Try again. The longest lasting republic is San Marino, a tiny landlocked country entirely surrounded by Italy, which has been chugging along happily since the 4th century AD.
Whatever it is, America only does more of it, never first or best.
This is not an example of a condition mistreated as an act. Saying something IS an act. Words can do as much harm as physical aggression can.
Under certain circumstances. But laws prohibiting speech invariably precipitate governments that perpetrate the most appalling acts of physical aggression. Like Nazi Germany, for example, a state that employed the same kind of oleaginous excuses for political suppression -- and that is the correct term -- that you appear to be advocating here.
Playing free and easy with the tradeoff between freedom and security is another common practice of politically oppressive states. The flaw with the argument is that selling freedom in the name of security diminishes minor violence in the short term while ensuring major violence, i.e., war, in the long term. The road to despotism always begins with regulation in the name of security and always ends in war: civil, foreign, or both.
Isolated acts of violence by officially tolerated skinheads are a fair price to pay to avoid millions of deaths in a war against the sort of government we would create if we chose to suppress them. We cannot afford to yield to the temptation to become what we hate.
And please don't think I take "isolated acts of violence" lightly. I've been beaten to within an inch of my life more than once by skinheads. But it is for precisely this reason that I don't want to give the national government, which is far better organized and armed, carte blanche to employ violence to suppress dissent.
You will note that the French (or German) courts have not shut down a large
number of Neo-Nazi sites running in the USA. (Though I would love to see them go)
I would not. Not because I like Nazis, but because it's easier to keep track of them when they're out in the open, and because shutting them down would only serve to give them credibility, additional propaganda ("The Jews in the government are trying to suppress our message!"), and power.
Freedom of speech either exists or it does not. As soon as you start laying conditions on it, it ceases to be freedom and instead becomes permission, which is something else entirely. Your freedom to debunk Nazism as a pack of vicious lies depends on their freedom to spew those lies.
Faith in the power of truth to win out in open debate is a hard thing. But in the long run, the only thing that can stop truth is the absence of that debate. Countries like Germany, France, and Australia are only laying the groundwork for future resurgences of the very things they are, no doubt with the best of intentions, trying to suppress.
People can get quite emotional about Python, in a way they rarely get about software.
Whatever.
People (read: geeks like us) get quite emotional about software in general, and about languages and operating systems in particular. I work in an office where Perl is the dominant language, and the Perl-heads here are quite passionate about Perl. I'm mainly a C programmer myself, and I can get quite passionate about C. (This becomes especially amusing in my office, because I'm implementing a library for C that provides the functionality of Perl, so we have wonderful lunchtime arguments about that, too.) I've seen people get quite overheated about PHP, Python, C++, Eiffel, ML, Haskell, Prolog, Scheme, Forth, assembly language, and pretty much every other language I've encountered, including COBOL and RPG. (Hard to believe? Pick a fight with my mother.)
It's just the nature of the beast. To use and like a language, you have to get deeply into it, and once you see its full possibilities, it's irritating to have to debate them with someone who doesn't know the language as well. The assertion that people get more passionate about Python than other languages is just either pure BS, or else it's marketeering by Guido.
I've used Python, and while I agree it's cleaner than Perl, it also has some annoying features, too. Just like every other language. Frankly, I think Icon is a better text-handling language than either Python or Perl, but that's just my personal needs and prejudices speaking.
What I don't understand -- and this could be equally well aimed at C++ and Java as Perl and Python -- is why people find a language they like and insist that everyone else must use it. It's generally acknowledged that the peculiarly American habit of insisting that everyone speak English is asinine; I wonder why the same conclusion hasn't been reached about programming language advocacy. All non-trivial languages have strengths and weaknesses, and there really isn't much to recommend one over the other except personal preference and practical requirements, i.e., what you already know and the nature of the task at hand.
Diversity is good. This applies no less to tools than it does to people.
NCR, and later Apple, threw a lot of money at pen computing before Palm got it right. Did Palm learn from NCR's mistakes, or would they have gotten everything right on the first try?
Right. And does that mean I can start sending invoices to the men who ended up marrying my ex-girlfriends? After all, without my spectacular crash-and-burns, how would they have known what to avoid? Think of it as an inverse patent -- I come up with a way to do something badly, and then go around suing people who figured out how to do it right. That would be like Edison getting sued by the developers of gaslights.
(I am, of course, making an exception for the poor schmuck who ended up with Angela. But he paid dearly enough for emulating my bad business model.)
"Newsforge has an article detailing Eazel's layoff of over 50% of its workforce.
Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.
Let me guess, "They are free to no longer have to worry about album sales, because there aren't any?".
Right. And there was no art and literature before copyright. Ten thousand fnarking years of human history during which we could have had art and literature, and we've only had it for the last century or two because no one ever thought of copyright. Of course, all those museums and libraries just confuse the issue by perpetuating the hoax of history. This is just one big conspiracy like NASA's attempts to make us think they really went to the moon when we all know that the earth is flat and the moon is fixed within one of the crystal spheres that surrounds the earth! The nerve!
One of the greatest things about PHP is that it is easy for people with little/no programming skills to pick up and create
web applications. To push it to a full fledged language defeats the purpose, in my opinion.
It's called "room for growth". It's not a bad thing. Otherwise, all those people who learned PHP will discover that they wasted their time when they run into the limits of the language.
We try to push everything (languages, OS's, apps) to try to be everything to everyone. PHP is great for what it is. If you
want to create a GUI, use something that was built for it the ground up for it.
Oh, piff! With the exception of Visual Basic and kindred proprietary RAD languages, there are no significant languages out there that were "designed from the ground up" for GUIs. (Java is arguable, but still...) I'm not even sure what it would mean for a language to be designed for GUIs, or how it would differ from any existing procedural or OO language. Make window a reserved word? Whatever.
The fact of the matter is that most GUI API's are grotesquely complex and present a steep learning curve for a beginner or someone who just wants to write a simple graphical frontend for a tool. Tcl/Tk has heretofore been the only exception worthy of note, but Tcl has its own host of problems including limited compatibility between versions and its DOS-batch-language-gone-wild syntax. Python is probably a better language (than PHP or Tcl), but PHP has the advantage of presenting a gentler learning curve for anyone who already knows C, minus all of the implicit syntax that makes Perl so difficult for newbies.
If you want to create an interactive database driven website (and you don't know perl) use PHP.
PHP is a lot easier to use than mod_perl or Mason for lightweight tasks. I use all of the above, and only use Perl when the situation is sufficiently complex to call for it. It's also a helluva lot easier to configure.
I hope this doesn't ever work itself into the main distribution of PHP... More bloat.
Consider learning to edit your makefiles if it ever does. A Gtk extension to PHP would only be appropriate to the standalone build, not the Apache module.
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CPRM and similar schemes are easy to defeat
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CPRM Smokescreen
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· Score: 2
Um, maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't encrypting data -- even with a trivial XOR scheme -- basically prevent HD copy-protection hardware from recognizing protected materials? Sure, there would be a (very small) performance hit, but this is the sort of thing that could be easily and transparently routed around at the filesystem software level. Nor would it necessarily run afoul of DMCA provisions against circumventing protection schemes, since encryption of data has "substantial non-infringing uses", as it were, and a modified ext2 filesystem that permitted users to select from a variety of encryption schemes, from trivial to industrial-grade, would provide substantial value to users, entirely aside from its utility in confusing CPRM devices.
I'm beginning to think that "loser pays" and penalties for frivolous lawsuits are looking like a better idea with every passing day. . .
The problem with "loser pays" is that it makes large companies untouchable. If your next-door neighbor screws you and you sue him and lose, it costs you a few thousand dollars. If you sue Microsoft and lose, you're instantly six digits in debt because they put a team of fifteen highly paid corporate lawyers on the job. Oh sure, maybe one of them actually did any work on it, but because he walked past the other fourteen in the hall and said hello to them, they'll bill for it. And the beauty of it is that your hometown lawyer never had a chance against a mob of the best corporate lawyers in the country. They already stall as long as possible to drive up your legal expenses; a loser-pays system just makes it harder to get justice.
In the actual case under discussion, the boy's family has every right to sue for defamation. That being said, I don't think the girl's family ought to pick up the tab because by being recruited as an informer, she was basically acting as an agent or employee of the school district.
In the end, probably, reason will prevail. (Of course, the road to the end will be littered with ruined lives and missed opportunities, but our species is stupid that way.) However, there's another approach that can be taken at least in some areas: open content.
Nowhere is this more applicable than where textbooks and reference books are concerned. Why teachers at all levels have not collaborated to produce universal, free textbooks is utterly beyond me. Given the technology available -- content could be included conditionally to suit the requirements, pedagogical and ideological, of each school district or university, for example -- and given the hideous cost of textbooks, it seems like the only reasonable solution. Likewise with things like encyclopedias. God knows there's at least a few people with expertise in every subject area who would be willing to write a quality article for free. The overpriced training materials that go with lucrative technical certifications are another obvious target. Are you certified by Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, etc? Help out those who aren't yet.
I know this isn't an all-inclusive solution, but at least in this one area, it would eliminate the political influence of textbook and reference publishers by putting them out of business.
Knowledge is the collective property of the entire human race. Yes, that's an ideological stance, but it's one that has seen the sacrifice of millions of lives on battlefields around the world. If Hitler and Stalin couldn't stop it, it would be a shame to see fnarking copyright lawyers succeed.
To be fair, we don't know exactly what Pluto is composed of; we just know its surface composition on the basis of spectroscopic data.
Not that anyone is asking me -- I'm a sysadmin, not an astronomer -- but if it orbits the sun and it's large enough for its gravity to mash it into a spheroid, it ought to be called a planet. With the same amount of hair-splitting that's being applied to Pluto, you could argue that Jupiter isn't a planet at all but a pre-stellar mass instead.
In the end, it is mostly a debate over semantics and a strangely snotty one, considering how little it matters what we call Pluto. The unfolding story of its origin, like that of other solar system objects, is much more interesting (and substantial) than this petty labelling debate. Let's do something useful instead and urge Congress to fund a Pluto/Kuiper belt survey mission and at least generate some interesting data to argue about. Otherwise, this is just an exercise in cartographic conventions.
Mass abandonment of Linux for OS X? Hardly probable. Even if OS X was completely superior and ran on Intel hardware, the ideology of Open Source and sheer stubborn religiousness
withing the
*LINUX* community would keep users -- just like the "deluded apple followers" you mention.
Hogwash. I'm with Linux partly because I like Linux, but mainly because it's free. And both the "free beer" and "free speech" issues matter to me alot. Apple has shown some willingness to head towards both kinds of free, but an equally clear unwillingness to go all the way, and you still have to buy their ugly, overpriced hardware.
And I realize the "ugly" part is just my personal opinion and, plainly, others see that differently.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
That OS X can be learned from is a valid point, and a good one at that. That OS X or any Apple product is "something to be reckoned with" is just nonsense. Apple was a force to be reckoned with once and only once, and despite their abortive comeback attempt, their internal culture makes it impossible for them to gain more than a small fraction of the market no matter how good their products are or aren't. IBM has a similar permanent blind spot in its marketing department.
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Re:What makes Wintel better than anything else...
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Digital Doodling
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· Score: 2
The Mac lost because Apple wasn't a big company. No one in big buisness trusted the two kids from a garage. Apple was first. Apple was better. Apple just didn't matter.
The Mac lost because most of us didn't like them enough to buy one. If you're assuming that most people made that decision on the basis of advertising without ever trying competing machines before purchasing, you're probably wrong.
The Mac was technically nice, but it lacked even the option of a CLI, so I wrote it off as not being a serious machine. I like my machines to have both a CLI and a GUI, but if I have to have only one, I can't do without the CLI. I was an ardent Apple fan until the Mac came out, and it wasn't IBM's advertising that swayed me -- it was Apple's new machines.
This isn't a big issue to me, because I probably watch no more than thirty hours of television a year and seldom if ever rent movies, but if timeshifting goes away, that drops to zero for me. The last thing I watched with any regularity was The X-Files, and if it hadn't been for my VCR, I wouldn't have watched at all because Sunday evening is a bad time for me to sit on my arse.
The other issue that this brings to my mind is the increasingly short lifespan of media formats. I'm still trying to replace my rather large record and tape collection with CDs -- and no, while it's not ideal, I don't mind paying for better-quality CD versions of my old vinyl -- but there's a lot of stuff that isn't available on CD, and in case you haven't noticed, finding decent turntables (and styli for them) has gotten expensive and really good cassette decks have been extinct for some years. The story is the same here as with TV -- the harder they make it for me, the less likely I'm going to bother with it.
Like I said, TV per se isn't my issue, but the general principle applies to other things. I'm voting with my dollars and buying more grossly overpriced books instead. Alphabetic text on a substrate of pressed vegetable matter has been in continuous use since about 4000 BC, which is a record I doubt any modern medium will surpass, even if the modern version contains acids that will destroy the paper within a century or so. If I'm still around then, I'll spring for a Xerox machine.
I dunno about Microsoft, but the very large tech company I work for has so few blacks and hispanics that it's actually surprising to run into one. There are plenty of Indians and various other Asian ethnicities, but it's still predominantly white and male.
To be fair to Microsoft, I don't think this is necessarily indicative of a racist policy at Microsoft. MS may well hire qualified applicants irrespective of race. What it does indicate is a societal problem. I don't know enough black people to have a particularly detailed picture of the challenges they face, but I know enough women to know that from grade school onwards, women are discouraged in various ways from pursuing technical and management careers. I'd be willing to bet blacks face similar pressures.
I was one of a handful of white kids bussed to a predominantly black public school as part of desegregation in Tennessee in the early 80's, and I can say that the mostly black schools I saw were in utter disrepair, short on textbooks, and staffed with teachers who did not compare well to their counterparts in mostly white schools. (In both cases, most of the teachers were white.) Schools in TN are some of the worst in the nation -- I went to what was regarded as the best high school in the area and didn't have to write a single essay in four years -- but the predominately black schools were even worse. We can talk all we want about the role of individual initiative, but not having the opportunity to learn will screw you good.
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Re:Sounds really intuitive, no no, really.
on
3D GUI Project
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· Score: 2
Perhaps a bigger problem in this scenario is that of the menus within these windows. If they're not maximized, then to get to the menu in each window you have to click in a different location every time. This is very non-intuitive.
Probably the only feature of the awful Mac GUI that I like is the application menu system. There is a permanent menu bar across the top of the screen, and it is used by whatever application is in the foreground at the time, whether or not it is maximized. I wonder if any X window managers offer that functionality.
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Requiring users to use more mouse buttons is a bad idea, but having more mouse buttons for those who want to use them is not. Chording systems, like the one used in the Oberon GUI, take a while to learn but are really handy once you've gotten used to them. And I've always wanted something like a high-end digitizer tablet puck for a mouse -- the standard buttons, plus a programmable keypad. In many cases, this would reduce the number of times I have to move my hand between the mouse and the keyboard.
I guess by Angst's (and your? and Freud's?) definition my culture is insane.
Based on what I know of the way women are treated in China -- and admitting that I don't know how Taiwan differs from mainland China in this respect -- then I'd have to agree that yes, I think your culture is insane, just as a significant portion of mine is. The treatment of women in the far east is legendarily barbaric. I certainly hope that I've heard wrong and that women over there treated as fully independent equals, or that it is at least a goal towards which your society strives.
And modern Western psychology's are not shared by a good portion of the rest of us. Nor even, it would appear, by a significant portion of your own society.
I can only cite the Western ideal that people have certain inherent, inalienable rights that are not subject to review by popular opinion or government fiat. No one denies that the West has more than its fair share of sexually-stunted misogynistic bigots. We have made great strides in the last century -- well within living memory there was no concept of marital rape but it is now recognized prohibited by law in most places -- and hopefully we will continue to move forward. If your society chooses to take a different course, I understand that such is your society's prerogative, but I can't reasonably be expected to respect a policy of inhumanity as if it were something trivial like driving on the left side of the road.
Actually, the Puritans encouraged a highly active sex life -- within the bonds of a monogamous marriage, of course -- to the extent that they built beds with small dividers, placed a teenager on each side of the divider, and promptly married them in the morning if they ended up on the same side of the bed. The Victorians, on the other hand, put skirts on the legs of tables and chairs to avoid reminding anyone of a bare human leg, and considered words like "ankle" and "pregnant" to be obscene.
The roots of Western prudishness obviously go back to the tangled warren of late classical monotheistic religions that eventually produced Judaism and Christianity (and Islam). I mentioned the Victorian era only because many present-day attitudes are directly attributable to it.
Why is the US government set up to let this happen?
Because it suits the purposes of the corporations who produce the ongoing performance of "Democracy" on the stage in Washington. I hear they're finally going to add musical numbers next year, to which bread and circuses will no doubt be attached as a rider.
The real problem here isn't a legal one, it's cultural. Thanks to the way the Victorian Era poisoned our culture, Westerners in general and Americans in particular have a morbid fear of sexuality. This fear is so deeply entrenched that it doesn't seem odd that exposing a (female) nipple in public is a criminal offense, and may be a felony in some instances.
Some (though hardly all) feminists have muddied the water by suggesting that pornography denigrates women. There is much truth to this argument, but they are incorrect in their estimate of the underlying cause. Pornography denigrates women not because it treats women as objects -- though obviously it does -- but because the pseudo-religious opposition to pornography treats women as toxins from which society must be protected. To a lesser degree than in Islamic society, but for much the same reasons, the more stringent standards for female body coverings rest on the premise that women are a corrupting influence on men, and that they cannot be trusted to control their instinctual imperatives, and at the same time insisting that they must yield to the instinctual imperatives of dominant males.
Our society is choked with people who -- and I don't care what pious excuses are offered for this -- are deeply afraid of sexuality, and more often than not full of fear and loathing for female sexuality. (Before anyone flames, please don't think that I'm arguing that male-oriented porn is either a realistic or healthy representation of female sexuality. But it wouldn't matter if it were.)
The contest between censorship and anti-censorship in America has got squat to do with civil liberties. It is a battle against an entrenched, institutionalized form of mental illness, a phobia of sexuality that manifests itself in the form of political oppression on the grand scale and domestic terror on the personal scale. Those who oppose censorship can shout all day long about free speech and they will utterly fail of effect because they are not addressing the real hidden agenda. We must take a stand in favor of sex and sexuality as a healthy, normal, and necessary part of human existence and refuse to knuckle under to this morbid anti-sex psychopathology no matter what political or religious mask it uses to hide its shame.
The argument that a diversity of licensing schemes will kill free software is an old one, and like many old rumors, completely innocent of any kind of evidence to support it.
The number of new open source licenses has exploded in recent years. Oddly, the amount of open source software has also exploded in recent years, which is not what you'd expect if multiple licenses were somehow a deterrent to development. Then the argument is always pushed into the future -- eventually, a diversity of licenses will choke open source. Yeah, right.
Let's put this in proper perspective: Compared to commercial software, the handful of open source licenses out there is barely worth noticing. Every software company, and frequently every individual commercial product, has its own license. There are literally tens of thousands of commercial software licenses out there right now, and yet commercial software is a multi-billion dollar industry, growing by leaps and bounds.
Free software licenses are an annoyance at worst. In cases where they prevent an existing package from being used, they end up spurring the development of a competing package. That may be a pain in the ass for developers, but it's a good thing for users.
I'm probably one of the relative few who actually like most of Katz's columns, even if they do tend toward self-indulgence most of the time, but this gamers-as-subculture thread is really getting tiresome. Sure, gamers are a subculture -- so are golfers, fly fisherman, and model railroad enthusiasts. Big fnarking deal.
The assertion that gamers are, as a group, any smarter or more logical than any other group of people picked at random is utter bull, and I wish Katz would get off of it. Gaming gave me better eye-hand coordination and a lot of fun hours in the process, but I can't say it affected my real-world problem-solving skills. Programming sure did, as did the formal logic courses I took in college, but Quake? Pfaw.
Thanks for doing this, Ron. I've been hoping that someone would port the best of the door games to a web format. (I'm still holding my breath for a good port of Solar Realms Elite, or for the time to do it myself...)
PHP's a fine choice for this; I'd probably use it myself. The only alternative that readily springs to mind would be to write a daemon in C to interface with Imatix's great open source Xitami web server, which is especially friendly for this sort of hackery.
Anyway, I look forward to playing Tradewars again. Good job!
Why do we care if we can change the skin on a software package?
We (that's you and me and others like us, buddy) don't, but the vast unwashed masses do. As in all things, but especially in software, most people don't have the knowledge to understand the underlying substance, nor do they care. They want flash. Apple understands this -- look how many millions of dollars they've made from colored plastic and, looking forward, a GUI that simulates colored plastic. Microsoft sure as hell understands this, too.
Yes, it's stupid. But fashion ain't exactly a new force in human affairs, and until we outgrow our primate brains, it isn't going anywhere. Personally, I'd be happy if the designers of too-hip-to-live programs would just provide a compile-time switch to leave out all that skin code so I can get on to the important stuff without wasting RAM and CPU cycles.
Of course, I'm being completely hypocritical here. I'd pay attention to skins more if someone would cook up an XMMS skin that looks like a Wyse 60 greenscreen terminal display so I could get rid of the Wyse 60 terminal I use to launch mpg123...:)
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever it is, America only does more of it, never first or best.
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Under certain circumstances. But laws prohibiting speech invariably precipitate governments that perpetrate the most appalling acts of physical aggression. Like Nazi Germany, for example, a state that employed the same kind of oleaginous excuses for political suppression -- and that is the correct term -- that you appear to be advocating here.
Playing free and easy with the tradeoff between freedom and security is another common practice of politically oppressive states. The flaw with the argument is that selling freedom in the name of security diminishes minor violence in the short term while ensuring major violence, i.e., war, in the long term. The road to despotism always begins with regulation in the name of security and always ends in war: civil, foreign, or both.
Isolated acts of violence by officially tolerated skinheads are a fair price to pay to avoid millions of deaths in a war against the sort of government we would create if we chose to suppress them. We cannot afford to yield to the temptation to become what we hate.
And please don't think I take "isolated acts of violence" lightly. I've been beaten to within an inch of my life more than once by skinheads. But it is for precisely this reason that I don't want to give the national government, which is far better organized and armed, carte blanche to employ violence to suppress dissent.
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I would not. Not because I like Nazis, but because it's easier to keep track of them when they're out in the open, and because shutting them down would only serve to give them credibility, additional propaganda ("The Jews in the government are trying to suppress our message!"), and power.
Freedom of speech either exists or it does not. As soon as you start laying conditions on it, it ceases to be freedom and instead becomes permission, which is something else entirely. Your freedom to debunk Nazism as a pack of vicious lies depends on their freedom to spew those lies.
Faith in the power of truth to win out in open debate is a hard thing. But in the long run, the only thing that can stop truth is the absence of that debate. Countries like Germany, France, and Australia are only laying the groundwork for future resurgences of the very things they are, no doubt with the best of intentions, trying to suppress.
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Whatever.
People (read: geeks like us) get quite emotional about software in general, and about languages and operating systems in particular. I work in an office where Perl is the dominant language, and the Perl-heads here are quite passionate about Perl. I'm mainly a C programmer myself, and I can get quite passionate about C. (This becomes especially amusing in my office, because I'm implementing a library for C that provides the functionality of Perl, so we have wonderful lunchtime arguments about that, too.) I've seen people get quite overheated about PHP, Python, C++, Eiffel, ML, Haskell, Prolog, Scheme, Forth, assembly language, and pretty much every other language I've encountered, including COBOL and RPG. (Hard to believe? Pick a fight with my mother.)
It's just the nature of the beast. To use and like a language, you have to get deeply into it, and once you see its full possibilities, it's irritating to have to debate them with someone who doesn't know the language as well. The assertion that people get more passionate about Python than other languages is just either pure BS, or else it's marketeering by Guido.
I've used Python, and while I agree it's cleaner than Perl, it also has some annoying features, too. Just like every other language. Frankly, I think Icon is a better text-handling language than either Python or Perl, but that's just my personal needs and prejudices speaking.
What I don't understand -- and this could be equally well aimed at C++ and Java as Perl and Python -- is why people find a language they like and insist that everyone else must use it. It's generally acknowledged that the peculiarly American habit of insisting that everyone speak English is asinine; I wonder why the same conclusion hasn't been reached about programming language advocacy. All non-trivial languages have strengths and weaknesses, and there really isn't much to recommend one over the other except personal preference and practical requirements, i.e., what you already know and the nature of the task at hand.
Diversity is good. This applies no less to tools than it does to people.
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Right. And does that mean I can start sending invoices to the men who ended up marrying my ex-girlfriends? After all, without my spectacular crash-and-burns, how would they have known what to avoid? Think of it as an inverse patent -- I come up with a way to do something badly, and then go around suing people who figured out how to do it right. That would be like Edison getting sued by the developers of gaslights.
(I am, of course, making an exception for the poor schmuck who ended up with Angela. But he paid dearly enough for emulating my bad business model.)
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Too bad they can't trim 50% off of Nautilus' memory footprint. For being a file manager, it's pretty pathetic to be grabbing 138 megs of system memory just to sit there.
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Right. And there was no art and literature before copyright. Ten thousand fnarking years of human history during which we could have had art and literature, and we've only had it for the last century or two because no one ever thought of copyright. Of course, all those museums and libraries just confuse the issue by perpetuating the hoax of history. This is just one big conspiracy like NASA's attempts to make us think they really went to the moon when we all know that the earth is flat and the moon is fixed within one of the crystal spheres that surrounds the earth! The nerve!
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It's called "room for growth". It's not a bad thing. Otherwise, all those people who learned PHP will discover that they wasted their time when they run into the limits of the language.
We try to push everything (languages, OS's, apps) to try to be everything to everyone. PHP is great for what it is. If you want to create a GUI, use something that was built for it the ground up for it.
Oh, piff! With the exception of Visual Basic and kindred proprietary RAD languages, there are no significant languages out there that were "designed from the ground up" for GUIs. (Java is arguable, but still...) I'm not even sure what it would mean for a language to be designed for GUIs, or how it would differ from any existing procedural or OO language. Make window a reserved word? Whatever.
The fact of the matter is that most GUI API's are grotesquely complex and present a steep learning curve for a beginner or someone who just wants to write a simple graphical frontend for a tool. Tcl/Tk has heretofore been the only exception worthy of note, but Tcl has its own host of problems including limited compatibility between versions and its DOS-batch-language-gone-wild syntax. Python is probably a better language (than PHP or Tcl), but PHP has the advantage of presenting a gentler learning curve for anyone who already knows C, minus all of the implicit syntax that makes Perl so difficult for newbies.
If you want to create an interactive database driven website (and you don't know perl) use PHP.
PHP is a lot easier to use than mod_perl or Mason for lightweight tasks. I use all of the above, and only use Perl when the situation is sufficiently complex to call for it. It's also a helluva lot easier to configure.
I hope this doesn't ever work itself into the main distribution of PHP... More bloat.
Consider learning to edit your makefiles if it ever does. A Gtk extension to PHP would only be appropriate to the standalone build, not the Apache module.
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Um, maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't encrypting data -- even with a trivial XOR scheme -- basically prevent HD copy-protection hardware from recognizing protected materials? Sure, there would be a (very small) performance hit, but this is the sort of thing that could be easily and transparently routed around at the filesystem software level. Nor would it necessarily run afoul of DMCA provisions against circumventing protection schemes, since encryption of data has "substantial non-infringing uses", as it were, and a modified ext2 filesystem that permitted users to select from a variety of encryption schemes, from trivial to industrial-grade, would provide substantial value to users, entirely aside from its utility in confusing CPRM devices.
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The problem with "loser pays" is that it makes large companies untouchable. If your next-door neighbor screws you and you sue him and lose, it costs you a few thousand dollars. If you sue Microsoft and lose, you're instantly six digits in debt because they put a team of fifteen highly paid corporate lawyers on the job. Oh sure, maybe one of them actually did any work on it, but because he walked past the other fourteen in the hall and said hello to them, they'll bill for it. And the beauty of it is that your hometown lawyer never had a chance against a mob of the best corporate lawyers in the country. They already stall as long as possible to drive up your legal expenses; a loser-pays system just makes it harder to get justice.
In the actual case under discussion, the boy's family has every right to sue for defamation. That being said, I don't think the girl's family ought to pick up the tab because by being recruited as an informer, she was basically acting as an agent or employee of the school district.
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Nowhere is this more applicable than where textbooks and reference books are concerned. Why teachers at all levels have not collaborated to produce universal, free textbooks is utterly beyond me. Given the technology available -- content could be included conditionally to suit the requirements, pedagogical and ideological, of each school district or university, for example -- and given the hideous cost of textbooks, it seems like the only reasonable solution. Likewise with things like encyclopedias. God knows there's at least a few people with expertise in every subject area who would be willing to write a quality article for free. The overpriced training materials that go with lucrative technical certifications are another obvious target. Are you certified by Oracle, Cisco, Microsoft, etc? Help out those who aren't yet.
I know this isn't an all-inclusive solution, but at least in this one area, it would eliminate the political influence of textbook and reference publishers by putting them out of business.
Knowledge is the collective property of the entire human race. Yes, that's an ideological stance, but it's one that has seen the sacrifice of millions of lives on battlefields around the world. If Hitler and Stalin couldn't stop it, it would be a shame to see fnarking copyright lawyers succeed.
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Not that anyone is asking me -- I'm a sysadmin, not an astronomer -- but if it orbits the sun and it's large enough for its gravity to mash it into a spheroid, it ought to be called a planet. With the same amount of hair-splitting that's being applied to Pluto, you could argue that Jupiter isn't a planet at all but a pre-stellar mass instead.
In the end, it is mostly a debate over semantics and a strangely snotty one, considering how little it matters what we call Pluto. The unfolding story of its origin, like that of other solar system objects, is much more interesting (and substantial) than this petty labelling debate. Let's do something useful instead and urge Congress to fund a Pluto/Kuiper belt survey mission and at least generate some interesting data to argue about. Otherwise, this is just an exercise in cartographic conventions.
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Hogwash. I'm with Linux partly because I like Linux, but mainly because it's free. And both the "free beer" and "free speech" issues matter to me alot. Apple has shown some willingness to head towards both kinds of free, but an equally clear unwillingness to go all the way, and you still have to buy their ugly, overpriced hardware.
And I realize the "ugly" part is just my personal opinion and, plainly, others see that differently.
But don't think that means that OS X isn't something to be reckoned with -- and learned from.
That OS X can be learned from is a valid point, and a good one at that. That OS X or any Apple product is "something to be reckoned with" is just nonsense. Apple was a force to be reckoned with once and only once, and despite their abortive comeback attempt, their internal culture makes it impossible for them to gain more than a small fraction of the market no matter how good their products are or aren't. IBM has a similar permanent blind spot in its marketing department.
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The Mac lost because most of us didn't like them enough to buy one. If you're assuming that most people made that decision on the basis of advertising without ever trying competing machines before purchasing, you're probably wrong.
The Mac was technically nice, but it lacked even the option of a CLI, so I wrote it off as not being a serious machine. I like my machines to have both a CLI and a GUI, but if I have to have only one, I can't do without the CLI. I was an ardent Apple fan until the Mac came out, and it wasn't IBM's advertising that swayed me -- it was Apple's new machines.
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The other issue that this brings to my mind is the increasingly short lifespan of media formats. I'm still trying to replace my rather large record and tape collection with CDs -- and no, while it's not ideal, I don't mind paying for better-quality CD versions of my old vinyl -- but there's a lot of stuff that isn't available on CD, and in case you haven't noticed, finding decent turntables (and styli for them) has gotten expensive and really good cassette decks have been extinct for some years. The story is the same here as with TV -- the harder they make it for me, the less likely I'm going to bother with it.
Like I said, TV per se isn't my issue, but the general principle applies to other things. I'm voting with my dollars and buying more grossly overpriced books instead. Alphabetic text on a substrate of pressed vegetable matter has been in continuous use since about 4000 BC, which is a record I doubt any modern medium will surpass, even if the modern version contains acids that will destroy the paper within a century or so. If I'm still around then, I'll spring for a Xerox machine.
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To be fair to Microsoft, I don't think this is necessarily indicative of a racist policy at Microsoft. MS may well hire qualified applicants irrespective of race. What it does indicate is a societal problem. I don't know enough black people to have a particularly detailed picture of the challenges they face, but I know enough women to know that from grade school onwards, women are discouraged in various ways from pursuing technical and management careers. I'd be willing to bet blacks face similar pressures.
I was one of a handful of white kids bussed to a predominantly black public school as part of desegregation in Tennessee in the early 80's, and I can say that the mostly black schools I saw were in utter disrepair, short on textbooks, and staffed with teachers who did not compare well to their counterparts in mostly white schools. (In both cases, most of the teachers were white.) Schools in TN are some of the worst in the nation -- I went to what was regarded as the best high school in the area and didn't have to write a single essay in four years -- but the predominately black schools were even worse. We can talk all we want about the role of individual initiative, but not having the opportunity to learn will screw you good.
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Probably the only feature of the awful Mac GUI that I like is the application menu system. There is a permanent menu bar across the top of the screen, and it is used by whatever application is in the foreground at the time, whether or not it is maximized. I wonder if any X window managers offer that functionality.
I'm sorry, but this just sounds ridiculous to me. User interfaces are pretty badly designed as it is, adding more mouse buttons doesn't solve anything. It just makes it worse.
Requiring users to use more mouse buttons is a bad idea, but having more mouse buttons for those who want to use them is not. Chording systems, like the one used in the Oberon GUI, take a while to learn but are really handy once you've gotten used to them. And I've always wanted something like a high-end digitizer tablet puck for a mouse -- the standard buttons, plus a programmable keypad. In many cases, this would reduce the number of times I have to move my hand between the mouse and the keyboard.
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Based on what I know of the way women are treated in China -- and admitting that I don't know how Taiwan differs from mainland China in this respect -- then I'd have to agree that yes, I think your culture is insane, just as a significant portion of mine is. The treatment of women in the far east is legendarily barbaric. I certainly hope that I've heard wrong and that women over there treated as fully independent equals, or that it is at least a goal towards which your society strives.
And modern Western psychology's are not shared by a good portion of the rest of us. Nor even, it would appear, by a significant portion of your own society.
I can only cite the Western ideal that people have certain inherent, inalienable rights that are not subject to review by popular opinion or government fiat. No one denies that the West has more than its fair share of sexually-stunted misogynistic bigots. We have made great strides in the last century -- well within living memory there was no concept of marital rape but it is now recognized prohibited by law in most places -- and hopefully we will continue to move forward. If your society chooses to take a different course, I understand that such is your society's prerogative, but I can't reasonably be expected to respect a policy of inhumanity as if it were something trivial like driving on the left side of the road.
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The roots of Western prudishness obviously go back to the tangled warren of late classical monotheistic religions that eventually produced Judaism and Christianity (and Islam). I mentioned the Victorian era only because many present-day attitudes are directly attributable to it.
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Because it suits the purposes of the corporations who produce the ongoing performance of "Democracy" on the stage in Washington. I hear they're finally going to add musical numbers next year, to which bread and circuses will no doubt be attached as a rider.
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Some (though hardly all) feminists have muddied the water by suggesting that pornography denigrates women. There is much truth to this argument, but they are incorrect in their estimate of the underlying cause. Pornography denigrates women not because it treats women as objects -- though obviously it does -- but because the pseudo-religious opposition to pornography treats women as toxins from which society must be protected. To a lesser degree than in Islamic society, but for much the same reasons, the more stringent standards for female body coverings rest on the premise that women are a corrupting influence on men, and that they cannot be trusted to control their instinctual imperatives, and at the same time insisting that they must yield to the instinctual imperatives of dominant males.
Our society is choked with people who -- and I don't care what pious excuses are offered for this -- are deeply afraid of sexuality, and more often than not full of fear and loathing for female sexuality. (Before anyone flames, please don't think that I'm arguing that male-oriented porn is either a realistic or healthy representation of female sexuality. But it wouldn't matter if it were.)
The contest between censorship and anti-censorship in America has got squat to do with civil liberties. It is a battle against an entrenched, institutionalized form of mental illness, a phobia of sexuality that manifests itself in the form of political oppression on the grand scale and domestic terror on the personal scale. Those who oppose censorship can shout all day long about free speech and they will utterly fail of effect because they are not addressing the real hidden agenda. We must take a stand in favor of sex and sexuality as a healthy, normal, and necessary part of human existence and refuse to knuckle under to this morbid anti-sex psychopathology no matter what political or religious mask it uses to hide its shame.
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The number of new open source licenses has exploded in recent years. Oddly, the amount of open source software has also exploded in recent years, which is not what you'd expect if multiple licenses were somehow a deterrent to development. Then the argument is always pushed into the future -- eventually, a diversity of licenses will choke open source. Yeah, right.
Let's put this in proper perspective: Compared to commercial software, the handful of open source licenses out there is barely worth noticing. Every software company, and frequently every individual commercial product, has its own license. There are literally tens of thousands of commercial software licenses out there right now, and yet commercial software is a multi-billion dollar industry, growing by leaps and bounds.
Free software licenses are an annoyance at worst. In cases where they prevent an existing package from being used, they end up spurring the development of a competing package. That may be a pain in the ass for developers, but it's a good thing for users.
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The assertion that gamers are, as a group, any smarter or more logical than any other group of people picked at random is utter bull, and I wish Katz would get off of it. Gaming gave me better eye-hand coordination and a lot of fun hours in the process, but I can't say it affected my real-world problem-solving skills. Programming sure did, as did the formal logic courses I took in college, but Quake? Pfaw.
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PHP's a fine choice for this; I'd probably use it myself. The only alternative that readily springs to mind would be to write a daemon in C to interface with Imatix's great open source Xitami web server, which is especially friendly for this sort of hackery.
Anyway, I look forward to playing Tradewars again. Good job!
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We (that's you and me and others like us, buddy) don't, but the vast unwashed masses do. As in all things, but especially in software, most people don't have the knowledge to understand the underlying substance, nor do they care. They want flash. Apple understands this -- look how many millions of dollars they've made from colored plastic and, looking forward, a GUI that simulates colored plastic. Microsoft sure as hell understands this, too.
Yes, it's stupid. But fashion ain't exactly a new force in human affairs, and until we outgrow our primate brains, it isn't going anywhere. Personally, I'd be happy if the designers of too-hip-to-live programs would just provide a compile-time switch to leave out all that skin code so I can get on to the important stuff without wasting RAM and CPU cycles.
Of course, I'm being completely hypocritical here. I'd pay attention to skins more if someone would cook up an XMMS skin that looks like a Wyse 60 greenscreen terminal display so I could get rid of the Wyse 60 terminal I use to launch mpg123... :)
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