The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town...
I'm shocked at this report of such profound ignorance and stupidity on the part of a government official in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is normally such a liberal, tolerant, open-minded place.
Call this office and tell them you will NOT be building your next call center in India if they keep trying to censor the Internet!
I tried to call the Ministry to complain, but I ended up talking to some chick with a thick Brooklyn accent and neither one of us could understand what the other was saying.
The polish of Opera isn't something you can just transfer from one browser to another.
Sure it is. You just need to copy opera_polish.c into the Firfox src/ directory, and do a configure / make / make install cycle!:-)
All kidding aside, as far as I know, Opera is still proprietary. If the Firefox devs could look at its internals, they might be able to adapt some of the Opera technologies for Firefox. If Opera ownership were contractually transferred to Firefox, maybe certain licensing / copyright / patent / whatever issues would be removed, allowing Firefox to do things they know how to do, but can't do for legal reasons.
And what if Google bought the entire Opera company, as opposed to just the browser? (Once again, pocket change for Larry and Sergey.) Those "very talented people" would now be working for Google, who could assign them to work with the Firefox team to implement Opera-like features in Firefox.
This is all an idle fantasy, of course. Who knows if Google is really planning to buy Opera or what they might be planning to do with it? But I've used Opera, and it was a really nice browser. If all of that talent and expertise were available to Firefox, think of what the synergy might accomplish. It could be done, and it would rock.
It's a much more polished browser... Firefox is great, but Opera still beats it in performance, resource usage and (most important) its terrific user [interface]...
I hope Google is buying Opera in order to donate that all that polish to Firefox. Firefox can't afford to just snap up an entire company with pocket change, but Google can. Let's cross our fingers.
I'm a geek who likes productivity and I use Gnome. It's nicer looking, and cleaner. Which is not to say that it's lack of customization doesn't piss me off, and I've tried moving to KDE a few times, but KDEs look & feel is just... icky.
Thanks, arkanes, for posting this; it's clarified my thinking on this issue a bit. I love GNOME, but there's no real customization[1]. I hate KDE, but there are a million options. What's the source of my love of GNOME and my hate for KDE?
KDE feels wrong.
That makes either zero sense or a sixth sense, but there's something in KDE that drives me nuts. It's as if KDE is playing a supersonic buzz that I can't hear consciously. Whenever I use it, it feel like things are happening just outside of my conscious perception. I want to ask the interface, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be just sitting there?"
Morpheus: I know exactly what you mean. Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. That there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?
That is exactly how I felt when I used KDE. What is the Katrix?:-)
When Patrick removed GNOME from Slackware, I decided to try KDE; I wanted an option in case I decided not to keep GNOME current manually. KDE's bazillions of options were, at first, thrilling, but I eventually left because it just felt wrong. (I went back to the emacs of windows managers, fvwm. My personal customizations aren't as good-looking as GNOME, but now my desktop does exactly what I tell it, exactly when I tell it.)
[1] I think someone's already mentioned that there's a GNOME trend against --geek_opts going back to at least the metacity/sawfish switch... why not just have an advanced options option, like gtk-gnutella or All-In-One Sidebar?
It seems to me that Babylon 5 was an attempt to produce something a little like Hill Street Blues in space.
Although B5 was much bigger than just that -- having elements of the grand war and personal heroic epics, in addition to the intimacy of HSB -- this was undoubtedly in Joe's mind early on. In the Volume 1 script book, there's a casting note that describes Sinclair as a "cross between William Shatner and Daniel Travanti". The same note describes Carolyn Sykes, Sinclair's SO, as "more like Veronica Hammel than Connie Seleca".
You've got it backwards. If the people in those red states in the South hadn't voted for Bush, God wouldn't have had to send down the hurricanes to punish them!
Lol, I can tell from reading that which side you're on.
In that case, I wish you would elaborate. Deslock's post was elegantly constructed -- strong parallelism, similar formatting and similar paragraph lengths! -- to give equal coverage to both 'sides', because he was breaking out the 2-axis model: libertarian-vs-authoritarian crossed against liberal-vs-conservative.
So which side do you say he is on? And why do you say that?
And before you give me the old Libertarian saw about how the power companies would be hurting themselves... remember that people and companies do a whole lot of things which, in hindsight, appear to be stupid....
This is the reason I'm not a pure libertarian anymore. The economic side of the libertarian worldview is dependent on Adam Smith-type assumptions which just aren't correct. For instance, there are many barriers to entry, and information flow is highly restricted. These might be addressed by decreased regulation and increased regulation, respectively.
The real problem, however, is fundamental, and can't be addressed by regulation. The real problem won't change until people change. The real problem is that people don't make decisions that maximize their long-term profits, people make decisions that maximize their short-term satisfaction.
They can, but they won't. The difference between Microsoft and Google is the "Don't be evil" philosophy.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that Sergei and Larry are saints. I just think that they realize that their long-term benefit is directly related to how well they serve their customers, and the fact that they consider users of the search engine to be customers also, not just a commodity to be served up to their paying advertisers. I think "Don't be evil" is a subtle and subversive encapsulation of the idea that altruism is equal to pragmatism in the long run.
Microsoft isn't capable of this type of long-term thinking. Bill Gates makes money so fast that it's not worth his time to stop and pick up a $10,000 bill. With that kind of net worth, Gates could release powerful bug-free software at reasonable prices. He could be a genuine hero, and lauded as such, and still make immense amounts of money. The fact that he doesn't do this points to some kind of profound disconnection from reality, perhaps an emotional disturbance of some sort. That's why only 30 years after its founding, Microsoft is at the beginning of the end.
I'm sure Gates would love to topple Google, but not at the price of changing whatever twisted worldview leads him to throw away both riches and honor.
Why is it that... there's no such outcry over the fact that great apes effectively have no rights?
Once again, you see why the United States is the world leader in social isses. Even as we speak, the Bush administration is working tirelessly to ensure that humans and great apes have exactly the same rights under the law.
Why is this an "interesting interview"? There is little to no content here.
I think it's the/. equivalent of a Rolling Stone "Top 50 Albums of All Time" list. They put the Beach Boys ahead of Jimi Hendrix so people will buy the issue just to show people how stupid the editors at Rolling Stone are.
Any advice for frustrated users, especially non-technical users?
These non-technical users are the cause of all these problems. They don't know how to use their OSes, they don't want to know how to use their OSes, they think anti-virus software works, they use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, and they buy the crap sold by spam email. My advice?
Businesses that thrive when their customers need them deserve extinction?
I said "business that can only thrive when their customers need them" (emphasis added).
If customers _don't_ need a business then that business won't exist [anymore?]. The way things work is that businesses exist [solely] because they're providing things customers need.
Nonsense. No one needs a Big Mac. Hell, most of us need to have a few less Big Macs, judging by the fact that the USA is now the world's biggest exporter of arterial plaque. (And when I say the biggest....) McDonald's nonetheless thrives, because they provide something people want.
In different words: Sun is following the Big Corporation(tm) business model: get people hooked, then raise the price and keep yo pimp hand strong. But Sun is paying the price: as soon as people had an alternative OS for their Sun hardware, they left. If Sun had looked at the long-term picture, they would have been doing what was best for their customers in order to build a long-term relationship. The healthiest long-term relationships are built on mutual benefit, not on dependency.
Slashdot Mirror
You're both wrong. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Steve says that his kids are not allowed to use Google or have an iPod.
Agggh, the pain... can't decide how to karmawhore... call Micro$oft evil... make fun of Ballmer... Norman, coordinate!!!
The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town...
I'm shocked at this report of such profound ignorance and stupidity on the part of a government official in Oklahoma. Oklahoma is normally such a liberal, tolerant, open-minded place.
... google has rolled out a finance site.
If they ever release sex.google.com, I won't need any other sites!
Now, after they created a form of governemnt that allows us to make those changes in a peaceful way, there should be no need to perform such actions.
If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.
Call this office and tell them you will NOT be building your next call center in India if they keep trying to censor the Internet!
I tried to call the Ministry to complain, but I ended up talking to some chick with a thick Brooklyn accent and neither one of us could understand what the other was saying.
Wait, I think I've figured out the pattern!Now if we can just get Google to promise not to be evil... oh, wait, my analogy is breaking down.
Nothing beats a great "Launch Linup".
Well, everyone knows that Slashdot prefers the Linup operating system.
Can you imagine the damage some antisocial radio vandal could do to the Mars Rovers, for instance, if the command traffic was sent in the clear?
I'm emotionally erect.
The polish of Opera isn't something you can just transfer from one browser to another.
:-)
Sure it is. You just need to copy opera_polish.c into the Firfox src/ directory, and do a configure / make / make install cycle!
All kidding aside, as far as I know, Opera is still proprietary. If the Firefox devs could look at its internals, they might be able to adapt some of the Opera technologies for Firefox. If Opera ownership were contractually transferred to Firefox, maybe certain licensing / copyright / patent / whatever issues would be removed, allowing Firefox to do things they know how to do, but can't do for legal reasons.
And what if Google bought the entire Opera company, as opposed to just the browser? (Once again, pocket change for Larry and Sergey.) Those "very talented people" would now be working for Google, who could assign them to work with the Firefox team to implement Opera-like features in Firefox.
This is all an idle fantasy, of course. Who knows if Google is really planning to buy Opera or what they might be planning to do with it? But I've used Opera, and it was a really nice browser. If all of that talent and expertise were available to Firefox, think of what the synergy might accomplish. It could be done, and it would rock.
It's a much more polished browser... Firefox is great, but Opera still beats it in performance, resource usage and (most important) its terrific user [interface]...
I hope Google is buying Opera in order to donate that all that polish to Firefox. Firefox can't afford to just snap up an entire company with pocket change, but Google can. Let's cross our fingers.
Thanks, arkanes, for posting this; it's clarified my thinking on this issue a bit. I love GNOME, but there's no real customization[1]. I hate KDE, but there are a million options. What's the source of my love of GNOME and my hate for KDE?
KDE feels wrong.
That makes either zero sense or a sixth sense, but there's something in KDE that drives me nuts. It's as if KDE is playing a supersonic buzz that I can't hear consciously. Whenever I use it, it feel like things are happening just outside of my conscious perception. I want to ask the interface, "What are you doing? Aren't you supposed to be just sitting there?"
That is exactly how I felt when I used KDE. What is the Katrix?
When Patrick removed GNOME from Slackware, I decided to try KDE; I wanted an option in case I decided not to keep GNOME current manually. KDE's bazillions of options were, at first, thrilling, but I eventually left because it just felt wrong. (I went back to the emacs of windows managers, fvwm. My personal customizations aren't as good-looking as GNOME, but now my desktop does exactly what I tell it, exactly when I tell it.)
[1] I think someone's already mentioned that there's a GNOME trend against --geek_opts going back to at least the metacity/sawfish switch... why not just have an advanced options option, like gtk-gnutella or All-In-One Sidebar?
Damn dyslexia my.
You might want to have the doctor run some tests for Yoda-itis, too.
It seems to me that Babylon 5 was an attempt to produce something a little like Hill Street Blues in space.
Although B5 was much bigger than just that -- having elements of the grand war and personal heroic epics, in addition to the intimacy of HSB -- this was undoubtedly in Joe's mind early on. In the Volume 1 script book, there's a casting note that describes Sinclair as a "cross between William Shatner and Daniel Travanti". The same note describes Carolyn Sykes, Sinclair's SO, as "more like Veronica Hammel than Connie Seleca".
SuperMallen: ... I have reached maximum capacity in terms of what can go in my pants pockets.
... and the princess never had to go to the pharmacy for D-cell batteries again. The End.
billyhoward: Find someone with a vagina.
Kerry would have stopped those hurricanes!
You've got it backwards. If the people in those red states in the South hadn't voted for Bush, God wouldn't have had to send down the hurricanes to punish them!
Lol, I can tell from reading that which side you're on.
In that case, I wish you would elaborate. Deslock's post was elegantly constructed -- strong parallelism, similar formatting and similar paragraph lengths! -- to give equal coverage to both 'sides', because he was breaking out the 2-axis model: libertarian-vs-authoritarian crossed against liberal-vs-conservative.
So which side do you say he is on? And why do you say that?
And before you give me the old Libertarian saw about how the power companies would be hurting themselves... remember that people and companies do a whole lot of things which, in hindsight, appear to be stupid....
This is the reason I'm not a pure libertarian anymore. The economic side of the libertarian worldview is dependent on Adam Smith-type assumptions which just aren't correct. For instance, there are many barriers to entry, and information flow is highly restricted. These might be addressed by decreased regulation and increased regulation, respectively.
The real problem, however, is fundamental, and can't be addressed by regulation. The real problem won't change until people change. The real problem is that people don't make decisions that maximize their long-term profits, people make decisions that maximize their short-term satisfaction.
can the old supplant the new?
They can, but they won't. The difference between Microsoft and Google is the "Don't be evil" philosophy.
Don't get me wrong. I don't believe that Sergei and Larry are saints. I just think that they realize that their long-term benefit is directly related to how well they serve their customers, and the fact that they consider users of the search engine to be customers also, not just a commodity to be served up to their paying advertisers. I think "Don't be evil" is a subtle and subversive encapsulation of the idea that altruism is equal to pragmatism in the long run.
Microsoft isn't capable of this type of long-term thinking. Bill Gates makes money so fast that it's not worth his time to stop and pick up a $10,000 bill. With that kind of net worth, Gates could release powerful bug-free software at reasonable prices. He could be a genuine hero, and lauded as such, and still make immense amounts of money. The fact that he doesn't do this points to some kind of profound disconnection from reality, perhaps an emotional disturbance of some sort. That's why only 30 years after its founding, Microsoft is at the beginning of the end.
I'm sure Gates would love to topple Google, but not at the price of changing whatever twisted worldview leads him to throw away both riches and honor.
Why is it that... there's no such outcry over the fact that great apes effectively have no rights?
Once again, you see why the United States is the world leader in social isses. Even as we speak, the Bush administration is working tirelessly to ensure that humans and great apes have exactly the same rights under the law.
Why is this an "interesting interview"? There is little to no content here.
/. equivalent of a Rolling Stone "Top 50 Albums of All Time" list. They put the Beach Boys ahead of Jimi Hendrix so people will buy the issue just to show people how stupid the editors at Rolling Stone are.
I think it's the
Stupid all the way to the bank. Ick.
Any advice for frustrated users, especially non-technical users?
These non-technical users are the cause of all these problems. They don't know how to use their OSes, they don't want to know how to use their OSes, they think anti-virus software works, they use Internet Explorer instead of Firefox, and they buy the crap sold by spam email. My advice?
Smile and bid them farewell.
I myself think printing is one of the fundamentals
"Print is dead." -- Egon Spengler
As a historian it has been interesting for me to see you tackle historical subjects (and from my period to boot).
:-)
You're older than you look.
Businesses that thrive when their customers need them deserve extinction?
I said "business that can only thrive when their customers need them" (emphasis added).
If customers _don't_ need a business then that business won't exist [anymore?]. The way things work is that businesses exist [solely] because they're providing things customers need.
Nonsense. No one needs a Big Mac. Hell, most of us need to have a few less Big Macs, judging by the fact that the USA is now the world's biggest exporter of arterial plaque. (And when I say the biggest....) McDonald's nonetheless thrives, because they provide something people want.
In different words: Sun is following the Big Corporation(tm) business model: get people hooked, then raise the price and keep yo pimp hand strong. But Sun is paying the price: as soon as people had an alternative OS for their Sun hardware, they left. If Sun had looked at the long-term picture, they would have been doing what was best for their customers in order to build a long-term relationship. The healthiest long-term relationships are built on mutual benefit, not on dependency.