I am writing to urge you to speak out against the Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004
(the so called PIRATE act) sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy.
This act would have far reaching negative consequences, resulting in the further criminalisation of hundreds of thousands of your constituents and result in widespread abuses of civil law. A law like this flies in the face of common sense and given that it so lowers the standards of proof required, is ripe for corrupt selective enforcement.
Please consider instead offering a solution similar to that which has worked for the radio industry for decades, where compulsory licensing has allowed artists to be rewarded and has allowed millions of people to enjoy the gift of music without being treated as criminals.
An Ontology is supposed to tell you what things are (what things there are) and how those things are related.
OWL and RDF schemas are ontologies in the philosophical sense in that they define a set of entities and relations which allow you to make meaningful inferences from assertions framed in terms defined by the ontologies in question. An Ontology defines the categories and relations that make up a world.
Ontologies are not themselves information (except in the trivial sense) but rather structures which allow agents (human or machine) to make sense of information.
To use an extremely basic example, let's say you have an Ontology for all things connected to selling snacks, you would have categories for Snacks, Owners, Currency and Transactions. Each of those categories might have sub categories (Snacks:hot,Snacks:cold) and each Category will have constraints on the relationships it can have. You would also have entries for the relations that can exist (Whole-part, owns, consumes). As you can see even a very basic ontology quickly grows to be quite complex.
Seems to me my Linux machines are plenty smart already, there are just some missing parts:
1. Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not much more than self-monitoring with statefulness and history.) there is a mathematical/biological term for this 'homeostasis' 2 flavors move away from bad move toward good
2. Communication with decent machine/machine and machine/human interfaces (direct software for machine/machine, add human language capability or greatly improved H.I. for human/machine. Much work has already been done on these.)
how many pages today I dunno, a whole bunch, I got slashdotted a few times would you sign me up for one of those replication services, I've got more work than just one of me can handle. I don't think we have the budget but boss,... they charge by bandwidth and you get a break if you let 'em advertise. Hmmm
(later: server quietly accepts kickback from bandwidth baron) 3. History of self/other interactions which can be stored and referrenced (should be an interesting database project.) keywords: ontology, epistemology, knowledge and representation For a server interactions that should be remembered are conversations; logins; anomalous events Make smart machines, not fake humans.
I work for a freenet that's been around for
quite a while. It's the Eugene Free Network
and it started off back in '92-'93 as basically a
single box under the stairs at clif's house.
Nowadays we serve approximately 16,000 members.
A few years ago, (before I joined) the
IRS came in and gave the organization a bunch of
grief for providing internet access as a
non-profit, basically their stand was that since
EFN was providing a service (internet access) it
was competing with other businesses and could not
qualify as a non-profit organization regardless
of whether it was a money-making operation or
not. The end result was that we ended up
with two organizations OPN (Oregon Public
Networking) which is a 501c3 charitable
organization which owns EFN (Eugene Free
Community Network) which is a not-for-profit
business.
OPN is involved in a variety of
efforts that would interest the more
public-spirited slashdot members, including
internet access for the blind and disabled;
hosting the local LUG and most
recently an ongoing effort to encourage the local
school districts to adopt the LTSP.
If you're ever in Eugene, come check us out 43
w. Broadway
Somebody had to bring it up. But if there really is a conspiracy the 'group of scientists decide to cull te human race and then get whacked by evil forces who want to immunize themselves before releasing the plague' is a pretty good one.
Or do you really believe RMS'
crap about how using closed source is
wrong??
Yes!
But then I have a
strong sense of morality and ethics. And I
understand that my actions do affect the
world I live in now and the one I will live in in
the future.
I also think that public
service is a worthy calling and that money
is not the be all end all of my participation in
society. Childish whiners who grew up on a diet
off Rush Limbaugh and Ayn Rand may call me crazy;
I prefer to think of myself as civilised.
This looks like it would be a very good test suite tool box, from the looks of it you could use this to stress test your application in all sorts of ways. Want to know how your app deals with some level of network or system misbehavior, it would be very easy to write a pass through script that would mangle 1 in 300 characters read off the wire, or produce a randomised map of 'bad' sectors on the storage volume that can be written to but not read from.
Bad signals, subtly wonky devices etc. would all be trivially easy to emulate, this is a tool you would want if you really want to make your app bulletproof.
Because this is exactly the sort of thing python is good for. It's
clean and encourages reuse, and it's easy to write quickly, even for
relatively slow programmers.
In this case it was probably the C integration that made it work
really well.
Shouldn't we have an XML app for
this? I know XML isn't the wholy grail, but
wasn't this type of problem the reason we have
XML?
Yes, it is. The reason that you don't see more
sites offering filtering and content-negotiation
is that
It's costs more to implement
and uses more resources to serve, and is more
complicated to administer.
Client-side
support sucks mostly.
Standards? what
standards?
The last item is kind of a red herring in that
the standards we have work fine, and if you use
lynx as your target browser, it will work
reasonably well for most portables and you can
then layer the glitz on using CSS and Javascript.
Unfortunately people who pay the bills for
web development don't quite get this, if some
dreamweaver jockey shows them the fancy pants 80
jpegs per page site running off their laptops
they drool and open their wallets; if you show
them a site that has the info people are actually
seeking when they visit the site and that
loads in under a 2 seconds on a 28.8 dial up
connection they'll say that it looks a little
bland!
It's the eternal battle between the
content and the container.
I went and looked at the email and noticed
that the very first patch he mentions was from
the woman who came and gave a talk to EUGLUG last
spring. For one of our Demo Days we emailed IBM
and asked them if they would send down
someone to talk about IBM's Linux effort. We were
kind of worried that they would send a marketing
type in a suit who would tell us all about
how much money they were going to spend, etc.,
etc. But we were very pleasantly surprised when
they sent down a hardcore engineer who had
been with Sequent until they were swallowed by
IBM.
She did a pretty broadranging
overview of the linux projects currently in place
at IBM, and then dived into the NUMA/Q stuff that
she had been working on. The main gist of which
is that Sequent had these 16-way fault-tolerant
redundant servers that needed linux because the
number of applications that ran on the native OS
was small and getting smaller. Turned out that
even the SMP code that was in the current tree at
the time did not quite do it. She had some fairly
hairy debugging stories, apparently sprinkling
print statements through the code doesn't work
too well when you're dealing with boot
time on a multiprocessor system because it causes
the kernel to serialize when in normal
circumstances it wouldn't...
I think the
end result of all this progress with
multiprocessor systems is that we'll be able to
go down to the hardware store and buy more nodes
plug 'em into the bus; and compute away.
rufusdufus you are either a relatively sophisticated troll or you are one of those fortunate and lucky souls who have gotten a start with capital, and been lucky enough never to be deprived of it. Whichever, you show a startling but alas not too unusual lack of empathy and a lack of understanding of the human condition that is truly deplorable. Most of the work performed by human beings has NEVER been a part of what someone like you would consider the Real Economy. Think, Motherhood, Parenting, helping your neighbours clean up after the big storm, playing around with ideas technical and otherwise, teaching someone to use a mouse, etc.. All of those things are WORK, and few if any of them are likely to be compensated in monetary terms, much less at fair market value.
You suggest that the time of someone who has been idled by the business cycle is valueless, unless they are as selfish and Randoid as you seem to be. Value as a concept exceeds that of money. Or to restate the above, money is at best a signifier of exchange value, but it is not itself of value. Is it possible to put a dollar figure on a healthy society, or to lay a price on the look in a lover's eyes; I say to you that it is not. Voluntarism has a millenia old place in holding human societies together far more reliably than any financial or mercantile system yet devised. True, if you wish to be a naive sociobiologist about it you can claim that it is all only selfish genes, interacting in a relentlessly darwinian environment; however a few hours experience in the real world, say reading to hospice patients, or helping MRDD adults to shop will soon cure you of that illusion.
Finally, I would directly oppose your statement that to the best thing to do for the recently unemployed is to hurry into the job market to find another master. Volunteering is THE way to become a member of your community, it's the best way to find the healthy and long lasting relationships that will allow you to succeed with a small business, and to build the skills that will make you a desirable employee should you choose to work for a larger organization.
I doubt that Python will be a minority language for that much longer
'sides which most of the python programmers locally
already know at least one other language.
Add to which a programmer should be able to learn languages at need no?
Innovators Dilemma is a book that might explain why Intel
and AMD might not be able to touch it with a barge pole, even if they
wanted to.
Chipzilla and it's sibling are already deeply invested and focused
on a capital-intensive model of production. Roll-Tronics and it's ilk
are a completely different model, and market segment. It would cost
intel or amd even more than a startup to become proficient at this
type of production because it runs counter to all of the companies
carefully built up knowledge and experience. And for the forseeable
future it won't be profitable for them to do so.
Bold Predictions
Rolltronics will have licensing deals with 3M and Rubbermaid
this technology will be a key part of ubiquitous computing, but you'll
hardly notice it.
possible products:
wall coverings with network addressable display screens
cheaper embedded sensors in things from shoes to skyscrapers
Lynx, pine, ssh, and a clueful ISP that offers me
a shell account. I'm reasonably happy with a 28.8
connection. True it's annoying when there is something
that I actually want to SEE in.jpeg or.png format
but that has more to do with booting in to X which only happens about once a week
if that.
Yes, You are utterly right. I spent time trying to
point out to a former employer that the fancy crap_o_la his dreamweaver jockeys
were pushing didn't meet business needs. But
I was firmly told that the most important thing was not that
the site be useful and quick to load via modem,
but that it look good on the salesmans laptop.
This is perfectly normal behavior for a culture that values quantity over quality.
I found this comment because you said something that rather closely mirrored something
I said under "Open Monopoly" and I must say SubtleNuance
that you might have better luck if you at least gave people
a chance to reply to you outside of the fora,
unless you think slashdot is all about talking trash under a nym.
A pointer to a page with a yahoo addy would be a start.
I have a problem with this whole only programmers can
contribute to open source attitude that some have. It's elitist
in the worst way, in that it assumes that people can't
learn. Something that most of the people I know have proven wrong over
and over again.
I can see a future version of open source,
indeed, a current one for some people, in which writing software is
just another part of daily life, like writing prose. Certain model
forms, call them patterns for the sake of argument, will come to be
recognised as universals, and every person who pretends to even a
basic understanding of the subject will have some aquaintance with
them.
You seem to assume that there is something dark and
mysterious about programming that only the elect can master. I think
you are wrong. It's time to recognise that software is a cultural
activity in the same sense that literature, architecture and dance
are. I do think though, that I would rather have my culture recognised for
producing emacs, python or wiki than for clippy, powerpoint, or nt
Re:Go ahead and burn all the farms
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
Of course you're conflating two very different kinds of genetic modification.
Cross-breeding and hybridization are relatively slow and inefficient, in other words, have natural safeguards in terms of how destructive the end result can be.
Germ-line engineering, whether the crude cell-fusion methods of a decade ago, or todays slice'n'dice 'we can build you' methods, are untested in engineering terms.
To use a software analogy it's the difference between bugfix releases of stable production software and alpha-versions of experimental kernel features. Which one is more likely to crash and burn?
It's okay, i've seen that line about Genetic Modification having been used for thousands of years, it's very obviously spin if you deconstruct it even a little.
Re:If these guys had any sense at all...
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 1
Umm, I live in Eugene, I've met several of the people discussed in the
article, so I think i can say something about the nature and character of Direct Action, MonkeyWrenching types who do this sort of thing (and build roadblocks for log trucks, platforms for treesit, etc, etc)
It's rather strange, in numbers, the 'anarchists' who think free was framed and the conservatives who think he should just be shot, are about the same (small) size.
Most people here are sympathetic to the ideals of the rad greens but can't stomach violence or destruction on any scale.
There are three things about the sort of people who get involved in this kind of low-grade terrorism/advanced vandalism.
True believers, they have THE answers and know whats best(like quite a few slashdotters).
Very angry, they usually have a valid beef with with society and have this great need to DO SOMETHING whether or not it's effective, or even whether it causes people to turn away from their declared movement. Part of this is that the people who do this are mostly young and male (angry young men defying established society, how long has that been going on?)
They're on drugs, as with many other groups smoking weed is seen as this striking out against 'the MAN, WesternCiv, and Industrial Culture', of course it corrodes the judgment, reduces the planning horizon, and makes people who are already angry and confused about right and wrong, stupid and paranoid as well. This may explain a lot (like why some of the attacks don't make much sense from any perspective.
So there, i've said my piece, I should note that if you are an EPD or other law enforcement officer that i know no specific details about any event, person or group that is involved with anything illegal and that you could probably get more solid information by reading the newspapers.
(hafta do that, the epd are currently in full civil-rights violation and ave been for the past three years, and haven't shown themselves to be very discriminating when it comes to whom they bother)
Look, we all know that McSoft has a level of hubristic arrogance that is rare outside of greek tragedies.
It probaly is "Legal" for them to say that if you want to play with their toys you can't play with anyone else's, but it's probably ill-considered.
The practice of restrictive licensing may not be all that smart in that this will probably spur the use of other toolkits (java and IBM both have mobile agent frameworks out there) and have the opposite effect.
On the other hand the truly paranoid could make a case for the idea that they are testing the waters, and will soon be busting Cygnus for porting the GNU toolset to XP.(yucko)
Hmmm. I'm not too sure about your definition of relevance, relevant to what is the operative question. from your last post, it sort of seems like only HotTopics(tm) are relevant. In which case relevancy comes and relevancy goes, and the tide flows out leaving much junk and a little treasure. One example is last springs python frenzy, with magazine covers, frequent posts etc. which has now sunk out of sight of the collective consciousness. Does this mean that all the people who found python congenial and started using it on a regular basis should switch to the current language of the month now. No.
This month it's GNOME and KDE, next month it'll be something else. What's important is to pick the good stuff out from the incidentals, copy it and adapt it to your environment, the strength of OSS is that you have the freedom to do that.
User Interface is a much deeper topic than most people seem to realize, it's much more than the buttons and other widgets that show up on the screen, it's the concepts and constructs with which one deals with the tasks at hand. This is why windows has lost much of the developer community to the various *nices, the concepts that windows is optimised for are those of business, in which appearance counts and profitability comes first. Unix was built by programmers for programmers and exposes concepts appropriate for those users.
User environments must be built by those who have a strong and intimate knowledge of the concepts used by the community in question. There is no one size fits all answer.
The WindowMaker/gnustep environment is not dead, not by a long shot, projects such as the i3dkit, webkit and even the swarm simulation environment are in daily use and active development.
The problem for many people who might otherwise be interested in it is that it depends on Objective-C which is a minority language by any standard. The good thing about Objective-C is that it's built in to most of the more recent versions of the GCC, the bad thing (to the unfamiliar) is that it's the bastard child of C and smalltalk. Myself, I find it eminently readable and robust, so I'll go on using it even if it is "totally irrelevant".
For free software it all comes down to personal preference, that's why there won't be a One True Interface ®. Now or in the future, that's not to say that certain interface idioms won't become nearly universal, or that better education and more experience won't raise people's expectations. But as long as anyone can modify or alter any aspect of their system (a good thing) and as long as the only check on releasing code is the choice of uptake on the part of the users there will be only minimal interface consistency.
This isn't a bad thing, the people who want consistent UI standards are acting as if the Free Software Movement is a unitary entity that should be acting in concert towards a defined goal. Ha.
Gnustep Links for the interestedOfficial Gnustep site Unofficial Gnustep Site WindowMaker Swarm Project not part of Gnustep, but an interesting use of Objective-C.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Senator $congresscritter,
I am writing to urge you to speak out against the Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation Act of 2004 (the so called PIRATE act) sponsored by Senators Orrin Hatch and Patrick Leahy.
This act would have far reaching negative consequences, resulting in the further criminalisation of hundreds of thousands of your constituents and result in widespread abuses of civil law. A law like this flies in the face of common sense and given that it so lowers the standards of proof required, is ripe for corrupt selective enforcement.
Please consider instead offering a solution similar to that which has worked for the radio industry for decades, where compulsory licensing has allowed artists to be rewarded and has allowed millions of people to enjoy the gift of music without being treated as criminals.
Yours $nameyou can find your senators by following this link
try Johncompanies I know a couple of people using them and they are very satisfied.
An Ontology is supposed to tell you what things are (what things there are) and how those things are related.
OWL and RDF schemas are ontologies in the philosophical sense in that they define a set of entities and relations which allow you to make meaningful inferences from assertions framed in terms defined by the ontologies in question. An Ontology defines the categories and relations that make up a world.
Ontologies are not themselves information (except in the trivial sense) but rather structures which allow agents (human or machine) to make sense of information.
To use an extremely basic example, let's say you have an Ontology for all things connected to selling snacks, you would have categories for Snacks, Owners, Currency and Transactions. Each of those categories might have sub categories (Snacks:hot,Snacks:cold) and each Category will have constraints on the relationships it can have. You would also have entries for the relations that can exist (Whole-part, owns, consumes). As you can see even a very basic ontology quickly grows to be quite complex.
Seems to me my Linux machines are plenty smart
already, there are just some missing parts:
1. Self-awareness on the part of the machine (not
much more than self-monitoring with statefulness
and history.)
there is a mathematical/biological term for this
'homeostasis' 2 flavors
move away from bad
move toward good
2. Communication with decent machine/machine and
machine/human interfaces (direct software for
machine/machine, add human language capability or
greatly improved H.I. for human/machine. Much
work has already been done on these.)
how many pages today
I dunno, a whole bunch, I got slashdotted
a few times would you sign me up for one
of those replication services, I've got
more work than just one of me can handle.
I don't think we have the budget
but boss,... they charge by bandwidth and
you get a break if you let 'em advertise.
Hmmm
(later: server quietly accepts kickback from
bandwidth baron)
3. History of self/other interactions which can
be stored and referrenced (should be an
interesting database project.)
keywords: ontology, epistemology, knowledge and
representation
For a server interactions that should be
remembered are conversations; logins; anomalous
events
Make smart machines, not fake humans.
yes, couldn't agree more
I work for a freenet that's been around for quite a while. It's the Eugene Free Network and it started off back in '92-'93 as basically a single box under the stairs at clif's house. Nowadays we serve approximately 16,000 members.
A few years ago, (before I joined) the IRS came in and gave the organization a bunch of grief for providing internet access as a non-profit, basically their stand was that since EFN was providing a service (internet access) it was competing with other businesses and could not qualify as a non-profit organization regardless of whether it was a money-making operation or not. The end result was that we ended up with two organizations OPN (Oregon Public Networking) which is a 501c3 charitable organization which owns EFN (Eugene Free Community Network) which is a not-for-profit business.
OPN is involved in a variety of efforts that would interest the more public-spirited slashdot members, including internet access for the blind and disabled; hosting the local LUG and most recently an ongoing effort to encourage the local school districts to adopt the LTSP.
If you're ever in Eugene, come check us out 43 w. Broadway
Somebody had to bring it up. But if there really is a conspiracy
the 'group of scientists decide to cull te human race and then get whacked by evil forces who want to immunize themselves before releasing the plague'
is a pretty good one.
Yes!
But then I have a strong sense of morality and ethics. And I understand that my actions do affect the world I live in now and the one I will live in in the future.
I also think that public service is a worthy calling and that money is not the be all end all of my participation in society. Childish whiners who grew up on a diet off Rush Limbaugh and Ayn Rand may call me crazy; I prefer to think of myself as civilised.
This looks like it would be a very good test
suite tool box, from the looks of it you could
use this to stress test your application in all
sorts of ways. Want to know how your app deals
with some level of network or system misbehavior,
it would be very easy to write a pass through
script that would mangle 1 in 300 characters read
off the wire, or produce a randomised map of
'bad' sectors on the storage volume that
can be written to but not read from.
Bad signals, subtly wonky devices etc. would all
be trivially easy to emulate, this is a tool you
would want if you really want to make your
app bulletproof.
Because this is exactly the sort of thing python is good for. It's clean and encourages reuse, and it's easy to write quickly, even for relatively slow programmers.
In this case it was probably the C integration that made it work really well.
Maybe he has a setup like mine, none of that glitzy windowing shit, just
pure text and curses. Lynx crosslinked with emacs to edit the text boxes.
Yeah I know it's retro, but I built the system up from a bare hard
drive and I know it and it's productive for me.
Bennies:
*Slashdot ads don't get in my face
*fast surfing on a dial-up link
*rock solid stable
*billg free and lovin' it
Would you rather have an untested prototype or a well supported production model.
Yes, it is. The reason that you don't see more sites offering filtering and content-negotiation is that
It's costs more to implement and uses more resources to serve, and is more complicated to administer.
Client-side support sucks mostly.
Standards? what standards?
The last item is kind of a red herring in that the standards we have work fine, and if you use lynx as your target browser, it will work reasonably well for most portables and you can then layer the glitz on using CSS and Javascript. Unfortunately people who pay the bills for web development don't quite get this, if some dreamweaver jockey shows them the fancy pants 80 jpegs per page site running off their laptops they drool and open their wallets; if you show them a site that has the info people are actually seeking when they visit the site and that loads in under a 2 seconds on a 28.8 dial up connection they'll say that it looks a little bland!
It's the eternal battle between the content and the container.
I went and looked at the email and noticed that the very first patch he mentions was from the woman who came and gave a talk to EUGLUG last spring. For one of our Demo Days we emailed IBM and asked them if they would send down someone to talk about IBM's Linux effort. We were kind of worried that they would send a marketing type in a suit who would tell us all about how much money they were going to spend, etc., etc. But we were very pleasantly surprised when they sent down a hardcore engineer who had been with Sequent until they were swallowed by IBM.
She did a pretty broadranging overview of the linux projects currently in place at IBM, and then dived into the NUMA/Q stuff that she had been working on. The main gist of which is that Sequent had these 16-way fault-tolerant redundant servers that needed linux because the number of applications that ran on the native OS was small and getting smaller. Turned out that even the SMP code that was in the current tree at the time did not quite do it. She had some fairly hairy debugging stories, apparently sprinkling print statements through the code doesn't work too well when you're dealing with boot time on a multiprocessor system because it causes the kernel to serialize when in normal circumstances it wouldn't...
I think the end result of all this progress with multiprocessor systems is that we'll be able to go down to the hardware store and buy more nodes plug 'em into the bus; and compute away.
rufusdufus you are either a relatively
sophisticated troll or you are one of those
fortunate and lucky souls who have gotten a start
with capital, and been lucky enough never to be
deprived of it.
Whichever, you show a startling but alas not too
unusual lack of empathy and a lack of
understanding of the human condition that is
truly deplorable. Most of the work performed by
human beings has NEVER been a part of what
someone like you would consider the Real
Economy. Think, Motherhood, Parenting, helping
your neighbours clean up after the big storm,
playing around with ideas technical and
otherwise, teaching someone to use a mouse, etc..
All of those things are WORK, and few if any of
them are likely to be compensated in monetary
terms, much less at fair market value.
You suggest that the time of someone who has been
idled by the business cycle is valueless, unless
they are as selfish and Randoid as you seem to
be. Value as a concept exceeds that of money. Or
to restate the above, money is at best a
signifier of exchange value, but it is not itself
of value. Is it possible to put a dollar figure
on a healthy society, or to lay a price on the
look in a lover's eyes; I say to you that it is
not.
Voluntarism has a millenia old place in holding
human societies together far more reliably than
any financial or mercantile system yet
devised. True, if you wish to be a naive
sociobiologist about it you can claim that it is
all only selfish genes, interacting in a
relentlessly darwinian environment; however a few
hours experience in the real world, say reading
to hospice patients, or helping MRDD adults to
shop will soon cure you of that illusion.
Finally, I would directly oppose your statement
that to the best thing to do for the recently
unemployed is to hurry into the job market to
find another master. Volunteering is THE way to
become a member of your community, it's the best
way to find the healthy and long lasting
relationships that will allow you to succeed with
a small business, and to build the skills that
will make you a desirable employee should
you choose to work for a larger organization.
I doubt that Python will be a minority language for that much longer
'sides which most of the python programmers locally
already know at least one other language.
Add to which a programmer should be able to learn languages at need no?
Innovators Dilemma is a book that might explain why Intel and AMD might not be able to touch it with a barge pole, even if they wanted to.
Chipzilla and it's sibling are already deeply invested and focused on a capital-intensive model of production. Roll-Tronics and it's ilk are a completely different model, and market segment. It would cost intel or amd even more than a startup to become proficient at this type of production because it runs counter to all of the companies carefully built up knowledge and experience. And for the forseeable future it won't be profitable for them to do so.
Bold Predictions
Works for me ;-)
.jpeg or .png format
Lynx, pine, ssh, and a clueful ISP that offers me
a shell account. I'm reasonably happy with a 28.8
connection. True it's annoying when there is something
that I actually want to SEE in
but that has more to do with booting in to X which only happens about once a week
if that.
Yes, You are utterly right. I spent time trying to
point out to a former employer that the fancy crap_o_la his dreamweaver jockeys
were pushing didn't meet business needs. But
I was firmly told that the most important thing was not that
the site be useful and quick to load via modem,
but that it look good on the salesmans laptop.
This is perfectly normal behavior for a culture that values quantity over quality.
Whoah there, gentle now , calm, calm....
I found this comment because you said something that rather closely mirrored something
I said under "Open Monopoly" and I must say SubtleNuance
that you might have better luck if you at least gave people
a chance to reply to you outside of the fora,
unless you think slashdot is all about talking trash under a nym.
A pointer to a page with a yahoo addy would be a start.
I have a problem with this whole only programmers can contribute to open source attitude that some have. It's elitist in the worst way, in that it assumes that people can't learn. Something that most of the people I know have proven wrong over and over again.
I can see a future version of open source, indeed, a current one for some people, in which writing software is just another part of daily life, like writing prose. Certain model forms, call them patterns for the sake of argument, will come to be recognised as universals, and every person who pretends to even a basic understanding of the subject will have some aquaintance with them.
You seem to assume that there is something dark and mysterious about programming that only the elect can master. I think you are wrong. It's time to recognise that software is a cultural activity in the same sense that literature, architecture and dance are. I do think though, that I would rather have my culture recognised for producing emacs, python or wiki than for clippy, powerpoint, or nt
Of course you're conflating two very different kinds of genetic modification. Cross-breeding and hybridization are relatively slow and inefficient, in other words, have natural safeguards in terms of how destructive the end result can be. Germ-line engineering, whether the crude cell-fusion methods of a decade ago, or todays slice'n'dice 'we can build you' methods, are untested in engineering terms. To use a software analogy it's the difference between bugfix releases of stable production software and alpha-versions of experimental kernel features. Which one is more likely to crash and burn? It's okay, i've seen that line about Genetic Modification having been used for thousands of years, it's very obviously spin if you deconstruct it even a little.
- True believers, they have THE answers and know whats best(like quite a few slashdotters).
- Very angry, they usually have a valid beef with with society and have this great need to DO SOMETHING whether or not it's effective, or even whether it causes people to turn away from their declared movement. Part of this is that the people who do this are mostly young and male (angry young men defying established society, how long has that been going on?)
- They're on drugs, as with many other groups smoking weed is seen as this striking out against 'the MAN, WesternCiv, and Industrial Culture', of course it corrodes the judgment, reduces the planning horizon, and makes people who are already angry and confused about right and wrong, stupid and paranoid as well. This may explain a lot (like why some of the attacks don't make much sense from any perspective.
So there, i've said my piece, I should note that if you are an EPD or other law enforcement officer that i know no specific details about any event, person or group that is involved with anything illegal and that you could probably get more solid information by reading the newspapers. (hafta do that, the epd are currently in full civil-rights violation and ave been for the past three years, and haven't shown themselves to be very discriminating when it comes to whom they bother)Look, we all know that McSoft has a level of hubristic arrogance that is rare outside of greek tragedies. It probaly is "Legal" for them to say that if you want to play with their toys you can't play with anyone else's, but it's probably ill-considered. The practice of restrictive licensing may not be all that smart in that this will probably spur the use of other toolkits (java and IBM both have mobile agent frameworks out there) and have the opposite effect. On the other hand the truly paranoid could make a case for the idea that they are testing the waters, and will soon be busting Cygnus for porting the GNU toolset to XP.(yucko)
This month it's GNOME and KDE, next month it'll be something else. What's important is to pick the good stuff out from the incidentals, copy it and adapt it to your environment, the strength of OSS is that you have the freedom to do that.
User Interface is a much deeper topic than most people seem to realize, it's much more than the buttons and other widgets that show up on the screen, it's the concepts and constructs with which one deals with the tasks at hand. This is why windows has lost much of the developer community to the various *nices, the concepts that windows is optimised for are those of business, in which appearance counts and profitability comes first. Unix was built by programmers for programmers and exposes concepts appropriate for those users.
User environments must be built by those who have a strong and intimate knowledge of the concepts used by the community in question. There is no one size fits all answer.
The problem for many people who might otherwise be interested in it is that it depends on Objective-C which is a minority language by any standard. The good thing about Objective-C is that it's built in to most of the more recent versions of the GCC, the bad thing (to the unfamiliar) is that it's the bastard child of C and smalltalk. Myself, I find it eminently readable and robust, so I'll go on using it even if it is "totally irrelevant".
For free software it all comes down to personal preference, that's why there won't be a One True Interface ®. Now or in the future, that's not to say that certain interface idioms won't become nearly universal, or that better education and more experience won't raise people's expectations. But as long as anyone can modify or alter any aspect of their system (a good thing) and as long as the only check on releasing code is the choice of uptake on the part of the users there will be only minimal interface consistency.
This isn't a bad thing, the people who want consistent UI standards are acting as if the Free Software Movement is a unitary entity that should be acting in concert towards a defined goal. Ha.
Gnustep Links for the interested Official Gnustep site
Unofficial Gnustep Site
WindowMaker
Swarm Project not part of Gnustep, but an interesting use of Objective-C.