"In the day" you weren't stuck with batch files for "programming". That would be just sad.
Yeah, in retrospect, it was. And there was no documentation or tutorials for the QBasic environment which came with DOS 6.2 either.
I know this is going to sound crazy to some posters, but I'll post it anyway.
They hypothesized that streaming video and video games are a substitute for the stimulation previous generations got from pursuing and having sex, and other external experiences outside the safety of the home. With streaming and video gams, they get that brain chemical rush, without the perceived 'risks' of the real world.
I'd go further than that and posit that computers present themselves to people, superficially, as a cyberspace world of pseudo-physical objects which are gently manipulated through the soft caress of a touch-screen our mouse pointer. Just because Slashdot posters know the origin story of the high-level metaphors behind the desktop/window paradigm doesn't mean that kids born since the Mac do, and just because those kids abstractly know that computers are physical objects that "do things" with "1s and 0s" doesn't mean they have any experience or knowledge getting in touch or feeling the existence of computers. With no physical vinyl albums, VHS tapes, photographs to paste into scrap-books, etc. their literal phsyical world is ever-less tangible for their bodies to even gain tactile awareness and comfort with. There are fewer things to get in touch with, feel, drop, break, etc. beyond the devices themselves, which present themselves not-so-much as objects or machines but as magic windows to cyberspace world through the looking-glass one can almost, but not quite reach. Accordingly, their sense of identity and being in the world is likewise rendered less tangible owing how much of their extensions and personal property exists solely within their own imagination, unmanifested in meatspace.
I think you're approaching this from an end-user perspective, as though Linux desktops are equivalent to products being sold to consumers, want to compete on market-share, etc. That's missing the point of what drives the Free Software ecosystem. Since people can produce their own software, they will. The desktops themselves are down-stream of different toolkits, and then set-ups for those desktops in various distros are downstream from there.
The GTK was developed for the GNU Image Manipulation Program, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced Gnome. Qt was developed, and then developers said "hey, we can use this to make a desktop with!" and they produced KDE. Others looked at GTK and said "hey! we can produce a desktop which is more lightweight than Gnome!" and developed Xfce. Since lots of people find programming fun, and they love sharing stuff, lots of stuff gets made.
This is a good thing. This isn't a competition, because this isn't a market. Individual installations aren't commodities. The only way to have a "standard" would be to go around telling everyone they're bad people for creating and installing and releasing new stuff. Just because Apple and Microsoft have end-users brainwashed into being terrified of knowing what's under the hood of their computer doesn't mean Linux has to go hide all the gory details from you.
...what's underground gets drudged back up into the open. In late 2014 discussions of run-of-the-mill internet drama regarding ideologues and he-said, she-said stories was unexpectedly banned from multiple websites, so it moved to 4chan. And then, in an unprecedented move, it was mass-banned from 4chan as well.
So, what happens then? The conversation doesn't stop; it moves to the venue which is least likely to inhibit it, which ended up being 8chan. The Streisand Effect was strong. As soon as it happened I knew that it'd be some kind of turning point.
All politics aside (jokes! I know that's impossible), the dynamics of crowds and movement on the internet seem to be something woefully misunderstood by the people who positioned themselves - through venture-capital funding and fuck-you money, I'd reckon - into power over moderation of the internet. Any long-time netizen could have predicted this would happen. Drama plays itself out in a matter of days or weeks if you don't take drastic steps to squelch it.
The summary reads like nonsensical whinging about things that have nothing to do with Adobe.
That's because it's actually just a bug report and a feature request for a piece of proprietary software; something which necessitates all the power of an international journalist outlet to get any actual response to from the developers. Just another reminder that Stallman Was Right.
blowing off IBM
Refusing to sell off all control of your flagship product or to agree to a one-directional NDA preventing you from ever discussing the deal is a far stretch from saying Kildall blew off IBM. Seems like a carefully-considered decision to not cash out on his life's work and end his company overnight. If the only thing that should have factored into his thoughts was the pay-out, then maybe. The real mistake was letting IBM decide the price for CP/M and letting them price it several hundred dollars more than PC-DOS.
Having to read, at one's own pace; being able to go back a few pages to find that earlier illustration for guidance; having the freedom to pace myself to MY learning rate, are all benefits of books. I fear Television (which I still enjoy as entertainment) and Video in general is just a way to sell a product, not ENGAGE the participant in the learning experience.
Exactly! Thank you, this is precisely my experience with books. They are tangible, tactile, books that give you an intuitive feel for where you "are" in them that can't be digitized. You can flip back and forth and write in them and grab them instantly and place them spots. I've been reading lots of Marshall McLuhan in the past year and the more I do, the more I appreciate what we're missing out on by putting everything on the other-side of a pane of glass.
The problem is that screens are so environmental that it's like fish trying to study the effects of water.
I'm thinking you have to follow McLuhan's lead and consider screens the latest manifestation of what started with the telegraph and the modern newspaper: study the effects of people having their senses stretched more and more out of the immediate physical vicinity every day into imaginary yet often real places.
Once a technology has insinuated itself into your life you and subsequent generations are stuck with it for decades. I'm going to say that you should go slow with your relationship with Alexa because people change.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
