We need less bias
on
We the Media
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem with the media is too much bias. The "news-as-entertainment" problem still ranks high on my list, but it's the outright political bias that drives me nuts the most.
I am not a conservative, nor am I a Republican. But I can still see the bias in the media. The mainstream news in particular has a distinct Democrat/liberal bent. This is hard to see if you're a Democrat/liberal, and you'll probably vehemently deny it exists, but if you're not a liberal or Democrat, you can plainly see it.
Heck, even a lot of liberal Greens can see it, just because the blackout of any news on Nader and the Green Party. That party decided the 2000 election, but the media acts as if it were irrelevant to the 2004 campaign coverage.
When I mean bias, I don't mean obvious blatant bias that any numbskull can see. I mean a subtle bias in the stories presented, adjectives used, body language by anchors, etc. But sometimes that bias is obvious, as when the media was having orgasms over the Clark candidacy last year. That last what, all of two weeks?
Here's a subtle bias as an example. Mrs. Kerry is a millionaire. Mr. Cheney is a millionaire. Both once had strong corporate ties, but no longer do. Yet which one will the media portray as having a corporate war chest? Which one is more often mentioned being a millionaire? Which one is more often mentioned as having corporate ties?
I am not claiming that this bias is intentional. But with 90% (IIRC) of news reporters registered Democrat, they've constructed themselves a world isolated from the real one. While the owners of the media tend to be Republican, those that actually report the news are not. If you ran across a news outlet that consisted of 90% Republican (or Libertarian or Green) reporters, you would expect those skewed numbers to produce a strong bias. So why don't you expect the same when the news outlets are all 90% Democrat?
Re:No more Kernel Panic and Linux Thinking
on
Moving To Linux
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· Score: 1
But there is still a significant amount of BSOD's on 2K/XP systems. To pretend that those experiencing them are merely hallucinating, as most of those other posts are doing, is disingenuous. It doesn't fix their problem by telling them it doesn't exist.
Re:No more Kernel Panic and Linux Thinking
on
Moving To Linux
·
· Score: 1
If you see one of these with WinXP or Win2K you have serious hardware issues, PERIOD.
This is about the dozenth reply like this that I've seen so far scrolling down this story. Are you all paid shills of Microsoft or something?
While a BSOD is less common on 2K/XP, it still occurs. My work is 2K/XP, and every morning at least one system out of several hundred is sitting there with a BSOD waiting for someone to dutifully reboot.
What Linux needs to do is to support generic, industry standards.
It does. So do all of the BSDs. That's not the problem. The problem is that the hardware manufacturers don't like generic industry standards. My coworker spent most of last week doing the Fry's runs trying to find a wifi card that worked with Linux. A network card should be standard enough that a generic driver should work for ALL OF THEM, but that is not the case.
So computers are not simple or intuitive to use. Big deal, nothing is.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of tech reporters not only believe that it's possible, but that it actually exists in whatever OS they're a shill for. To them, Linux/BSD/Unix will NEVER be ready for the desktop, because they're measuring it against an impossible yardstick.
I have never once experienced a BSOD on my system. Granted I don't use Windows much. But I see it often at work, even on Win2K machines. I think I know what the difference is.
People who get BSODs are those that install every random piece of crap that strikes their fancy, and have never uninstalled anything. They never empty their trash until they run out of harddrive space. They never defrag even when runnning FAT32 on a 40G partition. And they run about twenty zillion processes at the same time.
Not all of them. There's a few that still require drivers. Ditto for mp3 players and thumbdrives. Yes, even thumbdrives. You would think all of these devices would use standard industry-wide interfaces, but there are still PHB's in strategic positions who still think proprietary == market advantage.
Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)
Not having written any GTK themes, I nonetheless beleive that GTK has that ability. If they are true theme "engines:, then you can apply whatever color scheme you want to them. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do in the "new and improved" GNOME.
Why the GNOME leadership considers color schemes distinct from widget themes to be too difficult for newbies to use is beyond my understanding.
The GPL is a license, hence the "L" in the name. But if you're not licensing it to anyone, what's the freaking point? In a very real sense, it can't be released under the GPL until it has been released.
I've actually found it easier to install FreeBSD on my new laptop than Windows. Lose your hardware vendor CDs, and Windows becomes impossible to install.
For years it has been the "wisdom" of the Linux community that there are no problems with the OS. Everytime there has been someone pointing out a potential problem, they have been figuratively burned at the stake. You just don't question the religion.
Some of these naysayers are obviously wrong, like Microsoft and SCO. But maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't the perfect bed of roses you pretend it is. Maybe, just maybe, this company is trying to keep your butt out of the legal wringer. So instead of instinctively dismissing them as fudmongers, be honest and admit that the possibility of patent infringement exists in Linux. Large corporations with hordes of lawyers routinely violate other companies' patents inadvertently, so what makes you think a bunch of hackers are more legally savvy?
If you pay him $50 he will grudgingly allow you to omit the "GNU" from the name of your linux/busybox/dietlibc system. But you can't tell anyone else! Otherwise people will find out how truly unessential GNU is to Linux.
...or at the very least, "the GNU toolset", GCC, glibc, etc.
As far as I am aware, only Linux and Hurd distros use glibc. Certainly Solaris, AIX and *BSD do not. They have their own, and probably more standard ones at that.
We are rapidly approaching the point at which UNIX is a Linux-like operating system rather than Linux being a UNIX-like operating system.
Bullshit. Until those commercial UNIX systems abandon their kernel architectures for one modeled on Linux, it won't happen. There are no improvements in Solaris to make its kernel more closely match the architecture of Linux.
Best reason: The Unix monicker would stop all the GNU fanatics from frothing at the mouth every time they heard the word "Unix".
Case in point. I'm at a conference. Someone asks me what I use. I reply "Unix". Suddenly their eyes bug out, their ears turn red, and they scream, "no you're not, GNU/Linux is not Unix!!!" Then I explain that I'm not running Linux and they're heads finally explode.
Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but in my experience most GNU advocates (a distinct breed from Linux advocates) take great pains to enforce the Open Group's trademark.
Copyrights for books and recordings are essentially the same. Go read the law if you don't believe me. If it's legitimate to replace a tape when it wears out, then it's legitimate to demand a new copy of a book when I thumb through it till it falls apart.
Oh, and music tapes were not licensed. Just like CDs are not licensed today. You only obligations and rights are those conferred by copyright law.
Do the tee-shirt sales, popularity and name recognition outweigh the lost music sales? And if even if it somehow does in your universe, what about the poor studio musician who doesn't do live concerts or sell tee-shirts? Is he somehow a lesser artists?
Selling tee shirts is not a great incentive to get into the business...
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The problem with the media is too much bias. The "news-as-entertainment" problem still ranks high on my list, but it's the outright political bias that drives me nuts the most.
I am not a conservative, nor am I a Republican. But I can still see the bias in the media. The mainstream news in particular has a distinct Democrat/liberal bent. This is hard to see if you're a Democrat/liberal, and you'll probably vehemently deny it exists, but if you're not a liberal or Democrat, you can plainly see it.
Heck, even a lot of liberal Greens can see it, just because the blackout of any news on Nader and the Green Party. That party decided the 2000 election, but the media acts as if it were irrelevant to the 2004 campaign coverage.
When I mean bias, I don't mean obvious blatant bias that any numbskull can see. I mean a subtle bias in the stories presented, adjectives used, body language by anchors, etc. But sometimes that bias is obvious, as when the media was having orgasms over the Clark candidacy last year. That last what, all of two weeks?
Here's a subtle bias as an example. Mrs. Kerry is a millionaire. Mr. Cheney is a millionaire. Both once had strong corporate ties, but no longer do. Yet which one will the media portray as having a corporate war chest? Which one is more often mentioned being a millionaire? Which one is more often mentioned as having corporate ties?
I am not claiming that this bias is intentional. But with 90% (IIRC) of news reporters registered Democrat, they've constructed themselves a world isolated from the real one. While the owners of the media tend to be Republican, those that actually report the news are not. If you ran across a news outlet that consisted of 90% Republican (or Libertarian or Green) reporters, you would expect those skewed numbers to produce a strong bias. So why don't you expect the same when the news outlets are all 90% Democrat?
But there is still a significant amount of BSOD's on 2K/XP systems. To pretend that those experiencing them are merely hallucinating, as most of those other posts are doing, is disingenuous. It doesn't fix their problem by telling them it doesn't exist.
If you see one of these with WinXP or Win2K you have serious hardware issues, PERIOD.
This is about the dozenth reply like this that I've seen so far scrolling down this story. Are you all paid shills of Microsoft or something?
While a BSOD is less common on 2K/XP, it still occurs. My work is 2K/XP, and every morning at least one system out of several hundred is sitting there with a BSOD waiting for someone to dutifully reboot.
What Linux needs to do is to support generic, industry standards.
It does. So do all of the BSDs. That's not the problem. The problem is that the hardware manufacturers don't like generic industry standards. My coworker spent most of last week doing the Fry's runs trying to find a wifi card that worked with Linux. A network card should be standard enough that a generic driver should work for ALL OF THEM, but that is not the case.
So computers are not simple or intuitive to use. Big deal, nothing is.
Unfortunately, the vast majority of tech reporters not only believe that it's possible, but that it actually exists in whatever OS they're a shill for. To them, Linux/BSD/Unix will NEVER be ready for the desktop, because they're measuring it against an impossible yardstick.
I have never once experienced a BSOD on my system. Granted I don't use Windows much. But I see it often at work, even on Win2K machines. I think I know what the difference is.
People who get BSODs are those that install every random piece of crap that strikes their fancy, and have never uninstalled anything. They never empty their trash until they run out of harddrive space. They never defrag even when runnning FAT32 on a 40G partition. And they run about twenty zillion processes at the same time.
Not all of them. There's a few that still require drivers. Ditto for mp3 players and thumbdrives. Yes, even thumbdrives. You would think all of these devices would use standard industry-wide interfaces, but there are still PHB's in strategic positions who still think proprietary == market advantage.
Add compatibility with KDE themes to GTK, since they seem superior (ability to change colors, not just widget styles, etc.)
Not having written any GTK themes, I nonetheless beleive that GTK has that ability. If they are true theme "engines:, then you can apply whatever color scheme you want to them. Unfortunately, this is very difficult to do in the "new and improved" GNOME.
Why the GNOME leadership considers color schemes distinct from widget themes to be too difficult for newbies to use is beyond my understanding.
The GPL is a license, hence the "L" in the name. But if you're not licensing it to anyone, what's the freaking point? In a very real sense, it can't be released under the GPL until it has been released.
User-interface: single toolkit and desktop, sane design. Consistency is the result.
At least until someone ports GNOME or KDE over. Please, pass a law banning freedom or we will never get a free desktop suitable for the masses!
I've actually found it easier to install FreeBSD on my new laptop than Windows. Lose your hardware vendor CDs, and Windows becomes impossible to install.
For years it has been the "wisdom" of the Linux community that there are no problems with the OS. Everytime there has been someone pointing out a potential problem, they have been figuratively burned at the stake. You just don't question the religion.
Some of these naysayers are obviously wrong, like Microsoft and SCO. But maybe, just maybe, Linux isn't the perfect bed of roses you pretend it is. Maybe, just maybe, this company is trying to keep your butt out of the legal wringer. So instead of instinctively dismissing them as fudmongers, be honest and admit that the possibility of patent infringement exists in Linux. Large corporations with hordes of lawyers routinely violate other companies' patents inadvertently, so what makes you think a bunch of hackers are more legally savvy?
I'm worried about that "spray" command. And from what I hear, so is she.
That's "publik"
If you pay him $50 he will grudgingly allow you to omit the "GNU" from the name of your linux/busybox/dietlibc system. But you can't tell anyone else! Otherwise people will find out how truly unessential GNU is to Linux.
That's "GNU/Fedora" to you...
...or at the very least, "the GNU toolset", GCC, glibc, etc.
As far as I am aware, only Linux and Hurd distros use glibc. Certainly Solaris, AIX and *BSD do not. They have their own, and probably more standard ones at that.
We are rapidly approaching the point at which UNIX is a Linux-like operating system rather than Linux being a UNIX-like operating system.
Bullshit. Until those commercial UNIX systems abandon their kernel architectures for one modeled on Linux, it won't happen. There are no improvements in Solaris to make its kernel more closely match the architecture of Linux.
Best reason: The Unix monicker would stop all the GNU fanatics from frothing at the mouth every time they heard the word "Unix".
Case in point. I'm at a conference. Someone asks me what I use. I reply "Unix". Suddenly their eyes bug out, their ears turn red, and they scream, "no you're not, GNU/Linux is not Unix!!!" Then I explain that I'm not running Linux and they're heads finally explode.
Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but in my experience most GNU advocates (a distinct breed from Linux advocates) take great pains to enforce the Open Group's trademark.
Q: How far can the plane fly after a fatal exception error?
A: All the way to the scene of the crash. Hell, it will probably beat the paramedics there by half an hour!
Copyrights for books and recordings are essentially the same. Go read the law if you don't believe me. If it's legitimate to replace a tape when it wears out, then it's legitimate to demand a new copy of a book when I thumb through it till it falls apart.
Oh, and music tapes were not licensed. Just like CDs are not licensed today. You only obligations and rights are those conferred by copyright law.
Not all music is conducive to live concerts. And there are awesome musicians who are amazing in the studio but just can perform live.
That's like claiming you deserve a new book because you spilled ink all over it. Stop whining and go buy a new book.
Do the tee-shirt sales, popularity and name recognition outweigh the lost music sales? And if even if it somehow does in your universe, what about the poor studio musician who doesn't do live concerts or sell tee-shirts? Is he somehow a lesser artists?
Selling tee shirts is not a great incentive to get into the business...
It's not the software guys at Sony who are the problem. It's the bosses of the software guys who screwed this one up.