page nubmers did not work for a long time cause office is not consistent - you learn how to use word, and the same thing is diff in excell and pp cause service packs and upgrades disable running programs stupid help and error messages
I have repeatedly posted that the emperorer has no clothes: this is a ludicrous project, making up in stupidity what it lacks in arrogance.
That the academic deitys at the MIT media center should presume to tell millions of families around the world what is good for them is unbelievalbe; if the wahabist wackos did this, what would you say ? And it is not even a real laptop, but some educational thing, stripped down without any of the fun (those of you with kids know how well that would go over, but apparently the poor slope/goog/wog kids are supposed to be grateful for whatever crumbs we give them, after all, we all know they aint creative, just good at coding (joke))
the whole thing is stupid: u can go down to your fav store, and buy a quite good laptop for a few hundred bucks.
this means that if anyone out there in india or wherever actually gave a flying f*ck, they could order a million stripped down REAL laptops for ~100 - 200 each.
the loss of dominance merely reflects the shift from the abnormal situation following the two world wars, and the long term abnormality of china not being a major world power
science dominance is a zero sum game - the "pie" of science (as measured say by the 1,000 most important papers per year) is so big; what we are fighting about is our share of that pie. over the last few thousand years of history, most of the time china has been one of if not the dominant nation on the planet; the last hundred years or so have been abnormal. the return of china means that less of the pie is available to us
Traditinally, germany and other euro powers were as big as the us, again, the postware era , an abnormality, is fading, and again as the euros take more of the pie, there is less for us
Further, we have nations like singapore and korea that are climbing the development curve, which is asymptotic
there is NO lack of money for training scientitst in this country; there is a lack of long term job stability, there is the lure of parasites like hedge funds and comsmetic surgery draining people from science, there is an idiot president and congress earmarking money for stupid things, but these are all minor. For instance, fusion "research" is nothing but welfare for physicsts; if the same money was put into basic material science research toward better solar power this country would be way better off similarly, the emphasis on the space station is a national disaster; there is plenty of money, just not being spent well of course, "plenty of money" is relative when your kid is dying of cancer; you might be forgiven for thinking we are not spending enough. but good researchers are not common (like good programmers/mythical man month) you just can't create good science with $$$ - you need long term comittements to careers so bright people will invest 20 or 30 years of their lifes
those guys in oklahoma city, sure looked moslem, not to mention the ira, basque, KKK, skinheads, red brigades, shining path....... talk about stereotype racism
when i say noone i know has been hurt, i mean i dont notice it - my computer might be sending out gazillions of spams a second, but it doens't really affect me. i bet most people are similar: spam and malware and so forth don't really amount to, at most a few minutes a day - it is just not a big deal (darfur, iraq, global warming) as for he shopping thing (a_ online shopping is doing ok (b) the vendors are big people, if it is a problem, in our free market economy it is their problem, per recent herbert article newyork times, we could do with a lot less shopping and a lot more worrying about iraq
the id theft is an exagertaion is true: certainly, there are a small number of people hurt by id theft, but most of it has to do with friends and family, not online security; id theft occurs when your trusted freind relative coworker steals your passwords
it is in this sense that the media is making the probllem much larger then it appears
lets say the article is right does it matter? so far as i know, neither I, nor any member of my family, nor anyone i know, has actually been seriously hurt by malware, except for a few minutes removing viagra ads, and for me, spambayes does most of that pretty well
as we know, the whole id theft thing is a media exaggeration, like missing children: most of the id theft is from family or friends, and most of the missing children are out for a walk with their parents
all irrelevant at least below the vp level, it is the employees job to argue, but in the end do his assignment if someone was told, do this useless job or be fired, , loose your house, go broke, should he do that ? this is a senior managment problemm,not an employee problem
as for jobs being an a**hole, have you ever seen this guy on tv ? his sole job on earth is to make larry ellison not look so bad
further, jobs/mac have a long history of being half right; they do some things very well and some things very badly, so on avg they are not that good, and so why does jobs get all this accolade shit ?
ms is a business techno nerd it doesnt matter if the product is good or bad - it matters what the profit is which is why mit geeks work for harvard mbas
In a large corporation that is mismandaged, is it the employees repsonsiblity to justify their existence or to say, give me some good guidance and see what i can do ?
jobs is such an a**hole
I suspect the few things that have been done right at apple are not his (I bet the mac gui was some underpaid female artist type) the ipod wheel was probably someone else...
his comments about the excess choices are wrong, as is most of what he says (good training to figure out why) he is wrong because while it is true that to many choices is bad, it only matters if people have to think about the choices. what happens with the off button is people quickly train themselves just to use the one or two choices they need.
First, this is an old, old,old problem, see G Hardin, the tragedy of the commons
second, why on earth does anyont think that an open free public blog/post spot, like/. wont be abused.
In the old days, they solved this problem in a very, very, very simple way - $ for subscriptions.
perhpas we are seeing the natural evolution of the web back to the paid/publish model that sustained newspapers for nearly 200 years or so
(I'm sure the old timers remember when the web would revolutionize everything, and it has turned, mainly, into a marketing tool for large corporations [wiki has substantial corp funding, once removed, as did open office]) after all, if you ain't willin go pay for it, how much can it be worth ?
Re:Because there is no enforcement.
on
Leopard Vs. Vista
·
· Score: 1
so the way to linux desktops to the masses is to charge MORE make it a gamer/prestige thing, and the masses will follow
I am one of those people who use firefox because it is better; I really don't care 2 cents about MS wars and open source. I use fire fox because of four features, tabs, save all bookmarks to folder, cntrl+ , and clear private features. Most of my friends are the same. So, I, and I assume most of your users, have zero loyalty to firefox - or IE; that is the way consumers are, they are awful things to have as customers (and that is why in the real world, contrary to all the biz school bs, the 1st thing any business trys to do is create some sort of barrieer to lock consumers into the product)
So, what is new about ff that I should care about ? And, if you do not have an active IP policy, how on earth do you ever expect to stay ahead ?
What would I like ? how about a recorder, seperate audio and video streams,just hit the button and whatever is playing on the screen is captured (sort of like camtasia)
How about link farm blockers
But most of all, a good yellow pages equivalent - that, with wikipedia, is probably 50% of my browsing
two problems one - it is just not true - a lot of mac is surface veneer BS (acrylic speakers ?) Second, they don't do a good job - why pay for somehting when they don't sweat all the details (i wd give examples, but fair people know what i mean and mac addicts won't listen) ok an example: the rubber keypads on the laptops that leave marks on the screen , talk about a basic bone headed error; shitty power cable connectors, another juvenile mistake,.......
that is a really interesting point, which gets to the heart of the discussion: certain things can be solved by technology (bits/$/square mm) and some things can't - safety of flying cars, or the amount of energy required to lift someone into orbit, or they require really new technologies (automated safety systems, fusion power)
I think as older americans like myself, there was a bit of jingoism in what we were taught about the history of heavier then air flight, the brave wright brothers battling the doubters...in fact, I think the history is more that many poeple were trying heavier then air flight, and the theorists knew they had significant problems with their theorys, since theory predicted the bumblebee could not fly (they did not know about,for instance, wake vortices)
re the advance of comp;uters, there will always be some technology that is doing much better then the others; that does not mean the others should move as fast, but that there are some special circumstance that made possible the fast moving technology.
as Feynman remarked, the physics mafia is carefull to boast about how they can predict the origin of the universe, but they can't predict what will happen when you push water through a pipe.
Enthusiasts are hoping ot have a working flying car to take people to the PROPOSED space elevator. Says G Pangloss, ceo, we expect a working elevator protype to be built sometime in the next 20 years, and our flying car will allow you to get priority status by going directly to the landing station at 15,000 feet...
In other news,/.ers continue with wierd offf the wall fantasys..
problems can be divided into three categorys 1) easily knowable answers, like who is the 10th president, or angelina jolies boyfriend
2) hard to know answers, like how may diff types of beetles live in california - with enough money, you could answer this, but it would take alot of work
3) unknowable answers, like what interest rates will be this year, or what the stock market will do tomorrow (obviously unaswerable, cause if you could, you would make gates look like a pauper), or what will happen in Iraq.
The wisdom of the crowds is simply related to #1; the problem is that "experts" get paid to pretend that they know how to give answers to #3, like the talking heads that provide cheap filler for TV news.
all ask or other sites would have to do is implement some minimal set of filters, eg get rid of the link farms and a few other filters, better search features in advanced search (how do you say google sucks big time here) I'm sure/.s could add a few more
this is just like firefox: ALL you have to do is find the one or two really simple things people actually need and want This would have the added benefit of reducing google revenue; the financial markets are fickle sharks, and one quarter unexpected bad news will cause google's stock to collapse
1) Because OSS is not about business, but about Hobbys that are Impotant. If you talk to engineers and scientists in their 70s,many of these guys (and they are all guys) grew up making crystal radios and things like that, and they all say, those hobbys helped make me an engineer, and what are kids today going to do, since you can't really take apart a chip. The answer is LINUX kids can do what ever they want, and the nerdy dispised socially awkward loosers using linux will be the people who drive the NASA equivalent of hte 21st century
2) Its about features and volume. If you learn anything about the pc midi mainframe history, it is tht volume trumps all. But you don't get volume without features. This is seen clearly in firefox. People, on the whole, use firefox and don't use thunderbird or open office because firefox does something that they want to do and can't get anywhere else. thunderbird and oo don't.
As for this stuff about "better" give me a break - since when in the real world does better trump cheaper ????
PS: the answer is for the oss community to patent imp new ideas; then oss will have features that people want, you will get volume, volume begets low cost.....
first rate post You are assuming that the FOSS people want to convert the world (which, to be fair, is what they say). But since they continue to do all of the wrong things to convert people, you have to ask yourself, what do they really want ? Alot of them are showoffs, in a geeky sense; the sort of guys who would spend 15,000 dollars on stereo speakers. Many are venture capitial backed startups, which means all they care about is exit strategy and cashing out.
Many are stupid - they think that open office will displace ms office on price (you can safely ignore anyone who says this) Actually, in the last two years or so on./ , i have not seen ONE PERSON say the obvious things - what are the features that will make people WANT linux. The obvious model is firefox - poeople use it cause of (a) tabs, (b) erase personal data, (c) cntrl+ to increase font size...the point is that fire fox does something new and useful and unique. Untill open source can do that, there is no reason to go away from ms, and, since most of us do what advertising tells us to (honestly, why did you buy X last week ?) it is unlikely that open source can displace ms without signiccant backign from some large company, say google or yahoo, or foreign govts/schools (i thought the recent post on linux in indian schools, and how these kids are going to be the software startups of the next ten years must have been the scariest thing to hit redmond in the last ten years)
if FOSS really wanted to convert people,they would have an "ip" site where people could discuss noew features, adn have them ip protected agaisnst ms
Many posters note that fixing the poor UI as more important then clipart.
But what is a good UI ? Perfect for slashpol Category Graphs - genera Graphs - axis....
The math is a lot like the ask an audience feature in do u want 2b a millioniare. if there is a consensus you will get a set of votes x + y, where x is the preferred soluiton and Y is the sum of the unpreferred, and all of the components of y are small (the math is really clear with 4 choices)
the only problem is if the better solutions are not well know, eg I really like the layout of graphs in Kaleidagraph, which few people know about.
Slashdot Mirror
uh, should nt you just ignore, by definition, any marketing material with animation or sound ?
page nubmers did not work for a long time
cause office is not consistent - you learn how to use word, and the same thing is diff in excell and pp
cause service packs and upgrades disable running programs
stupid help and error messages
first, people say forking is good, then they complain that vendors won't support unlimited forks. YOu can't have it both ways.
I have repeatedly posted that the emperorer has no clothes: this is a ludicrous project, making up in stupidity what it lacks in arrogance.
That the academic deitys at the MIT media center should presume to tell millions of families around the world what is good for them is unbelievalbe; if the wahabist wackos did this, what would you say ? And it is not even a real laptop, but some educational thing, stripped down without any of the fun (those of you with kids know how well that would go over, but apparently the poor slope/goog/wog kids are supposed to be grateful for whatever crumbs we give them, after all, we all know they aint creative, just good at coding (joke))
the whole thing is stupid: u can go down to your fav store, and buy a quite good laptop for a few hundred bucks.
this means that if anyone out there in india or wherever actually gave a flying f*ck, they could order a million stripped down REAL laptops for ~100 - 200 each.
remember, u saw it here first
the loss of dominance merely reflects the shift from the abnormal situation following the two world wars, and the long term abnormality of china not being a major world power
science dominance is a zero sum game - the "pie" of science (as measured say by the 1,000 most important papers per year) is so big; what we are fighting about is our share of that pie.
over the last few thousand years of history, most of the time china has been one of if not the dominant nation on the planet; the last hundred years or so have been abnormal. the return of china means that less of the pie is available to us
Traditinally, germany and other euro powers were as big as the us, again, the postware era , an abnormality, is fading, and again as the euros take more of the pie, there is less for us
Further, we have nations like singapore and korea that are climbing the development curve, which is asymptotic
there is NO lack of money for training scientitst in this country; there is a lack of long term job stability, there is the lure of parasites like hedge funds and comsmetic surgery draining people from science, there is an idiot president and congress earmarking money for stupid things, but these are all minor.
For instance, fusion "research" is nothing but welfare for physicsts; if the same money was put into basic material science research toward better solar power this country would be way better off
similarly, the emphasis on the space station is a national disaster; there is plenty of money, just not being spent well
of course, "plenty of money" is relative when your kid is dying of cancer; you might be forgiven for thinking we are not spending enough. but good researchers are not common (like good programmers/mythical man month) you just can't create good science with $$$ - you need long term comittements to careers so bright people will invest 20 or 30 years of their lifes
those guys in oklahoma city, sure looked moslem, not to mention the ira, basque, KKK, skinheads, red brigades, shining path.......
talk about stereotype racism
this guy writes comic strips
and he is qualified to decide who should be POTUS ?
it is like a dilbert cartoon..
when i say noone i know has been hurt, i mean i dont notice it - my computer might be sending out gazillions of spams a second, but it doens't really affect me.
i bet most people are similar: spam and malware and so forth don't really amount to, at most a few minutes a day - it is just not a big deal (darfur, iraq, global warming)
as for he shopping thing (a_ online shopping is doing ok (b) the vendors are big people, if it is a problem, in our free market economy it is their problem, per recent herbert article newyork times, we could do with a lot less shopping and a lot more worrying about iraq
the id theft is an exagertaion is true: certainly, there are a small number of people hurt by id theft, but most of it has to do with friends and family, not online security; id theft occurs when your trusted freind relative coworker steals your passwords
it is in this sense that the media is making the probllem much larger then it appears
lets say the article is right
does it matter?
so far as i know, neither I, nor any member of my family, nor anyone i know, has actually been seriously hurt by malware, except for a few minutes removing viagra ads, and for me, spambayes does most of that pretty well
as we know, the whole id theft thing is a media exaggeration, like missing children: most of the id theft is from family or friends, and most of the missing children are out for a walk with their parents
all irrelevant
at least below the vp level, it is the employees job to argue, but in the end do his assignment
if someone was told, do this useless job or be fired, , loose your house, go broke, should he do that ? this is a senior managment problemm,not an employee problem
as for jobs being an a**hole, have you ever seen this guy on tv ? his sole job on earth is to make larry ellison not look so bad
further, jobs/mac have a long history of being half right; they do some things very well and some things very badly, so on avg they are not that good, and so why does jobs get all this accolade shit ?
ms is a business techno nerd
it doesnt matter if the product is good or bad - it matters what the profit is
which is why mit geeks work for harvard mbas
In a large corporation that is mismandaged, is it the employees repsonsiblity to justify their existence or to say, give me some good guidance and see what i can do ?
jobs is such an a**hole
I suspect the few things that have been done right at apple are not his (I bet the mac gui was some underpaid female artist type) the ipod wheel was probably someone else...
his comments about the excess choices are wrong, as is most of what he says (good training to figure out why)
he is wrong because while it is true that to many choices is bad, it only matters if people have to think about the choices. what happens with the off button is people quickly train themselves just to use the one or two choices they need.
First, this is an old, old,old problem, see G Hardin, the tragedy of the commons
/. wont be abused.
second, why on earth does anyont think that an open free public blog/post spot, like
In the old days, they solved this problem in a very, very, very simple way - $ for subscriptions.
perhpas we are seeing the natural evolution of the web back to the paid/publish model that sustained newspapers for nearly 200 years or so
(I'm sure the old timers remember when the web would revolutionize everything, and it has turned, mainly, into a marketing tool for large corporations [wiki has substantial corp funding, once removed, as did open office])
after all, if you ain't willin go pay for it, how much can it be worth ?
so the way to linux desktops to the masses is to charge MORE
make it a gamer/prestige thing, and the masses will follow
I am one of those people who use firefox because it is better; I really don't care 2 cents about MS wars and open source. I use fire fox because of four features, tabs, save all bookmarks to folder, cntrl+ , and clear private features.
Most of my friends are the same.
So, I, and I assume most of your users, have zero loyalty to firefox - or IE; that is the way consumers are, they are awful things to have as customers (and that is why in the real world, contrary to all the biz school bs, the 1st thing any business trys to do is create some sort of barrieer to lock consumers into the product)
So, what is new about ff that I should care about ?
And, if you do not have an active IP policy, how on earth do you ever expect to stay ahead ?
What would I like ? how about a recorder, seperate audio and video streams,just hit the button and whatever is playing on the screen is captured (sort of like camtasia)
How about link farm blockers
But most of all, a good yellow pages equivalent - that, with wikipedia, is probably 50% of my browsing
two problems
one - it is just not true - a lot of mac is surface veneer BS (acrylic speakers ?)
Second, they don't do a good job - why pay for somehting when they don't sweat all the details (i wd give examples, but fair people know what i mean and mac addicts won't listen)
ok an example: the rubber keypads on the laptops that leave marks on the screen , talk about a basic bone headed error; shitty power cable connectors, another juvenile mistake,.......
I find it hard to believe that " moissanite" aka silicon carbide, has a higher thermal conductivity then diamond - do you have a reference for this
PS: isotopically pure diamond has a higher thermal conductivity then diamonds with natural isotope distribution
that is a really interesting point, which gets to the heart of the discussion: certain things can be solved by technology (bits/$/square mm) and some things can't - safety of flying cars, or the amount of energy required to lift someone into orbit, or they require really new technologies (automated safety systems, fusion power)
I think as older americans like myself, there was a bit of jingoism in what we were taught about the history of heavier then air flight, the brave wright brothers battling the doubters...in fact, I think the history is more that many poeple were trying heavier then air flight, and the theorists knew they had significant problems with their theorys, since theory predicted the bumblebee could not fly (they did not know about,for instance, wake vortices)
re the advance of comp;uters, there will always be some technology that is doing much better then the others; that does not mean the others should move as fast, but that there are some special circumstance that made possible the fast moving technology.
as Feynman remarked, the physics mafia is carefull to boast about how they can predict the origin of the universe, but they can't predict what will happen when you push water through a pipe.
Enthusiasts are hoping ot have a working flying car to take people to the PROPOSED space elevator. Says G Pangloss, ceo, we expect a working elevator protype to be built sometime in the next 20 years, and our flying car will allow you to get priority status by going directly to the landing station at 15,000 feet...
/.ers continue with wierd offf the wall fantasys..
In other news,
problems can be divided into three categorys
1) easily knowable answers, like who is the 10th president, or angelina jolies boyfriend
2) hard to know answers, like how may diff types of beetles live in california - with enough money, you could answer this, but it would take alot of work
3) unknowable answers, like what interest rates will be this year, or what the stock market will do tomorrow (obviously unaswerable, cause if you could, you would make gates look like a pauper), or what will happen in Iraq.
The wisdom of the crowds is simply related to #1;
the problem is that "experts" get paid to pretend that they know how to give answers to #3, like the talking heads that provide cheap filler for TV news.
all ask or other sites would have to do is implement some minimal set of filters, eg get rid of the link farms and a few other filters, better search features in advanced search (how do you say google sucks big time here) I'm sure /.s could add a few more
this is just like firefox: ALL you have to do is find the one or two really simple things people actually need and want
This would have the added benefit of reducing google revenue; the financial markets are fickle sharks, and one quarter unexpected bad news will cause google's stock to collapse
1) Because OSS is not about business, but about Hobbys that are Impotant. If you talk to engineers and scientists in their 70s,many of these guys (and they are all guys) grew up making crystal radios and things like that, and they all say, those hobbys helped make me an engineer, and what are kids today going to do, since you can't really take apart a chip.
The answer is LINUX kids can do what ever they want, and the nerdy dispised socially awkward loosers using linux will be the people who drive the NASA equivalent of hte 21st century
2) Its about features and volume. If you learn anything about the pc midi mainframe history, it is tht volume trumps all. But you don't get volume without features.
This is seen clearly in firefox. People, on the whole, use firefox and don't use thunderbird or open office because firefox does something that they want to do and can't get anywhere else. thunderbird and oo don't.
As for this stuff about "better" give me a break - since when in the real world does better trump cheaper ????
PS: the answer is for the oss community to patent imp new ideas; then oss will have features that people want, you will get volume, volume begets low cost.....
first rate post
./ , i have not seen ONE PERSON say the obvious things - what are the features that will make people WANT linux. The obvious model is firefox - poeople use it cause of (a) tabs, (b) erase personal data, (c) cntrl+ to increase font size...the point is that fire fox does something new and useful and unique. Untill open source can do that, there is no reason to go away from ms, and, since most of us do what advertising tells us to (honestly, why did you buy X last week ?) it is unlikely that open source can displace ms without signiccant backign from some large company, say google or yahoo, or foreign govts/schools (i thought the recent post on linux in indian schools, and how these kids are going to be the software startups of the next ten years must have been the scariest thing to hit redmond in the last ten years)
You are assuming that the FOSS people want to convert the world (which, to be fair, is what they say).
But since they continue to do all of the wrong things to convert people, you have to ask yourself, what do they really want ?
Alot of them are showoffs, in a geeky sense; the sort of guys who would spend 15,000 dollars on stereo speakers.
Many are venture capitial backed startups, which means all they care about is exit strategy and cashing out.
Many are stupid - they think that open office will displace ms office on price (you can safely ignore anyone who says this)
Actually, in the last two years or so on
if FOSS really wanted to convert people,they would have an "ip" site where people could discuss noew features, adn have them ip protected agaisnst ms
Many posters note that fixing the poor UI as more important then clipart.
....
But what is a good UI ? Perfect for slashpol
Category
Graphs - genera
Graphs - axis
The math is a lot like the ask an audience feature in do u want 2b a millioniare.
if there is a consensus you will get a set of votes x + y, where x is the preferred soluiton and Y is the sum of the unpreferred, and all of the components of y are small (the math is really clear with 4 choices)
the only problem is if the better solutions are not well know, eg I really like the layout of graphs in Kaleidagraph, which few people know about.