Unfortunately, I think there's a big uphill climb in getting people to accept a desktop.
OS X has gained a respectable amount of traction but there's something that linux evangelists forget:
In order to grab a mostly disinterested audience, you need to have the desktop stay 90% the same year after year after year.
It's not the 80s. Folks aren't used to learning a new using environment every time they buy a computer.
I'm the same, more or less. By doing just about everything I can, except web browsing, on bash, I ensure that when the big leap in whatever interface happens, I can just keep doing things exactly like I have.
The world was really excited to try out new desktop configurations around 1989. It's old news now and we really just want ot get back to work.
The linux for the clueless distributions need to settle on a much more consistant presentation.
The computer market is huge, and a solution doesn't have to be right for *everyone* or even some imaginary majority that you invent from your own use patterns.
Dell's a big company. If this thing is appealing to just 3% of the market, that's a lot of cash.
Because your generation were all so sold on rock and roll anything equaling cool that when they all got jobs in advertising and other such bullshit, they put rock and roll on a chopping block and made it just another brand.
Or maybe any artform has a natural lifespan, and Rock and Rolls was semi-miraculously extended a few more times than likely as it is. Even jazz stopped innovating at some point.
And just maybe radio and the record industry aren't what they were once, so you're not going to hear edgy bands without looking for them.
Maybe there is rebel music. It's called hip hop, and a lot of emerging scenes in the 3rd world. Maybe there's still good rock and roll out there because kids are going to play the music they love whether or not they're showing up late to the party. Maybe garages and basements are alive and well and you wouldn't know because you haven't participated in any culture that doesn't require buying a ticket or subscription in two decades.
And who says rebellious = new. The bits of 70s and 80s punk that weren't safe enough to be marketable are still *totally* fair game for lashing out when you're 17. The best music of the past 30 years has all come out of that stuff, why stop?
Anyway, rock's older. It's got more cruft. That's just the way things go. Look at the movies. But the kids are all right. And all this spineless pitchfork crap will pass.
I've been using Dreamhost for 9 years, hosting my own and several clients' commercial sites. Their uptime is well ahead of industry averages and their customer service turnaround is a thing of beauty.
Yes you can ultimately get more out of something like rackspace, but that's a different tier of service, and is priced accordingly.
If you want to get a web business going for $10 / month, DH are a very decent choice.
20% of America lives like the better-off portions of the 3rd world (it's not all the Congo and Burma).
If you didn't have an office job and half your family and friends weren't dispersed around the country or world, and you only used publicly provided internet like a library for essentials like taxes and job hunting, who would you email?
You are aware that recording eventually put the majority of musicians out of business.
Every fancy restaurant in the country, not to mention every hotel, every dance, every social gathering that wanted to have music HIRED a full band.
Before the movies and TV, every town had multiple Vaudeville and Theater houses.
People used to go to school for music because it was a *smart career move*
If things changed and the people creators sell their 'rights' to no longer had monopoly control - society would adapt. The current models for profiting off of works would mostly fail (though not small performers, they by and large sell their recordings & films at cost to generate attention for live performance) you're not allowing yourself to imagine our society becoming something very different from what it is.
Which it of course has been doing continuously.
Also you don't know what you're talking about re: Saudi Arabia and you're full of crap.
There's a basic problem here. Should laws and practices govern the interactions of people or the interactions of vast financial legal entities?
Because it doesn't seem possible to have laws that blindly treat both as equals and come out with something that both works for citizens and for businesses.
The licensing process assumes that the one making the request for the license is doing so in order to make millions of dollars off of the property. Thus *anyone* avoiding the licensing process is willfully circumventing a 6-8 figure business transaction with the content owner. And that really is how they see it AND
It's how they have to see it.
Otherwise people could get rich off of their property for cheap.
This is a big problem, and I don't think the current system can solve it with just some small changes.
But I'm a radical. My response is that people have been very creative since the dawn of time. Well before any kind of profit motive as we mean it. You're provided a right to try to get rich off of whatever, but you're not provided (or shouldn't be provided) any guarantee of getting rich off of anything in particular. So get rid of intellectual property. The broadcast creativity of individuals and organizations immediatly becomes culture. If I can't say or write whatever I want about culture, I don't have freedom of speach at all.
Maybe there could be a way of certifying things that actually DO come from the creator, for those that care or want to help.
Yeah this would collapse Hollywood, kill the big recording companies, and make art about live performance and commission rather than selling product. Whatever. More to gain than to lose on that front.
New technologies give little advantage to the experienced, and so the playing field is flat for creativity, fresh perspective, and all that lovely stuff to succeed.
That said, there's a lot more maxed out credit cards than there are Facebooks.
Still, I think the reason that there's a perception of startups being littered with 21 year olds, is that when a 21 year old's startup does something noteworth, a LOT more gets written about it.
A general phenomenon I like to call the "Action News" effect. If something is being reported on, it is an anomaly not the rule. The stuff on Action News doesn't kill your kids, cars and run of the mill accidents kill your kids. Kidnappings by strangers are so rare as to be national news. Etc.
Well, according to Hobbes, even under tyranny, people accept their fate because without their dictator, neighboring dictators would treat them even worse as nationless people sitting on valuable land (like say the Native Americans).
Anyway, if a huge chunk of the population of the richest nation in the world is unable to access modern medicine, something is seriously wrong.
The people most hurt by the current system are not those at the bottom of the social ladder, but rather those who have struggled to work their way up a few rungs. Emergency rooms aren't free if you own any kind of property at all, and they can wipe out someone who is trying to start a business or use their free time for nightschool etc.
The healthcare problems of this country are hurting our ability to generate new businesses.
Yes but isn't it the goal of organizing as a society to improve the lives of citizens? If this is the attitude we're going to take, we might as well dissolve the government and the cops and have Mad Max rule of the strongest.
This would also dissolve the Corporations. That manner of collective property is held together by a highly elaborate set of economically invasive (anti-invisible hand) laws.
As well as increasing the self-sufficiency of developing nations.
There's a real lack of foresight by a lot of charities. It has a lot to do with government funding of independent charity, it creates a real conflict of interest. The people who run the a more controversial (to voters or $ contributors) organizations have to pick policy with the goal of being invisible to congress.
"The Revolution Will Not Be Funded" is a good read.
The only solution is to get rid of the government.
now we're talking.
but before we can do that, we need to get our local towns and small cities to become more civic and self-sufficient. local economies have to be prioritized over the national one. a fast collapse of the us federal government would mean chaos and blood in the streets. real pressure to shrink (not empty promises like newt's) while local communities step up and render the feds irrelevant could do the job without firing a shot.
The internet has historically been accessible to the blind and deaf. Braille readers, large text output, and screen readers have been around since the 80s.
It will be a shame if in going multimedia the internet loses functionality that it has had for decades.
Frankly, your argument "Well they can't drive cars, who cares if they can or can't do anything." marks you as a pretty enormous asshole. What do you propose the disabled do in the modern world?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're against cutting them checks once we've made it impossible for them to work or live self-sufficiently.
If basic accessibility standards are followed, non-multimedia content is easily made available for the disabled. It's callous to refuse to be bothered to take basic steps to help others.
Now you tell me, I bought all these Higgs-Bosons and I can't *give* the suckers away. It's worse than those graviton futures I sank my last bonus into.
It took an act of the whitehouse to get telephones and powerlines connected to everyone in the US. If they feel like they can make more money not installing fiber everywhere, then we won't be getting fiber any time soon.
The funny thing is that after decades of "deregulation" we have less of a market economy than ever before. The largest businesses in the country (and this is especially true in telecom) hold their positions with a massive buttress of government contracts and protectionist legislation. Government regulation doesn't do half the damage to a market that government favor brokering does.
Oh no the massive profits the telecom industry has enjoyed with the explosion of the internet might at some point cause them to have to sink money into infrastructure? The horror!
Some crimes are hard to define in terms that are both necessary and sufficient (to borrow math teacher speak). The letter of the law exists beside a broad history of court interpretation.
If one really could not in print accuse a person, corporation, institution, or government service or crime without the agreement of a judge and jury, then we could hardly be called a free society.
In practice, the only surefire way to get stuck with libel is to be a reporter erroneously reporting gross lies and total fabrication about someone's life as if it were confirmed and researched fact. It basically has to look like a deliberate campaign of character assassination.
So some webpage attacking some fly by night company that may or may not actually exist?
Is not going to be libel in the United States of America. And this is a good thing. The government should stay the hell out of speech in any situation where the speech itself is not a direct, immediate, and premeditated harm to specific persons.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd love it if someone could show me a successfully prosecuted libel case of similar triviality.
Slashdot Mirror
And users care about that distinction because...?
Unfortunately, I think there's a big uphill climb in getting people to accept a desktop.
OS X has gained a respectable amount of traction but there's something that linux evangelists forget:
In order to grab a mostly disinterested audience, you need to have the desktop stay 90% the same year after year after year.
It's not the 80s. Folks aren't used to learning a new using environment every time they buy a computer.
I'm the same, more or less. By doing just about everything I can, except web browsing, on bash, I ensure that when the big leap in whatever interface happens, I can just keep doing things exactly like I have.
The world was really excited to try out new desktop configurations around 1989. It's old news now and we really just want ot get back to work.
The linux for the clueless distributions need to settle on a much more consistant presentation.
The computer market is huge, and a solution doesn't have to be right for *everyone* or even some imaginary majority that you invent from your own use patterns.
Dell's a big company. If this thing is appealing to just 3% of the market, that's a lot of cash.
If it's a hit? Cool. But it doesn't have to be.
Because your generation were all so sold on rock and roll anything equaling cool that when they all got jobs in advertising and other such bullshit, they put rock and roll on a chopping block and made it just another brand.
Or maybe any artform has a natural lifespan, and Rock and Rolls was semi-miraculously extended a few more times than likely as it is. Even jazz stopped innovating at some point.
And just maybe radio and the record industry aren't what they were once, so you're not going to hear edgy bands without looking for them.
Maybe there is rebel music. It's called hip hop, and a lot of emerging scenes in the 3rd world. Maybe there's still good rock and roll out there because kids are going to play the music they love whether or not they're showing up late to the party. Maybe garages and basements are alive and well and you wouldn't know because you haven't participated in any culture that doesn't require buying a ticket or subscription in two decades.
And who says rebellious = new. The bits of 70s and 80s punk that weren't safe enough to be marketable are still *totally* fair game for lashing out when you're 17. The best music of the past 30 years has all come out of that stuff, why stop?
Anyway, rock's older. It's got more cruft. That's just the way things go. Look at the movies. But the kids are all right. And all this spineless pitchfork crap will pass.
I've been using Dreamhost for 9 years, hosting my own and several clients' commercial sites. Their uptime is well ahead of industry averages and their customer service turnaround is a thing of beauty.
Yes you can ultimately get more out of something like rackspace, but that's a different tier of service, and is priced accordingly.
If you want to get a web business going for $10 / month, DH are a very decent choice.
This is why I don't trust anything but W.A.S.T.E.
I can't believe that Microsoft are finally having their IBM moment.
I no longer care nearly as much as I used to, but goddamn if this isn't a blast to watch.
Before I get flamed, I want to say that I'm defining the third world as nations without any sort of post-industrial economy.
20% of America lives like the better-off portions of the 3rd world (it's not all the Congo and Burma).
If you didn't have an office job and half your family and friends weren't dispersed around the country or world, and you only used publicly provided internet like a library for essentials like taxes and job hunting, who would you email?
You are aware that recording eventually put the majority of musicians out of business.
Every fancy restaurant in the country, not to mention every hotel, every dance, every social gathering that wanted to have music HIRED a full band.
Before the movies and TV, every town had multiple Vaudeville and Theater houses.
People used to go to school for music because it was a *smart career move*
If things changed and the people creators sell their 'rights' to no longer had monopoly control - society would adapt. The current models for profiting off of works would mostly fail (though not small performers, they by and large sell their recordings & films at cost to generate attention for live performance) you're not allowing yourself to imagine our society becoming something very different from what it is.
Which it of course has been doing continuously.
Also you don't know what you're talking about re: Saudi Arabia and you're full of crap.
There's a basic problem here. Should laws and practices govern the interactions of people or the interactions of vast financial legal entities?
Because it doesn't seem possible to have laws that blindly treat both as equals and come out with something that both works for citizens and for businesses.
The licensing process assumes that the one making the request for the license is doing so in order to make millions of dollars off of the property. Thus *anyone* avoiding the licensing process is willfully circumventing a 6-8 figure business transaction with the content owner. And that really is how they see it AND
It's how they have to see it.
Otherwise people could get rich off of their property for cheap.
This is a big problem, and I don't think the current system can solve it with just some small changes.
But I'm a radical. My response is that people have been very creative since the dawn of time. Well before any kind of profit motive as we mean it. You're provided a right to try to get rich off of whatever, but you're not provided (or shouldn't be provided) any guarantee of getting rich off of anything in particular. So get rid of intellectual property. The broadcast creativity of individuals and organizations immediatly becomes culture. If I can't say or write whatever I want about culture, I don't have freedom of speach at all.
Maybe there could be a way of certifying things that actually DO come from the creator, for those that care or want to help.
Yeah this would collapse Hollywood, kill the big recording companies, and make art about live performance and commission rather than selling product. Whatever. More to gain than to lose on that front.
Different people have different needs.
I'm assuming that if Dreamworks is making this request then it is because their guys have a use for it. I'm at least curious.
But no,
"I have no need for this! It shouldn't exist!"
that makes more sense.
New technologies give little advantage to the experienced, and so the playing field is flat for creativity, fresh perspective, and all that lovely stuff to succeed.
That said, there's a lot more maxed out credit cards than there are Facebooks.
Still, I think the reason that there's a perception of startups being littered with 21 year olds, is that when a 21 year old's startup does something noteworth, a LOT more gets written about it.
A general phenomenon I like to call the "Action News" effect. If something is being reported on, it is an anomaly not the rule. The stuff on Action News doesn't kill your kids, cars and run of the mill accidents kill your kids. Kidnappings by strangers are so rare as to be national news. Etc.
How very Shinto / animist.
Well, according to Hobbes, even under tyranny, people accept their fate because without their dictator, neighboring dictators would treat them even worse as nationless people sitting on valuable land (like say the Native Americans).
Anyway, if a huge chunk of the population of the richest nation in the world is unable to access modern medicine, something is seriously wrong.
The people most hurt by the current system are not those at the bottom of the social ladder, but rather those who have struggled to work their way up a few rungs. Emergency rooms aren't free if you own any kind of property at all, and they can wipe out someone who is trying to start a business or use their free time for nightschool etc.
The healthcare problems of this country are hurting our ability to generate new businesses.
I know a lot of 20somes who live... well, not safely.
Between all the stupid things people do, the one I've seen fuck up more people is riding a bicycle without health insurance.
A sudden accident and you're tens of thousands of dollars in debt.
Yes but isn't it the goal of organizing as a society to improve the lives of citizens? If this is the attitude we're going to take, we might as well dissolve the government and the cops and have Mad Max rule of the strongest.
This would also dissolve the Corporations. That manner of collective property is held together by a highly elaborate set of economically invasive (anti-invisible hand) laws.
As well as increasing the self-sufficiency of developing nations.
There's a real lack of foresight by a lot of charities. It has a lot to do with government funding of independent charity, it creates a real conflict of interest. The people who run the a more controversial (to voters or $ contributors) organizations have to pick policy with the goal of being invisible to congress.
"The Revolution Will Not Be Funded" is a good read.
The only solution is to get rid of the government.
now we're talking.
but before we can do that, we need to get our local towns and small cities to become more civic and self-sufficient. local economies have to be prioritized over the national one. a fast collapse of the us federal government would mean chaos and blood in the streets. real pressure to shrink (not empty promises like newt's) while local communities step up and render the feds irrelevant could do the job without firing a shot.
if, of course, enough people wanted it.
The internet has historically been accessible to the blind and deaf. Braille readers, large text output, and screen readers have been around since the 80s.
It will be a shame if in going multimedia the internet loses functionality that it has had for decades.
Frankly, your argument "Well they can't drive cars, who cares if they can or can't do anything." marks you as a pretty enormous asshole. What do you propose the disabled do in the modern world?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that you're against cutting them checks once we've made it impossible for them to work or live self-sufficiently.
If basic accessibility standards are followed, non-multimedia content is easily made available for the disabled. It's callous to refuse to be bothered to take basic steps to help others.
Good info but I have to ask, are other people's slashdot comments really worth that much of your time?
I promise you that if you know how to debug and update COBOL software on 1970 era mainframes, there is work out there for you.
Now you tell me, I bought all these Higgs-Bosons and I can't *give* the suckers away. It's worse than those graviton futures I sank my last bonus into.
It took an act of the whitehouse to get telephones and powerlines connected to everyone in the US. If they feel like they can make more money not installing fiber everywhere, then we won't be getting fiber any time soon.
The funny thing is that after decades of "deregulation" we have less of a market economy than ever before. The largest businesses in the country (and this is especially true in telecom) hold their positions with a massive buttress of government contracts and protectionist legislation. Government regulation doesn't do half the damage to a market that government favor brokering does.
Oh no the massive profits the telecom industry has enjoyed with the explosion of the internet might at some point cause them to have to sink money into infrastructure? The horror!
Some crimes are hard to define in terms that are both necessary and sufficient (to borrow math teacher speak). The letter of the law exists beside a broad history of court interpretation.
If one really could not in print accuse a person, corporation, institution, or government service or crime without the agreement of a judge and jury, then we could hardly be called a free society.
In practice, the only surefire way to get stuck with libel is to be a reporter erroneously reporting gross lies and total fabrication about someone's life as if it were confirmed and researched fact. It basically has to look like a deliberate campaign of character assassination.
So some webpage attacking some fly by night company that may or may not actually exist?
Is not going to be libel in the United States of America. And this is a good thing. The government should stay the hell out of speech in any situation where the speech itself is not a direct, immediate, and premeditated harm to specific persons.
I am not a lawyer, but I'd love it if someone could show me a successfully prosecuted libel case of similar triviality.