I wrote more or less the exact same letter to them in 1995. At that time however, the subject was their broken promise regarding the "new operating system" (that never really ended up being released anyway) being able to run on the *extremely expensive* hardware that I had just purchased. I never received a response. It was not the first time Apple had LIED TO and SCREWED its users, and, *obviously* not the last. I turned away then and never looked back.
When I see people advocating the mac these days, I just feel sorry for them, because I know how dicked over they're going to feel eventually.
What was it that Scotty said? "Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me."
Here's someone who actually read the bill(s) and gave a careful, reasoned analysis of the actual effect of this bill, the limit of it's reach, and the probability of whether it will be eventually limited, or struck down by the courts. Most of you seem to have had a knee-jerk reaction about the "life in prison" part, and ignored entirely the "search" part.
Do you believe that all Linux distributions should use such a friendly series of dialog boxes in order to attract more users to Linux?
Uh... ouch, this is making my head hurt. Hold on... I'm thinking about it. OH!! I know the answer:
"No. Absolutely Not. All Linux distributions should require the user to write their own install scripts. That way they can be COOL just like the average linux guru!"
One of the comments to the KDE3 article (on the article's page) said this:
"Would it be too much to ask for a Linux distro made specifically for KDE so that it may be optimized for KDE and really integrate KDE into the underlying system?"
Wow! Is this an original thought? I can't believe I never thought of that myself. I'd sure as heck give a such a distro a try on *my* desktop. I know so many folks prefer other desktops, and for good reasons, but if a standardized desktop (forced on the community because the KDE distribution overwhelmingly becomes *the* distro that all non-sysadmins use) that most apps were (in the long run) coded towards; that finally allowed me to cut and paste between apps (like the mac has been able to do for 18 years) would finally enable me to dump windows forever.
[Aside: I finally tracked down an OSX machine to check out the OS that so many/.ers have been raving about. Opinion: Yes, it's very nice. The nicest OS I've ever seen. But then I saw one of THESE and decided that when it comes to lugging a laptop around all day, weight is primary and OS choice is secondary. I'll be ordering one in a month. You have to see the little thing to believe it. It's unbelievably cute!]
All of our space missions (except the ones that we used to spy on ourselves) ultimately, though it isn't mentioned very often, have the goal of answering this question. But we keep attacking the question around the edges and I've never seen anyone propose the one real way to attack the question *directly*.
The only way that we have that can definitely find out without any doubt, and that we have the technology to do right now, so that we all will almost definitely and without a doubt KNOW in our lifetime is this:
We need to build a HUGE telescope in space or on the moon. Big enough to clearly resolve small features on planets.
Seriously, why do we bother spending all these gazillions of dollars on so many seperate small telescopes all over the earth (and in space)?
If we took all the cash going into the International Silly Station, planetary expeditions, and observational satellites and instead put a SUPER-MEGA-GIGANTA-mirror outside of our atmosphere, we could actually LOOK at planets, take pictures of them and see if there are cities or other signs of life on them.
Does anyone remember the Star Trek episode with Trallain (sp?)? He used (so Spock hypothesized) a giant telescope to look at the earth from 200 light years away, forgot about that silly speed of light thing, and decided that people from earth dressed like folks in 18th century France. I want that telescope! Let's build one.
How big does that telescope need to be? I'm not sure though I'd imagine some of you astrogeeks could figure it out pretty quickly. I would guess out of thin air that it would need to be hundreds of meters in diamater to capture and focus so very few photons that reach us from a teensy little thing like a planet so far off.
Of course there are the distortion/flexing problems with such a big chunk of material, but if we threw enough money at the thing, it could have enough computer/robotic power on the backside of it to keep everything in the correct shape. Alternatively it could be a giant array of hundreds of 5 meter scopes, or whatever would be easiest to do.
But the only reasons I can think of that we are not doing this are:
1. No one has thought of it yet? (doubtful) 2. Politics (perhaps) 3. Microsoft (most likely). 4. The folks in charge of the $$$ already know the answer to the question. (?)
I own two cars that are in mint condition, that I meticulously maintain like the former mechanic that I am -- and I drive them like an old lady. But treating a car like that all the time leads to a buildup of certain frustations, that I've only found a release for when I fly somewhere and then rent a car.
The last time I rented a car, I killed it, and loved every second of it. The white sedan, when they gave me the keys, had 7 miles on it. I was the first person to ever use it. It was some kind of Chevrolet 6 cylinder FWD auto sedan thing, in other words a complete POS.
Well, first I had to see just what it took to get some serious wheelspin out it, & I'm talking the fill the air with blue smoke kind of spin. I found that holding the accelerator to the floor for a few seconds in neutral and then dropping it into gear did the trick. Then I had to see how fast it could go (in each gear individually) for long periods of time, how well it could stop from maximum speed (over and over again), how well it did off road. It actually was pretty good off road except that after a while from somewhere underneath it kept making these horrible "clump-snap noises"
By the time I brought it back, it had a little over 200 miles on the clock. The engine was missing out of at least one cylinder, had a VERY bad knock and smoked some out of the tail pipe. For the last 40 miles or so it had been stuck in second gear and I have no idea why. It didn't really take the bumps as well as when I started either.
I don't really get it. Here in Louisiana, with Cox, before the @Home crash/burn/switchover, I was uncapped (down) and several times pulled over 500 kb/sec, steady, for several hours. Yes that's right and I'm not making it up. This was with a multisource downloading program. now, since the switchover from @Home, I'm capped at 300kb/sec down. The price has always been $35/mo.
U/L has always been capped at 30 kb/sec up, but I'm not running a server, so it doesn't bother me. So what's the big deal?
Perhaps one of the reasons it works here is that this state is uh... one of the "less technologically advanced" (ha ha ha ha heee hee hee ha ha), and there might not be that many folks in my neighborhood that even know what broadband is or could understand the concept if I explained it to them -- which leaves all the b/w for me!
The PBS signal down here in Louisiana is often several minutes to several HOURS off. I missed recording quite a few things because of that. I eventually just turned the silly thing off and just set the clock in the VCR manually now.
(and no it isn't the VCR. The TV also sets to the signal and goes off by the exact same amount)
I have an Oregon Scientifc clock set by the 5Mhz NIST signal (If you have a SW radio you can hear what the audible portion sounds like at exactly 5.000 Mhz) every night, or at least it tries to set itself -- if the conditions are bad (e.g., sun eruptions), it might not be able to set itself for days & hence experiences some drift.
But as the article pointed out, the most (rediculously) accurate clocks available to ordinary folks come down from the GPS satellites. Interestingly, PCS technology *requires* incredibly accurate time syncronization & each SprintPCS tower takes continuous readings from the GPS network. So when I power up my SprintPCS phone, and the tower gives my phone the time, I am sure it is accurate to within a milisecond or so.
And related to this: The new GPS phones that are coming out: they don't work like regular GPS receivers. Rather, they need to pick up only a *single* GPS satellite. Then, by using that signal and knowing the exact time, it can triangulate with a tower and give your position. Because it only needs that single satellite, it works fine inside buildings where an ordinary GPS receiver would display nothing.
I only have a Sprint phone so I've looked into how they work. Other digital mobile phones may do the same thing, but I don't know anything about those.
My 7 MHz A1000 + 4megs +80Meg Hard Drive seems more responsive than my current 1gig duron + 256megs + 60gig 7200rpm. Why? Heck, I'm not really sure. Something about lots of functions being done in specialized hardware and ram, that PCs, even to this day need to rely on processor and regular ram to do? Or something like that...
Unfortunately when the platform died, so did most software development. Also, when it comes down actually crunching gazillions of numbers, obviously a 7Mhz processor isn't going to touch my Duron. But as far as having wild and fun graphics stuff happen on the screen, loaded off of the boot sector of a 800 Meg floppy disk in about half a second -- no PC can touch that.
Commodore (the company that took over the Amiga, and then proceeded to do everything they could to kill it -- and succeeded), was like the primitive prototype of Worldcom style management. For those too young to remember, Commodore had a string of CEOs and management teams -- a new set every 6 months or so, who proceeded to rape the company for as much as they could get away with before going to jail; then they would turn it over to the next team that would do the identical thing, until there was nothing left except scraps for the creditors to pick over at bankruptcy proceedings.. Jerks.
Of note though, I've noticed that the same types of folks that embraced the Amiga way back when, seem to be embracing Linux today. I'm not sure what that means.
It seems like every time I blink RedHat is releasing an updated version. Maybe they're beginning to acknowledge (read: "worry about") the surprising popularity of Mandrake?
(Although Mandrake hasn't updated in quite a while; it's still at KDE2.2 over there with a semi-difficult KDE3.0 install option available).
Exactly. In the trade you are known as "judgement proof." Since it's likely that the great majority of P2Pers are, in relative terms, poor and can immediately chapter (bankrupt) out of any money award against them, this is really a piss poor tactic that they are going to use as a psychological weapon only -- it simply cannot, in the long run, make them more money than they will expend in legal fees.
IMO, the largest problem they have in using this as a terror weapon is that most teenagers don't have much fear of civil suits. The only way they'll ever put the fear of the law into P2Pers is after they convince various legislatures to pass CRIMINAL laws against the behavior, and then they start throwing folks in the pen.
Do I think this is unlikely? Based on that nasty organizations past behavior, I think it is a certainty!
It's silly how bizarre everyone's being about a little piece of rock: It's not chemically different from a plain old earth rock -- and it's not like it's rare or anything. Everbody knows that there're hundreds of billions of tons of the crud and everyone knows exactly where to find it.
That was sarcasm insufficiently clever to be wit. I agree that the "slippery slope" tactic fails classical deductive reasoning. Unfortunately the slippery slope seems sadly to be how everything has been progressing for the past 80 years or so.
The FTC isn't saying anything about how these corporations can conduct their business,...
[snip]
they are saying is that, when the results are presented to the customer, [the FTC requires that some results be] marked....
Hmmm... this was modded up higher than my original post for being insightful? Wow. Obviously I am insufficiently clueless as to how to whore for karma around here.
Search engines are for-profit corporations. They ought to be able to do what they please, so long as they are not doing direct harm to others. That is the essence of capitalism. If consumers of information demand unbiased searches, then they will gravitate to search engines that advertise such. Again, this is how capitalism works: the company that provides what the customer wants succeeds.
How dare the government dictate how information, from a search engine that is composed exactly of SPEECH and the PRESS ought to be formatted to benefit the "consumer." That is unprecedented, and unconstitutional.
If we let them get away with this, it's one fast ride down a greased up slippery slope to control of information on the net.
I like a clean desktop with no icons. This is why: I like to drag all the stuff I'm working on to my desktop, then put the important pieces away, and then do a quick drag over everything and "delete" and then I'm all set to begin another task. I don't have to drag carefully avoiding the home/trashcan icons. Also I know that everything on the desktop is related to what I am doing. I also like an icon-free desktop for the purely asthetic reasons: no clutter.
I can do this with both WinXP, and with KDE3. I cannot do it with Gnome, unless I remove the desktop itself, which of course defeats the reason for running a high resource consuming desktop manager in the first place. I have never understood why there isn't some way, even if it is difficult to get to (as it is on WinXP and KDE2/3) get rid of all the desktop icons under Gnome1/2.
-- Just another lone user crying out in the wilderness.
Slashdot Mirror
I wrote more or less the exact same letter to them in 1995. At that time however, the subject was their broken promise regarding the "new operating system" (that never really ended up being released anyway) being able to run on the *extremely expensive* hardware that I had just purchased. I never received a response. It was not the first time Apple had LIED TO and SCREWED its users, and, *obviously* not the last. I turned away then and never looked back.
When I see people advocating the mac these days, I just feel sorry for them, because I know how dicked over they're going to feel eventually.
What was it that Scotty said? "Burn me once, shame on you. Burn me twice, shame on me."
Here's someone who actually read the bill(s) and gave a careful, reasoned analysis of the actual effect of this bill, the limit of it's reach, and the probability of whether it will be eventually limited, or struck down by the courts. Most of you seem to have had a knee-jerk reaction about the "life in prison" part, and ignored entirely the "search" part.
as soon as they figure out how to make an electric motor sound like driving one of these. Until then they can keep their pussy motor.
Countach
Do you believe that all Linux distributions should use such a friendly series of dialog boxes in order to attract more users to Linux?
Uh... ouch, this is making my head hurt. Hold on... I'm thinking about it. OH!! I know the answer:
"No. Absolutely Not. All Linux distributions should require the user to write their own install scripts. That way they can be COOL just like the average linux guru!"
Wow! You are one of the few people I have ever seen in person or print that actually understands this. Let me guess your graduate degree:
Sanford or Yale, Business or Law... or both?
Am I close?
The leggo idea is uh... I just can't find the right word. But the most ambitious auto-musician project ever attempted (to date) has been the mubot
One of the comments to the KDE3 article (on the article's page) said this:
/.ers have been raving about. Opinion: Yes, it's very nice. The nicest OS I've ever seen. But then I saw one of THESE and decided that when it comes to lugging a laptop around all day, weight is primary and OS choice is secondary. I'll be ordering one in a month. You have to see the little thing to believe it. It's unbelievably cute!]
"Would it be too much to ask for a Linux distro made specifically for KDE so that it may be optimized for KDE and really integrate KDE into the underlying system?"
Wow! Is this an original thought? I can't believe I never thought of that myself. I'd sure as heck give a such a distro a try on *my* desktop. I know so many folks prefer other desktops, and for good reasons, but if a standardized desktop (forced on the community because the KDE distribution overwhelmingly becomes *the* distro that all non-sysadmins use) that most apps were (in the long run) coded towards; that finally allowed me to cut and paste between apps (like the mac has been able to do for 18 years) would finally enable me to dump windows forever.
[Aside: I finally tracked down an OSX machine to check out the OS that so many
The grandest question of all questions is this:
Are we alone?
All of our space missions (except the ones that we used to spy on ourselves) ultimately, though it isn't mentioned very often, have the goal of answering this question. But we keep attacking the question around the edges and I've never seen anyone propose the one real way to attack the question *directly*.
The only way that we have that can definitely find out without any doubt, and that we have the technology to do right now, so that we all will almost definitely and without a doubt KNOW in our lifetime is this:
We need to build a HUGE telescope in space or on the moon. Big enough to clearly resolve small features on planets.
Seriously, why do we bother spending all these gazillions of dollars on so many seperate small telescopes all over the earth (and in space)?
If we took all the cash going into the International Silly Station, planetary expeditions, and observational satellites and instead put a SUPER-MEGA-GIGANTA-mirror outside of our atmosphere, we could actually LOOK at planets, take pictures of them and see if there are cities or other signs of life on them.
Does anyone remember the Star Trek episode with Trallain (sp?)? He used (so Spock hypothesized) a giant telescope to look at the earth from 200 light years away, forgot about that silly speed of light thing, and decided that people from earth dressed like folks in 18th century France. I want that telescope! Let's build one.
How big does that telescope need to be? I'm not sure though I'd imagine some of you astrogeeks could figure it out pretty quickly. I would guess out of thin air that it would need to be hundreds of meters in diamater to capture and focus so very few photons that reach us from a teensy little thing like a planet so far off.
Of course there are the distortion/flexing problems with such a big chunk of material, but if we threw enough money at the thing, it could have enough computer/robotic power on the backside of it to keep everything in the correct shape. Alternatively it could be a giant array of hundreds of 5 meter scopes, or whatever would be easiest to do.
But the only reasons I can think of that we are not doing this are:
1. No one has thought of it yet? (doubtful)
2. Politics (perhaps)
3. Microsoft (most likely).
4. The folks in charge of the $$$ already know the answer to the question. (?)
Really, I think this is a heck of an informative post. Seriously, I'm not kidding. I think a -1 was a bit harsh.
After reading that little "polka" (and you KNOW what I'm talking about) *several* times I've been wondering all today "just what the heck is a choad?"
Now I can rest in peace.
SOMETHING will survive
BULLSHIT!
The earth is TOAST!
Nope. There's just lots of Ben-a-likes out here.
I own two cars that are in mint condition, that I meticulously maintain like the former mechanic that I am -- and I drive them like an old lady. But treating a car like that all the time leads to a buildup of certain frustations, that I've only found a release for when I fly somewhere and then rent a car.
The last time I rented a car, I killed it, and loved every second of it. The white sedan, when they gave me the keys, had 7 miles on it. I was the first person to ever use it. It was some kind of Chevrolet 6 cylinder FWD auto sedan thing, in other words a complete POS.
Well, first I had to see just what it took to get some serious wheelspin out it, & I'm talking the fill the air with blue smoke kind of spin. I found that holding the accelerator to the floor for a few seconds in neutral and then dropping it into gear did the trick. Then I had to see how fast it could go (in each gear individually) for long periods of time, how well it could stop from maximum speed (over and over again), how well it did off road. It actually was pretty good off road except that after a while from somewhere underneath it kept making these horrible "clump-snap noises"
By the time I brought it back, it had a little over 200 miles on the clock. The engine was missing out of at least one cylinder, had a VERY bad knock and smoked some out of the tail pipe. For the last 40 miles or so it had been stuck in second gear and I have no idea why. It didn't really take the bumps as well as when I started either.
I just love renting cars.
I don't really get it. Here in Louisiana, with Cox, before the @Home crash/burn/switchover, I was uncapped (down) and several times pulled over 500 kb/sec, steady, for several hours. Yes that's right and I'm not making it up. This was with a multisource downloading program. now, since the switchover from @Home, I'm capped at 300kb/sec down. The price has always been $35/mo.
U/L has always been capped at 30 kb/sec up, but I'm not running a server, so it doesn't bother me. So what's the big deal?
Perhaps one of the reasons it works here is that this state is uh... one of the "less technologically advanced" (ha ha ha ha heee hee hee ha ha), and there might not be that many folks in my neighborhood that even know what broadband is or could understand the concept if I explained it to them -- which leaves all the b/w for me!
The PBS signal down here in Louisiana is often several minutes to several HOURS off. I missed recording quite a few things because of that. I eventually just turned the silly thing off and just set the clock in the VCR manually now.
(and no it isn't the VCR. The TV also sets to the signal and goes off by the exact same amount)
I have my PC clock. It's OK.
I have an Oregon Scientifc clock set by the 5Mhz NIST signal (If you have a SW radio you can hear what the audible portion sounds like at exactly 5.000 Mhz) every night, or at least it tries to set itself -- if the conditions are bad (e.g., sun eruptions), it might not be able to set itself for days & hence experiences some drift.
But as the article pointed out, the most (rediculously) accurate clocks available to ordinary folks come down from the GPS satellites. Interestingly, PCS technology *requires* incredibly accurate time syncronization & each SprintPCS tower takes continuous readings from the GPS network. So when I power up my SprintPCS phone, and the tower gives my phone the time, I am sure it is accurate to within a milisecond or so.
And related to this: The new GPS phones that are coming out: they don't work like regular GPS receivers. Rather, they need to pick up only a *single* GPS satellite. Then, by using that signal and knowing the exact time, it can triangulate with a tower and give your position. Because it only needs that single satellite, it works fine inside buildings where an ordinary GPS receiver would display nothing.
I only have a Sprint phone so I've looked into how they work. Other digital mobile phones may do the same thing, but I don't know anything about those.
My 7 MHz A1000 + 4megs +80Meg Hard Drive seems more responsive than my current 1gig duron + 256megs + 60gig 7200rpm. Why? Heck, I'm not really sure. Something about lots of functions being done in specialized hardware and ram, that PCs, even to this day need to rely on processor and regular ram to do? Or something like that...
Unfortunately when the platform died, so did most software development. Also, when it comes down actually crunching gazillions of numbers, obviously a 7Mhz processor isn't going to touch my Duron. But as far as having wild and fun graphics stuff happen on the screen, loaded off of the boot sector of a 800 Meg floppy disk in about half a second -- no PC can touch that.
Commodore (the company that took over the Amiga, and then proceeded to do everything they could to kill it -- and succeeded), was like the primitive prototype of Worldcom style management. For those too young to remember, Commodore had a string of CEOs and management teams -- a new set every 6 months or so, who proceeded to rape the company for as much as they could get away with before going to jail; then they would turn it over to the next team that would do the identical thing, until there was nothing left except scraps for the creditors to pick over at bankruptcy proceedings.. Jerks.
Of note though, I've noticed that the same types of folks that embraced the Amiga way back when, seem to be embracing Linux today. I'm not sure what that means.
It seems like every time I blink RedHat is releasing an updated version. Maybe they're beginning to acknowledge (read: "worry about") the surprising popularity of Mandrake?
(Although Mandrake hasn't updated in quite a while; it's still at KDE2.2 over there with a semi-difficult KDE3.0 install option available).
Exactly. In the trade you are known as "judgement proof." Since it's likely that the great majority of P2Pers are, in relative terms, poor and can immediately chapter (bankrupt) out of any money award against them, this is really a piss poor tactic that they are going to use as a psychological weapon only -- it simply cannot, in the long run, make them more money than they will expend in legal fees.
IMO, the largest problem they have in using this as a terror weapon is that most teenagers don't have much fear of civil suits. The only way they'll ever put the fear of the law into P2Pers is after they convince various legislatures to pass CRIMINAL laws against the behavior, and then they start throwing folks in the pen.
Do I think this is unlikely? Based on that nasty organizations past behavior, I think it is a certainty!
There's this distribution:
http://www.lnx-bbc.org/
that is designed to fit in your wallet!
It's silly how bizarre everyone's being about a little piece of rock: It's not chemically different from a plain old earth rock -- and it's not like it's rare or anything. Everbody knows that there're hundreds of billions of tons of the crud and everyone knows exactly where to find it.
That was sarcasm insufficiently clever to be wit. I agree that the "slippery slope" tactic fails classical deductive reasoning. Unfortunately the slippery slope seems sadly to be how everything has been progressing for the past 80 years or so.
The FTC isn't saying anything about how these corporations can conduct their business,...
[snip]
they are saying is that, when the results are presented to the customer, [the FTC requires that some results be] marked....
Hmmm... this was modded up higher than my original post for being insightful? Wow. Obviously I am insufficiently clueless as to how to whore for karma around here.
Search engines are for-profit corporations. They ought to be able to do what they please, so long as they are not doing direct harm to others. That is the essence of capitalism. If consumers of information demand unbiased searches, then they will gravitate to search engines that advertise such. Again, this is how capitalism works: the company that provides what the customer wants succeeds.
How dare the government dictate how information, from a search engine that is composed exactly of SPEECH and the PRESS ought to be formatted to benefit the "consumer." That is unprecedented, and unconstitutional.
If we let them get away with this, it's one fast ride down a greased up slippery slope to control of information on the net.
I like a clean desktop with no icons. This is why: I like to drag all the stuff I'm working on to my desktop, then put the important pieces away, and then do a quick drag over everything and "delete" and then I'm all set to begin another task. I don't have to drag carefully avoiding the home/trashcan icons. Also I know that everything on the desktop is related to what I am doing. I also like an icon-free desktop for the purely asthetic reasons: no clutter.
I can do this with both WinXP, and with KDE3. I cannot do it with Gnome, unless I remove the desktop itself, which of course defeats the reason for running a high resource consuming desktop manager in the first place. I have never understood why there isn't some way, even if it is difficult to get to (as it is on WinXP and KDE2/3) get rid of all the desktop icons under Gnome1/2.
--
Just another lone user crying out in the wilderness.