Thanks so much for bringing this up! Both articles claim that Radio is a loser, and I couldn't agree more. You've pinpointed the exact reason why that is, but most people ignore it, and it's really sad. The radio waves were a hell of a lot more dynamic even three or four years ago, but they've become as dried up and dull as PressPlay or its ilk.
This is a clear case of consumers losing, and I think it's the big reason why people have flocked online to get their music, rather than listen to the radio. It's strange though, because most everyone I know doesn't download as much new stuff as old stuff that they've enjoyed hearing for years.
If you're going to be fed something that you didn't choose, it'd better damn well be great and exciting! If it's not, it's better to eat the stuff that you want to eat, even if it is the same old thing.
Fair enough. The problem is though, what happens if the company that exists today doesn't exist tomorrow? I have nothing against the Mac community at all. In fact, I still feel a great deal of allegiance to it, and I'm really happy with the strides they've made in terms of shareware stuff for OSX. But there are, unfortunately, no guarantees with apple, as anyone who pinned their hopes on Lisa/QuickdrawGX/OpenDoc/Copland/Be/Clones knows. Apple has definitely changed for the better. They are easily 100% better than they were five years ago. But Mac users are still tied in the end.
I think these guys get a worse rap than they deserve. Remember, the original Mac wasn't selling for shit becuase it was underpowered. The Mac Plus was the computer they should have released (a full meg RAM was so necessary) and Scully presided over that. He also helped push the low cost color macs that really earned Macs their place in the educational market. All those iMacs in elementary schools are spiritual descendants of the lc. Before that, all Macs were way too expensive.
Say what you will about the Newton also, but it's still a great platform. I love my Dad's 2000, it's just too damn big. The one (name escapes me) that the guy who designed the iMac made, the one that had a keyboard and was like a tiny laptop, now that thing was cool. I wanted one so bad even though I knew the platform would be axed. Newton was a great idea. Scully doesn't deserve all the crap he got over it.
There are some other great things these guys did too. They started bringing game developers back with Gamesprockets and Quickdraw3d (pre OpenGL/DirectX dominance). They shepherded the fantastic transition to the PPC. They really moved the multimedia stuff, with things like video editing which are really major areas for Apple now. Quicktime is a major fruit of those labors, and it's still a big part in what they do now. Truetype fonts were largely an Apple thing, and they were critical for the publishing market. Hypercard too, went counter to everything Jobs wanted in his Mac, so Scully was the champion for that wonderful program.
I think all Macheads (me included, in the past) tend to idealize Jobs and demonize everyone else. It's really not fair, as Jobs wouldn't have nearly the same flexibility to build up Apple with if he didn't have raw material like color screens and Quicktime.
Is a hammer fun to use?
Sure. Ever built anything for fun? I took woodshop in junior high, and I loved building things in there. Yes, I used a hammer, and I had fun doing it, as well as all the other tools.
Are a pen and paper?
Yeah. I love doing things like reading books printed on paper, doing crossword puzzles printed on paper with my pen. I also love *gasp* writing things like short stories and poems. For fun. With pen and paper, just to clarify.
Celphone?
Yep. Unless you don't enjoy talking to friends on the phone. Plus, I can play solitaire on mine on the busride to work.
Answering machine?
Well, not in and of itself, I grant you that, but I know a lot of people who like putting weird funny messages on their machines to mess with friends who call. Plus, if someone leaves a message that leaves to getting together with them and having fun, then well, why not?
What you must learn, Mr. Genius IQ, is that Tools != Work. Tools are, like many things in this world, without any inherent purpose. A hammer is used to pound nails, but nails are used to hold things together, but what is that thing? The hammer is completely separate in and of itself from me, and as such I can get what I want out of it. If I get enjoyment out of making marks on paper, then how does that affect the status of the pen and paper I use? Does it make them any less tools?
And besides that, what happens if I use my phone while I'm on vacation? It's still a tool, but I'm using it to have fun! If you can't extract even simple pleasures out of things, then you really must be living a miserable life. Not that things are all there is to life, but they're so easy to find some small joy in. If you can't do that, then I pity you. Maybe you need to not work so hard. Stop and smell the flowers, which are not only meant to be ground up and sold in perfumes, but are also meant to be enjoyed as they are.
He brought in Scully, who wound up having him fired anyway.
His first baby was the Lisa, if you recall. We all know how well that one did. Only when he got kicked off of Lisa did he take up Macintosh. Raskin deserves a lot of credit there.
He insisted that the original Mac have only one floppy and 128k of RAM, both of which made it almost useless. He also had these grand delusions of how well the original Mac was selling, and made up his own projected figures and treated them as real. This helped precipitate his firing.
While I'm on that one, he didn't want the 3.5" floppy at all. The original engineers literally had to hide the sony representative selling the things in the closet when Steve popped up unexpectedly. The team saved his ass there.
Jobs didn't have color in that first Mac. The Mac II really sold a lot because of the color.
No games originally. These new Macintosh things are serious machines. He didn't fight this one at all.
No development environment free until OSX. This sort of thing stifled a lot of free/sharware that could have really helped things out. Thank god for Bill Atkinson and Hypercard!
The G4 cube.
Not that Jobs' return hasn't done great things for the company, but I think one of the things he's learned is to leave all the technical stuff to Avie Tevanian, and just run the show. The man isn't a saint (stole some money from Woz in the early days too) and he doesn't have a crystal ball. There's no guarantee he'll maintain his lead, and there's no guarantee that his ego won't push everyone with a mac in a direction they shouldn't be going. And if that happens, or if he leaves, then you're up a creek again. It's Ok though, Linux will run on all those old Macs that cost a fortune to upgrade.
I know, I was a big time supporter of the community myself back in the day.
The problem with the mac community though, is that you control nothing. Apple owns you in every way, and when they drop the ball, you get dropped with it. You have no sway over your own destiny. I personally wasn't a graphic designer, so in the mid 90's I really felt fucked over. I didn't do photoshop or quark or freehand or premier or Kai or any of the other programs that Apple really loved. As a result, I felt alienated. I especially felt out becuase I wanted to create programs on the platform that was described as the platform for creative types. And I couldn't because I couldn't afford it.
What a load of shit.
Apple likes having a community around, but you have no power. You had no power to save cyberdog or OpenDoc or Quickdraw GLX or any of the other great stuff Apple put out. You had no power to say "I want OSX to support my older Powermacs!" You had no power to demand that games be made for the system (only recently has that even started to change). And you have no power to say "I want to buy my system from someone else." This is key, especially if you've ever tried to deal with upgrading a mac, and finding you're paying the price for a whole new machine (something I've experienced).
The Mac community is a strong and rabid one no doubt, but they hold no real sway. If Apple moves, you move with it, no ifs ands or buts. If IBM moves, I don't. If Redhat moves then I don't. I control my own destiny here because Redhat and IBM don't own Linux anymore than Slackware, Debian, or even Linus does. And if someone with a balance sheet decides not to bother with something I need because it's got nothing to do with Adobe products, then I'm not screwed. That's the difference between Mac and Linux, and that's why I made my switch.
Computers aren't supposed to be fun. They're supposed to be TOOLS.
Why can't they be fun? Or better yet, why can't they be fun tools? For someone who likes to brag about how smart they are, this was a pretty poorly thought out statement.
Ok, first off... 0.24% is not bad. I personally don't care, because that number can still go higher. I know Linus isn't aiming for world domination, nor is Redhat, Debian, or anyone else really (maybe RMS, but that's Ok.) The point is, it's there, it's usable, and people can move to it if they choose.
As for OSX, yeah it's a fantastic product. The best OS in the world for desktop in my opinion. But that doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
Anyone remember 1984? Apple was the best desktop OS then too. They were really something to cheer for then. It wasn't just a new pretty and slick interface, it was a whole new way of working with computers. Sure, it was clunky in some ways, but Apple had the best system on the market for years.
So what happened? Well, most people know about this, but they got greedy and lazy. They overcharged. They stopped building the coolest stuff. They let the OS wither and die as we salivated over the ill-fated Copland. 3rd party developers abandoned us and unless you were willing to fork out hundreds of dollars for dev tools and docs, there was no way you were going to help the problem. They still had their strengths, but they were a shell of the vibrant company that they once were.
So here we are now. Apple's fixed things. They've got the best system on the planet. They've got slick hardware. They give the dev tools and docs for free again, AppleII style. People gush about the system left and right, and they should! It's really nice.
But who's to say that it'll be that way in two years? Apple could get lazy again. They could get greedy again. They could fire all their talent or let them leave again. And then everyone with macs will be back where they were five years ago, fretting over whether or not to move to windows.
And you know what? Linux will still be there,.24% or more or less, but it will still be there. So I personally don't care about what this article is talking about. I felt screwed by apple, and I'm never going back, no matter how nice their stuff is. There's a reason people push free as in speech, and it's because you will not get screwed over when some company like apple decides you're not worth the effort because you don't use photoshop.
I love Linux because it frees me, not just to work and learn, but to work and learn with confidence that my skills will be worthwhile, and that I will never be a commodity because I can contribute. I'm proud to be part of that 0.24% because that 0.24% isn't just something to be treated like pennies that someone is afraid to lose. It's 0.24% people who care, who can and do contribute. Linux is that 0.24%: it's people not stock options.
So you can keep your flashy system. I'm staying right here where I'm not just revenue on a balance sheet.
Weird, Pubmed works fine for me. It's just another toolbar underneath my bookmarks. I haven't tried any of the other apps. I wouldn't be surprised though, if the fact that yours didn't work (I haven't updated Pubmed in a while, so I don't know) is that the API isn't stable. It could always be a chrome problem too, maybe try another skin? I don't know. Your bug definitely needs fixing though.
I firmly agree with you on the ability to easily remove modules. The install I found to be pretty easy (click the link, click ok, let it download, restart moz) but the uninstall definitely needs to happen. Either a prefs panel to do it or something in the tasks menu. Hopefully that wouldn't be too hard to add. Moz devs?
Honestly, I want the core frozen absolutely solid. Then declare 1.0. While I love all the features that have been put in to the UI, what really needs to happen for 1.0 in my opinion is to stabilize that API so people can start coding around the platform.
The original vision is still critical, and I want to see more projects like the fantastic pubmed. These things are going to be what really kicks mozilla in to high gear. I really believe that third party stuff like this will make mozilla worth having.
1.0 is all about stability. The browser itself is certainly stable enough to go 1.0. You can add the UI enhancements for 1.1, but make the core solid so people have the platform. Then we'll start to get the plugins that we so desperately need too.
I just wanted to weigh in my thanks. I know it's reduntant and all, but I know the moz team reads the site (hi Asa!) and I just wanted to say thanks for the great browser. I use it in conjunction with Konqueror at home, and it's my browser of choice on my windows partition and at work. I've been amazed at how much it's progressed, and now my most waited for feature (javascript prefs panel) is in! Thanks you guys. I'm rooting for you!
Yeah, and after all the flack everyone gave him here for being terse with his interview, it's great to see his changelog speaking for him instead. Much kudos.
On the subject of gaming, how is it you're going about playing windows games? I'd like to make the final switch, and now that I've finally used SO 6 (which rocks my world, aside from needing to disable the damned help system) I don't really need Windows for much besides games.
So, are you using transmeta, wine, or something I'm not aware of? I'd love to get some advice on this one. The more I move to Linux, the happier I am.
I had nearly the same dilemma! I went with bash in the end, after a gruelling few months with csh. The GUI stuff is easy, choosing something as important as your shell... that's tough.
Pretty cool. I've never seen Applescript studio. Unfortunatley, I kicked my Mac habit a few years back, so I won't get to try it out.
It looks pretty different than Cocoa was though. Cocoa wasn't about creating apps really, there weren't what you'd call "widgets". Instead, the concept was to have a grid and according to the state of the grid you'd alter the objects on the grid. Now that I think about it, it's a hell of a lot like cellular automata, but as a programming method.
So you have these different items that would appear on the board. You could make a rule saying "If the fly moves next to the frog, then the fly disappears and the frog's tongue appears." This would be done visually, by having a before and after panel, making definining state changes really easy. There would also be rules to respond to events, like "If you hit the right arrow key, move Jimmy to the right." It could play sounds too. The coolest thing about it was that there was a plugin that allowed you to view the apps in your browser. They were talking about moving the apps to java to make this easier, but it was too much work.
Anyhow, the project was never designed to build apps that would be really useful. It was, however, a great way to get kids started on programming, and it really was fun to use. It was, by nature, the kind of app that encouraged playfulness, which I've never encountered in the same way in another environment. I've never actually worked with hypercard, but Cocoa was so insanely simple that you just had to play with it.
Yeah, I guess I was being a little unclear. The "he" isn't so much Tolkien himself, but the works. The works themselves merit the deal in terms of full control and large amounts of cash. While this doesn't affect the man himself (he is dead after all), it's amazing to me whenever a work gets this kind of special privledge. Had Tolkien himself been alive today and cutting the deal, he would have gotten what he wanted personally. As it is, the works have to stand for him on their own.
And as for the estate, I had assumed they would get royalties for all works derived. I don't know the details of movie rights sales, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a royalty deal in there somewhere for his estate to cash in on. If there isn't, then I suppose they won't benefit except by book sales like you mention. I guess I assumed too much with the royalty thing though, my mistake.
This is so common, it's almost absurd to even bring it up. As Wilde said, "When artists get together they talk about money, when bankers get together they talk about art."
Shakespeare wrote tons of plays in order to keep the audiences rolling in. It's nothing shocking that they bear a lot of similarities to each other, it made them quicker to write! Some people resorted to writing much quicker plays, but there's a reason he was so successful.
Dickens was paid by the word. There's the reason why his books are so long and drawn out, he got rewarded to make them long.
Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 (in the basement of the building I'm in now no less!) and the whole of Martian Chronicles just to help pay the rent. Asimov wrote the Foundation and robot stories to pay for his tuition.
Every single artist from the Renaissance had a patron who paid for the art.
Does any of this get in the way of the fact that the art is great in and of itself. Long after the money has evaporated, the work is still there for us. That's part of what makes it great.
Poshumuously, and through an intermediary, but he got it.
Jackson $270 million to make the movie, and free reign over the whole project. That's both the money and the artistic control, and I'm sure Tolkien's estate will benefit from it.
It just shows the strength of these books that they merited this kind of deal. Very few things in the entertainment industry do.
Pretty cool, but I'm waiting for a player that supports ogg files too, since all my own music is encoded that way. Once there's a nice high storage player that supports oggs too, I'll go for it.
I also see a fairly limited use for this sort of thing, since most people probably want a player that has a fair amount of local storage. While this thing is really cool if you're on a network, most of us don't really have the capability to use it. I wish I was on the kind of network that would allow this to be useful though.:-)
Now totally OT, but I'm glad Taco's been posting today again. He's still got the best story choices of all the editors.
That one really is dangerous, because if you buy it for your kid then all the other kids at school will beat him up for being the loser who's still in to Power Rangers.
I'm not entirely sure, but I was pretty involved in it up to a point. I think they stopped developing it, but I think it was done out of house, so those guys kept working on it. That's the last I heard of it, and I'm betting it's dead and buried now.
It's pretty unfortunate too, it was a great way to write simple little apps. I wrote a whole Mendelian genetics breeding simulation (which I still have somewhere), and I have a couple of books that have pictures and descriptions from tons of little programs people wrote. It wasn't meant for serious work, but could make some nifty little demos very easily. Great way to get kids programming. I've thought repeatedly about doing a free version for linux, but it's a lot more work than I have time for. Still, it'd be a very worthy project.
As far as I can tell, it's not in the sig (there is no sig, it's an AC!) but it's just appended to the link with a bunch of spaces (%20) in between the goatse and the site redirect that goes before it.
If you enter this in to your navbar:
http://srd.yahoo.com/* http://www.linux.com"
You can guess where you'll end up. Clever trick, but then taco said they'd have to be clever.
You strike me as a man with a lot of deep seated issues, but I'll respond anyway.
First of all, did you ever think that all the overcrowding is due to the fact that the schools don't have the money they need? I know you think that it's the teachers that screwed everything up, but did you ever stop to consider that with more resources they could have built more classrooms, gotten better textbooks, hired more people, and generally done a better job?
Perhaps this is difficult to understand if you're the type who is actually complaining about working for $150 an hour (which I'm sure you got paid very well for), but these are people who are insanely underpaid and overstressed and simply do not have the resources to deal with the shit they go through each day. I can guarantee you, none of these teachers is doing it for the money.
As for your trailer park comment, I totally disagree. Having had many classes in such trailers, I can honestly tell you that it makes no difference. I know you think very little of teachers, but it is the teachers that make the difference, not whether the room you're in is labeled temporary or not. All that blacktop space you want back so much will just be used to give kids a good time, which you don't care about anyway. What we actually need are smaller class sizes, which requires hiring more teachers (even if they have to work in "temporary" classrooms), and that requires money. Money which you don't want to give them. Funny thing that. If you want to know what really makes schools "cold" it's the fact that classes are so big that students don't even get a chance to interact with the teacher, let alone parents. You want more parent interaction? Hire more teachers. You want more teachers? Give the schools money.
And as for your proposal of reintroducing corporal punishment and humiliation, I totally agree with you that it would be effective in dealing with the problem at hand. However, humiliation may not come in the form of a dunce cap any more, but kids always get in trouble in public, and it's always a scene. The humiliation factor hasn't gone away at all, in fact I'd say it's used as often now as ever, if not more so. At my schools, we had to do things like pick up trash at lunch (you actually would resort to asking your friends for their trash) and standing in corners for a time. Not a dunce cap, but still publicly humiliating.
And corporal punishment... well, I always think of violence as the resort of the desperate and the incompetent. Which are you?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks so much for bringing this up! Both articles claim that Radio is a loser, and I couldn't agree more. You've pinpointed the exact reason why that is, but most people ignore it, and it's really sad. The radio waves were a hell of a lot more dynamic even three or four years ago, but they've become as dried up and dull as PressPlay or its ilk.
This is a clear case of consumers losing, and I think it's the big reason why people have flocked online to get their music, rather than listen to the radio. It's strange though, because most everyone I know doesn't download as much new stuff as old stuff that they've enjoyed hearing for years.
If you're going to be fed something that you didn't choose, it'd better damn well be great and exciting! If it's not, it's better to eat the stuff that you want to eat, even if it is the same old thing.
Fair enough. The problem is though, what happens if the company that exists today doesn't exist tomorrow? I have nothing against the Mac community at all. In fact, I still feel a great deal of allegiance to it, and I'm really happy with the strides they've made in terms of shareware stuff for OSX. But there are, unfortunately, no guarantees with apple, as anyone who pinned their hopes on Lisa/QuickdrawGX/OpenDoc/Copland/Be/Clones knows. Apple has definitely changed for the better. They are easily 100% better than they were five years ago. But Mac users are still tied in the end.
I think these guys get a worse rap than they deserve. Remember, the original Mac wasn't selling for shit becuase it was underpowered. The Mac Plus was the computer they should have released (a full meg RAM was so necessary) and Scully presided over that. He also helped push the low cost color macs that really earned Macs their place in the educational market. All those iMacs in elementary schools are spiritual descendants of the lc. Before that, all Macs were way too expensive.
Say what you will about the Newton also, but it's still a great platform. I love my Dad's 2000, it's just too damn big. The one (name escapes me) that the guy who designed the iMac made, the one that had a keyboard and was like a tiny laptop, now that thing was cool. I wanted one so bad even though I knew the platform would be axed. Newton was a great idea. Scully doesn't deserve all the crap he got over it.
There are some other great things these guys did too. They started bringing game developers back with Gamesprockets and Quickdraw3d (pre OpenGL/DirectX dominance). They shepherded the fantastic transition to the PPC. They really moved the multimedia stuff, with things like video editing which are really major areas for Apple now. Quicktime is a major fruit of those labors, and it's still a big part in what they do now. Truetype fonts were largely an Apple thing, and they were critical for the publishing market. Hypercard too, went counter to everything Jobs wanted in his Mac, so Scully was the champion for that wonderful program.
I think all Macheads (me included, in the past) tend to idealize Jobs and demonize everyone else. It's really not fair, as Jobs wouldn't have nearly the same flexibility to build up Apple with if he didn't have raw material like color screens and Quicktime.
Is a hammer fun to use?
Sure. Ever built anything for fun? I took woodshop in junior high, and I loved building things in there. Yes, I used a hammer, and I had fun doing it, as well as all the other tools.
Are a pen and paper?
Yeah. I love doing things like reading books printed on paper, doing crossword puzzles printed on paper with my pen. I also love *gasp* writing things like short stories and poems. For fun. With pen and paper, just to clarify.
Celphone?
Yep. Unless you don't enjoy talking to friends on the phone. Plus, I can play solitaire on mine on the busride to work.
Answering machine?
Well, not in and of itself, I grant you that, but I know a lot of people who like putting weird funny messages on their machines to mess with friends who call. Plus, if someone leaves a message that leaves to getting together with them and having fun, then well, why not?
What you must learn, Mr. Genius IQ, is that Tools != Work. Tools are, like many things in this world, without any inherent purpose. A hammer is used to pound nails, but nails are used to hold things together, but what is that thing? The hammer is completely separate in and of itself from me, and as such I can get what I want out of it. If I get enjoyment out of making marks on paper, then how does that affect the status of the pen and paper I use? Does it make them any less tools?
And besides that, what happens if I use my phone while I'm on vacation? It's still a tool, but I'm using it to have fun! If you can't extract even simple pleasures out of things, then you really must be living a miserable life. Not that things are all there is to life, but they're so easy to find some small joy in. If you can't do that, then I pity you. Maybe you need to not work so hard. Stop and smell the flowers, which are not only meant to be ground up and sold in perfumes, but are also meant to be enjoyed as they are.
Don't forget all of Jobs' mistakes.
He brought in Scully, who wound up having him fired anyway.
His first baby was the Lisa, if you recall. We all know how well that one did. Only when he got kicked off of Lisa did he take up Macintosh. Raskin deserves a lot of credit there.
He insisted that the original Mac have only one floppy and 128k of RAM, both of which made it almost useless. He also had these grand delusions of how well the original Mac was selling, and made up his own projected figures and treated them as real. This helped precipitate his firing.
While I'm on that one, he didn't want the 3.5" floppy at all. The original engineers literally had to hide the sony representative selling the things in the closet when Steve popped up unexpectedly. The team saved his ass there.
Jobs didn't have color in that first Mac. The Mac II really sold a lot because of the color.
No games originally. These new Macintosh things are serious machines. He didn't fight this one at all.
No development environment free until OSX. This sort of thing stifled a lot of free/sharware that could have really helped things out. Thank god for Bill Atkinson and Hypercard!
The G4 cube.
Not that Jobs' return hasn't done great things for the company, but I think one of the things he's learned is to leave all the technical stuff to Avie Tevanian, and just run the show. The man isn't a saint (stole some money from Woz in the early days too) and he doesn't have a crystal ball. There's no guarantee he'll maintain his lead, and there's no guarantee that his ego won't push everyone with a mac in a direction they shouldn't be going. And if that happens, or if he leaves, then you're up a creek again. It's Ok though, Linux will run on all those old Macs that cost a fortune to upgrade.
I know, I was a big time supporter of the community myself back in the day.
The problem with the mac community though, is that you control nothing. Apple owns you in every way, and when they drop the ball, you get dropped with it. You have no sway over your own destiny. I personally wasn't a graphic designer, so in the mid 90's I really felt fucked over. I didn't do photoshop or quark or freehand or premier or Kai or any of the other programs that Apple really loved. As a result, I felt alienated. I especially felt out becuase I wanted to create programs on the platform that was described as the platform for creative types. And I couldn't because I couldn't afford it.
What a load of shit.
Apple likes having a community around, but you have no power. You had no power to save cyberdog or OpenDoc or Quickdraw GLX or any of the other great stuff Apple put out. You had no power to say "I want OSX to support my older Powermacs!" You had no power to demand that games be made for the system (only recently has that even started to change). And you have no power to say "I want to buy my system from someone else." This is key, especially if you've ever tried to deal with upgrading a mac, and finding you're paying the price for a whole new machine (something I've experienced).
The Mac community is a strong and rabid one no doubt, but they hold no real sway. If Apple moves, you move with it, no ifs ands or buts. If IBM moves, I don't. If Redhat moves then I don't. I control my own destiny here because Redhat and IBM don't own Linux anymore than Slackware, Debian, or even Linus does. And if someone with a balance sheet decides not to bother with something I need because it's got nothing to do with Adobe products, then I'm not screwed. That's the difference between Mac and Linux, and that's why I made my switch.
Why can't they be fun? Or better yet, why can't they be fun tools? For someone who likes to brag about how smart they are, this was a pretty poorly thought out statement.
Ok, first off... 0.24% is not bad. I personally don't care, because that number can still go higher. I know Linus isn't aiming for world domination, nor is Redhat, Debian, or anyone else really (maybe RMS, but that's Ok.) The point is, it's there, it's usable, and people can move to it if they choose.
.24% or more or less, but it will still be there. So I personally don't care about what this article is talking about. I felt screwed by apple, and I'm never going back, no matter how nice their stuff is. There's a reason people push free as in speech, and it's because you will not get screwed over when some company like apple decides you're not worth the effort because you don't use photoshop.
As for OSX, yeah it's a fantastic product. The best OS in the world for desktop in my opinion. But that doesn't mean it'll stay that way.
Anyone remember 1984? Apple was the best desktop OS then too. They were really something to cheer for then. It wasn't just a new pretty and slick interface, it was a whole new way of working with computers. Sure, it was clunky in some ways, but Apple had the best system on the market for years.
So what happened? Well, most people know about this, but they got greedy and lazy. They overcharged. They stopped building the coolest stuff. They let the OS wither and die as we salivated over the ill-fated Copland. 3rd party developers abandoned us and unless you were willing to fork out hundreds of dollars for dev tools and docs, there was no way you were going to help the problem. They still had their strengths, but they were a shell of the vibrant company that they once were.
So here we are now. Apple's fixed things. They've got the best system on the planet. They've got slick hardware. They give the dev tools and docs for free again, AppleII style. People gush about the system left and right, and they should! It's really nice.
But who's to say that it'll be that way in two years? Apple could get lazy again. They could get greedy again. They could fire all their talent or let them leave again. And then everyone with macs will be back where they were five years ago, fretting over whether or not to move to windows.
And you know what? Linux will still be there,
I love Linux because it frees me, not just to work and learn, but to work and learn with confidence that my skills will be worthwhile, and that I will never be a commodity because I can contribute. I'm proud to be part of that 0.24% because that 0.24% isn't just something to be treated like pennies that someone is afraid to lose. It's 0.24% people who care, who can and do contribute. Linux is that 0.24%: it's people not stock options.
So you can keep your flashy system. I'm staying right here where I'm not just revenue on a balance sheet.
Weird, Pubmed works fine for me. It's just another toolbar underneath my bookmarks. I haven't tried any of the other apps. I wouldn't be surprised though, if the fact that yours didn't work (I haven't updated Pubmed in a while, so I don't know) is that the API isn't stable. It could always be a chrome problem too, maybe try another skin? I don't know. Your bug definitely needs fixing though.
I firmly agree with you on the ability to easily remove modules. The install I found to be pretty easy (click the link, click ok, let it download, restart moz) but the uninstall definitely needs to happen. Either a prefs panel to do it or something in the tasks menu. Hopefully that wouldn't be too hard to add. Moz devs?
Honestly, I want the core frozen absolutely solid. Then declare 1.0. While I love all the features that have been put in to the UI, what really needs to happen for 1.0 in my opinion is to stabilize that API so people can start coding around the platform.
The original vision is still critical, and I want to see more projects like the fantastic pubmed. These things are going to be what really kicks mozilla in to high gear. I really believe that third party stuff like this will make mozilla worth having.
1.0 is all about stability. The browser itself is certainly stable enough to go 1.0. You can add the UI enhancements for 1.1, but make the core solid so people have the platform. Then we'll start to get the plugins that we so desperately need too.
I just wanted to weigh in my thanks. I know it's reduntant and all, but I know the moz team reads the site (hi Asa!) and I just wanted to say thanks for the great browser. I use it in conjunction with Konqueror at home, and it's my browser of choice on my windows partition and at work. I've been amazed at how much it's progressed, and now my most waited for feature (javascript prefs panel) is in! Thanks you guys. I'm rooting for you!
Yeah, and after all the flack everyone gave him here for being terse with his interview, it's great to see his changelog speaking for him instead. Much kudos.
On the subject of gaming, how is it you're going about playing windows games? I'd like to make the final switch, and now that I've finally used SO 6 (which rocks my world, aside from needing to disable the damned help system) I don't really need Windows for much besides games.
So, are you using transmeta, wine, or something I'm not aware of? I'd love to get some advice on this one. The more I move to Linux, the happier I am.
I had nearly the same dilemma! I went with bash in the end, after a gruelling few months with csh. The GUI stuff is easy, choosing something as important as your shell... that's tough.
Pretty cool. I've never seen Applescript studio. Unfortunatley, I kicked my Mac habit a few years back, so I won't get to try it out.
It looks pretty different than Cocoa was though. Cocoa wasn't about creating apps really, there weren't what you'd call "widgets". Instead, the concept was to have a grid and according to the state of the grid you'd alter the objects on the grid. Now that I think about it, it's a hell of a lot like cellular automata, but as a programming method.
So you have these different items that would appear on the board. You could make a rule saying "If the fly moves next to the frog, then the fly disappears and the frog's tongue appears." This would be done visually, by having a before and after panel, making definining state changes really easy. There would also be rules to respond to events, like "If you hit the right arrow key, move Jimmy to the right." It could play sounds too. The coolest thing about it was that there was a plugin that allowed you to view the apps in your browser. They were talking about moving the apps to java to make this easier, but it was too much work.
Anyhow, the project was never designed to build apps that would be really useful. It was, however, a great way to get kids started on programming, and it really was fun to use. It was, by nature, the kind of app that encouraged playfulness, which I've never encountered in the same way in another environment. I've never actually worked with hypercard, but Cocoa was so insanely simple that you just had to play with it.
Yeah, I guess I was being a little unclear. The "he" isn't so much Tolkien himself, but the works. The works themselves merit the deal in terms of full control and large amounts of cash. While this doesn't affect the man himself (he is dead after all), it's amazing to me whenever a work gets this kind of special privledge. Had Tolkien himself been alive today and cutting the deal, he would have gotten what he wanted personally. As it is, the works have to stand for him on their own.
And as for the estate, I had assumed they would get royalties for all works derived. I don't know the details of movie rights sales, but I'd be surprised if there wasn't a royalty deal in there somewhere for his estate to cash in on. If there isn't, then I suppose they won't benefit except by book sales like you mention. I guess I assumed too much with the royalty thing though, my mistake.
Different project. HotSauce was their 3d web browser thingie.
Sweet! Does anyone know of a player that can store and play them locally?
This is so common, it's almost absurd to even bring it up. As Wilde said, "When artists get together they talk about money, when bankers get together they talk about art."
Shakespeare wrote tons of plays in order to keep the audiences rolling in. It's nothing shocking that they bear a lot of similarities to each other, it made them quicker to write! Some people resorted to writing much quicker plays, but there's a reason he was so successful.
Dickens was paid by the word. There's the reason why his books are so long and drawn out, he got rewarded to make them long.
Bradbury wrote Farenheit 451 (in the basement of the building I'm in now no less!) and the whole of Martian Chronicles just to help pay the rent. Asimov wrote the Foundation and robot stories to pay for his tuition.
Every single artist from the Renaissance had a patron who paid for the art.
Does any of this get in the way of the fact that the art is great in and of itself. Long after the money has evaporated, the work is still there for us. That's part of what makes it great.
Poshumuously, and through an intermediary, but he got it.
Jackson $270 million to make the movie, and free reign over the whole project. That's both the money and the artistic control, and I'm sure Tolkien's estate will benefit from it.
It just shows the strength of these books that they merited this kind of deal. Very few things in the entertainment industry do.
Pretty cool, but I'm waiting for a player that supports ogg files too, since all my own music is encoded that way. Once there's a nice high storage player that supports oggs too, I'll go for it.
:-)
I also see a fairly limited use for this sort of thing, since most people probably want a player that has a fair amount of local storage. While this thing is really cool if you're on a network, most of us don't really have the capability to use it. I wish I was on the kind of network that would allow this to be useful though.
Now totally OT, but I'm glad Taco's been posting today again. He's still got the best story choices of all the editors.
That one really is dangerous, because if you buy it for your kid then all the other kids at school will beat him up for being the loser who's still in to Power Rangers.
Parents beware!
I'm not entirely sure, but I was pretty involved in it up to a point. I think they stopped developing it, but I think it was done out of house, so those guys kept working on it. That's the last I heard of it, and I'm betting it's dead and buried now.
It's pretty unfortunate too, it was a great way to write simple little apps. I wrote a whole Mendelian genetics breeding simulation (which I still have somewhere), and I have a couple of books that have pictures and descriptions from tons of little programs people wrote. It wasn't meant for serious work, but could make some nifty little demos very easily. Great way to get kids programming. I've thought repeatedly about doing a free version for linux, but it's a lot more work than I have time for. Still, it'd be a very worthy project.
As far as I can tell, it's not in the sig (there is no sig, it's an AC!) but it's just appended to the link with a bunch of spaces (%20) in between the goatse and the site redirect that goes before it.
If you enter this in to your navbar:
http://srd.yahoo.com/* http://www.linux.com"
You can guess where you'll end up. Clever trick, but then taco said they'd have to be clever.
You strike me as a man with a lot of deep seated issues, but I'll respond anyway.
First of all, did you ever think that all the overcrowding is due to the fact that the schools don't have the money they need? I know you think that it's the teachers that screwed everything up, but did you ever stop to consider that with more resources they could have built more classrooms, gotten better textbooks, hired more people, and generally done a better job?
Perhaps this is difficult to understand if you're the type who is actually complaining about working for $150 an hour (which I'm sure you got paid very well for), but these are people who are insanely underpaid and overstressed and simply do not have the resources to deal with the shit they go through each day. I can guarantee you, none of these teachers is doing it for the money.
As for your trailer park comment, I totally disagree. Having had many classes in such trailers, I can honestly tell you that it makes no difference. I know you think very little of teachers, but it is the teachers that make the difference, not whether the room you're in is labeled temporary or not. All that blacktop space you want back so much will just be used to give kids a good time, which you don't care about anyway. What we actually need are smaller class sizes, which requires hiring more teachers (even if they have to work in "temporary" classrooms), and that requires money. Money which you don't want to give them. Funny thing that. If you want to know what really makes schools "cold" it's the fact that classes are so big that students don't even get a chance to interact with the teacher, let alone parents. You want more parent interaction? Hire more teachers. You want more teachers? Give the schools money.
And as for your proposal of reintroducing corporal punishment and humiliation, I totally agree with you that it would be effective in dealing with the problem at hand. However, humiliation may not come in the form of a dunce cap any more, but kids always get in trouble in public, and it's always a scene. The humiliation factor hasn't gone away at all, in fact I'd say it's used as often now as ever, if not more so. At my schools, we had to do things like pick up trash at lunch (you actually would resort to asking your friends for their trash) and standing in corners for a time. Not a dunce cap, but still publicly humiliating.
And corporal punishment... well, I always think of violence as the resort of the desperate and the incompetent. Which are you?