'police yourself before you police others'.... Not to start something(ok, maybe to start a LITTLE something) but that is anti-common cliche if ever there was one. Quite the opposite is happening in the US these days, unless you count something like 'police ourselves as if you yourself were the others... all the while also trying to policing others'.
Isn't "crawling back up fast" an oxymoron? And yet, it seems to accurately portray Apple's marketshare perfectly.../me types this from a 12" powerbook, 1ghz, 768meg RAM.
regedit is your (unholy) friend, most likely. Most companies leave(or install and conveniently forget to remove, etc) a registry entry. Regedit(comes with Windows) can search for keywords (the company or product name, for instance) in your registry and remove them. ALWAYS backup(and burn to cd, and mail your cd to a non-existant Chinese address to ensure long mail trip time) your registry. ALWAYS.
Now deleting that key should erase all backdoor reminders that the software was install. It could have been a hidden file in your filesystem, in which case either make sure to manually delete the C:\Program Files\SOFTWARE NAME\ folder. If, for some reason, the file is stored not there then you should boycott the company on principle(or just a get a refund).
FInally, if thise were a Mac 10.x problem, I would tell you to go to you ~/library/preferences folder and delete the companies (or products) folder and then to double check by running a search from the finder by product and company name, just in case.
Do you happen to have that excel file still on hand? I would appreciate it if you could send me a copy as part of a for-fun project I have been doing in trying to tabulate the electoral votes, more information(that is more accurate) the better...
In that light, assuming they did sorta-independent but integrated(can use the seperately if you want, but they work together nicely) programs for each, I could see something happening along those lines.
The Orkut is questionable, only because Google has not put much work into it, they created it as a side for-fun project, and it has remained as such.
If it was tri(mac win lin, with freebsd/etc a nice bonus)-platform, I could see this taking off quickly.
First, Google-groups, gmail, and google IM(something i AM in support of, but doesn't exist) are nothing that need to or should be tied to a single browser. That is silly.
Second, IE wouldn't just disappear, and the majority of people wouldn't really care if GBrowse was released, they are not aware of what a 'browser' is.
To get even 20% of the market, which in itself, is an unbelievably huge and almost unattainable task, Google has to blow the socks off of IE and generric firefox. Not just add cool button to search Google quickly, or a gmail pop-up for new mail, I am talking jumping a full generation in browser development such that people will be waranted in going out of their way(which 80-90 % of people could care less about doing, they are happy with hotmail and IE 6, seriously. Ignorance is bliss) to discover this new program.
Now, maybe if Orkut(google's social-net cliet) got a major face-lift, and some compelling work went into it such that it became as big a demand as Gmail. Google would have something.
But don't think that just because Google releases a Firefox-based browser that the world will change, that is just wishful.
I think hypercard, if given away similar to Applescript's authoring tools, still could have a chance at success.
Have an auto-supported program(anything written in cocoa or carbon, for instance, and a well-designed GUI, the power of hypercard would seep through.
If they made it more standard-like, and allowed for cross-platform development the way openstep and (carbon? I get cocoa/carbon mixed up) promised then you really have a chance at something.
I have to admit I have a soft spot for a system 6 classic mac all-in-one computer. I am 18, and barely actually 'remember' using them when they were being sold as new, if at all.
The idea that you can drop in a new finder file, or upgrade your sytem by swapping out a couple old system extenstions with the ones that came in a magazine freewar section is amazing. I think there is a lot of very powerful stuff that was designed into the mac.
File extensions and such, while not perfect, are a really easy way to upgrade and maintain your system. You can do so much with just moving/replacing files that would break a Windows or Mac or linux box with DLL hell and what not.
I think serious multi-tasking, obviously, was the core problem for the mac. It was too easy to jump ship to windows(who, at the time, was worse off in most respects) and point at the weak(but just as reliable in all honesty) multi-tasking ability of system 7 and such.
Macs, more so then than now, had a simple directory structure too. System, Documents, Applications. Takes about 2 seconds(the time it took to read those three words) to figure out where a given file is gonna be, really.
I have great love for the old macs. It had a clean and elegant system.
P.S: I say this while listening to iTunes on my 12" Powerbook, I still love the mac.:)
Sure, you might have some inconvenience(loss of civil liberties) now, but once we win the war on terror, I am sure we will be returned all those rights.
Wait, you mean to tell me the war on terror is an endless battle of extremists? You mean the war cannot be won? You mean the President admitted this and doesn't believe it will end either?
I want my civil liberties and privacy back please, Mr. Bush.
"What good does it do we, the people, to have these kinds of people representing us for 30 or 40 years?"
Because we the people have chosen that man to be the best representative of our values and beliefs in the federal government, we made that choice as a majority democratic vote.
The people want Senator X, they like and agree with him. Now, after 12 years, with a 70% approval record and noone who so accurately agrees with the populace as this Senator, you want to remove him from power. Why? The people, whom decide the elected officials, want Mr. X.
The people should be smart enough to vote for whom they want, without term limits(with the exception of the President, in my opinion) and gotchas that hinder their choice.
The same is true of a judge being forced to hand down mandatory sentences. He is a judge, his opinion and knowledge was chosen to aide and contribute to the legal sytem, why are you tying his hands? Why even have a judge. Just hire Judge Dread with a motorcycle and the cops can hand out prision sentences more efficiently...
But, what if there are exceptions, what if it isn't a black and white case? Nope, too bad, you commited X you serve Y, no questions, no gray area, no exceptions.
Yes, I wholly agree the United States has stepped beyond its bounds, acted selfishly(for no FREAKING reason, *sigh*) and commited some of the worst international policy changes since... the word international was invented.
However, for the UN to 'act' would be a joke. Lets say the UN wanted to pass a 'resolution', well too bad, the US has absolute veto power. Just like France, Germany and the other 7 nations of the world(whome I don't care to guess or look up right now).
Now if the UN had a Senate of 1 representative for each recognized soverign nation, then we could talk, until then, no chance in hell.
It really seems, from an Oregonian and US citizen's perspective, that Canada will be fully justified in leading a UN-backed NATO invasion of the US. Sad part? Almost all of our National Gaurdsmen and women(the volunteer citizen army that are designed to protect our nation's borders and such) are in Iraq and involved with either the logistics or the fighting. Good plan Bush.
"Is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family?"
Would I support the prosecution of a man stealing bread for his starving family? No, because I am not an asshole.
Second. Bread is a physical thing. The owner lossing a bread is an calculable loss, he had 10 loaves before, now he has nine.
If I were to 'steal' a digital recording, the store owner didn't loss anything. He had 10 songs on his harddrive, I made a copy(stole it) but he still has 10 songs. No harm, no fowl. The only loss, arguably, is if I were initially planning on buying that copy of the song, but changed my mind, and made a free digital copy instead. That would be theoretical loss, not actual loss.
Finally. They arn't stealing music. It is essentially an on-demand radio station... Imagine your buddy had the largest music collection you had ever seen. Rediculous, thousands of cds. You went to his dorm, plugged in your headphones to a cd player in his dorm and listened to a cd he had, then you leave.
Now, imagine that that buddy had N number of discman/headphone setup in his dorm(and sufficient room, etc to house the temporary crowd) and he let everyone on campus to go to his dorm, listen to a cd of their choice and leave? Is that stealing? No one is gaining or lossing a copy of music in any sense.
This is that same system, only, you don't have to leave your dorm to listen to your buddy's(the music service's) cd collection. At the end of the day, you don't get to keep the music you listened to, no matter how often you listened to them.
So you 'listen' to the cd without actually keeping a copy of it indeffinetly? Excellent... One step further.
What if instead of physically sharing the cd(too messy, too much latency, etc) we put your cd's on your computer, and allow 1 person to listen to that song at any given time. Without having you or anyone else listen to it.
If everyone does this, and we each share our libraries in one-at-a-time streaming media, what do we have? Sounds like iTunes to me.
At the very least, it is singlecasting streaming radio, with DRM builtinto it.
Not that it is a bad idea, but the concept has been used.
The cluster would have to be high-performance(above average, atleast) on gigabit small dedicated LAN...
The latency of going OS->mobo->nic->wire->nic->mobo->OS, etc is too much compared to the previous single system setup.
Now something like smart AI bots, that do more prediciton/learning, sure, that would be easy to put over the network, but then the end would not justify the means as a bot just isn't that intense to justify mroe than 1 computer for all the bots in a medium/large map.
Pre-rendering maps and viewpoints? Just seems like too much bandwidth required to make the ends justify the means.
The problem with 'gaming rig' is the latency. Lets assume you want this 'cluster', I would call it a web, of systems would be spread over the internet. Heck, even an enterprise-sized LAN(10,000 workstations over, say, a couple dozen subnets, etc). The latency of going from the most available(least used) 'resource'(workstation), have it punch out the result and return the end product, would be too long for even lowend gaming. The latency and overhead required in a multi-sytem network is just too great.
Now, let me throw a buzzword in here, please. Do not shoot me. Lets say we have 1,000 machines running this FirefOS (ok, NOW shoot me), they are kernels+firefox GUI, essentially.
Lets say this 'web' of grid resources, was a loose nit peer network of like-minded machines. Of the 1,000, lets say that each machine discovers 50-100 or so, that are in the 'ideal' range(roundtrip time, not already overloaded with peers, etc). Now, lets say that each system has it's own frontend gui. Each is a workstation in its own right. Now, when you want to compile your gentoo distro, or have some reasonably grid-able task, your workstation handsoff the specified tasks to a workstation on your peer list(routing table with metrics of processor load, round trip time, bandwidth connection) and once done, the data is returned. Now, if each did this in a SETI-style, where the computer would prioritize its OWN workload higher than another computer's load, it would be a floating supercomputer. Whatever computers were on screensaver or non-use, would contribute to processing of large tasks.
In theory, this is something similar to Playstation 3 and grid computing.
Sadly, most super computer tasks are not the type of calculations that can be easily broken up into N part and spread of a fairly high-latency network. SETI or Distributed.net are great for these tasks. Earthsim or Nuclear bomb theoretical testing, not so much.
Netscape: Killed by MS, partially by poor management. MS shipped IE for free, cut Netscape's reasonable ability to sell their product and drove them out of the market.
Java: MS shipped a knowingly and specifically buggy JRE with Windows that broke and hurt Java's adoption significantly. Things, I thik(?) are better, but the initial wave of Java lost almost all of its steam.
Flash: Never heard of Flash as a platform. It has been marketed(or implemented) as a too-heavy UI for websites, and is only now settling into the 'useful' category and moving away from the 'oh god, my eyes, they burn!' category.
Firefox? Open Source, Free, badass. MS can't undercut the price, they can't ship an incompatable version of Firefox(no, IE doesn't, necesarily, count) and Firefox is arguably superior in every aspect of the game than IE is, with the exception of sites that are written to ONLY work with IE.
If ever there was a true 'platform' to debunk Microsoft's Windows platform, it is Firefox. That is assuming Sun doesn't move to open source Java reasonably soon.
"Marijuana: Used up before launch by ground crew, causing crew to riot."
I would have gone with:
Marijuana: Used up before launch by ground crew, resulting in apathy and disinterest site-wide at the Kennedy Space Center and caused NASA to push back the launch date.
Slashdot Mirror
More than you can shake a uh... stick at?
amazing UID, very nice..
'police yourself before you police others'.... Not to start something(ok, maybe to start a LITTLE something) but that is anti-common cliche if ever there was one. Quite the opposite is happening in the US these days, unless you count something like 'police ourselves as if you yourself were the others... all the while also trying to policing others'.
Lower traffic bills? Have you seen how much money both candidates have in their war chest?
Could pay down a couple percentages on the national debt... Money saving is not a big priority I don't think.
Try again:
CLICKABLE
Woah there... Don't be putting 'esceptions' and 'what abouts' in there. President Bush stands by his convictions and he stands by this!
Flame me, mod me. I can take it.
Isn't "crawling back up fast" an oxymoron? And yet, it seems to accurately portray Apple's marketshare perfectly... /me types this from a 12" powerbook, 1ghz, 768meg RAM.
regedit is your (unholy) friend, most likely. Most companies leave(or install and conveniently forget to remove, etc) a registry entry. Regedit(comes with Windows) can search for keywords (the company or product name, for instance) in your registry and remove them. ALWAYS backup(and burn to cd, and mail your cd to a non-existant Chinese address to ensure long mail trip time) your registry. ALWAYS.
Now deleting that key should erase all backdoor reminders that the software was install. It could have been a hidden file in your filesystem, in which case either make sure to manually delete the C:\Program Files\SOFTWARE NAME\ folder. If, for some reason, the file is stored not there then you should boycott the company on principle(or just a get a refund).
FInally, if thise were a Mac 10.x problem, I would tell you to go to you ~/library/preferences folder and delete the companies (or products) folder and then to double check by running a search from the finder by product and company name, just in case.
Hope that helps your future problems
Do you happen to have that excel file still on hand? I would appreciate it if you could send me a copy as part of a for-fun project I have been doing in trying to tabulate the electoral votes, more information(that is more accurate) the better...
maburns AT gmail dot com
Thank you.
So are you the first to say the color iPod is gonna fail. Can we put 20 bucks on it, and can I get a witness to verify, please?
Come on. iPod, iPod mini, iMac G5 even, all were said to be flops, all were huge successes.
hey, atleast you didn't say Canadians For Kerry .com. Oh, wait a minute...
In that light, assuming they did sorta-independent but integrated(can use the seperately if you want, but they work together nicely) programs for each, I could see something happening along those lines.
The Orkut is questionable, only because Google has not put much work into it, they created it as a side for-fun project, and it has remained as such.
If it was tri(mac win lin, with freebsd/etc a nice bonus)-platform, I could see this taking off quickly.
Wow there cowboy.
First, Google-groups, gmail, and google IM(something i AM in support of, but doesn't exist) are nothing that need to or should be tied to a single browser. That is silly.
Second, IE wouldn't just disappear, and the majority of people wouldn't really care if GBrowse was released, they are not aware of what a 'browser' is.
To get even 20% of the market, which in itself, is an unbelievably huge and almost unattainable task, Google has to blow the socks off of IE and generric firefox. Not just add cool button to search Google quickly, or a gmail pop-up for new mail, I am talking jumping a full generation in browser development such that people will be waranted in going out of their way(which 80-90 % of people could care less about doing, they are happy with hotmail and IE 6, seriously. Ignorance is bliss) to discover this new program.
Now, maybe if Orkut(google's social-net cliet) got a major face-lift, and some compelling work went into it such that it became as big a demand as Gmail. Google would have something.
But don't think that just because Google releases a Firefox-based browser that the world will change, that is just wishful.
I did.
I think hypercard, if given away similar to Applescript's authoring tools, still could have a chance at success.
Have an auto-supported program(anything written in cocoa or carbon, for instance, and a well-designed GUI, the power of hypercard would seep through.
If they made it more standard-like, and allowed for cross-platform development the way openstep and (carbon? I get cocoa/carbon mixed up) promised then you really have a chance at something.
I have to admit I have a soft spot for a system 6 classic mac all-in-one computer. I am 18, and barely actually 'remember' using them when they were being sold as new, if at all.
:)
The idea that you can drop in a new finder file, or upgrade your sytem by swapping out a couple old system extenstions with the ones that came in a magazine freewar section is amazing. I think there is a lot of very powerful stuff that was designed into the mac.
File extensions and such, while not perfect, are a really easy way to upgrade and maintain your system. You can do so much with just moving/replacing files that would break a Windows or Mac or linux box with DLL hell and what not.
I think serious multi-tasking, obviously, was the core problem for the mac. It was too easy to jump ship to windows(who, at the time, was worse off in most respects) and point at the weak(but just as reliable in all honesty) multi-tasking ability of system 7 and such.
Macs, more so then than now, had a simple directory structure too. System, Documents, Applications. Takes about 2 seconds(the time it took to read those three words) to figure out where a given file is gonna be, really.
I have great love for the old macs. It had a clean and elegant system.
P.S: I say this while listening to iTunes on my 12" Powerbook, I still love the mac.
Sure, you might have some inconvenience(loss of civil liberties) now, but once we win the war on terror, I am sure we will be returned all those rights.
Wait, you mean to tell me the war on terror is an endless battle of extremists? You mean the war cannot be won? You mean the President admitted this and doesn't believe it will end either?
I want my civil liberties and privacy back please, Mr. Bush.
*sigh*
"What good does it do we, the people, to have these kinds of people representing us for 30 or 40 years?"
Because we the people have chosen that man to be the best representative of our values and beliefs in the federal government, we made that choice as a majority democratic vote.
The people want Senator X, they like and agree with him. Now, after 12 years, with a 70% approval record and noone who so accurately agrees with the populace as this Senator, you want to remove him from power. Why? The people, whom decide the elected officials, want Mr. X.
The people should be smart enough to vote for whom they want, without term limits(with the exception of the President, in my opinion) and gotchas that hinder their choice.
The same is true of a judge being forced to hand down mandatory sentences. He is a judge, his opinion and knowledge was chosen to aide and contribute to the legal sytem, why are you tying his hands? Why even have a judge. Just hire Judge Dread with a motorcycle and the cops can hand out prision sentences more efficiently...
But, what if there are exceptions, what if it isn't a black and white case? Nope, too bad, you commited X you serve Y, no questions, no gray area, no exceptions.
The world isn't that simple.
Yes, I wholly agree the United States has stepped beyond its bounds, acted selfishly(for no FREAKING reason, *sigh*) and commited some of the worst international policy changes since... the word international was invented.
However, for the UN to 'act' would be a joke. Lets say the UN wanted to pass a 'resolution', well too bad, the US has absolute veto power. Just like France, Germany and the other 7 nations of the world(whome I don't care to guess or look up right now).
Now if the UN had a Senate of 1 representative for each recognized soverign nation, then we could talk, until then, no chance in hell.
It really seems, from an Oregonian and US citizen's perspective, that Canada will be fully justified in leading a UN-backed NATO invasion of the US. Sad part? Almost all of our National Gaurdsmen and women(the volunteer citizen army that are designed to protect our nation's borders and such) are in Iraq and involved with either the logistics or the fighting. Good plan Bush.
"Is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family?"
Would I support the prosecution of a man stealing bread for his starving family? No, because I am not an asshole.
Second. Bread is a physical thing. The owner lossing a bread is an calculable loss, he had 10 loaves before, now he has nine.
If I were to 'steal' a digital recording, the store owner didn't loss anything. He had 10 songs on his harddrive, I made a copy(stole it) but he still has 10 songs. No harm, no fowl. The only loss, arguably, is if I were initially planning on buying that copy of the song, but changed my mind, and made a free digital copy instead. That would be theoretical loss, not actual loss.
Finally. They arn't stealing music. It is essentially an on-demand radio station... Imagine your buddy had the largest music collection you had ever seen. Rediculous, thousands of cds. You went to his dorm, plugged in your headphones to a cd player in his dorm and listened to a cd he had, then you leave.
Now, imagine that that buddy had N number of discman/headphone setup in his dorm(and sufficient room, etc to house the temporary crowd) and he let everyone on campus to go to his dorm, listen to a cd of their choice and leave? Is that stealing? No one is gaining or lossing a copy of music in any sense.
This is that same system, only, you don't have to leave your dorm to listen to your buddy's(the music service's) cd collection. At the end of the day, you don't get to keep the music you listened to, no matter how often you listened to them.
So you 'listen' to the cd without actually keeping a copy of it indeffinetly? Excellent... One step further.
What if instead of physically sharing the cd(too messy, too much latency, etc) we put your cd's on your computer, and allow 1 person to listen to that song at any given time. Without having you or anyone else listen to it.
If everyone does this, and we each share our libraries in one-at-a-time streaming media, what do we have? Sounds like iTunes to me.
At the very least, it is singlecasting streaming radio, with DRM builtinto it.
Not that it is a bad idea, but the concept has been used.
The cluster would have to be high-performance(above average, atleast) on gigabit small dedicated LAN...
The latency of going OS->mobo->nic->wire->nic->mobo->OS, etc is too much compared to the previous single system setup.
Now something like smart AI bots, that do more prediciton/learning, sure, that would be easy to put over the network, but then the end would not justify the means as a bot just isn't that intense to justify mroe than 1 computer for all the bots in a medium/large map.
Pre-rendering maps and viewpoints? Just seems like too much bandwidth required to make the ends justify the means.
The problem with 'gaming rig' is the latency. Lets assume you want this 'cluster', I would call it a web, of systems would be spread over the internet. Heck, even an enterprise-sized LAN(10,000 workstations over, say, a couple dozen subnets, etc). The latency of going from the most available(least used) 'resource'(workstation), have it punch out the result and return the end product, would be too long for even lowend gaming. The latency and overhead required in a multi-sytem network is just too great.
Now, let me throw a buzzword in here, please. Do not shoot me. Lets say we have 1,000 machines running this FirefOS (ok, NOW shoot me), they are kernels+firefox GUI, essentially.
Lets say this 'web' of grid resources, was a loose nit peer network of like-minded machines. Of the 1,000, lets say that each machine discovers 50-100 or so, that are in the 'ideal' range(roundtrip time, not already overloaded with peers, etc). Now, lets say that each system has it's own frontend gui. Each is a workstation in its own right. Now, when you want to compile your gentoo distro, or have some reasonably grid-able task, your workstation handsoff the specified tasks to a workstation on your peer list(routing table with metrics of processor load, round trip time, bandwidth connection) and once done, the data is returned. Now, if each did this in a SETI-style, where the computer would prioritize its OWN workload higher than another computer's load, it would be a floating supercomputer. Whatever computers were on screensaver or non-use, would contribute to processing of large tasks.
In theory, this is something similar to Playstation 3 and grid computing.
Sadly, most super computer tasks are not the type of calculations that can be easily broken up into N part and spread of a fairly high-latency network. SETI or Distributed.net are great for these tasks. Earthsim or Nuclear bomb theoretical testing, not so much.
This grammar nazi is in serious need of a promotion, well done.
Netscape: Killed by MS, partially by poor management. MS shipped IE for free, cut Netscape's reasonable ability to sell their product and drove them out of the market.
Java: MS shipped a knowingly and specifically buggy JRE with Windows that broke and hurt Java's adoption significantly. Things, I thik(?) are better, but the initial wave of Java lost almost all of its steam.
Flash: Never heard of Flash as a platform. It has been marketed(or implemented) as a too-heavy UI for websites, and is only now settling into the 'useful' category and moving away from the 'oh god, my eyes, they burn!' category.
Firefox? Open Source, Free, badass. MS can't undercut the price, they can't ship an incompatable version of Firefox(no, IE doesn't, necesarily, count) and Firefox is arguably superior in every aspect of the game than IE is, with the exception of sites that are written to ONLY work with IE.
If ever there was a true 'platform' to debunk Microsoft's Windows platform, it is Firefox. That is assuming Sun doesn't move to open source Java reasonably soon.
"Marijuana: Used up before launch by ground crew, causing crew to riot."
I would have gone with:
Marijuana: Used up before launch by ground crew, resulting in apathy and disinterest site-wide at the Kennedy Space Center and caused NASA to push back the launch date.