Microsoft should be making spyware removal software. After all, they've got the budget to stay on top of it, and the knowledge to cut crafty spyware off at the pass.
You'd think they'd have a pretty good reason to make sure that (at least the latest version) of Windows is performing well for people. Sheesh.
I'm with you, a Mac is a superior tool for all kinds of work, but I don't think anybody will hold back on buying a Mac just because there aren't enough games for it. It's not like there aren't good games for the Mac, it's just a lack of comprehensive coverage. The same people who demand that quantity of games also will want the latest video cards and fastest hardware, all of which is only available on one platform.
The language guranteed to fuck you up if you've by some strange chance of fate actually programmed before getting to the school. Why a school, with over 50,000 people attending (second largest in the US now) and a fairly large IT department does that is beyond me. Oh wait... no it isn't. They need to employ their crazy AI professors who bust a nut using it.
The reason they use it is because the program is based on MIT's highly-esteemed CSCI curriculum.
If Scheme fucked you up then you didn't really know anything about programming. LISP is a pretty questionable language for real world programming, but for the little tasks they make you do in Intro to CS it's perfect. It lets you learn about recursion and the fundamental sameness of code and data without a bunch of syntactical overhead.
Then later when they dump you head first into C for Machine Architecture and Operating Systems you can at least write good algorithms while you grapple with pointers and memory management.
It's a hell of a lot better then teaching kids Java's class libraries or a million magic ways to do things in Perl. A CSCI degree should not teach you things you wanted to know before, it should introduce you to all the things that make a good programmer. Study hard kid.
But the G5 is pound-for-pound faster than the PC chips out today.
Maybe on a benchmark, but games (or any performance intensive app) are all about optimization.
Any game that comes out for the Mac will be at least somewhat optimized for what's currently available. For the casual gamer, the Mac has a reasonable selection of games and the new iMac will provide reasonable performance.
However, for the hardcore gamer, there's no arguing that you need a PC. That's where most of the game optimization goes (regardless of theoretical hardware performance), and that's where the bleeding edge graphics cards are available first.
With that in mind, I don't think the hardcore gaming market would be very profitable to Apple. Aside from convincing the game and graphics card developers to give Apple equal development (not gonna happen), then they would have to sell systems optimized for gaming. They already optimize for other high-end applications like video and audio production, and making the systems gamer-ready would just push the price higher. The alternative would be to offer gamer-specific models, but that would cost a lot more R&D for the hardware AND all the software (more hardware to support), and for what? A very small market that already has a bad impression of Macs.
Much better to go after the casual gamers. They may buy a Playstation instead, but any customers it gains will come 'for free' without a lot of extra development dollars.
I'm not sure the article author has actually read the Paul Graham essay that he is responding to.
I'm not sure either.
The reason Java is considered 'uncool' in a majority of cases is a lot like the reason certain people are considered uncool in high school. It's mostly prejudice from people who are desperate to be accepted by their peers. Certainly some people have given Java a fair shake and decided they hate it, but the majority are just jumping on the bandwagon.
Frankly I expect better from geeks. It's come to the point where I don't even listen anymore because every diatribe against Java is based on some small pet peeve or overly specific scenario. Everyone rehashes the same old arguments ad nauseam. Quit yer bitchin' and write some goddamn code and you might be useful for once.
Re:That'll lower the productivity index
on
Vive La Loafing!
·
· Score: 1
Christ you're bitter.
Because my alternative is to take no pay and not work. Fairly easy decision matrix there.
First of all, I don't know how much 'low pay' is to you, but if you need a lot of money to be happy, chances are you won't be happy with a lot of money.
Pretending like you have no choice with what do with your life while living in America is the kind of egotistical whining that only someone who has lived in a rich, opportunity-filled country their whole life could dream up. You have plenty of choice, now get over yourself.
On top of this, management makes no value distinction within the engineering profession, because they don't understand engineering.
And you don't understand management. If you did, then you could communicate your worth to them. Maybe at your job you are a cog and your worth actually is that small, but not all jobs are like that, and don't pretend like your anecdote is more valid than anyone else's.
I am. I have. I do. That's why I'm locked into my job.
You're locked in because you choose not to find a better job. Either get off your ass and start living your life or stop complaining about it. Not because you don't have a right to complain, but because no one likes an emotional black hole. On the other hand, if bitter and lonely is your optimal lifestyle who am I to stop you?
The software industry is one of a very few that does/not/ market a service.
Is this a joke? I personally right code as a service to numerous clients, as custom software houses have done for decades.
The reason it's not more popular is that it's expensive. Now I presume you don't support the premise of the great grandparent, that software should ONLY be a service. That idea is just religious fundamentalism manifest as software devlopment ideology. If people can't sell software they write then there's gonna be a whole lot less software period.
OTOH, people like us are viewed as "resources". Therefore, we can be replaced, upgraded, downgraded, or simply pitched out like used up garbage. We have the skills, but not the connections. The people who have the connections frequently don't have the skills to evaluate OUR skills because they were hired, again, because of their little piece of paper rather than promoted because of what they proved they knew.
And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.
Look, of course business has a tendency towards evil. It's sad that the most altruistic and non-money-oriented people don't get paid more, but the truth is as immutable as a physical law: People with lots of money and power are generally that way because they pursue it. Sure they need us to have power, and it's a bit of a good ol' boys club, but we are all complicit because a) we are not so power hungry, and b) they give us cool stuff.
I know it's frustrating to be viewed as nothing more than a cog, but don't let it bother you. The powerful few view everyone this way, and why not? They couldn't run a business if they took the time to know how to evaluate every type of employee. You can take consolation in the fact that they are no more likely to be happy then you are, and probably have a much higher stress-level. They are surrounded by sharks day in and day out, and may have a very difficult time discovering who their true friends are (if any).
Bottom line is, we didn't choose this career for money and peer recognition is more important than manager recognition anyway. If they knew what you knew they wouldn't need you, so be thankful you have a job doing something you love. This is a pretty unique time in history as far as that goes.
Recently, a judge said that sharing songs online is no different than placing a photocopier in a library. He argued that, although the person sharing a file is providing an automated copying service to the public, it is the person USING the service who is making the copy, and therefore, breaking the law. So, in Canada, it is illegal to download songs, but precident now says that the mere act of sharing them is not illegal.
Well that's cool and all, but it's a little nonsensical. A library allows one to use (ie read) copyrighted materials without having to buy them. A photocopier is mostly used for fair-use purposes (ie. copy some small portion of a book), and is decidedly inconvenient (and expensive!) to copy entire books with.
P2P networks on the other hand have nothing to do with fair use, and they don't allow 'browsing' of copyrighted works the same way a library does. Even if they did, this falls into the cloudy nether-regions of copyright law that radio and other 'public performance' of copyrighted works falls into and which I know nothing about. Nevertheless the legitimate uses of P2P are centered around personal copying and uncopyrighted works, not fair use.
But they give bigger rebates banking on the fact that a certain percentage of people won't send them in. This means if you do jump through the hoops your low price is effectively being subsidized by lazier customers. I'll take that deal any day.
If you study to the level of RHCE (or whatever) you can't ever transfer your skills to anything else.
I call bullshit, learning more specifics does not somehow negate your general purpose knowledge. The fact is that a lot of places use Redhat, and getting the cert will look good on a resume. Whether the cert makes you more knowledgeable is a heavily-debated, but largely moot point. Some great techs and some not-so-great techs will get the cert, but it won't tip their skills one way or the other.
Of course your next paragraph kind of gets at this point:
If someone is worth their salt then skills learnt with one distribution will be transferrable to another. The days of rote memorisation being sufficient for passing are pretty much gone - it'd even be a challenge to pass a MS exam with zero understanding of what you had memorised.
By the way, rote memorisation is probably more useful today than it ever was. Mainly because you can memorize how to use a few tools in Windows and you have a huge market of potential customers with broken computers. At least in the old days it was impossible to do anything without some understanding.
Gather your LUG and go out there to debunk this MS (or should I say Anti Linux) spin zone that they are trying to create. This would work very well if we use factual data to show the performance improvements gained using linux for server computing.
See the problem is that lots of money is being made by creating this anti-Linux spin, which would otherwise be a endlessly tedious task. Where is the motivation for Linux users to conduct similar comparison case-studies and generate the hard data? The answer is that there is no motivation! The proof is your closing sentence:
Good luck and be sure to report back.
If this was the kind of idea that people wanted to do, then you would be the first one out there and you wouldn't need to implore other people to action.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it won't happen. But on the brightside, word-of-mouth advocacy and steadily improving quality will help Linux win in the long run. We just have to worry about misguided idealogical crusades in government that could restrict our freedom to create.
I know most of us on slashdot will enjoy a bit of MS bashing but this article is interesting in pointing out the apparent weakness of the MS mindset
Indeed. The main weakness he pointed out, obsession with the gargantuan revenue streams of Windows and Office, is obvious but also indicates what a tight spot Microsoft is in.
Due to fiscal responsibilities they can only go after huge markets, but the next billion dollar market hasn't emerged yet! So they cling to Windows and Office even though such basic software is destined to be free. They will lose this battle because there's really only so much that an operating system and productivity software need to do.
Like the article says, I think Google is on the right track for the next big thing. Network services and clustering are the two obvious areas that have a lot of room for innovation.
It's just a shame that Microsoft has to stubbornly protect aging revenue streams and inflict its horribly engineered operating system and productivity software on everyone. If they devoted those resources to entering emerging markets, we might actually see some cool stuff coming out of Redmond.
Though people may cite overpopulation and religious reasons why we shouldn't do this, those are just straw men.
The real reason is because this totally turns the natural order of things upside-fucking-down which will likely be to our detriment. If you only care about yourself as is human nature (and particularly reinforced by individualistic American values) then fine, try to live forever. But as far as our species is concerned, living forever is not necessarily the most advantageous. Of course no one can see all ends, but consider:
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution. Do we want to be strictly responsible for our own genetics? How do we identify practical genetic defects if we never die? Our existence as a species will then be dependent on the survival of a highly technological civilization which is far from guaranteed.
Take away the motivation of a limited lifespan and suddenly everything seems a lot less urgent. Motivation to learn, motivation to find the meaning of life, motivation to accomplish something. After all, you can always do it later.
How does the human brain develop at such extreme ages? We all know that people are shaped by childhood experience, and that many old people are set in their ways. With a huge population who 'have it all figured out' how will we continue to make progress? Periodic lobotomies?
I'm all for extending life through healthier living, but the quest for the fountain of youth is an egotistical obsession stemming from the fear of death. Personally I refuse to let the fear of death drive me to radical genetic techniques to extend the inevitable. I don't want to be some kind of artifically-preserved shell of a human, and I don't think anybody should want to (though I wouldn't stop them). What people need nowadays (in America anyway) is acceptance of the fact that we can't control everything. The best you can do is live your life well, make good decisions, and hopefully fate will be kind.
All these Movable Type bloggers whining about the new licensing scheme is getting a little old. Sure I agree that the new licensing move is stupid (considering the quality of the product), but they have every right to go and shoot themselves in the foot if they want.
As far as the individual blogger is concerned, the lesson is this: use a tool that will allow you to migrate your data. Tools will continue to advance, and you can always redesign, but your archives the only irreplaceable part of the whole equation. In the case of Movable Type, you are already ahead of the game because every other blogging tool in existence imports MT data.
Why you migrate is a non-issue. You could just as easily be forced to abandon a GPLed package because it is no longer being upgraded and you need the latest features. Even if you write your own CMS, you still run the risk of not having time to add the features you need! Paying a license fee is just one of many considerations you need to make when picking a CMS.
This guy misses the mark by being concerned about price. Corporations are less concerned with acquisition price as they are with operation costs.
Not every company is a big corporation, and not every IT buyer is a CTO. In a controlled corporate environment with a dedicated IT staff, of course they are going to be capable of making a more objective decision about what platform to purchase.
But in the small business world things like sticker price do matter, and they do have a psychological effect. You may argue that small businesses are irrelevant to Linux marketshare, but stop and think about how slow-moving massive corporations are. Small businesses can turn on a dime, deploy Linux, and be the trendsetters. Corporations are far too conservative to jump head-first into Linux, but small business success stories can definitely help shift the balance.
Every day I ride home to the top of my hill I'm glad to be hauling 17 pounds of bike versus 25.
I agree that weight is a real issue and not just a fad. However, I'd much rather have a 20 lb bike that lasts 5 years than a 17 pound bike that lasts 2 years.
I'm a serious mountain biker. I'll spend $2000 on a bike, but I'll never buy XTR components. Sure if you're professional racer, then you're likely getting a new bike every year anyway and that extra pound is worth the money (especially if you're sponsored). For most people durability and performance are more important than weight (within reason).
That's why the move to 9-speed sprockets a few years ago really pissed me off. I don't NEED more gears, I'd rather have a more durable chain.
Even something as simple as "center this element on it's parent" is impossible without absolute positioning.
Try margin: auto;
Sure, you also need the parent to have a text-align: center for it to work in IE PC, but you'll usually have all your text in lower level block elements that can be defined with text-align: left to smooth things out.
The whole seperation of content thing is crap, though. The structure of the HTML still affects both the layout and the formatting, so there's no way you can get a totally clean break.
I definitely agree with this, though the only reason it really comes up is as a backlash against the horrendous practices that developed during the browser wars.
The cross-browser issues are a real pain with CSS - it's worse than the hacks we all used back in 93 to make stuff render correctly. IE may be broken and non-compilant but it's still got the 80-90% market share and if you're doing any large-scale site it MUST render correctly on IE. That means giving up on a whole ton of CSS functionality, and especially if you're using it for positioning. One more reason to stick with tables for another couple years.
The table hacks seem to make more sense, but in many ways I think it's just the familiarity that makes them seem better. Some of the CSS hacks ARE ugly, but a) there's a ton of stuff you can do without any egregious hacks and b) a little server-side IE detection can clean things up immensely.
There is a ton of functionality that we do have to give up on for IE, but on the same token, there is a ton of stuff that works and is not possible using tables.
I'm only concerned that my pages work in IE. Frankly, I'd much rather have them look better in Mozilla or Safari, to give Microsoft an incentive to further their CSS support. I've gotten several people to switch to Firefox after simply coming into my office and saying "wow, your web looks so much cooler!".
I still do use tables for many common purposes (forms, certain types of alignment where floats break down, etc.), but now is definitely the time to start learning CSS-P techniques. Once you get a handle on some of the major IE bugs it gets a lot easier, trust me.
Slashdot Mirror
But if the only reason the poster can be bothered to include is that they're moving to C# and visual studio...well, that's just unconvincing to me.
You're so right. Now if he was a web designer required to use FrontPage, well, that would be a whole different story.
The fact that this was moderated troll has finally convinced me that posting to Slashdot is a ridiculous waste of time.
The idea of Microsoft doing something to help Windows users is not a troll you ignorant groupthinkers. It would benefit all parties, period.
Bah, I should have stopped participating in this exercise in idealogical circlejerking hubris a long time ago. What a waste of time.
Microsoft should be making spyware removal software. After all, they've got the budget to stay on top of it, and the knowledge to cut crafty spyware off at the pass.
You'd think they'd have a pretty good reason to make sure that (at least the latest version) of Windows is performing well for people. Sheesh.
I'm with you, a Mac is a superior tool for all kinds of work, but I don't think anybody will hold back on buying a Mac just because there aren't enough games for it. It's not like there aren't good games for the Mac, it's just a lack of comprehensive coverage. The same people who demand that quantity of games also will want the latest video cards and fastest hardware, all of which is only available on one platform.
Why would they censor it? They have that in Hellraiser, Event Horizon, Silence of the Lambs, etc...
The language guranteed to fuck you up if you've by some strange chance of fate actually programmed before getting to the school. Why a school, with over 50,000 people attending (second largest in the US now) and a fairly large IT department does that is beyond me. Oh wait... no it isn't. They need to employ their crazy AI professors who bust a nut using it.
The reason they use it is because the program is based on MIT's highly-esteemed CSCI curriculum.
If Scheme fucked you up then you didn't really know anything about programming. LISP is a pretty questionable language for real world programming, but for the little tasks they make you do in Intro to CS it's perfect. It lets you learn about recursion and the fundamental sameness of code and data without a bunch of syntactical overhead.
Then later when they dump you head first into C for Machine Architecture and Operating Systems you can at least write good algorithms while you grapple with pointers and memory management.
It's a hell of a lot better then teaching kids Java's class libraries or a million magic ways to do things in Perl. A CSCI degree should not teach you things you wanted to know before, it should introduce you to all the things that make a good programmer. Study hard kid.
But the G5 is pound-for-pound faster than the PC chips out today.
Maybe on a benchmark, but games (or any performance intensive app) are all about optimization.
Any game that comes out for the Mac will be at least somewhat optimized for what's currently available. For the casual gamer, the Mac has a reasonable selection of games and the new iMac will provide reasonable performance.
However, for the hardcore gamer, there's no arguing that you need a PC. That's where most of the game optimization goes (regardless of theoretical hardware performance), and that's where the bleeding edge graphics cards are available first.
With that in mind, I don't think the hardcore gaming market would be very profitable to Apple. Aside from convincing the game and graphics card developers to give Apple equal development (not gonna happen), then they would have to sell systems optimized for gaming. They already optimize for other high-end applications like video and audio production, and making the systems gamer-ready would just push the price higher. The alternative would be to offer gamer-specific models, but that would cost a lot more R&D for the hardware AND all the software (more hardware to support), and for what? A very small market that already has a bad impression of Macs.
Much better to go after the casual gamers. They may buy a Playstation instead, but any customers it gains will come 'for free' without a lot of extra development dollars.
I'm not sure the article author has actually read the Paul Graham essay that he is responding to.
I'm not sure either.
The reason Java is considered 'uncool' in a majority of cases is a lot like the reason certain people are considered uncool in high school. It's mostly prejudice from people who are desperate to be accepted by their peers. Certainly some people have given Java a fair shake and decided they hate it, but the majority are just jumping on the bandwagon.
Frankly I expect better from geeks. It's come to the point where I don't even listen anymore because every diatribe against Java is based on some small pet peeve or overly specific scenario. Everyone rehashes the same old arguments ad nauseam. Quit yer bitchin' and write some goddamn code and you might be useful for once.
Christ you're bitter.
Because my alternative is to take no pay and not work. Fairly easy decision matrix there.
First of all, I don't know how much 'low pay' is to you, but if you need a lot of money to be happy, chances are you won't be happy with a lot of money.
Pretending like you have no choice with what do with your life while living in America is the kind of egotistical whining that only someone who has lived in a rich, opportunity-filled country their whole life could dream up. You have plenty of choice, now get over yourself.
On top of this, management makes no value distinction within the engineering profession, because they don't understand engineering.
And you don't understand management. If you did, then you could communicate your worth to them. Maybe at your job you are a cog and your worth actually is that small, but not all jobs are like that, and don't pretend like your anecdote is more valid than anyone else's.
I am. I have. I do. That's why I'm locked into my job.
You're locked in because you choose not to find a better job. Either get off your ass and start living your life or stop complaining about it. Not because you don't have a right to complain, but because no one likes an emotional black hole. On the other hand, if bitter and lonely is your optimal lifestyle who am I to stop you?
Hopefully we can drop
I know Slashdot readers don't get out much, but can you imagine having to actually say ?>
The software industry is one of a very few that does /not/ market a service.
Is this a joke? I personally right code as a service to numerous clients, as custom software houses have done for decades.
The reason it's not more popular is that it's expensive. Now I presume you don't support the premise of the great grandparent, that software should ONLY be a service. That idea is just religious fundamentalism manifest as software devlopment ideology. If people can't sell software they write then there's gonna be a whole lot less software period.
OTOH, people like us are viewed as "resources". Therefore, we can be replaced, upgraded, downgraded, or simply pitched out like used up garbage. We have the skills, but not the connections. The people who have the connections frequently don't have the skills to evaluate OUR skills because they were hired, again, because of their little piece of paper rather than promoted because of what they proved they knew.
And yet because of business you can get a job that pays $75,000 a year, have cheap commodity hardware to play on, and live in a world largely shaped by the efforts of 'people like us'.
Look, of course business has a tendency towards evil. It's sad that the most altruistic and non-money-oriented people don't get paid more, but the truth is as immutable as a physical law: People with lots of money and power are generally that way because they pursue it. Sure they need us to have power, and it's a bit of a good ol' boys club, but we are all complicit because a) we are not so power hungry, and b) they give us cool stuff.
I know it's frustrating to be viewed as nothing more than a cog, but don't let it bother you. The powerful few view everyone this way, and why not? They couldn't run a business if they took the time to know how to evaluate every type of employee. You can take consolation in the fact that they are no more likely to be happy then you are, and probably have a much higher stress-level. They are surrounded by sharks day in and day out, and may have a very difficult time discovering who their true friends are (if any).
Bottom line is, we didn't choose this career for money and peer recognition is more important than manager recognition anyway. If they knew what you knew they wouldn't need you, so be thankful you have a job doing something you love. This is a pretty unique time in history as far as that goes.
Recently, a judge said that sharing songs online is no different than placing a photocopier in a library. He argued that, although the person sharing a file is providing an automated copying service to the public, it is the person USING the service who is making the copy, and therefore, breaking the law. So, in Canada, it is illegal to download songs, but precident now says that the mere act of sharing them is not illegal.
Well that's cool and all, but it's a little nonsensical. A library allows one to use (ie read) copyrighted materials without having to buy them. A photocopier is mostly used for fair-use purposes (ie. copy some small portion of a book), and is decidedly inconvenient (and expensive!) to copy entire books with.
P2P networks on the other hand have nothing to do with fair use, and they don't allow 'browsing' of copyrighted works the same way a library does. Even if they did, this falls into the cloudy nether-regions of copyright law that radio and other 'public performance' of copyrighted works falls into and which I know nothing about. Nevertheless the legitimate uses of P2P are centered around personal copying and uncopyrighted works, not fair use.
But they give bigger rebates banking on the fact that a certain percentage of people won't send them in. This means if you do jump through the hoops your low price is effectively being subsidized by lazier customers. I'll take that deal any day.
If you study to the level of RHCE (or whatever) you can't ever transfer your skills to anything else.
I call bullshit, learning more specifics does not somehow negate your general purpose knowledge. The fact is that a lot of places use Redhat, and getting the cert will look good on a resume. Whether the cert makes you more knowledgeable is a heavily-debated, but largely moot point. Some great techs and some not-so-great techs will get the cert, but it won't tip their skills one way or the other.
Of course your next paragraph kind of gets at this point:
If someone is worth their salt then skills learnt with one distribution will be transferrable to another. The days of rote memorisation being sufficient for passing are pretty much gone - it'd even be a challenge to pass a MS exam with zero understanding of what you had memorised.
By the way, rote memorisation is probably more useful today than it ever was. Mainly because you can memorize how to use a few tools in Windows and you have a huge market of potential customers with broken computers. At least in the old days it was impossible to do anything without some understanding.
Gather your LUG and go out there to debunk this MS (or should I say Anti Linux) spin zone that they are trying to create. This would work very well if we use factual data to show the performance improvements gained using linux for server computing.
See the problem is that lots of money is being made by creating this anti-Linux spin, which would otherwise be a endlessly tedious task. Where is the motivation for Linux users to conduct similar comparison case-studies and generate the hard data? The answer is that there is no motivation! The proof is your closing sentence:
Good luck and be sure to report back.
If this was the kind of idea that people wanted to do, then you would be the first one out there and you wouldn't need to implore other people to action.
I'm not saying it's a bad idea, just that it won't happen. But on the brightside, word-of-mouth advocacy and steadily improving quality will help Linux win in the long run. We just have to worry about misguided idealogical crusades in government that could restrict our freedom to create.
I know most of us on slashdot will enjoy a bit of MS bashing but this article is interesting in pointing out the apparent weakness of the MS mindset
Indeed. The main weakness he pointed out, obsession with the gargantuan revenue streams of Windows and Office, is obvious but also indicates what a tight spot Microsoft is in.
Due to fiscal responsibilities they can only go after huge markets, but the next billion dollar market hasn't emerged yet! So they cling to Windows and Office even though such basic software is destined to be free. They will lose this battle because there's really only so much that an operating system and productivity software need to do.
Like the article says, I think Google is on the right track for the next big thing. Network services and clustering are the two obvious areas that have a lot of room for innovation.
It's just a shame that Microsoft has to stubbornly protect aging revenue streams and inflict its horribly engineered operating system and productivity software on everyone. If they devoted those resources to entering emerging markets, we might actually see some cool stuff coming out of Redmond.
Though people may cite overpopulation and religious reasons why we shouldn't do this, those are just straw men.
The real reason is because this totally turns the natural order of things upside-fucking-down which will likely be to our detriment. If you only care about yourself as is human nature (and particularly reinforced by individualistic American values) then fine, try to live forever. But as far as our species is concerned, living forever is not necessarily the most advantageous. Of course no one can see all ends, but consider:
People living forever means less need for kids, which slows down evolution. Do we want to be strictly responsible for our own genetics? How do we identify practical genetic defects if we never die? Our existence as a species will then be dependent on the survival of a highly technological civilization which is far from guaranteed.
Take away the motivation of a limited lifespan and suddenly everything seems a lot less urgent. Motivation to learn, motivation to find the meaning of life, motivation to accomplish something. After all, you can always do it later.
How does the human brain develop at such extreme ages? We all know that people are shaped by childhood experience, and that many old people are set in their ways. With a huge population who 'have it all figured out' how will we continue to make progress? Periodic lobotomies?
I'm all for extending life through healthier living, but the quest for the fountain of youth is an egotistical obsession stemming from the fear of death. Personally I refuse to let the fear of death drive me to radical genetic techniques to extend the inevitable. I don't want to be some kind of artifically-preserved shell of a human, and I don't think anybody should want to (though I wouldn't stop them). What people need nowadays (in America anyway) is acceptance of the fact that we can't control everything. The best you can do is live your life well, make good decisions, and hopefully fate will be kind.
All these Movable Type bloggers whining about the new licensing scheme is getting a little old. Sure I agree that the new licensing move is stupid (considering the quality of the product), but they have every right to go and shoot themselves in the foot if they want.
As far as the individual blogger is concerned, the lesson is this: use a tool that will allow you to migrate your data. Tools will continue to advance, and you can always redesign, but your archives the only irreplaceable part of the whole equation. In the case of Movable Type, you are already ahead of the game because every other blogging tool in existence imports MT data.
Why you migrate is a non-issue. You could just as easily be forced to abandon a GPLed package because it is no longer being upgraded and you need the latest features. Even if you write your own CMS, you still run the risk of not having time to add the features you need! Paying a license fee is just one of many considerations you need to make when picking a CMS.
Seriously though, if you really want to know, read this instead of asking the unwashed Slashdot masses.
Anyone care to shed some light (or links) onto what RDF and OWL actually do?
Anything you want! It's inspired by zombo.com
You've got to be the biggest karma whore I've ever seen on this site.
So? At least he is posting something useful, unlike you and me!
If there's anything worse than worrying about your own karma, it's worrying about someone else's.
This guy misses the mark by being concerned about price. Corporations are less concerned with acquisition price as they are with operation costs.
Not every company is a big corporation, and not every IT buyer is a CTO. In a controlled corporate environment with a dedicated IT staff, of course they are going to be capable of making a more objective decision about what platform to purchase.
But in the small business world things like sticker price do matter, and they do have a psychological effect. You may argue that small businesses are irrelevant to Linux marketshare, but stop and think about how slow-moving massive corporations are. Small businesses can turn on a dime, deploy Linux, and be the trendsetters. Corporations are far too conservative to jump head-first into Linux, but small business success stories can definitely help shift the balance.
Every day I ride home to the top of my hill I'm glad to be hauling 17 pounds of bike versus 25.
I agree that weight is a real issue and not just a fad. However, I'd much rather have a 20 lb bike that lasts 5 years than a 17 pound bike that lasts 2 years.
I'm a serious mountain biker. I'll spend $2000 on a bike, but I'll never buy XTR components. Sure if you're professional racer, then you're likely getting a new bike every year anyway and that extra pound is worth the money (especially if you're sponsored). For most people durability and performance are more important than weight (within reason).
That's why the move to 9-speed sprockets a few years ago really pissed me off. I don't NEED more gears, I'd rather have a more durable chain.
Even something as simple as "center this element on it's parent" is impossible without absolute positioning.
Try margin: auto;
Sure, you also need the parent to have a text-align: center for it to work in IE PC, but you'll usually have all your text in lower level block elements that can be defined with text-align: left to smooth things out.
The whole seperation of content thing is crap, though. The structure of the HTML still affects both the layout and the formatting, so there's no way you can get a totally clean break.
I definitely agree with this, though the only reason it really comes up is as a backlash against the horrendous practices that developed during the browser wars.
The cross-browser issues are a real pain with CSS - it's worse than the hacks we all used back in 93 to make stuff render correctly. IE may be broken and non-compilant but it's still got the 80-90% market share and if you're doing any large-scale site it MUST render correctly on IE. That means giving up on a whole ton of CSS functionality, and especially if you're using it for positioning. One more reason to stick with tables for another couple years.
The table hacks seem to make more sense, but in many ways I think it's just the familiarity that makes them seem better. Some of the CSS hacks ARE ugly, but a) there's a ton of stuff you can do without any egregious hacks and b) a little server-side IE detection can clean things up immensely.
There is a ton of functionality that we do have to give up on for IE, but on the same token, there is a ton of stuff that works and is not possible using tables.
I'm only concerned that my pages work in IE. Frankly, I'd much rather have them look better in Mozilla or Safari, to give Microsoft an incentive to further their CSS support. I've gotten several people to switch to Firefox after simply coming into my office and saying "wow, your web looks so much cooler!".
I still do use tables for many common purposes (forms, certain types of alignment where floats break down, etc.), but now is definitely the time to start learning CSS-P techniques. Once you get a handle on some of the major IE bugs it gets a lot easier, trust me.