Applications software is deader than hell. It's been slaughtered by the Open Source community, who can produce solid software that not only costs nothing, but which can be copied infinitely, and has no hidden gotchas like the equivalent proprietary software.
I'd like to believe this is true, but it isn't. Commercial application software hasn't been slaughtered by open source software; very few people use Mozilla, or Open Office, or Evolution. The only space open source software dominates is web infrastructure, where it has always dominated, from BIND to Apache to Sendmail to....
Stagnation has killed the application software industry. In the past, the application industry has relied on the periodic introduction of the "killer app" to revitalize flagging sales. There has not been a killer app since the introduction of the web browser in the early '90s.
Part of the blame lies with Microsoft, which has dominated the application space over the last 8 years. As long as there is one single company in control of the application and desktop space, innovation is unlikely. Part of the blame lies with the fact that there are more computers out there these days, increasing the inertia to change. ("Backwards compatibility" is still a major warcry.)
Part of the blame lies with us. We have not been able to create anything truly unique, something that would encourage a new niche for computing.
In any case, Open Source has not contributed significantly to the demise of applications programming.
This is of course theoretical, but KHTML (for KDE Konqueror) has had code back from Apple, due to GPL. I seriously doubt they had provided their changes if KHTML was BSD-licensed.
Good post, except for this. Apple has released quite a bit of source code in the form of Darwin, which is BSD-derived. I think Apple has shown at least a little bit of integrity in the past.
Seems they should have to compile the source code into a binary, and compare that binary with the final distribution binary. The only way to prove they are not showing untainted code is to prove it is the codebase they used to create their system.
In a way, the resulting binary *is* a checksum-equivelent.
3. While individual movies aren't worth protecting, the set of all older movies is.
Every time Mickey Mouse's copyright is due to expire, the copyright gets extended. One of the biggest funders of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act: Disney.
It's not hard to see that our cultural heritage is being held safe from us simply because Disney doesn't want to lose their prime mascot.
I'm not thinking it's "all or none", either. I've got Ghost, so no big whoop. See, what I'm really wondering about is... Are all the kinks worked out? Am I going to be frustrated trying it.
Dude, if you ever find an OS with all the kinks worked out, let us know. If you ever find an OS that isn't frustrating, let us know. You will become one of the most celebrated geeks of all time.
In my experience, all operating systems suck. Some just suck less.
I have proposed two Linux slogans, both of which are copped from someone else (blatant plagarism!):
"Linux: It sucks less."
And:
"Of course Linux is user friendly! It's just very picky about its friends."
The truth is, if you see no reason to switch to Linux, then you probably shouldn't. If you like your current environment, and don't feel a political, philosophical, or technical imperative to switch, don't.
There are many reasons to switch to Linux; the protection of our future rights and freedoms is not least (philosophical and political imperatives). Linux is more stable than XP in my experience, but not by that much (technical). MS-Windows still has all the games, though. (Although, I have to say: I would rather play a game on my PS2 than on my computer.)
Linux installs within about an hour. You should be productive within a couple of hours after that, but you will spend the next 20 years learning. (Of course, you better spend the next 20 years learning no matter what system you choose.)
If you want to develop MS-Windows programs, for God's sake, man, use MS-Windows! Don't drive yourself crazy trying to do some devilishly-complicated scheme, when the simple solution is, well, simple.
I believe it is dangerous to support Microsoft in any way. Their history has shown they will destroy any emergent technology simply to retain a lock on "innovation." If you are doing anything remotely interesting, they are likely to either buy you up (good for you), or kill you (bad for you). Either way, you benefit Microsoft more than yourself.
I also believe you are giving up your rights by using Microsoft products. Their EULA are becoming draconian; at some poing, you will have no rights at all.
Linux brings back the fun in computing, both at the systems level, and at the development level. I haven't had so much fun with a system since the old Apple ][ days. Of course, I've been using Linux for almost 10 years now, so it's been a long fun jag.
If these arguments do not appeal to you, then you probably have nothing to gain by moving to Linux. Stick with what you have. Don't kill yourself by attempting a switch.
However, if you'd like to see what the fun is all about, pull out an old PII computer and install away. Play with it, integrate it with your home network, start exploring the things that interest you. You can have the best of both worlds, you know. It's not an either/or proposition.
But, no matter what you do, have fun. Keep one eye on the future, but don't let yourself become blind to the present: have extreme amounts of fun.
Most procurement systems are biased against open-source software. They are designed specifically to cater to commercial entities. For instance, many bids that go out are mandated by policy to include certain types of software, often name-specific.
Also, by the very fact they go out to bid indicates money must be spent. Software is not represented by a commercial entity is at a disadvantage.
The problem with a monopoly is that it warps the market space-time around it, like a black hole. Decisions are made not by "value propositions," but by control of the distribution points. History (and internal memos released during the anti-trust trial) shows that Microsoft is a master manipulator: of public opinion, of the stock market (if you discount the money they print as stock options, MS is not very profitable at all), and especially of the distribution chain.
The recent spate of proposed local- and state-level legislation merely provides an alternative to commercial-only procurements. There is no "forcing down their throats."
Are criminals who happen to be techies now lesser criminals or better humans because of this?
Dude, he's not necessarily a criminal. He's a *suspect*. And the constitution has clauses that protect people from being improperly incarcerated; the big deal is this: the US is being fucked over by our own government. We are losing our constitionally-guaranteed rights to a bunch of morons who courted Saddam Hussein 20 years ago (while he was gassing Iranians), and now are suddenly outraged because he *might* have chemical weapons?!?!?
No fucking way! We stand up for our rights, right here, right now. We tell them they will not take another one of us without due process.
We take our country back.
If Hawash is guilty, let it be proven in a court of law, the old-fashioned way.
Point one: X is too dependent on networking protocols and is just pretty goddamn slow all-around.
X is hardly dependent on networking protocols. Local client access to the server happens over Unix Sockets, a very low-latency, architecture-independent solution. Nor is X that slow. X ran jes' fine on my old 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 256K CL graphics card. Let's see the "fast GUI system like Windows or MacOS X" do that....without all the bloat of the gtk+ and QT toolkits.
I think this is the core problem, not X.
Point 2: Instead of developing Window Manager # 123480, people need to collaborate and make a common, consistent, and standard layout that all programs can use...
If Linux were a business, I'd agree with you. However, Linux is not a business; it's essentially a hobby. Linux' success is based not on the application of business practices, but by a bunch of people having fun writing software.
Sure, there's a lot of businesses interested in Linux, and contributing to Linux for their own needs. But this is after-the-fact; businesses have already accepted Linux. Now they are customising it to fit their own needs, or supporting it out of the understanding that what is good for Linux is good for business.
Anyway, this is all a lot of armchair quarterbacking. Linux is Linux is Linux. Telling a bunch of volunteer developers what they *should* be working on (instead of providing positive and useful feedback on they projects they *are* working on) shows both ingratitude and lack of understanding of the entire Free/Open Source culture.
Not really. I was being a bastard. I took the "mindpixel" comment a little too personally. You obviously do have a sense of humor. My original post was intended more to point out that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously, Tivo or no Tivo (playing off the dichotomy of a minor syntactic/grammatical error vis-a-vis your compare/contrast of TV watching versus TV non-watching people: not as funny to others as it was to me).
I was just cranky last night. Sorry about that. I try not to let that affect me.
BTW, thanks for the Bod reference. I had never heard of him before. I will read his work; it seems interesting.
It's not just the positional notation which creates the droll ambiguity of your original sentence, but the relative adjective "which," which indicates not a person, but a thing; "whom" is the preferred adjective when the antecedent is a person.
But, just in case you missed it, I was being facetious. If you augmented your neural net with a mindpixel or two (better yet, 1.3 million, which you sell cheaply, possibly because you are not using them yourself), you would realize the context was humourous (at least to a very small degree).
Although grammar is not a set of rules (precisely), there are rules to which proper grammar adheres. Rieteeng iz knot just freistile rambeleeng, ewe no. Just as there are proper spellings, there are also properly-formed sentences.
Rens Bod, although thought-provoking, is not contributing the the area of proper communication. His work seems more in the vein of error-correction in poor communication, which seems to give lazy communicators an excuse to continue in their laziness. His title alone connotates his work is not in grammar per-se, but in the concept of language as a grammar-free (i.e., exclusively contextual) method of communcation.
Grammar itself is a method of creating internally-consistent communcation, and provides tools for error correction within the data stream itself (for instance, providing rules for creating consistent placement of adjectives, and proper antecedent/relative pronoun relationships). Grammar also provides a contract between perveyer and recipient, contributing a structural framework to language which does not otherwise exist.
Considering your rant about television providing a corrupting medium, I'm surprised at your lack of precision in communication. Your slipshod approach at writing, as well as your lack of humor, is hardly an endorsement of the superiority of reading over television.
BTW, many televisions win prizes, just as many cars win "Car of the Year," and whatnot.
free to be regulated, that is No offence, but this is a perfect example of why a codified constitution is IMO bad. UKer, and happy to be so.
UK? Isn't that the place that's been following the US' lead in peace and war? Seems a lot of restrictive legislation is passed first in the US (because we're all political pussies), and then the rest of the world says, "See? It passed in the great land of the United States, so it must be good for us!"
And: the constitution is the only thing that might save us in the end.
If they don't like things like strong encryption, how could they possibly want to make it illegal to break even weak encryption.
<rant mode="paranoia">
Y'ever think this is exactly where they want us? If it's illegal to attack weak encryption, or even publish flaws in the encryption we use, then They can decrypt it illicitly, but we can't.
And since we can't really even work together to create a better encryption, we'll always have sucky and weak encryption which They will always be able to intercept.
It's all a plot to keep us survielled, catagorized, analyzed, and oppressed. It's not a conscious thing they do, but it works out the same. We're becoming thought-slaves to the perverted desires and whims of corporate B&D masters and their Tony Blair-like lap dogs, our lovely legislators.
Put on your consumer-grade, MPAA-approved red leather masks! (And bring out The Gimp.)
Probably the moment that the ACLU supports a terror organization..
That's the problem; the US PATRIOT Act doesn't define what a "Terror Organization" really is. It's essentially, "Any organisation that acts in opposition to the United States." Considering that the entire concept of the ACLU is to act in opposition to the US government when it believes the government is behaving illegally, that is pretty much the definition of the ACLU.
The KKK is (historically) a terrorist organisation, but you don't see the government going after them. But the ACLU: won't be long, if we keep going the way we are going.
"Mr. Taylor, have you ever been a member of, or sympathised with, the ACLU? Yes? You, sir, are an eeeevvvviiillll Pinko terrorist!"
I'm proud to be an American, but I despise the US government. Our current President is a snivelling coward (Daddy helped him stay out of Vietnam) who is willing to put our best and brightest in harm's way, but at the same time is cutting their VA benefits. That's respecting our troops! Ha-ha!
<rant>
The US has contributed to attrocities throughout the world that make Saddam Hussein and his ilk seem like schoolyard bullies by comparison, from the oil-industry-sponsored genocide in East Timor and Nigeria, to the drug-related coups in Central America that overthrew democratically-elected governments and replaced them with military dictator regimes.
My country is filled to overflowing with hypocricy, lies, greed, and callous disregard for the rest of the world; and that is just our President. In a time when a group of companies can sue an individual for $78,000,000 with a straight face; in a country where killing gets you 10 years in prison, but cracking into a corporate machine gets you 20, and a $100,000 fine; with a government in which a convicted felon who perjured himself before congress is now organizing the government's "Total Information Awareness" project (which is a fine name for spying on its own citizens); in this, I am ashamed.
I live in a country where we invade another in an unprovoked act of agression, killing thousands of their citizens, just to do the dual job of distracting us from the failed "war on terror," and to allow the Vice President the chance to reward his previous employer (Halliburton) with some tasty contracts to rebuild Iraq... contracts which have been moved into the purvue of the DoD and classified as "Secret!"
We are getting fucked in the ass with a 50mm wire brush, and you are fucking proud?!?!?! "Give it to me, Mr. President! More! I just love the fucking humiliation and pain! More!"
The reason we aren't just swarming with military is, they don't need it to control us. We're willing to walk to the fucking slaughterhouse, and say, "I'm proud to be an American." We're willing to stand idly by as the US PATRIOT act encourages us to narc out our neighbors, who are guilty of nothing more than honoring a God different from the state-accepted God. We're willing to allow our government to push surveilence devices up our rectums (or at least into our TVs... isn't that ironic?) using the DMCA and the new "Super DMCAs" that will outlaw cryptographic data streams (such as VPN).
I too am proud to be an American. We were once the greatest nation in the world, leading in technology and freedom and honor. But then the damned 1900s hit us, and it's been downhill ever since. </rant>
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology.
Bill Joy is a Luddite; he'd rather bury the technology and forget about it than face the possibilities these technologies bring. *Every* technology brings with it both good and bad, advantageous and dangerous. The computers Bill Joy helped design are today used to design and build Weapons Of Mass Destruction; I don't hear Bill screaming about *that*.
As we advance technologically, we are forced to advance socially, as well. The Nuclear Age has ushered in vast wonders, and even greater threats; but we as a world-based society have had to learn lessons to keep from blowing ourselves to glow-in-the-dark smithereens.
Someone named Alfred Nobel invented a new class of explosives. He figured it would be great for mining, and building new structures, and generally helping Man progress. Unfortunately, it was also used for killing on a scale that was (until then) unknown. Feeling a mite guilty, he created a prize for peace, which was (amazing coincidence) called the Nobel Peace Prize.
What *hasn't* been mentioned is this: even the non-lethal uses of dynamite are used for ethically-questionable purposes, such as strip mining vast amounts of land, bad movie plot devices, and fishing (which is lethal to the fish, I guess).
The things of which Bill Joy is frighted, such as nanotech and designer viruses, are coming closer to reality every day. But, along with the ability to design custom plagues comes the ability to quickly build and deploy anti-plagues. As Neal Stephenson wrote in _The Diamond Age_, destructive nanites will be countered by general purpose antinans, or custom antinans if required.
Sure, some people will die. But through technological advances, even more will be saved. Dynamite has, in general, been a Good Thing, and helped the advance of society. Sun computers have been, in general, Good Things.
Nuclear war has been averted so far. At the moment, the only nation capable of taking out the entire world is the United States. And although our illustrious President Bush is behaving as an idiot child with a loaded gun (well, he *is* an idiot child with a gun, so I guess that's appropriate), I don't believe he's pig-stupid enough to press the big, red, candy-like button. So maybe even nuclear power will one day prove worth the risk we have taken.
Besides, we have to be optimistic: the djinn is already out of the bottle. We should make the best of it.
I think a lot of posts here miss the point. Microsoft has never claimed that Linux hasn't gained ground; but, they *do* claim Linux gains ground at the expense of other Unixes, and not at the expense of MS-Windows.
I believe the most important point of the article is this: Linux is *not* just canniballizing Unix. It is actively gaining ground against the entrenched "market share leader," Ms. Windows.
Your rant is spot-on. I have stated the same thing many times in the past (a couple of times on/.).
However, the statement, "If Microsoft used a standard XML format for their documents then anyone could read them," makes sense if you s/format/schema/ . There *is* a proposed standard XML schema for word processing documents.
The article is sound, with only a few symantic errors (confusing XML format with XML schema, for instance).
Now, if people would just start using the jargon properly....
What if I don't care about music? If I like music, I will buy CDs, not computers. What you are suggesting is that the government tack a levy on automobiles because people use them to steal books.
The only way you can do anything useful about it is prove that the loss is negligible, and to stop illegal copying.
There is another option: fight stupid fucking legislation like this. This isn't like raising the prices of CDs to recoup losses. It's the *government* intervening on behalf of corporations to steal from the public, on the grounds that the public is stealing from the corporations.
This is a fucking crock. Fight the *crime*, and the *criminals*. Don't pass legislation that benefits groups that have been convicted of illegal practices like price fixing, at the expense of innocent citizens.
What we are seeing is not capitalism. It is corporatism, which is the antithesis of capitalism.
It doesn't assume inevitability, it assumes precedence. This levy sets a terrible precedent. The first copyright extension act was hard to push through here in the states; later, copyright extension became easier, because of the precedent.
Or, as they say in the military, killing your first enemy is the hardest. After that, it gets a lot easier.
The "slippery slope" argument is shorthand for the concept of the wedge. When you see a self-serving agenda that starts with a small change, you can assume you are seeing the blade of the wedge. The purpose of the self-serving agenda is not going away.
The hardest freedom to kill is the first; after that, it becomes a lot easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Applications software is deader than hell. It's been slaughtered by the Open Source community, who can produce solid software that not only costs nothing, but which can be copied infinitely, and has no hidden gotchas like the equivalent proprietary software.
I'd like to believe this is true, but it isn't. Commercial application software hasn't been slaughtered by open source software; very few people use Mozilla, or Open Office, or Evolution. The only space open source software dominates is web infrastructure, where it has always dominated, from BIND to Apache to Sendmail to....
Stagnation has killed the application software industry. In the past, the application industry has relied on the periodic introduction of the "killer app" to revitalize flagging sales. There has not been a killer app since the introduction of the web browser in the early '90s.
Part of the blame lies with Microsoft, which has dominated the application space over the last 8 years. As long as there is one single company in control of the application and desktop space, innovation is unlikely. Part of the blame lies with the fact that there are more computers out there these days, increasing the inertia to change. ("Backwards compatibility" is still a major warcry.)
Part of the blame lies with us. We have not been able to create anything truly unique, something that would encourage a new niche for computing.
In any case, Open Source has not contributed significantly to the demise of applications programming.
The case becomes interesting when the user becomes the distributer, such as when giving friends copies of software, etc.
The GPL encourages *all* users to become distributors. That's the point: sharing helps us all.
This is of course theoretical, but KHTML (for KDE Konqueror) has had code back from Apple, due to GPL. I seriously doubt they had provided their changes if KHTML was BSD-licensed.
Good post, except for this. Apple has released quite a bit of source code in the form of Darwin, which is BSD-derived. I think Apple has shown at least a little bit of integrity in the past.
Hopefully, we can expect the same in the future.
This is a fairly common business strategy.
No wonder the Free Market is fucked.
Seems they should have to compile the source code into a binary, and compare that binary with the final distribution binary. The only way to prove they are not showing untainted code is to prove it is the codebase they used to create their system.
In a way, the resulting binary *is* a checksum-equivelent.
3. While individual movies aren't worth protecting, the set of all older movies is.
Every time Mickey Mouse's copyright is due to expire, the copyright gets extended. One of the biggest funders of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act: Disney.
It's not hard to see that our cultural heritage is being held safe from us simply because Disney doesn't want to lose their prime mascot.
Sucks to be us, doesn't it?
I'm not thinking it's "all or none", either. I've got Ghost, so no big whoop. See, what I'm really wondering about is... Are all the kinks worked out? Am I going to be frustrated trying it.
Dude, if you ever find an OS with all the kinks worked out, let us know. If you ever find an OS that isn't frustrating, let us know. You will become one of the most celebrated geeks of all time.
In my experience, all operating systems suck. Some just suck less.
I have proposed two Linux slogans, both of which are copped from someone else (blatant plagarism!):
"Linux: It sucks less."
And:
"Of course Linux is user friendly! It's just very picky about its friends."
The truth is, if you see no reason to switch to Linux, then you probably shouldn't. If you like your current environment, and don't feel a political, philosophical, or technical imperative to switch, don't.
There are many reasons to switch to Linux; the protection of our future rights and freedoms is not least (philosophical and political imperatives). Linux is more stable than XP in my experience, but not by that much (technical). MS-Windows still has all the games, though. (Although, I have to say: I would rather play a game on my PS2 than on my computer.)
Linux installs within about an hour. You should be productive within a couple of hours after that, but you will spend the next 20 years learning. (Of course, you better spend the next 20 years learning no matter what system you choose.)
If you want to develop MS-Windows programs, for God's sake, man, use MS-Windows! Don't drive yourself crazy trying to do some devilishly-complicated scheme, when the simple solution is, well, simple.
I believe it is dangerous to support Microsoft in any way. Their history has shown they will destroy any emergent technology simply to retain a lock on "innovation." If you are doing anything remotely interesting, they are likely to either buy you up (good for you), or kill you (bad for you). Either way, you benefit Microsoft more than yourself.
I also believe you are giving up your rights by using Microsoft products. Their EULA are becoming draconian; at some poing, you will have no rights at all.
Linux brings back the fun in computing, both at the systems level, and at the development level. I haven't had so much fun with a system since the old Apple ][ days. Of course, I've been using Linux for almost 10 years now, so it's been a long fun jag.
If these arguments do not appeal to you, then you probably have nothing to gain by moving to Linux. Stick with what you have. Don't kill yourself by attempting a switch.
However, if you'd like to see what the fun is all about, pull out an old PII computer and install away. Play with it, integrate it with your home network, start exploring the things that interest you. You can have the best of both worlds, you know. It's not an either/or proposition.
But, no matter what you do, have fun. Keep one eye on the future, but don't let yourself become blind to the present: have extreme amounts of fun.
After all, that's what life is all about.
Most procurement systems are biased against open-source software. They are designed specifically to cater to commercial entities. For instance, many bids that go out are mandated by policy to include certain types of software, often name-specific.
Also, by the very fact they go out to bid indicates money must be spent. Software is not represented by a commercial entity is at a disadvantage.
The problem with a monopoly is that it warps the market space-time around it, like a black hole. Decisions are made not by "value propositions," but by control of the distribution points. History (and internal memos released during the anti-trust trial) shows that Microsoft is a master manipulator: of public opinion, of the stock market (if you discount the money they print as stock options, MS is not very profitable at all), and especially of the distribution chain.
The recent spate of proposed local- and state-level legislation merely provides an alternative to commercial-only procurements. There is no "forcing down their throats."
Are criminals who happen to be techies now lesser criminals or better humans because of this?
Dude, he's not necessarily a criminal. He's a *suspect*. And the constitution has clauses that protect people from being improperly incarcerated; the big deal is this: the US is being fucked over by our own government. We are losing our constitionally-guaranteed rights to a bunch of morons who courted Saddam Hussein 20 years ago (while he was gassing Iranians), and now are suddenly outraged because he *might* have chemical weapons?!?!?
No fucking way! We stand up for our rights, right here, right now. We tell them they will not take another one of us without due process.
We take our country back.
If Hawash is guilty, let it be proven in a court of law, the old-fashioned way.
Point one:
...without all the bloat of the gtk+ and QT toolkits.
X is too dependent on networking protocols and is just pretty goddamn slow all-around.
X is hardly dependent on networking protocols. Local client access to the server happens over Unix Sockets, a very low-latency, architecture-independent solution. Nor is X that slow. X ran jes' fine on my old 386 with 8 MB of RAM and 256K CL graphics card. Let's see the "fast GUI system like Windows or MacOS X" do that.
I think this is the core problem, not X.
Point 2:
Instead of developing Window Manager # 123480, people need to collaborate and make a common, consistent, and standard layout that all programs can use...
If Linux were a business, I'd agree with you. However, Linux is not a business; it's essentially a hobby. Linux' success is based not on the application of business practices, but by a bunch of people having fun writing software.
Sure, there's a lot of businesses interested in Linux, and contributing to Linux for their own needs. But this is after-the-fact; businesses have already accepted Linux. Now they are customising it to fit their own needs, or supporting it out of the understanding that what is good for Linux is good for business.
Anyway, this is all a lot of armchair quarterbacking. Linux is Linux is Linux. Telling a bunch of volunteer developers what they *should* be working on (instead of providing positive and useful feedback on they projects they *are* working on) shows both ingratitude and lack of understanding of the entire Free/Open Source culture.
I imagine the sender will queue them up and send them as soon as the client machine is turned back on.
Seems like The Right Thing to me, anyway.
You are quite correct on all point [save Bod.]
Not really. I was being a bastard. I took the "mindpixel" comment a little too personally. You obviously do have a sense of humor. My original post was intended more to point out that we shouldn't take ourselves too seriously, Tivo or no Tivo (playing off the dichotomy of a minor syntactic/grammatical error vis-a-vis your compare/contrast of TV watching versus TV non-watching people: not as funny to others as it was to me).
I was just cranky last night. Sorry about that. I try not to let that affect me.
BTW, thanks for the Bod reference. I had never heard of him before. I will read his work; it seems interesting.
It's not just the positional notation which creates the droll ambiguity of your original sentence, but the relative adjective "which," which indicates not a person, but a thing; "whom" is the preferred adjective when the antecedent is a person.
But, just in case you missed it, I was being facetious. If you augmented your neural net with a mindpixel or two (better yet, 1.3 million, which you sell cheaply, possibly because you are not using them yourself), you would realize the context was humourous (at least to a very small degree).
Although grammar is not a set of rules (precisely), there are rules to which proper grammar adheres. Rieteeng iz knot just freistile rambeleeng, ewe no. Just as there are proper spellings, there are also properly-formed sentences.
Rens Bod, although thought-provoking, is not contributing the the area of proper communication. His work seems more in the vein of error-correction in poor communication, which seems to give lazy communicators an excuse to continue in their laziness. His title alone connotates his work is not in grammar per-se, but in the concept of language as a grammar-free (i.e., exclusively contextual) method of communcation.
Grammar itself is a method of creating internally-consistent communcation, and provides tools for error correction within the data stream itself (for instance, providing rules for creating consistent placement of adjectives, and proper antecedent/relative pronoun relationships). Grammar also provides a contract between perveyer and recipient, contributing a structural framework to language which does not otherwise exist.
Considering your rant about television providing a corrupting medium, I'm surprised at your lack of precision in communication. Your slipshod approach at writing, as well as your lack of humor, is hardly an endorsement of the superiority of reading over television.
BTW, many televisions win prizes, just as many cars win "Car of the Year," and whatnot.
The smartest people I know, don't own televisions (one of which has a Nobel Prize)
<nazi type="grammar">
So, the television has a Nobel Prize?
</nazi>
Tivo sucks all my time. I used to watch 1-2 hrs TV a week; now (because Tivo catches all the stuff I want to watch) I watch 2-3 hours a day .
Good God. I used to have something resembling a life.
free to be regulated, that is No offence, but this is a perfect example of why a codified constitution is IMO bad. UKer, and happy to be so.
UK? Isn't that the place that's been following the US' lead in peace and war? Seems a lot of restrictive legislation is passed first in the US (because we're all political pussies), and then the rest of the world says, "See? It passed in the great land of the United States, so it must be good for us!"
And: the constitution is the only thing that might save us in the end.
If they don't like things like strong encryption, how could they possibly want to make it illegal to break even weak encryption.
<rant mode="paranoia">
Y'ever think this is exactly where they want us? If it's illegal to attack weak encryption, or even publish flaws in the encryption we use, then They can decrypt it illicitly, but we can't.
And since we can't really even work together to create a better encryption, we'll always have sucky and weak encryption which They will always be able to intercept.
It's all a plot to keep us survielled, catagorized, analyzed, and oppressed. It's not a conscious thing they do, but it works out the same. We're becoming thought-slaves to the perverted desires and whims of corporate B&D masters and their Tony Blair-like lap dogs, our lovely legislators.
Put on your consumer-grade, MPAA-approved red leather masks! (And bring out The Gimp.)
</rant>
Seriously, it is kinda scary, isn't it?
Probably the moment that the ACLU supports a terror organization..
That's the problem; the US PATRIOT Act doesn't define what a "Terror Organization" really is. It's essentially, "Any organisation that acts in opposition to the United States." Considering that the entire concept of the ACLU is to act in opposition to the US government when it believes the government is behaving illegally, that is pretty much the definition of the ACLU.
The KKK is (historically) a terrorist organisation, but you don't see the government going after them. But the ACLU: won't be long, if we keep going the way we are going.
"Mr. Taylor, have you ever been a member of, or sympathised with, the ACLU? Yes? You, sir, are an eeeevvvviiillll Pinko terrorist!"
I'm proud to be an American, but I despise the US government. Our current President is a snivelling coward (Daddy helped him stay out of Vietnam) who is willing to put our best and brightest in harm's way, but at the same time is cutting their VA benefits. That's respecting our troops! Ha-ha!
<rant>
The US has contributed to attrocities throughout the world that make Saddam Hussein and his ilk seem like schoolyard bullies by comparison, from the oil-industry-sponsored genocide in East Timor and Nigeria, to the drug-related coups in Central America that overthrew democratically-elected governments and replaced them with military dictator regimes.
My country is filled to overflowing with hypocricy, lies, greed, and callous disregard for the rest of the world; and that is just our President. In a time when a group of companies can sue an individual for $78,000,000 with a straight face; in a country where killing gets you 10 years in prison, but cracking into a corporate machine gets you 20, and a $100,000 fine; with a government in which a convicted felon who perjured himself before congress is now organizing the government's "Total Information Awareness" project (which is a fine name for spying on its own citizens); in this, I am ashamed.
I live in a country where we invade another in an unprovoked act of agression, killing thousands of their citizens, just to do the dual job of distracting us from the failed "war on terror," and to allow the Vice President the chance to reward his previous employer (Halliburton) with some tasty contracts to rebuild Iraq... contracts which have been moved into the purvue of the DoD and classified as "Secret!"
We are getting fucked in the ass with a 50mm wire brush, and you are fucking proud?!?!?! "Give it to me, Mr. President! More! I just love the fucking humiliation and pain! More!"
The reason we aren't just swarming with military is, they don't need it to control us. We're willing to walk to the fucking slaughterhouse, and say, "I'm proud to be an American." We're willing to stand idly by as the US PATRIOT act encourages us to narc out our neighbors, who are guilty of nothing more than honoring a God different from the state-accepted God. We're willing to allow our government to push surveilence devices up our rectums (or at least into our TVs... isn't that ironic?) using the DMCA and the new "Super DMCAs" that will outlaw cryptographic data streams (such as VPN).
I too am proud to be an American. We were once the greatest nation in the world, leading in technology and freedom and honor. But then the damned 1900s hit us, and it's been downhill ever since.
</rant>
Feh, I say. Feh.
Go read Bill Joy's article, "Why the future doesn't need us." Possibly the best discussion I've seen on the dangers of future (and present!) technology.
Bill Joy is a Luddite; he'd rather bury the technology and forget about it than face the possibilities these technologies bring. *Every* technology brings with it both good and bad, advantageous and dangerous. The computers Bill Joy helped design are today used to design and build Weapons Of Mass Destruction; I don't hear Bill screaming about *that*.
As we advance technologically, we are forced to advance socially, as well. The Nuclear Age has ushered in vast wonders, and even greater threats; but we as a world-based society have had to learn lessons to keep from blowing ourselves to glow-in-the-dark smithereens.
Someone named Alfred Nobel invented a new class of explosives. He figured it would be great for mining, and building new structures, and generally helping Man progress. Unfortunately, it was also used for killing on a scale that was (until then) unknown. Feeling a mite guilty, he created a prize for peace, which was (amazing coincidence) called the Nobel Peace Prize.
What *hasn't* been mentioned is this: even the non-lethal uses of dynamite are used for ethically-questionable purposes, such as strip mining vast amounts of land, bad movie plot devices, and fishing (which is lethal to the fish, I guess).
The things of which Bill Joy is frighted, such as nanotech and designer viruses, are coming closer to reality every day. But, along with the ability to design custom plagues comes the ability to quickly build and deploy anti-plagues. As Neal Stephenson wrote in _The Diamond Age_, destructive nanites will be countered by general purpose antinans, or custom antinans if required.
Sure, some people will die. But through technological advances, even more will be saved. Dynamite has, in general, been a Good Thing, and helped the advance of society. Sun computers have been, in general, Good Things.
Nuclear war has been averted so far. At the moment, the only nation capable of taking out the entire world is the United States. And although our illustrious President Bush is behaving as an idiot child with a loaded gun (well, he *is* an idiot child with a gun, so I guess that's appropriate), I don't believe he's pig-stupid enough to press the big, red, candy-like button. So maybe even nuclear power will one day prove worth the risk we have taken.
Besides, we have to be optimistic: the djinn is already out of the bottle. We should make the best of it.
I think a lot of posts here miss the point. Microsoft has never claimed that Linux hasn't gained ground; but, they *do* claim Linux gains ground at the expense of other Unixes, and not at the expense of MS-Windows.
I believe the most important point of the article is this: Linux is *not* just canniballizing Unix. It is actively gaining ground against the entrenched "market share leader," Ms. Windows.
Your rant is spot-on. I have stated the same thing many times in the past (a couple of times on /.).
However, the statement, "If Microsoft used a standard XML format for their documents then anyone could read them," makes sense if you s/format/schema/ . There *is* a proposed standard XML schema for word processing documents.
The article is sound, with only a few symantic errors (confusing XML format with XML schema, for instance).
Now, if people would just start using the jargon properly....
What if I don't care about music? If I like music, I will buy CDs, not computers. What you are suggesting is that the government tack a levy on automobiles because people use them to steal books.
The only way you can do anything useful about it is prove that the loss is negligible, and to stop illegal copying.
There is another option: fight stupid fucking legislation like this. This isn't like raising the prices of CDs to recoup losses. It's the *government* intervening on behalf of corporations to steal from the public, on the grounds that the public is stealing from the corporations.
This is a fucking crock. Fight the *crime*, and the *criminals*. Don't pass legislation that benefits groups that have been convicted of illegal practices like price fixing, at the expense of innocent citizens.
What we are seeing is not capitalism. It is corporatism, which is the antithesis of capitalism.
Because it falsely assumes inevitability.
It doesn't assume inevitability, it assumes precedence. This levy sets a terrible precedent. The first copyright extension act was hard to push through here in the states; later, copyright extension became easier, because of the precedent.
Or, as they say in the military, killing your first enemy is the hardest. After that, it gets a lot easier.
The "slippery slope" argument is shorthand for the concept of the wedge. When you see a self-serving agenda that starts with a small change, you can assume you are seeing the blade of the wedge. The purpose of the self-serving agenda is not going away.
The hardest freedom to kill is the first; after that, it becomes a lot easier.