That certainly sounds like it could be an O'Rourke quote.
Here's another:
The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter,
taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans
are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get
elected and prove it. -- P.J. O'Rourke
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Yeah! What a great idea! Go after the 0.001% of the market that would want to do remote X display, and increase costs for the other 99.999% of the market that doesn't know what an X server is (or why the "X server" runs on the "client" machine and the "X clients" run on the "server" machine:^) ).
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical/. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X
years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span
all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought.
(For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
I turned 17 in 1981. I'm totally ancient.
I first joined Usenet in about 1989, just after the Great Renaming. It was still good then. You could read news with rn and a couple of killfile entries. Nowdays, I use Gnus and scores and adaptive scores just to try to find the wheat along with the chaff.
But you know what? I'll still take today's Internet over what we had back then. Yeah, it was a neat little club, but the amount of information (and resources) available on the Internet today is just mindboggling.
I'll never use Mac because there is no method for switching between apps from the keyboard. (someone correct me if this has been implemented since I've used a Mac)
Those who remember Disneyland from way back in the "E" ticket days, or just want to read some stuff from nostalgaic old farts, should check out Yesterland
A whole bunch of the Newton engineers went to work for Palm, which was one of the real indications that Newton was history. It was pretty obvious months before the announcement.
So, with much of the Newton team working on Palm, I suspect a lot of "Newton ideas" have been finding their way into the Palm design.
Several years later, I still haven't seen a handheld with the potential of the Newton.
I suppose Jobs had his reasons, and time and the stock market have validated his move, but I sure do wish they'd kept the Newton (or kept it spun off as Newton, Inc.)
Just image with Newton OS 3.0 running on a MessagePad 3200 might have been like. Then again, don't. It's too depressing.
Are there builds for other platforms somewhere? I'd love to try Mozilla, but I'm on Tru64 Unix, which doesn't seem to have builds on mozilla.org.
I did try downloading the source a milestone or two ago, but after dinking with it for a little while, I saw that it was going to take a bit of work to get it built, and since WSU doesn't pay me to build Mozilla, I had to move on.
If there's a Tru64 build, though, I'd be happy to use it and file bug reports....
If everyone did set their level to 2 how do you suppose that new messages would ever get moderated to a higher level? You will not see level 0 and 1 messages so nobody will moderate them up.
When you get moderator points, the system advises you to set your browse level down to -1, to catch abuses.
I normally browse at 2, with high scores first, but when I have moderator points, I browse at -1, with new messages first.
Highlighted events include... hundreds of anecdotes about Linux-using grandmothers and girlfriends.
Oh the irony. The very next article below this one in my display (threaded, highest scores first, threshold of 2) was:
My mom can *almost* use it... (Score:3, Interesting)
by Randy Rathbun (rathbun@spamcop.net) on 03:22 PM March 3rd, 2000 PDT (#21)
Nothing against Randy, though, cause I use the "Mom" comparison as well.
Geoff
Re:Apple, please fix widgets in Classic environmen
on
MacOS X DP3
·
· Score: 1
So Apple are punishing users for the non-action of developers? An interesting theory, and given Apple's history not totally inconceivable.
I think you underestimate Mac users. How are they being punished because some widgets won't be as pretty as others? And I think it's a very safe bet that the best way to get action out of developers is to turn the wrath of the Mac community on them.
Case in point: MS Word 6 for the Mac was severely vilified, because MS used their own libraries instead of the Mac libraries, and Word 6 had the "look and feel" of Word for Windows. Microsoft touted this as an advantage ("works the same on both platforms!") but the Mac users would have nothing to do with it. Word 6 was destroyed in reviews, and sales of Word 6 stunk. People either stayed with Word 5 or switched to WordPerfect.
Microsoft "got it" and the next version of Word used the Mac look and feel, and got a cover on Macworld (or was it MacUser) that shouted "Microsoft Repents!"
Don't underestimate the power of the marketplace to get the attention of developers, even the almighty Microsoft. Mac users are a picky bunch, and vote with their wallets. If Mac OS X catches on, developers will port their code to Carbon. Bet on it.
Ahh, another example of why stoplists don't work, especially on something as nebulous as the Internet.
My new iMac came with a web blocking package, so I decided to see how it works. I don't recall the name of the package, but they do it the right way -- there is a list of "approved" sites, and the person in control (parent, teacher, etc.) can add sites.
The software blocked RedHat, for example, but it was trivial to go in and say, "Naw, it's ok for my kids to go there" and add it to the "ok" list.
Interestingly, Dav Pilkey is on the default "ok" list. So apparently being dangerously subversive isn't enough to prevent approval.....
Re:Look for something amazing from this project
on
New Desktop for Linux
·
· Score: 1
As the lounge singer said, "the thrill is gone, baby."
Lounge singer? BB King is a lounge singer?
Heresy!
Re:Well, Solaris doesn't really understand kill -9
on
Server Uptimes Ranked
·
· Score: 1
Keep in mind that "kill" doesn't kill a process. It tells a process to commit suicide. A process that's stuck waiting on I/O (which sounds like what you're describing) will not be killable on any Unix or Unix-like OS. A process must run to die.
The only thing special about -9 is that a process can't trap it.
KXLY in Spokane, Washington broadcasts in HDTV, and touts it heavily. I doubt there are a whole lot of HTDVs in Spokane yet, but they're trying to get the content out there to create the market for the TVs. Chickens and eggs.
Surely if it's being done in Spokane, it's being done elsewhere, no?
The "Internet Economy" go down the toilet? It/is/ possible, but frankly, your rationale is like someone in the 30's saying that if the economy slowed down, they'd be able to get rid of the new fangled "telephone" they'd just got in their office - return to the good old days, etc.
How many people do you think are making big bucks to make your telephone work? Probably not very many. How many jobs did it take in the 30s to make telephones work? How about today? Shucks, I'm old enough to remember when the phone was owned by the phone company, and there were repair men who came to your house to fix it. Today, if the phone breaks, throw it away and go buy another one for $20 at Wal-Mart.
He's not saying computer programmers won't be needed. He's saying there would be a huge jump in the number of programmers, which would drop the value of the individuals. Basic supply and demand.
Actually, he did say that the time may come when the demand goes away. Rob's words:
Something - it could be genetic algorithms or some other new, less labor-intensive programming methodology or it could be an overall economic downturn that ripples through the high-tech industries and brings Internet growth to halt... will throw a lot of high-tech workers out in the street.
It's still supply and demand, but I agree with Rob that the demand is more likely to change (and will have a bigger impact than the supply when it does).
I've been there, done that. I was an engineer in the 80s, and I'm a sysadmin in the 90s. I have no idea what I'll be in the 00s.
A similar thing happened in the 80s when "Desktop Publishing" came into being. Suddenly, with a Mac Plus and a copy of Pagemaker, anyone could be a typographer and layout designer. Or could they?
Once the dust settled and the "desktop publishing" industry matured, those of us who were duffers learned that documents with 75 different fonts really didn't look all that good, and companies whose output really mattered (magazines, advertizers, etc.) still employed real layout designers.
I expect the same thing to happen with the web. Sure, just about anybody can make a web page these days. How many people are making really good ones?
Slashdot Mirror
That certainly sounds like it could be an O'Rourke quote.
Here's another:
Include wireless networking and an X Windows server. Then I can run all my apps from anywhere in the house. Do that and they kick Palm out of the market!!
Yeah! What a great idea! Go after the 0.001% of the market that would want to do remote X display, and increase costs for the other 99.999% of the market that doesn't know what an X server is (or why the "X server" runs on the "client" machine and the "X clients" run on the "server" machine :^) ).
Please, people, don't disrupt my wishful thinking with nitpicky little points like "reality." Thank you.
Oh. Sorry. Never mind, then.
At least it's not Friday!
Speaking of age, Good God - what is the average age of the typical /. member? With everyone dating themselves by saying "I was only X
years old when these were written" or "I was but a zygote back then," I'm beginning to feel ancient. I like to think that those who post span
all age groups, but perhaps it's more skewed toward Generation Y (or whatever - people younger than my generation) than I thought.
(For the record, I turned 8 in 1981, old enough to remember but larval enough to be totally unaware of computers until a few years later.)
I turned 17 in 1981. I'm totally ancient.
I first joined Usenet in about 1989, just after the Great Renaming. It was still good then. You could read news with rn and a couple of killfile entries. Nowdays, I use Gnus and scores and adaptive scores just to try to find the wheat along with the chaff.
But you know what? I'll still take today's Internet over what we had back then. Yeah, it was a neat little club, but the amount of information (and resources) available on the Internet today is just mindboggling.
The computer languages chart doesn't have nearly enough lines going into "Perl 1.0". :^)
I teach Computer Science 302, Unix System Administration at Washington State University, and my lecture on Unix history just got a whole lot easier.
Tres cool!
While the economy in Canada is not as good as the US, Canadian's seem to have a more wholesome society.
Absolutely! I mean, look at Red Green.
I'll never use Mac because there is no method for switching between apps from the keyboard. (someone correct me if this has been implemented since I've used a Mac)
Straight from the horse's mouth:
http://www.info.apple.com/info.apple.com/te/traini ng/macos8.5/Help/Mac %20OS%20Help/fp/pgs/fpSwtprg.htm
Those who remember Disneyland from way back in the "E" ticket days, or just want to read some stuff from nostalgaic old farts, should check out Yesterland
A whole bunch of the Newton engineers went to work for Palm, which was one of the real indications that Newton was history. It was pretty obvious months before the announcement.
So, with much of the Newton team working on Palm, I suspect a lot of "Newton ideas" have been finding their way into the Palm design.
Yeah, me too.
Several years later, I still haven't seen a handheld with the potential of the Newton.
I suppose Jobs had his reasons, and time and the stock market have validated his move, but I sure do wish they'd kept the Newton (or kept it spun off as Newton, Inc.)
Just image with Newton OS 3.0 running on a MessagePad 3200 might have been like. Then again, don't. It's too depressing.
Yeah, yesterday's ruling will wipe Microsoft off the face of the earth, just like previous rulings did to Standard Oil and AT&T....
Geoff
p.s. Just in case anyone doubts, the above is sarcasm.
For more fun with accelerometers, check out what Scrawl Software did with a Newton, an accelerometer, and Canobie Lake amusement park.
A Pilot version of this hack would be even more usable!
Are there builds for other platforms somewhere? I'd love to try Mozilla, but I'm on Tru64 Unix, which doesn't seem to have builds on mozilla.org.
I did try downloading the source a milestone or two ago, but after dinking with it for a little while, I saw that it was going to take a bit of work to get it built, and since WSU doesn't pay me to build Mozilla, I had to move on.
If there's a Tru64 build, though, I'd be happy to use it and file bug reports....
If everyone did set their level to 2 how do you suppose that new messages would ever get moderated to a higher level? You will not see level 0 and 1 messages so nobody will moderate them up.
When you get moderator points, the system advises you to set your browse level down to -1, to catch abuses.
I normally browse at 2, with high scores first, but when I have moderator points, I browse at -1, with new messages first.
Oh the irony. The very next article below this one in my display (threaded, highest scores first, threshold of 2) was:
Nothing against Randy, though, cause I use the "Mom" comparison as well.
Geoff
So Apple are punishing users for the non-action of developers? An interesting theory, and given Apple's history not totally inconceivable.
I think you underestimate Mac users. How are they being punished because some widgets won't be as pretty as others? And I think it's a very safe bet that the best way to get action out of developers is to turn the wrath of the Mac community on them.
Case in point: MS Word 6 for the Mac was severely vilified, because MS used their own libraries instead of the Mac libraries, and Word 6 had the "look and feel" of Word for Windows. Microsoft touted this as an advantage ("works the same on both platforms!") but the Mac users would have nothing to do with it. Word 6 was destroyed in reviews, and sales of Word 6 stunk. People either stayed with Word 5 or switched to WordPerfect.
Microsoft "got it" and the next version of Word used the Mac look and feel, and got a cover on Macworld (or was it MacUser) that shouted "Microsoft Repents!"
Don't underestimate the power of the marketplace to get the attention of developers, even the almighty Microsoft. Mac users are a picky bunch, and vote with their wallets. If Mac OS X catches on, developers will port their code to Carbon. Bet on it.
Ahh, another example of why stoplists don't work, especially on something as nebulous as the Internet.
My new iMac came with a web blocking package, so I decided to see how it works. I don't recall the name of the package, but they do it the right way -- there is a list of "approved" sites, and the person in control (parent, teacher, etc.) can add sites.
The software blocked RedHat, for example, but it was trivial to go in and say, "Naw, it's ok for my kids to go there" and add it to the "ok" list.
Interestingly, Dav Pilkey is on the default "ok" list. So apparently being dangerously subversive isn't enough to prevent approval.....
Lounge singer? BB King is a lounge singer?
Heresy!
Keep in mind that "kill" doesn't kill a process. It tells a process to commit suicide. A process that's stuck waiting on I/O (which sounds like what you're describing) will not be killable on any Unix or Unix-like OS. A process must run to die.
The only thing special about -9 is that a process can't trap it.
KXLY in Spokane, Washington broadcasts in HDTV, and touts it heavily. I doubt there are a whole lot of HTDVs in Spokane yet, but they're trying to get the content out there to create the market for the TVs. Chickens and eggs.
Surely if it's being done in Spokane, it's being done elsewhere, no?
Geoff
An anonymous coward said:
/is/ possible, but frankly, your rationale is like someone in the 30's saying that if the economy slowed down, they'd be able to get rid of the new fangled "telephone" they'd just got in their office - return to the good old days, etc.
... will throw a lot of high-tech workers out in the street.
The "Internet Economy" go down the toilet? It
How many people do you think are making big bucks to make your telephone work? Probably not very many. How many jobs did it take in the 30s to make telephones work? How about today? Shucks, I'm old enough to remember when the phone was owned by the phone company, and there were repair men who came to your house to fix it. Today, if the phone breaks, throw it away and go buy another one for $20 at Wal-Mart.
GrenDel Fuego (gboyce@herot.rakis.net.boing!) said:
He's not saying computer programmers won't be needed. He's saying there would be a huge jump in the number of programmers, which would drop the value of the individuals. Basic supply and demand.
Actually, he did say that the time may come when the demand goes away. Rob's words:
Something - it could be genetic algorithms or some other new, less labor-intensive programming methodology or it could be an overall economic downturn that ripples through the high-tech industries and brings Internet growth to halt
It's still supply and demand, but I agree with Rob that the demand is more likely to change (and will have a bigger impact than the supply when it does).
I've been there, done that. I was an engineer in the 80s, and I'm a sysadmin in the 90s. I have no idea what I'll be in the 00s.
A similar thing happened in the 80s when "Desktop Publishing" came into being. Suddenly, with a Mac Plus and a copy of Pagemaker, anyone could be a typographer and layout designer. Or could they?
Once the dust settled and the "desktop publishing" industry matured, those of us who were duffers learned that documents with 75 different fonts really didn't look all that good, and companies whose output really mattered (magazines, advertizers, etc.) still employed real layout designers.
I expect the same thing to happen with the web. Sure, just about anybody can make a web page these days. How many people are making really good ones?
Don't forget system accounts with no passwords!
When a robot can outplay Omar Vizquel at shortstop or Ken Griffey, Jr. in center field, then I'll be impressed. :^)