What's to say that his present, well-remunerated post at Microsoft doesn't swallow up all his available time and energy, leaving him unable to contribute to or direct FOSS projects?
After all, there's the permissible...and then the possible
I've never been at Tryst during the daytime. I will confirm for the slashdotting public that Tryst is really quite sociable at night, with nary a laptop (of the electronic kind anyway) in sight.
And if that's too high-tech for you, you can always go have a few drinks at Millie & Al's--last time I was there, the TV was tuned to WJLA-7, and, judging from the fuzziness, was connected to an old pair of rabbit ears somewhere....
It was cheap . Competing operating systems were not. The Apple and Amiga platforms were generally regarded as superior, but who really wants to spend money?
It was fast . I loved macs. They were neat little machines, capable of doing a lot. They also seeemed downright sluggish in comparison with a DOS machine, which wasn't running so much overhead.
It got the job done.
Loads of applications--from Lotus 1-2-3 to Lesiure Suit Larry--were developed for MSDOS. Never mind that we all had to learn how to use the command line--the apps that you needed to get the job done (or have fun) were on DOS.
Within its limitations DOS was and is a good platform.
Large bureaucracies are also surprisingly creative at ways to spend money.
In the negative, this usually means bloat, waste, and corruption. But, given good and enlightened leadership, this may mean an opportunity for innovation, investment, and improvement.
Ilford and Foma papers are great, and have usually been cheaper than Kodak papers for me, anyway. I haven't used Oriental Seagull paper yet, but I hear nice things about it.
B&W has been steadily shrinking since the C-41 process took over for consumers. It's actually getting harder and harder to get honest b&w film. People who want b&w images using conventional chemical photography seem to be moving to the chromogenic, C-41 process films like Kodak's T400CN and Ilford's XP-2. They cite finer grain and workflow simplification--C-41 films seem to scan easier. Unfortunately, they don't know what they're missing--I've always found c-41 films to be very mushy-grained in b&w, because the "grain" is really composed of fluffy dye clouds rather than hard-edged silver halide crystals. Plus, c-41 stuff is a royal pain to print onto b&w paper
I wonder how much longer I'll be able to enjoy this b&w hobby of mine though. As it is, most of my photography is digital now--but I've been toying with the notion of getting an 8x10 view camera and investigating non-silver processes. Time to see if I can find an old copy of WH Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature and go back to the very beginnings...
Those of you trashing SMS would do well to see what it does in other parts of the world. In the Philippines, SMS messaging is ubiquitous, and has been credited with enabling the rapid mobilization of street protesters which ousted corrupt President Joseph "Erap" Estrada from power.
SMS messages do many other things, as well. The Philippine Army and National Police allow citizens to report suspected guerrilla and terrorist activity via SMS. Similarly, anonymous reports can be made about government graft and corruption. The easy availability of text messaging is making government more responsive to the people.
Why SMS? because it's cheap. While you pay per minute for a voice connection, a text up to 255 characters costs you only 1 peso--that's a little less than US$0.02. Incomes are of course much lower there, and most mobile users have cash-flow problems, so mobile minutes and texts are bought on a peso-by-peso basis. Living like this, SMS is the sensible way to communicate.
Come on, people. Exactly what can really be divined from a handful of fairly bland screenshots of a pre-beta build posted on a blog? The only thing they tell me is that MS is not changing much in terms of its UI for Longhorn. Big deal. From their point of view, radical changes to the UI are a bad thing...they have an established (if admittedly not pretty) look and feel, and an absolutely enormous userbase who are utterly dependent on that UI staying exactly as it is.
And it isn't as if the "ugliness" of the UI is going to turn people away. At the end of the day, it's the OS that came preloaded with their computer. OSX may be pretty, but it's not what their school or office is running or has trained them on, and, besides, those shiny computers are too expensive compared to the more homely boxes that run Microsoft's OS. Yes, they can always defect to GNU/Linux, or *BSD, or even FreeDOS, but why go through all the trouble?
Not to detract from Linux in any way, but I think you do Apple's platform an injustice by implying that you need to pay lots of money to learn to develop on it, or that there are no good sources of knowledge.
...but I already have to pay lots of good money to use their platform, never mind learn to develop on it! The hardware is expensive. The software is neither free(beer) nor free(speech).
Don't get me wrong--I like Apple. I just can't afford 'em. By comparison, I can certainly afford Linux: I'm writing this on a computer I got free (it used to run WinME, and ended up messed-up & unbootable) with an operating system I got free. That leaves some money left over for beer, never mind speech...
Granted. Given that, "viruses" is far more preferable to "virii," since we're really using "virus" in English rather than Latin.
Latin itself changed during the two thousand years it was in use as a literary language--the difference between Cato the Elder (2nd Century BC) and, say, Hugo Grotius (17th Century AD) is something like the difference between Shakespeare and John Updike. One way of looking at things is that many people still *do* speak Latin--in its changed forms of Italian, Castilian, Catalan, French, Romanian, etc.
Six years of schoolboy Latin really makes "virii" grate on my ears.
Notwithstanding its -us ending in the nominative singular, "virus" (meaning "slime," "sludge," "poision," or even "stench") is a neuter noun of the second declension, so its plural (in both the nominative and accusative cases) should be 'vira'
Note that I say should be...because as far as I'm aware, there are no extant instances where "virus" was ever used in the plural.
What industry wants are not well-educated people, but well-trained people--cogs in their machines. If industry uses MSOffice, they expect prospective employees to be proficient in that application suite without additional (expensive) retraining.
Education takes a great deal of time than specific training, and, in the view of most organizations, education is not necessary for most tasks. It's far more efficient to train specific individuals to accomplish specific tasks. For an old-school demonstration of this, re-read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter I ("On the Division of Labour")--the famous pin-manufacturing example:
But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them haveing been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made....the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of a proper division and combination of their different operations
US$2.00 per CD is the going rate in the pirate software markets of Southeast Asia. (at least as of the last time I was in Manila, the going rate was PHP 100 per CD, or just under US$ 2.00)
I can do everything I *need* on Linux. I've got my web browser and mailreader, some media players, an office suite (OpenOffice), instant messaging...
the only thing I can't do is play my old Windows games. I'm a bit annoyed at that, but not too much. When it comes to getting work done, Linux actually does it for me better than Windows does-- the apps are good enough for me, they're free, and I have a choice of desktop environments in which to run them. When was the last time you tried linux on the desktop?
Most drivers don't change their own oil--they wouldn't know how. Likewise, most users don't install their own OSes--they come installed already. Telling them that they *can't* doesn't really make that much of a difference, since they don't.
And incidentally--if that SUV is the vehicle that Joe User wants to drive, his stock response to your example would be : "Well, those other stations don't let me use this great SUV!".
Something has to jolt the average user out of his regular routine. Maybe it's necessity (in my own case, a computer died, and I couldn't afford a new one. Making Linux run on the old computer was the most viable option) but in most cases there will be a positive pull to a new, more interesting, more fascinating world, with real benefits (even if those benefits seem frivolous to us). Firefox is getting a lot of buzz not because it's free but because people see good things in it, and are enthusiastic about it. The freedom comes later.
This already exists in several flavours.
The freely-downloadable edition of Xandros limits CD burning speeds to under 4x. (there are other limits, but that's the one that I remember).
Ubuntu doesn't come with support for anything but oggs out of the box--admittedly, they have thus wisely avoided liability for patent violations in doing so, but for basic users, this really means very limited multimedia support out of the box. (although this is easily remedied with a visit to the ubuntu restricted-formats wikipage)
Or if you want 'stripped-down' in another sense, there's always DamnSmallLinux, Feather, and PuppyLinux. Damnsmall is under 50 MB, Feather and Puppy aren't terribly large--all of them run quite happily on very limited system resources.
Linux doesn't need to compete with Microsoft on price--just perception.
Slashdot Mirror
If your folks are good enough web searchers to answer their own questions, then they're probably in the minority.
What's to say that his present, well-remunerated post at Microsoft doesn't swallow up all his available time and energy, leaving him unable to contribute to or direct FOSS projects?
After all, there's the permissible...and then the possible
I've never been at Tryst during the daytime. I will confirm for the slashdotting public that Tryst is really quite sociable at night, with nary a laptop (of the electronic kind anyway) in sight.
And if that's too high-tech for you, you can always go have a few drinks at Millie & Al's--last time I was there, the TV was tuned to WJLA-7, and, judging from the fuzziness, was connected to an old pair of rabbit ears somewhere....
Let's not forget why MSDOS won:
- It was cheap . Competing operating systems were not. The Apple and Amiga platforms were generally regarded as superior, but who really wants to spend money?
- It was fast . I loved macs. They were neat little machines, capable of doing a lot. They also seeemed downright sluggish in comparison with a DOS machine, which wasn't running so much overhead.
- It got the job done.
- Loads of applications--from Lotus 1-2-3 to Lesiure Suit Larry--were developed for MSDOS. Never mind that we all had to learn how to use the command line--the apps that you needed to get the job done (or have fun) were on DOS.
Within its limitations DOS was and is a good platform....how does this make it any different from any other drug, then?
I know alcoholics who can't function normally unless they've had a drink...and it has nothing to do with how much they enjoy a drop now and again
This article is ridiculous flamebait. Anyone who is a Decision Maker, recognizes the usefullness of both Operating Systems.
Wishful thinking. If Decision Makers were so enlightened, why are there bad decisions?
keep advertising to a minimum? I think not. The best we can hope for is far more targetted ads...
Large bureaucracies are also surprisingly creative at ways to spend money.
In the negative, this usually means bloat, waste, and corruption. But, given good and enlightened leadership, this may mean an opportunity for innovation, investment, and improvement.
Roll a d4; if you got a 2,3, or 4, you lose 1 point of Charisma.
Ilford and Foma papers are great, and have usually been cheaper than Kodak papers for me, anyway. I haven't used Oriental Seagull paper yet, but I hear nice things about it.
B&W has been steadily shrinking since the C-41 process took over for consumers. It's actually getting harder and harder to get honest b&w film. People who want b&w images using conventional chemical photography seem to be moving to the chromogenic, C-41 process films like Kodak's T400CN and Ilford's XP-2. They cite finer grain and workflow simplification--C-41 films seem to scan easier. Unfortunately, they don't know what they're missing--I've always found c-41 films to be very mushy-grained in b&w, because the "grain" is really composed of fluffy dye clouds rather than hard-edged silver halide crystals. Plus, c-41 stuff is a royal pain to print onto b&w paper
I wonder how much longer I'll be able to enjoy this b&w hobby of mine though. As it is, most of my photography is digital now--but I've been toying with the notion of getting an 8x10 view camera and investigating non-silver processes. Time to see if I can find an old copy of WH Fox Talbot's The Pencil of Nature and go back to the very beginnings...
can we expect eyecandy, or will this be like Folding@home, where linux users are consigned to a command-line client without the pretty graphics?
A text message can do an awful lot.
Those of you trashing SMS would do well to see what it does in other parts of the world. In the Philippines, SMS messaging is ubiquitous, and has been credited with enabling the rapid mobilization of street protesters which ousted corrupt President Joseph "Erap" Estrada from power.
SMS messages do many other things, as well. The Philippine Army and National Police allow citizens to report suspected guerrilla and terrorist activity via SMS. Similarly, anonymous reports can be made about government graft and corruption. The easy availability of text messaging is making government more responsive to the people.
Why SMS? because it's cheap. While you pay per minute for a voice connection, a text up to 255 characters costs you only 1 peso--that's a little less than US$0.02. Incomes are of course much lower there, and most mobile users have cash-flow problems, so mobile minutes and texts are bought on a peso-by-peso basis. Living like this, SMS is the sensible way to communicate.
...the more things stay the same
Come on, people. Exactly what can really be divined from a handful of fairly bland screenshots of a pre-beta build posted on a blog? The only thing they tell me is that MS is not changing much in terms of its UI for Longhorn. Big deal. From their point of view, radical changes to the UI are a bad thing...they have an established (if admittedly not pretty) look and feel, and an absolutely enormous userbase who are utterly dependent on that UI staying exactly as it is.
And it isn't as if the "ugliness" of the UI is going to turn people away. At the end of the day, it's the OS that came preloaded with their computer. OSX may be pretty, but it's not what their school or office is running or has trained them on, and, besides, those shiny computers are too expensive compared to the more homely boxes that run Microsoft's OS. Yes, they can always defect to GNU/Linux, or *BSD, or even FreeDOS, but why go through all the trouble?
Help is for the weak. :)
....or for those who have other things to do than muddle about randomly....
...but I already have to pay lots of good money to use their platform, never mind learn to develop on it! The hardware is expensive. The software is neither free(beer) nor free(speech).
Don't get me wrong--I like Apple. I just can't afford 'em. By comparison, I can certainly afford Linux: I'm writing this on a computer I got free (it used to run WinME, and ended up messed-up & unbootable) with an operating system I got free. That leaves some money left over for beer, never mind speech...
heck, I just works, too! I wish I just works less hours, though.
Granted. Given that, "viruses" is far more preferable to "virii," since we're really using "virus" in English rather than Latin.
Latin itself changed during the two thousand years it was in use as a literary language--the difference between Cato the Elder (2nd Century BC) and, say, Hugo Grotius (17th Century AD) is something like the difference between Shakespeare and John Updike. One way of looking at things is that many people still *do* speak Latin--in its changed forms of Italian, Castilian, Catalan, French, Romanian, etc.
lingua Latina: semel scripta, ubique lecta
Ironic that the whole bureaucratic procurement system was designed to *prevent* such a thing from taking place...
Six years of schoolboy Latin really makes "virii" grate on my ears.
Notwithstanding its -us ending in the nominative singular, "virus" (meaning "slime," "sludge," "poision," or even "stench") is a neuter noun of the second declension, so its plural (in both the nominative and accusative cases) should be 'vira'
Note that I say should be...because as far as I'm aware, there are no extant instances where "virus" was ever used in the plural.
Good education is different from good training.
What industry wants are not well-educated people, but well-trained people--cogs in their machines. If industry uses MSOffice, they expect prospective employees to be proficient in that application suite without additional (expensive) retraining.
Education takes a great deal of time than specific training, and, in the view of most organizations, education is not necessary for most tasks. It's far more efficient to train specific individuals to accomplish specific tasks. For an old-school demonstration of this, re-read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, Book I, Chapter I ("On the Division of Labour")--the famous pin-manufacturing example:
US$2.00 per CD is the going rate in the pirate software markets of Southeast Asia. (at least as of the last time I was in Manila, the going rate was PHP 100 per CD, or just under US$ 2.00)
How simple do you want?
I can do everything I *need* on Linux. I've got my web browser and mailreader, some media players, an office suite (OpenOffice), instant messaging...
the only thing I can't do is play my old Windows games. I'm a bit annoyed at that, but not too much. When it comes to getting work done, Linux actually does it for me better than Windows does-- the apps are good enough for me, they're free, and I have a choice of desktop environments in which to run them. When was the last time you tried linux on the desktop?
Most drivers don't change their own oil--they wouldn't know how. Likewise, most users don't install their own OSes--they come installed already. Telling them that they *can't* doesn't really make that much of a difference, since they don't.
And incidentally--if that SUV is the vehicle that Joe User wants to drive, his stock response to your example would be : "Well, those other stations don't let me use this great SUV!".
Something has to jolt the average user out of his regular routine. Maybe it's necessity (in my own case, a computer died, and I couldn't afford a new one. Making Linux run on the old computer was the most viable option) but in most cases there will be a positive pull to a new, more interesting, more fascinating world, with real benefits (even if those benefits seem frivolous to us). Firefox is getting a lot of buzz not because it's free but because people see good things in it, and are enthusiastic about it. The freedom comes later.
This already exists in several flavours. The freely-downloadable edition of Xandros limits CD burning speeds to under 4x. (there are other limits, but that's the one that I remember). Ubuntu doesn't come with support for anything but oggs out of the box--admittedly, they have thus wisely avoided liability for patent violations in doing so, but for basic users, this really means very limited multimedia support out of the box. (although this is easily remedied with a visit to the ubuntu restricted-formats wikipage) Or if you want 'stripped-down' in another sense, there's always DamnSmallLinux, Feather, and PuppyLinux. Damnsmall is under 50 MB, Feather and Puppy aren't terribly large--all of them run quite happily on very limited system resources. Linux doesn't need to compete with Microsoft on price--just perception.
Pirates give them a more functional OS for very nearly free. Same difference, right?