You ask an average American (and polls have) what they think about Europe and they'll tell you that it's a backwards place which has turned its back on God and suffered for it.
I think any honest reading of the 20th century history would suggest that Europe suffered rather a lot from regimes which "turned their back on God."
So, no, America has not learned from the EU.
The US had a population of 100 million in 1915. 200 million in 1967. 300 million in 2006. It has become a multi-racial, multi-cultural, society to a degree that is difficult to comprehend. But a society that is still uniquely and recognizably American.
We had a neighbor who made his friends by giving away stuff that fell off a truck. He isn't with us anymore.
The geek reminds me not a little of our late governor, Eliot Spitzer.
The difference is only that the geek derives his sense of entitlement from his technical skills and not his bank account. Not that he isn't living rather well.
60% of American households don't have a broadband connection.
These are the households who have to buy or rent the video, borrow a copy from their public library or go without.
But they do receive something in return.
It is, after all, the market - the paying customer - which determines which films and videos are produced.
High School Musical cost Disney $4.2 million. The kids bought the CDs, the videos, the tickets to the arena stage show. My sister is directing a local production.
Harry Potter will retire to a theme park in Orlando.
The majors have the money, experience and technical resources to bring to life anything in sci-fi or fantasy a geek could ever hope to see. But why should they bother?
would have dominated the market when the Amiga, Atari ST and Archimedes were in vogue, and we might now all be using RISC OS based PCs, instead of Microshaft.
"Microshaft." How clever of you.
In 1982 magazines like Creative Computing were stuffed with adds targeting the market for the emergent IBM PC. Most of interest to small business, of course - and that would prove decisive.
But the new 16 bit micro was already drawing attention from gamers. This would be the year of Flight Simulator for the IBM PC.
When they gave IBM the finger and started whoring around with every other fly by night computer vendor on the planet they set this whole fiasco in motion.
The fiasco being that the dual core desktop PC with 2 GB RAM, a 500 GB HDD and a serviceable video card for PC gaming can be built for around $700.
Linux supports *a lot* more hardware than Vista does. Think about it.
I try not to.
In the consumer market the buyer is interested in the OEM install on a new PC with all the latest bells and whistles.
If he chooses the desktop he will most likely bundle in the wide screen monitor and the multifunction color printer-scanner. That will be the last significant hardware purchase he will make in the next three to five years.
I need long-term access to my own documents. And now I don't have to worry about it any more, because they're all stored in an open format.
Now all you have to worry about is maintenance of the readers and the preservation of the files - against hard drive failures, fires and other accidents. I have my own solution: it is called "print" and the media is paper.
No offense intended. But this story is getting really, really old. (2003) Rather more interesting is the fact that MS Office accounts for 67 cents of every new retail dollar being spent on software.
People who can't afford the full version of Office and are either not capable of or not comfortable with pirating it
Tell me how you can afford the consumables and not the software. Tell me who is paying retail list for a legit copy of Office.
Businesses who are looking at the amount Office costs per annum and would like to reduce this.
Changing your core business software is never simple and never without a price.
The MS Office system includes components not to be found in OpenOffice.org. Outlook is simply the most visible example.
It is trivially easy to find and recruit workers trained in MS Office. You have fifteen years experience in-house. There are countless third party programs and add-ons that integrate with MS Office...
By not reading it for free, immediately, you are enriching yourself and protecting our way of life
Baloney.
You want free, go to the public library.
You want Clarke's books to remain in print and accessible to everyone? Not just the Geek with a computer and a broadband connection? Buy the paperback.
The P2P nets are not an archieve. They are snapshot in time of the geek's momentary enthusiasms. Books and authors in which he has lost interest quickly fade from view.
My first exposure to Clarke wasn't fiction at all but a non-fiction, non-technical look at the future of space travel called "The Exploration of Space." My father must have acquired it in the early Fifties.
I have a copy and would not part with it for love or money.
"The Exploration of Space" was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It stands in good company with the Disneyland specials on space flight.
Look at the advancement of humankind because he didn't patent the idea of satellites
You can't patent an idea. Sci-fi and fantasy writers had been playing with the idea for at least a half-century. Clarke's contribution was to sketch out the advantages of placing relay stations in synchronous orbit in convincing detail.
Look at the advancement of humankind because he didn't patent the idea of satellites
He didn't patent the idea because an idea can't be patented. Nor was the idea original. Fantasy and sci-fi writers had been playing with the concept for at least a half-century. Clarke's contribution was to sketch out the advantages of placing relays in synchronous orbit in convincing detail.
Asimov dropped off the manuscript the following week, and it was promptly serialized in a magazine,
The magazine was the Saturday Evening Post.
For close on to seventy years to be published in the Post was your ticket out of the pulps.
Your readers were adults and not an adolescent fandom. No magazine paid better or more promptly and none reached a wider middle class audience. The presentation was always first class.
One item to consider is whether word processing has changed so much in the last 10 years that we now need over 5 times the processor speed, 16 times as much memory, and 10 times as much drive space.
The word processor is one component of an office suite - and has become something more - often much more - than a text editor.
No matter how many times I see this it blows me away. This isn't an anti Microsoft bash - this is a serious efficiency issue - we have gone from a suggested 8Mb for WFWG 3.11 (1992/93 UK) to 2Gb in a generation.
Tell me why it ia inefficient to make the maximum use of RAM when RAM is cheap.
I was arguing that on the Internet nothing should be blocked/censored, even child porn. We should be setting an example for countries like China.
She would not agree and even went so far as to say that all porn should be filtered on the Internet. She was of the impression that filtering content from the internet was for the greater good of society. She would not budge.
All you've proven here is that the Geek also believes in absolutes. You've had your say and the world moves on. Decisions are made that are neither black or white.
How does walking ankle-deep in liquefied horseshit grab you? That's a pretty good description of life in a major city at the turn of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, writers were demanding "the banishment of the horse from American cities" in vigorous terms. The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one 1908 authority is "an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life."
Sanitary experts in the early part of the twentieth century agreed that the normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure a day, with the average being something like twenty-two pounds. In a city like Milwaukee in 1907 with a human population of 350,000 and a horse population of 12,500, this meant 133 tons of manure a day, for a daily average of nearly three-quarters of a pound of manure for each resident. Or, as health officials in Rochester, New York, calculated in 1900, the fifteen thousand horses in that city produced enough manure in a year to make a pile 175 feet high covering an acre of ground and breeding sixteen billion flies, each one a potential spreader of germs.
To a great extent nineteenth-century urban life moved at the pace of horse-drawn transportation, and the evidence of the horse was everywhere--in the piles of manure that littered the streets attracting swarms of flies and creating stench, in the iron rings and hitching posts sunk into the pavements for fastening horses' reins, and in the numerous livery stables that gave off a mingled smell of horse urine and manure, harness oil and hay. In 1880 New York and Brooklyn were served by 427 blacksmith shops, 249 carriage and wagon enterprises, 262 wheelwright shops, and 290 establishments dealing in saddles and harnesses.
And then there was noise. In many American cities, early paving consisted largely of cobblestones, on which the clopping and clanking of horses' iron shoes and the iron-tired wheels of carts and wagons created an immense din. As late as the 1890's a writer in Scientific American noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made conversation nearly impossible.
Many overworked, mistreated urban horses simply died in the city streets. Since asphalt-paved or cobbled streets were slipperier than dirt roads, horses often stumbled and fell. An unfortunate beast who broke a leg in this way was destroyed where it lay. A description of Broadway in 1866 spoke of the street as being clogged with "dead horses and vehicular entanglements." The equine carcasses added fearsomely to the smells and flies already rising in clouds from stables and manure piles. In 1880 New York City removed fifteen thousand dead horses from its streets, and as late as 1912 Chicago carted away nearly ten thousand horse carcasses. A book on the collection of municipal refuse advised that, since the average weight of a dead horse was thirteen hundred pounds, "trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive lift." The complaint of one horse lover that "in the city the working horse is treated worse than a steam-engine or sewing machine," was justified.
Blamed on the horse were such familiar plagues as cholera and typhoid fever and intestinal diseases like dysentery and infant diarrhea. The reason why faithful dobbin was adjudged guilty was that such diseases were often transmitted by the housefly, and the favorite breeding place of the fly was the manure heap. In the late 1890's actuaries discovered that employees in livery stables and those living near stables had a higher rate of infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, than the general public. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a large outpouring of material warning of the danger of the infection-carrying "queen of the dung-heap," Musca domestica. The most obvious way to eradicate the "typhoid fly "was to eliminate the horse.
Occasionally it's just nice to see something was done purely as a technical achivement rather than putting a financial value on it
Nice spin there. But the SST was promoted as a commercially viable aircraft with a short turn-around. It was to make flights to Asia and the Pacific convenient and affordable and the North Atlantic a commuter run.
Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems.
The Chinese Fire Drill.
You are telling me that WordPerfect: The Corporation was moving in every direction at once. You are also telling me that WordPerfect was obsessed with the cardboard box.
That WordPerfect feared an OEM install would disrupt relatioships with its retail distributers.
[I can't find a reference to an OEM WordPerfect before WordPerfect's purchase by Corel. Can you?]
W.E. Peterson joined WordPerfect in 1980 as a part time office manager and left as Executive V.P of Sales in 1992. Almost Perfect
"Listen" would be the theme for 1990.
In January Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away.
Some of us were ready to postpone OS/2 in favor of Windows, but the programmers in the OS/2 group, who had also been given the assignment of eventually creating the Windows version, were not ready to give up on OS/2. They were making good progress and hated the idea of starting over... They wanted to believe in IBM, as did the rest of us. The failure of OS/2 meant having to play on a field owned and operated by Microsoft, with Microsoft making the rules.
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process.
1991...was our year to "think."
Our biggest [problem] was the continued delay in the shipment of WordPerfect for Windows. Just one week after Fall COMDEX in 1990, the Windows programmers informed us that the dates we had given...would be impossible to meet.... We were in deep trouble.
We...took too long to make our experienced DOS programmers get involved. They could have helped a little more, but we had a hard time convincing them that the Windows project was more important than anything else. With sales still going up, many thought things were going too well to be concerned.
One big problem was getting all the different Office development groups to work together. By now we had teams for PC networks, for the Macintosh, and for UNIX, DG, and DEC machines. Unfortunately, none of the groups seemed to be willing to work out their differences.
Our long term success was, I thought, dependent on diversity. If the world was filled only with Windows machines, then Microsoft would have a tremendous advantage. If instead the world was filled with DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX machines, we could maintain our advantage in the personal computer word processing market.
Our theme for 1992 was "focus."
We were...disappointed by the lukewarm WPwin reviews. The reviewers complained that the product was a little slow and a little buggy, and they were right. Long gone were the days when I could take a WordPerfect review home and be certain I would enjoy reading it.
We needed to get a cleaner and faster version of WPwin out the door, but it would take some time. Microsoft was heavily promoting DDE (dynamic data exchange)... In theory, if we wrote our program to support Microsoft's specifications, a WPwin document could give and receive information to and from other programs. Instead of releasing another version of WPwin right away, the programmers wanted to delay the release so the new feature could be included..
Slashdot Mirror
I think any honest reading of the 20th century history would suggest that Europe suffered rather a lot from regimes which "turned their back on God."
So, no, America has not learned from the EU.
The US had a population of 100 million in 1915. 200 million in 1967. 300 million in 2006. It has become a multi-racial, multi-cultural, society to a degree that is difficult to comprehend. But a society that is still uniquely and recognizably American.
I am not sure I know the "European" of the EU.
You don't tell me earth is only 6,000 years old in my science class.
But who is funding your science class? Who chooses the teachers? The textbooks? The course of studies?
We had a neighbor who made his friends by giving away stuff that fell off a truck. He isn't with us anymore.
The geek reminds me not a little of our late governor, Eliot Spitzer.
The difference is only that the geek derives his sense of entitlement from his technical skills and not his bank account. Not that he isn't living rather well.
60% of American households don't have a broadband connection.
These are the households who have to buy or rent the video, borrow a copy from their public library or go without.
But they do receive something in return.
It is, after all, the market - the paying customer - which determines which films and videos are produced.
High School Musical cost Disney $4.2 million. The kids bought the CDs, the videos, the tickets to the arena stage show. My sister is directing a local production.
Harry Potter will retire to a theme park in Orlando.
The majors have the money, experience and technical resources to bring to life anything in sci-fi or fantasy a geek could ever hope to see. But why should they bother?
"Microshaft." How clever of you.
In 1982 magazines like Creative Computing were stuffed with adds targeting the market for the emergent IBM PC. Most of interest to small business, of course - and that would prove decisive.
But the new 16 bit micro was already drawing attention from gamers. This would be the year of Flight Simulator for the IBM PC.
Now there is a provocative phrase. The renegade demon - from the Cylon point of view - would almost certainly have to be a Cylon.
The fiasco being that the dual core desktop PC with 2 GB RAM, a 500 GB HDD and a serviceable video card for PC gaming can be built for around $700.
Linux supports *a lot* more hardware than Vista does. Think about it.
I try not to.
In the consumer market the buyer is interested in the OEM install on a new PC with all the latest bells and whistles.
If he chooses the desktop he will most likely bundle in the wide screen monitor and the multifunction color printer-scanner. That will be the last significant hardware purchase he will make in the next three to five years.
This is loopy notion even for Slashdot.
The drunk is not in control of anything.
His response time is lousy and his judgment is worse. It is quite impossible for him to "exercise greater care."
Now all you have to worry about is maintenance of the readers and the preservation of the files - against hard drive failures, fires and other accidents. I have my own solution: it is called "print" and the media is paper.
No offense intended. But this story is getting really, really old. (2003) Rather more interesting is the fact that MS Office accounts for 67 cents of every new retail dollar being spent on software.
Maybe. But to my eyes this looks better: Office Online Home Page
More likely it is because Linux remains "the geek's OS." You are expected to dig yourself out of whatever hole you've dug yourself into.
The geek maintains the distinction between the computer and the operating system only when it is convenient.
The Windows PC has no standard configuration.
It can be customized endlessly by a billion end-users who have no understanding of the underlying technology.
The modem is rented from a cable service. The video card purchased from the bargain bin at Tiger Direct. The RAM from eBay.
But, according to the geek, Microsoft is expected to tie all this together and make it work 100% of the time.
This is off-topic, I suppose. But does anyone else think that in 2008 it is lame for a web forum to require HTML code for casual formatting?
Tell me how you can afford the consumables and not the software. Tell me who is paying retail list for a legit copy of Office.
Businesses who are looking at the amount Office costs per annum and would like to reduce this.
Changing your core business software is never simple and never without a price.
The MS Office system includes components not to be found in OpenOffice.org. Outlook is simply the most visible example.
It is trivially easy to find and recruit workers trained in MS Office. You have fifteen years experience in-house. There are countless third party programs and add-ons that integrate with MS Office...
People who can't/don't want to run Windows.
Which would currently be about 0.65% of OpenOffice.org's potential market. Operating System Market Share for February, 2008
Baloney.
You want free, go to the public library.
You want Clarke's books to remain in print and accessible to everyone? Not just the Geek with a computer and a broadband connection? Buy the paperback.
The P2P nets are not an archieve. They are snapshot in time of the geek's momentary enthusiasms. Books and authors in which he has lost interest quickly fade from view.
I have a copy and would not part with it for love or money.
"The Exploration of Space" was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. It stands in good company with the Disneyland specials on space flight.
You can't patent an idea. Sci-fi and fantasy writers had been playing with the idea for at least a half-century. Clarke's contribution was to sketch out the advantages of placing relay stations in synchronous orbit in convincing detail.
He didn't patent the idea because an idea can't be patented. Nor was the idea original. Fantasy and sci-fi writers had been playing with the concept for at least a half-century. Clarke's contribution was to sketch out the advantages of placing relays in synchronous orbit in convincing detail.
The magazine was the Saturday Evening Post.
For close on to seventy years to be published in the Post was your ticket out of the pulps.
Your readers were adults and not an adolescent fandom. No magazine paid better or more promptly and none reached a wider middle class audience. The presentation was always first class.
The word processor is one component of an office suite - and has become something more - often much more - than a text editor.
Tell me why it ia inefficient to make the maximum use of RAM when RAM is cheap.
She would not agree and even went so far as to say that all porn should be filtered on the Internet. She was of the impression that filtering content from the internet was for the greater good of society. She would not budge.
All you've proven here is that the Geek also believes in absolutes. You've had your say and the world moves on. Decisions are made that are neither black or white.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, writers were demanding "the banishment of the horse from American cities" in vigorous terms. The presence of 120,000 horses in New York City, wrote one 1908 authority is "an economic burden, an affront to cleanliness, and a terrible tax upon human life."
Sanitary experts in the early part of the twentieth century agreed that the normal city horse produced between fifteen and thirty pounds of manure a day, with the average being something like twenty-two pounds. In a city like Milwaukee in 1907 with a human population of 350,000 and a horse population of 12,500, this meant 133 tons of manure a day, for a daily average of nearly three-quarters of a pound of manure for each resident. Or, as health officials in Rochester, New York, calculated in 1900, the fifteen thousand horses in that city produced enough manure in a year to make a pile 175 feet high covering an acre of ground and breeding sixteen billion flies, each one a potential spreader of germs.
To a great extent nineteenth-century urban life moved at the pace of horse-drawn transportation, and the evidence of the horse was everywhere--in the piles of manure that littered the streets attracting swarms of flies and creating stench, in the iron rings and hitching posts sunk into the pavements for fastening horses' reins, and in the numerous livery stables that gave off a mingled smell of horse urine and manure, harness oil and hay. In 1880 New York and Brooklyn were served by 427 blacksmith shops, 249 carriage and wagon enterprises, 262 wheelwright shops, and 290 establishments dealing in saddles and harnesses.
And then there was noise. In many American cities, early paving consisted largely of cobblestones, on which the clopping and clanking of horses' iron shoes and the iron-tired wheels of carts and wagons created an immense din. As late as the 1890's a writer in Scientific American noted that the sounds of traffic on busy New York streets made conversation nearly impossible.
Many overworked, mistreated urban horses simply died in the city streets. Since asphalt-paved or cobbled streets were slipperier than dirt roads, horses often stumbled and fell. An unfortunate beast who broke a leg in this way was destroyed where it lay. A description of Broadway in 1866 spoke of the street as being clogged with "dead horses and vehicular entanglements." The equine carcasses added fearsomely to the smells and flies already rising in clouds from stables and manure piles. In 1880 New York City removed fifteen thousand dead horses from its streets, and as late as 1912 Chicago carted away nearly ten thousand horse carcasses. A book on the collection of municipal refuse advised that, since the average weight of a dead horse was thirteen hundred pounds, "trucks for the removal of dead horses should be hung low, to avoid an excessive lift." The complaint of one horse lover that "in the city the working horse is treated worse than a steam-engine or sewing machine," was justified.
Blamed on the horse were such familiar plagues as cholera and typhoid fever and intestinal diseases like dysentery and infant diarrhea. The reason why faithful dobbin was adjudged guilty was that such diseases were often transmitted by the housefly, and the favorite breeding place of the fly was the manure heap. In the late 1890's actuaries discovered that employees in livery stables and those living near stables had a higher rate of infectious diseases, such as typhoid fever, than the general public. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a large outpouring of material warning of the danger of the infection-carrying "queen of the dung-heap," Musca domestica. The most obvious way to eradicate the "typhoid fly "was to eliminate the horse.
The old gray mare was not the ecological marvel, in American cities, that horse lovers like to believe
Nice spin there. But the SST was promoted as a commercially viable aircraft with a short turn-around. It was to make flights to Asia and the Pacific convenient and affordable and the North Atlantic a commuter run.
The Chinese Fire Drill.
You are telling me that WordPerfect: The Corporation was moving in every direction at once. You are also telling me that WordPerfect was obsessed with the cardboard box.
That WordPerfect feared an OEM install would disrupt relatioships with its retail distributers.
[I can't find a reference to an OEM WordPerfect before WordPerfect's purchase by Corel. Can you?]
"Listen" would be the theme for 1990.
In January Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away.
Some of us were ready to postpone OS/2 in favor of Windows, but the programmers in the OS/2 group, who had also been given the assignment of eventually creating the Windows version, were not ready to give up on OS/2. They were making good progress and hated the idea of starting over... They wanted to believe in IBM, as did the rest of us. The failure of OS/2 meant having to play on a field owned and operated by Microsoft, with Microsoft making the rules.
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process.
1991...was our year to "think."
Our biggest [problem] was the continued delay in the shipment of WordPerfect for Windows. Just one week after Fall COMDEX in 1990, the Windows programmers informed us that the dates we had given...would be impossible to meet. ... We were in deep trouble.
We...took too long to make our experienced DOS programmers get involved. They could have helped a little more, but we had a hard time convincing them that the Windows project was more important than anything else. With sales still going up, many thought things were going too well to be concerned.
One big problem was getting all the different Office development groups to work together. By now we had teams for PC networks, for the Macintosh, and for UNIX, DG, and DEC machines. Unfortunately, none of the groups seemed to be willing to work out their differences.
Our long term success was, I thought, dependent on diversity. If the world was filled only with Windows machines, then Microsoft would have a tremendous advantage. If instead the world was filled with DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX machines, we could maintain our advantage in the personal computer word processing market.
Our theme for 1992 was "focus."
We were...disappointed by the lukewarm WPwin reviews. The reviewers complained that the product was a little slow and a little buggy, and they were right. Long gone were the days when I could take a WordPerfect review home and be certain I would enjoy reading it.
We needed to get a cleaner and faster version of WPwin out the door, but it would take some time. Microsoft was heavily promoting DDE (dynamic data exchange)... In theory, if we wrote our program to support Microsoft's specifications, a WPwin document could give and receive information to and from other programs. Instead of releasing another version of WPwin right away, the programmers wanted to delay the release so the new feature could be included..
We were in a battle to the death w