Re:It's as if icons peaked 2-4 years ago
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A History of Icons
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· Score: 1
It's important to understand what icons were originally meant for, and how their use has been stretched. If you look at the original MacOS, icons were used on the desktop to represent folders, files, and applications. And very importantly, all of those also had text names written underneath them.
With the exception of the apple menu, pretty much everything else that you interacted with was plain old text. The dialog boxes may have had an icon of some sort, but you always clicked on a button that had text. The menu items were text.
It starts getting really problematic when applications start filling up huge toolbars with tiny little icons. It's a pain in the ass learning what all of those tiny buttons do, not to mention that their small size makes them hard to click quickly. This is a problem far more prevalent in windows than on Macs, even to this day. Although phpMyAdmin did that crap too in a semi-recent update, and that drives me crazy.
Yeah, learning a little about something that many of us interact with for hours upon hours of every day sure is strange.
The easy spread of information as obscure as the history of icons is what makes the internet so cool. I'm glad such things are available (or at least will be when the current barrage of traffic slows).
I'll give a specific example that isn't really windows, but still bugs me. phpMyAdmin is an excellent piece of software that really makes my life easier. But a few versions ago they made a change that really bugs me. Before, if you were looking at a database, it could list all of the different tables in a chart, and it'd have links for all the different options (browse, insert, search, drop, empty, etc). Then one day I logged in and it was updated. All those quick little text links were replaced with tiny 16x16 icons. And they aren't even good icons. The icon for empty is a trashcan on top of some weird looking window. It's arguable whether or not a trashcan is a good symbol for empty, but regardless of that, the stupid window in the background makes it illegible. A finger pointing at a piece of paper stands for "structure"?
There are six commands in that table that they icon-ified. They saved maybe a few pixels of horizontal space, but I don't think they were hurting for room anyways. And it's a big step backwards in terms of usability and intuitiveness.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So isn't it overkill to use an image to replace one single word? How is that supposed to make things any easier?
It'd be like/. replacing the Submit and Preview button text with little images. What would be the point?
actually, until my third year, our building didn't have a/c. And this was in new orleans. Lots of fun being in a hot, humid room with two dozen people who haven't slept or bathed in a few days.
I hate this so much. When I was in school, physical plant had control of the central air/heat in our building. They were in a small office next to a warehouse. I spent most of my time in a five story building on the other side of campus. They decided when our a/c went on. We could call them, but we'd be lucky if they actually listened. There were lots of people in our building 24 hours per day. Good luck getting the air turned up in the middle of the night. Ugh.
I'm not sure of any significant relationship between pirates and spades, but people are certainly itching for more social, team based games. Card games have been common suggestions, but the devs have been a little hesitant to introduce too much of a 'gambling' aspect into the game. Spades is sort of a compromise.
So they can hire some designers to spend a couple weeks to bring the site up to spec. It'd probably end up saving them money in bandwidth costs in the long term, not to mention probably making future work on the site easier.
Of course, for all I know, the code base could be such a huge mess that this would be a such a miserable project that it's not worth the benefits.
Re:Getting rid of the surprize factor
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IE7 Details Emerge
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· Score: 1
Yeah, this sure does suck for MS. Now all the other browser makers will hear about these new technologies and beat them to market. Oh, wait...all the other browers already have tabbed browsing? What? The other browsers have been updated over the last five years?
Don't be so unimaginative. Touch screens aren't great for gaming as it's been designed so far, because until recently, there wasn't a decent gaming system with touch screen input. The DS seems to be selling pretty well, so now that there's a market for touchscreen games, we should hopefully be seeing some cool ideas being implemented.
Plus I think I could make a pretty decent argument that there are already games that could benefit from a touch screen. Point and click PC games are a good one, seeing as most portable game systems don't have a mouse. Something like warcraft or command & conquer sure look like good game types for a touch screen. It's only a matter of time before those start appearing.
If you want a bigger screen and more 3D acceleration, then sony will happily sell you a PSP. I, on the other hand, am perfectly happy having my playstation at home, and would rather spend my money on something with different games, rather than just a smaller copy where I have to worry about battery life, even if it is portable.
True enough, not to mention that the Think Secret case has less to do with whether or not they're journalism, and more with whether or not they posted information in violation with trade secret laws. Those laws exist, they're defined, and they do not make exceptions for journalism.
TS and their lawyers trying to make this an argument of Apple vs. blogs is them trying to make a case in the court of public opinion, since they've got no good defense in the court of actual laws.
Yeah, but for actual realism, you need to have a realistic world for the AI to act in.
The developers have been hammering on graphics for years. Sound to a degree as well, although that's probably the easiest part to get done well.
Physics and AI are what's left, and physics seems to be the easier of those two problems, so it's going to get the attention first. The AI is just going to take a while longer.
The hardest part is actually communicating with the probes. That requires big, expensive, and not too common equipment. That equipment needs to be maintained and operated, or at least rented from someone who's running it for you. That's what costs money.
The whole point of my argument is that "Should journalist protections apply to blogs?" isn't a valid question, because "blogs" are not a coherent type of media in any sense other than a generic set of technologies used to publish them. And that technology does not make the content inherently valuable or worthless.
Some blogs are journalism, some are utter crap, some are in between. It really should be taken on a case by case basis, and the judge ruling against ThinkSecret's journalistic value should not mean that all blogs are forevermore considered worthless garbage in the eyes of the law.
The world is too complicated to be broken down into black and white definitions. That's why lawyers get paid so much money to muck around with all the details. It sucks that it has to be this way, but if you try and boil things down to a statement as simple as "All blogs are journalism and deserve legal protections", or the opposite, you're going to be causing problems.
Well, the thinksecret case needs to prove two points, as I see it. I'm not a lawyer, so this is just opinion, but I'm sharing anyways.
First, to win they're argument, they have to convince a judge that they're a legitimate journalistic website, and as such should be protected by those applicable journalist laws. I don't know how familiar you are with ThinkSecret, but I've been reading it on and off for years, and I'm not sure I'd consider it journalism as much as I'd call it rumor-mongering. There is certainly a difference, one of the most important being the expectation to admit when you're wrong, something that TS is loath to do.
The second thing that TS needs to prove is that the actions they are defending are even legally protected by journalistic shield laws. And from what I've been reading, that's questionable. The "I'm a journalist" defense is not all encompassing. Just as there are some practical restrictions on free speech as a whole, even journalists have legal limits. And sharing trade secrets that you should reasonably know are supposed to be under an NDA might fall outside of those limits. TS has been around for a while, they most certainly were aware of Apple's extreme secrecy and consistent use of NDA's.
I'd be reluctant to have the law try and write out a standard legal definition for a journalist. First off, it seems like a daunting task just to begin with, and any result would likely be so complicated that it really wouldn't make a case like this any easier to decide. Secondly, I think that something like this could easily backfire against the world of blogs and small-time independent publishers, because if forced to make a more declarative legal definition of journalism, the legislature might end up being very conservative, and unfairly leave out a lot of people who do valid work. Third, it's just as likely that somewhere soon down the line, more advances in technology will lead to all new ways for people to share information, and once again the definitions and laws will become problematic. What happens when broadband and video streaming becomes so commonplace that anyone can create their own "TV news" shows. It'll be over the internet instead of the television, but it'll be sort of the same. And just like blogs right now, some will be excellent sources of ideas and information, some will be utter crap, and some will be inbetween, creating a lot of confusion for the public at large.
I entirely agree with you. That's actually the point that I was trying to get across. Everyone seems to be trying to figure out, "are blogs journalism?" But like you said, not all things are of equal value. Some blogs most certainly are journalism. Others, like my website, are stupid rants, and utter crap.
If the court decides that Think Secret does not represent an journalistic publication, and therefore does not deserve journalistic protections, that's not the same as the judge saying that all blogs are worthless and don't deserve first amendment rights. Yet that seems to be the crux of Think Secret's defense.
There are plenty of blogs that I read every day to learn more about world events, or even local events. There are also others that I read about to see what my friends are up to. I read still others just to be amused by goofy writing and funny pictures. And I fully understand the differences between them. The one thing that makes them blogs is similarities in the technology used to publish them. It has nothing to do with the quality of content of the sites. They should not be considered the same by any other measure, and so it's expected that different laws will apply to them differently.
You're using circular arguments, and then posing a question that entirely contradicts that. You're dancing around the question.
Is all writing (excluding intended fiction) journalism? I think you can make a good argument that the answer is no. I'm not sure if it's possible to come up with a good, clear, and simple definition of journalism that will always be applicable. That being the case, people tend to be going to either extreme, saying blogs ARE journalism, case closed! Or blogs ARE NOT journalism, case closed!
To try and make an all-inclusive definition of a word such as "blog" reflect its value towards something as nebulous as "journalism" is an exercise in futility, and doesn't help make the situation any clearer.
Could a fourteen year old girl create a blog on Livejournal that served as a good example of journalism. Sure. I bet if you searched for a while, you could find a few. And those examples should be recognized for the quality and usefulness that they provide. But does that mean that all 14 year old girl's weblogs should be considered journalism? No. That'd be foolish. I know it sucks that the world is so complicated. I really makes things difficult that we have to dig through all these levels of gray, instead of everything being black and white. But that's just how it goes, and trying to distill things down is not going to help. For every example or analogy I come up with, anyone should be able to come up with a good counter example. That's how big and complicated this issue is.
You're right. In fact, we should approach all laws like this. It's unfortunate that some people use violence to try and hurt innocent people, but on the other hand, sometimes people use violence in self defense.
It wouldn't be fair to condemn these people, and since violence is violence, we can't condemn a criminal for hurting someone either. It's unfortunate, but we have to!
Give me a break. I don't understand why so many people are trying to boil this down to simple semantics. A journalist is "one who keeps/writes a journal"? Really? Is that why I subscribe to the news paper? To read a bunch of journals? No, I read to find useful and generally confirmed information, or at least proof read opinions, which are clearly marked as such.
A Blog is an online journal? Is it always? I think there are probably about a zillion different types of blogs out there. Placing the livejournal of a fourteen year old girl under the same category as a constantly updated analysis of political strategies written by some forty year old DC resident doesn't accomplish anything productive.
Just as there are lots of different people, there are lots of different blogs. The only thing that makes them all blogs is the fact that they're on the internet, and maybe a basic organizational scheme. The content, and the quality of the content is entirely independent of that, and the content is the only thing that should be an issue when considering whether or not it is "journalism".
Not all things are of equal value. Not all things should be measured the same way. Trying to group the world into neat little packages and simple definitions is not going to get you anywhere.
How can you be so insanely cynical and negative towards something you know nothing about. At least save that crap for when they announce what this "revolution" is. Then you can at least pretend to know what you're talking about.
Normally people don't start talking that bitter about the future until they're like 80 years old. If you are 80, and you play video games, then good for you, weirdo.
I love both my gamecube and my xbox. Tell your brother to pick up Burnout 3. If both you and him don't have a great time with it, there's somethign wrong with you.
If you really feel that way, then why are you still a customer? Apple most certainly does have a history of proprietary hardware and software. But they also have a history of providing a computing environment that fueled the creation of many creative industries, such as desktop publishing, graphic editing, and as of late, big pushes into movies and music.
They've pretty much always had total control over their platform. The exception being during the clone era, which didn't go well for a number of reasons. It's how they've managed to keep the quality of their products higher than average.
I don't understand your argument that they want to totally control how I use my Mac. There's no software on my machine that I can't remove. A lot of their apps are collaborate in neat ways, but if take one of them off, the rest still work. Sure, they dictate what buttons and windows their programs present to me, but doesn't every application writer do that?
Much of their software writes to open formats, and other developers are free to pull apart and write to those files (keynote, ical, etc...).
I've installed various versions of Mac OS dozens of times on many different machines, and not once have I been asked to a serial number, or to authenticate.
I can think of lots of software on my computer that Apple didn't create. I don't even have to ask them for permission to use those programs.
I'm free to try and upgrade my hardware. My mac is filled mostly with pretty standard components. Video card choices are a bit limited because of the mac's smaller marketshare, but not because of any Apple conspiracy. I guess I can't really change my motherboard, but the percentage of computer users who care in the least what sort of motherboard they have is negligible.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of Apple fansites that have been operating for years, and I don't think many of them have been sued.
Linux and OpenBSD and whatnot most certainly do provide an extremely open and free environment. It's an environment that many people thrive in, and really enjoy. There are, however, plenty of other people who like to have a lot of the work already done for them, and that's the market that Apple has always targeted. Paying someone else make a bunch of decisions for you, so that you can get to work on the ones that you're actually interested in, that's not evil. And a company existing to make money off of doing that is not evil either.
That's very true, but it's not readily apparent to your average consumer.
I can call up my mom and say hey, check it out, you should get this mac mini, it's a tiny cheap computer that I think you'd find very useful. And she'll say but it's a mac and I'm used to windows. And look, here's some windows computers that look just as little and cheap.
And so I say, yeah, but with the mac, you'll get, for free; a decent web browser, excellent music management, a fun movie creation program, a good mail client, etc. And she'll say, windows comes with all that stuff too.
I'll try to explain to her how Apple's software is generally a lot easier and more pleasant to use, I may even take my mac over there and try and show her, but she doesn't have the time to sit down with the computer and really understand it.
MS only has to match apple with the number of features, not with the quality, then their inertia will keep them on the forefront. It's in Apple's best interests to avoid this copying for as long as is possible.
There's a huge difference between a whistle blower case and this.
If you are doing something illegal, you cannot legitimately enforce and NDA on someone telling them to keep quiet. You'd be asking them to sign a contract that makes them an accessory to a crime.
If Apple started kidnapping babies and using their blood as the cooling fluid in their liquid cooling systems, and an employee leaked that, then that'd be a whistle blower case. I don't think that after Steve Jobs got arrested that he'd get very far suing whoever let the world know. That'd be like calling up the cops and complaining because someone broke into your house and stole four pounds of cocaine.
A whistle blower case is different because they're revealing illegal acts by their employer. An NDA that says don't tell anybody about this illegal stuff we're doing is not legitimate.
An NDA that says don't tell anybody about this product we're developing is valid.
It's the reporter's responsibility to determine facts about a story because that's what journalism is supposed to be. I don't think journalists go to school to just learn how to stick whatever they hear onto a web site or a newspaper. If that's all it was, then Slashdot would be a paragon of journalistic integrity, because that's all the editors do here (although not all that well lately).
In the Think Secret case, the guy running the website has been at it for years, he most certainly knew that Apple is intensively secret about their stuff, and if he didn't assume that just about any information he got was via a broken NDA, then he's just playing ignorant because it suits his cause. That's not very responsible reporting, and I'd be reluctant to give someone like that even the respect required to call him a "journalist".
If Apple leaks information to generate hype, why would they sue the press? In this case, they're trying to get thinksecret to cough up the names of the leaks. If they already knew who it was, why would they go through this trouble and potential PR mess?
Slashdot is not much of a news agency. It's more of a community, one that is spurred into discussion via news aggregation. Except for the occasional interview,/. editors put very little effort into creating content, they don't research, they don't break stories, they don't fact-check.
National Security is not the only reason that something should be held secret. Private information, whether it belongs to a person or a corporation should generally be considered private, especially when ones source is of questionable legality.
For an only partly applicable analogy (a better one doesn't come to mind), the patterns on my underwear is not a matter of national security, but it's not really anyone's business either. I don't care for the whole world to know about it. But if you decide you want to write a story about it, how you get your information is a pretty significant part of your job. If you ask me, or maybe my girlfriend, and one of us cough up the info, then fine, run with it. If you're courting people who you think may have broken into my house and rifled through my dresser, well, that's a bit sketchy. And when I read the article you published, and realize you probably know who it was that broke into my house and went through all my stuff, I'd expect you to tell me who it was. Otherwise you're basically aiding a criminal.
Now in Apple's case, it's a little different, but someone broke an NDA, a legal-contract that they willingly signed, and Apple wants to know who it is so that they can take actions against them that they feel appropriate. ThinkSecret can play dumb all they want, but with as long as they've been around, they understood that they were soliciting information that they're only going to receive if someone breaks an NDA. By not giving up their sources, they're helping someone who broke the law get away with it. I don't understand how that is defensible.
Slashdot Mirror
It's important to understand what icons were originally meant for, and how their use has been stretched. If you look at the original MacOS, icons were used on the desktop to represent folders, files, and applications. And very importantly, all of those also had text names written underneath them.
With the exception of the apple menu, pretty much everything else that you interacted with was plain old text. The dialog boxes may have had an icon of some sort, but you always clicked on a button that had text. The menu items were text.
It starts getting really problematic when applications start filling up huge toolbars with tiny little icons. It's a pain in the ass learning what all of those tiny buttons do, not to mention that their small size makes them hard to click quickly. This is a problem far more prevalent in windows than on Macs, even to this day. Although phpMyAdmin did that crap too in a semi-recent update, and that drives me crazy.
Yeah, learning a little about something that many of us interact with for hours upon hours of every day sure is strange.
The easy spread of information as obscure as the history of icons is what makes the internet so cool. I'm glad such things are available (or at least will be when the current barrage of traffic slows).
I'll give a specific example that isn't really windows, but still bugs me. phpMyAdmin is an excellent piece of software that really makes my life easier. But a few versions ago they made a change that really bugs me. Before, if you were looking at a database, it could list all of the different tables in a chart, and it'd have links for all the different options (browse, insert, search, drop, empty, etc). Then one day I logged in and it was updated. All those quick little text links were replaced with tiny 16x16 icons. And they aren't even good icons. The icon for empty is a trashcan on top of some weird looking window. It's arguable whether or not a trashcan is a good symbol for empty, but regardless of that, the stupid window in the background makes it illegible. A finger pointing at a piece of paper stands for "structure"?
/. replacing the Submit and Preview button text with little images. What would be the point?
There are six commands in that table that they icon-ified. They saved maybe a few pixels of horizontal space, but I don't think they were hurting for room anyways. And it's a big step backwards in terms of usability and intuitiveness.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So isn't it overkill to use an image to replace one single word? How is that supposed to make things any easier?
It'd be like
actually, until my third year, our building didn't have a/c. And this was in new orleans. Lots of fun being in a hot, humid room with two dozen people who haven't slept or bathed in a few days.
It'd be awesome if i had a hot tub that could get that hot. I'd make the biggest batch wonton soup. Rock on.
I hate this so much. When I was in school, physical plant had control of the central air/heat in our building. They were in a small office next to a warehouse. I spent most of my time in a five story building on the other side of campus. They decided when our a/c went on. We could call them, but we'd be lucky if they actually listened. There were lots of people in our building 24 hours per day. Good luck getting the air turned up in the middle of the night. Ugh.
I'm not sure of any significant relationship between pirates and spades, but people are certainly itching for more social, team based games. Card games have been common suggestions, but the devs have been a little hesitant to introduce too much of a 'gambling' aspect into the game. Spades is sort of a compromise.
So they can hire some designers to spend a couple weeks to bring the site up to spec. It'd probably end up saving them money in bandwidth costs in the long term, not to mention probably making future work on the site easier.
Of course, for all I know, the code base could be such a huge mess that this would be a such a miserable project that it's not worth the benefits.
Yeah, this sure does suck for MS. Now all the other browser makers will hear about these new technologies and beat them to market. Oh, wait...all the other browers already have tabbed browsing? What? The other browsers have been updated over the last five years?
There's nothing surprising in that feature list.
Don't be so unimaginative. Touch screens aren't great for gaming as it's been designed so far, because until recently, there wasn't a decent gaming system with touch screen input. The DS seems to be selling pretty well, so now that there's a market for touchscreen games, we should hopefully be seeing some cool ideas being implemented.
Plus I think I could make a pretty decent argument that there are already games that could benefit from a touch screen. Point and click PC games are a good one, seeing as most portable game systems don't have a mouse. Something like warcraft or command & conquer sure look like good game types for a touch screen. It's only a matter of time before those start appearing.
If you want a bigger screen and more 3D acceleration, then sony will happily sell you a PSP. I, on the other hand, am perfectly happy having my playstation at home, and would rather spend my money on something with different games, rather than just a smaller copy where I have to worry about battery life, even if it is portable.
True enough, not to mention that the Think Secret case has less to do with whether or not they're journalism, and more with whether or not they posted information in violation with trade secret laws. Those laws exist, they're defined, and they do not make exceptions for journalism.
TS and their lawyers trying to make this an argument of Apple vs. blogs is them trying to make a case in the court of public opinion, since they've got no good defense in the court of actual laws.
Yeah, but for actual realism, you need to have a realistic world for the AI to act in.
The developers have been hammering on graphics for years. Sound to a degree as well, although that's probably the easiest part to get done well.
Physics and AI are what's left, and physics seems to be the easier of those two problems, so it's going to get the attention first. The AI is just going to take a while longer.
The hardest part is actually communicating with the probes. That requires big, expensive, and not too common equipment. That equipment needs to be maintained and operated, or at least rented from someone who's running it for you. That's what costs money.
The whole point of my argument is that "Should journalist protections apply to blogs?" isn't a valid question, because "blogs" are not a coherent type of media in any sense other than a generic set of technologies used to publish them. And that technology does not make the content inherently valuable or worthless.
Some blogs are journalism, some are utter crap, some are in between. It really should be taken on a case by case basis, and the judge ruling against ThinkSecret's journalistic value should not mean that all blogs are forevermore considered worthless garbage in the eyes of the law.
The world is too complicated to be broken down into black and white definitions. That's why lawyers get paid so much money to muck around with all the details. It sucks that it has to be this way, but if you try and boil things down to a statement as simple as "All blogs are journalism and deserve legal protections", or the opposite, you're going to be causing problems.
Well, the thinksecret case needs to prove two points, as I see it. I'm not a lawyer, so this is just opinion, but I'm sharing anyways.
First, to win they're argument, they have to convince a judge that they're a legitimate journalistic website, and as such should be protected by those applicable journalist laws. I don't know how familiar you are with ThinkSecret, but I've been reading it on and off for years, and I'm not sure I'd consider it journalism as much as I'd call it rumor-mongering. There is certainly a difference, one of the most important being the expectation to admit when you're wrong, something that TS is loath to do.
The second thing that TS needs to prove is that the actions they are defending are even legally protected by journalistic shield laws. And from what I've been reading, that's questionable. The "I'm a journalist" defense is not all encompassing. Just as there are some practical restrictions on free speech as a whole, even journalists have legal limits. And sharing trade secrets that you should reasonably know are supposed to be under an NDA might fall outside of those limits. TS has been around for a while, they most certainly were aware of Apple's extreme secrecy and consistent use of NDA's.
I'd be reluctant to have the law try and write out a standard legal definition for a journalist. First off, it seems like a daunting task just to begin with, and any result would likely be so complicated that it really wouldn't make a case like this any easier to decide. Secondly, I think that something like this could easily backfire against the world of blogs and small-time independent publishers, because if forced to make a more declarative legal definition of journalism, the legislature might end up being very conservative, and unfairly leave out a lot of people who do valid work. Third, it's just as likely that somewhere soon down the line, more advances in technology will lead to all new ways for people to share information, and once again the definitions and laws will become problematic. What happens when broadband and video streaming becomes so commonplace that anyone can create their own "TV news" shows. It'll be over the internet instead of the television, but it'll be sort of the same. And just like blogs right now, some will be excellent sources of ideas and information, some will be utter crap, and some will be inbetween, creating a lot of confusion for the public at large.
I entirely agree with you. That's actually the point that I was trying to get across. Everyone seems to be trying to figure out, "are blogs journalism?" But like you said, not all things are of equal value. Some blogs most certainly are journalism. Others, like my website, are stupid rants, and utter crap.
If the court decides that Think Secret does not represent an journalistic publication, and therefore does not deserve journalistic protections, that's not the same as the judge saying that all blogs are worthless and don't deserve first amendment rights. Yet that seems to be the crux of Think Secret's defense.
There are plenty of blogs that I read every day to learn more about world events, or even local events. There are also others that I read about to see what my friends are up to. I read still others just to be amused by goofy writing and funny pictures. And I fully understand the differences between them. The one thing that makes them blogs is similarities in the technology used to publish them. It has nothing to do with the quality of content of the sites. They should not be considered the same by any other measure, and so it's expected that different laws will apply to them differently.
You're using circular arguments, and then posing a question that entirely contradicts that. You're dancing around the question.
Is all writing (excluding intended fiction) journalism? I think you can make a good argument that the answer is no. I'm not sure if it's possible to come up with a good, clear, and simple definition of journalism that will always be applicable. That being the case, people tend to be going to either extreme, saying blogs ARE journalism, case closed! Or blogs ARE NOT journalism, case closed!
To try and make an all-inclusive definition of a word such as "blog" reflect its value towards something as nebulous as "journalism" is an exercise in futility, and doesn't help make the situation any clearer.
Could a fourteen year old girl create a blog on Livejournal that served as a good example of journalism. Sure. I bet if you searched for a while, you could find a few. And those examples should be recognized for the quality and usefulness that they provide. But does that mean that all 14 year old girl's weblogs should be considered journalism? No. That'd be foolish.
I know it sucks that the world is so complicated. I really makes things difficult that we have to dig through all these levels of gray, instead of everything being black and white. But that's just how it goes, and trying to distill things down is not going to help. For every example or analogy I come up with, anyone should be able to come up with a good counter example. That's how big and complicated this issue is.
You're right. In fact, we should approach all laws like this. It's unfortunate that some people use violence to try and hurt innocent people, but on the other hand, sometimes people use violence in self defense.
It wouldn't be fair to condemn these people, and since violence is violence, we can't condemn a criminal for hurting someone either. It's unfortunate, but we have to!
Give me a break. I don't understand why so many people are trying to boil this down to simple semantics. A journalist is "one who keeps/writes a journal"? Really? Is that why I subscribe to the news paper? To read a bunch of journals? No, I read to find useful and generally confirmed information, or at least proof read opinions, which are clearly marked as such.
A Blog is an online journal? Is it always? I think there are probably about a zillion different types of blogs out there. Placing the livejournal of a fourteen year old girl under the same category as a constantly updated analysis of political strategies written by some forty year old DC resident doesn't accomplish anything productive.
Just as there are lots of different people, there are lots of different blogs. The only thing that makes them all blogs is the fact that they're on the internet, and maybe a basic organizational scheme. The content, and the quality of the content is entirely independent of that, and the content is the only thing that should be an issue when considering whether or not it is "journalism".
Not all things are of equal value. Not all things should be measured the same way. Trying to group the world into neat little packages and simple definitions is not going to get you anywhere.
How can you be so insanely cynical and negative towards something you know nothing about. At least save that crap for when they announce what this "revolution" is. Then you can at least pretend to know what you're talking about.
Normally people don't start talking that bitter about the future until they're like 80 years old. If you are 80, and you play video games, then good for you, weirdo.
I love both my gamecube and my xbox. Tell your brother to pick up Burnout 3. If both you and him don't have a great time with it, there's somethign wrong with you.
If you really feel that way, then why are you still a customer? Apple most certainly does have a history of proprietary hardware and software. But they also have a history of providing a computing environment that fueled the creation of many creative industries, such as desktop publishing, graphic editing, and as of late, big pushes into movies and music.
They've pretty much always had total control over their platform. The exception being during the clone era, which didn't go well for a number of reasons. It's how they've managed to keep the quality of their products higher than average.
I don't understand your argument that they want to totally control how I use my Mac. There's no software on my machine that I can't remove. A lot of their apps are collaborate in neat ways, but if take one of them off, the rest still work. Sure, they dictate what buttons and windows their programs present to me, but doesn't every application writer do that?
Much of their software writes to open formats, and other developers are free to pull apart and write to those files (keynote, ical, etc...).
I've installed various versions of Mac OS dozens of times on many different machines, and not once have I been asked to a serial number, or to authenticate.
I can think of lots of software on my computer that Apple didn't create. I don't even have to ask them for permission to use those programs.
I'm free to try and upgrade my hardware. My mac is filled mostly with pretty standard components. Video card choices are a bit limited because of the mac's smaller marketshare, but not because of any Apple conspiracy. I guess I can't really change my motherboard, but the percentage of computer users who care in the least what sort of motherboard they have is negligible.
There are hundreds, probably thousands of Apple fansites that have been operating for years, and I don't think many of them have been sued.
Linux and OpenBSD and whatnot most certainly do provide an extremely open and free environment. It's an environment that many people thrive in, and really enjoy. There are, however, plenty of other people who like to have a lot of the work already done for them, and that's the market that Apple has always targeted. Paying someone else make a bunch of decisions for you, so that you can get to work on the ones that you're actually interested in, that's not evil. And a company existing to make money off of doing that is not evil either.
That's very true, but it's not readily apparent to your average consumer.
I can call up my mom and say hey, check it out, you should get this mac mini, it's a tiny cheap computer that I think you'd find very useful. And she'll say but it's a mac and I'm used to windows. And look, here's some windows computers that look just as little and cheap.
And so I say, yeah, but with the mac, you'll get, for free; a decent web browser, excellent music management, a fun movie creation program, a good mail client, etc. And she'll say, windows comes with all that stuff too.
I'll try to explain to her how Apple's software is generally a lot easier and more pleasant to use, I may even take my mac over there and try and show her, but she doesn't have the time to sit down with the computer and really understand it.
MS only has to match apple with the number of features, not with the quality, then their inertia will keep them on the forefront. It's in Apple's best interests to avoid this copying for as long as is possible.
There's a huge difference between a whistle blower case and this.
If you are doing something illegal, you cannot legitimately enforce and NDA on someone telling them to keep quiet. You'd be asking them to sign a contract that makes them an accessory to a crime.
If Apple started kidnapping babies and using their blood as the cooling fluid in their liquid cooling systems, and an employee leaked that, then that'd be a whistle blower case. I don't think that after Steve Jobs got arrested that he'd get very far suing whoever let the world know. That'd be like calling up the cops and complaining because someone broke into your house and stole four pounds of cocaine.
A whistle blower case is different because they're revealing illegal acts by their employer. An NDA that says don't tell anybody about this illegal stuff we're doing is not legitimate.
An NDA that says don't tell anybody about this product we're developing is valid.
It's the reporter's responsibility to determine facts about a story because that's what journalism is supposed to be. I don't think journalists go to school to just learn how to stick whatever they hear onto a web site or a newspaper. If that's all it was, then Slashdot would be a paragon of journalistic integrity, because that's all the editors do here (although not all that well lately).
In the Think Secret case, the guy running the website has been at it for years, he most certainly knew that Apple is intensively secret about their stuff, and if he didn't assume that just about any information he got was via a broken NDA, then he's just playing ignorant because it suits his cause. That's not very responsible reporting, and I'd be reluctant to give someone like that even the respect required to call him a "journalist".
If Apple leaks information to generate hype, why would they sue the press? In this case, they're trying to get thinksecret to cough up the names of the leaks. If they already knew who it was, why would they go through this trouble and potential PR mess?
Slashdot is not much of a news agency. It's more of a community, one that is spurred into discussion via news aggregation. Except for the occasional interview, /. editors put very little effort into creating content, they don't research, they don't break stories, they don't fact-check.
National Security is not the only reason that something should be held secret. Private information, whether it belongs to a person or a corporation should generally be considered private, especially when ones source is of questionable legality.
For an only partly applicable analogy (a better one doesn't come to mind), the patterns on my underwear is not a matter of national security, but it's not really anyone's business either. I don't care for the whole world to know about it. But if you decide you want to write a story about it, how you get your information is a pretty significant part of your job. If you ask me, or maybe my girlfriend, and one of us cough up the info, then fine, run with it. If you're courting people who you think may have broken into my house and rifled through my dresser, well, that's a bit sketchy. And when I read the article you published, and realize you probably know who it was that broke into my house and went through all my stuff, I'd expect you to tell me who it was. Otherwise you're basically aiding a criminal.
Now in Apple's case, it's a little different, but someone broke an NDA, a legal-contract that they willingly signed, and Apple wants to know who it is so that they can take actions against them that they feel appropriate. ThinkSecret can play dumb all they want, but with as long as they've been around, they understood that they were soliciting information that they're only going to receive if someone breaks an NDA. By not giving up their sources, they're helping someone who broke the law get away with it. I don't understand how that is defensible.