That is a shame that that's what holding everybody else back. Baggage, after all, is simply there to be thrown away. I didn't always use Linux. In fact, far from complaining that it wasn't I_Cant_Believe_Its_Not_Windows like some people, I was very surprised (and even a little put off!) at the similarity - the Linux desktop was more like Windows than an Apple or an OS/2...or even an earlier Windows! I got that Red Hat 6 installed on the first try, booted into a Gnome desktop, and ten minutes later was wondering "What's the big deal? This is the easiest thing I've ever done on a computer!"
My now-nine-year-old twins have grown up in a Linux-only household. They're perfectly at ease with it - use all three computers with multi-boot systems and live CDs besides. Why? No prior baggage!
To get straight to the point: everybody who sits there with a wet-diaper attitude complaining that Linux is too hard, learning any one single thing is too much to ask, I'll pay someone else to do it for me, etc: Well, say howdy-do to your new slave-master! He comes from a village of mud huts, is skinny from eating on 50 cents a day, wears a loincloth and a castaway bandana, and has three teeth left. But he can program cirles around you. He's taking technology into his own hands, the way all the lazy slobs with nothing but fat between the ears won't. And he will control your life with a few keys.
It's been one of my favorite sayings for going on ten years, now: The technology that you do not master, will master you. What a shame that America won the space race, pioneered the computer race, and then lapsed into barbarism. Quite a shame; what a lead we lost. How glorious we could have been! Check the distros at DistroWatch.com sometime - a growing percentage of them are *NOT* in English! Many are tailer-made for a specific country or language other than the US.
Well, I'm glad I kept *my* hand in, instead of vegging on the couch watching football. As a second-generation immigrant myself, who taught himself eight programming languages and landed a string of tech jobs with nothing but a little vocational training paid for by his own job, don't expect me to be all sympathetic when the rest of the world leaves America behind. No one can bail you out of this mess, if you won't lift a finger to help yourself.
A mind is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste, and a person throwing away their mind on purpose wastes their life as well; an even greater tragedy. So I'll sign my rant off with deepest regrets...
Upon viewing the Google cache of her page, if even one tenth of this is true, that Activa Holdings, Inc. needs to be fined for all it has by the government and then shut down.
From the site: "I saw a suspicious looking diesel tank. I took a closer look and saw it was intentionally supported on a pile of scrap wood on a tilt. That's when I noticed the rubber hose. The hose was being used to syphon the diesel fuel and below it was evidence of a spill. The area smelled strong and the ground was saturated."
So, essentially, she had a nice suburban neighborhood and then somebody came in and dumped a tanker of diesel fuel all over the place. Yeah, I'd be pissed, too, if that happened on my street. I'd be demanding a cleanup.
And: I saw many unharnessed roofers and dozens of workers without hard hats actively working on site. This one unharnessed roofer was quite a site to see. The yellow cable in the roof photos is the extention cord for the nail gun this fella was using while working on a roof of the house at 23 Big Springs Court. He squatted down on the wood of the roof and slid down it like a slide.
Now, this is probably not her business. But still, this speaks of massive unprofessionalism. Some guys may be too macho to use safety harnesses, but every site I've ever been on required hard hats *everywhere*, even with nothing overhead. I don't know how things are regulated in Canada, but here in the USA that sounds like tens of thousands of dollars in OSHA fines, just for starters. Still other reports seem kind of iffy. Empty beer bottles can be left by any passing gaggle of kids - pictures of workers on the job in the daytime with the bottles in their hands would have been more damning.
It looks like she might have had pictures, but they're not coming up in the Google cache. Pity, as even a photo or two would confirm this. I pray for her sake that this gets the throwing out of court that it most probably deserves. As for Activa Holdings, stupid move. Before, they had one website bad-mouthing them, now they've got half of Slashdot.
Scientists are debunking it. Slashdotters are ridiculing it. Most sensible people on the street would at least doubt it. Junior-high-schoolers who stay half awake in science class would be skeptical. But put it in front of the US Patent Office and they sit there with the drool pooling in their laps and go, "Da-ah, OK!"
You mean the music sucks so badly that you can't just *listen* to it with your own ears and figure out if it's any good, you have to get a *computer* to listen to it for you?
You mean MI-God-help-me-T is getting that slow? Think this over: A few months of picking pop hits statistically is nothing but a couple of lucky hours at a craps table. So, you pump out hits based on what have been hits over the past few months. How can you go to MIT and think of trends in that short a term?
You think this program could have picked punk rock when everybody had been listening to disco? Grunge when it had been nothing but heavy metal for five years? Marilyn Manson right at the beginning of the Goth movement? "14-year-old girls" as the article calls them, like youngsters of every generation, want to *own* their music in a generational sense - want to feel that that music is uniquely theirs. They don't wanna listen to the same crap mom and dad did. Who the hell is so culturally blind, that they cannot see that? True, once a genre is born, it settles down into a derivative self-reproducing pattern - for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Then there's a curve ball all of the sudden, and that's the next genre. What next, they start working on perpetual motion again? And don't they realize that refeeding this engine it's own output a few months later is going to change the pattern?
As a market study aide, yes, I can see that. But not as the sole guide. And as for combing blogs for comments about the music, that's not even a whole program. That's a shell script that posts data to Google and curl-scrapes the results and greps for keywords. Show me a studio that relies on this tech and I'll show you a dropped stock in six months.
You mean like I refer to my 8-year-old daughter? Who regularly reboots computers around the house into whatever live CD she currently likes, surfs the web with Firefox (customized to her preferences), tweaks the background and styles in both KDE and Gnome, knows how to navigate the interface in just about any window manager that runs on Linux (from Fluxbox and Window Maker to TWM.), has beaten half the games available for Linux and has figured out the level editors for all those that have one, and even occasionally pops open a console to play with Python one-liners? Yeah, that never fails to silence whichever troll I'm arguing with on/. about Linux being "too hard to learn" and Linux "not being a desktop system." But silencing is different from convincing, not that that's my problem.
Now, I'm not talking about the people who simply don't know Linux, but are willing to learn. But there is a sizable proportion of the users out there that I've learned to stop beating my head against a brick wall over. I call them "dittoheads" after the Rush Limbaugh term, because they caught an MS-sponsored meme early on and it lodged in their heads once and for all, preventing them from ever advancing in life. Expressions such as "Linux will never be viable on the desktop.", "Linux is too difficult to learn.", "Open Source isn't really free.", etc. join with "The Holocost never happened.", "We DID find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.", and "DRM is to protect the consumer." as some of history's greatest mind-stunting propaganda.
I said it would be like this at the beginning of "The Information Age" (or at least when the public at large first heard of the term): I said that the information age would propegate fiction as easily as truth, and thus computers would not make us smarter as a people. Computers only magnify human intellect, and if that intellect is rotten, the rotteness gets magnified a thousand-fold.
Ahem: years ago, I made up the "moving time" rule that books *must* be packed in the smallest available boxes. Anything of dimensions around 2x1x1 feet. After straining on the book boxes previously, it occurred to me that it's human nature to (a) pack books first, reasoning that you're not going to be doing much reading in the next couple days anyway... and (b) upon first beginning to pack, grab the biggest box to start with.
how about that bit about not disassembling, decompiling or reverse-engineering software
Yeah, it's gotten to the point where, if I can get the package open and the disk out without seeing an EULA, I reverse-engineer it on autopilot. Like I got another AOL disk in the mail. No EULA on the envelope! No EULA on the disk! So I mounted it in Mandriva and had a gander at the AOL.exe binaries in Emacs using hexl-mode. Damn sorry sight it was, too. Written in MS Visual C++, only about two error-checks in the installer (each of them overflows), compiled with no optimization at all. Perhaps I'll toss it through the nasm decompiler on Slackware when I'm bored. No, I don't know who this "AOL" outfit is or why they would send me disks, but I assume that if it wasn't mine to abuse, they (a) would put a label on the front telling me what I can't do with it, or (b) wouldn't mail it, unbidden, to my house.
See this? http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/AJAX:Getting_ Started it's a tutorial. In the AJAX LANGUAGE. With an example that you can run. I don't care what your dictionary definition is in this case. Eventually, browsers with be rated AJAX-compatible, special functions will be designed to utilize AJAX, code will be referred to as AJAX, at which point it will become a LANGUAGE. Go definition-flame somebody else - I'm not interested in playing stupid word games with you. Other things are considered languages when they aren't even Turing-complete or have no application outside a single program. Many (MOST!) other languages descended from other languages - as Perl descended from Modula, C, awk, and shell, for instance.
Aren't you the same shmoo who grunts at me every time I say "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" ? What, were you sick? I missed you!
First, print out all the patents. Wrap them around all the lawyers. Then burn the patents.
I'm fed up with this stupidity. I'm ready for the abolition of all patents. Let businesses try to compete based on their own merits for a change. Clearly, the potential to abuse the system in the name of playing stupid games with our courts has far out-weighed the benefit of securing one company's exclusive right to manufacture a given design.
I anticipate that this will not sit well with two classes of people: Microsoft shills/stockholders, and lawyers. But those two weren't my favorite groups already.
That's bound to be a boom. Because everybody knows, nothing holds value like an old Microsoft distribution! Yes, I'm sure IT professionals nationwide are dying to get ahold of Windows 95 disks - still loading as good as the day they were sold!
Gre-e-e-at, AJAX is the hottest language on the planet. I'll queue it behind the 2,567,899,110 *other* hottest languages on the planet I'll get around to learning some day, right after I've fully mastered the piddling mere trivial ten I know.
No need to wonder!...blah blah blah what FOX said...
No, no no no no. I hope the point didn't muss your hair on it's way over your head. Let us take all of these non-answers one at a time:
That entire movement is focused the re-establishment of, as a start, a pan-Arab caliphate spanning all of the regions once conquered/held by Islam.
And *WHY* do they think this would be a good idea? Do they feel wronged by not having owned it? Is there money to be made? Are they, in fact, rightfully entitled? (I'm talking land deeds and tax records, here. No, actually, I'm asking because I don't know!) Do they have moral issues with the people who own it now? Is their opinion based on faulty information, such as that supplied by a slanted news source?
That would include, of course, places like Spain, and certainly all of the middle east.
Now, Spain, where does that figure? Is this tied in somewhere with a historical grudge? Might they be persueded to let bygones be bygones, were they invited to meet with Spanish foreign leaders?
They want to see those places all ruled by a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy, and they say so on a regular basis - both in word and deed (see their mercifully aborted warm-up act in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan).
Yes, I understand completely. Kind of like wanting a whole country to be ruled by a fundamentalist insert name of any random religion here theocracy. We simply *can't* think of any other religions that are guilty of this charge, at some point in history...
Their aspirations, of course, include the widening of that influence across the globe. Their vision provides for this taking generations, and they're willing to do anything it takes.
Hmmmm....where have I heard this before? Hey! Maybe they think we're all slaves to an evil dictator and they want to invade us so they can free us from our oppressors?
Oh, cheer up, it's all in good fun! Of course, my suggestions are wildest speculation. But it goes to show - examine the enemy close enough, and they'll make more sense than you thought they did. (Note: you can be wrong as wrong...and still make SENSE!...but other people have to see where you're wrong so they can explain it to you in a way you won't reject.)
Use a text editor for 6+ hours per day for 10+ years, and you will not think that it is such a trivial choice.
6+ hours? Is that all? For a mere ten years? Try 16 hours/day for your whole life! I use Emacs/vi - and love 'em both!!! For different reasons... - and wrote my own text editor once just for fun. That kinda happens when you know C, C++, Visual C++, BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Java, Perl, Python, eLisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Tcl/Tk/Expect, DOS, Bash, POVray (my current workhorse - results posted daily in the blog in my sig), yada yada yada.
Yes, it's still trivial. See, people start out not knowing *any* text editor. Then they pick one up and learn it. Most people stop right there. They may try another one, but it isn't like theirs, so it's seen as "bad"...the user remembers an impression of the "foreign" editor's learning curve, forgetting that the learning curve for their first editor was just as steep...it just didn't seem that way at the time, because you approach your first model with a clean slate and no expectations. The negative impression is all that is retained, in most people.
Yeh, given proper motivation, I work with equal efficiency in many different editors for most tasks - in programming only, I choose Emacs, because it was nursed with the milk from the titty, and when I'm coding, I need my whole brain for coding and none for remembering the keymap/feature set for the current editor. That, and I can use my set of Lisp macros. Had I not discovered Emacs until after OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Macintosh Write, Microsoft Wordpad, KDE kedit, Gnome gedit, or the others, 'twould not have been so. Such objectivity I take with me into all pursuits, and it meketh of me a pain in the ass.
Yah, the immediately previous story on the page is California's class action suit against Sony. Horns one minute and halo the next! Or maybe they want to get friendlier with Linux so they can get DRM working on Linux as well?
That's like saying Osama Bin Laden was "driven" to attack the WTC. Or the people who attacked London in July were "driven" to it by the victims.
Um, what, exactly, else CAN you call it? Whether or not we agree with the perpetrator, whether or not they are correct in their reasoning, people only do these extreme actions because they feel driven. Even psychopaths feel justified in acting on the impulses their psychosis inspires. Osama...who can say what his purpose was? Religion? Economics? He thinks somebody screwed him, so he screwed back? Well, we'll never know now, will we? And since we don't know, we know less about the motives of the *next* Osama. If we want to solve the problem, we should be looking at the cause. Shooting back because we were shot at makes it nothing but a gang war in the ghetto. Defending ourselves is necessary, of course, but it's too easy to trust the gun and the bomb to solve *all* problems - and they don't.
We could eliminate so much of "terrorism" in the world if we simply asked ourselves "WHY do they feel they have to do this?". Then did something to change they way they feel about things. You know, few terrorists actions happen without being accompanied by some sort of message explaining what they're doing. Of course, that's not the American way. Whether it's an abused wife getting out of her abusive relationship the only way she knows how, a desperate ghetto youth turning to drugs and gangs because that's the only answers he has, an individual citizen choosing to explore alternative political ideas because they're dissatisfied with their current system, or a home computer user deciding they can do better writing their own operating system, the American response is "That person's being DIFFERENT! ATTACK!" Which is, of course, just more "terrorism" back.
I wonder how many people in the world see America's actions as "terrorist"? No, go watch Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil", *then* answer that question...
they have become so emotionally attached to Microsoft they see it as a personal affront
That, as Hunter S. T. put it, is the nut of the matter. And what *is* this? Do people develop emotional dependence on Texeco gas and get all zealotous when somebody mentions Chevron? Does KMart have loyal customers who sneer at Target shoppers as "communist"? Do HBO viewers stick to their "chosen" channel and deride Cinemax? Yet bring up operating systems, web browsers, programming languages...anything at all related to computers, down to such trivial choices as text editors: instant Jihad! I think we'd better add "computers" to "politics and religion" in the list of topics not to bring up at a table.
Man, I always figured if I'm going to put all that love into something, it's got to love me back. I just use what works for me, and don't really care what anybody else uses. Pity we can't all be shown the same courtesy.
Are you seriously suggesting that speaking up for Gates in any way for any reason is tantamount to speaking up for a a child molester?
No...but only because he hasn't been caught doing it yet. But the Halo never tarnishes for some. "Of COURSE Ballmer threw the chair...it dared to get IN HIS WAY!" I've never,never,never,never seen it fail. Not once. The law as I'm stating it: "There is no action so nefarious, so heinous, that if Bill Gates did it, 1000's of Window-worshipers wouldn't justify it."
Hey, I used Windows once, too (just like, along the way, I've used Mac, OS/2, Linux, DOS...and whatever the Commodore ran.) in it's 3.0 days. Then one day, my mouth opened in response to Windows criticism with a defense/explanation/apology for the latest Microsoft dirty deed...and I gave it some thought and figured, the hell with it, if I make excuses, it'll be for my kids or my mom...somebody who'll love me back. You think Bill Gates gives a wet fart about you? I sure hope so, because it sounds like you're putting an awful lot into your side of the friendship.
Slashdot Mirror
That is a shame that that's what holding everybody else back. Baggage, after all, is simply there to be thrown away. I didn't always use Linux. In fact, far from complaining that it wasn't I_Cant_Believe_Its_Not_Windows like some people, I was very surprised (and even a little put off!) at the similarity - the Linux desktop was more like Windows than an Apple or an OS/2...or even an earlier Windows! I got that Red Hat 6 installed on the first try, booted into a Gnome desktop, and ten minutes later was wondering "What's the big deal? This is the easiest thing I've ever done on a computer!"
My now-nine-year-old twins have grown up in a Linux-only household. They're perfectly at ease with it - use all three computers with multi-boot systems and live CDs besides. Why? No prior baggage!
It's been one of my favorite sayings for going on ten years, now: The technology that you do not master, will master you. What a shame that America won the space race, pioneered the computer race, and then lapsed into barbarism. Quite a shame; what a lead we lost. How glorious we could have been! Check the distros at DistroWatch.com sometime - a growing percentage of them are *NOT* in English! Many are tailer-made for a specific country or language other than the US.
Well, I'm glad I kept *my* hand in, instead of vegging on the couch watching football. As a second-generation immigrant myself, who taught himself eight programming languages and landed a string of tech jobs with nothing but a little vocational training paid for by his own job, don't expect me to be all sympathetic when the rest of the world leaves America behind. No one can bail you out of this mess, if you won't lift a finger to help yourself.
A mind is, indeed, a terrible thing to waste, and a person throwing away their mind on purpose wastes their life as well; an even greater tragedy. So I'll sign my rant off with deepest regrets...
9) You are not allowed to respect anything else but money; not love, values, culture, morals, wisdom, or courtesy.
From the site:
"I saw a suspicious looking diesel tank. I took a closer look and saw it was intentionally supported on a pile of scrap wood on a tilt. That's when I noticed the rubber hose. The hose was being used to syphon the diesel fuel and below it was evidence of a spill. The area smelled strong and the ground was saturated."
So, essentially, she had a nice suburban neighborhood and then somebody came in and dumped a tanker of diesel fuel all over the place. Yeah, I'd be pissed, too, if that happened on my street. I'd be demanding a cleanup.
And:
I saw many unharnessed roofers and dozens of workers without hard hats actively working on site. This one unharnessed roofer was quite a site to see. The yellow cable in the roof photos is the extention cord for the nail gun this fella was using while working on a roof of the house at 23 Big Springs Court. He squatted down on the wood of the roof and slid down it like a slide.
Now, this is probably not her business. But still, this speaks of massive unprofessionalism. Some guys may be too macho to use safety harnesses, but every site I've ever been on required hard hats *everywhere*, even with nothing overhead. I don't know how things are regulated in Canada, but here in the USA that sounds like tens of thousands of dollars in OSHA fines, just for starters. Still other reports seem kind of iffy. Empty beer bottles can be left by any passing gaggle of kids - pictures of workers on the job in the daytime with the bottles in their hands would have been more damning.
It looks like she might have had pictures, but they're not coming up in the Google cache. Pity, as even a photo or two would confirm this. I pray for her sake that this gets the throwing out of court that it most probably deserves. As for Activa Holdings, stupid move. Before, they had one website bad-mouthing them, now they've got half of Slashdot.
Scientists are debunking it. Slashdotters are ridiculing it. Most sensible people on the street would at least doubt it. Junior-high-schoolers who stay half awake in science class would be skeptical. But put it in front of the US Patent Office and they sit there with the drool pooling in their laps and go, "Da-ah, OK!"
You mean MI-God-help-me-T is getting that slow? Think this over: A few months of picking pop hits statistically is nothing but a couple of lucky hours at a craps table. So, you pump out hits based on what have been hits over the past few months. How can you go to MIT and think of trends in that short a term?
You think this program could have picked punk rock when everybody had been listening to disco? Grunge when it had been nothing but heavy metal for five years? Marilyn Manson right at the beginning of the Goth movement? "14-year-old girls" as the article calls them, like youngsters of every generation, want to *own* their music in a generational sense - want to feel that that music is uniquely theirs. They don't wanna listen to the same crap mom and dad did. Who the hell is so culturally blind, that they cannot see that? True, once a genre is born, it settles down into a derivative self-reproducing pattern - for anywhere from a few months to a few years. Then there's a curve ball all of the sudden, and that's the next genre. What next, they start working on perpetual motion again? And don't they realize that refeeding this engine it's own output a few months later is going to change the pattern?
As a market study aide, yes, I can see that. But not as the sole guide. And as for combing blogs for comments about the music, that's not even a whole program. That's a shell script that posts data to Google and curl-scrapes the results and greps for keywords. Show me a studio that relies on this tech and I'll show you a dropped stock in six months.
You mean like I refer to my 8-year-old daughter? Who regularly reboots computers around the house into whatever live CD she currently likes, surfs the web with Firefox (customized to her preferences), tweaks the background and styles in both KDE and Gnome, knows how to navigate the interface in just about any window manager that runs on Linux (from Fluxbox and Window Maker to TWM.), has beaten half the games available for Linux and has figured out the level editors for all those that have one, and even occasionally pops open a console to play with Python one-liners? Yeah, that never fails to silence whichever troll I'm arguing with on /. about Linux being "too hard to learn" and Linux "not being a desktop system." But silencing is different from convincing, not that that's my problem.
I said it would be like this at the beginning of "The Information Age" (or at least when the public at large first heard of the term): I said that the information age would propegate fiction as easily as truth, and thus computers would not make us smarter as a people. Computers only magnify human intellect, and if that intellect is rotten, the rotteness gets magnified a thousand-fold.
Anonymous cowards -> the line forms to the right.
Ahem: years ago, I made up the "moving time" rule that books *must* be packed in the smallest available boxes. Anything of dimensions around 2x1x1 feet. After straining on the book boxes previously, it occurred to me that it's human nature to (a) pack books first, reasoning that you're not going to be doing much reading in the next couple days anyway... and (b) upon first beginning to pack, grab the biggest box to start with.
Loser gets AOL.
Too bad. That's all the aggravation I could make for you.
Yeah, it's gotten to the point where, if I can get the package open and the disk out without seeing an EULA, I reverse-engineer it on autopilot. Like I got another AOL disk in the mail. No EULA on the envelope! No EULA on the disk! So I mounted it in Mandriva and had a gander at the AOL .exe binaries in Emacs using hexl-mode. Damn sorry sight it was, too. Written in MS Visual C++, only about two error-checks in the installer (each of them overflows), compiled with no optimization at all. Perhaps I'll toss it through the nasm decompiler on Slackware when I'm bored. No, I don't know who this "AOL" outfit is or why they would send me disks, but I assume that if it wasn't mine to abuse, they (a) would put a label on the front telling me what I can't do with it, or (b) wouldn't mail it, unbidden, to my house.
It was supposed to be *funny*. If you need a frame of reference for what funny is, go look in the mirror.
Aren't you the same shmoo who grunts at me every time I say "Linux" instead of "GNU/Linux" ? What, were you sick? I missed you!
I'm fed up with this stupidity. I'm ready for the abolition of all patents. Let businesses try to compete based on their own merits for a change. Clearly, the potential to abuse the system in the name of playing stupid games with our courts has far out-weighed the benefit of securing one company's exclusive right to manufacture a given design.
I anticipate that this will not sit well with two classes of people: Microsoft shills/stockholders, and lawyers. But those two weren't my favorite groups already.
That's bound to be a boom. Because everybody knows, nothing holds value like an old Microsoft distribution! Yes, I'm sure IT professionals nationwide are dying to get ahold of Windows 95 disks - still loading as good as the day they were sold!
Gre-e-e-at, AJAX is the hottest language on the planet. I'll queue it behind the 2,567,899,110 *other* hottest languages on the planet I'll get around to learning some day, right after I've fully mastered the piddling mere trivial ten I know.
No, no no no no. I hope the point didn't muss your hair on it's way over your head. Let us take all of these non-answers one at a time:
That entire movement is focused the re-establishment of, as a start, a pan-Arab caliphate spanning all of the regions once conquered/held by Islam.
And *WHY* do they think this would be a good idea? Do they feel wronged by not having owned it? Is there money to be made? Are they, in fact, rightfully entitled? (I'm talking land deeds and tax records, here. No, actually, I'm asking because I don't know!) Do they have moral issues with the people who own it now? Is their opinion based on faulty information, such as that supplied by a slanted news source?
That would include, of course, places like Spain, and certainly all of the middle east.
Now, Spain, where does that figure? Is this tied in somewhere with a historical grudge? Might they be persueded to let bygones be bygones, were they invited to meet with Spanish foreign leaders?
They want to see those places all ruled by a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy, and they say so on a regular basis - both in word and deed (see their mercifully aborted warm-up act in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan).
Yes, I understand completely. Kind of like wanting a whole country to be ruled by a fundamentalist insert name of any random religion here theocracy. We simply *can't* think of any other religions that are guilty of this charge, at some point in history...
Their aspirations, of course, include the widening of that influence across the globe. Their vision provides for this taking generations, and they're willing to do anything it takes.
Hmmmm....where have I heard this before? Hey! Maybe they think we're all slaves to an evil dictator and they want to invade us so they can free us from our oppressors?
Oh, cheer up, it's all in good fun! Of course, my suggestions are wildest speculation. But it goes to show - examine the enemy close enough, and they'll make more sense than you thought they did. (Note: you can be wrong as wrong...and still make SENSE!...but other people have to see where you're wrong so they can explain it to you in a way you won't reject.)
6+ hours? Is that all? For a mere ten years? Try 16 hours/day for your whole life! I use Emacs/vi - and love 'em both!!! For different reasons... - and wrote my own text editor once just for fun. That kinda happens when you know C, C++, Visual C++, BASIC, QBASIC, Visual Basic, Java, Perl, Python, eLisp, Common Lisp, Scheme, Tcl/Tk/Expect, DOS, Bash, POVray (my current workhorse - results posted daily in the blog in my sig), yada yada yada.
Yes, it's still trivial. See, people start out not knowing *any* text editor. Then they pick one up and learn it. Most people stop right there. They may try another one, but it isn't like theirs, so it's seen as "bad"...the user remembers an impression of the "foreign" editor's learning curve, forgetting that the learning curve for their first editor was just as steep...it just didn't seem that way at the time, because you approach your first model with a clean slate and no expectations. The negative impression is all that is retained, in most people.
Yeh, given proper motivation, I work with equal efficiency in many different editors for most tasks - in programming only, I choose Emacs, because it was nursed with the milk from the titty, and when I'm coding, I need my whole brain for coding and none for remembering the keymap/feature set for the current editor. That, and I can use my set of Lisp macros. Had I not discovered Emacs until after OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Macintosh Write, Microsoft Wordpad, KDE kedit, Gnome gedit, or the others, 'twould not have been so. Such objectivity I take with me into all pursuits, and it meketh of me a pain in the ass.
(-:
Yes, but IBM and Sony have to touch their fists together and say "Wonder twin powers - activate!" first.
Yah, the immediately previous story on the page is California's class action suit against Sony. Horns one minute and halo the next! Or maybe they want to get friendlier with Linux so they can get DRM working on Linux as well?
Um, what, exactly, else CAN you call it? Whether or not we agree with the perpetrator, whether or not they are correct in their reasoning, people only do these extreme actions because they feel driven. Even psychopaths feel justified in acting on the impulses their psychosis inspires. Osama...who can say what his purpose was? Religion? Economics? He thinks somebody screwed him, so he screwed back? Well, we'll never know now, will we? And since we don't know, we know less about the motives of the *next* Osama. If we want to solve the problem, we should be looking at the cause. Shooting back because we were shot at makes it nothing but a gang war in the ghetto. Defending ourselves is necessary, of course, but it's too easy to trust the gun and the bomb to solve *all* problems - and they don't.
We could eliminate so much of "terrorism" in the world if we simply asked ourselves "WHY do they feel they have to do this?". Then did something to change they way they feel about things. You know, few terrorists actions happen without being accompanied by some sort of message explaining what they're doing. Of course, that's not the American way. Whether it's an abused wife getting out of her abusive relationship the only way she knows how, a desperate ghetto youth turning to drugs and gangs because that's the only answers he has, an individual citizen choosing to explore alternative political ideas because they're dissatisfied with their current system, or a home computer user deciding they can do better writing their own operating system, the American response is "That person's being DIFFERENT! ATTACK!" Which is, of course, just more "terrorism" back.
I wonder how many people in the world see America's actions as "terrorist"? No, go watch Terry Gilliam's movie "Brazil", *then* answer that question...
That, as Hunter S. T. put it, is the nut of the matter. And what *is* this? Do people develop emotional dependence on Texeco gas and get all zealotous when somebody mentions Chevron? Does KMart have loyal customers who sneer at Target shoppers as "communist"? Do HBO viewers stick to their "chosen" channel and deride Cinemax? Yet bring up operating systems, web browsers, programming languages...anything at all related to computers, down to such trivial choices as text editors: instant Jihad! I think we'd better add "computers" to "politics and religion" in the list of topics not to bring up at a table.
Man, I always figured if I'm going to put all that love into something, it's got to love me back. I just use what works for me, and don't really care what anybody else uses. Pity we can't all be shown the same courtesy.
All this time I thought playing video games was about having fun and getting a high score!
No...but only because he hasn't been caught doing it yet. But the Halo never tarnishes for some. "Of COURSE Ballmer threw the chair...it dared to get IN HIS WAY!" I've never,never,never,never seen it fail. Not once. The law as I'm stating it: "There is no action so nefarious, so heinous, that if Bill Gates did it, 1000's of Window-worshipers wouldn't justify it."
Hey, I used Windows once, too (just like, along the way, I've used Mac, OS/2, Linux, DOS...and whatever the Commodore ran.) in it's 3.0 days. Then one day, my mouth opened in response to Windows criticism with a defense/explanation/apology for the latest Microsoft dirty deed...and I gave it some thought and figured, the hell with it, if I make excuses, it'll be for my kids or my mom...somebody who'll love me back. You think Bill Gates gives a wet fart about you? I sure hope so, because it sounds like you're putting an awful lot into your side of the friendship.