hypothesis, and any lack of evidence can be explained by conspiracy theory. There is no contradiction.
Thank you for your time, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
Check your pants, JonKatz. You might have spooged a bit when you found this book in your search for another reason to step up on the soapbox and proclaim technology our new god.
Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker
It will never work, because people are trained from birth to understand the economics of enforced scarcity rather than the truth, that wealth is infinite.
Scarcity is at the heart of capitalism; in the tradeoff between supply and demand, since demand will always increase over time, (barring a disaster which reverses the growth of population) the owners have a vested interest in controlling supply to maximize profit. This explains why energy efficiency and use of renewable resources is achieved only after an uphill battle of regulation or public protest.
Regardless of the asking price, no power company will voluntarily rely on another party to meet the demand in its area. To rely on a competitor is tantamount to admitting defeat, and to rely on a non-competitor in another country is to undermine the foundation of the cathedral of capitalism, enforced scarcity.
The company will complain just long enough to get the public finger of blame pointed at a certain party (Silicon Valley, Intel, etc.) and then hike rates on everyone, citing the costs of adding capacity to existing plants and building new ones. Powers keep on lyin', people keep on dyin', world keep on turnin'.
So what's the answer? Change human nature, or at least several thousand years worth of learned behaviour. Might as well try to kick a hole in the sky.
Thank you...
...cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
That is, unless it is just a complex tax shelter to provide for King Bill the XIIIth's retirement in the year 2300. Or maybe funding a secret project to download Gates's brain onto a Zip disk and freeze his body when he kicks it, so he can be revived to celebrate when the first bug-free Microsoft software is released.
To splurge on oneself is one thing. To behave like 21st century royalty is another. We rejected a king in 1776, and ever since then the "owners" have constantly tried to set themselves back in the throne, by buying up political power and buying or building their 'castles.'
IIRC William Randolph Hearst was vacationing around Europe when he saw a monastery that he particularly liked the looks of. He bought it from the monks, and built them a new one worth 10x the paper value of the old one. He then had the old monastery torn down, crated up, and stored. It remained in a warehouse until Hearst's estate was auctioned off. Also I believe there was some story about how Hearst once circled a picture of an art piece in a catalogue or newspaper, and wrote a memo to his assistant; "Do I own this? If not, buy it." In a word, pointless.
In a capitalist system, money becomes what blue blood is in a monarchy; license to behave like a god on earth. Being in the right place at the right time is the Divine Mandate.
It stands to reason that the wheel of fortune turns for everyone; the phrase "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in 3 generations" comes to mind. The names Astor, Morgan, or Gould don't necessarily mean much any more, but at one time these people were powerful enough to play hardball with the entire government.
However, just wait until life extension technology comes to market. Bill doesn't have to worry about his great great grandchildren frittering away their inheritance, if he's still alive to shake his finger at them. And at that time, Ol' Bill can order President George W.W.W. Bush IV to change his soiled diaper, since he already bought and sold the government several times over.
Just my two cents, cunt.
Love,
Slashfucker
The author should concentrate on an original idea, rather than trying to recreate this great game by guesswork. It comes off looking like a real hatchet-job.
Unless I have the right to run this program under Windows 2000 (for stability) and to ftp these "punch cards" to my friend in Holland for free, it does not meet RMS's definition of free software.
I propose that you either port your "punch card" software to Visual Basic, GW-Basic, QuickBasic, and perl, and release it under the GPL, or withdraw your offer of "closed-source" software, which is not welcome on this forum.
Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker
Thanks, cunt!
Love,
Slashfucker