I don't know. I sort of think that Slashdot should have an editorial obligation to run a more diverse selection of reviews. I understand that no one wants to read bad books, nevermind examine them enough to write reviews. But that only exacerbates the problem here -- tastes vary, and no matter how good or bad some title is, *someone* out there is going to like it enough to want to write about. If we just run every single positive review that comes in, then it's hard to take any of them seriously -- at least for me it is.
Maybe the solution would be to have a staff critic, or a commission for published reviews or something. Some incentive, in other words, to speak up about a title even if it wasn't that great. I have no idea if Slashdot has the budget to take on a (part|full) time staff critic, but I think that doing so could bring in quite a bit of credibility to this department.
I'm not really assuming that Slashdot is trying to push ORA books, even if it comes across that way. But publishing a variety of reviews meets several needs -- for one thing, it highlights titles that should may be avoided, and more importantly it raises the believability of all reviews when it is seen that the site is capable of saying this or that book was just plain bad, or even mediocre or had a certain flaw or sucked excepot for so-and-so or... you get the idea.
Variety, variety, variety. Spice of life, doncha know, and we don't have neough of it around here. I'll belabor no further:)
Everyone (incl me) seems to be posting favorite haikus (what is this, an excuse or something?:), but I'll post a *picture* of one of my favorites instead! hahaha
Posting some haiku
would be too predictable but I can't help it
I don't suppose the on-the-fly error haiku generated by...I forget the name of the Perl module... doesn't count for this does it? Too bad, that's some funny stuff -- especially the abstract which itself is written in 5-7-5 form. I'd post a link but forget where it is offhand -- try CPAN I guess...
Maybe I remember this wrong (my eyes are fine so I don't really need to know at this point in my life) (knock on silicon), but I thought 20/20 just meant that at a distance of 20 feet, an object looks like it's 20 feet away -- that is, everything's normal. Thus 30/30 would mean that at 30 feet, things would look 30 feet away -- no interesting change there.
I think the real boost would be like 30/10 vision, whereby at 30 feet an object seems 10 feet away. Hmm... well, assuming you can do this without screwing up your sense of depth perception that is.
Really cool would be some sort of "extended focal length" type of vision, simulating the zoom or telescopic nature of a long length camera or telescope lens. At the same time, a wide angle mode might be interesting as well, assumign your peripheral vision cna pick up everything.
Ahh hell, the best solution would be to just go totally Lee Majors & get bionic eyes, and the rest of your body while you're at it. Then you can fine tune your vision & abilities to any situation:)
Yeah no kidding, I knew it was offtopic so I didn't give myself the +1 score, and still someone didn't like it. Sheesh.
I don't really care if anyone likes my [or anyone else's] sense of humor or not, but the tunnel vision around here really gets on my nerves sometimes. What's so bad about the occasional offtopic thread? THere might be some interesting discussions started if we could put up with a little of that, but noooo, gotta adhere to the Party Line.
Oh well, their loss, I'll lose no sleep over it. I think I'll go listen to some motown now:)
Um...has Slashdot ever run a unfavorable book review before? I really want to know. It seems like every review that comes out just trumpets the virtues of the latest manual that comes down the pike -- more often than not from O'Reilly. Problem is, I make a point of skimming a lot of these books for myself, and in spite of what the reviews here say, they're *not* uniformly excellent. Some are, to be sure, but others... yechh.
Further, in addition to being about as negative as advertising copy [that is, not at all], they're also uniformly shallow. I guess there isn't anything deep to be said about a lot of this material (though a review of the existential angst and ennui in a data patterns book could be pretty funny), still a lot of these just feel like a rehash of the table of contents. Surely we can do a little better than that.
I know, I know, the "right" thing to do, if I'm so disappointed in the reviews, would be to offer some myself (or encourage others to do so -- I'm not saying I'm necessarily the one that can fix the problem). Fair point, but the one thing I give you is that you consistently read the books before I get a chance so that doesn't feel like an option here.
I dunno. I guess I'm just asking for some variety. I love O'Reilly books too, and think well of most of the many I've read (but not all! e.g. the MySQL one... damn that was lousy), but it's hard to take the reviewers opinions seriously when they like *everything* they write about. Maybe we can run some reviews of "...For Dummies" books as counterpoint or something, or get multiple *contrasting* reviews each time around. As it is, the reviews are barely worth reading -- I could just thumb through an ORA catalog of upcoming titles to see for myself what you're going to love next...
Woo hoo! Motown! Then of course it will get appealed to the Four Tops, who will review the case and hand it back down to Aretha Franklin for final Decision. Any idea what her politics are?
Okay okay that was lame, I know, but I couldn't resist:)
Ahh, the old Malthusian argument: the earth can only support a population of $foo, so we're going to have to go elsewhere if we don't want mass crowding, famine, pandemics, etc. Thomas Malthus made this prediction in the 1700s or so, saying Great Britain could never support a population above something like 10 million.
Of course, now London alone has a population greater than that.
The problem is that this sort of thinking doesn't properly account for the march of technology. Higher agricultural yields, among other advances, have allowed the population of the UK and indeed the entire planet to bloom over the last few centuries, and while there are obvious problems to deal with & I'm not disregarding those problems, the problem isn't nearly as bad as Malthus expected it would be. Not by a long shot.
I agree with this poster's point, but not his rationale. We *do* need to explore space, but not because the onlysalvation for earth is by terraforming other planets. That sounds like a worthy & ambitious goal, but one that would be centuries at best to realize. We need something a little more immediate than that go get people motivated.
No, the real reason we need to get out into space and onto Mars is because exploration of new areas has been one of the biggest engines of development over the last 500 years or so. Consider for example the famed American Frontiersman, the men & women that went out into the west and had to use their ingenuity & determination to survive & build a new nation. This character takes every form from Lewis & Clark and Davy Crockett to the gold prospectors & modern day Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- all of whom went out on the edge of society -- literally -- to find their fortune and build a new world.
This is the sort of thing we need to be encouraging. Consider that, for the most part, the old world was stagnating 500 years ago (Renaissance notwithstanding), and the exploration & settlement of the Americas & Far East, with the accompanying cross pollination of cultures, technologies, and resources, as well as the explorers need to innovate to persist, brought about greater advances in the span of a few hundred years than was seen over the course of the previous couple of thousand.
This is the sort of advance that I think space exploration -- specifically but not exclusively of Mars -- can bring. The propulsion technologies that cna get us there are only the tip of a very large iceberg, and no one alive today can really grasp what a few decades of living out in space will bring. Consider that the settlers are going to have to find creative ways of supporting themselves in a land with no plant or animal life, very little water or oxygen, limited direct human contact, etc. Their one big asset will be their brains, and I can't wait to see what those pioneers will come up with.
Apply that to the old Malthusian argument. It isn't the physical space that another continent or so worth of land is going to provide that will make room for further comfortable population blooming. It's going to be the way we taught ourselves to live on almost nothing out in space, knowledge that will surely make its way back home, that is going to be the protector of future generations. And it won't take centuries to achieve -- just a few years out on our own...
Personally, I'm still hoping to be one of the first to go:)
________________________
Ho hum. Since I've gone this far, I might as well mention the Mars Direct Plan, which can get us there now with current non-exotic technology, on an affordable budget, quickly and safely. The plan is well thought out and fully executable -- all we need is the will to do so. If government (NASA) won't help, then perhaps private concerns can guide us to the stars. Any takers?
IT'S THE YEAR 2000 GODDAMMIT! I WANT MY FLYING CAR!
Now look. It's the middle of June 2000. Still no flying cars. Six months ago my last car died & I had to get a new one -- a plain old Neon. That's fine, I guess, but really upsets my years long plan here, namely to get a flying fuckin car in the year 2000. GODDAMMIT!
Alright, mister dee-troit automotive aeronautical engineers. You've got exactly five and a half months to ship me out something with wings and a great big fuckin rocket strapped on to the back, and if I can't spend new year's eve flying from here to Paris like Charles Frickin Lindbergh then I'm gonna take my plain old black bomber and I'm gonna slam it into your shiny corner office in Dearborn instead -- GOT IT?
MS can charge whatever they want for [Win95] Not as a monopoly they can't, unless I misunderstand antitrust law. It is my understanding (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this -- I could be), it is illegal for a monopoly to use it's position to extract an exorbitant fee from the public. MS has consistently done this wherever possible -- or did you not read the findings of fact?
If you can prove that [innovation was stifled] I will shut up forever. Unfortunately, this is not a provable statement so I'm not really going to debate it. Yes, you're right, there has been much progress. But one of the best engines of progress seems to be market competition, and that has been absent here for years. What would we have today if that competition had existed? No one can say, and there isn't a lot of point debating it. I'm a little bit more interested in the question of MS's supposed innovations -- what have they offered that hasn't been a refinement of something stolen from another source? Nothing leaps to mind. They make decent software, for the most part, but it's all derivitive stuff and seldom if ever any better than the original material. I can't think of a single truly new & innovative thing that MS has offered in any area where it had crushed the competition, and welcome examples to prove otherwise.
You think that win95 is worse than 3.1? Than Dos 3? 9x is so-so.[....]What do you want? Each new generation is, I'll admit, marginally better than the one that came before it. But they're better in the wrong ways. It's more quantity, not more quality. More crap, more complexity, but for all the new hardware we have to buy to make the new versions work (256 mb of ram for W2k? you've gotta be kidding me!), it doesn't seem as if the machines are actually doing more for all this. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect software not to crash or corrupt data. I do think it's unreasonable to give "reinstall the system" as a legitimate solution to average problems. I do think it's reasonable to hold software to high standards of reliability, and Windows has never met even a low standard on this front. What's the joke about Gates debating the head of GM? If you notice, all the computer advances Gates cites are hardware based & thus had nothing to do with MS, while all the criticisms raised by the GM guy are valid criticisms of MS software which have not been met to date.
Sorry but I need something better than that. Sorry, but apparently I'm not the person to give it to you. You seem to want to hear precise reasons to justify touching MS. Fair enough. But I'm at the other end of things, and want to hear a good justification for them to exist in the first place. I see no benefit to society in allowing a company like this to continue to exist, and don't think that any kind of breakup is enough to restore the state of things as they should be.
So, rather than let things get ugly (as they oh so often do around here;), I'll just agree to disagree with you on this one...
Interesting point, but my contention is that any solution is going to end up harming someone, and while the MS employees were just "following orders" so to speak, I would think that most of them are pretty talented individuals that would not have too much trouble finding (or starting!) new companies in a hypothetical post-MS world -- especially in the current economy (though, granted, that could well change by the time this mess gets resolved one way or the other).
I think the priority of the government should be towards protecting the consumer and the diversity of the industry, and leaving MS alone (or, worse, not doing enough) will only make everythign worse because it could stand to benefit the ones that have created this problem in the first place. The bullet must be bitten at some point, like it or not, and I think most MS employees can probably handle it. Hell, with MS on their resumes they should be very employable elsewhere...
Price gouging (the existence of free [beer] & cheap OSes like Linux & Be make the pricetag on Windows look suspicious)
Stifling of innovation (suppression of competing technologies has prevented possibly great ones from emerging)
Corrosion of quality (we have unnecessarily come to expect shitty software; this should not be the case but we've all been fooled into believing it)
Wealth redistribution (Gates & pals ahve profited handsomely here, and while anyone is of course free to buy MS shares, the reality is that very few have gained from this arrangement)
And no, splitting MS into more companies is not the solution. The government can't just go messing around with the economy at will... They have an obligation to do only what is absolutely necessary to "fix" the problem.
Well no, actually government has an obligation to protect the people, and splitting up a predatory corporation is a perfectly good example of how to do this. What's the greater priority -- defending the average consumer or defending Microsoft shareholders? In many ways, it comes down to one or the other here, and if you pick the latter then I think you're pretty profoundly missing the point of having a democratically elected republican form of government.
It's not "just" the browser. For one thing, it's a pretty complex little piece of software -- it has to handle network communication using multiple protocols (http, ftp, email, others), it has to be able to quickly & accurately render a wide variety of file formats (text, graphics, sound, video, etc), it has to carry an interpreter that can run scripts (javascript, vbscript, html if you count that, etc) (but why do none of them allow perl or python???), etc. In short, it does a lot of the same tasks that a modern OS does, only in an encapsulated, lightweight form. So don't just dismiss it as trivial software. There are reasons that Mozilla, KDE, and Be are all having a hard time coming up with a good browser.
More importantly, part of the browser's significance is the way it has to work in tandem with the server side code. If everyone stuck to published standards (yeah right), this wouldn't be an issue. But as it is, with browsers being deliberately & accidentally incompatible in important ways, the people working on the server end of thigns cannot ignore what is out there on the client end. If 80% or whatever of the market is using IE, and IE wants your html to look a certain way, then that's the way you're going to design your pages. If IE goes a step further and says it can only recognize pages delivered from IIS and nothing from, say, Apache, then servers will have to start configuring their software to keep the clients happy. One thing can lead to another and we find ourselves in a situation where a company has leveraged its position in one market in order to take over things in another one.
That is exactly the sort of behavior that this trial was all about, and if allowed to go unchecked it's the sort of behavior that will have a very nasty effect on things in the future. It is important, if you look at how everything fits together here.
I for one still think they got off easy -- if it had been up to me, I'd just say to shut the bastards down, none of this lameass breakup nonsense. American law gives corporations the status of "artificial persons", with all the protections afforded to real people. Horseshit! Corporations, if left unchecked, are much *more* powerful & protected than real people, and we don't need braindead laws like this to make things easier for them. If I had my way, we'd make examples out of a few corporations to show them that the people are still in charge in a democracy like this. Start with Phillip Morris & Microsoft, find out where their corporate charter is held, and sign a petition to have it revoked. Hey presto and with a stroke of a pen they cease to exist. There is legal precedent for this, though not within the last 100 years. I'd like to see it happen again, and I think this trial would have been a perfect test case.
But then, maybe my bias against the sleazy bastards is a bit obvious here, and I doubt I would have been given the cae even if I were a judge. Oh well, I can dream, can't I?:)
Video games & pinball have coexisted for, what, 20 years or so? And yet pinball still exists, even if it isn't as common as it used to be. Maybe it really is dying -- I hope not, but I'll grant that it's possible. I think, however, that eventually we'll reach a steady-state where pinball machines occupy, say. 5 or 10 percent of the arcade space and the rest would be other things, mostly video of course, but others too. A real arcade would of course have other things too -- skeeball, air hockey, wack-a-mole, free throw basketball, darts, foosball, that foosball-like ice hockey under a clear dome thing, etc. I'd be sad to hear that places like this had all been replace by a bunch of video game parlors...
I'm not much of a game player, but it just occured to me that the two classes of games I like & play most are analogues for real life games: pinball emulators & various card [& board] games. Doom / Quake etc just leave me cold. Dune / Command & Conquer / Empire stuff is okay, but I'd rather play Risk or Axis & Allies. Sim City variants are nice in that they don't seem to have a "real life" equivalent, but they get stale too once you catch on to the strategies used by the game. The real life games are so much rewarding becaue they have that physical &/or human element. No two pinball games are exactly alike, but no two video games can ever be more different than their pseudo-random number generator algorithm will allow. *yawn*.
A professor formerly with my school was studying computer vision, and was using pinball as his test case. He had a machine rigged up in one of the labs here with a couple of cameras aimed at it such that he could write code to get the machine to play against itself. Pretty cool stuff to watch. Now he's gone though unfortunately [too bad -- he was the first one to expose me to *nix, Python, cvs, and/usr/games/bin/fortune -s hahaha) but now they're trying to do similar thigns with robotic soccer. To that end we have a ping pong table set up for future robots to run around on. Neat-o.
Ho hum. Like I say, random thoughts, any coherence is strictly unintentional...
...huh??? What the HELL are you talking about? I just looked up your user page, and every single one of your posts is this sort of buzzword riddled incoherent nonsense? I can't decide if you just think needless polysyllabic rambling is funny, or if someone has written a clever 'bot that feeds semi-relevant nonsense to Slashdot, Eliza style. I'd ask if you are in fact a bot, but a human would deny it and so would a program, so I won't bother:).
Anyway, um, topic relevance. Pinball is the only gaming I really care about in arcades. Now that I think about it, my favorite games on my PC are more often than not just pinball emulators, which may say something itself. Hmm. How much does a machine cost, anyway? Maybe someday when I'm not living on a student's budget....
Wouldn't it be ironic if, in order to protect things like free speech and free enterprise, sites had to move to places like Russia (perceived lack of free speech) and China (haven for software [etc] piracy). Wouldn't it be ironic if sites had to flee the US, with it's supposed protection of free speech, open enterprise, and innovation. Oh the irony...
"Available for $8765.00 for US and Canada..."... something to that extent. If you're smart, you'll make that Canadian dollars, of course. If the company was smart, they'd be explicit about that sort of detail, lest they lose 1/4 of their money on each purchase...:)
How about a version that gets info from one of the urban legends sites when crafting itself. I can just see it now. "Yeah, I know I told you to ignore any warnings about the Good Times virus, but now it's actually real." "So, I *should* pay attention to those warnings?" "Well, yeah, now it's really dangerous, so yeah." "But you kept telling me to just delete that stuff..." heh there you go, a virus that totally undermines people's sense of trust in the people they know that have a clue about computers...
Someone on one of the mailing lists I'm on half-jokingly suggested that the next obvious step for ILOVEYOU would be dynamically generated content. Little did anyone suspect that it would actually happen. I say the next step is a -- ooh, I got it! -- a version that has it's payload as a message warning about the dangers of Outlook viruses, in effect describing what it's doing to you while doing it.
It's all fun to joke about as an academic exercise, but this is really gonna mess people up. My boss tells me I'm free to set up an Outlook Express account here, but I'm happy to just forward my mail to my pine account. Ascii doesn't scare me, I see no reason to ditch it...
This is the Unix version of 'I Love You' which works on the honor system.
If you receive this mail, you should delete a bunch of GIFs, MP3s and binaries from your home directory, then send a copy of this e-mail to everyone you know.
A local church here in -- yep! -- Alabama had a sign out for a month or saying to visit them on the web at http://www.com.god/, much to the derision of my sinner techie friends & I. Little did we suspect that the name would actually be up for grabs before long... Jesus... hahahahaha
This one's gonna be too good not to abuse. I can see it now -- atheist.god, i.am.god, $foo.is.god (with $foo as who/what ever), ask.god (hehe confessional! hahaha), find.god (aka 'where's waldo'), etc. The hilarity just may never end.
But first, I've gotta get com.god. I must! hahahahaha
So how, exactly, do garish background colors, illegible typefonts, a pointless splash-screen home page, and non-standard navigational cues (e.g. non underlined links) help make for a "well-designed" site? I'm having a hard time understanding it. My instinct is to let the defaults rule -- if the user of my sites wants to use dark grey letters on a deep black page, hey, that's her business -- my job is just to get her the material. Whatever works well for her is fine by me. But then, I'm not a fancy web designer.
I can see where exciting design tricks are usful for, say, a magazine or TV show. But on the web, where I for one am working with a low resolution monitor and (often) a text based connection, and where others may be using anything from IE5 on a shiny new Mac to the default browser on a Palm VII, I have a hard time seeing the point in making flashy 'designed' web pages. The 'benefit' of having to turn off javascript just to be able to read the font that looked best on your monitor just doesn't work for me. But then again, I'm not the fancy web designer, I'm just a happy little page minimalist.
At least your pages seem to work okay when I disable the gadgetry -- that's an excellent start. And it also looks okay in Lynx -- an easy thing to do, but too often overlooked (as it translates into "looking good" on palmtops, for search engines, and on alternative browsers for e.g. the blind). I give you points for that. But I still don't see the point -- the benefit -- of all the flashiness. Maybe it's just my sense of aesthetics -- I like a nice clean simple site, without all the trappings (think photo.net. Different strokes...
I guess that's the gist of my question though: when there are so many benefits to having a straightforward, Lynx friendly site, and when it takes so much effort to get an "enhanced" site to degrade to the older level, what exactly do you gain by the effort? What, in short, makes it worthwhile?
We'll show them, we'll blast a hole on the moon with what I like to call a "Lay-zer", as part of the "Alan Parsons Project".
Thank you, Dr Eisenhower. Scenario Two:
Evil BadGuy: I'll write my name on the moon! Then they'll never forget the name Chairface! Muahahaha!
Henchman: But sir, you only got as far as Cha--, no one will be impressed by that.
Evil: BadGuy: Oh shut up.
Heh. Ten points to anyone that can cite both references. 'course, these were lasers, not nuclear weapons, but hey -- defacing the moon is defacing the moon, right? Who says we're any better than fictional arch-evil doers?;)
Heh. Well, keep in mind that I've been gathering them for like 10 years now, so that's not *that* bad:-). In high school I was pretty much straightedge (in spirit if not in terminology), so when my friends got into beer & pot, I kept buying CDs. They've got a bunch of emtpy bottles & spent roaches to show for their money; I've still got my mountain of music:-), and I'm not planning on spending the time to convert to a newer (and perhaps arguably better, though with drawbacks) format like MP3.
Actually, this touches on a bigger theme anyway: data storage preservation. Tapes wear out, floppy discs and hard drives go bad, CDs are as near as I can tell the best semi-permanent storage we have access to today. The good thing about a book is that it's pretty permanent -- I could go digging in Alexandria & hopefully find books that the Greeks & Egyptians read thousands of years ago (well, assuming I could read the material, but the problems are all on my end, not the book's). Modern media aren't nearly that good. I can wander down to the Salvation Army right now and pick up a stack of Jimi Hendrix & Clash 8-Tracks, but probably won't be able to find anythign to play them with -- and I certainly can't "read" the tapes by myself.
I think backwards compatibility is a vastly underappreciated priority in digital media. If all of today's music is kept on discs that 25 years frow now are hard to play and 100 years from now are just gone, then what will future generatiosn remember of us? We left behind a bunch of useless junk. I know that new formats offer great benefits (encoded as MP3, my 750 audio CDs would fit on a handful of DVD discs, at most, right?), but we shouldn't be forced to re-record everythign with each new generation of the storage technology. It should be officially okay to keep the old stuff around too. If we can't do that, then we risk creatign a possibly Very Large Hole for future generations.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the solution would be to have a staff critic, or a commission for published reviews or something. Some incentive, in other words, to speak up about a title even if it wasn't that great. I have no idea if Slashdot has the budget to take on a (part|full) time staff critic, but I think that doing so could bring in quite a bit of credibility to this department.
I'm not really assuming that Slashdot is trying to push ORA books, even if it comes across that way. But publishing a variety of reviews meets several needs -- for one thing, it highlights titles that should may be avoided, and more importantly it raises the believability of all reviews when it is seen that the site is capable of saying this or that book was just plain bad, or even mediocre or had a certain flaw or sucked excepot for so-and-so or... you get the idea.
Variety, variety, variety. Spice of life, doncha know, and we don't have neough of it around here. I'll belabor no further :)
Everyone (incl me) seems to be posting favorite haikus (what is this, an excuse or something? :), but I'll post a *picture* of one of my favorites instead! hahaha
I don't suppose the on-the-fly error haiku generated by ...I forget the name of the Perl module... doesn't count for this does it? Too bad, that's some funny stuff -- especially the abstract which itself is written in 5-7-5 form. I'd post a link but forget where it is offhand -- try CPAN I guess...
I think the real boost would be like 30/10 vision, whereby at 30 feet an object seems 10 feet away. Hmm... well, assuming you can do this without screwing up your sense of depth perception that is.
Really cool would be some sort of "extended focal length" type of vision, simulating the zoom or telescopic nature of a long length camera or telescope lens. At the same time, a wide angle mode might be interesting as well, assumign your peripheral vision cna pick up everything.
Ahh hell, the best solution would be to just go totally Lee Majors & get bionic eyes, and the rest of your body while you're at it. Then you can fine tune your vision & abilities to any situation :)
I don't really care if anyone likes my [or anyone else's] sense of humor or not, but the tunnel vision around here really gets on my nerves sometimes. What's so bad about the occasional offtopic thread? THere might be some interesting discussions started if we could put up with a little of that, but noooo, gotta adhere to the Party Line.
Oh well, their loss, I'll lose no sleep over it. I think I'll go listen to some motown now :)
Further, in addition to being about as negative as advertising copy [that is, not at all], they're also uniformly shallow. I guess there isn't anything deep to be said about a lot of this material (though a review of the existential angst and ennui in a data patterns book could be pretty funny), still a lot of these just feel like a rehash of the table of contents. Surely we can do a little better than that.
I know, I know, the "right" thing to do, if I'm so disappointed in the reviews, would be to offer some myself (or encourage others to do so -- I'm not saying I'm necessarily the one that can fix the problem). Fair point, but the one thing I give you is that you consistently read the books before I get a chance so that doesn't feel like an option here.
I dunno. I guess I'm just asking for some variety. I love O'Reilly books too, and think well of most of the many I've read (but not all! e.g. the MySQL one... damn that was lousy), but it's hard to take the reviewers opinions seriously when they like *everything* they write about. Maybe we can run some reviews of "...For Dummies" books as counterpoint or something, or get multiple *contrasting* reviews each time around. As it is, the reviews are barely worth reading -- I could just thumb through an ORA catalog of upcoming titles to see for myself what you're going to love next...
Woo hoo! Motown! Then of course it will get appealed to the Four Tops, who will review the case and hand it back down to Aretha Franklin for final Decision. Any idea what her politics are?
Okay okay that was lame, I know, but I couldn't resist :)
Of course, now London alone has a population greater than that.
The problem is that this sort of thinking doesn't properly account for the march of technology. Higher agricultural yields, among other advances, have allowed the population of the UK and indeed the entire planet to bloom over the last few centuries, and while there are obvious problems to deal with & I'm not disregarding those problems, the problem isn't nearly as bad as Malthus expected it would be. Not by a long shot.
I agree with this poster's point, but not his rationale. We *do* need to explore space, but not because the onlysalvation for earth is by terraforming other planets. That sounds like a worthy & ambitious goal, but one that would be centuries at best to realize. We need something a little more immediate than that go get people motivated.
No, the real reason we need to get out into space and onto Mars is because exploration of new areas has been one of the biggest engines of development over the last 500 years or so. Consider for example the famed American Frontiersman, the men & women that went out into the west and had to use their ingenuity & determination to survive & build a new nation. This character takes every form from Lewis & Clark and Davy Crockett to the gold prospectors & modern day Silicon Valley entrepreneurs -- all of whom went out on the edge of society -- literally -- to find their fortune and build a new world.
This is the sort of thing we need to be encouraging. Consider that, for the most part, the old world was stagnating 500 years ago (Renaissance notwithstanding), and the exploration & settlement of the Americas & Far East, with the accompanying cross pollination of cultures, technologies, and resources, as well as the explorers need to innovate to persist, brought about greater advances in the span of a few hundred years than was seen over the course of the previous couple of thousand.
This is the sort of advance that I think space exploration -- specifically but not exclusively of Mars -- can bring. The propulsion technologies that cna get us there are only the tip of a very large iceberg, and no one alive today can really grasp what a few decades of living out in space will bring. Consider that the settlers are going to have to find creative ways of supporting themselves in a land with no plant or animal life, very little water or oxygen, limited direct human contact, etc. Their one big asset will be their brains, and I can't wait to see what those pioneers will come up with.
Apply that to the old Malthusian argument. It isn't the physical space that another continent or so worth of land is going to provide that will make room for further comfortable population blooming. It's going to be the way we taught ourselves to live on almost nothing out in space, knowledge that will surely make its way back home, that is going to be the protector of future generations. And it won't take centuries to achieve -- just a few years out on our own...
Personally, I'm still hoping to be one of the first to go :)
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Ho hum. Since I've gone this far, I might as well mention the Mars Direct Plan, which can get us there now with current non-exotic technology, on an affordable budget, quickly and safely. The plan is well thought out and fully executable -- all we need is the will to do so. If government (NASA) won't help, then perhaps private concerns can guide us to the stars. Any takers?
Now look. It's the middle of June 2000. Still no flying cars. Six months ago my last car died & I had to get a new one -- a plain old Neon. That's fine, I guess, but really upsets my years long plan here, namely to get a flying fuckin car in the year 2000. GODDAMMIT!
Alright, mister dee-troit automotive aeronautical engineers. You've got exactly five and a half months to ship me out something with wings and a great big fuckin rocket strapped on to the back, and if I can't spend new year's eve flying from here to Paris like Charles Frickin Lindbergh then I'm gonna take my plain old black bomber and I'm gonna slam it into your shiny corner office in Dearborn instead -- GOT IT?
Right!
Not as a monopoly they can't, unless I misunderstand antitrust law. It is my understanding (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this -- I could be), it is illegal for a monopoly to use it's position to extract an exorbitant fee from the public. MS has consistently done this wherever possible -- or did you not read the findings of fact?
If you can prove that [innovation was stifled] I will shut up forever.
Unfortunately, this is not a provable statement so I'm not really going to debate it. Yes, you're right, there has been much progress. But one of the best engines of progress seems to be market competition, and that has been absent here for years. What would we have today if that competition had existed? No one can say, and there isn't a lot of point debating it. I'm a little bit more interested in the question of MS's supposed innovations -- what have they offered that hasn't been a refinement of something stolen from another source? Nothing leaps to mind. They make decent software, for the most part, but it's all derivitive stuff and seldom if ever any better than the original material. I can't think of a single truly new & innovative thing that MS has offered in any area where it had crushed the competition, and welcome examples to prove otherwise.
You think that win95 is worse than 3.1? Than Dos 3? 9x is so-so.[....]What do you want?
Each new generation is, I'll admit, marginally better than the one that came before it. But they're better in the wrong ways. It's more quantity, not more quality. More crap, more complexity, but for all the new hardware we have to buy to make the new versions work (256 mb of ram for W2k? you've gotta be kidding me!), it doesn't seem as if the machines are actually doing more for all this. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect software not to crash or corrupt data. I do think it's unreasonable to give "reinstall the system" as a legitimate solution to average problems. I do think it's reasonable to hold software to high standards of reliability, and Windows has never met even a low standard on this front. What's the joke about Gates debating the head of GM? If you notice, all the computer advances Gates cites are hardware based & thus had nothing to do with MS, while all the criticisms raised by the GM guy are valid criticisms of MS software which have not been met to date.
Sorry but I need something better than that.
Sorry, but apparently I'm not the person to give it to you. You seem to want to hear precise reasons to justify touching MS. Fair enough. But I'm at the other end of things, and want to hear a good justification for them to exist in the first place. I see no benefit to society in allowing a company like this to continue to exist, and don't think that any kind of breakup is enough to restore the state of things as they should be.
So, rather than let things get ugly (as they oh so often do around here ;), I'll just agree to disagree with you on this one...
I think the priority of the government should be towards protecting the consumer and the diversity of the industry, and leaving MS alone (or, worse, not doing enough) will only make everythign worse because it could stand to benefit the ones that have created this problem in the first place. The bullet must be bitten at some point, like it or not, and I think most MS employees can probably handle it. Hell, with MS on their resumes they should be very employable elsewhere...
Just to pick four off the top of my head...
heh thanks for the vote of confidence. i thought i was ranting a little too much, maybe i'll not hold back next time :)
Well no, actually government has an obligation to protect the people, and splitting up a predatory corporation is a perfectly good example of how to do this. What's the greater priority -- defending the average consumer or defending Microsoft shareholders? In many ways, it comes down to one or the other here, and if you pick the latter then I think you're pretty profoundly missing the point of having a democratically elected republican form of government.
More importantly, part of the browser's significance is the way it has to work in tandem with the server side code. If everyone stuck to published standards (yeah right), this wouldn't be an issue. But as it is, with browsers being deliberately & accidentally incompatible in important ways, the people working on the server end of thigns cannot ignore what is out there on the client end. If 80% or whatever of the market is using IE, and IE wants your html to look a certain way, then that's the way you're going to design your pages. If IE goes a step further and says it can only recognize pages delivered from IIS and nothing from, say, Apache, then servers will have to start configuring their software to keep the clients happy. One thing can lead to another and we find ourselves in a situation where a company has leveraged its position in one market in order to take over things in another one.
That is exactly the sort of behavior that this trial was all about, and if allowed to go unchecked it's the sort of behavior that will have a very nasty effect on things in the future. It is important, if you look at how everything fits together here.
I for one still think they got off easy -- if it had been up to me, I'd just say to shut the bastards down, none of this lameass breakup nonsense. American law gives corporations the status of "artificial persons", with all the protections afforded to real people. Horseshit! Corporations, if left unchecked, are much *more* powerful & protected than real people, and we don't need braindead laws like this to make things easier for them. If I had my way, we'd make examples out of a few corporations to show them that the people are still in charge in a democracy like this. Start with Phillip Morris & Microsoft, find out where their corporate charter is held, and sign a petition to have it revoked. Hey presto and with a stroke of a pen they cease to exist. There is legal precedent for this, though not within the last 100 years. I'd like to see it happen again, and I think this trial would have been a perfect test case.
But then, maybe my bias against the sleazy bastards is a bit obvious here, and I doubt I would have been given the cae even if I were a judge. Oh well, I can dream, can't I? :)
Anyway, um, topic relevance. Pinball is the only gaming I really care about in arcades. Now that I think about it, my favorite games on my PC are more often than not just pinball emulators, which may say something itself. Hmm. How much does a machine cost, anyway? Maybe someday when I'm not living on a student's budget....
Wouldn't it be ironic if, in order to protect things like free speech and free enterprise, sites had to move to places like Russia (perceived lack of free speech) and China (haven for software [etc] piracy). Wouldn't it be ironic if sites had to flee the US, with it's supposed protection of free speech, open enterprise, and innovation. Oh the irony...
"Available for $8765.00 for US and Canada..."... something to that extent. If you're smart, you'll make that Canadian dollars, of course. If the company was smart, they'd be explicit about that sort of detail, lest they lose 1/4 of their money on each purchase... :)
Someone on one of the mailing lists I'm on half-jokingly suggested that the next obvious step for ILOVEYOU would be dynamically generated content. Little did anyone suspect that it would actually happen. I say the next step is a -- ooh, I got it! -- a version that has it's payload as a message warning about the dangers of Outlook viruses, in effect describing what it's doing to you while doing it.
It's all fun to joke about as an academic exercise, but this is really gonna mess people up. My boss tells me I'm free to set up an Outlook Express account here, but I'm happy to just forward my mail to my pine account. Ascii doesn't scare me, I see no reason to ditch it...
This one's gonna be too good not to abuse. I can see it now -- atheist.god, i.am.god, $foo.is.god (with $foo as who/what ever), ask.god (hehe confessional! hahaha), find.god (aka 'where's waldo'), etc. The hilarity just may never end.
But first, I've gotta get com.god. I must! hahahahaha
I can see where exciting design tricks are usful for, say, a magazine or TV show. But on the web, where I for one am working with a low resolution monitor and (often) a text based connection, and where others may be using anything from IE5 on a shiny new Mac to the default browser on a Palm VII, I have a hard time seeing the point in making flashy 'designed' web pages. The 'benefit' of having to turn off javascript just to be able to read the font that looked best on your monitor just doesn't work for me. But then again, I'm not the fancy web designer, I'm just a happy little page minimalist.
At least your pages seem to work okay when I disable the gadgetry -- that's an excellent start. And it also looks okay in Lynx -- an easy thing to do, but too often overlooked (as it translates into "looking good" on palmtops, for search engines, and on alternative browsers for e.g. the blind). I give you points for that. But I still don't see the point -- the benefit -- of all the flashiness. Maybe it's just my sense of aesthetics -- I like a nice clean simple site, without all the trappings (think photo.net. Different strokes...
I guess that's the gist of my question though: when there are so many benefits to having a straightforward, Lynx friendly site, and when it takes so much effort to get an "enhanced" site to degrade to the older level, what exactly do you gain by the effort? What, in short, makes it worthwhile?
Thank you, Dr Eisenhower. Scenario Two:
Heh. Ten points to anyone that can cite both references. 'course, these were lasers, not nuclear weapons, but hey -- defacing the moon is defacing the moon, right? Who says we're any better than fictional arch-evil doers? ;)
Actually, this touches on a bigger theme anyway: data storage preservation. Tapes wear out, floppy discs and hard drives go bad, CDs are as near as I can tell the best semi-permanent storage we have access to today. The good thing about a book is that it's pretty permanent -- I could go digging in Alexandria & hopefully find books that the Greeks & Egyptians read thousands of years ago (well, assuming I could read the material, but the problems are all on my end, not the book's). Modern media aren't nearly that good. I can wander down to the Salvation Army right now and pick up a stack of Jimi Hendrix & Clash 8-Tracks, but probably won't be able to find anythign to play them with -- and I certainly can't "read" the tapes by myself.
I think backwards compatibility is a vastly underappreciated priority in digital media. If all of today's music is kept on discs that 25 years frow now are hard to play and 100 years from now are just gone, then what will future generatiosn remember of us? We left behind a bunch of useless junk. I know that new formats offer great benefits (encoded as MP3, my 750 audio CDs would fit on a handful of DVD discs, at most, right?), but we shouldn't be forced to re-record everythign with each new generation of the storage technology. It should be officially okay to keep the old stuff around too. If we can't do that, then we risk creatign a possibly Very Large Hole for future generations.