Grading papers based purely on mechanical issues of grammar and spelling is idiotic.
In high school I discovered that there are more people who speak English OUTSIDE the United States than INSIDE. Ever since then , I have usually used British Spelling when addressing any international forum. But not necessarily consistently, as I am often rushed for time and can't use my spellcheck (Set for Intl English) all the time.
So, I would score poorly in the spelling department. However, I do think that essays should be judged on their meaning and insight. That is not presently a feature of any programme that I know of, and for that reason, the programme described in the article is useless for what is essential to good writing: a sound and critical mind.
Spelling does matter, and it matters more than the illiterate pinheads I share an office with think, but not as much as the pedants and grammar police would like to think.
systems with extreme distributions will tend to fail against systems with moderated distributions.
company A makes widgets. People buy the widgets, and thusly, company A makes wealth or value. This value (say, $100 million) is then distributed to various outputs: costs for materials, labour, shareholders. The managers of company A (CEO, CFO etc.) only take a small multiple of the company's bottom pay scale (say, 5x the bottom value).
company B makes widgettes. People buy the widgettes, and thusly, company B makes wealth or value. This value (say $100 million) is them distributed to various outputs: costs for materials, labour, shareholders. But in company B, the executive staff takes 10x the bottom pay scale.
Now. all things being equal (labour, materials etc.) which company will be better able to compete?
company A, of course - they'll have more money available to invest in research and development, advertising, marketing, and infrastructure.
company B will have less to invest, and will be less competitive.
The executives of each didn't "earn" anything - it's the structure of compensation that gives the executives their pay.
It is time that executives be TRULY seen as merely employees, and recieve pay that is more inline with what they actually do.
I would also advocate a democritisation of the workforce, where the company rank and file (not the oligarchic board of directors) elects the company officers. Scale in this regard is important - companies under a certain size would have to be exempt, so as to accomodate the source of corporate development - the entrepreneur.
After all, we're happy to deomcritise the distribution of power, why not the distribution of wealth?
an excessive labour pool is only a problem when there are 7 billion / 8 billion / 9 billion... people who need jobs.
Get rid of the people, and you then have a labour shortage.
Overproduction of labour was desired by industrial capitalism as it expanded the pool of labour. As most labour 100 years ago was fairly unskilled, the more labourers there were, the cheaper the labour, and the more profits availing the ruling class.
With a robotic economy, human labour is largely superfluous, and there is no longer any economic incentive to having children, in fact, it would be economically detrimental to have more kidz. Therefore the logical place to go is to Tax Children.
Since the reproduction of the species is critical, one doesn't tax one child. In fact, I would give a huge tax break to family with one child. With the second kid, the tax break disappears. With the third kid, the tax break reverses, and you would have to pay the equivalent of a single child tax break. With a fourth child you have to pay DOUBLE. Fifth - double again. Sixth - double again.
Would the rich have lots of kids? sure - if they want to - they can afford it. But the poor, who can least afford them, would be economically disinclined to have them. In this way, the labour problem takes care of itself over a few generations.
This, combined with a TRULY progressive income tax, such as that found i nthe USA ca. 1958, would work WONDERS for the economy if the proceeds were directly re-distributed.
If such re-distribution is not effected and REALLY SOON, I predict Bill Gates's head on a spade within ten years. and Ellison's. and Jobs. And the entire Rockefeller clan. And the duPonts. etc. etc. etc. which would be sad as it is so unnecessary.
That's really smart on the part of the pinheads at Register. Everyone knows that Iran's regime, while more liberal than it was, say, 20 years ago, is hardly a bastion of liberal values.
So, here we have the Register finding something out about the Merkin Gummint helping the poor bastards who have to live under that brutal theocracy with anonymised web access only available to Iranian IP addresses. And, because it's the fetid corrupt Bush Admin doing the deed, they feel compelled to publish it.
So, now that it's been broadcast by the Register all over the freakin planet, you know that the jackbooted thugs...errr...turbaned thugs who run the Iranian security apparatus are going to shut that down ASAP.
Leaving the poor bastards to swelter in from of their P2/266s with even less hope than before.
Good move Register! Ya hit one right out of the park with that one. Ya boneheads.
I'm not saying that they should NOT have published it. I just think they should have THOUGHT about it and THOUGHT about how they could report it without making the theiving rat bastards in Washington look like heroes, OR jeopardise this obviously useful and progressive idea.
As usual, they didn't and I don't give that anonymiser more than 3 weeks.
Taking on IBM was quixotic at best, and certainly foolhardy, but THIS move? Demanding $700 a seat from the gummint, even one as transparently corrupt as the Bush Admin? Now that takes NOIVE I TELL YA.
And then spread FUD upon the rabid TiVo masses? And make concrete monetary demands? That's beyond the pale.
Complete fucking idiots. They jumped the shark. They are totally fucking doomed.
Speaking as a former full time and now only occasional type designer, these elvish fonts are mediocre.
They are cleary swiped from other fonts, but I will comment on the more "standard" of the lot, TengwarQuenya.
First off, it's taken from Times New Roman, which is not a big deal to me. It's boring, but not bad - I'd have prefered something with a little more tang, like Cloister or even Berling, but Oh Well. We're talking LOTR geeks, not Hermann Zapf. Speaking of Zapf, Gudrun's font, Diotima, would be nice for the Elvish treatment...
Secondly, the curves in the letters that are not derived from Times are very uneven, and ungraceful. Because of this, there are a pleathora of points describing what is essentially a simple clean curve.
A good example of this would be the char in l.c. "i" and the l.c. "k".. they're wavy snaky things with about 5x as many points as they need, and that's even accounting for the quadratic curve description differences in TrueType.
The letter spacing is mediocre. There are a few combos that could use some kerning, but the real problem lies in how letters that have identical forms are given different side bearings. Example: in English the letters (in helvetica / arial) l, h, and b sould have extremely similar if not largely identical left sidebearing values. In Adobe Helvetica, the left sidebearings for k, b, h, and l are:
67, 58, 65, and 67.
For letters q, w, y, and t in Tengwar Times, which all have very similar left side shapes, and similar counter spaces, have values of :
12, 25, 12 and 0. Which is crap.
So, overall, I give these fonts a C+.
They'll do the trick for the unclued, but they're not art.
Also, they are not available in Mac format, and for a graphics oriented font, that's a really sad thing to overlook. But it was devised by Geeks for other Geeks using MS Word, so, we're talking dupes of the conspiracy here.
He can say "any measure of time is an interval" until he's blue in the face, but once you're below a certain value (IIRC 10^-43) it doesn't matter - Planck Time *is* the instant, and anything underneath that is impossible to determine. We don't/can't know if anything changes during a Planck instant, and it is change that permits any understanding of time. No change = no time.
Since somethings don't change (Einstein Rosen condensate or a black hole) they are technically "outside of time". Hence: time is a perceptual strategy, not a physical property.
Zeno's paradox is wrong simply because it is a false dilemma - it assumes that time exists in the first place.
Go to hypercar.com and see the car of the future, whether you like it or not. They've been talking about BTO cars for years.
It's good to see someone finally getting off their duffs and doing it. Now if they can do it with off the shelf hybrid parts, carbon fibre body shells, etc. the hypercar will be that much closer to realisaiton.
As others have noted, the average amount of power needed is on the order of about 15 terawatts per year, and going up. And to do it all with solar power, we'll need to cover an area the size of Alaska with panels.
Obviously, that isn't going to happen now, tomorrow or ever.
At the same time, using fossil fuels is clearly destructive and a Very Bad Idea.
So, we have to look at other non-carbon producing energy sources. Nuculer?
We could run breeder reactors that generate their own fuel - plutonium. Unfortunately, plutonium is also very handy for making really nastly bombs, and given the number of assholes in the world, this makes breeder reactors politically unfeasible for universal implmentation.
So, then regular nuke plants? There's only so much Uranium on the planet and it is a fairly limited resource. I saw someone on Frontline say that if we converted over to nukes for 100% of the world's power, we'd run out of Uranium in less than 30 years.
I'd also point out that we'd then be saddled with tons of nasty toxic crap that no one would want anywhere near them, and this nasty toxic crap will likely remain nasty toxic crap until sometime well after the next ice age. So, nuculer isn't going to do it to it.
But we still have to power up 15 or 16 terawatts of Mr Coffee machines, hair curlers, computers, and all kinds o' junk and useless nonsense we clutter our lives with. So WHERE is the juice going to come from?
1. by changing the needs base. removing automobiles from the fossil feul food chain by cracking water with solar energy to make hydrogen for hypercars will extend the life of fossil fuel energy production, and by reducing the demand for it, reduce its price.
2. by maximising efficiency of use. devices that use less juice will be at a great advantage in the market place when:
3. Energy markets are opened up to speculators who greedily distort energy prices to their own advantage, driving the need for greater efficiency to reduce dependency on the vampiric rat bastards.
4. Homes are made to be energy self sufficient. Getting people off the grid is the most important thing we can do to reduce energy consumption. when people have to pay for their own power and have to live on an energy budget, they will wildly seek out hyper efficient appliances, and this will encourage non-fossil fuel devices. It will also encourge people to sell energy back to the vampiric grid.
5. population reduction. We need to get rid of people. Gently and gradually. If we had one tenth the number of people roaming this shattered little planet, light use of carbon fuels (wood, methane, etc.) would even be permissible.
So, that's what needs to be done if we ever expect to have a sustainble future that includes something resembling an industrial civilisation. Get rid of people, make energy expensive, and make people responsible for their energy consumption.
>Good poetry is what works for the reader,
>regardless of intent by the poet. A good poet
> is one that can write good poems that
>convey at least part of what he or she had to
>say. But good poems doesn't have to
>come from good poets.
Post-Modernist deconstructivist malarky.
"What Works" for a reader is not the same as good poetry. God poetry is where the form of the poem (the sounds) amplify or help create the meaning (the sense) of the poem. It's the unity of the writer's skill as a poet and the poet's depth of vision that make for good poetry. To excise intention from poetry is to excise its value as a practice.
If you take proper care of the sense, the sounds will take care of themselves.
Machines can't make poetry (yet) because they don't have any grasp of meaning. Manipulating words using some vagrant Markov process blown through a rhymer doesn't make poetry - it just makes rhyming nonsense.
Of course, now, my cake is melting in the rain, and it took so long to bake it...
there are SO many books on revenge, now that we know who the fucker is we can easily make his life impossible.
My fave?
Send $5 to some rabid wing of Jebus freeeeks with a note that says:
"I AM POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL. PLEASE COME TO MY HOUSE AT (x) ADDRESS AND PRAY WITH ME TO SAVE MY SOUL!!! I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH LONGER I WILL BE "NORMAL" AGAIN! IF I TELL YOU TO LEAVE - IGNORE ME - IT'S JUST THE DEVIL SPEAKING !!! HELP ME!!! PLEASE SWEET JEBUS!!!!"
Also: sign him up for one of those "10 CDs for a dime" offers and send him the worlds WORST music. Not even kitshy fun crap - just garbage, like some anonymous second rate "Modern Country" or some grade B hip hop or treacle like "smooth jazz".
Not only does he get a lot of crappy CDs, but a rekkid company intent on demanding he by more of their "product".
He Did point out where the web based apps can rule: info retrieval and DB work. He also pointed out where web based stuff utterly sucks: content creation.
I make my meagre living doing content creation. I don't see how there will ever be a useful web-based video editing program. It don't woik dat way.
info retrieval and DB work is just one slice of the pie, and, from my perspective, one that will through natural selection winnow itself into an ever narrower slice of the technology pie. Things that are cheap/free and extremely robust AND EASY TO USE will win and dominate, and over time become increasingly ubiquitous. Just take those three dimensions of cost, power, and ease of use and manipulate them into whatever levels you want and you arrive at the available platforms.
Because the parameters of IT are known and mechanical, it will tend to drive down in cost, and reduce its need in manpower over time.
However: while people live and work in such an Aristotlean world, they dream and party in a neoplatonic world of myth and shadows. Hence: there will always be a need for content creation, and the more people there are, the greater the need for more content. Therefore, proprietary platforms will strengthen their grip over content creation, and, unfortunately, that means Microsoft will, as usual, dominate our lives for no really good reason.
Example: all the movies theatres are going digital, and the Windows Media format is the file type they are using. Not QuickTime. Apple TOTALLY dropped the ball on that, and if the high end is all Windows (not Linux or even Macintosh), the others stand precious little chance of getting anywhere, because of the reduced cost of vertical integration of platform standards.
So, everyone can be snippy and chirpy about Linux / OSS / etc. but that pie is shrinking in proportion, and the media pie is growing, and it's all proprietary and increasingly owned by a monopolist...
That's what I wanna know... I wanna pick up one of the cheapy 5 giggers on the used market, and then pop in an 80gig monster drive and put my whole CD collection on it. No muss, no fuss, no expensive mess. (There's no way on this little green planet of clocks that I'm going to spend $400 on an MP3 player...)
RS
because it's a world wide webthat has been balkanised into ecnomic spheres.
the itunes music server is a case in point. Until Europe gets on board with the Stationer's Cartel we call modern American copyright law, iTMS won't be selling jack to the EU.
He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.... It's all political and completely corrupt and deeply bound up with the factthat government exists to protect and project the intersts of the rich and powerful. Always has, always will. In our time, gummint protects and projects the interests of corporate cartels that are based in certain economic superstates, Oceania (USA/NAFTA), Eurasia (EU & Russia), and EastAsia (china/Japan). That's how it works.
The parent articles whinging about it is sad, as it indicates the depth of the problem...
hope and pray someone mods me up big time, because this is very important and I hope people pay attention:
Adobe isn't just abandoning the Apple Platform. You don't just dump a platform for the hell of it. You go TO another platform with a plan. And, given the evidence I beleieve THIS is Adobe's plan:
To become the dominant media creation tool providers in the Windows Platform.
This is how you do it:
1. create a seamless UI and file management system from acquisition to media creation.
2. Get it into the hands of students
3. Wait.
This creates a unified workflow with a unified UI - scan in Photoshop, DV in Premiere, Audio acquire in Audition. Put it together in Premiere and process with After Effects and Photoshop. Project complete, export it as a movie or sequence back into DV/Web (Premiere), DVD (Encore), or Print/Web (Acrobat).
With a unified UI, it's all super easy, and an extremely powerful suite of applications.
Since going between machines is a royal pain in the ass in a given workflow, and Apple blew Premiere away with Final Cut Pro (Note: the core engineering team for Apple FCP was from Macromedia, and Macromedia raided them from Premiere back around v4!) Adobe lost a leg in their media creation system. Rather than screw with Apple over FCP, it makes MUCH more sense to create an entire new industry based on the Windows platform.
To create this new workflow, you have to get students involved, and right now, Adobe spews TONS of software for a very nominal price into the education channel. In fact, their single largest sales client is the fourth rate Art Institutes International (any art school that advertises on daytime TV is not an Art school...) who soak up thousands of seat licenses for Adobe, and churn out thousands of little graphic design drones. A.I.I. is not alone - all major art schools have such agreements with Adobe.
And when these kidz get out of school, they will know nad love Adobe products. So, when they go out into the world GUESS what they will use? FreeHand? Painter? Final Cut Pro? Vegas? DVD Studio Pro? Sonic Foundry? Quark? No:
They will use Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Audition, and InDesign - all of them sharing similar similar UI cues and systems, providing them with a uniform media creation environment.
Already their stranglehold on the education market has killed off FreeHand and Painter. They tried to kill off FreeHand back in 1994, but failed, and went to the aggressive education strategy shortly thereafter.
With thousands of little droids who think they're being creative cranking out graphics, video, and DVDs, usingthe unified Adobe environment, Adobe will pretty much own that space in about 5 years.
Innovation will occur around the fringes, and the ideas will filter into Adobe over time. Just like how ideas filter in Microsoft over time. At the core, like Microsoft, there is precious little reason to innovate at Adobe. Like Microsoft, they have cash cows: PostScript and Photoshop, like Windows and Word...
Unless Apple does something amazing REALLY SOON, the loss of IE and Premiere spell one direction for Apple:
SGI.
You heard it here first. Sure the G5 is faster. So what? An MP SGI Onyx box back in its day kicked butt too...
What I hope this post does:
Someone will forward it to someone at Apple (and people who make software in the same space as Adobe) so they might WAKE UP AND GET A CLUE. I love my Apple computers, and I want to be using an Apple 10 years from now, not some POS wintel box. If they continue along this path, they face the same fate as SGI: marginalised and ignored. which is very very sad.
I hope and pray someone mods me up big time, because this is very important and I hope people pay attention:
Adobe isn't just abandoning the Apple Platform. You don't just dump a platform for the hell of it. You go TO another platform with a plan. And, given the evidence I beleieve THIS is Adobe's plan:
To become the dominant media creation tool providers in the Windows Platform.
This is how you do it:
1. create a seamless UI and file management system from acquisition to media creation.
2. Get it into the hands of students
3. Wait.
This creates a unified workflow with a unified UI - scan in Photoshop, DV in Premiere, Audio acquire in Audition. Put it together in Premiere and process with After Effects and Photoshop. Project complete, export it as a movie or sequence back into DV/Web (Premiere), DVD (Encore), or Print/Web (Acrobat).
With a unified UI, it's all super easy, and an extremely powerful suite of applications.
Since going between machines is a royal pain in the ass in a given workflow, and Apple blew Premiere away with Final Cut Pro (Note: the core engineering team for Apple FCP was from Macromedia, and Macromedia raided them from Premiere back around v4!) Adobe lost a leg in their media creation system. Rather than screw with Apple over FCP, it makes MUCH more sense to create an entire new industry based on the Windows platform.
To create this new workflow, you have to get students involved, and right now, Adobe spews TONS of software for a very nominal price into the education channel. In fact, their single largest sales client is the fourth rate Art Institutes International (any art school that advertises on daytime TV is not an Art school...) who soak up thousands of seat licenses for Adobe, and churn out thousands of little graphic design drones. A.I.I. is not alone - all major art schools have such agreements with Adobe.
And when these kidz get out of school, they will know nad love Adobe products. So, when they go out into the world GUESS what they will use? FreeHand? Painter? Final Cut Pro? Vegas? DVD Studio Pro? Sonic Foundry? Quark? No:
They will use Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere,
After Effects, Encore, Audition, and InDesign - all of them sharing similar similar UI cues and systems, providing them with a uniform media creation environment.
Already their stranglehold on the education market has killed off FreeHand and Painter. They tried to kill off FreeHand back in 1994, but failed, and went to the aggressive education strategy shortly thereafter.
With thousands of little droids cranking out graphics, video, and DVDs, usingthe unified Adobe environment, Adobe will pretty much own that space in about 5 years.
Innovation will occur around the fringes, and the ideas will filter into Adobe over time. Just like how ideas filter in Microsoft over time. At the core, like Microsoft, there is precious little reason to innovate at Adobe. Like Microsoft, they have cash cows: PostScript and Photoshop, like Windows and Word...
Unless Apple does something amazing REALLY SOON, the loss of IE and Premiere spell one direction for Apple:
SGI.
You heard it here first. Sure the G5 is faster. So what? An MP SGI Onyx box back in its day kicked butt too...
What I hope this post does:
Someone will forward it to someone at Apple (and people who make software in the same space as Adobe) so they might WAKE UP AND GET A CLUE. I love my Apple computers, and I want to be using an Apple 10 years from now, not some POS wintel box. If they continue along this path, they face the same fate as SGI: marginalised and ignored. which is very very sad.
Nope. I didn't know the HT difference. As I said, I'm more of a Macintosh user than a Pentium fan. Thanks for the clarification! Much appreciated!
I wonder when we'll see dual Xeon laptops?
Probably around the same time they make the shells out of asbestos?
Still, I think that dual Xeons would be pretty cool. I do video a lot and I like working in a nicer environment than some dreary office or the hovel that is my studio. As far as battery life goes - my powerbook using "normal" software (like MS Office or Quark, etc. - stuff that does beat on the CPU) gets on average 4 - 5 hours. My old P3 laptop NEVER got more than 2 hours. So, i usually don't bother with batteries and laptops with those machines, oddly enough. It seems that with an Intel/AMD laptop, JUST as I settle into what I'm doing, it needs a freakin' charge. Woof. Why bother.
Also: G5 laptops? Not for a while - the towers need *nine* fans to cool the machines - imagine cramming one of those caliente babies into a 3/4 inch piece of aluminium. You'd cauterise your legs off at the knees.
It's optimised for video editing, but DAMN this would be the gamer's dream machine... Note: I would never buy one, nor am I involved with the company - I'm a happy Apple Powerbook owner sitting in Final Cut Pro-land - but
I know my brake fluid, and this is the real deal.
1 Beyond DV Pro 3000
P4 Dual HT 3.06 GHz!
* 85% faster than P4m (mobile)!
* DDR 266 MHz Memory
* 16.1" UXGA TFT LCD, ATI 9000
* Dual drives Raided to 120GB
40MB/S SDR
* TV Tuner with TIVO functions,
* Mpeg2 Recording real-time
* TV / CD / VCR Remote Control
* Removable MP3 Player
* Built-in IEEE 1394 Firewire
* v V.90 56k data/fax modem
* v 4 USB 2.0 Ports, S-Video In/Out
* 10/100 LAN and Opt'l WiFi
* Noise Canceling Headphones
* Turnkey Editing SW:
* AVID Xpress DV 3.5 or
* Adobe Premiere 6.5
* Pinnacle Edition
To defeat video DRM: spend a few hundred bucks on a video time base corrector (TBC). You can get one used on eBay fairly cheaply for about $200. Plug your DVD player's video out into it's video in, and put a DV camera with analogue IN on the TBC's stabilised video out. The DRM usually skips the audio portion, so you can (usually) string the audio right across from the DVD player to the DV camera.
The TBC will strip out the DRM / Macrovision bullshit, and replace it that track with blank information, giving you a completely stable video signal. done.
Now: DRM'd audio CDs?
This is harder and it will take some serious programming chops, but it's pretty much a permanent solution to the whole damn thing:
write a program that takes the digital audio data just prior to it going to the DAC. This will require someone reverse engineering a part of the audio driver in the OS du jour. Once you have that datastream, you dupe it: half go to the DAC (As expected, so this way, if the DAC has some kind of checksum going, it won't notice) the other dupe gets saved directly to the hard drive as an MP3 / OGG / WAV / AIF / whatever floats your boat file format.
OK - let's take your phantasy in a very practical sense. You live in, say, San Francisco, and you want to email someone who's in, say, Advocate Harbour, Nova Scotia. And you want to do it from the comfort of your table at StarBarfs while sipping your double non-fat decaf soy latte. And the person you're emailing your 1337 hipster nonsense to is hanging out watching the tide come in at the Bay of Fundy next to a lighthouse. cuz it's beeeyoootiful.
NOW: how is this done?
you have your communcation device - a telephone or laptop, and you type in your message. It gets transmitted tooo... an 802.11g transceiver/router. Who paid for that device? Starbarfs? Where did the money come from? Oh... your overpriced pseudo coffee drink...
OK - so now the information is transmitted along some wires out of the building into some telephone lines. WHO maintains those lines? Are those lines free? How much do the telephone poles cost? And the wire that connects them? Who pays for THAT? And who pays the people who repair the pole when some teenTard (TM) and his gang of idiot friends plows his car into the pole? And who pays for the truck that transports the repairmen to the site? And who pays for their tools?
Now the wire goes to some huge telco building. the telco building is filled to the gunnels and they need a new one to handle all the traffic, beucase the "Free" aspect means everyone is useing the living daylights out of it. WHO pays for the new building and the digital swiches in it? And who pays for the people who work there who maintain it? And who pays for the giant satellite dish that pops the data up to a telco satellite?
And WHO pays for the satellite? And who pays forthe extra satellites that will be needed to handle the traffic?
So the satellite beams your desperately important little message of:
"huh - this is k3wl. I'm like, sippin latte at Starbarfs and like, typing this message, d00d..."
To the Canadian telco reciever in Halifax, NS. From there it goes to land lines or microwave, and ALL the expenses of the telco/ISP system in SF are now replicated in NS, but now it's in Canadian dollars...
So it streams along to the craggy corner of NS called Advocate Harbour. But... THEN there has to be another wireless arena set uyup, and he's sitting 100 yards from the lighthouse. So, you'll need some very powerful transmitters, and WHO PAYS FOR THOSE? And who maintains them?
So finally, after all that, it ends up in his inbox, and he sees your name and deletes it without reading it, because he knows you're totally clueless about the simplest facts of economy, and have been ever since you got that job in 1997 at that dotbomb delivering cat litter by way of Fedex...
Your phantasy WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
People work, and when they work, they expect to get paid. A lot. And the more complex, specialised, and tedious the work, the more they need to make...
This is not a flame - I honestly want the parent to know that their question is utterly ridiculous in the most literal sense: worthy of ridicule: and WHY this is so, which is why I was so detailed in the response.
Cursive writing in the USA is based on the "Palmer Method". The Palmer Method is based on the kind of loopy handwriting developed by engravers in the 18th century. That kind of "calligraphy" is lush and complex, but ultimately rather gaudy and hard to read. Basing a nations handwriting models on it was a BAD IDEA to start with.
The best handwriting was (and still is, IMHO) from the renaissance. Various forms of "italic" hand were developed by people who's names later became typefaces, such as Palatino.
The interesting thing is, if you write with an italic hand, even with a monoline ballpoint, your writing becomes a bit more angular, but a bit neater and easier to read, and (alors!) faster. It *is* faster to write italic than palmer, because there are far fewer strokes involved.
I'm as much of a computer geek as the rest, but I also have a passion for calligraphy. It is an amazing practice that should never die.
this is a very well taken point and should be modded up.
I've noticed this on/. - when someone who isn't a continuous poster makes a short well written point they get a 1 because it is a positive number but the people who assign values are too lazy to give it the value it deserves.
Of course, this means I'll probably be modded down on this post.
To the point:
We are slowly evolving into a new form of government:
democratic fascism.
People get to vote, there are multiple parties, but fundamentally, it's a one party state - like a hydra - many heads that hate each other, but the body walks in one direction, and we're all trapped on its back.
When things get rough they throw the slaves some bread (social services) and circuses (TV). This shuts the proles up, and the ruling class stays put.
Slashdot Mirror
Grading papers based purely on mechanical issues of grammar and spelling is idiotic.
In high school I discovered that there are more people who speak English OUTSIDE the United States than INSIDE. Ever since then , I have usually used British Spelling when addressing any international forum. But not necessarily consistently, as I am often rushed for time and can't use my spellcheck (Set for Intl English) all the time.
So, I would score poorly in the spelling department. However, I do think that essays should be judged on their meaning and insight. That is not presently a feature of any programme that I know of, and for that reason, the programme described in the article is useless for what is essential to good writing: a sound and critical mind.
Spelling does matter, and it matters more than the illiterate pinheads I share an office with think, but not as much as the pedants and grammar police would like to think.
Overall, a big ho hum from Mr Spoilsport.
RS
systems with extreme distributions will tend to fail against systems with moderated distributions.
company A makes widgets. People buy the widgets, and thusly, company A makes wealth or value. This value (say, $100 million) is then distributed to various outputs: costs for materials, labour, shareholders. The managers of company A (CEO, CFO etc.) only take a small multiple of the company's bottom pay scale (say, 5x the bottom value).
company B makes widgettes. People buy the widgettes, and thusly, company B makes wealth or value. This value (say $100 million) is them distributed to various outputs: costs for materials, labour, shareholders. But in company B, the executive staff takes 10x the bottom pay scale.
Now. all things being equal (labour, materials etc.) which company will be better able to compete?
company A, of course - they'll have more money available to invest in research and development, advertising, marketing, and infrastructure.
company B will have less to invest, and will be less competitive.
The executives of each didn't "earn" anything - it's the structure of compensation that gives the executives their pay.
It is time that executives be TRULY seen as merely employees, and recieve pay that is more inline with what they actually do.
I would also advocate a democritisation of the workforce, where the company rank and file (not the oligarchic board of directors) elects the company officers. Scale in this regard is important - companies under a certain size would have to be exempt, so as to accomodate the source of corporate development - the entrepreneur.
After all, we're happy to deomcritise the distribution of power, why not the distribution of wealth?
RS
an excessive labour pool is only a problem when there are 7 billion / 8 billion / 9 billion... people who need jobs.
Get rid of the people, and you then have a labour shortage.
Overproduction of labour was desired by industrial capitalism as it expanded the pool of labour. As most labour 100 years ago was fairly unskilled, the more labourers there were, the cheaper the labour, and the more profits availing the ruling class.
With a robotic economy, human labour is largely superfluous, and there is no longer any economic incentive to having children, in fact, it would be economically detrimental to have more kidz. Therefore the logical place to go is to Tax Children.
Since the reproduction of the species is critical, one doesn't tax one child. In fact, I would give a huge tax break to family with one child. With the second kid, the tax break disappears. With the third kid, the tax break reverses, and you would have to pay the equivalent of a single child tax break. With a fourth child you have to pay DOUBLE. Fifth - double again. Sixth - double again.
Would the rich have lots of kids? sure - if they want to - they can afford it. But the poor, who can least afford them, would be economically disinclined to have them. In this way, the labour problem takes care of itself over a few generations.
This, combined with a TRULY progressive income tax, such as that found i nthe USA ca. 1958, would work WONDERS for the economy if the proceeds were directly re-distributed.
If such re-distribution is not effected and REALLY SOON, I predict Bill Gates's head on a spade within ten years. and Ellison's. and Jobs. And the entire Rockefeller clan. And the duPonts. etc. etc. etc. which would be sad as it is so unnecessary.
RS
Now, if there was anything worth listening to on the radio, I'd say they'd have something, but hey don't because "Garbage In = Garbage Out".
While hacking up pig snouts and horse hooves might make for an interesting, ummmm... "sausage", it's still nasty dead stuff...
RS
So, here we have the Register finding something out about the Merkin Gummint helping the poor bastards who have to live under that brutal theocracy with anonymised web access only available to Iranian IP addresses. And, because it's the fetid corrupt Bush Admin doing the deed, they feel compelled to publish it.
So, now that it's been broadcast by the Register all over the freakin planet, you know that the jackbooted thugs...errr...turbaned thugs who run the Iranian security apparatus are going to shut that down ASAP.
Leaving the poor bastards to swelter in from of their P2/266s with even less hope than before.
Good move Register! Ya hit one right out of the park with that one. Ya boneheads.
I'm not saying that they should NOT have published it. I just think they should have THOUGHT about it and THOUGHT about how they could report it without making the theiving rat bastards in Washington look like heroes, OR jeopardise this obviously useful and progressive idea.
As usual, they didn't and I don't give that anonymiser more than 3 weeks.
I hope the Register's happy now.
RS
And then spread FUD upon the rabid TiVo masses? And make concrete monetary demands? That's beyond the pale.
Complete fucking idiots. They jumped the shark. They are totally fucking doomed.
RS
They are cleary swiped from other fonts, but I will comment on the more "standard" of the lot, TengwarQuenya.
First off, it's taken from Times New Roman, which is not a big deal to me. It's boring, but not bad - I'd have prefered something with a little more tang, like Cloister or even Berling, but Oh Well. We're talking LOTR geeks, not Hermann Zapf. Speaking of Zapf, Gudrun's font, Diotima, would be nice for the Elvish treatment...
Secondly, the curves in the letters that are not derived from Times are very uneven, and ungraceful. Because of this, there are a pleathora of points describing what is essentially a simple clean curve.
A good example of this would be the char in l.c. "i" and the l.c. "k".. they're wavy snaky things with about 5x as many points as they need, and that's even accounting for the quadratic curve description differences in TrueType.
The letter spacing is mediocre. There are a few combos that could use some kerning, but the real problem lies in how letters that have identical forms are given different side bearings. Example: in English the letters (in helvetica / arial) l, h, and b sould have extremely similar if not largely identical left sidebearing values. In Adobe Helvetica, the left sidebearings for k, b, h, and l are: 67, 58, 65, and 67.
For letters q, w, y, and t in Tengwar Times, which all have very similar left side shapes, and similar counter spaces, have values of : 12, 25, 12 and 0. Which is crap.
So, overall, I give these fonts a C+.
They'll do the trick for the unclued, but they're not art.
Also, they are not available in Mac format, and for a graphics oriented font, that's a really sad thing to overlook. But it was devised by Geeks for other Geeks using MS Word, so, we're talking dupes of the conspiracy here.
RS
Since somethings don't change (Einstein Rosen condensate or a black hole) they are technically "outside of time". Hence: time is a perceptual strategy, not a physical property.
Zeno's paradox is wrong simply because it is a false dilemma - it assumes that time exists in the first place.
RS
It's good to see someone finally getting off their duffs and doing it. Now if they can do it with off the shelf hybrid parts, carbon fibre body shells, etc. the hypercar will be that much closer to realisaiton.
RS
Obviously, that isn't going to happen now, tomorrow or ever.
At the same time, using fossil fuels is clearly destructive and a Very Bad Idea.
So, we have to look at other non-carbon producing energy sources. Nuculer?
We could run breeder reactors that generate their own fuel - plutonium. Unfortunately, plutonium is also very handy for making really nastly bombs, and given the number of assholes in the world, this makes breeder reactors politically unfeasible for universal implmentation.
So, then regular nuke plants? There's only so much Uranium on the planet and it is a fairly limited resource. I saw someone on Frontline say that if we converted over to nukes for 100% of the world's power, we'd run out of Uranium in less than 30 years.
I'd also point out that we'd then be saddled with tons of nasty toxic crap that no one would want anywhere near them, and this nasty toxic crap will likely remain nasty toxic crap until sometime well after the next ice age. So, nuculer isn't going to do it to it.
But we still have to power up 15 or 16 terawatts of Mr Coffee machines, hair curlers, computers, and all kinds o' junk and useless nonsense we clutter our lives with. So WHERE is the juice going to come from?
1. by changing the needs base. removing automobiles from the fossil feul food chain by cracking water with solar energy to make hydrogen for hypercars will extend the life of fossil fuel energy production, and by reducing the demand for it, reduce its price.
2. by maximising efficiency of use. devices that use less juice will be at a great advantage in the market place when:
3. Energy markets are opened up to speculators who greedily distort energy prices to their own advantage, driving the need for greater efficiency to reduce dependency on the vampiric rat bastards.
4. Homes are made to be energy self sufficient. Getting people off the grid is the most important thing we can do to reduce energy consumption. when people have to pay for their own power and have to live on an energy budget, they will wildly seek out hyper efficient appliances, and this will encourage non-fossil fuel devices. It will also encourge people to sell energy back to the vampiric grid.
5. population reduction. We need to get rid of people. Gently and gradually. If we had one tenth the number of people roaming this shattered little planet, light use of carbon fuels (wood, methane, etc.) would even be permissible.
So, that's what needs to be done if we ever expect to have a sustainble future that includes something resembling an industrial civilisation. Get rid of people, make energy expensive, and make people responsible for their energy consumption.
RS
>regardless of intent by the poet. A good poet
> is one that can write good poems that
>convey at least part of what he or she had to
>say. But good poems doesn't have to
>come from good poets.
Post-Modernist deconstructivist malarky.
"What Works" for a reader is not the same as good poetry. God poetry is where the form of the poem (the sounds) amplify or help create the meaning (the sense) of the poem. It's the unity of the writer's skill as a poet and the poet's depth of vision that make for good poetry. To excise intention from poetry is to excise its value as a practice.
If you take proper care of the sense, the sounds will take care of themselves.
RS
Machines can't make poetry (yet) because they don't have any grasp of meaning. Manipulating words using some vagrant Markov process blown through a rhymer doesn't make poetry - it just makes rhyming nonsense.
Of course, now, my cake is melting in the rain, and it took so long to bake it...
T'UFF UM - I ZIMBRA!
RS
If it isn't self refuting, it isn't complete.
My fave?
Send $5 to some rabid wing of Jebus freeeeks with a note that says:
"I AM POSSESSED BY THE DEVIL. PLEASE COME TO MY HOUSE AT (x) ADDRESS AND PRAY WITH ME TO SAVE MY SOUL!!! I DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH LONGER I WILL BE "NORMAL" AGAIN! IF I TELL YOU TO LEAVE - IGNORE ME - IT'S JUST THE DEVIL SPEAKING !!! HELP ME!!! PLEASE SWEET JEBUS!!!!"
Also: sign him up for one of those "10 CDs for a dime" offers and send him the worlds WORST music. Not even kitshy fun crap - just garbage, like some anonymous second rate "Modern Country" or some grade B hip hop or treacle like "smooth jazz".
Not only does he get a lot of crappy CDs, but a rekkid company intent on demanding he by more of their "product".
RS
RIGHT HERE IN THE CITY OF EMPHYSEMA!
I make my meagre living doing content creation. I don't see how there will ever be a useful web-based video editing program. It don't woik dat way.
info retrieval and DB work is just one slice of the pie, and, from my perspective, one that will through natural selection winnow itself into an ever narrower slice of the technology pie. Things that are cheap/free and extremely robust AND EASY TO USE will win and dominate, and over time become increasingly ubiquitous. Just take those three dimensions of cost, power, and ease of use and manipulate them into whatever levels you want and you arrive at the available platforms.
Because the parameters of IT are known and mechanical, it will tend to drive down in cost, and reduce its need in manpower over time.
However: while people live and work in such an Aristotlean world, they dream and party in a neoplatonic world of myth and shadows. Hence: there will always be a need for content creation, and the more people there are, the greater the need for more content. Therefore, proprietary platforms will strengthen their grip over content creation, and, unfortunately, that means Microsoft will, as usual, dominate our lives for no really good reason.
Example: all the movies theatres are going digital, and the Windows Media format is the file type they are using. Not QuickTime. Apple TOTALLY dropped the ball on that, and if the high end is all Windows (not Linux or even Macintosh), the others stand precious little chance of getting anywhere, because of the reduced cost of vertical integration of platform standards.
So, everyone can be snippy and chirpy about Linux / OSS / etc. but that pie is shrinking in proportion, and the media pie is growing, and it's all proprietary and increasingly owned by a monopolist...
Unfortunately.
HW
That's what I wanna know... I wanna pick up one of the cheapy 5 giggers on the used market, and then pop in an 80gig monster drive and put my whole CD collection on it. No muss, no fuss, no expensive mess. (There's no way on this little green planet of clocks that I'm going to spend $400 on an MP3 player...) RS
the itunes music server is a case in point. Until Europe gets on board with the Stationer's Cartel we call modern American copyright law, iTMS won't be selling jack to the EU.
He who pays the fiddler calls the tune.... It's all political and completely corrupt and deeply bound up with the factthat government exists to protect and project the intersts of the rich and powerful. Always has, always will. In our time, gummint protects and projects the interests of corporate cartels that are based in certain economic superstates, Oceania (USA/NAFTA), Eurasia (EU & Russia), and EastAsia (china/Japan). That's how it works.
The parent articles whinging about it is sad, as it indicates the depth of the problem...
RS
hope and pray someone mods me up big time, because this is very important and I hope people pay attention:
Adobe isn't just abandoning the Apple Platform. You don't just dump a platform for the hell of it. You go TO another platform with a plan. And, given the evidence I beleieve THIS is Adobe's plan:
To become the dominant media creation tool providers in the Windows Platform.
This is how you do it:
1. create a seamless UI and file management system from acquisition to media creation.
2. Get it into the hands of students
3. Wait.
How does Adobe do this?
Acquisition: Photoshop, Premiere, Audition.
Processing: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects
Creation: Premiere, Encore, Acrobat
This creates a unified workflow with a unified UI - scan in Photoshop, DV in Premiere, Audio acquire in Audition. Put it together in Premiere and process with After Effects and Photoshop. Project complete, export it as a movie or sequence back into DV/Web (Premiere), DVD (Encore), or Print/Web (Acrobat).
With a unified UI, it's all super easy, and an extremely powerful suite of applications.
Since going between machines is a royal pain in the ass in a given workflow, and Apple blew Premiere away with Final Cut Pro (Note: the core engineering team for Apple FCP was from Macromedia, and Macromedia raided them from Premiere back around v4!) Adobe lost a leg in their media creation system. Rather than screw with Apple over FCP, it makes MUCH more sense to create an entire new industry based on the Windows platform.
To create this new workflow, you have to get students involved, and right now, Adobe spews TONS of software for a very nominal price into the education channel. In fact, their single largest sales client is the fourth rate Art Institutes International (any art school that advertises on daytime TV is not an Art school...) who soak up thousands of seat licenses for Adobe, and churn out thousands of little graphic design drones. A.I.I. is not alone - all major art schools have such agreements with Adobe.
And when these kidz get out of school, they will know nad love Adobe products. So, when they go out into the world GUESS what they will use? FreeHand? Painter? Final Cut Pro? Vegas? DVD Studio Pro? Sonic Foundry? Quark? No:
They will use Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Audition, and InDesign - all of them sharing similar similar UI cues and systems, providing them with a uniform media creation environment.
Already their stranglehold on the education market has killed off FreeHand and Painter. They tried to kill off FreeHand back in 1994, but failed, and went to the aggressive education strategy shortly thereafter.
With thousands of little droids who think they're being creative cranking out graphics, video, and DVDs, usingthe unified Adobe environment, Adobe will pretty much own that space in about 5 years.
Innovation will occur around the fringes, and the ideas will filter into Adobe over time. Just like how ideas filter in Microsoft over time. At the core, like Microsoft, there is precious little reason to innovate at Adobe. Like Microsoft, they have cash cows: PostScript and Photoshop, like Windows and Word...
Unless Apple does something amazing REALLY SOON, the loss of IE and Premiere spell one direction for Apple:
SGI.
You heard it here first. Sure the G5 is faster. So what? An MP SGI Onyx box back in its day kicked butt too...
What I hope this post does: Someone will forward it to someone at Apple (and people who make software in the same space as Adobe) so they might WAKE UP AND GET A CLUE. I love my Apple computers, and I want to be using an Apple 10 years from now, not some POS wintel box. If they continue along this path, they face the same fate as SGI: marginalised and ignored. which is very very sad.
RS
Adobe isn't just abandoning the Apple Platform. You don't just dump a platform for the hell of it. You go TO another platform with a plan. And, given the evidence I beleieve THIS is Adobe's plan:
To become the dominant media creation tool providers in the Windows Platform.
This is how you do it:
1. create a seamless UI and file management system from acquisition to media creation.
2. Get it into the hands of students
3. Wait.
How does Adobe do this?
Acquisition: Photoshop, Premiere, Audition. Processing: Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects
Creation: Premiere, Encore, Acrobat
This creates a unified workflow with a unified UI - scan in Photoshop, DV in Premiere, Audio acquire in Audition. Put it together in Premiere and process with After Effects and Photoshop. Project complete, export it as a movie or sequence back into DV/Web (Premiere), DVD (Encore), or Print/Web (Acrobat).
With a unified UI, it's all super easy, and an extremely powerful suite of applications.
Since going between machines is a royal pain in the ass in a given workflow, and Apple blew Premiere away with Final Cut Pro (Note: the core engineering team for Apple FCP was from Macromedia, and Macromedia raided them from Premiere back around v4!) Adobe lost a leg in their media creation system. Rather than screw with Apple over FCP, it makes MUCH more sense to create an entire new industry based on the Windows platform.
To create this new workflow, you have to get students involved, and right now, Adobe spews TONS of software for a very nominal price into the education channel. In fact, their single largest sales client is the fourth rate Art Institutes International (any art school that advertises on daytime TV is not an Art school...) who soak up thousands of seat licenses for Adobe, and churn out thousands of little graphic design drones. A.I.I. is not alone - all major art schools have such agreements with Adobe.
And when these kidz get out of school, they will know nad love Adobe products. So, when they go out into the world GUESS what they will use? FreeHand? Painter? Final Cut Pro? Vegas? DVD Studio Pro? Sonic Foundry? Quark? No:
They will use Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere, After Effects, Encore, Audition, and InDesign - all of them sharing similar similar UI cues and systems, providing them with a uniform media creation environment.
Already their stranglehold on the education market has killed off FreeHand and Painter. They tried to kill off FreeHand back in 1994, but failed, and went to the aggressive education strategy shortly thereafter.
With thousands of little droids cranking out graphics, video, and DVDs, usingthe unified Adobe environment, Adobe will pretty much own that space in about 5 years.
Innovation will occur around the fringes, and the ideas will filter into Adobe over time. Just like how ideas filter in Microsoft over time. At the core, like Microsoft, there is precious little reason to innovate at Adobe. Like Microsoft, they have cash cows: PostScript and Photoshop, like Windows and Word...
Unless Apple does something amazing REALLY SOON, the loss of IE and Premiere spell one direction for Apple:
SGI.
You heard it here first. Sure the G5 is faster. So what? An MP SGI Onyx box back in its day kicked butt too...
What I hope this post does:
Someone will forward it to someone at Apple (and people who make software in the same space as Adobe) so they might WAKE UP AND GET A CLUE. I love my Apple computers, and I want to be using an Apple 10 years from now, not some POS wintel box. If they continue along this path, they face the same fate as SGI: marginalised and ignored. which is very very sad.
RS
I wonder when we'll see dual Xeon laptops?
Probably around the same time they make the shells out of asbestos?
Still, I think that dual Xeons would be pretty cool. I do video a lot and I like working in a nicer environment than some dreary office or the hovel that is my studio. As far as battery life goes - my powerbook using "normal" software (like MS Office or Quark, etc. - stuff that does beat on the CPU) gets on average 4 - 5 hours. My old P3 laptop NEVER got more than 2 hours. So, i usually don't bother with batteries and laptops with those machines, oddly enough. It seems that with an Intel/AMD laptop, JUST as I settle into what I'm doing, it needs a freakin' charge. Woof. Why bother.
Also: G5 laptops? Not for a while - the towers need *nine* fans to cool the machines - imagine cramming one of those caliente babies into a 3/4 inch piece of aluminium. You'd cauterise your legs off at the knees.
RR
http://www.1beyond.com
It's optimised for video editing, but DAMN this would be the gamer's dream machine... Note: I would never buy one, nor am I involved with the company - I'm a happy Apple Powerbook owner sitting in Final Cut Pro-land - but
I know my brake fluid, and this is the real deal.
1 Beyond DV Pro 3000
P4 Dual HT 3.06 GHz!
* 85% faster than P4m (mobile)!
* DDR 266 MHz Memory
* 16.1" UXGA TFT LCD, ATI 9000
* Dual drives Raided to 120GB 40MB/S SDR
* TV Tuner with TIVO functions,
* Mpeg2 Recording real-time
* TV / CD / VCR Remote Control
* Removable MP3 Player
* Built-in IEEE 1394 Firewire
* v V.90 56k data/fax modem
* v 4 USB 2.0 Ports, S-Video In/Out
* 10/100 LAN and Opt'l WiFi
* Noise Canceling Headphones
* Turnkey Editing SW:
* AVID Xpress DV 3.5 or
* Adobe Premiere 6.5
* Pinnacle Edition
Now THAT'S a LAPTOP....
RR
The TBC will strip out the DRM / Macrovision bullshit, and replace it that track with blank information, giving you a completely stable video signal. done.
Now: DRM'd audio CDs?
This is harder and it will take some serious programming chops, but it's pretty much a permanent solution to the whole damn thing:
write a program that takes the digital audio data just prior to it going to the DAC. This will require someone reverse engineering a part of the audio driver in the OS du jour. Once you have that datastream, you dupe it: half go to the DAC (As expected, so this way, if the DAC has some kind of checksum going, it won't notice) the other dupe gets saved directly to the hard drive as an MP3 / OGG / WAV / AIF / whatever floats your boat file format.
best,
RR
NOW: how is this done?
you have your communcation device - a telephone or laptop, and you type in your message. It gets transmitted tooo... an 802.11g transceiver/router. Who paid for that device? Starbarfs? Where did the money come from? Oh... your overpriced pseudo coffee drink...
OK - so now the information is transmitted along some wires out of the building into some telephone lines. WHO maintains those lines? Are those lines free? How much do the telephone poles cost? And the wire that connects them? Who pays for THAT? And who pays the people who repair the pole when some teenTard (TM) and his gang of idiot friends plows his car into the pole? And who pays for the truck that transports the repairmen to the site? And who pays for their tools?
Now the wire goes to some huge telco building. the telco building is filled to the gunnels and they need a new one to handle all the traffic, beucase the "Free" aspect means everyone is useing the living daylights out of it. WHO pays for the new building and the digital swiches in it? And who pays for the people who work there who maintain it? And who pays for the giant satellite dish that pops the data up to a telco satellite?
And WHO pays for the satellite? And who pays forthe extra satellites that will be needed to handle the traffic?
So the satellite beams your desperately important little message of:
"huh - this is k3wl. I'm like, sippin latte at Starbarfs and like, typing this message, d00d..."
To the Canadian telco reciever in Halifax, NS. From there it goes to land lines or microwave, and ALL the expenses of the telco/ISP system in SF are now replicated in NS, but now it's in Canadian dollars...
So it streams along to the craggy corner of NS called Advocate Harbour. But... THEN there has to be another wireless arena set uyup, and he's sitting 100 yards from the lighthouse. So, you'll need some very powerful transmitters, and WHO PAYS FOR THOSE? And who maintains them?
So finally, after all that, it ends up in his inbox, and he sees your name and deletes it without reading it, because he knows you're totally clueless about the simplest facts of economy, and have been ever since you got that job in 1997 at that dotbomb delivering cat litter by way of Fedex...
Your phantasy WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
People work, and when they work, they expect to get paid. A lot. And the more complex, specialised, and tedious the work, the more they need to make...
This is not a flame - I honestly want the parent to know that their question is utterly ridiculous in the most literal sense: worthy of ridicule: and WHY this is so, which is why I was so detailed in the response.
other than that simple point, malice toward none-
Shoes for industry, compadre,
RR
SCO Gives Friday Deadline To IBM
-snip-
Apple: Apple Sued Over Unix Trademark
-snip-
So, SCO is going to bring IBM "to its knees" over UNIX, and Apple is being sued over UNIX.
This is getting silly.
I tihnk we need to develop a totally swanky GUI on top of VMS....errrr...oh...right...that's Windows...ummmmm....
I think we need to develop a totally swanky GUI on top of CP/M! There we go! Now, who owns CP/M?
Help me somebody - dogs and cats are LIVING TOGETHER!!!
RR
The best handwriting was (and still is, IMHO) from the renaissance. Various forms of "italic" hand were developed by people who's names later became typefaces, such as Palatino.
The interesting thing is, if you write with an italic hand, even with a monoline ballpoint, your writing becomes a bit more angular, but a bit neater and easier to read, and (alors!) faster. It *is* faster to write italic than palmer, because there are far fewer strokes involved.
I'm as much of a computer geek as the rest, but I also have a passion for calligraphy. It is an amazing practice that should never die.
RR
I've noticed this on
Of course, this means I'll probably be modded down on this post.
To the point:
We are slowly evolving into a new form of government:
democratic fascism.
People get to vote, there are multiple parties, but fundamentally, it's a one party state - like a hydra - many heads that hate each other, but the body walks in one direction, and we're all trapped on its back.
When things get rough they throw the slaves some bread (social services) and circuses (TV). This shuts the proles up, and the ruling class stays put.
Same as it ever was.
RR