In many cases those same telecoms have spent years ignoring as potential customers the cities and towns now undertaking Net infrastructure projects
The first question I would ask is how many of these projects are going to be successful now matter how they are funded. The for-profit telco avoids the backroads because the market is small and too damned expensive to service.
He is the O.J. Simpson of nerds. We can't believe he's guilty because he's one of us. Br>
the other side of the coin - and no more attractive -
is that when a geek is found guilty of an economic crime - a white collar crime - it always comes as a surprise that he is facing hard time.
Compaq made IBM clones. MS software has FUCK ALL to do with computers getting cheaper.
Page through back issues of Creative Computing and you will discover that MS-DOS was rapidly gaining ground before the reverse engineering of the BIOS.
The generic MS-DOS PC was as much Compaq's competition as the IBM.
If a program isn't in his distro's repository, the non-technical user may never be able to successfully install it - assuming he knows that it exists at all.
A better picture might help put things into... perspective.
I need a car for someone no longer as limber as a fourteen year old gymnast.
I need a car that can take on the gale force winds and snows of an upstate winter. That won't crack my mother's back on streets that haven't seen a repair crew since the Eisenhower Administration.
Free software is much cheaper than proprietary software, because society only has to pay to solve the software portion of a problem once.
I am not prepared to swallow this notion whole.
WordPerfect thought it had the Almost Perfect word processor for the PC.
The DOS era ends and the era of MS Word, Windows and Office begins. The web begins to weave its spell and SharePoint becomes a billion dollar node in the evolving MS Office eco-system.
This tells me that the problems of the office suite and the browser are not solved and that society is still paying the price for development - and contributing to the profit margins of their corporate sponsors - even when these programs nominally evolve through open source.
The bill is simply hidden in the price of shopping through Google or in purchases of goods and services from Sun.
That raises the interesting question of whether this model is not in fact regressive. When your project is funded through Ad-Sense is it the WalMart shopper who keeps it afloat?
Microsoft is building a $300 million research campus for 5,000 in Beijing's university district.
It's true that 60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S. It's also true that Microsoft is a significant employer and investor outside the U.S.
The multinational corporation is not the one-way street the Geek pretends.
In October 2006 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was split into two entities: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the endowment assets and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which "... conducts all operations and grantmaking work, and it is the entity from which all grants are made." Also announced was the decision to "... spend all of [the Trust's] resources within 50 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths." This would close the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and effectively end the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.... Warren Buffett has stipulated that the proceeds from the Berkshire Hathaway shares he still owns at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes within 10 years after his estate has been settled.
The plan to close the Foundation Trust is in contrast to most large charitable foundations that have no set closure date. This should lead to lower administrative costs over the years of the Foundation Trust's life and ensure that the Foundation Trust not fall into a situation where the vast majority of its expenditures are on administrative costs, including salaries, with only token amounts contributed to charitable causes. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Hitler and Goebbels personally sought out Lang to ask him to make films for the government, essentially to take the job eventually given the Leni Riefenstahl. Lang caught the first boat out of the country; he could see that it'd be impossible to work outside of the government in the years to come
Fritz Lang's credits - simply as a director - are amazing.
Here you'll find the archetypes of Science Fiction - The Spy Thriller - The Technicolor Western - Film Noir
1927 Metropolis
1928 The Spy
1929 Rocket to the Moon
1931 M
1941 Western Union
1941 Man Hunt
1952 Rancho Notorius
1953 The Big Heat
1956 While The City Sleeps
these days there's a loud majority of Slashbots who seem to think that market share is the only valid goal and hence the only valid technical goal is that idiots should be able to use it: the idiot as the epitome and endpoint of human technical endeavours.... I'm sure that if we cared about their views, then we should listen to them, but we shouldn't.
Then you learn to live with a 0.68% share of the desktop for Linux.
The GWB is an elegant expression of an engineering aesthetic - but the fundamentally mundane reason for its existence is to move 300,000 vehicles a day quickly and efficiently across the Hudson River.
It is engineer's job to make technology accessible. It is an engineer's job to strip away unneeded and unwanted layers of complexity. It is an engineer's job to expose complexity only to those with a compelling need to deal with it.
Background downloading on a modem will make it practically unusable, with multi-second latency.
From 2005, "The Reader's Digest" version of how it works:
BITS is a cool new file transfer feature of Windows that asynchronously downloads files from a remote server over HTTP. BITS can manage multiple downloads from multiple users while making use of idle bandwidth exclusively. Although the use of BITS is not limited to auto-updating applications, it is the underlying API used by Windows Update. And since it is available to any application, it can be used to do much of the really tough work involved in creating an auto-updating application.
Here is the basic idea. An application asks BITS to manage the download of a file or set of files. BITS adds the job to its queue and associates the job with the user context under which the application is running. As long as the user is logged on, BITS will drizzle the files across the network using idle bandwidth. In fact, the code-name for the BITS technology is Drizzle, which, it turns out, is quite descriptive of what BITS does.
How does all of this work? The technology is actually fairly sophisticated. First, BITS is implemented as a Windows service that maintains a collection of jobs organized into a set of priority queues: foreground, high, normal, and low. Each job in the same priority level is given bandwidth via time slices of about five minutes, in a round-robin fashion. Once there are no jobs remaining in a queue, the next priority queue is inspected for jobs.
Jobs in the foreground queue use as much network bandwidth as they can, and for this reason the foreground priority should only be used by code that is responding to a user request. The remaining priorities, high, normal, and low, are much more interesting because they are all background priorities, which is to say that they only make use of network bandwidth that's not in use.
To achieve this background feature, BITS monitors network packets and disregards packets that it recognizes as its own. The remaining packets are considered the active load on the machine's bandwidth. BITS uses the active load information along with the connection speed and some other statistics to decide whether it should continue downloading files or back off in order to increase throughput for the active user. Because of this, the user doesn't experience bandwidth problems.
The ability to drop what it is doing at a moment's notice is very important for BITS. In many cases, only part of a file is downloaded before BITS must give up the network or even lose connection altogether. The partially downloaded file is saved, however, and when BITS gets another crack at the network, it picks up where it left off. This ability to recover does have some side effects.
Remember that BITS is used to transfer files from HTTP servers. A server should be HTTP 1.1-compliant or at least support the Range header in the GET method for BITS to work. This is because BITS needs to be able to request a portion of a file. In addition, the content being downloaded must be static content such as a markup file, code file, bitmap, or sound. A GET request including a Range header makes no sense when requesting dynamic content such as that produced by CGI, ISAPI, or ASP.NET.
Currently, there are two versions of BITS: 1.0 and 1.5. BITS 1.0 ships with Windows XP and has the following features: interruptible background downloading of files, download prioritization, optional notification of completed jobs and error situations, and optional progress notifications for use with dialog boxes and other UI elements. BITS 1.5 ships with Windows.NET Server. In addition to the features contained in BITS 1.0, version 1.5 has interruptible background uploading of files and authenticated connections using Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate (Kerberos) or Passport. BITS 1.5 is available as a redistributable that is compatible with Windows 2000 and greater (see Background Intelligent Transfer Ser
Not to mention software patches! How many dial-up users are going to install XP SP3? those unpatched systems don't need much bandwidth to send lots of two line text-only spam.
Automatic Updates downloads patches in the background.
Automatic Updates downloads service packs in the background
"We'll get there when we get there." The service works just fine whether you have dial-up or broadband.
This is not headline news.
If you have the patience of a ten year old, you can order Windows XP Service Pack 3 on CD-ROM from Microsoft for $3.99. The CD-ROM is currently available in nineteen languages and dialects.
It's just a matter of time before people realize that OpenOffice works just as well AND is free.
Of course so does a pirated copy of MS Office.
I hear this mantra repeated endlessly on Slashdot.
Then I look at numbers like these:
Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. In other words, the ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent.The Year of Office 2007.
The July 3 Amazon.com Software Best Sellers:
1. MS Office Home and Student 2007
3. MS Office Home and Student 2008 - OSX
7. MS Outlook 2007
21. Apple iWork 08
28. MS Office Standard - Full Version $315
29. MS Office Pro 2003 $170 [10 AM ET Updated Hourly]
In Windows Office Suites, the Spanish MS Office Home & Student 2007 [at #13] outsells OpenOffice.org 2.4 on CD for $2.
OLPC couldn't hold the line against Windows XP and Word.
SharePoint - which is part of the MS Office eco-system - rockets to a billion dollars in sales.
Microsoft does very well in markets where piracy is not a factor and the geek has no excuse.
Sun's investment in Star Office is worth a ranking of 3,600 in Amazon software sales, a ranking of 65 in Amazon office suite sales for Windows, and 9 in business and office software sales for Linux.
The general consensus seems to be that Star Office sucks rocks.
Tell me why OpenOffice,org should be ranked any higher.
During the summer, the curtains should be closed to block out some of the heat from the sun. During the winter, allowing the sun to heat your home is a more efficient use of that energy anyway.
This assumes that your house is oriented properly and that your windows are large.
In northern climes, windows exposed to the north and to the prevailing winds tend to be small. Windows to the south tend to be big. You want that southern light and heat in winter. Home Design Basics
Curtains are an element in interior design. They have colors, they have folds, they have textures. That does not make for an efficient collector. Your wife may have other plans for that window.
is the America online of Linux distributions. In other words, it's for people who don't know any better. The only difference is that it lacks a marketing department.
Linspire had a marketing department.
Which is why the OEM Linspire PC could be purchased off the shelf at Walmart - and why the Lindows-Windows dust-up was worth a few thousand posts to Slashdot.
AOL reached about thirty million U.S. households at its peak.
In the realm of the OS, Linspire dared to say that this was not a bad thing.
In mid-2008 Linux has 0.68% of the desktop market - and growth is barely perceptible. The Vista Premium laptop at Walmart.com starts at $500. The Duo Core AMD with 3 GB RAM at $600.
OLPC couldn't hold the line against Windows on the XO.
Windows on the Netbook is a reality.
This has to sting the geek when the story comes out as a Microsoft press release:
"The Asus Eee PC has been and continues to be a very successful product for Cellnet," said Julian Phua, general manager of Cellnet Group Ltd. "The feedback from our customers in retail and the reseller channel is that they overwhelmingly prefer to sell the Eee PC running with Windows. To move our existing Linux inventory, we are now offering our channel the option of purchasing Windows XP with their Eee units so they can provide a compelling offering for customers."
I think Linspire users must be as rare as hen's teeth, I've certainly never even heard of a single person using it, other than the guy who reviewed it for distrowatch
The OEM Linspire PC could be found at Walmart.
Linspire carried the torch for OEM Linux - Linux as a direct competitor to Windows in the consumer market.
Linspire irritated the FOSS purist because it believed the installed and licensed proprietary media codec and player was essential to delivering a commercially viable product.
It sold commercial software through its CNR repository.
Bitstrean fonts. DVD players. Games like Postal.
To this day, Walmart and Consumer Reports find it necessary to publish a disclaimer whenever they expose a newcomer to OEM Linux:
This is a Linux based PC and will not perform completely like a Windows based machine. It can perform basic activities such as E-mail, Web Browsing, Music and Pictures.
To this day, the mass-market Linux PC remains firmly anchored among the bottom-feeders. To this day. Linux hasn't broken through to a 1% share on the consumer desktop. Operating System Market Share
these machines had about as much memory as a sheet of notebook paper, and were glacially slow at calculations. What kind of tasks could be worth the expense of building one?
glacially slow by what standard? the mechanical adding machine? you could have half your office staff performing routine calculations with all the opportunities for error that implied.
Didn't MS already do that? I mean your browser has to look rather super-sized with all those spyware toolbars, and drie-thru downloads are a lot like the drive-by downloads that IE has....
I think I would count the number of extensions that weight down the typical Firefox browser before I began pointing fingers.
For a better example: Lavender Mist No. 1 1950 Oil on canvas, Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas. 7x10 feet. National Gallery of Art. Washington, DC.
The depth of a Pollack is not easily captured on screen. You need to visit a gallery.
The element of chance in Pollack's "drip paintings" is no less an illusion than the effects of a representational artist. The colors and materials used in Lavender Mist were consciously chosen and layered to achieve a particular effect.
You don't have to be an art critic to know that Jackson Pollock's true art form was not painting, but rather convincing people that he was an artist. Polock's "art" was typical of the stupid abstract expressionist movement--- intentionally devoid of representational content.
Of course Pollack's drip paintings are devoid of representational content.
There are entire cultures whose art is a mastery of abstraction. There are also perfectly intelligible reasons why a Titian can set a modern audience off into gales of laughter.
You may own your car - but you don't own the road.
Disabling the kill switch accomplishes one thing only: If you haven't the sense to pull over, the police will put an end to the chase the old-fashioned way, with raw muscle and heavy fire-power.
Slashdot Mirror
The first question I would ask is how many of these projects are going to be successful now matter how they are funded. The for-profit telco avoids the backroads because the market is small and too damned expensive to service.
It is not reasonable to expect every question to be answered.
That only happens in detective fiction and in the courtroom melodramas of a Perry Mason.
Br>
the other side of the coin - and no more attractive - is that when a geek is found guilty of an economic crime - a white collar crime - it always comes as a surprise that he is facing hard time.
MS software has FUCK ALL to do with computers getting cheaper.
Page through back issues of Creative Computing and you will discover that MS-DOS was rapidly gaining ground before the reverse engineering of the BIOS.
The generic MS-DOS PC was as much Compaq's competition as the IBM.
What were the NPOs paying before Microsoft had any significant competition?
This isn't a virtue, it is a necessity.
If a program isn't in his distro's repository, the non-technical user may never be able to successfully install it - assuming he knows that it exists at all.
I need a car for someone no longer as limber as a fourteen year old gymnast.
I need a car that can take on the gale force winds and snows of an upstate winter. That won't crack my mother's back on streets that haven't seen a repair crew since the Eisenhower Administration.
In a traditional Islamic society that concept has no meaning whatsoever.
I am not prepared to swallow this notion whole.
WordPerfect thought it had the Almost Perfect word processor for the PC.
The DOS era ends and the era of MS Word, Windows and Office begins. The web begins to weave its spell and SharePoint becomes a billion dollar node in the evolving MS Office eco-system.
OpenOffice.org is funded and staffed by Sun.
The Mozilla Foundation receives about 85% of its funding from Google.
This tells me that the problems of the office suite and the browser are not solved and that society is still paying the price for development - and contributing to the profit margins of their corporate sponsors - even when these programs nominally evolve through open source.
The bill is simply hidden in the price of shopping through Google or in purchases of goods and services from Sun.
That raises the interesting question of whether this model is not in fact regressive. When your project is funded through Ad-Sense is it the WalMart shopper who keeps it afloat?
Microsoft is building a $300 million research campus for 5,000 in Beijing's university district.
It's true that 60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S. It's also true that Microsoft is a significant employer and investor outside the U.S.
The multinational corporation is not the one-way street the Geek pretends.
In October 2006 the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was split into two entities: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust, which manages the endowment assets and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which "... conducts all operations and grantmaking work, and it is the entity from which all grants are made." Also announced was the decision to "... spend all of [the Trust's] resources within 50 years after Bill's and Melinda's deaths." This would close the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust and effectively end the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. ... Warren Buffett has stipulated that the proceeds from the Berkshire Hathaway shares he still owns at death are to be used for philanthropic purposes within 10 years after his estate has been settled.
The plan to close the Foundation Trust is in contrast to most large charitable foundations that have no set closure date. This should lead to lower administrative costs over the years of the Foundation Trust's life and ensure that the Foundation Trust not fall into a situation where the vast majority of its expenditures are on administrative costs, including salaries, with only token amounts contributed to charitable causes. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
You must be under 25.
and posting a rant to Slashdot when some damn fool stunt lands a geek in jail.
Fritz Lang's credits - simply as a director - are amazing.
Here you'll find the archetypes of Science Fiction - The Spy Thriller - The Technicolor Western - Film Noir
1927 Metropolis
1928 The Spy
1929 Rocket to the Moon
1931 M
1941 Western Union
1941 Man Hunt
1952 Rancho Notorius
1953 The Big Heat
1956 While The City Sleeps
Silent movies were never silent.
The big budget production would be scored for a full theater orchestra.
There would at minimum be suggestions for the piano or organ of a smaller house.
Then you learn to live with a 0.68% share of the desktop for Linux.
The GWB is an elegant expression of an engineering aesthetic - but the fundamentally mundane reason for its existence is to move 300,000 vehicles a day quickly and efficiently across the Hudson River.
It is engineer's job to make technology accessible. It is an engineer's job to strip away unneeded and unwanted layers of complexity. It is an engineer's job to expose complexity only to those with a compelling need to deal with it.
From 2005, "The Reader's Digest" version of how it works:
BITS is a cool new file transfer feature of Windows that asynchronously downloads files from a remote server over HTTP. BITS can manage multiple downloads from multiple users while making use of idle bandwidth exclusively. Although the use of BITS is not limited to auto-updating applications, it is the underlying API used by Windows Update. And since it is available to any application, it can be used to do much of the really tough work involved in creating an auto-updating application.
Here is the basic idea. An application asks BITS to manage the download of a file or set of files. BITS adds the job to its queue and associates the job with the user context under which the application is running. As long as the user is logged on, BITS will drizzle the files across the network using idle bandwidth. In fact, the code-name for the BITS technology is Drizzle, which, it turns out, is quite descriptive of what BITS does.
How does all of this work? The technology is actually fairly sophisticated. First, BITS is implemented as a Windows service that maintains a collection of jobs organized into a set of priority queues: foreground, high, normal, and low. Each job in the same priority level is given bandwidth via time slices of about five minutes, in a round-robin fashion. Once there are no jobs remaining in a queue, the next priority queue is inspected for jobs.
Jobs in the foreground queue use as much network bandwidth as they can, and for this reason the foreground priority should only be used by code that is responding to a user request. The remaining priorities, high, normal, and low, are much more interesting because they are all background priorities, which is to say that they only make use of network bandwidth that's not in use.
To achieve this background feature, BITS monitors network packets and disregards packets that it recognizes as its own. The remaining packets are considered the active load on the machine's bandwidth. BITS uses the active load information along with the connection speed and some other statistics to decide whether it should continue downloading files or back off in order to increase throughput for the active user. Because of this, the user doesn't experience bandwidth problems.
The ability to drop what it is doing at a moment's notice is very important for BITS. In many cases, only part of a file is downloaded before BITS must give up the network or even lose connection altogether. The partially downloaded file is saved, however, and when BITS gets another crack at the network, it picks up where it left off. This ability to recover does have some side effects.
Remember that BITS is used to transfer files from HTTP servers. A server should be HTTP 1.1-compliant or at least support the Range header in the GET method for BITS to work. This is because BITS needs to be able to request a portion of a file. In addition, the content being downloaded must be static content such as a markup file, code file, bitmap, or sound. A GET request including a Range header makes no sense when requesting dynamic content such as that produced by CGI, ISAPI, or ASP.NET.
Currently, there are two versions of BITS: 1.0 and 1.5. BITS 1.0 ships with Windows XP and has the following features: interruptible background downloading of files, download prioritization, optional notification of completed jobs and error situations, and optional progress notifications for use with dialog boxes and other UI elements. BITS 1.5 ships with Windows .NET Server. In addition to the features contained in BITS 1.0, version 1.5 has interruptible background uploading of files and authenticated connections using Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate (Kerberos) or Passport. BITS 1.5 is available as a redistributable that is compatible with Windows 2000 and greater (see Background Intelligent Transfer Ser
those unpatched systems don't need much bandwidth to send lots of two line text-only spam.
Automatic Updates downloads patches in the background.
Automatic Updates downloads service packs in the background
"We'll get there when we get there." The service works just fine whether you have dial-up or broadband.
This is not headline news.
If you have the patience of a ten year old, you can order Windows XP Service Pack 3 on CD-ROM from Microsoft for $3.99. The CD-ROM is currently available in nineteen languages and dialects.
Of course so does a pirated copy of MS Office.
I hear this mantra repeated endlessly on Slashdot.
Then I look at numbers like these:
Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. In other words, the ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent. The Year of Office 2007.
The July 3 Amazon.com Software Best Sellers:
1. MS Office Home and Student 2007
3. MS Office Home and Student 2008 - OSX
7. MS Outlook 2007
21. Apple iWork 08
28. MS Office Standard - Full Version $315
29. MS Office Pro 2003 $170 [10 AM ET Updated Hourly]
In Windows Office Suites, the Spanish MS Office Home & Student 2007 [at #13] outsells OpenOffice.org 2.4 on CD for $2.
OLPC couldn't hold the line against Windows XP and Word.
SharePoint - which is part of the MS Office eco-system - rockets to a billion dollars in sales.
Microsoft does very well in markets where piracy is not a factor and the geek has no excuse.
Sun's investment in Star Office is worth a ranking of 3,600 in Amazon software sales, a ranking of 65 in Amazon office suite sales for Windows, and 9 in business and office software sales for Linux.
The general consensus seems to be that Star Office sucks rocks.
Tell me why OpenOffice,org should be ranked any higher.
This assumes that your house is oriented properly and that your windows are large.
In northern climes, windows exposed to the north and to the prevailing winds tend to be small. Windows to the south tend to be big. You want that southern light and heat in winter. Home Design Basics
Curtains are an element in interior design. They have colors, they have folds, they have textures. That does not make for an efficient collector. Your wife may have other plans for that window.
Linspire had a marketing department.
Which is why the OEM Linspire PC could be purchased off the shelf at Walmart - and why the Lindows-Windows dust-up was worth a few thousand posts to Slashdot.
AOL reached about thirty million U.S. households at its peak.
In nine million homes it is still there. AOL rate increase maybe not as dumb as it look [June 30]
AOL's legacy includes the MMORPG. Neverwinter Nights. Instant Messaging. The complexities of the BBS, IRC and USENET client disappear.
In time, an entire geek-oriented culture of the "Net" begins to disappear:
Internet Evolution: Things Change
In the realm of the OS, Linspire dared to say that this was not a bad thing.
In mid-2008 Linux has 0.68% of the desktop market - and growth is barely perceptible. The Vista Premium laptop at Walmart.com starts at $500. The Duo Core AMD with 3 GB RAM at $600.
OLPC couldn't hold the line against Windows on the XO.
Windows on the Netbook is a reality.
This has to sting the geek when the story comes out as a Microsoft press release:
"The Asus Eee PC has been and continues to be a very successful product for Cellnet," said Julian Phua, general manager of Cellnet Group Ltd. "The feedback from our customers in retail and the reseller channel is that they overwhelmingly prefer to sell the Eee PC running with Windows. To move our existing Linux inventory, we are now offering our channel the option of purchasing Windows XP with their Eee units so they can provide a compelling offering for customers."
Following Success of Windows on Netbooks, Microsoft Extends Windows Offering to Nettop Devices [June 3]
The OEM Linspire PC could be found at Walmart.
Linspire carried the torch for OEM Linux - Linux as a direct competitor to Windows in the consumer market.
Linspire irritated the FOSS purist because it believed the installed and licensed proprietary media codec and player was essential to delivering a commercially viable product.
It sold commercial software through its CNR repository.
Bitstrean fonts. DVD players. Games like Postal.
To this day, Walmart and Consumer Reports find it necessary to publish a disclaimer whenever they expose a newcomer to OEM Linux:
This is a Linux based PC and will not perform completely like a Windows based machine. It can perform basic activities such as E-mail, Web Browsing, Music and Pictures.
To this day, the mass-market Linux PC remains firmly anchored among the bottom-feeders. To this day. Linux hasn't broken through to a 1% share on the consumer desktop. Operating System Market Share
All this id going to do is to move the customer into metered billing or a higher tier of service.
glacially slow by what standard? the mechanical adding machine? you could have half your office staff performing routine calculations with all the opportunities for error that implied.
I think I would count the number of extensions that weight down the typical Firefox browser before I began pointing fingers.
The Wikipedia distorts the colors and shrinks a 4x8 foot painting to postage stamp size and this is how you make a judgment?
A Pollock Is Sold, Possibly for a Record Price [2006]
For a better example: Lavender Mist No. 1 1950 Oil on canvas, Oil, enamel, and aluminum on canvas. 7x10 feet. National Gallery of Art. Washington, DC.
The depth of a Pollack is not easily captured on screen. You need to visit a gallery.
The element of chance in Pollack's "drip paintings" is no less an illusion than the effects of a representational artist. The colors and materials used in Lavender Mist were consciously chosen and layered to achieve a particular effect.
You don't have to be an art critic to know that Jackson Pollock's true art form was not painting, but rather convincing people that he was an artist. Polock's "art" was typical of the stupid abstract expressionist movement--- intentionally devoid of representational content.
Of course Pollack's drip paintings are devoid of representational content.
There are entire cultures whose art is a mastery of abstraction. There are also perfectly intelligible reasons why a Titian can set a modern audience off into gales of laughter.
You may own your car - but you don't own the road.
Disabling the kill switch accomplishes one thing only: If you haven't the sense to pull over, the police will put an end to the chase the old-fashioned way, with raw muscle and heavy fire-power.