You've got a good counterpoint there... It's very useful when they wouldn't get the same points through otherwise. The first interracial TV kiss (Kirk/Uhuru) deserves more credit than my comment might have allowed for.
But that's clearly in a different category than the "save the whales" plot in that damn Star Trek movie. Blech. Being provocative is different than being didactic. And I WANT to save whales. Look at my nick; I've read Moby Dick more than once...
I should be more precise, but I cannot - at this time - clearly explain the difference between pandering and provoking. You've got a point.
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troll or no (beowulf cluster is imaginative relative to the usual tripe deez dayez)... BSD for science, GPL for not getting skrewed by your employer.
the SAD part is, the implicit contract between academia and industry has been whorified; once, academia did pure research and industry and the world reaped the profits. Now, industry still reaps the profits and academia whores itself.... Not a GPL-o-phile, but at times like this...
(sure, an exaggeration, but) Or???? (drunk, fuck yall)
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I always find it strange that the/. crowd tends to analyze this along libertarian/privacy-advocate lines. Most posters - myself among them - are quick to point out the inevitable failure of encryption-based rights management, but we can't see how inevitable it is that
I find this blind spot even stranger when you consider the number of Trek-aware posters on/. I saw a TNG episode where a cryo-survivor from the 20th century is able to find out where the captain is, get him on comm, and wander around the ship. Picard explained that they don't NEED internal measures to protect these things, basically, because human civilization has progressed beyond that point. In Voyager, I've seen people view infra-red scans of private quarters, and in the final episode, Seven transports directly into Chakotay's quarters. On other Trek-derived stuff, people get databases on the past of certain folk all the time. In other words, it's not just about security; their society has progressed to the point of being, with the exception of certain military-critical data, transparent. So why haven't I noticed any transparency advocates here?
I'm curious whether the fans of various Treks tend to fall on the privacy-defending side or on the libertarian side of this debate.
Personally, I take the view that both sides are grievously wrong and that the real solution is to watch the watchers. The "tribal" idea was very trendy during the 90s, and many here have pointed out that "tribal" societies (or, as some of us know them, small towns), word tends to get around and privacy isn't really possible. To me, the surveilled future looks the same way.
McNealy's attitude sucks, but you might as well get used to the zero-privacy society - by giving everyone the same rights, and to keep the keenest eye on the watchers. A transparent society is a very different kind of society than any of us live in, but it's the only way to keep the anti-crime benefits from being overwhelmed by Big Brother abuses. There are still a lot of questions, but at least it meets the "orthagonal alternative" or "neither of the above" test.
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If you think yoga is too wussy for you, try Bikram yoga. It's done in a hot room. Many people feel like they are going to faint their first class.
I used to have chronic numbness in my elbows; once the inflammation starts, good chairs won't help. A couple hours after my first Bikram class, I noticed the numbness that had been in my elbows for 3 months was gone. As long as I keep going to classes, it doesn't come back.
Try this a couple times a day: stand, put hands behind back, interlace fingers, bend
forward and push hands high in the air. Keep pushing them as far back as you can, until you feel your shoulderblades relax and roll back a little. Hold, push, relax. Repeat. This is a great counterstretch for the tension of hunching at a screen/keyboard.
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Re-read your quotes again. "After all, Odysseus was the sole survivor..."
Funny, most of the criticisms of the author seem to accuse him of seeing
pattern where there is none.
Meanwhile, you are talking about the order of a couple random notes, while missing the point that they were explicitly and deliberately working in elements of the Odyssey, to the point of changing the story line to resemble it better.
The title wasn't set from the start; that's true of most works except the kind that remain only titles. You're an idiot if you think that the "How the Solar System was Won" title was anything more than a joking parallel of "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb". The name Bowman happened to be mentioned in these notes before the
name Odysseus. There is zero indication that it wasn't already the Odyssey from day one, so your assertion that the name was chosen "before" is laughable. Why wasn't the word there earlier? Probably because the Odysseus metaphor was so obvious to the creators that it wasn't worth writing down. Probably because they are artists and not literal-minded children. If you can't see that they were doing Odysseus from this evidence - they were changing the story to improve the allegory - then you are too big a loon to argue with.
There are few things that clearly identify fake
intellectualism more than wacky theories and finding crazy non-existent patterns in things. Ranking very high among them; the idea that all symbolism in art is accidental. It's a fundamentally neanderthal argument that's the sneakier sibling to "That ain't art, my 2 year old coulda painted that thar pitchur!"
I've talked to enough creative people - artists, musicians, etc - about their influences that I feel reasonably certain about an artists' internal influences - and they aren't always the ones they admit to. But Zarathustra and Odysseus are dead on. Are you really that thick?
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Re:High Warp Restriction?
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
Which only goes to show that letting contemporary political issues seep into the framework of a science fiction series is a bad idea in the first place. Sci fi sucks when it doesn't bother to create interesting worlds out of conjecture, but merely transplants the present into technicological drag.
Voyager was mixed, but after a while it made it on the strength of its characters. But I still wish I could nuke any holodeck episodes. There hasn't been a good holodeck/VR story since the Western episode of The Prisoner (excepting the Matrix and Zardoz, go ahead, laugh). Too often, it's a thin ploy to do a (non-sci-fi) genre piece that contributes nothing to the overall storyline.
Speaking of The Prisoner, anyone know of a sci-fi representation of Virtual Reality - or even any discussion of it - that predates The Prisoner?
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It's helpful for them... I don't claim that it won't be a raw deal for consumers.
Monopolies in different fields cooperating isn't much different than a small group of competitors cooperating to screw their consumers, e.g. airlines, RIAA labels, California electricity providers.
AOL-Time-Warner is a weirder beast than a straight monopoly, however. They have enough clout to dictate certain things, within limits, and in a Microsoftian way, their power in one area can be used to force their hand in others. Putting them together has consequences I don't want to see.
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I used to use that back when. May not have been the best web server ever written, but it was preferable to Microsoft's "Personal Web Server" and IIRC it was out earlier. I even got Perl CGI working on it!
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Looks like Microsoft is getting a little smarter about taking actions to keep future antitrust actions at bay. With some helpful "suggestions" from AOL's lawyers, no doubt.
But the real battle takes place with the "last mile" to consumers. As long as there is a truly open Internet accessible to all, there's a limit to how much damage these kinds of consolidations can do.
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Agree with you about "optional". One major issue that isn't immediately clear to me is how actions get bound to guestures. The more the user can customize and assign, the better; that's something that *VERY* few OSes or apps get right now. Of course, good intuitive defaults are important, but it's not nice to straightjacket users.
On the other hand, the other big unknown is how long it will take before these kinds of interfaces can progress beyond simple commands. I was playing around with OS X voice commands the other day, and I realized there aren't that many. While I'll probably be using a keyboard til I die, it's still interesting for another reason. As you start creating the ability for a computer to do something like "open a new document with vim in my complaint letters folder", progressing to "download all the images with thumbnails on this page and put them in a new folder called 'Kournikova'", you eventually start crossing over into the real ability of a computer to use language. No doubt, these kind of simple OS-related tasks will be the first practical application of this.
Interesting, but I still prefer keyboard shortcuts. Heavy mouse usage makes me rest my hands, which makes my elbows tingle after a while. Seriously, keep your wrists in the air as much as possible. There's a reason you never heard about carpal tunnel syndrome in the era of manual typewriters.
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Jackson's tastelessness has always been exceptionally dark and layered with meaning, and it's always involved a double dose of fantasy as well. This is not like hearing that Allan Smithee of Police Academy 7 is directing LOTR.
Consider the worst that Hollywood does to films; it infantilizes them and prettifies them. Tack on a happy ending, dumb everything down. Mulan is a great example; in the original Chinese story, she is a fierce and accomplished warrior trying to reconcile conflicting societal obligations to honor her parents and fit traditional roles for women. By the time Disney was done with the story, she was a bumbling idiot whose victories were accidental and mere incidents in the story of her love life.
Now look again at Jackson's involvement; a director whose films are dark, psychologically complex, and fantastical is the best insurance I could imagine against Hollywood ruining the film. The biggest question mark is the quality of the script.
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Yeah! Let Canada do it! Or Uzbekistan! At this point, it's not terribly likely that anyone besides NASA would be in a position to do this... Maybe the US can trade an asteroid deflection for forgiveness of unpaid U.N. dues...
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That's an interesting limitation. Do any of the kiddie tools support the "targeted backscatter" technique you describe? If so, that could be a really significant limitation.
Regardless, their study is probably useful at gauging the frequency of attacks that aren't truly massive enough to attract widespread notice. Some of those do seem to reveal more sophistication than this technique would catch. Yahoo attacks and the Microsoft DNS attack seem to have revealed a certain amount of awareness of network structure. But as a technique of measuring attacks that aren't otherwise widely reported, this study is an order of magnitude more interesting than anything I've seen before.
I've personally noticed what I believe to be "backscatter" - large, brief ping floods that are too small or brief to be an actual DoS.
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In this case, it would be good if the winner were picked by a long process of evaluation and development, followed by developers voting with their feet (well, fingers). Unfortunately that almost never happens. The fact that I run windowmaker, but can run qt/kde and gtk/gnome apps simultaneously means this will be a long, drawn out battle, with no clear criterion for picking the winner. Probably it will come down to dev tools or something not quite the true merits.
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That was pretty good. But my favorite was "It was a crappy dragon." That had me in tears. I don't know why, it's just a funny thing for someone to say. HAW HAW HAW.
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Let's be honest: by interoperability you mean "apps and OS work together through proprietary, binary format methods that prevent interoperability with the rest of the world."
And I have no problem managing signatures in KMail or Mutt. Try setting Outlook 2000 to use different signatures when replying or starting a new message. Or acting with different "personalities" based on any kind of rulesets. Or taking your rulesets with you.
What interoperability problems? I cut-n-paste all the time with a variety of unix desktop apps. There's even several nice clipboard programs for when cut-n-paste gets more complicated.
Frankly I wish that widget sets didn't grow into such large desktop projects. After using windomaker for a while, I can conclude that the only thing lacking is a nice file manager, so I use Konqueror. Too bad so many small problems for real usability on the Unix desktop became such a giant holy war. X is pretty clean. OS X *tried* to get it right (XP will, just later and not as cleanly); storing stuff on the desktop is a pretty bad idea. I can't even do one second of work on the average desktop pack-rat's mess.
IE 5.5 is great on a Mac. On a PC it just sucks less than Netscape.
I'd love to see more games, and I really wish that more cards were supported in most games.
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I want to agree with you, but I can't. The most graffitti-ridden walls I've ever seen are in places where no one will see them. True, this is in part due to the convenience factor; it's pretty hard to spraypaint the Statue of Liberty.
But take a look at your average subway tunnel. Walls and walls of graffitti that pretty much no one ever sees. The graffittists (word?) must walk through hundreds of yards of rat-infested, garbage-strewn tunnels to get there at substantial risk and low payoff. Their only audience is each other.
I'd be more willing to predict a rise in IRC channels dedicated to posting defacements.
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As a consumer, I have to agree with you. When the end user no longer has the ability to have permanent reachability, the most important consequence of the Internet is in danger of being stifled; it's fundamental freedom.
Users will be limited by the courage of hosting companies and the like. If I could (and I can't) get my home cable modem to run "lronhubbardisanalienslugmonster.com", I have the choice to criticize Scientology with that site. If the end user loses all hope of running their own services, then his freedom of speech will be limited by the most cowardly tendencies of hosting providers. Great, cable companies and Geocities will be the arbiters of content. Blech.
How does IPv6 fit into this? It's critical! Until the core internet becomes completely IPv6, the holders of addresses currently - ISPs, generally speaking - hold the limiting property for the medium. I'm guessing that as addresses become scarcer, and therefore more valuable, the ISPs find LESS incentive to upgrade.
It also looks like a truly portable address under IPv6 - say, tacocellphone.slashdot.org - has to rely on dynamic DNS with VERY low refresh...
Now let's look at the home user in the future. People on mass broadband - the type with dynamic addresses, or the type not meant for "real" use - your basic peon connectivity - might be the first to be stuffed behind IPv6. Their ISP maintains external v4, but of course you can't really be reached at home from pure non-upgraded v4 customers. If this happens, then some whole new layer of peer-to-peer services become critical.
But I can't see how Junior can run a quake server under this scenario, so we've got problems. On the other hand, I'm sure Time Warner would love for the net to become a passive medium, but for the sake of the argument, let's assume that they can't go v6 like this. Now we're stuck with v4 addresses becoming like broadcast licenses. Increasing censorship, high cost prevents newcomers, amateurs, hobbyists from participating, so the internet, while it has more "channels" than cable ever will not die, it will just become more and more boring, as the massive amount of content becomes more and more scrutinized.
The only way out that I see, of course, is smaller ISPs - how are they going to get you connected? Some kind of high-speed wireless, large cities only, I'm guessing. But the point is, the transition path might be that as v4 begins to suck, some customers will jump ship to v6 ISPs. They will accept becoming client-only for v4 net in exchange for greater freedom - v6 ISPs won't be tracking your P2P actions and snitching the way TimeWarner probably will, eventually. They won't care all that much what people do, it will just be a rebirth of mom-and-pop ISPs. The situation will be alleviated somewhat by application-aware routers that take a v4 address, look at the application layer - Host: headers, for example, and translate into v6 addresses. Lots more "port 80 tunneling" in that future. But eventually, the freedom to occupy space (all the addresses you can eat), crazy hobbyist content, special interest IPv6 ISPs, etc
So what happens? My guess is that Japan will have the first large-scale version of the v6 ISPs. They will figure "whatever, v4 internet is mostly english. If we all switch to v6, we can access Japanese content, good enough." Their government won't be terrorized, as ours is, by claims of too much government interference, so they will create incentives. The US may stay IPv4 for a long time, trying to use the v4 address privilege to maintain an aristocracy of content production.
Of course, all of this supposes a migration of the hip to v6 to create enough "cool" for the scenario to go to completion.
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Re:WxWindows is the de facto cross platform Standa
on
Qt for Mac
·
· Score: 2
I suspect that overall you are right - but the fact remains that until there is some Aqua port of Gimp, either via GTK port, QT port, or pure carbon or whatever, the most interesting thing for OS X has not yet happened. Frankly, it's probably in Apple's interest to assign some developer to carbonizing The GIMP. Despite some grumbling from Adobe, it is the kind of thing that could create a viable development market for OS X, from the ground up. All it takes is the *perception* of a development community, and The GIMP is the most potent PR tool for Apple that way. Especially because you still hear from many boomer agers "But aren't there more applications for the PC?" It's not true in any meaningful sense, especially for end users, but the perception is still there.
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Good point. If you put the right mime type for m3u (audio/x-mpegurl) into your apache configs, you can "stream" mp3 via apache. TCP streaming with no variable-bandwidth aspect isn't true streaming, so Apache and wget can fake it well enough.
There's also a program called "streamripper" which can save mp3 streams, which is good for when you're not doing an on-demand download of one track. It also has support for autosplitting files and works nicely on the command line with mpeg123 so you can listen at the same time.
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There is an awful lot of streaming out there underwritten by the folks who want to make an impact - Real, Microsoft, and Yahoo/Broadcast all take on lots of freeloading customers for the prestige of having them on "their team". This includes the full spectrum from free software to free bandwidth to full hosting.
Microsoft, of course, has used a lot of astroturf to accomplish this - fake calls from phony members of the general public requesting WMP because "That other one doesn't sound good but the Microsoft software always sounds good." Of course, the people in charge of making the decisions are so blinded by the simultaneous offers of assistance that they usually fall for the obvious fake calls.
These companies are probably losing lots of money on this, but they see the future profits of total subjugation to their rule as so deleriously wonderful that they will be willing to sink a lot on this for a long time.
Little does NPR realize that that kind of ass-kissing will get them the same fate as pacifica, eventually. This is a hardball game.
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Right, and the lawsuits over those redirects are stupid, too. Porn site operators learned long ago how to stop that, and at this moment, the sleazemeisters are looking a whole lot smarter than Ford. They are looking smarter than the lawyers, too, which is bad for the lawyers, because people already hate the porn pushers less.
You know what? It's not even that hard. Use mod_access_referer. Don't use Apache? It's free and has that capability. If your commercial web server can't handle it, you are getting ripped off.
Ford's trademark argument is pathetic. They might have a slander case if the domain were "lubedwiththefatofbabies.com". But it isn't.
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If I even owned a DVD player (and I won't until the nonsense ceases), it really wouldn't be worth my time and money. I'd rather buy the DVD for $20-25 or else wait until it comes out of rental and the price comes down (since I assume that most new releases [will] go for $75-125 for 6 months as they do on VHS). On the other hand, giving home movies of the kid to the grandparents IS useful.
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Right on. His choice of inventors was the kind of revealing slip that he'll get reamed for soon enough. There are plenty of examples of the creations of real inventors he could have used, dunno the guy who invented liquid paper (or was that a woman? or am I just thinking that because it was Michael Nesmiths maternal granfather?) who show the value of patents protecting innovators. That he chose none of them only highlights the flaws in his reasoning.
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Slashdot Mirror
But that's clearly in a different category than the "save the whales" plot in that damn Star Trek movie. Blech. Being provocative is different than being didactic. And I WANT to save whales. Look at my nick; I've read Moby Dick more than once...
I should be more precise, but I cannot - at this time - clearly explain the difference between pandering and provoking. You've got a point.
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the SAD part is, the implicit contract between academia and industry has been whorified; once, academia did pure research and industry and the world reaped the profits. Now, industry still reaps the profits and academia whores itself.... Not a GPL-o-phile, but at times like this...
(sure, an exaggeration, but) Or???? (drunk, fuck yall)
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I always find it strange that the /. crowd tends to analyze this along libertarian/privacy-advocate lines. Most posters - myself among them - are quick to point out the inevitable failure of encryption-based rights management, but we can't see how inevitable it is that
I find this blind spot even stranger when you consider the number of Trek-aware posters on /. I saw a TNG episode where a cryo-survivor from the 20th century is able to find out where the captain is, get him on comm, and wander around the ship. Picard explained that they don't NEED internal measures to protect these things, basically, because human civilization has progressed beyond that point. In Voyager, I've seen people view infra-red scans of private quarters, and in the final episode, Seven transports directly into Chakotay's quarters. On other Trek-derived stuff, people get databases on the past of certain folk all the time. In other words, it's not just about security; their society has progressed to the point of being, with the exception of certain military-critical data, transparent. So why haven't I noticed any transparency advocates here?
I'm curious whether the fans of various Treks tend to fall on the privacy-defending side or on the libertarian side of this debate.
Personally, I take the view that both sides are grievously wrong and that the real solution is to watch the watchers. The "tribal" idea was very trendy during the 90s, and many here have pointed out that "tribal" societies (or, as some of us know them, small towns), word tends to get around and privacy isn't really possible. To me, the surveilled future looks the same way.
McNealy's attitude sucks, but you might as well get used to the zero-privacy society - by giving everyone the same rights, and to keep the keenest eye on the watchers. A transparent society is a very different kind of society than any of us live in, but it's the only way to keep the anti-crime benefits from being overwhelmed by Big Brother abuses. There are still a lot of questions, but at least it meets the "orthagonal alternative" or "neither of the above" test.
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I used to have chronic numbness in my elbows; once the inflammation starts, good chairs won't help. A couple hours after my first Bikram class, I noticed the numbness that had been in my elbows for 3 months was gone. As long as I keep going to classes, it doesn't come back.
Try this a couple times a day: stand, put hands behind back, interlace fingers, bend forward and push hands high in the air. Keep pushing them as far back as you can, until you feel your shoulderblades relax and roll back a little. Hold, push, relax. Repeat. This is a great counterstretch for the tension of hunching at a screen/keyboard.
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Funny, most of the criticisms of the author seem to accuse him of seeing pattern where there is none. Meanwhile, you are talking about the order of a couple random notes, while missing the point that they were explicitly and deliberately working in elements of the Odyssey, to the point of changing the story line to resemble it better.
The title wasn't set from the start; that's true of most works except the kind that remain only titles. You're an idiot if you think that the "How the Solar System was Won" title was anything more than a joking parallel of "How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb". The name Bowman happened to be mentioned in these notes before the name Odysseus. There is zero indication that it wasn't already the Odyssey from day one, so your assertion that the name was chosen "before" is laughable. Why wasn't the word there earlier? Probably because the Odysseus metaphor was so obvious to the creators that it wasn't worth writing down. Probably because they are artists and not literal-minded children. If you can't see that they were doing Odysseus from this evidence - they were changing the story to improve the allegory - then you are too big a loon to argue with.
There are few things that clearly identify fake intellectualism more than wacky theories and finding crazy non-existent patterns in things. Ranking very high among them; the idea that all symbolism in art is accidental. It's a fundamentally neanderthal argument that's the sneakier sibling to "That ain't art, my 2 year old coulda painted that thar pitchur!"
I've talked to enough creative people - artists, musicians, etc - about their influences that I feel reasonably certain about an artists' internal influences - and they aren't always the ones they admit to. But Zarathustra and Odysseus are dead on. Are you really that thick?
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Voyager was mixed, but after a while it made it on the strength of its characters. But I still wish I could nuke any holodeck episodes. There hasn't been a good holodeck/VR story since the Western episode of The Prisoner (excepting the Matrix and Zardoz, go ahead, laugh). Too often, it's a thin ploy to do a (non-sci-fi) genre piece that contributes nothing to the overall storyline.
Speaking of The Prisoner, anyone know of a sci-fi representation of Virtual Reality - or even any discussion of it - that predates The Prisoner?
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Monopolies in different fields cooperating isn't much different than a small group of competitors cooperating to screw their consumers, e.g. airlines, RIAA labels, California electricity providers.
AOL-Time-Warner is a weirder beast than a straight monopoly, however. They have enough clout to dictate certain things, within limits, and in a Microsoftian way, their power in one area can be used to force their hand in others. Putting them together has consequences I don't want to see.
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I used to use that back when. May not have been the best web server ever written, but it was preferable to Microsoft's "Personal Web Server" and IIRC it was out earlier. I even got Perl CGI working on it!
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But the real battle takes place with the "last mile" to consumers. As long as there is a truly open Internet accessible to all, there's a limit to how much damage these kinds of consolidations can do.
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On the other hand, the other big unknown is how long it will take before these kinds of interfaces can progress beyond simple commands. I was playing around with OS X voice commands the other day, and I realized there aren't that many. While I'll probably be using a keyboard til I die, it's still interesting for another reason. As you start creating the ability for a computer to do something like "open a new document with vim in my complaint letters folder", progressing to "download all the images with thumbnails on this page and put them in a new folder called 'Kournikova'", you eventually start crossing over into the real ability of a computer to use language. No doubt, these kind of simple OS-related tasks will be the first practical application of this.
Interesting, but I still prefer keyboard shortcuts. Heavy mouse usage makes me rest my hands, which makes my elbows tingle after a while. Seriously, keep your wrists in the air as much as possible. There's a reason you never heard about carpal tunnel syndrome in the era of manual typewriters.
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Consider the worst that Hollywood does to films; it infantilizes them and prettifies them. Tack on a happy ending, dumb everything down. Mulan is a great example; in the original Chinese story, she is a fierce and accomplished warrior trying to reconcile conflicting societal obligations to honor her parents and fit traditional roles for women. By the time Disney was done with the story, she was a bumbling idiot whose victories were accidental and mere incidents in the story of her love life.
Now look again at Jackson's involvement; a director whose films are dark, psychologically complex, and fantastical is the best insurance I could imagine against Hollywood ruining the film. The biggest question mark is the quality of the script.
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Yeah! Let Canada do it! Or Uzbekistan! At this point, it's not terribly likely that anyone besides NASA would be in a position to do this... Maybe the US can trade an asteroid deflection for forgiveness of unpaid U.N. dues...
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Regardless, their study is probably useful at gauging the frequency of attacks that aren't truly massive enough to attract widespread notice. Some of those do seem to reveal more sophistication than this technique would catch. Yahoo attacks and the Microsoft DNS attack seem to have revealed a certain amount of awareness of network structure. But as a technique of measuring attacks that aren't otherwise widely reported, this study is an order of magnitude more interesting than anything I've seen before.
I've personally noticed what I believe to be "backscatter" - large, brief ping floods that are too small or brief to be an actual DoS.
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In this case, it would be good if the winner were picked by a long process of evaluation and development, followed by developers voting with their feet (well, fingers). Unfortunately that almost never happens. The fact that I run windowmaker, but can run qt/kde and gtk/gnome apps simultaneously means this will be a long, drawn out battle, with no clear criterion for picking the winner. Probably it will come down to dev tools or something not quite the true merits.
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That was pretty good. But my favorite was "It was a crappy dragon." That had me in tears. I don't know why, it's just a funny thing for someone to say. HAW HAW HAW.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
And I have no problem managing signatures in KMail or Mutt. Try setting Outlook 2000 to use different signatures when replying or starting a new message. Or acting with different "personalities" based on any kind of rulesets. Or taking your rulesets with you.
What interoperability problems? I cut-n-paste all the time with a variety of unix desktop apps. There's even several nice clipboard programs for when cut-n-paste gets more complicated.
Frankly I wish that widget sets didn't grow into such large desktop projects. After using windomaker for a while, I can conclude that the only thing lacking is a nice file manager, so I use Konqueror. Too bad so many small problems for real usability on the Unix desktop became such a giant holy war. X is pretty clean. OS X *tried* to get it right (XP will, just later and not as cleanly); storing stuff on the desktop is a pretty bad idea. I can't even do one second of work on the average desktop pack-rat's mess.
IE 5.5 is great on a Mac. On a PC it just sucks less than Netscape.
I'd love to see more games, and I really wish that more cards were supported in most games.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
But take a look at your average subway tunnel. Walls and walls of graffitti that pretty much no one ever sees. The graffittists (word?) must walk through hundreds of yards of rat-infested, garbage-strewn tunnels to get there at substantial risk and low payoff. Their only audience is each other.
I'd be more willing to predict a rise in IRC channels dedicated to posting defacements.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Users will be limited by the courage of hosting companies and the like. If I could (and I can't) get my home cable modem to run "lronhubbardisanalienslugmonster.com", I have the choice to criticize Scientology with that site. If the end user loses all hope of running their own services, then his freedom of speech will be limited by the most cowardly tendencies of hosting providers. Great, cable companies and Geocities will be the arbiters of content. Blech.
How does IPv6 fit into this? It's critical! Until the core internet becomes completely IPv6, the holders of addresses currently - ISPs, generally speaking - hold the limiting property for the medium. I'm guessing that as addresses become scarcer, and therefore more valuable, the ISPs find LESS incentive to upgrade.
It also looks like a truly portable address under IPv6 - say, tacocellphone.slashdot.org - has to rely on dynamic DNS with VERY low refresh...
Now let's look at the home user in the future. People on mass broadband - the type with dynamic addresses, or the type not meant for "real" use - your basic peon connectivity - might be the first to be stuffed behind IPv6. Their ISP maintains external v4, but of course you can't really be reached at home from pure non-upgraded v4 customers. If this happens, then some whole new layer of peer-to-peer services become critical.
But I can't see how Junior can run a quake server under this scenario, so we've got problems. On the other hand, I'm sure Time Warner would love for the net to become a passive medium, but for the sake of the argument, let's assume that they can't go v6 like this. Now we're stuck with v4 addresses becoming like broadcast licenses. Increasing censorship, high cost prevents newcomers, amateurs, hobbyists from participating, so the internet, while it has more "channels" than cable ever will not die, it will just become more and more boring, as the massive amount of content becomes more and more scrutinized.
The only way out that I see, of course, is smaller ISPs - how are they going to get you connected? Some kind of high-speed wireless, large cities only, I'm guessing. But the point is, the transition path might be that as v4 begins to suck, some customers will jump ship to v6 ISPs. They will accept becoming client-only for v4 net in exchange for greater freedom - v6 ISPs won't be tracking your P2P actions and snitching the way TimeWarner probably will, eventually. They won't care all that much what people do, it will just be a rebirth of mom-and-pop ISPs. The situation will be alleviated somewhat by application-aware routers that take a v4 address, look at the application layer - Host: headers, for example, and translate into v6 addresses. Lots more "port 80 tunneling" in that future. But eventually, the freedom to occupy space (all the addresses you can eat), crazy hobbyist content, special interest IPv6 ISPs, etc
So what happens? My guess is that Japan will have the first large-scale version of the v6 ISPs. They will figure "whatever, v4 internet is mostly english. If we all switch to v6, we can access Japanese content, good enough." Their government won't be terrorized, as ours is, by claims of too much government interference, so they will create incentives. The US may stay IPv4 for a long time, trying to use the v4 address privilege to maintain an aristocracy of content production.
Of course, all of this supposes a migration of the hip to v6 to create enough "cool" for the scenario to go to completion.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
I suspect that overall you are right - but the fact remains that until there is some Aqua port of Gimp, either via GTK port, QT port, or pure carbon or whatever, the most interesting thing for OS X has not yet happened. Frankly, it's probably in Apple's interest to assign some developer to carbonizing The GIMP. Despite some grumbling from Adobe, it is the kind of thing that could create a viable development market for OS X, from the ground up. All it takes is the *perception* of a development community, and The GIMP is the most potent PR tool for Apple that way. Especially because you still hear from many boomer agers "But aren't there more applications for the PC?" It's not true in any meaningful sense, especially for end users, but the perception is still there.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
There's also a program called "streamripper" which can save mp3 streams, which is good for when you're not doing an on-demand download of one track. It also has support for autosplitting files and works nicely on the command line with mpeg123 so you can listen at the same time.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
This is what happens when you let the rabid banshees, er, lawyers get into the works.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Microsoft, of course, has used a lot of astroturf to accomplish this - fake calls from phony members of the general public requesting WMP because "That other one doesn't sound good but the Microsoft software always sounds good." Of course, the people in charge of making the decisions are so blinded by the simultaneous offers of assistance that they usually fall for the obvious fake calls.
These companies are probably losing lots of money on this, but they see the future profits of total subjugation to their rule as so deleriously wonderful that they will be willing to sink a lot on this for a long time.
Little does NPR realize that that kind of ass-kissing will get them the same fate as pacifica, eventually. This is a hardball game.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
You know what? It's not even that hard. Use mod_access_referer. Don't use Apache? It's free and has that capability. If your commercial web server can't handle it, you are getting ripped off.
Ford's trademark argument is pathetic. They might have a slander case if the domain were "lubedwiththefatofbabies.com". But it isn't.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
If I even owned a DVD player (and I won't until the nonsense ceases), it really wouldn't be worth my time and money. I'd rather buy the DVD for $20-25 or else wait until it comes out of rental and the price comes down (since I assume that most new releases [will] go for $75-125 for 6 months as they do on VHS). On the other hand, giving home movies of the kid to the grandparents IS useful.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Right on. His choice of inventors was the kind of revealing slip that he'll get reamed for soon enough. There are plenty of examples of the creations of real inventors he could have used, dunno the guy who invented liquid paper (or was that a woman? or am I just thinking that because it was Michael Nesmiths maternal granfather?) who show the value of patents protecting innovators. That he chose none of them only highlights the flaws in his reasoning.
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.