(Oddly) your minimalist post jolted me to think of a pet peeve that is also a heresy!
A creeping diseased meme disfunctionally behind the times and out of all sync with reality seems to be sweeping through web designers of the world (excepting/.) as they create nicely arranged columns of totally unreadable lines of fly droppings. I therefore heretically proclaim that everyone does NOT have their display set to 800x600. I repeat:
EVERYONE DOES NOT HAVE THEIR DISPLAY SET TO 800x600.
In fact, I would argue that the majority of people are browsing at 1024x768 or greater and THEY are the people who should be targeted for browser optimization. See: http://www.dreamink.com/design5.shtml If the resulting text looks large on an 800x600 screen -- tough. At least it is legible to them.
Thank Cthulhu Mozilla has a "minimum font" setting to bump stuff up to legibility without setting the whole page to a zoom magnification. But why should I have to defensively do this to protect myself against web designer stupidity?
There! I said it and, gosh, I feel better! Great topic.
Yeah, people just don't give credit where credit is due. I believe the orderly bureaucratic practice of doing contracts in triplicate and registering a copy with the government so the courts could rule on disagreements was instigated in Caligula's reign. Go figure.
>There's so many more workers in China it's only a matter of time (and very little at that compared to the US, IMHO) before workers there demand more, and decide to demand it in groups.
>>Well, now you're talking sense. Because an overabundance of workers in our workforce certainly translates to power for those workers. Oh wait, it doesn't. 10 workers for every job usually means that if you even hint at unhappiness with your lot, they can find others to do it without complaint.
Both of these viewpoints have some truth. Which is why I'm driven crazy by the U.S. neocons and libertarians who want to take us back to the glorious 19th century and equally by the slave reparation people who want to be paid off because their ancestors were slaves.
Doesn't anybody have a basic knowledge of the less glorious underbelly of U.S. history? On the latter point, let's "get medieval" in a butal, 19th century kind of way. Hell, a slave was property. An owner was stupid if he didn't take care of his quite expensive "investment". On the other hand, a nineteenth-century factory worker could be worked to death in much the same conditions that prevail in third-world factories today. Let him die. The factory owner didn't have an investment in him. There was always another Irish potato famine refugee to take his place.
Obviously, the juxtiposition isn't to promote slavery as the lesser evil (which is perhaps worth pointing out to a handful of countries the internet could touch), but merely to highlight the unforgivingly brutal position of the U.S. worker in the 19th century that is so often neglected. Upton Sinclair's book , The Jungle c. 1900, has a chapter where a worker falls into a meat grinder and the foreman doesn't shut it down. That didn't promote sympathy for worker safety regulation. It promoted sympathy for better food inspection. The worker's movement took more than another decade to get rolling -- with no small inspiration from Lenin.
Even then, President McKinley wasn't above calling out the Guard to kill striking workers. There is no reason to believe China will be any prettier.
So even though both people above are right, the conditions are not entirely dissimilar from 19th century America. There were ample replacements willing to be worked to death then too. Therefore, the cycle has to be broken by resistance from the people. Rather amusing when one first thinks of China, in name a "people's democracy", isn't it?
This line of reasoning only superficially sounds communist or revolutionary to current U.S. tastes. Probably one of the reasons things went so well for so many for so long in the latter half of the 20th century in the first world is that capitalist governments said, "Well, you aren't getting communism, but we will support, and even promote, unions." Hence, a somewhat "pure" socialist government presence that encouraged wealth distribution without necessarily promoting the government programs conservatives abhor. In no way "communist" but also in no way "pure, unbridled capitalism".
Now, if one _really_ wants to cause trouble: the average secretary, generally non-unionized, with a computer today is doing the work of ten secretaries with typewriters? Her relative wage compared to the company owner today is at what percentage.......???
What's more, many Chinese DVD manufacturers don't pay the $10 to $15 in royalties due per unit for patented technologies -- penalizing established consumer-electronics companies that honor intellectual-property rights.
So, if I get this straight, people who buy cheap DVD players should be hunted down like dogs by the RIAA because they are the same filthy commies as linux users who want to _play_ a DVD on their computers?
Well, yeah. My first thought was, "You mean a jetliner CAN'T be flown without a working nav computer anymore?" (What? It drops like a rock? "Take that, suicide pilot! Pull out this module and the plane goes down!") It has to be accessible for maintenance. Get the manual, know what to yank. Geez.
Conversely, if this thing is truly inaccessible from inside a plane, do you really want to be on that plane? Will it run on Windows?
God damit!! It's not a fucking game, it's your life you're betting.
Absolutely, only more so. That windshield isn't a video game display. The people you run into or over are real people who die and had lives. When little monkey behind wheel, dammit, little monkey better pay attention.
Much of my conviction comes from walking/jogging/running to work and back for many years (paradoxically?) for my health. Even though I'm in a state with a state-wide law against a vehicle entering a crosswalk when a pedestrian is present, I'm only alive a dozen times over because of the deadly-serious frosty mindset I take into a crosswalk. But it isn't just a personal issue. I have known three women in various workplaces who each had their fathers killed in a stop sign or stop light crosswalk.
Outside of anecdote, I'm sure the Slashdot audience is intelligent and can appreciate the main point of the author of Innumeracy -- that people individually and collectively make personal and policy decisions based upon poor knowledge of real-world probabilities. How about this: 3000 people killed at the World Trade Center and we have shaken up the constitution internally and disrupted the world externally. What's 3000 people? About 1-1/2 years worth of pedestrians picked off in the U.S. by other U.S. drivers. In others words, since 9/11 more U.S. citizens have been picked off in the mall parking lots and crosswalks of America than died in 9/11. Who's crying for them? Can anyone say "cultural blind spot"?
Look at it this way. Senator Janklow (R-S.D.) blew off speeding laws for decades, apparently because he was too intelligent, observant, and just plain "special" to obey them. Until he breezed through a stop sign at 70 m.p.h. and killed someone. It's just ugly, stupid, immature and sociopathic to think you are so "special" you don't have to take your responsibilities behind the wheel seriously. You want to make that a bulletpoint in your lifetime legacy?
Sure. I saw it in a documentary with Requel Welsh _decades_ ago. But the blood/brain barrier can be difficult to pass for the little ship carrying the researchers.
Of course, Penn Gilette had the all-time best word on that in his PC Computing essay. Just write a little start-up program that fills your PC screen with "10...9...8...7...". Airport security love a passenger with a sense of humour.
Outside of perhaps a welfare office or major metropolitan emergency room waiting area, is there any public space more repellent than an airport? Inspecting your shoes while they do a cursory glance at the _cargo_ riding with you is just added value in an already surreal experience.
Positive suggestion: avoidance. Less than 150 miles, drive. Less than 500-600 miles: Can you arrange a Monday business meeting? Amtrak down Sunday. Amtrak back the same day.
A couple years ago my mother gave me a poured acrylic faux-ceramic desk lamp with a couch base covered in kittens with a kitten pattern lamp shade and three faux ceramic kittens to hang from the top of the shade.
This year we got two sets of three hanging kittens to accessorize the theme among our other lamp shades.
Still have mine packed away -- yes, ZX-81. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it is heavily modded and I have no idea what became of the original case. Hardwired into a real keyboard, reset, power switch with LED (yes, on the transformer side), "joystick port" for flight simulator, memory pack hardwired in so the "expansion bus" points out to connect with the thermal printer, "sound generator" AND, the biggie, a stringy floppy (little microcassettes of video tape). If I remember, the stringy floppy had about the feel of the speed of the Commodore "shoebox". Laughable now, but cool then.
Learned a little assembly when the 16K got filled.
But the pivotal machine for me was the Commodore Plus/4 -- which I purchased with foolish pride during the, about 3 month, period when it was sold retail. "Compatible with the C64" -- (if you didn't mind rewriting the programs). With a built-in assembler/disassembler and functional break, it was instrumental in encouraging me to do some successful cracking and program conversions of greater and lesser success for my own use from C64.
Sadly, I wouldn't bet against it. Why bother with a lawsuit when your name is Microsoft? Just drop a dime on Homeland Security from Microsoft Corporate and, overnight, your user population is back to the all-American IE experience Microsoft intends the world to enjoy.
And Mohammed is in Gitmo explaining why there is a "z" in openwarez to the quiet people in shades.
Strange, how times can change. And yet, if you asked me my general opinion of AOL, I'd still say they suck - But I suppose I have to thank them for sponsoring two pretty nice programs.
Scary thought - Perhaps some day, we'll have to thank (gasp!) Microsoft for creating something nice for us? Eeeek. Time to go hide under the bed for a while.
To stay on a Hitlerian theme, why do you think it is called the "People's Car". Yup, that delightful vehicle so beloved by hippies and yuppies was heavily promoted by The Man himself as an example of the coming good times.
Don't you just hate it when people don't get credit for the _good_ things they do?
Well, I read about the following 20 posts and nobody else was rude enough to ask whether the cards were set up with the proper _accelerated_ drivers. So it's up to me. Maybe with stock drivers Quake 3 wouldn't be so good even on those machines.
Actually, I've done San Fran to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Baltimore (twice) and about 14 trips Minneapolis to Chicago by Amtrak and it seemed like most seats were full. And most of the trips were pleasant experiences. A restaurant, sightseeing car and a sleeper is my way to see the U.S. pass by. And I like _walking_ to a hotel in the center of downtown instead if being stuck in some butt-ugly hotel park surrounding the airport.
Before you knock Amtrak outside the NW corridor, you know what? THEY DON'T OWN THE TRACKS!! High speed trains -- you've got to be kidding. The _track_ is so bad between Minneapolis and Chicago, several times we've gone about 25 mph for stretches of miles at a time. Woo Hoo! We ain't becomin' no 3rd world country.
Why WFW311? It's my music production machine. I work with MIDI and no digital audio. I have a Music Quest MQX32M MIDI interface with SMPTE I/O. That card is one of the best MIDI cards ever made
I can relate to that. I recently (finally) moved to a motherboard with 0 ISA slots and replaced my Turtle Beach Malibu with an OEM SB 4.1. Ouch. Sound cards are not all the same.
Win4lin running 98 was the only way I could get my wife on linux: Flash, Illustrator and Arachnophilia (doesn't like the Java version). And the ability to see see what web pages are like on IE. Took a while but she is pretty good about using Win4Lin in one virtual window and linux on the rest. I have Windows 95 running in Win4Lin for encyclopedias and magazines that have proprietary Windows readers, Delphi and some Media Player content that I can't access with Mplayer.
I've read that VMWare is pretty good but the WFW3.11 I have running under Bochs is sort of a stupid computer trick so I'm a little leery about PC emulation performance.
I set up an uncompressed Knoppix on a dual-boot for an eMachine dial-up user new to linux. Didn't go badly. 64 meg video was OK. Response was OK. There was a proprietary modem driver available with a crippled demo download that installed fine. If you just need a computer and can get a good price, I wouldn't knock it.
It all comes down to that blastula having a "soul". Sort of hard to have a rational argument with someone once that meme imprints them. Hey, my cat is possessed by a consciousness from the third planet around Vega. _Prove_ that I'm wrong, dude!
And those who lament "the life that would have been" seem unconcerned about the countless life ended early in agonizing disease. Presumably by rationalizing that God's cancer is the tourist class seat to the good land.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, for dang sure! Most likely same setup what staged the moon landing. Just look here. They ain't even afraid to admit it no more:
The airbags are fully inflated in this photograph taken at the JPL In-Situ Instrument Laboratory or "Testbed,"
I'll be looking on cable for shows that uncover this "testbed" conspiracy.
"Internet Protocol Address Verifier"? Woah!
Well, it is government. "Web bug" isn't even trying -- bureaucracy-speak-wise.
(Oddly) your minimalist post jolted me to think of a pet peeve that is also a heresy!
/.) as they create nicely arranged columns of totally unreadable lines of fly droppings. I therefore heretically proclaim that everyone does NOT have their display set to 800x600. I repeat:
A creeping diseased meme disfunctionally behind the times and out of all sync with reality seems to be sweeping through web designers of the world (excepting
EVERYONE DOES NOT HAVE THEIR DISPLAY SET TO 800x600.
In fact, I would argue that the majority of people are browsing at 1024x768 or greater and THEY are the people who should be targeted for browser optimization. See: http://www.dreamink.com/design5.shtml If the resulting text looks large on an 800x600 screen -- tough. At least it is legible to them.
Thank Cthulhu Mozilla has a "minimum font" setting to bump stuff up to legibility without setting the whole page to a zoom magnification. But why should I have to defensively do this to protect myself against web designer stupidity?
There! I said it and, gosh, I feel better! Great topic.
Mr Hitler was a fantastic orator?
Yeah, people just don't give credit where credit is due. I believe the orderly bureaucratic practice of doing contracts in triplicate and registering a copy with the government so the courts could rule on disagreements was instigated in Caligula's reign. Go figure.
>There's so many more workers in China it's only a matter of time (and very little at that compared to the US, IMHO) before workers there demand more, and decide to demand it in groups.
>>Well, now you're talking sense. Because an overabundance of workers in our workforce certainly translates to power for those workers. Oh wait, it doesn't. 10 workers for every job usually means that if you even hint at unhappiness with your lot, they can find others to do it without complaint.
Both of these viewpoints have some truth. Which is why I'm driven crazy by the U.S. neocons and libertarians who want to take us back to the glorious 19th century and equally by the slave reparation people who want to be paid off because their ancestors were slaves.
Doesn't anybody have a basic knowledge of the less glorious underbelly of U.S. history? On the latter point, let's "get medieval" in a butal, 19th century kind of way. Hell, a slave was property. An owner was stupid if he didn't take care of his quite expensive "investment". On the other hand, a nineteenth-century factory worker could be worked to death in much the same conditions that prevail in third-world factories today. Let him die. The factory owner didn't have an investment in him. There was always another Irish potato famine refugee to take his place.
Obviously, the juxtiposition isn't to promote slavery as the lesser evil (which is perhaps worth pointing out to a handful of countries the internet could touch), but merely to highlight the unforgivingly brutal position of the U.S. worker in the 19th century that is so often neglected. Upton Sinclair's book , The Jungle c. 1900, has a chapter where a worker falls into a meat grinder and the foreman doesn't shut it down. That didn't promote sympathy for worker safety regulation. It promoted sympathy for better food inspection. The worker's movement took more than another decade to get rolling -- with no small inspiration from Lenin.
Even then, President McKinley wasn't above calling out the Guard to kill striking workers. There is no reason to believe China will be any prettier.
So even though both people above are right, the conditions are not entirely dissimilar from 19th century America. There were ample replacements willing to be worked to death then too. Therefore, the cycle has to be broken by resistance from the people. Rather amusing when one first thinks of China, in name a "people's democracy", isn't it?
This line of reasoning only superficially sounds communist or revolutionary to current U.S. tastes. Probably one of the reasons things went so well for so many for so long in the latter half of the 20th century in the first world is that capitalist governments said, "Well, you aren't getting communism, but we will support, and even promote, unions." Hence, a somewhat "pure" socialist government presence that encouraged wealth distribution without necessarily promoting the government programs conservatives abhor. In no way "communist" but also in no way "pure, unbridled capitalism".
Now, if one _really_ wants to cause trouble: the average secretary, generally non-unionized, with a computer today is doing the work of ten secretaries with typewriters? Her relative wage compared to the company owner today is at what percentage.......???
What's more, many Chinese DVD manufacturers don't pay the $10 to $15 in royalties due per unit for patented technologies -- penalizing established consumer-electronics companies that honor intellectual-property rights.
So, if I get this straight, people who buy cheap DVD players should be hunted down like dogs by the RIAA because they are the same filthy commies as linux users who want to _play_ a DVD on their computers?
Well, yeah. My first thought was, "You mean a jetliner CAN'T be flown without a working nav computer anymore?" (What? It drops like a rock? "Take that, suicide pilot! Pull out this module and the plane goes down!") It has to be accessible for maintenance. Get the manual, know what to yank. Geez.
Conversely, if this thing is truly inaccessible from inside a plane, do you really want to be on that plane? Will it run on Windows?
it's largely content-free.
Yes. "Tux, when I gaze upon the lifeline of your palm, I see changes you must face bravely in 2004."
God damit!! It's not a fucking game, it's your life you're betting.
Absolutely, only more so. That windshield isn't a video game display. The people you run into or over are real people who die and had lives. When little monkey behind wheel, dammit, little monkey better pay attention.
Much of my conviction comes from walking/jogging/running to work and back for many years (paradoxically?) for my health. Even though I'm in a state with a state-wide law against a vehicle entering a crosswalk when a pedestrian is present, I'm only alive a dozen times over because of the deadly-serious frosty mindset I take into a crosswalk. But it isn't just a personal issue. I have known three women in various workplaces who each had their fathers killed in a stop sign or stop light crosswalk.
Outside of anecdote, I'm sure the Slashdot audience is intelligent and can appreciate the main point of the author of Innumeracy -- that people individually and collectively make personal and policy decisions based upon poor knowledge of real-world probabilities. How about this: 3000 people killed at the World Trade Center and we have shaken up the constitution internally and disrupted the world externally. What's 3000 people? About 1-1/2 years worth of pedestrians picked off in the U.S. by other U.S. drivers. In others words, since 9/11 more U.S. citizens have been picked off in the mall parking lots and crosswalks of America than died in 9/11. Who's crying for them? Can anyone say "cultural blind spot"?
Look at it this way. Senator Janklow (R-S.D.) blew off speeding laws for decades, apparently because he was too intelligent, observant, and just plain "special" to obey them. Until he breezed through a stop sign at 70 m.p.h. and killed someone. It's just ugly, stupid, immature and sociopathic to think you are so "special" you don't have to take your responsibilities behind the wheel seriously. You want to make that a bulletpoint in your lifetime legacy?
Sure. I saw it in a documentary with Requel Welsh _decades_ ago. But the blood/brain barrier can be difficult to pass for the little ship carrying the researchers.
Yup. NT, OS/2 and linux in a classic WinTV here.
Of course, Penn Gilette had the all-time best word on that in his PC Computing essay. Just write a little start-up program that fills your PC screen with "10...9...8...7...". Airport security love a passenger with a sense of humour.
Outside of perhaps a welfare office or major metropolitan emergency room waiting area, is there any public space more repellent than an airport? Inspecting your shoes while they do a cursory glance at the _cargo_ riding with you is just added value in an already surreal experience.
Positive suggestion: avoidance. Less than 150 miles, drive. Less than 500-600 miles: Can you arrange a Monday business meeting? Amtrak down Sunday. Amtrak back the same day.
A couple years ago my mother gave me a poured acrylic faux-ceramic desk lamp with a couch base covered in kittens with a kitten pattern lamp shade and three faux ceramic kittens to hang from the top of the shade.
This year we got two sets of three hanging kittens to accessorize the theme among our other lamp shades.
Does that count?
Still have mine packed away -- yes, ZX-81. Unfortunately, or fortunately, it is heavily modded and I have no idea what became of the original case. Hardwired into a real keyboard, reset, power switch with LED (yes, on the transformer side), "joystick port" for flight simulator, memory pack hardwired in so the "expansion bus" points out to connect with the thermal printer, "sound generator" AND, the biggie, a stringy floppy (little microcassettes of video tape). If I remember, the stringy floppy had about the feel of the speed of the Commodore "shoebox". Laughable now, but cool then.
Learned a little assembly when the 16K got filled.
But the pivotal machine for me was the Commodore Plus/4 -- which I purchased with foolish pride during the, about 3 month, period when it was sold retail. "Compatible with the C64" -- (if you didn't mind rewriting the programs). With a built-in assembler/disassembler and functional break, it was instrumental in encouraging me to do some successful cracking and program conversions of greater and lesser success for my own use from C64.
Why doesn't your data know more about you?
Why else would buying CAT food at PetSmart get me an email to watch the Thanksgiving Purina DOG show on TV?
Sadly, I wouldn't bet against it. Why bother with a lawsuit when your name is Microsoft? Just drop a dime on Homeland Security from Microsoft Corporate and, overnight, your user population is back to the all-American IE experience Microsoft intends the world to enjoy.
And Mohammed is in Gitmo explaining why there is a "z" in openwarez to the quiet people in shades.
Strange, how times can change. And yet, if you asked me my general opinion of AOL, I'd still say they suck - But I suppose I have to thank them for sponsoring two pretty nice programs.
Scary thought - Perhaps some day, we'll have to thank (gasp!) Microsoft for creating something nice for us? Eeeek. Time to go hide under the bed for a while.
To stay on a Hitlerian theme, why do you think it is called the "People's Car". Yup, that delightful vehicle so beloved by hippies and yuppies was heavily promoted by The Man himself as an example of the coming good times.
Don't you just hate it when people don't get credit for the _good_ things they do?
Well, I read about the following 20 posts and nobody else was rude enough to ask whether the cards were set up with the proper _accelerated_ drivers. So it's up to me. Maybe with stock drivers Quake 3 wouldn't be so good even on those machines.
Actually, I've done San Fran to Minneapolis, Minneapolis to Baltimore (twice) and about 14 trips Minneapolis to Chicago by Amtrak and it seemed like most seats were full. And most of the trips were pleasant experiences. A restaurant, sightseeing car and a sleeper is my way to see the U.S. pass by. And I like _walking_ to a hotel in the center of downtown instead if being stuck in some butt-ugly hotel park surrounding the airport.
Before you knock Amtrak outside the NW corridor, you know what? THEY DON'T OWN THE TRACKS!! High speed trains -- you've got to be kidding. The _track_ is so bad between Minneapolis and Chicago, several times we've gone about 25 mph for stretches of miles at a time. Woo Hoo! We ain't becomin' no 3rd world country.
Why WFW311? It's my music production machine. I work with MIDI and no digital audio. I have a Music Quest MQX32M MIDI interface with SMPTE I/O. That card is one of the best MIDI cards ever made
I can relate to that. I recently (finally) moved to a motherboard with 0 ISA slots and replaced my Turtle Beach Malibu with an OEM SB 4.1. Ouch. Sound cards are not all the same.
Win4lin running 98 was the only way I could get my wife on linux: Flash, Illustrator and Arachnophilia (doesn't like the Java version). And the ability to see see what web pages are like on IE. Took a while but she is pretty good about using Win4Lin in one virtual window and linux on the rest. I have Windows 95 running in Win4Lin for encyclopedias and magazines that have proprietary Windows readers, Delphi and some Media Player content that I can't access with Mplayer.
I've read that VMWare is pretty good but the WFW3.11 I have running under Bochs is sort of a stupid computer trick so I'm a little leery about PC emulation performance.
What do you need? What will it cost you?
I set up an uncompressed Knoppix on a dual-boot for an eMachine dial-up user new to linux. Didn't go badly. 64 meg video was OK. Response was OK. There was a proprietary modem driver available with a crippled demo download that installed fine. If you just need a computer and can get a good price, I wouldn't knock it.
It all comes down to that blastula having a "soul". Sort of hard to have a rational argument with someone once that meme imprints them. Hey, my cat is possessed by a consciousness from the third planet around Vega. _Prove_ that I'm wrong, dude!
And those who lament "the life that would have been" seem unconcerned about the countless life ended early in agonizing disease. Presumably by rationalizing that God's cancer is the tourist class seat to the good land.
Excuse me, but is this a cool way to get people back to low audio bandwidth while charging them the same or more?
And you can look at your phone log in a browser!
Yipee.
An' fer sure, that there Billy Ray came offa their WalMart Lindows box they picked up cause WalMart give em such a good deal on that rifle.
I see more undeserved guilt by association in the Penguin's future.