What point was that? The product is completey unnecessary and negative in impact. It harms the consumer's (in the most literal way) health, and the package being celebrated harms the environment. There isn't one good thing about this. (Sure, you can make a wifi antenna out of the can. That will use about.001% of them.)
Yet the inventors are being congratulated for this product that contributes to the prematire deaths of thousands every year.
I vaguely remember another vertical DTP app that was really bad--way back in the early 90's There used to be this absolutely terrifying GUI word processor for Unix called "Frame"
If that's "FrameMaker, it was bought by Adobe. Still around, in Windows versions now, and I'm trying to learn it, it's very powerful (footnotes, references, etc) but not user friendly. Still a standard in academic and technical publishing. (InDesign will eventually replace it, it's clear that's Adobe's plan, but not yet.)
I was weaned on Xerox Ventura, but that changed hands many times, is now owned by Corel, but hasn't been updated for years and is pretty flaky now, sadly. I still use the old DOS GUI version 3 for simple projects (novels, poetry, etc).
And a large part of the combatants captured in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia... The point is that there is a large and mobile population that has decided to make war on the US.
Really? How many is "large"?
Anyway, they're not "making war on the US". They're trying to force the US out of the Middle East. Big difference. The US is thousands of miles away from the war. 9/11 was pretty spectacular, but it was a very isolated incident. One attack by 20 terrorists is not a "war".
Iraq had a tyrant and was allied with Osama and other terrorist groups (similar to Hitler and Nazi Germany which I am comparing it to)
Sorry, you're sadly misinformed. Saddam was not an ally of al Qaeda. He was a nominal Muslim, but his policies were anathema to he fundamentalists. (He let women work and attend university, for instance.) Saddam was on al Qaeda's hit list, and he knew it. They wanted to get rid of corrupt, loose-living secularists like Saddam and install a theocracy, like the Taliban, in every Muslim country. Saddam was an evil dictator, but never, to my knowledge, took any action against the US outside the Middle East.
Hmmm... I feel safer killing insurgents in their backyard rather than killing them here, but I am probably strange that way
Strange, all right. Do you seriously claim that Iraq was about to invade the US? Or even launch a terrorist campaign? (No, they didn't have anything to do with 9/11, hope that wasn't what you were thinking.)
Real Player never crashed my machine (That I remember, at least I can say it never became enough of a pattern for me to recognize it as one). Adobe Reader used to almost every time I hit a PDF file--if it was a large file over dialup--guaranteed
Real didn't crash, but it was unpleasant in many other ways. As for reading PDFs online; if it's a short document I might view it in the browser, but I almost always r-click to download and view it once it's all there, rather than try to view inline. You have to specifically optimise a PDF for viewing inline so it's not really Adobe's fault if it doesn't work. Print PDF files are different.
Not only that, but typically it would hang your entire browser--not just that one window--while it loaded a PDF; I'm not sure how they pulled that off.
So why use the browser plugin if it was so much hassle?
If it hadn't been for Adobe, we would have had nice, simple, readable HTML-based documents instead.
Sometimes PDFs are gratuitous, but often the alternative would be nothing at all, or a horrible bitmap page scan, or worst of all, Word DOC files, complete with macro viruses. Print-to-PDF allowed many documents originally designed for print to be easily repurposed as downloads. I have a collection of PDF manuals for all kinds of hardware that I really doubt I would have if the manufacturers had had to translate to HTML.
Windows 3.1 used to crash all the time, when I removed ATM, it crashed significantly less. Well, not remove so much as re-install windows without it.
Maybe you had too many fonts, or corrupt ones. In any case, I used 3.1 for years, with ATM and using CorelDraw. It crashed occasionally, almost always when editing large bitmaps, so I doubt it was related to ATM.
Adobe has to be the worst company ever to supply popular software for the web, and it has always been a horrid company--at least since "ATM" started destroying my PCs back in the ole Windows 3.0 days.
Sorry, I find this absurd. I've been using ATM ever since Win 3.0 too. Never had any issues with it. T1 fonts are essential (to DTP anyway). I use Acrobat every day (though I stick with Acrobat 4 mostly, it has all I need). There are many, many more obnoxious web software products -- who can forget RealPlayer? And many weird and wonderful "enhancements" whose main and often only function was to deliver ads and spy on you while using your bandwidth and hogging your cycles. I'm sure a quick tour of some porn sites would find many more hostile/useless/spammy programs.
Look at TFA: it's in a column called "Hyperbole, Embellishment, and Sys Admins". Other articles in this section include A report from a north pole sysadmin about Santa Claus' data centre. These are literally FAIRY TALES. As for the X-Box story, no names, dates, institutions named. And consider a manager who could know how to pull the X-Box out of the rack, unplug the networking, would know enough to realise that it was not set up as a game machine, but a server. What manager would be so insane as to risk his job for stealing equipment from a server room? And if his son doesn't have an X-Box, where was he going to get the games to play on this machine? Warez? If the manager has already stolen the hardware, I suppose he wouldn't hesitate to steal the software too.
The stoy is fake, and for Slashdot editors to present it as real just makes them look even dumber than usual.
I'm afraid you're not going to get your wish. I had an email discussion with CmdrTaco on this subject last summer.
I used to send corrections to them -- typos, dupes, factual errors, and such. About half the time they did then fix them. But Taco was very bitchy and unappreciative about it. I realised I was just being an unpaid proofreader for lazy jerks who didn't give a shit, so I gave up. Now I just ignore their errors or snark about them in the comments.
The comment moderation is the thing that makes the site work, so interesting comments float up. But they failed to take the next step, allowing moderation of the articles themselves so crappy articles can be filtered out. (WTF is it with the tags that have been in beta for a year or so -- how do they expect anyone to take it seriously when they don't implement them in any real way?)
Of course, if they had editors who 1) read the articles and 2) spent 5 minutes checking them before posting, the site would not be such an embarrassment.
Even if the submitter was trying to fool the editors it wasn't a very convincing trick. The date appears clear-as-day above the article's headline. The submitter could have just as easily missed the year of the article, but I'd fault the editor for the miss.
It convinced the editors. Of course the date is "clear as day" to anyne who reads it, which the editors apparently hardly ever do. But I'm sure it was noticed by and deliberately chosen by the submitter, using a date so close to today. How could they have found their way to a 2-year-old article without knowing they were looking at an archive?
The editors, if they notice the date at all, are often suckered by this trick of some submitters of using an article with today's date, several years ago.
Sound's an awful lot like communism to me. Why can't we learn the sesson how we tried government meddling in the free market on earth and see where that ended up. Its depressing that the first thing we want to do in space is set up soviet styled collective's.
Yep. We should just let whoever wants to use any land just take it. If someone disputes a claim, they can settle it like Real Men, with an arm-wrestling match, without involviment from any sissy lawyers or bureaucrats.
Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?
No. The Tasmanian Tiger became extinct in the 1930s. We have samples taken from freshly dead corpses and preserved in laboratories. Not fossilised for 65 million years.>P?
Anyway, Crichton's "plot" was" wild animals escaper, kill people, and finally some survivors escape. The plot could have been exactly the same with tigers, vampire bats, anacondas, or for thta matter, robots (like Westworld, an earlier Crichton book/movie) etc, etc.
Yes. This is not about NEWS suppression. As TFA says, it's about entertainment. Since today was the first of three official days of mourning in China, (including here in Hong Kong), one week after the quake hit, many light-hearted events were cancelled or postponed. There was a three minute silence this afternoon at 2:28 pm, the time of the quake. Disneyland HK has cancelled its fireworks, the Olympic Torch run has stopped. Flags are at half mast.
There is no cover up gong on that I've noticed. There is a scandal about shoddily constructed schools that collapsed, being vigorously pursued.
If there is any spin going on, I suspect they're trying to change the story from "China suppresses Tibet" to "Brave China united to recover from earthquake".
Twenty years ago our company used to get letters, (snail mail) from Nigeria, with exactly the sme pitches as they use now in email. A few years later they came by fax.
The medium is new, the scams are not. It's true that we now get them much more frequently than when it was something we passed around in the office and laughed at their audacity.
I don't understand what it is Microsoft think they are going to get out of this. There's no point in applying ven-duh lock-in to people who literally can't afford to buy your products...
There are many excellent reasons. Some of the students will grow up and start businesses, requiring computers. They will choose what is familiar to them. That's why MS virtually gives away software to universities. In the bigger picture, MS is trying to keep a lid on the development of alternative OSs anywhere. If a few million PCs in one country are running Linux, it creates a big enough user population (even if mostly using free software) that people will develop all kinds of solutions using it as a base. And when road tested and reliable, there is no reason these could not be sold into the first world.
That's why Ballmer will fly all over the world and pay any government or other large organisations that start making noises about shifting to Linux. It takes a strong government to reject fistfuls of money. They may honestly feel they are serving their people better by taking MS's money, as Negroponte obviously does. In the short and medium term they may be right.
And in its usual hysterical-nanny way, the government decided to ban ALL laser pointers because apparently it's easier to do that than to try and outlaw 'stupid'.
Well, it IS easier to ban a gadget than "outlaw stupid". Look at the US which tried the "outlaw stupidity" method with regrds to gun control. Isn't working very effectively, IMHO. Most other contries just outlawed the gadget rather trying to make people smarter, laudable though that is in abstract.
Anyway, the summary is misleading as well as poorly drafted. If you read TFA, it's not a simple survey about "Censorship: good or bad?", it was about the perils of the Internet, and whether the government should protect users from porn, stalkers, malware, fraud. Put in those terms, you'd get similar answers anywhere. And of course, Chinese are not stupid. Those that DO have misgivings about government controls are exactly the people who suspect that every word they write is monitored.
could be wrong but my understanding is the 'piracy' label came from the early days of DRM/copy protection.
No, the word "piracy" has been used in publishing for centuries.
piracy [Oxford English Dictionary]
2. The unauthorized reproduction or use of an invention or work of another, as a book, recording, computer software, intellectual property, etc., esp. as constituting an infringement of patent or copyright; plagiarism; an instance of this.
[1654 J. MENNES Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces clxxvi, All the wealth, Of wit and learning, not by stealth, Or Piracy, but purchase got.] 1700 E. WARD Journey to Hell II. vii. 14 Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done. 1770 P. LUCKOMBE Conc. Hist. Printing 76 They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition. 1855 D. BREWSTER Mem. Life I. Newton (new ed.) I. iv. 71 With the view of securing his invention of the telescope from foreign piracy. 1886 Cent. Mag. Feb. 629/1 That there are many publishers who despise such piracy..does not remove the presumption that publishers and papermakers have been influential opponents of an equitable arrangement. 1977 Gramophone Apr. 1527/3 Governments have begun to realize that unauthorized reproduction of records (so-called piracy) adversely affects also the rights of..composers, authors and performers. 1996 China Post (Taipei) 1 May 16/3 Authorities here said they have cracked down on piracy in recent years, but foreign computer firms claim they are still soft on piracy.
The Chinese government objects to maps that depict certain regions as being separate sovereign countries, such as Tibet and Taiwan, which the Chinese government holds are both part of China.
And even more sensitively, areas whose sovereignty is disputed with neighbouring countries. There are border disputes, small and large, with Vietnam, Nepal, Russia. Several island groups in the South China Sea (the Spratlys, eg) are claimed by China, and several other countries. Most are uninhabited but would allow a claim to large areas of "open" sea and any minerals or oil on the nearby seabed. China has been building concrete pilings on various almost submerged islands to enlarge their claims. China gets very stroppy about any maps available in China, which of course now includes via Internet, depicting these areas and insists they show they belong to China.
Slashdot Mirror
If other protocols were impeded, soon, all P2P would look like HTTP.
What point was that? The product is completey unnecessary and negative in impact. It harms the consumer's (in the most literal way) health, and the package being celebrated harms the environment. There isn't one good thing about this. (Sure, you can make a wifi antenna out of the can. That will use about .001% of them.)
Yet the inventors are being congratulated for this product that contributes to the prematire deaths of thousands every year.
I think the health impact of a "food" consisting of fat, starch, salt and chemical flavourings was probably worse.
If that's "FrameMaker, it was bought by Adobe. Still around, in Windows versions now, and I'm trying to learn it, it's very powerful (footnotes, references, etc) but not user friendly. Still a standard in academic and technical publishing. (InDesign will eventually replace it, it's clear that's Adobe's plan, but not yet.)
I was weaned on Xerox Ventura, but that changed hands many times, is now owned by Corel, but hasn't been updated for years and is pretty flaky now, sadly. I still use the old DOS GUI version 3 for simple projects (novels, poetry, etc).
Really? How many is "large"?
Anyway, they're not "making war on the US". They're trying to force the US out of the Middle East. Big difference. The US is thousands of miles away from the war. 9/11 was pretty spectacular, but it was a very isolated incident. One attack by 20 terrorists is not a "war".
Sorry, you're sadly misinformed. Saddam was not an ally of al Qaeda. He was a nominal Muslim, but his policies were anathema to he fundamentalists. (He let women work and attend university, for instance.) Saddam was on al Qaeda's hit list, and he knew it. They wanted to get rid of corrupt, loose-living secularists like Saddam and install a theocracy, like the Taliban, in every Muslim country. Saddam was an evil dictator, but never, to my knowledge, took any action against the US outside the Middle East.
No, still zero.
Here "they" was referring to Iraqis. None of your examples involved Iraq.
Strange, all right. Do you seriously claim that Iraq was about to invade the US? Or even launch a terrorist campaign? (No, they didn't have anything to do with 9/11, hope that wasn't what you were thinking.)
Real didn't crash, but it was unpleasant in many other ways. As for reading PDFs online; if it's a short document I might view it in the browser, but I almost always r-click to download and view it once it's all there, rather than try to view inline. You have to specifically optimise a PDF for viewing inline so it's not really Adobe's fault if it doesn't work. Print PDF files are different.
Not only that, but typically it would hang your entire browser--not just that one window--while it loaded a PDF; I'm not sure how they pulled that off.
So why use the browser plugin if it was so much hassle?
If it hadn't been for Adobe, we would have had nice, simple, readable HTML-based documents instead.
Sometimes PDFs are gratuitous, but often the alternative would be nothing at all, or a horrible bitmap page scan, or worst of all, Word DOC files, complete with macro viruses. Print-to-PDF allowed many documents originally designed for print to be easily repurposed as downloads. I have a collection of PDF manuals for all kinds of hardware that I really doubt I would have if the manufacturers had had to translate to HTML. Windows 3.1 used to crash all the time, when I removed ATM, it crashed significantly less. Well, not remove so much as re-install windows without it.
Maybe you had too many fonts, or corrupt ones. In any case, I used 3.1 for years, with ATM and using CorelDraw. It crashed occasionally, almost always when editing large bitmaps, so I doubt it was related to ATM.
If you do any DTP, Adobe products are essential.
Sorry, I find this absurd. I've been using ATM ever since Win 3.0 too. Never had any issues with it. T1 fonts are essential (to DTP anyway). I use Acrobat every day (though I stick with Acrobat 4 mostly, it has all I need). There are many, many more obnoxious web software products -- who can forget RealPlayer? And many weird and wonderful "enhancements" whose main and often only function was to deliver ads and spy on you while using your bandwidth and hogging your cycles. I'm sure a quick tour of some porn sites would find many more hostile/useless/spammy programs.
The stoy is fake, and for Slashdot editors to present it as real just makes them look even dumber than usual.
I used to send corrections to them -- typos, dupes, factual errors, and such. About half the time they did then fix them. But Taco was very bitchy and unappreciative about it. I realised I was just being an unpaid proofreader for lazy jerks who didn't give a shit, so I gave up. Now I just ignore their errors or snark about them in the comments.
The comment moderation is the thing that makes the site work, so interesting comments float up. But they failed to take the next step, allowing moderation of the articles themselves so crappy articles can be filtered out. (WTF is it with the tags that have been in beta for a year or so -- how do they expect anyone to take it seriously when they don't implement them in any real way?)
Of course, if they had editors who 1) read the articles and 2) spent 5 minutes checking them before posting, the site would not be such an embarrassment.
It convinced the editors. Of course the date is "clear as day" to anyne who reads it, which the editors apparently hardly ever do. But I'm sure it was noticed by and deliberately chosen by the submitter, using a date so close to today. How could they have found their way to a 2-year-old article without knowing they were looking at an archive?
It was 27th where I live.
The editors, if they notice the date at all, are often suckered by this trick of some submitters of using an article with today's date, several years ago.
Yep. We should just let whoever wants to use any land just take it. If someone disputes a claim, they can settle it like Real Men, with an arm-wrestling match, without involviment from any sissy lawyers or bureaucrats.
No. The Tasmanian Tiger became extinct in the 1930s. We have samples taken from freshly dead corpses and preserved in laboratories. Not fossilised for 65 million years.>P? Anyway, Crichton's "plot" was" wild animals escaper, kill people, and finally some survivors escape. The plot could have been exactly the same with tigers, vampire bats, anacondas, or for thta matter, robots (like Westworld, an earlier Crichton book/movie) etc, etc.
Yes. This is not about NEWS suppression. As TFA says, it's about entertainment. Since today was the first of three official days of mourning in China, (including here in Hong Kong), one week after the quake hit, many light-hearted events were cancelled or postponed. There was a three minute silence this afternoon at 2:28 pm, the time of the quake. Disneyland HK has cancelled its fireworks, the Olympic Torch run has stopped. Flags are at half mast.
There is no cover up gong on that I've noticed. There is a scandal about shoddily constructed schools that collapsed, being vigorously pursued.
If there is any spin going on, I suspect they're trying to change the story from "China suppresses Tibet" to "Brave China united to recover from earthquake".
See The Spanish Prisoner. This scam is at least 100 years old.
Twenty years ago our company used to get letters, (snail mail) from Nigeria, with exactly the sme pitches as they use now in email. A few years later they came by fax.
The medium is new, the scams are not. It's true that we now get them much more frequently than when it was something we passed around in the office and laughed at their audacity.
There are many excellent reasons. Some of the students will grow up and start businesses, requiring computers. They will choose what is familiar to them. That's why MS virtually gives away software to universities. In the bigger picture, MS is trying to keep a lid on the development of alternative OSs anywhere. If a few million PCs in one country are running Linux, it creates a big enough user population (even if mostly using free software) that people will develop all kinds of solutions using it as a base. And when road tested and reliable, there is no reason these could not be sold into the first world.
That's why Ballmer will fly all over the world and pay any government or other large organisations that start making noises about shifting to Linux. It takes a strong government to reject fistfuls of money. They may honestly feel they are serving their people better by taking MS's money, as Negroponte obviously does. In the short and medium term they may be right.
Well, it IS easier to ban a gadget than "outlaw stupid". Look at the US which tried the "outlaw stupidity" method with regrds to gun control. Isn't working very effectively, IMHO. Most other contries just outlawed the gadget rather trying to make people smarter, laudable though that is in abstract.
What semi-literate posted that?
Anyway, the summary is misleading as well as poorly drafted. If you read TFA, it's not a simple survey about "Censorship: good or bad?", it was about the perils of the Internet, and whether the government should protect users from porn, stalkers, malware, fraud. Put in those terms, you'd get similar answers anywhere. And of course, Chinese are not stupid. Those that DO have misgivings about government controls are exactly the people who suspect that every word they write is monitored.
I'd argue with that. Half of them would be dead in a month. 90% by the end of a year, in a village environment.
The OLPCs are rugged, pretty waterproof, batteries (a VITAL point) cheap and much longer life than standard laptops.
No, the word "piracy" has been used in publishing for centuries.
And even more sensitively, areas whose sovereignty is disputed with neighbouring countries. There are border disputes, small and large, with Vietnam, Nepal, Russia. Several island groups in the South China Sea (the Spratlys, eg) are claimed by China, and several other countries. Most are uninhabited but would allow a claim to large areas of "open" sea and any minerals or oil on the nearby seabed. China has been building concrete pilings on various almost submerged islands to enlarge their claims. China gets very stroppy about any maps available in China, which of course now includes via Internet, depicting these areas and insists they show they belong to China.