We don't actually need to make easy to use interfaces for people to accept Linux on their desktop. No, we have to save them from the control Windows has over them. Give people a console, force them to learn obscure commands, that is the way to freedom.
IMO, that author is on crack, and this is a cheap way to advertise a bad movie.
I heard very similar arguments when in first year environmental science in 1995.
Truth is, the vast majority of scientists working on the issue all agree: we're fucking up the climate. They disagree on details, but on the whole: we're putting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this is NOT going to be a GOOD THING (TM).
I don't even bother to check a scientists' funding anymore when they come out with such studies. There's been too many that were bought and paid for by the oil lobby that I don't trust a single one of them.
So what if we're wrong? BIG DEAL. Some people chose not to expose their kids to second-hand smoke at a time when some doctors still insisted it was good for you. In the absence of complete information, do what seems sensible. Besides, people are already dying in measurable numbers from air pollution.
Plus, our governments heavily subsidize (both directly and indirectly) fossil-fuel use, leading many to believe that we can exceed Kyoto targets at a profit.
If we can make money and have cleaner air, why the hell are we worrying about models for?
In the week ending 26 October, 857,000 songs were sold over the internet - compared to just 170,000 in record shops, Billboard said.
But the best-selling CD single is still outstripping the most popular download, the magazine reported.
The top CD single, I Can Only Imagine by MercyMe, sold 6,900 copies in one week, compared with 4,700 for the biggest online track, OutKast's Hey Ya!, according to Billboard.
I'm supposing we can conclude from those few figures that online sales lead to a much wider range of music being sold. If so, I hope that trend continues.
What the hell is the application for this? Sure, it can probably do all sorts of interesting things. But what's the military rationale?
The article mentions two types of weapons: indiscriminate "ultrawideband" and focused, laser-like "narrowband".
Most of the US's potential enemies are still using cold-war equipment, and its electronics are shielded. If you use ultrawideband on those, you'll kill all the people wearing pacemakers and fry all the civilian infrastructure at the same time. Since recent events have shown that winning the peace is harder than winning the war, that seems like a very, very dumb move indeed. More soldiers have died since the end of major hostilities; worse conditions would have meant more dead.
But what of the laser-like narrowband? Well, as the article notes, "they are far more difficult to develop". What's the word for that? Vapor-ware?
It's also militarily counter-productive. If I were a general and my enemy had those weapons, or if I just suspected they did, I'd go straight to guerilla warfare. I believe an AK47 downed a US helicopter during major hostilities, a known vulnerability. Again, even more casualties can be expected. A very good strategy too when you consider the American public's repugnance for seeing body bags.
There are weapons escalations that are moronic, because they'll only make the whole business of war nastier. This is one of them.
And with the iTMS now available for Windows, it's not in Apple's interest to assist a third-party music service by making the iPod work with it.
If I were Apple, I might let MTV use their service with iPod, and then give the gadget to every single artist that will use it in public or on their video:)
How many more iPods will they sell, and will that cancel out lost iTMS sales? Will MTV users switch to iTMS once they expand their musical tastes, or simply because the iTMS interface is much nicer?
Plus, once they have an iPod, they're not only primed for using iTMS, but also for buying a new laptop, desktop... So I'm not so sure it's necessarily a bad idea in their case not to interoperate.
That's a problem. If we can't even trust the bigger projects, how can we trust the smaller ones to carry out the projects they promised?
A lot of the stuff I use is done by small open-source projects, and I shouldn't have to research their track record every time I want a specific feature.
It would be great if one of the Open Source foundations could co-ordinate these donations. If a foundation gave a project money when the feature is added - maybe to the satisfaction of most of the bidders - they get the payment. Or the foundation can research the trust-worthiness of the project.
A project like this would also benefit from people being able to suggest features or improvements. Like "I want a point release with overall improvements in speed and I don't need any more releases", "I want better usability", "This has to be able to generate an X report".
Rather than just port to PostgreSQL, they want to do
Real time parsing Oracle DDL and DML statements and converting them to the target database.
So, you'll have a performance hit for using anything else but Oracle?
They also note that they got stuck porting to PostgreSQL because it lacked embedded transactions. How about offering them $20,000 for adding that feature? They already have most of the work done!
Some will whine that this approach does not support MySQL (as evidenced by the comments by donors). Having had experience with using both Oracle and MySQL for enterprise applications written in Java, I can say that the performance and productivity hit is fairly high (like reading/.)
You can't for example write a "DELETE from products where product_id in (Select product_id from... )" query in the last stable release of MySQL. As a result, you are forced to write many, many more lines of code, and make a lot more calls to the db. (I'm not dumping on MySQL - I still use it - it's fast, but it's not "Enterprise" material yet).
In more densely populated European countries, they often force farmers to keep smaller scale operations, and use less smelly methods for raising animals.
One thing I found amazing: we're still spreading hog manure ON the ground, they're injecting it IN the soil. Sure, it costs more, but you can hardly smell it even while you're there during the operation. That's elegant.
Smaller scale farming and better ways to deal with our shit are what we need. Training nasal rangers to go after the worst offenders without dealing with the underlying problem is nothing but a kludge.
"Now we've got a presentation system that's always on and ready to go, and you flip a switch and it goes from art to tapping into our (computer) server.''
This is so never going to fly. If art can be digital, and you can plug this thing in to a computer... all sorts of people will compete without the $500 gizmo.
I could see your local art galleries offering this service for a fee and to advertise their upcoming and current shows. Many will be only too happy to broadcast their images for free.
Anyone else find it amusing that Bill Gates is financing a company (Corbis) that seeks to make money selling what others will give away for free?
It's ridiculous that we're always playing catch-up.
If OSS is to continute thriving after Microsoft is dead, it's maybe time we also increase our capacity to develop our own specs.
It's not good enough to say we can do it better faster but after you've released it. We should be competing against perfection: tools that users don't even notice because they're intuitive, easy to use and work all the time like they're supposed to, and last but not least, safe.
For most users, all operating systems suck. All of them. There isn't a single one that does all the things mentionned above. The metaphors we offer users (desktop, files, folders) are worn cliches more adapted to office environments than to the role of a modern household computer: entertainment and communication center.
Sure, the law there may not qualify that as a rights violation, but it still wouldn't be my CHOICE if I were driving someone's delivery vehicle.
Also, what's to guarantee that this won't be used to monitor the whereabouts of politically active people?
However, I'd be more concerned about stolen vehicles being stopped without warning and causing accidents... I wonder if insurance companies factored that in when deciding to give people discounts on premiums.
actually, I calculate $123 per person, and that's straight up, not figuring out interests - paying $123 each month is not the same as having to pay it all NOW. I think with a normal mortgage, you pay 2-3 times the cost of the amount you borrow over 20 years... so... not cheap.
Plus, what are we comparing this with? Burning all that fuel? Come on! I don't for a second believe there aren't a few energy efficiency retrofits that you can do that would save you a bundle.
Low-flow showerheads and compact-fluorescent light-bulbs are always mentionned... but if you're paying through the nose for electricity, you can probably make a 20-40% return on investment on R40 insulated walls, super-insulated windows, etc... You can probably replace those 80's fridges with modern stuff that uses less than a third the energy... better hot-water heaters, washer machines, etc...
The technology is all there. And if you still think that a $20 million nuclear plant makes sense after getting rid of half your demand with good energy efficiency at a fraction of that cost, then you can have it running for 40 years instead. But I very much doubt that's a cheaper alternative.
(oh- they said something about needing $600million for R&D, subsidized by the state, for 100 projected plants. Assuming 100 plants, which is optimistic, that'd be more like $26m... yet another example of a huge subsidy to large corporations - meanwhile you pay through the nose.)
Reading through the comments, it seems a lot of people don't really see the value of good branding. They should look at some of Steven Gerrity's other work.
He's the creative director of Silver Orange, a company with a great track record for producing highly usable designs. They recently got noticed (again) for another outstanding intranet design, and their e-commerce sites perform very well - funny, sales actually increase when you make sure "normal users" can figure out how to buy.
Even if we programmers don't give a damn about visual identity, it's nice to see designers worrying about such things and wanting to contribute - especially when they have a track record of making things nicer so more people use them.
While I'm commenting, I'd also like to recommend people check out the silverorange labs, currently featuring some cool simple CSS tabs.
Now if only we could get more PR people to donate their time to Mozilla...
Did a quick search for Galena, Alaska, and got to this page, which says there are 675 people in that village:
http://galenaak.cu.myareaguide.com/stats.html
They are currently using 700,000 gallons of diesel annually, a bit more than 1k gallons/person.
I know it's cold up there but geez, have they looked at all the possibilities for energy efficiency? Given the amount of subsidies for energy, prices are much lower than they would be in a normal market, and there is less incentive to pursue energy efficiency.
A $20 million reactor for 675 people is almost $30 grand for each person. Surely a mix of energy efficiency and renewables is cheaper, even in such harsh conditions.
In 2001, 1,261 cases of tuberculosis were reported in New York City, [...]the lowest number of tuberculosis cases ever reported in the city.
New York City's 2001 tuberculosis rate is still 2.8 times the national rate
of 5.6 per 100,000, and is the highest case rate of all areas reporting to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention. http://www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/doh/pdf/tb/tb2001.pdf
Should those numbers go back up, and too many poor people not comply with their prescriptions, I predict they will be the first to get these new expensive drugs.
Africa and HIV can seem like a far away threat to justify such an expense when there's street people that could infect you with TB just a block away from you...
Slashdot Mirror
We don't actually need to make easy to use interfaces for people to accept Linux on their desktop. No, we have to save them from the control Windows has over them. Give people a console, force them to learn obscure commands, that is the way to freedom.
IMO, that author is on crack, and this is a cheap way to advertise a bad movie.
I heard very similar arguments when in first year environmental science in 1995.
Truth is, the vast majority of scientists working on the issue all agree: we're fucking up the climate. They disagree on details, but on the whole: we're putting a bunch of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and this is NOT going to be a GOOD THING (TM).
I don't even bother to check a scientists' funding anymore when they come out with such studies. There's been too many that were bought and paid for by the oil lobby that I don't trust a single one of them.
So what if we're wrong? BIG DEAL. Some people chose not to expose their kids to second-hand smoke at a time when some doctors still insisted it was good for you. In the absence of complete information, do what seems sensible. Besides, people are already dying in measurable numbers from air pollution.
Plus, our governments heavily subsidize (both directly and indirectly) fossil-fuel use, leading many to believe that we can exceed Kyoto targets at a profit.
If we can make money and have cleaner air, why the hell are we worrying about models for?
What the hell is the application for this? Sure, it can probably do all sorts of interesting things. But what's the military rationale?
The article mentions two types of weapons: indiscriminate "ultrawideband" and focused, laser-like "narrowband".
Most of the US's potential enemies are still using cold-war equipment, and its electronics are shielded. If you use ultrawideband on those, you'll kill all the people wearing pacemakers and fry all the civilian infrastructure at the same time. Since recent events have shown that winning the peace is harder than winning the war, that seems like a very, very dumb move indeed. More soldiers have died since the end of major hostilities; worse conditions would have meant more dead.
But what of the laser-like narrowband? Well, as the article notes, "they are far more difficult to develop". What's the word for that? Vapor-ware?
It's also militarily counter-productive. If I were a general and my enemy had those weapons, or if I just suspected they did, I'd go straight to guerilla warfare. I believe an AK47 downed a US helicopter during major hostilities, a known vulnerability. Again, even more casualties can be expected. A very good strategy too when you consider the American public's repugnance for seeing body bags.
There are weapons escalations that are moronic, because they'll only make the whole business of war nastier. This is one of them.
If I were Apple, I might let MTV use their service with iPod, and then give the gadget to every single artist that will use it in public or on their video :)
How many more iPods will they sell, and will that cancel out lost iTMS sales? Will MTV users switch to iTMS once they expand their musical tastes, or simply because the iTMS interface is much nicer?
Plus, once they have an iPod, they're not only primed for using iTMS, but also for buying a new laptop, desktop... So I'm not so sure it's necessarily a bad idea in their case not to interoperate.
That's a problem. If we can't even trust the bigger projects, how can we trust the smaller ones to carry out the projects they promised?
A lot of the stuff I use is done by small open-source projects, and I shouldn't have to research their track record every time I want a specific feature.
It would be great if one of the Open Source foundations could co-ordinate these donations. If a foundation gave a project money when the feature is added - maybe to the satisfaction of most of the bidders - they get the payment. Or the foundation can research the trust-worthiness of the project.
A project like this would also benefit from people being able to suggest features or improvements. Like "I want a point release with overall improvements in speed and I don't need any more releases", "I want better usability", "This has to be able to generate an X report".
So, you'll have a performance hit for using anything else but Oracle?
They also note that they got stuck porting to PostgreSQL because it lacked embedded transactions. How about offering them $20,000 for adding that feature? They already have most of the work done!
Some will whine that this approach does not support MySQL (as evidenced by the comments by donors). Having had experience with using both Oracle and MySQL for enterprise applications written in Java, I can say that the performance and productivity hit is fairly high (like reading
You can't for example write a "DELETE from products where product_id in (Select product_id from
In more densely populated European countries, they often force farmers to keep smaller scale operations, and use less smelly methods for raising animals.
One thing I found amazing: we're still spreading hog manure ON the ground, they're injecting it IN the soil. Sure, it costs more, but you can hardly smell it even while you're there during the operation. That's elegant.
Smaller scale farming and better ways to deal with our shit are what we need. Training nasal rangers to go after the worst offenders without dealing with the underlying problem is nothing but a kludge.
This is so never going to fly. If art can be digital, and you can plug this thing in to a computer... all sorts of people will compete without the $500 gizmo.
I could see your local art galleries offering this service for a fee and to advertise their upcoming and current shows. Many will be only too happy to broadcast their images for free.
Anyone else find it amusing that Bill Gates is financing a company (Corbis) that seeks to make money selling what others will give away for free?
It's ridiculous that we're always playing catch-up.
If OSS is to continute thriving after Microsoft is dead, it's maybe time we also increase our capacity to develop our own specs.
It's not good enough to say we can do it better faster but after you've released it. We should be competing against perfection: tools that users don't even notice because they're intuitive, easy to use and work all the time like they're supposed to, and last but not least, safe.
For most users, all operating systems suck. All of them. There isn't a single one that does all the things mentionned above. The metaphors we offer users (desktop, files, folders) are worn cliches more adapted to office environments than to the role of a modern household computer: entertainment and communication center.
It's not your choice if you're an employee.
Sure, the law there may not qualify that as a rights violation, but it still wouldn't be my CHOICE if I were driving someone's delivery vehicle.
Also, what's to guarantee that this won't be used to monitor the whereabouts of politically active people?
However, I'd be more concerned about stolen vehicles being stopped without warning and causing accidents... I wonder if insurance companies factored that in when deciding to give people discounts on premiums.
actually, I calculate $123 per person, and that's straight up, not figuring out interests - paying $123 each month is not the same as having to pay it all NOW. I think with a normal mortgage, you pay 2-3 times the cost of the amount you borrow over 20 years... so... not cheap.
Plus, what are we comparing this with? Burning all that fuel? Come on! I don't for a second believe there aren't a few energy efficiency retrofits that you can do that would save you a bundle.
Low-flow showerheads and compact-fluorescent light-bulbs are always mentionned... but if you're paying through the nose for electricity, you can probably make a 20-40% return on investment on R40 insulated walls, super-insulated windows, etc... You can probably replace those 80's fridges with modern stuff that uses less than a third the energy... better hot-water heaters, washer machines, etc...
The technology is all there. And if you still think that a $20 million nuclear plant makes sense after getting rid of half your demand with good energy efficiency at a fraction of that cost, then you can have it running for 40 years instead. But I very much doubt that's a cheaper alternative.
(oh- they said something about needing $600million for R&D, subsidized by the state, for 100 projected plants. Assuming 100 plants, which is optimistic, that'd be more like $26m... yet another example of a huge subsidy to large corporations - meanwhile you pay through the nose.)
He's the creative director of Silver Orange, a company with a great track record for producing highly usable designs. They recently got noticed (again) for another outstanding intranet design, and their e-commerce sites perform very well - funny, sales actually increase when you make sure "normal users" can figure out how to buy.
Even if we programmers don't give a damn about visual identity, it's nice to see designers worrying about such things and wanting to contribute - especially when they have a track record of making things nicer so more people use them.
While I'm commenting, I'd also like to recommend people check out the silverorange labs, currently featuring some cool simple CSS tabs.
Now if only we could get more PR people to donate their time to Mozilla...
Did a quick search for Galena, Alaska, and got to this page, which says there are 675 people in that village: http://galenaak.cu.myareaguide.com/stats.html
They are currently using 700,000 gallons of diesel annually, a bit more than 1k gallons/person.
I know it's cold up there but geez, have they looked at all the possibilities for energy efficiency? Given the amount of subsidies for energy, prices are much lower than they would be in a normal market, and there is less incentive to pursue energy efficiency.
A $20 million reactor for 675 people is almost $30 grand for each person. Surely a mix of energy efficiency and renewables is cheaper, even in such harsh conditions.
Africa and HIV can seem like a far away threat to justify such an expense when there's street people that could infect you with TB just a block away from you...