Regarding drug costs in the 3rd world, you think the US legislates that?
Your new AIDS 'Tsar' is a former pharmaceutical company boss, and I believe the Bush administration was pursuing a complaint at the WTO in 2001 against Brazil for generics. I would hold the government responsible for not forcing the companies to take a reasonable stance (well within its powers). But we have very different views of government. I don't want 'the state to wither away' (google for that!).
But yes, I think we agree in principle on the tariffs - unfortunately nations look out for their own first.
We fundamentally disagree here. For me any fair system will NOT be skewed.
Yes, we do : ). In the best of all possible worlds, a fair system will not be skewed. However we do not yet live in the best of all possible worlds.
the field is level for everyone, rich and poor, strong and weak.
You confound wealth with physical strength with virtue in this sentence. Do you mean to imply that rich people are also somehow 'strong' (rather than lucky)? If you start out rich (like Bush or Kerry for example) you're not going to have a hard time staying on top. Is this remotely fair?
However you're right, we do fundamentally disagree about whether enlightened self-interest with absolutely no external controls will lead to continual improvement (your view) or abuse (my view).
That's my definition of just -- everyone is treated equally
oh, well since that's your definition of just, perhaps you'd like your country (and the rest of the 1st world) to stop imposing tariffs on incoming agricultural, steel and other products, to stop demanding that drugs which could save millions are sold at exorbitant prices in the 3rd world, and to cancel the loans made after the colonial period which are leaching away the little money third world countries have?
Or perhaps you want to be treated 'equally' when it suits you?
The world is currently structured in a very unfair way; any truly fair system will therefore be skewed towards those nations who are historically disadvantaged. The reason for involving China et al just now is to get them to the point where they can start to cut pollution, and since they'll be within the system, it'll be easier to persuade them to take the next step.
Frankly I think the non-ratification of the treaty has a lot more to do with the unilateral go it alone against the world spirit of the current administration, along with fear of Chinese (and to a lesser extent Indian) domination of the global economy, than with any so-called concept of 'justice'.
There should be laws meaning we can lock people like you up without trial, indefinitely. Unfortunately, because of our commitment to FREEDOM in the United States^^^^^^ civilised world, that could never happen.
If you believe in God, I'm not sure why you're trying to enter into rational debate with people who don't believe in your god. You can argue rationally with people who accept that axiom, but not with others.
The concept of 'God' as I understand it allows your belief system to adapt to any eventually, as God is omnipotent - he could have done *anything* if you accept his existence. Using a prime mover as one of your axioms renders any further debate superfluous because he can at any time be used as a get-out clause, eg I don't know why the earth exists, but God is there so he must have done it, the rest I can explain with evolution. This doesn't explain anything at all.
To someone who doesn't accept the belief in God as given, this argument is baseless.
1. Our arguments are about the premise, not the logic, so there's no 'refuting' to be done.
Arguments are not often simply about the semantics, much as you'd like them to be; it's not algebra. 'The appeal to authority' (there is only one?), is valid in a world in which people betray their intentions and motives far more often through their actions and achievements than their 'logical' arguments (sophistry!). People can use an appeal to authority and be wrong, or they can use it and be right. It's often wrong when the authority is unjustified (or the authority strays beyond their field) or when it encourages uncritical acceptance. On the contrary it's justified when the authority has worked for years in a field and you haven't.
If you want to talk about it in philosophical terms, I don't believe this was an example anyway - the parents weren't saying Kay says X, therefore it's so, but Kay says X, you should listen more carefully to what he says because of his background... The reason it was used in this case was that the original speaker didn't seem to have paid any attention to the person he was analysing, dismissing him as a grumpy old man.
2. I was overstating the case. Actually if you've read the article you'll know that he doesn't whine at all, just offers constructive criticism of a few points of Java he doesn't like, mingled with criticisms of his own pet language. But I'm sure you know this and are feeling pedantic, and if you don't, and aren't, I can't help you : )
3. An appeal to non-authority? I should have put Lisp in my list of original languages...
One of the most renowned logical fallacies is... One must always appeal to reason before authority.
There's a reason people often appeal to the authority of a particular speaker - it doesn't mean they are infallible, it just means you should not dismiss their ideas lightly, as you appear to have done. 'Logical fallacy' or not, this rule of thumb can often be useful - personally I find it more useful than attempting to judge all ideas with no context.
'Whiners' don't write languages or define a field. Alan Kay is not a whiner, he just doesn't agree with a lot of choices made in mainstream languages - many of which are built from historical accidents rather than being carefully constructed idioms.
Isn't it strange that many very modern languages are going back to Lisp and Smalltalk (Ruby, Objective-C, C# etc)?
Take a look at this ad hoc list of Ruby applied. It's a relatively young language, so there aren't as many libraries/apps as something like C or Java, but it's growing.
So try a different website - there are loads out there. Perhaps one with user moderation of stories (Kuro5hin etc), which isn't based on the horrible slashcode. The only thing Slashdot has going for it is the number of people here (which is also in some ways a disadvantage), so why not branch out and just read some other sites with tech news...
The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version.
I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor. It'd be great if they bundled subversion, and gave users easy to use version control right there in the finder, and of course in an API accessible to the applications too. They could have a central repository (hidden) for each user, and just check stuff in and out as it was changed, collecting comments from the user on what changes were made (or automatically generating comments from diffs).
Then you could rewind, diff, look at version etc all to your heart's content. Only thing they'd have to deal with would be giving documents out to other people, but again if they were clever about it the svn info could be in the document bundle too, so that your commit comments, changes etc on that file were picked up automagically when sent to someone else. Anyway, enough rambling.
Re the Minimal Changes in document layout - it doesn't surprise me they had a hard time with that as lots of versions of word have the same sort of problems with earlier versions of their own software, which should tell you something : ) Re Pages being just page layout, that's its primary function just now, however it may evolve into a more general purpose tool.
There are a whole load of different word processors on OS X, and depending on their needs, I think most people could quite happily live in TextEdit, TextMate, Mellel or Pages, it's just they feel they *need* Office because that's what everyone else uses..doc is probably one of the worst document formats to use as a way to store your stuff as it's constantly changing, binary, and very difficult to reverse engineer. So if you ever do want to move from Word, you'll be stuck.
Wait... You mean it's all stored by some other company, who we have no control over?
There are two distinct markets here - Business and Consumers.
Consumers couldn't care less about security, and if they did, and they run windows, you could argue they have less to worry about in giving their data to google than in leaving it on their desktop. We've already seen viruses which distribute private documents from infected machines. The vast majority of people would be very happy with a service they could look at anywhere, from any machine, which kept all their settings/docs/apps in one place, with a secure login. Not everyone (not me for example) but 90% of the population.
Big business would require a very different service, but it could be tempting for some to cut their IT department to the bone and simply support a simple linux distro (free) and a browser (free) on each desktop. In fact Google could sell a Google Appliance which didn't just do search, but which hosted all the company's documents AND applications centrally - that obviates the need for desktop upgrades etc etc. Google still gets a nice pay packet from upgrades, new XUL software, and support services if people want to build custom apps. If formats are open the company won't even feel tied down to Google by doing that - they could always move in the future, exactly the opposite of the position they're in with MS.
Everyone is happy, save MS.
Given the way MS is tying everything up with.NET and bury the internet with XAML, Google would be crazy not to try something like this.
Yes all these things have been done before, but the time has come for a switch, people are sick of paying through the nose for stuff that half-works from MS.
Well, G4s are significantly cooler, and significantly cheaper, so for now they're quite a good choice, particularly for a small machines. But yes, as you say, on all technical counts, it'd be nice to have a G5 in there, they're just expensive right now. On the x86 side the difference is more pronounced because of the registers. Given their history with OS X (still supports G3s) I doubt they're going to dump G4 support anytime in the next 10 years.
Re:They're overhyping a bit, aren't they?
on
Firefox In Print
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· Score: 1
It also chokes on my company's online timecard page, and looking at the page code I don't see anything particularly unusual or esoteric.
Did you actually validate the code of your company website? There's probably just a small error in the HTML, often that's why stuff renders in a strange way.
Re:Lazy IE Only Scripted Webpages...
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Firefox In Print
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I *want* my browser to fudge things a bit so they look right. As a caveat, I use Firecrap for its stability at the moment, but I wish I had a browser that parsed HTML like IE does and functions like Firefox. It's a stupid browser, it's not that hard to write, people! Tempted to go back to freakin' Lynx...
If it's so simple to write a 'stupid browser', try writing it yourself, should only take a few weeks, right? It will be easy to interpret the intentions of someone halfway through the world obscured by whatever tool they used to make the pages, right? It will be easy to be bug for bug compatible with a closed source program, right? I mean, figuring out what to do if they forgot to close a deeply nested table or missed out an angle bracket, that will be *easy* to work out won't it?
Let me know when you get it finished, not that I'd want to use it, because it'd be fundamentally broken, and I'd never know if my web pages were correct when testing on it.
The reason you don't notice the interpretation IE has of web-pages is that most people check on that - if it doesn't look right, they go back and fix it. Most people even work round any well-known bugs in their box-model etc, because they know that's what most of their clients will look at it on.
So the IE team doesn't have to do anything, apart from be careful not to change too much : ). If you had your way no bugs would be fixed because 'they broke my pages' even though it's your pages that are broken, and fixing the bug caused them to look wrong.
There is little incentive for companies to have developers port applications from 64 to 32 bit
On the contrary, there is little incentive right now to use 64bit only operations, and little opportunity in fact, you have to jump through hoops to do it. That will change (in a few years at the earliest), but when it does, programs won't have to be 'ported' to 32bit, they'll probably just be compiled using different 32 bit libraries (for math etc) and run slower. As the parent said, this can be handled quite easily with the bundle format, that's what it's designed for.
In fact a bundle could include an x86 binary too, if the OS handled that platform. If all APIs, libraries etc were available (big if) for that platform, the developer would just have to do a recompile with a different target for that as well. That'll never happen though.
In 1995 when Win 95 came out (MS's first 32 bit OS), almost overnight everything became 32 bit only.
Apple is not Microsoft; programs written and compiled for 68k processors still run on OS X, and will do for the forseeable future.
Going by your logic, you should be happy with your 32 bit machine bought now in 5 years, as G4 macs happily run software written in the early 90s or even the 80s -- for a different OS, on a different hardware platform.
In 5 years your position will be reasonable, right now I think it's a little pessimistic.
It started with sigs, and now it moves on to messages.
What's next, are you going to start emailing everyone in your address book (or perhaps strangers) with that link and a little blurb about this Gre4t s1te with free stuff? ?
While I agree with you that things are not very well integrated on a cheap PC, and the programs you get with it are usually substandard, adware or worse, Picasa for Windows is in my opinion a better solution than iPhoto 4. It's slicker, looks like it doesn't have a crazy folder structure for the pics, and has some nice presentation options (not to mention integration with Blogger). The little collages option looks cute too. Problem for not very savvy users is that they have to find out about it and download it though.
Having said that iPhoto 5 looks like it will be a good upgrade and will hopefully fix some of the gripes people have with the older iPhoto. In a way it'd be nice if Picasa was on the mac too to provide some competition.
I use a mac as my main machine and wouldn't use Windows, but the Apple iApps are not always the best of category (at least not in the first few iterations). It's more that the combination means you have reasonably good solutions out of the box for everything you'd like to do, solutions which just work and don't get in the way (no clippy!).
If anyone is considering buying this machine to try to compile a Linux kernel tree (or any application/os that size) on it regularly, I think you need to rethink the purchase. Same goes for heavy video editing.
It's a budget, CONSUMER, box, it's not even the 'pro' consumer model (the iMac). The point of the parent was that perhaps 4% of the computing populace would even notice 1GB of RAM in their machine (as opposed to 512MB), which makes all the kvetching about the price of 1GB on Slashdot seem a little specious.
The FIX is for Slashdot to use compliant HTML which would, incidentally, save them an awful lot of money if they could be bothered to do it. Sure they could use tables etc to make sure it all works in older browsers, but at least make the website validate.
The code of this website reads like it was exported from Frontpage circa 1995.
BODY BGCOLOR="000000"
TEXT="000000"
LINK="666666" VLINK="000000"
TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0"
MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0"
and continues
TD BACKGROUND="//images.slashdot.org/slashbar-black.g if"
BGCOLOR="666666" WIDTH="99%"
FONT FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="FFFFFF"
They don't even use CSS for heavens sake, look at all those wasted lines full of 'arial,helvetica'. There are 1538 instances of the tag FONT in the markup for this article. That's 1538 too many.
Re the download video market - we're not quite there yet in terms of infrastructure, but there is a lot of demand for this stuff (TV episodes and films). When you can download quickly and reliably from a store that offers a lot of choice, this sort of thing will really take off. Why would you tun on a TV on the off chance something is on if you could choose exactly what you wanted to see? Most of the appeal of an online music store is that you can buy something straight away.
Re distribution/bandwidth problems - use Bit torrent in your custom client and/or provide Bit torrent links, problem solved.
Great site, and a nice idea. Re the rejected story, seems like not much that's interesting gets posted at Slashdot, the only reason they're so popular is the volume of comments on each story.
Wouldn't it be great if someone launched a movie store with BT as the distribution method to limit costs?
Wow, downloaded in less than 2 minutes. Wouldn't it be great if other media files on the www (as opposed to the internet) were distributed this way? Have left the torrent up as I watch it...
Now why aren't Slashdot offering to do this for other content-heavy sites before they post the stories? I guess that'd be too much like work.
There is no such thing; each of the many choices in creating reportage imposes a viewpoint. Viewpoints are not bad, you just have to bear them in mind when you watch things, and they're often better when worn lightly by a presenter who has a sense of irony about their own position and makes it clear. Better than pretending to be without any views.
e.g. You are in the congo covering a volcanic eruption in Goma - a resort town popular with whites. There are looters across town, or there is a government press conference on this side of town about the relief effort. There are also some ex-colonials staying in the hotel you stay in as a journalist. Which one do you choose to cover in person, with the camera, and which others through syndicated news? The choice could drastically change the story you come up with. The reality of TV news, or newspaper reporting, is that there are many choices on the way to the reportage and each one affects what you can report.
The same choices are made by photo-journalists all the time when they snap images. They don't take images of everything (they can't possibly) but try to give a flavour of what it was like. What it was like depends heavily on who they are.
Re Internet news making you stupid, brief and ephemeral comments are encouraged by the medium, but we might see that change as more and more newspapers come online. In fact all the newspapers I buy have an electronic edition which is almost an exact replica of the paper one - I don't see how the internet could therefore be less detailed/reflective. Re tunnel-vision, I think you underestimate how many people in the US watch Fox News as their sole source of news (for example). The internet would be a big step up.
The main advantages of the internet as I see it are the plurality of views available, and the fact that you can search it (not to be underestimated).
I'm not your original anonymous zealot, obviously just another one;) I certainly don't feel hateful and twisted, but hey, it's the internet, sometimes things get misread. Frankly though, the ad-hominem attacks are misplaced.
You obviosuly have never had contact with a lawyer. The government has just appointed a man who was toold to look over the legality of torture
Whilst it's perfectly possible to write a report on the feasibility of a certain decision and not agree with it, I was going by the way he (Alberto Gonzales) encouraged the Bush regime to legitimise torture, and twisted the spirit of international law to do so by inventing a new category of combatant. To say that interrogation must include:
"injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions--in order to constitute torture."
is quite a strong position, and not one I'd be comfortable with a government which had control over me espousing; he's saying that regular beatings and psychological torture or humiliation don't count. Couple that with the fact that you can be detained without reason other than the suspicion of links to terrorism, and the government has now arrogated a lot of power in a very short time. They show no sign of slowing down.
For him to say that the new war on terror renders quaint some of its [the Geneva Conventions'] provisions shows that he is willing to sacrifice morality and play dirty to get results - like many of the other players in this current war. Though war is often corrosive of people's morals, and a little moral slippage is inevitable, the slide into McCarthyism (Axis of Evil, etc etc) of the current US administration, and even the populace, would have stopped me long ago crowing about the Freedom of U.S. Citizens - I think that's what the original poster took exception to.
Slashdot Mirror
Regarding drug costs in the 3rd world, you think the US legislates that?
Your new AIDS 'Tsar' is a former pharmaceutical company boss, and I believe the Bush administration was pursuing a complaint at the WTO in 2001 against Brazil for generics. I would hold the government responsible for not forcing the companies to take a reasonable stance (well within its powers). But we have very different views of government. I don't want 'the state to wither away' (google for that!).
But yes, I think we agree in principle on the tariffs - unfortunately nations look out for their own first.
We fundamentally disagree here. For me any fair system will NOT be skewed.
Yes, we do : ). In the best of all possible worlds, a fair system will not be skewed. However we do not yet live in the best of all possible worlds.
the field is level for everyone, rich and poor, strong and weak.
You confound wealth with physical strength with virtue in this sentence. Do you mean to imply that rich people are also somehow 'strong' (rather than lucky)? If you start out rich (like Bush or Kerry for example) you're not going to have a hard time staying on top. Is this remotely fair?
However you're right, we do fundamentally disagree about whether enlightened self-interest with absolutely no external controls will lead to continual improvement (your view) or abuse (my view).
That's my definition of just -- everyone is treated equally
oh, well since that's your definition of just, perhaps you'd like your country (and the rest of the 1st world) to stop imposing tariffs on incoming agricultural, steel and other products, to stop demanding that drugs which could save millions are sold at exorbitant prices in the 3rd world, and to cancel the loans made after the colonial period which are leaching away the little money third world countries have?
Or perhaps you want to be treated 'equally' when it suits you?
The world is currently structured in a very unfair way; any truly fair system will therefore be skewed towards those nations who are historically disadvantaged. The reason for involving China et al just now is to get them to the point where they can start to cut pollution, and since they'll be within the system, it'll be easier to persuade them to take the next step.
Frankly I think the non-ratification of the treaty has a lot more to do with the unilateral go it alone against the world spirit of the current administration, along with fear of Chinese (and to a lesser extent Indian) domination of the global economy, than with any so-called concept of 'justice'.
COMMUNIST! TERRORIST! LIBERAL!
There should be laws meaning we can lock people like you up without trial, indefinitely. Unfortunately, because of our commitment to FREEDOM in the United States^^^^^^ civilised world, that could never happen.
; )
If you believe in God, I'm not sure why you're trying to enter into rational debate with people who don't believe in your god. You can argue rationally with people who accept that axiom, but not with others.
The concept of 'God' as I understand it allows your belief system to adapt to any eventually, as God is omnipotent - he could have done *anything* if you accept his existence. Using a prime mover as one of your axioms renders any further debate superfluous because he can at any time be used as a get-out clause, eg I don't know why the earth exists, but God is there so he must have done it, the rest I can explain with evolution. This doesn't explain anything at all.
To someone who doesn't accept the belief in God as given, this argument is baseless.
Full marks for pedantry.
1. Our arguments are about the premise, not the logic, so there's no 'refuting' to be done.
Arguments are not often simply about the semantics, much as you'd like them to be; it's not algebra. 'The appeal to authority' (there is only one?), is valid in a world in which people betray their intentions and motives far more often through their actions and achievements than their 'logical' arguments (sophistry!). People can use an appeal to authority and be wrong, or they can use it and be right. It's often wrong when the authority is unjustified (or the authority strays beyond their field) or when it encourages uncritical acceptance. On the contrary it's justified when the authority has worked for years in a field and you haven't.
If you want to talk about it in philosophical terms, I don't believe this was an example anyway - the parents weren't saying Kay says X, therefore it's so, but Kay says X, you should listen more carefully to what he says because of his background... The reason it was used in this case was that the original speaker didn't seem to have paid any attention to the person he was analysing, dismissing him as a grumpy old man.
2. I was overstating the case. Actually if you've read the article you'll know that he doesn't whine at all, just offers constructive criticism of a few points of Java he doesn't like, mingled with criticisms of his own pet language. But I'm sure you know this and are feeling pedantic, and if you don't, and aren't, I can't help you : )
3. An appeal to non-authority? I should have put Lisp in my list of original languages...
I've blethered enough already
One of the most renowned logical fallacies is... One must always appeal to reason before authority.
There's a reason people often appeal to the authority of a particular speaker - it doesn't mean they are infallible, it just means you should not dismiss their ideas lightly, as you appear to have done. 'Logical fallacy' or not, this rule of thumb can often be useful - personally I find it more useful than attempting to judge all ideas with no context.
'Whiners' don't write languages or define a field. Alan Kay is not a whiner, he just doesn't agree with a lot of choices made in mainstream languages - many of which are built from historical accidents rather than being carefully constructed idioms.
Isn't it strange that many very modern languages are going back to Lisp and Smalltalk (Ruby, Objective-C, C# etc)?
Ruby on Rails? Datavision? Basecamp? Instiki?
Take a look at this ad hoc list of Ruby applied. It's a relatively young language, so there aren't as many libraries/apps as something like C or Java, but it's growing.
So try a different website - there are loads out there. Perhaps one with user moderation of stories (Kuro5hin etc), which isn't based on the horrible slashcode. The only thing Slashdot has going for it is the number of people here (which is also in some ways a disadvantage), so why not branch out and just read some other sites with tech news...
How about digg.com
The revision abilities in Word are excellent - even better in Office X than in the MS Office XP version.
.doc is probably one of the worst document formats to use as a way to store your stuff as it's constantly changing, binary, and very difficult to reverse engineer. So if you ever do want to move from Word, you'll be stuck.
I think this is something that should be built into the OS, not added to a word processor. It'd be great if they bundled subversion, and gave users easy to use version control right there in the finder, and of course in an API accessible to the applications too. They could have a central repository (hidden) for each user, and just check stuff in and out as it was changed, collecting comments from the user on what changes were made (or automatically generating comments from diffs).
Then you could rewind, diff, look at version etc all to your heart's content. Only thing they'd have to deal with would be giving documents out to other people, but again if they were clever about it the svn info could be in the document bundle too, so that your commit comments, changes etc on that file were picked up automagically when sent to someone else. Anyway, enough rambling.
Re the Minimal Changes in document layout - it doesn't surprise me they had a hard time with that as lots of versions of word have the same sort of problems with earlier versions of their own software, which should tell you something : ) Re Pages being just page layout, that's its primary function just now, however it may evolve into a more general purpose tool.
There are a whole load of different word processors on OS X, and depending on their needs, I think most people could quite happily live in TextEdit, TextMate, Mellel or Pages, it's just they feel they *need* Office because that's what everyone else uses.
Wait... You mean it's all stored by some other company, who we have no control over?
.NET and bury the internet with XAML, Google would be crazy not to try something like this.
There are two distinct markets here - Business and Consumers.
Consumers couldn't care less about security, and if they did, and they run windows, you could argue they have less to worry about in giving their data to google than in leaving it on their desktop. We've already seen viruses which distribute private documents from infected machines. The vast majority of people would be very happy with a service they could look at anywhere, from any machine, which kept all their settings/docs/apps in one place, with a secure login. Not everyone (not me for example) but 90% of the population.
Big business would require a very different service, but it could be tempting for some to cut their IT department to the bone and simply support a simple linux distro (free) and a browser (free) on each desktop. In fact Google could sell a Google Appliance which didn't just do search, but which hosted all the company's documents AND applications centrally - that obviates the need for desktop upgrades etc etc. Google still gets a nice pay packet from upgrades, new XUL software, and support services if people want to build custom apps. If formats are open the company won't even feel tied down to Google by doing that - they could always move in the future, exactly the opposite of the position they're in with MS.
Everyone is happy, save MS.
Given the way MS is tying everything up with
Yes all these things have been done before, but the time has come for a switch, people are sick of paying through the nose for stuff that half-works from MS.
: o
a real legitimate reason NOT TO go 64 bit
Well, G4s are significantly cooler, and significantly cheaper, so for now they're quite a good choice, particularly for a small machines. But yes, as you say, on all technical counts, it'd be nice to have a G5 in there, they're just expensive right now. On the x86 side the difference is more pronounced because of the registers. Given their history with OS X (still supports G3s) I doubt they're going to dump G4 support anytime in the next 10 years.
It also chokes on my company's online timecard page, and looking at the page code I don't see anything particularly unusual or esoteric.
Did you actually validate the code of your company website? There's probably just a small error in the HTML, often that's why stuff renders in a strange way.
run it through http://validator.w3.org/
I *want* my browser to fudge things a bit so they look right.
As a caveat, I use Firecrap for its stability at the moment, but I wish I had a browser that parsed HTML like IE does and functions like Firefox. It's a stupid browser, it's not that hard to write, people! Tempted to go back to freakin' Lynx...
If it's so simple to write a 'stupid browser', try writing it yourself, should only take a few weeks, right? It will be easy to interpret the intentions of someone halfway through the world obscured by whatever tool they used to make the pages, right? It will be easy to be bug for bug compatible with a closed source program, right? I mean, figuring out what to do if they forgot to close a deeply nested table or missed out an angle bracket, that will be *easy* to work out won't it?
Let me know when you get it finished, not that I'd want to use it, because it'd be fundamentally broken, and I'd never know if my web pages were correct when testing on it.
The reason you don't notice the interpretation IE has of web-pages is that most people check on that - if it doesn't look right, they go back and fix it. Most people even work round any well-known bugs in their box-model etc, because they know that's what most of their clients will look at it on.
So the IE team doesn't have to do anything, apart from be careful not to change too much : ). If you had your way no bugs would be fixed because 'they broke my pages' even though it's your pages that are broken, and fixing the bug caused them to look wrong.
There is little incentive for companies to have developers port applications from 64 to 32 bit
On the contrary, there is little incentive right now to use 64bit only operations, and little opportunity in fact, you have to jump through hoops to do it. That will change (in a few years at the earliest), but when it does, programs won't have to be 'ported' to 32bit, they'll probably just be compiled using different 32 bit libraries (for math etc) and run slower. As the parent said, this can be handled quite easily with the bundle format, that's what it's designed for.
In fact a bundle could include an x86 binary too, if the OS handled that platform. If all APIs, libraries etc were available (big if) for that platform, the developer would just have to do a recompile with a different target for that as well. That'll never happen though.
In 1995 when Win 95 came out (MS's first 32 bit OS), almost overnight everything became 32 bit only.
Apple is not Microsoft; programs written and compiled for 68k
processors still run on OS X, and will do for the forseeable future.
Going by your logic, you should be happy with your 32 bit machine bought now in 5 years, as G4 macs happily run software written in the early 90s or even the 80s -- for a different OS, on a different hardware platform.
In 5 years your position will be reasonable, right now I think it's a little pessimistic.
It started with sigs, and now it moves on to messages.
What's next, are you going to start emailing everyone in your address book (or perhaps strangers) with that link and a little blurb about this Gre4t s1te with free stuff? ?
While I agree with you that things are not very well integrated on a cheap PC, and the programs you get with it are usually substandard, adware or worse, Picasa for Windows is in my opinion a better solution than iPhoto 4. It's slicker, looks like it doesn't have a crazy folder structure for the pics, and has some nice presentation options (not to mention integration with Blogger). The little collages option looks cute too. Problem for not very savvy users is that they have to find out about it and download it though.
Having said that iPhoto 5 looks like it will be a good upgrade and will hopefully fix some of the gripes people have with the older iPhoto. In a way it'd be nice if Picasa was on the mac too to provide some competition.
I use a mac as my main machine and wouldn't use Windows, but the Apple iApps are not always the best of category (at least not in the first few iterations). It's more that the combination means you have reasonably good solutions out of the box for everything you'd like to do, solutions which just work and don't get in the way (no clippy!).
If anyone is considering buying this machine to try to compile a Linux kernel tree (or any application/os that size) on it regularly, I think you need to rethink the purchase. Same goes for heavy video editing.
It's a budget, CONSUMER, box, it's not even the 'pro' consumer model (the iMac). The point of the parent was that perhaps 4% of the computing populace would even notice 1GB of RAM in their machine (as opposed to 512MB), which makes all the kvetching about the price of 1GB on Slashdot seem a little specious.
The FIX is for Slashdot to use compliant HTML which would, incidentally, save them an awful lot of money if they could be bothered to do it. Sure they could use tables etc to make sure it all works in older browsers, but at least make the website validate.
g if"
The code of this website reads like it was exported from Frontpage circa 1995.
BODY BGCOLOR="000000"
TEXT="000000"
LINK="666666" VLINK="000000"
TOPMARGIN="0" LEFTMARGIN="0"
MARGINWIDTH="0" MARGINHEIGHT="0"
and continues
TD BACKGROUND="//images.slashdot.org/slashbar-black.
BGCOLOR="666666" WIDTH="99%"
FONT FACE="arial,helvetica" SIZE="4" COLOR="FFFFFF"
They don't even use CSS for heavens sake, look at all those wasted lines full of 'arial,helvetica'. There are 1538 instances of the tag FONT in the markup for this article. That's 1538 too many.
Stop the insanity!
Re the download video market - we're not quite there yet in terms of infrastructure, but there is a lot of demand for this stuff (TV episodes and films). When you can download quickly and reliably from a store that offers a lot of choice, this sort of thing will really take off. Why would you tun on a TV on the off chance something is on if you could choose exactly what you wanted to see? Most of the appeal of an online music store is that you can buy something straight away.
Re distribution/bandwidth problems - use Bit torrent in your custom client and/or provide Bit torrent links, problem solved.
Great site, and a nice idea. Re the rejected story, seems like not much that's interesting gets posted at Slashdot, the only reason they're so popular is the volume of comments on each story.
Wouldn't it be great if someone launched a movie store with BT as the distribution method to limit costs?
Wow, downloaded in less than 2 minutes. Wouldn't it be great if other media files on the www (as opposed to the internet) were distributed this way? Have left the torrent up as I watch it...
Now why aren't Slashdot offering to do this for other content-heavy sites before they post the stories? I guess that'd be too much like work.
self-contradictory
Nice tautology, Toby.
pure reportage
There is no such thing; each of the many choices in creating reportage imposes a viewpoint. Viewpoints are not bad, you just have to bear them in mind when you watch things, and they're often better when worn lightly by a presenter who has a sense of irony about their own position and makes it clear. Better than pretending to be without any views.
e.g.
You are in the congo covering a volcanic eruption in Goma - a resort town popular with whites. There are looters across town, or there is a government press conference on this side of town about the relief effort. There are also some ex-colonials staying in the hotel you stay in as a journalist. Which one do you choose to cover in person, with the camera, and which others through syndicated news? The choice could drastically change the story you come up with. The reality of TV news, or newspaper reporting, is that there are many choices on the way to the reportage and each one affects what you can report.
The same choices are made by photo-journalists all the time when they snap images. They don't take images of everything (they can't possibly) but try to give a flavour of what it was like. What it was like depends heavily on who they are.
Re Internet news making you stupid, brief and ephemeral comments are encouraged by the medium, but we might see that change as more and more newspapers come online. In fact all the newspapers I buy have an electronic edition which is almost an exact replica of the paper one - I don't see how the internet could therefore be less detailed/reflective. Re tunnel-vision, I think you underestimate how many people in the US watch Fox News as their sole source of news (for example). The internet would be a big step up.
The main advantages of the internet as I see it are the plurality of views available, and the fact that you can search it (not to be underestimated).
Get one and run linux on it too... you can even do some GNUStep stuff in Objective-C and have it run on both (bit limited though).
Try Ruby too if you're learning a new language.
I'm not your original anonymous zealot, obviously just another one ;) I certainly don't feel hateful and twisted, but hey, it's the internet, sometimes things get misread. Frankly though, the ad-hominem attacks are misplaced.
:
You obviosuly have never had contact with a lawyer. The government has just appointed a man who was toold to look over the legality of torture
Whilst it's perfectly possible to write a report on the feasibility of a certain decision and not agree with it, I was going by the way he (Alberto Gonzales) encouraged the Bush regime to legitimise torture, and twisted the spirit of international law to do so by inventing a new category of combatant. To say that interrogation must include
"injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions--in order to constitute torture."
is quite a strong position, and not one I'd be comfortable with a government which had control over me espousing; he's saying that regular beatings and psychological torture or humiliation don't count. Couple that with the fact that you can be detained without reason other than the suspicion of links to terrorism, and the government has now arrogated a lot of power in a very short time. They show no sign of slowing down.
For him to say that the new war on terror renders quaint some of its [the Geneva Conventions'] provisions shows that he is willing to sacrifice morality and play dirty to get results - like many of the other players in this current war. Though war is often corrosive of people's morals, and a little moral slippage is inevitable, the slide into McCarthyism (Axis of Evil, etc etc) of the current US administration, and even the populace, would have stopped me long ago crowing about the Freedom of U.S. Citizens - I think that's what the original poster took exception to.