This is another example of ESR ignoring the dangers of closed-source software in his devotion to "pragmatism." There is always a role for the monks of society, and RMS is the monk of free software. It's relatively easy to be a pragmatist. It takes something special to be a monk.
I don't live like RMS, but I find his insights to be important. The dystopian future from The Right to Read, especially, is being carried out in terms of years instead of decades. The secret to RMS's "fanaticism" is his long-term planning. Pragmatism seems to work now, but sooner or later closed-source is going to hurt you.
The elevator example is not that good. ESR has forgotten about elevator breakdowns. Elevators also usually include surveillance and phone-home equipment, which have implications for reliability, privacy, and vendor lock-in.
The microwave example is not that good, either. Many modern microwaves have an insanely complicated user interface, and I wouldn't mind replacing it with a more intuitive one. Not to mention what silly things you could do with a microwave if you could network it.
...some artifacts tween the gimp and firefox which built up until the screen was complete garbage...
Probably a graphics hardware problem.
The great thing about Linux is the freedom. I have a laptop where the graphics card went kaput. (Old NVIDIA thing with the thermal death.) If it were running Windows, it would start to load the graphics driver and then freeze. Sometimes it would run for a few hours before freezing.
But the great thing about Linux is that I can tell it to ignore the built-in graphics chip. Now I'm using it as a terminal with an external screen and a USB graphics chip. I couldn't do this with Windows, but it's possible with Linux.
Amazon has never had DRM on it's MP3s from day one. There's DRM on it's movie rentals, but that's expected (since you're explicitly NOT purchasing; you're "leasing")
That's not a counter-example. Amazon is in a position of weakness in the music business, so they push for openness. They're in a position of strength in book publishing, so they push their proprietary AZW format. The "leasing" argument is stupid, because it's counter to human expectation, and it doesn't apply to books.
As it turns out, DRM is a useability nightmare, so Steve Jobs convinced the record companies to let go of it. But Fairplay is still being used for videos.
Google Voice was originally a startup named GrandCentral, and it was invented to fill a personal need for a phone number that is independent of the phone carriers. Presumably, that need still exists.
the only logical conclusion of your argument is that white people are smarter than any other race.
I'm Asian-American. You whites and blacks have certainly made a mess of the place. What you need is a surge of Asians to take over your dilapidated institutions and revitalize the country.
It is 2012, not 1962. Am I seriously reading someone asking what the problem would be with disenfranchising "impoverished and minority voters"?
Ad hominem and begging the question. Just because something was supposed to be an improvement, doesn't mean it's beyond discussion now.
Personally, I do have a problem with disenfranchising minorities just for being minorities. Laws should be evenhanded and fair. But sometimes, when you judge people for the content of their character, you find that you're judging a bunch of people in a politically incorrect way. I think that behavioral problems are learned, not hereditary, but saying that a problem is environmental doesn't make it go away. (Also, I think a lot of judges are judging minorities more harshly than whites for the same crimes, but that's another problem.)
But on the average, poor people have been shown to have bad decision-making skills.
By whom? Citations please, preferably to studies that show that middle- and upper-income people are significantly better at making decisions. (Because it sure looks like a lot of rich folk have made some pretty shitty decisions recently. It wasn't poor people who invented subprime mortgages!)
Or do you mean that it's self-evident from the fact that they're poor? Because that would be your privilege talking, not your brain.
Haha, no, I'm not anywhere near rich. And I'm not judging the rest of the poor based on myself, either, even if I'm spending time responding to you instead of doing something profitable.
You're playing the structural racism card, and that's not a healthy way to play.
Why not? Structural racism is a thing. Pointing out that the policy you are advocating would be a terrible idea because it would disproportionately disenfranchise people who already suffer from the racism endemic in this nation is hardly unhealthy.
Structural racism is an unhealthy excuse against implementing a policy because it's used as an excuse against self-improvement. Or, "Darn that Clarence Thomas, how dare he adopt white culture to acquire prosperity for himself."
It's also intermingled with the idea that there is no redeeming quality in white American culture, what the Right calls "cultural relativism." Besides being a cause of political strife, this idea is an existential threat to the United States as a sovereign entity. When you train yourself to think of your country as being dominated by negative circumstances outside your control, you tend not to put much care into maintaining and strengthening it. I prefer to live in a country that's strong against enemies.
...
More ad hominem attacks, straw men, boring.
In San Francisco, Lowell Alternative High School, the public high school with the highest test scores, is 64% Asian, compared with 33% average for the city. (It's also 14% white, compared with 48% for the city. The whites must be idiots.) Kids get in based on high test scores and "other" figures of merit. One of the figures used to be race, but it was abolished in a court decision. Immediately, Lowell turned into an Asian school. After that, they tried adding proxies for race, but it turns out that the high-achievers among the poor are also Asian. I'm not sure what they're doing now to try to increase their diversity.
Played another way, why don't we extend the franchise to undocumented Hispanics, who may have just as much stake in our
it's a lot easier to bribe a few dozen than an entire electorate.
These days, do the politicians actually bribe an entire electorate? Seems like they still bribe only a few dozen. But instead of the few dozen being the civil servants, they're bribing the demagogues who run the media.
Okay, technically, campaign ads don't count as bribery. But note how the demagogues talk only about the people who run ads, and not about people who have interesting issues to bring to the voters. They're reporting the election like it's a popularity contest, and it makes me sick.
See, I think that your proposal to exclude "entitlement" beneficiaries is just cover for discriminating against impoverished and minority voters.
What's the problem with that? A few of the poor might be civically involved and responsible, such as yourself. But on the average, poor people have been shown to have bad decision-making skills. Also, "causality" mentioned "benefits" because he would prefer if decisions were not made by people who stand to benefit at the expense of the rest of the country.
Also, "minority"? Are you serious? You're playing the structural racism card, and that's not a healthy way to play. Oh no, we can't increase our standards, or else a group that is disproportionately represented in the lower score will be disadvantaged. Played one way, why can't they be like Asians, who suffered prejudice and came out ahead? Played another way, why don't we extend the franchise to undocumented Hispanics, who may have just as much stake in our country as we do?
I also don't think people understand how complicated it all is, and how impossible it is to deliver on all the expectations with a fraction of the money. It wears me out a bit.
So, disappoint someone. Deliver on fewer expectations, the expectations that parents actually care about, and lay off all the statisticians and administrative assistants that are needed to comply with Title 1. I'm sure that Christy (by Catherine Marshall) was not concerned about federal funding.
Oh, and while I'm talking of impossible dreams, let's get corporations out of politics. The teacher unions are a scourge on the nation.
But that's not my call. In local school board elections, I've never voted for a member of a teacher's union, but they keep being elected. The non-members I vote for never win.
BerliOS definitely has publicity problems. Either that, or the people running it don't have much of a passion for keeping it running, because the first I heard about them having problems was about them deciding to shut it down.
Contrast that to, say, Wikipedia, Blender, or The Document Foundation. Major publicity when they needed money, with progress tallies and everything. Especially Wikipedia.
Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.
Actually, the Alphas have a basic x86 emulator in their massive ROMs, so they're able to initialize standard VGA cards. Note that derinax has an ATI Radeon 9000, which certainly did not come in an Alpha version.
It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.
How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
I've highlighted the relevant word for you. It's because these are companies with bureaucratic processes and hidden agendas. In these alliances, they cooperate on low-level stuff but try to preserve some sort of "secret sauce," to the detriment of the whole, and that's when they're working properly. Very few companies have the successful dictator like Steve Jobs of Apple.
I was aware of the N900. I still use an N800. I just didn't need an upgrade yet, and I was waiting for step 5 of the 5-step mass market process for Maemo (becoming concerned about bureaucratic interference when Meego became the company's strategy and they decided to dump Debian for Linux Foundation silliness), when the Elop Effect happened. So, no, I don't think the N900 was successful.
I love building my own stuff, more than most/.ers. Anything electronic in the house is done my yours truly. As is most cooking. Bicycles I build myself. I even build by own car and I even persuade the dealer to allow me do so.
The more I know how it's assembled, the less I have the ability to build myself. When you build your own electronics, are you actually making masks and lithographing the chips? Or even soldering the components together on the motherboard? Life is just too short, and budget too small.
Building your own stuff is great when your labour results in having stuff finished as it's supposed to be. And here's where IKEA just isn't worth the effort. After huge amounts of labour you almost always wind up with particle board stuff. Ugly, without any personality whatsoever to it and heavy as lead. Ever tried rearranging average IKEA furniture? Ever moved house with IKEA furniture?
[Ikea furniture] is never finished perfectly -unaligned panels and doors, the works. How are you going to die happily when your bank account is full to the brim and you own IKEA furniture?
Ugh, don't remind me. Someone gave me an Ikea thing. I spent a little time assembling it, trying to align it. And then I put stuff inside it, and it warped. Ikea indicates bad taste, if nothing else.
But I don't think it's my place to judge someone else's values. Maybe your acquaintance will be laid off, and then he'll need that full bank account. Even if he'll be fine, there are other uses for money.
General idea seems good, but I dont really understand the fascination with drobos for anyone who does any kind of serious IT work. A freenas box with a proper hardware RAID card can be had (sans drives) for about half the price of an equivalent (sans drives) drobo, is faster, supports ZFS, and has built in Unison | Rsync | ftp.... etc. It also doesnt use some poorly documented "kind-of RAID".
Why would I want a drobo?
Some people want to get into cloud-type services because they don't want the hassle of configuring it all themselves. The Drobo is designed to be really easy to use.
Sure, Windows 7 sucks, but for different reasons than you think.
Having had the displeasure of working with this abomination at work, I can tell you that whoever thought these "enhancements" to the "user experience" would be an improvement should be taken out back and beaten to bloody a pulp with baseball bat.
You're just used to Windows XP's abusive interface, having had almost 10 years to get used to it.
What used to be a simple process to change, such as changing the default path for a network drive, is now a convoluted mess that requires three times as much effort.
On the other hand, what used to be tedious to change, such as moving a window to the left or right half of the screen, are now much simpler. I dare say people are more likely to do window management than change My Document settings.
You cannot find anything quickly or easily in 7. Everything is a search. I don't want to fucking search for something when I know where it is.
Ah, the joy of ignorance. Microsoft changes where everything is every release or two of Windows. I find search much easier, so I don't have to worry about the latest place where Microsoft hid the settings.
It is impossible to see every program installed on your PC in one location. Who the fuck thought hiding things was a great idea?
As for me, it looks like I'll have to take the plunge and go to Linux (and thrash about with that during the learning process).
Hiding things? Have you been paying attention to GNOME? Not having one location to see every program? You would be disappointed in Linux.
Calling Bill Gates ruthless and greedy, this is controversial? It seems rather a compliment compared with what other labels you could legitimately attach to him.
Some texts such as Every Day Math[sic] from the University of Chicago does [sic] a much better job at integrating all sorts of skills and teaching in a much more holistic method.
... Have you actually tried teaching using that curriculum? A few posts up and down from your post, I see plenty of complaints about Everyday Math (including a few from parents not knowing its name and complaining about the "spiral curriculum"), and few defenses. The only eager defense I've heard about it was from kids who like the tedious diagonal grid style of multiplication (if someone else builds the grid), especially the ones that are too special-ed to multiply numbers the normal way.
I think the biggest problem is that Everyday Math really depends on excellent teaching, and on students being ready and eager. If teachers and parents don't understand the material, and if the kids don't care, then Everyday Math is a big waste of time. Furthermore, it teaches confusion by introducing all sorts of weird terms and symbols that have no meaning when you graduate from it.
A good math teacher, given free rein, will teach well no matter the assigned curriculum. A bad teacher should at least teach something useful when given a traditional curriculum. Cue standard arguments about teacher freedom and how horrible bad teachers actually can be.
In my own experience (a volunteer tutor), the schools in San Francisco switched to Everyday Math last year. For the first year, the teachers slavishly tried to spiral, going into statistics then arithmetic then factors like some Russian dance, and everybody got dizzy. My workload seemingly quadrupled, because I was the only tutor in the organization with the mathematical background to keep up. This year, the teachers are taking a more moderate approach, concentrating on single subjects and breaking the spirals apart. Everybody's less confused, but the kids especially love how few problems they solve on each assignment. A few teachers are supplementing the Everyday Math curriculum with traditional drill assignments.
How many "real" word problems have you had to solve in the last ten years?
I like word problems. (The kids hate them.) Being able to translate issues into solvable equations and back is a very useful skill. Granted, most often it comes in terms like, "Which block of cheese will give me the best value?" rather than "Two trains are speeding at each other. One is traveling at 25 mph and the other at 40 mph. How long until they collide?"
My problem is that eTextbooks suck. Sure, I like the idea of paying less, not printing as much, carrying around less paper. But the eTextbooks that I've used are poor translations of paper.
Last year, I tried a Coursesmart online textbook. Flipping from page to page has a significant delay that reminds me of e-paper. Even worse, the page was formatted like a paper book scan. Reading the thing on my laptop involved separate actions to scroll down the page and then go to the next page. Or I could flip my laptop monitor to portrait mode and read with my laptop on its side. Zooming in was not an option, because I would have had to scroll horizontally on every line. No wonder Coursesmart has such a low market share.
This year, I saw some elementary school kids using Pearson online textbooks. The user experience there is even worse. Each page is like a scan, again, but you see the page only in a small frame. When you resize your browser window, the frame doesn't resize to fill it. However, the kids have learned not to read texts (both San Francisco Unified School District and Catholic schools), so the usability problems don't bother them. Besides, they use the textbooks mainly for the questions at the end of the chapter.
Then I tried piracy. I can't find all the books that I need, but the ones that I find are, at worst, better than the legal version. For example, the PDF versions can be opened in any PDF reader, which have vastly better scrolling than the online texts. The better pirated texts use OCR, and can be opened in a program that reflows text depending on zoom and window size.
Given this track record, I don't expect the textbook publishers to create compelling eTextbooks.
Windows is still not ready for desktop use
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Ubuntu on a Dime
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· Score: 1
Linux persists because it's designed to be a desktop operating system. Windows is an adaptation of a standalone workstation operation system. All of the software is there in Linux, and it gets out of your way and has a community backing it up by writing professional software, maintaining hordes of stable device drivers, and taking responsibility to fix bugs instead of hiding them for as long as possible.
No offense intended to Windows users, but there's a reason companies pay developers to write open source software: It can pay to collaborate instead of fighting with everybody. Closed source can inspire great performance by individuals, but what makes a great OS is more than good ideas; it's good execution, support, and really boring work like driver development.
In addition, while I use Windows and tolerate it, I'm never going to fool myself into thinking that this software matches professional level stuff. OpenSSH beats the pants off Remote Desktop, Active Directory, CIFS, and Homegroup, no competition, it's not even funny. There simply is no competition once you get past the fiefdom model of development.
I will always have a Windows machine somewhere to keep my hand in. But I wouldn't want to drop it into an office. For all its flaws, Linux makes desktop computing fun, fast, and relatively reliable.
FTFY.
Really, when I read, "being there to issue updates in a timely manner," or "good interface design," the only reason I didn't laugh was because I felt like crying.
PowerPC was not a failure. PowerPC's were sold by IBM in their POWER architectures and had quite a bit of success there as well.
IBM was selling POWER before PowerPC, and it took until 1998 with the POWER3 before POWER chips were based on PowerPC.
I'm surprised you didn't note that all 3 of the current generation game consoles now have PowerPC processors.
However, the failure that I remember was the PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP). It was supposed to usher in a golden age for RISC, with cloners helping IBM and Motorola to develop faster processors by buying lots of them, like they do with Intel, and with lots of operating systems including MacOS and Windows.
Instead, development was bogged down in territorial squabbles, no cloners built anything except the Mac clones, and Microsoft soon discontinued their Windows NT port. Apple's experiment with clones hurt the company a great deal. Now, outside of IBM and the game consoles, the only systems using PowerPC are embedded, and PowerPC is nowhere near the performance lead.
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This is another example of ESR ignoring the dangers of closed-source software in his devotion to "pragmatism." There is always a role for the monks of society, and RMS is the monk of free software. It's relatively easy to be a pragmatist. It takes something special to be a monk.
I don't live like RMS, but I find his insights to be important. The dystopian future from The Right to Read, especially, is being carried out in terms of years instead of decades. The secret to RMS's "fanaticism" is his long-term planning. Pragmatism seems to work now, but sooner or later closed-source is going to hurt you.
The elevator example is not that good. ESR has forgotten about elevator breakdowns. Elevators also usually include surveillance and phone-home equipment, which have implications for reliability, privacy, and vendor lock-in.
The microwave example is not that good, either. Many modern microwaves have an insanely complicated user interface, and I wouldn't mind replacing it with a more intuitive one. Not to mention what silly things you could do with a microwave if you could network it.
...some artifacts tween the gimp and firefox which built up until the screen was complete garbage...
Probably a graphics hardware problem.
The great thing about Linux is the freedom. I have a laptop where the graphics card went kaput. (Old NVIDIA thing with the thermal death.) If it were running Windows, it would start to load the graphics driver and then freeze. Sometimes it would run for a few hours before freezing.
But the great thing about Linux is that I can tell it to ignore the built-in graphics chip. Now I'm using it as a terminal with an external screen and a USB graphics chip. I couldn't do this with Windows, but it's possible with Linux.
not all companies follow that.
Amazon has never had DRM on it's MP3s from day one. There's DRM on it's movie rentals, but that's expected (since you're explicitly NOT purchasing; you're "leasing")
That's not a counter-example. Amazon is in a position of weakness in the music business, so they push for openness. They're in a position of strength in book publishing, so they push their proprietary AZW format. The "leasing" argument is stupid, because it's counter to human expectation, and it doesn't apply to books.
As it turns out, DRM is a useability nightmare, so Steve Jobs convinced the record companies to let go of it. But Fairplay is still being used for videos.
Apple pushes for standards and Microsoft attempted to lock users to Internet Explorer based technologies.
Apple pushes for standards? No, not really.
Like many companies, they push for standards only if they're in a position of weakness. When they achieve dominance, they lock things down.
Examples of when they were in a position of weakness:
Operating systems, so they released Darwin with MacOS X
Web browsers, so they released Webkit with Safari
TCP/IP service discovery, so they released DNS-SD and MDNS with Bonjour
Examples of when they were in a position of strength:
Facetime
Fairplay
App Store
Google Voice was originally a startup named GrandCentral, and it was invented to fill a personal need for a phone number that is independent of the phone carriers. Presumably, that need still exists.
the only logical conclusion of your argument is that white people are smarter than any other race.
I'm Asian-American. You whites and blacks have certainly made a mess of the place. What you need is a surge of Asians to take over your dilapidated institutions and revitalize the country.
Just kidding. Actually, I'm part-Asian. And I think that everybody just gotta keep fucking everybody till they're all the same color.
It is 2012, not 1962. Am I seriously reading someone asking what the problem would be with disenfranchising "impoverished and minority voters"?
Ad hominem and begging the question. Just because something was supposed to be an improvement, doesn't mean it's beyond discussion now.
Personally, I do have a problem with disenfranchising minorities just for being minorities. Laws should be evenhanded and fair. But sometimes, when you judge people for the content of their character, you find that you're judging a bunch of people in a politically incorrect way. I think that behavioral problems are learned, not hereditary, but saying that a problem is environmental doesn't make it go away. (Also, I think a lot of judges are judging minorities more harshly than whites for the same crimes, but that's another problem.)
By whom? Citations please, preferably to studies that show that middle- and upper-income people are significantly better at making decisions. (Because it sure looks like a lot of rich folk have made some pretty shitty decisions recently. It wasn't poor people who invented subprime mortgages!)
Do you ignore the word, "average"? The most recent study I can think of is the one showing how being poor depletes your decision-making energy, so you have less energy to make good decisions.
Or do you mean that it's self-evident from the fact that they're poor? Because that would be your privilege talking, not your brain.
Haha, no, I'm not anywhere near rich. And I'm not judging the rest of the poor based on myself, either, even if I'm spending time responding to you instead of doing something profitable.
Why not? Structural racism is a thing. Pointing out that the policy you are advocating would be a terrible idea because it would disproportionately disenfranchise people who already suffer from the racism endemic in this nation is hardly unhealthy.
Structural racism is an unhealthy excuse against implementing a policy because it's used as an excuse against self-improvement. Or, "Darn that Clarence Thomas, how dare he adopt white culture to acquire prosperity for himself."
It's also intermingled with the idea that there is no redeeming quality in white American culture, what the Right calls "cultural relativism." Besides being a cause of political strife, this idea is an existential threat to the United States as a sovereign entity. When you train yourself to think of your country as being dominated by negative circumstances outside your control, you tend not to put much care into maintaining and strengthening it. I prefer to live in a country that's strong against enemies.
...
More ad hominem attacks, straw men, boring.
In San Francisco, Lowell Alternative High School, the public high school with the highest test scores, is 64% Asian, compared with 33% average for the city. (It's also 14% white, compared with 48% for the city. The whites must be idiots.) Kids get in based on high test scores and "other" figures of merit. One of the figures used to be race, but it was abolished in a court decision. Immediately, Lowell turned into an Asian school. After that, they tried adding proxies for race, but it turns out that the high-achievers among the poor are also Asian. I'm not sure what they're doing now to try to increase their diversity.
it's a lot easier to bribe a few dozen than an entire electorate.
These days, do the politicians actually bribe an entire electorate? Seems like they still bribe only a few dozen. But instead of the few dozen being the civil servants, they're bribing the demagogues who run the media.
Okay, technically, campaign ads don't count as bribery. But note how the demagogues talk only about the people who run ads, and not about people who have interesting issues to bring to the voters. They're reporting the election like it's a popularity contest, and it makes me sick.
See, I think that your proposal to exclude "entitlement" beneficiaries is just cover for discriminating against impoverished and minority voters.
What's the problem with that? A few of the poor might be civically involved and responsible, such as yourself. But on the average, poor people have been shown to have bad decision-making skills. Also, "causality" mentioned "benefits" because he would prefer if decisions were not made by people who stand to benefit at the expense of the rest of the country.
Also, "minority"? Are you serious? You're playing the structural racism card, and that's not a healthy way to play. Oh no, we can't increase our standards, or else a group that is disproportionately represented in the lower score will be disadvantaged. Played one way, why can't they be like Asians, who suffered prejudice and came out ahead? Played another way, why don't we extend the franchise to undocumented Hispanics, who may have just as much stake in our country as we do?
I also don't think people understand how complicated it all is, and how impossible it is to deliver on all the expectations with a fraction of the money. It wears me out a bit.
So, disappoint someone. Deliver on fewer expectations, the expectations that parents actually care about, and lay off all the statisticians and administrative assistants that are needed to comply with Title 1. I'm sure that Christy (by Catherine Marshall) was not concerned about federal funding.
Oh, and while I'm talking of impossible dreams, let's get corporations out of politics. The teacher unions are a scourge on the nation.
But that's not my call. In local school board elections, I've never voted for a member of a teacher's union, but they keep being elected. The non-members I vote for never win.
Progress: "I don't need my car anymore! I now have a bicycle, a rapid transit train system, and a conveniently available airport!"
BerliOS definitely has publicity problems. Either that, or the people running it don't have much of a passion for keeping it running, because the first I heard about them having problems was about them deciding to shut it down.
Contrast that to, say, Wikipedia, Blender, or The Document Foundation. Major publicity when they needed money, with progress tallies and everything. Especially Wikipedia.
Been there, tried that --- this was on an old CATS ARM box. Turns out that there's a lot of ia32 code in ROM on the graphics card which, of course, ARMs and Alphas are totally unable to run.
Actually, the Alphas have a basic x86 emulator in their massive ROMs, so they're able to initialize standard VGA cards. Note that derinax has an ATI Radeon 9000, which certainly did not come in an Alpha version.
I don't know whether this card will work, though.
It seems likely that politics has a role to play here. Qt came into the MeeGo project from Nokia. Despite recent moves towards open governance, is still very much associated with Nokia. Intel were unhappy that Nokia switched to Windows Phone and the member of LiMo (including Samsung) may prefer to avoid mentioning or relying on what is perceived to be a competitor's asset.
Not just that. Samsung has been sponsoring Enlightenment, and they may see it as being better for low-powered devices than Qt.
How the hell have the relevant companies managed to screw up producing a Linux-based mobile phone OS/interface so badly?
I've highlighted the relevant word for you. It's because these are companies with bureaucratic processes and hidden agendas. In these alliances, they cooperate on low-level stuff but try to preserve some sort of "secret sauce," to the detriment of the whole, and that's when they're working properly. Very few companies have the successful dictator like Steve Jobs of Apple.
I was aware of the N900. I still use an N800. I just didn't need an upgrade yet, and I was waiting for step 5 of the 5-step mass market process for Maemo (becoming concerned about bureaucratic interference when Meego became the company's strategy and they decided to dump Debian for Linux Foundation silliness), when the Elop Effect happened. So, no, I don't think the N900 was successful.
I love building my own stuff, more than most /.ers. Anything electronic in the house is done my yours truly. As is most cooking. Bicycles I build myself. I even build by own car and I even persuade the dealer to allow me do so.
The more I know how it's assembled, the less I have the ability to build myself. When you build your own electronics, are you actually making masks and lithographing the chips? Or even soldering the components together on the motherboard? Life is just too short, and budget too small.
Building your own stuff is great when your labour results in having stuff finished as it's supposed to be. And here's where IKEA just isn't worth the effort. After huge amounts of labour you almost always wind up with particle board stuff. Ugly, without any personality whatsoever to it and heavy as lead. Ever tried rearranging average IKEA furniture? Ever moved house with IKEA furniture?
[Ikea furniture] is never finished perfectly -unaligned panels and doors, the works. How are you going to die happily when your bank account is full to the brim and you own IKEA furniture?
Ugh, don't remind me. Someone gave me an Ikea thing. I spent a little time assembling it, trying to align it. And then I put stuff inside it, and it warped. Ikea indicates bad taste, if nothing else.
But I don't think it's my place to judge someone else's values. Maybe your acquaintance will be laid off, and then he'll need that full bank account. Even if he'll be fine, there are other uses for money.
General idea seems good, but I dont really understand the fascination with drobos for anyone who does any kind of serious IT work. A freenas box with a proper hardware RAID card can be had (sans drives) for about half the price of an equivalent (sans drives) drobo, is faster, supports ZFS, and has built in Unison | Rsync | ftp.... etc. It also doesnt use some poorly documented "kind-of RAID".
Why would I want a drobo?
Some people want to get into cloud-type services because they don't want the hassle of configuring it all themselves. The Drobo is designed to be really easy to use.
Sure, Windows 7 sucks, but for different reasons than you think.
Having had the displeasure of working with this abomination at work, I can tell you that whoever thought these "enhancements" to the "user experience" would be an improvement should be taken out back and beaten to bloody a pulp with baseball bat.
You're just used to Windows XP's abusive interface, having had almost 10 years to get used to it.
What used to be a simple process to change, such as changing the default path for a network drive, is now a convoluted mess that requires three times as much effort.
On the other hand, what used to be tedious to change, such as moving a window to the left or right half of the screen, are now much simpler. I dare say people are more likely to do window management than change My Document settings.
You cannot find anything quickly or easily in 7. Everything is a search. I don't want to fucking search for something when I know where it is.
Ah, the joy of ignorance. Microsoft changes where everything is every release or two of Windows. I find search much easier, so I don't have to worry about the latest place where Microsoft hid the settings.
It is impossible to see every program installed on your PC in one location. Who the fuck thought hiding things was a great idea?
As for me, it looks like I'll have to take the plunge and go to Linux (and thrash about with that during the learning process).
Hiding things? Have you been paying attention to GNOME? Not having one location to see every program? You would be disappointed in Linux.
Calling Bill Gates ruthless and greedy, this is controversial? It seems rather a compliment compared with what other labels you could legitimately attach to him.
"Nokia Jumps from a 'Burning Platform' and Swims with the Man-Eating Sharks"
Some texts such as Every Day Math [sic] from the University of Chicago does [sic] a much better job at integrating all sorts of skills and teaching in a much more holistic method.
... Have you actually tried teaching using that curriculum? A few posts up and down from your post, I see plenty of complaints about Everyday Math (including a few from parents not knowing its name and complaining about the "spiral curriculum"), and few defenses. The only eager defense I've heard about it was from kids who like the tedious diagonal grid style of multiplication (if someone else builds the grid), especially the ones that are too special-ed to multiply numbers the normal way.
I think the biggest problem is that Everyday Math really depends on excellent teaching, and on students being ready and eager. If teachers and parents don't understand the material, and if the kids don't care, then Everyday Math is a big waste of time. Furthermore, it teaches confusion by introducing all sorts of weird terms and symbols that have no meaning when you graduate from it.
A good math teacher, given free rein, will teach well no matter the assigned curriculum. A bad teacher should at least teach something useful when given a traditional curriculum. Cue standard arguments about teacher freedom and how horrible bad teachers actually can be.
In my own experience (a volunteer tutor), the schools in San Francisco switched to Everyday Math last year. For the first year, the teachers slavishly tried to spiral, going into statistics then arithmetic then factors like some Russian dance, and everybody got dizzy. My workload seemingly quadrupled, because I was the only tutor in the organization with the mathematical background to keep up. This year, the teachers are taking a more moderate approach, concentrating on single subjects and breaking the spirals apart. Everybody's less confused, but the kids especially love how few problems they solve on each assignment. A few teachers are supplementing the Everyday Math curriculum with traditional drill assignments.
How many "real" word problems have you had to solve in the last ten years?
I like word problems. (The kids hate them.) Being able to translate issues into solvable equations and back is a very useful skill. Granted, most often it comes in terms like, "Which block of cheese will give me the best value?" rather than "Two trains are speeding at each other. One is traveling at 25 mph and the other at 40 mph. How long until they collide?"
It doesn't work with Western Digitals. I hate Western Digital.
A random discussion of this issue.
My problem is that eTextbooks suck. Sure, I like the idea of paying less, not printing as much, carrying around less paper. But the eTextbooks that I've used are poor translations of paper.
Last year, I tried a Coursesmart online textbook. Flipping from page to page has a significant delay that reminds me of e-paper. Even worse, the page was formatted like a paper book scan. Reading the thing on my laptop involved separate actions to scroll down the page and then go to the next page. Or I could flip my laptop monitor to portrait mode and read with my laptop on its side. Zooming in was not an option, because I would have had to scroll horizontally on every line. No wonder Coursesmart has such a low market share.
This year, I saw some elementary school kids using Pearson online textbooks. The user experience there is even worse. Each page is like a scan, again, but you see the page only in a small frame. When you resize your browser window, the frame doesn't resize to fill it. However, the kids have learned not to read texts (both San Francisco Unified School District and Catholic schools), so the usability problems don't bother them. Besides, they use the textbooks mainly for the questions at the end of the chapter.
Then I tried piracy. I can't find all the books that I need, but the ones that I find are, at worst, better than the legal version. For example, the PDF versions can be opened in any PDF reader, which have vastly better scrolling than the online texts. The better pirated texts use OCR, and can be opened in a program that reflows text depending on zoom and window size.
Given this track record, I don't expect the textbook publishers to create compelling eTextbooks.
Linux persists because it's designed to be a desktop operating system. Windows is an adaptation of a standalone workstation operation system. All of the software is there in Linux, and it gets out of your way and has a community backing it up by writing professional software, maintaining hordes of stable device drivers, and taking responsibility to fix bugs instead of hiding them for as long as possible.
No offense intended to Windows users, but there's a reason companies pay developers to write open source software: It can pay to collaborate instead of fighting with everybody. Closed source can inspire great performance by individuals, but what makes a great OS is more than good ideas; it's good execution, support, and really boring work like driver development.
In addition, while I use Windows and tolerate it, I'm never going to fool myself into thinking that this software matches professional level stuff. OpenSSH beats the pants off Remote Desktop, Active Directory, CIFS, and Homegroup, no competition, it's not even funny. There simply is no competition once you get past the fiefdom model of development.
I will always have a Windows machine somewhere to keep my hand in. But I wouldn't want to drop it into an office. For all its flaws, Linux makes desktop computing fun, fast, and relatively reliable.
FTFY.
Really, when I read, "being there to issue updates in a timely manner," or "good interface design," the only reason I didn't laugh was because I felt like crying.
Of course, you could be trolling.
PowerPC:
PowerPC was not a failure. PowerPC's were sold by IBM in their POWER architectures and had quite a bit of success there as well.
IBM was selling POWER before PowerPC, and it took until 1998 with the POWER3 before POWER chips were based on PowerPC.
I'm surprised you didn't note that all 3 of the current generation game consoles now have PowerPC processors.
However, the failure that I remember was the PowerPC Reference Platform (PReP). It was supposed to usher in a golden age for RISC, with cloners helping IBM and Motorola to develop faster processors by buying lots of them, like they do with Intel, and with lots of operating systems including MacOS and Windows.
Instead, development was bogged down in territorial squabbles, no cloners built anything except the Mac clones, and Microsoft soon discontinued their Windows NT port. Apple's experiment with clones hurt the company a great deal. Now, outside of IBM and the game consoles, the only systems using PowerPC are embedded, and PowerPC is nowhere near the performance lead.