> As several people have pointed out, our system does not function > perfectly in a capitalistic sense, particularly since Microsoft is a > monopoly and the odds of our changing that through legal action grow
Monopolies are not viable in the long term (though they sure can make a trainload of money in the short and medium term). It takes (from the consumer's perspective) an immense while, but if a monopoly becomes sufficiently total to be secure, it loses the incentive to produce a competitive product and rots from the inside out until _eventually_ the product it produces is so bad that consumers broaden their thinking and look past the entire market for that product to parallel markets for dissimilar but substitutable products. Applied to Microsoft, this might mean that (if they gain and retain a complete monopoly, which has not happened yet and may not at all; Unix has increased its user base (as in, number of users) by a respectable percentage every year since it was created, albeit not as fast as Windows did) in a couple hundred years consumers would decide they don't actually need an operating system at all, either because they can computer without one (using special-purpose devices) or because they don't need computers as we think of them due to the emmergence of some other new product. Humans are rigidly inflexible when they can be but amazingly adaptable in the face of long term dire need.
> Anyway, point is that I'm not sure we can safely model Linux with > current economic theory, so those predictions aren't safe.
I'm not sure whether I'm about to disagree with you or only clarify what you said, but here goes... I believe we can understand the ecconomic influence of Linux specifically and OSS in general (and they does have an ecconomic influence) using standard ecconomic models. However, Linux is not a widget. (For those who haven't had econ: a widget is a good or service that is supplied to profit from a demand. This is a simplification, but it will do for our purposes here.) Support may be a widget, and therefore in some cases certain features may be widgets (if a customer you support wants a feature, you may implement it for that reason), but OSS is not primarily a widget. Microsoft still views Linux as a widget, as a product in direct competition with their own products. A lot of Linux advocates seem to view it that way too, but it's a faulty view. OSS cannot be viewed only as a competitor to closed software; it is more than that.
For example, OSS is for many people a _hobby_. This does NOT mean that we have to throw everything we know about ecconomics out the window. Ecconomists know about hobbies to a large extent. Hobbies are important to ecconomists, because they produce spending behavior. If you want to understand the ecconomic impact of OSS, you have to understand (among other things) that while it _may_ reduce the demand for Windows (though that has not been demonstrated) and commercial unices (there is less doubt here) it increases the demand for a number of other products, e.g., PC hardware (this is a no-brainer) and broadband internet access (because more updates are freely available than for Windows and also because of the desire of hobbiests to host development projects and mirrors and such). Furthermore, the increase in demand for related parephenalia is not the only impact a hobby has on the ecconomy. There are also interesting effects in terms of the labour supply (because the way people are spending their free time has an impact on how much labour they are willing to supply), consumer morale (which influences buying, saving, and investing behavior), and marketing for other products, which can often benefit from identifying with peoples' hobbies.
Then there's the whole question of worker productivity, because Linux is not just a hobby, it's also a useful tool. But I'll stop now, because I belive I've made my point: Linux is not a widget, but that doesn't mean ecconomic theory can't make observations about it.
> Can you actually point to any web pages that don't work > properly in Mozilla/NS7?
So far, in the course of my browsing experience, I have discovered three. One was a case of incorrect sniffing that gave Mozilla the content intended for Netscape 4 instead of the content intended for Netscape 6. (It was purely a useragent issue; if you set general.useragent.vendor to anything containing "Netscape", it worked fine.) The other two were using nonstandard DOM (in both cases, document.all was involved) in some javascript links.
These are the only three I have run across in my own browsing: www.ebsco.com, www.eisenbrauns.com, and www.mrcpl.lib.oh.us All three sites have since been fixed. Yes, there _are_ sites out there that have not been fixed, quite a few of them, as you can discover by searching for Tech Evangelism bugs in bugzilla, but those are the only ones _I've_ run across. Out of hundreds upon hundreds of sites I've visited, including major corporations committed soundly to Microsoft. I think it says a lot that when Microsoft rigged their site to only work in IE, community outcry _forced_ them to fix it. Yes, the way they did it was particularly nasty, but still...
> In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and > Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they > have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are > expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue, > and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on > those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math, > the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the > board -- better than Boardwalk.
Okay, I'm going to follow your line of reasoning way off topic here, but rest assured I will bring it back full circle and return to the topic at hand eventually...
Both are poor investements, if they are the only thing you develop. Boardwalk takes too long to develop and doesn't get hit with any frequency, and Baltic and Mediterranean with hotels can get hit three times and not pay you enough to land once on any serious developed property. Sure, they pay for _themselves_, but you can't build a game strategy around that, unless you plan to forego dice and land on your own property every time.
The light blue, orange, and yellow properties are the ones you want. The orange ones (New York and so on) are best. Build them to three houses as quickly as you can for optimal return on investment. When you can afford it, push them on to hotels for the extra income. The yellow (Marvin's Gardens and whatnot) are a bit harder to get developed, and the light blue (Connecticut et cetera) max out too low, but they still give a good return on your investment. If you can get both these sets, build the light blue ones up first, and pray the orange ones don't get built up by someone else before you can get serious with the yellow ones, because a couple of lands on St. James will wipe out your chances of building up any investment capital. In a pinch, you can substitute the magenta or red ones, but it's an uphill battle, because the magenta (St. Charles &c) cost more than the light blue to develop and don't get hit enough to pay off like the orange, and the red ones compare unfavourably with the orange and yellow on the same grounds. I should mention that the light blue set by itself is inadequate to allow you to compete in the game. However, it can be good enough to let you get another set developed that you otherwise could not (say, the red ones).
In the event _two_ powers emerge with sustaining levels of hotel income, then the properties on the fourth side of the board (green and dark blue) become important.
If you play with an open market (trades and sales among players permitted), it is _always_ a good investment to purchase any bank-owned property you land on except the utilities, because developable property is worth more than the bank price. (Usually substantially more.) If you play with a closed market, you have to be more selective in the early game, so you can afford to get one complete set. Also: resist the urge to believe that the rents on undeveloped properties (excepting railroads when there are no serious (>Baltic&Med) developed properties yet) can have an impact on the outcome of the game; it ain't so.
> The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you > have to pay a premium for it. This is true.
> You know its value will depreciate very quickly. While also true, this statement is meaningless. _All_ hardware depreciates rapidly, whether it was top-of-the-line or bargain basement or used. Today's $200 system will be worth approximately nothing in sixteen months.
> Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a > computer built around a more mature technology. Only because it has further down to go. What is more interesting is not the resale value but the replacement value and the cost of maintaining it at a usable level.
> well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to > get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind
There is merit in this approach. Now, "really powerful" may be overkill, but you do want to get a system that will be able to be maintained with affordable upgrades for several years, for two reasons. First, it means you can get comfortable with the system and finally get to the point after about two years where you _don't_ discover every _week_ something you hadn't got around to installing yet that you need (PAIN), and second because upgrading is a good deal cheaper than replacing, so the costs ballance out if you strike a decent happy medium.
Now, it's possible to go to far. A Boardwalk system is not for the average user. It's price-prohibitive. But it's possible to get a system that can be developed (upgraded) to a decent and reasonable level, like New York and St. James, for a pretty reasonable price, and it will last you a lot longer than a Baltic system. My computer right now is over four and a half years old (well, most of it is; some components are newer). It will be at _least_ another year, maybe two, before I have to replace the system. (Some components I'll be able to keep, of course, but I'm talking motherboard and CPU at least, and probably some other major parts too at that point.) If you bear with me, the ecconomics of this will bear me out.
Discounting the monitor, which is really a subject for another thread, I paid $1550 for this sytem new, in 1998. It's a PentiumII/233 system, but the motherboard was a nicer one with lots of expandability. I could have got a system for around $1200 at the time, but it would have been much lower end, not nearly as upgradeable. For example, when RAM prices dropped, I eventually beefed up my system to 512MB of RAM. If I'd bought a $1200 system, it would have maxed out lower than that, and I'd have replaced it by now; instead of spending $80 on RAM a few months back, I'd have probably spent $400 on a new system. PLUS I'd have had the hassle of losing my nice, comfortable system with everything I use already installed and going back to an out-of-the- box system with virtually nothing installed, at least two years sooner than necessary. Compare:
$1200 + $400 + PAIN = $1600 + PAIN
$1550 + $80 + comfort = $1630 + comfort In addition, I had a somewhat better system ad interim. My conclusion: Yeah, Boardwalk systems are for people rolling in dough, but Baltic systems are for people who enjoy pain. Buy St. James systems (or at least Connecticut systems) and stay sane.
What this means is, you don't have to wait until you can afford a Hammer system. All you have to do is wait until the news of Hammer systems hitting the market drives the prices on moderate Athlon XP systems through the floor, and buy one of those (St. James) or a good quality non-bargain-basement Duron system (Connecticut). If you feel guilty about saving money at the expense of a struggling computer industry, make a donation to your favourite OSS vendor or something.
Disclaimer: People who use a lot of CPU power may find that things break down differently. Most of what I do leaves the CPU sitting idle most of the time, so I find that things like RAM and drive space (I'm a multibooter (six OS installations on the same hardware and counting...), which uses up drive space several times as fast) are more important. If you do a lot of raytracing or calculate the factorials of large primes, you'll have to upgrade the CPU, and that costs more.
The statement in the article notwithstanding, I'm fairly certain it _does_ have the potential to be addictive. My own research shows very clearly that sleep is a very addictive habbit that not one person in a hundred can kick.
> Finally, for many people the last mile problem is a major issue > in terms of software adoption. OpenOffice may be free, but > downloading OpenOffice over a modem connections is still a > serious task.
These people obviously haven't discovered wget yet. When I was using a browser to do downloads, I considered "large" things like Java to be a nightmare to download. No more. wget makes it _easy_. You just give it a list of URLs to download, minimize the window it's running in, and get on with your life. Later you check to see if it's finished yet. With wget, something small like Java or OpenOffice is NO problem. I downloaded a set of three ISO CD images for Mandrake 9.0 Beta 2 over my 33.6 dialup connection. The connection had to be redialed periodically, but each time wget just kept right on going where it left off... no problem.
There are also outfits that will burn stuff like OO to a CD-R and send it to you for a price that is much more reasonable than MS licensing fees. If you want to talk about _features_ Word has that OO lacks, okay, but don't try to make the fact that OO can be downloaded a strike against it.
I agree that most people will use whatever comes on the computer. I will go so far as to add that if the store had similarly priced models sitting side-by-side, one with everything MS and the other with Gnome and OO and Mozilla, people would look at things like the visual attractiveness of the case and the brand name on the monitor when making the decision which to get. Really.
> rather than a more primitive, ugly, yet free and somewhat > as functional word processor (Emacs or other unix WP)
Calling Emacs a word processor and complaining that it isn't Word is like calling your house a car and complaining that it isn't a [insert favourite brand of expensive car].
People don't use Word as a substitute for Emacs. They use Notepad as a substitute for Emacs. And if there was ever anything primitive or ugly, Notepad makes it look advanced and beautiful by comparison. Using Notepad as a substitute for Emacs is roughly equivalent to using a wheelbarrow as a substitute for a HumVee. People can argue that they prefer the Jeep (vim), and we just shake our heads and say there's no accounting for taste, but arguing for the wheelbarrow can only be done out of complete ignorance. All of this is no reflection on Word -- Word is not the same type of thing. Word is a word processor. An expensive word processor. Emacs is not a word processor. I _love_ Emacs, but despite joking about using it as an operating system, I do not use it as a substitute for MS Word. (I use OpenOffice for that.) On the other hand, I would never subject myself to the agony of attempting to use a word processor (MS or otherwise) as a substitute for Emacs. I'm not even sure that's possible; it certainly isn't sane. Not only does it (Word or any word processor) lack the big high-end features of Emacs (_complete_ scriptability and automatic indentation and character insertion according to the mode determined by the type of file being edited, _complete_ email and usenet facilities, unparalleled extensibility), but it lacks even the basic features that nearly all modern text editors have, without which editing is intensely painful (regular expression search-and-replace and mode-driven syntax highlighting, for example; it does at least have recordable macros, but what good are they if you can't record the things you would do in a real text editor, such as regex searches?).
Besides, Word can't use your ISO standard network coffee maker to brew coffee:-)
Hospital medical records should never be on a system that is connected, directly or indirectly, to the internet. _No_ OS is sufficiently secure for that to be acceptable. We just had an openssl vulerability a few weeks ago, in case you're forgetting. Yes, it was patched right away, but it makes the point clear that no OS can be known with certitude to be absolutely secure.
Sure, the hospital needs _some_ systems connected to the internet, but they absolutely SHOULD NOT be connected to the systems that have the private medical information.
> Yes it is - different minerals. In some of the more extreme > cases (particularly comparing bicarb-heavy ones with the more > neutral ones) there are quite different flavours.
Yep. I like mine with a good deal of iron, a little lime, trace amounts of assorted other minerals, and carefully calculated amounts of chloride and fluoride. (In some circles, this is known as "tap water".) I can handle a small-to-moderate amount of sulfur, but too much leaves a bad aftertaste. I don't like very much sodium.
And I _definitely_ don't like water without minerals. In particular, I can't stand it if the iron is missing, and it also bothers me some if the chlorine is missing. Distilled water is right near impotable as far as I'm concerned, and most brands of bottled water are not much better. Put some iron in it, for crying out loud.
Flash wasn't the problem. We did install Flash on the PC my parents use. I generally don't keep it installed on my Linux box, because I personally don't _like_ annoying flashy blinking things, but that's unrelated.
> Yes, fixing six vulnerabilities is good... but the real > question is... How many more did they add?
I doubt the fix added any. Usually vulnerabilities are added by feature work, not by security fixes. (I said usually.) And yeah, they still have work to do before the security community will consider IE to be fixed. But as I said, this is progress. If they can just fix the known outstanding vulnerabilities in IE6 before releasing IE7, that will be a step in the right direction.
> Nice, I wonder how many of those sites simply don't work > because of the VM you're using
Sorry, I must have miscommunicated. This is not on my Linux box, but on the Windows box upstairs. So, Windows is running right on the hardware, with no intervening VM. Sorry for any confusion. (If you meant the Java VM, it was the latest one available at the time, although some browsers may use their own implementation instead.)
> or some setting you've been messing with in the registry
The only settings I mess with in the registry are the ones that applications abuse to start themselves at system start time. Allowing apps to do this seriously degrades system performance. If one app does it, that app starts a bit faster, but when twelve[1] apps do it, they all start slower, because you have no RAM left. So I don't let any apps do this, especially not ones we don't use all the time. What's really annoying about misbehaved apps that put themselves in the Run keys without asking is, they invariably take measures to insert themselves into the Run keys not just on install but every time they run.
When the user manually starts up an application, then it loads just as it would have at system start, had it been allowed to do so at that time.
I was personally surprised that he didn't find more sites using MS-specific code (mainly, the document.all interface), but there weren't that many (that he visited -- YMMV). Mostly he got sites in one of two categories: their HTML was obviously broken (you know, mismatched tags, misspelled tags, imaginary tags, tags missing their closing right angle bracket, required close tags missing, imaginary attributes, attributes from one tag placed on another tag that has never accepted them in any known browser, unquoted attributes containing spaces, and that sort of nonsense) or else they relied on the Plugin Of The Week (by which I mean, some plugin that is not listed on Netscape's plugin finder service and does not come with IE; the only one I remember is Shockwave (which as it turns out is produced by the same company as Flash, but less well-known), but we ran across perhaps a couple dozen different ones, all obscure).
The former type of site (HTML run through a blender) was the more common type. The Plugin Of The Week issue mostly happened when he was looking for WTC news last fall.
My mom also ran into at least one instance of bad server-side sniffing, wherein if the browser was neither NS4 nor IE, nonstandard characters were inserted in a document (in places where the other browsers got spaces, according to View Source) that didn't declare its character set. This was at Ancestry.com, but the issue went away because my mom doesn't visit that site any longer. Any email to the webmaster is answered (by a bot, apparently) with a letter explaining which browsers are supported. Funny thing is, the letter says Netscape 4 or later, but later versions are handled incorrectly.
[1] A slight exaggeration only. MSIE, AIM, the MSN IM client
(and its associated spyware), and YIM all do this without
even asking. Other apps (Mozilla, Netscape, OpenOffice,...)
ask, and respect your choice, so I don't have a problem with
them. But the misbehaved ones I keep in check by editing the
registry, yes. There were at one time some other apps doing
this (well, trying to) that I haven't listed, but they've
been uninstalled now.
> dynamic gifs that would cause epilepsy in a blind mole
This problem has been solved in modern browsers. In Mozilla or Netscape it's in Edit->Preferences->Privacy&Security->Images where you can choose to let animations play as many times as they like (i.e., accept your epilepsy like a good consumer), once only (what I do) or not at all (you see just one still frame). Mozilla isn't the only browser that lets you do this, either. In fact, I believe IE is notable for _not_ having this option.
Unfortunately, if you install any plugins, you are at the mercy of the plugin provider to provide you with similar controls, and most plugin developers don't. I find it necessary to have two different plugin directories, one with nothing but Java and one with everything. Then in the event that I actually _need_ to use any plugin other than Java (which is rare), I switch the symlink to point to the other plugin dir and restart my browser. It is fortunate that while Java is used for a lot of useful stuff, it is very seldom used for annoying advertisements; the various Macromedia plugins seem to be in vogue for that sort of nonsense, and most of the time I don't have them installed.
Oh, and the only-java plugin directory doesn't have that annoying plugin-finder default/null plugin, either, so I don't get prompted to install any plugins. They just display a nice little broken puzzle piece image where the plugin would have gone, and the rest of the site (in most cases) works like normal.
There are sites that use Flash for their front door, but most of the time I don't need to use those sites. When I do, I switch to the other plugin directory.
As soon as we get Exchange out of the way, there
will still be something else left to take its
place to prevent adoption.
For any given user, family, or organisation,
the list will be different. Exchange may be the last item for some, and for others Exchange may
be entirely irrelevant. Personally, until this
discussion, I thought Exchange was just a mail
server. I had no idea it did scheduling, because
I never went looking for scheduling software.
We don't use Exchange here. For us, the only
real barrier is the lack of a major OEM that
pre-installs Linux for the desktop. If the
catalog vendor we buy from (MicroWarehouse)
had Linux desktops, I'd be recommending them
for our client systems. But I can't recommend
"let me fdisk the sucker as soon as we get it
and install this other OS". I did that for the
one on my desk, and I can do that for servers,
but I can't do that for the desktops in the rest
of the organisation, probably.
See, for each outfit, the barriers will be
different.
> Um, shouldn't you allow your family to make their own decisions? > You can suggest they don't use MS, but saying you don't allow it > seems a little peculiar.
I theoretically let my (non-geek) family members use IE if they want, but I make sure it's not the default browser and that it doesn't load itself at system startup time. (Yes, this requires doing a registry merge from autoexec.bat, but I have to do that anyway to keep the %$#! instant messaging clients out of the HKLM|HKCU/Software|Microsoft|Windows|CurrentV ersio n|Run* keys. It also requires a Custom install of IE6, but you knew to always to custom install of everything anyway, right?) So if they want to use IE, they go to the Browsers folder (there is a shortcut on the desktop for this) and choose IE from a list of assorted choices. The default browser (current NS7.0PR1 IIRC) has an icon directly on the desktop, as well as in the Browsers folder.
Guess what? They use the default browser. Because they don't really have a preference, and whichever one has an icon right on the desktop is the one they use. IE is two doubleclicks away, and they know it's there (or knew at one time -- I'm pretty sure they don't all remember), but they never use it. Because an extra doubleclick is too much trouble.
That extra doubleclick saves me a lot of admin hassle.
At first, every time my dad found a website that didn't work right, he asked me why, and I suggested it might have been designed for a certain browser, and why didn't he try one of the other options. He'd try the same site in IE and Opera and Mozilla and Netscape 4, but nine times out of ten NONE of them would get it right. So I'd tell him that if at least one of those browsers couldn't get it right, the site must just be broken. After a while, he sensed a pattern. These days, he just uses the default browser all the time.
Sure, users with a bit more knowledge will make their own shortcuts. But users with a bit more knowledge might have some idea what it means for random people on the internet to be able to do arbitrary things on their computer, if you explain it to them. (They might not care, but at least they might understand the risk they are taking.)
I was actually thinking about switching to OS X. I mean, it's really _cool_. Then reality hit: there is absolutely no way I can afford it. The cost of the upgrades at $100+ per pop, the higher cost of Apple's hardware, the need to buy commercial applications or else spend dozens of hours per app to get OSS apps working (almost) correctly, the relative impossibility of keeping the hardware current with small, incremental upgrades, so that you have to replace the whole system at least twice as often... I just can't afford it. My annual computer budget is perhaps at most a few hundred bucks -- not a few *thousand*.
Now, if I made more money, I would probably get a PowerMac (not that I'd throw out my PC...), but on what I make... it's just out of reach. Please note that I'm not saying it's not worth it, if you can afford it. I'm just saying, I can't afford it. Oh, and one other thing: I doubt I'm alone.
Err, you don't have to upgrade every single thing every time a new version comes out. They make the new versions available for the people who _want_ them.
I have a short list of applications that I update with any freqency. (Mostly, Mozilla. I upgrade Mozilla just about every milestone, and sometimes in-between.)
Everything else, I upgrade when it promises a feature that I specifically want, or an important security fix, or when I am dissatisfied with the stability of a several-versions-old version that I have of something.
*Occasionally*, I get a completely new distribution CD set and do a fresh install on a new drive or partition, then copy over my data from the old one, but I sure don't do that every time a new version of my distro comes out.
> Why, exactly, is any website _required_ to permit another page to > link to it? I have yet to see a _real_ answer to this question. > ("Because they should" is not a real answer, neither is "because > they can't stop you".)
How about, because that's part of the definition of how the web works. If you had read a basic web tutorial back in 1994, you would understand this fundamental principle that no web tutorial is complete without stating: any page on the web can link to any other page on the web. That's why it's a "web" -- because each site links to and is linked from a motley assortment of other sites. That's what makes the web the web. If that's not the effect you want, select another medium. Put up a gopher server or something.
Demanding that web pages not link to your web pages is like posting messages to usenet and demanding that they not be distributed on other people's news servers. It represents a fundamental lack of understanding about the basic concept of the medium in question.
The fastest way to browse is to connect your TCP/IP stack directly to your cerebral interface (remember that article about the monkey and the remote-control rats?) and just mentally telnet into port 80.
> (Or wget depending on your persuasion).
wget *rocks*, but it's not a browser. It's a download manager. A really *awesome* download manager. I never would have been able to download that set of 3 ISO CD-ROM images for Mandrake 9.0 beta 2 over my intermittent 33.6 modem connection without wget. With wget, it was easy. Best of all, it's hands-off -- you tell it what URL you want, and then you do something else for a few days... still, as cool as this is, it doesn't qualify wget as a fast browser.
There are some additional things Opera needs, too. Off the top of my head, the most obvious glaring thing that is missing is the ability to disable page colours when webmasters have lousy tastes in colours (as happens quite often). That's an important accessibility feature, besides being quite handy for power users.
> I once made the mistake of taking a significant elective in history, > whereupon I realized that an engineering student doesn't really have > the time to read 20+ history books per semester.
Heh. Again and again I hear things like this that lead me to the conclusion that I made a very fortunate choice as a Freshman: I went to a school with big programs in Music and Biology and Education, so what did I pick to major in? Math. Not Math-ed, and not Business or Applied Math, just plain old pure Math. The kind where you take Modern Algebra so you can forget that Math ever involved numbers in the first place, then you take Number Theory so you can generalise the concept of "number" until you realise you were studying numbers all along after all, even in your off-major classes.
Okay, so my major impresses nobody, but does anyone care what your major was in college anyway, once you've got a couple of years of job experience?
The benefits of an off-major, something outside the big programs of the college... I got to take any electives I wanted. Literally.
I took two semesters of Greek, just because I wanted to. I took Astronomy, just because I wanted to. I took a drawing course from the Art department, just because I decided it would round out my education a little better. I took extra computer science courses that my minor did not require. (Some of those have come in handy... others have not. If anyone can clue me in why I thought it would be a good idea to take Intro to Multimedia... I can't figure out for the life of me what I was thinking.) I even took a couple semesters of Theology -- figure out how _that_ fits into a Math major. This is of course all on top of the required Gen-ed core of history and English and so on and so forth.
Is there any possibility I'll ever get a job in the field of Math? No way. I'd rather chew aluminum foil for a living than do actuarial work, and if you even mention accounting my eyes will glaze over. So, if I had to do over again, would I major in Math again? Absolutely.
> most people know what they want to focus on in college, and for > $10K-$30K/year they should be allowed to stockpile as much > knowledge as possible in their chosen fields
If you feel this way, you should select a vocational school, rather than a liberal-arts college. The purpose of vocational school is to train you for a certain line of work. That is NOT the purpose of college. The whole point of college is to round you out and make you into the kind of educated person who can carry on an intelligent conversation, even with someone from a (gasp) different line of work. If that doesn't interest you, you should choose a vocational school, rather than a liberal arts school.
The distinction has unfortunately become blurred, as many vocational schools have been including the word "college" or "university" in their names, and many colleges have been lured into offering vocational programs in order to attract additional students, but the distinction is an important one anyway, because we're talking about entirely different kinds of eduction.
How about rewriting it? I normally don't like to complain heavily about grammar in online forums, since the author may not be writing his first language, but when the grammar gets bad enough that I have substantial difficulty deciphering what was meant... Can someone please explain it to me in plain English? What business did TurboLinux sell? The whole company, or just a subset?
> Do you think that Chinese is obfuscated because you can't > read it? (assuming you don't know chinese...) Of course > it isn't. Neither is perl
Uuuh, hello? He was talking about the OPC. *Those* scripts are *definitely* hard to read. I love Perl, and I don't consider well-written Perl to be any harder to read than well-written English, but if you don't think the OPC winners are hard to read, you haven't tried to read them. You can spend _days_ trying to figure them out.
Slashdot Mirror
> As several people have pointed out, our system does not function
> perfectly in a capitalistic sense, particularly since Microsoft is a
> monopoly and the odds of our changing that through legal action grow
Monopolies are not viable in the long term (though they sure can make
a trainload of money in the short and medium term). It takes (from
the consumer's perspective) an immense while, but if a monopoly
becomes sufficiently total to be secure, it loses the incentive to
produce a competitive product and rots from the inside out until
_eventually_ the product it produces is so bad that consumers broaden
their thinking and look past the entire market for that product to
parallel markets for dissimilar but substitutable products. Applied
to Microsoft, this might mean that (if they gain and retain a complete
monopoly, which has not happened yet and may not at all; Unix has
increased its user base (as in, number of users) by a respectable
percentage every year since it was created, albeit not as fast as
Windows did) in a couple hundred years consumers would decide they
don't actually need an operating system at all, either because they
can computer without one (using special-purpose devices) or because
they don't need computers as we think of them due to the emmergence of
some other new product. Humans are rigidly inflexible when they can
be but amazingly adaptable in the face of long term dire need.
> Anyway, point is that I'm not sure we can safely model Linux with
> current economic theory, so those predictions aren't safe.
I'm not sure whether I'm about to disagree with you or only clarify
what you said, but here goes... I believe we can understand the
ecconomic influence of Linux specifically and OSS in general (and they
does have an ecconomic influence) using standard ecconomic models.
However, Linux is not a widget. (For those who haven't had econ: a
widget is a good or service that is supplied to profit from a demand.
This is a simplification, but it will do for our purposes here.)
Support may be a widget, and therefore in some cases certain features
may be widgets (if a customer you support wants a feature, you may
implement it for that reason), but OSS is not primarily a widget.
Microsoft still views Linux as a widget, as a product in direct
competition with their own products. A lot of Linux advocates seem to
view it that way too, but it's a faulty view. OSS cannot be viewed
only as a competitor to closed software; it is more than that.
For example, OSS is for many people a _hobby_. This does NOT mean
that we have to throw everything we know about ecconomics out the
window. Ecconomists know about hobbies to a large extent. Hobbies
are important to ecconomists, because they produce spending behavior.
If you want to understand the ecconomic impact of OSS, you have to
understand (among other things) that while it _may_ reduce the demand
for Windows (though that has not been demonstrated) and commercial
unices (there is less doubt here) it increases the demand for a number
of other products, e.g., PC hardware (this is a no-brainer) and
broadband internet access (because more updates are freely available
than for Windows and also because of the desire of hobbiests to host
development projects and mirrors and such). Furthermore, the increase
in demand for related parephenalia is not the only impact a hobby has
on the ecconomy. There are also interesting effects in terms of the
labour supply (because the way people are spending their free time has
an impact on how much labour they are willing to supply), consumer
morale (which influences buying, saving, and investing behavior), and
marketing for other products, which can often benefit from identifying
with peoples' hobbies.
Then there's the whole question of worker productivity, because Linux
is not just a hobby, it's also a useful tool. But I'll stop now,
because I belive I've made my point: Linux is not a widget, but that
doesn't mean ecconomic theory can't make observations about it.
> Can you actually point to any web pages that don't work
> properly in Mozilla/NS7?
So far, in the course of my browsing experience, I have discovered
three. One was a case of incorrect sniffing that gave Mozilla the
content intended for Netscape 4 instead of the content intended
for Netscape 6. (It was purely a useragent issue; if you set
general.useragent.vendor to anything containing "Netscape", it
worked fine.) The other two were using nonstandard DOM (in both
cases, document.all was involved) in some javascript links.
These are the only three I have run across in my own browsing:
www.ebsco.com, www.eisenbrauns.com, and www.mrcpl.lib.oh.us
All three sites have since been fixed. Yes, there _are_ sites
out there that have not been fixed, quite a few of them, as you
can discover by searching for Tech Evangelism bugs in bugzilla,
but those are the only ones _I've_ run across. Out of hundreds
upon hundreds of sites I've visited, including major corporations
committed soundly to Microsoft. I think it says a lot that
when Microsoft rigged their site to only work in IE, community
outcry _forced_ them to fix it. Yes, the way they did it was
particularly nasty, but still...
> In Monopoly, practically everyone wants to acquire Park Place and
> Boardwalk. Sure, when your rivals hit those properties, once they
> have hotels, they have to dig deep. But Those properties are
> expensive to buy, and expensive to develop. Whereas Baltic Avenue,
> and its sibling, are very cheap. Developing houses and hotels on
> those properties is also very cheap. And yet, when you do the math,
> the return on investment on those two properties is the best on the
> board -- better than Boardwalk.
Okay, I'm going to follow your line of reasoning way off
topic here, but rest assured I will bring it back full circle
and return to the topic at hand eventually...
Both are poor investements, if they are the only thing you develop.
Boardwalk takes too long to develop and doesn't get hit with any
frequency, and Baltic and Mediterranean with hotels can get hit
three times and not pay you enough to land once on any serious
developed property. Sure, they pay for _themselves_, but you
can't build a game strategy around that, unless you plan to forego
dice and land on your own property every time.
The light blue, orange, and yellow properties are the ones you want.
The orange ones (New York and so on) are best. Build them to three
houses as quickly as you can for optimal return on investment. When
you can afford it, push them on to hotels for the extra income. The
yellow (Marvin's Gardens and whatnot) are a bit harder to get
developed, and the light blue (Connecticut et cetera) max out too
low, but they still give a good return on your investment. If you
can get both these sets, build the light blue ones up first, and
pray the orange ones don't get built up by someone else before you
can get serious with the yellow ones, because a couple of lands
on St. James will wipe out your chances of building up any
investment capital. In a pinch, you can substitute the magenta
or red ones, but it's an uphill battle, because the magenta (St. Charles &c) cost more than the light blue to develop and don't get
hit enough to pay off like the orange, and the red ones compare unfavourably with the orange and yellow on the same grounds. I
should mention that the light blue set by itself is inadequate
to allow you to compete in the game. However, it can be good
enough to let you get another set developed that you otherwise
could not (say, the red ones).
In the event _two_ powers emerge with sustaining levels of hotel
income, then the properties on the fourth side of the board (green
and dark blue) become important.
If you play with an open market (trades and sales among players
permitted), it is _always_ a good investment to purchase any
bank-owned property you land on except the utilities, because
developable property is worth more than the bank price. (Usually
substantially more.) If you play with a closed market, you have
to be more selective in the early game, so you can afford to get
one complete set. Also: resist the urge to believe that the
rents on undeveloped properties (excepting railroads when there
are no serious (>Baltic&Med) developed properties yet) can have
an impact on the outcome of the game; it ain't so.
> The new machine, the cutting edge machine? You know you
> have to pay a premium for it.
This is true.
> You know its value will depreciate very quickly.
While also true, this statement is meaningless. _All_ hardware
depreciates rapidly, whether it was top-of-the-line or bargain
basement or used. Today's $200 system will be worth approximately
nothing in sixteen months.
> Its value will depreciate much more quickly than a
> computer built around a more mature technology.
Only because it has further down to go. What is more interesting
is not the resale value but the replacement value and the cost
of maintaining it at a usable level.
> well, I want it to last me for five years or more. So I have to
> get a really powerful machine, so I won't be left too far behind
There is merit in this approach. Now, "really powerful" may be
overkill, but you do want to get a system that will be able to
be maintained with affordable upgrades for several years, for two
reasons. First, it means you can get comfortable with the system
and finally get to the point after about two years where you
_don't_ discover every _week_ something you hadn't got around to
installing yet that you need (PAIN), and second because upgrading
is a good deal cheaper than replacing, so the costs ballance out
if you strike a decent happy medium.
Now, it's possible to go to far. A Boardwalk system is not
for the average user. It's price-prohibitive. But it's possible
to get a system that can be developed (upgraded) to a decent and
reasonable level, like New York and St. James, for a pretty
reasonable price, and it will last you a lot longer than a
Baltic system. My computer right now is over four and a half
years old (well, most of it is; some components are newer).
It will be at _least_ another year, maybe two, before I have
to replace the system. (Some components I'll be able to keep,
of course, but I'm talking motherboard and CPU at least, and
probably some other major parts too at that point.) If you
bear with me, the ecconomics of this will bear me out.
Discounting the monitor, which is really a subject for another
thread, I paid $1550 for this sytem new, in 1998. It's a
PentiumII/233 system, but the motherboard was a nicer one with
lots of expandability. I could have got a system for around
$1200 at the time, but it would have been much lower end, not
nearly as upgradeable. For example, when RAM prices dropped,
I eventually beefed up my system to 512MB of RAM. If I'd bought
a $1200 system, it would have maxed out lower than that, and I'd
have replaced it by now; instead of spending $80 on RAM a few
months back, I'd have probably spent $400 on a new system. PLUS
I'd have had the hassle of losing my nice, comfortable system with
everything I use already installed and going back to an out-of-the-
box system with virtually nothing installed, at least two years
sooner than necessary. Compare:
$1200 + $400 + PAIN = $1600 + PAIN
$1550 + $80 + comfort = $1630 + comfort
In addition, I had a somewhat better system ad interim. My
conclusion: Yeah, Boardwalk systems are for people rolling in
dough, but Baltic systems are for people who enjoy pain. Buy St.
James systems (or at least Connecticut systems) and stay sane.
What this means is, you don't have to wait until you can afford
a Hammer system. All you have to do is wait until the news of
Hammer systems hitting the market drives the prices on moderate
Athlon XP systems through the floor, and buy one of those (St.
James) or a good quality non-bargain-basement Duron system
(Connecticut). If you feel guilty about saving money at the
expense of a struggling computer industry, make a donation to
your favourite OSS vendor or something.
Disclaimer:
People who use a lot of CPU power may find that things
break down differently. Most of what I do leaves the CPU
sitting idle most of the time, so I find that things like
RAM and drive space (I'm a multibooter (six OS installations
on the same hardware and counting...), which uses up drive
space several times as fast) are more important. If you do
a lot of raytracing or calculate the factorials of large
primes, you'll have to upgrade the CPU, and that costs more.
The statement in the article notwithstanding, I'm fairly certain
it _does_ have the potential to be addictive. My own research
shows very clearly that sleep is a very addictive habbit that
not one person in a hundred can kick.
> Finally, for many people the last mile problem is a major issue
> in terms of software adoption. OpenOffice may be free, but
> downloading OpenOffice over a modem connections is still a
> serious task.
These people obviously haven't discovered wget yet. When I
was using a browser to do downloads, I considered "large"
things like Java to be a nightmare to download. No more.
wget makes it _easy_. You just give it a list of URLs to
download, minimize the window it's running in, and get on
with your life. Later you check to see if it's finished
yet. With wget, something small like Java or OpenOffice
is NO problem. I downloaded a set of three ISO CD images
for Mandrake 9.0 Beta 2 over my 33.6 dialup connection.
The connection had to be redialed periodically, but each
time wget just kept right on going where it left off...
no problem.
There are also outfits that will burn stuff like OO to
a CD-R and send it to you for a price that is much more
reasonable than MS licensing fees. If you want to talk
about _features_ Word has that OO lacks, okay, but don't
try to make the fact that OO can be downloaded a strike
against it.
I agree that most people will use whatever comes on the
computer. I will go so far as to add that if the store
had similarly priced models sitting side-by-side, one
with everything MS and the other with Gnome and OO and
Mozilla, people would look at things like the visual
attractiveness of the case and the brand name on the
monitor when making the decision which to get. Really.
> rather than a more primitive, ugly, yet free and somewhat
:-)
> as functional word processor (Emacs or other unix WP)
Calling Emacs a word processor and complaining that it
isn't Word is like calling your house a car and complaining
that it isn't a [insert favourite brand of expensive car].
People don't use Word as a substitute for Emacs. They use
Notepad as a substitute for Emacs. And if there was ever
anything primitive or ugly, Notepad makes it look advanced
and beautiful by comparison. Using Notepad as a substitute
for Emacs is roughly equivalent to using a wheelbarrow as a
substitute for a HumVee. People can argue that they prefer
the Jeep (vim), and we just shake our heads and say there's
no accounting for taste, but arguing for the wheelbarrow can
only be done out of complete ignorance. All of this is no
reflection on Word -- Word is not the same type of thing.
Word is a word processor. An expensive word processor.
Emacs is not a word processor. I _love_ Emacs, but despite
joking about using it as an operating system, I do not
use it as a substitute for MS Word. (I use OpenOffice
for that.) On the other hand, I would never subject myself
to the agony of attempting to use a word processor (MS or
otherwise) as a substitute for Emacs. I'm not even sure
that's possible; it certainly isn't sane. Not only does
it (Word or any word processor) lack the big high-end
features of Emacs (_complete_ scriptability and automatic
indentation and character insertion according to the mode
determined by the type of file being edited, _complete_
email and usenet facilities, unparalleled extensibility),
but it lacks even the basic features that nearly all modern
text editors have, without which editing is intensely painful
(regular expression search-and-replace and mode-driven syntax
highlighting, for example; it does at least have recordable
macros, but what good are they if you can't record the things
you would do in a real text editor, such as regex searches?).
Besides, Word can't use your ISO standard network coffee
maker to brew coffee
Hospital medical records should never be on a system that is
connected, directly or indirectly, to the internet. _No_ OS
is sufficiently secure for that to be acceptable. We just
had an openssl vulerability a few weeks ago, in case you're
forgetting. Yes, it was patched right away, but it makes
the point clear that no OS can be known with certitude to
be absolutely secure.
Sure, the hospital needs _some_ systems connected to the
internet, but they absolutely SHOULD NOT be connected to
the systems that have the private medical information.
> Redhat has something else going for it -
> probably the fact that they sell hardware
Now, *that's* interesting. The article estimated that
RH would get into selling hardware "two days after never".
> Yes it is - different minerals. In some of the more extreme
> cases (particularly comparing bicarb-heavy ones with the more
> neutral ones) there are quite different flavours.
Yep. I like mine with a good deal of iron, a little lime,
trace amounts of assorted other minerals, and carefully
calculated amounts of chloride and fluoride. (In some
circles, this is known as "tap water".) I can handle
a small-to-moderate amount of sulfur, but too much leaves
a bad aftertaste. I don't like very much sodium.
And I _definitely_ don't like water without minerals.
In particular, I can't stand it if the iron is missing,
and it also bothers me some if the chlorine is missing.
Distilled water is right near impotable as far as I'm
concerned, and most brands of bottled water are not
much better. Put some iron in it, for crying out loud.
Flash wasn't the problem. We did install Flash on the PC
my parents use. I generally don't keep it installed on
my Linux box, because I personally don't _like_ annoying
flashy blinking things, but that's unrelated.
> Yes, fixing six vulnerabilities is good ... but the real ... How many more did they add?
> question is
I doubt the fix added any. Usually vulnerabilities are added
by feature work, not by security fixes. (I said usually.)
And yeah, they still have work to do before the security
community will consider IE to be fixed. But as I said, this
is progress. If they can just fix the known outstanding
vulnerabilities in IE6 before releasing IE7, that will be
a step in the right direction.
> Nice, I wonder how many of those sites simply don't work
...)
> because of the VM you're using
Sorry, I must have miscommunicated. This is not on my Linux box,
but on the Windows box upstairs. So, Windows is running right on
the hardware, with no intervening VM. Sorry for any confusion.
(If you meant the Java VM, it was the latest one available at the
time, although some browsers may use their own implementation
instead.)
> or some setting you've been messing with in the registry
The only settings I mess with in the registry are the ones that
applications abuse to start themselves at system start time.
Allowing apps to do this seriously degrades system performance.
If one app does it, that app starts a bit faster, but when
twelve[1] apps do it, they all start slower, because you have no
RAM left. So I don't let any apps do this, especially not ones
we don't use all the time. What's really annoying about
misbehaved apps that put themselves in the Run keys without
asking is, they invariably take measures to insert themselves
into the Run keys not just on install but every time they run.
When the user manually starts up an application, then it loads
just as it would have at system start, had it been allowed to do
so at that time.
I was personally surprised that he didn't find more sites using
MS-specific code (mainly, the document.all interface), but there
weren't that many (that he visited -- YMMV). Mostly he got sites
in one of two categories: their HTML was obviously broken (you
know, mismatched tags, misspelled tags, imaginary tags, tags
missing their closing right angle bracket, required close tags
missing, imaginary attributes, attributes from one tag placed on
another tag that has never accepted them in any known browser,
unquoted attributes containing spaces, and that sort of nonsense)
or else they relied on the Plugin Of The Week (by which I mean,
some plugin that is not listed on Netscape's plugin finder
service and does not come with IE; the only one I remember is
Shockwave (which as it turns out is produced by the same company
as Flash, but less well-known), but we ran across perhaps a
couple dozen different ones, all obscure).
The former type of site (HTML run through a blender) was the more
common type. The Plugin Of The Week issue mostly happened when
he was looking for WTC news last fall.
My mom also ran into at least one instance of bad server-side
sniffing, wherein if the browser was neither NS4 nor IE,
nonstandard characters were inserted in a document (in places
where the other browsers got spaces, according to View Source)
that didn't declare its character set. This was at Ancestry.com,
but the issue went away because my mom doesn't visit that site
any longer. Any email to the webmaster is answered (by a bot,
apparently) with a letter explaining which browsers are
supported. Funny thing is, the letter says Netscape 4 or later,
but later versions are handled incorrectly.
[1] A slight exaggeration only. MSIE, AIM, the MSN IM client
(and its associated spyware), and YIM all do this without
even asking. Other apps (Mozilla, Netscape, OpenOffice,
ask, and respect your choice, so I don't have a problem with
them. But the misbehaved ones I keep in check by editing the
registry, yes. There were at one time some other apps doing
this (well, trying to) that I haven't listed, but they've
been uninstalled now.
> dynamic gifs that would cause epilepsy in a blind mole
This problem has been solved in modern browsers. In Mozilla
or Netscape it's in Edit->Preferences->Privacy&Security->Images
where you can choose to let animations play as many times as
they like (i.e., accept your epilepsy like a good consumer),
once only (what I do) or not at all (you see just one still
frame). Mozilla isn't the only browser that lets you do this,
either. In fact, I believe IE is notable for _not_ having
this option.
Unfortunately, if you install any plugins, you are at the
mercy of the plugin provider to provide you with similar
controls, and most plugin developers don't. I find it
necessary to have two different plugin directories, one
with nothing but Java and one with everything. Then in
the event that I actually _need_ to use any plugin other
than Java (which is rare), I switch the symlink to point
to the other plugin dir and restart my browser. It is
fortunate that while Java is used for a lot of useful
stuff, it is very seldom used for annoying advertisements;
the various Macromedia plugins seem to be in vogue for
that sort of nonsense, and most of the time I don't have
them installed.
Oh, and the only-java plugin directory doesn't have that
annoying plugin-finder default/null plugin, either, so I
don't get prompted to install any plugins. They just
display a nice little broken puzzle piece image where
the plugin would have gone, and the rest of the site
(in most cases) works like normal.
There are sites that use Flash for their front door, but
most of the time I don't need to use those sites. When
I do, I switch to the other plugin directory.
For any given user, family, or organisation, the list will be different. Exchange may be the last item for some, and for others Exchange may be entirely irrelevant. Personally, until this discussion, I thought Exchange was just a mail server. I had no idea it did scheduling, because I never went looking for scheduling software. We don't use Exchange here. For us, the only real barrier is the lack of a major OEM that pre-installs Linux for the desktop. If the catalog vendor we buy from (MicroWarehouse) had Linux desktops, I'd be recommending them for our client systems. But I can't recommend "let me fdisk the sucker as soon as we get it and install this other OS". I did that for the one on my desk, and I can do that for servers, but I can't do that for the desktops in the rest of the organisation, probably.
See, for each outfit, the barriers will be different.
Fixing six vulnerabilities is good. They're not _finished_,
but it's progress.
> Um, shouldn't you allow your family to make their own decisions?
V ersio n|Run* keys.
> You can suggest they don't use MS, but saying you don't allow it
> seems a little peculiar.
I theoretically let my (non-geek) family members use IE if they
want, but I make sure it's not the default browser and that it
doesn't load itself at system startup time. (Yes, this requires
doing a registry merge from autoexec.bat, but I have to do that
anyway to keep the %$#! instant messaging clients out of the
HKLM|HKCU/Software|Microsoft|Windows|Current
It also requires a Custom install of IE6, but you knew to always
to custom install of everything anyway, right?) So if they want
to use IE, they go to the Browsers folder (there is a shortcut
on the desktop for this) and choose IE from a list of assorted
choices. The default browser (current NS7.0PR1 IIRC) has an
icon directly on the desktop, as well as in the Browsers folder.
Guess what? They use the default browser. Because they don't
really have a preference, and whichever one has an icon right
on the desktop is the one they use. IE is two doubleclicks
away, and they know it's there (or knew at one time -- I'm
pretty sure they don't all remember), but they never use it.
Because an extra doubleclick is too much trouble.
That extra doubleclick saves me a lot of admin hassle.
At first, every time my dad found a website that didn't work
right, he asked me why, and I suggested it might have been
designed for a certain browser, and why didn't he try one of
the other options. He'd try the same site in IE and Opera
and Mozilla and Netscape 4, but nine times out of ten NONE
of them would get it right. So I'd tell him that if at least
one of those browsers couldn't get it right, the site must
just be broken. After a while, he sensed a pattern. These
days, he just uses the default browser all the time.
Sure, users with a bit more knowledge will make their own
shortcuts. But users with a bit more knowledge might have
some idea what it means for random people on the internet
to be able to do arbitrary things on their computer, if
you explain it to them. (They might not care, but at
least they might understand the risk they are taking.)
I was actually thinking about switching to OS X. I mean, it's
really _cool_. Then reality hit: there is absolutely no way
I can afford it. The cost of the upgrades at $100+ per pop,
the higher cost of Apple's hardware, the need to buy commercial
applications or else spend dozens of hours per app to get OSS
apps working (almost) correctly, the relative impossibility
of keeping the hardware current with small, incremental upgrades,
so that you have to replace the whole system at least twice as
often... I just can't afford it. My annual computer budget is
perhaps at most a few hundred bucks -- not a few *thousand*.
Now, if I made more money, I would probably get a PowerMac (not
that I'd throw out my PC...), but on what I make... it's just
out of reach. Please note that I'm not saying it's not worth
it, if you can afford it. I'm just saying, I can't afford it.
Oh, and one other thing: I doubt I'm alone.
Err, you don't have to upgrade every single thing every time a new
version comes out. They make the new versions available for the
people who _want_ them.
I have a short list of applications that I update with any
freqency. (Mostly, Mozilla. I upgrade Mozilla just about
every milestone, and sometimes in-between.)
Everything else, I upgrade when it promises a feature that I
specifically want, or an important security fix, or when I am
dissatisfied with the stability of a several-versions-old
version that I have of something.
*Occasionally*, I get a completely new distribution CD set and
do a fresh install on a new drive or partition, then copy over
my data from the old one, but I sure don't do that every time a
new version of my distro comes out.
> Why, exactly, is any website _required_ to permit another page to
> link to it? I have yet to see a _real_ answer to this question.
> ("Because they should" is not a real answer, neither is "because
> they can't stop you".)
How about, because that's part of the definition of how the web
works. If you had read a basic web tutorial back in 1994, you
would understand this fundamental principle that no web tutorial
is complete without stating: any page on the web can link to any
other page on the web. That's why it's a "web" -- because each
site links to and is linked from a motley assortment of other
sites. That's what makes the web the web. If that's not the
effect you want, select another medium. Put up a gopher server
or something.
Demanding that web pages not link to your web pages is like posting
messages to usenet and demanding that they not be distributed on
other people's news servers. It represents a fundamental lack of
understanding about the basic concept of the medium in question.
> Is Links!!! Or Lynx. No question.
The fastest way to browse is to connect your TCP/IP stack directly
to your cerebral interface (remember that article about the monkey
and the remote-control rats?) and just mentally telnet into port 80.
> (Or wget depending on your persuasion).
wget *rocks*, but it's not a browser. It's a download manager.
A really *awesome* download manager. I never would have been
able to download that set of 3 ISO CD-ROM images for Mandrake
9.0 beta 2 over my intermittent 33.6 modem connection without
wget. With wget, it was easy. Best of all, it's hands-off --
you tell it what URL you want, and then you do something else
for a few days... still, as cool as this is, it doesn't
qualify wget as a fast browser.
There are some additional things Opera needs, too. Off the top of
my head, the most obvious glaring thing that is missing is the ability
to disable page colours when webmasters have lousy tastes in colours
(as happens quite often). That's an important accessibility feature,
besides being quite handy for power users.
> I once made the mistake of taking a significant elective in history, > whereupon I realized that an engineering student doesn't really have > the time to read 20+ history books per semester.
Heh. Again and again I hear things like this that lead me to
the conclusion that I made a very fortunate choice as a Freshman:
I went to a school with big programs in Music and Biology and
Education, so what did I pick to major in? Math. Not Math-ed,
and not Business or Applied Math, just plain old pure Math.
The kind where you take Modern Algebra so you can forget that
Math ever involved numbers in the first place, then you take
Number Theory so you can generalise the concept of "number"
until you realise you were studying numbers all along after
all, even in your off-major classes.
Okay, so my major impresses nobody, but does anyone care what
your major was in college anyway, once you've got a couple of
years of job experience?
The benefits of an off-major, something outside the big
programs of the college... I got to take any electives I
wanted. Literally.
I took two semesters of Greek, just because I wanted to.
I took Astronomy, just because I wanted to. I took a
drawing course from the Art department, just because I
decided it would round out my education a little better.
I took extra computer science courses that my minor did
not require. (Some of those have come in handy... others
have not. If anyone can clue me in why I thought it would
be a good idea to take Intro to Multimedia... I can't
figure out for the life of me what I was thinking.) I
even took a couple semesters of Theology -- figure out
how _that_ fits into a Math major. This is of course all
on top of the required Gen-ed core of history and English
and so on and so forth.
Is there any possibility I'll ever get a job in the field
of Math? No way. I'd rather chew aluminum foil for a
living than do actuarial work, and if you even mention
accounting my eyes will glaze over. So, if I had to do
over again, would I major in Math again? Absolutely.
> most people know what they want to focus on in college, and for
> $10K-$30K/year they should be allowed to stockpile as much
> knowledge as possible in their chosen fields
If you feel this way, you should select a vocational school,
rather than a liberal-arts college. The purpose of vocational
school is to train you for a certain line of work. That is NOT
the purpose of college. The whole point of college is to round
you out and make you into the kind of educated person who can
carry on an intelligent conversation, even with someone from a
(gasp) different line of work. If that doesn't interest you,
you should choose a vocational school, rather than a liberal
arts school.
The distinction has unfortunately become blurred, as many
vocational schools have been including the word "college"
or "university" in their names, and many colleges have been
lured into offering vocational programs in order to attract
additional students, but the distinction is an important
one anyway, because we're talking about entirely different
kinds of eduction.
> Reread that submission.
How about rewriting it? I normally don't like to complain heavily
about grammar in online forums, since the author may not be writing
his first language, but when the grammar gets bad enough that I
have substantial difficulty deciphering what was meant... Can
someone please explain it to me in plain English? What business
did TurboLinux sell? The whole company, or just a subset?
> Do you think that Chinese is obfuscated because you can't
> read it? (assuming you don't know chinese...) Of course
> it isn't. Neither is perl
Uuuh, hello? He was talking about the OPC. *Those* scripts
are *definitely* hard to read. I love Perl, and I don't
consider well-written Perl to be any harder to read than
well-written English, but if you don't think the OPC winners
are hard to read, you haven't tried to read them. You can
spend _days_ trying to figure them out.