Needs to be a little fuzzier, and the bottom edge of the screen is too clear, plus you need to overlay some of the fuzziness of the background (in particular, it looks like the original image was also jpeg and you need to fake the artifacts before compressing it) Tonal range is good though perhaps a bit _too_ good. All in all a nice effort and soon you will be able to fool judges and slashdotters.
Gates is arranging matters so he can entirely cash out. He's done. He's tired of being treated like a villain, cannot understand why he'd be considered guilty in this, and at a time when it's becoming clear that _something's_ going to go down painting the braintrust of Microsoft as robber barons and criminals, Gates finds that is not to his taste.
He can't buy off the government- he's tried. But he can buy a fall guy. That is Ballmer. He can extricate himself, claim Ballmer set the whole tone for the abuses of MS, and spend the rest of his life giving away huge sums of money while still living better than most kings. Who wouldn't want that? Gates wants that.
It is also true that the kind of person who can build an empire of this nature simply will not let go- but this isn't Gates letting go, really. Microsoft's _reputation_ is being wrested from him, and I'd say this also indicates no plans of Microsoft's indicate any change in overall strategy or approach. MS will play dirty to the end- Gates doesn't see this as wrong, but he's not a dope and he does see that _others_ see it as wrong. Given enough incentive, people do change- I picture Gates thinking about his image, how he wishes to be seen. He can afford to be the benevolent philanthropist for the rest of his life, a Carnegie in the best possible way- if he chooses. But at some point he must accept that Microsoft has taken him as far as it can- and has started to get in the way of his new dreams for a well-loved future as a philanthropist. And, just like any of a thousand unfortunate tech startups that were in the way and had to go, now Microsoft, its culture, its legacy are in the way of the life Gates wants for himself- and it has to go.
Gates is not a sentimental man, and he is easily as perceptive as the Judge and intelligent enough to see the full implications of his position. At some point he began taking all this seriously- and started laying escape plans.
Ballmer is left in a position to preside over the decay of an empire. There's really no way for MS to expand further- _especially_ with AOL Time Warner suddenly appearing- and MS is hopelessly dependent not on profitability alone but an outlandish growth rate. That cannot continue and won't. Ballmer is also combative, a perfect match to the job of making Microsoft fight to the death. They won't in fact die, but their being relegated to only one choice in an industry of choices will be a very, very painful and bitterly fought loss.
Gates has the opportunity, having made MS what it is, to now cut it loose, cash in, and go home to be a lovable billionaire. Doing this is perfectly in character with the approach that made MS what it is- ironically, I'd been saying for awhile that there was no reason to believe MS would have loyalty to the USA, and now it turns out that Gates does not have loyalty to a losing MS either. Perhaps surprising, but plausible.
Get used to the idea of Gates as a benevolent philanthropist. He _will_ be able to separate himself from the unpleasantness, but his ways of doing so may be startling...
Are you kidding? Apple was the first homebrew computer company to get serious venture capital funding and professional management (Mike Markkula). You honestly think they began with the Mac? o_O
I hardly know where to begin. Back in the days of the very first commercial home computer game ('Mystery House' by On-Line systems, later known as Sierra On-Line- 'Mystery House' was sold as a disk and a photocopied sheet in a baggie:) ), the game was shopped to Apple for possible distribution. It took Apple a _year_ to get back to the Williamses, because by that time Apple was _already_ a multimillion-dollar business, wealthy and kind of sluggish and dim. By the time it got back to the Williamses, they were already doing a roaring business as On-Line Systems...
Honestly, those who make accusations of revisionist history should either learn genuine history of some sort (even a small effort would do!) or should be old enough to have seen some of this happen. Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean it's impossible. Apple was a huge business at the time, seller of Apple IIs to the exploding home market in its first big boom and to schools in their original marketing campaigns that got them so established in education back then. They were the Microsoft of that era. Microsoft was still coding Typing Tutor in Bellevue, Washington at the time. They not only had that much stock, it was worth a lot, and they did indeed pay Xerox for the right to go in, gawk like mad at everything and take notes and then go home and use whatever they saw or thought they saw.
Are you kidding? This is howlingly, screamingly false, netwiz, as far as your contention of what Xerox had. Let me explain _exactly_ where you have been led astray.
There were no regions (irregular areas of halfconcealed windows) on the Xerox product. It used tiling windows. Apple people _thought_ they saw windows overlap, and later learned they'd invented what they thought they were reverse engineering:)
The Xerox system used popup menus on all screen objects, being heavily Smalltalk influenced. Have you seen Smalltalk, or at least pictures of it back then?
The Xerox system had _no_ direct manipulation, as in dragging around icons like they were objects and dropping them random places where they'd stay, much less dropping icons on other icons to accomplish tasks like opening a document with a particular app. In Smalltalk and in the Xerox system, you'd pop open a popup menu (like rightclicking, in fact I think it _was_ rightclicking) on the object in question, which would supply a list of the apps the document could be opened with or whatever else was needed.
Calling early Smalltalk a clone of MacOS system 1 cheapens Smalltalk. Calling MacOS system 1 a rip from Xerox PARC cheapens _it_. Both have exceptional virtues that resonated throughout the computer industry ever after (where do you think Windows got rightclicking and contextual menus- Apple?). Both are utterly different in significant ways.
And on top of all this, it's a matter of public record that Apple paid off Xerox in stock for the opportunity to go in with a crew of techs, walk around looking at all the stuff that Xerox wasn't doing squat with, and then (handing Xerox the payment) go off and freely come up with their own twist on the concepts they were paying for access to, be it closely related or wildly divergent. It ended up _fairly_ divergent. It took over ten years for some concepts like the contextual menus to make it to the MacOS, but then Xerox _never_ had direct icon manipulation, _only_ popups, so it balances.
I ask only for personal interest and indeed morbid fascination- where do you get your ideas?
Were you a Kaleidoscope interface hacker around the time of the C-Futuro Classic flap? Apple at the time was keeping its options open w.r.t a darker techy sort of interface theme, with a very specific design. One person (for the c.p. Church Windows, I believe) did a really accurate copy, and Ed Deans did C-Futuro Classic by basically taking Apple's 'HiTech' theme and adapting it as accurately as possible into a straight rect window.
Apple persecuted this vigorously, too, and there was much discussion and ranting and noise about the matter, but the end result was the removal of HiTech themes 'from the wild'. If you wanted a high tech theme, you had to *gasp* make one up. Seeing as on the kaleidoscope scheme archive there are 127 different schemes from authors with names beginning with 'A' alone, there are a lot of alternatives to using a clone of HiTech- or Aqua.
Plain and simple- don't blatantly rip Apple's expensive and fancy interface designs until _after_ they are released. They are less pissy when their product is actually shipping. When it's a nebulous project (HiTech, which got 'steved') or the next big thing that's being built as a replacement to Apple Platinum (Aqua), they get real pissy about someone heisting a facade of what they're building and offering it around.
Think Go Computing and Pen Windows. In what way is making a thin facade of Aqua with only the look of certain elements, little of the behavior or animation, and little debugging, NOT like the classic vaporware tactic? I'm sure it's less prone to dry up investor support in Apple;) but it's the same thing, releasing a facade of the new Apple interface to confuse, lessen the impact, and raise questions as to whether it's just the look of a window or a whole system involved.
Oh no, the dreaded Apple is stealing its, uh, its own graphical user interface. It's ruthlessly denying people free immediate hacking to largely arbitrary and artistic interface details that... geee, that _it_ paid handsomely for. Funny how that works, isn't it? Hire yer own damn graphic designers;) or just keep on keeping on. I've been playing with Afterstep a bit. I may like to make it look like classic NeXT (ahhhh) but I feel no need to make it look like Aqua.
I still think it would be better to break MS up along the lines of legacy OS and modern OS. In particular, W95/98/Millenium are known to be a real mess, but have the overwhelming advantage of numbers- they deserve a company dedicated to the maintenance of W95/98 users, a company that isn't just trying to switch all the people to a new OS (W2K).
Conversely, W2K deserves its own company. It has virtually zero real marketshare, really severe hardware requirements, but all reports seem to indicate that it is not as bad as w95:)
The apps could either go to both companies, or they could all stay with the W95 company. That would be an interesting move- take all the legacy, historical stuff and concentrate it. Make one company that is still hugely powerful and integrated but by splitting off the newer stuff, define the bigger company as a caretaker entity. Make a littler company with nothing but the newer stuff like W2K- and give that one Gates and Ballmer. Such a plan might ironically appeal to them as much as it annoys them:)
You can't deny that somebody ends up winning the lottery, too, but it is still basically a tax on people who are stupid about math.
This is the same deal. Do you seriously think J. Random Temp is going to walk into a Palo Alto ranch house anytime soon? The window of opportunity is over, over, over, and even when it was open, we're talking lottery chances here.
Face it, you're acting like a math luser. Forget the stories you've read in Time about teenager stock option millionares. It doesn't apply here. The window is closed, and it was smaller than you imagine in the first place- and the only people buying your argument are scratch ticket buyers.
Why do slashdotters argue madly that Microsoft stock options are a great thing and can never falter or collapse while:
suffering the problems and scarcities of a monopoly-owned industry
working to _change_ the state of affairs so that Microsoft is no longer the total unopposable crushing force it has been- a situation that is directly responsible for its current valuation?
I'm sorry, but I really don't see it. It appears to me that MS's valuation is extremely situational- it depends on their being a monopoly. If you don't think that can ever change, what the hell are you doing here? Slashdot can't be _that_ interesting to a total Microsoft partisan, and in any case most slashdotters are not total Microsoft partisans. So why this assumption that MS stock is not 'company scrip'? It sure looks like it. The whole options game is sick in a number of ways...
company scrip
your profits are directly boosted not simply by your excelling, but by making your competitors _fail_
options make it very unprofitable to take a long view and be concerned about the environment, the economy in general, society etc. It becomes a game with only one piece, which is a coin: but you don't get the coin, even though it represents you- instead you get how much somebody else _thinks_ it's worth, after they look at you and your competition. Is it any wonder options turn people into schizoid sociopaths? Your livelihood ends up depending on how badly your environment does in comparison with you.
COMPANY SCRIP, man! Who came up with this latest twist on company scrip? Our anonymous friend has this one figured out very nicely.
Microsoft's accounting procedures have been... unusual. I would question if we really have an accurate idea of how much money MS actually has. In particular, I wonder whether perhaps Microsoft DOESN'T HAVE much more than the $150 million.
wavy dissolve, to the court's private meeting room
MS: Well, there's something you should know. We only have 400 million dollars anyhow, and we need most of that to maintain operations. How about $10 million and we'll settle this here and now? Caldera:*shock* You're kidding! You guys are supposed to have countless billions! MS:*wry bitter grin* Well, that is counted _before_ paying the salaries of this year's workforce, which of course is figured _after_ paying the tax assuming the outgoes for _two_ years ago... Caldera:*ulp* You guys are worse than _we_ are, even with Cowpland. MS: Kinda scary, isn't it? Caldera: You said it. MS: So how about settling for 8 million like good fellows, huh? Caldera: You just said ten million! MS: Stock fluctuation. Hey, give us a break. Caldera: Sure. 200 million. MS: You're crazy! Caldera: And loving it. 200 million. Now. MS: There isn't that much. Caldera: Do tell! 150 million, then. Or we repeat what you just said to Wall Street. Because it would amuse us. MS: Bastards! All right. 150 million. And you better settle and not be a problem to us anymore! Caldera: In cash.
_Effusive_ apologies for carrying on like that, but notice what just happened? A whole bunch of people totally ignored the hype. Just as a whole bunch of people now ignore politics and won't vote, etc. When you are drowning in information you really lose interest in selecting among it, and you begin to reject _all_ of it simply because too much of it is unsuitable or inappropriate...
I post to a musician web board, and a common topic has been, "Ack, get a load of these clowns email spamming all of us to get downloaded!" This gets great contempt. Well, just recently everyone got spammed by a _new_ twist- a person sending 'a fan has sent you an email!' mail, who expressed great appreciation, said they downloaded all your songs and if you check it turns out they _did_, and asks only, "Will you put me on your band's mailing list so I can be informed when new material comes out?"
The consensus was: it was a very determined attempt to harvest addresses- which would then be spammed to hell. Many people got this treatment, and some of them had bought in to similar approaches and ended up getting spammed like mad from bands they had not even heard of.
So at this point in this musician community, the 'fan has sent you an email' mechanism (operated from a web page) has become utterly worthless because there is no perceptible difference between a genuine fan and attempts to harvest emails. You can't even go by 'does the mail display someone else's URL or is it just a letter' because it can be seemingly a totally sincere letter and _still_ be a baited hook!
That situation would seemingly be immune to 'regulons' and yet in practice the mechanism can end up ignored due to abuses.
I've said before that we're looking at an economy of _attention_, and this is precisely the regulating factor. Much advertising, not to mention web advertising, is useless- some actually un-sells products by being too annoying (this can be measured...) and the more advertising screams for attention the less it's noticed.
Know who Victor Kiam is? You've probably seen his face. People recognise him on the street because he is the guy who 'liked the shaver so much, he bought the company'. He sells electric razors in those advertisements.
Quick- what is the brand name of razor he's selling? People recognise this guy's face on the street and remember the 'I bought the company' tagline. When he then asks them what is the name of the company, more than half of the people don't know.
Quick, what sport is Michael Jordan known for? You'll find many people recognise the name but haven't a clue what the guy does.
Regulon, meet Katz. Katz, meet Regulon....but you already know each other, don't you? Because Regulon has been causing people to tune _you_ out, Katz, for years. Just as it does to _everybody_.
Notice how I singled out crack? I didn't use marijuana for my bitter remark. I'll tell you, me and marijuana happened not to get along very well- even though it's one of the least aggressively harmful drugs you can get, I still got well and truly hung up on it, and won't touch that stuff anymore. I can see how even that could be harmful, but I can accept that my experience might be atypical.
I said crack because high-powered cocaine (and, obviously, opiates) are without question the most likely 'victimless' drugs to actually cause victims- either in the form of physical addiction that some people never escape, or in the form of criminal acts performed to get the money for more crack or opiates. _You_ know that's true, better than most. Many of the criminals you deal with are also abusing substances, and a lot of the really familiar faces are strung out on heavy drugs and simply desperate to get a fix. Suburban potheads might not want to believe this is a reality, but yes there are drugs that tend to produce conditions like that.
You also know that serious drug supply is not a charity or public service- it's a bigtime capitalist enterprise more vicious than most, and it's heavily geared towards extracting as much money as possible from consumers who are often poor and not in a position to pay for what they need. Again, it's the potheads that present a less vicious picture, a more peaceful front. Start looking at other drugs and you get sellers who will not do payment plans or 'help out a friend who's hurtin' and it's cash on the barrelhead or nothing, and they don't care where you get it. And again, welcome to robbery, fraud, mugging, the gamut of victim crimes, for the purpose of getting money. Few things are more motivating than a severe physical addiction like opiates, or a magic Superman pill like highpowered cocaine, particularly when they can erase your concern about what acts you may have just committed to get the money for your drugs.
So, I wasn't saying there was _no_ way in which drugs could be decriminalised sanely- it seems to me serious regulation and taxation would help. But just flinging the doors open and kicking the underground, criminal (in various senses of the word) economy into high gear without trying to change it? You'd be overloaded again, this time with victim crimes. Sale of crack is a canonical example of a 'victimless act' that has a really high probability of rapidly eating through the buyer's money, no matter how much that is. It's not like pot- you can burn through _large_ amounts of money consuming cocaine. And when the money is gone, then what? GET MORE, what else? Naturally, some people are going to take more direct approaches to this problem, and that becomes your problem as a cop.
If you want a lower caseload in the long run, work for decriminalisation that results in practically a government subsidy on drugs. Get the government set up as your friendly dope dealer. Otherwise, the underground economy already in place will burgeon and swamp you with other crime as the dealers and distribution chain fight over booming business and the new buyers produce a steady percentage of new muggers, robbers and con artists.
Better yet, he can decriminalise everything! Then the jails can be mostly emptied, and 90% of those people can hit the streets and, rejoicing and singing merry songs, flood the fscking country with crack! How empowering:P
Simple answers make complicated messes. I'd rather see complicated answers to hopefully make simpler messes. To me, _both_ "Jail 'em all!" and "Let 'em all go!" are dangerously simple answers. The reality is a lot trickier than that, believe me.
Bill Bradley. Name _one_ other candidate that was a top-echelon athletic star (i.e. basketball, for Bradley), with experience getting situational awareness of many people running around competing with you, plus the remainder of a sports star's youthful reflexes. _Plus_, what other candidate has been in such a public competition as pro basketball, relied upon to win the game, the center of attention and stress?
I might also add that Bradley would be well suited to playing team Quake because he always played team basketball very well, working with teammates rather than being a ballhog, and I have to emphasise the situational awareness- Bradley was known for startling quick passes to teammates that he wasn't even _looking_ at, sensing where they'd moved to and winging the ball to where they must be without looking. This tended to leave crowds cheering like maniacs as it seemed superhuman.
With all this going for him, how could Bradley _not_ totally wipe the floor with anybody in American politics, playing Quake III? The ability to keep track of where individuals are going in a busy melee would have him owning all of them, by a huge margin. Anyone know if he plays the game? I'm serious- there's every reason to believe Bradley would just humiliate all the other politicians. How could he not?
Are you sure this fellow wants to lower barriers to entry as you imply? You strongly suggest all this supports people like us, but you could as easily say:
2) Stop lawyers from attacking the technology industry and make sure special interests like Microsoft can do absolutely anything they want without fear of legal hassle
Gee, sounds like Microsoft might like that a lot, actually!
3)Eliminate capital gains taxes to make sure the existing rich special interests can be even more rich and even more capable of starving out and crushing any high-tech small business dumb enough to try and apply late-80s rules to 2000 and beyond- or, failing that, just buy anything that looks threatening and divvy up the developers and skilled people among random corporate projects to keep them out of circulation.
Ooo, stick it to the man;P
I don't trust this guy as far as I could throw him on _Jupiter_. Yeesh. How many slashdotters really buy into this sort of thing? It's amazing how people can see total pandering to trusts as 'woo hoo, freedom'. I don't have an answer- I'd go with Bradley, not real enthusiastically- but I'd like to think I at least have a clue. American Politics is the _dumbest_ place I can think of to worship the wealthy in the belief that they will be above influence. o_O
Understandable seeing as I make 'em parts of a recording studio:)
Here's what I do. I have one powermac (9500) and an old Performa 410. The powermac runs two IBM SCSI drives and has two internal fans, so it needed extra help, but the Performa is what would be running if I was sequencing MIDI parts and singing or playing an acoustic instrument on top of them to get more instruments per track. Both got similar treatments. The key parts are Mortite (a sort of caulk stuff that stays pliable and is a powerful damper, metal foil tape, and heavy felt (like 1/2" thick and fluffy- I got mine out of old Pioneer speakers. Or, alternately, acrylic fake-fur, believe it or not)
The first thing you do is kill panel resonances. Heat doesn't dissipate much through solid panels- not much airflow through those! so you want to make them heavier and less resonant. Mortite can be separated into thin strings of material- fasten these to the inside of the case, fixing them permanently in place with a tapelike strip of metal tape over them. The 'bubble' of metal tape over mortite will keep the mortite permanently soft, and any deflection of the case sides will force either the mortite or the tape to distort. Since the metal tape is aluminum, either way you have a very mechanically lossy damping effect. Put lots of these all over the case panels. They kill hints of reverberation from undamped metal panels 'singing' along with the drives, and they help the case hold sound in, because you're making the panels heavier too. They probably really need it.
Next, hunt down all little airspaces that do _not_ contribute to airflow. Macs are pretty safe with this, be extra careful with high-powered PCs. You'll be finding places to stick bits of the felt (or fakefur, or fibreglass- anything that's acoustic damping). The inside of a computer is not only a hell of digital noise, it's also acoustically reverberant- you'll rarely see anything even vaguely soft in there. Your job is to get something in there that will cut down on this grating morass of highpitched flutter echo;)
For my 9500, the case was much as you might expect for a PC, perhaps heavier gauge metal than some. Damping the panels was straightforward, and there proved to be many little nooks and corner places to tuck bits of felt in. I had to be careful to still allow airflow in crucial areas- tracking the air from vent slots at the bottom of the case to the top and the power supply exhaust fan.
The Performa is a pizzabox case, with a flat internally ribbed lid- which also has a metal shielding layer! This was a natural for damping- it's a mass of little airspaces that don't go anywhere. I heavily damped the internal metal part with metal tape/mortite, then cut up huge amounts of the felt into tiny bits, and made the entire lid a big sound absorber unit, almost solid with felt bits:)
This approach has produced two computers that are very pleasingly quiet. The noise that they do make is not intrusive. I once set up an old Mac II this way and ended up with a computer that sounded like the cabin of a 747:) it's definitely worth some experimenting, just be very careful to maintain airflow- including convection in major internal airspaces to help establish an even internal temperature, without hotspots.
If you want super quiet, look into replacing solid areas of panel with heavy solid panels- the ultimate material would be something like lead, but you can avoid poisonous materials by choosing many worthy substitutes. The materials used to damp metal panels on cars and trucks are an obvious candidate. Have fun!
In short, is Clinton wittingly or unwittingly loading people into a channel that Microsoft has surreptitiously bought outright? Maybe it would be better if computer education got _less_ money so people would be forced to think about theory and write their own stuff instead of taking how-to courses on commercial products. The world doesn't start and end with programmers- huge percentages of the computer courses of the world are really "Using Microsoft Works" and the like. Do we want that to become federally subsidized?
Well, I'm sitting here playing with some wacky sound-tracking software (PlayerPro) I just got, and plotting to soup up my speakers even more crazedly to keep up with the crazy imaginary bassnotes some sequences have, and when I put my full name (i.e. 'Christopher' as on my birth certificate), what do I get but "Eight-Legged DJ"! That's pretty cool and apropos in a peculiar way.
Now that I know that- what the hell _is_ a Wu Name??
Free Software only exists within a social context. Expecting a formal punishment for people like this belies the fact that already the social penalty is death:) both in Linux circles and, interestingly, in stock market circles, LinuxOne == mud.
There isn't a need for a formal authority stating that LinuxOne is bad, because there wasn't a formal authority stating Linux is good either- indeed, the most likely candidate for a formal authority is the likes of Mindcraft and Microsoft, and it's pretty obvious that their credibility is zilch too, particularly when you consider the subject and their motives for assuming authority on it and making announcements.
Instead, LinuxOne has already been singled out for contempt and dismissal (bordering on vengeance!) by two entirely separate communities. Any uninformed person inquiring, later, why it was a disaster, could get two entirely distinct authoritative answers why it was a big scam (OSS: it was Mandrake with the serial numbers filed off, they wouldn't give source, etc.. and The Street: didn't you notice they were incorporated in Nevada? etc)
LinuxOne watching is nothing more than bloodsport or sick humor and doesn't really _matter_ in any sense. Be assured that if any investors get suckered, Wall Street itself will think (along with OSS people) that they were fools. The prospect of Wall Street going "Oh my God, Linux is a scam!" is zilch: they know, better than we could ever know, how to spot con artist entrepreneurs, and the Street has already spotted LinuxOne for what it is (besides which, anyone trying to find out on the net would rapidly hit tons of Slashdot hysteria and outrage on the subject- and again, Wall Street knows what that sort of thing means.)
Penny Arcade is a special case, Ciannait. It is a gamer comic strip, by and about gamers, and gamers are psychotically competitive- that's the whole gag, that's the most common joke on Penny Arcade. For instance, consider the two gamers in the 'line-down-the-middle' strip. "This side of the house is for the noble Quake 3 Arena legions, and _this_ side is for the miserable Unreal Tournament heathens." "The refrigerator is on your side!" "So is God." I mean, that's classic character humor- and it is echoed completely by the creators of the strip itself- they _are_ gamers, they're like that, of course they're coming across all combative towards User Friendly! You should see what they do to bad game websites;) *shudder*
I'm reminded of a Winsor McCay 'Little Nemo' book my Dad got for christmas. McCay was an absolutely phenomenal draftsman and artist, with staggering imagination, and his strip was basically immersion in this astonishing dream-world. In the book are many reproduced strips- and the commentaries of many current comic artists. Most say nice things about McCay in this book that is _about_ McCay's work. Then there was Bill Watterson, who did Calvin and Hobbes... you'd swear it was Calvin writing the blurb. He _savages_ McCay, totally unimpressed, pointing out that there are no characters, no depth, it's nothing but a hollow vehicle for McCay's amazing drafting talents (which C+H readers know Watterson can basically rival anyhow). It's astonishing that any book would include a blurb that scorns and ruthlessly critiques the book's honored subject- but how Calvinish of Watterson to do so! Just like Penny Arcade being harshly competitive, Calvin is arrogant, thoughtless and full of himself because Watterson is just as tough to impress and just as sadistic a critic. He was the only comic artist in the McCay book to even hint that Winsor McCay wasn't a Superman of comic art, and he puts the whole thing (including his own role in it!) into perspective.
Food for thought the next time you get annoyed by Penny Arcade being totally hostile:)
He happens to pick one of the most hysterically funny multiple-twist UF strips ever written! This really hurts his case about such jokes not being funny. To summarize:
Techie asks what the password is, response is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk'. First joke: clueless user who thinks the password is what is shown on screen when he types.
Doubletake! Techie is unix guru and for a horrible second wonders what would happen if every character in the password was a wildcard character! This, not the first frame, is what had me LOL.
Twist! Techie begins stammering and trying to find out if the guy REALLY TYPED that, and bam! Suddenly the victim, the hapless luser, turns on him with a "Muahahaha! You don't know if I'm an idiot or really really clever, DO you?" And sure enough, the techie doesn't...
...but in fact the joke is also on us the readers, particularly if we're Unix savvy but not really clued enough to be _sure_ about the password characters. The final joke is if we aren't sure- then, not only does the techie not know, WE don't know who the joke is really on either:)
It's absolutely fscking brilliant. And there are so many levels that are inside jokes for the Unix friendly (everything after the doubletake) that it makes it all the funnier, sharing a _private_ joke. Didn't this editorializer see the last panel with the suddenly-nefarious luser turning on the techie with an evil laugh? See the techie getting very flustered? Did he seriously think the joke was entirely on the luser? Geez. Some people ought not to be allowed to come in contact with humor without adult supervision;)
Slashdot Mirror
*lengthy shocked silence*
*grin*
Kewl. Well, on to the next subject... ;)
He can't buy off the government- he's tried. But he can buy a fall guy. That is Ballmer. He can extricate himself, claim Ballmer set the whole tone for the abuses of MS, and spend the rest of his life giving away huge sums of money while still living better than most kings. Who wouldn't want that? Gates wants that.
It is also true that the kind of person who can build an empire of this nature simply will not let go- but this isn't Gates letting go, really. Microsoft's _reputation_ is being wrested from him, and I'd say this also indicates no plans of Microsoft's indicate any change in overall strategy or approach. MS will play dirty to the end- Gates doesn't see this as wrong, but he's not a dope and he does see that _others_ see it as wrong. Given enough incentive, people do change- I picture Gates thinking about his image, how he wishes to be seen. He can afford to be the benevolent philanthropist for the rest of his life, a Carnegie in the best possible way- if he chooses. But at some point he must accept that Microsoft has taken him as far as it can- and has started to get in the way of his new dreams for a well-loved future as a philanthropist. And, just like any of a thousand unfortunate tech startups that were in the way and had to go, now Microsoft, its culture, its legacy are in the way of the life Gates wants for himself- and it has to go.
Gates is not a sentimental man, and he is easily as perceptive as the Judge and intelligent enough to see the full implications of his position. At some point he began taking all this seriously- and started laying escape plans.
Ballmer is left in a position to preside over the decay of an empire. There's really no way for MS to expand further- _especially_ with AOL Time Warner suddenly appearing- and MS is hopelessly dependent not on profitability alone but an outlandish growth rate. That cannot continue and won't. Ballmer is also combative, a perfect match to the job of making Microsoft fight to the death. They won't in fact die, but their being relegated to only one choice in an industry of choices will be a very, very painful and bitterly fought loss.
Gates has the opportunity, having made MS what it is, to now cut it loose, cash in, and go home to be a lovable billionaire. Doing this is perfectly in character with the approach that made MS what it is- ironically, I'd been saying for awhile that there was no reason to believe MS would have loyalty to the USA, and now it turns out that Gates does not have loyalty to a losing MS either. Perhaps surprising, but plausible.
Get used to the idea of Gates as a benevolent philanthropist. He _will_ be able to separate himself from the unpleasantness, but his ways of doing so may be startling...
Seems like a logical plan to _me_.
I hardly know where to begin. Back in the days of the very first commercial home computer game ('Mystery House' by On-Line systems, later known as Sierra On-Line- 'Mystery House' was sold as a disk and a photocopied sheet in a baggie :) ), the game was shopped to Apple for possible distribution. It took Apple a _year_ to get back to the Williamses, because by that time Apple was _already_ a multimillion-dollar business, wealthy and kind of sluggish and dim. By the time it got back to the Williamses, they were already doing a roaring business as On-Line Systems...
Honestly, those who make accusations of revisionist history should either learn genuine history of some sort (even a small effort would do!) or should be old enough to have seen some of this happen. Just because you don't like the truth doesn't mean it's impossible. Apple was a huge business at the time, seller of Apple IIs to the exploding home market in its first big boom and to schools in their original marketing campaigns that got them so established in education back then. They were the Microsoft of that era. Microsoft was still coding Typing Tutor in Bellevue, Washington at the time. They not only had that much stock, it was worth a lot, and they did indeed pay Xerox for the right to go in, gawk like mad at everything and take notes and then go home and use whatever they saw or thought they saw.
There were no regions (irregular areas of halfconcealed windows) on the Xerox product. It used tiling windows. Apple people _thought_ they saw windows overlap, and later learned they'd invented what they thought they were reverse engineering :)
The Xerox system used popup menus on all screen objects, being heavily Smalltalk influenced. Have you seen Smalltalk, or at least pictures of it back then?
The Xerox system had _no_ direct manipulation, as in dragging around icons like they were objects and dropping them random places where they'd stay, much less dropping icons on other icons to accomplish tasks like opening a document with a particular app. In Smalltalk and in the Xerox system, you'd pop open a popup menu (like rightclicking, in fact I think it _was_ rightclicking) on the object in question, which would supply a list of the apps the document could be opened with or whatever else was needed.
Calling early Smalltalk a clone of MacOS system 1 cheapens Smalltalk. Calling MacOS system 1 a rip from Xerox PARC cheapens _it_. Both have exceptional virtues that resonated throughout the computer industry ever after (where do you think Windows got rightclicking and contextual menus- Apple?). Both are utterly different in significant ways.
And on top of all this, it's a matter of public record that Apple paid off Xerox in stock for the opportunity to go in with a crew of techs, walk around looking at all the stuff that Xerox wasn't doing squat with, and then (handing Xerox the payment) go off and freely come up with their own twist on the concepts they were paying for access to, be it closely related or wildly divergent. It ended up _fairly_ divergent. It took over ten years for some concepts like the contextual menus to make it to the MacOS, but then Xerox _never_ had direct icon manipulation, _only_ popups, so it balances.
I ask only for personal interest and indeed morbid fascination- where do you get your ideas?
Apple persecuted this vigorously, too, and there was much discussion and ranting and noise about the matter, but the end result was the removal of HiTech themes 'from the wild'. If you wanted a high tech theme, you had to *gasp* make one up. Seeing as on the kaleidoscope scheme archive there are 127 different schemes from authors with names beginning with 'A' alone, there are a lot of alternatives to using a clone of HiTech- or Aqua.
Plain and simple- don't blatantly rip Apple's expensive and fancy interface designs until _after_ they are released. They are less pissy when their product is actually shipping. When it's a nebulous project (HiTech, which got 'steved') or the next big thing that's being built as a replacement to Apple Platinum (Aqua), they get real pissy about someone heisting a facade of what they're building and offering it around.
Think Go Computing and Pen Windows. In what way is making a thin facade of Aqua with only the look of certain elements, little of the behavior or animation, and little debugging, NOT like the classic vaporware tactic? I'm sure it's less prone to dry up investor support in Apple ;) but it's the same thing, releasing a facade of the new Apple interface to confuse, lessen the impact, and raise questions as to whether it's just the look of a window or a whole system involved.
Oh no, the dreaded Apple is stealing its, uh, its own graphical user interface. It's ruthlessly denying people free immediate hacking to largely arbitrary and artistic interface details that... geee, that _it_ paid handsomely for. Funny how that works, isn't it? Hire yer own damn graphic designers ;) or just keep on keeping on. I've been playing with Afterstep a bit. I may like to make it look like classic NeXT (ahhhh) but I feel no need to make it look like Aqua.
Conversely, W2K deserves its own company. It has virtually zero real marketshare, really severe hardware requirements, but all reports seem to indicate that it is not as bad as w95 :)
The apps could either go to both companies, or they could all stay with the W95 company. That would be an interesting move- take all the legacy, historical stuff and concentrate it. Make one company that is still hugely powerful and integrated but by splitting off the newer stuff, define the bigger company as a caretaker entity. Make a littler company with nothing but the newer stuff like W2K- and give that one Gates and Ballmer. Such a plan might ironically appeal to them as much as it annoys them :)
This is the same deal. Do you seriously think J. Random Temp is going to walk into a Palo Alto ranch house anytime soon? The window of opportunity is over, over, over, and even when it was open, we're talking lottery chances here.
Face it, you're acting like a math luser. Forget the stories you've read in Time about teenager stock option millionares. It doesn't apply here. The window is closed, and it was smaller than you imagine in the first place- and the only people buying your argument are scratch ticket buyers.
- suffering the problems and scarcities of a monopoly-owned industry
- working to _change_ the state of affairs so that Microsoft is no longer the total unopposable crushing force it has been- a situation that is directly responsible for its current valuation?
I'm sorry, but I really don't see it. It appears to me that MS's valuation is extremely situational- it depends on their being a monopoly. If you don't think that can ever change, what the hell are you doing here? Slashdot can't be _that_ interesting to a total Microsoft partisan, and in any case most slashdotters are not total Microsoft partisans. So why this assumption that MS stock is not 'company scrip'? It sure looks like it. The whole options game is sick in a number of ways...- company scrip
- your profits are directly boosted not simply by your excelling, but by making your competitors _fail_
- options make it very unprofitable to take a long view and be concerned about the environment, the economy in general, society etc. It becomes a game with only one piece, which is a coin: but you don't get the coin, even though it represents you- instead you get how much somebody else _thinks_ it's worth, after they look at you and your competition. Is it any wonder options turn people into schizoid sociopaths? Your livelihood ends up depending on how badly your environment does in comparison with you.
COMPANY SCRIP, man! Who came up with this latest twist on company scrip? Our anonymous friend has this one figured out very nicely.Well, humor value is largely untouched. Wouldn't it be funny if something like this was the real explanation?
wavy dissolve, to the court's private meeting room
MS: Well, there's something you should know. We only have 400 million dollars anyhow, and we need most of that to maintain operations. How about $10 million and we'll settle this here and now?
Caldera:*shock* You're kidding! You guys are supposed to have countless billions!
MS:*wry bitter grin* Well, that is counted _before_ paying the salaries of this year's workforce, which of course is figured _after_ paying the tax assuming the outgoes for _two_ years ago...
Caldera:*ulp* You guys are worse than _we_ are, even with Cowpland.
MS: Kinda scary, isn't it?
Caldera: You said it.
MS: So how about settling for 8 million like good fellows, huh?
Caldera: You just said ten million!
MS: Stock fluctuation. Hey, give us a break.
Caldera: Sure. 200 million.
MS: You're crazy!
Caldera: And loving it. 200 million. Now.
MS: There isn't that much.
Caldera: Do tell! 150 million, then. Or we repeat what you just said to Wall Street. Because it would amuse us.
MS: Bastards! All right. 150 million. And you better settle and not be a problem to us anymore!
Caldera: In cash.
The truth is out there....
That said- why did Katz, who is familiar with television, miss this potentially embarrassing detail?
There's your 'regulon', right there.
Not only that, I can _demonstrate_ the Regulon. Watch closely:
_Effusive_ apologies for carrying on like that, but notice what just happened? A whole bunch of people totally ignored the hype. Just as a whole bunch of people now ignore politics and won't vote, etc. When you are drowning in information you really lose interest in selecting among it, and you begin to reject _all_ of it simply because too much of it is unsuitable or inappropriate...
I post to a musician web board, and a common topic has been, "Ack, get a load of these clowns email spamming all of us to get downloaded!" This gets great contempt. Well, just recently everyone got spammed by a _new_ twist- a person sending 'a fan has sent you an email!' mail, who expressed great appreciation, said they downloaded all your songs and if you check it turns out they _did_, and asks only, "Will you put me on your band's mailing list so I can be informed when new material comes out?"
The consensus was: it was a very determined attempt to harvest addresses- which would then be spammed to hell. Many people got this treatment, and some of them had bought in to similar approaches and ended up getting spammed like mad from bands they had not even heard of.
So at this point in this musician community, the 'fan has sent you an email' mechanism (operated from a web page) has become utterly worthless because there is no perceptible difference between a genuine fan and attempts to harvest emails. You can't even go by 'does the mail display someone else's URL or is it just a letter' because it can be seemingly a totally sincere letter and _still_ be a baited hook!
That situation would seemingly be immune to 'regulons' and yet in practice the mechanism can end up ignored due to abuses.
I've said before that we're looking at an economy of _attention_, and this is precisely the regulating factor. Much advertising, not to mention web advertising, is useless- some actually un-sells products by being too annoying (this can be measured...) and the more advertising screams for attention the less it's noticed.
Know who Victor Kiam is? You've probably seen his face. People recognise him on the street because he is the guy who 'liked the shaver so much, he bought the company'. He sells electric razors in those advertisements.
Quick- what is the brand name of razor he's selling? People recognise this guy's face on the street and remember the 'I bought the company' tagline. When he then asks them what is the name of the company, more than half of the people don't know.
Quick, what sport is Michael Jordan known for? You'll find many people recognise the name but haven't a clue what the guy does.
Regulon, meet Katz. Katz, meet Regulon. ...but you already know each other, don't you? Because Regulon has been causing people to tune _you_ out, Katz, for years. Just as it does to _everybody_.
I said crack because high-powered cocaine (and, obviously, opiates) are without question the most likely 'victimless' drugs to actually cause victims- either in the form of physical addiction that some people never escape, or in the form of criminal acts performed to get the money for more crack or opiates. _You_ know that's true, better than most. Many of the criminals you deal with are also abusing substances, and a lot of the really familiar faces are strung out on heavy drugs and simply desperate to get a fix. Suburban potheads might not want to believe this is a reality, but yes there are drugs that tend to produce conditions like that.
You also know that serious drug supply is not a charity or public service- it's a bigtime capitalist enterprise more vicious than most, and it's heavily geared towards extracting as much money as possible from consumers who are often poor and not in a position to pay for what they need. Again, it's the potheads that present a less vicious picture, a more peaceful front. Start looking at other drugs and you get sellers who will not do payment plans or 'help out a friend who's hurtin' and it's cash on the barrelhead or nothing, and they don't care where you get it. And again, welcome to robbery, fraud, mugging, the gamut of victim crimes, for the purpose of getting money. Few things are more motivating than a severe physical addiction like opiates, or a magic Superman pill like highpowered cocaine, particularly when they can erase your concern about what acts you may have just committed to get the money for your drugs.
So, I wasn't saying there was _no_ way in which drugs could be decriminalised sanely- it seems to me serious regulation and taxation would help. But just flinging the doors open and kicking the underground, criminal (in various senses of the word) economy into high gear without trying to change it? You'd be overloaded again, this time with victim crimes. Sale of crack is a canonical example of a 'victimless act' that has a really high probability of rapidly eating through the buyer's money, no matter how much that is. It's not like pot- you can burn through _large_ amounts of money consuming cocaine. And when the money is gone, then what? GET MORE, what else? Naturally, some people are going to take more direct approaches to this problem, and that becomes your problem as a cop.
If you want a lower caseload in the long run, work for decriminalisation that results in practically a government subsidy on drugs. Get the government set up as your friendly dope dealer. Otherwise, the underground economy already in place will burgeon and swamp you with other crime as the dealers and distribution chain fight over booming business and the new buyers produce a steady percentage of new muggers, robbers and con artists.
Simple answers make complicated messes. I'd rather see complicated answers to hopefully make simpler messes. To me, _both_ "Jail 'em all!" and "Let 'em all go!" are dangerously simple answers. The reality is a lot trickier than that, believe me.
I might also add that Bradley would be well suited to playing team Quake because he always played team basketball very well, working with teammates rather than being a ballhog, and I have to emphasise the situational awareness- Bradley was known for startling quick passes to teammates that he wasn't even _looking_ at, sensing where they'd moved to and winging the ball to where they must be without looking. This tended to leave crowds cheering like maniacs as it seemed superhuman.
With all this going for him, how could Bradley _not_ totally wipe the floor with anybody in American politics, playing Quake III? The ability to keep track of where individuals are going in a busy melee would have him owning all of them, by a huge margin. Anyone know if he plays the game? I'm serious- there's every reason to believe Bradley would just humiliate all the other politicians. How could he not?
2) Stop lawyers from attacking the technology industry and make sure special interests like Microsoft can do absolutely anything they want without fear of legal hassle
Gee, sounds like Microsoft might like that a lot, actually!
3)Eliminate capital gains taxes to make sure the existing rich special interests can be even more rich and even more capable of starving out and crushing any high-tech small business dumb enough to try and apply late-80s rules to 2000 and beyond- or, failing that, just buy anything that looks threatening and divvy up the developers and skilled people among random corporate projects to keep them out of circulation.
Ooo, stick it to the man ;P
I don't trust this guy as far as I could throw him on _Jupiter_. Yeesh. How many slashdotters really buy into this sort of thing? It's amazing how people can see total pandering to trusts as 'woo hoo, freedom'. I don't have an answer- I'd go with Bradley, not real enthusiastically- but I'd like to think I at least have a clue. American Politics is the _dumbest_ place I can think of to worship the wealthy in the belief that they will be above influence. o_O
Here's what I do. I have one powermac (9500) and an old Performa 410. The powermac runs two IBM SCSI drives and has two internal fans, so it needed extra help, but the Performa is what would be running if I was sequencing MIDI parts and singing or playing an acoustic instrument on top of them to get more instruments per track. Both got similar treatments. The key parts are Mortite (a sort of caulk stuff that stays pliable and is a powerful damper, metal foil tape, and heavy felt (like 1/2" thick and fluffy- I got mine out of old Pioneer speakers. Or, alternately, acrylic fake-fur, believe it or not)
The first thing you do is kill panel resonances. Heat doesn't dissipate much through solid panels- not much airflow through those! so you want to make them heavier and less resonant. Mortite can be separated into thin strings of material- fasten these to the inside of the case, fixing them permanently in place with a tapelike strip of metal tape over them. The 'bubble' of metal tape over mortite will keep the mortite permanently soft, and any deflection of the case sides will force either the mortite or the tape to distort. Since the metal tape is aluminum, either way you have a very mechanically lossy damping effect. Put lots of these all over the case panels. They kill hints of reverberation from undamped metal panels 'singing' along with the drives, and they help the case hold sound in, because you're making the panels heavier too. They probably really need it.
Next, hunt down all little airspaces that do _not_ contribute to airflow. Macs are pretty safe with this, be extra careful with high-powered PCs. You'll be finding places to stick bits of the felt (or fakefur, or fibreglass- anything that's acoustic damping). The inside of a computer is not only a hell of digital noise, it's also acoustically reverberant- you'll rarely see anything even vaguely soft in there. Your job is to get something in there that will cut down on this grating morass of highpitched flutter echo ;)
For my 9500, the case was much as you might expect for a PC, perhaps heavier gauge metal than some. Damping the panels was straightforward, and there proved to be many little nooks and corner places to tuck bits of felt in. I had to be careful to still allow airflow in crucial areas- tracking the air from vent slots at the bottom of the case to the top and the power supply exhaust fan.
The Performa is a pizzabox case, with a flat internally ribbed lid- which also has a metal shielding layer! This was a natural for damping- it's a mass of little airspaces that don't go anywhere. I heavily damped the internal metal part with metal tape/mortite, then cut up huge amounts of the felt into tiny bits, and made the entire lid a big sound absorber unit, almost solid with felt bits :)
This approach has produced two computers that are very pleasingly quiet. The noise that they do make is not intrusive. I once set up an old Mac II this way and ended up with a computer that sounded like the cabin of a 747 :) it's definitely worth some experimenting, just be very careful to maintain airflow- including convection in major internal airspaces to help establish an even internal temperature, without hotspots.
If you want super quiet, look into replacing solid areas of panel with heavy solid panels- the ultimate material would be something like lead, but you can avoid poisonous materials by choosing many worthy substitutes. The materials used to damp metal panels on cars and trucks are an obvious candidate. Have fun!
In short, is Clinton wittingly or unwittingly loading people into a channel that Microsoft has surreptitiously bought outright? Maybe it would be better if computer education got _less_ money so people would be forced to think about theory and write their own stuff instead of taking how-to courses on commercial products. The world doesn't start and end with programmers- huge percentages of the computer courses of the world are really "Using Microsoft Works" and the like. Do we want that to become federally subsidized?
Ack, there are several of them, apparently!
Quick, open source them! Then we can port Linux to them and make them into a Beowulf cluster to sell to Transmeta, who are clearly making fish.
Now _that_ would be a helluva crack! >;)
8-Legged DJ, truly evil :)
Now that I know that- what the hell _is_ a Wu Name??
Free Software only exists within a social context. Expecting a formal punishment for people like this belies the fact that already the social penalty is death :) both in Linux circles and, interestingly, in stock market circles, LinuxOne == mud.
There isn't a need for a formal authority stating that LinuxOne is bad, because there wasn't a formal authority stating Linux is good either- indeed, the most likely candidate for a formal authority is the likes of Mindcraft and Microsoft, and it's pretty obvious that their credibility is zilch too, particularly when you consider the subject and their motives for assuming authority on it and making announcements.
Instead, LinuxOne has already been singled out for contempt and dismissal (bordering on vengeance!) by two entirely separate communities. Any uninformed person inquiring, later, why it was a disaster, could get two entirely distinct authoritative answers why it was a big scam (OSS: it was Mandrake with the serial numbers filed off, they wouldn't give source, etc.. and The Street: didn't you notice they were incorporated in Nevada? etc)
LinuxOne watching is nothing more than bloodsport or sick humor and doesn't really _matter_ in any sense. Be assured that if any investors get suckered, Wall Street itself will think (along with OSS people) that they were fools. The prospect of Wall Street going "Oh my God, Linux is a scam!" is zilch: they know, better than we could ever know, how to spot con artist entrepreneurs, and the Street has already spotted LinuxOne for what it is (besides which, anyone trying to find out on the net would rapidly hit tons of Slashdot hysteria and outrage on the subject- and again, Wall Street knows what that sort of thing means.)
I'm reminded of a Winsor McCay 'Little Nemo' book my Dad got for christmas. McCay was an absolutely phenomenal draftsman and artist, with staggering imagination, and his strip was basically immersion in this astonishing dream-world. In the book are many reproduced strips- and the commentaries of many current comic artists. Most say nice things about McCay in this book that is _about_ McCay's work. Then there was Bill Watterson, who did Calvin and Hobbes... you'd swear it was Calvin writing the blurb. He _savages_ McCay, totally unimpressed, pointing out that there are no characters, no depth, it's nothing but a hollow vehicle for McCay's amazing drafting talents (which C+H readers know Watterson can basically rival anyhow). It's astonishing that any book would include a blurb that scorns and ruthlessly critiques the book's honored subject- but how Calvinish of Watterson to do so! Just like Penny Arcade being harshly competitive, Calvin is arrogant, thoughtless and full of himself because Watterson is just as tough to impress and just as sadistic a critic. He was the only comic artist in the McCay book to even hint that Winsor McCay wasn't a Superman of comic art, and he puts the whole thing (including his own role in it!) into perspective.
Food for thought the next time you get annoyed by Penny Arcade being totally hostile :)
- Techie asks what the password is, response is 'asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk asterisk'. First joke: clueless user who thinks the password is what is shown on screen when he types.
- Doubletake! Techie is unix guru and for a horrible second wonders what would happen if every character in the password was a wildcard character! This, not the first frame, is what had me LOL.
- Twist! Techie begins stammering and trying to find out if the guy REALLY TYPED that, and bam! Suddenly the victim, the hapless luser, turns on him with a "Muahahaha! You don't know if I'm an idiot or really really clever, DO you?" And sure enough, the techie doesn't...
- ...but in fact the joke is also on us the readers, particularly if we're Unix savvy but not really clued enough to be _sure_ about the password characters. The final joke is if we aren't sure- then, not only does the techie not know, WE don't know who the joke is really on either
:)
It's absolutely fscking brilliant. And there are so many levels that are inside jokes for the Unix friendly (everything after the doubletake) that it makes it all the funnier, sharing a _private_ joke. Didn't this editorializer see the last panel with the suddenly-nefarious luser turning on the techie with an evil laugh? See the techie getting very flustered? Did he seriously think the joke was entirely on the luser? Geez. Some people ought not to be allowed to come in contact with humor without adult supervision