If he'd kept his griping primarily to the Zeta folks, my hackles wouldn't have raised quite as much. For practical purposes, it sounds like Zeta is going to be what the next release of BeOS would have been... sort of. As another commenter pointed out, Be never shipped support for hardware-based OpenGL, and I don't think Zeta has this. I'd go out on a limb and say that if Be, Inc., hadn't lost its corporate mind, they'd have probably worked on fixing problems like that; Zeta, as far as I know, still doesn't.
Of course, there are companies out there whose business model, such as it is, involves stringing along diehard Amiga users by bringing AmigaOS variants up to parity with late '90s OS technology. Come to think of it, they're all in Germany, too. There may be something in the beer.
I have no idea what bug you have up your butt, but here's a few points.
Yes, BeOS is a dead operating system. There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not what's around now.
Steinberg ported Nuendo to BeOS. You'll notice that it could process 96 media tracks simultaneously. Why is this significant? Because on the same hardware the NT version could only do 48 tracks.
As a matter of fact, yes, BeOS did have a better media core than anything else did, in one specific area: latency. There was literally nothing else beyond true RTOSes that could touch it. If you go to a stage show in Vegas, Disney or even some Broadway theatres, there's a non-zero chance that the sound and lighting system is still being run by a BeOS-based system from LCS. In 2005, other operating systems have caught up in some respects, but the main thing that "beats" BeOS in media processing is simply Moore's Law: machines are so much faster now than they were six years ago that it doesn't matter that their signal processing still blows moose chunks.
There are other things that BeOS had that no other operating system had, most notably the file system and live queries that could operate on metadata. Make a virtual folder that contains all the word processing documents you've edited in the last week? No problem. BeOS was by far the most responsive operating system I've ever used. And you know what? It got more commercial applications announced for it in its first two years of public release than Linux did in its first five or six. (Some of those commercial applications are in fact still around, now on other platforms.)
Yes, BeOS had its share of problems, some of them did involve driver support, and there's been very little development on drivers since 2000. But it wasn't difficult to find supported hardware back then--I ran it on a pretty much stock Gateway PC--and I can assure you that BeOS does not suck. If Be had made some wiser business decisions (like not going after the non-existent internet appliance market, and knifing their desktop developers in order to do it), it'd probably still be around.
I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005, it's not a very compelling operating system. But you obviously don't have a clue why so much of the computing world was excited about it in 1999.
And making sites that don't like like shit is pretty non-trivial to people who put the word designer in quotes, like it's some kind of disease. It's this kind of "creative people are too stupid to learn standards" attitude that ensures designers aren't going to be listening to you, even when you're making sense.
In point of fact, all of Macromedia's products do make it pretty easy to create 100% standards-compliant web sites. Studio MX has its faults, but an inability to handle CSS and XHTML is not one of them. Many modern web sites that degrade gracefully all the way down to Lynx were created with some combination of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and HomeSite.
Granted, I only use Fireworks from those, and do the rest in BBEdit. Yeah, I'm on a Mac. It's sure difficult for an Apple zealot like me to use all of those fancy validation features, integrated HTML Tidy and the like, but somehow my little designer mind can get wrapped around it. Hyuk hyuk hyuk.
This is an interesting paradox I'm not sure the "hack to free the music" crowd has entirely thought through. You may feel that any DRM is too much DRM, and I respect that, but I may feel that a given DRM is livable enough for my purposes--like Apple's scheme for iTunes. I do own my music (unlike, say, Napster's subscription model), and I don't consider the restrictions on burning and sharing sufficiently onerous.
However, if you--in this case, "you" being "DVD Jon," or people with similar mindsets--decide that because you don't like that restriction, the proper response is not to simply avoid iTunes but to break iTunes' DRM, you put Apple in a position where they have to slap duct tape over the hole you've made. The chances are that the "duct tape" they're using makes their DRM scheme fractionally more restrictive. And if you keep at it, eventually Apple's countermeasures will leave me with a product which no longer meets my needs. You will at that point have forced me to either stop using the iTunes store, or to join you in the DRM arms race. Your attempts to "protect my freedom" will, from my point of view, have had the opposite effect.
I understand the philosophical objection to DRM, and I'd prefer it if the iTMS was closer to Magnatune (in both lack of restriction and choice of downloadable music formats). But I'm not convinced that monkeywrenching is the ideal response -- or ultimately, even a very good one.
First off, Ubuntu Linux has a GUI. I've seen it. In fact, I used it, without doing any configuration at all; I just put in the CD and it came up. Using it as an example of what's wrong with open source software is like using an inability to run Doom III on your PC as an example of what's wrong with first-person shooters: you're abstracting a single-case problem into a denunciation of the class.
On the larger point, I think you're arguing a slightly different point. You're saying that program has to have a certain level of functionality before it's acceptable to you. The other people are saying that functionality is not the only concern. And you're both arguing as if these points are contradictory. They're not.
There's a word processor I used when I used Windows called Nota Bene. In terms of functionality, it's not just better than Word, it dunks Word's head in the toilet and mops the floor with it. It's also aimed at a niche market, though, and it costs more than all of Microsoft Office does. For most people, Word has the necessary level of functionality, and it doesn't matter that there's something else out there with more functionality.
If we allow that, and we then allow that once that has been met other factors come into play in choosing software, there's no reason that "source license" couldn't be one of those factors just like "price" is. If AbiWord gives me the necessary level of functionality and it has a source license I like more than OpenOffice, there's no intrinsic reason why I should choose OpenOffice simply because it has more functionality.
This is not meant as a flamebait question, but a serious one. Back in the stone age, there were standalone grammar checkers, and there were three big ones: Grammatik, Correct Grammar, and RightWriter. The first two were basically dictionary systems; the third didn't use a dictionary, but actually used a parse tree and compared it against a rule base which could be associated with different styles of writing (so you could say "if this is fiction, don't bug me about double negatives"), and also could produce a marked-up copy of your file rather than trying to make you proof it interactively. None of these programs were great, but RightWriter was head and shoulders above the others.
Unfortunately, Corel bought Grammatik and integrated it into WordPerfect, and Microsoft bought Correct Grammar and integrated it into Word. RightWriter closed up shop.
AFAIK, the grammar checker in Word now is mostly written in house and uses some of the same ideas that RightWriter had introduced more than a decade earlier, but it's still slower and more error-prone than its predecessor.
Nice theory, but here's a few more points for you:
Finder doesn't display previews of Postscript files.
Finder doesn't display previews of EPS files, either. (It might if they have attached bitmap previews, but I'm not sure.)
Finder does display PDFs natively (and Quartz uses very PDF-like display lists natively), but PDF is not Turing-complete.
It doesn't matter if the language is Turing-complete if it executes in a contained environment. Malicious code can only harm what it has access to, by definition.
Postscript has been around two decades now, and AFAIK the only "virus" ever reported written it couldn't do anything but reset your Apple Laserwriter password. If you think you can write a Postscript program which reformats my hard drive, talks to my mail client, or even just brings up a dialogue box on my screen that says "Hi, I'm PostScript!", you're welcome to start hackin' now.
You don't need to even RTFA, you could just RTF quote before shooting off about complete zeros:
For Sananda Maitreya, who also joined the legal brief, online music distribution gives him the freedom he says he lacked when he was signed with a major label in the 1980s under his former name, Terence Trent D'Arby. Back then, Maitreya recalled, committees had to sign off on any music released.
"The Beatles could not have faced that criteria and come up with anything other than the most mediocre, conservative music," said Maitreya, who now lives in Italy.
His example was clearly using the Beatles as an example of a group which produced great music, and suggesting they wouldn't have been able to do so with the record-by-committee style of modern pop.
Ask not for the asshat is worn. It is worn for thee.
As an "I'm not an employee but a satisfied user" comment, look at the trackballs from Kensington. They have two lines -- the Orbit is basically their version of Logitech's Marble Mouse, which might be what you're describing above (the ball in the middle, two buttons to either side), and the Expert Mouse is a *big* trackball with four buttons and either a scroll wheel above the ball or a "scroll ring" around the ball depending on which model you get.
A couple years ago I decided that I needed a second Marble Mouse for work (I had one at home and couldn't find one, so got an Orbit, and decided that it was actually slightly better than Logitech's original. So the Marble Mouse came to work with me. Just a couple months ago I bought an Expert Mouse for home and took the Orbit into the office with me.
The Orbit's pretty reasonably priced (around $30). The Expert Mouse is a somewhat dismaying $100, but it's really good.
Incidentally, Kensington also makes the "StudioBoard," which is the closet thing on the market I've found to the original IBM PC mechnical switch keyboard. They sell it specifically for Macs (as a modern incarnation of the old Apple Studio Keyboard), but since it's USB, it should work for PCs, too. A good keyboard is probably as important as a good mouse to fight RSI, and in my experience a "standard" keyboard with good keypress quality is better than most "ergonomic" keyboards are. (I can't speak to the really serious $250+ ergonomic keyboards.)
While I agree with you to a large degree, I think the neocons are extremely good at framing debates, including the way their opponents are perceived. John Kerry, for all his faults, wasn't remotely the way-out-in-left-field he was successfully presented as; over his Senate career, his voting record actually put him about in the middle of the Democratic pack, and on military issues he was fairly hawkish. But through highly misleading and frequently repeated talking points, most of just heard "fourth most liberal in the Senate" and "voted against $4 billion in military spending" and yadda yadda.
And then, of course, there's Howard Dean, who's supposed to be even more liberal--except that his track record in Vermont was pretty fiscally conservative.
The Democrats don't put very liberal candidates up for presidential office, not seriously. Kucinich, Boxer, Frank--can you imagine these guys even winning a primary, let alone the nomination? No, the problem is really one of getting across to the moderates that when Democrats are being painted as more of those crazy tax and spend liberals, it's not the truth. C'mon, Bill Clinton reduced the deficit, overhauled the welfare system and championed free trade--Bob Dole complained that Clinton won in 1996 by taking Republican positions faster than Dole could. Hillary Clinton is pretty much cut from the same political cloth as her husband, yet she's been successfully painted as Karl Marx reincarnated with tits.
If the Democrats move right far enough that the Republicans can't go after them for being Too Darn Liberal, it means they're going to be running a Joe Lieberman-Zell Miller ticket, and I admit that prospect doesn't really enthuse me.:)
Actually, to be fair, the current company called "SCO" is the company that was called "Caldera"; their business model was Linux, and while they ruffled feathers in the Linux community, the Caldera Network Desktop was one of the first attempts to be "Linux for the business user." It was when the principals of Caldera left the company and the new CEO came in that they got their new sue-everyone business model. (I originally wrote "principles of Caldera," but one could argue they left the company then, too...)
The company that actually made SCO Unix went through what you describe and saw the writing on the wall, but their choice was to sell SCO Unix and the name to Caldera, then rename themselves Tarantella and sell an application server. AFAIK, they're still around.
No, you didn't say you were a libertarian, but your phrasing and examples come across as extremely similar to a particular kind of fiercely anti-government, market-over-everything libertarian stance. If you feel that's a mischaracterization of your position, I apologize, but it's inherent in the concept of "law" that laws can be enforced, and most people don't seem to have an inherent problem with that notion. I have literally never heard the "all government power comes from the point of a gun" line from anyone who doesn't regard all government as tyranny. If you're using it simply to melodramatically make a point that government power is different from non-governmental power, I've not stated otherwise, although yes, it is my feeling that if you underpaid a tax bill for $10 the police would not be breaking down your door over it. (Speaking from personal past experience, given a choice between underpaying your city government and underpaying Citibank, underpay the government, because they will not put nearly as much effort into screwing you.)
But the threat is not make-believe as you would have it.
I never suggested the threat was "make-believe," I suggested the comparison between people eating you in a life boat and being forced to pay a extra $10 in property tax is ridiculous. The fact that government is in a unique position to legally make your life miserable does not make a slippery slope fallacy less fallacious.
There are several quibbles I have with the "government is evil" mindset of the most dedicated libertarians, but you expose one inadvertently:
If government was voluntary, it wouldn't be government at all -- it would be free enterprise.
This contains a host of assumptions, from the explicit idea that governments are never formed or rejected voluntarily to the implicit idea that non-governmental organizations never have coercive, binding force. All of these are highly questionable assumptions indeed.
If libertarians were more willing as a whole to recognize that the problem with the potential use of force by government is a problem with any organization with a high concentration of power, I'd be a lot more comfortable with their positions. Government organizations undoubtedly have legal force that private organizations do not, but--at least in a representational form of government--there is an accountability to those affected by their actions that corporations simply do not have. (And if you don't think corporations can exercise lethal force and get away with it, you need to study history--even recent history--more closely.)
Remember, there are very, very few actions our government takes that are just done for the hell of it--there are people outside of government calling for those actions to be taken, and very often these actions are being taken at the behest of "free enterprise." If you want to save people from the government, you need to change who government is accountable to. Attempting to reduce government's functions without addressing accountability issues may well leave you worse off than before.
The problem with this sort of comparison--and virtually all comparisons, I'm afraid, that libertarians make that ever invoke the phrase at the point of a gun or something similar--is that it's assigning an ethical equivalence to requiring you to pay $10 more a year in property taxes or something similarly trivial and being put to death. This is utter nonsense.
In any given group there are infrastructure needs which simply make more sense to be funded collectively, even though there is probably no one single function that all members of the community will need. There will be some people who inevitably pay for services that other people use. But when they're paying for such a service, they're paying for something that they don't need right now but might at some other point--and might not be available cost-effectively, or even available at all, without spreading the burden around. And, of course, some of those services provide indirect benefits: even if you don't use that service directly, services that you do rely on may in turn rely on that common infrastructure.
Is it possible to envision a society with no common infrastructure costs? Sure. But it'd be a society in which all those costs are a lot higher for those who do use the services, and there's a great deal more difficulty for those who don't, and we're not talking about inconvenience--we're talking about no access to police, fire, water, sewer, roads and any other municipal service. Everyone in the society but those at the very top would be poorer, sicker and in more danger. The benefits of this "coercion" outweigh the incremental loss of individual freedom.
Municipal wireless obviously isn't a basic infrastructure need, and I can see arguing against it. But you know, that's the wonder of our government--people can go to town meetings and argue against what they consider to be stupid ideas, and anyone who watches local government knows that they do listen. (Anyone who watches local government knows that, in fact, citizen input is where most of the stupid ideas come from, too.)
While I know you're being facetious, there's actually some value in that observation, you know. There's a famous (or infamous) audiophile magazine called The Absolute Sound, and the name refers to the idea of audio recording trying to be as perfect a replication of the live performance as possible.
And, incidentally, most of the TAS guys seem to be happy enough with SACD -- but not so much CD. The original poster's observation that you can't tell the difference between digital and analog with sufficient sampling resolution isn't really what was in dispute among the analog-philes -- what was in dispute was whether the sampling rate of CD was high enough. And as Jeffrey Baker observed in other comments, digital has hard clipping rather than soft clipping, and that can make a difference. (This is something you run into the visual equivalent of in digital cameras versus film--the difference between overexposing Kodak Portra 160VC film in my old 35mm SLR and overexposing a shot on my D70 is pretty stark, and--despite the many advantages the digital camera has otherwise--not in the D70's favor.)
...probably in an even higher percentage. And this has nothing to do with the back end software you're using.
The difference with LiveJournal is simply that it puts all its journals on the same "level," because they've had a much stronger focus on community than any other blogging service and certainly more than independent blogs. I'd suggest that most bloggers who host their own domains don't have anything more substantial to contribute to "the community" than LJ users do; the difference is that 99% of the weblogs out there are never seen by anyone except their owner and the five people they've given the URL to.
Outside of LJ, there really isn't a "community" for blogs: there's a handful of big name ones in various fields (mostly politics and tech), a second tier that shows up from association with the big names, and a whole bunch of never-seens. What LJ critics see as its weakness is also its strength compared to every other service--there's a whole big honking heap of metadata there. You can search for people by physical location, by interests, through friend-of-friend lists. All of the things that FOAF and Trackbacks and Pingbacks and blogrolls try to do, with very limited success, have been done successfully for years over on LiveJournal.
There's some fine writing on LJ, too -- in general, because of the way "friends lists" get interlaced, finding one thoughtful journalist will lead you to a lot of others. Finding an uninteresting journal will, well, usually lead you to more uninteresting ones. Does LiveJournal have a higher percentage of crap than other systems? Possibly, because it has a lower barrier of entry--it can be both no cost and no work, unlike any other system but Blogger. I suspect if you could limit random searches to only paid LJ accounts, the quality would marginally improve; likewise, I suspect if you could actually get a random Blogger-powered journal with a button click, you'd find much the same level of cow dung there as you do on LJ.
Frankly, I hope this rumor doesn't pan out. After trying for a while to move my LJ to MT (and writing a little 'echo' patch that mirrored the MT posts to the old LJ account), I realized that the only value being brought by this approach was the ability for spammers to bomb my Movable Type installation. By flipping things around--using LJ as the main back end, and embedding a custom view of it on my home page--the ones and ones of people who were reading my weblog on my home page still get to do it, with very little visual change, and I keep all the considerable benefits of LJ's community. And no damn comment spam.
Re:Comment from the writer of the Czech article
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Doom Movie Update
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There is no chance of making big-budget commercial Hollywood movie featuring upside-down crosses and "666" symbols.
Because goodness knows, Hollywood sure hasn't done films about demons before. "The Exorcist," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Omen," "Fallen"... those were all about fluffy bunnies, right?
Blame Microsoft and to a lesser degree Netscape, not Opera. No, seriously.
The support for Netscape 4.x, which most people refused to give up supporting until very recently, obviously kills all attempts to get XML/XSL going. But even making that go away doesn't fix the other problem: IE's support for XSL is broken.
Sure, both it and Mozilla can process XSLT perfectly. The thing is, the MIME type for XSL should be "text/xml". Pretty simple, right? Except that IE won't display it with that MIME type. No, it requires the pages to be served with "text/xsl" or it won't display 'em. (And, in fact, only Windows IE supports it at all. The Mac version doesn't process XSL.)
So, unless you get your web server to specifically check what browser a client is using and change the MIME type it serves, you have to choose supporting Netscape or WinIE. You can't do both. (I worked at There.com for a while, and I recall people bitching that you could only use IE to log into it. Guess why? Because they were serving XML/XSL pages.)
Having said all this, the idea that bandwidth is dramatically saved by using XML/XSL instead of XHTML/CSS is... dubious. My resume in XHTML is 177 lines, with an embedded style sheet. The XML source is 192 lines, and the XSLT file is 127 lines. The advantage of XML isn't that it's compact, but rather that it's abstract (I have separate XSL files that also generate RTF and plain text). The only reason to push XML/XSL to the browser is to offload the conversion to XHTML/CSS from server to client.
Nobody gives a flying coconut what Opera does and doesn't support, or at least they haven't for several years. You check against IE and Netscape--first 4.7, now 6.0--and, well, that's about it. (Safari and KHTML may get support because there's still a disproportionate number of graphic artist types using Macs.) At its peak usage, I don't think Opera hit 1% of the market. The idea that the entire internet is being held back because Opera is failing to support some technology is giving them way, way too much influence.
The added punchline there is that PalmSource has been working on a new OS for a while, Cobalt -- er, BeOS -- er, PalmOS 6, which addresses a lot of the software problems. PalmOne, the hardware company, refuses to commit to being a customer for Cobalt -- they're happy with what they have now.
If the corporate market is going to PocketPC and the consumer market is going to smartphones, I wonder just who's going to be using Cobalt when it ships.
Re:Jef Raskin's involvement with the Macintosh
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Jef Raskin On The Mac
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While you're probably right with the "widely-marketed" proviso, the computer that was probably the purest expression of his approach is the Canon Cat.
Is it just me, or is there always a charge of "the environmentalists are just trying to protect their funding" from the "it's junk science" crowd, without even a glimmer of acknowledgement of the irony? A single corporation that feels "threatened" by an environmental study makes more in a day than their environmentalist critics do in a year. If protecting your income is enough to get you to lie about something like this, organizations with a lot of money invested in, and a lot of profits riding on, the status quo have a much better reason to vigorously dismiss their opponents calling for change. (The scientists, after all, can go on to get funding for something else with much less "economic disruption" than industries can usually change.)
I'm not arguing one way or another about the ozone layer here, but this is a "bias" that the all-regulation-is-evil crowd doesn't seem to ever want to acknowledge. A hundred scientists at a hundred universities, they're all hacks motivated by something other than real science--but the folks in the coal power industry, they don't have any interest in the outcome, so let's accept their word uncritically?
Incidentally, the ozone hole over the southern hemisphere was, in a 2002 report, about 40-50% larger than when the hole was first reported on in the early 80s, not "2% bigger." In some local areas it was up to 70% for short periods. (The "hole" contracts and expands seasonally, and these are averages.) Shrinking by 20% presumably means that, on average, it's now 32%-40% bigger than it was when first reported--and yes, it's probably too early to know if that's a trend, because that's implicit in the definition of the word "trend." Ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have been trending downward over the last decade, and the recovery of the ozone layer was expected in that 2002 report--the 1987 Montreal Protocol has been followed pretty well. (And as strange as it may seem, there are no documented examples of industry collapse and economic ruin due to this onerous government intrusion into business.)
Whenever I hear this sort of argument, there's part of me that always imagines how I'd feel getting onto a plane and hearing the captain say over the intercom, "Thank you for choosing Third Party Airways! I've never flown anything before, but I have some great new ideas on how to fly planes I think you're going to enjoy! So just sit back..."
You're one of those people who preferred the happy ending version of Brazil, aren't you? And you're waiting for the Disney version of 1984, where Big Brother repents and joins in the big musical finale number with Winston, Julia and a whole bunch of dancing rats.
Well, that certainly does a bang-up job of demolishing the stereotype that IT people are insufferable blowhards with fragile egos and incredibly poor social skills. Good work.
...if the server is smart enough to support it, too. A lot of "big" content management systems -- possibly like the one Infoworld uses -- don't; they generate their RSS feeds on the fly for every request.
I'm not sure whether Slashdot supports the conditional get, but from a cursory examination of NetNewsWire's bandwidth report, the answer is no. Part of the problem Commander Taco is complaining about in his commentary on this could be addressed by making Slashcode smarter.
Slashdot Mirror
If he'd kept his griping primarily to the Zeta folks, my hackles wouldn't have raised quite as much. For practical purposes, it sounds like Zeta is going to be what the next release of BeOS would have been... sort of. As another commenter pointed out, Be never shipped support for hardware-based OpenGL, and I don't think Zeta has this. I'd go out on a limb and say that if Be, Inc., hadn't lost its corporate mind, they'd have probably worked on fixing problems like that; Zeta, as far as I know, still doesn't.
Of course, there are companies out there whose business model, such as it is, involves stringing along diehard Amiga users by bringing AmigaOS variants up to parity with late '90s OS technology. Come to think of it, they're all in Germany, too. There may be something in the beer.
I have no idea what bug you have up your butt, but here's a few points.
Yes, BeOS is a dead operating system. There are no marketing claims for BeOS after about 2000. If you're going to be evaluating the original claims for BeOS made during its brief moment in the sun, 1998-1999, compare those claims with what was around then, not what's around now.
Steinberg ported Nuendo to BeOS. You'll notice that it could process 96 media tracks simultaneously. Why is this significant? Because on the same hardware the NT version could only do 48 tracks.
As a matter of fact, yes, BeOS did have a better media core than anything else did, in one specific area: latency. There was literally nothing else beyond true RTOSes that could touch it. If you go to a stage show in Vegas, Disney or even some Broadway theatres, there's a non-zero chance that the sound and lighting system is still being run by a BeOS-based system from LCS. In 2005, other operating systems have caught up in some respects, but the main thing that "beats" BeOS in media processing is simply Moore's Law: machines are so much faster now than they were six years ago that it doesn't matter that their signal processing still blows moose chunks.
There are other things that BeOS had that no other operating system had, most notably the file system and live queries that could operate on metadata. Make a virtual folder that contains all the word processing documents you've edited in the last week? No problem. BeOS was by far the most responsive operating system I've ever used. And you know what? It got more commercial applications announced for it in its first two years of public release than Linux did in its first five or six. (Some of those commercial applications are in fact still around, now on other platforms.)
Yes, BeOS had its share of problems, some of them did involve driver support, and there's been very little development on drivers since 2000. But it wasn't difficult to find supported hardware back then--I ran it on a pretty much stock Gateway PC--and I can assure you that BeOS does not suck. If Be had made some wiser business decisions (like not going after the non-existent internet appliance market, and knifing their desktop developers in order to do it), it'd probably still be around.
I'm not particularly interested in ZetaOS because, in the context of 2005, it's not a very compelling operating system. But you obviously don't have a clue why so much of the computing world was excited about it in 1999.
And making sites that don't like like shit is pretty non-trivial to people who put the word designer in quotes, like it's some kind of disease. It's this kind of "creative people are too stupid to learn standards" attitude that ensures designers aren't going to be listening to you, even when you're making sense.
In point of fact, all of Macromedia's products do make it pretty easy to create 100% standards-compliant web sites. Studio MX has its faults, but an inability to handle CSS and XHTML is not one of them. Many modern web sites that degrade gracefully all the way down to Lynx were created with some combination of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and HomeSite.
Granted, I only use Fireworks from those, and do the rest in BBEdit. Yeah, I'm on a Mac. It's sure difficult for an Apple zealot like me to use all of those fancy validation features, integrated HTML Tidy and the like, but somehow my little designer mind can get wrapped around it. Hyuk hyuk hyuk.
Yes, absolutely.
This is an interesting paradox I'm not sure the "hack to free the music" crowd has entirely thought through. You may feel that any DRM is too much DRM, and I respect that, but I may feel that a given DRM is livable enough for my purposes--like Apple's scheme for iTunes. I do own my music (unlike, say, Napster's subscription model), and I don't consider the restrictions on burning and sharing sufficiently onerous.
However, if you--in this case, "you" being "DVD Jon," or people with similar mindsets--decide that because you don't like that restriction, the proper response is not to simply avoid iTunes but to break iTunes' DRM, you put Apple in a position where they have to slap duct tape over the hole you've made. The chances are that the "duct tape" they're using makes their DRM scheme fractionally more restrictive. And if you keep at it, eventually Apple's countermeasures will leave me with a product which no longer meets my needs. You will at that point have forced me to either stop using the iTunes store, or to join you in the DRM arms race. Your attempts to "protect my freedom" will, from my point of view, have had the opposite effect.
I understand the philosophical objection to DRM, and I'd prefer it if the iTMS was closer to Magnatune (in both lack of restriction and choice of downloadable music formats). But I'm not convinced that monkeywrenching is the ideal response -- or ultimately, even a very good one.
First off, Ubuntu Linux has a GUI. I've seen it. In fact, I used it, without doing any configuration at all; I just put in the CD and it came up. Using it as an example of what's wrong with open source software is like using an inability to run Doom III on your PC as an example of what's wrong with first-person shooters: you're abstracting a single-case problem into a denunciation of the class.
On the larger point, I think you're arguing a slightly different point. You're saying that program has to have a certain level of functionality before it's acceptable to you. The other people are saying that functionality is not the only concern. And you're both arguing as if these points are contradictory. They're not.
There's a word processor I used when I used Windows called Nota Bene. In terms of functionality, it's not just better than Word, it dunks Word's head in the toilet and mops the floor with it. It's also aimed at a niche market, though, and it costs more than all of Microsoft Office does. For most people, Word has the necessary level of functionality, and it doesn't matter that there's something else out there with more functionality.
If we allow that, and we then allow that once that has been met other factors come into play in choosing software, there's no reason that "source license" couldn't be one of those factors just like "price" is. If AbiWord gives me the necessary level of functionality and it has a source license I like more than OpenOffice, there's no intrinsic reason why I should choose OpenOffice simply because it has more functionality.
How many other grammar checkers have you seen?
This is not meant as a flamebait question, but a serious one. Back in the stone age, there were standalone grammar checkers, and there were three big ones: Grammatik, Correct Grammar, and RightWriter. The first two were basically dictionary systems; the third didn't use a dictionary, but actually used a parse tree and compared it against a rule base which could be associated with different styles of writing (so you could say "if this is fiction, don't bug me about double negatives"), and also could produce a marked-up copy of your file rather than trying to make you proof it interactively. None of these programs were great, but RightWriter was head and shoulders above the others.
Unfortunately, Corel bought Grammatik and integrated it into WordPerfect, and Microsoft bought Correct Grammar and integrated it into Word. RightWriter closed up shop.
AFAIK, the grammar checker in Word now is mostly written in house and uses some of the same ideas that RightWriter had introduced more than a decade earlier, but it's still slower and more error-prone than its predecessor.
Nice theory, but here's a few more points for you:
Postscript has been around two decades now, and AFAIK the only "virus" ever reported written it couldn't do anything but reset your Apple Laserwriter password. If you think you can write a Postscript program which reformats my hard drive, talks to my mail client, or even just brings up a dialogue box on my screen that says "Hi, I'm PostScript!", you're welcome to start hackin' now.
You don't need to even RTFA, you could just RTF quote before shooting off about complete zeros:
His example was clearly using the Beatles as an example of a group which produced great music, and suggesting they wouldn't have been able to do so with the record-by-committee style of modern pop.
Ask not for the asshat is worn. It is worn for thee.
As an "I'm not an employee but a satisfied user" comment, look at the trackballs from Kensington. They have two lines -- the Orbit is basically their version of Logitech's Marble Mouse, which might be what you're describing above (the ball in the middle, two buttons to either side), and the Expert Mouse is a *big* trackball with four buttons and either a scroll wheel above the ball or a "scroll ring" around the ball depending on which model you get.
A couple years ago I decided that I needed a second Marble Mouse for work (I had one at home and couldn't find one, so got an Orbit, and decided that it was actually slightly better than Logitech's original. So the Marble Mouse came to work with me. Just a couple months ago I bought an Expert Mouse for home and took the Orbit into the office with me.
The Orbit's pretty reasonably priced (around $30). The Expert Mouse is a somewhat dismaying $100, but it's really good.
Incidentally, Kensington also makes the "StudioBoard," which is the closet thing on the market I've found to the original IBM PC mechnical switch keyboard. They sell it specifically for Macs (as a modern incarnation of the old Apple Studio Keyboard), but since it's USB, it should work for PCs, too. A good keyboard is probably as important as a good mouse to fight RSI, and in my experience a "standard" keyboard with good keypress quality is better than most "ergonomic" keyboards are. (I can't speak to the really serious $250+ ergonomic keyboards.)
While I agree with you to a large degree, I think the neocons are extremely good at framing debates, including the way their opponents are perceived. John Kerry, for all his faults, wasn't remotely the way-out-in-left-field he was successfully presented as; over his Senate career, his voting record actually put him about in the middle of the Democratic pack, and on military issues he was fairly hawkish. But through highly misleading and frequently repeated talking points, most of just heard "fourth most liberal in the Senate" and "voted against $4 billion in military spending" and yadda yadda.
:)
And then, of course, there's Howard Dean, who's supposed to be even more liberal--except that his track record in Vermont was pretty fiscally conservative.
The Democrats don't put very liberal candidates up for presidential office, not seriously. Kucinich, Boxer, Frank--can you imagine these guys even winning a primary, let alone the nomination? No, the problem is really one of getting across to the moderates that when Democrats are being painted as more of those crazy tax and spend liberals, it's not the truth. C'mon, Bill Clinton reduced the deficit, overhauled the welfare system and championed free trade--Bob Dole complained that Clinton won in 1996 by taking Republican positions faster than Dole could. Hillary Clinton is pretty much cut from the same political cloth as her husband, yet she's been successfully painted as Karl Marx reincarnated with tits.
If the Democrats move right far enough that the Republicans can't go after them for being Too Darn Liberal, it means they're going to be running a Joe Lieberman-Zell Miller ticket, and I admit that prospect doesn't really enthuse me.
Actually, to be fair, the current company called "SCO" is the company that was called "Caldera"; their business model was Linux, and while they ruffled feathers in the Linux community, the Caldera Network Desktop was one of the first attempts to be "Linux for the business user." It was when the principals of Caldera left the company and the new CEO came in that they got their new sue-everyone business model. (I originally wrote "principles of Caldera," but one could argue they left the company then, too...)
The company that actually made SCO Unix went through what you describe and saw the writing on the wall, but their choice was to sell SCO Unix and the name to Caldera, then rename themselves Tarantella and sell an application server. AFAIK, they're still around.
No, you didn't say you were a libertarian, but your phrasing and examples come across as extremely similar to a particular kind of fiercely anti-government, market-over-everything libertarian stance. If you feel that's a mischaracterization of your position, I apologize, but it's inherent in the concept of "law" that laws can be enforced, and most people don't seem to have an inherent problem with that notion. I have literally never heard the "all government power comes from the point of a gun" line from anyone who doesn't regard all government as tyranny. If you're using it simply to melodramatically make a point that government power is different from non-governmental power, I've not stated otherwise, although yes, it is my feeling that if you underpaid a tax bill for $10 the police would not be breaking down your door over it. (Speaking from personal past experience, given a choice between underpaying your city government and underpaying Citibank, underpay the government, because they will not put nearly as much effort into screwing you.)
I never suggested the threat was "make-believe," I suggested the comparison between people eating you in a life boat and being forced to pay a extra $10 in property tax is ridiculous. The fact that government is in a unique position to legally make your life miserable does not make a slippery slope fallacy less fallacious.
There are several quibbles I have with the "government is evil" mindset of the most dedicated libertarians, but you expose one inadvertently:
This contains a host of assumptions, from the explicit idea that governments are never formed or rejected voluntarily to the implicit idea that non-governmental organizations never have coercive, binding force. All of these are highly questionable assumptions indeed.
If libertarians were more willing as a whole to recognize that the problem with the potential use of force by government is a problem with any organization with a high concentration of power, I'd be a lot more comfortable with their positions. Government organizations undoubtedly have legal force that private organizations do not, but--at least in a representational form of government--there is an accountability to those affected by their actions that corporations simply do not have. (And if you don't think corporations can exercise lethal force and get away with it, you need to study history--even recent history--more closely.)
Remember, there are very, very few actions our government takes that are just done for the hell of it--there are people outside of government calling for those actions to be taken, and very often these actions are being taken at the behest of "free enterprise." If you want to save people from the government, you need to change who government is accountable to. Attempting to reduce government's functions without addressing accountability issues may well leave you worse off than before.
The problem with this sort of comparison--and virtually all comparisons, I'm afraid, that libertarians make that ever invoke the phrase at the point of a gun or something similar--is that it's assigning an ethical equivalence to requiring you to pay $10 more a year in property taxes or something similarly trivial and being put to death. This is utter nonsense.
In any given group there are infrastructure needs which simply make more sense to be funded collectively, even though there is probably no one single function that all members of the community will need. There will be some people who inevitably pay for services that other people use. But when they're paying for such a service, they're paying for something that they don't need right now but might at some other point--and might not be available cost-effectively, or even available at all, without spreading the burden around. And, of course, some of those services provide indirect benefits: even if you don't use that service directly, services that you do rely on may in turn rely on that common infrastructure.
Is it possible to envision a society with no common infrastructure costs? Sure. But it'd be a society in which all those costs are a lot higher for those who do use the services, and there's a great deal more difficulty for those who don't, and we're not talking about inconvenience--we're talking about no access to police, fire, water, sewer, roads and any other municipal service. Everyone in the society but those at the very top would be poorer, sicker and in more danger. The benefits of this "coercion" outweigh the incremental loss of individual freedom.
Municipal wireless obviously isn't a basic infrastructure need, and I can see arguing against it. But you know, that's the wonder of our government--people can go to town meetings and argue against what they consider to be stupid ideas, and anyone who watches local government knows that they do listen. (Anyone who watches local government knows that, in fact, citizen input is where most of the stupid ideas come from, too.)
While I know you're being facetious, there's actually some value in that observation, you know. There's a famous (or infamous) audiophile magazine called The Absolute Sound, and the name refers to the idea of audio recording trying to be as perfect a replication of the live performance as possible.
And, incidentally, most of the TAS guys seem to be happy enough with SACD -- but not so much CD. The original poster's observation that you can't tell the difference between digital and analog with sufficient sampling resolution isn't really what was in dispute among the analog-philes -- what was in dispute was whether the sampling rate of CD was high enough. And as Jeffrey Baker observed in other comments, digital has hard clipping rather than soft clipping, and that can make a difference. (This is something you run into the visual equivalent of in digital cameras versus film--the difference between overexposing Kodak Portra 160VC film in my old 35mm SLR and overexposing a shot on my D70 is pretty stark, and--despite the many advantages the digital camera has otherwise--not in the D70's favor.)
...probably in an even higher percentage. And this has nothing to do with the back end software you're using.
The difference with LiveJournal is simply that it puts all its journals on the same "level," because they've had a much stronger focus on community than any other blogging service and certainly more than independent blogs. I'd suggest that most bloggers who host their own domains don't have anything more substantial to contribute to "the community" than LJ users do; the difference is that 99% of the weblogs out there are never seen by anyone except their owner and the five people they've given the URL to.
Outside of LJ, there really isn't a "community" for blogs: there's a handful of big name ones in various fields (mostly politics and tech), a second tier that shows up from association with the big names, and a whole bunch of never-seens. What LJ critics see as its weakness is also its strength compared to every other service--there's a whole big honking heap of metadata there. You can search for people by physical location, by interests, through friend-of-friend lists. All of the things that FOAF and Trackbacks and Pingbacks and blogrolls try to do, with very limited success, have been done successfully for years over on LiveJournal.
There's some fine writing on LJ, too -- in general, because of the way "friends lists" get interlaced, finding one thoughtful journalist will lead you to a lot of others. Finding an uninteresting journal will, well, usually lead you to more uninteresting ones. Does LiveJournal have a higher percentage of crap than other systems? Possibly, because it has a lower barrier of entry--it can be both no cost and no work, unlike any other system but Blogger. I suspect if you could limit random searches to only paid LJ accounts, the quality would marginally improve; likewise, I suspect if you could actually get a random Blogger-powered journal with a button click, you'd find much the same level of cow dung there as you do on LJ.
Frankly, I hope this rumor doesn't pan out. After trying for a while to move my LJ to MT (and writing a little 'echo' patch that mirrored the MT posts to the old LJ account), I realized that the only value being brought by this approach was the ability for spammers to bomb my Movable Type installation. By flipping things around--using LJ as the main back end, and embedding a custom view of it on my home page--the ones and ones of people who were reading my weblog on my home page still get to do it, with very little visual change, and I keep all the considerable benefits of LJ's community. And no damn comment spam.
There is no chance of making big-budget commercial Hollywood movie featuring upside-down crosses and "666" symbols.
Because goodness knows, Hollywood sure hasn't done films about demons before. "The Exorcist," "Rosemary's Baby," "The Omen," "Fallen"... those were all about fluffy bunnies, right?
Blame Microsoft and to a lesser degree Netscape, not Opera. No, seriously.
The support for Netscape 4.x, which most people refused to give up supporting until very recently, obviously kills all attempts to get XML/XSL going. But even making that go away doesn't fix the other problem: IE's support for XSL is broken.
Sure, both it and Mozilla can process XSLT perfectly. The thing is, the MIME type for XSL should be "text/xml". Pretty simple, right? Except that IE won't display it with that MIME type. No, it requires the pages to be served with "text/xsl" or it won't display 'em. (And, in fact, only Windows IE supports it at all. The Mac version doesn't process XSL.)
So, unless you get your web server to specifically check what browser a client is using and change the MIME type it serves, you have to choose supporting Netscape or WinIE. You can't do both. (I worked at There.com for a while, and I recall people bitching that you could only use IE to log into it. Guess why? Because they were serving XML/XSL pages.)
Having said all this, the idea that bandwidth is dramatically saved by using XML/XSL instead of XHTML/CSS is... dubious. My resume in XHTML is 177 lines, with an embedded style sheet. The XML source is 192 lines, and the XSLT file is 127 lines. The advantage of XML isn't that it's compact, but rather that it's abstract (I have separate XSL files that also generate RTF and plain text). The only reason to push XML/XSL to the browser is to offload the conversion to XHTML/CSS from server to client.
Nobody gives a flying coconut what Opera does and doesn't support, or at least they haven't for several years. You check against IE and Netscape--first 4.7, now 6.0--and, well, that's about it. (Safari and KHTML may get support because there's still a disproportionate number of graphic artist types using Macs.) At its peak usage, I don't think Opera hit 1% of the market. The idea that the entire internet is being held back because Opera is failing to support some technology is giving them way, way too much influence.
The added punchline there is that PalmSource has been working on a new OS for a while, Cobalt -- er, BeOS -- er, PalmOS 6, which addresses a lot of the software problems. PalmOne, the hardware company, refuses to commit to being a customer for Cobalt -- they're happy with what they have now. If the corporate market is going to PocketPC and the consumer market is going to smartphones, I wonder just who's going to be using Cobalt when it ships.
While you're probably right with the "widely-marketed" proviso, the computer that was probably the purest expression of his approach is the Canon Cat.
Is it just me, or is there always a charge of "the environmentalists are just trying to protect their funding" from the "it's junk science" crowd, without even a glimmer of acknowledgement of the irony? A single corporation that feels "threatened" by an environmental study makes more in a day than their environmentalist critics do in a year. If protecting your income is enough to get you to lie about something like this, organizations with a lot of money invested in, and a lot of profits riding on, the status quo have a much better reason to vigorously dismiss their opponents calling for change. (The scientists, after all, can go on to get funding for something else with much less "economic disruption" than industries can usually change.)
I'm not arguing one way or another about the ozone layer here, but this is a "bias" that the all-regulation-is-evil crowd doesn't seem to ever want to acknowledge. A hundred scientists at a hundred universities, they're all hacks motivated by something other than real science--but the folks in the coal power industry, they don't have any interest in the outcome, so let's accept their word uncritically?
Incidentally, the ozone hole over the southern hemisphere was, in a 2002 report, about 40-50% larger than when the hole was first reported on in the early 80s, not "2% bigger." In some local areas it was up to 70% for short periods. (The "hole" contracts and expands seasonally, and these are averages.) Shrinking by 20% presumably means that, on average, it's now 32%-40% bigger than it was when first reported--and yes, it's probably too early to know if that's a trend, because that's implicit in the definition of the word "trend." Ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have been trending downward over the last decade, and the recovery of the ozone layer was expected in that 2002 report--the 1987 Montreal Protocol has been followed pretty well. (And as strange as it may seem, there are no documented examples of industry collapse and economic ruin due to this onerous government intrusion into business.)
Whenever I hear this sort of argument, there's part of me that always imagines how I'd feel getting onto a plane and hearing the captain say over the intercom, "Thank you for choosing Third Party Airways! I've never flown anything before, but I have some great new ideas on how to fly planes I think you're going to enjoy! So just sit back..."
You're one of those people who preferred the happy ending version of Brazil, aren't you? And you're waiting for the Disney version of 1984, where Big Brother repents and joins in the big musical finale number with Winston, Julia and a whole bunch of dancing rats.
Well, that certainly does a bang-up job of demolishing the stereotype that IT people are insufferable blowhards with fragile egos and incredibly poor social skills. Good work.
...if the server is smart enough to support it, too. A lot of "big" content management systems -- possibly like the one Infoworld uses -- don't; they generate their RSS feeds on the fly for every request.
I'm not sure whether Slashdot supports the conditional get, but from a cursory examination of NetNewsWire's bandwidth report, the answer is no. Part of the problem Commander Taco is complaining about in his commentary on this could be addressed by making Slashcode smarter.