If these new "makers" could work with the materials that could build a cannon or other arms, or could even do a decent job working with metal, I might agree. These makers are the equivalent of the "mee too"ers of Usenet in the early days of the Commercial Internet.
I've never seen the Renaissance Festival near me called "faire" by anyone actually associated with it. Lots of people informally call it Renfaire, but those actually working it usually use "Renfest" if they have to abbreviate.
What's new now is that people that haven't chosen to commit their dollars to doing something are upset that they don't have access to that something.
Some choose to buy high end electronics all of the time. Some choose to buy expensive new cars. Some choose to eat-out constantly. Some choose to buy expensive houses. Etc, etc, etc.
Some even chose poorly when they could have done better for themselves in the past, and some didn't get much of a choice and are stuck with detrimental starting experiences. That's called life. I'm not asking for subsidy for my workshop, nor do I think that most others, with all things being equitable, need subsidy for theirs either.
Bridgeport pays no attention to its google hits because it literally does not matter where they fall in the rankings. Those that use large precision metalworking tools already know about them. Those that don't use large precision metalworking tools have no direct need for them. It is irrevelant that people not-in-the-know can't find them when people in-the-know can.
I've always called it, "going out into the workshop". My dad had a workshop. My mother's father had a workshop at home and was a machinist responsible for the manufacturing equipment at a Whirlpool appliance factory. My father's father had a farm and had to take care of the equipment.
The very term maker is pretentious in the extreme when it's self-applied, given that the bulk of the people who call themselves this probably wouldn't even qualify as apprentices in the trades model, as far as their knowledge and abilities go. They're hobbyists that think their singular experience means that they're experts; they've done one thing once or a few things a few times and think that they know the whole trade.
When I go out into the shop I know that my experiences are limited and that I will be going through a novice degree of trial-and-error. There's nothing spectacular or special about it, just a guy with a bunch of tools and supplies doing something.
I don't think that the Surface is rugged enough. People are not terribly kind to business equipment that they are provided with, and consumer-spec tablets do not seem to be up to snuff.
You know, I thought of the PC Junior moments after hitting submit.
A teacher in high school had one, with one of the expansion sidecars, probably a parallel port or something. It was kind of nifty in a kid's toy sort of way. Not something that I'd want to use for work but not necessarily a bad way to learn for someone of the Nintendo Entertainment System generation.
Maybe I'm lazy, but even though I'm sure I could root a phone or side-load applications, it's a goddamn phone, I don't want to have to do that to just use it. There is a point where I'm no longer interested in digging under the hood, and that limit seems to be the cell phone for me. Computers, network routers, wireless access points, all stuff to play with, but I just want my phone to be reliable and to do the things that it's touted as being capable of. I don't want to have to modify it to remove the crippleware just to reach intended functionality.
The only way it would work even close to properly would be like in The Specials or in Watchmen, where there's only one consciousness and individual bodies act like appendages to that consciousness. It would also require a fairly vast consciousness to be able to handle all of that control at the same time without dropouts, and then there's the question of distance.
I suppose it might work if a clone can spawn and then re-merge, such that the original organism maintains all of the memories and learning experiences while split, but that would assume that the clone would be inclined to reintegrate.
I had forgotten about the various iterations of Crichton. Between the cave-man version and the brainiac version, then later the parallel version created on the dying leviathan it was interesting to see how they handled Aeryn Sun's perception of the situation and how the now-twins dealt with it both while in good health together and while the one was dying.
Local grocery chains are already better positioned to offer this kind of service; their stores themselves can act as the supply house from which the order is pulled, assembled, and delivered from. Even if a particular chain decides to select only specific stores to do it, those can be the best equipped stores with the most merchandise variety to source from.
This whole thing reminds me of how Sears really screwed up; they could have been the Amazon of today if they had leveraged their geographical ubiquity and made home delivery and online ordering work with the Internet. They had one of the best catalog services ever, and they tore it apart to put their efforts into store retail sales. They could have fulfilled same-day or next-day delivery to probably 80% of the population of the United States for LOTS of products if they'd tried. Instead their various divisions are forced to compete against each other.
Amazon outsources their local deliveries. Where I live it's OnTrac. I have never seen an OnTrac delivery vehicle that wasn't dented-up as badly as airport service vehicles. I really don't know why, I've had a field van assigned to me at my job for the last decade and the only obvious scrapes are on the back bumper where I park it against the fence so that it's harder to break into. These vans look like they strayed into the opening heat of a demolition derby before they realized and got the hell out; doesn't matter if it's a Ford Econoline, Ford Transit Connect, GMC Savannah or Chevy Express, or a Sprinter, they're always bashed up.
I suspect that they're being parked back at the lot by people that simply don't care; if they were in that many accidents on the road they'd probably have their insurance revoked and be shut down.
I predict the chances of him actually getting a patent for this approaches zero.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. The patent office has taken the approach that if they issue stupid or bogus patents, the courts will fix it. The courts have taken the attitude that if the patent office issued the patent, it must be good. That's why there have been so many high-profile problems with patent enforcement/infringement for things that are pretty damn obvious; neither entity is willing to assume the responsibility to protect us from predatory BS.
Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the distributions that he endorses?
I can't, because literally the only time that I've read, seen, or otherwise heard of the distributions in question was in the article talking about his endorsement, and the subsequent problems trying to use those distributions to actually do anything.
What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?
I honestly can't think of any. Almost all the useful apps available for Linux are available for Windows, too. And what's left is mostly Linux-specific system-management stuff.
And THAT is the problem with Linux on the desktop. There simply aren't any compelling applications that aren't ALSO available for Windows or OS X. Yes, security is good (though ACL support still sucks, which is ridiculous), and not having to worry about viruses is nice, too. But those are secondary concerns, honestly.
A good command-line SSH program that fits into the command-prompt like the telnet program does. I don't want to navigate dialogue boxes when I just want to ssh to a given IP address or hostname.
You're a bunch of assholes who cannot understand business. People pay for Office because it's better.
No, people pay for Office because they have to. Nobody actually thinks it is better.
It was better. Then Ribbon and Metro screwed it up royally. It was like Microsoft Bob got applied to Office.
I find LibreOffice is a lot faster to work with for the vast majority of what I do. Only problems I have using it are when someone takes custom documents/templates too far and they don't want to work right because they're so locked down that they even don't always work right in MS Office.
You know, that's always bothered me in science fiction, when they duplicate people. There's an assumption on the part of the character duplicating himself that the other iterations will do what he wants them to do or will otherwise see him as a leader. The most egregious example was an episode of the modern Doctor Who series where The Master duplicated himself over nearly everyone on earth, and despite them all being him they all followed orders, when he wouldn't be inclined to follow orders of anyone, arguably even himself. It was also a bit of an issue in the second and third Matrix films, but Smith's more singular purpose seemed to be better at not having the clones fight against each other, and possibly even simply be parallel processes of the same intelligence instead of truly forked, independent processes.
The only time I've seen it done well was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a long-ago duplicated Riker was discovered living in an abandoned outpost, where the issues of who could and should claim what aspects of life were debated. Both Rikers were indeed individual people at that point even if they started out as one.
Stallman got to the point where the only Linux distributions he would endorse were tiny, obscure completely-free ones that were almost unusable before accounting for the lack of "nonfree" software.
We've become far more sedentary than we used to be. First we went from having three to five tv stations to having dozens if not hundreds, then we enabled everyone to spend all of their waking hours doing the equivalent of browsing all of the magazines that could ever exist.
Well, since Stallman would disagree with Redhat, Debian, Slackware, and anyone else that makes it easy to install "nonfree" software from distribution-supported repositories, I don't think that Stallman is in-agreement with how the Open Source movement has gone.
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If these new "makers" could work with the materials that could build a cannon or other arms, or could even do a decent job working with metal, I might agree. These makers are the equivalent of the "mee too"ers of Usenet in the early days of the Commercial Internet.
I've never seen the Renaissance Festival near me called "faire" by anyone actually associated with it. Lots of people informally call it Renfaire, but those actually working it usually use "Renfest" if they have to abbreviate.
What's new now is that people that haven't chosen to commit their dollars to doing something are upset that they don't have access to that something.
Some choose to buy high end electronics all of the time. Some choose to buy expensive new cars. Some choose to eat-out constantly. Some choose to buy expensive houses. Etc, etc, etc.
Some even chose poorly when they could have done better for themselves in the past, and some didn't get much of a choice and are stuck with detrimental starting experiences. That's called life. I'm not asking for subsidy for my workshop, nor do I think that most others, with all things being equitable, need subsidy for theirs either.
Bridgeport pays no attention to its google hits because it literally does not matter where they fall in the rankings. Those that use large precision metalworking tools already know about them. Those that don't use large precision metalworking tools have no direct need for them. It is irrevelant that people not-in-the-know can't find them when people in-the-know can.
I've always called it, "going out into the workshop". My dad had a workshop. My mother's father had a workshop at home and was a machinist responsible for the manufacturing equipment at a Whirlpool appliance factory. My father's father had a farm and had to take care of the equipment.
The very term maker is pretentious in the extreme when it's self-applied, given that the bulk of the people who call themselves this probably wouldn't even qualify as apprentices in the trades model, as far as their knowledge and abilities go. They're hobbyists that think their singular experience means that they're experts; they've done one thing once or a few things a few times and think that they know the whole trade.
When I go out into the shop I know that my experiences are limited and that I will be going through a novice degree of trial-and-error. There's nothing spectacular or special about it, just a guy with a bunch of tools and supplies doing something.
No, they ship them out to catalog customers...
I don't think that the Surface is rugged enough. People are not terribly kind to business equipment that they are provided with, and consumer-spec tablets do not seem to be up to snuff.
Oh no! Andrea hit a refuse pocket from the Golden Corral instead!
You know, I thought of the PC Junior moments after hitting submit.
A teacher in high school had one, with one of the expansion sidecars, probably a parallel port or something. It was kind of nifty in a kid's toy sort of way. Not something that I'd want to use for work but not necessarily a bad way to learn for someone of the Nintendo Entertainment System generation.
Maybe I'm lazy, but even though I'm sure I could root a phone or side-load applications, it's a goddamn phone, I don't want to have to do that to just use it. There is a point where I'm no longer interested in digging under the hood, and that limit seems to be the cell phone for me. Computers, network routers, wireless access points, all stuff to play with, but I just want my phone to be reliable and to do the things that it's touted as being capable of. I don't want to have to modify it to remove the crippleware just to reach intended functionality.
The only way it would work even close to properly would be like in The Specials or in Watchmen, where there's only one consciousness and individual bodies act like appendages to that consciousness. It would also require a fairly vast consciousness to be able to handle all of that control at the same time without dropouts, and then there's the question of distance.
I suppose it might work if a clone can spawn and then re-merge, such that the original organism maintains all of the memories and learning experiences while split, but that would assume that the clone would be inclined to reintegrate.
I had forgotten about the various iterations of Crichton. Between the cave-man version and the brainiac version, then later the parallel version created on the dying leviathan it was interesting to see how they handled Aeryn Sun's perception of the situation and how the now-twins dealt with it both while in good health together and while the one was dying.
I don't think that's a matter of knowing what all of the clones knew so much as knowing himself and knowing that he would never have made that call.
I want something that doesn't require a new environment started in order to use it. I want to Win-R, "cmd" enter, "ssh user@host" and be on my way.
There is no reason for it to have to be embedded in a subsystem.
...if actually they didn't run out of stock, and they're buried in a landfill next to a bunch of Lisas and Newtons...
Local grocery chains are already better positioned to offer this kind of service; their stores themselves can act as the supply house from which the order is pulled, assembled, and delivered from. Even if a particular chain decides to select only specific stores to do it, those can be the best equipped stores with the most merchandise variety to source from.
This whole thing reminds me of how Sears really screwed up; they could have been the Amazon of today if they had leveraged their geographical ubiquity and made home delivery and online ordering work with the Internet. They had one of the best catalog services ever, and they tore it apart to put their efforts into store retail sales. They could have fulfilled same-day or next-day delivery to probably 80% of the population of the United States for LOTS of products if they'd tried. Instead their various divisions are forced to compete against each other.
This made me laugh...
Amazon outsources their local deliveries. Where I live it's OnTrac. I have never seen an OnTrac delivery vehicle that wasn't dented-up as badly as airport service vehicles. I really don't know why, I've had a field van assigned to me at my job for the last decade and the only obvious scrapes are on the back bumper where I park it against the fence so that it's harder to break into. These vans look like they strayed into the opening heat of a demolition derby before they realized and got the hell out; doesn't matter if it's a Ford Econoline, Ford Transit Connect, GMC Savannah or Chevy Express, or a Sprinter, they're always bashed up.
I suspect that they're being parked back at the lot by people that simply don't care; if they were in that many accidents on the road they'd probably have their insurance revoked and be shut down.
I predict the chances of him actually getting a patent for this approaches zero.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. The patent office has taken the approach that if they issue stupid or bogus patents, the courts will fix it. The courts have taken the attitude that if the patent office issued the patent, it must be good. That's why there have been so many high-profile problems with patent enforcement/infringement for things that are pretty damn obvious; neither entity is willing to assume the responsibility to protect us from predatory BS.
Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the distributions that he endorses?
I can't, because literally the only time that I've read, seen, or otherwise heard of the distributions in question was in the article talking about his endorsement, and the subsequent problems trying to use those distributions to actually do anything.
What Linux-only apps would you like to see available on Windows?
I honestly can't think of any. Almost all the useful apps available for Linux are available for Windows, too. And what's left is mostly Linux-specific system-management stuff.
And THAT is the problem with Linux on the desktop. There simply aren't any compelling applications that aren't ALSO available for Windows or OS X. Yes, security is good (though ACL support still sucks, which is ridiculous), and not having to worry about viruses is nice, too. But those are secondary concerns, honestly.
A good command-line SSH program that fits into the command-prompt like the telnet program does. I don't want to navigate dialogue boxes when I just want to ssh to a given IP address or hostname.
You're a bunch of assholes who cannot understand business. People pay for Office because it's better.
No, people pay for Office because they have to. Nobody actually thinks it is better.
It was better. Then Ribbon and Metro screwed it up royally. It was like Microsoft Bob got applied to Office.
I find LibreOffice is a lot faster to work with for the vast majority of what I do. Only problems I have using it are when someone takes custom documents/templates too far and they don't want to work right because they're so locked down that they even don't always work right in MS Office.
You know, that's always bothered me in science fiction, when they duplicate people. There's an assumption on the part of the character duplicating himself that the other iterations will do what he wants them to do or will otherwise see him as a leader. The most egregious example was an episode of the modern Doctor Who series where The Master duplicated himself over nearly everyone on earth, and despite them all being him they all followed orders, when he wouldn't be inclined to follow orders of anyone, arguably even himself. It was also a bit of an issue in the second and third Matrix films, but Smith's more singular purpose seemed to be better at not having the clones fight against each other, and possibly even simply be parallel processes of the same intelligence instead of truly forked, independent processes.
The only time I've seen it done well was in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a long-ago duplicated Riker was discovered living in an abandoned outpost, where the issues of who could and should claim what aspects of life were debated. Both Rikers were indeed individual people at that point even if they started out as one.
Stallman got to the point where the only Linux distributions he would endorse were tiny, obscure completely-free ones that were almost unusable before accounting for the lack of "nonfree" software.
That is not pragmatic.
We've become far more sedentary than we used to be. First we went from having three to five tv stations to having dozens if not hundreds, then we enabled everyone to spend all of their waking hours doing the equivalent of browsing all of the magazines that could ever exist.
Well, since Stallman would disagree with Redhat, Debian, Slackware, and anyone else that makes it easy to install "nonfree" software from distribution-supported repositories, I don't think that Stallman is in-agreement with how the Open Source movement has gone.