There already were. Part of Google's competitve advantage is that they're not scared to include wild amounts of porn in there text and image search index.
I love it. How are "not functioning pixels" "not a sign of malfunction"?
To be a little nit-picky, a dead pixel is better considered a "defect" and not a "malfunction". Of course, Sony's not really admitting that either. Think of it this way: I bought a bike on Craig's List recently that was an extra good deal because it was missing a little flange that buttresses the rear drop-outs on one side. Now, that's a defect. It affects the bike cosmetically, and has the tiniest possibility of causing problems if I don't tighten my rear skewer bolts enough. A malfunction would be if the bike manufacturer sold me a gearing system that, during operation, regularly broke.
I'm not excusing Sony: they're using a semantic detail to try to paper over a widespread manufacturing defect.
Microsoft understand this. You won't believe the pressure from them to turn universities into MS training centers. There is a constant stream of invitations to free conferences for the staff. I said free? Considering the tons of gadgets dumped at the participants they are more like 'paid'. Free books and licenses of MS software for staff and students are the norm.
Similarly, I was at a national non-profit technology conference, and MS was out in force -- "diamond" sponsorship, fancy dancy party at the House of Blues, lunchtime keynote with some security dude.
At least at small-medium sized non-profits, there's tons of momentum to move towards open source, which is totally making some of these "for the public good" tech consultancies heads explode. "Wait, we're getting lots of money from Microsoft! We love Microsoft! Wait, our clients want Linux? Uh, well, don't you want Windows 2003 Server? It's only $50 for nonprofits!!! Oh, you hate the server... but we're funded by....oh, but you hate per-seat licensing, but... but..."
I think the dynamic for a place like Brazil is similar. Sure, you can get MS stuff for cheap, but the true cost is perceived to be way too high, and it probably is if you factor in ethical concerns and annoyance level.
At this conference I met a consultant who grilled at my talk on FOSS about TCO and functionality of the email/groupware solution I deployed at the nonprofit I work versus the functionality and tco of Exchange Server. All through q&a he was on my ass. After q&a, he comes up and says, "look, our clients hate Exchange. Because it's a pain over the long haul, and they hate calling us in all the time. And I'm tired of it, too."
I am shocked nobody asked about deployment options. Is there a way to deploy firefox/thunderbird widely in a company without using ghost? How about the ability to lock down certain settings? You can't compete with IE in the workplace without those.
I run the IT department for a small-ish law legal services organization. I like Firefox a lot, Thunderbird pretty well. But we're using Ghost to deploy (which is okay, really) because it's pretty tricky otherwise. Also, whenever I've asked questions about enterprise deployment on the MozillaZine forums I've received snarky replies or none at all. I think the prevailing attitude is that they're not going to get much enterprise penetration except at educational institutions and a few funky offices and that the priority is far and away the home user. They're probably right, though my users love FireFox.
This thread is full of arguments that there are flaws in making columns with CSS. These are a) bunk because it isn't very hard, and b) stupid because columns aren't a good way to read/view textual content on a low resolution device such as a computer screen.
A much bigger problem is the problem of liquid layouts and response to dynamic content. Some posters have acknowledged this. But why are these flaws more important?
First there is the issue of versatility on the design side. A designer may not know what content is going to be thrown at his or her design, and it is reasonable for a designer to want CSS-based tools that will respond to that content and match the layout to the content. Right now, that's fairly difficult to accomplish.
Second there is the issue of variation on the client side. Your end user may like her/his text teeny tiny. Or may be legally blind and need it to be humungous. Or be on a screen reader. Or on a 15" CRT or a 21" LCD. Etc. You want designs that maximize readability and legibility across a reasonable spectrum of possible user-variation (the spectrum being largely defined by the characteristics of the content and the audience). Again, this is more difficult than it should be, even with CSS properties such as "max-width" and "min-width". This is partly an issue of browser support (IE doesn't support max-width), but partly a flaw in the standards writing body, which did not take such considerations into account as fully as they could have.
This is why you see good designers creating a lot of fixed width or 100% width designs, with little in the way of liquid layout that focuses on maintaining column count for text (essential for readability) or element proportionality when scaling. I can't tell you how crazy I go when I try to look at otherwise well designed sites like www.stopdesign.com on at 1600 by 1200 resolution.
Furthermore, the fact that his site also suggested "setting a trap" to nail spammers (PDF of page at the time) make him looks lawsuit happy...
And from TFR:
Of course, as the article points out, none of this is actually illegal, even if it does make the victim look a bit less like a white knight.
Not only is it not illegal, it's quite common practice to proactively solicit the behavior you wish to sue over. In some cases, this is fradulent, unethical, deceptive, etc.
But in many cases, this is worthwhile and ethical behavior. Many lawsuits against various sorts of abusers are thrown out because their procedural and evidenciary ducks aren't in a row, or the behavior isn't particularly egregious. If the spammers (or brutal cops or corrupt city government, in the cases I work on) really are what you say they are, this isn't unethical baiting or deception. They'll do the nasty things they do whether or not you exist. The difference is that you open yourself up for them to do it to you or in front of you and make sure you document it all painstakingly.
Our society is a little too lawsuit happy, but I don't think this besmirches Mr. Mumma in the least.
I think you have a valid point here that Slashdotters are beating up on Ahead. However, it's useful that some of the comments, as well as the review, are critiques. These will help Ahead make NeroLinux better. Secondly, this is a really bad comparision because K3B is so good. Thirdly, free software and commerical software should be compared: why is NeroLinux inferior at this point to K3b? Why does Photoshop continue to blow the GIMP out of the water for most non-trivial graphics design work? These comparisons allow thoughtful people to create a cohesive philosophy of free software and proprietary software. Under what circumstances is the one appropriate and the other not? What structural features of the open source development model encourage successful software in which market segments and why?
I suspect the fraction of free software developers who infringe many copyrights is lower than the fraction of general internet users who infringe many copyrights, just because the former tend to be more familiar with the law and what it takes to produce a copyrightable work.
This diverges slightly from the file-trading theme here, but to extend your point: Many of us who use free software started to do so in part because we didn't have the means to legally obtain and use much of the software we used previously. Some people have moved to free software because they can't or don't want (for various reasons) to pay Microsoft, etc. to use their software, but also don't think that violating copyright is a moral thing to do either.
As always, Slashdot book reviews are not exactly, uh, insightful, and are far too charitable.
But I'm going to advocate for the book anyway. It actually is not simplistic at all. The power of Allen's approach is in seeing better than others have seen where productivity is lost. I did Franklin Planning for a bit and it was a bunch of bunkus -- mainly I found I could do just as well with a pad of paper and later with Ximian Evolution what they were charging an assload of money for. Allen's approach is very different -- there's a few tricks, but mainly, the focus is agnostic to the system of organization you choose, and focused on why you lose track of projects and what principles help you get those projects back on track. And the main principle is to get everything out of your head and into some organized but flexible system that you can review at various stages of your life, typically on a weekly basis. Most of the other advice stems from this principle: for example, just goddamn do things that don't take long to do, right when you get them, so that they're done and you don't have to think about them anymore. Maybe you should note that you did do them, for future reference, but just get them out of the way. I've found the principle: get it out of your head and into some kind of system (mine's just barely systematic) is much better advice than "write a list of your tasks and your priorities" because goddamn if that doesn't change every 5-10 minutes, at least where I'm working now, trying to fix an ailing IT department where everything is breaking.
Notice also that Allen's approach isn't "getting lots of things done" or "getting everything done" -- it's much more about managing one's time in a healthy way, which includes knowing what you decided to blow off instead of just forgetting about it. Allen's as cognizant as anybody that most of us are pretty overdrawn and stretched out, but the system is as much about tracking those things you decide not to do for whatever reason as those things you decide to do.
Don't tell me the only TDA with a Basic interpreter is a scam.
Re:Depends on the kind of graffiti
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Reverse Graffiti
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It's not art at all, it's just vandalism.
Couldn't it be both art and vandalism?
Also, what is the status of your argument about the property of others when the property is being wasted or otherwise ignored, such as vacant lots and abandoned factories that are still "owned" by someone.
And just WHY should CNN, or any other news service, "push" one product over another? What possible interest could they have?
Oh, I don't know, public interest, perhaps? Why do you think they review movies? News outlets and the media have often served to inform consumers of what their best options are, because it makes them look good if they pick good products/services. I don't see why browsers are different.
That said, I agree with you about personal activism whole heartedly.
Once clear property title and rights are established, the free market can operate as well as it does in other areas property. The government can still retain ownership of some frequencies and domains for things like emergency use, just like it does now with land.
I read that, and I fail to see exactly what you mean by the free market operating as well as it does in other areas. The free market can do very effective and powerful things, but, as we've seen with intellectual property, it can also be quite nasty. That example is fairly straightforward, because at least companies (and the people who run them) are being more or less rational in trying to maximize their own benefit. Other market inefficiences like the way black people and women are paid in this country for work of "comparable worth" to the work of white men -- which is to say, still significantly less. Therefore, I think the idea of property rights here is dangerous -- I don't think there is a lot of indication that either market forces working efficiently will produce an outcome that we'd like nor that the market will necessarily even be an efficent one.
The way this article is framed is really lame. Obviously, the FCC has a few major areas that are significantly broken. Powell has pushed an agenda that is allowing a lot of concentration of media power. The dubious censorship practiced by the FCC in a legalistic way is secondary to the self-censorship that can come when you have a handful of powerful news sources with incredibly broad audiences.
But the question should not be an all/nothing, either/or question. Spectrum is precisely an area where libertarian fantasies (as implied in the subject of the post) about business self-regulation run aground. Spectrum is, in some sense, a common good, and it needs a more neutral overseer than business necessarily provides. One could retort that a libetarian scenario exists where businesses are not recognized as individuals. I agree that in such a scenario a kind of individual libertarianism could coexist with a regulatory body that oversaw the electromagnetic spectrum. But the point is that there needs to be a body that is, if not 100% politically neutral, transparent and open to input from various interests in society.
The question should be: what is wrong with the FCC and what should its role be in the future, not should we ban it. What should our vision for the role of the FCC be?
I'm do free-lance web design to pay the bills while I'm in grad school. I don't have kids, but the neighbor kids have flunky parents and I'm basically like a second dad.
What I've found is that working from home actually makes it harder to deal with competing demands. When I was working in an office doing database development last summer, I would go there, work from 8 to 5 or 6, and then come home. The kids and I could play, watch a movie, go to the public pool, whatever. Now, because there's no clear line between work and being at home, it takes a lot more discipline to make sure I'm spending enough time with the kids, because when I work from home, I can shut the door my bedroom/computer room and work and work and work. It's great in its way, but I think if I had a family, it would be hell for them.
A few friends when I was in high school had moms and dads that did the home office thing when I was in high school, and I noticed the same thing. The kids hated their parents being around all the time, and at the same time, the parents didn't actually seem to spend that much quality time with their kids.
Perhaps other people have better experiences or thoughts on this.
I live in Chicago, and the lakefront path in the summertime is already overcrowded. Does the city really need quite possibly obese people who don't know how to ride a Segway zipping up and down the lakefront? Generally, they need to reengineer the paths to deal with the different kinds of traffic. I stay away from the lakefront at busy times ever since I was riding my bike (going around 25mph in the clear) and another cyclist decided, last second, to swing waaaaay out into my lane to ride next to his girlfriend. I ruined a wheel, smashed my nose to shit, and spent the next 9 months in physical therapy to fix my knee.
You mention the responsiveness of BeOS. I think that needs to be underscored: the responsiveness wasn't simply a nice cosmetic feature, it was a really big issue with multimedia. I remember seeing that the latency of a call to the Windows sound playback system was about 50ms, and on BeOS it was under 8-9ms on average hardware. At the time, I was just bopping around high school, but I knew a couple of people in their 20s developing homemade audio and video manipulation programs to make experimental music, and they were all developing on BeOS because they found it so much easier and quicker than Mac or PC development. That being said, I think it's quite clear that Be made about a million missteps business-wise and otherwise. Combine that with the 2*10^3 lb gorilla, and the OS had no chance.
The overwhelming majority are innocent. Thus the presumption is based, not on some act of misplaced kindness that permits wealthy and influential to escape justice, but a simple acknowledgment of the true fact. Such injustice happens by other means. The presumption of innocence allows people to exist without be harrassed in the absence of reasonable evidence to the contrary.
Actually, I think there's a better explanation of this than the one you've given and that has been followed by a series of arguments that most accused perps are guilty without citing any data pro or contra. More importantly, this presumption is based on the notion that legal innocence is almost impossible to prove, but legal guilt is, in principle and in fact, provable. Hannah Arendt makes this point quite persuasively in On Revolution.
The rest of your comment doesn't make a lot of sense: it's incoherent and dogmatic Enlightenment liberalism. First, law is a kind of morality in some sense. Several strong philosophical accounts (see Alasdair MacIntyre, for example) see law as a set of precepts governing relationships and actions which are detrimental to a shared project. So, in such schemes (which start, systematically, with Aristotle, and remain with us in a variety of forms), law is a very special subset of morality which defines that which is actionably "bad". One may fail to be a good citizen on account of lying or be incompetent at a given job or be an asshole and that would be bad in a broader moral sense. Or one might break contracts or murder, which has the potential not just to be part of the inherent friction of a society trying to reach and transcend certain goals but to actually break the society in a more fundamental ways, and so is a kind of morality that the society takes it upon itself to be actionable. Note that I'm synthesizing a lot of Locke and Rosseau and social contract theory with the Aristotelian account, but I think that it's a fair characterization. I've taken a few law school classes now in my graduate program with some of the foremost legal scholars and litigators in the country and I can tell you that they certainly proceed in precisely this way, whether they specify a utilitarian purpose to law or a higher, more metaphysical purpose, they have in mind a moral role for law in the limited way I've descibed. I'm not saying this is an absolute truth, but to put in question your assumption that law doesn't operate in a moral way. It most certainly does, and you can demonstrate that historically as well as in contemporary discourse.
I see your point about the law and government, though I really think you might want to think about it as courts and government. Government, in the US, in the form of the Congress, has the power to make law. What I think you meant was that courts and government are not the same thing, which is true, more-or-less, of our system. But, as has happened in several cases, the Congress has bypassed Supreme Court rulings--for example, in the case of pregnancy, when the Supreme Court said it was okay as a source of discrimination in health-care benefits packages by employers, the Congress tightened the Civil Rights Act to say explicitly that it wasn't okay. It was in their power because the court didn't decide on the constitutionality of legislating such a mandate, only on the legality, in the abscence of such a mandate, of differential treatment for pregnant women and everybody else in employment benefits packages. So it's a little more complicated in the US system than you make it out to be.
I agree on your wife's point -- I guess I was trying to say that there's an assumption that we're dealing with only white folks.
I also hope they get the hair right. He'll be, uh, prefect for the role.
David
Anybody have any thoughts on Mos Def as Ford Prefect? I think this is really cool -- Mos Def is incredibly charming and a good actor, and I think having him as Ford Prefect is a cool twist for sci-fi, which tends to just sort of assume people are white or Asian. In my experience, there are quite a few African American sci-fi fans, so I think having Mos in a more-or-less mainstream sci-fi film could really tweak people's heads in a good way.
Yet another example of micropolitics in action. That is taking every conceivable act one does, breathing, eating, talking about the weather, being a Linux User Group member, walking or not walking on the cracks on the sidewalk and adjusting one's behaviour based on some pedantic notion that one's choices in these minor manners is having some kind of political impact.
This is exactly right. I have a roommate with a similar problem. The attitude is "well, because there are people suffering in the world, I can't embrace living life at all or pursuing what I believe in." The article is essentially politically myopic in this way. Because the military uses Linux, well, then, I can't. Because capitalism is corrupt, I won't make enough money to help my roommates pay the bills. Etc.
That's not to say, and this is critical, that software or anything else is a neutral tool that has no moral import attached to it. That's equally myopic. Of course free software has a power to enable people to do evil that proprietary software vendors have more control over. Of course, those vendors themselves could choose to do evil things. It's a pretty complicated landscape, morally. But it's not "just a tool."
But the point about micropolitics is precisely on point. You don't go after an ideologically motivated war that's been poorly executed strategically and politically and whose strategic purpose is specious beyond the internals of the war itself by throwing a tantrum about free software. Instead, if you want, you get involved in the larger systematic political struggles. Futhermore, at the level of personal action, you work best to find and live out the values--to express the virtues--that you wish to apply more largely politically. In that sense, free software is *not* to be abandoned. It actually lets you do precisely that with much more freedom of action and movement. In my own work--tackling systemic repression and racism in Chicago's public housing--we've seen that free software gives us the freedom that we need to empower residents using technology and to bring incredible political pressure to bear on the political organs that (at a macro-level) are fucking up their lives. Our political adversaries could be using free software, too, for all we know. Frankly, I don't care. I feel that using free software in this way is like being a good neighbor--living a life that affirms humanity and hope while struggling to address what's messed up in the world without descending into cynicism.
Coming in late: Physical interface to 3d desktops
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Sphere XP Makes GUI 3D
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Generally, 3d desktops suffer from a lack of metaphorical coherence, but what's worse is the lack of a decent physical control device to use them. I think that the effort put into these sorts of gimmicky UIs would be better spent thinking about how to implement a 3d system in a heads up display or thinking about how to make it work for the image-onto-retina technology that various groups are working on. These technologies could actually effectively integrate the two pieces needed -- a decent physical interface and a compelling reason to use the 3d graphical abstraction of information and functionality compared to the 2d abstraction of information and functionality.
Re:Printing: Another Advantage of CSS
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CSS for the LDP?
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I see your point. But if a designer settles on Docbook--and does it right--then they might as well still attach good CSS for the HTML output. Users may want to simply click print in their browser while looking at HTML that was generated from a Docbook format doc.
CSS shouldn't be used to make something printable, but it should be used to enhance the screen output.
CSS can and should be used to enhance screen output, braille output, screen-reader output, print output. The spec is specifically designed to style multiple media. That doesn't exclude generating from Docbook (or any sort of data format a developer cooks up), but CSS is pretty well supported already and the support is improving across all sorts of user agents, so it's a smart way to do those things, even if you are also generating TeX and PDF and everything else. Users deserve the choice, and CSS is a well designed spec for offering those choices.
Re:Here is what needs to be done
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CSS for the LDP?
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· Score: 5, Informative
You won't believe it how many Linux/Unix users use Lynx and Links. So please, think of them.
Ahem. This is completely silly. Well structured documents--a prerequisite for good CSS--degrade *better* in browsers like Lynx because the underlying tag structure reflects the logical document structure.
The important thing to remember here is that the new CCS'ed documents should render well on older browsers. For example, if you use CSS to give a background color to the document or to a table cell, ALSO include the equivelant HTML tag.
Why would anybody do that? Modern browsers like Firefox are actually zippier, even on older hardware, than Netscape 4.xyz. A designer should think about how to make the page degrade because many of the browsers you mentioned choke on some CSS. But there are lots of tricks for hiding the CSS from those browsers, and if you do, then the user still gets a nice, logically structured document.
Anyway, CSS isn't all that hard to do right. I just did a site that looks really nice and polished and works in every browser (IE, Moz, Firefox, Safari, Camino, Konq, Opera, Lynx) on tons of platforms (Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, OS X, OS 9)...and it worked on the first try -- I didn't have to change a single thing (rsvp.uchicago.edu). I tested it on all possible combinations of those I could think of and it looked nice (and in the way I expected) on all of them.
Finally, I can't imagine a situation, except using minimal HTML 4, which would be silly, because it'd practically be XHTML at that point, where it would be heavier that the XHTML/CSS equivalent. Even if the stylesheet is relatively large, say 300-400 lines (I'm pushing 500 on a site I'm working on), it typically downloads once and then gets cached, at which point all subsequent pages that use that stylesheet will only download the nicely structured document.
Slashdot Mirror
There already were. Part of Google's competitve advantage is that they're not scared to include wild amounts of porn in there text and image search index.
To be a little nit-picky, a dead pixel is better considered a "defect" and not a "malfunction". Of course, Sony's not really admitting that either. Think of it this way: I bought a bike on Craig's List recently that was an extra good deal because it was missing a little flange that buttresses the rear drop-outs on one side. Now, that's a defect. It affects the bike cosmetically, and has the tiniest possibility of causing problems if I don't tighten my rear skewer bolts enough. A malfunction would be if the bike manufacturer sold me a gearing system that, during operation, regularly broke.
I'm not excusing Sony: they're using a semantic detail to try to paper over a widespread manufacturing defect.
Similarly, I was at a national non-profit technology conference, and MS was out in force -- "diamond" sponsorship, fancy dancy party at the House of Blues, lunchtime keynote with some security dude.
At least at small-medium sized non-profits, there's tons of momentum to move towards open source, which is totally making some of these "for the public good" tech consultancies heads explode. "Wait, we're getting lots of money from Microsoft! We love Microsoft! Wait, our clients want Linux? Uh, well, don't you want Windows 2003 Server? It's only $50 for nonprofits!!! Oh, you hate the server... but we're funded by....oh, but you hate per-seat licensing, but... but..."
I think the dynamic for a place like Brazil is similar. Sure, you can get MS stuff for cheap, but the true cost is perceived to be way too high, and it probably is if you factor in ethical concerns and annoyance level.
At this conference I met a consultant who grilled at my talk on FOSS about TCO and functionality of the email/groupware solution I deployed at the nonprofit I work versus the functionality and tco of Exchange Server. All through q&a he was on my ass. After q&a, he comes up and says, "look, our clients hate Exchange. Because it's a pain over the long haul, and they hate calling us in all the time. And I'm tired of it, too."
I run the IT department for a small-ish law legal services organization. I like Firefox a lot, Thunderbird pretty well. But we're using Ghost to deploy (which is okay, really) because it's pretty tricky otherwise. Also, whenever I've asked questions about enterprise deployment on the MozillaZine forums I've received snarky replies or none at all. I think the prevailing attitude is that they're not going to get much enterprise penetration except at educational institutions and a few funky offices and that the priority is far and away the home user. They're probably right, though my users love FireFox.
But, there are some resources emerging: see this post for some details.
This thread is full of arguments that there are flaws in making columns with CSS. These are a) bunk because it isn't very hard, and b) stupid because columns aren't a good way to read/view textual content on a low resolution device such as a computer screen.
A much bigger problem is the problem of liquid layouts and response to dynamic content. Some posters have acknowledged this. But why are these flaws more important?
First there is the issue of versatility on the design side. A designer may not know what content is going to be thrown at his or her design, and it is reasonable for a designer to want CSS-based tools that will respond to that content and match the layout to the content. Right now, that's fairly difficult to accomplish.
Second there is the issue of variation on the client side. Your end user may like her/his text teeny tiny. Or may be legally blind and need it to be humungous. Or be on a screen reader. Or on a 15" CRT or a 21" LCD. Etc. You want designs that maximize readability and legibility across a reasonable spectrum of possible user-variation (the spectrum being largely defined by the characteristics of the content and the audience). Again, this is more difficult than it should be, even with CSS properties such as "max-width" and "min-width". This is partly an issue of browser support (IE doesn't support max-width), but partly a flaw in the standards writing body, which did not take such considerations into account as fully as they could have.
This is why you see good designers creating a lot of fixed width or 100% width designs, with little in the way of liquid layout that focuses on maintaining column count for text (essential for readability) or element proportionality when scaling. I can't tell you how crazy I go when I try to look at otherwise well designed sites like www.stopdesign.com on at 1600 by 1200 resolution.
Last time I went hawking radiation through my email marketing business, that Mr. Mumma fellow decided to sue me.
From TFA:
And from TFR:
Not only is it not illegal, it's quite common practice to proactively solicit the behavior you wish to sue over. In some cases, this is fradulent, unethical, deceptive, etc.
But in many cases, this is worthwhile and ethical behavior. Many lawsuits against various sorts of abusers are thrown out because their procedural and evidenciary ducks aren't in a row, or the behavior isn't particularly egregious. If the spammers (or brutal cops or corrupt city government, in the cases I work on) really are what you say they are, this isn't unethical baiting or deception. They'll do the nasty things they do whether or not you exist. The difference is that you open yourself up for them to do it to you or in front of you and make sure you document it all painstakingly.
Our society is a little too lawsuit happy, but I don't think this besmirches Mr. Mumma in the least.
I think you have a valid point here that Slashdotters are beating up on Ahead. However, it's useful that some of the comments, as well as the review, are critiques. These will help Ahead make NeroLinux better. Secondly, this is a really bad comparision because K3B is so good. Thirdly, free software and commerical software should be compared: why is NeroLinux inferior at this point to K3b? Why does Photoshop continue to blow the GIMP out of the water for most non-trivial graphics design work? These comparisons allow thoughtful people to create a cohesive philosophy of free software and proprietary software. Under what circumstances is the one appropriate and the other not? What structural features of the open source development model encourage successful software in which market segments and why?
This diverges slightly from the file-trading theme here, but to extend your point: Many of us who use free software started to do so in part because we didn't have the means to legally obtain and use much of the software we used previously. Some people have moved to free software because they can't or don't want (for various reasons) to pay Microsoft, etc. to use their software, but also don't think that violating copyright is a moral thing to do either.
As always, Slashdot book reviews are not exactly, uh, insightful, and are far too charitable.
But I'm going to advocate for the book anyway. It actually is not simplistic at all. The power of Allen's approach is in seeing better than others have seen where productivity is lost. I did Franklin Planning for a bit and it was a bunch of bunkus -- mainly I found I could do just as well with a pad of paper and later with Ximian Evolution what they were charging an assload of money for. Allen's approach is very different -- there's a few tricks, but mainly, the focus is agnostic to the system of organization you choose, and focused on why you lose track of projects and what principles help you get those projects back on track. And the main principle is to get everything out of your head and into some organized but flexible system that you can review at various stages of your life, typically on a weekly basis. Most of the other advice stems from this principle: for example, just goddamn do things that don't take long to do, right when you get them, so that they're done and you don't have to think about them anymore. Maybe you should note that you did do them, for future reference, but just get them out of the way. I've found the principle: get it out of your head and into some kind of system (mine's just barely systematic) is much better advice than "write a list of your tasks and your priorities" because goddamn if that doesn't change every 5-10 minutes, at least where I'm working now, trying to fix an ailing IT department where everything is breaking.
Notice also that Allen's approach isn't "getting lots of things done" or "getting everything done" -- it's much more about managing one's time in a healthy way, which includes knowing what you decided to blow off instead of just forgetting about it. Allen's as cognizant as anybody that most of us are pretty overdrawn and stretched out, but the system is as much about tracking those things you decide not to do for whatever reason as those things you decide to do.
Scam? What are you talking about?
Didn't you see that it is both "the only one with a 'memory saver'" and "the only one featuring a Basic interpreter"?
Don't tell me the only TDA with a Basic interpreter is a scam.
Couldn't it be both art and vandalism?
Also, what is the status of your argument about the property of others when the property is being wasted or otherwise ignored, such as vacant lots and abandoned factories that are still "owned" by someone.
Oh, I don't know, public interest, perhaps? Why do you think they review movies? News outlets and the media have often served to inform consumers of what their best options are, because it makes them look good if they pick good products/services. I don't see why browsers are different.
That said, I agree with you about personal activism whole heartedly.
I read that, and I fail to see exactly what you mean by the free market operating as well as it does in other areas. The free market can do very effective and powerful things, but, as we've seen with intellectual property, it can also be quite nasty. That example is fairly straightforward, because at least companies (and the people who run them) are being more or less rational in trying to maximize their own benefit. Other market inefficiences like the way black people and women are paid in this country for work of "comparable worth" to the work of white men -- which is to say, still significantly less. Therefore, I think the idea of property rights here is dangerous -- I don't think there is a lot of indication that either market forces working efficiently will produce an outcome that we'd like nor that the market will necessarily even be an efficent one.
The way this article is framed is really lame. Obviously, the FCC has a few major areas that are significantly broken. Powell has pushed an agenda that is allowing a lot of concentration of media power. The dubious censorship practiced by the FCC in a legalistic way is secondary to the self-censorship that can come when you have a handful of powerful news sources with incredibly broad audiences.
But the question should not be an all/nothing, either/or question. Spectrum is precisely an area where libertarian fantasies (as implied in the subject of the post) about business self-regulation run aground. Spectrum is, in some sense, a common good, and it needs a more neutral overseer than business necessarily provides. One could retort that a libetarian scenario exists where businesses are not recognized as individuals. I agree that in such a scenario a kind of individual libertarianism could coexist with a regulatory body that oversaw the electromagnetic spectrum. But the point is that there needs to be a body that is, if not 100% politically neutral, transparent and open to input from various interests in society.
The question should be: what is wrong with the FCC and what should its role be in the future, not should we ban it. What should our vision for the role of the FCC be?
I'm do free-lance web design to pay the bills while I'm in grad school. I don't have kids, but the neighbor kids have flunky parents and I'm basically like a second dad.
What I've found is that working from home actually makes it harder to deal with competing demands. When I was working in an office doing database development last summer, I would go there, work from 8 to 5 or 6, and then come home. The kids and I could play, watch a movie, go to the public pool, whatever. Now, because there's no clear line between work and being at home, it takes a lot more discipline to make sure I'm spending enough time with the kids, because when I work from home, I can shut the door my bedroom/computer room and work and work and work. It's great in its way, but I think if I had a family, it would be hell for them.
A few friends when I was in high school had moms and dads that did the home office thing when I was in high school, and I noticed the same thing. The kids hated their parents being around all the time, and at the same time, the parents didn't actually seem to spend that much quality time with their kids.
Perhaps other people have better experiences or thoughts on this.
I live in Chicago, and the lakefront path in the summertime is already overcrowded. Does the city really need quite possibly obese people who don't know how to ride a Segway zipping up and down the lakefront? Generally, they need to reengineer the paths to deal with the different kinds of traffic. I stay away from the lakefront at busy times ever since I was riding my bike (going around 25mph in the clear) and another cyclist decided, last second, to swing waaaaay out into my lane to ride next to his girlfriend. I ruined a wheel, smashed my nose to shit, and spent the next 9 months in physical therapy to fix my knee.
You mention the responsiveness of BeOS. I think that needs to be underscored: the responsiveness wasn't simply a nice cosmetic feature, it was a really big issue with multimedia. I remember seeing that the latency of a call to the Windows sound playback system was about 50ms, and on BeOS it was under 8-9ms on average hardware. At the time, I was just bopping around high school, but I knew a couple of people in their 20s developing homemade audio and video manipulation programs to make experimental music, and they were all developing on BeOS because they found it so much easier and quicker than Mac or PC development. That being said, I think it's quite clear that Be made about a million missteps business-wise and otherwise. Combine that with the 2*10^3 lb gorilla, and the OS had no chance.
Actually, I think there's a better explanation of this than the one you've given and that has been followed by a series of arguments that most accused perps are guilty without citing any data pro or contra. More importantly, this presumption is based on the notion that legal innocence is almost impossible to prove, but legal guilt is, in principle and in fact, provable. Hannah Arendt makes this point quite persuasively in On Revolution.
The rest of your comment doesn't make a lot of sense: it's incoherent and dogmatic Enlightenment liberalism. First, law is a kind of morality in some sense. Several strong philosophical accounts (see Alasdair MacIntyre, for example) see law as a set of precepts governing relationships and actions which are detrimental to a shared project. So, in such schemes (which start, systematically, with Aristotle, and remain with us in a variety of forms), law is a very special subset of morality which defines that which is actionably "bad". One may fail to be a good citizen on account of lying or be incompetent at a given job or be an asshole and that would be bad in a broader moral sense. Or one might break contracts or murder, which has the potential not just to be part of the inherent friction of a society trying to reach and transcend certain goals but to actually break the society in a more fundamental ways, and so is a kind of morality that the society takes it upon itself to be actionable. Note that I'm synthesizing a lot of Locke and Rosseau and social contract theory with the Aristotelian account, but I think that it's a fair characterization. I've taken a few law school classes now in my graduate program with some of the foremost legal scholars and litigators in the country and I can tell you that they certainly proceed in precisely this way, whether they specify a utilitarian purpose to law or a higher, more metaphysical purpose, they have in mind a moral role for law in the limited way I've descibed. I'm not saying this is an absolute truth, but to put in question your assumption that law doesn't operate in a moral way. It most certainly does, and you can demonstrate that historically as well as in contemporary discourse.
I see your point about the law and government, though I really think you might want to think about it as courts and government. Government, in the US, in the form of the Congress, has the power to make law. What I think you meant was that courts and government are not the same thing, which is true, more-or-less, of our system. But, as has happened in several cases, the Congress has bypassed Supreme Court rulings--for example, in the case of pregnancy, when the Supreme Court said it was okay as a source of discrimination in health-care benefits packages by employers, the Congress tightened the Civil Rights Act to say explicitly that it wasn't okay. It was in their power because the court didn't decide on the constitutionality of legislating such a mandate, only on the legality, in the abscence of such a mandate, of differential treatment for pregnant women and everybody else in employment benefits packages. So it's a little more complicated in the US system than you make it out to be.
I agree on your wife's point -- I guess I was trying to say that there's an assumption that we're dealing with only white folks. I also hope they get the hair right. He'll be, uh, prefect for the role. David
Anybody have any thoughts on Mos Def as Ford Prefect? I think this is really cool -- Mos Def is incredibly charming and a good actor, and I think having him as Ford Prefect is a cool twist for sci-fi, which tends to just sort of assume people are white or Asian. In my experience, there are quite a few African American sci-fi fans, so I think having Mos in a more-or-less mainstream sci-fi film could really tweak people's heads in a good way.
This is exactly right. I have a roommate with a similar problem. The attitude is "well, because there are people suffering in the world, I can't embrace living life at all or pursuing what I believe in." The article is essentially politically myopic in this way. Because the military uses Linux, well, then, I can't. Because capitalism is corrupt, I won't make enough money to help my roommates pay the bills. Etc.
That's not to say, and this is critical, that software or anything else is a neutral tool that has no moral import attached to it. That's equally myopic. Of course free software has a power to enable people to do evil that proprietary software vendors have more control over. Of course, those vendors themselves could choose to do evil things. It's a pretty complicated landscape, morally. But it's not "just a tool."
But the point about micropolitics is precisely on point. You don't go after an ideologically motivated war that's been poorly executed strategically and politically and whose strategic purpose is specious beyond the internals of the war itself by throwing a tantrum about free software. Instead, if you want, you get involved in the larger systematic political struggles. Futhermore, at the level of personal action, you work best to find and live out the values--to express the virtues--that you wish to apply more largely politically. In that sense, free software is *not* to be abandoned. It actually lets you do precisely that with much more freedom of action and movement. In my own work--tackling systemic repression and racism in Chicago's public housing--we've seen that free software gives us the freedom that we need to empower residents using technology and to bring incredible political pressure to bear on the political organs that (at a macro-level) are fucking up their lives. Our political adversaries could be using free software, too, for all we know. Frankly, I don't care. I feel that using free software in this way is like being a good neighbor--living a life that affirms humanity and hope while struggling to address what's messed up in the world without descending into cynicism.
Generally, 3d desktops suffer from a lack of metaphorical coherence, but what's worse is the lack of a decent physical control device to use them. I think that the effort put into these sorts of gimmicky UIs would be better spent thinking about how to implement a 3d system in a heads up display or thinking about how to make it work for the image-onto-retina technology that various groups are working on. These technologies could actually effectively integrate the two pieces needed -- a decent physical interface and a compelling reason to use the 3d graphical abstraction of information and functionality compared to the 2d abstraction of information and functionality.
I see your point. But if a designer settles on Docbook--and does it right--then they might as well still attach good CSS for the HTML output. Users may want to simply click print in their browser while looking at HTML that was generated from a Docbook format doc.
CSS can and should be used to enhance screen output, braille output, screen-reader output, print output. The spec is specifically designed to style multiple media. That doesn't exclude generating from Docbook (or any sort of data format a developer cooks up), but CSS is pretty well supported already and the support is improving across all sorts of user agents, so it's a smart way to do those things, even if you are also generating TeX and PDF and everything else. Users deserve the choice, and CSS is a well designed spec for offering those choices.
Ahem. This is completely silly. Well structured documents--a prerequisite for good CSS--degrade *better* in browsers like Lynx because the underlying tag structure reflects the logical document structure.
Why would anybody do that? Modern browsers like Firefox are actually zippier, even on older hardware, than Netscape 4.xyz. A designer should think about how to make the page degrade because many of the browsers you mentioned choke on some CSS. But there are lots of tricks for hiding the CSS from those browsers, and if you do, then the user still gets a nice, logically structured document.
Anyway, CSS isn't all that hard to do right. I just did a site that looks really nice and polished and works in every browser (IE, Moz, Firefox, Safari, Camino, Konq, Opera, Lynx) on tons of platforms (Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, OS X, OS 9)...and it worked on the first try -- I didn't have to change a single thing (rsvp.uchicago.edu). I tested it on all possible combinations of those I could think of and it looked nice (and in the way I expected) on all of them.
Finally, I can't imagine a situation, except using minimal HTML 4, which would be silly, because it'd practically be XHTML at that point, where it would be heavier that the XHTML/CSS equivalent. Even if the stylesheet is relatively large, say 300-400 lines (I'm pushing 500 on a site I'm working on), it typically downloads once and then gets cached, at which point all subsequent pages that use that stylesheet will only download the nicely structured document.