Actually, there are devices which have embedded operating systems but aren't necessarily "rich" in the Internet Appliance sense. High speed data and phone switches are a prime example--and yes, from what I understand (up until early this year I was at the engineering group of a fairly major CLEC), some of them really do run Embedded NT. And they're actually pretty stable. As one wag put it, "The 'NT' part isn't the problem, the 'Windows' part is."
I'd really say that QNX's market is more along those lines, too. The QNX "Realtime Platform" has obviously been targeted for internet appliances, but its sibling, QNX RTOS 6, isn't.
Years of evolution has given us a sense of proportion which means that the mass of people is almost never wrong about what's worth bothering with. That's why turnout is so low in Presidential elections.
You know, two responses come to mind:
The serious response
You more or less make the case, with the "presidential elections" crack, that the mass of people can quite obviously be wrong about what's worth bothering with. There is nothing more important to the health of a representative democracy than choosing who represents you: if you don't take that responsibility seriously, you abandon it to the dwindling number of people who will be bothered to vote. This is precisely why campagin ads are so often repugnant scare tactics: the idea is to depress most voters out of voting, leaving only the ones who really believe, say, electing the Democrat will mean abortion clinics opening on every street corner to vote. And eventually we end up in a situation like we have now: where the best way to get elected to government is to campaign against government, and to bash anyone who believes that government can possibly be useful. And, gosh, when the government gets full of people like that, darned if it isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy!
What you're talking about is promoting running free applications in closed operating environments. What RMS was objecting to is the promotion of running closed applications in free operating environments. These two things obviously aren't equal. Up until relatively recently (i.e., all the years before Linux was really firmly established), proprietary operating systems weren't avoidable for most users.
I suppose the argument, and it's defensible, is that free apps on closed systems helps promote free software in a way that closed apps on free systems doesn't. It's also worth repeating that regardless of RMS' own feelings on the subject, even if he had his way and the GNOME project itself wouldn't publish announcements about non-free software on their desktop, he couldn't prevent a third party from doing so. And, I suspect announcements of the GNOME desktop on closed operating systems like Solaris would be exempt from this.
Is this a choice I would make? In the sense of making it official GNOME policy to not talk about proprietary apps, no. But I probably wouldn't talk about them in practice unless they were of exceptional importance. (Yes, that's a subjective measure.)
His "warped position" is that terrorism can be defined as "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." Personally, I'd simplify the definition to: "committing an act of war against non-combatants."
Tell me how the hell the legitimacy of self defense has anything to do with that definition.
Bluntly, what you're offended by isn't the definition, but by the unpleasant truth that an objective reading of what terrorism is sometimes condemns the good guys, too. You don't want to hear it.
The war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is probably the closest to a "just war" that we've fought, at least since World War II. Get over the idea that we're spotless and wonderful, though. Yes, Americans are blocking out bigger pictures. We condemn the idea of killing innocent civilians for political ends, but we go on the record as saying that thousands of Iraqi children dying a month from sanctions is an acceptable tactic to try to overthrow Hussein (not that it's doing any good). This goes back to our actions in World War II as well as the enemy's: by all reasonable definitions, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was terrorism. Don't kid yourself into thinking anything else. The entire point was to send the message, "If you don't surrender, we will kill not your soldiers but your families, your wives and your children, with weapons more terrifying than you can possibly imagine."
People seem to be under the apprehension that those of us pointing out that America sometimes does Bad Things are excusing having Bad Things done to us. We're not. We're saying that two wrongs don't make a right. And we're saying that if we're going to set a moral example for the rest of the world--and it's not American arrogance to say that given our position as the only superpower, we damn well better be willing to set that example--we've got to be moral. We can't be doing this "situational ethics" shit anymore, can't act like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" does us (or anyone else) any good, can't loudly praise democracy while quietly supporting fascist dictators who are open to foreign investment--and even helping them overthrow democratically-elected governments that seemed a little too socialist.
Maybe in your eyes it's "warped" to talk about America's foreign policy failures. If so, what you want isn't patriotism--it's jingoism. I hope for our country's sake that enough people understand the difference. True patriotism isn't "my country, right or wrong." It's helping your country do what's right, and trying to prevent it from doing what's wrong.
Yes, I do remember computing in the early '80s. I remember a lot of vibrant hardware and software platforms that were manifestly different from one another, and that indeed most users of those machines were "educated, trained computer users" who were "able to program their own systems." In fact, this strikes me as the biggest flaw in your argument: the standardization on the IBM PC didn't make the microcomputer world open to the programmer, it made it open to the non-programmer.
If we still had to use machine language and punch cards, there wouldn't be open source.
No offense, but I can't think of a single microcomputer in the early '80s that could use a punch card even if you wanted one, and most micros only came with interpreted BASIC--if you wanted another programming language, including Assembly, you bought something. I had a BASIC compiler and Forth for my TRS-80, and could have also had Fortran, COBOL, C (K&R, of course) and, of all things, APL. And under CP/M, I could have had another program you might have heard of: Turbo Pascal. High-level languages supplanted assembly as the commercial programming environment of choice not because of the wonders of the standardized IBM PC, but because higher amounts of RAM in computers coupled with faster processors made it viable to program in them. When you only had 64K of RAM to load your OS, application and data, you needed to be real damn efficient.
I think it's somewhat dubious to say that the standardization on one hardware platform was a panacea for problems in the computing world before that standardization happened. If, say, three or four competing hardware platforms had split the market, I see no reason why computer users would necessarily be worse off. When one hardware/software combination has over 90% of the market, it's easy to blow off the other 10%. If that hardware/software combination only has 50% of the market, you don't blow the other half off so easily. The move toward platform independence for both (source) code and data interchange formats might well have been accelerated in a "no one standard" environment--and that's fertile ground for open source development, isn't it?
"They provide a lot of enhancements over ksh and sh (kick-ass completion,"
So does ksh.
"readline,"
If you mean inline editing, more generally, so does ksh, using both Emacs and vi keybindings if you wish.
"floating point arithmetic,"
Yep, so does ksh.
"a lot of handy shortcuts and builtins, etc)."
Well, you know what this line would be, right?
A lot of Linux distributions are using "pdksh," which is based on an earlier standard. Ksh is actually a pretty advanced scripting language (with indexed and associative arrays, compound variables, 'printf' formatting and an execution-tracing debugger), and theoretically it's 100% backward-compatible with sh.
Personally I've taken to zsh myself, but don't 'dis' ksh.:) It's pretty sophisticated. It's unfortunate that 'ksh93' hasn't made its way into wide use, or at least wide inclusion in distributions, yet; linking '/bin/sh' to the 1993 ksh release might be a little more 'true sh compatible' than bash, which is really what this topic was about.
And what I've noticed is that it's usually at commercial prices. Low-end commercial prices, to be sure, but it ain't cheap. And despite your implicit assertion to the contrary, freeware applications of any value are few and far between.
This has been one of my disappointments with my iBook. You can accuse me of being cheap, with some justification--but I look at it as being honest: I don't want to use unregistered shareware, so I'll certainly look for freeware first. And I usually won't find it. I usually won't even find up-to-date ports of common cross-platform applications like Vim and Emacs.
Granted, I've had other disappointments like the fact that MacOS 9 isn't much more advanced internally than System 7 was, that the iBook's battery design seems to be flamingly stupid, and that MacOS X is targeted to machines much faster than mine (note I didn't say that was a flaw, just a disappointment). But the Mac community as a whole seems to be less interested in the 'gift economy' than Windows programmers, much less Linux and BSD folks.
Yet even with that "archaicness" I find kernel configuration in BSD to be easier. This isn't because I'm a canonical GUI-hating Unix guy; it's probably because I'm not. XConfig and particularly MenuConfig are excruciatingly tedious compared to opening your own kernel configuration file in one window in a text editor and the LINT file in the other. My FreeBSD configuration generally is a matter of commenting out a bunch of lines (mostly SCSI stuff) and adding two at the bottom for my sound card.
I've honestly been very impressed with how logical the BSD configuration "system" is; it's not pretty but it's straightforward and easy to make changes to. The/etc/rc.conf file changes or overrides many things that Linux distributions tend to scatter around the system (often in places that change from distribution to distribution, no less).
If they weren't authoritarians, they wouldn't care about changing the world.
This is essentially an assertion that one can't desire to improve the world without being an authoritarian. Given thet any expression of a strongly-held opinion about how a given subject should be dealt with could be considered "a desire to improve the world," this essentially leaves us with a choice between inaction--more than inaction, a virtual silence--and oppression.
You're not just dismissing Marx and Zappa (a curious combination, if I may say so) but everyone who's urged one approach to anything in preference to another. You dismiss disparate icons such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi in one fell swoop.
That's a pretty dismal view of the world, honestly. It's also implicitly founded on the false premise that arguing a point is the same as forcing a point. Obviously, anyyone who favors one approach to a problem over another approach will be at odds with people who don't, and when someone in a position of power favors a given approach he will impose it on others. This is a hardly a sign of bias or authoritarianism; choosing to leave something alone (whether that means to the whims of nature, the whims of market forces or whatever) is just as much a moral choice as intervention is, and thus just as subject to controversy.
While I won't gainsay Eugenia, I'll have to say that I haven't had any problems with Gobe Productive 2.0 (under BeOS) in its export/import capabilities for Microsoft Word. The RTF filter is rather dimwitted (logically, it should be capable of everything the Word filter is, but in practice it definitely isn't), and the HTML export is extremely barebones--although in some ways that's a blessing, since it means I have much less crap to remove when I want to turn it into a real web page.
I used StarOffice 5.1 under Linux and Windows and it drove me absolutely batshit. I applaud the effort in OpenOffice to fix some of its predecessor's atrocities, but it's still an amazing resource pig.
Speaking solely for myself, I'll be looking forward to gobeProductive for Windows, and I'll certainly see if I can run the Linux binary at work under FreeBSD. (Yes, bizarrely enough, I use FreeBSD at work and Windows at home these days, although I'm in the process of setting up a Slackware 8 partition on my PC.) I know some people have had good luck with AbiWord, but I'm not one of them; the only open source office application I've liked so far has been Gnumeric. The new Productive release fixes one major hole in previous incarnations (no sections). If they've added the ability to start numbering at pages other than 1, I'll be set. If they start taking advantage of their frames to move toward being a baby desktop publishing program, too, that'd rock.:)
IBM became cool in the early '90s when they were working with Apple. The media reports were focusing on the defunct "Pink" OS project, but really, it was a Subgenius technology trade. IBM gave Apple the PowerPC, and Apple gave IBM their Slack.
In a certain sense 4DOS predates MS-DOS. It's actually a relative of ZCPR, a Z80 replacement for CP/M-80's command shell. And, yes, with ZCPR, you got basic scripting, I/O redirection, command line editing, stacking and history.
It was quite a step backward to go from my Intertec Superbrain (a circa 1979 Z80 machine somebody gave me when I was at college!) to a 386-based PC with MS-DOS. 4DOS (and the Norton repackaging of it as "NDOS" helped a lot).
When I ran Windows NT at work, and now that I run W2K at home, I use a descendant of 4DOS called "Take Command/32". Set it up and alias Unix commands to the DOS ones, and it's a livable working environment. (Granted that's not much of a slogan. "Buy our product and Windows becomes livable!")
Why are we so surprised it passed? This post is NOT flamebait, its a wake-up call to those of you who think lobbying a democrat or republican is going to make a difference -- its not. The ONLY Libertarian in Congress, Rep. Ron Paul [house.gov] has an exemplery voting record.
Your argument is severely undercut by the very topic you're replying to. You seem to consider this bill unconstitutional, as do I--but the sole vote cast against it was not Ron Paul's. Since there were no abstentions, he voted for this bill.
Ultimately, party affiliation isn't a good indicator of who will and won't buckle to popular pressure. This is the real definition of "political correctness" in my book: it has nothing to do with being liberal (or conservative), it has to do with tailoring your speech and actions to what you think will win you the most political points.
I applaud the "don't point the finger at Congress," though. Too many people I know--including my Libertarian friends--tend to think of the citizenry and the government as "us and them." The whole point of the American system is that them is us, folks.
Because as we know, products live and die in the marketplace based solely on how great the idea is, and profitability is one singular factor rather than an amalgamation. You never have to worry about things like capital for advertising and manufacturing, relationships with other vendors, and unexpected resource limitations, let alone less "open" issues like exclusive deals between distributors and competitors, legal but unsavory tactics like "Scorched Earth" policies (Wal-Mart's phrasing, not mine), and so on.
The market's a wonderful thing, but when we say it rewards what's profitable, we often take that to mean that it rewards delivering the best possible product at the best possible price. But those two things are not identical. Many people recognized that DR-DOS was a better product than MS-DOS; at the start of the PC era, CP/M-86 was arguably a better product than PC-DOS. It lost first due to missteps by Digital Research and later on due to Microsoft's unethical OEM contracts. Note that I'm not commenting on the legality, but in my opinion requiring your customers to pay for your product whenever they use a competitor's is pretty seedy--and it's undeniably taking active steps to avoid competition on the open market.
I can't comment about Sprint's ION service specifically, but having worked in telecom for a while, I know that even for the largest companies there are a lot of factors that can get in the way of rolling out services in a timely fashion that you can't control. You're dependent not only on your vendors but usually on your competitors for critical parts of any large order, which can make for a marketplace which--while workable in its own way--is certainly nothing Adam Smith could ever have envisioned.
Actually, some of Polaroid's cameras did have good lenses, zoom and otherwise; they made professional-level cameras up until the early '90s. They still make ones for niche markets--but niches where photo quality isn't that important.
If you're a photography buff, you'll recognize that importance of what those Polaroid cameras really were: they weren't just "instant" cameras, they were medium format cameras. When I say they had a professional line, they were low-end professional, to be sure--but they were endorsed by no less a professional than Ansel Adams. (And by "endorsed" I don't mean he was paid to be a spokesman--as far as I know he never was. He wrote about them with some enthusiasm in his classic photography textbooks.)
Really, that might be the place where they most significantly missed the boat. They couldn't compete with digital cameras for the instant part, but they could easily have continued their "prosumer" line and even enhanced it--instead of fruitlessly trying to undercut digital cameras, they should have been marketing themselves as a way to get into medium-format photography with prices competitive with 35mm SLR cameras. If I ran the zoo, er, camera company, I'd have probably even done something radical like make that prosumer line be able to accept both instant film cartridges and cheaper ones that required external development. If you could do that, then given the way the Land Cameras were designed--pretty simply, with the ability to have changable backs in some models--the next step would have been to work on a "digital cartridge" that converted the camera into a digital medium format camera. (Right now digital medium format cameras are... let's just say they're not as cheap as digital SLRs. If you know how much most digital SLRs cost, that should worry you.)
It's kind of surprising to me, in retrospect, that a company as innovative as Polaroid had been instead decided the best course through the '90s would be to refocus themselves as the Kiddie Camera Company. One does honestly wonder what the hell they were thinking.
Congratulations, you've shown people how to get to the intersection of Kennedy and Tampa Street, which happens to be smack in the middle of downtown Tampa's business district. (I used to work a block away from there, at an office building at the intersection of Jackson and Franklin St.)
I'd like to give you credit for the joke, but you'll have to try a little harder. Pick a suburb near the university (it's called "dorm" for a reason, and my suspicion is the suburb in question is Temple Terrace, renowned across the county for being tremendously uptight).
It may be a valid patent, but the question of whether it's valid for digital video recorders is another question. They seem to specifically be addressing the idea of "providing these and other options and capabilities [those options being rewind, fast-forward, etc., like a VCR] when the user of the broadcast receiver is monitoring the program concurrently with its reception" (a quote from the patent, my emphasis).
Is that the way you use your TiVo? Probably not.
Furthermore, the patent specifically calls for a "circular buffer." By its own definition of a circular buffer, it's difficult to say if TiVo or other PVRs really qualify. They do know to delete old instances of programs when their capacity is reaching its limit, but it's not a simple circular buffer--it's a relatively intelligent file management system.
It seems pretty likely the patent was written with the intention of letting users do limited time-shifting while a program was being played, not with the intention of letting them record many hours of programs.
I'm also more than a bit disenchanted with the patent's clear call for an analog TV signal at its start and the C-Y-A references to HDTV at the end--very likely the 1996 patent revisitation was to add that. But, that's another story.
As others have pointed out, "American Pie" isn't as much a 'plane crash song' as it is about changing times and worldviews. Don McLean wrote about "the day the music died" as a focal point, an event after which the way everyone related to their country and their world changed. This change could only be marked (to McLean) with a melancholy, a recognition that beyond the tangible, clear losses, something intangible--but just as irreplaceable--had also been lost.
How Clear Channel sees it is their business (literally), but it seems to me those thoughts are more timely at this moment than they've been in decades.
I don't think that's the case any more than BeOS is a flavor of Unix. They both support most of Posix, but the underlying kernel is implemented completely differently. If anything, NT's indirect ancestor is VMS.
At this point counter-attacking is irrational chiefly because there's no one to attack. I'm not a big fan of our President-Select, but I don't believe he's going to run off and bomb Afghanistan because pundits on Fox News are chanting 'Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden.'
However, the reality, even for a bleeding-heart liberal pacifist like myself, is that for all intents this was an act of war. It was a stunningly sophisticated and well-coordinated attack. (The most plausible argument against Bin Laden's responsibility is that it would be a stretch even for his resources.) If these planes had been from a known military force rather than hijacked passenger planes, we'd declare war before the sun set.
So sure, at this point in time counter-attacking is irrational. But that doesn't mean that any retaliation is irrational.
Will retaliation "solve" anything? To turn the question around, how do you "solve" terrorism? It's worthy to ask whether US policy toward the Middle East fans the flames of anti-American sentiment, but that's an entirely separate issue from this attack. The lives of US citizens are already at risk. The lives of lots of people all around the world are already at risk. The risk isn't of American military attacks, it's of more attacks just like these. Will not retaliating address that?
RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing. I see someone else has marked your comment as flamebait, but I think you're simply misinformed. The reality is that RTF is a Microsoft-created format and, at least when I looked at the RTF specs for Word 6, Word 95 and Word 97, tracked Word feature for feature save for embedded objects (although I believe it may have supported specifying links to external files).
Let's face it. The main reason programs "need" import/export filters for Word documents is because of user assumption--i.e., that everyone can read Word documents. They shouldn't need anything more than the openly-documented RTF. In practice, you'd better have a pretty good import filter for Word's native format--but in practice you really only need to be able to export RTF documents.
Incidentally, out of the 'alternative' office apps mentioned in this little article blurb, Gobe Productive 2.0 had the least trouble dealing with Word documents for me--although others have reported less success. The Linux (and Windows) versions of Productive will be of version 3.0.
Apple says Sorenson won't allow a Linux version, not them.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
I actually wrote Sorensen (I think it's "-en," not "-on," isn't it?) about this a couple years ago, when BeOS R4.5 came out and its Media Kit was (mostly) functional--in theory, it could have played and written Sorensen QuickTimes if only Sorensen made a codec for BeOS. Sorensen's response was quick and polite: "we've licensed the codec exclusively to Apple, so it's up to Apple to port their QuickTime player to other platforms."
And of course, that was sure likely. At least judging by actions, Gassee and Jobs have been in a pissing contest for years. Linux doesn't have Jobs' personal animosity directed at it, but--again judging by actions--it doesn't quite penetrate Steve's personal reality distortion field. (Apple's support of MkLinux predates Jobs, and I suspect there are reasons what support they give to the open source world these days is BSD-centric.)
While this is a late entry into this argument, you--and your opponents--seem to forget that Microsoft is not being targeted for being a monopoly, they are being targeted for anti-trust violations. Being a monopoly is legal. Using the power that being a monopoly gives you to strongarm your way into dominating other markets is not.
Personally, I'm dubious about the idea that Microsoft is technically a monopoly to start with, but I certainly agree with Scot Hacker's contention that the bootloader is a more serious issue than browser integration. It isn't an anti-trust issue--it's a prior restraint of trade issue.
Of course, I've been dubious for a while about whether the common supposition that "less regulation = more competition" always holds true. If it was illegal for a vendor to dictate the relationships OEMs have with other vendors, this provides more freedom for the OEMs. Is the vendor's freedom reduced by the inability to say "deal only with me or don't deal with anyone at all"? Sure--to the same degree that a street gang's freedom is reduced by the cops busting them for forcing "protection" on neighborhood businesses. I'm sorry, I just don't think Adam Smith would consider "my way or the highway" to be the Invisible Hand at work.
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Actually, there are devices which have embedded operating systems but aren't necessarily "rich" in the Internet Appliance sense. High speed data and phone switches are a prime example--and yes, from what I understand (up until early this year I was at the engineering group of a fairly major CLEC), some of them really do run Embedded NT. And they're actually pretty stable. As one wag put it, "The 'NT' part isn't the problem, the 'Windows' part is."
I'd really say that QNX's market is more along those lines, too. The QNX "Realtime Platform" has obviously been targeted for internet appliances, but its sibling, QNX RTOS 6, isn't.
You know, two responses come to mind:
The serious response
You more or less make the case, with the "presidential elections" crack, that the mass of people can quite obviously be wrong about what's worth bothering with. There is nothing more important to the health of a representative democracy than choosing who represents you: if you don't take that responsibility seriously, you abandon it to the dwindling number of people who will be bothered to vote. This is precisely why campagin ads are so often repugnant scare tactics: the idea is to depress most voters out of voting, leaving only the ones who really believe, say, electing the Democrat will mean abortion clinics opening on every street corner to vote. And eventually we end up in a situation like we have now: where the best way to get elected to government is to campaign against government, and to bash anyone who believes that government can possibly be useful. And, gosh, when the government gets full of people like that, darned if it isn't a self-fulfilling prophecy!
The flippant answer
People watch Tom Green. Enough said.
What you're talking about is promoting running free applications in closed operating environments. What RMS was objecting to is the promotion of running closed applications in free operating environments. These two things obviously aren't equal. Up until relatively recently (i.e., all the years before Linux was really firmly established), proprietary operating systems weren't avoidable for most users.
I suppose the argument, and it's defensible, is that free apps on closed systems helps promote free software in a way that closed apps on free systems doesn't. It's also worth repeating that regardless of RMS' own feelings on the subject, even if he had his way and the GNOME project itself wouldn't publish announcements about non-free software on their desktop, he couldn't prevent a third party from doing so. And, I suspect announcements of the GNOME desktop on closed operating systems like Solaris would be exempt from this.
Is this a choice I would make? In the sense of making it official GNOME policy to not talk about proprietary apps, no. But I probably wouldn't talk about them in practice unless they were of exceptional importance. (Yes, that's a subjective measure.)
His "warped position" is that terrorism can be defined as "The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons." Personally, I'd simplify the definition to: "committing an act of war against non-combatants."
Tell me how the hell the legitimacy of self defense has anything to do with that definition.
Bluntly, what you're offended by isn't the definition, but by the unpleasant truth that an objective reading of what terrorism is sometimes condemns the good guys, too. You don't want to hear it.
The war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda is probably the closest to a "just war" that we've fought, at least since World War II. Get over the idea that we're spotless and wonderful, though. Yes, Americans are blocking out bigger pictures. We condemn the idea of killing innocent civilians for political ends, but we go on the record as saying that thousands of Iraqi children dying a month from sanctions is an acceptable tactic to try to overthrow Hussein (not that it's doing any good). This goes back to our actions in World War II as well as the enemy's: by all reasonable definitions, killing tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was terrorism. Don't kid yourself into thinking anything else. The entire point was to send the message, "If you don't surrender, we will kill not your soldiers but your families, your wives and your children, with weapons more terrifying than you can possibly imagine."
People seem to be under the apprehension that those of us pointing out that America sometimes does Bad Things are excusing having Bad Things done to us. We're not. We're saying that two wrongs don't make a right. And we're saying that if we're going to set a moral example for the rest of the world--and it's not American arrogance to say that given our position as the only superpower, we damn well better be willing to set that example--we've got to be moral. We can't be doing this "situational ethics" shit anymore, can't act like "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" does us (or anyone else) any good, can't loudly praise democracy while quietly supporting fascist dictators who are open to foreign investment--and even helping them overthrow democratically-elected governments that seemed a little too socialist.
Maybe in your eyes it's "warped" to talk about America's foreign policy failures. If so, what you want isn't patriotism--it's jingoism. I hope for our country's sake that enough people understand the difference. True patriotism isn't "my country, right or wrong." It's helping your country do what's right, and trying to prevent it from doing what's wrong.
Yes, I do remember computing in the early '80s. I remember a lot of vibrant hardware and software platforms that were manifestly different from one another, and that indeed most users of those machines were "educated, trained computer users" who were "able to program their own systems." In fact, this strikes me as the biggest flaw in your argument: the standardization on the IBM PC didn't make the microcomputer world open to the programmer, it made it open to the non-programmer.
No offense, but I can't think of a single microcomputer in the early '80s that could use a punch card even if you wanted one, and most micros only came with interpreted BASIC--if you wanted another programming language, including Assembly, you bought something. I had a BASIC compiler and Forth for my TRS-80, and could have also had Fortran, COBOL, C (K&R, of course) and, of all things, APL. And under CP/M, I could have had another program you might have heard of: Turbo Pascal. High-level languages supplanted assembly as the commercial programming environment of choice not because of the wonders of the standardized IBM PC, but because higher amounts of RAM in computers coupled with faster processors made it viable to program in them. When you only had 64K of RAM to load your OS, application and data, you needed to be real damn efficient.
I think it's somewhat dubious to say that the standardization on one hardware platform was a panacea for problems in the computing world before that standardization happened. If, say, three or four competing hardware platforms had split the market, I see no reason why computer users would necessarily be worse off. When one hardware/software combination has over 90% of the market, it's easy to blow off the other 10%. If that hardware/software combination only has 50% of the market, you don't blow the other half off so easily. The move toward platform independence for both (source) code and data interchange formats might well have been accelerated in a "no one standard" environment--and that's fertile ground for open source development, isn't it?
So does ksh.
If you mean inline editing, more generally, so does ksh, using both Emacs and vi keybindings if you wish.
Yep, so does ksh.
Well, you know what this line would be, right?
A lot of Linux distributions are using "pdksh," which is based on an earlier standard. Ksh is actually a pretty advanced scripting language (with indexed and associative arrays, compound variables, 'printf' formatting and an execution-tracing debugger), and theoretically it's 100% backward-compatible with sh.
Personally I've taken to zsh myself, but don't 'dis' ksh. :) It's pretty sophisticated. It's unfortunate that 'ksh93' hasn't made its way into wide use, or at least wide inclusion in distributions, yet; linking '/bin/sh' to the 1993 ksh release might be a little more 'true sh compatible' than bash, which is really what this topic was about.
And what I've noticed is that it's usually at commercial prices. Low-end commercial prices, to be sure, but it ain't cheap. And despite your implicit assertion to the contrary, freeware applications of any value are few and far between.
This has been one of my disappointments with my iBook. You can accuse me of being cheap, with some justification--but I look at it as being honest: I don't want to use unregistered shareware, so I'll certainly look for freeware first. And I usually won't find it. I usually won't even find up-to-date ports of common cross-platform applications like Vim and Emacs.
Granted, I've had other disappointments like the fact that MacOS 9 isn't much more advanced internally than System 7 was, that the iBook's battery design seems to be flamingly stupid, and that MacOS X is targeted to machines much faster than mine (note I didn't say that was a flaw, just a disappointment). But the Mac community as a whole seems to be less interested in the 'gift economy' than Windows programmers, much less Linux and BSD folks.
Yet even with that "archaicness" I find kernel configuration in BSD to be easier. This isn't because I'm a canonical GUI-hating Unix guy; it's probably because I'm not. XConfig and particularly MenuConfig are excruciatingly tedious compared to opening your own kernel configuration file in one window in a text editor and the LINT file in the other. My FreeBSD configuration generally is a matter of commenting out a bunch of lines (mostly SCSI stuff) and adding two at the bottom for my sound card.
/etc/rc.conf file changes or overrides many things that Linux distributions tend to scatter around the system (often in places that change from distribution to distribution, no less).
I've honestly been very impressed with how logical the BSD configuration "system" is; it's not pretty but it's straightforward and easy to make changes to. The
This is essentially an assertion that one can't desire to improve the world without being an authoritarian. Given thet any expression of a strongly-held opinion about how a given subject should be dealt with could be considered "a desire to improve the world," this essentially leaves us with a choice between inaction--more than inaction, a virtual silence--and oppression.
You're not just dismissing Marx and Zappa (a curious combination, if I may say so) but everyone who's urged one approach to anything in preference to another. You dismiss disparate icons such as Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Ghandi in one fell swoop.
That's a pretty dismal view of the world, honestly. It's also implicitly founded on the false premise that arguing a point is the same as forcing a point. Obviously, anyyone who favors one approach to a problem over another approach will be at odds with people who don't, and when someone in a position of power favors a given approach he will impose it on others. This is a hardly a sign of bias or authoritarianism; choosing to leave something alone (whether that means to the whims of nature, the whims of market forces or whatever) is just as much a moral choice as intervention is, and thus just as subject to controversy.
While I won't gainsay Eugenia, I'll have to say that I haven't had any problems with Gobe Productive 2.0 (under BeOS) in its export/import capabilities for Microsoft Word. The RTF filter is rather dimwitted (logically, it should be capable of everything the Word filter is, but in practice it definitely isn't), and the HTML export is extremely barebones--although in some ways that's a blessing, since it means I have much less crap to remove when I want to turn it into a real web page.
I used StarOffice 5.1 under Linux and Windows and it drove me absolutely batshit. I applaud the effort in OpenOffice to fix some of its predecessor's atrocities, but it's still an amazing resource pig.
Speaking solely for myself, I'll be looking forward to gobeProductive for Windows, and I'll certainly see if I can run the Linux binary at work under FreeBSD. (Yes, bizarrely enough, I use FreeBSD at work and Windows at home these days, although I'm in the process of setting up a Slackware 8 partition on my PC.) I know some people have had good luck with AbiWord, but I'm not one of them; the only open source office application I've liked so far has been Gnumeric. The new Productive release fixes one major hole in previous incarnations (no sections). If they've added the ability to start numbering at pages other than 1, I'll be set. If they start taking advantage of their frames to move toward being a baby desktop publishing program, too, that'd rock. :)
IBM became cool in the early '90s when they were working with Apple. The media reports were focusing on the defunct "Pink" OS project, but really, it was a Subgenius technology trade. IBM gave Apple the PowerPC, and Apple gave IBM their Slack.
In a certain sense 4DOS predates MS-DOS. It's actually a relative of ZCPR, a Z80 replacement for CP/M-80's command shell. And, yes, with ZCPR, you got basic scripting, I/O redirection, command line editing, stacking and history.
It was quite a step backward to go from my Intertec Superbrain (a circa 1979 Z80 machine somebody gave me when I was at college!) to a 386-based PC with MS-DOS. 4DOS (and the Norton repackaging of it as "NDOS" helped a lot).
When I ran Windows NT at work, and now that I run W2K at home, I use a descendant of 4DOS called "Take Command/32". Set it up and alias Unix commands to the DOS ones, and it's a livable working environment. (Granted that's not much of a slogan. "Buy our product and Windows becomes livable!")
Your argument is severely undercut by the very topic you're replying to. You seem to consider this bill unconstitutional, as do I--but the sole vote cast against it was not Ron Paul's. Since there were no abstentions, he voted for this bill.
Ultimately, party affiliation isn't a good indicator of who will and won't buckle to popular pressure. This is the real definition of "political correctness" in my book: it has nothing to do with being liberal (or conservative), it has to do with tailoring your speech and actions to what you think will win you the most political points.
I applaud the "don't point the finger at Congress," though. Too many people I know--including my Libertarian friends--tend to think of the citizenry and the government as "us and them." The whole point of the American system is that them is us, folks.
Because as we know, products live and die in the marketplace based solely on how great the idea is, and profitability is one singular factor rather than an amalgamation. You never have to worry about things like capital for advertising and manufacturing, relationships with other vendors, and unexpected resource limitations, let alone less "open" issues like exclusive deals between distributors and competitors, legal but unsavory tactics like "Scorched Earth" policies (Wal-Mart's phrasing, not mine), and so on.
The market's a wonderful thing, but when we say it rewards what's profitable, we often take that to mean that it rewards delivering the best possible product at the best possible price. But those two things are not identical. Many people recognized that DR-DOS was a better product than MS-DOS; at the start of the PC era, CP/M-86 was arguably a better product than PC-DOS. It lost first due to missteps by Digital Research and later on due to Microsoft's unethical OEM contracts. Note that I'm not commenting on the legality, but in my opinion requiring your customers to pay for your product whenever they use a competitor's is pretty seedy--and it's undeniably taking active steps to avoid competition on the open market.
I can't comment about Sprint's ION service specifically, but having worked in telecom for a while, I know that even for the largest companies there are a lot of factors that can get in the way of rolling out services in a timely fashion that you can't control. You're dependent not only on your vendors but usually on your competitors for critical parts of any large order, which can make for a marketplace which--while workable in its own way--is certainly nothing Adam Smith could ever have envisioned.
Actually, some of Polaroid's cameras did have good lenses, zoom and otherwise; they made professional-level cameras up until the early '90s. They still make ones for niche markets--but niches where photo quality isn't that important.
If you're a photography buff, you'll recognize that importance of what those Polaroid cameras really were: they weren't just "instant" cameras, they were medium format cameras. When I say they had a professional line, they were low-end professional, to be sure--but they were endorsed by no less a professional than Ansel Adams. (And by "endorsed" I don't mean he was paid to be a spokesman--as far as I know he never was. He wrote about them with some enthusiasm in his classic photography textbooks.)
Really, that might be the place where they most significantly missed the boat. They couldn't compete with digital cameras for the instant part, but they could easily have continued their "prosumer" line and even enhanced it--instead of fruitlessly trying to undercut digital cameras, they should have been marketing themselves as a way to get into medium-format photography with prices competitive with 35mm SLR cameras. If I ran the zoo, er, camera company, I'd have probably even done something radical like make that prosumer line be able to accept both instant film cartridges and cheaper ones that required external development. If you could do that, then given the way the Land Cameras were designed--pretty simply, with the ability to have changable backs in some models--the next step would have been to work on a "digital cartridge" that converted the camera into a digital medium format camera. (Right now digital medium format cameras are... let's just say they're not as cheap as digital SLRs. If you know how much most digital SLRs cost, that should worry you.)
It's kind of surprising to me, in retrospect, that a company as innovative as Polaroid had been instead decided the best course through the '90s would be to refocus themselves as the Kiddie Camera Company. One does honestly wonder what the hell they were thinking.
Congratulations, you've shown people how to get to the intersection of Kennedy and Tampa Street, which happens to be smack in the middle of downtown Tampa's business district. (I used to work a block away from there, at an office building at the intersection of Jackson and Franklin St.)
I'd like to give you credit for the joke, but you'll have to try a little harder. Pick a suburb near the university (it's called "dorm" for a reason, and my suspicion is the suburb in question is Temple Terrace, renowned across the county for being tremendously uptight).
If you start arguing who is better, Brittney Spears or Christina Agulera I will have to shoot you.
Of course. There can't be any argument, Christina Aguilera is obviously better.
And I bet she uses Emacs, too.
It may be a valid patent, but the question of whether it's valid for digital video recorders is another question. They seem to specifically be addressing the idea of "providing these and other options and capabilities [those options being rewind, fast-forward, etc., like a VCR] when the user of the broadcast receiver is monitoring the program concurrently with its reception" (a quote from the patent, my emphasis).
Is that the way you use your TiVo? Probably not.
Furthermore, the patent specifically calls for a "circular buffer." By its own definition of a circular buffer, it's difficult to say if TiVo or other PVRs really qualify. They do know to delete old instances of programs when their capacity is reaching its limit, but it's not a simple circular buffer--it's a relatively intelligent file management system.
It seems pretty likely the patent was written with the intention of letting users do limited time-shifting while a program was being played, not with the intention of letting them record many hours of programs.
I'm also more than a bit disenchanted with the patent's clear call for an analog TV signal at its start and the C-Y-A references to HDTV at the end--very likely the 1996 patent revisitation was to add that. But, that's another story.
For instance, we're looking at the later appearance of the Klingons...
Psst. Hey, fanboy, you wanna know what Worf didn't want to tell you in that episode about the Klingon appearance change?
It's called "having a special effects budget."
As others have pointed out, "American Pie" isn't as much a 'plane crash song' as it is about changing times and worldviews. Don McLean wrote about "the day the music died" as a focal point, an event after which the way everyone related to their country and their world changed. This change could only be marked (to McLean) with a melancholy, a recognition that beyond the tangible, clear losses, something intangible--but just as irreplaceable--had also been lost.
How Clear Channel sees it is their business (literally), but it seems to me those thoughts are more timely at this moment than they've been in decades.
Technically, NT is a flavor of Unix...
I don't think that's the case any more than BeOS is a flavor of Unix. They both support most of Posix, but the underlying kernel is implemented completely differently. If anything, NT's indirect ancestor is VMS.
At this point counter-attacking is irrational chiefly because there's no one to attack. I'm not a big fan of our President-Select, but I don't believe he's going to run off and bomb Afghanistan because pundits on Fox News are chanting 'Bin Laden Bin Laden Bin Laden.'
However, the reality, even for a bleeding-heart liberal pacifist like myself, is that for all intents this was an act of war. It was a stunningly sophisticated and well-coordinated attack. (The most plausible argument against Bin Laden's responsibility is that it would be a stretch even for his resources.) If these planes had been from a known military force rather than hijacked passenger planes, we'd declare war before the sun set.
So sure, at this point in time counter-attacking is irrational. But that doesn't mean that any retaliation is irrational.
Will retaliation "solve" anything? To turn the question around, how do you "solve" terrorism? It's worthy to ask whether US policy toward the Middle East fans the flames of anti-American sentiment, but that's an entirely separate issue from this attack. The lives of US citizens are already at risk. The lives of lots of people all around the world are already at risk. The risk isn't of American military attacks, it's of more attacks just like these. Will not retaliating address that?
RTF doesn't support tables, embedded objects, headers/footers, TOC, index, etc.
Bzzt! Thanks for playing. I see someone else has marked your comment as flamebait, but I think you're simply misinformed. The reality is that RTF is a Microsoft-created format and, at least when I looked at the RTF specs for Word 6, Word 95 and Word 97, tracked Word feature for feature save for embedded objects (although I believe it may have supported specifying links to external files).
Let's face it. The main reason programs "need" import/export filters for Word documents is because of user assumption--i.e., that everyone can read Word documents. They shouldn't need anything more than the openly-documented RTF. In practice, you'd better have a pretty good import filter for Word's native format--but in practice you really only need to be able to export RTF documents.
Incidentally, out of the 'alternative' office apps mentioned in this little article blurb, Gobe Productive 2.0 had the least trouble dealing with Word documents for me--although others have reported less success. The Linux (and Windows) versions of Productive will be of version 3.0.
Apple says Sorenson won't allow a Linux version, not them.
Bzzt! Thank you for playing.
I actually wrote Sorensen (I think it's "-en," not "-on," isn't it?) about this a couple years ago, when BeOS R4.5 came out and its Media Kit was (mostly) functional--in theory, it could have played and written Sorensen QuickTimes if only Sorensen made a codec for BeOS. Sorensen's response was quick and polite: "we've licensed the codec exclusively to Apple, so it's up to Apple to port their QuickTime player to other platforms."
And of course, that was sure likely. At least judging by actions, Gassee and Jobs have been in a pissing contest for years. Linux doesn't have Jobs' personal animosity directed at it, but--again judging by actions--it doesn't quite penetrate Steve's personal reality distortion field. (Apple's support of MkLinux predates Jobs, and I suspect there are reasons what support they give to the open source world these days is BSD-centric.)
While this is a late entry into this argument, you--and your opponents--seem to forget that Microsoft is not being targeted for being a monopoly, they are being targeted for anti-trust violations. Being a monopoly is legal. Using the power that being a monopoly gives you to strongarm your way into dominating other markets is not.
Personally, I'm dubious about the idea that Microsoft is technically a monopoly to start with, but I certainly agree with Scot Hacker's contention that the bootloader is a more serious issue than browser integration. It isn't an anti-trust issue--it's a prior restraint of trade issue.
Of course, I've been dubious for a while about whether the common supposition that "less regulation = more competition" always holds true. If it was illegal for a vendor to dictate the relationships OEMs have with other vendors, this provides more freedom for the OEMs. Is the vendor's freedom reduced by the inability to say "deal only with me or don't deal with anyone at all"? Sure--to the same degree that a street gang's freedom is reduced by the cops busting them for forcing "protection" on neighborhood businesses. I'm sorry, I just don't think Adam Smith would consider "my way or the highway" to be the Invisible Hand at work.