Thanks for helping me, however unwittingly, to make my point. If one never forgets, one cannot enter the culture at large in an intimate way.
I am sorry I did not add to the recipe that we first be in perfect physical and mental health. I do not believe happiness can be achieved without good health first and foremost.
One must forget one's childhood, take on the cloak of civilization, and, then shed it and be re-born as a baby. Or, as Lao-Tzu said, "one must unlearn everything one has learned." He did not say one must never learn anything at all.
as remembering our lives before about three years old.
Why is it we consider it normal to have "blacked out" our entire childhoods, when such a blackout is considered a symptom of psychosis?
Could our culture itself be psychotic? If so, what would be the symptoms of a psychotic culture? Frequent wars, famines, early sickness and death, personalized unhappiness, generalized misery, systematic abuse and periodic "ethnic cleansings"?
We are bigger than the culture that tries to confine and contain us, so we become folded, stapled and twisted when forced to "fit in."
Happiness is remembering our childhoods entire.
It is possible; I have done it.
We are not humans in search of a spritual experience, we are spirits out to find the human -- and happiness is nothing more or less than knowing this.
when he became afraid that Netscape could do this and decided to kill them before they did.
Gates is nothing if not far-sighted.
Disclaimer: only one (of five) of my computers runs ANY Microsoft product (Windows 98SE) -- and that one runs WordPerfect, not Office. RTF is fine with me.
In the sixties, there was another such push to make "deviant" sexual literature (sic) illegal -- notably the Tropic of Cancer and Lenny Bruce cases.
There was one organization whose methods approached those spoken of in TFA -- and it was headed up by one Charles Keating, who proposed that his ethical standards were so high they should become law.
Yes, the same Charles Keating convicted of felonies around the Lincoln Savings and Loan bailout/debacle.
I have been using Opera since ver. 2.xx, about nine years or so. I still use old hardware sometimes, and Firefox borks on PentiumII's, K6-2's and slower. Opera runs fine on very slow, memory-impaired hardware. And I know the keyboard shortcuts and 'gestures' by heart.
Firefox is nice, too. But I have used Opera for a long time (eschewing IE from its beginnings) and will continue to do so until something Firefox offers that Opera does not appears. So far, that hasn't happened.
Of course, if some generous/.er replaces my aging Dell M133 notebook with something faster, I may change my tune.
So who has the cahones to develop a standards-compliant web browser for this gui?
Already done: And it's GPLed. Get it here:
http://home.arachne.cz/
Also, Caldera's old DR-DOS 7.03 came with a DR-Webspy, a browser that ran, together with the OS, off a floppy.
Some years ago IBM marketed a browser based on an early Arachne with a more normal GUI.
An Open Source version of DesqView would make an excellent companion project to this, as that was the other popular environment of the day.
DesqView opened their binaries after they went defunct or were bought out several years ago. I d/led all the DV versions plus QEMMs (also opened at the time) and tried them in a DOSbox; they worked justs as I remembered them (but not in EMS IIRC). Isn't it funny how memories tend to gloss over difficulties?
Even using it running on DR-DOS 7.03 ("Musltitasking") did not help the single-threading.
Although I still use DOS regularly, I have just one question for this project: WHY?
I wanted to write a novel, so, having learned from friends what PCs could be made to do (automatic repagination, easy spellcheck and search-and-replace) I bought a used IBM XT2 (8086, 8MHz) with an upgraded 20-Mb hard disk and CGA graphics for less than a thou.
First thing I did was install WordPerfect-5.1 (brand new at the time) and mock up a novel-sized document. I then scrolled to the end. I would have sworn it had frozen had the green disk-in-use light not been blinking steadily. I waited for several minutes for it to get to the end (300 pages) and, impatient, left the stopwatch running on the desk next to the puter, went out to dinner, came back hours later only to find the disk access light still flickering regularly.
Round about midnight, the light's rhythm had changed dramatically, blinking more brightly but less often, and then, WHAM, before my eyes, the last line of the mockup test text appeared!
Lo and behold, it took a little more than six hours to scroll to the end of a 75-thousand word text.
I was hooked on making a faster PC right then.
PS: I am using a fairly modern PC to write this: a Duron 750 with a exactly a thousand times as much RAM (640 Mb) which should be enough for word processing, being ten thousand or so time as fast as the XT2 was, but using the outline feature in Abiword-2.2.x installed on Feather and loaded completely into RAM brings the PC's CPU to its knees, making me wait for updates and scrolling slowly and unevenly, even though there is no swap space being used.
...in 1957 or thereabouts when I was a high school student (yes, I am retired now.) A GM spokesman on career day (I believe he came down from Detroit) flatly stated there will never be more than three viable motorcar manufacturers worldwide because "there isn't enough capital" to build a company to compete with them, Ford and Chrysler. Of the three, GM had more than fifty per cent market share.
This was in precisely the same year that Soichiro Honda, who only recently had started a company that mated washing machine motors to bicycle frames, showed his first car at the Tokyo motor show, its chain drive revealing its origins.
Talk about hubris!
Based on this, I would rather predict dozens if not hundreds of dominant OSes in the next hundred years or less.
"How often are studies successfully altered by funding agencies to conceal negative results?"
From my experience in other fields, this would be a regular occurrance.
At one time I was a chief engineer for a commercial AM radio station, a new construction in the same area that Marconi orignally used for his US experiments. After construction, field strength measurements showed excellent protection for the dominant station on the frequency about a hundred miles away -- in fact they were so good, they were at the lower limit of the theoretical values based on the data for the area published by the FCC.
So I signed off on the permit for permanent license. But management would not allow the data to be sent. Their argument was that the values found could not be duplicated by another engineer and might change due to climate change, raising or lowering of the aquifer, etc. and would I raise the values in the application?
In fact, I was being asked to change the data of an experiment, which data was to be sent to the FCC, where it would be added to the data provided by others. Thinking the pool of data the FCC uses might be polluted by political rather than scientific considerations, I refigured my results using Marconi's old values instead of the FCC's and found Marconi's values fit the experiment MUCH better than the FCC's.
The answer is, YES, data are changed routinely. I am only glad the atomic clock and the meter stick cannot easily be played with for political gain.
Trust the governemt's data NOT. It will just get you involved in a metaphorical Iraq, looking for WMDs.
IIRC the backlight on the screen is the single largest power consumer; there have been announcements of recent minor breakthroughs on this front.
Reducing CPU power consumption is near the top of Intel and AMD's priorities lists, according to what I've (been allowed to) read.
If the first two can be reduced by, say, fifty-to-seventy-five per cent each, then the power savings of a flash drive over a mechanical one will become almost mandatory. Batteries are not only expensive, hard on the environment, but heavy. A good percentage of a laptop's mass and bulk is because of batteries.
Using less power would let us carry smaller batteries and smaller, lighter and less expensive devices.
And it could still leave the option of carrying a modern laptop load (about 9 pounds for fully-configured ones) that would allow uptimes on battery measured in days....
This, indeed, looks like a viable breakthrough once the early-adopters have brought down the price by voting with their dollars.
I've been using Puppy for a while; it's my distro of choice. Why? Many reasons have been given, but IT JUST WORKS out of the box.
For one example, last week I had SBC-Yahoo! DSL service started. It took two phone calls to SBC help to install (under Windows 98SE) the CD-ROM programs SBC bundled with, including a user name change and downloading IE-6 (which I would never, ever use) and allowing it to become my default browser. When all was done, I was told I had to reset the modem to the new username/pwd combo, which I did, all the while wondering how my Puppy would withstand the changes.
The answer was: Windows should be so easy. All it took was to click on the Ethernet/Network Wizard and choose DHCP -- and I was connected to SBC-Yahoo! with no further work and no need to reconcile a username/pwd for SBC-Yahoo! DSL.
Everything works and works together. I can make a graphic in Sodipodi and print it on a dead tree, or incorporate it into a document page in Scribus for typesetting or in Mozilla Composer or Abiword for export as htm.
If I highlight a selection of part of a URL and paste it into Mozilla Composer, it comes out looking like a real html page with no further work on my part, just like the 35-meg Mozilla installations I am used to.
There is a small database and Gaby, a personal db. Spreadsheets. A unit conversion utility (one of my main needs) and a choice of calculators.
I am using puppy right now to write this.
Nothing beats its speed, either (Duron 750 w/640 Mb RAM). Mozilla opens on first boot in less than two seconds (timed with a stopwatch!)
And if you're interested in security, its linux nature, needlessness of a hard disk and ability to physically possess all your data and applications is reassuring.
Plus it comes with exactly the applications I have been using for years under Red Hat-6.2: gFTP, Sylpheed mail, ytree file manager (in Pup-get archives) Sodipodi, Mozilla, Scribus. And did I mention it's the fastest OS I've ever used (with the exception of DOS-5 on an early Pentium) and IT JUST WORKS?
Being a critical reader is not just asking, "is this story true". Nowadays, it's asking, "Why was this story published?"
Good point, which I would like to amplify.
Use your reasoning to explain why the New York Times published a "study" that purported to announce two social scientists working for the U of O(hio) had developed a system whereby they can determine the IQ of a writer by examining his/her syntax and vocabulary. The study found that J.F.K's IQ was (IIRC) 160, Jimmy Carters' was 150, Richard Nixon's was 135, Bill Clinton's was 175 and George Dubya Bush's was 90.
I had first seen the PR piece in an email a friend sent me (this friend is a rabid liberal Democrat); the NYT article was very slightly changed (if at all) from the email PR piece.
As a writer who has used (the original DOS) Grammatik and find it wondrous still (giving grade-level difficulty scores on text, reading ease, and other stats) I was curious as to what lengths this technology had been pushed to, so I researched the authors of the "study" and found they apparently had published nothing in the past. I then researched the scientific journal it had been published in and found that journal had gone defunct sometime in the '80s.
That took me all of ten or fifteen minutes, from home. Any NYT editor could (should) have been able to check on the facts in less time than that.
So why did they publish it? Do they have a partisan bias? Or have they simply descended to re-printing all the PR fluff that fits in their pages as you seem to suggest other papers do? I suspect the latter, but I have been wrong before.
But, one is not on safe ground assuming hidden agendas when simple incompetence can explain the phenomenon (Occam's Razor.)
Willie Brown has been out of office since the election of 2003. You may remember the new mayor, Gavin Newsome, made some waves by marrying gays on Valentine's Day last year.
The DMCA is hated in SF, whose City Council is investigating going WiFi city wide.
That same august body has decided, in its infinite wizdumb, to regulate blogs under the new federal election funding law called McCain-Feingold. Which is not the same as the DMCA. But I see your point.
SF in an unusally liberal city. Here, a conservative is someone who thinks prostitution ought to be legalized; the rest seem to think it ought to be made mandatory.
Just funnin' about that. ____________________ Anna Merikin -- the last heterosexual left in San Fracisco.
No offense taken. I tried to email this reply to you, but your email does not link to your name. But I feel a reply is necessary.
We have different opinions. The facts, however dramatically I put them, are the facts.
The Little Red Book I referred to is, of course, a metaphor for Mao's enforced view of the world. And he enforced the destruction of the former culture relentlessly. As you suggest, I was not in fact mode, I was in metaphor mode. Which is how one reads Chinese, by the way. I have, indeed, learned to write and read Chinese, although not enough characters to find it useful for general reading. Sometime if you like we can discuss in another forum what I've learned.
If you read my post as rhetoric, I think you will find we agree. There are several ongoing cultures, and, as you say, the I Ching was mainly a useful intellectual tool only for the cognocenti, but that is true for the high culture everywhere, throughout time. The I Ching is also a teaching tool for T'ai Chi (or WAS, before Mao) along with certain other books that Mao banned (The Hui Ming Ching, for example). T'ai Chi DOES have a deeper meaning, and its history, teachers, literature and art went to Taipei.
If you didn't see the humor in Ping-pong replacing T'ai Chi, then, perhaps humor is wasted on you -- no offense intended. Some people are humorless. I am sorry to have misled you. I stand by the insight in this metaphor, too.
Yes, the Cultural Revolution was much more important, long-term, than Collectivism, but Collectivism was revolutionary AT THE TIME and replaced feudalism, largely. Collectivism was an early tool Mao used to destroy the path back to the former culture.
(Besides, it sounded better in apposition to Confucianism! Puns are an important part of the Chinese language, and "Cultural Revolution" doesn't even remotely sound like either "Collectivism" nor "Confucianism.")
I can cerainly agree with what you posted. Can you find room to include my truth in your world view? It might be rewarding.
> the largest, oldest, in-tact cultures, such as China
It is very, very doubtful that any thoughtful Sinologist would agree with you; Mao burnt all the bridges to the past in 1948-9 when he defeated the kuomingtang and sent them off to Taiwan.
The I Ching was replaced by Mao's Little Red Book, Confucianism with Collectivism and T'ai Chi with ping-pong. Now, even the nature and detail of the written language is being revolutionized.
Congress made a law saying the FEC can write binding regulations. If the regulations are defective or unconstitutional, Congress or the courts can change them. Meanwhile, though, they're in effect.
Federal employees tend to want more and more power. So do the commissions they make up. Thus Congress mandated public rulesmaking procedures so people like/.ers and others who care can make their opposition heard. The FEC is just using this first draft as a trial balloon which, obviously crashed hard.
This is a strange process, and the first draft reminds me of the way we Europeans treated the Indian lands we came upon: Since white people have or might travel here, we need regulations to keep them safe....
Reread Brave New World. The values and civilization the natural people at the end achieved is called the Perennial Philosophy, and is very similar to Open Source or FSF.
Freedom is not granted by a well-crafted constitution; it must be seized!
Human perception varies widely. In the season he hit.406, Ted Williams, in answer to the question, "How do you hit so well?" replied, "I wait till the ball is as big as a watermelon and I can see the stitches and the printing on the hide and then I smack it."
To explain how he alone avoided a terrible accident around a blind curve during a Grand Prix roadrace, Juan Manuel Fangio explained that as he drifted around the turn at about 120 mph, he became aware that the crowd along the side of the track was not watching him, but had turned their faces ahead and that gave him the clue to slow down as there must have been big trouble in the curve.
Human perception varies greatly, or did I already say that?
I do not usually see flicker, but some CRTs are better or worse than others. I cannot tell the difference between smoothed fonts and others. But I can sure hear a tiny bit of distortion above 10kHz! Even so small an amount that others cannot detect it drives me into the pain zone, so I have to choose my audio components very carefully.
When Caldera was about to be de-listed b/c its stock was under one dollar a share for a while. I forget the time limit involved, but I remember a sudden and surprising legal settlement from MS over DR-DOS, which Caldera had inherited from Novell through R. Noorda, relisting, renaming, buying SCO, which in turn had been derived/obtained from Novell, and then suing everyone in sight in apparent hopes lightning would strike twice....
Boo this bad actor off the stage of decent (?) capitalist pigs, if there be such things.
Do NOT include the 1100 series, nor the cheap 4L, 5L, or 6L. I have no knowledge of the 1320, but the previously mentioned are all junk with respect to their page-pickers. HP had a free fix, but I guess it was only temporary, and the offer ended years ago.
The 1200 was good (PS for Linux/BSD/MAC). For those who only may need 600 dpi, the 4, 5, 6 M/P series printers are still available in good condition used....
After owning a 4L, 6L and 1100, I will stick with the 1200 I have now at all costs.
Unless I missed something obvious, the article never specifies why this release is important enough to warrant a/. article on its importance.
Great: a new ubuntu (I am just about to install the first one.) So I searched the article for ONE reason why I should skip Warty and download Hoary in vain.
Grumble, grumble... "The state of journalism nowadays...."
One of the main differences is that while Transmeta's chip had no market to speak of, there is a market waiting in the wings for this technology -- and it is mega-hella-huge: HDTV.
Within a flexibile timeframe, there is an inflexible truth -- there will be no popular analog TV broadcasts in the US. This cannot happen without the technologies in place for digital to replace analog TV. The market is, what, a couple of hundred million sets in the US, and a billion or so world-wide, eventually?
Do you think these computational-power hogs will run Opterons-in-massive-parallel? Me neither. They will run this or one of their soon-to-be-announced competitors. This is a humoungous market and it WILL exist. It is not vaporware. If IBM, Sony and Toshiba can piggyback on the development inventment for game players such a technical breakthrough, so much better for them.
This is not a replacement for the x86 chips or architechture, as I see it, but a totally new thing that MIGHT have use in general computing. Or it might not.
In any case the HDTV market will dwarf the PC market. In fact, the PC might just become a satellite of a HDTV system. At least I get the idea that's what Comcast and Viacom have in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
"I never forgot my childhood."
Thanks for helping me, however unwittingly, to make my point. If one never forgets, one cannot enter the culture at large in an intimate way.
I am sorry I did not add to the recipe that we first be in perfect physical and mental health. I do not believe happiness can be achieved without good health first and foremost.
One must forget one's childhood, take on the cloak of civilization, and, then shed it and be re-born as a baby. Or, as Lao-Tzu said, "one must unlearn everything one has learned." He did not say one must never learn anything at all.
as remembering our lives before about three years old.
Why is it we consider it normal to have "blacked out" our entire childhoods, when such a blackout is considered a symptom of psychosis?
Could our culture itself be psychotic? If so, what would be the symptoms of a psychotic culture? Frequent wars, famines, early sickness and death, personalized unhappiness, generalized misery, systematic abuse and periodic "ethnic cleansings"?
We are bigger than the culture that tries to confine and contain us, so we become folded, stapled and twisted when forced to "fit in."
Happiness is remembering our childhoods entire.
It is possible; I have done it.
We are not humans in search of a spritual experience, we are spirits out to find the human -- and happiness is nothing more or less than knowing this.
when he became afraid that Netscape could do this and decided to kill them before they did.
Gates is nothing if not far-sighted.
Disclaimer: only one (of five) of my computers runs ANY Microsoft product (Windows 98SE) -- and that one runs WordPerfect, not Office. RTF is fine with me.
In the sixties, there was another such push to make "deviant" sexual literature (sic) illegal -- notably the Tropic of Cancer and Lenny Bruce cases.
There was one organization whose methods approached those spoken of in TFA -- and it was headed up by one Charles Keating, who proposed that his ethical standards were so high they should become law.
Yes, the same Charles Keating convicted of felonies around the Lincoln Savings and Loan bailout/debacle.
Beware those who want to control your lives.
I have been using Opera since ver. 2.xx, about nine years or so. I still use old hardware sometimes, and Firefox borks on PentiumII's, K6-2's and slower. Opera runs fine on very slow, memory-impaired hardware. And I know the keyboard shortcuts and 'gestures' by heart.
/.er replaces my aging Dell M133 notebook with something faster, I may change my tune.
Firefox is nice, too. But I have used Opera for a long time (eschewing IE from its beginnings) and will continue to do so until something Firefox offers that Opera does not appears. So far, that hasn't happened.
Of course, if some generous
So who has the cahones to develop a standards-compliant web browser for this gui? Already done: And it's GPLed. Get it here: http://home.arachne.cz/ Also, Caldera's old DR-DOS 7.03 came with a DR-Webspy, a browser that ran, together with the OS, off a floppy. Some years ago IBM marketed a browser based on an early Arachne with a more normal GUI.
DesqView opened their binaries after they went defunct or were bought out several years ago. I d/led all the DV versions plus QEMMs (also opened at the time) and tried them in a DOSbox; they worked justs as I remembered them (but not in EMS IIRC). Isn't it funny how memories tend to gloss over difficulties? Even using it running on DR-DOS 7.03 ("Musltitasking") did not help the single-threading. Although I still use DOS regularly, I have just one question for this project: WHY?
I wanted to write a novel, so, having learned from friends what PCs could be made to do (automatic repagination, easy spellcheck and search-and-replace) I bought a used IBM XT2 (8086, 8MHz) with an upgraded 20-Mb hard disk and CGA graphics for less than a thou.
First thing I did was install WordPerfect-5.1 (brand new at the time) and mock up a novel-sized document. I then scrolled to the end. I would have sworn it had frozen had the green disk-in-use light not been blinking steadily. I waited for several minutes for it to get to the end (300 pages) and, impatient, left the stopwatch running on the desk next to the puter, went out to dinner, came back hours later only to find the disk access light still flickering regularly.
Round about midnight, the light's rhythm had changed dramatically, blinking more brightly but less often, and then, WHAM, before my eyes, the last line of the mockup test text appeared!
Lo and behold, it took a little more than six hours to scroll to the end of a 75-thousand word text.
I was hooked on making a faster PC right then.
PS: I am using a fairly modern PC to write this: a Duron 750 with a exactly a thousand times as much RAM (640 Mb) which should be enough for word processing, being ten thousand or so time as fast as the XT2 was, but using the outline feature in Abiword-2.2.x installed on Feather and loaded completely into RAM brings the PC's CPU to its knees, making me wait for updates and scrolling slowly and unevenly, even though there is no swap space being used.
Makes you think, doesn't it?
Several ways to try:
/dev/hdax/elive.iso /mnt/elive might work)
chroot to the ISO mounted as a loopback device (mount -t loop
Gujin bootloader on loopback
http://gujin.sourceforge.net/
Smart Boot Manager might find the kernel, too.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/btmgr/
Using a loopback, you won't need a whole partition to itself, but the filesystem sees the file (ISO) as a partition.
One might call the dropping of the price of MS's stock from above $120 to $20 within weeks of the judgment a negative result.
...in 1957 or thereabouts when I was a high school student (yes, I am retired now.) A GM spokesman on career day (I believe he came down from Detroit) flatly stated there will never be more than three viable motorcar manufacturers worldwide because "there isn't enough capital" to build a company to compete with them, Ford and Chrysler. Of the three, GM had more than fifty per cent market share.
This was in precisely the same year that Soichiro Honda, who only recently had started a company that mated washing machine motors to bicycle frames, showed his first car at the Tokyo motor show, its chain drive revealing its origins.
Talk about hubris!
Based on this, I would rather predict dozens if not hundreds of dominant OSes in the next hundred years or less.
"How often are studies successfully altered by funding agencies to conceal negative results?"
From my experience in other fields, this would be a regular occurrance.
At one time I was a chief engineer for a commercial AM radio station, a new construction in the same area that Marconi orignally used for his US experiments. After construction, field strength measurements showed excellent protection for the dominant station on the frequency about a hundred miles away -- in fact they were so good, they were at the lower limit of the theoretical values based on the data for the area published by the FCC.
So I signed off on the permit for permanent license. But management would not allow the data to be sent. Their argument was that the values found could not be duplicated by another engineer and might change due to climate change, raising or lowering of the aquifer, etc. and would I raise the values in the application?
In fact, I was being asked to change the data of an experiment, which data was to be sent to the FCC, where it would be added to the data provided by others. Thinking the pool of data the FCC uses might be polluted by political rather than scientific considerations, I refigured my results using Marconi's old values instead of the FCC's and found Marconi's values fit the experiment MUCH better than the FCC's.
The answer is, YES, data are changed routinely. I am only glad the atomic clock and the meter stick cannot easily be played with for political gain.
Trust the governemt's data NOT. It will just get you involved in a metaphorical Iraq, looking for WMDs.
IIRC the backlight on the screen is the single largest power consumer; there have been announcements of recent minor breakthroughs on this front.
Reducing CPU power consumption is near the top of Intel and AMD's priorities lists, according to what I've (been allowed to) read.
If the first two can be reduced by, say, fifty-to-seventy-five per cent each, then the power savings of a flash drive over a mechanical one will become almost mandatory. Batteries are not only expensive, hard on the environment, but heavy. A good percentage of a laptop's mass and bulk is because of batteries.
Using less power would let us carry smaller batteries and smaller, lighter and less expensive devices.
And it could still leave the option of carrying a modern laptop load (about 9 pounds for fully-configured ones) that would allow uptimes on battery measured in days....
This, indeed, looks like a viable breakthrough once the early-adopters have brought down the price by voting with their dollars.
I've been using Puppy for a while; it's my distro of choice. Why? Many reasons have been given, but IT JUST WORKS out of the box.
For one example, last week I had SBC-Yahoo! DSL service started. It took two phone calls to SBC help to install (under Windows 98SE) the CD-ROM programs SBC bundled with, including a user name change and downloading IE-6 (which I would never, ever use) and allowing it to become my default browser. When all was done, I was told I had to reset the modem to the new username/pwd combo, which I did, all the while wondering how my Puppy would withstand the changes.
The answer was: Windows should be so easy. All it took was to click on the Ethernet/Network Wizard and choose DHCP -- and I was connected to SBC-Yahoo! with no further work and no need to reconcile a username/pwd for SBC-Yahoo! DSL.
Everything works and works together. I can make a graphic in Sodipodi and print it on a dead tree, or incorporate it into a document page in Scribus for typesetting or in Mozilla Composer or Abiword for export as htm.
If I highlight a selection of part of a URL and paste it into Mozilla Composer, it comes out looking like a real html page with no further work on my part, just like the 35-meg Mozilla installations I am used to.
There is a small database and Gaby, a personal db. Spreadsheets. A unit conversion utility (one of my main needs) and a choice of calculators.
I am using puppy right now to write this.
Nothing beats its speed, either (Duron 750 w/640 Mb RAM). Mozilla opens on first boot in less than two seconds (timed with a stopwatch!)
And if you're interested in security, its linux nature, needlessness of a hard disk and ability to physically possess all your data and applications is reassuring.
Plus it comes with exactly the applications I have been using for years under Red Hat-6.2: gFTP, Sylpheed mail, ytree file manager (in Pup-get archives) Sodipodi, Mozilla, Scribus. And did I mention it's the fastest OS I've ever used (with the exception of DOS-5 on an early Pentium) and IT JUST WORKS?
Being a critical reader is not just asking, "is this story true". Nowadays, it's asking, "Why was this story published?"
Good point, which I would like to amplify.
Use your reasoning to explain why the New York Times published a "study" that purported to announce two social scientists working for the U of O(hio) had developed a system whereby they can determine the IQ of a writer by examining his/her syntax and vocabulary. The study found that J.F.K's IQ was (IIRC) 160, Jimmy Carters' was 150, Richard Nixon's was 135, Bill Clinton's was 175 and George Dubya Bush's was 90.
I had first seen the PR piece in an email a friend sent me (this friend is a rabid liberal Democrat); the NYT article was very slightly changed (if at all) from the email PR piece.
As a writer who has used (the original DOS) Grammatik and find it wondrous still (giving grade-level difficulty scores on text, reading ease, and other stats) I was curious as to what lengths this technology had been pushed to, so I researched the authors of the "study" and found they apparently had published nothing in the past. I then researched the scientific journal it had been published in and found that journal had gone defunct sometime in the '80s.
That took me all of ten or fifteen minutes, from home. Any NYT editor could (should) have been able to check on the facts in less time than that.
So why did they publish it? Do they have a partisan bias? Or have they simply descended to re-printing all the PR fluff that fits in their pages as you seem to suggest other papers do? I suspect the latter, but I have been wrong before.
But, one is not on safe ground assuming hidden agendas when simple incompetence can explain the phenomenon (Occam's Razor.)
Since I live in SF, let me clarify:
Willie Brown has been out of office since the election of 2003. You may remember the new mayor, Gavin Newsome, made some waves by marrying gays on Valentine's Day last year.
The DMCA is hated in SF, whose City Council is investigating going WiFi city wide.
That same august body has decided, in its infinite wizdumb, to regulate blogs under the new federal election funding law called McCain-Feingold. Which is not the same as the DMCA. But I see your point.
SF in an unusally liberal city. Here, a conservative is someone who thinks prostitution ought to be legalized; the rest seem to think it ought to be made mandatory.
Just funnin' about that.
____________________
Anna Merikin -- the last heterosexual left in San Fracisco.
makes me stronger.
--Nietsche
No offense taken. I tried to email this reply to you, but your email does not link to your name. But I feel a reply is necessary.
We have different opinions. The facts, however dramatically I put them, are the facts.
The Little Red Book I referred to is, of course, a metaphor for Mao's enforced view of the world. And he enforced the destruction of the former culture relentlessly. As you suggest, I was not in fact mode, I was in metaphor mode. Which is how one reads Chinese, by the way. I have, indeed, learned to write and read Chinese, although not enough characters to find it useful for general reading. Sometime if you like we can discuss in another forum what I've learned.
If you read my post as rhetoric, I think you will find we agree. There are several ongoing cultures, and, as you say, the I Ching was mainly a useful intellectual tool only for the cognocenti, but that is true for the high culture everywhere, throughout time. The I Ching is also a teaching tool for T'ai Chi (or WAS, before Mao) along with certain other books that Mao banned (The Hui Ming Ching, for example). T'ai Chi DOES have a deeper meaning, and its history, teachers, literature and art went to Taipei.
If you didn't see the humor in Ping-pong replacing T'ai Chi, then, perhaps humor is wasted on you -- no offense intended. Some people are humorless. I am sorry to have misled you. I stand by the insight in this metaphor, too.
Yes, the Cultural Revolution was much more important, long-term, than Collectivism, but Collectivism was revolutionary AT THE TIME and replaced feudalism, largely. Collectivism was an early tool Mao used to destroy the path back to the former culture.
(Besides, it sounded better in apposition to Confucianism! Puns are an important part of the Chinese language, and "Cultural Revolution" doesn't even remotely sound like either "Collectivism" nor "Confucianism.")
I can cerainly agree with what you posted. Can you find room to include my truth in your world view? It might be rewarding.
> the largest, oldest, in-tact cultures, such as China
It is very, very doubtful that any thoughtful Sinologist would agree with you; Mao burnt all the bridges to the past in 1948-9 when he defeated the kuomingtang and sent them off to Taiwan.
The I Ching was replaced by Mao's Little Red Book, Confucianism with Collectivism and T'ai Chi with ping-pong. Now, even the nature and detail of the written language is being revolutionized.
How can you support your view in this light?
Congress made a law saying the FEC can write binding regulations. If the regulations are defective or unconstitutional, Congress or the courts can change them. Meanwhile, though, they're in effect.
/.ers and others who care can make their opposition heard. The FEC is just using this first draft as a trial balloon which, obviously crashed hard.
Federal employees tend to want more and more power. So do the commissions they make up. Thus Congress mandated public rulesmaking procedures so people like
This is a strange process, and the first draft reminds me of the way we Europeans treated the Indian lands we came upon: Since white people have or might travel here, we need regulations to keep them safe....
Reread Brave New World. The values and civilization the natural people at the end achieved is called the Perennial Philosophy, and is very similar to Open Source or FSF.
Freedom is not granted by a well-crafted constitution; it must be seized!
AnnaMerikin
Human perception varies widely. In the season he hit .406, Ted Williams, in answer to the question, "How do you hit so well?" replied, "I wait till the ball is as big as a watermelon and I can see the stitches and the printing on the hide and then I smack it."
To explain how he alone avoided a terrible accident around a blind curve during a Grand Prix roadrace, Juan Manuel Fangio explained that as he drifted around the turn at about 120 mph, he became aware that the crowd along the side of the track was not watching him, but had turned their faces ahead and that gave him the clue to slow down as there must have been big trouble in the curve.
Human perception varies greatly, or did I already say that?
I do not usually see flicker, but some CRTs are better or worse than others. I cannot tell the difference between smoothed fonts and others. But I can sure hear a tiny bit of distortion above 10kHz! Even so small an amount that others cannot detect it drives me into the pain zone, so I have to choose my audio components very carefully.
Human perception varies greatly.
When Caldera was about to be de-listed b/c its stock was under one dollar a share for a while. I forget the time limit involved, but I remember a sudden and surprising legal settlement from MS over DR-DOS, which Caldera had inherited from Novell through R. Noorda, relisting, renaming, buying SCO, which in turn had been derived/obtained from Novell, and then suing everyone in sight in apparent hopes lightning would strike twice....
Boo this bad actor off the stage of decent (?) capitalist pigs, if there be such things.
Do NOT include the 1100 series, nor the cheap 4L, 5L, or 6L. I have no knowledge of the 1320, but the previously mentioned are all junk with respect to their page-pickers. HP had a free fix, but I guess it was only temporary, and the offer ended years ago.
The 1200 was good (PS for Linux/BSD/MAC). For those who only may need 600 dpi, the 4, 5, 6 M/P series printers are still available in good condition used....
After owning a 4L, 6L and 1100, I will stick with the 1200 I have now at all costs.
Unless I missed something obvious, the article never specifies why this release is important enough to warrant a /. article on its importance.
Great: a new ubuntu (I am just about to install the first one.) So I searched the article for ONE reason why I should skip Warty and download Hoary in vain.
Grumble, grumble... "The state of journalism nowadays...."
One of the main differences is that while Transmeta's chip had no market to speak of, there is a market waiting in the wings for this technology -- and it is mega-hella-huge: HDTV.
Within a flexibile timeframe, there is an inflexible truth -- there will be no popular analog TV broadcasts in the US. This cannot happen without the technologies in place for digital to replace analog TV. The market is, what, a couple of hundred million sets in the US, and a billion or so world-wide, eventually?
Do you think these computational-power hogs will run Opterons-in-massive-parallel? Me neither. They will run this or one of their soon-to-be-announced competitors. This is a humoungous market and it WILL exist. It is not vaporware. If IBM, Sony and Toshiba can piggyback on the development inventment for game players such a technical breakthrough, so much better for them.
This is not a replacement for the x86 chips or architechture, as I see it, but a totally new thing that MIGHT have use in general computing. Or it might not.
In any case the HDTV market will dwarf the PC market. In fact, the PC might just become a satellite of a HDTV system. At least I get the idea that's what Comcast and Viacom have in mind.
Think bigger.