You don't get it. A checker built into the text widget and shared throughout the OS means there's ONE spellchecker, not one each in every app. In other words, it REDUCES bloat. It's factoring out a common element into a single point of implementation.
Imagine if every app implemented its own textbox? Consider how much ridiculous bloat that would mean. Not so long ago under primitive X before KDE/Gnome, this was pretty much the case. It wasn't unusual to have five different GUI toolkits up on one screen of work. Both ugly and wasteful!
Things that every app wants to do should be shared and done once, correctly.
It echoes the usual anarchist objection to government. You want a government to protect you? But from whom? Isn't the government itself the biggest and most common aggressor? How can it possibly protect you against itself? Even the most high minded attempt to wall off the judiciary will fail; after all, who's paying their salary?
This anarchist says: anyone who gives it some thought will recognise that law is separate from government, and that law came first. Government wants to control the courts in order to pick and choose which parts of the law they have to obey. Only private courts can deliver honest law.
For reference, I got into unix when there were already a lot of good editors, including nedit (probably my second favouite).
My discovery process went much like this (over a longer time, of course):
How can I do complicated stuff fast? This is a computer, it ought to be able to automate. (Rule out all the "small, fast" editors like joe and pico, as well as the vast majority of graphical shit. Regex searching is not "fully automated", assholes.)
WTF, evil random keybindings? WTF, no control-whatsit key for simple repeat previous search? I have to type this in longhand each time? Menus with no key equivalent? Ork-skin ui? Antique dialect of lisp? Frickin' built in kitchen sink? (Rule out emacs, kerplunk.)
Hmm, graphical, can do loads with the mouse, pretty highlighting, fairly automatable. Motif sucks bilious goat ass. Nice enough, but what about console? (Rule in nedit, barely, but fer fricks sake, ditch motif for the 21st century!!!)
Gah, how do I exit this? I can't understand it? Oh, "a" or "i" is to type? and escape to command? Hmm. Oh nice, it understands my windowsy keybindings in edit mode. *reads manual* Whoah, it does that? *learns about "." command* Well blow me down, automation at a keypress. Hmm, it understands all my unixy standard keybindings like "/" to search. Navigation commands, me likey. WTF, it has a graphical mode too? And fast? highlighting? Whoohoo! (Rule in vim, preced by a parade and virgins strewing flowers.)
...to make tech suitable for the most numbskulled luddite, all OSS projects should be abandoned in favour of a single uber-project with a single app, whose interface is a single screen-spanning and beautifully decorated click button, reading "I am an idiot. Tell me what to do."
In addition, in case the user is an illiterate, the computer will be equipped with a pleasant female voice to read the button's caption (with proper grammar substitution: "you are an idiot. click the mouse to be told what to do")
In extra easy mode, the screen reader also explains "mouse" and "click".
Modes that begin teaching the english language from "ma-ma!" on upward to the point where "button" is a concept are currently alpha, and would welcome developers.
NoScript extension will allow you to whitelist by hostname (or by partial hostname), and block by default. For example on this post page I'm whitelisting slashdot.org and google-analytics.com but forbidding tacoda.net and falkag.net.
Yeah, like, nobody would possbly think of putting an encyclopedia up on the web for free?
Capitalism works, true. I'm very fond of it myself. But when the raw materials are free, duplication is trivial and the effort can be done as a hobby or a sideline, then the price will tend towards zero. The laws of economics are as impersonally certain as the laws of physics.
It would be anti-capitalism to try to control the price by imposing monopolies - and yes, that's what copyright does.
...that every bit of packaging beyond a printed cardboard sleeve and a waterproof plastic wrapper exists solely to convince you on a subliminal level that you're buying something more substantial than data.
Same goes double and triple for software. One DVD's worth of data, in a fat 6 by 4 by 2 inch box with a half-inch thick printed manual (how quaint!) and some packing peanuts. As unsubtle as a puffer-fish!
Now this is just plain beginning to pee me off. Children supposedly have "innocence" which is worth protecting from "filth" (both terms in scare quotes because frankly I don't believe the conventional idea of either). However, to achieve this, we have to basically lock them in an information gulag, herd them from protected environment to protected environment, monitor their every doing and listen in on their every conversation.
I propose: that this very real "cure" is far worse than the frankly questionable "disease".
I propose: that children have civil rights to free association, free speech, free thought, free movement, and access to uncensored information. That these civil rights are more important than "innocence". I recall that women in the patriarchal era and negroes in the slavery era were considered "innocent" in the same way, and that then too it was a code word for repression.
I propose: that when anyone's natural rights are being stomped on, everyone's are in danger. As indeed the evidence bears out, with children being used to excuse attacks on adults!
Therefore: if you want your adult civil rights protected, you should protect children's civil rights. You certainly shouldn't sell them down the river to win yourself a walled-off "adult" space!
Radiation in survivable amounts IS good for species. It overclocks evolution. It's only harmful for some individuals, the "unfit". Since humans care about individuals more than species, we'd rather go without.
Note that radiation would likely not lower the population. At most it would lower the life expectancy, but the breeding rate would rise automatically to compensate.
Thinking about the future of the human race on this planet calls for long term planning.
Nope. Not so. That would be entirely analogous to the 18th century folks trying to pre-plan the 20th century. Worse than useless!
"Pushing the problem onto future generations" is exactly the correct strategy. It's like one of those computational problems that you can solve fastest by letting it alone for a few years while Moore's law catches up. Future techological problems are best solved with future technology - our best course is to attempt to reach that future as soon as possible. To which end, fuel the economy! Because economic growth is basically the wave-front that's pushing scientific growth.
Well, dolphins and old growth are pretty, that's reason enough to keep some around. Owls can be cute, but personally I think a more sensible way to save them would be captive breeding in zoo aviaries. Certainly, people come first!
However, you lost me on the tax thing. Europe is taxed and regulated to fuck and back, and has "social services" out the wazoo, mainly for lazy assholes like the recent rioters in France ("if he could fire us we might have to do what the boss wants", complained one student). What it needs is: a welfare-state shutdown, a 15% flat income/corporation tax with an untaxed threshold level above the breadline, and 99% of its "public" workforce thrown out on their asses to get a real job.
Oh, and gasoline would be cheap. Except for, here in the UK as an example, 80% of the price is pure tax.
One thing I like about/. posts like this is that all the bugs crawl out of the woodwork, where I can swat them with the "foe" bat. Kersplut!
Oh and by the way, to a pro-capitalist like me, your little quote reads like the think tanks are heroes, the last respite of a corporation which wants its views to be heard on the merits. Interesting what a change of perspective does, hmm?
If in 50 + 150 years, we can't find another good source of energy, we deserve to starve from laziness.
Consider that, a comparable period of time ago now, Napoleon was raging in Europe, the USA was newly founded, and the steam engine was bleeding edge technology.
by the same people who duped us about [...] hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s.
The thing is, out of all the 1960s doomy predictions, those were the ones that were right. People would have died. There wasn't an error in the calculations - people were saved, in very large numbers, by the "green revolution" of improved hybrid crops and farming techniques.
Frankenstein foods, intensive agriculture, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides saved the planet. Ponder, o hippies, the world your "scruples" would have left you in!
In fact, chances are the world's luddite opposition to GM is holding back as much improvement again.
If an ISP won't provide the very service for which I'm paying them, namely bandwith enough to run torrents should I so choose, connectivity on all ports, and the right to run servers, then I can and will dump them for someone else who has the entrepreneurial good sense to give me what I want.
BTW, my current ISP gives me pure un-tampered connectivity, a static IP address, and bandwidth bounded only by the size of the pipe. ("Demon Net", £24.99 monthly.) That's why I remain brand-loyal.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, no, the market wasn't formed.
The sign of an unformed market is customers groaning. The sign of a formed market is when the customers sigh in contentment.
Does nobody else remember how frickin' useless search engines were before Google?
You don't get it. A checker built into the text widget and shared throughout the OS means there's ONE spellchecker, not one each in every app. In other words, it REDUCES bloat. It's factoring out a common element into a single point of implementation.
Imagine if every app implemented its own textbox? Consider how much ridiculous bloat that would mean. Not so long ago under primitive X before KDE/Gnome, this was pretty much the case. It wasn't unusual to have five different GUI toolkits up on one screen of work. Both ugly and wasteful!
Things that every app wants to do should be shared and done once, correctly.
It echoes the usual anarchist objection to government. You want a government to protect you? But from whom? Isn't the government itself the biggest and most common aggressor? How can it possibly protect you against itself? Even the most high minded attempt to wall off the judiciary will fail; after all, who's paying their salary?
This anarchist says: anyone who gives it some thought will recognise that law is separate from government, and that law came first. Government wants to control the courts in order to pick and choose which parts of the law they have to obey. Only private courts can deliver honest law.
For reference, I got into unix when there were already a lot of good editors, including nedit (probably my second favouite).
My discovery process went much like this (over a longer time, of course):
How can I do complicated stuff fast? This is a computer, it ought to be able to automate. (Rule out all the "small, fast" editors like joe and pico, as well as the vast majority of graphical shit. Regex searching is not "fully automated", assholes.)
WTF, evil random keybindings? WTF, no control-whatsit key for simple repeat previous search? I have to type this in longhand each time? Menus with no key equivalent? Ork-skin ui? Antique dialect of lisp? Frickin' built in kitchen sink? (Rule out emacs, kerplunk.)
Hmm, graphical, can do loads with the mouse, pretty highlighting, fairly automatable. Motif sucks bilious goat ass. Nice enough, but what about console? (Rule in nedit, barely, but fer fricks sake, ditch motif for the 21st century!!!)
Gah, how do I exit this? I can't understand it? Oh, "a" or "i" is to type? and escape to command? Hmm. Oh nice, it understands my windowsy keybindings in edit mode. *reads manual* Whoah, it does that? *learns about "." command* Well blow me down, automation at a keypress. Hmm, it understands all my unixy standard keybindings like "/" to search. Navigation commands, me likey. WTF, it has a graphical mode too? And fast? highlighting? Whoohoo! (Rule in vim, preced by a parade and virgins strewing flowers.)
...or alternatively, please unambiguously authorize people to hack up their own TTF of your glyphs and distribute it as OSS.
...of this is: use a real programming language, in which comparing a function's name to an int is a syntactic error rather than a pointer operation.
...to make tech suitable for the most numbskulled luddite, all OSS projects should be abandoned in favour of a single uber-project with a single app, whose interface is a single screen-spanning and beautifully decorated click button, reading "I am an idiot. Tell me what to do."
In addition, in case the user is an illiterate, the computer will be equipped with a pleasant female voice to read the button's caption (with proper grammar substitution: "you are an idiot. click the mouse to be told what to do")
In extra easy mode, the screen reader also explains "mouse" and "click".
Modes that begin teaching the english language from "ma-ma!" on upward to the point where "button" is a concept are currently alpha, and would welcome developers.
NoScript extension will allow you to whitelist by hostname (or by partial hostname), and block by default. For example on this post page I'm whitelisting slashdot.org and google-analytics.com but forbidding tacoda.net and falkag.net.
"Since the centrifugal machine is sustained force and not an impulse, I doubt would inherently make your bones stonger."
Only if they lie flat and don't move. A footfall at 12 gees has to hurt. Even shuffling would be "haul up, smash down".
So now the one with the red laser is the bad guy?
No, wait, that's lightsabers.
Yeah, like, nobody would possbly think of putting an encyclopedia up on the web for free?
Capitalism works, true. I'm very fond of it myself. But when the raw materials are free, duplication is trivial and the effort can be done as a hobby or a sideline, then the price will tend towards zero. The laws of economics are as impersonally certain as the laws of physics.
It would be anti-capitalism to try to control the price by imposing monopolies - and yes, that's what copyright does.
...that every bit of packaging beyond a printed cardboard sleeve and a waterproof plastic wrapper exists solely to convince you on a subliminal level that you're buying something more substantial than data.
Same goes double and triple for software. One DVD's worth of data, in a fat 6 by 4 by 2 inch box with a half-inch thick printed manual (how quaint!) and some packing peanuts. As unsubtle as a puffer-fish!
Now this is just plain beginning to pee me off. Children supposedly have "innocence" which is worth protecting from "filth" (both terms in scare quotes because frankly I don't believe the conventional idea of either). However, to achieve this, we have to basically lock them in an information gulag, herd them from protected environment to protected environment, monitor their every doing and listen in on their every conversation.
I propose: that this very real "cure" is far worse than the frankly questionable "disease".
I propose: that children have civil rights to free association, free speech, free thought, free movement, and access to uncensored information. That these civil rights are more important than "innocence". I recall that women in the patriarchal era and negroes in the slavery era were considered "innocent" in the same way, and that then too it was a code word for repression.
I propose: that when anyone's natural rights are being stomped on, everyone's are in danger. As indeed the evidence bears out, with children being used to excuse attacks on adults!
Therefore: if you want your adult civil rights protected, you should protect children's civil rights. You certainly shouldn't sell them down the river to win yourself a walled-off "adult" space!
I've been using Freenet 0.7, and it's both fast and network-light now - pretty impressive. Looks like they made it just in time...
Radiation in survivable amounts IS good for species. It overclocks evolution. It's only harmful for some individuals, the "unfit". Since humans care about individuals more than species, we'd rather go without.
Note that radiation would likely not lower the population. At most it would lower the life expectancy, but the breeding rate would rise automatically to compensate.
you do realise that under your proposed scheme people [...] who are incapable of getting a job die?
Would you let them die?
Seriously, that's what it means when you imply private charity wouldn't work.
Thinking about the future of the human race on this planet calls for long term planning.
Nope. Not so. That would be entirely analogous to the 18th century folks trying to pre-plan the 20th century. Worse than useless!
"Pushing the problem onto future generations" is exactly the correct strategy. It's like one of those computational problems that you can solve fastest by letting it alone for a few years while Moore's law catches up. Future techological problems are best solved with future technology - our best course is to attempt to reach that future as soon as possible. To which end, fuel the economy! Because economic growth is basically the wave-front that's pushing scientific growth.
Well, dolphins and old growth are pretty, that's reason enough to keep some around. Owls can be cute, but personally I think a more sensible way to save them would be captive breeding in zoo aviaries. Certainly, people come first!
However, you lost me on the tax thing. Europe is taxed and regulated to fuck and back, and has "social services" out the wazoo, mainly for lazy assholes like the recent rioters in France ("if he could fire us we might have to do what the boss wants", complained one student). What it needs is: a welfare-state shutdown, a 15% flat income/corporation tax with an untaxed threshold level above the breadline, and 99% of its "public" workforce thrown out on their asses to get a real job.
Oh, and gasoline would be cheap. Except for, here in the UK as an example, 80% of the price is pure tax.
They're pretty. That would be reason enough for me to plant them, anyhow.
One thing I like about /. posts like this is that all the bugs crawl out of the woodwork, where I can swat them with the "foe" bat. Kersplut!
Oh and by the way, to a pro-capitalist like me, your little quote reads like the think tanks are heroes, the last respite of a corporation which wants its views to be heard on the merits. Interesting what a change of perspective does, hmm?
If in 50 + 150 years, we can't find another good source of energy, we deserve to starve from laziness.
Consider that, a comparable period of time ago now, Napoleon was raging in Europe, the USA was newly founded, and the steam engine was bleeding edge technology.
Says the species who lives everywhere from the Arctic to the Sahara: "three degrees of warming will kill our civilization".
And if you bought that one, I have some seafront land in Kansas going cheap...
by the same people who duped us about [...] hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s.
The thing is, out of all the 1960s doomy predictions, those were the ones that were right. People would have died. There wasn't an error in the calculations - people were saved, in very large numbers, by the "green revolution" of improved hybrid crops and farming techniques.
Frankenstein foods, intensive agriculture, chemical fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides saved the planet. Ponder, o hippies, the world your "scruples" would have left you in!
In fact, chances are the world's luddite opposition to GM is holding back as much improvement again.
It's called "overselling"
Fair enough. I think basically what the real outcome of this is, is that the market will segment:
* Cheap ISPs explicitly "oversell", with caps, port blocking, gimp masks, whips and chains.
* Full price ISPs sell on an exactly 1:1 ratio, we have N clients at B bandwidth, so we buy N*B upstream bandwidth, and no messing.
Ever heard of the phrase "the customer is king"?
If an ISP won't provide the very service for which I'm paying them, namely bandwith enough to run torrents should I so choose, connectivity on all ports, and the right to run servers, then I can and will dump them for someone else who has the entrepreneurial good sense to give me what I want.
BTW, my current ISP gives me pure un-tampered connectivity, a static IP address, and bandwidth bounded only by the size of the pipe. ("Demon Net", £24.99 monthly.) That's why I remain brand-loyal.