You may say you had more corrupt governments in the 19th Century. I can't say, because I'm not that familiar with US history.
I, on the other hand, am familiar with US history. You are entirely correct.
The US government has fallen from grace. It is little more now than a tyrannical terrorist government, similar to Israel. Today, it's still pretty good for its own citizens, but I don't envy the poor Palestinians.
But it's worse than that. Even though it's still pretty good for its citizens today, it's rapidly becoming more like China. It's spying on its own citizens and passing a litany of laws to make this practice more widespread.
The poster that originally criticised me assumed I meant typical Slashdot things: DMCA and DRM. Couldn't be more wrong. Those are simply symptoms of a deeper problem: our government isn't of, by, and for the people anymore. It's of, by, and for the corps.
This explains the problems we see: going to war for a corp. Modifying elections for the corps. The fact that our biggest most powerful leaders are also very entwined with big corps.
And I stand by my assertion that government by lottery (or, as another poster put it, stabbing your finger into the phone book) would give us a BETTER government than we have today.
It turns out that the best leaders are those who do not want it. Steve Jobs probably doesn't fall into this category, being the grab-asstic wannabe he is, but Linus Torvalds, for example, would probably be the best president we've had for half a century. This goes for any number of do-good low-key individuals not only in the Open Source movement, but in human rights movements, etc.
I think that at this point, our government is so corrupt and broken, that appointing government officials by lottery would yield something better.
Sorry for a second post, but another awesome wiki with a more technical bent is at c2 dot com (I linked you to starting points). Another place where I've spent hours and hours and... aaah. Collaboration rocks.
So since no-one's ever heard of this game anyway, and it looks lame, I'm gonna bring up a keyword-related subject.
It's about universes and entropy.
See, a friend and I were wondering, what would the universe be like if the second law of thermodynamics were reverse: entropy didn't increase in a closed-system reaction, but DECREASED.
In any reaction, the potential energy after the reaction is slightly more than before. Instead of sugar dissolving in water, it would cause the water to crystallise.
Blah, blah blah. How would you cook a chicken? Or would you even cook? Maybe you would want to eat something raw or even rotton?
Instead of life being defined as a long battle against entropy against which you eventually lose, and your atoms scatter to the wind, life is a battle against order and chaos which you eventually lose, becoming a crystalline diamond.
Of course, all of this is just rough-draft preliminary rambling. What would the universe really be like? Because I'm sure I got a lot of that dramatically wrong because I've only thought through the ramifications one level deep.
Here's a "me, too" posting. I just started using Popfile when Slashdot covered it a few weeks back. A slightly rough start, but pretty impressive so far.
In order to help my testing, I have Popfile sorting my mailing list traffic, too.
It's got a nice HTTP GUI interface for reclassifying wrongly-classified emails, which makes me very, very happy.
I don't see this "ratpoison" WM as saving much in the way of keystrokes. In the way he uses it, he's got far more keystrokes to do than I do in my stock GNOME2.0 (Mandrake 9) environment. And GNOME2.0's WM is pretty lightweight (Metacity).
For example, I keep three "root" GTerm's on desktop 1 which is bound to "F1" -- yep, a single keypress and I'm on my first desktop. More GTerm's on 2, email & Galeon on 3, etc. I can get from app to app with single keypresses and occasionally an alt-tab if I want to "overload" a given desktop.
The biggest obstacle to eliminating the mouse in GUI land isn't the WM anymore. Metacity finally fixes the keyboard bindings for moving/resizing windows like -- [ahem] -- that other OS has had since 3.11.
What's the biggest obstacle then? The apps. Tell me, in Mozilla, how do you navigate a web page*? How, in Gimp, do you select a rectangular region? How, in Dia, do you create five objects? The theme? You use the mouse. You don't use the keyboard. You can't use the keyboard.
GNOME2.0 is addressing the problems. I'm not sure where and with what document, but every GNOME2.0 app I've seen thus far is so much more keyboard-compliant than any other Linux app I've seen to date, there must be some central document explaining in simple checkbox style what keyboard shortcuts apps must support.
* Yes, I know you CAN navigate a web page in Mozilla using the keyboard, but scroll down seven pages until you see a link you're interested in, press "TAB" and notice how it scrolls all the way back to the top where the first link is. F--king brain-dead. Useless.
They're small. They take often 1600x1200 pictures, which is enough resolution for an 8.5x11 page (or A4, if you're over there).
I used it to "scan" my passport when I needed to get a copy of it to someone in the States once, and then just emailed the "scan" so they could print it out there. Looked better than a fax, and worked better, too.
I can't see why the FSF is trying to become the new Linux authority. First they've tried to claim that much of Linux was written by GNU, this is not true, I put to you, they tried changing Linux to GNU/Linux. Notice that GNU is placed before the word Linux, this implies a strong bias towards the former entity.
You are so right! Richard Stallman, in his blatent use of English (putting the adjective before the noun my ass. Ask the French and Spanish what they think of this abhorrent practice!) has shown his true colours.
Linus has pronounced that from now on, in all comments, the adjective must follow the noun, like so:
Linux GNU
Car red
Child small
Parent poster silly
Please immediately start following this method new of modifying nouns when speaking English. Don't let your megalomania be the demise of you. All programmers Source Open must like Yoda be.
I'm starting to see a pattern in these posts... in order to let your congressperson know what you as a constituent wants done, legally, you must donate money to them.
Could it be any more clear that our legislative branch of government operates only on bribery?
We've become mainland China, and we don't even lament.
Well, he could always be simulating the accent over the e, given he didn't make the same mistake on 'jobs'.
Wouldn't it then be "re'sume's"?
I'm never surprised anymore. A complete lack of English-writing skills seems to be more prevalent than ever. The inability to then properly include French words shouldn't surprise.
I had the unenvious job of having to weed through 30 resumes for some entry-level tech position a few years back. It pained me to see the illiteracy that's rampant in our society.
I may as well be the first to post some semi-literate self-contradicting piece of Microsoft defense. I'll try to hit all the cliches so you won't feel you're on the wrong 'blog.
The Slashdot editors posted a link to a Microsoft-backed security organisation that is devoted to making the world a better place. Just because Microsoft, which has perpetrated just about every evil on the software industry imaginable, is the company backing this other company, doesn't mean it won't be completely impartial and cause security-related bugs to become freedom-loving United States citizens!
Slashdot is just full of trolls who can't understand that this is an ad hominem attack which means an argument that says whenever someone acts evil 100% of the time for 20 years you can't discount the possibility that this time they're acting to promote the greater good of mankind.
Just read the article, people! And I quote:
The organisation expects to release drafts of its guidelines in early 2003.
See? They're going to release drafts of the guidelines in early 2003. Nothing to worry about here, folks. Move along. DRM is good. Linux is bad. Stop worrying, buy your DVDs and CDs, and consume like you've never consumed before. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Microsoft is obligated to screw the consumer. There is no monopoly. The Justice Department meted out the justice already.
Send in my registration card? Naw. I'll make it simple for the marketdroids: release a good game with Linux support, and I'll buy it. Otherwise, I won't.
I read this story on Friday morning. NTK Now covered it. The submission seems almost a word-for-word copy/paste of NTK Now's coverage. Hell, why not? I'll copy/paste NTK Now's coverage:
TRACKING: sufficiently advanced technology : the gathering
DVDSYNC is a low-level Windows filter that can sit between a
DVD player and your DVD player software, and mess with data
streams and controller commands on the fly. There's not much
there yet but what there is demonstrates the great promise
of the design. Already You can create your own subtitles
(there are already some improved English subs for Gauche the
Cellist, and a couple of other anime tracks). In the future,
we imagine, you'll be able to perfectly sync-up extra audio
tracks or even skin your own DVD menus. There's also, ahem,
a filter to take out any DVD zoning information before it
gets to the DVD playing software. In other words, a really
useful utility for DVD watchers - and anyone who likes
improving on the creativity of others - which will have the
military- industrial-entertainment complex spitting blood.
This is what TCPA, EUCD, DMCA and any anagrams thereof were
cynically designed to smack down. Get it while you can.
http://www.roundelay.net/dvdsynth/prerelease.html
- despoiling our DVDs with homemade content? Who could want such a thing?
http://www.yil.com/columns/column.asp?columnist=eb ert&date=020201&page=01
- Ah. And wasn't killing Siskel enough of a warning?
This is a great first step. I hope the government has the balls to ban email spam, too.
I want an email spam law that allows me to charge for equipment, storage, and my time used to stop the spam. Since I'm a DBA, that should come to roughly $1,000 per spam, give or take a couple hundred dollars.
You think Opencola is an Open Source answer to the corporate theives? You really think so?
Relevent Quote from the page:
Thank you for your interest in Opencola.
The Opencola soft drink formula was a time-limited marketing promotion that ran publicly until 2001 in support of the company's introductory open source product offering. Opencola has since changed its strategic direction and is now focusing its core business on developing a proprietary distributed content search application.
Any other Open Source Colas out there? On the bright side, if you act fast, you can download the PDF of making Open Cola now, and maybe someone can fork the project.
Double-sized playlist? Oh... I'm using XMMS, so I can't speak for the "nullsoft fuckwads," but in XMMS, you can pick the playlist font.
But you can't pick the font for the display of the song. Well, actually, you can, but it doesn't resize the display in which the font is... er... displayed. So it looks like shit.
Yeh, Winamp/XMMS UI sucks. Unfortunately, I've found nothing under Linux that's better. I'm sure there's something, but I'm unaware of it. Maybe someone would reply to me and show me the error of my ways.
Okay, so you run a honking big image server. I could easily do the same, since my photography runs in 1000s of rolls. If you do the same as me, then the original negitives are stored in a fire proof vault somewhere and you work with the scanned images.
Negatives? Fireproof vault? Oh, how 1980's. Nikon Coolpix 995, dude. It's all about digital photography.
How often do I look at the photos? I dunno, once a month? Work with them? Once every six months? Sell them? Never. Transmit them? I dunno, let me look at my Apache logs. Here, confuse me, download some: Pictures.
I keep them online/nearline because that's the only place they exist. If they're not online, they're gone. Forever. I need double the HDD space for everything I have because I backup to HDD (cheaper and easier than anything else I've found). If I can buy a 320GB drive, I'll be happy, if it's mostly reliable (ie: doesn't die in less than 2 years).
Music? I need it all online. So I can listen to it on my laptop, or on my server, or in my bedroom, or... It's the nature of the times, my man. I archive my CDs -- they're source material, not what I actually listen to. I want to archive my DVDs -- just don't have the disk space yet.
Just remember, Robert X. Cringely isn't the definitive user of HDD space. In fact, since he uses only 200MB, it looks like he's in the small minority.
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
I have a lot of Mac&Bumble on my box. That's about 1.5GB. I have a bit of DOMAI. That's another few hundred MB. I have Kuniscans. That's another GB or two. Then there's my own personal photography. That's at least 12GB. Then there are all the pictures my wife has/saves. 2GB or so.
Then there's my database-backed image server. That's another 2GB or so.
Then all the code I've written and the code that is generated by the code I've written. Another 0.5GB?
All my MP3s? I think it's 30 or 40GB, and my collection is small (what, since it's LEGAL and all).
I guess that's more than 200MB, and I can't see how any of it's really recoverable if there's a fire. I guess I could book some tickets for another ONE FULL YEAR ABROAD in Taiwan, New Zealand, and Guam and try to get a semi-substitute.
Never mind nude pics of the ex-girlfriend, which are completely irreplaceable (I hear she plumped out a bit)...;)
So yeh, I think a 320GB HDD or four (for redundancy) wouldn't make me unhappy. As it is now, my puny 200GB or so of storage on my five computers isn't enough for me to rip my DVD collection (which I'd like to do so that I can use VLC to watch them anywhere in the house).
Slashdot Mirror
I, on the other hand, am familiar with US history. You are entirely correct.
The US government has fallen from grace. It is little more now than a tyrannical terrorist government, similar to Israel. Today, it's still pretty good for its own citizens, but I don't envy the poor Palestinians.
But it's worse than that. Even though it's still pretty good for its citizens today, it's rapidly becoming more like China. It's spying on its own citizens and passing a litany of laws to make this practice more widespread.
The poster that originally criticised me assumed I meant typical Slashdot things: DMCA and DRM. Couldn't be more wrong. Those are simply symptoms of a deeper problem: our government isn't of, by, and for the people anymore. It's of, by, and for the corps.
This explains the problems we see: going to war for a corp. Modifying elections for the corps. The fact that our biggest most powerful leaders are also very entwined with big corps.
And I stand by my assertion that government by lottery (or, as another poster put it, stabbing your finger into the phone book) would give us a BETTER government than we have today.
It turns out that the best leaders are those who do not want it. Steve Jobs probably doesn't fall into this category, being the grab-asstic wannabe he is, but Linus Torvalds, for example, would probably be the best president we've had for half a century. This goes for any number of do-good low-key individuals not only in the Open Source movement, but in human rights movements, etc.
I think that at this point, our government is so corrupt and broken, that appointing government officials by lottery would yield something better.
Sorry for a second post, but another awesome wiki with a more technical bent is at c2 dot com (I linked you to starting points). Another place where I've spent hours and hours and... aaah. Collaboration rocks.
I've spent hours browsing topics on that site, and remain constantly amazed at the depth and breadth of knowledge on it.
For amusement, look up "slashdot" on it. You will find more history and amusement than you remembered ever living through yourself.
It even covers the troll era, with entries on Natalie Portman, grits, whatnot (I dare not type too many examples lest I be lameness filtered).
So since no-one's ever heard of this game anyway, and it looks lame, I'm gonna bring up a keyword-related subject.
It's about universes and entropy.
See, a friend and I were wondering, what would the universe be like if the second law of thermodynamics were reverse: entropy didn't increase in a closed-system reaction, but DECREASED.
In any reaction, the potential energy after the reaction is slightly more than before. Instead of sugar dissolving in water, it would cause the water to crystallise.
Blah, blah blah. How would you cook a chicken? Or would you even cook? Maybe you would want to eat something raw or even rotton?
Instead of life being defined as a long battle against entropy against which you eventually lose, and your atoms scatter to the wind, life is a battle against order and chaos which you eventually lose, becoming a crystalline diamond.
Of course, all of this is just rough-draft preliminary rambling. What would the universe really be like? Because I'm sure I got a lot of that dramatically wrong because I've only thought through the ramifications one level deep.
Here's a "me, too" posting. I just started using Popfile when Slashdot covered it a few weeks back. A slightly rough start, but pretty impressive so far.
In order to help my testing, I have Popfile sorting my mailing list traffic, too.
It's got a nice HTTP GUI interface for reclassifying wrongly-classified emails, which makes me very, very happy.
I don't see this "ratpoison" WM as saving much in the way of keystrokes. In the way he uses it, he's got far more keystrokes to do than I do in my stock GNOME2.0 (Mandrake 9) environment. And GNOME2.0's WM is pretty lightweight (Metacity).
For example, I keep three "root" GTerm's on desktop 1 which is bound to "F1" -- yep, a single keypress and I'm on my first desktop. More GTerm's on 2, email & Galeon on 3, etc. I can get from app to app with single keypresses and occasionally an alt-tab if I want to "overload" a given desktop.
The biggest obstacle to eliminating the mouse in GUI land isn't the WM anymore. Metacity finally fixes the keyboard bindings for moving/resizing windows like -- [ahem] -- that other OS has had since 3.11.
What's the biggest obstacle then? The apps. Tell me, in Mozilla, how do you navigate a web page*? How, in Gimp, do you select a rectangular region? How, in Dia, do you create five objects? The theme? You use the mouse. You don't use the keyboard. You can't use the keyboard.
GNOME2.0 is addressing the problems. I'm not sure where and with what document, but every GNOME2.0 app I've seen thus far is so much more keyboard-compliant than any other Linux app I've seen to date, there must be some central document explaining in simple checkbox style what keyboard shortcuts apps must support.
* Yes, I know you CAN navigate a web page in Mozilla using the keyboard, but scroll down seven pages until you see a link you're interested in, press "TAB" and notice how it scrolls all the way back to the top where the first link is. F--king brain-dead. Useless.
I'm waiting for Mandrake as my desktop and Debian as my server to fail spectacularly to live up to my expectations of a desktop or server OS.
When they do so fail, I'll try Gentoo, among other things.
It's been a few years. I'm not predicting spectacular failure anytime in the next few months.
They're small. They take often 1600x1200 pictures, which is enough resolution for an 8.5x11 page (or A4, if you're over there).
I used it to "scan" my passport when I needed to get a copy of it to someone in the States once, and then just emailed the "scan" so they could print it out there. Looked better than a fax, and worked better, too.
Linus has pronounced that from now on, in all comments, the adjective must follow the noun, like so:
- Linux GNU
- Car red
- Child small
- Parent poster silly
Please immediately start following this method new of modifying nouns when speaking English. Don't let your megalomania be the demise of you. All programmers Source Open must like Yoda be.I'm starting to see a pattern in these posts... in order to let your congressperson know what you as a constituent wants done, legally, you must donate money to them.
Could it be any more clear that our legislative branch of government operates only on bribery?
We've become mainland China, and we don't even lament.
It says "3D/2D blah blah blah" but I see "R2D2 blah blah blah."
God help us all.
I'm never surprised anymore. A complete lack of English-writing skills seems to be more prevalent than ever. The inability to then properly include French words shouldn't surprise.
I had the unenvious job of having to weed through 30 resumes for some entry-level tech position a few years back. It pained me to see the illiteracy that's rampant in our society.
The Slashdot editors posted a link to a Microsoft-backed security organisation that is devoted to making the world a better place. Just because Microsoft, which has perpetrated just about every evil on the software industry imaginable, is the company backing this other company, doesn't mean it won't be completely impartial and cause security-related bugs to become freedom-loving United States citizens!
Slashdot is just full of trolls who can't understand that this is an ad hominem attack which means an argument that says whenever someone acts evil 100% of the time for 20 years you can't discount the possibility that this time they're acting to promote the greater good of mankind.
Just read the article, people! And I quote:
See? They're going to release drafts of the guidelines in early 2003. Nothing to worry about here, folks. Move along. DRM is good. Linux is bad. Stop worrying, buy your DVDs and CDs, and consume like you've never consumed before. If you don't like it, don't buy it. Microsoft is obligated to screw the consumer. There is no monopoly. The Justice Department meted out the justice already.
Send in my registration card? Naw. I'll make it simple for the marketdroids: release a good game with Linux support, and I'll buy it. Otherwise, I won't.
This is a great first step. I hope the government has the balls to ban email spam, too.
I want an email spam law that allows me to charge for equipment, storage, and my time used to stop the spam. Since I'm a DBA, that should come to roughly $1,000 per spam, give or take a couple hundred dollars.
They already ripped someone off this way in the past!
What, did they hire some actors for this one?
Double-sized playlist? Oh... I'm using XMMS, so I can't speak for the "nullsoft fuckwads," but in XMMS, you can pick the playlist font.
But you can't pick the font for the display of the song. Well, actually, you can, but it doesn't resize the display in which the font is... er... displayed. So it looks like shit.
Yeh, Winamp/XMMS UI sucks. Unfortunately, I've found nothing under Linux that's better. I'm sure there's something, but I'm unaware of it. Maybe someone would reply to me and show me the error of my ways.
Negatives? Fireproof vault? Oh, how 1980's. Nikon Coolpix 995, dude. It's all about digital photography.
How often do I look at the photos? I dunno, once a month? Work with them? Once every six months? Sell them? Never. Transmit them? I dunno, let me look at my Apache logs. Here, confuse me, download some: Pictures.
I keep them online/nearline because that's the only place they exist. If they're not online, they're gone. Forever. I need double the HDD space for everything I have because I backup to HDD (cheaper and easier than anything else I've found). If I can buy a 320GB drive, I'll be happy, if it's mostly reliable (ie: doesn't die in less than 2 years).
Music? I need it all online. So I can listen to it on my laptop, or on my server, or in my bedroom, or... It's the nature of the times, my man. I archive my CDs -- they're source material, not what I actually listen to. I want to archive my DVDs -- just don't have the disk space yet.
Just remember, Robert X. Cringely isn't the definitive user of HDD space. In fact, since he uses only 200MB, it looks like he's in the small minority.
You've misspelled "resume" in your sig, unless my font is rendering it wrong.
You've used the accente grave.
Or is this some sort of subtle French joke?
I'll bite.
;)
I have a lot of Mac&Bumble on my box. That's about 1.5GB. I have a bit of DOMAI. That's another few hundred MB. I have Kuniscans. That's another GB or two. Then there's my own personal photography. That's at least 12GB. Then there are all the pictures my wife has/saves. 2GB or so.
Then there's my database-backed image server. That's another 2GB or so.
Then all the code I've written and the code that is generated by the code I've written. Another 0.5GB?
All my MP3s? I think it's 30 or 40GB, and my collection is small (what, since it's LEGAL and all).
I guess that's more than 200MB, and I can't see how any of it's really recoverable if there's a fire. I guess I could book some tickets for another ONE FULL YEAR ABROAD in Taiwan, New Zealand, and Guam and try to get a semi-substitute.
Never mind nude pics of the ex-girlfriend, which are completely irreplaceable (I hear she plumped out a bit)...
So yeh, I think a 320GB HDD or four (for redundancy) wouldn't make me unhappy. As it is now, my puny 200GB or so of storage on my five computers isn't enough for me to rip my DVD collection (which I'd like to do so that I can use VLC to watch them anywhere in the house).