I think you're approaching this from an end-user perspective, as though Linux desktops are equivalent to products being sold to consumers, want to compete on market-share, etc. That's missing the point of what drives the Free Software ecosystem. Since people can produce their own software, they will. The desktops themselves are down-stream of different toolkits, and then set-ups for those desktops in various distros are downstream from there.
The GTK was developed for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced Gnome. Qt was developed, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced KDE. Others looked at GTK and said "hey! we can produce a desktop which is more lightweight than Gnome!" and developed Xfce. Since lots of people find programming fun, and they love sharing stuff, lots of stuff gets made.
This is a good thing. This isn't a competition, because this isn't a market. Individual installations aren't commodities. The only way to have a "standard" would be to go around telling everyone they're bad people for creating and installing and releasing new stuff. Just because Apple and Microsoft have end-users brainwashed into being terrified of knowing what's under the hood of their computer doesn't mean Linux has to go hide all the gory details from you.
...what's underground gets drudged back up into the open. In late 2014 discussions of run-of-the-mill internet drama regarding ideologues and he-said, she-said stories was unexpectedly banned from multiple websites, so it moved to 4chan. And then, in an unprecedented move, it was mass-banned from 4chan as well.
So, what happens then? The conversation doesn't stop; it moves to the venue which is least likely to inhibit it, which ended up being 8chan. The Streisand Effect was strong. As soon as it happened I knew that it'd be some kind of turning point.
All politics aside (jokes! I know that's impossible), the dynamics of crowds and movement on the internet seem to be something woefully misunderstood by the people who positioned themselves - through venture-capital funding and fuck-you money, I'd reckon - into power over moderation of the internet. Any long-time netizen could have predicted this would happen. Drama plays itself out in a matter of days or weeks if you don't take drastic steps to squelch it.
The summary reads like nonsensical whinging about things that have nothing to do with Adobe.
That's because it's actually just a bug report and a feature request for a piece of proprietary software; something which necessitates all the power of an international journalist outlet to get any actual response to from the developers. Just another reminder that Stallman Was Right.
Having skeuomorphic renditions of familiar desk accessories aided new computer users users in accepting the virtual desktop interface metaphor. Whether or not they were actually useful in-and-of-themselves is ancillary.to this purpose.
Refusing to sell off all control of your flagship product or to agree to a one-directional NDA preventing you from ever discussing the deal is a far stretch from saying Kildall blew off IBM. Seems like a carefully-considered decision to not cash out on his life's work and end his company overnight. If the only thing that should have factored into his thoughts was the pay-out, then maybe. The real mistake was letting IBM decide the price for CP/M and letting them price it several hundred dollars more than PC-DOS.
Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.
Exactly! Thank you, this is precisely my experience with books. They are tangible, tactile, books that give you an intuitive feel for where you "are" in them that can't be digitized. You can flip back and forth and write in them and grab them instantly and place them spots. I've been reading lots of Marshall McLuhan in the past year and the more I do, the more I appreciate what we're missing out on by putting everything on the other-side of a pane of glass.
The GPL is user-centric. The user is entitled to fully own their computer, so they can get the source code and modify the software whenever they want. All the restrictions and "unfree" elements of the GPL are placed on distributors and manufacturers because it's not their freedom being protected. I don't get why the GPL3 is in the wrong for prioritizing the freedom of the user to fully control their devices over the freedom of distributors to lock down and control them.
The problem is that screens are so environmental that it's like fish trying to study the effects of water.
I'm thinking you have to follow McLuhan's lead and consider screens the latest manifestation of what started with the telegraph and the modern newspaper: study the effects of people having their senses stretched more and more out of the immediate physical vicinity every day into imaginary yet often real places.
I've pre-paid for a few years on a shared-hosting plan. Since I don't have a dedicated IP address, that means my little blog doesn't have an SSL certificate. I've got 2-factor authentication turned on, so I'm not super-worried about credentials being intercepted... is there anything else I really need to worry about?
Sure, and before Transformers came along television cartoons never once, ever, existed for brazenly the sole purpose of peddling kids plastic junk. And back when Google's motto was "Don't be evil" it was totally trustworthy and I gave it all of my personal information.
Once a technology has insinuated itself into your life you and subsequent generations are stuck with it for decades. I'm going to say that you should go slow with your relationship with Alexa because people change.
There's a good point buried in your dismissal that is worth responding to. Do we listen to canaries in coalmines who are tweeting in distress? Because in 20 years a ton of kids are going to find themselves where I am today.
Check the link in my signature, that's sort of my approach too. I'm basing it on Marshall McLuhan who said that the content of the new, invisible medium is always the old thing. So back in the early 80s everyone was used to filing cabinets and manila file folders, which lent the Macintosh a interface a friendly interface for an otherwise difficult transition. Now people may use folders on a computer without ever having made use of a filing cabinet to begin with: the meaning of computer interface is severed from the originating metaphors. If you're strapped for time jump straight to episode II (skipping the Prelude and the first ep).
I think we'd all like to be able to immerse ourselves in a computer generated reality
Speak for yourself. I've a hard enough time maintaining presence and immersion within the physically/chemically generated reality I was born into. Then again, I'm in my late 20s and had a screen in front of my face every day since I was about 6. Seeing as this story about screen time is still on the front page, I think we'd better deal with the long-term effects of the 1080p virtual reality we already have before strapping things onto our face any more than we already are.
First time I've heard of this. Had to dig deep to find out it's a distant fork of CyanogenMod. Are they really making their logo an upside-down Google G?
Worth following, since being Android it'll be useful for people who need their apps. But Puri.sm is more like what I'm looking for.
Well that's what 3rd Rock from the Sun was all about too, except the reasons for the Solomon's lack of social adjustment were more artfully and sensitively handled. Nobody who might have learned something from that show would think that they were supposed to be the target for the message.
The comparison isn't between computers and books -- it's between computers/books and face to face learning. The media just facilitates one-to-many styles of information dissemination. If classrooms shrunk from one teacher with 30 students down to a 1:1 personal tutor model, and all media were eliminated for face to face working in a totally personal way then wouldn't quality of education increase immensely?
At The Beer Store in Ontario we have price lists for all the product. Taxes are included in the shelf-price. When the power goes out it slows us down, but we can still just use a calculator and tabulate everything manually. No debit or credit, just cash. There are no receipts, obviously, but for the most part customers just want their beer.
If there was tax involved and the products were varied as opposed to mostly of the same sort and fairly consistent in price then it might be harder to do.
I've been reading Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and Curtis and LambdaaMOO was mentioned in a section about what we call "video game addiction" today.
But to the hardest-core MUDders, the traditional online epithet "Get a life" is more the issue. When you are putting in seventy or eighty hours a week on your fantasy character, you don't have much time left for a healthy social life. If you are a college student, as the majority of MUDders are, MUDding for seventy hours a week can be as destructive to the course of your life as chemical dependency. Computer scientist Pavel Curtis created an experimental MUD, LambdaMOO, on his workstation at Xerox Corporation's renowned Palo Alto Research Center. At a panel discussion in Berkeley, California, Curtis had this to say about the addictive potential of MUDding:
I am concerned about the degree to which people find virtual communities enchanting. We have people who use LambdaMOO who are not in control of their usage who are, I believe, seriously and clinically addicted. . . . These people aren't addicted to playing video games. It wouldn't do the same thing for them. They're communication addicted. They're addicted to being able to go out and find people twenty-four hours a day and have interesting conversations with them. We're talking about people who spend up to seventy hours a week connected and active on a MUD. Seventy hours a week, while they're trying to put themselves through school at Cambridge. I'm talking about a fellow who's supposed to be at home in Cambridge to see his family for the holidays, missed his train by five hours, phoned his parents, lied about why he was late, got on the next train, got home at 12:30 in the morning, didn't go home, went to a terminal room at Cambridge University and MUDded for another two hours. He arrived home at 2:30 in the morning to find the police and some panicked parents, and then began to wonder if maybe he wasn't in control.
These are very enticing places for a segment of the community. And it's not like the kinds of addictions that we've dealt with as a society in the past. If they're out of control, I think that's a problem. But if someone is spending a large portion of their time being social with people who live thousands of miles away, you can't say that they've turned inward. They aren't shunning society. They're actively seeking it. They're probably doing it more actively than anyone around them. It's a whole new ballgame. That's what I'm saying about virtual societies.
Just watched the first episode of Electric Avenue and it was pretty great. Giant space voyage simulator with CG view screen, computer usage in the field by archeologists, and a blind woman who runs some sort of graphics design company (!) using microcomputer accessibility devices. Lots of neat footage.
https://computer-literacy-proj...
I've been thinking about the Spotify A.I.s and wondering whether or not more people choose music based on the style of the song or on the meaning in the words. Because if lots of people like songs with a certain message, than is it possible to end up getting song recommendations in some sort of subliminal suggestion bubble? Like, every week, you end up with songs telling you how great you are, or, worse, some sad country songs about how terrible everything is?
Slashdot Mirror
I think you're approaching this from an end-user perspective, as though Linux desktops are equivalent to products being sold to consumers, want to compete on market-share, etc. That's missing the point of what drives the Free Software ecosystem. Since people can produce their own software, they will. The desktops themselves are down-stream of different toolkits, and then set-ups for those desktops in various distros are downstream from there.
The GTK was developed for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced Gnome. Qt was developed, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced KDE. Others looked at GTK and said "hey! we can produce a desktop which is more lightweight than Gnome!" and developed Xfce. Since lots of people find programming fun, and they love sharing stuff, lots of stuff gets made.
This is a good thing. This isn't a competition, because this isn't a market. Individual installations aren't commodities. The only way to have a "standard" would be to go around telling everyone they're bad people for creating and installing and releasing new stuff. Just because Apple and Microsoft have end-users brainwashed into being terrified of knowing what's under the hood of their computer doesn't mean Linux has to go hide all the gory details from you.
...what's underground gets drudged back up into the open. In late 2014 discussions of run-of-the-mill internet drama regarding ideologues and he-said, she-said stories was unexpectedly banned from multiple websites, so it moved to 4chan. And then, in an unprecedented move, it was mass-banned from 4chan as well.
So, what happens then? The conversation doesn't stop; it moves to the venue which is least likely to inhibit it, which ended up being 8chan. The Streisand Effect was strong. As soon as it happened I knew that it'd be some kind of turning point.
All politics aside (jokes! I know that's impossible), the dynamics of crowds and movement on the internet seem to be something woefully misunderstood by the people who positioned themselves - through venture-capital funding and fuck-you money, I'd reckon - into power over moderation of the internet. Any long-time netizen could have predicted this would happen. Drama plays itself out in a matter of days or weeks if you don't take drastic steps to squelch it.
Dammit, Slashdot Beta! Responded to the wrong commenter.
That's because it's actually just a bug report and a feature request for a piece of proprietary software; something which necessitates all the power of an international journalist outlet to get any actual response to from the developers. Just another reminder that Stallman Was Right.
Having skeuomorphic renditions of familiar desk accessories aided new computer users users in accepting the virtual desktop interface metaphor. Whether or not they were actually useful in-and-of-themselves is ancillary.to this purpose.
Refusing to sell off all control of your flagship product or to agree to a one-directional NDA preventing you from ever discussing the deal is a far stretch from saying Kildall blew off IBM. Seems like a carefully-considered decision to not cash out on his life's work and end his company overnight. If the only thing that should have factored into his thoughts was the pay-out, then maybe. The real mistake was letting IBM decide the price for CP/M and letting them price it several hundred dollars more than PC-DOS.
Exactly! Thank you, this is precisely my experience with books. They are tangible, tactile, books that give you an intuitive feel for where you "are" in them that can't be digitized. You can flip back and forth and write in them and grab them instantly and place them spots. I've been reading lots of Marshall McLuhan in the past year and the more I do, the more I appreciate what we're missing out on by putting everything on the other-side of a pane of glass.
The GPL is user-centric. The user is entitled to fully own their computer, so they can get the source code and modify the software whenever they want. All the restrictions and "unfree" elements of the GPL are placed on distributors and manufacturers because it's not their freedom being protected. I don't get why the GPL3 is in the wrong for prioritizing the freedom of the user to fully control their devices over the freedom of distributors to lock down and control them.
The problem is that screens are so environmental that it's like fish trying to study the effects of water.
I'm thinking you have to follow McLuhan's lead and consider screens the latest manifestation of what started with the telegraph and the modern newspaper: study the effects of people having their senses stretched more and more out of the immediate physical vicinity every day into imaginary yet often real places.
No, obviously you should use it like a magic eight ball, or a natural-language command line.
I'm pretty sure lots of people have read Paul Freiberger's Fire in the Valley, which is how I knew who he was. Very sad.
I've pre-paid for a few years on a shared-hosting plan. Since I don't have a dedicated IP address, that means my little blog doesn't have an SSL certificate. I've got 2-factor authentication turned on, so I'm not super-worried about credentials being intercepted... is there anything else I really need to worry about?
Once a technology has insinuated itself into your life you and subsequent generations are stuck with it for decades. I'm going to say that you should go slow with your relationship with Alexa because people change.
There's a good point buried in your dismissal that is worth responding to. Do we listen to canaries in coalmines who are tweeting in distress? Because in 20 years a ton of kids are going to find themselves where I am today.
Check the link in my signature, that's sort of my approach too. I'm basing it on Marshall McLuhan who said that the content of the new, invisible medium is always the old thing. So back in the early 80s everyone was used to filing cabinets and manila file folders, which lent the Macintosh a interface a friendly interface for an otherwise difficult transition. Now people may use folders on a computer without ever having made use of a filing cabinet to begin with: the meaning of computer interface is severed from the originating metaphors. If you're strapped for time jump straight to episode II (skipping the Prelude and the first ep).
Speak for yourself. I've a hard enough time maintaining presence and immersion within the physically/chemically generated reality I was born into. Then again, I'm in my late 20s and had a screen in front of my face every day since I was about 6. Seeing as this story about screen time is still on the front page, I think we'd better deal with the long-term effects of the 1080p virtual reality we already have before strapping things onto our face any more than we already are.
I'm pleased by the moratorium.
What? No, no, the marketers would never go for that, too common. How about "video terminal"?
How about no software at all? TVs with just a bunch of easily-identifiable ICs and no programming. "The Future is Dumb."
First time I've heard of this. Had to dig deep to find out it's a distant fork of CyanogenMod. Are they really making their logo an upside-down Google G? Worth following, since being Android it'll be useful for people who need their apps. But Puri.sm is more like what I'm looking for.
Well that's what 3rd Rock from the Sun was all about too, except the reasons for the Solomon's lack of social adjustment were more artfully and sensitively handled. Nobody who might have learned something from that show would think that they were supposed to be the target for the message.
The comparison isn't between computers and books -- it's between computers/books and face to face learning. The media just facilitates one-to-many styles of information dissemination. If classrooms shrunk from one teacher with 30 students down to a 1:1 personal tutor model, and all media were eliminated for face to face working in a totally personal way then wouldn't quality of education increase immensely?
At The Beer Store in Ontario we have price lists for all the product. Taxes are included in the shelf-price. When the power goes out it slows us down, but we can still just use a calculator and tabulate everything manually. No debit or credit, just cash. There are no receipts, obviously, but for the most part customers just want their beer.
If there was tax involved and the products were varied as opposed to mostly of the same sort and fairly consistent in price then it might be harder to do.
Just watched the first episode of Electric Avenue and it was pretty great. Giant space voyage simulator with CG view screen, computer usage in the field by archeologists, and a blind woman who runs some sort of graphics design company (!) using microcomputer accessibility devices. Lots of neat footage. https://computer-literacy-proj...
I've been thinking about the Spotify A.I.s and wondering whether or not more people choose music based on the style of the song or on the meaning in the words. Because if lots of people like songs with a certain message, than is it possible to end up getting song recommendations in some sort of subliminal suggestion bubble? Like, every week, you end up with songs telling you how great you are, or, worse, some sad country songs about how terrible everything is?