That'd be a neat trick, since Doug is still alive. As are most of the people who worked with him. Here's Doug's home page if you want to see what he's been up to lately:
When working with an overseas development group you will have to send people over there to:
(1) keep tabs on progress, and
(2) answer technical questions and clarify specifications.
We found that unless we had people there, stuff didn't get done. We started out with the idea that it would all be hands-off but ended up keeping at least a couple people there at all times. A project manager type and a techie.
As the "techie", I spend about 6 months last year in Hong Kong helping our technology partner there make on-the-spot UI and design decisions, figuring out where the problem areas were in the applications they were writing for us, and making sure their needs were being met.
One big advantage of being there is that conference calls can seem overly formal. Our partners didn't like to convey bad news over the phone to a large group of people, but I could ask in person and get an honest answer which _I_ then relayed to the same group of people. We got more honest answers more quickly that way than any other procedure we discovered. Also when I sat in on the conference calls I could see what was going on in terms of body language and such. And it helped reduce language difficulties.
Rather than being there continuously, our overseas team would spend up to a month at a time there, then return home for a week or so before going back. That made it much easier to pay bills, stay in touch with friends and family and so on.
To describe a post pointing these biases out as an "attack on Cato" is IMHO very erroneous.
You slammed Cato largely on the basis that on their site they linked to another organization with which you disapprove. Feel free to point out Cato's native bias; that's fine. But the other stuff was just odd. Cato is Libertarian, they aren't Objectivist.
Cato also isn't particularly conservative in the traditional sense. If you want conservative, try Hoover. Oh, wait. They linked to Hoover on that page too, therefore...:-)
It's not all bad. MacKenzie looked at the Windows apps on Amazon in detail and discovered that in the area he studied (productivity apps), the effect of multiple versions over time tailored to different audiences was to inflate the apparent number of titles by about a factor of ten. Amazon lists over 7000 titles but only 500 of them are unique. The author makes some handwavy arguments that the areas not studied are at least as bad as this and that the areas studied describe a significant fraction of what's available but I'm inclined to skepticism in both regards(*) and I'd really like to see him include shareware and free applications in his analysis.
MacKenzie has one important and valid overriding point to make which is that if the courts are going to take "too many applications" as evidence of monopoly power, we need to be specific about this. How many apps is too many? The court probably should should not have accepted and relied upon the claim "Windows has 70,000 applications for it" without a little clarification. He did clarify where such numbers might have come from and why they were probably poorly defended and were misused by the judge.
But then MacKenzie muddled matters by being pretty vague as to what he considers an application. The definition implied by his treatment seems to be "an extra program you pay money for that comes in a box with a manual and isn't yet obsolete." By his definition, Windows 2000 doesn't come with hundreds of "applications" pre-installed. Calculator.exe and minesweeper.exe don't count for him, nor does anything on http://www.jumbo.com . That's not the standard definition of "application" in the industry, so our confusion is understandable.
Also, the claim that his students are more likely to use lots of apps than most people, strikes me as unreasonable. (My contrary hunch: people who work full time as managers while getting a degree on the side are atypically busy people and thus less likely than the norm to have installed or used a great many applications.)
In all, this looks like a pretty sloppy report. As a Cato supporter, I'm disappointed that their review process let this one slip through. It needed a more critical review committee.
[(*) reasons for skepticism: (1) Game programs in particular tend not to be sold in as many versions or bundle types as apps are; Doom and Doom 2 are objectively different games. (2) Amazon only quite recently got into the software market and certainly doesn't dominate it the way they do the book market. (3) Much software is not sold in stores but is sold on line or via direct-mail and mail-order catalogs. (4) Much software isn't sold at all but is still available for use (ie, shareware)]
Cato self labels itself as "market liberalism". But if you also search a little deeper in the other links, you will see a link to the Institute of Objectivist Studies. And in case you don't know what Objectivism is, it is based on Ayn Rand.
I'm sorry, but if you're referring to Cato's Other Links Of Interest page, you didn't look closely enough. Heck, they link to the Brookings Institute too; can we claim on that basis that they are secretly Democratic Party supporters, advocates of greater regional planning and a "fair" living wage? I think not. That page is simply collection of links to various and sundry think tanks that might be of interest to Cato browsers. There's a libertarianish bias to the list but there are also a lot of outliers. IOS no more exemplifies Cato's core focus than does Brookings or Hoover or the Urban Institute.
Side note: I'm personally a Cato sponsor. And nope, I've got no interest in supporting the IOS.
70,000 figure might actually represent the number of applications that have been written during the entire history of the personal computer industry.
We should probably wait to see the actual Cato study before lambasting Mr. MacKenzie too much based on what a New York Times reporter heard. But I agree that sentence sounds ridiculous unless he's using the word "application" in some highly restrictive sense. Look at the big shareware repositories. Jumbo.com has "over 300,000 shareware and freeware programs"; Shareware.com has "over 250,000 shareware files". Unfortunately those services don't return more than 500 results per query, but that would be a good place to start. Removing duplicates from a service of this sort would get you a list of applications that run on relatively recent hardware and were popular enough to be worth indexing, but it'd still be a small fraction of applications ever written because it wouldn't include most commercial apps, any apps for defunct platforms like the Commodore 64, apps written in-house, and apps that are or were only available in more limited distribution..
I challenge you to look at Aqua and then look at GNOME or KDE. There is absolutely no comparison. Aqua is by far the most advanced GUI out there.
Windows is lagging by at least 2 years and KDE and GNOME are, at minimum, 3 years behind. Obviously, Mac takes honors in this arena.
I'll be happy to look at Aqua if and when it actually ships. Until then, it's vaporware. It's not fair to compare something that's currently in use by real users to something that might eventually ship one of these days but so far is only a promising demo. (The might-ship-soon versions of Eazel and Enlightenment look pretty snazzy when shown by skilled operators in prescripted demos at LinuxWorld Expo, but it wouldn't be fair to compare them to the current MacOS and declare Mac dead on that basis alone.)
What about Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks..
on
Is Pinball Dying?
·
· Score: 1
These days a coin op arcade is an arena of sameness, with the same coin op game cliches that haven't evolved since the late '80s
I disagree. There's a new breed of games popular in Japan and Hong Kong just starting to make it out here that rely on a user interface more physical than a joystick. Dance Dance Revolution, Guitar Freaks and other games along those lines are legitimately new and exciting. The games that simulate skiing, skateboarding, hangliding and driving a bicycle-powered glider with appropriate control surfaces are also new and interesting.
For the uninitiated, _Dance Dance Revolution_ is a game where the player stands on a platform and hops, jumps and steps on big floor buttons in order to do a preprogrammed dance. Timing is critical. When you get really good at it there are challenge and competition modes; it's a two-player game.
(I got addicted to DDR while spending 6 months in Hong Kong, so I'm overjoyed to finally see it making inroads here. Now if only we had _True Kiss Destination_...)
ESR gun rants are a shame for both the free software movement and the US.
Interesting perspective. As for me, reading the ESR essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun was what finally convinced me to take a gun safety & use class and take up target shooting. It's a fun hobby, and once I've tried enough varieties of gun to know what I like or don't like shooting, I'll probably end up buying one. I also plan on getting a Concealed Carry Permit since in California that's the best way to reduce your chance of accidentally violating much of the vast thicket of obscure and contradictory gun laws.
Eric is inflammatory, but he's also right. John Lott is right too.
Secondly, Apple have never once challenged Be's oft-stated claim that the necessary specs have been witheld. --- Actually, they have.
I followed the link and can't find what you're referring to. I checked the FAQ page and I tried a search on "BeOS"; nothing. Could you be more specific? Perhaps a link directly to the relevant page, or a quote from it?
Apple lost my business due in large part to the fact that BeOS didn't run on the latest macs. A couple years ago when attending MacWorld I put off buying a G3 (or was it a G2? Probably a G2) because I wanted the option of playing with BeOS. I put that purchase off a long time and finally ended up getting a Windows PC (and installing various OSes on it). I've been buying WinTel boxes ever since.
I can't speak for the other guy, but I personally used to belong to the ACLU and eventually let my membership lapse due in large part what seemed to me like bigotry against Christians in their promotional literature.
I am not a Christian, nor am I a right-winger. I'm a Jewish atheist left-libertarian. But I don't particularly hate "the christian right". And the ACLU kept sending me fundraising letters that demonized "the christian right". In reading these it seemed to me the ACLU had lost its focus on constitutional issues and become a generic liberal cause instead. For example, I got letters warning me that if we weren't careful the christian right would destroy our public schools with voucher initiatives. Is schooling a federal issue? Is it mentioned in the Bill of Rights? Is it even mentioned in the constitution? Nope. Then why is the ACLU working on this issue? Because that evil "christian right" appears to be for it, so the ACLU must therefore be against it.
Anyway, I'll be a data point on this one: I'm not christian and I agree with the previous poster. And I'd honestly have been just as bothered if it had been applied to any other group.
I want to help out with certain free software projects, but when I was hired at my company, I signed all the various "you own my brain" forms that big companies typically require.
Why did you sign them without changing them? Many big companies occasionally ask you to sign contracts that include an overbroad restriction on what you are allowed to do or on who owns what. Keep in mind that you don't have to take these agreements as a given. If there is any clause to which you have an objection, you can almost always change it. Cross out the offending part, insert your alternative wording and initial the change, then sign the modified document. Sometimes they won't notice there has been a change, other times there will be some guy in the legal department who can look at your change and okay it. If you don't know how to write in legalese what you want to change, say "I'm not comfortable signing this; I have a problem with one of the paragraphs. Who can I talk to about this?" You might have to negotiate a little bit. But if your request is reasonable it shouldn't be a problem to get some sort of addendum included.
I've modified some term of my contract with every employer I've ever had including with such biggies as IBM, Apple, and Dow Jones/Telerate. All you want is to make it clear that if you do software development on your own time on your own premises using your own equipment not using any proprietary information of your employer's - you own it. The time to make this clear is whenever you are being asked to sign something to the contrary.
If you haven't heard of him yet, you've missed a lot. David Friedman is the foremost thoughtful advocate for anarchocapitalism. His home page refers to a lot of good stuff he has written. Here's a limited index of ideas.
Another good book for the philosophical approach to AI is a 1985 collection of essays called The Mind's Eye, edited by Douglass Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. This one includes John Searle's Chinese Room experiment and various other gedankenexperiments intended to explore how we think about how we think.
Also, those interested should look up "complexity theory" to see what mathematicians and computer scientists have to say about the nature of intractable problems.
The scare over DDT has been discredited. DDT has not been proven to have a significant deleterious effect either on people or on the bird populations that all the fuss was made about.
More information is available at http://www.junkscience.com. Scroll down to the January 1 entry for the DDT commentary, or go directly to the DDT FAQ page.
The evidence that DDT leads to eggshell thinning in birds and threatened the extinction of species like the peregrine falcon and the American bald eagle is absolutely airtight.
Sorry, but the eggshell thinning stuff is not at all airtight. See the eggshell thinning section of the junkscience.com DDT FAQ for relevant references.
amazing, I had no idea there are tools to non-destructively resize ffs partitions now. Or were you speaking out of your ass?
There are several such tools available under Windows. I usually use Partition Magic to non-destructively resize partitions prior to setting up a dual-boot system.
The obvious solution to the problem at hand - science teachers being out of date - is to remove some of the credentialism. Specifically, stop requiring potential instructors to have a teaching degree. That one requirement weeds out 98% of the people who could potentially be superb at teaching math and science - working mathematicians and scientists who have a passion for their field.
As for fixing the deeper problems with the school system, I tend to favor the Sudbury Valley approach, best described by Danny Greenberg in the article Back to Basics. As he says, learning is something you do, not something that is done to you. The fundamental problem with modern schools is that kids are force-fed a preplanned curriculum rather than allowed to make their own decisions about what to learn and how and when to learn it.
If you're in Silicon Valley and have school-age kids, you should check out Cedarwood Sudbury School in Santa Clara.
Nope, the whole concept of the Olympics isn't to foster world harmony, it's to engage in nationalistic my-country-is-better-than-yours propaganda. NBC's coverage was more in tune with what the Olympics are really about than was China's.
Personally, I enjoyed the X Games more. Watching Tony Hawk make his "nine" (a 900 degree spin on a skateboard) was far more exciting than anything I saw at Atlanta.
The article illustrated a very good point, people want stuff that "just works", when sites don't they get frustrated and will go back to the herd.
Exactly. For instance, I just bought a laptop computer. On the basis of size, weight, quality of the screen and a few other factors, I picked a Sharp Actius PC-280. It came with Windows 98 on an 8.1 gig hard drive. I figured with Partition Magic and a few install CDs in no time I'd be able to install BeOS and Linux, always booting into the best OS for the job at hand.
As a change of pace - I'm used to Redhat and Turbo - I tried to install Caldera OpenLinux, but eventually gave up in disgust. Then I tried to install BeOS and gave up in disgust. I've been working for most of a week in my spare time to try to install an alternative OS either directly from PCMCIA-based CD or off a hard disk partition built by copying files off that CD under Windows, and have thus far been entirely unsuccessful. We are so far away from being plug-and-play on new hardware at this point that it's just ridiculous.
I'm sure I'll eventually manage to install some form of Linux - I'm about to try a net install of RedHat - but most people wouldn't bother. If we end up with an OS that only runs on last year's hardware, we've failed.
Why do people pirate software? There are, from my experience, three types of "pirates", if you will: [...]
Your list left out the low-end, high volume criminals and their customers. Here in Hong Kong you can get most playstation games for about $2.50 US ($20 HK). You can get just about any movie on a VCD for the same $2.50, DVDs and Windows programs are slightly more (say, $3.25 US per CD, a bit more for Mac software) but still not much over the cost of production due to a high degree of competition.
The software piracy situation here is at least a _little_ underground with respect to english-language titles, and the reason for that is that companies like Microsoft make a lot of noise. But with VCDs it's out in the open and ubiquitous. There are neighborhoods where every block has multiple high-profile stores selling nothing but illegal CDs, DVDs and VCDs.
Why? Because it's socially acceptable in Hong Kong to buy and sell copies, so such behavior is winked at, even by the police. The point of anti-copying publicity campaigns in America is to combat that sort of attitude, so that the extent of copying _remains_ as much a marginalized activity as it is today in the US.
BillG already knows of Apple's contributions, because he bought the people from there that gave the Mac its coolness factor and used them for Windows 3.0
This is true, and some specifics are in order. Susan Kare did the original icons for MacPaint and for the Finder. [And also a lot of graphics that appeared in the Scrapbook and in Apple's advertising screenshots such as that drawing of the Japanese woman combing her hair.]
Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.
It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too.:-)
Glen Raphael (who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)
If this happens in Italy or South America you call it corruption. I don't think there's another word for it.
There are lots of other words for it, but the right one in this case is "extortion". The way things work around here is that politicians attack industries one at a time in order to extort campaign contributions. A few years ago the health care industry was the main target; now it's the software industry's turn. The fact that Microsoft finally gave in to the pressure is not something we should be particuarly surprised about, but I do find it depressing.
This is not a case of Microsoft arrogantly Challenging The System but is actually the exact opposite. We're seeing Microsoft meekly accept the way things are and increase its lobbying presence accordingly.
Once Microsoft is seen to be giving "enough" money and clout to both major parties, we'll see the DOJ move on to attack some other players in the industry.
And don't think we're immune; one of the cornerstones of modern antitrust law is the notion of "predatory pricing". Microsoft was once attacked for charging too little for IE in order to drive Netscape out of business, just as Standard Oil was attacked mostly for charging too little for oil. If Red Hat and VA Research ever become phenomenally successful on the basis of selling a product that is too cheap to compete with, they too will be forced to pay protection money in the form of a large lobbying budget or suffer the legal consequences.
Glen Raphael
P.S.: Read _The Myth Of The Robber Barons_ for another take on the Standard Oil case.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be a neat trick, since Doug is still alive. As are most of the people who worked with him. Here's Doug's home page if you want to see what he's been up to lately:
http://www.bootstrap.org/
(Doug worked for my dad at SRI.)
(1) keep tabs on progress, and
(2) answer technical questions and clarify specifications.
We found that unless we had people there, stuff didn't get done. We started out with the idea that it would all be hands-off but ended up keeping at least a couple people there at all times. A project manager type and a techie.
As the "techie", I spend about 6 months last year in Hong Kong helping our technology partner there make on-the-spot UI and design decisions, figuring out where the problem areas were in the applications they were writing for us, and making sure their needs were being met.
One big advantage of being there is that conference calls can seem overly formal. Our partners didn't like to convey bad news over the phone to a large group of people, but I could ask in person and get an honest answer which _I_ then relayed to the same group of people. We got more honest answers more quickly that way than any other procedure we discovered. Also when I sat in on the conference calls I could see what was going on in terms of body language and such. And it helped reduce language difficulties.
Rather than being there continuously, our overseas team would spend up to a month at a time there, then return home for a week or so before going back. That made it much easier to pay bills, stay in touch with friends and family and so on.
You slammed Cato largely on the basis that on their site they linked to another organization with which you disapprove. Feel free to point out Cato's native bias; that's fine. But the other stuff was just odd. Cato is Libertarian, they aren't Objectivist.
Cato also isn't particularly conservative in the traditional sense. If you want conservative, try Hoover. Oh, wait. They linked to Hoover on that page too, therefore... :-)
MacKenzie has one important and valid overriding point to make which is that if the courts are going to take "too many applications" as evidence of monopoly power, we need to be specific about this. How many apps is too many? The court probably should should not have accepted and relied upon the claim "Windows has 70,000 applications for it" without a little clarification. He did clarify where such numbers might have come from and why they were probably poorly defended and were misused by the judge.
But then MacKenzie muddled matters by being pretty vague as to what he considers an application. The definition implied by his treatment seems to be "an extra program you pay money for that comes in a box with a manual and isn't yet obsolete." By his definition, Windows 2000 doesn't come with hundreds of "applications" pre-installed. Calculator.exe and minesweeper.exe don't count for him, nor does anything on http://www.jumbo.com . That's not the standard definition of "application" in the industry, so our confusion is understandable.
Also, the claim that his students are more likely to use lots of apps than most people, strikes me as unreasonable. (My contrary hunch: people who work full time as managers while getting a degree on the side are atypically busy people and thus less likely than the norm to have installed or used a great many applications.)
In all, this looks like a pretty sloppy report. As a Cato supporter, I'm disappointed that their review process let this one slip through. It needed a more critical review committee.
[(*) reasons for skepticism: (1) Game programs in particular tend not to be sold in as many versions or bundle types as apps are; Doom and Doom 2 are objectively different games. (2) Amazon only quite recently got into the software market and certainly doesn't dominate it the way they do the book market. (3) Much software is not sold in stores but is sold on line or via direct-mail and mail-order catalogs. (4) Much software isn't sold at all but is still available for use (ie, shareware)]
I'm sorry, but if you're referring to Cato's Other Links Of Interest page, you didn't look closely enough. Heck, they link to the Brookings Institute too; can we claim on that basis that they are secretly Democratic Party supporters, advocates of greater regional planning and a "fair" living wage? I think not. That page is simply collection of links to various and sundry think tanks that might be of interest to Cato browsers. There's a libertarianish bias to the list but there are also a lot of outliers. IOS no more exemplifies Cato's core focus than does Brookings or Hoover or the Urban Institute.
Side note: I'm personally a Cato sponsor. And nope, I've got no interest in supporting the IOS.
We should probably wait to see the actual Cato study before lambasting Mr. MacKenzie too much based on what a New York Times reporter heard. But I agree that sentence sounds ridiculous unless he's using the word "application" in some highly restrictive sense. Look at the big shareware repositories. Jumbo.com has "over 300,000 shareware and freeware programs"; Shareware.com has "over 250,000 shareware files". Unfortunately those services don't return more than 500 results per query, but that would be a good place to start. Removing duplicates from a service of this sort would get you a list of applications that run on relatively recent hardware and were popular enough to be worth indexing, but it'd still be a small fraction of applications ever written because it wouldn't include most commercial apps, any apps for defunct platforms like the Commodore 64, apps written in-house, and apps that are or were only available in more limited distribution..
I'll be happy to look at Aqua if and when it actually ships. Until then, it's vaporware. It's not fair to compare something that's currently in use by real users to something that might eventually ship one of these days but so far is only a promising demo. (The might-ship-soon versions of Eazel and Enlightenment look pretty snazzy when shown by skilled operators in prescripted demos at LinuxWorld Expo, but it wouldn't be fair to compare them to the current MacOS and declare Mac dead on that basis alone.)
For the uninitiated, _Dance Dance Revolution_ is a game where the player stands on a platform and hops, jumps and steps on big floor buttons in order to do a preprogrammed dance. Timing is critical. When you get really good at it there are challenge and competition modes; it's a two-player game.
(I got addicted to DDR while spending 6 months in Hong Kong, so I'm overjoyed to finally see it making inroads here. Now if only we had _True Kiss Destination_...)
Interesting perspective. As for me, reading the ESR essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun was what finally convinced me to take a gun safety & use class and take up target shooting. It's a fun hobby, and once I've tried enough varieties of gun to know what I like or don't like shooting, I'll probably end up buying one. I also plan on getting a Concealed Carry Permit since in California that's the best way to reduce your chance of accidentally violating much of the vast thicket of obscure and contradictory gun laws.
Eric is inflammatory, but he's also right. John Lott is right too.
I followed the link and can't find what you're referring to. I checked the FAQ page and I tried a search on "BeOS"; nothing. Could you be more specific? Perhaps a link directly to the relevant page, or a quote from it?
Apple lost my business due in large part to the fact that BeOS didn't run on the latest macs. A couple years ago when attending MacWorld I put off buying a G3 (or was it a G2? Probably a G2) because I wanted the option of playing with BeOS. I put that purchase off a long time and finally ended up getting a Windows PC (and installing various OSes on it). I've been buying WinTel boxes ever since.
I am not a Christian, nor am I a right-winger. I'm a Jewish atheist left-libertarian. But I don't particularly hate "the christian right". And the ACLU kept sending me fundraising letters that demonized "the christian right". In reading these it seemed to me the ACLU had lost its focus on constitutional issues and become a generic liberal cause instead. For example, I got letters warning me that if we weren't careful the christian right would destroy our public schools with voucher initiatives. Is schooling a federal issue? Is it mentioned in the Bill of Rights? Is it even mentioned in the constitution? Nope. Then why is the ACLU working on this issue? Because that evil "christian right" appears to be for it, so the ACLU must therefore be against it.
Anyway, I'll be a data point on this one: I'm not christian and I agree with the previous poster. And I'd honestly have been just as bothered if it had been applied to any other group.
Making Sense of English Law Enforcement in the Eighteenth Century
Private Creation and Enforcement of Law -- A Historical Case.
(Medieval Iceland as described in the Sagas - the article was published in the Journal of Legal Studies).
There are a lot of other relevant published articles on his website, especially the academic publications page and the libertarian writings page.
I've modified some term of my contract with every employer I've ever had including with such biggies as IBM, Apple, and Dow Jones/Telerate. All you want is to make it clear that if you do software development on your own time on your own premises using your own equipment not using any proprietary information of your employer's - you own it. The time to make this clear is whenever you are being asked to sign something to the contrary.
Presumably he means David Friedman, son of Milton and author of the classic The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism.
If you haven't heard of him yet, you've missed a lot. David Friedman is the foremost thoughtful advocate for anarchocapitalism. His home page refers to a lot of good stuff he has written. Here's a limited index of ideas.
Twenty years later (in 1993) Dreyfus wrote the sequel What Computers Still Can't Do - it's still in print.
Another good book for the philosophical approach to AI is a 1985 collection of essays called The Mind's Eye, edited by Douglass Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett. This one includes John Searle's Chinese Room experiment and various other gedankenexperiments intended to explore how we think about how we think.
Also, those interested should look up "complexity theory" to see what mathematicians and computer scientists have to say about the nature of intractable problems.
Wired did a pretty good story about the current state of cold fusion not long ago. Interesting stuff here:
What if Cold Fusion is Real?
More information is available at http://www.junkscience.com. Scroll down to the January 1 entry for the DDT commentary, or go directly to the DDT FAQ page.
Sorry, but the eggshell thinning stuff is not at all airtight. See the eggshell thinning section of the junkscience.com DDT FAQ for relevant references.
There are several such tools available under Windows. I usually use Partition Magic to non-destructively resize partitions prior to setting up a dual-boot system.
As for fixing the deeper problems with the school system, I tend to favor the Sudbury Valley approach, best described by Danny Greenberg in the article Back to Basics. As he says, learning is something you do, not something that is done to you. The fundamental problem with modern schools is that kids are force-fed a preplanned curriculum rather than allowed to make their own decisions about what to learn and how and when to learn it.
If you're in Silicon Valley and have school-age kids, you should check out Cedarwood Sudbury School in Santa Clara.
Personally, I enjoyed the X Games more. Watching Tony Hawk make his "nine" (a 900 degree spin on a skateboard) was far more exciting than anything I saw at Atlanta.
Exactly. For instance, I just bought a laptop computer. On the basis of size, weight, quality of the screen and a few other factors, I picked a Sharp Actius PC-280. It came with Windows 98 on an 8.1 gig hard drive. I figured with Partition Magic and a few install CDs in no time I'd be able to install BeOS and Linux, always booting into the best OS for the job at hand.
As a change of pace - I'm used to Redhat and Turbo - I tried to install Caldera OpenLinux, but eventually gave up in disgust. Then I tried to install BeOS and gave up in disgust. I've been working for most of a week in my spare time to try to install an alternative OS either directly from PCMCIA-based CD or off a hard disk partition built by copying files off that CD under Windows, and have thus far been entirely unsuccessful. We are so far away from being plug-and-play on new hardware at this point that it's just ridiculous.
I'm sure I'll eventually manage to install some form of Linux - I'm about to try a net install of RedHat - but most people wouldn't bother. If we end up with an OS that only runs on last year's hardware, we've failed.
The software piracy situation here is at least a _little_ underground with respect to english-language titles, and the reason for that is that companies like Microsoft make a lot of noise. But with VCDs it's out in the open and ubiquitous. There are neighborhoods where every block has multiple high-profile stores selling nothing but illegal CDs, DVDs and VCDs.
Why? Because it's socially acceptable in Hong Kong to buy and sell copies, so such behavior is winked at, even by the police. The point of anti-copying publicity campaigns in America is to combat that sort of attitude, so that the extent of copying _remains_ as much a marginalized activity as it is today in the US.
Glen Raphael
Microsoft hired Ms. Kare to make Microsoft Windows 3.0 more user friendly. You can find some of the resulting work in Ms. Kare's portfolio and a good overview of her career history in this New York Times article.
It's also worth mentioning that Microsoft was involved with the Mac almost from the beginning, and that Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word were among the earliest and most successful big-name software programs for that platform. So maybe Bill credits himself for that too. :-)
Glen Raphael
(who used to teach about Excel in the BMUG beginner's group classes)
This is not a case of Microsoft arrogantly Challenging The System but is actually the exact opposite. We're seeing Microsoft meekly accept the way things are and increase its lobbying presence accordingly.
Once Microsoft is seen to be giving "enough" money and clout to both major parties, we'll see the DOJ move on to attack some other players in the industry.
And don't think we're immune; one of the cornerstones of modern antitrust law is the notion of "predatory pricing". Microsoft was once attacked for charging too little for IE in order to drive Netscape out of business, just as Standard Oil was attacked mostly for charging too little for oil. If Red Hat and VA Research ever become phenomenally successful on the basis of selling a product that is too cheap to compete with, they too will be forced to pay protection money in the form of a large lobbying budget or suffer the legal consequences.
Glen Raphael
P.S.: Read _The Myth Of The Robber Barons_ for another take on the Standard Oil case.