Free software gives the power to the software engineer.
This is an excellent point. If anyone should be running business (or society in general), it should be the scientists, artists and academics. They are typically not blinded by avarice in the sameway that the average businessman is. Profit is useful, but it should never be the main motivation for doing something. The main motivation should be the further development of mankind so that the totality of the species may expand beyond the confines of our primitive solar system. The improvements to our cultures should not only be in the technology arena, but also in social and behavioral aspects. The goal should be to stamp out fear, greed and selfishness and replace them with a thirst for knowledge, a deeper understanding of the benefits of cooperation over competition, and a strong awareness of our responsibility to those around us.
Sadly, we have let our society be taken over by the common criminal's desire for material wealth with no reasonable limits. Fortunately, not everyone thinks this way and many of us attempt to rise above that archaic mode of thinking. We see the value in cooperation and how making top dollar does little to further the species. Capitalism has served it's purpose, but it is not scaling well as the means of information production becomes ubiquitous. IP laws and software patents are not there to protect you unless you are a big enough software business to afford the lawyers. This is not right or just. Source code is merely the analogue to a recipe, the compilers, linkers, etc... are the cooking utensils. No one has set out to restrict what you can cook, so why should they restrict what you write for your computer? Is it illegal to make a hamburger at home? Did McDonald's set out to keep people from stealing the hmburger from their virttual monopoly? No. So all this talk of software patents is pure rubbish and legal tacticsto keep the power inthe richest hands. The time has come to destroy this system of control. I plan to continue writing code in any way I see fit in order to do what I need to do with my machines. No corporations are going to stop me even if they wish to brand me a criminal. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe in. I believe that computers are tools and my ideas are free.
I feel it's my duty as a true American to give the Feds a tip on a concept that's widely dispersed in various places throughout the internets. This secret tehnology has been placed in everything from chocolate chip recipes to plumbing manuals, but if put in the wrong hands and used in combination with a few other technologies, it could be use to take down a jet airliner. In fact, it even appears to have been use in an indirect way during the 9/11 incident.
Here it is: Take two objects (should be sticks or flints, but there are other objects) and rub them together until you get either a spark or smoke. You can tell if you're doing this properly because you should start seeing smoke before you eventually see this horrific technology make it's appearance.
In other terms: "The secret is to bag the rocks together guys"!;P
You have illustrated the other aspect to this: different strokes for different folks.;) There is no one interface that wil satisfy everyone as we all know. But, I would say that far more people are familiar with WIMP than most AV equipment interfaces. So it would take less time to learn to operate such a device. And the KB/Mouse combo is handled nicely by a wireless integrated device. Even better if you had custom Xine compatible labels for each key.
Off topic: Now as far as the complexity of the scripting goes. They're actually extremely simple. Not something the average Joe could deal with making, but certainly a web designer who can handle CGI could do it. The funny thing about that for me is that I get frightened every time I'm faced with HTML. But give me C, Perl or Bash and it's easy as pie. No one I know can comprehend that. I think it has to do with the return on the investment of time. HTML takes me hours to do successfully if I want something good looking. Tables terrify me to no end because I know I'll have massive "debugging" sessions to get them to work just right. But with an actual scripting or coding language, there is structure and form and hierarchy. Again, it's differet strokes for different folks.
It's not a media center, it's just a computer with some added software to try and simplify things. The problem is that in many cases the simplification leads to an interface that is foreign to the user. It's somewhere halfway between a VCR or DVD player menu system and a GUI. Not good.
Considering how many people these days are VERY familiar with the W.I.M.P. (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm, there is no need to disguise what these boxes really are unless you are trying to create a very limited use appliance like a Tivo or iPod.
With that in mind, my home theater PC is just a Celeron (P4 family) running Fedora Core 3, Xine (which does nearly everything) and a Hauppaugue PVR250 card (which is perfect for this sort of thing). I wrote some scripts and created some icons to match and my wife finds this WAYYYY easier than the VCR menus system, the Windows ME based system we had before and you know why? She looked at it and said, "Oh, it works like a computer. This is easy'. I've been running like this since about February. It's perfect. Click on one icon and the system becomes a "TV". Hit "Q" (thanks to Xine's extensive kb shortcuts) and you're back to the desktop. Watch a DVD? Just pop it in the drive and Fedora's MagicDev application will launch my "playdvd" script which automatically starts a fullscreen Xine session and starts playing the DVD with full menu navigation support, etc...
Schedule a recording? Just click the scheduler icon and thanks to the magic of Gnome 2.x's Zenity add on, I have a series of nice GUI based dialog boxes that allow me to select the date and time of the recording as well as program name and recording length. It sticks all the info in cron and the show is scheduled. Pause live TV? Just click the "pausetv" icon on the button dock and Xine launches while I have a 'cat/dev/video >/mnt/video1/Pause.mpg' process running in the background. After a slight delay, Xine just starts playing the Pause.mpg file as it's being recorded. I can pause the program at any time and pick up where I left of or go back. When I exit Xine, I'm even asked if I want to rename Pause.mpg to save it for later. And ALL of the playback functions whether it's from the capture card, MPG, AVI or WMV files or a DVD can be stopped using the kb shortcuts. "Q" always gets you out of trouble by quitting Xine no matter what. Music playback and Photos are all handled by the software that comes with Fedora.
My wife loves the new system since she feels it's the easiest I've ever set up. The real key is to put down the pretenses that this box is anything more than a computer. For my next trick, I'll be completely eliminating any TV or stereo gear from this setup. The TV gets replaced by a much higher quality display LCD computer monitor. The Yamaha 5.1 amp is getting replaced with an amp of my own design that will just be an amp leaving all the preamp features to Gnome's Mixer applet. Can't get any easier than that...
I like shiny things with power and flexibility. That's why I use Linux with Enlightenment... However, no one can say that Apple doesn't win the "shiny and powerful" battle. They're very close on the felxibility too now that I can compile and run most *nix software on OS X.
Re:Sorry, but that is just plain wrong.
on
BBC Launches APIs
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I'm sure the Beeb has it's problems. But compared to the crapfest we have here on 500 channels that we have to pay much higher rates for, you lot have it really good. As it is I pay nearly $600 a year ( I think that's around £275-300 a year) for what works out in reality to be 67 channels (DirecTV "Plus" package). Out of those 67, the local channels are not included unless I want to pay another $72 a year. The other thing is that they make the claim that you get all these channels when most of them are special pay-per-view channels that charge between $2.50 and $11.00 for ablock of programming that ranges from two to four hours. The digital music channels aren't terribly good either and they take up a good 30-40 channel slots our of the total of "500 channels".
But beyond the monetary side of things, the quality of the programming and the genres in America are awful. On the one hand we have the ever ubiquitous "reality TV" which is usually much more gratiuitously cheap and tawdry than some of the British reality shows. I get much more of a kick out of watching "Faking It" or Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Disasters than I do the ridiculous Survivor or Bachelor shite we're stuck with. I also love the mystery genre. There are no American mysteries that can compete with Murder in Mind, Wire in the Blood, Waking the Dead or even Jonathon Creek. Our CSI series is a little to heavy on the ass kicking and soap opera angles to appeal to me. Although I will say I didn't like Red Cap much. It seemed a little too American in a way.
I know it's all subjective and many of the shows I like from the U.K. probably produce many of the same complaints there that I have of many of our shows. I honestly haven't watched American network TV since about 2002, it's that bad. That's why I don't pay that extra $6.00 a month for local/network stations. The other thing is that British programs have much more educated references than American shows. Any time I have caught a glimpse of our latest network travesties, all I've seen are people making fools of themselves for money on the reality programs. That seems to be VERY popular at the moment. Very few people in America would get subtle cultural references in the way that Brits do, so our programs have to be dumbed down. It's annoying and embarassing. Of course, with all of that said, it's also "just television". Now, I'm off to see if I can dig up "Round the Horne" radio clips...:)
I refer to this country as "the States" because I've never really felt like I've belonged. I'm an anglophile at heart as well. And... "amongst" is used by those of us who think it sounds better. However, I really am an American. Born here in the 70s and raised here.
...that the Beeb has got it right. In the media business, the focus should be on content generation and the flexibility of form in media. Who cares about market share or sales or ratings, when you are truly focused on creating content and sparking creativity amongst the viewers/readers/listeners, etc... This is why the quality of everything the BBC produces is of the highest caliber. The closest thing we have here in the states is the poorly underfunded PBS and NPR networks. The day that the Republicans decided to rip away government funding from PBS was a dark day indeed and we're still paying for it in every sense of the word. Discovery and TLC don't even come close to what PBS used to be able to offer when it got better governement funding. Kudos to the BBC for showing the rest of the world how good it could be.
Coprophiles and coprophages would probably jump at the chance to work in the sewers. People with other forms of paraphilia may be interested in the trash removal industry. As far as telephone sanitizers go... they should all be shipped off first on the B ark so that we could be assured of having clean telephones when we arrive on our new homeworld. You see? There is a solution for every problem.
The main point is that I've never seen a PC (outside of the largely vaporous Liebermann Computers) that has even come close to the physical style of an Apple Mac case that didn't look like a cheap and kludgy knockoff. Regarding the OS experience, Windows XP can't even come close to the performance of Mac OS X in terms of smooth graphical beauty or even grace under pressure. Even Mac OS X's hard crash messages are much more human centered with an aesthetic quality that Microsoft will never comprehend. No ugly BSODs in Mac OS X land.
One of my coworkers and I managed to get the new Mac to crash hard while trying to remotely run an X app. Instead of the screen getting messed up or getting an ugly blue screen with some cryptic message, we were presented with a beautifully rendered error messagage in a translucent smoke grey text box that said something more sensible than the usual "access violation" or what have you. Instead it basically said, "Your system must be restarted because of a problem. Please press the power button..." etc... Much nicer IMNSHO.
So the Windows/PC camp fails on both the finesse and elegance of the hardware and the beauty and clean responsiveness of the GUI experience.
Sarcasm noted.:) However, sitting here looking at the shiny new Mac G5 (with 20" wide screen LCD) we got in our office yesterday sitting next to a pathetic Compaq Evo Tower with a Compaq flatscreen 17" LCD monitor, I think I can safely say that Apple will always be ahead of MS in the innovation department. It doesn't matter is it's 1984, 1994, or 2004. Apple has always been ahead with both technological and aesthetic innovation. In 1984, they got the GUI desktop right for that day and age. Microsoft didn't even come close until 1995 and even then they were still clunky. With the advent of Mac OS X and the real *nix under the hood, Apple has again "got it right". They have taken the robustness and well planned design of Unix and placed the luxurious and flawless GUI born of the old Mac and NeXT and produced the perfect OS.
Considering Steve Jobs affinity for things that "don't suck", I don't think he'll be caught unawares by Gates and Co. If the buying public wants a converged media and communications device, you can bet that Apple will get there first. Microsoft will do what they've always done: imitate when the pricepoint can be made more palatable to the masses. Apple doesn't jump on bandwagons like MS does, they build bandwagons and drive them around town.
Hehehe... and imagine that! I'm a Linux user and I still think Apple does computers better than MS.:)
Why was backing up one drive to another a bad idea? I'm just curious because I do the same thing here at home. I have about 250 gigs on one striped LVM set that I sync up with rsync nighlty. That way if the one set dies, I still have the other set. The worst I'm out is a day's worth of data.
Hmmm... care to show us any free of charge resources that are better than Google for web searching and high capacity mail storage? What about really nice mapping features like maps.google.com? Or is your stock portfolio so tied in with your autonomic brain functions that you need to keep shilling for either Yahoo or Microsoft since they are the ones who are hardcore anti-Google?
In other news... there IS already Fedora for 64-bit. I haven't tried it yet, but as soon as I get my dual Opteron system going, you can bet I'll be switching.
Speaking as Captain Obvious, I;d like to say, Well played sir!! You're response to the GPP could have been more... obvious? Hehehe. I love to give a good rugburn.;P
Hehehe... actually I rail on about greed quite a bit both on/. and in real life. It's one human trait that I would love to see eliminated from humanity while still retaining the positive qualities of motivation through need. Of course since I'm not a geneticist/dictator I can't do anything about that negative quality in humanity.:)
I don't think there is anything wrong with people trying to make money from their work. I just think it's wrong when they think that the amount they get isn't enough and they do everything they can (even if it's unethical) to tip the balance in their favor. This can range from legal games like the IP wars to licensing practices that attempt to squeeze out alternatives. (Like MS telling major PC vendors that they would raise the licensing costs of Windows if they started selling PCs with Linux as an optional OS).
If people were truly honest with their approach to making money with their work, they would happily accept whatever the market deemed the value of their work was worth. But many people never seem to do that...
That's kind of a frightening prospect. It implies that what we have is a world made of people who don't honestly enjoy their professions. I know that this is true, but it's not a good reflection on the state of the human race. Of course, I'm not advocating selflessness as a motivation. I'm simply saying that people should love their jobs otherwise they should try to find something more suitable to their personalities even if it means less money.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement. I'm just wondering out loud. Why does this stuff always have to come down to money? It would be great if we could just dump all the business interests from computing and just focus on making great software. I do this stuff because I love it and making money from it just happens to be incidental. To me, it's a lot like being a musician. You are either a musician who makes music because you love music, or you're a hack who gets into music to "make it big" and get paid. Personally, I associate myself with the more honest make music (or software) because you like doing it. If you happen to make money then consider yourself lucky.
...that every time Microsoft introduces a "new" version of their Windows platform for another hardware platform, that it MUST come with some version of Word and Excel? I mean think about it... This version of Windows is supposed to unify multiple mobile devices, including things like phones. I don't know about you, but I long for the day when a phone is JUST a phone. I don't want to go typing up Word documents on it for crying out loud!!! That's just plain stupid! If I want to do text entry, just allow me to use something useful like Dasher and combine it with plain text notepad. It's not like I can't take that text and cut and paste it into Word when I get back to my desk. (Or more likely, Writer from the wonderful OpenOffice.org suite) Microsoft has been beating this concept of Windows everywhere to death. And in many cases Windows is just not a good fit. At least not until those knuckledraggers realise that they need a better interface than stylus or pen...
And the hundreds of dollars that computer cost could have gone a long way helping less fortunate people who don't even have electricity, let alone computers - and who might disapprove of your selfish hoarding.
I would not be opposed to giving away a computer to someone who needed it (ie. can't afford one because they are living in poverty). I would simply give it away and work towards getting another one. It's a luxury item for most people. And believe me, I've had to work hard to buy computer hardware, so it's definitely a luxury item. It just so happens that my career involves computers.
I do, of course. But... the standard metric is based on how much of a resource I need in practical terms. For instance, where I live (The Greater Cleveland Area in Ohio), and with the kind of things I typically do just in general, I would cap off my needed salary at $75,000. I'm not near that at all, but if I ever made that much, I'd be perfectly willing to give up anything beyond that to a good cause (public schools for example). I don't need any more than that. That is a reasonable and practical point of view taking the cost of living into account. Anything beyond that $75,000 is not needed. If people were reasonable, they'd be able to identify what they don't need. (Yachts, cruises, SUVs, mansions, etc... are not needs)
Lay off the sauce. If you want to be a "shelfish bastard" that's your own lookout. But, supporting the right to be a "selfish bastard" is just like supporting the right to be a murder or rapist. There is nothing good about selfishness when it doesn't serve the needs of society as a whole.
A lot of this comes from my belief that every human on the planet should have a good life, where good life = being happy and not having to worry about the basic necessities of life. It excludes extravagance. Having a home that costs $300,000 in the midwest is extravagant. Having a flat screen TV on the wall is extravagant. If someone wants those things they should have to work hard for them. If those things are easy to acquire, then they have more than enough funds to share. Just a simple example anyway.
Wow. The responses I got for this post are exactly what I expected. Mostly people shaking their fists in the air rattling on about communism. At least you didn't do that, so I will respond.
Sharing is not voluntary, it's a moral obligation. I'm more than willing to share the things that I have and freely give away things that I have more than enough of. What's the point in my keeping more of a resource than I need? I can see keeping alittle in reserve for the potential that I may need more of a resource later. But anything more than that is selfish hoarding. The way I see it, there is only one thing that we are all here for: to help each other. If some people can't be bothered to help others who are less fotunate out, then they are typically the root cause of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
...who take their instapunditry too seriously. But you got the Mein Kampf part right.
Said in Beavis Cornholio voice: "Are you thrrrrreatening me"?
This is an excellent point. If anyone should be running business (or society in general), it should be the scientists, artists and academics. They are typically not blinded by avarice in the sameway that the average businessman is. Profit is useful, but it should never be the main motivation for doing something. The main motivation should be the further development of mankind so that the totality of the species may expand beyond the confines of our primitive solar system. The improvements to our cultures should not only be in the technology arena, but also in social and behavioral aspects. The goal should be to stamp out fear, greed and selfishness and replace them with a thirst for knowledge, a deeper understanding of the benefits of cooperation over competition, and a strong awareness of our responsibility to those around us.
Sadly, we have let our society be taken over by the common criminal's desire for material wealth with no reasonable limits. Fortunately, not everyone thinks this way and many of us attempt to rise above that archaic mode of thinking. We see the value in cooperation and how making top dollar does little to further the species. Capitalism has served it's purpose, but it is not scaling well as the means of information production becomes ubiquitous. IP laws and software patents are not there to protect you unless you are a big enough software business to afford the lawyers. This is not right or just. Source code is merely the analogue to a recipe, the compilers, linkers, etc... are the cooking utensils. No one has set out to restrict what you can cook, so why should they restrict what you write for your computer? Is it illegal to make a hamburger at home? Did McDonald's set out to keep people from stealing the hmburger from their virttual monopoly? No. So all this talk of software patents is pure rubbish and legal tacticsto keep the power inthe richest hands. The time has come to destroy this system of control. I plan to continue writing code in any way I see fit in order to do what I need to do with my machines. No corporations are going to stop me even if they wish to brand me a criminal. Sometimes you just have to stand up for what you believe in. I believe that computers are tools and my ideas are free.
...searching for potential terrorist secrets:
;P
I feel it's my duty as a true American to give the Feds a tip on a concept that's widely dispersed in various places throughout the internets. This secret tehnology has been placed in everything from chocolate chip recipes to plumbing manuals, but if put in the wrong hands and used in combination with a few other technologies, it could be use to take down a jet airliner. In fact, it even appears to have been use in an indirect way during the 9/11 incident.
Here it is: Take two objects (should be sticks or flints, but there are other objects) and rub them together until you get either a spark or smoke. You can tell if you're doing this properly because you should start seeing smoke before you eventually see this horrific technology make it's appearance.
In other terms: "The secret is to bag the rocks together guys"!
You have illustrated the other aspect to this: different strokes for different folks. ;) There is no one interface that wil satisfy everyone as we all know. But, I would say that far more people are familiar with WIMP than most AV equipment interfaces. So it would take less time to learn to operate such a device. And the KB/Mouse combo is handled nicely by a wireless integrated device. Even better if you had custom Xine compatible labels for each key.
Off topic: Now as far as the complexity of the scripting goes. They're actually extremely simple. Not something the average Joe could deal with making, but certainly a web designer who can handle CGI could do it. The funny thing about that for me is that I get frightened every time I'm faced with HTML. But give me C, Perl or Bash and it's easy as pie. No one I know can comprehend that. I think it has to do with the return on the investment of time. HTML takes me hours to do successfully if I want something good looking. Tables terrify me to no end because I know I'll have massive "debugging" sessions to get them to work just right. But with an actual scripting or coding language, there is structure and form and hierarchy. Again, it's differet strokes for different folks.
It's not a media center, it's just a computer with some added software to try and simplify things. The problem is that in many cases the simplification leads to an interface that is foreign to the user. It's somewhere halfway between a VCR or DVD player menu system and a GUI. Not good.
/dev/video > /mnt/video1/Pause.mpg' process running in the background. After a slight delay, Xine just starts playing the Pause.mpg file as it's being recorded. I can pause the program at any time and pick up where I left of or go back. When I exit Xine, I'm even asked if I want to rename Pause.mpg to save it for later. And ALL of the playback functions whether it's from the capture card, MPG, AVI or WMV files or a DVD can be stopped using the kb shortcuts. "Q" always gets you out of trouble by quitting Xine no matter what. Music playback and Photos are all handled by the software that comes with Fedora.
Considering how many people these days are VERY familiar with the W.I.M.P. (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) paradigm, there is no need to disguise what these boxes really are unless you are trying to create a very limited use appliance like a Tivo or iPod.
With that in mind, my home theater PC is just a Celeron (P4 family) running Fedora Core 3, Xine (which does nearly everything) and a Hauppaugue PVR250 card (which is perfect for this sort of thing). I wrote some scripts and created some icons to match and my wife finds this WAYYYY easier than the VCR menus system, the Windows ME based system we had before and you know why? She looked at it and said, "Oh, it works like a computer. This is easy'. I've been running like this since about February. It's perfect. Click on one icon and the system becomes a "TV". Hit "Q" (thanks to Xine's extensive kb shortcuts) and you're back to the desktop. Watch a DVD? Just pop it in the drive and Fedora's MagicDev application will launch my "playdvd" script which automatically starts a fullscreen Xine session and starts playing the DVD with full menu navigation support, etc...
Schedule a recording? Just click the scheduler icon and thanks to the magic of Gnome 2.x's Zenity add on, I have a series of nice GUI based dialog boxes that allow me to select the date and time of the recording as well as program name and recording length. It sticks all the info in cron and the show is scheduled. Pause live TV? Just click the "pausetv" icon on the button dock and Xine launches while I have a 'cat
My wife loves the new system since she feels it's the easiest I've ever set up. The real key is to put down the pretenses that this box is anything more than a computer. For my next trick, I'll be completely eliminating any TV or stereo gear from this setup. The TV gets replaced by a much higher quality display LCD computer monitor. The Yamaha 5.1 amp is getting replaced with an amp of my own design that will just be an amp leaving all the preamp features to Gnome's Mixer applet. Can't get any easier than that...
I like shiny things with power and flexibility. That's why I use Linux with Enlightenment... However, no one can say that Apple doesn't win the "shiny and powerful" battle. They're very close on the felxibility too now that I can compile and run most *nix software on OS X.
I'm sure the Beeb has it's problems. But compared to the crapfest we have here on 500 channels that we have to pay much higher rates for, you lot have it really good. As it is I pay nearly $600 a year ( I think that's around £275-300 a year) for what works out in reality to be 67 channels (DirecTV "Plus" package). Out of those 67, the local channels are not included unless I want to pay another $72 a year. The other thing is that they make the claim that you get all these channels when most of them are special pay-per-view channels that charge between $2.50 and $11.00 for ablock of programming that ranges from two to four hours. The digital music channels aren't terribly good either and they take up a good 30-40 channel slots our of the total of "500 channels".
:)
But beyond the monetary side of things, the quality of the programming and the genres in America are awful. On the one hand we have the ever ubiquitous "reality TV" which is usually much more gratiuitously cheap and tawdry than some of the British reality shows. I get much more of a kick out of watching "Faking It" or Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Disasters than I do the ridiculous Survivor or Bachelor shite we're stuck with. I also love the mystery genre. There are no American mysteries that can compete with Murder in Mind, Wire in the Blood, Waking the Dead or even Jonathon Creek. Our CSI series is a little to heavy on the ass kicking and soap opera angles to appeal to me. Although I will say I didn't like Red Cap much. It seemed a little too American in a way.
I know it's all subjective and many of the shows I like from the U.K. probably produce many of the same complaints there that I have of many of our shows. I honestly haven't watched American network TV since about 2002, it's that bad. That's why I don't pay that extra $6.00 a month for local/network stations. The other thing is that British programs have much more educated references than American shows. Any time I have caught a glimpse of our latest network travesties, all I've seen are people making fools of themselves for money on the reality programs. That seems to be VERY popular at the moment. Very few people in America would get subtle cultural references in the way that Brits do, so our programs have to be dumbed down. It's annoying and embarassing. Of course, with all of that said, it's also "just television". Now, I'm off to see if I can dig up "Round the Horne" radio clips...
I refer to this country as "the States" because I've never really felt like I've belonged. I'm an anglophile at heart as well. And... "amongst" is used by those of us who think it sounds better. However, I really am an American. Born here in the 70s and raised here.
...that the Beeb has got it right. In the media business, the focus should be on content generation and the flexibility of form in media. Who cares about market share or sales or ratings, when you are truly focused on creating content and sparking creativity amongst the viewers/readers/listeners, etc... This is why the quality of everything the BBC produces is of the highest caliber. The closest thing we have here in the states is the poorly underfunded PBS and NPR networks. The day that the Republicans decided to rip away government funding from PBS was a dark day indeed and we're still paying for it in every sense of the word. Discovery and TLC don't even come close to what PBS used to be able to offer when it got better governement funding. Kudos to the BBC for showing the rest of the world how good it could be.
Coprophiles and coprophages would probably jump at the chance to work in the sewers. People with other forms of paraphilia may be interested in the trash removal industry. As far as telephone sanitizers go... they should all be shipped off first on the B ark so that we could be assured of having clean telephones when we arrive on our new homeworld. You see? There is a solution for every problem.
The main point is that I've never seen a PC (outside of the largely vaporous Liebermann Computers) that has even come close to the physical style of an Apple Mac case that didn't look like a cheap and kludgy knockoff. Regarding the OS experience, Windows XP can't even come close to the performance of Mac OS X in terms of smooth graphical beauty or even grace under pressure. Even Mac OS X's hard crash messages are much more human centered with an aesthetic quality that Microsoft will never comprehend. No ugly BSODs in Mac OS X land.
One of my coworkers and I managed to get the new Mac to crash hard while trying to remotely run an X app. Instead of the screen getting messed up or getting an ugly blue screen with some cryptic message, we were presented with a beautifully rendered error messagage in a translucent smoke grey text box that said something more sensible than the usual "access violation" or what have you. Instead it basically said, "Your system must be restarted because of a problem. Please press the power button..." etc... Much nicer IMNSHO.
So the Windows/PC camp fails on both the finesse and elegance of the hardware and the beauty and clean responsiveness of the GUI experience.
Sarcasm noted. :) However, sitting here looking at the shiny new Mac G5 (with 20" wide screen LCD) we got in our office yesterday sitting next to a pathetic Compaq Evo Tower with a Compaq flatscreen 17" LCD monitor, I think I can safely say that Apple will always be ahead of MS in the innovation department. It doesn't matter is it's 1984, 1994, or 2004. Apple has always been ahead with both technological and aesthetic innovation. In 1984, they got the GUI desktop right for that day and age. Microsoft didn't even come close until 1995 and even then they were still clunky. With the advent of Mac OS X and the real *nix under the hood, Apple has again "got it right". They have taken the robustness and well planned design of Unix and placed the luxurious and flawless GUI born of the old Mac and NeXT and produced the perfect OS.
:)
Considering Steve Jobs affinity for things that "don't suck", I don't think he'll be caught unawares by Gates and Co. If the buying public wants a converged media and communications device, you can bet that Apple will get there first. Microsoft will do what they've always done: imitate when the pricepoint can be made more palatable to the masses. Apple doesn't jump on bandwagons like MS does, they build bandwagons and drive them around town.
Hehehe... and imagine that! I'm a Linux user and I still think Apple does computers better than MS.
:) Yes. That's the intents. Unfortunately, the money mongers keep ruining things by interfering where they are not welcome.
Why was backing up one drive to another a bad idea? I'm just curious because I do the same thing here at home. I have about 250 gigs on one striped LVM set that I sync up with rsync nighlty. That way if the one set dies, I still have the other set. The worst I'm out is a day's worth of data.
Hmmm... care to show us any free of charge resources that are better than Google for web searching and high capacity mail storage? What about really nice mapping features like maps.google.com? Or is your stock portfolio so tied in with your autonomic brain functions that you need to keep shilling for either Yahoo or Microsoft since they are the ones who are hardcore anti-Google?
In other news... there IS already Fedora for 64-bit. I haven't tried it yet, but as soon as I get my dual Opteron system going, you can bet I'll be switching.
Speaking as Captain Obvious, I;d like to say, Well played sir!! You're response to the GPP could have been more... obvious? Hehehe. I love to give a good rugburn. ;P
Hehehe... actually I rail on about greed quite a bit both on /. and in real life. It's one human trait that I would love to see eliminated from humanity while still retaining the positive qualities of motivation through need. Of course since I'm not a geneticist/dictator I can't do anything about that negative quality in humanity. :)
I don't think there is anything wrong with people trying to make money from their work. I just think it's wrong when they think that the amount they get isn't enough and they do everything they can (even if it's unethical) to tip the balance in their favor. This can range from legal games like the IP wars to licensing practices that attempt to squeeze out alternatives. (Like MS telling major PC vendors that they would raise the licensing costs of Windows if they started selling PCs with Linux as an optional OS).
If people were truly honest with their approach to making money with their work, they would happily accept whatever the market deemed the value of their work was worth. But many people never seem to do that...
That's kind of a frightening prospect. It implies that what we have is a world made of people who don't honestly enjoy their professions. I know that this is true, but it's not a good reflection on the state of the human race. Of course, I'm not advocating selflessness as a motivation. I'm simply saying that people should love their jobs otherwise they should try to find something more suitable to their personalities even if it means less money.
I'm not disagreeing with your statement. I'm just wondering out loud. Why does this stuff always have to come down to money? It would be great if we could just dump all the business interests from computing and just focus on making great software. I do this stuff because I love it and making money from it just happens to be incidental. To me, it's a lot like being a musician. You are either a musician who makes music because you love music, or you're a hack who gets into music to "make it big" and get paid. Personally, I associate myself with the more honest make music (or software) because you like doing it. If you happen to make money then consider yourself lucky.
...that every time Microsoft introduces a "new" version of their Windows platform for another hardware platform, that it MUST come with some version of Word and Excel? I mean think about it... This version of Windows is supposed to unify multiple mobile devices, including things like phones. I don't know about you, but I long for the day when a phone is JUST a phone. I don't want to go typing up Word documents on it for crying out loud!!! That's just plain stupid! If I want to do text entry, just allow me to use something useful like Dasher and combine it with plain text notepad. It's not like I can't take that text and cut and paste it into Word when I get back to my desk. (Or more likely, Writer from the wonderful OpenOffice.org suite) Microsoft has been beating this concept of Windows everywhere to death. And in many cases Windows is just not a good fit. At least not until those knuckledraggers realise that they need a better interface than stylus or pen...
I would not be opposed to giving away a computer to someone who needed it (ie. can't afford one because they are living in poverty). I would simply give it away and work towards getting another one. It's a luxury item for most people. And believe me, I've had to work hard to buy computer hardware, so it's definitely a luxury item. It just so happens that my career involves computers.
I do, of course. But... the standard metric is based on how much of a resource I need in practical terms. For instance, where I live (The Greater Cleveland Area in Ohio), and with the kind of things I typically do just in general, I would cap off my needed salary at $75,000. I'm not near that at all, but if I ever made that much, I'd be perfectly willing to give up anything beyond that to a good cause (public schools for example). I don't need any more than that. That is a reasonable and practical point of view taking the cost of living into account. Anything beyond that $75,000 is not needed. If people were reasonable, they'd be able to identify what they don't need. (Yachts, cruises, SUVs, mansions, etc... are not needs)
Lay off the sauce. If you want to be a "shelfish bastard" that's your own lookout. But, supporting the right to be a "selfish bastard" is just like supporting the right to be a murder or rapist. There is nothing good about selfishness when it doesn't serve the needs of society as a whole.
A lot of this comes from my belief that every human on the planet should have a good life, where good life = being happy and not having to worry about the basic necessities of life. It excludes extravagance. Having a home that costs $300,000 in the midwest is extravagant. Having a flat screen TV on the wall is extravagant. If someone wants those things they should have to work hard for them. If those things are easy to acquire, then they have more than enough funds to share. Just a simple example anyway.
Wow. The responses I got for this post are exactly what I expected. Mostly people shaking their fists in the air rattling on about communism. At least you didn't do that, so I will respond.
Sharing is not voluntary, it's a moral obligation. I'm more than willing to share the things that I have and freely give away things that I have more than enough of. What's the point in my keeping more of a resource than I need? I can see keeping alittle in reserve for the potential that I may need more of a resource later. But anything more than that is selfish hoarding. The way I see it, there is only one thing that we are all here for: to help each other. If some people can't be bothered to help others who are less fotunate out, then they are typically the root cause of the problem.