"I never thought I'd see the day when Americans were so paranoid about traffic law violators that they would voluntarily subject themselves to a "Driving Permission Card". It's really sad."
England in the 1700s was not necessarily oppressive, it was undergoing a significant transition. The country was moving from a uniquely tempered monarchy (through the "nobles", etc.) to a quasi-constitutional democracy. The problem was that the fundamental arrangment of power never actually changed. England was marked more by a strong class structure (a problem with which it still struggles today) that tended to excessively classify people. I would say, though, that England of that period was one of the more liberal states in Europe. Russia was still overcoming backwardness, the French Revolution had not taken place, and Germany was in a state of chaotic morselization. Indeed, England was one of the few countries in which the R.C. or Orthodox churches did not have co-legal sway over the people. Granted that the Anglican church duplicated many of the Roman Catholic's oppressions, and it was to escape the Church of England that most of the emigrants left GB, but otherwise, I think it was a pretty liberal state.
Perhaps someone better versed in British history will correct me.
Anyhow, I don't care how much the government knows about me, really. When you think about it, they already know it. And if they wanted to know more, it wouldn't take that much effort on their part. Americans are very pissy about symbols, but real issues roll off our backs with hardly a batted eyelash. Look at the controversy over flag burning while actual liberty is allowed to slip away unelegized.
How different is that from someone finding your wallet with your driver's license and your credit cards?
It really isn't that far from what we have now, when you think about it. How many times have you had to give your social security number or other personal information to get a job. Have you bought anything from Radio Shack lately?
We really don't have all that much privacy to lose.
I didn't say it was good, but sometimes a few enforced standards are positive. The Woz way had a computer with a whole bunch of identical ports and an open bus. That's pretty cool, but I don't know how far it would fly today. A G3 is awfully different from an Apple ][.
It strikes me that people will hesitate adopting 1394 unless support is guaranteed. Look at how hesitant the USB market was until the iMac. Steve/Apple is good at triggering things, and I think that it is appropriate for him to push Firewire. The thing's been in progress for long enough.
You're missing the point of the Apple (Steve Jobs) Way. If it's better, do it. Do it now, and be far ahead of the pack when they realize that you were right. If you do it now, you don't have to do it perfectly, you have to have done it. Witness: the Mac (not all Steve, but a manifestation of him), the NeXT, Toy Story, the iMac, the iBook. None of them have been perfect, but they have all set precedents. He did them. He didn't wait for the rest of the world to figure out what it wanted, he told it what was right.
You don't have to agree with that way of doing things, but it is the Apple way. Back in '84, Apple told Mac Plus buyers that SCSI was _the_ way to add high-capacity storage devices to their Macintoshes. And people did. And it was good.
In 1999, Apple is telling us that USB is _the_ way to add peripherals to a computer, and 1394 is _the_ way to add high-performance storage/media peripherals.
I am not making any judgments about how effective a policy is, or if it is the right thing to do, but that's how--as far as I can tell--Steve works. And you have to admit, it is fun. He gets a whole lot of attention, and has a pretty darned good time doing it. I don't really want an iBook or an iMac (my 8100 is fine for now), but, darn it, Apple is exciting again! I can't wait for the next thing to come out of Cupertino.
Are you really that busy? I can't fathom being so bogged down in anything that I couldn't take the time to write a letter.
I have to say that starting to write letters can be difficult, but once you have a book of stamps and a sheaf of stationary with envelopes, it really doesn't take all that much effort.
You should try it more often. It can be a cleansing and wholesome experience.
I'm going to go meditate now and drink herbal tea. Not really, but after reading that last sentence, it seems like I should.
It's true. My best friend is working on a ranch in Montana. During school, we send up to 30 emails a day to each other. Sometimes they are as unimportant as "Back from lunch, where are you?"
After a month of writing to her by hand (sometimes sixteen pages a week), I feel that I know her better than ever (after fifteen years of friendship) and I feel closer, though I haven't seen or spoken to her for several weeks.
Handwriting (though mine can be, umm, interesting) is a very powerful way to communicate. It provides a very useful non-verbal way of reinforcing the text, and it can be significantly more expressive than straight text. And writing in pen forces me to organize my thoughts before writing them down, which is a rigor that email makes irrelevant. I find that it makes my letters better thought out and more interesting as a result.
And putting a letter in the mail just feels wholesome. Does anyone else ever get that feeling? I like the continuity that I feel with generations of other postal correspondents.
It and everyone else are carrying on like it is the Great Amiga coming down out of the steppes to save and protect the faithful from the club-wielding barbarians knocking their battering rams on the gates of Kiev.
The new Amiga-folk are doing nothing active to counter the impression that they are or want to be a continuation of the old Amiga legacy.
Yep. That was one reason that I was less than screwed. The key init scripts weren't overwritten. But lots of other parts were (including the passwd and shadowed passwd files).
What I'm afraid of is genetic variability. It's okay to clone a sheep, as there are a _whole_lot_of_sheep_ out there (try driving through rural England if you think I'm lying), so it has plenty of other sheep with which to mate.
When this bird is created, how many different combinations will there be? Or will we have a whole lot of 'mentally challenged' or otherwise inbred huias flapping about in circles?
Mosquitoes are a vitally important part of many food chains. Ask anyone (who knows a tiny bit about what he is talking about) in Southwest Florida.
Massive spraying for mosquitoes kills the larvae which live on the surface of the water among mangrove roots. Many fish feed on these larvae as one of their primary food sources. The massive killing of the larvae caused a precipitous drop in the numbers of these fish. Those drops were blamed on commercial fishermen, and netfishing was banned. Lots of hard-working Floridians were suddenly left without livlihoods.
Worse (in the minds of some) sportfishing declined somewhat as the number of snook and other popular quarries declined. Now, to eat snook commercially, one has to import it from Lake Victoria in Africa.
All because mosquitoes are annoying.
Of course, I'm not complaining too much. They are nasty vectors of disease (I got malaria in Africa from one of the buggers), but is is incredibly arrogant of humans to feel that they can meddle with links of systems that have been in existance for millions of years without causing profound imbalances in those systems.
I fully agree. It just looks like the last dregs of this company that refuses to die are trying to rally the remaining troops for one last stand.
Does the world really need it?
It isn't even the Amiga. It's Amiga flavored Linux. IMO, that's even worse than another Amiga. As you said, they should donate their time to the Linux community and get away from the whole 'Amiga' pretense. Sheesh.
You must have done something dramatically wrong. Debian's install is difficult to get going, but once the install process began, it was clear-sailing. It's been rock solid (despite some of the moronic things that I've done to the system) since then. I'm a believer.
Actually, I accidentally replaced the Debian/etc directory with the/etc from a NetBSD install on a pmax DEC machine. Debian booted more-or-less successfully. I was even able to log in and repair the damage.
I imagine it would be quite possible to replace the Debian/etc with a RedHat/etc, assuming you adjusted the appropriate pathnames and other minutae. Compare that to replacing the registry of a WinNT install with that of a Win95 install. No amount of tweaking will reconcile them. _They_ are different operating systems.
That is teriffic. For me, good customer service is the most important thing a company can provide. A number of years ago, I got a Kensington TurboMouse for my Mac. One of the buttons died and they replaced it for free (in about 1996). The same button broke in the replacement mouse this year (1999) and they again replaced it for free. No shipping costs, nothing. In fact, they offered to send me the new version of the mouse instead of the older one that I had. It's that kind of service that will make me buy Kensington products again.
It is encouraging to see that theere are companies that understand the importance of maintaining customer loyalty through effective customer service.
What makes it worse is that the Declaration of Independence doesn't have a jurisdiction. It's not a law, just a document written by a guy who would later become President of a country that didn't exist at the time.
And I wonder what dark (might you say, shadowy?) eeeevil force sabotaged IPv1-3? Perhaps it was the same dark, eeeeevil force that's been sabotaging every good technology for the last thousand years. Microsoft!
Or they could do the (sweden? iceland?) thing and have everyone switch at noon, or something silly like that. I heard that when switching sides of the road for driving, it was to happen at noon, or some such time so that everyone would remember to do it at once. Odd.
Okay, everyone. Now! (sound of millions rebooting)
Slashdot Mirror
What do you call a driver's licence?
"I never thought I'd see the day when Americans were so paranoid about traffic law violators that they would voluntarily subject themselves to a "Driving Permission Card". It's really sad."
-awc
England in the 1700s was not necessarily oppressive, it was undergoing a significant transition. The country was moving from a uniquely tempered monarchy (through the "nobles", etc.) to a quasi-constitutional democracy. The problem was that the fundamental arrangment of power never actually changed. England was marked more by a strong class structure (a problem with which it still struggles today) that tended to excessively classify people. I would say, though, that England of that period was one of the more liberal states in Europe. Russia was still overcoming backwardness, the French Revolution had not taken place, and Germany was in a state of chaotic morselization. Indeed, England was one of the few countries in which the R.C. or Orthodox churches did not have co-legal sway over the people. Granted that the Anglican church duplicated many of the Roman Catholic's oppressions, and it was to escape the Church of England that most of the emigrants left GB, but otherwise, I think it was a pretty liberal state.
Perhaps someone better versed in British history will correct me.
Anyhow, I don't care how much the government knows about me, really. When you think about it, they already know it. And if they wanted to know more, it wouldn't take that much effort on their part. Americans are very pissy about symbols, but real issues roll off our backs with hardly a batted eyelash. Look at the controversy over flag burning while actual liberty is allowed to slip away unelegized.
Etc.
-awc
How different is that from someone finding your wallet with your driver's license and your credit cards?
It really isn't that far from what we have now, when you think about it. How many times have you had to give your social security number or other personal information to get a job. Have you bought anything from Radio Shack lately?
We really don't have all that much privacy to lose.
-awc
We already have so many forms of ID, one consolidated one won't be that different.
-awc
I love perl, but it is a little scary trusting my hard drive to it.
Not for any real reason, but it just seems somehow wrong.
It's like a Java disk partitioning program. It would just be totally, wholly, cosmically wrong. =)
-awc
I didn't say it was good, but sometimes a few enforced standards are positive. The Woz way had a computer with a whole bunch of identical ports and an open bus. That's pretty cool, but I don't know how far it would fly today. A G3 is awfully different from an Apple ][.
It strikes me that people will hesitate adopting 1394 unless support is guaranteed. Look at how hesitant the USB market was until the iMac. Steve/Apple is good at triggering things, and I think that it is appropriate for him to push Firewire. The thing's been in progress for long enough.
-awc
You're missing the point of the Apple (Steve Jobs) Way. If it's better, do it. Do it now, and be far ahead of the pack when they realize that you were right. If you do it now, you don't have to do it perfectly, you have to have done it. Witness: the Mac (not all Steve, but a manifestation of him), the NeXT, Toy Story, the iMac, the iBook. None of them have been perfect, but they have all set precedents. He did them. He didn't wait for the rest of the world to figure out what it wanted, he told it what was right.
You don't have to agree with that way of doing things, but it is the Apple way. Back in '84, Apple told Mac Plus buyers that SCSI was _the_ way to add high-capacity storage devices to their Macintoshes. And people did. And it was good.
In 1999, Apple is telling us that USB is _the_ way to add peripherals to a computer, and 1394 is _the_ way to add high-performance storage/media peripherals.
I am not making any judgments about how effective a policy is, or if it is the right thing to do, but that's how--as far as I can tell--Steve works. And you have to admit, it is fun. He gets a whole lot of attention, and has a pretty darned good time doing it. I don't really want an iBook or an iMac (my 8100 is fine for now), but, darn it, Apple is exciting again! I can't wait for the next thing to come out of Cupertino.
And _that's_ how it should be. =)
-awc
Are you really that busy? I can't fathom being so bogged down in anything that I couldn't take the time to write a letter.
I have to say that starting to write letters can be difficult, but once you have a book of stamps and a sheaf of stationary with envelopes, it really doesn't take all that much effort.
You should try it more often. It can be a cleansing and wholesome experience.
I'm going to go meditate now and drink herbal tea. Not really, but after reading that last sentence, it seems like I should.
-awc
It's true. My best friend is working on a ranch in Montana. During school, we send up to 30 emails a day to each other. Sometimes they are as unimportant as "Back from lunch, where are you?"
After a month of writing to her by hand (sometimes sixteen pages a week), I feel that I know her better than ever (after fifteen years of friendship) and I feel closer, though I haven't seen or spoken to her for several weeks.
Handwriting (though mine can be, umm, interesting) is a very powerful way to communicate. It provides a very useful non-verbal way of reinforcing the text, and it can be significantly more expressive than straight text. And writing in pen forces me to organize my thoughts before writing them down, which is a rigor that email makes irrelevant. I find that it makes my letters better thought out and more interesting as a result.
And putting a letter in the mail just feels wholesome. Does anyone else ever get that feeling? I like the continuity that I feel with generations of other postal correspondents.
-awc
Uhh, ma, it's broke. The network wire don't fit into that little 'ol hole there.
It's okay, Cleetus, go water the mule.
'Kay, ma.
Isn't that what they said about SCSI when the Mac Plus had it way-back-when?
-awc
It and everyone else are carrying on like it is the Great Amiga coming down out of the steppes to save and protect the faithful from the club-wielding barbarians knocking their battering rams on the gates of Kiev.
The new Amiga-folk are doing nothing active to counter the impression that they are or want to be a continuation of the old Amiga legacy.
-awc
Yep. That was one reason that I was less than screwed. The key init scripts weren't overwritten. But lots of other parts were (including the passwd and shadowed passwd files).
-awc
What I'm afraid of is genetic variability. It's okay to clone a sheep, as there are a _whole_lot_of_sheep_ out there (try driving through rural England if you think I'm lying), so it has plenty of other sheep with which to mate.
When this bird is created, how many different combinations will there be? Or will we have a whole lot of 'mentally challenged' or otherwise inbred huias flapping about in circles?
-awc
Mosquitoes are a vitally important part of many food chains. Ask anyone (who knows a tiny bit about what he is talking about) in Southwest Florida.
Massive spraying for mosquitoes kills the larvae which live on the surface of the water among mangrove roots. Many fish feed on these larvae as one of their primary food sources. The massive killing of the larvae caused a precipitous drop in the numbers of these fish. Those drops were blamed on commercial fishermen, and netfishing was banned. Lots of hard-working Floridians were suddenly left without livlihoods.
Worse (in the minds of some) sportfishing declined somewhat as the number of snook and other popular quarries declined. Now, to eat snook commercially, one has to import it from Lake Victoria in Africa.
All because mosquitoes are annoying.
Of course, I'm not complaining too much. They are nasty vectors of disease (I got malaria in Africa from one of the buggers), but is is incredibly arrogant of humans to feel that they can meddle with links of systems that have been in existance for millions of years without causing profound imbalances in those systems.
My two bits.
-awc
I fully agree. It just looks like the last dregs of this company that refuses to die are trying to rally the remaining troops for one last stand.
Does the world really need it?
It isn't even the Amiga. It's Amiga flavored Linux. IMO, that's even worse than another Amiga. As you said, they should donate their time to the Linux community and get away from the whole 'Amiga' pretense. Sheesh.
-awc
You must have done something dramatically wrong. Debian's install is difficult to get going, but once the install process began, it was clear-sailing. It's been rock solid (despite some of the moronic things that I've done to the system) since then. I'm a believer.
-awc
Actually, I accidentally replaced the Debian /etc directory with the /etc from a NetBSD install on a pmax DEC machine. Debian booted more-or-less successfully. I was even able to log in and repair the damage.
/etc with a RedHat /etc, assuming you adjusted the appropriate pathnames and other minutae. Compare that to replacing the registry of a WinNT install with that of a Win95 install. No amount of tweaking will reconcile them. _They_ are different operating systems.
I imagine it would be quite possible to replace the Debian
-awc
That is teriffic. For me, good customer service is the most important thing a company can provide. A number of years ago, I got a Kensington TurboMouse for my Mac. One of the buttons died and they replaced it for free (in about 1996). The same button broke in the replacement mouse this year (1999) and they again replaced it for free. No shipping costs, nothing. In fact, they offered to send me the new version of the mouse instead of the older one that I had. It's that kind of service that will make me buy Kensington products again.
It is encouraging to see that theere are companies that understand the importance of maintaining customer loyalty through effective customer service.
-awc
What makes it worse is that the Declaration of Independence doesn't have a jurisdiction. It's not a law, just a document written by a guy who would later become President of a country that didn't exist at the time.
-awc
If i'm not mistaken, the name is Goldman, Sachs & Co.
-awc
And I wonder what dark (might you say, shadowy?) eeeevil force sabotaged IPv1-3? Perhaps it was the same dark, eeeeevil force that's been sabotaging every good technology for the last thousand years. Microsoft!
We need to send some Vorlons out to get BillG.
-awc
Or they could do the (sweden? iceland?) thing and have everyone switch at noon, or something silly like that. I heard that when switching sides of the road for driving, it was to happen at noon, or some such time so that everyone would remember to do it at once. Odd.
Okay, everyone. Now! (sound of millions rebooting)
-awc
Do all of Rob's posts automatically get moderated to 2? =)
j/k
-awc
Not to mention that "Cracker Crackdown" sounds really silly. Like CNN lame-o title for a lawsuit against Nabisco.
"At the top of the hour, the Cracker Crackdown--will RJR Nabisco win, or will it have to pay up?"
-awc