They are probably safe because they are local clubs right. Only have fees on recorded music?
Relevant to the existing broadcast and future broadcast, but I'd like to point out that the purpose of SxSW is to hookup poor starving musicians with greedy blood-sucking record labels. It serves no other appreciable purpose (except the corresponding film festival which is a different story entirely).
It's cool, but half-assed, since SxSW only exists to serve the RIAA in the long run anyway.
LOL the C64 CLI was about as raw as you could get. Something about it was fun though. You felt like a hacker God just to get a game running at all sometimes.
Heh, speaking of hacker computers, I had an old tape-driven TS1000. It had a touch keyboard, back when those things were getting popular. I had a calculator with the same kind of keyboard that was solar-powered. That Timex, though. Wait 15 minutes for a 1K program to load, but that was ok because you could only have 2K. I think it was expandable to 4K, but I don't remember exactly. I remember programming shit on it, but I don't even remember what I programmed. I do remember wanting a hi-fi stereo, thinking it'd make the programs load faster. (I was, what, 8?)
And didja know that you can get ethernet for the C64 these days? You can even expand the memory up to a couple of MB, somehow, and run a web browser that's almost standards compliant! Or so I've heard, anyway. I've yet to see one running. I might still have my last C64. 4-5 years ago my sister gave me hers, and I wrote a budget program on it that totally straightened out my wife and my finances. Then the vic-II chip burned up and all hell broke loose in our checkbook. Heh. Commodore BASIC was a fun language, that's for sure. I kinda miss those days... but to get them back would mean regressing all the way to childhood. Heh. (I'm 28) But we did have GEOS for it, and I never could figure out why you'd want to move a joystick around to point at shit and click on it to make more shit happen. Worse yet, the thing was so slow that you could only open a raw text file editor, and maybe a small graphics editor. Not much you could do, really. Back then "piracy" was called "fair use". But I haven't seen a game since the Amiga days that had the kind of gameplay there was back then. It seems like they've replaced the part of the game that requires intelligence and imagination with 3d graphics. Questing in Ultima is still an experience that has yet to be remade with a newer game, at least from what I've played, and I'll admit I haven't played much. Ever since Wolfenstein came out and nobody can tell me if it's based on the old Muse game or not I just haven't had much interest in games. But if I were to start a gaming project right now, it'd be a isometric version of the old Castle Wolfenstein game. That game was pretty terrifying for the day (and one of the first, iirc, that used real speach), and I can't even imagine how terrifying it can be with modern computers, surround-sound, and so forth.
The fact that back then I could install Linux w/ X on a 486DX w/ 4Mb ram and a 170Mb hdd and have a pretty usable little system says a lot. X was crap ugly and not user friendly but you could connect to the Net and telnet or web browse easier than under Windows. I had a 2400baud modem so browsing without images was pretty common. ASCII/ANSI/RIP artwork was pretty much the rule.
Well, I'd gotten away from computers by the time Linux was useful as more than a toy. I remember hearing about it, but I didn't have a PC so I didn't care. I liked the idea, and had I gone into PCs right then I would've screwed with it. Anything was better than DOS. I hated DOS then, and I hate it now.:) I'm firmly opposed to a command-line based interface. I was working on GUIs on the C-64 just because I didn't like the interface. Of course, they were impossible to use, but it was fun anyway.:)
I'd say Microsoft was a monopoly but is not anymore (but is still trying to be).. not because of any legal action that happened as much as because opensource changed the rules. Apple has always had a small but loyal following. The inroads Linux made against Windows gave Apple some breathing room to really clean up MacOS. With the fine work Apple and the BSD folks did MacOS is finally a kickass platform. I think Windows will continue to dominate the market but would not be surprised to see them gradually reduced to a more fair market share over the next decade or so. I'd expect to see MacOS make strong inroads on the home desktop and Linux make strong inroads on the enterprise/embedded desktop. I think we'll see Microsoft start producing some really high quality software too.. due largely to the new competition.
Actually, I can't see Apple making inroads while their hardware is still so proprietary. It's not the fact that it's such a closed system (I understand it's more open than it used to be, though), it's that it's expensive. Like I said, I wouldn't buy into PPC unless it was competitively priced with PCs, and that's not likely. They could push the technology that way, though, and I'd be willing to buy into it regardless of price, but I'm not buying Apple. I want something I *know* I can upgrade, add to, and so forth. Same reason I'm not buying into the new Amigas, when/if they ever materialize.
I think we'll start seeing Microsoft producing higher quality software too, but I don't think the new competition is the biggest reason. I think the biggest reason is that they have so much previous work to build on. Remember, they've always built everything from scratch, whereas the rest of us have kept building on each other's work. We'll continue to outpace them for awhile, but they may catch up again. They did run into some limits on what they can do with Windows 2000 (ever see the presentation on winNT development vs. win2k development? Interesting stuff, that). It'll be interesting to see, though. But I don't expect Microsoft to dominate the market ever again like they did in the 90s. I think their days are over for that. They're losing fans and developers like flies that just realized the pile of shit they were on isn't shit after all.
Lots of great ideas. While we're on the topic of KDE I'd like to day something that just occurred to me: the panel has (or had; I have on obsolete version) two little bars at each end that you can use to make the panel slide over to one side of the screen. These would be better omitted and replaced with right-click options and/or a mouse gesture like in Opera and OptiMoz. As it is, if you move your mouse to the lower-left corner or the screen to click on the K button, it makes the panel slide. This isn't good.
You definitely must be using an obsolete version. At least, with Mandrake 9.0 by default there's only one shrinker button, and it's on the right away from the K menu. I don't use it, because I like to have the tasklist part of the bar visible at all times. It's probably configurable, and I can probably put one on the left if I want to, I haven't looked at it.
In all, though, this button can be eliminated for sure. The only issue is that if it requires a mouse gesture, then it's not immediately obvious to a user. But a right-click option is good, especially if the user knows to right-click on stuff to get options. Since you can right-click for options on the rest of the panel, it would be quite intuitive.
And the top Windows UI improvment im my book: move the contents of the Programs menu to the top level, and categorize them. And have a favorites menu for programs you use often so you don't have to go through the deep hierarchy.
This is a good idea, with only one major problem.:) Aftermarket developers tend to populate the start menu according to the mandates of their marketing department. Now, if MS came along and said "Here's the categorical structure for the start menu, here's the API for you to use, USE IT" then they'd probably do it. What are the chances MS will actually do that, though? Heh. I do get sick of seeing crap in the start menu that's referenced by the company name. Even Free Software projects tend to reference by project name.
We Free Software developers can address the issue at least partially, and it'll satisfy other developers. Just use the hierarchy that is already used in KDE. It is my understanding that KDE and GNOME are working together on making some things similar between the two (for interoperability), and this is something that they should address. It's a no-brainer, for sure.:) So we can just follow the same scheme for Windows, where an application will make the folder for the hierarchy if it's not already there.
I'd also like a side panel that contains icons for each category in the start menu and stays on all the time, like the panel. And then you click on the icon and the menu expands completely to show you all of the choices there. That would eliminate would hunt-and-click to navigate the hierarchy. Some will complain that it clutters the screen, though. They would probably also complain if they used my desktop, though.:)
It would be a good idea, if it isn't already there in some form, to add a mouse-gestures binding that's just like the keybindings. Solid interface that people are already acquainted with, standard definitions that can be customized. Integrated with the desktop would make it a good thing.:)
My fave - the CTRL+Enter which fills in the "www." and ".com" in IE's location bar. Ideally, you'd be able to configure ATL+Enter and/or Shift+Enter for.org and.edu or something...
My personal favorite IE shortcut is CTL-ALT-DEL. I find that the most useful shortcut in Windows actually. The only shortcut I can image that's more useful is to get my woodcutting ax and...
(two clicks to run this program, unless you have it configured for one click, but then get ready to confuse people who actually got used to double clicking, because they double click everything, even web links!)
I got a chuckle out of this. check this out:
My wife works with windows at work, and she comes home to KDE and tries to double-click shit all the time. The end result is that everytime she does something, she gets two instances of the program in memory. It confuses her for like half a second, and then either she realizes what she did or I bitch at her "Quit double-clicking everything! It's consistent, dammit. Single-click everything. If it doesn't work, it's a BUG."
Little side thing: You know how ghostbusters starts out with that ooooo, scary noise? The eerie stuff?
Well, MPLayer checks for instances of itself in memory and pauses itself if there's already an instance running. This is good because it sucks up 50% of my CPU when it's running, and that's just playing from a DVD.
So, this one night, my wife decides she wants to watch ghostbusters. About half-way through the movie, my daughter needed to go poop, but she didn't want to miss the movie. So I paused it for her. She goes poop, and while she's doing that, after a couple of seconds we start hearing this eerie music. Suffice it to say, it was quite spooky while watching ghostbusters.
Of course, all it was was the second instance of MPlayer playing ghostbusters because my wife had double-clicked again. heh.
Seriously, though, I whole-heartedly agree with you that interfaces suck these days. In fact, I have a hard time sometimes "proving" that KDE is easier to use than Windows, just because things in KDE could be better. However, I'll counter some of your statements:
The intuitive way would be to categorize programs. That's how they do it in linux. It's how I categorize my programs in Windows 2000 (though I have to manually hack stuff around, and that breaks the uninstallers a little). Yeah, it's not always easy to put everything into unique categories, but it's a heck of a lot easier than having a flat list of mixed between company names and program names.
True, all true. However, ideally, a user shouldn't have to navigate deep hierarchies to get to what they want. I saw something, and I forget where I saw it, that showed that if you eliminate the top-level part of the hierarchy, you can increase the user's efficiency when chosing an application by 50%. There is a point of diminishing returns, though. But the article did address the speed involved in having to read a long start menu vs a short start menu.
If the taskbar were just a vanilla taskbar, then maybe the masses would have taken to the concept of "if I see a name on this bar, that means that the program/application with this name is doing something even though I can't see it".
I have to disagree with this. I have a whole ton of shortcuts on the panel, and I use them more than I use the K menu. That's because I've put some menus (movies and stuff, Networking/WWW, Multimedia) to reduce the hierarchy, and specific applications that I use a LOT. I also have one or two that I don't use a lot, but when I need them I prefer them to just be there. Anyway, my point.:) In KDE, the panel has the sections clearly differentiated from one another. The part that shows running applications is clear from the part that shows all of your desktops, which in turn is quite clear from the part with all your shortcuts. My wife found herself naturally using it, and she's very much in the school that doesn't realize a computer can do more than one thing at a time. (It's mostly a frame of mind, near as I can tell, she can really only focus on one or two things at a time, and she has a serious problem with task-switching. She's like a DOS kernel.:) )
But there are improvements to be made here as well.:) For example, for all th
I was running some Linux already in '95.. on my grand ole 486DX. I was using a plain old X desktop without any of these fancy desktop enviroments. Back when the Linux desktop really did look like shit. (But hey it ran in 4M of memory.):)
Wish I could've been there. I didn't even have a computer myself, and when I finally did have one, it had windows. I didn't even know until a little over a year ago that there was something else available for a PC. I've been using Linux ever since then, though.:) (I'd like to buy into PPC, actually, but not if I have to buy a Mac. I'd run Linux on it, and I'd really like to see some PPC competition in the PC business)
Win95's one big bonus IMO was when they intergrated TCP/IP. Connecting to the web with Win3.1 or DOS was just a pain in the ass. Allowing long file names was pretty nice too. I don't remember ever having DOS/Win3.1 crash the way Win9x did though and files were generally organized in a more logical way. Actually I still have a DOS/Win3.1 box being used in my business. It's still working just fine so there is no reason to change it.
As a matter of fact, I never used DOS in the first place, so I was just talking out of my ass there.:) I'm an old amiga hacker, and I left computers for a number of years for personal reasons, and during that time Commodore went under and Windows 95 and 98 came out. And Me, and win2k. Oh yeah.
Leaving the command line behind was a huge mistake. Make an OS that even a blind three fingered ape can use and everyone will get used to blindly using a three finger keystroke to fix every problem. My experience has been that total computer illiterates learn to use Linux faster than experienced Win/Mac users. They don't think it's hard because they've never been trained to expect it to be chimp-easy.
Of this I only partially agree. I think the command line is a necessary part of the OS, and I can't imagine an OS where it isn't necessary. Sometimes you've just gotta open up a terminal to fix something. I also think that the GUI should allow you to do everything the command line does, sorta. As far as troubleshooting and fixing things and administering the system, the GUI should handle it. But how the hell do you script with a GUI? Shell scripting is the most useful thing you can possibly have for automating custom shit. Without it, what can you do? Sure, you have.bat files, but MS's scripting is so primitive... It's the highest level programming you can do, and it's something you can reasonably expect 75% of computer users to be able to do. Why? Because it's simple english, that's why. They know that "ls" lists a directory. They can certainly understand that putting it in `` on a command line means put the output of the command on the command line. So if you're doing a rm `ls` it should remove everything in the directory, right? (Primitive example, I know, but I made a script for ecasound that normalizes the whole directory by doing a ecanormalize on the output of an ls command, with a simple for loop) I find that both the gui and the command line are useful metaphors for using a computer, and both superior to the BASIC interface of previous personal computers. But there are always things you'll be able to do with a GUI that you just can't do with a command line, and vice versa. With bash shell scripting you can do things that you'd have to write an entire application to do with a gui.
Seriously, I really really think that MS got handed their monopoly, and their anticompetitive practices didn't make a difference at the time. And they're not going to make a difference now, either. I've seen numbers putting Macintoshes at 5% of the market (possibly higher), and numbers indicating that Linux has at least 5% of the market. That means Microsoft only has 90%, at the most. That might be considered a monopoly, but it's not. Both Mac and Linux usage is on the rise, and Windows is on the decline, and that's an important trend. If the GPL is like a disease, then let the plague run rampant, I say.:)
I'm not going to quote your post because I happen to agree with much of it.:)
Pilots' salaries are very much tied to results, when you think about it. At least, they should be as well. If a pilot *does* crash, and is determined to be at fault, what exactly happens to him? Presuming he lives, of course. Much like the captain at sea, the pilot should probably be the last person to leave the plane. Ah, the wonderful role of leadership.:)
Yes, it is true that our education system has a LOT of problems. I recall my 10-th grade biology teacher saying that he's not allowed to talk about God and religion in school, then giving us the probability that a certain few proteins would combine in the exact right way to make a self-replicating molecule and saying that that's where he think God stepped in. I also recall the prejudice I met with from faculty (and students) when I firmly stated my desire not to pledge allegiance to the flag because I had already pledged my allegiance to freedom.
Indeed, the education system needs lots of reform. I'll tell you one place I think it needs reform. Can the whole "teaching as profession" attitude. Personally, I consider it part of my obligation to the human race (NOT society) to spend my retirement years teaching, rather than being a playboy. I'll be a playboy now and forever, but I need to spend my retirement passing on what I've learned in life to whatever generation is in school at that time. So I will, when the time comes.
But should morality be censored out of teaching entirely? I'm not so sure about that. As adults we have a collective responsibility to the kids, not just our own. We also have a responsibility to each other not to step on each other's toes and raise their kids for them. Realistically, a kid spends more waking time in school (including studying and homework, if they still do that) than he does with his parents. That's quite an influence, and to remove morality from it completely would be a mistake, IMO. On the other hand, whose definition of morality should be accepted? It's a tricky situation, and both sides of the coin have nothing but the best of intentions for the kids. Personally, I don't have an opinion either way because I haven't resolved the issue for myself, yet.
And finally, what qualifies someone to be a teacher? A college degree and a certificate, last time I checked. "I should think you Jedis would have more respect for the difference between knowledge, and um huh uh, wisdom." (The only quote that made it out of that movie that matters:) ) And because of the low pay, they have to really *want* to do it. I figure it's the same as chosing a leader. The person who wants the job is the person who is least qualified to do it.:)
So yeah, in a perfect world, I think that my points about teachers and salaries are important, but still only to a certain extent. If you teach on the tail end of your life, like I say it should be done, then you're probably going to collect retirement or something (social security? heh). So a high salary isn't needed, you've already got income. But as a profession, the story's quite different.
Mostly I responded because I wanted to demonstrate a "mission critical" profession that is very low paid. That's all.
Now, I hate Microsoft more than the next guy, but...
Remember how many copies of Windows 95 Microsoft sold to people that didn't even own computers? For the most part people are sheep and take what they are given.
Where was GNU/Linux in '95? Wasn't KDE still using a then-proprietary widget? Was there a GNOME? What OS exactly was available at a competitive price to Windows?
You forget, in 1995 Commodore was going down the tubes, if it wasn't bankrupt already. Apple has been going out of business for the last 15 years, and they are showing every sign that they will continue to be going out of business for the next 15 years. Besides, PCs in 1995 costed much teh same as now (with exceptions: the used market wasn't as proliferate as it is now), and Macs costed much the same, ie 2x the price of a PC. What did PCs come with? What else was available?
Supply and demand, baby, supply and demand. If you supply something, and people demand it, they will buy it from you. If two people supply it, now you've got competition.
All other things aside about illegal anticompetitive practices and so forth, exactly how many choices were available in 1995? I remember windows 95 being kickin-ass when it came out. It was great! It only crashed every couple of hours, much stabler than DOS 6 or the Amiga, or even Mac System 7 (I don't even know if sys8 or 9 were out yet). It had real multi-threading, with a standard (for low-end computing) memory management model (read: none). Huge vendor and developer support. In 1995, Windows 95 was a beautiful operating system. The whole world collectively left the command line behind, in 1995. (They woulda done it sooner if 3.1 hadn't been so shitty, and it was shitty compared to its contemporaries)
There are lots of reasons Microsoft got their monopoly, but I strongly suspect they would've gotten it without their anticompetitive practices. And they wouldn't be losing customers left and right right now for their business ethics.
This may be an unpopular view, but this effort reminds me of the way another desktop environment developed. Creating more and more apps that rely on the mozilla codebase makes it central to the desktop... rather like IE.
To my knowledge, no desktops require Mozilla to work. Sure, GNOME has Nautilus (still? Or did they shitcan it?) which has Mozilla embedded, and Galeon is the GNOME browser, which has Mozilla embedded. However, and this is important. If Mozilla goes a direction these guys don't like, they can fork the code or put in a new renderer. YOU are not stuck with Mozilla, and you can change your directory browser (as far as I know, in KDE you can) and your default browser, and so forth.
The idea of making the browser integral with the desktop isn't inherently a bad idea, it's just that Microsoft did it specifically to drive Netscape out of business. Also, in doing so, Microsoft opened up holes in their system so big that Windows is now a whore to script kiddies. Any embedded MOzilla application doesn't run the risk at this time. (it might one day, but I don't think so)
It might be an unpopular view as far as Mozilla is concerned, just try to keep in mind that when you're talking about Free Software, the situation changes. It doesn't make it right (although in this case I think it is right), but it does change the way you have to evaluate the situation.
I think there are two basic architecture issues that turn a lot of people off. The first is Javascript (ECMAscript). The only place this language has a foothold is in HTML. If the real goal is to have people write general applications, nobody uses javascript and so this meets a non-demand.
I'm not so certain Mozilla was created to meet this non-demand as it was to make Microsoft's worst fears about Netscape come true. IIRC, MS went after Netscape when they realized that the browser was a likely candidate for being a true cross-platform development platform, with complete applicaitons and everything. Realizing this, they had to crush netscape or else run the risk of having a whole slew of applications come out that didn't require Windows.
So, while going under, Netscape thought "Well, why don't we just make those worst fears come true? By opening up the source code and making it Free Software with a newer BSD-style license, Microsoft can't kill it, and nobody need fear the GPL with it."
Thus did the great lizard begin walking the murky depths of the ocean. Let's summon up the Lizard by developing applications with it, and it'll walk up from the Puget Sound and stomp it's way across East Seattle, sink down into Lake Washington, and once again arise. Spitting fire all the way through downtown Bellevue on its way into Redmond, where it will destroy the One Redmond Way.
Damn, I'm glad I live in eastgate. I'll get a ringside seat without having to move out of the Lizard's way.
Once us web developers wake up and more of us start using CSS and using relative font definitions (like 100%, or 85%, etc...) then we won't have to worry about that. Of course, it won't help with your web comics, unless they go to using CSS and CSS2 to position text on the screen... hmm... that could be interesting...
If w3c ever fucking wakes up and gives us a property that lets us set an image size in percent, then the browsers could have you modify that percent much like you do text. For example, right now text is by default 100%, but with your browser you can map that to 120%, right? There's a proportion there, but I'm sure you can follow it without me doing the math.:)
Of course, Mozilla can do it already, at least the infrastructure is there, they just need to add it. I don't doubt that it's coming, so I'm not worried about it. But automatic image resizing, to me, implies that it resizes with the text.
They spend on average 8 hours a week with your kids, daily. Most parents spend about that time as well, or less.
Your kids really trust them and the information they are given by them. They get in trouble when they don't.
Your kids look up to them and try to behave like them.
Like it or not, your kids will learn morality from them, as well as you.
Considering that your kids (and mine) are the future of this world, would you feel comfortable paying their teachers a pilot's salary or teacher's salary? Mind you, too many mistakes by the adults in your kids lives can cause your kids to go throwing bombs and shooting up the school and stuff. Don't believe me? Read this
yeah, I know. That's just reactionary crap I just said. Fuck it.:)
Say I am a big (but non-criminal) guy walking around city block in shabby dress, carrying a sign and asking some random people if I can do some work for them. If someone did ask me to wash their car, carry a heavy bag home etc, I would do it to the best of my ability and bring money to my family, if any. But something tells me I might get some handouts but no work. In an agricultural society, on the other hand, my neighbors would make good use of my muscles to plow a field, dig out a tree, move stones and so on.
Problem is, it's just not that simple. Know where the best place to get the best drugs is? You guessed it, a welfare house. Wherever I've seen poverty, I've found drugs running rampant. People that can buy food, but instead spend their limited income on drugs. Sure, that's a separate problem in itself, but in my experience (lengthy at that), a drug problem is usually self-imposed, and it takes direct, personal responsibility to beat it. Those guys standing on the corner wanting a penny? "Will work for food?" It's a common joke that they're just gonna buy beer or drugs with it, but it's true. There are certainly exceptions to all of this, but the exceptions aren't the rule. The exceptions will climb out of the hole themselves, and it's to the exceptions that welfare, foodstamps, and unemployment are actually beneficial. (Obviously, when in the situation, I was the exception and climbed out)
It doesn't take anything to go to your local food kitchen. Most towns I've been in have something like it. Usually it's a soup kitchen run by a church or charity. In Austin, TX there's the PHASE program that gives out food and clothes and stuff. THe Salvation Army is usually good for a meal, but I never hit them up personally because I understand that they make you pray or something first. Most churches, if you just knock on the door, will be willing to help or at least direct you someplace where you can find it. Here in Bellevue, WA, there's Hopelink, that gives out groceries once a week. Just a typical foodbank. I've eaten quite a few meals prepared with this stuff that were both tasty and healthy.
What all of these resources I've mentioned have in common is that they find ways to transcend language difficulties and other people skills.
Keep in mind that I"m talking about a "demographic", or rather, a group of people that exhibit these traits for the most part on an individual level. There are always exceptions. I even talked to this guy who had spanged up enough change for a couple of beers who was thinking of going to stay with his sister, he was getting sick of the "alternative to working", as he put it.
People do choose to be beggars, and beggars really are chosers. Just like you chose to work, people chose not to work.
For that reason, the charities and stuff that are out there trying to help these people are quite successful. They give the help that's needed when it's needed by the people who will actually use it to make a permanent improvement in their lives. Some will always fall through the cracks, though.
The world hunger problem is about money, not lack of food. Zero-gravity growth experiments and terraforming won't solve that problem.
But it's not a problem you can just throw money at and expect it to be solved, either. I've known many "hungry and homeless" people who were so because they refused to take direct, personal responsibility for themselves. My kids eat because my wife and I take that kind of responsibility seriously, and we don't have any money. There will always be hungry people who won't eat because of a basic lack of responsibility. In this country of avarice, it's hard for me to picture a family that can't eat, but it's easy to picture a family that won't eat. Plenty of free food available (charities and so forth) if you just look for it. And before anybody chimes in with "you don't know what you're talking about, you've never been hungry!" I'd like to point out that I have been "hungry and homeless", and by taking direct, personal responsibility for the situation I corrected it.
This same fact doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world, however. For the rest of the world, it's still not so simple. Send food to Africa? Why? You know that the governments are gonna take it and not properly distribute it where it's intended, right? Corruption...
It's just not a problem you can throw money at and expect it to be fixed. Just keep in mind that if you give a man a fish, he only eats for a day. Perhaps education really is a better investment?
If you can be bothered to read the constitution [cornell.edu] then you would realize that America was never designed to have a standing military. The only purpose of the military was to combat a real threat to the nation (ie war). If you think about it this way, the US has been in a state of "war" for over 60 years...which seems kind of ridiculous...
Long gone are the days when any given man with a shotgun could be quickly trained to be the finest of soldiers. War has become so technological that it's now a full-time job to maintain a military that is technologically advanced enough to be effective in the world today.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that we shouldn't have a standing military, philosophically speaking, for the reasons you outlined. I just don't see another way. I think that privatizing military R&D would just encourage the already corrupt and bloated multinationals in a bad way. Perhaps a restructuring of our government that takes the military away from the executive branch? With the military as an integral part of the government (as they will always be so long as the president is commander-in-chief) we will always be a stone's throw away from a military dictatorship. The only thing the president needs to make this happen is the confidence and loyalty of the military, and he needs this dedication to be given above the dedication a man gives to his country.
But if we could make it a public-funded institution that isn't actually part of the government that requires Congress to authorize action, we'd have a slow-to-war military. They'd be quick-to-defend us, but slow to go fight wars in other lands. There's a lot of dynamics of the suggestion that I'm not addressing, I'll admit.:)
Making German trains run on time likely has little if anything to do with IBM contributions to the state of the art in COMPUTING.
This is true! Dude, you're missing the point! It demonstrates, with proof (like it's really needed), that IBM was around and working before Billy boy was born. That is *all*.
For the record, though, IBM also provided the Nazis with cutting-edge information technology that they were able to use to keep track of the extermination project and check its progress and so forth. Early database design, actually, with a very early computing setup. I don't know if it was credited as being a computer, but I *do* know from other articles I read that they provided more technology than just train scheduling. They also provided specific technology for the application of transporting Jews to be slaughtered, rather than just typical military, civilian, or cargo style information technology.
That's all irrelevant, I only used that article to show that IBM was in business and multinational before Billy boy was even a swimming sperm.
I wasn't speculating on the age of IBM. I already know that IBM started out long before the digital computer.
I was specifically speculating on hard research devoted to computing topics. When I speculated on IBM's contributions predating Bill Gates, I meant to imply that such contributions likely preceed Bill Gates's BIRTH.
I wasn't refering to the shaking down of MITS.
Am I just not following the discussion? You speculated that IBM's contributions started before Bill Gates was even a gleam in his daddy's eye, right? So I provided a link that showed that IBM was around building their evil empire during WWII as proof that IBM has been around far longer than Gates, to support your post. Eh?
I'm not copying anything from your post, if anybody wants it they can read the spoiler.:)
I heard a story once, and I cannot verify its authenticity, that Tolkien wrote the LOTR first. Then he realized he needed to explain how Bilbo got the ring from Gollum and wrote the Hobbit.
It doesn't have the "patch" feel though. The Hobbit definitely feels like a prequel, but it doesn't feel like a patch. So, assuming the story I heard is true (and checking publication dates on the books should suffice, I just haven't done it), then he probably had the whole story figured out already.
Well, that certainly makes a lot more sense. I'll rewatch the two movies, 'cause any excuse to watch them is probably a good one.:) The distinct impression I got from the movies is quite different, more like nobody even remembers it ever existed, and then people coming out of the woodwork to proclaim that Frodo has it and must be protected.
It's been so long since I read the Hobbit, so I don't remember much about the ring in that book. The movie for Fellowship of the Ring, of course, presents Gandalf's connecting of that ring to the One Ring as a brand-new thing he discovers only after Bilbo gets possessed by it. That's a detail that makes perfect sense to modify for the sake of the movie, since they didn't start with the Hobbit (neither did Tolkien, iirc).
The most credible source at that story was the only remaining IBM guy that worked at the office in question, who said that all he knew was that they were helping the government trains run. There was much huffing and puffing and "that gives us the final proof", but never was the final proof mentioned, just a lot of the context and possibility. It looks to me like some people are claiming that there is new evidence linking IBM to direct involvement, but no one in that story seemed to be able to describe what that evdence was, but rather to simply assert that it now existed.
Mind you, I'm not trying to open up a wound or nothing.:) I gave that link because it was at the top of google results, not because I found it credible. I only used it to show IBM was around in WWII, and in a graphic fashion at that. I probably could have made my point with less drama, but I didn't.:)
That said, I don't think we'll ever know all the ins and outs of the jewish extermination project that the Nazis mounted, and I don't know that it's necessary to know all the gory details. At least, not for me. Knowing how a madman such as he came into power is far more important to me than knowing a bunch of specifics about how it was done.
Take current politics. I'm not trying to compare George W. to Hitler, because that would be quite a stretch. However, I can see many parallels in his reign to Hitler's own rise to power that I find disconcerting. The main difference here is that we can look at Hitler's rise in a historical perspective, but we must judge current events in a contemporary fashion. Quite a limitation. In 20 years we may look back over this period of our history and say "How could we have ever drawn those conclusions?" Or, we might say "We knew it when it was happening, why didn't we stop it?"
For others, though, I realize that in order to deal with the knowledge they need to know as much about it as possible, uncovering as many details as they need to be satisfied. So long as they are looking for truth and not excuses, I don't see anything wrong with it.
As far as the IBM thing goes, I have read stories that had more detailed information than the one I linked, and there's a guy that put out a book on the subject. Seems it was more like the home office looked the other way when its german branch did business with the Nazis. Since an international corporation has to work in a variety of political situations, I have a hard time seeing the german office as doing wrong from a business perspective, but that doesn't mean I think they did right. It's a classic example of separating business and politics, which us freedom-lovers are always telling both politicians and businessmen they should do. Let history show us that it's not always the best way.:)
you can go part of the way, as the original hitch hikers guide to the Galaxy (hereafter h2g2) tv series did, and the radio play, by inserting "the book" as, I suppose, a sort of muse(?) but it still isnt the same.
I hate to say it, but you lost quite a bit of credibility with this statement.:)
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio show. Whether or not the TV show or the book came next I am unsure of, but I can look it up if it's that important. According to Douglas Adams, each adaptation of the story took all the same dialog and changed everything else. That is, in the book, the characters said and did the same things as in the radio show, but for completely different reasons. Ditto for the tv show. In fact, he mentions feeling uncomfortable about the radio transcripts being released since that made the first work in the series that accurately represented another work in the series.
So, in this specific case, in fact, Douglas Adams proves to us that each media is completely different from the rest with different needs and different ways of conveying the story. He has, probably, the only group of stories that stand on their own in each form of media in which they are made.
Slashdot Mirror
They are probably safe because they are local clubs right. Only have fees on recorded music?
Relevant to the existing broadcast and future broadcast, but I'd like to point out that the purpose of SxSW is to hookup poor starving musicians with greedy blood-sucking record labels. It serves no other appreciable purpose (except the corresponding film festival which is a different story entirely).
It's cool, but half-assed, since SxSW only exists to serve the RIAA in the long run anyway.
LOL the C64 CLI was about as raw as you could get. Something about it was fun though. You felt like a hacker God just to get a game running at all sometimes.
Heh, speaking of hacker computers, I had an old tape-driven TS1000. It had a touch keyboard, back when those things were getting popular. I had a calculator with the same kind of keyboard that was solar-powered. That Timex, though. Wait 15 minutes for a 1K program to load, but that was ok because you could only have 2K. I think it was expandable to 4K, but I don't remember exactly. I remember programming shit on it, but I don't even remember what I programmed. I do remember wanting a hi-fi stereo, thinking it'd make the programs load faster. (I was, what, 8?)
And didja know that you can get ethernet for the C64 these days? You can even expand the memory up to a couple of MB, somehow, and run a web browser that's almost standards compliant! Or so I've heard, anyway. I've yet to see one running. I might still have my last C64. 4-5 years ago my sister gave me hers, and I wrote a budget program on it that totally straightened out my wife and my finances. Then the vic-II chip burned up and all hell broke loose in our checkbook. Heh. Commodore BASIC was a fun language, that's for sure. I kinda miss those days... but to get them back would mean regressing all the way to childhood. Heh. (I'm 28) But we did have GEOS for it, and I never could figure out why you'd want to move a joystick around to point at shit and click on it to make more shit happen. Worse yet, the thing was so slow that you could only open a raw text file editor, and maybe a small graphics editor. Not much you could do, really. Back then "piracy" was called "fair use". But I haven't seen a game since the Amiga days that had the kind of gameplay there was back then. It seems like they've replaced the part of the game that requires intelligence and imagination with 3d graphics. Questing in Ultima is still an experience that has yet to be remade with a newer game, at least from what I've played, and I'll admit I haven't played much. Ever since Wolfenstein came out and nobody can tell me if it's based on the old Muse game or not I just haven't had much interest in games. But if I were to start a gaming project right now, it'd be a isometric version of the old Castle Wolfenstein game. That game was pretty terrifying for the day (and one of the first, iirc, that used real speach), and I can't even imagine how terrifying it can be with modern computers, surround-sound, and so forth.
The fact that back then I could install Linux w/ X on a 486DX w/ 4Mb ram and a 170Mb hdd and have a pretty usable little system says a lot. X was crap ugly and not user friendly but you could connect to the Net and telnet or web browse easier than under Windows. I had a 2400baud modem so browsing without images was pretty common. ASCII/ANSI/RIP artwork was pretty much the rule.
Well, I'd gotten away from computers by the time Linux was useful as more than a toy. I remember hearing about it, but I didn't have a PC so I didn't care. I liked the idea, and had I gone into PCs right then I would've screwed with it. Anything was better than DOS. I hated DOS then, and I hate it now. :) I'm firmly opposed to a command-line based interface. I was working on GUIs on the C-64 just because I didn't like the interface. Of course, they were impossible to use, but it was fun anyway. :)
I'd say Microsoft was a monopoly but is not anymore (but is still trying to be).. not because of any legal action that happened as much as because opensource changed the rules. Apple has always had a small but loyal following. The inroads Linux made against Windows gave Apple some breathing room to really clean up MacOS. With the fine work Apple and the BSD folks did MacOS is finally a kickass platform. I think Windows will continue to dominate the market but would not be surprised to see them gradually reduced to a more fair market share over the next decade or so. I'd expect to see MacOS make strong inroads on the home desktop and Linux make strong inroads on the enterprise/embedded desktop. I think we'll see Microsoft start producing some really high quality software too.. due largely to the new competition.
Actually, I can't see Apple making inroads while their hardware is still so proprietary. It's not the fact that it's such a closed system (I understand it's more open than it used to be, though), it's that it's expensive. Like I said, I wouldn't buy into PPC unless it was competitively priced with PCs, and that's not likely. They could push the technology that way, though, and I'd be willing to buy into it regardless of price, but I'm not buying Apple. I want something I *know* I can upgrade, add to, and so forth. Same reason I'm not buying into the new Amigas, when/if they ever materialize.
I think we'll start seeing Microsoft producing higher quality software too, but I don't think the new competition is the biggest reason. I think the biggest reason is that they have so much previous work to build on. Remember, they've always built everything from scratch, whereas the rest of us have kept building on each other's work. We'll continue to outpace them for awhile, but they may catch up again. They did run into some limits on what they can do with Windows 2000 (ever see the presentation on winNT development vs. win2k development? Interesting stuff, that). It'll be interesting to see, though. But I don't expect Microsoft to dominate the market ever again like they did in the 90s. I think their days are over for that. They're losing fans and developers like flies that just realized the pile of shit they were on isn't shit after all.
Lots of great ideas. While we're on the topic of KDE I'd like to day something that just occurred to me: the panel has (or had; I have on obsolete version) two little bars at each end that you can use to make the panel slide over to one side of the screen. These would be better omitted and replaced with right-click options and/or a mouse gesture like in Opera and OptiMoz. As it is, if you move your mouse to the lower-left corner or the screen to click on the K button, it makes the panel slide. This isn't good.
You definitely must be using an obsolete version. At least, with Mandrake 9.0 by default there's only one shrinker button, and it's on the right away from the K menu. I don't use it, because I like to have the tasklist part of the bar visible at all times. It's probably configurable, and I can probably put one on the left if I want to, I haven't looked at it.
In all, though, this button can be eliminated for sure. The only issue is that if it requires a mouse gesture, then it's not immediately obvious to a user. But a right-click option is good, especially if the user knows to right-click on stuff to get options. Since you can right-click for options on the rest of the panel, it would be quite intuitive.
And the top Windows UI improvment im my book: move the contents of the Programs menu to the top level, and categorize them. And have a favorites menu for programs you use often so you don't have to go through the deep hierarchy.
This is a good idea, with only one major problem. :) Aftermarket developers tend to populate the start menu according to the mandates of their marketing department. Now, if MS came along and said "Here's the categorical structure for the start menu, here's the API for you to use, USE IT" then they'd probably do it. What are the chances MS will actually do that, though? Heh. I do get sick of seeing crap in the start menu that's referenced by the company name. Even Free Software projects tend to reference by project name.
We Free Software developers can address the issue at least partially, and it'll satisfy other developers. Just use the hierarchy that is already used in KDE. It is my understanding that KDE and GNOME are working together on making some things similar between the two (for interoperability), and this is something that they should address. It's a no-brainer, for sure. :) So we can just follow the same scheme for Windows, where an application will make the folder for the hierarchy if it's not already there.
I'd also like a side panel that contains icons for each category in the start menu and stays on all the time, like the panel. And then you click on the icon and the menu expands completely to show you all of the choices there. That would eliminate would hunt-and-click to navigate the hierarchy. Some will complain that it clutters the screen, though. They would probably also complain if they used my desktop, though. :)
It would be a good idea, if it isn't already there in some form, to add a mouse-gestures binding that's just like the keybindings. Solid interface that people are already acquainted with, standard definitions that can be customized. Integrated with the desktop would make it a good thing. :)
My fave - the CTRL+Enter which fills in the "www." and ".com" in IE's location bar. Ideally, you'd be able to configure ATL+Enter and/or Shift+Enter for .org and .edu or something...
My personal favorite IE shortcut is CTL-ALT-DEL. I find that the most useful shortcut in Windows actually. The only shortcut I can image that's more useful is to get my woodcutting ax and...
(two clicks to run this program, unless you have it configured for one click, but then get ready to confuse people who actually got used to double clicking, because they double click everything, even web links!)
I got a chuckle out of this. check this out:
My wife works with windows at work, and she comes home to KDE and tries to double-click shit all the time. The end result is that everytime she does something, she gets two instances of the program in memory. It confuses her for like half a second, and then either she realizes what she did or I bitch at her "Quit double-clicking everything! It's consistent, dammit. Single-click everything. If it doesn't work, it's a BUG."
Little side thing: You know how ghostbusters starts out with that ooooo, scary noise? The eerie stuff?
Well, MPLayer checks for instances of itself in memory and pauses itself if there's already an instance running. This is good because it sucks up 50% of my CPU when it's running, and that's just playing from a DVD.
So, this one night, my wife decides she wants to watch ghostbusters. About half-way through the movie, my daughter needed to go poop, but she didn't want to miss the movie. So I paused it for her. She goes poop, and while she's doing that, after a couple of seconds we start hearing this eerie music. Suffice it to say, it was quite spooky while watching ghostbusters.
Of course, all it was was the second instance of MPlayer playing ghostbusters because my wife had double-clicked again. heh.
Seriously, though, I whole-heartedly agree with you that interfaces suck these days. In fact, I have a hard time sometimes "proving" that KDE is easier to use than Windows, just because things in KDE could be better. However, I'll counter some of your statements:
The intuitive way would be to categorize programs. That's how they do it in linux. It's how I categorize my programs in Windows 2000 (though I have to manually hack stuff around, and that breaks the uninstallers a little). Yeah, it's not always easy to put everything into unique categories, but it's a heck of a lot easier than having a flat list of mixed between company names and program names.
True, all true. However, ideally, a user shouldn't have to navigate deep hierarchies to get to what they want. I saw something, and I forget where I saw it, that showed that if you eliminate the top-level part of the hierarchy, you can increase the user's efficiency when chosing an application by 50%. There is a point of diminishing returns, though. But the article did address the speed involved in having to read a long start menu vs a short start menu.
If the taskbar were just a vanilla taskbar, then maybe the masses would have taken to the concept of "if I see a name on this bar, that means that the program/application with this name is doing something even though I can't see it".
I have to disagree with this. I have a whole ton of shortcuts on the panel, and I use them more than I use the K menu. That's because I've put some menus (movies and stuff, Networking/WWW, Multimedia) to reduce the hierarchy, and specific applications that I use a LOT. I also have one or two that I don't use a lot, but when I need them I prefer them to just be there. Anyway, my point. :) In KDE, the panel has the sections clearly differentiated from one another. The part that shows running applications is clear from the part that shows all of your desktops, which in turn is quite clear from the part with all your shortcuts. My wife found herself naturally using it, and she's very much in the school that doesn't realize a computer can do more than one thing at a time. (It's mostly a frame of mind, near as I can tell, she can really only focus on one or two things at a time, and she has a serious problem with task-switching. She's like a DOS kernel. :) )
But there are improvements to be made here as well. :) For example, for all th
I was running some Linux already in '95.. on my grand ole 486DX. I was using a plain old X desktop without any of these fancy desktop enviroments. Back when the Linux desktop really did look like shit. (But hey it ran in 4M of memory.) :)
Wish I could've been there. I didn't even have a computer myself, and when I finally did have one, it had windows. I didn't even know until a little over a year ago that there was something else available for a PC. I've been using Linux ever since then, though. :) (I'd like to buy into PPC, actually, but not if I have to buy a Mac. I'd run Linux on it, and I'd really like to see some PPC competition in the PC business)
Win95's one big bonus IMO was when they intergrated TCP/IP. Connecting to the web with Win3.1 or DOS was just a pain in the ass. Allowing long file names was pretty nice too. I don't remember ever having DOS/Win3.1 crash the way Win9x did though and files were generally organized in a more logical way. Actually I still have a DOS/Win3.1 box being used in my business. It's still working just fine so there is no reason to change it.
As a matter of fact, I never used DOS in the first place, so I was just talking out of my ass there. :) I'm an old amiga hacker, and I left computers for a number of years for personal reasons, and during that time Commodore went under and Windows 95 and 98 came out. And Me, and win2k. Oh yeah.
Leaving the command line behind was a huge mistake. Make an OS that even a blind three fingered ape can use and everyone will get used to blindly using a three finger keystroke to fix every problem. My experience has been that total computer illiterates learn to use Linux faster than experienced Win/Mac users. They don't think it's hard because they've never been trained to expect it to be chimp-easy.
Of this I only partially agree. I think the command line is a necessary part of the OS, and I can't imagine an OS where it isn't necessary. Sometimes you've just gotta open up a terminal to fix something. I also think that the GUI should allow you to do everything the command line does, sorta. As far as troubleshooting and fixing things and administering the system, the GUI should handle it. But how the hell do you script with a GUI? Shell scripting is the most useful thing you can possibly have for automating custom shit. Without it, what can you do? Sure, you have .bat files, but MS's scripting is so primitive... It's the highest level programming you can do, and it's something you can reasonably expect 75% of computer users to be able to do. Why? Because it's simple english, that's why. They know that "ls" lists a directory. They can certainly understand that putting it in `` on a command line means put the output of the command on the command line. So if you're doing a rm `ls` it should remove everything in the directory, right? (Primitive example, I know, but I made a script for ecasound that normalizes the whole directory by doing a ecanormalize on the output of an ls command, with a simple for loop) I find that both the gui and the command line are useful metaphors for using a computer, and both superior to the BASIC interface of previous personal computers. But there are always things you'll be able to do with a GUI that you just can't do with a command line, and vice versa. With bash shell scripting you can do things that you'd have to write an entire application to do with a gui.
Seriously, I really really think that MS got handed their monopoly, and their anticompetitive practices didn't make a difference at the time. And they're not going to make a difference now, either. I've seen numbers putting Macintoshes at 5% of the market (possibly higher), and numbers indicating that Linux has at least 5% of the market. That means Microsoft only has 90%, at the most. That might be considered a monopoly, but it's not. Both Mac and Linux usage is on the rise, and Windows is on the decline, and that's an important trend. If the GPL is like a disease, then let the plague run rampant, I say. :)
I'm not going to quote your post because I happen to agree with much of it. :)
Pilots' salaries are very much tied to results, when you think about it. At least, they should be as well. If a pilot *does* crash, and is determined to be at fault, what exactly happens to him? Presuming he lives, of course. Much like the captain at sea, the pilot should probably be the last person to leave the plane. Ah, the wonderful role of leadership. :)
Yes, it is true that our education system has a LOT of problems. I recall my 10-th grade biology teacher saying that he's not allowed to talk about God and religion in school, then giving us the probability that a certain few proteins would combine in the exact right way to make a self-replicating molecule and saying that that's where he think God stepped in. I also recall the prejudice I met with from faculty (and students) when I firmly stated my desire not to pledge allegiance to the flag because I had already pledged my allegiance to freedom.
Indeed, the education system needs lots of reform. I'll tell you one place I think it needs reform. Can the whole "teaching as profession" attitude. Personally, I consider it part of my obligation to the human race (NOT society) to spend my retirement years teaching, rather than being a playboy. I'll be a playboy now and forever, but I need to spend my retirement passing on what I've learned in life to whatever generation is in school at that time. So I will, when the time comes.
But should morality be censored out of teaching entirely? I'm not so sure about that. As adults we have a collective responsibility to the kids, not just our own. We also have a responsibility to each other not to step on each other's toes and raise their kids for them. Realistically, a kid spends more waking time in school (including studying and homework, if they still do that) than he does with his parents. That's quite an influence, and to remove morality from it completely would be a mistake, IMO. On the other hand, whose definition of morality should be accepted? It's a tricky situation, and both sides of the coin have nothing but the best of intentions for the kids. Personally, I don't have an opinion either way because I haven't resolved the issue for myself, yet.
And finally, what qualifies someone to be a teacher? A college degree and a certificate, last time I checked. "I should think you Jedis would have more respect for the difference between knowledge, and um huh uh, wisdom." (The only quote that made it out of that movie that matters :) ) And because of the low pay, they have to really *want* to do it. I figure it's the same as chosing a leader. The person who wants the job is the person who is least qualified to do it. :)
So yeah, in a perfect world, I think that my points about teachers and salaries are important, but still only to a certain extent. If you teach on the tail end of your life, like I say it should be done, then you're probably going to collect retirement or something (social security? heh). So a high salary isn't needed, you've already got income. But as a profession, the story's quite different.
Mostly I responded because I wanted to demonstrate a "mission critical" profession that is very low paid. That's all.
Now, I hate Microsoft more than the next guy, but...
Remember how many copies of Windows 95 Microsoft sold to people that didn't even own computers? For the most part people are sheep and take what they are given.
Where was GNU/Linux in '95? Wasn't KDE still using a then-proprietary widget? Was there a GNOME? What OS exactly was available at a competitive price to Windows?
You forget, in 1995 Commodore was going down the tubes, if it wasn't bankrupt already. Apple has been going out of business for the last 15 years, and they are showing every sign that they will continue to be going out of business for the next 15 years. Besides, PCs in 1995 costed much teh same as now (with exceptions: the used market wasn't as proliferate as it is now), and Macs costed much the same, ie 2x the price of a PC. What did PCs come with? What else was available?
Supply and demand, baby, supply and demand. If you supply something, and people demand it, they will buy it from you. If two people supply it, now you've got competition.
All other things aside about illegal anticompetitive practices and so forth, exactly how many choices were available in 1995? I remember windows 95 being kickin-ass when it came out. It was great! It only crashed every couple of hours, much stabler than DOS 6 or the Amiga, or even Mac System 7 (I don't even know if sys8 or 9 were out yet). It had real multi-threading, with a standard (for low-end computing) memory management model (read: none). Huge vendor and developer support. In 1995, Windows 95 was a beautiful operating system. The whole world collectively left the command line behind, in 1995. (They woulda done it sooner if 3.1 hadn't been so shitty, and it was shitty compared to its contemporaries)
There are lots of reasons Microsoft got their monopoly, but I strongly suspect they would've gotten it without their anticompetitive practices. And they wouldn't be losing customers left and right right now for their business ethics.
This may be an unpopular view, but this effort reminds me of the way another desktop environment developed. Creating more and more apps that rely on the mozilla codebase makes it central to the desktop... rather like IE.
To my knowledge, no desktops require Mozilla to work. Sure, GNOME has Nautilus (still? Or did they shitcan it?) which has Mozilla embedded, and Galeon is the GNOME browser, which has Mozilla embedded. However, and this is important. If Mozilla goes a direction these guys don't like, they can fork the code or put in a new renderer. YOU are not stuck with Mozilla, and you can change your directory browser (as far as I know, in KDE you can) and your default browser, and so forth.
The idea of making the browser integral with the desktop isn't inherently a bad idea, it's just that Microsoft did it specifically to drive Netscape out of business. Also, in doing so, Microsoft opened up holes in their system so big that Windows is now a whore to script kiddies. Any embedded MOzilla application doesn't run the risk at this time. (it might one day, but I don't think so)
It might be an unpopular view as far as Mozilla is concerned, just try to keep in mind that when you're talking about Free Software, the situation changes. It doesn't make it right (although in this case I think it is right), but it does change the way you have to evaluate the situation.
I think there are two basic architecture issues that turn a lot of people off. The first is Javascript (ECMAscript). The only place this language has a foothold is in HTML. If the real goal is to have people write general applications, nobody uses javascript and so this meets a non-demand.
I'm not so certain Mozilla was created to meet this non-demand as it was to make Microsoft's worst fears about Netscape come true. IIRC, MS went after Netscape when they realized that the browser was a likely candidate for being a true cross-platform development platform, with complete applicaitons and everything. Realizing this, they had to crush netscape or else run the risk of having a whole slew of applications come out that didn't require Windows.
So, while going under, Netscape thought "Well, why don't we just make those worst fears come true? By opening up the source code and making it Free Software with a newer BSD-style license, Microsoft can't kill it, and nobody need fear the GPL with it."
Thus did the great lizard begin walking the murky depths of the ocean. Let's summon up the Lizard by developing applications with it, and it'll walk up from the Puget Sound and stomp it's way across East Seattle, sink down into Lake Washington, and once again arise. Spitting fire all the way through downtown Bellevue on its way into Redmond, where it will destroy the One Redmond Way.
Damn, I'm glad I live in eastgate. I'll get a ringside seat without having to move out of the Lizard's way.
Once us web developers wake up and more of us start using CSS and using relative font definitions (like 100%, or 85%, etc...) then we won't have to worry about that. Of course, it won't help with your web comics, unless they go to using CSS and CSS2 to position text on the screen... hmm... that could be interesting...
If w3c ever fucking wakes up and gives us a property that lets us set an image size in percent, then the browsers could have you modify that percent much like you do text. For example, right now text is by default 100%, but with your browser you can map that to 120%, right? There's a proportion there, but I'm sure you can follow it without me doing the math. :)
Of course, Mozilla can do it already, at least the infrastructure is there, they just need to add it. I don't doubt that it's coming, so I'm not worried about it. But automatic image resizing, to me, implies that it resizes with the text.
Now tell me again why pilots are overpaid?
Ok, try this one on.
Considering that your kids (and mine) are the future of this world, would you feel comfortable paying their teachers a pilot's salary or teacher's salary? Mind you, too many mistakes by the adults in your kids lives can cause your kids to go throwing bombs and shooting up the school and stuff. Don't believe me? Read this
yeah, I know. That's just reactionary crap I just said. Fuck it. :)
Say I am a big (but non-criminal) guy walking around city block in shabby dress, carrying a sign and asking some random people if I can do some work for them. If someone did ask me to wash their car, carry a heavy bag home etc, I would do it to the best of my ability and bring money to my family, if any. But something tells me I might get some handouts but no work. In an agricultural society, on the other hand, my neighbors would make good use of my muscles to plow a field, dig out a tree, move stones and so on.
Problem is, it's just not that simple. Know where the best place to get the best drugs is? You guessed it, a welfare house. Wherever I've seen poverty, I've found drugs running rampant. People that can buy food, but instead spend their limited income on drugs. Sure, that's a separate problem in itself, but in my experience (lengthy at that), a drug problem is usually self-imposed, and it takes direct, personal responsibility to beat it. Those guys standing on the corner wanting a penny? "Will work for food?" It's a common joke that they're just gonna buy beer or drugs with it, but it's true. There are certainly exceptions to all of this, but the exceptions aren't the rule. The exceptions will climb out of the hole themselves, and it's to the exceptions that welfare, foodstamps, and unemployment are actually beneficial. (Obviously, when in the situation, I was the exception and climbed out)
It doesn't take anything to go to your local food kitchen. Most towns I've been in have something like it. Usually it's a soup kitchen run by a church or charity. In Austin, TX there's the PHASE program that gives out food and clothes and stuff. THe Salvation Army is usually good for a meal, but I never hit them up personally because I understand that they make you pray or something first. Most churches, if you just knock on the door, will be willing to help or at least direct you someplace where you can find it. Here in Bellevue, WA, there's Hopelink, that gives out groceries once a week. Just a typical foodbank. I've eaten quite a few meals prepared with this stuff that were both tasty and healthy.
What all of these resources I've mentioned have in common is that they find ways to transcend language difficulties and other people skills.
Keep in mind that I"m talking about a "demographic", or rather, a group of people that exhibit these traits for the most part on an individual level. There are always exceptions. I even talked to this guy who had spanged up enough change for a couple of beers who was thinking of going to stay with his sister, he was getting sick of the "alternative to working", as he put it.
People do choose to be beggars, and beggars really are chosers. Just like you chose to work, people chose not to work.
For that reason, the charities and stuff that are out there trying to help these people are quite successful. They give the help that's needed when it's needed by the people who will actually use it to make a permanent improvement in their lives. Some will always fall through the cracks, though.
The so-called "dark spot" is not a feature of Jupiter, but of Uranus.
Was that intended as the pun I read it to be?
The world hunger problem is about money, not lack of food. Zero-gravity growth experiments and terraforming won't solve that problem.
But it's not a problem you can just throw money at and expect it to be solved, either. I've known many "hungry and homeless" people who were so because they refused to take direct, personal responsibility for themselves. My kids eat because my wife and I take that kind of responsibility seriously, and we don't have any money. There will always be hungry people who won't eat because of a basic lack of responsibility. In this country of avarice, it's hard for me to picture a family that can't eat, but it's easy to picture a family that won't eat. Plenty of free food available (charities and so forth) if you just look for it. And before anybody chimes in with "you don't know what you're talking about, you've never been hungry!" I'd like to point out that I have been "hungry and homeless", and by taking direct, personal responsibility for the situation I corrected it.
This same fact doesn't necessarily apply to the rest of the world, however. For the rest of the world, it's still not so simple. Send food to Africa? Why? You know that the governments are gonna take it and not properly distribute it where it's intended, right? Corruption...
It's just not a problem you can throw money at and expect it to be fixed. Just keep in mind that if you give a man a fish, he only eats for a day. Perhaps education really is a better investment?
Are we now debating space policy on the basis of marketing tag lines?
Looks like it, so while we're at it, why can't we build a new space shuttle based on Windows (Where do you want to go today?)????
If you can be bothered to read the constitution [cornell.edu] then you would realize that America was never designed to have a standing military. The only purpose of the military was to combat a real threat to the nation (ie war). If you think about it this way, the US has been in a state of "war" for over 60 years...which seems kind of ridiculous...
Long gone are the days when any given man with a shotgun could be quickly trained to be the finest of soldiers. War has become so technological that it's now a full-time job to maintain a military that is technologically advanced enough to be effective in the world today.
Don't get me wrong, I agree that we shouldn't have a standing military, philosophically speaking, for the reasons you outlined. I just don't see another way. I think that privatizing military R&D would just encourage the already corrupt and bloated multinationals in a bad way. Perhaps a restructuring of our government that takes the military away from the executive branch? With the military as an integral part of the government (as they will always be so long as the president is commander-in-chief) we will always be a stone's throw away from a military dictatorship. The only thing the president needs to make this happen is the confidence and loyalty of the military, and he needs this dedication to be given above the dedication a man gives to his country.
But if we could make it a public-funded institution that isn't actually part of the government that requires Congress to authorize action, we'd have a slow-to-war military. They'd be quick-to-defend us, but slow to go fight wars in other lands. There's a lot of dynamics of the suggestion that I'm not addressing, I'll admit. :)
Making German trains run on time likely has little if anything to do with IBM contributions to the state of the art in COMPUTING.
This is true! Dude, you're missing the point! It demonstrates, with proof (like it's really needed), that IBM was around and working before Billy boy was born. That is *all*.
For the record, though, IBM also provided the Nazis with cutting-edge information technology that they were able to use to keep track of the extermination project and check its progress and so forth. Early database design, actually, with a very early computing setup. I don't know if it was credited as being a computer, but I *do* know from other articles I read that they provided more technology than just train scheduling. They also provided specific technology for the application of transporting Jews to be slaughtered, rather than just typical military, civilian, or cargo style information technology.
That's all irrelevant, I only used that article to show that IBM was in business and multinational before Billy boy was even a swimming sperm.
I wasn't speculating on the age of IBM. I already know that IBM started out long before the digital computer. I was specifically speculating on hard research devoted to computing topics. When I speculated on IBM's contributions predating Bill Gates, I meant to imply that such contributions likely preceed Bill Gates's BIRTH. I wasn't refering to the shaking down of MITS.
Am I just not following the discussion? You speculated that IBM's contributions started before Bill Gates was even a gleam in his daddy's eye, right? So I provided a link that showed that IBM was around building their evil empire during WWII as proof that IBM has been around far longer than Gates, to support your post. Eh?
Did I hit a speed bump?
I'm not copying anything from your post, if anybody wants it they can read the spoiler. :)
I heard a story once, and I cannot verify its authenticity, that Tolkien wrote the LOTR first. Then he realized he needed to explain how Bilbo got the ring from Gollum and wrote the Hobbit.
It doesn't have the "patch" feel though. The Hobbit definitely feels like a prequel, but it doesn't feel like a patch. So, assuming the story I heard is true (and checking publication dates on the books should suffice, I just haven't done it), then he probably had the whole story figured out already.
How about someone comes up with a competing cure, and you use your patent to sue them into oblivion?
Well, that certainly makes a lot more sense. I'll rewatch the two movies, 'cause any excuse to watch them is probably a good one. :) The distinct impression I got from the movies is quite different, more like nobody even remembers it ever existed, and then people coming out of the woodwork to proclaim that Frodo has it and must be protected.
It's been so long since I read the Hobbit, so I don't remember much about the ring in that book. The movie for Fellowship of the Ring, of course, presents Gandalf's connecting of that ring to the One Ring as a brand-new thing he discovers only after Bilbo gets possessed by it. That's a detail that makes perfect sense to modify for the sake of the movie, since they didn't start with the Hobbit (neither did Tolkien, iirc).
The most credible source at that story was the only remaining IBM guy that worked at the office in question, who said that all he knew was that they were helping the government trains run. There was much huffing and puffing and "that gives us the final proof", but never was the final proof mentioned, just a lot of the context and possibility. It looks to me like some people are claiming that there is new evidence linking IBM to direct involvement, but no one in that story seemed to be able to describe what that evdence was, but rather to simply assert that it now existed.
Mind you, I'm not trying to open up a wound or nothing. :) I gave that link because it was at the top of google results, not because I found it credible. I only used it to show IBM was around in WWII, and in a graphic fashion at that. I probably could have made my point with less drama, but I didn't. :)
That said, I don't think we'll ever know all the ins and outs of the jewish extermination project that the Nazis mounted, and I don't know that it's necessary to know all the gory details. At least, not for me. Knowing how a madman such as he came into power is far more important to me than knowing a bunch of specifics about how it was done.
Take current politics. I'm not trying to compare George W. to Hitler, because that would be quite a stretch. However, I can see many parallels in his reign to Hitler's own rise to power that I find disconcerting. The main difference here is that we can look at Hitler's rise in a historical perspective, but we must judge current events in a contemporary fashion. Quite a limitation. In 20 years we may look back over this period of our history and say "How could we have ever drawn those conclusions?" Or, we might say "We knew it when it was happening, why didn't we stop it?"
For others, though, I realize that in order to deal with the knowledge they need to know as much about it as possible, uncovering as many details as they need to be satisfied. So long as they are looking for truth and not excuses, I don't see anything wrong with it.
As far as the IBM thing goes, I have read stories that had more detailed information than the one I linked, and there's a guy that put out a book on the subject. Seems it was more like the home office looked the other way when its german branch did business with the Nazis. Since an international corporation has to work in a variety of political situations, I have a hard time seeing the german office as doing wrong from a business perspective, but that doesn't mean I think they did right. It's a classic example of separating business and politics, which us freedom-lovers are always telling both politicians and businessmen they should do. Let history show us that it's not always the best way. :)
you can go part of the way, as the original hitch hikers guide to the Galaxy (hereafter h2g2) tv series did, and the radio play, by inserting "the book" as, I suppose, a sort of muse(?) but it still isnt the same.
I hate to say it, but you lost quite a bit of credibility with this statement. :)
Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio show. Whether or not the TV show or the book came next I am unsure of, but I can look it up if it's that important. According to Douglas Adams, each adaptation of the story took all the same dialog and changed everything else. That is, in the book, the characters said and did the same things as in the radio show, but for completely different reasons. Ditto for the tv show. In fact, he mentions feeling uncomfortable about the radio transcripts being released since that made the first work in the series that accurately represented another work in the series.
So, in this specific case, in fact, Douglas Adams proves to us that each media is completely different from the rest with different needs and different ways of conveying the story. He has, probably, the only group of stories that stand on their own in each form of media in which they are made.