Yes. Liking a movie gets you +1 if it was referenced and idiots like me might not get the reference. Bitching about that +1 gets a -1. Now instead of 1 mod point being destroyed on this silliness, we get 2.
Oh, and don't bother modding this as OT...i'm taking -1 already.
Oh, hahaha! It is so fun to abuse the norms on Windows! Cretins, why don't they embrace our hilarious operating system which allows such cunning exploits as showing porn at lunc time, not to mention intuitive prevention from them! Just open a terminal, change directories to/bin/ and sudo -c chmod 500 me.mygroup xhost lol!
Look, the reason we support the MPAA and RIAA is we LIKE THE CREATIVE WORKS THEY REPRESENT! This isn't like Nike exploiting workers...there are only a handful of options that aren't held by interests of these two. We can't switch to a different "brand" of films and music, especially if we're not into the low budget, often limited appeal options in the 10%. I listen to RIAA acts 12+ hours per day. They have to become really goddamn nefarious for me to alter my lifestyle such.
I guess there's always piracy, but it seems to me that's not much of a way to get what you want. "Until you cease your anti-fair use machinations in the name of piracy prevention, we will be forced to pirate stuff." And then we'll use murder to prevent abortion...
I'd have to say that the current human-computer data interaction leaders "in volume by gigabytes" are video and audio based and I don't see that changing. This is because no matter how much I type and click over the week it can't touch a single 12 meg photo transferred from my camera.
It's just a stupid benchmark, is what i'm saying. If I invent a program which fills my hard drive with the letter Q when I hum softly, it wins over keyboard input.
Better might be an analysis by some scale which took into account the focus of the tool. If I spoke this to Dragon rather than typing, it would have taken me half the time for the same number of bytes. Which would let me have more time to surf porn with the left handed mouse. The dictator was much more useful than the mouse, but the latter is "doing more work."
As many as possible. I'm a math fiend and I don't get enough of it in my job as a software developer;). I love lookup tables and obscure rules and love working flawed characters in a strict world.
Which is why I loved AD&D, v2, and why with the advent of _D&D v3 I have moved on to gurps. Yes, there are cool classes. Yes, it is nice that ability scores go to 500 or whatever. But that doesn't help my gimpy thief with the 9 dexterity -- and that's his highest score. When I play D&D3, i have to mince around like a pansy as even a pinprick does 2 HP damage nowadays.
Gurps has a chart for anything you can think of and a rule that tells exactly how to do it. There's no penalty for being a clever player (as the DM says "roll against your intelligence, dummy"), and therefore no defense for hack & slash.
There's a study incentive if I ever heard one. I slacked like Bob Dobbs for the first three years of my college career because there was no instant gratification for doing well. If scoring a 4.0 got me a free computer when I graduated I would have done the boring busy work and maybe even gone to lectures.
Yeah, I know I was paying out the ass to fail, I know now anyway, but when faced with the freedom to bust my hump or stay in bed all day I took the latter. A simple thing like offering me a hawt computer would have been enough to wake me up. Funny how that works.
I am a multiplatform user and I usually tout the Apple as the best solution over all. It certainly is for music, graphic manipulation (colour matching is so much better and easier on my little iBook than it is even on my iiyama monitor) and iPhoto's genious for managing thousands and thousands of photos.
But I refuse to use my mac for movie editing. This has nothing to do with the speed of the processor...my 1 gig Tbird is about on par with my iBook for rendering times. It has everything to do with the speed of the interface.
I can't take the sluggishness of controls on OSX when video editing. I want instant control, instant jog and shuttle, precise scene sync, and I want it without having to type in timecodes. And even on the big sexy DP macs I just don't get it. Windows 2000, for all its faults, is very responsive and I love it for video editing.
Of course FCP's cool and nothing matches the simplicity of iMovie, but if you get a really nice software package (premiere and vegas video are jokes, windows xp's movie editor is like a bad pun) the sheer number of options for video on Windows make it awesome.
I pay nothing because I offset the cost hosting other people's sites. But that answer is glib and unhelpful, let me elaborate...
I was faced with the problem two years ago that my website was entirely too popular to continue running on a little PC in my basement but not popular enough to ever make any money. Furthermore, the sheer amount of content -- close to 5 gig of photos and movies I've worked on -- and my SQL/JSP needs placed me in the "Enterprise" class of most static web hosts.
I was looking at $100+ per month. For about the same price, I could lease a server with a very low 50 GB transfer limit (by the way, the pay per gigabyte thing is a sure sign your host is catering to the low end...real hosts tell you the kbit/s rate you're buying, which is how they buy it). So I leased a Cobalt RAQ (the worlds shittiest machine, but with a lot of tools to help out people who are idiots with UN*X and would otherwise seriously F up the machine) along with 6 of my friends.
It was supposed to be a co-op deal...everybody pays their fair share and can do what they like with it. But the other 5...well...they never paid me. Never do business with friends. So at the behest of a siteop I knew I hosted a guy for $10 a month and a free set of guitar strings. The price kind of stuck, so I adjusted the resources available to the machine until I could divvy them up fairly at $10 per month without taxing it while still keeping room for my things. Much the same way that you might divvy up an apartment building, which is why I chose the name "webslum." I work maybe 5 hours a week on the server, and charge a little extra for things that need more maintenance (SQL support is the big one).
The price is actually sort of steep for bottom of the barrell housing, but this guarantees the server will never get overloaded and that I'll always have time to answer questions personally. It also means that less goes wrong and solutions are simpler...and that means less down time (something like 99.98% uptime, beat that Geoshitties).
A lot of people are offsetting their server costs by getting a good deal for more than they need and selling the excess. In fact, our next server host did just that -- signed a desperation deal with a flailing ISP and began selling space in their racks for peanuts. We're going to take our share of that space and sell even more space and bandwidth for $10 a pop. It's like those emails I get about pyramids and tony robbins, only it actually works. The only trick is having to be rather clever.
Acutally, no. Their incentive is to get you to pay for a box -- you still don't really need one except for addressable channels. I only have one TV at home with a box on it; the rest use the cable ready features.
Would you pay 4 dollars per month to rent a box if it sucked and did the same thing your TV does already? A lot of people didn't...which is why they started making better and better boxes. When onscreen guide came out, I found it drastically enhanced the experience so I paid for it. The new DVR boxes are going to be another killer app for cable because they do things you can't do with VOD or standard DVR...things like record two pay or PPV stations at once, recording the digital stream directly rather than reencoding it (fewer artifacts that way), AC3 support and P&P over a single line (with a multituner chip, one of the coolest things I've ever seen). If you can get all these things for $15 per month, or pay hundreds to get the box and THEN pay $10 a month for the privilege of using the service, which would you do?
Since your rental fees offset the cost, the whole "cheaper box" thing should be a matter of volume, not features. And while some people in the industry will try and get the cheapest boxes they can, it's really not in their best interests. Cable exists without the mandatory contracts most cellular companies have, so they can't get away with cheap equipment. Don't like the DVR's quality? Return it and don't rent it next month. They NEED to keep you...they'll do it by providing excellent product or they'll fail.
BTW, I know this because my father's the one who decides which box his division goes with. I've been privy to some of the politics of box pricing, and invariably when they go with a box solely on price it bites them in the ass. Cable can be a very shrewd industry and I curse those anti-nepotism laws keeping me in this shady software biz...
Fuck you, I own that shirt. I wore it to work the first time and had to explain what the "poet" bit meant, since we programmed in ColdFusion. I wore that shirt to the first regional slam I went to after college; nobody understood what the "code" part meant. Most assumed it referred to either obfuscation poetics (which is fair, a lot of what I read was clang style word substitiution, heavy on puns) or some statement on the concept of idiolect. To misquote MC Paul Barman, "someone took too much semiotics."
I think General Instruments, Scientific Atlanta, Toshiba, Telstra and the half dozen other set top box developers might be a little surprised that they are "monopolies." They might wonder why the face such stiff competition every time a cable agency adopts a new technology.
Of course, if you're talking about a local monopoly you may be misunderstanding the problem. You rent a box from your cable provider but they don't make much out of the deal. A modern digital box might be about $100 on the open market vs the $30 your telco pays when buying in bulk, plus the cost of remotes, maintenance and so forth. The new DVR boxes are even more expensive. And your average cable co charges less than $5 to rent the box. Around here, Time Warner is considering charging $15 per month for a 30 gig DVR box, which is only $5 over what Tivo costs per month. And if you want a new box...well, just break the one you've got:).
I remember when TW brought out the first box with an on-screen guide. I was totally impressed -- they were selling on screen guide services at $5 per month and here TW was offering it for free with the normal addressable units. When they brought out the first boxes with digital audio out, there was no additional charge -- just ask for one. To this day you have a choice of optical or coax when ordering a new box. They also have a number of different remotes.
Choice seems like a good idea, but cable companies are in the business of getting you to pay monthly. They find little ways to make this affordable, no matter how much you think they're fleecing you. And covering the huge up front cost on boxes with that small rental fee is one of them. That's why AOLTW's cable division reports a nice profit every quarter while AOL bleeds like a stuck pig.
I guarantee there will be a high profile court caser involving freenet within the next 5 years.
It is the only totally anonymous forum anywhere, and as such is a very dangerous thing. There will be no commercial takers to the thrown -- there's no money in really slow encrypted uncontrollable networks. But it will become popular with some nut group, or some politician will try to ban it, and it will become very high profile.
And just think...if you stick a copy on your DSL enabled computer, and donate 10 gig or so, you can get in on the ground floor of this exciting future controversy. They may even sieze your computer.
Neophyte: "I have spent all day trying to do something mundane because the documentation is abyssmal. Apparently, nobody gets paid to write it, and nobody cares to organize it, and there's no help file for it."
Hardliner: "Oh, just download the XFT RPM and install the bin in the USR/local directory. i don't know what you were trying to do but it was a complete waste of time."
Can you imagine if Apple treated folks that way? I can't tell you how many times I've been at the apple store and heard something along the lines of "No no sir...clicking the X button only closes the _window_. The program is still running. See, Apple does that so you can clear up graphical space on the screen without losing the ability to use your program."
Explaining HOW to do something is always curt, and makes the new guy feel like a dumbass. Explaining WHY you do something always makes it easier to do next time. The problem is that so many of the WHYs of Linux are "well really you have a choice and could do it this way too but..." or "a long time ago a long haired libertarian named blah blah decided blah blah and so we called it Fnogl isn't that cute." It doesn't make sense.
I use my PDA for multimedia apps...mp3s, games, ebooks, flicks, etc...but I store phone numbers in my cell phone, write email on my PC, and wirte notes and task lists on little bits of paper.
Why? Because little bits of paper are always charged up, compatible with any OS, easily copiable and can site in my pocket all week without a cracked screen.
I think more development should be performed to make a PDA like multimedia device -- or to bring more minor PDA like features and an Open OS to things like mp3 players (zee ipod) and mini DVD players. That's what I really want out of my PDA anyway. Tapping away at a meeting i get less done with more ridicule with no added benefits.
You know what's funny? I swore by Ascii for my first two years with my company. Did NOTHING in ms word except the occasional doc for a customer. Then, my last week as I was documenting things, I kept feeling the urge to underline things. Then I felt like writing a footnote. At one point, I even wished I could embed a graphic.
Uh, so far Microsoft's support for XML has been stellar, champ. I've spent the last few years working with it and I must say it's at least on par with the apache group's implementations.
I mean hell,.NET uses XML documentation. Not a fantastic new idea, no, but in comparison to javadocs it's fascinating. Release your API the way you want to, as much or as little as you need to, using standardized tools.
I have no reason to believe that the new MS Word XML format will be just as open and useful as their other XML ventures. Which of course means it's an hour's worth of XSLT away from whatever standard the openoffice.org folks come up with.
Now, if only they can fix the interface shortcomings...
Yes, but with closed source software -- eg Microsoft Word, Encarta, Word Perfect, Windows networking, etc -- your average $25,000 per year study hall monitor can install and use the tools pretty well. That's who used to maintain the network at my high school. In my elementary school, we had one clever Ombudsman teacher who horded the original floppies for the C64s, most of which sat unused unless the kids knew what they were doing because the teachers didn't know the first thing about the C64. And typing "LOAD 'BANKSTREETWRITER',8" was MUCH simpler than your average linux isntallation. I've only met one elementary school teacher who I would trust not to freeze up like a tandy the first time he was prompted for "partitioning options." Most are liable to think of shelving units.
Sure, it's easy to learn Linux if you care. Most of teachers won't -- they don't have the time, nor the economic incentive to get into Linux administration. Maybe if you promised to channel that $27k into 100 raises for every employee...but then again, $100 isn't much of an incentive, either.
Uh, if it were walmart, they'd sue anybody whose price ends in.87. Rollbacks, nuhmean?
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 2
Well, when Xerces find a problem it throws an exception since it can't keep going. Since all you basic XML app does is run the parser, the exception causes the app to exit with a return code of 1. Which isn't really a crash, but close enough.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
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· Score: 3, Funny
Your post crashed Xerces due to bad XML. You should have excaped that ampersand in "Copy & Paste."
How proud are you that Linux sits proudly in Wal-mart next to quality merchandise such as Stanley tools, Apex electronics, Road Gear car stereos and President's Choice cola?
Seriously, this is embarrassing shit -- that the only big commercial outlet for an OS "better than Windows" is people who don't know any better and think they're getting a bargain.
Oh, I had two other problems with this post I wanted to mention.
First: no 2 year old understands the VALUE of money, even though she may understand its use or its importance. Money isn't about buying goods, it's about the tenuous trade off between pleasure, necesity and labor. A 2 year old understands only pleasure...she's never needed anything because you no doubt supply it well before the necesity is dire. She doesn't understand labor because at that age even chores are treated as games -- "lets help mommy do the dishes," etc. You, however, bust your ass to make sure she's got food and a stable roof and put up with a bunch of shit, sacrificing your own pleasure at times for stability and security. That 5 bucks means a lot more to you than just a couple minutes worked...it stands between you and hardship. If you've got a good savings plan, it means less than if you're paycheck to paycheck...and it's the same with your daughter. She's got the best savings plan and is doing the least to gain the most then she'll ever have in her life. What's five dollars when a DOLL can be had?
This is the real money trade off between corporate and open source software. Do you, as a user, get $100-200 worth of utility out of using Windows rather than Linux/BSD? I feel I do...shit, I've paid more money to Apple for upgrades than I've paid to MS for anything, and I don't feel cheated at all. At the same time, if I was a parent, fighting for hours with an MS OS that wouldn't run software my kids wanted while they nagged my ear off, I wouldn't be so hot to dump any money into their lap. It seems foolish to pay for a hard time.
The other thing. "Any kid that has been grounded knows about freedom." No -- any kid that has been grounded knows about imprisonment. It's not the same freedom Stallman rants about. Free as in beer and free as in speech are different from free as in not bound. It's very very difficult to teach anybody this kind of freedom, i'd say many of our leaders don't understand it, either. If they did, we'd see a much bigger libertarian party presence in this country. It's the difference between "If you don't love America, leave," a foolish phrase which has always reminded me of the jews fleeing Germany, and "If you don't love America, change it, because you have the right and ability to do so."
I don't think you understand what linear thought is -- or rather more specifically and less cruelly, what I meant by it.
Linear thought is when you chain sequences subjects together in a way that makes sense TO YOU. Non linear though is when you escape sequences of subjects and can return to the original thought.
Example:
Put the blue can inside the red box. Seems linear eh? It's not, really. It's something like this: Put
the
blue
can inside
the
red
Box.
with each tab indicating a new piece of information that must be processed in the child's brain.
You have to sort of hold on to the subject/object of the previous clause to understand the complete sentence. Children, especially young children, get easily lost returning to the previous subject. Listen when they talk...they may start talking about the can, bring up the fact that it is red, and then begin a new topic about other red things. It is not unlinear...it makes sense, when traversing, to continue to "free associate" subjects that are similar. This is because language and logic are stored in the brain similar to the way string values are stored in a good hash table. "Red" may be closer to "firetruck" then it is to "inside," and so it's easier to come up with a new subject.
It seem crazy to you in the same way a schizophrenic's clang associations make little sense to the rest of us...we don't understand things in that order because it is much harder to get anything done when you're free associating everywhere.
"Kid friendly" isn't just designing an interface for "humans." Children haven't developed as complete a set of signs (uh oh, look out, here comes the Pseudo Chomsky) and so it's important to keep within the standard set of language for children, or at least not to introduce too many new terms. Kids can learn the terms "File", "Print" or "Document" pretty easily, as well as the location of the functions they need. What they can't do is intuit what might be meant by "paragraph formatting" and so forth. All kids need to do is double space shit...why not give them a "Double Space" option, and leave the paragraph formatting for a "more advanced than I need, and I'm a graduate student" version.
(Yes, technically I need the drop indent for bibliographies, but I can use the tab key if I REALLY have to. I do everything in a proportional font anyway.)
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Yes. Liking a movie gets you +1 if it was referenced and idiots like me might not get the reference. Bitching about that +1 gets a -1. Now instead of 1 mod point being destroyed on this silliness, we get 2.
Oh, and don't bother modding this as OT...i'm taking -1 already.
Oh, hahaha! It is so fun to abuse the norms on Windows! Cretins, why don't they embrace our hilarious operating system which allows such cunning exploits as showing porn at lunc time, not to mention intuitive prevention from them! Just open a terminal, change directories to /bin/ and sudo -c chmod 500 me.mygroup xhost lol!
Look, the reason we support the MPAA and RIAA is we LIKE THE CREATIVE WORKS THEY REPRESENT! This isn't like Nike exploiting workers...there are only a handful of options that aren't held by interests of these two. We can't switch to a different "brand" of films and music, especially if we're not into the low budget, often limited appeal options in the 10%. I listen to RIAA acts 12+ hours per day. They have to become really goddamn nefarious for me to alter my lifestyle such.
I guess there's always piracy, but it seems to me that's not much of a way to get what you want. "Until you cease your anti-fair use machinations in the name of piracy prevention, we will be forced to pirate stuff." And then we'll use murder to prevent abortion...
I'd have to say that the current human-computer data interaction leaders "in volume by gigabytes" are video and audio based and I don't see that changing. This is because no matter how much I type and click over the week it can't touch a single 12 meg photo transferred from my camera.
It's just a stupid benchmark, is what i'm saying. If I invent a program which fills my hard drive with the letter Q when I hum softly, it wins over keyboard input.
Better might be an analysis by some scale which took into account the focus of the tool. If I spoke this to Dragon rather than typing, it would have taken me half the time for the same number of bytes. Which would let me have more time to surf porn with the left handed mouse. The dictator was much more useful than the mouse, but the latter is "doing more work."
Who will win?
As many as possible. I'm a math fiend and I don't get enough of it in my job as a software developer ;). I love lookup tables and obscure rules and love working flawed characters in a strict world.
Which is why I loved AD&D, v2, and why with the advent of _D&D v3 I have moved on to gurps. Yes, there are cool classes. Yes, it is nice that ability scores go to 500 or whatever. But that doesn't help my gimpy thief with the 9 dexterity -- and that's his highest score. When I play D&D3, i have to mince around like a pansy as even a pinprick does 2 HP damage nowadays.
Gurps has a chart for anything you can think of and a rule that tells exactly how to do it. There's no penalty for being a clever player (as the DM says "roll against your intelligence, dummy"), and therefore no defense for hack & slash.
A four year old _MAC_ laptop. Might as well be brand new.
There's a study incentive if I ever heard one. I slacked like Bob Dobbs for the first three years of my college career because there was no instant gratification for doing well. If scoring a 4.0 got me a free computer when I graduated I would have done the boring busy work and maybe even gone to lectures.
Yeah, I know I was paying out the ass to fail, I know now anyway, but when faced with the freedom to bust my hump or stay in bed all day I took the latter. A simple thing like offering me a hawt computer would have been enough to wake me up. Funny how that works.
I am a multiplatform user and I usually tout the Apple as the best solution over all. It certainly is for music, graphic manipulation (colour matching is so much better and easier on my little iBook than it is even on my iiyama monitor) and iPhoto's genious for managing thousands and thousands of photos.
But I refuse to use my mac for movie editing. This has nothing to do with the speed of the processor...my 1 gig Tbird is about on par with my iBook for rendering times. It has everything to do with the speed of the interface.
I can't take the sluggishness of controls on OSX when video editing. I want instant control, instant jog and shuttle, precise scene sync, and I want it without having to type in timecodes. And even on the big sexy DP macs I just don't get it. Windows 2000, for all its faults, is very responsive and I love it for video editing.
Of course FCP's cool and nothing matches the simplicity of iMovie, but if you get a really nice software package (premiere and vegas video are jokes, windows xp's movie editor is like a bad pun) the sheer number of options for video on Windows make it awesome.
I pay nothing because I offset the cost hosting other people's sites. But that answer is glib and unhelpful, let me elaborate...
...real hosts tell you the kbit/s rate you're buying, which is how they buy it). So I leased a Cobalt RAQ (the worlds shittiest machine, but with a lot of tools to help out people who are idiots with UN*X and would otherwise seriously F up the machine) along with 6 of my friends.
I was faced with the problem two years ago that my website was entirely too popular to continue running on a little PC in my basement but not popular enough to ever make any money. Furthermore, the sheer amount of content -- close to 5 gig of photos and movies I've worked on -- and my SQL/JSP needs placed me in the "Enterprise" class of most static web hosts.
I was looking at $100+ per month. For about the same price, I could lease a server with a very low 50 GB transfer limit (by the way, the pay per gigabyte thing is a sure sign your host is catering to the low end
It was supposed to be a co-op deal...everybody pays their fair share and can do what they like with it. But the other 5...well...they never paid me. Never do business with friends. So at the behest of a siteop I knew I hosted a guy for $10 a month and a free set of guitar strings. The price kind of stuck, so I adjusted the resources available to the machine until I could divvy them up fairly at $10 per month without taxing it while still keeping room for my things. Much the same way that you might divvy up an apartment building, which is why I chose the name "webslum." I work maybe 5 hours a week on the server, and charge a little extra for things that need more maintenance (SQL support is the big one).
The price is actually sort of steep for bottom of the barrell housing, but this guarantees the server will never get overloaded and that I'll always have time to answer questions personally. It also means that less goes wrong and solutions are simpler...and that means less down time (something like 99.98% uptime, beat that Geoshitties).
A lot of people are offsetting their server costs by getting a good deal for more than they need and selling the excess. In fact, our next server host did just that -- signed a desperation deal with a flailing ISP and began selling space in their racks for peanuts. We're going to take our share of that space and sell even more space and bandwidth for $10 a pop. It's like those emails I get about pyramids and tony robbins, only it actually works. The only trick is having to be rather clever.
Acutally, no. Their incentive is to get you to pay for a box -- you still don't really need one except for addressable channels. I only have one TV at home with a box on it; the rest use the cable ready features.
Would you pay 4 dollars per month to rent a box if it sucked and did the same thing your TV does already? A lot of people didn't...which is why they started making better and better boxes. When onscreen guide came out, I found it drastically enhanced the experience so I paid for it. The new DVR boxes are going to be another killer app for cable because they do things you can't do with VOD or standard DVR...things like record two pay or PPV stations at once, recording the digital stream directly rather than reencoding it (fewer artifacts that way), AC3 support and P&P over a single line (with a multituner chip, one of the coolest things I've ever seen). If you can get all these things for $15 per month, or pay hundreds to get the box and THEN pay $10 a month for the privilege of using the service, which would you do?
Since your rental fees offset the cost, the whole "cheaper box" thing should be a matter of volume, not features. And while some people in the industry will try and get the cheapest boxes they can, it's really not in their best interests. Cable exists without the mandatory contracts most cellular companies have, so they can't get away with cheap equipment. Don't like the DVR's quality? Return it and don't rent it next month. They NEED to keep you...they'll do it by providing excellent product or they'll fail.
BTW, I know this because my father's the one who decides which box his division goes with. I've been privy to some of the politics of box pricing, and invariably when they go with a box solely on price it bites them in the ass. Cable can be a very shrewd industry and I curse those anti-nepotism laws keeping me in this shady software biz...
Fuck you, I own that shirt. I wore it to work the first time and had to explain what the "poet" bit meant, since we programmed in ColdFusion. I wore that shirt to the first regional slam I went to after college; nobody understood what the "code" part meant. Most assumed it referred to either obfuscation poetics (which is fair, a lot of what I read was clang style word substitiution, heavy on puns) or some statement on the concept of idiolect. To misquote MC Paul Barman, "someone took too much semiotics."
I think General Instruments, Scientific Atlanta, Toshiba, Telstra and the half dozen other set top box developers might be a little surprised that they are "monopolies." They might wonder why the face such stiff competition every time a cable agency adopts a new technology.
:).
Of course, if you're talking about a local monopoly you may be misunderstanding the problem. You rent a box from your cable provider but they don't make much out of the deal. A modern digital box might be about $100 on the open market vs the $30 your telco pays when buying in bulk, plus the cost of remotes, maintenance and so forth. The new DVR boxes are even more expensive. And your average cable co charges less than $5 to rent the box. Around here, Time Warner is considering charging $15 per month for a 30 gig DVR box, which is only $5 over what Tivo costs per month. And if you want a new box...well, just break the one you've got
I remember when TW brought out the first box with an on-screen guide. I was totally impressed -- they were selling on screen guide services at $5 per month and here TW was offering it for free with the normal addressable units. When they brought out the first boxes with digital audio out, there was no additional charge -- just ask for one. To this day you have a choice of optical or coax when ordering a new box. They also have a number of different remotes.
Choice seems like a good idea, but cable companies are in the business of getting you to pay monthly. They find little ways to make this affordable, no matter how much you think they're fleecing you. And covering the huge up front cost on boxes with that small rental fee is one of them. That's why AOLTW's cable division reports a nice profit every quarter while AOL bleeds like a stuck pig.
I guarantee there will be a high profile court caser involving freenet within the next 5 years.
It is the only totally anonymous forum anywhere, and as such is a very dangerous thing. There will be no commercial takers to the thrown -- there's no money in really slow encrypted uncontrollable networks. But it will become popular with some nut group, or some politician will try to ban it, and it will become very high profile.
And just think...if you stick a copy on your DSL enabled computer, and donate 10 gig or so, you can get in on the ground floor of this exciting future controversy. They may even sieze your computer.
Another reason Linux will never be mainstream.
Neophyte: "I have spent all day trying to do something mundane because the documentation is abyssmal. Apparently, nobody gets paid to write it, and nobody cares to organize it, and there's no help file for it."
Hardliner: "Oh, just download the XFT RPM and install the bin in the USR/local directory. i don't know what you were trying to do but it was a complete waste of time."
Can you imagine if Apple treated folks that way? I can't tell you how many times I've been at the apple store and heard something along the lines of "No no sir...clicking the X button only closes the _window_. The program is still running. See, Apple does that so you can clear up graphical space on the screen without losing the ability to use your program."
Explaining HOW to do something is always curt, and makes the new guy feel like a dumbass. Explaining WHY you do something always makes it easier to do next time. The problem is that so many of the WHYs of Linux are "well really you have a choice and could do it this way too but..." or "a long time ago a long haired libertarian named blah blah decided blah blah and so we called it Fnogl isn't that cute." It doesn't make sense.
I use my PDA for multimedia apps...mp3s, games, ebooks, flicks, etc...but I store phone numbers in my cell phone, write email on my PC, and wirte notes and task lists on little bits of paper.
Why? Because little bits of paper are always charged up, compatible with any OS, easily copiable and can site in my pocket all week without a cracked screen.
I think more development should be performed to make a PDA like multimedia device -- or to bring more minor PDA like features and an Open OS to things like mp3 players (zee ipod) and mini DVD players. That's what I really want out of my PDA anyway. Tapping away at a meeting i get less done with more ridicule with no added benefits.
You know what's funny? I swore by Ascii for my first two years with my company. Did NOTHING in ms word except the occasional doc for a customer. Then, my last week as I was documenting things, I kept feeling the urge to underline things. Then I felt like writing a footnote. At one point, I even wished I could embed a graphic.
In the end, I put up a website. It felt so good.
Uh, so far Microsoft's support for XML has been stellar, champ. I've spent the last few years working with it and I must say it's at least on par with the apache group's implementations.
.NET uses XML documentation. Not a fantastic new idea, no, but in comparison to javadocs it's fascinating. Release your API the way you want to, as much or as little as you need to, using standardized tools.
I mean hell,
I have no reason to believe that the new MS Word XML format will be just as open and useful as their other XML ventures. Which of course means it's an hour's worth of XSLT away from whatever standard the openoffice.org folks come up with.
Now, if only they can fix the interface shortcomings...
Yes, but with closed source software -- eg Microsoft Word, Encarta, Word Perfect, Windows networking, etc -- your average $25,000 per year study hall monitor can install and use the tools pretty well. That's who used to maintain the network at my high school. In my elementary school, we had one clever Ombudsman teacher who horded the original floppies for the C64s, most of which sat unused unless the kids knew what they were doing because the teachers didn't know the first thing about the C64. And typing "LOAD 'BANKSTREETWRITER',8" was MUCH simpler than your average linux isntallation. I've only met one elementary school teacher who I would trust not to freeze up like a tandy the first time he was prompted for "partitioning options." Most are liable to think of shelving units.
Sure, it's easy to learn Linux if you care. Most of teachers won't -- they don't have the time, nor the economic incentive to get into Linux administration. Maybe if you promised to channel that $27k into 100 raises for every employee...but then again, $100 isn't much of an incentive, either.
Uh, if it were walmart, they'd sue anybody whose price ends in .87. Rollbacks, nuhmean?
Well, when Xerces find a problem it throws an exception since it can't keep going. Since all you basic XML app does is run the parser, the exception causes the app to exit with a return code of 1. Which isn't really a crash, but close enough.
Your post crashed Xerces due to bad XML. You should have excaped that ampersand in "Copy & Paste."
How proud are you that Linux sits proudly in Wal-mart next to quality merchandise such as Stanley tools, Apex electronics, Road Gear car stereos and President's Choice cola?
Seriously, this is embarrassing shit -- that the only big commercial outlet for an OS "better than Windows" is people who don't know any better and think they're getting a bargain.
Oh, I had two other problems with this post I wanted to mention.
First: no 2 year old understands the VALUE of money, even though she may understand its use or its importance. Money isn't about buying goods, it's about the tenuous trade off between pleasure, necesity and labor. A 2 year old understands only pleasure...she's never needed anything because you no doubt supply it well before the necesity is dire. She doesn't understand labor because at that age even chores are treated as games -- "lets help mommy do the dishes," etc. You, however, bust your ass to make sure she's got food and a stable roof and put up with a bunch of shit, sacrificing your own pleasure at times for stability and security. That 5 bucks means a lot more to you than just a couple minutes worked...it stands between you and hardship. If you've got a good savings plan, it means less than if you're paycheck to paycheck...and it's the same with your daughter. She's got the best savings plan and is doing the least to gain the most then she'll ever have in her life. What's five dollars when a DOLL can be had?
This is the real money trade off between corporate and open source software. Do you, as a user, get $100-200 worth of utility out of using Windows rather than Linux/BSD? I feel I do...shit, I've paid more money to Apple for upgrades than I've paid to MS for anything, and I don't feel cheated at all. At the same time, if I was a parent, fighting for hours with an MS OS that wouldn't run software my kids wanted while they nagged my ear off, I wouldn't be so hot to dump any money into their lap. It seems foolish to pay for a hard time.
The other thing. "Any kid that has been grounded knows about freedom." No -- any kid that has been grounded knows about imprisonment. It's not the same freedom Stallman rants about. Free as in beer and free as in speech are different from free as in not bound. It's very very difficult to teach anybody this kind of freedom, i'd say many of our leaders don't understand it, either. If they did, we'd see a much bigger libertarian party presence in this country. It's the difference between "If you don't love America, leave," a foolish phrase which has always reminded me of the jews fleeing Germany, and "If you don't love America, change it, because you have the right and ability to do so."
I don't think you understand what linear thought is -- or rather more specifically and less cruelly, what I meant by it.
Linear thought is when you chain sequences subjects together in a way that makes sense TO YOU. Non linear though is when you escape sequences of subjects and can return to the original thought.
Example:
Put the blue can inside the red box. Seems linear eh? It's not, really. It's something like this:
Put
the
blue
can
inside
the
red
Box.
with each tab indicating a new piece of information that must be processed in the child's brain.
You have to sort of hold on to the subject/object of the previous clause to understand the complete sentence. Children, especially young children, get easily lost returning to the previous subject. Listen when they talk...they may start talking about the can, bring up the fact that it is red, and then begin a new topic about other red things. It is not unlinear...it makes sense, when traversing, to continue to "free associate" subjects that are similar. This is because language and logic are stored in the brain similar to the way string values are stored in a good hash table. "Red" may be closer to "firetruck" then it is to "inside," and so it's easier to come up with a new subject.
It seem crazy to you in the same way a schizophrenic's clang associations make little sense to the rest of us...we don't understand things in that order because it is much harder to get anything done when you're free associating everywhere.
"Kid friendly" isn't just designing an interface for "humans." Children haven't developed as complete a set of signs (uh oh, look out, here comes the Pseudo Chomsky) and so it's important to keep within the standard set of language for children, or at least not to introduce too many new terms. Kids can learn the terms "File", "Print" or "Document" pretty easily, as well as the location of the functions they need. What they can't do is intuit what might be meant by "paragraph formatting" and so forth. All kids need to do is double space shit...why not give them a "Double Space" option, and leave the paragraph formatting for a "more advanced than I need, and I'm a graduate student" version.
(Yes, technically I need the drop indent for bibliographies, but I can use the tab key if I REALLY have to. I do everything in a proportional font anyway.)