While all that may be true, lack of trust is not necessary to explain why people who have a stake in the Internet might reasonably want to have a say in its governance. From TFA:
But several countries, led by developing nations, now argue that since the Internet is a global tool, no one country should control it. They contend that decisions should fall under the jurisdiction of an international body, such as the United Nations.
No. TFA is about the back-end (servers). They apparently still use Windows for their desktops.
(And believe me, you wouldn't just switch a bunch of employees over to BSD on a shoot-first basis without having your ass mailed to you with the personal belongings in your desk.)
From the article:
After the five-month migration, PWC's servers are now equally split between Windows and OpenBSD.
You buy the fastest CPU you can afford at the time. Stay away from the one or two top-of-the line chips unless you have mad money. And know that in another year you could buy twice the performance for the same price.
In 30 years the guy couldn't just write some code? Sorry, but he just sounds like a deranged theorist who lost out to people like Berners Lee who could interface with reality a little more pragmatically.
The WWW may be flawed, but it's a killer app of IT and has been handing out value to its users since day one while this Nelson character seems to have done nothing but steam in jealousy.
Disclaimer: I might be totally off base here, I'm just giving my reaction after reading the full Manifesto. And yeah, I've been around long enough to know that hypertext-the-concept was not invented by TBL. But even gopher continues to kick Nelson's ass in terms of user base.
2005 models of the Toyota Cherry Sage are being recalled because of a software glitch that causes them to stall or shut down.
Toyota will notify [Cherry Sage] owners by mail that they can take the [shrub] to a dealership for free repairs, said Allison Takahashi, a spokeswoman at Toyota's Torrance-based U.S. operation.
Faulty analogy. These aren't cracks in a windshield. If Debian or Redhat or Suse have a critical mass of developers (and they do), it doesn't matter how many yahoos go off and create their own blue-green-algae distro.
Dilution is a non-issue. How many of those distros have more developers than you can count on one hand? Bet you can count them on (wait for it) one hand.
From the article, it means things like LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP). Yeah it's biznomarketing speak, but it does translate to something real developers need.
I think we do mostly agree. What you say is esp. true for individual apps developed by third parties (re: freedom to follow guidelines, input from users).
But at a distro level, Apple hired a bunch of smart UI guys and pretty much everything that came with the OS followed those guidelines. They were imposed top-down. Third parties are free to do what they want, but benefit by having a consistent OS to integrate into if they choose.
Linux distros have tended to be more hodge-podge, reflecting the wild-and-woolly OSS pseudo-merito-democracy. It has been up to the DEs (like gnome) to wrangle their apps into a consistent look-and-feel, and I agree that gnome apps pull it off pretty well.
The distros that intend to be serious desktop players (RedHat at least) seem to put some effort into presenting a consistent look (icons, themes, etc.), but since most of their apps aren't written by them, they can't exert even as much authority as Apple did.
At any rate, it's coming together now for Linux desktops, but it has been a long ride compared to what they could do at Apple. It seems to me that when it comes to imposing consistency across a wide swath of the OS, the dictatorship of proprietary development still has the advantage of expediency over OSS.
Why is this desirable? Quite simply, having a unified look and feel makes switching between applications faster and easier. There is no need to figure out where quit is hiding when quit is always the last option under the file menu. There is no need to search for the folder button when the folder button looks the same in your applications as it does in your shell as it does in your browser.
Yeah and apparently Tango is the "look" part of the equation - providing icons and color theme guidelines. The "feel" part is already covered (for gnome) by the Human Interface Guidelines.
I doubt anything in open-source space can attempt to be as athoritative as Apple's style guidelines, and IMO the Linux desktop has suffered for the lack of benevolent dictatorship.
What if you pre-emptively decoded the next channel up and down, and any channel that the user is hovering over in the guide selector (if it's anything like digital cable)?
That would cover 75% of channel changes for me. The rest (where I punch in the channel number instead of surfing the guide) could be helped by keeping frequency-of-use information.
"Hey couch-potato #99432 just pressed 5, he's probably on his way to 550 which he watches on Tuesday nights, so start decoding it now. Oh and Walmart reports he just bought some new brand X shaving cream, show him an ad for brand Y."
I bet that's not how it works, but maybe it could...
Well one thing I give props to da Guvernator for is his support of a ballot measure that gives a panel of retired judges authority over redistricting. This could help avoid the nonsense we have now in Kalleefornia where the legislature draws the district boundaries so that no incumbent of either party loses his/her seat.
(Much less the Tom DeLay nonsense in Texas, where only Democrats lose their seats by fiat.)
Unfortunately, (and predictably) the measure isn't supported by either party, and it will probably die on the vine. But it's the right idea.
And I've said before: paying thousands of people for their votes is still more democratic than paying a few people (CEO of Diebold, etc.) for thousands of votes.
This is something I miss about Napster. I tried it out before it died the first time, to see what all the fuss was about. The coolest thing was looking for a song I knew I liked, and then finding new things to like in the collections of people who had that song. The record industry will never know it, but some of us actually ended up buying music that we wouldn't have discovered without Napster.
But somehow the Amazon recommendations don't quite hit the mark for me, and half the time they just seem to push whatever they're being paid to hype. Maybe that's just me.
According to the SFGate article (Top link here as posted by AKAImBatman above), the buyer called IBM tech support.
I imagine they just asked him for the serial number and it popped up on their screen as having been reported stolen. Sometimes the low-tech approach works.:)
This is, to me, the most interesting facet of this whole saga.
How many times has IBM done this before? Are their tech support staff trained to keep a straight face while asking for the caller's address? Do most other vendors do this too? Or was this done specially because the UC laptop was high-profile?
[And actually, the SFGate article does not mention the IBM tech support connection, but the Murky does.]
Neither Skype nor Gizmo work on Win9x. Does anybody know of a decent (preferably open source) Win9x client that is at least protocol-compatible with some Linux client?
Seriously, this is the first time I've really noticed that Win9x is approaching EOL due to lack of future development. If Skype gets back-ported I'll be relieved.
Slashdot Mirror
(And believe me, you wouldn't just switch a bunch of employees over to BSD on a shoot-first basis without having your ass mailed to you with the personal belongings in your desk.)
From the article:
Anybody besides me have flashbacks to the original Star Trek (despite the misleading subject line) after reading this ?
You buy the fastest CPU you can afford at the time. Stay away from the one or two top-of-the line chips unless you have mad money. And know that in another year you could buy twice the performance for the same price.
In 30 years the guy couldn't just write some code?
Sorry, but he just sounds like a deranged theorist who lost out to people like Berners Lee who could interface with reality a little more pragmatically.
The WWW may be flawed, but it's a killer app of IT and has been handing out value to its users since day one while this Nelson character seems to have done nothing but steam in jealousy.
Disclaimer: I might be totally off base here, I'm just giving my reaction after reading the full Manifesto. And yeah, I've been around long enough to know that hypertext-the-concept was not invented by TBL. But even gopher continues to kick Nelson's ass in terms of user base.
Yeah but the hieroglyphic records show that in 1328 BC they moved royal pillow production offshore. See what happens when you outsource?
Faulty analogy. These aren't cracks in a windshield. If Debian or Redhat or Suse have a critical mass of developers (and they do), it doesn't matter how many yahoos go off and create their own blue-green-algae distro.
Dilution is a non-issue. How many of those distros have more developers than you can count on one hand? Bet you can count them on (wait for it) one hand.
The solution to fungal-spore producing pillow mites was discovered thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt: the stone pillow.
NOT to be confused with this chinese knock-off.
True enough, though TFA actually mentioned only the AMP portion:
which is itself a valid Open Source (prepare to gag) "Solution Stack" (/end gag) even if it runs on (gag)Windows(/retch).
But why are you even reading this thread when there's that thing about the Archimedes death ray two topics up?
From the article, it means things like LAMP (Apache+Mysql+PHP).
Yeah it's biznomarketing speak, but it does translate to something real developers need.
I think we do mostly agree. What you say is esp. true for individual apps developed by third parties (re: freedom to follow guidelines, input from users).
But at a distro level, Apple hired a bunch of smart UI guys and pretty much everything that came with the OS followed those guidelines. They were imposed top-down. Third parties are free to do what they want, but benefit by having a consistent OS to integrate into if they choose.
Linux distros have tended to be more hodge-podge, reflecting the wild-and-woolly OSS pseudo-merito-democracy. It has been up to the DEs (like gnome) to wrangle their apps into a consistent look-and-feel, and I agree that gnome apps pull it off pretty well.
The distros that intend to be serious desktop players (RedHat at least) seem to put some effort into presenting a consistent look (icons, themes, etc.), but since most of their apps aren't written by them, they can't exert even as much authority as Apple did.
At any rate, it's coming together now for Linux desktops, but it has been a long ride compared to what they could do at Apple. It seems to me that when it comes to imposing consistency across a wide swath of the OS, the dictatorship of proprietary development still has the advantage of expediency over OSS.
Yeah and apparently Tango is the "look" part of the equation - providing icons and color theme guidelines. The "feel" part is already covered (for gnome) by the Human Interface Guidelines.
I doubt anything in open-source space can attempt to be as athoritative as Apple's style guidelines, and IMO the Linux desktop has suffered for the lack of benevolent dictatorship.
What if you pre-emptively decoded the next channel up and down, and any channel that the user is hovering over in the guide selector (if it's anything like digital cable)?
That would cover 75% of channel changes for me. The rest (where I punch in the channel number instead of surfing the guide) could be helped by keeping frequency-of-use information.
"Hey couch-potato #99432 just pressed 5, he's probably on his way to 550 which he watches on Tuesday nights, so start decoding it now. Oh and Walmart reports he just bought some new brand X shaving cream, show him an ad for brand Y."
I bet that's not how it works, but maybe it could...
If it's good enough for common cause it's good enough for me. They aren't party stooges.
Well one thing I give props to da Guvernator for is his support of a ballot measure that gives a panel of retired judges authority over redistricting. This could help avoid the nonsense we have now in Kalleefornia where the legislature draws the district boundaries so that no incumbent of either party loses his/her seat.
(Much less the Tom DeLay nonsense in Texas, where only Democrats lose their seats by fiat.)
Unfortunately, (and predictably) the measure isn't supported by either party, and it will probably die on the vine. But it's the right idea.
Oh - so you met Wally O'Dell then?
(cluestick: he's CEO of Diebold, and he has strong political views.)
And I've said before: paying thousands of people for their votes is still more democratic than paying a few people (CEO of Diebold, etc.) for thousands of votes.
This is something I miss about Napster. I tried it out before it died the first time, to see what all the fuss was about. The coolest thing was looking for a song I knew I liked, and then finding new things to like in the collections of people who had that song. The record industry will never know it, but some of us actually ended up buying music that we wouldn't have discovered without Napster.
But somehow the Amazon recommendations don't quite hit the mark for me, and half the time they just seem to push whatever they're being paid to hype. Maybe that's just me.
This is, to me, the most interesting facet of this whole saga.
How many times has IBM done this before? Are their tech support staff trained to keep a straight face while asking for the caller's address? Do most other vendors do this too? Or was this done specially because the UC laptop was high-profile?
[And actually, the SFGate article does not mention the IBM tech support connection, but the Murky does.]
Neither Skype nor Gizmo work on Win9x. Does anybody know of a decent (preferably open source) Win9x client that is at least protocol-compatible with some Linux client?
Seriously, this is the first time I've really noticed that Win9x is approaching EOL due to lack of future development. If Skype gets back-ported I'll be relieved.
Some of us haven't accepted it. For the moment we're "stuck" with independents and Netflix, but see below:
STOP THE PRE-MOVIE ADS!
Cool thx. (I still say there's still room for scriptable improvements though.)