I'm concerned about this too. If you go back in history, many said that the CP/M that you could run inside the Apple ][ harmed the Apple ][ platform as well.
That being said, there is one thing that keeps OSX alive: Apple software, which will obviously continue to be OSX-based. Programs like Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Garageband, Logic, etc, etc are class-leading products that, if I know Steve, are not about to go to Windows.
Almost all the commercial software running on my Apple computers is made by Apple, from Mail and Safari built into OSX to the various Final Cut incarnations and iTools. I don't think that will change no matter how good the virtualization is.
And, of course, not having to be a raving paranoiac over virii and spyware sure is a nice bonus.
For me, anyway, all that and the asethetic deficit (Windows and its applications are mind-bendingly ugly) will keep me firmly in the Apple camp.
If it wasn't for this lawsuit, I'd estimate that less than 1% of Beatles fans know that the record label was Apple Records.
Does ANYONE associate their favorite music with their favorite label? Does anyone even have a favorite label? If you asked me what label Steely Dan, my favorite popular music band, was on, I simply would not know.
Record stores are not organized by label; the label is at best a small logo somewhere on the CD jewel box; I don't think there's even an ID3 tag for it.
So I'm confused because I simply see no conflict between Apple Records and Apple Computer. If Apple Computer called its music store "The Beatles Store" then they would have a conflict. But Apple Records barely uses the name Apple, anywhere.
So what's the impact on Apple Records, or the public? I'd say it's close to zero and that's why I think this suit lacks merit.
What Robert Fisk was claiming is that there would be a bloody battle in Baghdad, that the Iraqi forces were clearly ready to resist in the capital, and he had seen their careful preparations to defend the city. Sorry, it didn't quite work out that way.
You sound like you are relishing that prospect, which is pretty sad. Are you on the side of the insurgency?
I have read many similar stories, so I'm confident of its accuracy.
Whenever someone tells me the Iraq war was a rotten thing for the people, we bombed them to pieces, they really loved Saddam, etc, I could argue with my own opinions until I was blue in the face. Instead, I send them the opinion of an ordinary Iraqi.
Have things changed in the long, hard years since then? Not a chance.
So if you think there is something romantic about the insurgency, or that they are the good guys, I hope you'll consider what I've shown you. No matter how much you hate the US military, we're still the good guys in Iraq, and the people are still overwhelmingly on our side:
My friend, where is your sense of adventure? Your willingness to do new things? Your eagerness to enjoy adventure in another country?
From the way you talk, you sound pretty sour on life. It disturbs me because nowadays America is the country of sour, unhappy people. I see them all over the place.
Then I visit the Philippines, and everyone there has a smile and a laugh for me, even though most of them only make about 200 pesos a day [$4].
And I wonder... who are the real losers here?
I hate to say it, but I think it's those of us who live here in America, land of depression.
A lot of the International media has more interesting, or at least more colorful, reporting. Right-wing columnist Mark Steyn writes his often hilarious and always insightful column for publications in Canada, the UK, Israel, the US and probably a few other countries I'm not remembering right now. He's a great writer and I'm happy to see him around.
If you want someone on the radical left, there's always good ol' blood and guts Robert Fisk of the Independent, also out of the UK, although you have to pay to read him nowadays. Be warned that although his writing is colorful, his predictive ability's a bit off; he thought our army would be facing tens of thousands of casualties in the Afghan war, for example.
The British press overall seems better written and more enjoyable to read than that in the US. Take The Economist on the center right and the Guardian on the left. So you can see news from every perspective and political viewpoint without even leaving your computer.
On a more positive vein, many nerds, who are complete losers in love in the US, might want to consider a Filipina wife. Once in the Philippines, you change magically into the biggest winner on the planet. International communications and relatively cheap flights makes this something worth thinking about for many.
Filipinas are not subservient, unlike what you may hear, but they do center their world around you, wanting to make you happy. You won't be happy with one if you want a slave, but if you want someone who really cares about you and will support you in what you do, my personal experience says a Filipina wife is just what a lonely nerd needs.
Needless to say, without an International internet, I would not have found out about this and I'd still be thinking my romantic potential was just about zero.
I'm planning to move to the Philippines permanently, due to the low cost of living and the potential happiness from finding a good girl. And of course that makes me hungry for news of the Philippines. Google news aggregates it, but I notice most of it comes from an interesting, diverse set of countries. Of course the local Philippines press is represented, but I also see myself commonly checking out news sources from China, India, and other locations too numerous to mention.
In short, if you look at where I get my news and even where I plan to get my future wife, you can see I'd lose a lot of the net were no longer an International place. And I'm lousy with foreign languages; it doesn't matter since most of these services are either English in origin or translated into English.
I've had a couple of bosses who are similar to Steve in many respects.
They get very upset if you don't live up to their standards, and of course virtually nobody does, and so meetings are tense, nasty affairs.
The problem is that I think it takes that type of person to produce truly great products. Producing great products is tough, and mediocrity is easy. Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate mediocrity in any form, even though mediocrity is what most Americans are trained to accept.
I wouldn't enjoy being in on his staff meetings, and I wouldn't enjoy being reamed by him when I did something wrong. But I don't work for the man, and all I can say is that he is responsible for more brilliant products, from the PowerBook to the iPod to Final Cut Pro and MacOS X than anyone else I know of.
I think you can admire Steve and what he's created without wanting to work for him:-).
The genius is all in taking the original opportunity with IBM and running with it, combined with shrewd marketing. I am not saying that this isn't genius, because plenty of people have had similar opportunities and have not capitalized on them as spectacularly as Microsoft.
But sadly it has little to do with the merits of the product, and I think that's where the anger comes from. Slashdot people live with the results of some brilliant marketing decisions that turned out to be just plain awful from a product quality standpoint.
I don't think homosexual should be an insult. The more gay men exist, the more women will be available for the rest of us, and Slashdot users know how hard it is for us to find women even in the best of times(*).
So please don't insult our wonderful homosexual users. Straight male Slashdotters, who are at least 85% of the audience here, will thank you for it.
D
(*) True, there are gay women, but there are far more gay men so homosexuality is still, on balance, favorable to men who prefer the female sex.
I think what they're describing is an effort to move many of their products over to being web services, and focusing on the revenues from things like Microsoft Live search.
I find it amusing that the statement I quoted was so ambiguous and confusing that two readers found two entirely different meanings for it. Maybe as this discussion continues we'll find even more potential meanings.
Of course when I tried Windows Live! a week or so ago, it simply did not work. I even tried it with Firefox (instead of Safari) and it still didn't work. I'm using a Mac, but that's no excuse; Google works great.
One thing you can say for Apple: I have read about many keynotes and Apple press releases and such, and I don't think I have ever encountered language that was in any way unclear or ambiguous. When Apple says something, I know what they mean and I feel I can trust them.
Microsoft's problem, incidentally, is not new, but I think at this point the harmful effects may be catching up to it. This is almost a decade old but still well worth reading.
While I'm here, I noticed your reference to the author's comments about Apple. Personally, I think they should have been higher up in the article, together with his ruminations on Linux, because Apple's a far better solution for most consumers in my view thanks to the availability of solid, high-quality commercial software like Office and the iLife/iWork suite.
1. Software + Services: Position for the next wave of innovation relative to our vision for Windows Live. Ray Ozzie and I continue to work closely to advance the Live vision announced last November. End-to-end scenarios that enable seamless experiences across client, server, and services are critical for all customers, and Windows Vista + Windows Live begins to address this vision. Utilizing services as a distribution vehicle for user experiences enables us to embrace the concept of software + service and deliver innovation to market faster. Doing this requires us to think about the Windows Live platform as a key to the value proposition we deliver to developers. These changes provide clear connections with Ray and his team to help shape the Live platform, Live experiences and the marketing that supports Windows Live.
Okay! In one second, without reading it more than once, what exactly did this mean?
When I quoted it, did you read it or simply skim over it in a vain effort to find something, anything, that was concrete and had some connection with the real world?
From the user's perspective, what are these products like? I can see the advantages of operating this way to Microsoft, but what in it is exciting to the end user who actually has to pay for this stuff?
If a company can only communicate in gutless, meaningless, abstract language, customers won't understand it and the press is going to stop caring. We're seeing this process begin in the Forbes editorial also cited by Slashdot.
Well, of course he appointed himself, and since he's himself, he's pretty secure in that position!
But seriously, who appointed Microsoft, or Red Hat, to be a gatekeeper?
My understanding is that the various exams are fairly straightforward multiple choice tests that most likely reward test taking ability more real-world skills. Thus the frequent complaints of MSCEs that know nothing and don't care to learn.
Besides, $2,000 is a LOT of money for an unemployed person...
You have a good point there, although of course Roark did find clients who accepted his way of doing things and were the better for it. I understand Rand loosely modeled Roark over Frank Lloyd Wright, who definitely had similar problems and similarly rigid attitudes during his career. Although people will argue over the practicality of Wright's creations, nobody denies that he's an architectural genius who created designs that were much beloved by clients, even as they fought roof leaks and worse.
Ayn Rand's villains have always seemed more convincing to me than her heroes, who seem just too perfect. And even among the heroes, those who were imperfect were the best drawn. I rooted for Hank Rearden more than John Galt, who barely emerged as an actual character.
In that vein, nobody should miss the portrayal of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. He feels distinctly lifelike, even in today's world.
The Macintosh interface was quite a bit different from the Xerox Star's, and innovation certainly includes making a formerly unaffordable product more affordable.
In my recollection, if you had to force quit an application on the Macintosh, it would usually hang on just long enough for you to save your files. (Note that I said usually, not always).
The same was true of the same type of error in Windows. If you had other applications open you could normally save the data in them and then reboot.
In the Amiga, BANG! You lost everything, instantly because the OS gave up the ghost basically the second something went wrong. Remember the top 1/4 of the screen turning black and the "Guru Meditation" message? The machine died then.
I had an Amiga. It loved to crash, and when one application died it would bring down the entire machine. Not even Windows 3.1 worked as badly (although Amiga multitasking actually worked, unlike Windows).
The Mac, with the first graphical interface in an affordable PC, was surely just as innovative as the Amiga, if not more so.
The Mac has had a two button mouse for what is it, six months now?
Admittedly, not on the portables, so I suppose you still have a point for the time being.
I just returned from a trip to the Philippines, where Internet cafes were plentiful and seemed to attract plenty of customers. Some of them were filipino nerds and others were filipinas looking to snag a Western husband or boyfriend. Still, they are beyond the reach of most; employed Filipinas make about 200 pesos [US$ 4] a day, making Internet fees of 25 pesos [$0.50] an hour prohibitively expensive.
Cellphones are generally prepaid and you buy "load" in packs of 100 pesos [$2] and up. A text message, the most common mode of communication, costs one peso [$0.02].
For middle class Filipinas, cellphones are major status symbols. I met several people with cellphones that cost 13,000 pesos [$260] and up. These phones are actually quite a bit nicer than the cellphones I've seen in common use in the US. The most common seems to be the Nokia 6630, with a nice big clear color screen, a camera and bluetooth. I could imagine using it for SSH in a pinch. Its user interface looks slick but I found it quite difficult to learn how to use. A lot of tiny buttons with almost invisible labelling made it very difficult to figure out how to get to places you might have fumbled yourself to minutes before. I suspect that if I'd had more time using it I really would have liked it, probably more than my T-Mobile Sidekick.
A Filipina is never without her cellphone. It is such a significant part of her life that westerners with romantic or even friendship connections with her can get jealous of the phone! I started calling it Celly, and treated it like a member of the family. I even took pictures of Celly like she was another family member. My picture of "Celly Eating" while she was on the charger got laughs from everyone! My Filipina friends laughed and enjoyed being asked about Celly's health!
Celly's health is a real concern; my friend with the 6630 got a multimedia message system virus. "Celly is very sick," I told her. I suggested we go to the Internet cafe and I would try to cure Celly. The mobile.f-secure.com web site has eradication tools as well as anti-virus software for Celly. Everyone was very impressed that I was able to cure Celly even though all I did was download and run the removal tool! The most difficult part of all this was trying to figure out how to access the web browser on the phone's convoluted user interface.
My friend, of course, later complained about her cellphone bill for data access, which skyrocketed thanks to Celly's illness. (The virus, of course, sends copies of itself to everyone it can find). I'm glad I was able to cure Celly for her before she faced even worse problems.
Of course most of the actual multimedia use of Celly was sending jokes, photos and funny cartoons and animations around to her friends. And most of her computer use was talking to foreigners in her quest for an American husband. My friend read her Yahoo mail on Celly but otherwise didn't make much use of the Internet features.
Sometimes I wonder about how these high-brow people pushing the $100 computer would think of the use real people make of this technology. Endless chats on the computer with foreigners, trying to lure them to the Philippines with promise of romance might not seem like the most idealistic use in the world. But I can tell you, it's the use that's going to be made as technology seeps into the third world.
Engagement in world affairs may be the exclusive province of people who still believe in some way in their government. Shortly after I left, there was a coup attempt in the Philippines which lead to a state of emergency. I was far more engaged in this than my Filipina friends. "That's just something going on in Manila [the capital]" was a typical comment.
In the US, I don't know if we really believe in our government all that much, but at least we consider the news as a source of entertainment. In the Philippines, the people have warmer relationships with each other and seem to have less need for this. They are desperately poor, a
He also combats piracy by raiding Internet cafes in those same countries, which can barely afford to stay open, because they didn't have proper software licenses for Windows.
This, of course, limits computer access in these countries and makes it more expensive to run Internet cafes. Those that don't switch to Linux have to buy Windows licenses, which are very expensive in a place where Internet cafe fees are commonly around $0.50 an hour.
If I were him, I'd ignore these markets (and allow piracy) until they were rich enough to pay for Windows with ease. But he sends the jackbooted thugs in, which I think just doesn't make a lot of sense. If he wants to help the third world, he should donate licenses to operations like those since they do help the spread of Windows computing around the world.
I think T-Mobile quality varies significantly by market.
I remember having tons of problems in Los Angeles but not nearly as many in Pittsburgh, where I presently live. Maybe things are just overloaded in LA.
At least on my PowerBook G4, you can pick which wireless network you can access by selecting them from a pop-up menu that's accessible globally from the system menu bar.
You can do the same thing in Windows, but of course it's not quite as slick.
Oops -- I was wrong. It would be 1400-odd years since the year 600.
Sorry, my mistake.
Still, many of those innovations are pre-Islam and certainly there's no question that in the last 250-odd years little noteworthy has come from the Islamic world compared to huge innovations from the West.
Many people have accused NASA of major stagnation, so that might not be the best example to support your case. As a good example, see How the West wasn't won.
That being said, it seems pretty obvious that within the last 250-odd years, the Islamic world has generated very little in the way of innovation, while Westerners have created a world of technology that's completely transformed people's lives. In fact, others have pointed out that in the 600-odd years Islam has existed, the Islamic world has produced very little compared to the innovative west. It seems like there is a fairly precise correlation between when Islam started growing and when innovation slowed to a stop.
This is not really surprising considering that Islam itself says that the Prophet Mohammed has said everything that needs to be said. It's a bit tough to innovate when you're told everything has already been discovered!
So this site tells us that it's a way for us to find fresh blogs and reading material based on the blogs I know.
So I put instapundit.com in and got a bunch of blogs as results. I read almost all of them regularly.
I clicked on a few of the results and got even more results, most of which I knew.
You can either say that I don't have a life, which is probably true, or that this site points out sites whose relevence is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
In short, if you read Instapundit, you know it links to Daily Kos or the Corner in National Review or Little Green Footballs regularly. So therefore you already go to those places if they interest you.
All this search engine seems to do is remember and build on those relationships, which sounds like it would be interesting but is really pointing out things you probably already know.
Roland is a fellow whose article suggestions to Slashdot mysteriously all seem to get approved, so you see a few stories a week from him.
Some people think this is a conspiracy of some kind, possibly greased with money or influence.
Or it's possible that Slashdot's management simply finds him a reliable source of articles that they can put up as interesting without looking at in any depth.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm concerned about this too. If you go back in history, many said that the CP/M that you could run inside the Apple ][ harmed the Apple ][ platform as well.
That being said, there is one thing that keeps OSX alive: Apple software, which will obviously continue to be OSX-based. Programs like Final Cut Pro, iMovie, Garageband, Logic, etc, etc are class-leading products that, if I know Steve, are not about to go to Windows.
Almost all the commercial software running on my Apple computers is made by Apple, from Mail and Safari built into OSX to the various Final Cut incarnations and iTools. I don't think that will change no matter how good the virtualization is.
And, of course, not having to be a raving paranoiac over virii and spyware sure is a nice bonus.
For me, anyway, all that and the asethetic deficit (Windows and its applications are mind-bendingly ugly) will keep me firmly in the Apple camp.
D
Oh no, I don't regard them as over.
But I do regard them as non-disasters and I don't think anything that occurs subsequently will change that significantly.
I'm afraid I don't watch many movies, so the reference was lost on me.
D
If it wasn't for this lawsuit, I'd estimate that less than 1% of Beatles fans know that the record label was Apple Records.
Does ANYONE associate their favorite music with their favorite label? Does anyone even have a favorite label? If you asked me what label Steely Dan, my favorite popular music band, was on, I simply would not know.
Record stores are not organized by label; the label is at best a small logo somewhere on the CD jewel box; I don't think there's even an ID3 tag for it.
So I'm confused because I simply see no conflict between Apple Records and Apple Computer. If Apple Computer called its music store "The Beatles Store" then they would have a conflict. But Apple Records barely uses the name Apple, anywhere.
So what's the impact on Apple Records, or the public? I'd say it's close to zero and that's why I think this suit lacks merit.
D
What Robert Fisk was claiming is that there would be a bloody battle in Baghdad, that the Iraqi forces were clearly ready to resist in the capital, and he had seen their careful preparations to defend the city. Sorry, it didn't quite work out that way.
You sound like you are relishing that prospect, which is pretty sad. Are you on the side of the insurgency?
Iraqis aren't, why are you?
Here's a nice summary of the situation on the ground.
I have read many similar stories, so I'm confident of its accuracy.
Whenever someone tells me the Iraq war was a rotten thing for the people, we bombed them to pieces, they really loved Saddam, etc, I could argue with my own opinions until I was blue in the face. Instead,
I send them the opinion of an ordinary Iraqi.
Have things changed in the long, hard years since then? Not a chance.
So if you think there is something romantic about the insurgency, or that they are the good guys, I hope you'll consider what I've shown you. No matter how much you hate the US military, we're still the good guys in Iraq, and the people are still overwhelmingly on our side:
Hope that helps.
D
My friend, where is your sense of adventure? Your willingness to do new things? Your eagerness to enjoy adventure in another country?
... who are the real losers here?
From the way you talk, you sound pretty sour on life. It disturbs me because nowadays America is the country of sour, unhappy people. I see them all over the place.
Then I visit the Philippines, and everyone there has a smile and a laugh for me, even though most of them only make about 200 pesos a day [$4].
And I wonder
I hate to say it, but I think it's those of us who live here in America, land of depression.
I challenge you to prove me wrong.
D
A lot of the International media has more interesting, or at least more colorful, reporting. Right-wing columnist Mark Steyn writes his often hilarious and always insightful column for publications in Canada, the UK, Israel, the US and probably a few other countries I'm not remembering right now. He's a great writer and I'm happy to see him around.
If you want someone on the radical left, there's always good ol' blood and guts Robert Fisk of the Independent, also out of the UK, although you have to pay to read him nowadays. Be warned that although his writing is colorful, his predictive ability's a bit off; he thought our army would be facing tens of thousands of casualties in the Afghan war, for example.
The British press overall seems better written and more enjoyable to read than that in the US. Take The Economist on the center right and the Guardian on the left. So you can see news from every perspective and political viewpoint without even leaving your computer.
On a more positive vein, many nerds, who are complete losers in love in the US, might want to consider a Filipina wife. Once in the Philippines, you change magically into the biggest winner on the planet. International communications and relatively cheap flights makes this something worth thinking about for many.
Filipinas are not subservient, unlike what you may hear, but they do center their world around you, wanting to make you happy. You won't be happy with one if you want a slave, but if you want someone who really cares about you and will support you in what you do, my personal experience says a Filipina wife is just what a lonely nerd needs.
Needless to say, without an International internet, I would not have found out about this and I'd still be thinking my romantic potential was just about zero.
I'm planning to move to the Philippines permanently, due to the low cost of living and the potential happiness from finding a good girl. And of course that makes me hungry for news of the Philippines. Google news aggregates it, but I notice most of it comes from an interesting, diverse set of countries. Of course the local Philippines press is represented, but I also see myself commonly checking out news sources from China, India, and other locations too numerous to mention.
In short, if you look at where I get my news and even where I plan to get my future wife, you can see I'd lose a lot of the net were no longer an International place. And I'm lousy with foreign languages; it doesn't matter since most of these services are either English in origin or translated into English.
D
Maybe not, though, because hasn't Vista been shedding features like the WinFs (supposedly needed to compete with Spotlight)?
D
I've had a couple of bosses who are similar to Steve in many respects.
:-).
They get very upset if you don't live up to their standards, and of course virtually nobody does, and so meetings are tense, nasty affairs.
The problem is that I think it takes that type of person to produce truly great products. Producing great products is tough, and mediocrity is easy. Steve Jobs doesn't tolerate mediocrity in any form, even though mediocrity is what most Americans are trained to accept.
I wouldn't enjoy being in on his staff meetings, and I wouldn't enjoy being reamed by him when I did something wrong. But I don't work for the man, and all I can say is that he is responsible for more brilliant products, from the PowerBook to the iPod to Final Cut Pro and MacOS X than anyone else I know of.
I think you can admire Steve and what he's created without wanting to work for him
D
Probably not.
Apple's whole development team has probably turned over completely since then, with most of the head guys coming from former NeXT.
We worship Steve now. Hail Steve!
And really, that's meant to be funny, but it's almost serious. What a job Steve's done, and what a vivid contrast to Ballmer and friends.
Isn't it funny that Steve Ballmer is never Steve? No, if we say Steve without a last name, it's always Jobs.
D
The genius is all in taking the original opportunity with IBM and running with it, combined with shrewd marketing. I am not saying that this isn't genius, because plenty of people have had similar opportunities and have not capitalized on them as spectacularly as Microsoft.
But sadly it has little to do with the merits of the product, and I think that's where the anger comes from. Slashdot people live with the results of some brilliant marketing decisions that turned out to be just plain awful from a product quality standpoint.
I don't think homosexual should be an insult. The more gay men exist, the more women will be available for the rest of us, and Slashdot users know how hard it is for us to find women even in the best of times(*).
So please don't insult our wonderful homosexual users. Straight male Slashdotters, who are at least 85% of the audience here, will thank you for it.
D
(*) True, there are gay women, but there are far more gay men so homosexuality is still, on balance, favorable to men who prefer the female sex.
I think what they're describing is an effort to move many of their products over to being web services, and focusing on the revenues from things like Microsoft Live search.
I find it amusing that the statement I quoted was so ambiguous and confusing that two readers found two entirely different meanings for it. Maybe as this discussion continues we'll find even more potential meanings.
Of course when I tried Windows Live! a week or so ago, it simply did not work. I even tried it with Firefox (instead of Safari) and it still didn't work. I'm using a Mac, but that's no excuse; Google works great.
One thing you can say for Apple: I have read about many keynotes and Apple press releases and such, and I don't think I have ever encountered language that was in any way unclear or ambiguous. When Apple says something, I know what they mean and I feel I can trust them.
Microsoft's problem, incidentally, is not new, but I think at this point the harmful effects may be catching up to it. This is almost a decade old but still well worth reading.
D
The world is ending.
:-).
Dell just bought Alienware.
While I'm here, I noticed your reference to the author's comments about Apple. Personally, I think they should have been higher up in the article, together with his ruminations on Linux, because Apple's a far better solution for most consumers in my view thanks to the availability of solid, high-quality commercial software like Office and the iLife/iWork suite.
And I don't have any Apple stock. Wish I did
D
Okay! In one second, without reading it more than once, what exactly did this mean?
When I quoted it, did you read it or simply skim over it in a vain effort to find something, anything, that was concrete and had some connection with the real world?
From the user's perspective, what are these products like? I can see the advantages of operating this way to Microsoft, but what in it is exciting to the end user who actually has to pay for this stuff?
If a company can only communicate in gutless, meaningless, abstract language, customers won't understand it and the press is going to stop caring. We're seeing this process begin in the Forbes editorial also cited by Slashdot.
D
Well, of course he appointed himself, and since he's himself, he's pretty secure in that position!
...
But seriously, who appointed Microsoft, or Red Hat, to be a gatekeeper?
My understanding is that the various exams are fairly straightforward multiple choice tests that most likely reward test taking ability more real-world skills. Thus the frequent complaints of MSCEs that know nothing and don't care to learn.
Besides, $2,000 is a LOT of money for an unemployed person
D
You have a good point there, although of course Roark did find clients who accepted his way of doing things and were the better for it. I understand Rand loosely modeled Roark over Frank Lloyd Wright, who definitely had similar problems and similarly rigid attitudes during his career. Although people will argue over the practicality of Wright's creations, nobody denies that he's an architectural genius who created designs that were much beloved by clients, even as they fought roof leaks and worse.
Ayn Rand's villains have always seemed more convincing to me than her heroes, who seem just too perfect. And even among the heroes, those who were imperfect were the best drawn. I rooted for Hank Rearden more than John Galt, who barely emerged as an actual character.
In that vein, nobody should miss the portrayal of Ellsworth Toohey in The Fountainhead. He feels distinctly lifelike, even in today's world.
D
The Macintosh interface was quite a bit different from the Xerox Star's, and innovation certainly includes making a formerly unaffordable product more affordable.
In my recollection, if you had to force quit an application on the Macintosh, it would usually hang on just long enough for you to save your files. (Note that I said usually, not always).
The same was true of the same type of error in Windows. If you had other applications open you could normally save the data in them and then reboot.
In the Amiga, BANG! You lost everything, instantly because the OS gave up the ghost basically the second something went wrong. Remember the top 1/4 of the screen turning black and the "Guru Meditation" message? The machine died then.
D
I had an Amiga. It loved to crash, and when one application died it would bring down the entire machine. Not even Windows 3.1 worked as badly (although Amiga multitasking actually worked, unlike Windows).
The Mac, with the first graphical interface in an affordable PC, was surely just as innovative as the Amiga, if not more so.
The Mac has had a two button mouse for what is it, six months now?
Admittedly, not on the portables, so I suppose you still have a point for the time being.
D
I just returned from a trip to the Philippines, where Internet cafes were plentiful and seemed to attract plenty of customers. Some of them were filipino nerds and others were filipinas looking to snag a Western husband or boyfriend. Still, they are beyond the reach of most; employed Filipinas make about 200 pesos [US$ 4] a day, making Internet fees of 25 pesos [$0.50] an hour prohibitively expensive.
Cellphones are generally prepaid and you buy "load" in packs of 100 pesos [$2] and up. A text message, the most common mode of communication, costs one peso [$0.02].
For middle class Filipinas, cellphones are major status symbols. I met several people with cellphones that cost 13,000 pesos [$260] and up. These phones are actually quite a bit nicer than the cellphones I've seen in common use in the US. The most common seems to be the Nokia 6630, with a nice big clear color screen, a camera and bluetooth. I could imagine using it for SSH in a pinch. Its user interface looks slick but I found it quite difficult to learn how to use. A lot of tiny buttons with almost invisible labelling made it very difficult to figure out how to get to places you might have fumbled yourself to minutes before. I suspect that if I'd had more time using it I really would have liked it, probably more than my T-Mobile Sidekick.
A Filipina is never without her cellphone. It is such a significant part of her life that westerners with romantic or even friendship connections with her can get jealous of the phone! I started calling it Celly, and treated it like a member of the family. I even took pictures of Celly like she was another family member. My picture of "Celly Eating" while she was on the charger got laughs from everyone! My Filipina friends laughed and enjoyed being asked about Celly's health!
Celly's health is a real concern; my friend with the 6630 got a multimedia message system virus. "Celly is very sick," I told her. I suggested we go to the Internet cafe and I would try to cure Celly. The mobile.f-secure.com web site has eradication tools as well as anti-virus software for Celly. Everyone was very impressed that I was able to cure Celly even though all I did was download and run the removal tool! The most difficult part of all this was trying to figure out how to access the web browser on the phone's convoluted user interface.
My friend, of course, later complained about her cellphone bill for data access, which skyrocketed thanks to Celly's illness. (The virus, of course, sends copies of itself to everyone it can find). I'm glad I was able to cure Celly for her before she faced even worse problems.
Of course most of the actual multimedia use of Celly was sending jokes, photos and funny cartoons and animations around to her friends. And most of her computer use was talking to foreigners in her quest for an American husband. My friend read her Yahoo mail on Celly but otherwise didn't make much use of the Internet features.
Sometimes I wonder about how these high-brow people pushing the $100 computer would think of the use real people make of this technology. Endless chats on the computer with foreigners, trying to lure them to the Philippines with promise of romance might not seem like the most idealistic use in the world. But I can tell you, it's the use that's going to be made as technology seeps into the third world.
Engagement in world affairs may be the exclusive province of people who still believe in some way in their government. Shortly after I left, there was a coup attempt in the Philippines which lead to a state of emergency. I was far more engaged in this than my Filipina friends. "That's just something going on in Manila [the capital]" was a typical comment.
In the US, I don't know if we really believe in our government all that much, but at least we consider the news as a source of entertainment. In the Philippines, the people have warmer relationships with each other and seem to have less need for this. They are desperately poor, a
He also combats piracy by raiding Internet cafes in those same countries, which can barely afford to stay open, because they didn't have proper software licenses for Windows.
This, of course, limits computer access in these countries and makes it more expensive to run Internet cafes. Those that don't switch to Linux have to buy Windows licenses, which are very expensive in a place where Internet cafe fees are commonly around $0.50 an hour.
If I were him, I'd ignore these markets (and allow piracy) until they were rich enough to pay for Windows with ease. But he sends the jackbooted thugs in, which I think just doesn't make a lot of sense. If he wants to help the third world, he should donate licenses to operations like those since they do help the spread of Windows computing around the world.
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I think T-Mobile quality varies significantly by market.
I remember having tons of problems in Los Angeles but not nearly as many in Pittsburgh, where I presently live. Maybe things are just overloaded in LA.
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At least on my PowerBook G4, you can pick which wireless network you can access by selecting them from a pop-up menu that's accessible globally from the system menu bar.
You can do the same thing in Windows, but of course it's not quite as slick.
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Oops -- I was wrong. It would be 1400-odd years since the year 600.
Sorry, my mistake.
Still, many of those innovations are pre-Islam and certainly there's no question that in the last 250-odd years little noteworthy has come from the Islamic world compared to huge innovations from the West.
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Many people have accused NASA of major stagnation, so that might not be the best example to support your case. As a good example, see How the West wasn't won.
That being said, it seems pretty obvious that within the last 250-odd years, the Islamic world has generated very little in the way of innovation, while Westerners have created a world of technology that's completely transformed people's lives. In fact, others have pointed out that in the 600-odd years Islam has existed, the Islamic world has produced very little compared to the innovative west. It seems like there is a fairly precise correlation between when Islam started growing and when innovation slowed to a stop.
This is not really surprising considering that Islam itself says that the Prophet Mohammed has said everything that needs to be said. It's a bit tough to innovate when you're told everything has already been discovered!
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So this site tells us that it's a way for us to find fresh blogs and reading material based on the blogs I know.
So I put instapundit.com in and got a bunch of blogs as results. I read almost all of them regularly.
I clicked on a few of the results and got even more results, most of which I knew.
You can either say that I don't have a life, which is probably true, or that this site points out sites whose relevence is pretty obvious to anyone paying attention.
In short, if you read Instapundit, you know it links to Daily Kos or the Corner in National Review or Little Green Footballs regularly. So therefore you already go to those places if they interest you.
All this search engine seems to do is remember and build on those relationships, which sounds like it would be interesting but is really pointing out things you probably already know.
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Roland is a fellow whose article suggestions to Slashdot mysteriously all seem to get approved, so you see a few stories a week from him.
Some people think this is a conspiracy of some kind, possibly greased with money or influence.
Or it's possible that Slashdot's management simply finds him a reliable source of articles that they can put up as interesting without looking at in any depth.
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