No, smoke signals would be 'stumble backward and fall on your back.'
Another step backward would be the networked BBSes and maybe a Usenet feed, which is what we all had (well, those of us who were online) before the Internet.
And it worked out pretty well, for a lot of what us 'geek' types want. Probably not so well for the mainstream sorts.
Why do you need to download 'Linux CDs' from all those places? Don't you realize that downloading canned binary-image combinations like that completely negate the whole concept behind Linux? It's fine to study the packaging schemes of the various 'distros' that you're curious about, but is it really necessary to suck dry the outgoing bandwidth of some site in Iran? Usually there is a mirror of the install set for you to examine, learn from, and grab the unique bits that are different from what you already have.
People who collect as many.ISOs of Linux as they can get are just using up a lot of bandwidth.
My Google 'preferences' are set to 'don't track me,' and if you 'check off' that box you don't get to choose any of the other 'preferences.' But that's fine by me.
But a world without passports is just like it has always been (except for the last ~ 100 years) and should be.
You mean, a world like the one of 100 years ago, when only the ultra-rich could afford to travel for recreation, on expensive cruise ships, and immigrants had to travel in 'steerage' (stuck in a hold below deck and never let out during the voyage) on one-way trips to places they could seldom if ever afford to return from?
My, my. Your world sounds backward and cruel, for the most part. But your nostalgic outlook is somewhat quaint, since I can't imagine you understand what you meant.
Actually, it is 'having access to international bookstores' that is crucial to your research. The Internet part you are just implying is crucial. There are and would be mail order options without a 'global' Internet. If you are 'saving $100' on purchases, it is OBVIOUS that there would be mail order options. If the net wasn't there for these booksellers to get your 'whatever cost it is that you save $100 on the purchase' book purchases, they would have no compunction about sending out a newsletter-catalog probably even once a month.
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to. Really, these 'regionalized' spheres of the Internet already exist. There is a sizable contingent of English-as-a-second-language participants on forums like this, but mostly the people in this forum are US, Canadian, or UK citizenry. (the 'rest of you' are, obviously, very welcomed. I am just stating fact, not defining boundaries to exclude anyone.)
And you know, that's probably a good thing. When an artist produces work that can't make money, that's just one way of saying that nobody wants to own it very badly (or at all).
There are more than a few instances of artists who made little or no money for their art while they were living, who were well advanced beyond their contemporary public, whose works are worth a fortune now.
"Does it Sell" is only a valid criterion for living room art designed to match the sofa.
He leaves behind him a trail of the people he has used and burned out.
But marketing shills like him have always been necessary to get 'the money guys' in line and supporting cool new products.
It's not a bad thing that Steve Jobs exists in the world. Not at all. But let's not buy into the myth that he's anything but a manipulative S.O.B. who happens to be useful.
Huh? I am typing this message right now on a very useful non-junk computer that is more than five years old.
I don't, however, necessarily want to change the perceptions of people like you, as I only paid about $5 for this machine (a used Dell Pentium III system.) It's useful to people like me who make 'best use' of less-than-new hardware for people like you to be out spending three or four figure amounts on the machines we buy with pennies-on-the-dollar a few years from now.
So flame on, tiger. Buy the new flashy stuff! Hoorah for you!!
That's really a shame, too, as Brokeback Mountain was all about shepherds and those who dally with sheep. Cowboys and ranchers always KNEW there was something wrong, deep at the core, with those 'sheep farmers.'
Try to think about it that way. Hollywood and their boosters have tried to use it to tear down the 'Old West' myth.
Yes, and said 'code cowboys' are the ones who throw a big wrench in the works, as they're the ones who don't view documentation and testing as part of a smooth process. So they both complain about 'the process' and sabatogue 'the process' at the same time.
Really, they need to be off in a corner somewhere writing the next great Shareware app that will go commercial two years later and be bought by Microsoft five years later. They do NOT belong in the main development process.
There is and was a long, looooong painful period while the kind of twinkies who write 'single workstation' apps for the DOS and Windows 3 market come up to speed with a multiuser, networked environment. The whole market for 'PeeCee' software, including Microsoft, evolved out of that user model and it badly distorts the architecture.
I ran stuff like the early ports of the GNU toolchain to the Win32 console, and thought it was great stuff. And all my old crap worked well enough in a single-workstation setting to be usable.
I never ran it in a commercial networked environment where it would have had to 'play nice' with the other stuff. The other stuff was all 'rougher' back then, too.
Isn't it funny that Steve Ballmer is never Steve? No, if we say Steve without a last name, it's always Jobs.
Maybe in your circles. The people I know all refer to him as 'Jobs' and dislike him in almost every way.
People who run the kind of 'personal operation' that Jobs does slowly alienate anybody who isn't a sucker. He uses people and either converts or discards them. I was reading an article about Jim Jones (you know- the 'Jim Jones' where everybody knows who you mean, even though it's a common name) and he has a similar personality to Steve Jobs.
Agreed. Which is why I stopped buying Microsoft's OSes when XP came out. I can do all of the above and don't have to kiss anybody's ring to 'validate' the software.
I pre-registered to pre-order Windows 2000 **, BTW. I used to be one of the guys who paid full price to get the full-install versions.
(** for most regular use, I was had already graduated from linux to a BSD os by the time W2K came out- I just needed a 'solid Windows' for those times when commercial apps are needed and the Free apps aren't out yet.)
If a Microsoft 'desktop' had just ONE of the rough unfinished edges that can be found everywhere within 'Linux Desktops' there would be a holy war of screaming against it.
I'm not flaming 'Unix desktop' projects per-se. I make daily use of this NetBSD machine running FVWM2 that I am typing this on, and find it a perfectly adequate system for my kind of use.
I'm not going to pretend, however, that any free software desktop is ready for 'the masses' the way Microsofts product is (kinda, anyway). There's no army of testers and usability engineers involved in the free projects. They aren't aimed at joe six-pack, who is an information-appliance user.
That's just how it is. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
I dunno. Has any founding Microsoft employee left and went to a company that just adapted a lot of legacy code and threw some layers of makeup on it, like NeXT did? Paul Allen comes to mind, but he hasn't funded a new computer company.
Otherwise, your analogy is amusing. You imply that the total failure that the Apple MacOS developers were is as bad as Microsoft long fruitless wander.
'dose guys who hang at apple.slashdot.org are gonna mod ya down, ya know. If they notice what you're implying....
He really didn't want to. Then his NeXT cube finally died, and somebody in the lab told him there was this 'website' called eBay where he could probably buy a replacement. . .
Early versions of NT (proir NT4) where absolutely horrible to use and run and certainly can not be favourably compared to VMS.
Can you provide references?
It seems to me, from my direct experience, that NT 3.51 was solid and had much more clean separations to allow for multiple users. NT 4.0 was Microsoft sloughing off a layer from Windows 95 and dumping it on NT. Plus the fact that NT 3.x is in many regards MUCH more reliable than 4.0 ever was. 3.51 wasn't 'sporty' or 'clean' like a VMS environment, but it seems more like a 1965 Chevy. 4.0 seems like an '82 Chevy (i.e. with four times as much tubing and shit in the engine compartment and the horrible design that lost the US auto market to Japan).
I'm leaving 'the user interface' aside in this discussion. Even though comparing the NT 3.51 and 4.0 'user interface' might still result in 3.x winning out.
If you're involved in a 'durable goods' industry, the Internet might be the way you access the McMaster-Carr catalog these days. Oh, and you might be recording your hours on a timecard system based on the corporate Intranet.
If you're selling virtual crap or throwaway consumer items, or are some form of marketing scum, maybe it's really important.
But this doesn't usually take into account that the people brought in by the contractor to do the job are usually less competent, and almost certainly less motivated to do a job they would be proud of.
My experience, working in a division of a large company where the average employee age is 55 years, and layoff and attrition policies over the years have 'filtered' things to the point where the whole PLACE is stacked with deadwood dud employees, is that long term permanent employees are not 'motivated to do a job they would be proud of.'
It's really weird, working in a place with top-to-bottom apathy and lethargy. And really weird to be one of the youngest employees at 46.
Slashdot Mirror
No, smoke signals would be 'stumble backward and fall on your back.'
Another step backward would be the networked BBSes and maybe a Usenet feed, which is what we all had (well, those of us who were online) before the Internet.
And it worked out pretty well, for a lot of what us 'geek' types want. Probably not so well for the mainstream sorts.
Why do you need to download 'Linux CDs' from all those places? Don't you realize that downloading canned binary-image combinations like that completely negate the whole concept behind Linux? It's fine to study the packaging schemes of the various 'distros' that you're curious about, but is it really necessary to suck dry the outgoing bandwidth of some site in Iran? Usually there is a mirror of the install set for you to examine, learn from, and grab the unique bits that are different from what you already have.
.ISOs of Linux as they can get are just using up a lot of bandwidth.
People who collect as many
My Google preferences are set to "Any language".
My Google 'preferences' are set to 'don't track me,' and if you 'check off' that box you don't get to choose any of the other 'preferences.' But that's fine by me.
would have rules against spam and any other forms of abuse
Don't look now, but you've just let the 'censorship' camel's nose in the tent.
At least your world will be all bright and shiney and 'clean' I guess...
But a world without passports is just like it has always been (except for the last ~ 100 years) and should be.
You mean, a world like the one of 100 years ago, when only the ultra-rich could afford to travel for recreation, on expensive cruise ships, and immigrants had to travel in 'steerage' (stuck in a hold below deck and never let out during the voyage) on one-way trips to places they could seldom if ever afford to return from?
My, my. Your world sounds backward and cruel, for the most part. But your nostalgic outlook is somewhat quaint, since I can't imagine you understand what you meant.
Actually, it is 'having access to international bookstores' that is crucial to your research. The Internet part you are just implying is crucial. There are and would be mail order options without a 'global' Internet. If you are 'saving $100' on purchases, it is OBVIOUS that there would be mail order options. If the net wasn't there for these booksellers to get your 'whatever cost it is that you save $100 on the purchase' book purchases, they would have no compunction about sending out a newsletter-catalog probably even once a month.
You're being sarcastic, right?
(and your sig is a joke, too, yes please?)
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to. Really, these 'regionalized' spheres of the Internet already exist. There is a sizable contingent of English-as-a-second-language participants on forums like this, but mostly the people in this forum are US, Canadian, or UK citizenry. (the 'rest of you' are, obviously, very welcomed. I am just stating fact, not defining boundaries to exclude anyone.)
Using the phrase 'jumped the shark' became, er... a tedious cliche awhile back, too.
But as long as you don't mind being over being trendy in a way that makes you seem like a wannabe trendie, that's cool.
And you know, that's probably a good thing. When an artist produces work that can't make money, that's just one way of saying that nobody wants to own it very badly (or at all).
There are more than a few instances of artists who made little or no money for their art while they were living, who were well advanced beyond their contemporary public, whose works are worth a fortune now.
"Does it Sell" is only a valid criterion for living room art designed to match the sofa.
Indeed. And I have a lot of games that I play on one of my other P3 systems.
Not necessarily twitch-ware, which is what 'high speed 3d graphics gaming' is all about.
I played through all the levels of Wolfenstein 3D back when a lot of the current 'gamers' were in diapers, btw.
No, Jobs didn't make them in the past, either.
He leaves behind him a trail of the people he has used and burned out.
But marketing shills like him have always been necessary to get 'the money guys' in line and supporting cool new products.
It's not a bad thing that Steve Jobs exists in the world. Not at all. But let's not buy into the myth that he's anything but a manipulative S.O.B. who happens to be useful.
Huh? I am typing this message right now on a very useful non-junk computer that is more than five years old.
I don't, however, necessarily want to change the perceptions of people like you, as I only paid about $5 for this machine (a used Dell Pentium III system.) It's useful to people like me who make 'best use' of less-than-new hardware for people like you to be out spending three or four figure amounts on the machines we buy with pennies-on-the-dollar a few years from now.
So flame on, tiger. Buy the new flashy stuff! Hoorah for you!!
Johnny Gassy?
Wow. Something smells really funny in here now.
Nope. That effete creep really belongs off somewhere in the farther reaches of Marketing.
That's really a shame, too, as Brokeback Mountain was all about shepherds and those who dally with sheep. Cowboys and ranchers always KNEW there was something wrong, deep at the core, with those 'sheep farmers.'
Try to think about it that way. Hollywood and their boosters have tried to use it to tear down the 'Old West' myth.
Yes, and said 'code cowboys' are the ones who throw a big wrench in the works, as they're the ones who don't view documentation and testing as part of a smooth process. So they both complain about 'the process' and sabatogue 'the process' at the same time.
Really, they need to be off in a corner somewhere writing the next great Shareware app that will go commercial two years later and be bought by Microsoft five years later. They do NOT belong in the main development process.
There is and was a long, looooong painful period while the kind of twinkies who write 'single workstation' apps for the DOS and Windows 3 market come up to speed with a multiuser, networked environment. The whole market for 'PeeCee' software, including Microsoft, evolved out of that user model and it badly distorts the architecture.
I ran stuff like the early ports of the GNU toolchain to the Win32 console, and thought it was great stuff. And all my old crap worked well enough in a single-workstation setting to be usable.
I never ran it in a commercial networked environment where it would have had to 'play nice' with the other stuff. The other stuff was all 'rougher' back then, too.
Isn't it funny that Steve Ballmer is never Steve? No, if we say Steve without a last name, it's always Jobs.
Maybe in your circles. The people I know all refer to him as 'Jobs' and dislike him in almost every way.
People who run the kind of 'personal operation' that Jobs does slowly alienate anybody who isn't a sucker. He uses people and either converts or discards them. I was reading an article about Jim Jones (you know- the 'Jim Jones' where everybody knows who you mean, even though it's a common name) and he has a similar personality to Steve Jobs.
'Praise Steve' indeed.
Agreed. Which is why I stopped buying Microsoft's OSes when XP came out. I can do all of the above and don't have to kiss anybody's ring to 'validate' the software.
I pre-registered to pre-order Windows 2000 **, BTW. I used to be one of the guys who paid full price to get the full-install versions.
(** for most regular use, I was had already graduated from linux to a BSD os by the time W2K came out- I just needed a 'solid Windows' for those times when commercial apps are needed and the Free apps aren't out yet.)
If a Microsoft 'desktop' had just ONE of the rough unfinished edges that can be found everywhere within 'Linux Desktops' there would be a holy war of screaming against it.
I'm not flaming 'Unix desktop' projects per-se. I make daily use of this NetBSD machine running FVWM2 that I am typing this on, and find it a perfectly adequate system for my kind of use.
I'm not going to pretend, however, that any free software desktop is ready for 'the masses' the way Microsofts product is (kinda, anyway). There's no army of testers and usability engineers involved in the free projects. They aren't aimed at joe six-pack, who is an information-appliance user.
That's just how it is. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
I dunno. Has any founding Microsoft employee left and went to a company that just adapted a lot of legacy code and threw some layers of makeup on it, like NeXT did? Paul Allen comes to mind, but he hasn't funded a new computer company.
Otherwise, your analogy is amusing. You imply that the total failure that the Apple MacOS developers were is as bad as Microsoft long fruitless wander.
'dose guys who hang at apple.slashdot.org are gonna mod ya down, ya know. If they notice what you're implying....
He really didn't want to. Then his NeXT cube finally died, and somebody in the lab told him there was this 'website' called eBay where he could probably buy a replacement. . .
Early versions of NT (proir NT4) where absolutely horrible to use and run and certainly can not be favourably compared to VMS.
Can you provide references?
It seems to me, from my direct experience, that NT 3.51 was solid and had much more clean separations to allow for multiple users. NT 4.0 was Microsoft sloughing off a layer from Windows 95 and dumping it on NT. Plus the fact that NT 3.x is in many regards MUCH more reliable than 4.0 ever was. 3.51 wasn't 'sporty' or 'clean' like a VMS environment, but it seems more like a 1965 Chevy. 4.0 seems like an '82 Chevy (i.e. with four times as much tubing and shit in the engine compartment and the horrible design that lost the US auto market to Japan).
I'm leaving 'the user interface' aside in this discussion. Even though comparing the NT 3.51 and 4.0 'user interface' might still result in 3.x winning out.
Depends on what industry you are in.
If you're involved in a 'durable goods' industry, the Internet might be the way you access the McMaster-Carr catalog these days. Oh, and you might be recording your hours on a timecard system based on the corporate Intranet.
If you're selling virtual crap or throwaway consumer items, or are some form of marketing scum, maybe it's really important.
But this doesn't usually take into account that the people brought in by the contractor to do the job are usually less competent, and almost certainly less motivated to do a job they would be proud of.
My experience, working in a division of a large company where the average employee age is 55 years, and layoff and attrition policies over the years have 'filtered' things to the point where the whole PLACE is stacked with deadwood dud employees, is that long term permanent employees are not 'motivated to do a job they would be proud of.'
It's really weird, working in a place with top-to-bottom apathy and lethargy. And really weird to be one of the youngest employees at 46.