Now that the annals of history have been released as open source, I can edit the past to suit my whims!
I'm hereby releasing GNU/History, a fork of the past 50 years in which every computer runs Linux and Bill Gates is RMS's plumber. At long last! Now to set up a Wiki...
As is typical, the linked-to article gives people a lot of incorrect impressions (including many that the general public already seems to subscribe to, for the most part).
Just in that brief piece, I can spot three typical points of inaccuracy:
Blurring the line between hardware and software. The use of the phrase "every Windows system shipped since 1990", coupled with the phrase "Windows PCs", seems to subtly (albeit probably unintentionally) imply that Windows is either hardware itself, or irrevokably paired with hardware. (I.e.: "No, that's a Windows PC, it can't run Linux.")
This, of course, is precisely the sort of vague, inaccurate half-understanding that Microsoft wishes end-users to have. If the phrasing of the article made it clear that Windows is not something physical, not something "shipped" in the same sense that a power supply or a mouse is "shipped"-- that there is no such thing as a "Windows PC", only a "PC running Windows"-- perhaps they'd begin to ask tough questions like "Well, are there any alternatives that we could run on our PCs to prevent these problems from affecting us?" These are, in their own small way, subversive questions, anti-authoritarian questions, anti-monopolistic questions-- and thus questions that Microsoft and their ilk don't want people asking.
Use of the overly simplistic term "virus" to describe any sort of computer security breach. I am getting incredibly sick of this. Yes, the biological metaphor was useful to convey the concept of a computer having problems. But it's worked too well. Now, any time I try to explain a non-virus form of computer affliction to a non-techie, they always seem to start out by saying "so it's a virus?" Spyware? "Viruses". Computer running slow? "Viruses." Pop-ups? "Viruses." On numerous occasions with numerous people, I've mentioned the word "spyware", only to have people say "oh, that's the program that gets rid of the viruses?" or something like that. (They confuse the name "Spybot" (as in "Spybot: Search and Destroy")" with the word "spyware".)
And last but not least: Demonization of those eeeeeeeeeevil "hackers". I know the "hacker vs. cracker" war of words is long since lost, but it still irks me when the term used to describe these guys (my heroes!) is now synonymous in the public mind with "malicious and destructive computer criminal".
On the bright side, at least they're admitting (finally) that the problems only affect computers running Windows. If I see another story talking about an "email virus" (read: "MS-Outlook-running-on-MS-Windows-only virus/worm/exploit"), my head is going to explode into a fine pink mist.
People, I'm sure, will say that I'm "nitpicking" or being an "English nazi", but one's choice of words does make a difference. The usages here are just reinforcing common vague half-truths and misconceptions that the general population has about computers, and for every article out there that says "Windows PCs" instead of "PCs running Windows", or "viruses" instead of "malware" or "security exploits", it just makes the already-huge problem of user ignorance that much bigger.
Consider the two sentences below:
"Senator Smith has not yet released a statement concerning the situation."
"When asked about the situation, Senator Smith responded, "No comment."
Which one makes Senator Smith out to be a sneaky crook, and which one merely cautious?
The difference is all in the choice of words. Words matter. So anyone who wants to tell me I'm just being nitpicky-- shove it. One's choice of words creates impressions, both conscious and subconscious, in the reader-- and thus, the seemingly
Strange sense of deja vu...
on
The Patent Epidemic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
SlashDot recently covered another BusinessWeek opinion piece entitled "Cutting Through the Patent Thicket", which argued that "the current U.S. system is harming innovation. A simplified process with stronger patents would encourage economic growth".
What it boils down to is:
Do I have a right to control distribution of ideas I have had?
Bullshit. What it boils down to is "Do large multinational corporations with a stranglehold on the most popular distribution mechanisms have a right to bully you into signing away distribution rights to ideas that you have had, sell them for obscenely inflated prices, and give you a mere pittance if you're lucky".
Spare us all the idealistic bullshit. You know as well as the rest of us that music isn't about the lone musician jamming away in her/his garage for a living. It's about the lone musician getting pressured into a big contract by a RIAA member, homogenized and repackaged to meet the mass market demands of millions of TV-numbed teens, and if s/he's lucky, seeing a 1% return on the sales of her/his albums.
And also spare us the idealistic "Well, if you don't like it, you can go indie" crap. It's hard enough making a living as a musician (or any other sort of artist, Web designers and commercial artists possibly excepted); it's even harder when you're indie.
There is an urban legend that at one point, the US Department of Defense actually wanted to NUKE the moon. I think the idea was supposedly that they would nuke a point on the moon that would appear to be one of the edges of the moon, as viewed from Moscow, so Muscovites (including the KGB) could actually see the blast with the naked eye. This was, of course, to be a demonstration of American military might designed to impress and frighten the USSR.
Can anyone comment upon the truth (or lack thereof) of this particular rumor?
To all those who think my above comment was "Flamebait" or a "Troll":
Firstly, I'm a Mac fan. I'm not a PC lover, a Microsoft fan, or a troll. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing the realities of my chosen community, and yes, Mac/Apple fans ARE still trendoids, far more so than PC folks.
Submitted as evidence:
Would the PC world pay forty bucks for a glorified volume knob? No, but these things have been on the Mac market for quite a while now.
How would a $100 trackball fare in the PC community? Pretty piss-poor, but these guys (and their ADB predecessors) were mainstays of the Mac community for years.
That's not to say Mac fans (including myself) are stupid, merely that they (we) like gadgets, and are willing (if not always able) to pay a premium to get shiny goodies.
Actually, I think Brenda would be a fine name for a programming language! And giving a programming language a female name would attract a lot more eager young males to the field...
"C" was an unusual enough name for a language. Then "C++", which makes sense to you or I but would only mystify a non-geek. Now "C++0x"? How is that even pronounced? "See Plus Plus Zero Ecks"? Or maybe just "C...ocks"?
Names like this serve to only further mystify computing and programming among the non-geek population.
I'm a Mac fan. Hate "PCs". That doesn't stop me from seeing the trends among Mac users, though. I'm also a geek; that doesn't stop me from seeing the fact that most geeks (for instance) lack social skills, or that most geeks are male.
My bad. I meant "excluding probably the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini" (i.e.: pretty much the only two Apple products with wide sales among poorer non-Apple folks)
The only problem is that the expected retail value of the EyeBud is around $600, about $200 more than a 60 gigabyte iPod.
In the "PC" (Wintel) market, this would be dead in the water, but the Apple market (including the iPod market) is far more trend-driven. People who buy Apple products (including iPods, excluding probably the iPod Nano and the Mac Mini) are relatively likely to be willing to spend hundreds of bucks on some shiny new geegaw, if it's appealing enough.
Don't write this one off just yet.
And if the Apple fans early-adopt this, we may see it for $200 or so in a few years! (Of course, if the Apple fans don't early-adopt it, we may see it in the discount bin at CompUSA for $200 anyhow.;) )
This is getting ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of stories here (not that they were USDA Grade A to begin with), accompanied by more frequent-- and more obvious-- trolling on the parts of the "Editors".
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to), but the editor who let a sneaky jab at free markets into the story text itself needs to be smacked. That was a troll, period. A blatant, bridge-dwelling, club-wielding troll.
No, I take that back. All the "Editors" need to be smacked. This is getting fucking ridiculous.
SlashDot: Trolls for nerds, stuff that was reported on the AP Newswire 5 days ago...
Not to devolve into an "Opera is dying!" post, but this bit makes me think:
"Oslo-based Opera Software is a tiny competitor of Microsoft in the Internet browser market, but the fast-growing part of its business is in browsers for mobile phones and other mobile electronic devices."
Right. Opera is tiny compared to MS. And we all have seen what MS has done to every other tiny company that's attempted to compete with them: Bought them out, or simply drove them into irrelevance (if not bankruptcy).
Eventually, the antics of the plucky Opera will awaken the Giant of Redmond, and Opera will be toast. I'm rooting for Opera, but honestly, do they have a snowball's chance in Hell? What's to stop Microsoft from undercutting Opera's prices on some fancy (or un-fancy!) new version of IE for mobile devices?
...a dedicated, well-written, well-publicized effort to educate the general public about this sort of thing. We need to establish a meme among the Joe Sixpacks, Moms and Dads, and Grandma Sues of this country that they're foolish if they don't read stories on [whatever].com each week. And on that site, we need to explain, in plain English, [A] what the flaw could do to their computer, [B] what they can do to temporarily/permanently fix the flaw, and [C] what the flaw is due to (99% of the time, this will be 'due to Microsoft software').
Microsoft obviously isn't interested in having an educated user base, or they'd make such a site themselves and advertise it extensively.
Christ, if you're going to make fun of people, at least learn how to write.
In other news speculation continues that/. editors are nothing more than a 1000 monkey's beating on computer keyboards accounting for the large number of duplicate stories being posted.
With more than 100 million Internet users, China has the second largest population of web content consumers after the United States.
I'm really getting sick of stories treating the Web as if it were just another conventional medium, like TV or publishing.
The whole point of the Web is that everyone is a producer. Even though, yes, there are millions upon millions of end-users who do nothing but read cnn.com, aol.com, foxnews.com, and the like, there are also millions of everyday users who produce their own content. Be it through commenting on blogs (or running their own ones), maintaining a MySpace page, writing to a LiveJournal/DeadJournal/Blurty/etc., or actually running their own domain, Web users are making their own corners of the Web. For that reason, I find it deceptive (if not outright insulting) that the body of Web users are described collectively as "consumers". "Users" would be more accurate.
I can see where the conventional news outlets would be inclined to reinforce the notion that the Web is a one-way, inactive medium (like television), but it isn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Time to trot out a link to a page I truly love: Molecules with Silly or Unusual Names.
Arsole! Megaphone! Spermine!
Have fun.
This sounds like a spam subject line from a parallel universe in which most people are geeks.
It'd be a pr0n site, of course.
Now that the annals of history have been released as open source, I can edit the past to suit my whims!
I'm hereby releasing GNU/History, a fork of the past 50 years in which every computer runs Linux and Bill Gates is RMS's plumber. At long last! Now to set up a Wiki...
Just in that brief piece, I can spot three typical points of inaccuracy:
This, of course, is precisely the sort of vague, inaccurate half-understanding that Microsoft wishes end-users to have. If the phrasing of the article made it clear that Windows is not something physical, not something "shipped" in the same sense that a power supply or a mouse is "shipped"-- that there is no such thing as a "Windows PC", only a "PC running Windows"-- perhaps they'd begin to ask tough questions like "Well, are there any alternatives that we could run on our PCs to prevent these problems from affecting us?" These are, in their own small way, subversive questions, anti-authoritarian questions, anti-monopolistic questions-- and thus questions that Microsoft and their ilk don't want people asking.
On the bright side, at least they're admitting (finally) that the problems only affect computers running Windows. If I see another story talking about an "email virus" (read: "MS-Outlook-running-on-MS-Windows-only virus/worm/exploit"), my head is going to explode into a fine pink mist.
People, I'm sure, will say that I'm "nitpicking" or being an "English nazi", but one's choice of words does make a difference. The usages here are just reinforcing common vague half-truths and misconceptions that the general population has about computers, and for every article out there that says "Windows PCs" instead of "PCs running Windows", or "viruses" instead of "malware" or "security exploits", it just makes the already-huge problem of user ignorance that much bigger.
Consider the two sentences below:
Which one makes Senator Smith out to be a sneaky crook, and which one merely cautious?
The difference is all in the choice of words. Words matter. So anyone who wants to tell me I'm just being nitpicky-- shove it. One's choice of words creates impressions, both conscious and subconscious, in the reader-- and thus, the seemingly
SlashDot recently covered another BusinessWeek opinion piece entitled "Cutting Through the Patent Thicket", which argued that "the current U.S. system is harming innovation. A simplified process with stronger patents would encourage economic growth".
Spare us all the idealistic bullshit. You know as well as the rest of us that music isn't about the lone musician jamming away in her/his garage for a living. It's about the lone musician getting pressured into a big contract by a RIAA member, homogenized and repackaged to meet the mass market demands of millions of TV-numbed teens, and if s/he's lucky, seeing a 1% return on the sales of her/his albums.
And also spare us the idealistic "Well, if you don't like it, you can go indie" crap. It's hard enough making a living as a musician (or any other sort of artist, Web designers and commercial artists possibly excepted); it's even harder when you're indie.
Throw away the goddamned rose-tinted spectacles.
There is an urban legend that at one point, the US Department of Defense actually wanted to NUKE the moon. I think the idea was supposedly that they would nuke a point on the moon that would appear to be one of the edges of the moon, as viewed from Moscow, so Muscovites (including the KGB) could actually see the blast with the naked eye. This was, of course, to be a demonstration of American military might designed to impress and frighten the USSR.
Can anyone comment upon the truth (or lack thereof) of this particular rumor?
I predict that... this thread will devolve into bad Thundercats jokes, followed by someone posting a link to "A Night on Thundera"...
To all those who think my above comment was "Flamebait" or a "Troll":
Firstly, I'm a Mac fan. I'm not a PC lover, a Microsoft fan, or a troll. But that doesn't prevent me from seeing the realities of my chosen community, and yes, Mac/Apple fans ARE still trendoids, far more so than PC folks.
Submitted as evidence:
Would the PC world pay forty bucks for a glorified volume knob? No, but these things have been on the Mac market for quite a while now.
How would a $100 trackball fare in the PC community? Pretty piss-poor, but these guys (and their ADB predecessors) were mainstays of the Mac community for years.
Fancy a thousand dollar low-end laptop? Mac fans buy them in droves. I've bought several.
Maybe a sixty dollar ONE-BUTTON mouse? Mac users buy 'em. By the thousands.
How about a $2,500 monitor? You'd be hard-pressed to find a Mac fan who wouldn't buy one if they had the money.
Thirty-five bucks for a small rubber sleeve? Three hundred bucks for a small pair of flat panel speakers? All of these things would fail miserably in the PC world, but there's a market for them in the Mac world.
That's not to say Mac fans (including myself) are stupid, merely that they (we) like gadgets, and are willing (if not always able) to pay a premium to get shiny goodies.
So, yes, Mac users are trendoids, but not stupid trendoids. If you want to talk about stupid trendoids, look at the "audiophile" morons buying $300 power cables.
I keed, I keed!
I had to think about this for a moment. "DAP" means "Digital Audio Player". (e.g. iPod, etc.)
I believe this is the first time this term has appeared in a SlashDot article. (Perhaps a SlashDot Glossary would be a good idea?)
"C" was an unusual enough name for a language. Then "C++", which makes sense to you or I but would only mystify a non-geek. Now "C++0x"? How is that even pronounced? "See Plus Plus Zero Ecks"? Or maybe just "C...ocks"?
Names like this serve to only further mystify computing and programming among the non-geek population.
I'm a Mac fan. Hate "PCs". That doesn't stop me from seeing the trends among Mac users, though. I'm also a geek; that doesn't stop me from seeing the fact that most geeks (for instance) lack social skills, or that most geeks are male.
Know thyself, and know thy peer group.
My bad. I meant "excluding probably the iPod Shuffle and the Mac Mini" (i.e.: pretty much the only two Apple products with wide sales among poorer non-Apple folks)
Don't write this one off just yet.
And if the Apple fans early-adopt this, we may see it for $200 or so in a few years! (Of course, if the Apple fans don't early-adopt it, we may see it in the discount bin at CompUSA for $200 anyhow.
This is getting ridiculous. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed a precipitous decline in the quality of stories here (not that they were USDA Grade A to begin with), accompanied by more frequent-- and more obvious-- trolling on the parts of the "Editors".
I'm not a big fan of unregulated free markets (since I've seen what they lead to), but the editor who let a sneaky jab at free markets into the story text itself needs to be smacked. That was a troll, period. A blatant, bridge-dwelling, club-wielding troll.
No, I take that back. All the "Editors" need to be smacked. This is getting fucking ridiculous.
SlashDot: Trolls for nerds, stuff that was reported on the AP Newswire 5 days ago...
Has it worked against them anywhere else?
Right. Opera is tiny compared to MS. And we all have seen what MS has done to every other tiny company that's attempted to compete with them: Bought them out, or simply drove them into irrelevance (if not bankruptcy).
Eventually, the antics of the plucky Opera will awaken the Giant of Redmond, and Opera will be toast. I'm rooting for Opera, but honestly, do they have a snowball's chance in Hell? What's to stop Microsoft from undercutting Opera's prices on some fancy (or un-fancy!) new version of IE for mobile devices?
...a dedicated, well-written, well-publicized effort to educate the general public about this sort of thing. We need to establish a meme among the Joe Sixpacks, Moms and Dads, and Grandma Sues of this country that they're foolish if they don't read stories on [whatever].com each week. And on that site, we need to explain, in plain English, [A] what the flaw could do to their computer, [B] what they can do to temporarily/permanently fix the flaw, and [C] what the flaw is due to (99% of the time, this will be 'due to Microsoft software').
Microsoft obviously isn't interested in having an educated user base, or they'd make such a site themselves and advertise it extensively.
Who's with me?
I'm really getting sick of stories treating the Web as if it were just another conventional medium, like TV or publishing.
The whole point of the Web is that everyone is a producer. Even though, yes, there are millions upon millions of end-users who do nothing but read cnn.com, aol.com, foxnews.com, and the like, there are also millions of everyday users who produce their own content. Be it through commenting on blogs (or running their own ones), maintaining a MySpace page, writing to a LiveJournal/DeadJournal/Blurty/etc., or actually running their own domain, Web users are making their own corners of the Web. For that reason, I find it deceptive (if not outright insulting) that the body of Web users are described collectively as "consumers". "Users" would be more accurate.
I can see where the conventional news outlets would be inclined to reinforce the notion that the Web is a one-way, inactive medium (like television), but it isn't.
Why am I reminded of a certain roommate...
Also, the Earth is a flat plate supported on the backs of myriad tortoises.