Please tell me again exactly what, if any, difference exists between our Industry and our Goverment? Historically, I think you can make the case that they're two heads on the same hydra, so to speak.
I think Microsoft vs. The United States of America is a good example of the above. But that's just my opinion, and I've been wrong before.
Is it just me, or does *nix offer the most truly evil-looking commands of any operating system?
rm -rf/
/sbin/mkfs/dev/hda
/sbin/badblocks -fw/dev/hda
That's cool.
"Foreigners" get confused? Um, so what?
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 1
This "oh, the poor foreigners get confused" gambit smacks of BS to me. So what? International tourism, while being hugely important for many countries throughout the world, is only one facet of that multi-header, multi-national juggernaut we call "the U.S. economy". Surely not a large enough facet that we need to go out and change our entire currency (at who knows what cost) so that people spending a six day / seven night vacation at DisneyWorld don't accidentally drop a $50 instead of a $5 when buying their 64oz. Gutbuster(TM) for Jr.
I think the real issue here is making it more difficult to counterfeit bills. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've heard for years that multicolored money is more difficult to counterfeit that bills which are of more limited color schemes (i.e. U.S. greenbacks).
In all likelihood, one impetus behind this move is to make it more difficult for foreign counterfeiters to reproduce U.S. dollars. If that is the case, then in actually what they're trying to do is make it MORE confusing for foreigners, not LESS.
Hehehe....reminds me of the Hells Angels and other motorcycle gangs who wear those "1%-er" patches. Does this mean that Linux/OSS users are the outlaw bikers of the desktop computer world? LOL!
I work as a web developer, so my main need for.DOC files exists in creating proposals, contracts, letters and similar for correspondence with my clients. Like many other Windows users, I've been using the various Word products for as long as I've been using computers.
I've always found Word to be one of the least-intuitive, poorly-supported applications that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. To say that I hate Word with a passion would not be an understatement. To make matters worse, with each new release, the number of Word's "features" seems to expand nearly geometrically, while my ability to use nearly ANY feature decreases by some sort of evil inverse proportion. Microsoft needs to hire Jacob Nielsen to conduct some usability studies on the app, seriously.
So for me, ANYTHING that can help me to escape from the grasp of Word sounds good. I've got the 1.0 release of OpenOffice and I love it. Sure, it's got bugs vis-a-vis opening and saving Word files perfectly, and the bulleted list thing is really annoying (although some Windows people think they look really cool! LOL), but since most of my documents need to be created for hardcopy printing only, I'm learning to love OpenOffice.
First off, thank you for taking the time to give that side-by-side comparison. That's cool!
I use OO on both Windows and Linux, and I've also found some of the similar issues pointed out in this example (along with the problem with the bullet points).
The one thing I can say about those sample screengrabs is this: while OO on Windows/Linux isn't entirely consistent with Word on Windows, it appears that OO is at least internally consistent with itself, across those two platforms.
So, if it's got to get it wrong, at least it's consistently wrong--which means that there is a defined locus for future improvement. Much better than random errors that go all over the place.
As a frequent contributor to my local NPR station and a web developer, I find your Linking Policy as expressed on this page (http://www.npr.org/about/linking_form.html) to be offensive to my intelligence and to the foundational principles upon which the Internet has been built.
The entire idea behind Hypertext is that a document can be linked to other documents containing similar or beneficially-related information. As I'm sure you will agree, the NPR website contains a wealth of information on current world and national events, politics, and culture (among many other things). I would think that NPR would want as many people possible to be exposed to this content, for if NPR doesn't put the content online for it to be read/downloaded, why do they have a website at all?
When someone links to a website, that website is effectively receiving both FREE advertising and site traffic. In addition, having numerous links to a website can provide said website with a higher ranking in many popular search engines (Google comes to mind). Almost all websites strive to increase their site traffic and search engine ranking. Why any organization would seek to turn the same away is literally beyond my comprehension.
By placing content online, you implicitly agree to have others view/download--and LINK TO--that content. If you do not wish for that content to be viewed/downloaded, then that content should not be placed online. While I certainly don't advocate the practice of framing page content, I feel that linking to ANY website, once it has been placed on the public Internet, is the fundamental right of any web publisher.
As a contributor to NPR and a taxpaying citizen of the United States of America, I am one of the people ultimately responsible for keeping NPR on the air and online. I demand that you change this Linking Policy immediately, and until such change has occurred I will forego any further contributions to NPR.
Sincerely,
YOUR NAME HERE YOUR ADDRESS IF YOU LIKE
Re:Wondering why NPR might do this?
on
Blogspace vs. NPR
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· Score: 1
Actually, I did take the time to read their "very broad wording". Here it is, just for conversation's sake:
-----
Request Permission to Link to NPR.org
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.
Please use this form to request permission to link to npr.org and its related sites.
-----
I'll agree with you that it's very broad language. But nonetheless, I am afraid that your attempt to reduce NPR's linking policy to one which is intended to prohibit linking to their audio content is flawed. I don't see how you got from "Linking to or framing of any material on this site..." to an understanding that this policy only applies to audio files--I think that "any material" really does mean ANY and ALL material...that's my understanding of the words, anyways.
As a frequent NPR contributor and a web developer by trade, I find this policy offensive. If they don't want people deep linking to their audio files, that is their prerogative (I say good luck!), but the policy in place currently has got to go. Anyone who knows anything about the web has got to know that links are what it's all about. Apparently they don't "get it", so I'm going to raise my voice and let them in on the big secret. I encourage others to do the same!:)
Could it be that consumers shopping Walmart.com, where these machines are being offered, are not as dumb as most/. respondents seem intent on making them out to be?
Remember, the systems are being offered as "fantastic low-cost alternatives to models that are preloaded with Windows". There's nothing ambiguous about that statement; these machines DO NOT COME with Windows, and thus WILL NOT RUN Windows applications.
In fact, what I think Walmart is really trying to do here is not necessarily directed at the home user market. I suspect that many of these systems are being sold to technologically-savvy small businesses, the same sorts of people who might go to Fry's to purchase some low-cost computer equipment to help meet a need in their office. At $300, these things are a steal. Whether or not they end up with pirated versions of XP on them is not something that I think Walmart is concerned about, but by selling them with Linux preloaded they can escape from the "aiding and abetting piracy" whines that Microsoft was laying on them when they were selling these machines with no preloaded OS.
However, the fact that Walmart is selling PCs with Linux preloaded is a huge opportunity for Linux to make inroads with all sectors of consumers, and I'm glad to see that Mandrake is proactively pursuing this by agreeing to provide their distro for these machines.
If you consider that these systems are going to be offered with Mandrake preloaded, and then take note that you can download Evolution and OpenOffice (assuming they aren't preloaded), then you're talking about a system that is pretty much there as far as Windows-land compatibility goes, from a home-user and small business perspective.
It's up to Mandrake, Lindows, and Walmart to see to it that their users' experience with this software is all that it can be. And I'd also like to forward the notion that anyone who's genuinely interested in seeing Linux gain desktop marketshare consider helping out some of these Walmartian newbies when they invariably start showing up to the message boards and newsgroups. After all, that's what the spirit of the OSS movement is all about, right?
I have to agree with you regarding the Mozilla form factor, um, factor, and will extend what you said with the following:
A short few years back, before I became a professional hired geek, I found that Netscape 4.x was the perfect "all-in-one" solution: web, mail, news, address book. It was with great reluctance, fear and loathing that I acquiesed to the demands placed upon me to conform to Outlook and IE by my employers.
Then came the dark days, initiated by the release of IE 5. Which was, to be honest, a damn good browser compared to the crap being shuffled around in the IE 4.x (and prior) releases. Still not standards compliant, but to be honest, IE has become so dominant that, like it or not, it has become the de facto standard, W3C be damned.
However, I've followed the development of Mozilla with great interest, and today I've got Mozilla 1.0 installed on both of my home machines (XP & OS X), and it has really become my favorite browser "again". The "disable unrequested popup windows" option is the most awesome thing ever, IMHO, what with major online advertisers adopting the pr0n javascript popup window spam tactic.
And mail and news have been fixed, compared to the dark days of NS 6.0 and the various beta versions of Mozilla. (How they screwed those features up, which seemed to work very well in 4.x, I was never able to understand completely). Mozilla 1.0 once again represents a very competent "all-in-one" solution for someone who just wants to web surf, get email, and visit newsgroups.
Lastly, for better or worse I can be confident that for most web pages that I create, if it looks okay in IE 6, it will look the same (or very nearly so) in Mozilla/Netscape 6.2.x. Which is a really, really good thing considering that it looks like AOL is very likely going to be switching over to Netscape.
So, to make a long and somewhat rambling post complete, I think the form factor of Mozilla is great, no matter what angle you look at it from. Whether or not it will spark a new browser war is really a moot point; it works very well for the most part, and for those who appreciate such things, it will prove useful and welcome.
It's sort of depressing to see just how elitist/bourgeois/classist many of these comments are, especially those concerning these so-called "rednecks" who shop at Wal-Mart. I mean, isn't one of the "great things" about Linux, and GNU in general, the ideal that operating systems, software and information in general "want to be free"? Or that people shouldn't have to pay $100-400+ for a modern operating system? Or that Linux and Open Source software is revolutionary, capable of breaking the grasp that Microsoft holds over the CONSUMER market?
So now you have Wal-Mart, a major retailer, offering complete machines with an OS and a number of useful applications at a price that is lower than the MSRP for the full version of Windows XP Pro. And rather than cheering about how this could potentially be a major opportunity for a Linux distribution to make signficant inroads with the CONSUMER market (remember the revolution?), many respondents have sought to portray the people who will purchase these systems as ignorant, foolish, uneducated, and/or intellectually inferior. Wow, what happened to all the populist ideals above?
I found your post really interesting. I'm a terrible chess player, even though I really enjoy the game, and to be certain I never thought of it as being a sort of pattern matching. This probably is one of the assuredly many explanations for why I suck so bad. LOL
"We're sort of in the Hegelian synthesis of figuring out where the products go once they've encountered the reality of the marketplace," said Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft's general manager for platform strategy.
You go with your bad self, Microsoft! Throw enough shit against the wall and something's bound to stick! LOL!!!
Like atomic energy, cloning can be used for beneficial purposes - to increase population and to open the window of genetic reprogramming
As far as I know, we're doing just fine with the task of increasing the human population of this planet without the help of cloning. (And isn't one of the better-known applications of atomic energy used to decrease the world's population??)
But what I'm concerned about is this: Why don't these infertile people consider the fact that, right or wrong, justly or unjustly, they're not meant to conceive on their own? If they want children that badly, I believe they should consider adopting an unwanted child before launching off on some science adventure to make copies of their (apparently) defective genetic material.
There are thousands of children around the world that could benefit from being placed with a loving family, able to provide for their care and upbringing. Obviously, the families interested in these cloning experiments really want a child--so why risk creating a Frankenstein when there are so many living, deserving children in need of a good home?
Flash MX (the new version of Flash set to launch in about two weeks) includes a number of accessibility improvements over previous versions of Flash. To whit, from Macromedia's site:
"Macromedia Flash Player 6 now supports assistive technologies such as screen readers through support of Microsoft Active Accessibility. In addition, Macromedia Flash MX now integrates tools for creating accessible content. To add descriptive text to animations and user interface elements, select an item and enter the appropriate description. Users with disabilities will be able to experience your content."
Granted, you have to use Microsoft's Active Accessibility product, but nevertheless, they're taking some steps in the right direction that should help to make Flash somewhat more accessible than it currently is.
Perhaps the archeologists will come to the conclusion that south eastern China was one of the most technologically advanced parts of the early 21st century world? After all, the article notes that as much as 80% of the U.S.'s electronic waste gets shipped out of country. Pottery shards today, hard drive fragments tomorrow...
I've turned off my television and stopped visiting CNN.com and all the rest of the mainstream media outlets. I'm becoming extremely disturbed by the direction which they've been heading since rougly 20 minutes after the second plane hit, and (as I recall) even before the first WTC tower fell.
The talk is of reprisal, and how the United States is going to respond to the attacks. Granted, nothing can justify what has happened, and there is no rationalization for what was done. However, could we perhaps get a bit wider perspective or perhaps even some critical thought/discussion regarding what has happened from CNN?
Today there was a poll on CNN.com that makes my point perfectly: "If Afghanistan refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden, should the U.S. bomb Kabul?" 79% of respondents said yes, we should bomb Kabul.
Hello, my fellow citizens! The people of Afghanistan are currently living under the tyrannical rule of the Taliban, having just come out of a long and very punishing war with the former Soviet Union. Not only has all the major infrastructure *already* been bombed, but the people are suffering tremendously as it currently stands.
Even more to the point, what could "we" possibly gain by bombing Kabul, which is a CITY full of CIVILIANS, after all? Does it make any difference whether it's a cruise missle or jetliner causing the explosion? Do you think the Taliban government, the only ones with access to food and equipment, will still be in Kabul when the bombs start to drop? Hardly--they'll be off in the hills with bin Laden, and the only people left to suffer the brunt of such an assault would be the civilian population.
The point I'm trying to make is that the mainstream media is so caught up in the idea that we could bomb Afghanistan that they've forgotten whether or not we should. After all, the only real way that we'll get bin Laden (or whomever is responsible for these crimes) out is by _going_in_after_them_. That will cost American and NATO lives. And, it can be aruged that it runs the high risk of polarizing other Muslim nations against what they could only perceive as an invasion by the West.
And if you've actually read anything about what bin Laden is trying to accomplish with his terrorist agenda, it's EXACTLY that--a world war between Islam and the West. And remember, Pakistan has nuclear bombs at their disposal.
Where is there any discussion of these facts in the mainstream media? That is what I truly fear, more than anything else. The manufacturing of our consent to what amounts to acts of genocide against civilian populations--and that ultimately leads to only greater and greater violence.
Retaliation: U.S. *Already* Terrorist Target #1
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
There's a theme going on here that "The U.S. should not retaliate for this incident because that retaliation will breed more enemies".
Here's the problem with that reasoning: The United States is perceived with great loathing by numerous groups (terrorist and otherwise) around the world. The images of Palestinians celebrating the fall of the towers illustrates this pretty succinctly. Perhaps this loathing is not unfounded; the U.S. has to some extent earned this reputation with it's tactics and politics both currently and in the past.
Regardless of that debate, the point is that the U.S. is already one of (if not the prime) terrorist targets in the world today. We've already made our enemies, either through our political and military practices or through a simple abhorrence of our Western culture being in direct conflict with the values and beliefs of various political organizations and fundamentalist religious groups. I don't think we need to fear inspiring additional vehemence through a reprisal for this attack--they hate us thoroughly already, and are (to the best of our knowledge) doing as much as they can to target us in any way possible already.
In contrast, I don't feel that we have yet come close to our potential to combat these terrorist activities. Surely, today is the first day of a new era in the United States, both in terms of how we think about security domestically, and how we attempt to ensure our security internationally. We are aware of numerous groups worldwide whose main avowed purpose is the destruction, preferrably through violent means, of the United States in particular and Western culture in general.
It is my opinion, completely outside of some value judgements as to whether "We" are right and "They" are wrong, that the United States definitely need to send a signal that this terrorist behavior, this complete disregard for any form of human life, will not be tolerated. We have the power to send this message and to make sure it's meaning will not soon be forgotten. We have opposed terrorism throughout the world for decades, through both political sanction and direct military action. It is now time to take that opposition to a higher pitch.
He played every night for months and only got paid $1500? No offense, but I'd be lucky if my wife didn't kick me out of the house for getting that kind of measly ROI.
While this sort of thing is certainly normal, it's kind of shocking to see XBoxII well along in it's development before XBoxI has even hit the store shelves. This thing's product lifecycle makes Microsoft's proposed 3-year licensing/upgrade scheme look pretty tame by comparison.
--
Insert witty URL here
Pretty code may not be covered in the budget
on
Software Aesthetics
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· Score: 1
I work mainly with Flash 5 ActionScript applied to web applications, and while that certainly *isn't* a real programming language, it is complex enough that issues of code cleanliness definitely arise. However, with website development budgets and deliverable deadlines getting tighter and tighter, the time it takes to really go through and optimize and comment your code sometimes just doesn't exist--or isn't budgeted for by the client. While that is no excuse in itself for ugly "Fruit Loop" code (a competent programmer shouldn't be doing that stuff anyways), sometimes the unfortunate reality seems to be that time and budget constraints force programmers to "just get it done". In a perfect world, we'd be able to get paid to take the time to perfect our applications, but in the real world, that's often just a fantasy, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
...maybe he's just washed up???
Please tell me again exactly what, if any, difference exists between our Industry and our Goverment? Historically, I think you can make the case that they're two heads on the same hydra, so to speak.
I think Microsoft vs. The United States of America is a good example of the above. But that's just my opinion, and I've been wrong before.
Is it just me, or does *nix offer the most truly evil-looking commands of any operating system?
/
/dev/hda
/dev/hda
rm -rf
/sbin/mkfs
/sbin/badblocks -fw
That's cool.
This "oh, the poor foreigners get confused" gambit smacks of BS to me. So what? International tourism, while being hugely important for many countries throughout the world, is only one facet of that multi-header, multi-national juggernaut we call "the U.S. economy". Surely not a large enough facet that we need to go out and change our entire currency (at who knows what cost) so that people spending a six day / seven night vacation at DisneyWorld don't accidentally drop a $50 instead of a $5 when buying their 64oz. Gutbuster(TM) for Jr.
I think the real issue here is making it more difficult to counterfeit bills. I'm no expert on the subject, but I've heard for years that multicolored money is more difficult to counterfeit that bills which are of more limited color schemes (i.e. U.S. greenbacks).
In all likelihood, one impetus behind this move is to make it more difficult for foreign counterfeiters to reproduce U.S. dollars. If that is the case, then in actually what they're trying to do is make it MORE confusing for foreigners, not LESS.
Hehehe....reminds me of the Hells Angels and other motorcycle gangs who wear those "1%-er" patches. Does this mean that Linux/OSS users are the outlaw bikers of the desktop computer world? LOL!
I work as a web developer, so my main need for .DOC files exists in creating proposals, contracts, letters and similar for correspondence with my clients. Like many other Windows users, I've been using the various Word products for as long as I've been using computers.
I've always found Word to be one of the least-intuitive, poorly-supported applications that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. To say that I hate Word with a passion would not be an understatement. To make matters worse, with each new release, the number of Word's "features" seems to expand nearly geometrically, while my ability to use nearly ANY feature decreases by some sort of evil inverse proportion. Microsoft needs to hire Jacob Nielsen to conduct some usability studies on the app, seriously.
So for me, ANYTHING that can help me to escape from the grasp of Word sounds good. I've got the 1.0 release of OpenOffice and I love it. Sure, it's got bugs vis-a-vis opening and saving Word files perfectly, and the bulleted list thing is really annoying (although some Windows people think they look really cool! LOL), but since most of my documents need to be created for hardcopy printing only, I'm learning to love OpenOffice.
First off, thank you for taking the time to give that side-by-side comparison. That's cool!
I use OO on both Windows and Linux, and I've also found some of the similar issues pointed out in this example (along with the problem with the bullet points).
The one thing I can say about those sample screengrabs is this: while OO on Windows/Linux isn't entirely consistent with Word on Windows, it appears that OO is at least internally consistent with itself, across those two platforms.
So, if it's got to get it wrong, at least it's consistently wrong--which means that there is a defined locus for future improvement. Much better than random errors that go all over the place.
Are there any plans to port GNOME on Windows?
You must be joking, right??
Copy & paste, modify to suite, and send to:
ombudsman@npr.org
-------
To whom it may concern-
As a frequent contributor to my local NPR station and a web developer, I find your Linking Policy as expressed on this page (http://www.npr.org/about/linking_form.html) to be offensive to my intelligence and to the foundational principles upon which the Internet has been built.
The entire idea behind Hypertext is that a document can be linked to other documents containing similar or beneficially-related information. As I'm sure you will agree, the NPR website contains a wealth of information on current world and national events, politics, and culture (among many other things). I would think that NPR would want as many people possible to be exposed to this content, for if NPR doesn't put the content online for it to be read/downloaded, why do they have a website at all?
When someone links to a website, that website is effectively receiving both FREE advertising and site traffic. In addition, having numerous links to a website can provide said website with a higher ranking in many popular search engines (Google comes to mind). Almost all websites strive to increase their site traffic and search engine ranking. Why any organization would seek to turn the same away is literally beyond my comprehension.
By placing content online, you implicitly agree to have others view/download--and LINK TO--that content. If you do not wish for that content to be viewed/downloaded, then that content should not be placed online. While I certainly don't advocate the practice of framing page content, I feel that linking to ANY website, once it has been placed on the public Internet, is the fundamental right of any web publisher.
As a contributor to NPR and a taxpaying citizen of the United States of America, I am one of the people ultimately responsible for keeping NPR on the air and online. I demand that you change this Linking Policy immediately, and until such change has occurred I will forego any further contributions to NPR.
Sincerely,
YOUR NAME HERE
YOUR ADDRESS IF YOU LIKE
Actually, I did take the time to read their "very broad wording". Here it is, just for conversation's sake:
:)
-----
Request Permission to Link to NPR.org
Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.
Please use this form to request permission to link to npr.org and its related sites.
-----
I'll agree with you that it's very broad language. But nonetheless, I am afraid that your attempt to reduce NPR's linking policy to one which is intended to prohibit linking to their audio content is flawed. I don't see how you got from "Linking to or framing of any material on this site..." to an understanding that this policy only applies to audio files--I think that "any material" really does mean ANY and ALL material...that's my understanding of the words, anyways.
As a frequent NPR contributor and a web developer by trade, I find this policy offensive. If they don't want people deep linking to their audio files, that is their prerogative (I say good luck!), but the policy in place currently has got to go. Anyone who knows anything about the web has got to know that links are what it's all about. Apparently they don't "get it", so I'm going to raise my voice and let them in on the big secret. I encourage others to do the same!
Could it be that consumers shopping Walmart.com, where these machines are being offered, are not as dumb as most /. respondents seem intent on making them out to be?
Remember, the systems are being offered as "fantastic low-cost alternatives to models that are preloaded with Windows". There's nothing ambiguous about that statement; these machines DO NOT COME with Windows, and thus WILL NOT RUN Windows applications.
In fact, what I think Walmart is really trying to do here is not necessarily directed at the home user market. I suspect that many of these systems are being sold to technologically-savvy small businesses, the same sorts of people who might go to Fry's to purchase some low-cost computer equipment to help meet a need in their office. At $300, these things are a steal. Whether or not they end up with pirated versions of XP on them is not something that I think Walmart is concerned about, but by selling them with Linux preloaded they can escape from the "aiding and abetting piracy" whines that Microsoft was laying on them when they were selling these machines with no preloaded OS.
However, the fact that Walmart is selling PCs with Linux preloaded is a huge opportunity for Linux to make inroads with all sectors of consumers, and I'm glad to see that Mandrake is proactively pursuing this by agreeing to provide their distro for these machines.
If you consider that these systems are going to be offered with Mandrake preloaded, and then take note that you can download Evolution and OpenOffice (assuming they aren't preloaded), then you're talking about a system that is pretty much there as far as Windows-land compatibility goes, from a home-user and small business perspective.
It's up to Mandrake, Lindows, and Walmart to see to it that their users' experience with this software is all that it can be. And I'd also like to forward the notion that anyone who's genuinely interested in seeing Linux gain desktop marketshare consider helping out some of these Walmartian newbies when they invariably start showing up to the message boards and newsgroups. After all, that's what the spirit of the OSS movement is all about, right?
I have to agree with you regarding the Mozilla form factor, um, factor, and will extend what you said with the following:
A short few years back, before I became a professional hired geek, I found that Netscape 4.x was the perfect "all-in-one" solution: web, mail, news, address book. It was with great reluctance, fear and loathing that I acquiesed to the demands placed upon me to conform to Outlook and IE by my employers.
Then came the dark days, initiated by the release of IE 5. Which was, to be honest, a damn good browser compared to the crap being shuffled around in the IE 4.x (and prior) releases. Still not standards compliant, but to be honest, IE has become so dominant that, like it or not, it has become the de facto standard, W3C be damned.
However, I've followed the development of Mozilla with great interest, and today I've got Mozilla 1.0 installed on both of my home machines (XP & OS X), and it has really become my favorite browser "again". The "disable unrequested popup windows" option is the most awesome thing ever, IMHO, what with major online advertisers adopting the pr0n javascript popup window spam tactic.
And mail and news have been fixed, compared to the dark days of NS 6.0 and the various beta versions of Mozilla. (How they screwed those features up, which seemed to work very well in 4.x, I was never able to understand completely). Mozilla 1.0 once again represents a very competent "all-in-one" solution for someone who just wants to web surf, get email, and visit newsgroups.
Lastly, for better or worse I can be confident that for most web pages that I create, if it looks okay in IE 6, it will look the same (or very nearly so) in Mozilla/Netscape 6.2.x. Which is a really, really good thing considering that it looks like AOL is very likely going to be switching over to Netscape.
So, to make a long and somewhat rambling post complete, I think the form factor of Mozilla is great, no matter what angle you look at it from. Whether or not it will spark a new browser war is really a moot point; it works very well for the most part, and for those who appreciate such things, it will prove useful and welcome.
It's sort of depressing to see just how elitist/bourgeois/classist many of these comments are, especially those concerning these so-called "rednecks" who shop at Wal-Mart. I mean, isn't one of the "great things" about Linux, and GNU in general, the ideal that operating systems, software and information in general "want to be free"? Or that people shouldn't have to pay $100-400+ for a modern operating system? Or that Linux and Open Source software is revolutionary, capable of breaking the grasp that Microsoft holds over the CONSUMER market? So now you have Wal-Mart, a major retailer, offering complete machines with an OS and a number of useful applications at a price that is lower than the MSRP for the full version of Windows XP Pro. And rather than cheering about how this could potentially be a major opportunity for a Linux distribution to make signficant inroads with the CONSUMER market (remember the revolution?), many respondents have sought to portray the people who will purchase these systems as ignorant, foolish, uneducated, and/or intellectually inferior. Wow, what happened to all the populist ideals above?
Nerf Herder is "old skool"? Shit, I must be getting old.
I found your post really interesting. I'm a terrible chess player, even though I really enjoy the game, and to be certain I never thought of it as being a sort of pattern matching. This probably is one of the assuredly many explanations for why I suck so bad. LOL
You go with your bad self, Microsoft! Throw enough shit against the wall and something's bound to stick! LOL!!!
As far as I know, we're doing just fine with the task of increasing the human population of this planet without the help of cloning. (And isn't one of the better-known applications of atomic energy used to decrease the world's population??)
But what I'm concerned about is this: Why don't these infertile people consider the fact that, right or wrong, justly or unjustly, they're not meant to conceive on their own? If they want children that badly, I believe they should consider adopting an unwanted child before launching off on some science adventure to make copies of their (apparently) defective genetic material.
There are thousands of children around the world that could benefit from being placed with a loving family, able to provide for their care and upbringing. Obviously, the families interested in these cloning experiments really want a child--so why risk creating a Frankenstein when there are so many living, deserving children in need of a good home?
Flash MX (the new version of Flash set to launch in about two weeks) includes a number of accessibility improvements over previous versions of Flash. To whit, from Macromedia's site:
"Macromedia Flash Player 6 now supports assistive technologies such as screen readers through support of Microsoft Active Accessibility. In addition, Macromedia Flash MX now integrates tools for creating accessible content. To add descriptive text to animations and user interface elements, select an item and enter the appropriate description. Users with disabilities will be able to experience your content."
Linkage
Granted, you have to use Microsoft's Active Accessibility product, but nevertheless, they're taking some steps in the right direction that should help to make Flash somewhat more accessible than it currently is.
Perhaps the archeologists will come to the conclusion that south eastern China was one of the most technologically advanced parts of the early 21st century world? After all, the article notes that as much as 80% of the U.S.'s electronic waste gets shipped out of country. Pottery shards today, hard drive fragments tomorrow...
I've turned off my television and stopped visiting CNN.com and all the rest of the mainstream media outlets. I'm becoming extremely disturbed by the direction which they've been heading since rougly 20 minutes after the second plane hit, and (as I recall) even before the first WTC tower fell.
The talk is of reprisal, and how the United States is going to respond to the attacks. Granted, nothing can justify what has happened, and there is no rationalization for what was done. However, could we perhaps get a bit wider perspective or perhaps even some critical thought/discussion regarding what has happened from CNN?
Today there was a poll on CNN.com that makes my point perfectly: "If Afghanistan refuses to hand over Osama bin Laden, should the U.S. bomb Kabul?" 79% of respondents said yes, we should bomb Kabul.
Hello, my fellow citizens! The people of Afghanistan are currently living under the tyrannical rule of the Taliban, having just come out of a long and very punishing war with the former Soviet Union. Not only has all the major infrastructure *already* been bombed, but the people are suffering tremendously as it currently stands.
Even more to the point, what could "we" possibly gain by bombing Kabul, which is a CITY full of CIVILIANS, after all? Does it make any difference whether it's a cruise missle or jetliner causing the explosion? Do you think the Taliban government, the only ones with access to food and equipment, will still be in Kabul when the bombs start to drop? Hardly--they'll be off in the hills with bin Laden, and the only people left to suffer the brunt of such an assault would be the civilian population.
The point I'm trying to make is that the mainstream media is so caught up in the idea that we could bomb Afghanistan that they've forgotten whether or not we should. After all, the only real way that we'll get bin Laden (or whomever is responsible for these crimes) out is by _going_in_after_them_. That will cost American and NATO lives. And, it can be aruged that it runs the high risk of polarizing other Muslim nations against what they could only perceive as an invasion by the West.
And if you've actually read anything about what bin Laden is trying to accomplish with his terrorist agenda, it's EXACTLY that--a world war between Islam and the West. And remember, Pakistan has nuclear bombs at their disposal.
Where is there any discussion of these facts in the mainstream media? That is what I truly fear, more than anything else. The manufacturing of our consent to what amounts to acts of genocide against civilian populations--and that ultimately leads to only greater and greater violence.
Try: http://www.zmag.org
There's a theme going on here that "The U.S. should not retaliate for this incident because that retaliation will breed more enemies".
Here's the problem with that reasoning: The United States is perceived with great loathing by numerous groups (terrorist and otherwise) around the world. The images of Palestinians celebrating the fall of the towers illustrates this pretty succinctly. Perhaps this loathing is not unfounded; the U.S. has to some extent earned this reputation with it's tactics and politics both currently and in the past.
Regardless of that debate, the point is that the U.S. is already one of (if not the prime) terrorist targets in the world today. We've already made our enemies, either through our political and military practices or through a simple abhorrence of our Western culture being in direct conflict with the values and beliefs of various political organizations and fundamentalist religious groups. I don't think we need to fear inspiring additional vehemence through a reprisal for this attack--they hate us thoroughly already, and are (to the best of our knowledge) doing as much as they can to target us in any way possible already.
In contrast, I don't feel that we have yet come close to our potential to combat these terrorist activities. Surely, today is the first day of a new era in the United States, both in terms of how we think about security domestically, and how we attempt to ensure our security internationally. We are aware of numerous groups worldwide whose main avowed purpose is the destruction, preferrably through violent means, of the United States in particular and Western culture in general.
It is my opinion, completely outside of some value judgements as to whether "We" are right and "They" are wrong, that the United States definitely need to send a signal that this terrorist behavior, this complete disregard for any form of human life, will not be tolerated. We have the power to send this message and to make sure it's meaning will not soon be forgotten. We have opposed terrorism throughout the world for decades, through both political sanction and direct military action. It is now time to take that opposition to a higher pitch.
FWIW--I say we glaze the fucking bastards.
He played every night for months and only got paid $1500? No offense, but I'd be lucky if my wife didn't kick me out of the house for getting that kind of measly ROI.
While this sort of thing is certainly normal, it's kind of shocking to see XBoxII well along in it's development before XBoxI has even hit the store shelves. This thing's product lifecycle makes Microsoft's proposed 3-year licensing/upgrade scheme look pretty tame by comparison.
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I work mainly with Flash 5 ActionScript applied to web applications, and while that certainly *isn't* a real programming language, it is complex enough that issues of code cleanliness definitely arise. However, with website development budgets and deliverable deadlines getting tighter and tighter, the time it takes to really go through and optimize and comment your code sometimes just doesn't exist--or isn't budgeted for by the client. While that is no excuse in itself for ugly "Fruit Loop" code (a competent programmer shouldn't be doing that stuff anyways), sometimes the unfortunate reality seems to be that time and budget constraints force programmers to "just get it done". In a perfect world, we'd be able to get paid to take the time to perfect our applications, but in the real world, that's often just a fantasy, IMHO.