And before you flame me for this last opinion, think 486 @ 100Mhz w 16 MB of FP RAM. A perfectly usable win98 machine.
My first linux box was almost exactly this - AMD 486/100. I think I had it jacked to 32MB, though. It ran a state of the art Slackware distro with an FVWM desktop beautifully.
That was in 1995, mind you. The only logical conclusion is that the hardware was faster back then.
No, the United States is perfectly happy with this sort of government in Saudi Arabia. Any Islamic state with these qualities that makes its oil and other strategic assets available to the United States would be correctly described as Islamolapdog. One that keeps its strategic assets for itself is correctly described as Islamowacko.
But, to be serious for a moment, the Baath party does have historical connections to classic European fascists, and could plausibly be given a "fascist" label. However, Baath-party states (namely Iraq and Syria) are also the most secular of the core Arab nations, so they don't really deserve the "Islamo-" prefix. It appears to be either a deliberate attempt to confuse the public, or an honest case of self-delusion, that they are conflating the Baathists with the fundamentalists. They are really two very different enemies, as proven by the fact that they are natural enemies themselves.
It's an awesome idea, and I wish I could convince others to do the same.
It's a good thing that you love them, but some of us have had different experiences. My wife can't stand them - the spectrum is peculiar and artificial. I personally find the start-up delay is annoying, and often makes me flick the switch on and off, thinking the bulb is dead. The light spectrum thing is one of those things like MP3 music - some people honestly can't tell the difference, and others strongly dislike the quality tradeoffs. After the cats broke my trial bulbs by knocking over the lamps they were in, we didn't replace them.
Besides, CFLs are just a stopgap tech -- LED lightbulbs are coming down the pipe. They are more efficient, responsive, and long lasting than CFLs, and cats can't break them. Unfortunately the cost hasn't come down to the same level as CFLs yet.
Re:Only mean spirited if you are reading between l
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New "Get a Mac" TV ads
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I'm a professional software developer with 20 years of experience, and I do want an electric magic box. I want it to magically do all the crap that I've spent the last 20 years doing, so that I don't have to ever do it again. (Okay, that's not quite magic, in your definition, since I know what the box is really doing, but sometimes it's even more magical when somebody does it well, because you know how badly the rest of the industry has failed at it despite years of effort.)
On the other hand, I don't want it to be a magic box for all the things I'm currently doing. In that case I want it to be transparent and eminently hackable. The nice thing about OS X it that it does a good job on both fronts.
Dude, we're already in that world, in case you hadn't noticed.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
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Dark Matter Exists
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The fact that there is way too much of it - many times the amount of visible matter, which is the opposite of what we see in our solar system, for instance. Normal matter in small amounts like planets and people cannot add up to the missing mass. Normal matter in large amounts tends to spark up and burn brightly. So we're left with surprising amounts of matter in unusual forms (eg. black holes), exotic forms of matter that don't interact much with normal matter, or serious modifications to our understanding of gravity, all of which are very interesting possibilities that will earn Nobel prizes for whoever sorts it all out.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
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· Score: 1
Technically yes, but cosmologically, we may as well be considered light matter because we are bound to a visible star whose mass completely overwhelms the "dark matter" that orbits it. This type of dark matter is not particularly interesting to a cosmologist; they want to learn about dark matter that is significant enough to influence galactic and intergalactic dynamics, or exotic kinds of matter that are not observed locally.
Linux is ready for the desktop, right now. [...] What it isn't ready for is the MS/Mac zealots, but then, it never will be because they have no desire to change, nor to admit there even is a viable alternative to their favorite OS.
I would say that Linux was ready for the desktop ten years ago, and has become LESS useable since then. I am currently running SuSE 10.1, and while it was slightly easier to install than Slack 2, it's a complete mess as far as user interface goes. The old Unix desktop paradigms have fallen by the wayside, and we are left with a dog's breakfast of Windows conventions slowly strangling the older Unix conventions. Ctrl-C for copy?!? Fucking brilliant. Just killed the the app I was copying from. Should have tried Ctrl-Alt-C in that window. Or not, if it's from an office app that uses it's own clipboard, since you won't actually be copying anything to the clipboard you think you're copying to, and you'll end up pasting some random 5K block of text that you copied from somewhere else an hour before.
Yup, Linux has been ruined by legions of disgruntled Windows users trying to replace their Microsoft shite with something stable. Thanks to their tireless efforts, we've now got Winux. All the badly designed shite that drives you crazy on Windows, but hey at least now it's stable and secure. Fortunately you can still get yourself back to a somewhat consistent Unixy environment after a couple of days of abolishing the atrocities of KDE, Gnome, Firefox, and assorted other crap, but since all the developer effort is going into making that crap even crappier to appeal to the next wave of disgruntled Windows refugees, I don't hold much hope for real advancement in the Linux UI realm.
Fortunately Apple stepped up to the plate, and provided a genuinely revolutionary step forward in Unix UIs. A lot of us have quietly walked away from Linux desktops in the last 5 years because of Apple. Linux servers are still the shit, so I'm still a fan, but the Linux desktop is hopelessly lost, and IMO has been since Redhat 4 shipped with fvwm95 as the default window manager.
to look for some 'Cacky Pants'. [...] To me, it describes, "Soiled underwear".
This is strange, since "khaki" is a British term.
Although it reminds me of a similar anecdote I heard in Jamaica, where khaki in American pronunciation ("kacky") comes across as "shitty", and in British pronunciation ("kah-ky") comes across as "penis-like". Endless hilarity, unless you're the hapless foreigner.
HSBC uses a double-password system, but only prompts for random characters from the second password. This makes it "impossible" for a keylogger to grab your complete password. I assume that the security flaw is that your complete password can be inferred after 9 logins.
In what way was VMS's impementation not modern? Who are the "we" in "we understand"?
"We" are the users of CVS, Subversion, and other revision control systems that store differences, not whole files. Time Machine backs up differences, so I'm presuming it works on similar principles.
How is Time Machine more modern in versioning than VMS? Why can't VMS recover a deleted file (unless you forcably delete all versions)?
VMS can't recover a deleted version of anything. All VMS does when you save a file is create a new file with the same name, and version number + 1. If you delete/purge that file, it's gone. Back in the early 90's when I last used VMS, you regularly purged your versions because they ate up a significant part of your disk quotas. They were mostly useful as temporary wokring backups, and were cleared out as soon as you weren't likely to need them any more.
In what way is Apple doing versioning that hasn't been done before? NetApp implements snapshots using versioning and there are others doing it besides the old VMS stuff.
RCS goes back to the 1980s, and it probably has a stronger claim to prior art on Time Machine than VMS versioning. I don't think anyone (outside of Apple marketing circles) has claimed that it's revolutionary, only that it's nice to have something like this well-integrated into the OS.
the whole "time machine" which is really just a versioning system from the looks of it. VMS had that years and years ago, it's nothing new.
VMS versioning was a "never overwrite" system, not a real versioning system as we understand the term today. Time Machine fuses the concept of a modern versioning system with automated backup and recovery. I've been doing something similar to Time Machine on my Mac Powerbook, using CVS to make remote backups of certain working directories to a server, which lets me recover not only by date, but also recover deleted files (which VMS versioning does not, or at least did not in the early 90s, last I used it). Time Machine promises to make this slicker because it autocommits (no more losing intermediate versions between commits), and makes rollbacks a lot easier.
My main concern is if you are doodling around in some package like iPhoto that auto-saves your changes, and you are making all sorts of experimental crops and enhancements to photos and then undoing them, is it going to save every single one? That's going to gobble a lot of disk space.
The other concern is that my homegrowm Time Machine doubles as a fileshare between multiple computers. That is, I can push data into the backup from one machine, and restore it on another, and can even go both ways simultaneously, relying on CVS to detect and resolve conflicts. I don't expect Time Machine will have this functionality.
Virtual desktops existed before OS X, so they would have been copying no matter what. But I also think it's about bloody time.
Re: natural virtualization, remember that they said there are still a few top secret features they aren't revealing yet. They previewed 10 Leopard features, not *all* Leopard features. Apprently there's still something big in the box.
Apple's idea of an intuitive design is to remove so much functionality that there's really a limited number of operations you can perform, thus not much to get confused about.
How's life back there in the '80s? Up here in the future, Macs run Unix, various CLI tools, X-windows apps, legacy Mac OSes, OS X, and even MS-Windows. With that number of UI paradigms supported on the same box, there's a lot more to get confused about than on any system money can buy. If confusion is your thing, and it sounds like it is, then you really need to consider switching.
As the foreword to just about any edition of the novel will tell you, he was reacting to post-war Britain, and using the example of Stalinist Russia to show where he thought Britain was heading. Wikipedia sums it up:
Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he viewed as the situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, when the British economy was poor, the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs, and wartime allies such as the USSR were rapidly becoming peacetime foes ('Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy').
Only on Canadian Soil. The government is free to act as it pleases outside our country, same as the US.
I take it you've never heard of the Somalia Affair. This led to murder charges, a major public inquiry, the resignation of top military brass, and the wholesale disbanding of an entire military regiment. All for the torture/killing of one thief.
Some countries do hold their soldiers and governments to higher standards.
Content management systems (decent ones, anyway) accomplish most of the goals of CSS, and do it better, IMO. Your design can be damn ugly HTML 2.0 if that's what works, and your content doesn't even have to be HTML, if your CMS can filter it and apply some rudimentary markup to make it legible. And even with nasty source material like that, you can have nearly perfect separation of content and design, and even implement access controls so your designer can't touch the content, and your content providers can't fsck up the design. You can use CSS where it helps, and throw it in the trash heap when it confuses things. And once your templates are configured, you never ever have to think about divs, classes, and the cascade again.
The real problem is that browsers aren't following standards, not that CSS is broken.
I'd say that both are real problems. CSS does have some serious flaws, not the least of which it is apparently VERY hard to code to spec, judging by the failed efforts of practically every single browser out there, despite the efforts of some brilliant developers. And it's a pretty obvious fact that standards that are hard to follow will not get followed well.
The sad irony is that the vagaries of page layout in a portable, open, plain text source format were solved to perfection ages ago with TeX. The problem spaces of HTML and TeX do not map perfectly, but given that the basic theory (how to slap boxes together on a page with various types of alignments and floats, and how to separate content from design) was sorted out ages ago, it's unfortunate that HTML/CSS ended up as such a complete mess.
I've just added Safari to our to-be-supported browser list because I noticed that it does support design mode. If you're using Safari, see for yourself.
It will tell you that your browser is unsupported, but follow the link to force the editor to load anyway. It's buggy as hell, because the software knows nothing about KHTML, but you can definitely edit (at least I can using Safari 1.3.2 on OSX 10.3.9). Although it works the first time when I load it, Safari will often crash if you load it again, so make sure you don't have any important pages open:-). Yes, it appears to be a highly unstable alpha feature, so it's no surprise that you haven't heard of it, but somebody is evidently working on the problem. Thanks, Apple!
Anyway, one of my developers now has an old iBook on his desk to add better support for this when he can find the time.
What's really happening is that Mac "nerds" are becoming versed enough in Unixisms because of OS X that they can take a walk on the wild side with Linux and not get completely freaked out. They have just enough street smarts to take a walk through the OS inner city with the tough nerds, and not get shot or beat up. And they've discovered that, hey, wow there's a lot of cool shit happening on the mean streets of Linuxville.
But what they don't know is that downtown Linuxville hasn't been a rough a place for a few years now. It still clings to its tough reputation, but it's all college kids and coffee bars now. The place is gentrifying, and has a bit of that yuppie stench to it these days. It's not yet all Wonderbread and Wal-mart, like Windowsland, up the highway, but the Windowsland folks are moving in, and it's starting to get that feel.
The old-timers who gave Linux the frightening reputation that it carries, have long since settled down, had kids, and moved out to the leafy lanes and plush lawns of Mactown, to get away from the plastic Windowsland people. As a result, the Mactown folks have realized those Linux guys aren't so scary after all, beards and sandles notwithstanding. Maybe, some of the Mactown folks think, we could get a condo in Linuxville, and try some of that inner city living. Just on weekends for a start.
So they get a luxury condo in Linuxville, right on Ubuntu Street, which was built by a big-name property developer who saw that all the starving artists were living in the area, building cool lofts and studios from the abandoned tenements and factories of old Unixville. So he bottled up that artsy mojo and built a condo development with new appliances, and hardwood floors, and put in a Starbucks on the ground floor, and marketed it heavily to Mactown and Windowsland people looking for a change. Come to Linuxville! Not as scary as you think! But every bit as edgy! Now with taskbars! Sometimes you get contemptuous looks from the mean looking men who still hang out on Slackware Road, but it's best not to go down there if you can help it. If you can avoid them (and ignore the snotty punks on Gentoo Avenue), then it's all terrifically edgy and artsy, and just so-o-o-o nerdy cool in that certain je-ne-sais-quoi kind of way. It feels like they're right on the cutting edge, where the culture is created, where everything happens, just like they read in Wired Magazine in 1996.
Yeah, those little things like rule of law, prosperous economies, stable governance, sound fiscal policies, educated populace, efficient transportation systems, and public safety really have no bearing on your ability to make billions of dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
World War II went nuclear, so at least one.
And before you flame me for this last opinion, think 486 @ 100Mhz w 16 MB of FP RAM. A perfectly usable win98 machine.
My first linux box was almost exactly this - AMD 486/100. I think I had it jacked to 32MB, though. It ran a state of the art Slackware distro with an FVWM desktop beautifully.
That was in 1995, mind you. The only logical conclusion is that the hardware was faster back then.
No, the United States is perfectly happy with this sort of government in Saudi Arabia. Any Islamic state with these qualities that makes its oil and other strategic assets available to the United States would be correctly described as Islamolapdog. One that keeps its strategic assets for itself is correctly described as Islamowacko.
But, to be serious for a moment, the Baath party does have historical connections to classic European fascists, and could plausibly be given a "fascist" label. However, Baath-party states (namely Iraq and Syria) are also the most secular of the core Arab nations, so they don't really deserve the "Islamo-" prefix. It appears to be either a deliberate attempt to confuse the public, or an honest case of self-delusion, that they are conflating the Baathists with the fundamentalists. They are really two very different enemies, as proven by the fact that they are natural enemies themselves.
It's a good thing that you love them, but some of us have had different experiences. My wife can't stand them - the spectrum is peculiar and artificial. I personally find the start-up delay is annoying, and often makes me flick the switch on and off, thinking the bulb is dead. The light spectrum thing is one of those things like MP3 music - some people honestly can't tell the difference, and others strongly dislike the quality tradeoffs. After the cats broke my trial bulbs by knocking over the lamps they were in, we didn't replace them.
Besides, CFLs are just a stopgap tech -- LED lightbulbs are coming down the pipe. They are more efficient, responsive, and long lasting than CFLs, and cats can't break them. Unfortunately the cost hasn't come down to the same level as CFLs yet.
I'm a professional software developer with 20 years of experience, and I do want an electric magic box. I want it to magically do all the crap that I've spent the last 20 years doing, so that I don't have to ever do it again. (Okay, that's not quite magic, in your definition, since I know what the box is really doing, but sometimes it's even more magical when somebody does it well, because you know how badly the rest of the industry has failed at it despite years of effort.)
On the other hand, I don't want it to be a magic box for all the things I'm currently doing. In that case I want it to be transparent and eminently hackable. The nice thing about OS X it that it does a good job on both fronts.
Dude, we're already in that world, in case you hadn't noticed.
The fact that there is way too much of it - many times the amount of visible matter, which is the opposite of what we see in our solar system, for instance. Normal matter in small amounts like planets and people cannot add up to the missing mass. Normal matter in large amounts tends to spark up and burn brightly. So we're left with surprising amounts of matter in unusual forms (eg. black holes), exotic forms of matter that don't interact much with normal matter, or serious modifications to our understanding of gravity, all of which are very interesting possibilities that will earn Nobel prizes for whoever sorts it all out.
Technically yes, but cosmologically, we may as well be considered light matter because we are bound to a visible star whose mass completely overwhelms the "dark matter" that orbits it. This type of dark matter is not particularly interesting to a cosmologist; they want to learn about dark matter that is significant enough to influence galactic and intergalactic dynamics, or exotic kinds of matter that are not observed locally.
WHERE'S OSAMA?
Since you mention Osama and the FBI in the same breath, this link seems apropos: http://www.teamliberty.net/id267.html
Linux is ready for the desktop, right now. [...] What it isn't ready for is the MS/Mac zealots, but then, it never will be because they have no desire to change, nor to admit there even is a viable alternative to their favorite OS.
I would say that Linux was ready for the desktop ten years ago, and has become LESS useable since then. I am currently running SuSE 10.1, and while it was slightly easier to install than Slack 2, it's a complete mess as far as user interface goes. The old Unix desktop paradigms have fallen by the wayside, and we are left with a dog's breakfast of Windows conventions slowly strangling the older Unix conventions. Ctrl-C for copy?!? Fucking brilliant. Just killed the the app I was copying from. Should have tried Ctrl-Alt-C in that window. Or not, if it's from an office app that uses it's own clipboard, since you won't actually be copying anything to the clipboard you think you're copying to, and you'll end up pasting some random 5K block of text that you copied from somewhere else an hour before.
Yup, Linux has been ruined by legions of disgruntled Windows users trying to replace their Microsoft shite with something stable. Thanks to their tireless efforts, we've now got Winux. All the badly designed shite that drives you crazy on Windows, but hey at least now it's stable and secure. Fortunately you can still get yourself back to a somewhat consistent Unixy environment after a couple of days of abolishing the atrocities of KDE, Gnome, Firefox, and assorted other crap, but since all the developer effort is going into making that crap even crappier to appeal to the next wave of disgruntled Windows refugees, I don't hold much hope for real advancement in the Linux UI realm.
Fortunately Apple stepped up to the plate, and provided a genuinely revolutionary step forward in Unix UIs. A lot of us have quietly walked away from Linux desktops in the last 5 years because of Apple. Linux servers are still the shit, so I'm still a fan, but the Linux desktop is hopelessly lost, and IMO has been since Redhat 4 shipped with fvwm95 as the default window manager.
If you used Google, you could rebut all of your arguments yourself and we wouldn't have to do it for you.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=107to look for some 'Cacky Pants'. [...] To me, it describes, "Soiled underwear".
This is strange, since "khaki" is a British term.
Although it reminds me of a similar anecdote I heard in Jamaica, where khaki in American pronunciation ("kacky") comes across as "shitty", and in British pronunciation ("kah-ky") comes across as "penis-like". Endless hilarity, unless you're the hapless foreigner.
HSBC uses a double-password system, but only prompts for random characters from the second password. This makes it "impossible" for a keylogger to grab your complete password. I assume that the security flaw is that your complete password can be inferred after 9 logins.
In what way was VMS's impementation not modern? Who are the "we" in "we understand"?
"We" are the users of CVS, Subversion, and other revision control systems that store differences, not whole files. Time Machine backs up differences, so I'm presuming it works on similar principles.
How is Time Machine more modern in versioning than VMS? Why can't VMS recover a deleted file (unless you forcably delete all versions)?
VMS can't recover a deleted version of anything. All VMS does when you save a file is create a new file with the same name, and version number + 1. If you delete/purge that file, it's gone. Back in the early 90's when I last used VMS, you regularly purged your versions because they ate up a significant part of your disk quotas. They were mostly useful as temporary wokring backups, and were cleared out as soon as you weren't likely to need them any more.
In what way is Apple doing versioning that hasn't been done before? NetApp implements snapshots using versioning and there are others doing it besides the old VMS stuff.
RCS goes back to the 1980s, and it probably has a stronger claim to prior art on Time Machine than VMS versioning. I don't think anyone (outside of Apple marketing circles) has claimed that it's revolutionary, only that it's nice to have something like this well-integrated into the OS.
the whole "time machine" which is really just a versioning system from the looks of it. VMS had that years and years ago, it's nothing new.
VMS versioning was a "never overwrite" system, not a real versioning system as we understand the term today. Time Machine fuses the concept of a modern versioning system with automated backup and recovery. I've been doing something similar to Time Machine on my Mac Powerbook, using CVS to make remote backups of certain working directories to a server, which lets me recover not only by date, but also recover deleted files (which VMS versioning does not, or at least did not in the early 90s, last I used it). Time Machine promises to make this slicker because it autocommits (no more losing intermediate versions between commits), and makes rollbacks a lot easier.
My main concern is if you are doodling around in some package like iPhoto that auto-saves your changes, and you are making all sorts of experimental crops and enhancements to photos and then undoing them, is it going to save every single one? That's going to gobble a lot of disk space.
The other concern is that my homegrowm Time Machine doubles as a fileshare between multiple computers. That is, I can push data into the backup from one machine, and restore it on another, and can even go both ways simultaneously, relying on CVS to detect and resolve conflicts. I don't expect Time Machine will have this functionality.
Virtual desktops existed before OS X, so they would have been copying no matter what. But I also think it's about bloody time.
Re: natural virtualization, remember that they said there are still a few top secret features they aren't revealing yet. They previewed 10 Leopard features, not *all* Leopard features. Apprently there's still something big in the box.
Apple's idea of an intuitive design is to remove so much functionality that there's really a limited number of operations you can perform, thus not much to get confused about.
How's life back there in the '80s? Up here in the future, Macs run Unix, various CLI tools, X-windows apps, legacy Mac OSes, OS X, and even MS-Windows. With that number of UI paradigms supported on the same box, there's a lot more to get confused about than on any system money can buy. If confusion is your thing, and it sounds like it is, then you really need to consider switching.
Then please explain MS's 95% marketshare versus Apple's 5%?
Simple: your numbers are imaginary. Microsoft has a 0% share of the computer manufacturing market.
Orwell was reacting to Stalinist Russia
As the foreword to just about any edition of the novel will tell you, he was reacting to post-war Britain, and using the example of Stalinist Russia to show where he thought Britain was heading. Wikipedia sums it up:
Only on Canadian Soil. The government is free to act as it pleases outside our country, same as the US.
I take it you've never heard of the Somalia Affair. This led to murder charges, a major public inquiry, the resignation of top military brass, and the wholesale disbanding of an entire military regiment. All for the torture/killing of one thief.
Some countries do hold their soldiers and governments to higher standards.
Content management systems (decent ones, anyway) accomplish most of the goals of CSS, and do it better, IMO. Your design can be damn ugly HTML 2.0 if that's what works, and your content doesn't even have to be HTML, if your CMS can filter it and apply some rudimentary markup to make it legible. And even with nasty source material like that, you can have nearly perfect separation of content and design, and even implement access controls so your designer can't touch the content, and your content providers can't fsck up the design. You can use CSS where it helps, and throw it in the trash heap when it confuses things. And once your templates are configured, you never ever have to think about divs, classes, and the cascade again.
The real problem is that browsers aren't following standards, not that CSS is broken.
I'd say that both are real problems. CSS does have some serious flaws, not the least of which it is apparently VERY hard to code to spec, judging by the failed efforts of practically every single browser out there, despite the efforts of some brilliant developers. And it's a pretty obvious fact that standards that are hard to follow will not get followed well.
The sad irony is that the vagaries of page layout in a portable, open, plain text source format were solved to perfection ages ago with TeX. The problem spaces of HTML and TeX do not map perfectly, but given that the basic theory (how to slap boxes together on a page with various types of alignments and floats, and how to separate content from design) was sorted out ages ago, it's unfortunate that HTML/CSS ended up as such a complete mess.
I've just added Safari to our to-be-supported browser list because I noticed that it does support design mode. If you're using Safari, see for yourself.
It will tell you that your browser is unsupported, but follow the link to force the editor to load anyway. It's buggy as hell, because the software knows nothing about KHTML, but you can definitely edit (at least I can using Safari 1.3.2 on OSX 10.3.9). Although it works the first time when I load it, Safari will often crash if you load it again, so make sure you don't have any important pages open :-). Yes, it appears to be a highly unstable alpha feature, so it's no surprise that you haven't heard of it, but somebody is evidently working on the problem. Thanks, Apple!
Anyway, one of my developers now has an old iBook on his desk to add better support for this when he can find the time.
What's really happening is that Mac "nerds" are becoming versed enough in Unixisms because of OS X that they can take a walk on the wild side with Linux and not get completely freaked out. They have just enough street smarts to take a walk through the OS inner city with the tough nerds, and not get shot or beat up. And they've discovered that, hey, wow there's a lot of cool shit happening on the mean streets of Linuxville.
But what they don't know is that downtown Linuxville hasn't been a rough a place for a few years now. It still clings to its tough reputation, but it's all college kids and coffee bars now. The place is gentrifying, and has a bit of that yuppie stench to it these days. It's not yet all Wonderbread and Wal-mart, like Windowsland, up the highway, but the Windowsland folks are moving in, and it's starting to get that feel.
The old-timers who gave Linux the frightening reputation that it carries, have long since settled down, had kids, and moved out to the leafy lanes and plush lawns of Mactown, to get away from the plastic Windowsland people. As a result, the Mactown folks have realized those Linux guys aren't so scary after all, beards and sandles notwithstanding. Maybe, some of the Mactown folks think, we could get a condo in Linuxville, and try some of that inner city living. Just on weekends for a start.
So they get a luxury condo in Linuxville, right on Ubuntu Street, which was built by a big-name property developer who saw that all the starving artists were living in the area, building cool lofts and studios from the abandoned tenements and factories of old Unixville. So he bottled up that artsy mojo and built a condo development with new appliances, and hardwood floors, and put in a Starbucks on the ground floor, and marketed it heavily to Mactown and Windowsland people looking for a change. Come to Linuxville! Not as scary as you think! But every bit as edgy! Now with taskbars! Sometimes you get contemptuous looks from the mean looking men who still hang out on Slackware Road, but it's best not to go down there if you can help it. If you can avoid them (and ignore the snotty punks on Gentoo Avenue), then it's all terrifically edgy and artsy, and just so-o-o-o nerdy cool in that certain je-ne-sais-quoi kind of way. It feels like they're right on the cutting edge, where the culture is created, where everything happens, just like they read in Wired Magazine in 1996.
The government didn't earn it either.
Yeah, those little things like rule of law, prosperous economies, stable governance, sound fiscal policies, educated populace, efficient transportation systems, and public safety really have no bearing on your ability to make billions of dollars.