The natural resources in the area did not belong to the King, but to ALL the people who lived in that area.
Yes, and they decided leave the management of those resources up to the king. They gave him that power. No alien mothership ever descended and said "Everyone else gets to choose, but Mozambique MUST be a despotic monarchy!" They decided that that is how those resources would be controlled. What a bunch of forward-thinking visionaries they must be.
Apple is all about convincing some people that the exact same Taiwanese components are worth twice as much when they have the Apple brand on them. Usually this is done by coloring the case white; in your case, the natural tendency of people to believe that a more expensive product must be better made seems to have done the trick.
I swear the instinct to buy the more expensive option and feel proud of it is one of mankind's strongest instincts. It's the sole reason I have a $1000000 bicycle. It's the sole reason for just about any buying decision my wife ever makes, which is why we have organic milk from Jersey cows fed on Supagrass(tm) in the fridge.
The government stepping in to reallocate property? Wouldn't it be better to let market forces take their course -- wait until the market places a high enough value on that spectrum that it is not economically viable to use it for 'archaic uses'?
Unfortunately for most IT geeks, the floppy will be part of our job for the forseeable future.
I haven't had to use a floppy at any of the sites I've worked at since about 2001.
Want to boot that PII machine?
No. I haven't seen one for years.
A forward thinking company, right? Then what's this floppy disk for?
It's to show you that the company is not forward-thinking. I'd love to know what kind of software works like that -- what happens if the floppy develops a bad sector?
Sorry folks, the floppy may have outlived its usefulness in the user realm but in the IT realm, we get to hang on to them for quite awhile.
Where 'we' is you.
I agree that there are probably zillions of sites around the globe that use floppies. I don't agreed that it is difficult to avoid such places:)
If you find a way to sneak in through the back door and view the art, aren't you really stealing.
No. The inability of/. to understand even the most basic legal distinctions is a source of neverending wonder to me.
Ignoring the trespassing aspects, isn't this essentially the same thing as taking intellectual property without paying?
Not usually, because you have not copied or distributed the $1 worth of art.
Unauthorized use != unauthorized distribution != theft.
Note: I realize that no matter how many times these differences are mentioned, explained, described in painstaking detail, and carved in gigantic stone tablets plated with gold and rare gems which are then placed atop the world's tallest buildings and floodlit 24 hours a day while a chorus line of lawyers sings an opera about the difference between civil and criminal law, 75% of Slashdotters will still just reply "It is theft!!11 Get a brain moran11!"
Given that I have to say a lot of fairly boring things I would rather put some effort into giving what I say the qualities you describe than just blurt it out. It makes my day slightly more interesting and it reduces the chance of people getting pissed off, which makes me tired (I am old).
So, while you're making a point of being 'candid, frank and direct' I'll be taking the extra five seconds to be polite, diplomatic and cautious. We'll see which strategy turns out to be more stressful.
It's not a fine piece of software. It _was_ one and it has been intentionally made otherwise.
I'm keeping my tinfoil hat firmly on. Imagine if Ford bought the company that checks for defects in cars, and the next week all Ford defects were considered as desirable behavior. Imagine if Monsanto bought the company that decides whether Bovine Growth Hormone is bad for you, and the next week it was announced that BGH is just fine... actually, you don't really have to imagine that.
This is a tiny attempt to extend to the software industry what is already standard in the 'traditional' industries; the use of quality and safety regulating entities to discourage competition rather than to protect the consumer.
I _will_ say that I don't expect MS to be as evil about it as Monsanto et al for a good many years yet.
What's funny about Bulgaria? Hee hee hee! Get this -- it's full of -- no, seriously -- it's full of guys who when you say it's a cheap place to make a movie *snort* Ha ha, sorry, milk went up my nose. Anyway, these guys, when you say it's a cheap place to make movies, hee hee hee, they totally get all offended and post semi coherent posts on Slashdot! Haw haw haw! No, I shit you not, they really do do that! Hee hee hee... oh, those guys!
No, seriously, I saw one do it today. Ah, those guys kill me.
Hear me before it is too late! SHUN the evil of the Three P's, Public Private Partnership! Turn ye either to the left, to publically funded projects, or to the right, to the blessed land of private enterprise -- but walk not the middle path, the path of the Three P's!
Once, this land of England was fair and pleasant, with mighty Industry and caring Government working hand in hand! Then came the Three P's! They promised us cost savings and social responsibility, but they delivered nothing -- nothing save gigantic invoices and permanent damage to the environmental and social fabric of the nation!
Turn aside, oh turn, I beg you, America, from this path of wickedness! For the evil of Bloated Government Inefficiency is in them, and the sin of Greedy Private Contractors they likewise have! And the private half shall spend, yea spend and spend, and the public half will know not nor care where the money has gone!
Repent therefore, repent before they do unto you as they have unto Europe!
My words have the semblance of jest, but the danger is deadly serious.
The IRA are noble freedom fighters who are combating oppression by striking at the heart of their oppressors, and that's why the USA has generously aided their noble cause.
Al-Qaeda are evil terrorists who are spreading misery by targeting civilians and landmarks, and that's why the USA has nobly opposed their evil agenda.
Could the difference BE more obvious? They don't even wear the same headgear; the IRA typically wear balaclavas because they are a perfectly sensible measure to avoid vicious British retaliation, and Al-Qaeda typically wear scarfy things because they are sinister and menacing symbols of terror.
They aren't funded the same way either. The IRA are funded partly by contributions and partly by the drug trade, which they are forced to get involved with brutal oppression leaves them no choice. Al-Qaede are funded partly by contributions and partly by the drug trade, which they are involved with because it suits their naturally evil state of mind.
If the difference still isn't clear, hang out with some Americans until it is.
With Opera vs Firefox, each contender has many advantages; the argument could go on forever and in the end it's just a matter of taste, and of suitability for a particular role.
With vi vs emacs, it's a much more important issue that has thankfully already been settled by vi winning.
Another attempt to make a 'grown up' computer game by removing the things that make games worth playing (simplified, fun universe that's not like what we do every day and offers clear goal to reach and things to explore) and adding in the things that make life worth escaping from (evenings like the one described in this game, and people called 'Trip').
Now, there are some good technical bits in this game -- it's nice not to be taking turns or picking from a menu. Much more conversation-ey. But as an idea for a game, 'handle an awkward evening in a sparsely furnished apartment' pretty much sucks.
Q: Is Longhorn just vapor and eye-candy with no useful content?
A: Nobody knows, but that 'review' sure fits that description pretty darn well, as reviews of a six-month-old alpha build that focus almost entirely on the way it looks go.
Major point: Please can that excellent windows icon with the bell and whistle casually draped over it be the new 'Microsoft' icon on/.? Pleeeeaaase?
Minor point: I could have sworn Windows had transparent and non-rectangular windows at least as far back as win2000, which is before OSX -- hey! Who are you guys, and why am I being handcuffed? And what do you mean, 'ideologically incorrect speech'? There's not even any such crime! Put me down! Put me doowwwwnnn...
With the intuous 2 and intuous 3, the pens come with fiber tips that have far more friction with the tablet surface -- much better than the old style although they do gradually wear down.
Incidentally, if you are using an older Wacom, I really recommend the intuous 3. I think they lost their way a bit with the design of the intuous 2 generation, but the 3 brings it all right back home -- small form, incredibly sturdy feel, even _more_ accuracy, far better pen, and the thumb pads on the edges of the tablet are amazingly useful with Painter.
There's a lot of bad English around, and there's a lot of bad English around in the tech world, but I'd say it's concentrated toward the bottom of the hierarchy.
The more important someone's opinion or research is, the more likely they are to be the kind of person who'd express it properly. None of the great figures of IT is known for poor English. Malapropisms and approximate grammar are common as heck in writing in general, but not at all common in top-quality research or important corporate documents.
The fact is, that the people who are likely to rise high enough to be putting their name on top-quality research or vital strategic reports are the people who are likely to learn to use good English. The people who spend their time making messy, dull, near-incomprehensible 'sentences' and then loudly proclaiming that there is no correct standard of English and that nobody has the right to criticize them are found often on Slashdot, but not often in positions of importance.
When they combine, they form a new terror, as vast as Microsoft yet as wicked as Claria -- and our weapons will be useless against it. It will destroy all of Meta-Tokyo, unless we can find the Magic Princess in time and give her the Moon Crystal and the Seven Essences! Your quest begins here...
I don't think an academic has a right to be wrong. They have a responsibility to be right, especially on basic facts.
Come to think of it, in Sakamura's case I think that might be the problem -- he might be fine as an academic. But the move into politics / ideology was not a wise one and it prevented him from getting things academically right as well.
I think the big mistake made by Sakamura and others is to see it as a case of globalism versus Japan. It's not; it's a case of getting JIS right. But many Japanese people just brought their internal politics to the meeting with them... and THAT is why you still have people using homemade shift-JIS variants because Unicode is 'American', and why you can't write the name 'watanabe' correctly in Unicode!
I wish they'd put mobile phone characters in -- that's way more annoying than missing some ancient kanji.
I used to say just what you are saying. In fact, I used to go round going "But don't you see, character X and character Y are seen as TWO SEPERATE CHARACTERS! You can't force people to use one!". And of course it's true that Han unification is a difficult job that can never be done perfectly.
But, it's a difficult job that Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean representatives were all able to see the need and true meaning of, and co-operate to do it well. The Japanese input into the discussion was clouded by their internal politics (the 'let's all speak Esperanto and ban kanji!' brigade versus the 'bring back Yukio Mishima!' brigade) and by bureaucratic inertia.
I actually did quite a lot of research into this sad bit of computing history, and the more I learned the more I realized that Western insensitivity hadn't been the real problem. I summarized the results here:
(It's kind of aimed at people without much background knowledge. It also contains mistakes and simplifications.)
Sakamura is a special case, though -- I think his disregard for facts in favor of nationalistic grandstanding (and I don't just mean Unicode, although it's a good example) do indeed justify the term 'nutcase'. The fact that people like him formed a significant part of Japan's outward-facing IT organization is regrettable... but the MOF is still worse overall:)
Ken Sakamura's a bit of a nutcase -- he always had this idea (common in Japan at the time, but wrong) that Unicode was some kind of conspiracy to take away Japanese identity and make everyone use a sinister Sino-American character set. So most Japanese computing initiatives have tended to avoid Unicode, and TRON insisted on seeing Unicode as just one charset among many, all mapped into a 'meta character set' space.
Thus when you say 'A' in TRON, you have to specify whether it's a Unicode 'A', a Mojikyou 'A', or some other 'A'. I am simplifying a bit.
In practise, ironically, everyone uses Shift-JIS, which really IS a sinister American conspiracy:)
Sakamura used to have a web page containing the most extraordinary rant about Unicode, with A LOT of factual errors, which was quite interesting for those wanting to see how certain very reactionary parts of the Japanese business community think. It wasn't exactly a good advert for TRON, though!
I can remember when the cool parts of TRON were still going -- the bTRON desktop, which had its own hyper-ergonomic keyboard with about eight shift keys, and the TRON charset which included Unicode and Mojikyou, so you could actually have a fair shot at representing old Asian texts on a computer without using image files for the characters.
Now, only the embedded iTRON part of the project is left. And it's been very successful -- I think at one point it was the most-used OS in the world, although to someone from a Linux/standard C background it seems kind of weird. But there's seriously no news here -- T-Engine is the attempt of the TRON project to remain relevant now that hardware can run embedded Linux or Windows or Symbian and what have you, and it's too little too late.
TRON rocked once, and for industrial robot arm controllers and what have you maybe it still does, but it's never going to break into the IT world now.
Slashdot Mirror
The natural resources in the area did not belong to the King, but to ALL the people who lived in that area.
Yes, and they decided leave the management of those resources up to the king. They gave him that power. No alien mothership ever descended and said "Everyone else gets to choose, but Mozambique MUST be a despotic monarchy!" They decided that that is how those resources would be controlled. What a bunch of forward-thinking visionaries they must be.
And they are the worse off for it.
NO! Really? Woah.
Ultimately, World War II was a total war.
You're a 'trained historian' but you think that.
Apple is all about convincing some people that the exact same Taiwanese components are worth twice as much when they have the Apple brand on them. Usually this is done by coloring the case white; in your case, the natural tendency of people to believe that a more expensive product must be better made seems to have done the trick.
I swear the instinct to buy the more expensive option and feel proud of it is one of mankind's strongest instincts. It's the sole reason I have a $1000000 bicycle. It's the sole reason for just about any buying decision my wife ever makes, which is why we have organic milk from Jersey cows fed on Supagrass(tm) in the fridge.
The government stepping in to reallocate property? Wouldn't it be better to let market forces take their course -- wait until the market places a high enough value on that spectrum that it is not economically viable to use it for 'archaic uses'?
I keed I keed I keed.
Unfortunately for most IT geeks, the floppy will be part of our job for the forseeable future.
:)
I haven't had to use a floppy at any of the sites I've worked at since about 2001.
Want to boot that PII machine?
No. I haven't seen one for years.
A forward thinking company, right? Then what's this floppy disk for?
It's to show you that the company is not forward-thinking. I'd love to know what kind of software works like that -- what happens if the floppy develops a bad sector?
Sorry folks, the floppy may have outlived its usefulness in the user realm but in the IT realm, we get to hang on to them for quite awhile.
Where 'we' is you.
I agree that there are probably zillions of sites around the globe that use floppies. I don't agreed that it is difficult to avoid such places
If you find a way to sneak in through the back door and view the art, aren't you really stealing.
/. to understand even the most basic legal distinctions is a source of neverending wonder to me.
No. The inability of
Ignoring the trespassing aspects, isn't this essentially the same thing as taking intellectual property without paying?
Not usually, because you have not copied or distributed the $1 worth of art.
Unauthorized use != unauthorized distribution != theft.
Note:
I realize that no matter how many times these differences are mentioned, explained, described in painstaking detail, and carved in gigantic stone tablets plated with gold and rare gems which are then placed atop the world's tallest buildings and floodlit 24 hours a day while a chorus line of lawyers sings an opera about the difference between civil and criminal law, 75% of Slashdotters will still just reply "It is theft!!11 Get a brain moran11!"
Were I such a person, I would be lynched real quick!
Only if you did all those things and _failed_ to get rich.
Given that I have to say a lot of fairly boring things I would rather put some effort into giving what I say the qualities you describe than just blurt it out. It makes my day slightly more interesting and it reduces the chance of people getting pissed off, which makes me tired (I am old).
So, while you're making a point of being 'candid, frank and direct' I'll be taking the extra five seconds to be polite, diplomatic and cautious. We'll see which strategy turns out to be more stressful.
It's not a fine piece of software. It _was_ one and it has been intentionally made otherwise.
I'm keeping my tinfoil hat firmly on. Imagine if Ford bought the company that checks for defects in cars, and the next week all Ford defects were considered as desirable behavior. Imagine if Monsanto bought the company that decides whether Bovine Growth Hormone is bad for you, and the next week it was announced that BGH is just fine... actually, you don't really have to imagine that.
This is a tiny attempt to extend to the software industry what is already standard in the 'traditional' industries; the use of quality and safety regulating entities to discourage competition rather than to protect the consumer.
I _will_ say that I don't expect MS to be as evil about it as Monsanto et al for a good many years yet.
What's funny about Bulgaria? Hee hee hee! Get this -- it's full of -- no, seriously -- it's full of guys who when you say it's a cheap place to make a movie
*snort*
Ha ha, sorry, milk went up my nose.
Anyway, these guys, when you say it's a cheap place to make movies, hee hee hee, they totally get all offended and post semi coherent posts on Slashdot! Haw haw haw! No, I shit you not, they really do do that! Hee hee hee... oh, those guys!
No, seriously, I saw one do it today. Ah, those guys kill me.
Cheap place to make a movie, too.
Hear me before it is too late! SHUN the evil of the Three P's, Public Private Partnership! Turn ye either to the left, to publically funded projects, or to the right, to the blessed land of private enterprise -- but walk not the middle path, the path of the Three P's!
Once, this land of England was fair and pleasant, with mighty Industry and caring Government working hand in hand! Then came the Three P's! They promised us cost savings and social responsibility, but they delivered nothing -- nothing save gigantic invoices and permanent damage to the environmental and social fabric of the nation!
Turn aside, oh turn, I beg you, America, from this path of wickedness! For the evil of Bloated Government Inefficiency is in them, and the sin of Greedy Private Contractors they likewise have! And the private half shall spend, yea spend and spend, and the public half will know not nor care where the money has gone!
Repent therefore, repent before they do unto you as they have unto Europe!
My words have the semblance of jest, but the danger is deadly serious.
FFS man, have you been asleep??
The IRA are noble freedom fighters who are combating oppression by striking at the heart of their oppressors, and that's why the USA has generously aided their noble cause.
Al-Qaeda are evil terrorists who are spreading misery by targeting civilians and landmarks, and that's why the USA has nobly opposed their evil agenda.
Could the difference BE more obvious? They don't even wear the same headgear; the IRA typically wear balaclavas because they are a perfectly sensible measure to avoid vicious British retaliation, and Al-Qaeda typically wear scarfy things because they are sinister and menacing symbols of terror.
They aren't funded the same way either. The IRA are funded partly by contributions and partly by the drug trade, which they are forced to get involved with brutal oppression leaves them no choice. Al-Qaede are funded partly by contributions and partly by the drug trade, which they are involved with because it suits their naturally evil state of mind.
If the difference still isn't clear, hang out with some Americans until it is.
With Opera vs Firefox, each contender has many advantages; the argument could go on forever and in the end it's just a matter of taste, and of suitability for a particular role.
With vi vs emacs, it's a much more important issue that has thankfully already been settled by vi winning.
^Z
^C
end
quit
ZZ
Another attempt to make a 'grown up' computer game by removing the things that make games worth playing (simplified, fun universe that's not like what we do every day and offers clear goal to reach and things to explore) and adding in the things that make life worth escaping from (evenings like the one described in this game, and people called 'Trip').
Now, there are some good technical bits in this game -- it's nice not to be taking turns or picking from a menu. Much more conversation-ey. But as an idea for a game, 'handle an awkward evening in a sparsely furnished apartment' pretty much sucks.
Yay!
Q: Is Longhorn just vapor and eye-candy with no useful content?
A: Nobody knows, but that 'review' sure fits that description pretty darn well, as reviews of a six-month-old alpha build that focus almost entirely on the way it looks go.
Major point: Please can that excellent windows icon with the bell and whistle casually draped over it be the new 'Microsoft' icon on
Minor point: I could have sworn Windows had transparent and non-rectangular windows at least as far back as win2000, which is before OSX -- hey! Who are you guys, and why am I being handcuffed? And what do you mean, 'ideologically incorrect speech'? There's not even any such crime! Put me down! Put me doowwwwnnn...
With the intuous 2 and intuous 3, the pens come with fiber tips that have far more friction with the tablet surface -- much better than the old style although they do gradually wear down.
Incidentally, if you are using an older Wacom, I really recommend the intuous 3. I think they lost their way a bit with the design of the intuous 2 generation, but the 3 brings it all right back home -- small form, incredibly sturdy feel, even _more_ accuracy, far better pen, and the thumb pads on the edges of the tablet are amazingly useful with Painter.
There's a lot of bad English around, and there's a lot of bad English around in the tech world, but I'd say it's concentrated toward the bottom of the hierarchy.
The more important someone's opinion or research is, the more likely they are to be the kind of person who'd express it properly. None of the great figures of IT is known for poor English. Malapropisms and approximate grammar are common as heck in writing in general, but not at all common in top-quality research or important corporate documents.
The fact is, that the people who are likely to rise high enough to be putting their name on top-quality research or vital strategic reports are the people who are likely to learn to use good English. The people who spend their time making messy, dull, near-incomprehensible 'sentences' and then loudly proclaiming that there is no correct standard of English and that nobody has the right to criticize them are found often on Slashdot, but not often in positions of importance.
Politics is an exception.
You! Back under your bridge NOW!
When they combine, they form a new terror, as vast as Microsoft yet as wicked as Claria -- and our weapons will be useless against it. It will destroy all of Meta-Tokyo, unless we can find the Magic Princess in time and give her the Moon Crystal and the Seven Essences! Your quest begins here...
(Press 'B' to continue)
I don't think an academic has a right to be wrong. They have a responsibility to be right, especially on basic facts.
Come to think of it, in Sakamura's case I think that might be the problem -- he might be fine as an academic. But the move into politics / ideology was not a wise one and it prevented him from getting things academically right as well.
I think the big mistake made by Sakamura and others is to see it as a case of globalism versus Japan. It's not; it's a case of getting JIS right. But many Japanese people just brought their internal politics to the meeting with them... and THAT is why you still have people using homemade shift-JIS variants because Unicode is 'American', and why you can't write the name 'watanabe' correctly in Unicode!
I wish they'd put mobile phone characters in -- that's way more annoying than missing some ancient kanji.
I used to say just what you are saying. In fact, I used to go round going "But don't you see, character X and character Y are seen as TWO SEPERATE CHARACTERS! You can't force people to use one!". And of course it's true that Han unification is a difficult job that can never be done perfectly.
But, it's a difficult job that Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean representatives were all able to see the need and true meaning of, and co-operate to do it well. The Japanese input into the discussion was clouded by their internal politics (the 'let's all speak Esperanto and ban kanji!' brigade versus the 'bring back Yukio Mishima!' brigade) and by bureaucratic inertia.
I actually did quite a lot of research into this sad bit of computing history, and the more I learned the more I realized that Western insensitivity hadn't been the real problem. I summarized the results here:
http://www.jbrowse.com/text/unij.html
(It's kind of aimed at people without much background knowledge. It also contains mistakes and simplifications.)
Sakamura is a special case, though -- I think his disregard for facts in favor of nationalistic grandstanding (and I don't just mean Unicode, although it's a good example) do indeed justify the term 'nutcase'. The fact that people like him formed a significant part of Japan's outward-facing IT organization is regrettable... but the MOF is still worse overall
Ken Sakamura's a bit of a nutcase -- he always had this idea (common in Japan at the time, but wrong) that Unicode was some kind of conspiracy to take away Japanese identity and make everyone use a sinister Sino-American character set. So most Japanese computing initiatives have tended to avoid Unicode, and TRON insisted on seeing Unicode as just one charset among many, all mapped into a 'meta character set' space.
Thus when you say 'A' in TRON, you have to specify whether it's a Unicode 'A', a Mojikyou 'A', or some other 'A'. I am simplifying a bit.
In practise, ironically, everyone uses Shift-JIS, which really IS a sinister American conspiracy
Sakamura used to have a web page containing the most extraordinary rant about Unicode, with A LOT of factual errors, which was quite interesting for those wanting to see how certain very reactionary parts of the Japanese business community think. It wasn't exactly a good advert for TRON, though!
I can remember when the cool parts of TRON were still going -- the bTRON desktop, which had its own hyper-ergonomic keyboard with about eight shift keys, and the TRON charset which included Unicode and Mojikyou, so you could actually have a fair shot at representing old Asian texts on a computer without using image files for the characters.
Now, only the embedded iTRON part of the project is left. And it's been very successful -- I think at one point it was the most-used OS in the world, although to someone from a Linux/standard C background it seems kind of weird. But there's seriously no news here -- T-Engine is the attempt of the TRON project to remain relevant now that hardware can run embedded Linux or Windows or Symbian and what have you, and it's too little too late.
TRON rocked once, and for industrial robot arm controllers and what have you maybe it still does, but it's never going to break into the IT world now.