I installed Windows 3.11... he other day and it prompted me to sign up for "The Microsoft Network" (MSN)
That "MSN" was a different beastie using the same trademark. The original "The Microsoft Network" was their attempt at an old-school BBS-with-GUI system (like early-90's AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy), before the masses started demanding the internet (more open, more free stuff) instead.
Interestingly, Microsoft has spent much of the past decade trying to reengineer the original vision of MSN around the internet. With MS-developed clients (IE, Outlook, Messenger, Money), MS-developed servers (IIS, Exchange), MS-operated/branded services (MSN Search, MSNBC.com, Hotmail), MS-provided access (MSN dial-up/broadband), etc. it's possible for a casual user's "internet experience" to be managed entirely by Microsoft. (Add to that the OS and office apps, and you have people whose entire "computing experience" rarely goes beyond what Microsoft has provided.)
Here in Michigan, SBC/Ameritech won't sell you ADSL if you're using another company for voice service via landline. Part of the reason is to be mean, I'm sure, but I believe there's also a technological issue involved, in that they run the DSL service over the same pair used for voice, making it more difficult to split the services between providers.
No, even if the author didn't have a deeper meaning in mind, that doesn't mean that, when read, the story won't bring a deeper meaning in to the mind of a reader.
You don't need to go into subjectivism to substantiate "deeper meaning". Even if the author didn't have one in mind (i.e. "I am writing a story about man's inhumanity to man"), that doesn't mean he didn't include it. If you read the short stories I wrote as a teen, there's a recurring message that life is cruel and capricious, and if there's a God he's uncaring. Even though I thought I was just writing clever plot twists for my characters to go through. In retrospect, I can confirm that's how I felt. The deeper meaning is there, and plain to see, even without my personal insight and confirmation. It's not scientifically provable... but in case you missed the original article, we were talking about how the humanities are not subject to the scientific method; it's why they're not called "the sciences".
I believe you completely misread what I wrote, because you just restated my point: LotR is not an allegory.
As for Bombadil, he may have begun as an amusement for young Christopher, but JRR explained (sorry, I can't footnote it; I'm a artist/technician, not a scholar) that he left Bombadil in (despite misgivings over his general irrelevance to the plot) because of what his presence meant about Middle Earth: there are things that even Wizards, Elves, or Ents don't have an explanation for. That's some of the "deeper meaning" (a commentary about the nature of things) that is not merely inferred by the readers, but stated by the author himself as intentional.
This article was pretty light on details. How do they program on it? In English?
{sigh} The article may have left out such details for the same reason it didn't bother to explain how they'll get electricity or what calendar they'll be using. This is not an announcement that the Far East is about to start using computers, learning to develop software, etc. Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian countries have been doing all this for decades, and Linux is already widely used in the region, with several popular distros with support for local languages. This is simply an effort to develop a standard base that they can count on to work properly with the local character sets, and handle the other sorts of localisation issues that a Michiganian such as I (or most other Euro/Americans) could only begin to guess at.
To answer your question, however, I'll venture a guess that they'll (continue to) program using the usual popular languages (most of which do use English-derived commands), including C++, SQL, HTML, Java, Perl... just like the French, the Germans, the Finns*, the Egyptians, the Russians, and the Brazillians do.
there is no such thing as private property (it's the definition of Communism, get over it flamers).
Um, the definition of Communism (at least according to Marx & Engels, who are widely credited with coming up wiht the idea) is that the government owns the means of production (e.g. factories, farms, etc.) Certainly in practise, Communist governments have always permitted some level of private property. At the very least, that roll of toilet paper you stood in line for four months to get and paid a million credits for is yours, and if your neighbor takes that car your family have been saving up for since the Revolution, the police will arrest him and put him in jail.
Human (property) rights
FYI, many people regard those as two distinct concepts.
Nonetheless, Tolkein did have "deeper significance" in mind in writing his works. They were not mere "allegory" (he flatly denied that - for example - the One Ring represented The Bomb, that the Shire was England, etc.) but - again, for example - the character of Tom Bombadil (sadly but understandably omitted from the recent films) was more than just a "character" for the Hobbits to encounter in an adventure, but served as an enigma of Middle Earth, deliberately left unexplained.
Perhaps not in first place, but there are certainly non-african runners who do very well. Stop looking at the narrow extremes and pay more attention to the vast middle.
A local teenager got charged with "child pornography" for taking snapshots of his (obviously quite willing) naked girlfriend of the same age. The prosecutors literally made a federal case out of it because the photo lab that the drug store sent the film to for processing was in another state.
I have a Bachelor of Science (comp sci), and a Bachelor of Fine Arts (illustration). While I'm sure many of my fellow computer geeks could also pull off an arts degree and many of my fellow art fags could get the science degree, I'd say that about equal numbers of each group would be hopelessly lost in each other's field.
Hell, just look at some bright./ers' abysmal handling of written English (even when it's their native language), and it's hard to imagine those folks passing undergrad French 101, let alone finishing a doctoral program in French Lit.
Scientists are "smarter" only if you define "smart" in terms of the scientific method.
there are some pretty fundamental differences between the genders.... but you're not allowed to talk about them.
I hear plenty of discussion about those fundamental differences. e.g. "Check her out: she's got a nicely different fundament!"
Races are different.
But they're far more alike. There may be variations in the statistical means (for athletic, academic performance, etc), but the standard deviations are usually so large that the two curves overlap heavily. This makes any kind of generalisation based on those means meaningless on an individual basis, and useless for predictive purposes.
"black people are better dancers than white people".... the usefulness of the generalisation.
What exactly is that "useful" for? Especially without being able to reliably factor in whether the white guy is gay or not?:)
why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"?
The differences between men and women in terms of their physical abilities are statistically more meaningful than between racial groups. The mean performance differs more, which makes for a smaller overlap between the two. Co-ed athletics would almost always be dominated by men, but co-racial athletics seem to provice a substantial number of stars of various races.
You seem to have missed one of the fundamental points of the article, which was that there have always been Things You Cannot Say. Political Correctness is just the recent term for it.
(The moderators who tagged this comment as "Insightful" also seem to have missed - or disagreed with - the part of the article where he suggested that merely saying things that are out of moral fashion doesn't mean you're onto something.)
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Nothing we do actually matters.
This is a conjecture, which we cannot dis/prove. It can only be "true" in retrospect, so it's really just a prediction.
It's possible that humanity will someday do something on a cosmic scale which will A) annihiliate the universe in such a way that it doesn't reform (i.e. no Big Crunch, so no more Big Bangs), or B) put the universe into a steady state such that it lasts forever. Either of those outcomes would "actually matter" (no pun intended).
It's also possible that humanity won't do any such thing, or that it will but God (who turns out to exist) hits the cosmic Ctrl-Z and un-does it.
Dell was the first to use the Web as its main sales channel.
Close, but you misspelled "magazine ads".
Dell was already a major player when this World Wide Watchamacallit started catching on in the mid-90's. They got there by selling custom-configured "PC's Limited" clones direct to the user (i.e. at lower prices than retail-channel manufacturers), through adverts in computer magazines. (I bought one in 1987.) They weren't the only ones doing this at the time, but the professional-looking multi-page ads clearly describing the configuration options and pricing inspired confidence (very much like a print version of modern build-your-own web pages), the machines delivered what they promised, and the tech support was quite good.
(Gateway followed a very similar model, undercutting Dell's prices using cheaper plains-states labor after the Texas outfit started moving upscale. That was also before the Web became a factor: it was the memorable cow adverts in magazines that put them on the map.)
I haven't tried it (no such machine to run it on), but XPlite is a utility that should be very good at removing unwanted "features" from WinXP. (There's a Win2K version as well.) This is by the same guy who created 98lite, which removes all traces of IE from Win98 (which MS had said wasn't possible) and replaces it with the file browser from Win95 (and the web browser of your choice). So when he says it "removes" a feature, I'm inclined to believe it really does.
...I just "have a problem" with caffeine use. I managed to go "cold turkey" last year... er, the year before last, when I went on an 8-day vacation backpacking on Isle Royale (the big island in Lake Superior, all wilderness except for a couple ranger stations).
I didn't want to carry fuel enough for brewing tea or coffee, packing soft drinks would have been insane, and I left the caffeinated mints at home. No liquor, either. And certainly no internet. Whether it was the environment, the exercise, the experience, or a combination, I was fine the whole time.
The catch, of course, is not falling back into the same habits once you return to civilisation, where 2 liters of non-calorie caffeinated goodness can be had for 99 cents plus deposit. But at least now I know that I can quit.
There was no "destop market" before IBM rolled out their PC.
Fooey. My Atari 400 sat on my desktop. Granted, I sometimes put it on the floor to play Star Raiders and Missile Command on the big TV in the family room, but it was most certainly a desktop computer. So were the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple ][, and assorted CP/M machines, all of which predated the IBM 5150, and frequently found their way onto desks where they ran personal business apps like VisiCalc or WordStar.
Yes, the business market started to take off when IBM introduce the Personal Computer, and PC/MS-DOS quickly became the dominant OS, but the desktop personal computer market definitely existed before that.
Apple ALWAYS played second fiddle to IBM/Microsoft in the "pc" market wrt market share.
Um, I'm pretty sure Apple had a personal-computer market-share lead over IBM/MS for the entire period from 1976 to (at least) 1981. It took a while - most importantly, waiting for IBM to actually introduce it - for sales of the IBM PC to eclipse those of the Apple ][ and//+.
Still is. It's currently available as a pre-installed option on machines from many of the major PC manufacturers. (I'd say "most" or "all" but I haven't checked.) Iomega even took to using the "Zip" name on other products they sell, to take advantage of the trademark recognition. Zip drives had some problems (I'd still trust them over floppies any day of the week), and better alternatives are overtaking them, but they were hardly a "flop".
I thought Elton John was a queen.
He and Ian McKellen are frequently referred to as "Dame Elton" and "Dame Ian" (the feminine version of "Sir"). I'm not sure Her Majesty would approve, but she must prefer it to the above alternative.
Open Source (tm) wouldn't exist, but the code sharing of the '60s would be the rule, not the exception.
The community that shared code back in the Golden Age of Ancient Unix had limited financial interests in that code. Expecting the fractious "community" of the Modern Age of Dot Com to play by the bygone rules of niche academia seems... unrealistic.
In a world with Copyright, Open Source's use of copyright is just a tool to make companies share code - one that wouldn't be needed if copying it without permission was legal.
Instead you'd need espionage and cracking to get companies to "share" code, and those activities could involved criminal charges, not just copyright suits.
And without going into Stallman's whole manifesto, I'll just point out that there were very compelling (to him) reasons for drafting the GPL rather than releasing GNU into the public domain; I can't imagine GNU being as rich as it is today without the contributions of anti-commercial zealots for whom PD coding was unacceptable.
Without value judgements, you should be able to agree that restrictions (copyright and patents) are non-free.
Of course they're a limit on freedom. But when you =do= apply value judgments to the question of freedom, most people prefer some balanced combination of limits and guaranteed minimums (e.g. gopyright and libel laws, along with the First Amendment).
Now, copyright *is* also holding us back. Look at Disney for the proof.
More precisely, =late-20th-century copyright law= is holding us back. If copyright law still had reasonable term limits (as it did several decades ago), and terms for certain classes of patents were reduced to reflect the current pace of technological change, these would still serve as an incentive/reward to creators, not as a guarantee of perpetual profits for corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
That "MSN" was a different beastie using the same trademark. The original "The Microsoft Network" was their attempt at an old-school BBS-with-GUI system (like early-90's AOL/CompuServe/Prodigy), before the masses started demanding the internet (more open, more free stuff) instead.
Interestingly, Microsoft has spent much of the past decade trying to reengineer the original vision of MSN around the internet. With MS-developed clients (IE, Outlook, Messenger, Money), MS-developed servers (IIS, Exchange), MS-operated/branded services (MSN Search, MSNBC.com, Hotmail), MS-provided access (MSN dial-up/broadband), etc. it's possible for a casual user's "internet experience" to be managed entirely by Microsoft. (Add to that the OS and office apps, and you have people whose entire "computing experience" rarely goes beyond what Microsoft has provided.)
Here in Michigan, SBC/Ameritech won't sell you ADSL if you're using another company for voice service via landline. Part of the reason is to be mean, I'm sure, but I believe there's also a technological issue involved, in that they run the DSL service over the same pair used for voice, making it more difficult to split the services between providers.
You don't need to go into subjectivism to substantiate "deeper meaning". Even if the author didn't have one in mind (i.e. "I am writing a story about man's inhumanity to man"), that doesn't mean he didn't include it. If you read the short stories I wrote as a teen, there's a recurring message that life is cruel and capricious, and if there's a God he's uncaring. Even though I thought I was just writing clever plot twists for my characters to go through. In retrospect, I can confirm that's how I felt. The deeper meaning is there, and plain to see, even without my personal insight and confirmation. It's not scientifically provable... but in case you missed the original article, we were talking about how the humanities are not subject to the scientific method; it's why they're not called "the sciences".
I believe you completely misread what I wrote, because you just restated my point: LotR is not an allegory.
As for Bombadil, he may have begun as an amusement for young Christopher, but JRR explained (sorry, I can't footnote it; I'm a artist/technician, not a scholar) that he left Bombadil in (despite misgivings over his general irrelevance to the plot) because of what his presence meant about Middle Earth: there are things that even Wizards, Elves, or Ents don't have an explanation for. That's some of the "deeper meaning" (a commentary about the nature of things) that is not merely inferred by the readers, but stated by the author himself as intentional.
{sigh} The article may have left out such details for the same reason it didn't bother to explain how they'll get electricity or what calendar they'll be using. This is not an announcement that the Far East is about to start using computers, learning to develop software, etc. Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian countries have been doing all this for decades, and Linux is already widely used in the region, with several popular distros with support for local languages. This is simply an effort to develop a standard base that they can count on to work properly with the local character sets, and handle the other sorts of localisation issues that a Michiganian such as I (or most other Euro/Americans) could only begin to guess at.
To answer your question, however, I'll venture a guess that they'll (continue to) program using the usual popular languages (most of which do use English-derived commands), including C++, SQL, HTML, Java, Perl... just like the French, the Germans, the Finns*, the Egyptians, the Russians, and the Brazillians do.
*Linus has always commented his code in English.
Um, the definition of Communism (at least according to Marx & Engels, who are widely credited with coming up wiht the idea) is that the government owns the means of production (e.g. factories, farms, etc.) Certainly in practise, Communist governments have always permitted some level of private property. At the very least, that roll of toilet paper you stood in line for four months to get and paid a million credits for is yours, and if your neighbor takes that car your family have been saving up for since the Revolution, the police will arrest him and put him in jail.
Human (property) rights
FYI, many people regard those as two distinct concepts.
Nonetheless, Tolkein did have "deeper significance" in mind in writing his works. They were not mere "allegory" (he flatly denied that - for example - the One Ring represented The Bomb, that the Shire was England, etc.) but - again, for example - the character of Tom Bombadil (sadly but understandably omitted from the recent films) was more than just a "character" for the Hobbits to encounter in an adventure, but served as an enigma of Middle Earth, deliberately left unexplained.
Perhaps not in first place, but there are certainly non-african runners who do very well. Stop looking at the narrow extremes and pay more attention to the vast middle.
Such brave brilliance. Learn to spell, kid.
A local teenager got charged with "child pornography" for taking snapshots of his (obviously quite willing) naked girlfriend of the same age. The prosecutors literally made a federal case out of it because the photo lab that the drug store sent the film to for processing was in another state.
Hell, just look at some bright ./ers' abysmal handling of written English (even when it's their native language), and it's hard to imagine those folks passing undergrad French 101, let alone finishing a doctoral program in French Lit.
Scientists are "smarter" only if you define "smart" in terms of the scientific method.
I hear plenty of discussion about those fundamental differences. e.g. "Check her out: she's got a nicely different fundament!"
Races are different.
But they're far more alike. There may be variations in the statistical means (for athletic, academic performance, etc), but the standard deviations are usually so large that the two curves overlap heavily. This makes any kind of generalisation based on those means meaningless on an individual basis, and useless for predictive purposes.
"black people are better dancers than white people" .... the usefulness of the generalisation.
What exactly is that "useful" for? Especially without being able to reliably factor in whether the white guy is gay or not? :)
why is it valid to segregate the 100m sprint into "male" and "female", but not into "african" and "chinese"?
The differences between men and women in terms of their physical abilities are statistically more meaningful than between racial groups. The mean performance differs more, which makes for a smaller overlap between the two. Co-ed athletics would almost always be dominated by men, but co-racial athletics seem to provice a substantial number of stars of various races.
You seem to have missed one of the fundamental points of the article, which was that there have always been Things You Cannot Say. Political Correctness is just the recent term for it.
(The moderators who tagged this comment as "Insightful" also seem to have missed - or disagreed with - the part of the article where he suggested that merely saying things that are out of moral fashion doesn't mean you're onto something.)
This is a conjecture, which we cannot dis/prove. It can only be "true" in retrospect, so it's really just a prediction.
It's possible that humanity will someday do something on a cosmic scale which will A) annihiliate the universe in such a way that it doesn't reform (i.e. no Big Crunch, so no more Big Bangs), or B) put the universe into a steady state such that it lasts forever. Either of those outcomes would "actually matter" (no pun intended).
It's also possible that humanity won't do any such thing, or that it will but God (who turns out to exist) hits the cosmic Ctrl-Z and un-does it.
But an entrepreneur with One Ring can rule them all! (And in the darkness bind them.)
Close, but you misspelled "magazine ads".
Dell was already a major player when this World Wide Watchamacallit started catching on in the mid-90's. They got there by selling custom-configured "PC's Limited" clones direct to the user (i.e. at lower prices than retail-channel manufacturers), through adverts in computer magazines. (I bought one in 1987.) They weren't the only ones doing this at the time, but the professional-looking multi-page ads clearly describing the configuration options and pricing inspired confidence (very much like a print version of modern build-your-own web pages), the machines delivered what they promised, and the tech support was quite good.
(Gateway followed a very similar model, undercutting Dell's prices using cheaper plains-states labor after the Texas outfit started moving upscale. That was also before the Web became a factor: it was the memorable cow adverts in magazines that put them on the map.)
I haven't tried it (no such machine to run it on), but XPlite is a utility that should be very good at removing unwanted "features" from WinXP. (There's a Win2K version as well.) This is by the same guy who created 98lite, which removes all traces of IE from Win98 (which MS had said wasn't possible) and replaces it with the file browser from Win95 (and the web browser of your choice). So when he says it "removes" a feature, I'm inclined to believe it really does.
I didn't want to carry fuel enough for brewing tea or coffee, packing soft drinks would have been insane, and I left the caffeinated mints at home. No liquor, either. And certainly no internet. Whether it was the environment, the exercise, the experience, or a combination, I was fine the whole time.
The catch, of course, is not falling back into the same habits once you return to civilisation, where 2 liters of non-calorie caffeinated goodness can be had for 99 cents plus deposit. But at least now I know that I can quit.
Fooey. My Atari 400 sat on my desktop. Granted, I sometimes put it on the floor to play Star Raiders and Missile Command on the big TV in the family room, but it was most certainly a desktop computer. So were the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple ][, and assorted CP/M machines, all of which predated the IBM 5150, and frequently found their way onto desks where they ran personal business apps like VisiCalc or WordStar.
Yes, the business market started to take off when IBM introduce the Personal Computer, and PC/MS-DOS quickly became the dominant OS, but the desktop personal computer market definitely existed before that.
Um, I'm pretty sure Apple had a personal-computer market-share lead over IBM/MS for the entire period from 1976 to (at least) 1981. It took a while - most importantly, waiting for IBM to actually introduce it - for sales of the IBM PC to eclipse those of the Apple ][ and //+.
Still is. It's currently available as a pre-installed option on machines from many of the major PC manufacturers. (I'd say "most" or "all" but I haven't checked.) Iomega even took to using the "Zip" name on other products they sell, to take advantage of the trademark recognition. Zip drives had some problems (I'd still trust them over floppies any day of the week), and better alternatives are overtaking them, but they were hardly a "flop".
I thought Elton John was a queen. He and Ian McKellen are frequently referred to as "Dame Elton" and "Dame Ian" (the feminine version of "Sir"). I'm not sure Her Majesty would approve, but she must prefer it to the above alternative.
That's a relief to hear! I was beginning to wonder why anyone was buying Xboxes, with video-out as crappy and blurry as those screenshots! ;)
...the Linux Router Project, a floppy-based 386-compatible micro-distro which served as the basis for (among other things) Coyote Linux.
The community that shared code back in the Golden Age of Ancient Unix had limited financial interests in that code. Expecting the fractious "community" of the Modern Age of Dot Com to play by the bygone rules of niche academia seems... unrealistic.
In a world with Copyright, Open Source's use of copyright is just a tool to make companies share code - one that wouldn't be needed if copying it without permission was legal.
Instead you'd need espionage and cracking to get companies to "share" code, and those activities could involved criminal charges, not just copyright suits.
And without going into Stallman's whole manifesto, I'll just point out that there were very compelling (to him) reasons for drafting the GPL rather than releasing GNU into the public domain; I can't imagine GNU being as rich as it is today without the contributions of anti-commercial zealots for whom PD coding was unacceptable.
Without value judgements, you should be able to agree that restrictions (copyright and patents) are non-free.
Of course they're a limit on freedom. But when you =do= apply value judgments to the question of freedom, most people prefer some balanced combination of limits and guaranteed minimums (e.g. gopyright and libel laws, along with the First Amendment).
Now, copyright *is* also holding us back. Look at Disney for the proof.
More precisely, =late-20th-century copyright law= is holding us back. If copyright law still had reasonable term limits (as it did several decades ago), and terms for certain classes of patents were reduced to reflect the current pace of technological change, these would still serve as an incentive/reward to creators, not as a guarantee of perpetual profits for corporations.