To me, Linux meets all the requirments for use in the classroom for those who are not even remotely computer literate
Including the Comp Sci profs? *shrug* Well, one thing I've noticed is that the "computers are easy to use!" hype has been tested, swallowed, and believed by thousands of people... and many thousands more are reaping that whirlwind. Computers are the most complex devices that humanity has invented, and as such, will have problems when their operators are virtually untrained. Maybe we need a "Computers are difficult and arcane! chmod and vi are your friends!" ad campaign:-)
Getting back to the PowerPoint thing-- tried StarOffice? It seems to handle.ppt files fairly well, though I haven't checked its "slide show" functions out. PowerPoint is, on the whole, a huge time-waster, as people spend hours and hours making their presentations look pretty, and they forget to include any useful information. Or maybe I'm just bitter.
A manager where I work said that I should not just comment the "hairy parts" of functions and give a general overview of what each function does, but also include "dependencies" in a boxed comment near the front of each function. That is, like so:
struct mystruct foo(int bar, int baz, FILE *fnord) /* This calls functions "function1" and "function2" and needs a FILE* *that points to the comma-delimited data that gets updated in function "blorf". */
That's saved me a few hassles. ("Why is this not working right?" "Hold on, I tweaked foo... looks like function blorf needs an update too; I'll get right on it.") Does CVS do something like this automatically? I ask because I have never used CVS; it seems like overkill for the essentially one-person project I'm working on. Besides, the users always let me know semi-immediately whenever anything breaks.
If I recall correctly, there was a program called Racter back in the mid '80s that simulated a mental patient in much the same way ELIZA simulated a psychiatrist. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe someone compiled a bunch of Racter's utterances into a book called "The Policeman's Beard is Half-Constructed." It was gibberish, but it was interesting gibberish. Here's a sample:
Many enraged psychiatrists are inciting a weary butcher. The butcher is weary and tired because he has cut meat and steak and lamb for hours and weeks. He does not desire to chant about anything with raving psychiatrists, but he sings about his gingivectomist, he dreams about a single cosmologist, he thinks about his dog. The dog is named Herbert.
I sincerely hope Brutus will do better than that, and show how much technology/+programming have advanced in 12 years.
(For a demonstration of actual rather than artificial insanity, check out the article's last sentence: "If the computer wins the contest, I'm going to take my computer and burn it. I certainly hope a human wins." Sigh. Did the Wright brothers burn their plane right after Kitty Hawk?)
Sorry, I didn't notice this story and its effect on the Segfault server until now. Check out The Official Mirror for the goods. That site will be active for the next six months, at least... Also, check out Another Parody if the first one didn't make you laugh.
To everyone who enjoyed it--thanks for the appreciation. To everyone who did not--well, you can't please everybody.
...but what makes you think schoolkids would want to play on old old computers? Personally I avoid the old computer lab in my school with Apple IIs, and head straight for the 300 Mhz G3 lab. I mean, most kids have fast computers at home now,
*sigh* I don't know where you live, or what socioeconomic group you are in, but there are an enormous number of people out there who have no computer in their homes. Anything, even a working Apple IIe system, would be an improvement on nothing. (Web browsing obviously limited on a IIe, but hey, Telnet to a *nix box, run Lynx/tin/Pine....)
Besides, if people have used old tech, they'll appreciate new tech that much more. Learning to use an old system can pay benefits even when you move to new tech. ("Memory's always scarce, so maybe I shouldn't open up 15 browser windows at once...") To say nothing of the fact that old systems almost always had built-in BASIC interpreters. It ain't a Real Language, but it can teach people a thing or two, and do so for a lot less $ than the latest C/C++ compiler...
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: Will KDE 2.0 allow users to change the default behavior from "single-click to open/execute..." to "double-click to open/execute"? I've heard that single-click is better and easier, but it just doesn't seem that way to me. Besides, all the machines at work are NT, configured "double-click" and moving from home to work is always good for Stupid Mouse Errors at least twice...
Another thing that really might be good to improve is the Minicli (the mini-command-line KDE gives when you press Alt-F2.) When it works, it works nicely, but I quit using it for anything serious because... nothing happens when the command you execute is misspelled or something. I'm thinking that they could pop up a small xterm-window that contained all text sent to stderr the first time anything sends to stderr when you exec something with minicli. (Would this be a Wretched Hack, a Good Idea, or some disgusting hybrid? Just curious.)
I'm still learning C++, otherwise I'd have done these things already. If KDE had been coded in C, I'd have "fixed" these by now:-).
Finally: Sure, the desktop screenshots are cool. But who ever has time to look at the desktop? With a GIMP window here, X11amp there, kvt there, and assorted other delights, at least 3 of the virtual desktops are completely covered, and I pay much more attention to the contents of the application windows than what's behind them. Yeah, I'm weird, but I think "themes" are the spawn of the devil and an animated Pink Panther cursor is akin to a bow tie with embedded blinking Christmas lights... cute, but you get sick of it really quickly.
You are in a forest. It is scary. There is something after you. You are running out of food. There is a stream nearby. There are ominous stick bundles on the ground. ]north
You don't know where north is, as you've lost the map. You wander around for a while anyway. You are in a forest. It is scary. There is something after you. You are running out of food. There is a stream nearby. There are ominous stick bundles on the ground. A movie director appears and bitches about "getting it all on film." Her cameraman bitches about running out of cigarettes. They bolt away as an odd pelting noise begins to come from somewhere.
]cross stream
The log is scary, and you are only a quarter of the way across before a horde of baying movie producers appears. They are frantically looking for the Next Big Thing, and the clamor of their passage knocks you off the log. You fall into the stream, where you hit your head on a rock.
You awaken in a dim place. Jon Katz is here. Hordes of angry, chanting/.ers are here.
]post comment
Your comment is flamed into oblivion. The backwash causes your ADSL connection to turn into a 14.4 modem. Then you hear the dreaded words, "NO CARRIER."
One thing I have noted often enough is that to many people who are aware of technology, revolutions are a good thing. I completely disagree. Revolution means drastic change. Change is good. Drastic is not. In any revolution in history, much was destroyed to bring about the revolution. The same implies with computers. If a new technology is revolutionary, it must change drasticly. That means incompatability and everything needs to be rebuilt.
OTOH, if we maintain full backwards-compatibility, we get that OS where you can run WordStar 1.0 if you really want to. (cough.) Maintaining backwards-compat. is usually a Good Thing, but it can be taken too far and can break things later on. Support:
"Most of the cruft in C++ results from efforts to be backwards-compatible with C." --The Jargon File, quoted in comp.lang.c and its environs as well.
"For compatibility with the real-mode way of doing things, the video frame buffer in PCs is usually kept in the 1st megabyte of memory 64 or 128K at a time and bank-switched." --Peter Norton's _Inside the PC_.
Anyway, you're probably right in saying that revolutionary all-at-once change is bad for most of those involved. As someone pointed out down this thread, though, most change tends to be evolutionary--"let's just stick this new feature in here..." Thing is, after 10-15 cycles of that, the final product bears no resemblance to what you started out with. In computers, apparently, enough micro-evolution leads to macro-evolution and/or "speciation." (Look at Solaris vs. HP-UX vs. IRIX vs. AIX... all Unix at core, but verry different in so many things.)
So don't ask for the end of Microsoft. Ask to make them smaller.
Amen. If they had, say, 60% of the OS market, they'd make a heck of a lot of cash, and they might actually have to compete, and people might be happier because they had a choice. Seems like they want it all, though. Another part of the American Dream, I guess--"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and UNLIMITED POWER!"
Well, the screenshots look awesome (drool...) but there's one thing about KDE 1.1 that really annoyed me: The default "single-click to open/execute." Despite RTFMing several times, I couldn't find any way of changing that to the "standard" double-click behavior. I know, I should've gone into the source and fixed things, but there were games to be played.
1.1 also had some warning about "security hole in libmedia.so, so KDE's system sounds are turned off by default." If this were fixed, it'd be excellent--the standard system speaker beep gets really annoying. I also noticed that the old kvt doesn't seem to be on the panel. Have they finally managed to get konsole working correctly?
And is there really a need for kfm to be able to run Java? It'd be cool, yes, but probably of limited utility unless you used kfm as a Web browser...
We all know that they're crap, but it's good news anyway, because lots of newbies don't know that
Well, my system came with a WinModem--something I did not know at the time, as the provider merely said it was a "56Kflex internal modem." I was really disgusted with it even before attempting to install Linux. Reasons:
About 1/3 of the time, when I connected, the modem would make an odd noise and reset the entire system, as if I'd turned the power off.
No blinking status lights to show what's really going on.
Can't seem to coexist happily with the external modem I bought to replace it. Win98 refuses to connect at a speed higher than 4800 baud to the external, but works with the internal just fine. (I'm yanking the WinModem soon, of course.)
The first item is, of course, the most troubling--especially with Linux; do you really want to have all your data scribbled because the modem acts up and resets everything in the middle of a disk write? Well, the more hardware supported, the better, I guess. I just hope WinModems will be required to carry labels warning of the power-hit problem.
Those tools are too complex to the average user. Users need technology to get their work done, not to learn lots of stuff about font types, kinds about paragraphs and all these weird typographic things.
What's the first thing people want to do with information? "Make it pretty"--because, after all, no one will pay any attention to any paper document that doesn't use fonts/spacing/horizontal lines/headings/bullet lists effectively. So people spend time dinking around with looks rather than content. (This criticism can actually be applied to StarOffice's GUI, most TV shows, and most Web pages as well.)
A document management system would be a good thing, but for it to be powerful at all, it'd have to be Complicated. I think well-chosen filenames, well-designed directory trees (broad, not deep) and some intelligence on the part of users would alleviate the personal user's need for a doc management system.
Also, WYSI(A)WYG is easy for people to understand. TeX isn't. Your average semi-intelligent college student gets confused by writing HTML with pico/vi/Notepad--and they'll be able to use TeX? Hoo boy.
As for StarOffice, I hope they'll ditch its browser functionality and clean up its standard user interface. It does not need a "Start Menu." An office suite should be an office suite, not a GUI shell... or a browser... what'll their new slogan be, "StarOffice: emacs for the '00's!"?
As for the Word/Excel/Powerpoint import functions, I hate the way that "curly quotes," en- and em- dashes, and a few other things get swallowed. Maybe I've just got my system configured wrong, but none of those characters ever appear in StarOffice, Netscape, or anything.
I don't know if anyone's done a real study on how age matters, but there was a study done quite a while ago about the effect of observing violent behavior on kids approx. 5-7 years old. To wit:
These kids were put, one at a time, into a room with many toys and an "adult model." For half the kids, the adult model behaved violently, picking up a mallet and whacking a "Bobo" doll around with it. For the other half of the kids, the adult model played quietly with blocks. Then, after 10 minutes, the kids were sent into another room, with other kids and similar toys.
Results: The kids who were exposed to the violent adult model behaved significantly more aggressively, and many of them copied things they'd seen the adult model do, including whacking the "Bobo" doll with the mallet.
How well this generalizes to movies/+older kids is questionable. Young kids are much more likely to imitate behaviors than older kids, for sure, but the whole question is exceedingly slippery. Personally, I think that watching violent movies may make people who have violent tendencies to begin with more likely to act on their impulses.
What are the effects of watching movies with sex, violence, and "bad" language on people of different age groups? Also, other factors should be explored, like IQ, years in school, religious affiliation, etc.
As for doing the extensive study mentioned above, there are so many variables involved there that it'd take freaking' forever and probably not produce much useful data. Age/sex/IQ level/education/cultural group/etc. interact in extremely complex ways--one reason why social science numbers are kind of held in disdain by those involved in physics/chemistry/math.
No, really. I liked the original Tron, though even way back then I knew it wasn't even close to "realistic." I just have this awful feeling that if they were to do a sequel, it'd turn into some horrible mishmash of "Lawnmower Man," "The Net," and a bunch of other movies that were substandard. Computers/+the Net have permeated popular culture far enough to be completely misunderstood by those in the movie business. (Hollywood truth: anyone who knows anything about computers can hack into top-secret NSA databases in less than 5 minutes!)
Or is Pixar going to make a kinder, gentler "The Matrix," with semi-violent heroes in glowing blue suits substituted for ultraviolent heroes in black trenchcoats?
How does a process "hide" in NT? Is this a "feature" of NT?
Not sure how something could really hide, but a process tried to do that on me just yesterday. Surfed a bit with Netscape on NT, then closed that program. A bit later, I noticed that M$ Word was running even more slowly than it usually does. Same thing with my terminal window and the RC5 client.
NT's Task Mangler showed only 3 tasks running--Telnet, RC5, and Word. Looking at the process list, though, showed that Netscape was A) still hanging around B) burning 90% of the CPU time. Hmmm.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. It would never fool a wise sysadmin, of course, but could squeak by someone who wasn't paying attention. I (think/hope) BO2K is more sophisticated in its hiding.
Come on. How about going the other way around? I used a Powerbook 180c for a while--approx. 4 kg weight, noCD-ROM, and a 9" screen. Plus, the thing was twice as thick as the standard notebook of today. If Apple were to put its latest and greatest electronics into that particular case, you could probably get an internal ZIP or JAZ drive with your CD-ROM for not much more money. (Larger case==less miniaturization== less expensive.) That and/or plunk in an extra battery so you could use the thing on a plane trip without recharging it.
Small/light is good. Powerful is better. Sorry, but I see people trying to run Win98 on 233MHz/16MB RAM/2G hard drives at my job all the time... These folks would be better served by A) less bloated software B) heavier, more powerful laptops. A) would be the best, but the way the world works, B) is the only option that's going to be popular.
As for the old 180c, its LCD screen died unexpectedly and the monitor port in back of the box wouldn't accept any cable I could find, not even after scouring five of the computer shops in the area. I sincerely hope this bit has been fixed for the new laptop.
Oddly enough, this theory is also put forth in Stephen King's "Dark Tower" series near the end of book 1, _The Gunslinger_. Of course, he wasn't doing it for humorous effect.
Can't wait to see how he develops the theory in the next books... "The Universe is contained within a grain of sand, and what if that grain of sand gets run over by a minivan?"
It was published in 1985 when 1 out of ever 3 American adults could not read. I think the situation is pretty much the same...it's a vicious cycle - parent who can't read produces a child who can't read,
I don't think that's accurate at all. You pretty much have to be able to read to get along in society at all--just think, if you can't read, how in the hell are you going to be able to make sense of TV Guide or the Prevue Channel? That's incentive enough to get folks reading.
The true problem is that people don't read. TV/video games offer far more in the way of instant gratification than sitting down with Moby-Dick or even Salem's Lot. If there were some way to get people thinking that reading was exciting and instantly gratifying, literacy rates would skyrocket. (Yeah, right.)
If a kid can't read, no job period. All the net training in the world would not make a difference if a child cannot read.
Last time I checked, an awful lot of the info on the WWW was still in good 'ol text format. And don't forget E-mail, either. It's quite possible that the Net/WWW would get people interested in reading--how could you use IRC/message boards/ whatever without being able to read? (This'd also give kids practice in decoding 31337 t3xt and stuff, but I digress...)
The Net is a tool, yes--probably the most widespread and complex tool humans have built yet. Asking large groups of people to use it responsibly and well without training is like expecting a chimp to pilot a 747. I think we'll get there eventually, but there will always be pr0n, 31337 kiddiez, and virtual illiterates using it--just as there are plenty of horrible drivers polluting the interstates. C'est la vie.
To my dying day I will never understand why a community with above-average intelligence and creativity will spend hours on end WHINING about the misunderstanding of the hacker/cracker term.
Let me try to explain, then... The actual names we have for things are extremely important, because the sound of the word as it's spoken, as well as the connotations the word has (if it's a word with several meanings, as "cracker"), tend to enforce a particular idea. GM found this out the hard way when they tried to sell the Chevy Nova south of the border--"No va"=="doesn't go" in Spanish. And I think "cracker" has failed in the mainstream press because it already has several other meanings, "big dumb redneck" being one of them.
Besides, being neurotic about labels and having the exact right name for something is a well-established computer-person trait. Having a compiler grind to a halt because of a missing ; or a call to "Printf()" may have caused this....
(All of this is, of course, just my misguided opinion.)
Re:Doesn't Suck. It's all worth it in the end.
on
Home Sweet Sweatshop
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· Score: 1
I know that would not have happened if i would have punched a clock and left work everyday at 5:05 like so many of my slackers workmates.
I think you've missed the point of the article in a HUGE way. Sure, you're making a lot of money now. You're also working 75 hours/week. So the big question is, do you actually have time to enjoy the incredible cash rewards you've earned? 75 hours/week is 44% of your week, and if you get 7 hours of sleep/night, that's another 29% of your week, leaving 26% of your week (44 hours, 6/day) left for "other." You know, those things like spending time with wife+kids, watching TV, taking long bike rides, or even being a "slacker friend."
What I got out of the article was that too much work is destroying both quantity and quality of life for high-tech folks. The assumption is that "more is better," whether that be money, cars, work, features in programming languages... Yecch.
Another problem is that insane high-speed work increases productivity in the short term. Pulling an all-nighter might get that paper or code module written, but it'll never get that revolutionary Unified Field Theory or C+++ written. The best ideas, like plants, require time to generate. Remember, you can't produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
...it was impossible to complete more than 255 boards. The 8-bit "board register" in the old game started out at 1, naturally, and when you got past board 255, it tried to access board 0. Then, the game basically gave you a "Seg Fault" and displayed random graphical garbage over half the screen. No, I don't have a screenshot; wish I did.
Max score per board in Pac-Man is something like 20,000 points. (That's eating each ghost 4 times on each power pill and chomping 1 5000-point bonus fruit.) 12,000/board is a little more realistic for an awesome player. But anyway... it's an awesome achievement, kind of like eating 28 hot dogs in 30 seconds.
We use up natural resources, destroy ecosystems for short term gain, screw around with the genetics of virulent diseases...
Other critters use up resources and destroy ecosystems too. Elephants can deforest areas just like logging companies, albeit more slowly. And bacteria tend to exchange DNA with each other and even with completely different bacterial species through various bacteriophages. Genetic engineering on a small scale, to be sure, but since many bacteria have generations every hour, the rate of evolution is fast.
If the actions of humans can be viewed in a larger sense as perfectly natural then I believe we will find ourselves on the WRONG side of natural selection. Think of AIDS and Ebola as Human Destroyer alpha products. Anybody want to try for beta?
The only thing that's keeping us alive right now is that so far, our learning has advanced just fast enough to keep us from eating/polluting ourselves into oblivion. So as I see it, we have two options:
Learn as much as we can as fast as we can
Stop taking advantage of the fruits of technology, go back to the land, and become a world of organic farmers.
I'd say choice #1 has it. Live in a 2-bedroom ranch, or live in a thatched hut? Easy choice. Live with the infrastructure and problems necessary to support the huge industrial complex, or go without TV/your 56K connection/your Honda? Some might opt for going without, but the vast mass of humanity won't. Ever.
As for AIDS/Ebola being "Human Destroyers in Alpha," I think the Beta was demonstrated quite well over Hiroshima. [run and cower]
Penguin Mints use an artificial sweetener that is usually reserved for diabetics, and has been known to cause health problems, maybe even cancer.
Hmm, which sweetener would that be? Saccharin causes problems, but it tastes sort of nasty and has largely been superseded by aspartame (Equal or Nutrasweet.) And yes, aspartame gives rats cancer if they eat the equivalent of 6 boxes/day for their entire lives. Feed rats that much of anything and they'll get cancer. Even water...
Besides, in a few years, they'll find out that aspartame/+saccharin protect you from the CIA using low-level pulsed microwaves to read your thoughts.
(This is a shot in the dark, mainly informed by fading memories of Chem 312/420. May not be right at all.)
Various people have mentioned that the frequencies and power levels at which cellphones transmit aren't enough to cause direct genetic damage by heating/knocking electrons out of their places. This is true AFAIK.
However, molecules don't just heat up when they absorb radiation--they vibrate and rotate as well. (Chemists and physicists have used microwave-band radiation for a very long time to measure rotational and vibrational modes of various molecules.) Cellphone frequencies and power levels are probably not enough to vibrate DNA/protein molecules (you need infrared to get decent vibration out of even small things) but rotation is a distinct possibility.
Having large and complex molecules rotating at rates other than the normal range might produce problems that are subtle and/or difficult to reproduce. Remember, at room temp, your average water molecule is rotating wildly as it is.
antenna unit inside the phone.....ugh....I feel bad enough using any cell phone as is...I can feel my brain cell DNA being modified during usage.
If that's what you're worried about, then I hope you sit at least 4 feet away from your monitor/hard drive/motherboard/microwave oven. Radiation is everywhere, and humans/raccoons/lizards/bacteria have evolved DNA repair mechanisms to compensate for that over the years. (To say nothing of even more highly damaging things like UV--better stay inside while you're talking on that cellphone!)
ANyway, this bit about small antennae is probably a good thing. The real problem that I can see is that smaller and smaller cellphones will eventually lead to cellphones being implanted into peoples' bodies. Think about it... microphone implanted under the jaw, speaker stuck in one ear, and the ever-tinier electronics package put wherever you want it. (Why carry around a StarTac when you have the entire system internally?)
This might not be accepted at first, but it might catch on. And if it had a GPS system as well... Big Brother knows exactly where you are at all times. Gulp.
Patron saint of the Net? No idea; the Net is still so new that it's hard to tell. Canonization takes a long time IIRC, at least 30 years, and it just hasn't been that long. Imagine the early Christians saying, "So let's get this saint thing going," half an hour after the crucifixion.
We could, of course, nominate Al Gore.:-]
Other cybersaints immediately come to mind. Babbage (Analytical Engine) and Turing (self-explanatory.) Continuing the Catholic analogies, we could just about beatify Ken T. and Linus right now....
Slashdot Mirror
Including the Comp Sci profs? *shrug* Well, one thing I've noticed is that the "computers are easy to use!" hype has been tested, swallowed, and believed by thousands of people... and many thousands more are reaping that whirlwind. Computers are the most complex devices that humanity has invented, and as such, will have problems when their operators are virtually untrained. Maybe we need a "Computers are difficult and arcane! chmod and vi are your friends!" ad campaign :-)
Getting back to the PowerPoint thing-- tried StarOffice? It seems to handle .ppt files fairly well, though I haven't checked its "slide show" functions out. PowerPoint is, on the whole, a huge time-waster, as people spend hours and hours making their presentations look pretty, and they forget to include any useful information. Or maybe I'm just bitter.
struct mystruct
/* This calls functions "function1" and "function2" and needs a FILE*
foo(int bar, int baz, FILE *fnord)
*that points to the comma-delimited data that gets updated in function "blorf".
*/
That's saved me a few hassles. ("Why is this not working right?" "Hold on, I tweaked foo... looks like function blorf needs an update too; I'll get right on it.") Does CVS do something like this automatically? I ask because I have never used CVS; it seems like overkill for the essentially one-person project I'm working on. Besides, the users always let me know semi-immediately whenever anything breaks.
Many enraged psychiatrists are inciting a weary butcher. The butcher is weary and tired because he has cut meat and steak and lamb for hours and weeks. He does not desire to chant about anything with raving psychiatrists, but he sings about his gingivectomist, he dreams about a single cosmologist, he thinks about his dog. The dog is named Herbert.
I sincerely hope Brutus will do better than that, and show how much technology/+programming have advanced in 12 years.
(For a demonstration of actual rather than artificial insanity, check out the article's last sentence: "If the computer wins the contest, I'm going to take my computer and burn it. I certainly hope a human wins." Sigh. Did the Wright brothers burn their plane right after Kitty Hawk?)
To everyone who enjoyed it--thanks for the appreciation. To everyone who did not--well, you can't please everybody.
*sigh* I don't know where you live, or what socioeconomic group you are in, but there are an enormous number of people out there who have no computer in their homes. Anything, even a working Apple IIe system, would be an improvement on nothing. (Web browsing obviously limited on a IIe, but hey, Telnet to a *nix box, run Lynx/tin/Pine....)
Besides, if people have used old tech, they'll appreciate new tech that much more. Learning to use an old system can pay benefits even when you move to new tech. ("Memory's always scarce, so maybe I shouldn't open up 15 browser windows at once...") To say nothing of the fact that old systems almost always had built-in BASIC interpreters. It ain't a Real Language, but it can teach people a thing or two, and do so for a lot less $ than the latest C/C++ compiler...
Another thing that really might be good to improve is the Minicli (the mini-command-line KDE gives when you press Alt-F2.) When it works, it works nicely, but I quit using it for anything serious because... nothing happens when the command you execute is misspelled or something. I'm thinking that they could pop up a small xterm-window that contained all text sent to stderr the first time anything sends to stderr when you exec something with minicli. (Would this be a Wretched Hack, a Good Idea, or some disgusting hybrid? Just curious.)
I'm still learning C++, otherwise I'd have done these things already. If KDE had been coded in C, I'd have "fixed" these by now :-).
Finally: Sure, the desktop screenshots are cool. But who ever has time to look at the desktop? With a GIMP window here, X11amp there, kvt there, and assorted other delights, at least 3 of the virtual desktops are completely covered, and I pay much more attention to the contents of the application windows than what's behind them. Yeah, I'm weird, but I think "themes" are the spawn of the devil and an animated Pink Panther cursor is akin to a bow tie with embedded blinking Christmas lights... cute, but you get sick of it really quickly.
There is a stream nearby.
There are ominous stick bundles on the ground.
]north
You don't know where north is, as you've lost the map. You wander around for a while anyway.
You are in a forest. It is scary. There is something after you. You are running out of food.
There is a stream nearby.
There are ominous stick bundles on the ground.
A movie director appears and bitches about "getting it all on film." Her cameraman bitches about running out of cigarettes. They bolt away as an odd pelting noise begins to come from somewhere.
]cross stream
The log is scary, and you are only a quarter of the way across before a horde of baying movie producers appears. They are frantically looking for the Next Big Thing, and the clamor of their passage knocks you off the log. You fall into the stream, where you hit your head on a rock.
You awaken in a dim place. /.ers are here.
Jon Katz is here.
Hordes of angry, chanting
]post comment
Your comment is flamed into oblivion. The backwash causes your ADSL connection to turn into a 14.4 modem. Then you hear the dreaded words, "NO CARRIER."
***You have died***
(sorry, I couldn't resist...)
OTOH, if we maintain full backwards-compatibility, we get that OS where you can run WordStar 1.0 if you really want to. (cough.) Maintaining backwards-compat. is usually a Good Thing, but it can be taken too far and can break things later on. Support:
Anyway, you're probably right in saying that revolutionary all-at-once change is bad for most of those involved. As someone pointed out down this thread, though, most change tends to be evolutionary--"let's just stick this new feature in here..." Thing is, after 10-15 cycles of that, the final product bears no resemblance to what you started out with. In computers, apparently, enough micro-evolution leads to macro-evolution and/or "speciation." (Look at Solaris vs. HP-UX vs. IRIX vs. AIX... all Unix at core, but verry different in so many things.)
So don't ask for the end of Microsoft. Ask to make them smaller.
Amen. If they had, say, 60% of the OS market, they'd make a heck of a lot of cash, and they might actually have to compete, and people might be happier because they had a choice. Seems like they want it all, though. Another part of the American Dream, I guess--"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and UNLIMITED POWER!"
1.1 also had some warning about "security hole in libmedia.so, so KDE's system sounds are turned off by default." If this were fixed, it'd be excellent--the standard system speaker beep gets really annoying. I also noticed that the old kvt doesn't seem to be on the panel. Have they finally managed to get konsole working correctly?
And is there really a need for kfm to be able to run Java? It'd be cool, yes, but probably of limited utility unless you used kfm as a Web browser...
Well, my system came with a WinModem--something I did not know at the time, as the provider merely said it was a "56Kflex internal modem." I was really disgusted with it even before attempting to install Linux. Reasons:
- About 1/3 of the time, when I connected, the modem would make an odd noise and reset the entire system, as if I'd turned the power off.
- No blinking status lights to show what's really going on.
- Can't seem to coexist happily with the external modem I bought to replace it. Win98 refuses to connect at a speed higher than 4800 baud to the external, but works with the internal just fine. (I'm yanking the WinModem soon, of course.)
The first item is, of course, the most troubling--especially with Linux; do you really want to have all your data scribbled because the modem acts up and resets everything in the middle of a disk write? Well, the more hardware supported, the better, I guess. I just hope WinModems will be required to carry labels warning of the power-hit problem.What's the first thing people want to do with information? "Make it pretty"--because, after all, no one will pay any attention to any paper document that doesn't use fonts/spacing/horizontal lines/headings/bullet lists effectively. So people spend time dinking around with looks rather than content. (This criticism can actually be applied to StarOffice's GUI, most TV shows, and most Web pages as well.)
A document management system would be a good thing, but for it to be powerful at all, it'd have to be Complicated. I think well-chosen filenames, well-designed directory trees (broad, not deep) and some intelligence on the part of users would alleviate the personal user's need for a doc management system.
Also, WYSI(A)WYG is easy for people to understand. TeX isn't. Your average semi-intelligent college student gets confused by writing HTML with pico/vi/Notepad--and they'll be able to use TeX? Hoo boy.
As for StarOffice, I hope they'll ditch its browser functionality and clean up its standard user interface. It does not need a "Start Menu." An office suite should be an office suite, not a GUI shell... or a browser... what'll their new slogan be, "StarOffice: emacs for the '00's!"?
As for the Word/Excel/Powerpoint import functions, I hate the way that "curly quotes," en- and em- dashes, and a few other things get swallowed. Maybe I've just got my system configured wrong, but none of those characters ever appear in StarOffice, Netscape, or anything.
These kids were put, one at a time, into a room with many toys and an "adult model." For half the kids, the adult model behaved violently, picking up a mallet and whacking a "Bobo" doll around with it. For the other half of the kids, the adult model played quietly with blocks. Then, after 10 minutes, the kids were sent into another room, with other kids and similar toys.
Results: The kids who were exposed to the violent adult model behaved significantly more aggressively, and many of them copied things they'd seen the adult model do, including whacking the "Bobo" doll with the mallet.
How well this generalizes to movies/+older kids is questionable. Young kids are much more likely to imitate behaviors than older kids, for sure, but the whole question is exceedingly slippery. Personally, I think that watching violent movies may make people who have violent tendencies to begin with more likely to act on their impulses.
What are the effects of watching movies with sex, violence, and "bad" language on people of different age groups? Also, other factors should be explored, like IQ, years in school, religious affiliation, etc.
As for doing the extensive study mentioned above, there are so many variables involved there that it'd take freaking' forever and probably not produce much useful data. Age/sex/IQ level/education/cultural group/etc. interact in extremely complex ways--one reason why social science numbers are kind of held in disdain by those involved in physics/chemistry/math.
No, really. I liked the original Tron, though even way back then I knew it wasn't even close to "realistic." I just have this awful feeling that if they were to do a sequel, it'd turn into some horrible mishmash of "Lawnmower Man," "The Net," and a bunch of other movies that were substandard. Computers/+the Net have permeated popular culture far enough to be completely misunderstood by those in the movie business. (Hollywood truth: anyone who knows anything about computers can hack into top-secret NSA databases in less than 5 minutes!)
Or is Pixar going to make a kinder, gentler "The Matrix," with semi-violent heroes in glowing blue suits substituted for ultraviolent heroes in black trenchcoats?
Not sure how something could really hide, but a process tried to do that on me just yesterday. Surfed a bit with Netscape on NT, then closed that program. A bit later, I noticed that M$ Word was running even more slowly than it usually does. Same thing with my terminal window and the RC5 client.
NT's Task Mangler showed only 3 tasks running--Telnet, RC5, and Word. Looking at the process list, though, showed that Netscape was A) still hanging around B) burning 90% of the CPU time. Hmmm.
I'm pretty sure this wasn't supposed to happen, but it did. It would never fool a wise sysadmin, of course, but could squeak by someone who wasn't paying attention. I (think/hope) BO2K is more sophisticated in its hiding.
Come on. How about going the other way around? I used a Powerbook 180c for a while--approx. 4 kg weight, noCD-ROM, and a 9" screen. Plus, the thing was twice as thick as the standard notebook of today. If Apple were to put its latest and greatest electronics into that particular case, you could probably get an internal ZIP or JAZ drive with your CD-ROM for not much more money. (Larger case==less miniaturization== less expensive.) That and/or plunk in an extra battery so you could use the thing on a plane trip without recharging it.
Small/light is good. Powerful is better. Sorry, but I see people trying to run Win98 on 233MHz/16MB RAM/2G hard drives at my job all the time... These folks would be better served by A) less bloated software B) heavier, more powerful laptops. A) would be the best, but the way the world works, B) is the only option that's going to be popular.
As for the old 180c, its LCD screen died unexpectedly and the monitor port in back of the box wouldn't accept any cable I could find, not even after scouring five of the computer shops in the area. I sincerely hope this bit has been fixed for the new laptop.
Can't wait to see how he develops the theory in the next books... "The Universe is contained within a grain of sand, and what if that grain of sand gets run over by a minivan?"
I don't think that's accurate at all. You pretty much have to be able to read to get along in society at all--just think, if you can't read, how in the hell are you going to be able to make sense of TV Guide or the Prevue Channel? That's incentive enough to get folks reading.
The true problem is that people don't read. TV/video games offer far more in the way of instant gratification than sitting down with Moby-Dick or even Salem's Lot. If there were some way to get people thinking that reading was exciting and instantly gratifying, literacy rates would skyrocket. (Yeah, right.)
If a kid can't read, no job period. All the net training in the world would not make a difference if a child cannot read.
Last time I checked, an awful lot of the info on the WWW was still in good 'ol text format. And don't forget E-mail, either. It's quite possible that the Net/WWW would get people interested in reading--how could you use IRC/message boards/ whatever without being able to read? (This'd also give kids practice in decoding 31337 t3xt and stuff, but I digress...)
The Net is a tool, yes--probably the most widespread and complex tool humans have built yet. Asking large groups of people to use it responsibly and well without training is like expecting a chimp to pilot a 747. I think we'll get there eventually, but there will always be pr0n, 31337 kiddiez, and virtual illiterates using it--just as there are plenty of horrible drivers polluting the interstates. C'est la vie.
Let me try to explain, then... The actual names we have for things are extremely important, because the sound of the word as it's spoken, as well as the connotations the word has (if it's a word with several meanings, as "cracker"), tend to enforce a particular idea. GM found this out the hard way when they tried to sell the Chevy Nova south of the border--"No va"=="doesn't go" in Spanish. And I think "cracker" has failed in the mainstream press because it already has several other meanings, "big dumb redneck" being one of them.
Besides, being neurotic about labels and having the exact right name for something is a well-established computer-person trait. Having a compiler grind to a halt because of a missing ; or a call to "Printf()" may have caused this....
(All of this is, of course, just my misguided opinion.)
I think you've missed the point of the article in a HUGE way. Sure, you're making a lot of money now. You're also working 75 hours/week. So the big question is, do you actually have time to enjoy the incredible cash rewards you've earned? 75 hours/week is 44% of your week, and if you get 7 hours of sleep/night, that's another 29% of your week, leaving 26% of your week (44 hours, 6/day) left for "other." You know, those things like spending time with wife+kids, watching TV, taking long bike rides, or even being a "slacker friend."
What I got out of the article was that too much work is destroying both quantity and quality of life for high-tech folks. The assumption is that "more is better," whether that be money, cars, work, features in programming languages... Yecch.
Another problem is that insane high-speed work increases productivity in the short term. Pulling an all-nighter might get that paper or code module written, but it'll never get that revolutionary Unified Field Theory or C+++ written. The best ideas, like plants, require time to generate. Remember, you can't produce a baby in one month by impregnating nine women.
Max score per board in Pac-Man is something like 20,000 points. (That's eating each ghost 4 times on each power pill and chomping 1 5000-point bonus fruit.) 12,000/board is a little more realistic for an awesome player. But anyway... it's an awesome achievement, kind of like eating 28 hot dogs in 30 seconds.
Other critters use up resources and destroy ecosystems too. Elephants can deforest areas just like logging companies, albeit more slowly. And bacteria tend to exchange DNA with each other and even with completely different bacterial species through various bacteriophages. Genetic engineering on a small scale, to be sure, but since many bacteria have generations every hour, the rate of evolution is fast.
If the actions of humans can be viewed in a larger sense as perfectly natural then I believe we will find ourselves on the WRONG side of natural selection. Think of AIDS and Ebola as Human Destroyer alpha products. Anybody want to try for beta?
The only thing that's keeping us alive right now is that so far, our learning has advanced just fast enough to keep us from eating/polluting ourselves into oblivion. So as I see it, we have two options:
- Learn as much as we can as fast as we can
- Stop taking advantage of the fruits of technology, go back to the land, and become a world of organic farmers.
I'd say choice #1 has it. Live in a 2-bedroom ranch, or live in a thatched hut? Easy choice. Live with the infrastructure and problems necessary to support the huge industrial complex, or go without TV/your 56K connection/your Honda? Some might opt for going without, but the vast mass of humanity won't. Ever.As for AIDS/Ebola being "Human Destroyers in Alpha," I think the Beta was demonstrated quite well over Hiroshima. [run and cower]
Hmm, which sweetener would that be? Saccharin causes problems, but it tastes sort of nasty and has largely been superseded by aspartame (Equal or Nutrasweet.) And yes, aspartame gives rats cancer if they eat the equivalent of 6 boxes/day for their entire lives. Feed rats that much of anything and they'll get cancer. Even water...
Besides, in a few years, they'll find out that aspartame/+saccharin protect you from the CIA using low-level pulsed microwaves to read your thoughts.
Various people have mentioned that the frequencies and power levels at which cellphones transmit aren't enough to cause direct genetic damage by heating/knocking electrons out of their places. This is true AFAIK.
However, molecules don't just heat up when they absorb radiation--they vibrate and rotate as well. (Chemists and physicists have used microwave-band radiation for a very long time to measure rotational and vibrational modes of various molecules.) Cellphone frequencies and power levels are probably not enough to vibrate DNA/protein molecules (you need infrared to get decent vibration out of even small things) but rotation is a distinct possibility.
Having large and complex molecules rotating at rates other than the normal range might produce problems that are subtle and/or difficult to reproduce. Remember, at room temp, your average water molecule is rotating wildly as it is.
If that's what you're worried about, then I hope you sit at least 4 feet away from your monitor/hard drive/motherboard/microwave oven. Radiation is everywhere, and humans/raccoons/lizards/bacteria have evolved DNA repair mechanisms to compensate for that over the years. (To say nothing of even more highly damaging things like UV--better stay inside while you're talking on that cellphone!)
ANyway, this bit about small antennae is probably a good thing. The real problem that I can see is that smaller and smaller cellphones will eventually lead to cellphones being implanted into peoples' bodies. Think about it... microphone implanted under the jaw, speaker stuck in one ear, and the ever-tinier electronics package put wherever you want it. (Why carry around a StarTac when you have the entire system internally?)
This might not be accepted at first, but it might catch on. And if it had a GPS system as well... Big Brother knows exactly where you are at all times. Gulp.
We could, of course, nominate Al Gore. :-]
Other cybersaints immediately come to mind. Babbage (Analytical Engine) and Turing (self-explanatory.) Continuing the Catholic analogies, we could just about beatify Ken T. and Linus right now....