My initial reaction to the Google announcement was deep skepticism. A "web" operating system? How silly. It didn't seem to me that what was being discussed was a real "operating system" at all—not like Unix or Windows. But later on in the day, it hit me: maybe Google really does have the smartest people on the planet working for them.
I've often remarked on how most people who now use computers actually shouldn't be let near one; anybody here who has been asked to help a relative with their fubared PC knows exactly what I am talking about. And I've fondly dreamed of being able to hand those migraine-inducing family members whose PCs are basically the computer equivalent of vacuum cleaners stuffed with viral dust bunnies a simple thin client box that you just plug in to the network, and can't possibly be screwed up because it's too limited to do anything dangerous. Dammit. And my esteemed spousal unit (now I've let the cat out of the bag) would be grateful for something like this: a box you plug in, use to surf the net, and read email, and that runs light applications (like Freecell!), and that doesn't get crudded up with all those nasty pop-ups and resource-sucking trojans.
Well, maybe this is it! The computer for the Facebook generation. Will it mean the death of Microsoft? Probably not—they're too big to die quick. But it will totally change the landscape. I wonder, will anybody but specialists and "enthusiasts" be using real general purpose computers 20 or 30 years from now?
All of which matters... not at all. The whole purpose of the device is to run ONE application, the browser. Everything else is there to support that...Google doesn't care if it's impossible to build standard applications on it
Ok, I don't like the picture I'm getting of the new Google "operating system"— indeed, it doesn't seem to be an operating system at all, but some kind of low-level software that supports only Google's peculiar notion of what kind of applications should run on people's computers (probably mostly their applications). That is not an operating system in my book, because I think of operating systems as a general purpose layer of software that supports basic computational services such as device drivers, hardware I/O, filesystem, file I/O, etc. and provides a way to run applications. Operating systems are—or should be—application-neutral. Even Microsoft allows anyone and everyone to write applications that run on their OS. If the Google thing will only support a very narrow range of "web" applications, then this is an extremely restrictive and ultimately disastrous model.
I was excited when I first heard about it; now I'm re-evaluating my previous belief that Google is run by really smart people.
This is a foundation for a new generation of apps which aren't beholden to binary APIs controlled by the likes of Microsoft.
I'm confused...how are you going to create an operating system that runs applications without having a "binary" API? Or did you mis-type "proprietary"?
It isn't 'another window manager', it's a new windowing system.
I'm confused. I thought the new product was an operating system. An operating system provides fundamental services (like hardware I/O, filesystem, process management, etc.) Only Microsoft thinks that an operating system is the same thing as a GUI.
Oh great, Mr. Anonymous coward, you're me, but forgot to log in! In my defense, there's a bug in the/. software: I knew I wasn't logged in, but when I filled out the captcha and clicked OK, I was expecting to be taken back to the edit window, from whence I would (I presumed) be given the opportunity to login. But no, my unedited comment simply got posted. Bah,/.!
Before everyone screams bloody murder, the fact remains that you'll still be able to buy the stuff, separately. Percocet, for example, is actually a mix of oxycodone and acetaminophen. You can buy them separately as Oxycontin and Tylenol (or paracetamol in the UK).
You're missing the point. Last I heard, Percocet was a schedule II narcotic in the U.S (http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/listby_sched/sched2.htm). That means lots of extra hassles for the prescribing physician, like special multi-part prescription pads and special tracking and oversight requirements. Most doctors don't like to prescribe sched II analgesics. Instead, they go for schedule III, and give you something like Vicodin (hydrocodone & acetaminophen).
Well guess what. There are no schedule III opioid analgesics that do not contain either acetaminophen or some other normally OTC pain-reliever, like aspirin or ibuprofen. Why is that? If one were cynical, one might suppose that the FDA in effect requires the most easily tolerated and inexpensive opioid analgesics to have acetaminophen in them because you will die a lingering and painful death if you take too many of them. But of course that's ridiculous.
So anybody want to take bets whether the FDA
Outlaws all schedule 3 analgesics because they contain acetaminophen, thus simply doing away with 90% of the pain control that physicians are able to prescribe
Allow pure opioid analgesics to be prescribed as schedule 3.
Do nothing
I don't think I need to tell you where my money is...
We would not take out LAN if we did not feel we could offer players something better.
If Blizzard were offering something better, they would not have to remove the game's LAN capability. Customers would just use the "better" thing, right?
Oh wait. Better for Blizzard. Ah, now it makes sense.
For years, peoples with money (mainly the government) have been paying for climate science that is intended to make us believe that we are all going to die unless something is done. Now they have moved into position to bring in the harvest: money and power. Huge new personal and corporate tax increases, the creation of yet more bogus financial instruments, and entire new bureaucracies will now benefit our elite masters.
Haven't they missed a small detail however? Our banking and economic systems are already on the verge of collapse. These new measures should supply the killing stroke. Or is that an intended consequence? The very rich and powerful are usually on higher ground than the rest of us, so they stay dry no matter how high the water rises.
To come back to the example with drug dealers, this would equal the police shooting people on sight because they think they are drug dealers and this being legal.
Not quite. It's more like the police preventing the drug dealers from getting their phone calls, and taking their names off the mail box. Let's try to keep our analogies...analogous, ok?
If you still needed proof that our political system is crap, this is it...If anyone shoots them all, I'll be there to applaud.
Ok, so let's be clear about this: you're willing to bring down the curtain on the type of government that Germany—and most of the "Western" countries—have, and initiate a violent revolution because a parliament did something dumb, something that is annoying and ineffectual, but that will cost no lives or even a lot of money (for values of $a_lot bandied about by government these days)? If you think that justifies taking up arms against any government, you're a clueless and dangerous idiot; clearly, you have neither a knowledge of history nor a sense of proportion. There may be reasons to call for blood and fire; there have been times and places when men have justifiable taken up arms to rise against intolerable governments or great injustices. Usually, the cost has been terrible, and the odds of success small. Smaller still is the number of revolutions that actually made things better.
Unfortunately this, and other data mining crap has been created and 1984 is alive and well and it can't be undone. All because some people - some programmers - thought that getting paid was better than doing what is moral and ethical in a free state. We are no longer free, ladies and gentlemen.
No, we're damned expensive.
Look, I was a bit overly optimistic 20 years ago myself. I thought the new technologies would bring a new era of freedom of expression and communication. I rejoiced over the fact that I could send email, and read and post to USENET at work, using company equipment—and my boss had no clue what was going on. I was so naive that I actually reveled in the illusion that people like me, people who understood the new technologies, had power.
The extent of my naivete has become completely clear to me in the intervening years, of course. The process of clarification probably started when I got that phone call from the BATF about a posting I'd made in rec.guns. (Yes, like most people, I was using my real name. Imagine that.) Then came the Endless Fall, and, of course, the spammers. (I was still getting spam to that same email address I'd been using in 1988 when I finally quit in 2003).
And of course the government had been busily hiring smart young programmers back before I had even heard of the internet. Remember, the government—specifically, DARPA—really did invent the Internet. (Though I doubt ALGOR ever worked for DARPA.)
I'm surprised you're surprised that your "former classmates and colleagues" would work for the government or Evil Corporations. Heck, if scientists are willing to make hydrogen bombs, what makes you think computer programmers won't write data mining programs for the NSA, if paid sufficiently big bucks?
Technology may have changed a lot over the past century, but nothing ever changes human nature. You can always depend on others, especially your classmates and colleagues, to screw you over for money.
The real issue isn't perceived nudity -- anyone having a problem with others seeing nakedness or immediately equates nakedness to "sex" is a seriously disturbed individual.
Call me disturbed, but I don't go to nudist beaches because I don't like people looking at me with my clothes off. I figure I have a right to feel that way.
If some actually good looking women inexplicably wanted to take their clothes off in front of me, I would not raise any objections—but I sure don't have the right to require that they do so. And neither should the government.
It sounds to me as though you are opposing this just because it was proposed by a Republican. Are you for the new, expanded war in Afgapakistan because a certain Democrat thinks it's a good idea? You need to expand your political horizons a bit.
I think you completely miss the point. This isn't prudery—it's a desire for privacy. Being scanned by one of these things is the same as being asked to take your clothes off.
Maybe you'll get more sensitive to the issue when the operators start snickering as you go through the scan, and one of them addresses you as "Tiny".
I've had an Ubuntu Hardy Heron set-up next to my Windows box ever since HH released. I got a KVM switch so I can just flip over to one box or the other whenever I want to, using the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The OS installed fine, it works fine. How useful is it? Well...I use it as an MP3 player. Got all my music on it, and got the audio going out into the AV receiver and 7.1 sound system in my computer room. That way, I don't have to worry about my music stopping when I have to run some CPU intensive stuff on my Windows box. But it's kind of freaking huge for an MP3 player...not to mention the power consumption.
Have I tried to use it for other stuff? Well, yes. But every time I do, I wind having to read a ton of Wikis and download this and try to find that...well...it's frankly too much trouble. In all fairness, just about all I do with a computer at home is play games, email, and look stuff up on the web. The Ubuntu box actually would do the last two just as well...I just don't usually bother switching over.
So I'm not optimistic that Ubuntu is going to take over the home/desktop market any time soon. No doubt, I could make my Ubuntu box do some more useful things. But frankly, I don't have the motivation to put in the work to make it work. Now, I could get motivated. Say Microsoft forces me to drop XP and adopt some DRM-riddled piece of crap like Vista...yeah, I'd work hard to keep that MP3 player in top condition.
Yeah, it's important to remember that there's a big difference between challenge and pointless frustration. One is a stimulant to gameplay, the other is a turn-off.
Compared to wow where i would pretend being afk when asked for help because i simply could not bear zepelin/windrider/mount timesink.
What a bunch of wusses you young whippersnappers are. Back in my day, you had to wait for over an hour for a ship that might never come (they would regularly sink). Then you had to be sitting in the little canoe-things that would take you out to the big ship...major pain the first time when I didn't realize the ship itself wasn't going to come pick me up. Then you had the trip itself, which probably only took about 15 minutes. And the way back was no faster.
Back in the olden days, game designers knew how to administer pain, and make you pay for it. Yes, I'm talking about Everquest (not number 2). Heck, you think spending real-time hours traveling to a new continent is bad, how about losing your corpse through drowning somewhere in a shark infested ocean, eh? I mean back before they made EQ easy, and had resurrection altars and all that crap. Corpse retrieval was a challenge then. I didn't stay up until 5 AM and go to work the next day with 2 hours of sleep because I was questing...nooooo I was being a loyal group member and helping some poor schmuck who had died in an impossible location, camped by red mobs (you remember, the ones that were labeled "What do you want your tombstone to say?" when you conned them).
But despite the absolutely punishing gameplay, despite the rare mobs that you had to camp for days because that was their spawn interval, despite the forced grouping, that game had a sense of community in the first few years. It had the feel of a real world—in that it was a good place to be.
And yes, I played Zork and the earlier text-based RPGs. None of them were as painful as EverCrack. And no other game has ever been so much fun. I know it sounds paradoxical, but sometimes a game that makes you work is the most fun. I think it's called "challenge".
Not if you write Python—no braces for you, bad boy. And if the editor you're using accidentally eats all the beginning of line white space...you have learned the true meaning of despair.
his writing sucked so much he couldn't bear to subject the general public to it while he was still alive.
I think you know better than this. Even though we have only what amounts to a journal or notebook, there's plenty in Wittgenstein to think about. His writing style was certainly lucid (at least in the original German)—so clear and spare that not a single word could be removed. Besides, he was quite modest about Investigations: "I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it." [From the Preface, third Edition (the one that levitates off the desk a bit when read by candlelight).]
He returned to the site 29 times? Must have been really...interesting. I wonder, how can I get the FBI to email me that link? For testing purposes, of course. Yeah, that's it...
Let's see...early or late Wittgenstein? The early Wittgenstein—the one who wrote the Tractatus—would have been a pure C programmer. Clarity, brevity, precision. The later Wittgenstein, the one we meet in Philosophical Investigations, programmed in Pascal. You know—the academic language which was completely cool, but never quite finished.
As for Kant, he was definitely a Python guy. Only an obsessive-compulsive German would think that making a language indent-sensitive is a good thing.
IT has the ability to set computers to power on and off at pre-determined hours. If the workday at your office is 9 to 5, you could set machines to wake up at 8:50 a.m. and power down at 5:15 p.m., aside from weekends.
Were it not rendered hopelessly ambiguous by the incomprehensible shift between "IT" and "you" between the first and second sentences, this might be taken to imply that IT should shut down and start up my PC on some regular schedule. Well, I don't have no freakin' regular schedule! . The day my boss tells me, "sorry, but we want to save seventy-five bucks a year, so you're going to have to work 8 to 5 now" is the day I quit. (And that's exactly what I did the last time a boss told me that.)
Sure, I wouldn't mind turning my PC on when I get in to work and off when I leave. But if I do that, I will sit around for an unknown amount of time every morning waiting for the patches that IT pushed the night before. (They used to push patches during the day, forcing reboots while people were working. I rather emphatically pointed out to the IT manager that this was unprofessional. To my amazement, this actually worked.)
And at home, I have...leseee...4 or 5 PCs. I do image backups of them on different nights per week, so that if some beloved member of my family gets another malware infestation, I can simply reimage her disk (they're all women, those people at home). I tell them never, ever to shut down their PCs because it's bad when all the electrons leak out of the CPU.
So I'm sorry, but I'm just an "always on" kind of guy.
Regardless there is no reason his Kindle should be effectively bricked. Yes, he can use the content he has already purchased, however he can never (legally) obtain any new content for that Kindle; a "feature" designed into the Kindle by Amazon. This sounds like a fundamental problem with DRM to me.
It's a problem with DRM that locks you into a single vendor for media that runs on your reader. I'm not saying that DRM is good—it's not good for me, and it's probably not good for you, but the media publishers seem to think it's essential, so I suspect we're probably going to have to live with some sort of DRM if we want ebooks. In the case of the Kindle, DRM is compounded by the fact that your media rights and your selection of media are owned by a single vendor. As you noted, if that vendor cuts you off, you can re-read all your old books as much as you like, but you can never get or read a new book on that device . That may not quite amount to "bricking" the Kindle, but it would sure cause me to turn it into kindling.
As I've said before, I'll buy an ebook when there's assurance of plentiful media from multiple vendors. I might have to live with some sort of DRM, but it's not going to be single-vendor DRM.
As a note of historical interest, early phonograph manufacturers did their best to engineer their devices so they would only play discs or cylinders manufactured by that same company. You can see how that worked out. I suppose we can hope that eventually Bezos will catch on.
Slashdot Mirror
"20 or 30 years" should probably be "8 to 15 years".
My initial reaction to the Google announcement was deep skepticism. A "web" operating system? How silly. It didn't seem to me that what was being discussed was a real "operating system" at all—not like Unix or Windows. But later on in the day, it hit me: maybe Google really does have the smartest people on the planet working for them.
I've often remarked on how most people who now use computers actually shouldn't be let near one; anybody here who has been asked to help a relative with their fubared PC knows exactly what I am talking about. And I've fondly dreamed of being able to hand those migraine-inducing family members whose PCs are basically the computer equivalent of vacuum cleaners stuffed with viral dust bunnies a simple thin client box that you just plug in to the network, and can't possibly be screwed up because it's too limited to do anything dangerous. Dammit. And my esteemed spousal unit (now I've let the cat out of the bag) would be grateful for something like this: a box you plug in, use to surf the net, and read email, and that runs light applications (like Freecell!), and that doesn't get crudded up with all those nasty pop-ups and resource-sucking trojans.
Well, maybe this is it! The computer for the Facebook generation. Will it mean the death of Microsoft? Probably not—they're too big to die quick. But it will totally change the landscape. I wonder, will anybody but specialists and "enthusiasts" be using real general purpose computers 20 or 30 years from now?
Ok, I don't like the picture I'm getting of the new Google "operating system"— indeed, it doesn't seem to be an operating system at all, but some kind of low-level software that supports only Google's peculiar notion of what kind of applications should run on people's computers (probably mostly their applications). That is not an operating system in my book, because I think of operating systems as a general purpose layer of software that supports basic computational services such as device drivers, hardware I/O, filesystem, file I/O, etc. and provides a way to run applications. Operating systems are—or should be—application-neutral. Even Microsoft allows anyone and everyone to write applications that run on their OS. If the Google thing will only support a very narrow range of "web" applications, then this is an extremely restrictive and ultimately disastrous model.
I was excited when I first heard about it; now I'm re-evaluating my previous belief that Google is run by really smart people.
I'm confused...how are you going to create an operating system that runs applications without having a "binary" API? Or did you mis-type "proprietary"?
I'm confused. I thought the new product was an operating system. An operating system provides fundamental services (like hardware I/O, filesystem, process management, etc.) Only Microsoft thinks that an operating system is the same thing as a GUI.
Oh great, Mr. Anonymous coward, you're me, but forgot to log in! In my defense, there's a bug in the /. software: I knew I wasn't logged in, but when I filled out the captcha and clicked OK, I was expecting to be taken back to the edit window, from whence I would (I presumed) be given the opportunity to login. But no, my unedited comment simply got posted. Bah, /.!
You're missing the point. Last I heard, Percocet was a schedule II narcotic in the U.S (http://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/schedules/listby_sched/sched2.htm). That means lots of extra hassles for the prescribing physician, like special multi-part prescription pads and special tracking and oversight requirements. Most doctors don't like to prescribe sched II analgesics. Instead, they go for schedule III, and give you something like Vicodin (hydrocodone & acetaminophen).
Well guess what. There are no schedule III opioid analgesics that do not contain either acetaminophen or some other normally OTC pain-reliever, like aspirin or ibuprofen. Why is that? If one were cynical, one might suppose that the FDA in effect requires the most easily tolerated and inexpensive opioid analgesics to have acetaminophen in them because you will die a lingering and painful death if you take too many of them. But of course that's ridiculous.
So anybody want to take bets whether the FDA
I don't think I need to tell you where my money is...
If Blizzard were offering something better, they would not have to remove the game's LAN capability. Customers would just use the "better" thing, right?
Oh wait. Better for Blizzard. Ah, now it makes sense.
For years, peoples with money (mainly the government) have been paying for climate science that is intended to make us believe that we are all going to die unless something is done. Now they have moved into position to bring in the harvest: money and power. Huge new personal and corporate tax increases, the creation of yet more bogus financial instruments, and entire new bureaucracies will now benefit our elite masters.
Haven't they missed a small detail however? Our banking and economic systems are already on the verge of collapse. These new measures should supply the killing stroke. Or is that an intended consequence? The very rich and powerful are usually on higher ground than the rest of us, so they stay dry no matter how high the water rises.
Not quite. It's more like the police preventing the drug dealers from getting their phone calls, and taking their names off the mail box. Let's try to keep our analogies...analogous, ok?
Ok, so let's be clear about this: you're willing to bring down the curtain on the type of government that Germany—and most of the "Western" countries—have, and initiate a violent revolution because a parliament did something dumb, something that is annoying and ineffectual, but that will cost no lives or even a lot of money (for values of $a_lot bandied about by government these days)? If you think that justifies taking up arms against any government, you're a clueless and dangerous idiot; clearly, you have neither a knowledge of history nor a sense of proportion. There may be reasons to call for blood and fire; there have been times and places when men have justifiable taken up arms to rise against intolerable governments or great injustices. Usually, the cost has been terrible, and the odds of success small. Smaller still is the number of revolutions that actually made things better.
No, we're damned expensive.
Look, I was a bit overly optimistic 20 years ago myself. I thought the new technologies would bring a new era of freedom of expression and communication. I rejoiced over the fact that I could send email, and read and post to USENET at work, using company equipment—and my boss had no clue what was going on. I was so naive that I actually reveled in the illusion that people like me, people who understood the new technologies, had power.
The extent of my naivete has become completely clear to me in the intervening years, of course. The process of clarification probably started when I got that phone call from the BATF about a posting I'd made in rec.guns. (Yes, like most people, I was using my real name. Imagine that.) Then came the Endless Fall, and, of course, the spammers. (I was still getting spam to that same email address I'd been using in 1988 when I finally quit in 2003).
And of course the government had been busily hiring smart young programmers back before I had even heard of the internet. Remember, the government—specifically, DARPA—really did invent the Internet. (Though I doubt ALGOR ever worked for DARPA.)
I'm surprised you're surprised that your "former classmates and colleagues" would work for the government or Evil Corporations. Heck, if scientists are willing to make hydrogen bombs, what makes you think computer programmers won't write data mining programs for the NSA, if paid sufficiently big bucks?
Technology may have changed a lot over the past century, but nothing ever changes human nature. You can always depend on others, especially your classmates and colleagues, to screw you over for money.
And you, sir, are just a juvenile twit.
Call me disturbed, but I don't go to nudist beaches because I don't like people looking at me with my clothes off. I figure I have a right to feel that way.
If some actually good looking women inexplicably wanted to take their clothes off in front of me, I would not raise any objections—but I sure don't have the right to require that they do so. And neither should the government.
It sounds to me as though you are opposing this just because it was proposed by a Republican. Are you for the new, expanded war in Afgapakistan because a certain Democrat thinks it's a good idea? You need to expand your political horizons a bit.
I think you completely miss the point. This isn't prudery—it's a desire for privacy. Being scanned by one of these things is the same as being asked to take your clothes off.
Maybe you'll get more sensitive to the issue when the operators start snickering as you go through the scan, and one of them addresses you as "Tiny".
I've had an Ubuntu Hardy Heron set-up next to my Windows box ever since HH released. I got a KVM switch so I can just flip over to one box or the other whenever I want to, using the same monitor, keyboard, and mouse. The OS installed fine, it works fine. How useful is it? Well...I use it as an MP3 player. Got all my music on it, and got the audio going out into the AV receiver and 7.1 sound system in my computer room. That way, I don't have to worry about my music stopping when I have to run some CPU intensive stuff on my Windows box. But it's kind of freaking huge for an MP3 player...not to mention the power consumption.
Have I tried to use it for other stuff? Well, yes. But every time I do, I wind having to read a ton of Wikis and download this and try to find that...well...it's frankly too much trouble. In all fairness, just about all I do with a computer at home is play games, email, and look stuff up on the web. The Ubuntu box actually would do the last two just as well...I just don't usually bother switching over.
So I'm not optimistic that Ubuntu is going to take over the home/desktop market any time soon. No doubt, I could make my Ubuntu box do some more useful things. But frankly, I don't have the motivation to put in the work to make it work. Now, I could get motivated. Say Microsoft forces me to drop XP and adopt some DRM-riddled piece of crap like Vista...yeah, I'd work hard to keep that MP3 player in top condition.
Yeah, it's important to remember that there's a big difference between challenge and pointless frustration. One is a stimulant to gameplay, the other is a turn-off.
What a bunch of wusses you young whippersnappers are. Back in my day, you had to wait for over an hour for a ship that might never come (they would regularly sink). Then you had to be sitting in the little canoe-things that would take you out to the big ship...major pain the first time when I didn't realize the ship itself wasn't going to come pick me up. Then you had the trip itself, which probably only took about 15 minutes. And the way back was no faster.
Back in the olden days, game designers knew how to administer pain, and make you pay for it. Yes, I'm talking about Everquest (not number 2). Heck, you think spending real-time hours traveling to a new continent is bad, how about losing your corpse through drowning somewhere in a shark infested ocean, eh? I mean back before they made EQ easy, and had resurrection altars and all that crap. Corpse retrieval was a challenge then. I didn't stay up until 5 AM and go to work the next day with 2 hours of sleep because I was questing...nooooo I was being a loyal group member and helping some poor schmuck who had died in an impossible location, camped by red mobs (you remember, the ones that were labeled "What do you want your tombstone to say?" when you conned them).
But despite the absolutely punishing gameplay, despite the rare mobs that you had to camp for days because that was their spawn interval, despite the forced grouping, that game had a sense of community in the first few years. It had the feel of a real world—in that it was a good place to be.
And yes, I played Zork and the earlier text-based RPGs. None of them were as painful as EverCrack. And no other game has ever been so much fun. I know it sounds paradoxical, but sometimes a game that makes you work is the most fun. I think it's called "challenge".
Not if you write Python—no braces for you, bad boy. And if the editor you're using accidentally eats all the beginning of line white space...you have learned the true meaning of despair.
his writing sucked so much he couldn't bear to subject the general public to it while he was still alive.
I think you know better than this. Even though we have only what amounts to a journal or notebook, there's plenty in Wittgenstein to think about. His writing style was certainly lucid (at least in the original German)—so clear and spare that not a single word could be removed. Besides, he was quite modest about Investigations: "I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it." [From the Preface, third Edition (the one that levitates off the desk a bit when read by candlelight).]
He returned to the site 29 times? Must have been really...interesting. I wonder, how can I get the FBI to email me that link? For testing purposes, of course. Yeah, that's it...
Let's see...early or late Wittgenstein? The early Wittgenstein—the one who wrote the Tractatus—would have been a pure C programmer. Clarity, brevity, precision. The later Wittgenstein, the one we meet in Philosophical Investigations, programmed in Pascal. You know—the academic language which was completely cool, but never quite finished.
As for Kant, he was definitely a Python guy. Only an obsessive-compulsive German would think that making a language indent-sensitive is a good thing.
Ugliness? It looked liked totally trashed HTML to me. No images, visible code, broken tables... How can somebody post a link to this?
From the article:
Were it not rendered hopelessly ambiguous by the incomprehensible shift between "IT" and "you" between the first and second sentences, this might be taken to imply that IT should shut down and start up my PC on some regular schedule. Well, I don't have no freakin' regular schedule! . The day my boss tells me, "sorry, but we want to save seventy-five bucks a year, so you're going to have to work 8 to 5 now" is the day I quit. (And that's exactly what I did the last time a boss told me that.)
Sure, I wouldn't mind turning my PC on when I get in to work and off when I leave. But if I do that, I will sit around for an unknown amount of time every morning waiting for the patches that IT pushed the night before. (They used to push patches during the day, forcing reboots while people were working. I rather emphatically pointed out to the IT manager that this was unprofessional. To my amazement, this actually worked.)
And at home, I have...leseee...4 or 5 PCs. I do image backups of them on different nights per week, so that if some beloved member of my family gets another malware infestation, I can simply reimage her disk (they're all women, those people at home). I tell them never, ever to shut down their PCs because it's bad when all the electrons leak out of the CPU.
So I'm sorry, but I'm just an "always on" kind of guy.
It's a problem with DRM that locks you into a single vendor for media that runs on your reader. I'm not saying that DRM is good—it's not good for me, and it's probably not good for you, but the media publishers seem to think it's essential, so I suspect we're probably going to have to live with some sort of DRM if we want ebooks. In the case of the Kindle, DRM is compounded by the fact that your media rights and your selection of media are owned by a single vendor. As you noted, if that vendor cuts you off, you can re-read all your old books as much as you like, but you can never get or read a new book on that device . That may not quite amount to "bricking" the Kindle, but it would sure cause me to turn it into kindling.
As I've said before, I'll buy an ebook when there's assurance of plentiful media from multiple vendors. I might have to live with some sort of DRM, but it's not going to be single-vendor DRM.
As a note of historical interest, early phonograph manufacturers did their best to engineer their devices so they would only play discs or cylinders manufactured by that same company. You can see how that worked out. I suppose we can hope that eventually Bezos will catch on.