Not necessarily. There is accountability and responsibility in hosting as well as posting. Recently I had the pleasure of reporting the GNAA guy to his ISP's abuse department because he posted to the comment section of my website. Unlike Slashdot, I will not pay to host that kind of trash -- so I recorded his IP address and contacted his ISP (Keycom/Keysurf) as did another person interested in tracking down this asshole. I don't know if we nailed him, but we both did our part to help police the Internet.
Aside from that, anyone who has a website with a public comment section has the responsibility to remove content which violates the rights of others. In other words if I post hate speech (which is NOT protected "free speech") the owner or administrator of the website has a responsibility to take it down as it serves no possible good and serves to harm innocent parties.
Likewise an auction site should do its best to eliminate fradulent sellers, and to completely disregard PayPal, a service notorious for robbing its users. If you don't believe me, see www.paypalsucks.com and www.paypalsuit.com among others. I personally have lost money because PayPal decided that they needed to freeze my seller account even though there were no chargebacks or other similar activities pending on my account.
If eBay were a responsible business, it would be making a lot of changes. As Microsoft has proved, being the most popular exempts you temporarily from being responsible for your customers' safety. I bet -- and you can totally call me on this -- that Microsoft and eBay and many other online businesses will all go down within weeks or months of each other. Internet consumers (or perhaps credit card companies or banks) are going to demand merchant accountability very soon, and the crooks that run PayPal/eBay and other similarly don't-ask-don't-tell online businesses are going to be in a lot of hot water.
Well if another auction site comes along that doesn't use the borderline-fraud service that is PayPal and offers superior customer service, decades of business history dictates that eBay will surrender to it.
The hard part, as Slashdot proves every day with its uncensored comment system, is making people accountable for what they do online.
And proprietary software is everywhere too, and you need a software key to open it, and you can't usually activate it more than three to five times before a silent alarm goes off and you must call the manufacturer and beg and explain.
Does that mean we should just shrug and accept that too?
What a poser you are. If nothing else, RMS has the sack to stand up for what he believes in. I hope you're not using any Free Software on your computer after having said what you did above.
I had some search terms for that come up in my site stats last month. I tracked it down to a user on my forums who posted a link to Microsoft's support site that fixed something simple, and he linked the text with "morons click here." So now when you search for that term, Microsoft is the first entry.
It's always hard to prove that people are doing things illegally because they never want to tell you about it.
But let's just take an unofficial guess here. Every single person I know IRL has at least one illegally copied Microsoft program (either Office or Windows or both) on their computer. Every single one. And it's not because of me either. How many do you know, especially in constrast with people who have not "pirated" Windows or Office?
I totally agree, however Microsoft should horon their "pirates." After all, if it weren't for the people who illegally copy and distribute Windows, the Microsoft market share would not be what it is right now. Microsoft owes a lot to "pirates."
Totally incorrect. Memory bandwidth affects 3D rendering more than CPU speed does. It also helps with video editing.
In other words, games get nocticeably better framerates with higher memory bandwidth in spite of latency. I did a ton of testing on this with more than 30 motherboards that used a half dozen different chipset technologies. The Rambus-1066 boards (32-bit much moreso than the 16-bit) blew the DDR boards out of the water in every way that I could find, and they remained on top even after dual-channel DDR chipsets were introduced.
Yeah the company are a bunch of bastards, but Rambus in its later models offered outstanding performance for gamers, and video editing (you'd be surprised how many "average" users do or want to do some video editing).
Why pay extra? Because it had incredibly bandwidth, that's why. In an era when you were lucky to pull 2.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth out of the top-end DDR motherboards, Rambus systems were getting 3.4 GB/sec. That's an enormous gain. It wasn't until the Intel E7205 chipset that that speed was matched (and the motherboards were so expensive that you may as well have gone with Rambus anyway), and it wasn't until the introduction of the 800FSB that it was surpassed. For about a year and a half, Rambus was the ultimate king of memory bandwidth.
If anything, Free Software is reducing software "piracy" so Adobe should be happy... if reducing "piracy" is truly their goal. I don't believe it is, because illegal distribution of software expands market presence and market share without affecting the people who are paying for it. No one "pirates" software that they can easily afford.
Yes but presumably the shoes' electronics are in operation at all times, and to some degree they would be in effect while walking. So they'd be "on" for as long as you were wearing the shoes.
That's roughly every ten days. Can you imagine changing your shoe batteries every ten days? And I thought it was bad changing my mouse batteries every four months...
Back in 95 I took the AP Pascal exam. That was the first year of the "new" exams, so we didn't know what to study. I think I got a 2. I never went to college anyway, so I guess it didn't matter.
Good thing it didn't matter; what do people still use Pascal for anyway? At the time, C++ was an elective course (I took it the following year) with no available AP exam. Java wasn't even invented yet. These kids today have everything.
If by near term you mean the next 1-2 years, I can agree with that. I would say though that the near term for longhorn is how long the product will live and I am guessing Ms plans to take it the next decade. What apps dominate the home environment 8 years from now I have NO clue. Maybe there will still be a "shortage" of processing power to do all the next, cool nifty stuff. But I doubt it and so does MS.
Well the topic *is* Microsoft's recommended hardware specs for their OS that is only two years away, and my original point was that in two years the average desktop system will not be this powerful. Looking at the hardware and software trends and innovations of the past year, I would believe it more likely that the average system in two years will be running at just above 3ghz, along the lines of today's top-end systems. Again: no one has the need to upgrade, and if GNU/Linux gains enough ground in the next two years, people may be more inclined to switch to that than buy a whole new computer just to keep using Windows.
That's old thinking. Will you still be saying that if games do become photo-realistic? Graphics can't get that much better than they are in current games. Once you make something look totally real, that's the end of the road. But as someone said above, do you really want everything to be that real? Even the blood and death scenes in Mafia are enough to affect me, and the Doom 3 demo makes me ill seeing all of that realistic gore. It's already too real.
If you'd said LyX, I'd agree with you. I assume you're talking about LaTeX, as TeX is a typesetting language, not a program.
Anyway, to answer your question about the world's obsession with WYSIWYG word processors, the reason is that they have spell-checkers and other nice features that make them invaluable to the vast majority of Americans who can hardly spell their own names. I know LyX has a spell-checker, but when you have a large document to edit (like a book manuscript) you don't want to have to sit through a six hour spell checking session... you want it done on the fly as you type. LyX can't do this.
LyX also outputs the most horrid, awful, painful, disgusting HTML I have ever had the displeasure of viewing from an exported document. Even MS Word 2000 does a better job, and that's saying a lot.
What LyX does very well is produce small documents, letters, letterhead, envelopes, and academic papers. It is not suited for a creative or occasional writer at all.
Hardcore gamers and early adopters are a very small minority. What has traditionally driven hardware innovation is software development and nothing else (of significance). If software never got more complex, hardware would never get more powerful.
How many new chipsets for P4 processors has Intel released in the past year? Answer: none. How many new motherboard models have they produced? None, although they revised the D875PBZ a half dozen times in the last 12 months. This is the first time in the history of Pentium-class processors that this long a period has passed with no new chipsets or motherboard models from Intel. Does that tell you something? Asus and MSI and the others will revise and release, but essentially they're reworking the same boards or using catch-up chipsets like the SiS655 and its later revisions.
The average consumer needs to need new hardware for something in order to really drive hardware upgrades. Ten years ago it was adding CD-ROMs and sound cards to computers... then CD writers, 3D video cards, DVD writers... now we have all of those, or can have them all for under $100 if we want. What's the next big hardware upgrade? What else do you want to do that you can't with an "average" machine?
Twenty years ago we couldn't envision doing some of these wild things we do with computers today. But since then our imaginations have grown and we can now imagine the most grandiose things done with computers. Most of those imaginings are possible; all that is truly left is a self-learning and fully adaptable artificial intelligence. Nothing else within the current and near-future realm of possibility can be done with a home computer (of course in the distant future there are Star Trek-like things to do).
The home PC is now mature. It's finished growing for now. You'll see exactly what I mean once Intel releases the new BTX boards. No one will buy them and then the wondering will be over about the future of desktop hardware. Sure, servers and workstations will continue to advance because the software they use are still driving them forward. Desktop software is not.
You're going back too far though. Go back five years. How much have word processors changed in that time period? How about games? If things continue to change at the same rate, in five years most people will be using Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, and everyone else will still be on WinXP. See my above post RE: the Google Zeitgeist.
But that's an unrealistic gain for the 3%ers. Realistically in five years most people will still be using WinXP. Look at the current struggle that Microsoft has to get people from Windows 98 to XP and from Office 2000 and XP to 2003. It's a monumental struggle for them. It's only going to get worse as good alternatives increase in popularity and quality.
If Microsoft really thinks that this will be an average system in two years then I doubt we will ever actually see Longhorn. Microsoft will be finished by then.
The vast majority of people today are more than happy with their computer systems as they are, and a significant number of people have too much machine for what they're doing. For many years into the future you will be seeing people with P3 and P4 machines still doing then what they do now.
There's a reason why processor sales are slipping for Intel, and it has little to do with AMD: no one's upgrading because the last upgrade they did made no real improvement. How much faster can you get a program to start? How much faster can you do what you already do (excluding those who are in scientific or graphics fields).
Hardware speed and power has accelerated so quickly up until now because software development could keep up with it. Now that proprietary software has stagnated (the last two software packages released by Microsoft, Corel, Macromedia and Adobe are exactly the same with one or two completely useless features thrown in and a new splash screen and icons) there is no reason to increase the capabilities of the hardware. Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers. Same with web browsers and email clients. Even games -- game development has slowed to a crawl because it takes so long to make them now. Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic (and really, they don't need to be -- the Doom 3 demo already makes my stomach turn).
The described system will not be anywhere near "average" for the "average" computer user in two years. Bookmark this post and flame me in 2006 if I'm wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily. There is accountability and responsibility in hosting as well as posting. Recently I had the pleasure of reporting the GNAA guy to his ISP's abuse department because he posted to the comment section of my website. Unlike Slashdot, I will not pay to host that kind of trash -- so I recorded his IP address and contacted his ISP (Keycom/Keysurf) as did another person interested in tracking down this asshole. I don't know if we nailed him, but we both did our part to help police the Internet.
Aside from that, anyone who has a website with a public comment section has the responsibility to remove content which violates the rights of others. In other words if I post hate speech (which is NOT protected "free speech") the owner or administrator of the website has a responsibility to take it down as it serves no possible good and serves to harm innocent parties.
Likewise an auction site should do its best to eliminate fradulent sellers, and to completely disregard PayPal, a service notorious for robbing its users. If you don't believe me, see www.paypalsucks.com and www.paypalsuit.com among others. I personally have lost money because PayPal decided that they needed to freeze my seller account even though there were no chargebacks or other similar activities pending on my account.
If eBay were a responsible business, it would be making a lot of changes. As Microsoft has proved, being the most popular exempts you temporarily from being responsible for your customers' safety. I bet -- and you can totally call me on this -- that Microsoft and eBay and many other online businesses will all go down within weeks or months of each other. Internet consumers (or perhaps credit card companies or banks) are going to demand merchant accountability very soon, and the crooks that run PayPal/eBay and other similarly don't-ask-don't-tell online businesses are going to be in a lot of hot water.
-JemWell if another auction site comes along that doesn't use the borderline-fraud service that is PayPal and offers superior customer service, decades of business history dictates that eBay will surrender to it.
The hard part, as Slashdot proves every day with its uncensored comment system, is making people accountable for what they do online.
-JemAnd proprietary software is everywhere too, and you need a software key to open it, and you can't usually activate it more than three to five times before a silent alarm goes off and you must call the manufacturer and beg and explain.
Does that mean we should just shrug and accept that too?
What a poser you are. If nothing else, RMS has the sack to stand up for what he believes in. I hope you're not using any Free Software on your computer after having said what you did above.
-JemI had some search terms for that come up in my site stats last month. I tracked it down to a user on my forums who posted a link to Microsoft's support site that fixed something simple, and he linked the text with "morons click here." So now when you search for that term, Microsoft is the first entry.
-Jem... and the damn prequels still sucked. I guess all the science in the world can't save you from George Lucas. -Jem
It's always hard to prove that people are doing things illegally because they never want to tell you about it.
But let's just take an unofficial guess here. Every single person I know IRL has at least one illegally copied Microsoft program (either Office or Windows or both) on their computer. Every single one. And it's not because of me either. How many do you know, especially in constrast with people who have not "pirated" Windows or Office?
-JemFlamebait??? It's a joke you morons. Didn't you ever see "Fletch?"
-Jem"Say, what kind of a name is Poon, anyway?"
"Comanche Indian."
horon = honor (somehow! It's late and I've got piles of work to do)
I totally agree, however Microsoft should horon their "pirates." After all, if it weren't for the people who illegally copy and distribute Windows, the Microsoft market share would not be what it is right now. Microsoft owes a lot to "pirates."
-JemTotally incorrect. Memory bandwidth affects 3D rendering more than CPU speed does. It also helps with video editing.
In other words, games get nocticeably better framerates with higher memory bandwidth in spite of latency. I did a ton of testing on this with more than 30 motherboards that used a half dozen different chipset technologies. The Rambus-1066 boards (32-bit much moreso than the 16-bit) blew the DDR boards out of the water in every way that I could find, and they remained on top even after dual-channel DDR chipsets were introduced.
Yeah the company are a bunch of bastards, but Rambus in its later models offered outstanding performance for gamers, and video editing (you'd be surprised how many "average" users do or want to do some video editing).
-JemWhy pay extra? Because it had incredibly bandwidth, that's why. In an era when you were lucky to pull 2.4 GB/sec memory bandwidth out of the top-end DDR motherboards, Rambus systems were getting 3.4 GB/sec. That's an enormous gain. It wasn't until the Intel E7205 chipset that that speed was matched (and the motherboards were so expensive that you may as well have gone with Rambus anyway), and it wasn't until the introduction of the 800FSB that it was surpassed. For about a year and a half, Rambus was the ultimate king of memory bandwidth.
-JemIf anything, Free Software is reducing software "piracy" so Adobe should be happy... if reducing "piracy" is truly their goal. I don't believe it is, because illegal distribution of software expands market presence and market share without affecting the people who are paying for it. No one "pirates" software that they can easily afford.
-JemYes but presumably the shoes' electronics are in operation at all times, and to some degree they would be in effect while walking. So they'd be "on" for as long as you were wearing the shoes.
-JemHow about:
Dark Helmet: (low tone) The way Microsoft manages things it won't last six months.
-JemThat's roughly every ten days. Can you imagine changing your shoe batteries every ten days? And I thought it was bad changing my mouse batteries every four months...
-JemBack in 95 I took the AP Pascal exam. That was the first year of the "new" exams, so we didn't know what to study. I think I got a 2. I never went to college anyway, so I guess it didn't matter.
Good thing it didn't matter; what do people still use Pascal for anyway? At the time, C++ was an elective course (I took it the following year) with no available AP exam. Java wasn't even invented yet. These kids today have everything.
-JemIf by near term you mean the next 1-2 years, I can agree with that. I would say though that the near term for longhorn is how long the product will live and I am guessing Ms plans to take it the next decade. What apps dominate the home environment 8 years from now I have NO clue. Maybe there will still be a "shortage" of processing power to do all the next, cool nifty stuff. But I doubt it and so does MS.
Well the topic *is* Microsoft's recommended hardware specs for their OS that is only two years away, and my original point was that in two years the average desktop system will not be this powerful. Looking at the hardware and software trends and innovations of the past year, I would believe it more likely that the average system in two years will be running at just above 3ghz, along the lines of today's top-end systems. Again: no one has the need to upgrade, and if GNU/Linux gains enough ground in the next two years, people may be more inclined to switch to that than buy a whole new computer just to keep using Windows.
-JemThat's old thinking. Will you still be saying that if games do become photo-realistic? Graphics can't get that much better than they are in current games. Once you make something look totally real, that's the end of the road. But as someone said above, do you really want everything to be that real? Even the blood and death scenes in Mafia are enough to affect me, and the Doom 3 demo makes me ill seeing all of that realistic gore. It's already too real.
-JemIf you'd said LyX, I'd agree with you. I assume you're talking about LaTeX, as TeX is a typesetting language, not a program.
Anyway, to answer your question about the world's obsession with WYSIWYG word processors, the reason is that they have spell-checkers and other nice features that make them invaluable to the vast majority of Americans who can hardly spell their own names. I know LyX has a spell-checker, but when you have a large document to edit (like a book manuscript) you don't want to have to sit through a six hour spell checking session... you want it done on the fly as you type. LyX can't do this.
LyX also outputs the most horrid, awful, painful, disgusting HTML I have ever had the displeasure of viewing from an exported document. Even MS Word 2000 does a better job, and that's saying a lot.
What LyX does very well is produce small documents, letters, letterhead, envelopes, and academic papers. It is not suited for a creative or occasional writer at all.
-JemHardcore gamers and early adopters are a very small minority. What has traditionally driven hardware innovation is software development and nothing else (of significance). If software never got more complex, hardware would never get more powerful.
How many new chipsets for P4 processors has Intel released in the past year? Answer: none. How many new motherboard models have they produced? None, although they revised the D875PBZ a half dozen times in the last 12 months. This is the first time in the history of Pentium-class processors that this long a period has passed with no new chipsets or motherboard models from Intel. Does that tell you something? Asus and MSI and the others will revise and release, but essentially they're reworking the same boards or using catch-up chipsets like the SiS655 and its later revisions.
The average consumer needs to need new hardware for something in order to really drive hardware upgrades. Ten years ago it was adding CD-ROMs and sound cards to computers... then CD writers, 3D video cards, DVD writers... now we have all of those, or can have them all for under $100 if we want. What's the next big hardware upgrade? What else do you want to do that you can't with an "average" machine?
Twenty years ago we couldn't envision doing some of these wild things we do with computers today. But since then our imaginations have grown and we can now imagine the most grandiose things done with computers. Most of those imaginings are possible; all that is truly left is a self-learning and fully adaptable artificial intelligence. Nothing else within the current and near-future realm of possibility can be done with a home computer (of course in the distant future there are Star Trek-like things to do).
The home PC is now mature. It's finished growing for now. You'll see exactly what I mean once Intel releases the new BTX boards. No one will buy them and then the wondering will be over about the future of desktop hardware. Sure, servers and workstations will continue to advance because the software they use are still driving them forward. Desktop software is not.
-JemYou're going back too far though. Go back five years. How much have word processors changed in that time period? How about games? If things continue to change at the same rate, in five years most people will be using Mac OS X and GNU/Linux, and everyone else will still be on WinXP. See my above post RE: the Google Zeitgeist.
But that's an unrealistic gain for the 3%ers. Realistically in five years most people will still be using WinXP. Look at the current struggle that Microsoft has to get people from Windows 98 to XP and from Office 2000 and XP to 2003. It's a monumental struggle for them. It's only going to get worse as good alternatives increase in popularity and quality.
-JemHeck, just look at how many people are still using Windows 98!
22% of the people using Google are on Win98.
And that was... 6 years ago?
-JemThe term you're looking for is "the passive voice," which the writer of that atrocious sentence is guilty of.
It's not grammatically illegal, per se, but it is not totally correct either.
-JemIf Microsoft really thinks that this will be an average system in two years then I doubt we will ever actually see Longhorn. Microsoft will be finished by then.
The vast majority of people today are more than happy with their computer systems as they are, and a significant number of people have too much machine for what they're doing. For many years into the future you will be seeing people with P3 and P4 machines still doing then what they do now.
There's a reason why processor sales are slipping for Intel, and it has little to do with AMD: no one's upgrading because the last upgrade they did made no real improvement. How much faster can you get a program to start? How much faster can you do what you already do (excluding those who are in scientific or graphics fields).
Hardware speed and power has accelerated so quickly up until now because software development could keep up with it. Now that proprietary software has stagnated (the last two software packages released by Microsoft, Corel, Macromedia and Adobe are exactly the same with one or two completely useless features thrown in and a new splash screen and icons) there is no reason to increase the capabilities of the hardware. Nothing you can do to a word processor will require more processing power than a current "average" machine offers. Same with web browsers and email clients. Even games -- game development has slowed to a crawl because it takes so long to make them now. Then there's the fact that game graphics can't get that much more realistic (and really, they don't need to be -- the Doom 3 demo already makes my stomach turn).
The described system will not be anywhere near "average" for the "average" computer user in two years. Bookmark this post and flame me in 2006 if I'm wrong.
-Jem