There's a difference between an investment and insurance, yes.
But Social Security is bad insurance and a terrible investment. It offers a negative return on your money as a retirement program and negligible benefits as insurance. The death benefit, for example, is $255, which isn't enough even for the most skimpy of funerals.
I have a right to say that I want a specific fire insurance policy. If it's sold, I can buy it.
I have a right to invest with about ten billion companies. If there's an investment approach, there's a fund to support it.
Why is it that there is compulsory social insurance, a package that in my view provides lousy benefits at an extremely high price, that I cannot change?
What if I could invest in anything I wanted under the umbrella of social insurance?
That's what Social Security private accounts would do. In my opinion, it is righting a long-standing injustice, pure and simple.
If society, whatever that is, says we need social insurance, whatever that is, fine. But let us choose the policy that's best for us. At minimum, then, let's choose a policy that actually offers a positive return on our investment, and is not dependent on an increasing population to pay benefits.
That's what Bush is proposing with Social Security Private Accounts. Tell me what's wrong with that. It seems to me that it's common sense that if you invest money for your retirement, or to protect you when you're sick and disabled, you should be able to manage that money on your own.
One size fits all went out with Henry Ford.
D
PS Social Security hurts the poor more than anyone else, since they don't have the investment money we do. SS/is/ their investment money. If they had the freedom to invest it as they wanted, everyone would be better off. That's my argument, pure and simple.
Taxes of 12-odd percent of our income are taken for SS.
If you invested that money in private accounts, you'd be wealthy by the time you retired, even if you made some seriously bad investment decisions.
Private accounts are the only way to PREVENT government from plundering SS! If you own money, you own it and the government isn't going to be able to change the terms.
Whether the SS system can pay promised benefits is not the point. The point is that the SS system is an enomous, unacceptable ripoff for the people in it now.
It's great for current retirees, but anyone in the system now will get negative returns on their "investment".
I know it's a social program, it's about the social contract and so on, but if the social contract is as one-sided as SS is, well, I want out. Period.
I believed that when I was barely getting by and I believed that when I was making $100k plus. My view has not changed. Private accounts would take something that ripped off 99% of participants and make it into a much less unfair system.
I'd really like to know how anyone could sleep at night after dooming people to poverty in their retirement thanks to a money-sucking horror of a system. Social Security as it stands is robbing blind 99% of the people in it, and they don't even realize it.
We can choose to take your product for free, or we can pay $150-odd for the Student/Teacher edition of Microsoft Office, which only requires that you're not the owner of a large business.
You should consider an alliance with Mac users because they have already decided to "think different". They just want a product worthy of different thinking.
Using a Windows-style GUI isn't going to cut it. After all, we didn't choose Windows, so the odds are pretty good that we don't want a me-too imitation. That's why the Microsoft Mac Business Unit creates a program that looks nothing like Windows.
Ironically enough, we'd rather have that product than yours, which, if my memory serves, has all the gray depressive feel of Windows 98.
(When I was IT manager (among other hats) at a mid-sized 200-employee company, I tried introducing OpenOffice and it bombed since it messed up the reading of even simple Office documents. It was a gigantic embarassment to me. All the hard work in the world doesn't pay off if it doesn't show in the product. Sorry, guys).
What does this mean for Omniweb and their other products? I always assumed you did development on that.
I love the latest Omniweb. For some strange reason it loved to crash for the first month or so I had it but it seems much more stable now. Not even sure what happened to fix it.
And what ever happened to Little Kimberly Anne? I still remember her AOL disk addiction. Seeing her web page many years ago was the first time I ever heard of Omni. Not the last, fortunately.
(Isn't it funny what people remember, even after years?)
I enjoy your license agreement. More people should have ones like that.
If you're browsing with Lynx, I don't see how you'd have a lot of use for their product, which is a neat combination of glitzy, visually oriented features.
If you dislike Flash enough to not have it working on your computer, you're a pretty unlikely customer for what they're selling.
This information, as a general rule, seems to come out less than a month before the actual product introductions, so I doubt that it's of that much help to competitors.
It does make the keynote a lot less fun for Steve, as some have pointed out on the message boards, and I can't help but wonder if that's the real reason for the legal manuvering. Steve wants to keep his podium place, and nobody's going to watch him if he has no undisclosed goodies to share.
However, usually Steve has a few surprises anyway (nobody broke the $99 price for the iPod shuttle, for example), and so I don't think people will stop listening to Steve any time soon. But that's probably what he thinks.
Think Secret's accuracy is probably its main problem - recently, if it's reported by them, you can pretty much take that knowledge to the bank.
People are going to be pretty confused about the different key names when they use a regular PC keyboard with the Mini. I'm not sure if this was such a good decision, and it feels cheap.
On the other hand, I think I know why it was done: The cool factor of the iPod-style packaging. Make it look like an iPod, people subconsciously think it will be just like one. Clever marketing move, and you can buy the keyboard and mouse right at the Apple store.
People come to Slashdot to get coverage of non-Microsoft platforms, with a special focus on open source.
Therefore, it should not be at all surprising that anti-Microsoft news is covered, nor that most of the stories are about, well, non-Microsoft platforms.
Wired happens to be a publication which reports on issues dear to Slashdot readers, including "your rights online" stuff and online business. Since these are subjects of interest to Slashdot readers, I'm not at all surprised or disappointed that these articles are posted.
Slashdot is, in my opinion, biased in the same way its readers are biased. I'm actually surprised at how balanced it is; positive Microsoft news, for example, is still covered. Even if we don't like Longhorn, we find out about it here.
There is too much technical news to not have some kind of bias or focus. If you really want pro-Microsoft news, well, read one of millions of sites devoted to Windows.
If you have any kind of home-based business, it's perfectly safe to deduct the cost of a computer through Section 179 of the tax code. (In English, that simply means that you deduct the money you pay for the computer instead of spreading the deduction over your years of ownership, as larger businesses have to do).
If you're doing any form of computer consulting and can book even fairly minimal revenue, the deduction is not generally questioned. Of course if you're working for an employer only you generally can't do it.
Hope that helps. I am not a lawyer or tax advisor; check your tax advisor or book for details, etc.
I'd certainly count Aqua and Quartz as being innovative. They had the guts to jettison ugly old X-Windows and replace it with something beautiful that is now pretty fast. Quartz Extreme is an innovative way to optimize its performance; we won't see anything like that in Windows until Longhorn and maybe not even then.
The creation of a Unix-based operating system that was accessible to the common man, with no compromises, deserves major kudos for innovation. At the time it was introduced, Linux was still stumbling badly in that category. (I don't know if it's caught up even now since it's been a while since I've used a new Linux distribution).
They were first to build wireless network access into their computers, and the first to use the new high-speed standard.
The cooling system of the G5, with multiple variable speed fans to cut down noise, is innovative.
Expose was innovative.
Producing an operating system that actually got faster with each release, instead of more bloated and sluggish (like Windows and even Linux) is innovative.
I'm sure there are a lot more things, but that's a pretty respectable list as it is.
You're referring to Osbourne Computer. The Osbourne I had something like a 52-column screen and when its owner leaked that the II would have an 80-column screen, sales of the I collapsed, bankrupting the company.
That being said, everyone knowledgeable enough to visit rumor sites knows that you don't buy a new Mac before January 11, when lots of new stuff gets announced. Ironically enough, the damage done by Think Secret is that they are now such a credible source that the mainstream media, like C|Net, picked up the story and distributed it to the world. This might have caused Apple real damage.
They do charge $10 for the SSH client, which I think is pretty reasonable considering that not many customers on a percentage basis are going to want it.
I have the T-Mobile Sidekick and I can say that it's a great feeling being able to SSH on my cellphone without worrying about the enormous monthly fees associated with other carriers.
But there are a few downsides. The main one is that T-Mobile service is pretty bad in many places, including Los Angeles, where I live. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't work, you can find yourself staring at a broken antenna icon for rather longer than I would hope.
Verizon has somewhat better service, from what I understand, but all cellphones seem to have trouble at one time or another. I will say that T-Mobile customer service is pretty good, and you can get the SideKick II and start service for very little out of pocket money. (Watch out for those cancellation penalties, though!)
The SSH client does work and it has saved my bacon a few times already. So I recommend it with reservations about service. If you can, check with fellow Sidekick users in your area before buying.
There are enough programs for both Windows and Macintosh that any one individual could not possibly try all of them in her lifetime.
Unless you want software specifically targeted at some obscure niche, like an accounting system geared towards left-handed people who work in the trout farming industry, you'll find plenty of Mac software available.
Well, or unless you want ten million ways to wander around rooms and kill off robotic monsters, instead of only one million. Then I can't help you.
Take notes using your computer and save them into the appropriate folder. That eliminates the "scrawl" problem.
If you're going to visit the court many times, include the date in your file name.
If you have the need to do a lot of diagrams, this is one instance where a tablet PC or equivalent might be useful. I normally don't like them, but I'm the type of guy who can't read what he's scribbled five minutes after doing the scribbling.
I ran old SGI systems for a few years and really loved them. I was never really into the graphics stuff, because most of the software was way too expensive, and the cheap software (Blender) was incomprehensible. But I loved the machines and used them for web stuff. Sure, they were allegedly insecure, but you could tighten them up pretty easily, and nowadays all the breakins are automated exploits of commodity systems. So now I'd say a SGI is a lot more secure than the average system just because they have such a tiny market share.
I thought the operating system and GUI were really slickly designed at the time. They certainly had the most attractive implementation of virtual desktops I've ever seen. Linux has them, but not with the style SGI does and I have to admit that style wins points with me - especially when Linux was still lost in the world of horrible, unreadable fonts while SGI did a great job making them legible and attractive.
But then came Apple and MacOS X, which really showed the world what a truly slick Unix desktop could be like, and I switched almost immediately, leaving my Windows, SGI and Linux machines in the dust. After all, Apple could do it all in one slickly designed system.
I'm sorry SGI never took off; I think they could have been a nice consumer alternative if they could have figured out how to keep costs down. I tried to install Mozilla on my old Indigo2 about six months ago and I got bogged down in dependencies and quit, so it's just sitting in the corner.
People talk about proprietary systems being bad, and the future being in open systems and commodity hardware. And there are bad things about proprietary systems, but I love the spirit that created them, the desire to create something that was designed, not built out of tinkertoy blocks. The desire to create something where the operating system and hardware were built together in one seamless, coherent way.
Because of this, I shed a tear for the proprietary systems, built when men were men, women were women, and computers were something special instead of crudely-designed commodities.
Those days, of course, live on in the Apple world. Which, if you think of it, may be the best of both worlds - the price has been forced down by commodity machines, but it's still very much a sleek, designer experience.
Because after all, that's what I want a computer to be: Something special.
I have a HP Colour LaserJet 3500, which I bought for $999 and I really love using it. Colour printing is very cool, and the cartridges last forever unless you print lots of photos. Even if you do tons of photo printing, it's still something like $0.50 per photo instead of $2.00. And it's really nice to be able to print the PDF instruction manuals programs like Apple Motion provide in colour. I wish they'd offer real printed manuals becauset they're easier to deal with, but they sure do look at lot better in colour than black and white. (Printing them on an inkjet, of course, would not be cost-effective at all).
Quality isn't quite as good as the high-end photo inkjets, so they still have their uses. As others have said, I recommend Canon. They're a company with integrity; their print cartridge system is simple, you buy individual ink tanks when they empty for reasonable sums, and they sell their printers with full cartridges, not starters.
There are no allegations (that I'm aware of, anyway) that you or I had any link to 9/11. There are allegations that say that Al Queda may have obtained funding and/or logistical support from Saddam. Those allegations are not proven, but they are at least worth exploring in more depth, no?
The primary reason I personally support the war, from the beginning, was that I have read extensively about Saddam's atrocities, including his invasion of Kuwait and believe his behaviour is beyond the pale. I don't like the fact that protest groups such as International ANSWER act as though Saddam and his regime were nice, peaceful folks who just wanted to be left alone. Saddam deserved to go, and as long as you agree with that proposition, the war was a moral positive.
I appreciate the idealism of neoconservatism, although I'm more a Libertarian outside of the war issue. And I don't like the multilateral defeatism of John Kerry and his pals. To me, the only right way to solve problems in the middle east is get rid of the despot regimes and replace them with something based on democratic principles. That's what Bush is doing and I salute him for it.
Every war has problems. And every defeated despot has people enriched by the regime who wish he was still around. What's going on in Iraq is that, at least for now, history is being told by those people, not by the millions of Iraqis who are now free and far better off than they were before.
The Jimmy Carters and John Kerrys of the world have sophisticated knowledge, which appeals to slashdotters. But oddly enough the people with principles but limited knowledge seem to do a lot better as Presidents. Does Jimmy Carter have one lasting foreign policy triumph to his credit? Now look at Ronald Reagan, who believed consistently in what he said, and had a leading role in toppling an empire. And look at George W Bush: We know what he believes in and we know he's doing his level best to achieve concrete results. It's way too early to know if he's succeeded or failed, but he's slogging through and I think the odds are on his side, if he's allowed to stay the course.
I'm not even sure what John Kerry wants to do as President, but based on the Democratic convention, I'd say his campaign has been based on lies and hypocracy from the start. He truly was for the war when he thought it was politically necessary, and now he's against the war, and he has a Plan that he refuses to tell us, but we know it's a perfect plan, because that's what he says. Surely we can both agree that this is utter bosh.
If I were against the war, I probably wouldn't vote, or would vote for Nader. Kerry's lying to one or both sides of this issue. You can't trust him, he's insulted our real allies ("coalition of the bribed" etc) and that's one lousy Presidentical candidate.
Personally, I think he just wants to fly on the big plane surrounded by sycopants. He doesn't have a clue about the big picture, and that should scare all of us.
I don't judge people based on being kids or adults. I judge them based on their actions.
A 15 year old killer is every bit as evil as a 28 year old killer.
Read the article I linked to and you'll get the picture a little better. The Palistinian Authority trains kids to be killers, and they are sent out on suicide missions starting at around 14.
These kids were 15, and they were handling explosive substances 200 meters away from an Israeli tank position.
You could say that the kids were not to blame for their indocriniation, but once they become killers, the duty of the Israeli Defence Forces is to destroy them before they kill innocents.
My conclusion is that the Israeli action was correct.
If you're playing soldier within 200 meters of actual soldiers, and your role in play is to be their enemy, I'd put you up for a Darwin Award. And that's exactly what this article claims.
Sure sounds to me like they were "seeking Shahada", and got what they wanted. If that's their attitude, quite honestly I see no moral problem with bringing them their wish before they strap on a suicide bomb and kill innocents.
That aside, the drone was almost certainly like any other drone -- remote controlled by IDF soldiers, not an AI.
Now moved on to the Mac and a 420SEL, but yes, same person:-).
Data entry in the Sidekick is very good. It's much slower than a real keyboard, of course, but it's many times faster than trying to peck letters out on a phone keyboard.
I belong to a political group that does street theater-style protests, and I've typed a few after-action reports on it successfully. It handles web forms exceptionally well.
One thing I didn't say in the above review (because I forgot, more than anything) was that I tried web forms with the Treo and it worked horribly. It just was not designed with that in mind at all.
What do you hear about the Sidekick camera? Have you seen decent pictures off it? I could almost convince myself to upgrade if I could get decent quality photos off the thing and use it as a "always there" camera.
That's actually a good answer, but I doubt that you'd put deceptive links in your postings to get people to use your spam engine!
So no, you didn't answer my question at all:-(. You said why people might write it but not why they'd disseminate it in the destructive fashion in which they do.
Not a direct reply to your message, but I thought this might interest you and people who liked your post.
My Colour Sidekick's scroll wheel broke, and since I'm having problems with the carrier, I decided to look at the Treo versus the Sidekick. Of course the phone I saw was the 600, not the 650, but a lot of things don't seem to have changed much.
Overall, the Sidekick seems to have by far the better ergonomic design. The keyboard's big enough to type on decently, while the Treo 600's was way too small for my biggish fingers. They apparently changed this a bit with the 650, but frankly it doesn't appear from the pictures like it would make much difference.
The old Sidekick had clear build quality problems, culminating in the broken scroll wheel that forced me to contemplate a replacement. The new Sidekick is much better made, by a far higher quality manufacturer. But the Treo, with its metal chassis, had an almost jewel-like feel that easily carried the day.
The Treo 600's screen was truly awful, the worst thing about the device. This is one place where the new model is an obvious massive improvement. On the screen alone, I would definitely wait for the new model. That being said, with the small form factor and the keyboard being part of the raw size (instead of a foldout like the SideKick), the screen's still going to be tiny and that's still going to make web sites very difficult to read.
The camera on the Sidekick II was a bit confusing to use - I had to have the guy at the store tell me the secret - but seemed to take a decent picture in the light available at the store. The Treo's camera didn't work nearly as well, although none of them are going to be serious competition for my Canon EOS D30. The Treo 650's camera looked to be higher resolution but still pretty bad, I think worse than the Sidekick II's.
The Colour Sidekick II costs $299 to buy or $199 to upgrade from the old model. The Treo costs $450 with a Verizon signup but apparently the phone carrier will reduce that to around $350 if you scream and yell enough.
In the end, I had to side with the Sidekick II as by far the better device. Unfortunately, Verizon had by far the best phone service, so I may consider buying the Treo 650 at a later date.
So what did I do about my scroll wheel-impaired SideKick? I called up T-Mobile and they are sending me a free warranty replacement. I wanted to get a SideKick II if they'd given me a half-decent price on it, but the deal they offered was actually worse than the $199 upgrade deal I would have gotten at the T-Mobile store. This was interesting considering that the T-Mobile guy was positively embarassed he couldn't do better for me than the $199. I think it's a pity T-Mobile ignored an excellent opportunity to upgrade my machine and still make a few bucks instead of sending out one of their old models.
So for the time being, I'm back in the T-Mobile court. I'd be happy there if only the Sidekick's reception wasn't lousy...
It seems like a lot of hard work was put into getting this "right", and the end result is a stupid form of perverse cruelty.
Surely we have better things to do with our lives than this sort of thing.
Viewing this kind of stuff in the privacy of your own home is just fine. Foisting it on unsuspecting people, and going to a lot of trouble to prevent them from closing the windows, is, well, sick.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a difference between an investment and insurance, yes.
/is/ their investment money. If they had the freedom to invest it as they wanted, everyone would be better off. That's my argument, pure and simple.
But Social Security is bad insurance and a terrible investment. It offers a negative return on your money as a retirement program and negligible benefits as insurance. The death benefit, for example, is $255, which isn't enough even for the most skimpy of funerals.
I have a right to say that I want a specific fire insurance policy. If it's sold, I can buy it.
I have a right to invest with about ten billion companies. If there's an investment approach, there's a fund to support it.
Why is it that there is compulsory social insurance, a package that in my view provides lousy benefits at an extremely high price, that I cannot change?
What if I could invest in anything I wanted under the umbrella of social insurance?
That's what Social Security private accounts would do. In my opinion, it is righting a long-standing injustice, pure and simple.
If society, whatever that is, says we need social insurance, whatever that is, fine. But let us choose the policy that's best for us. At minimum, then, let's choose a policy that actually offers a positive return on our investment, and is not dependent on an increasing population to pay benefits.
That's what Bush is proposing with Social Security Private Accounts. Tell me what's wrong with that. It seems to me that it's common sense that if you invest money for your retirement, or to protect you when you're sick and disabled, you should be able to manage that money on your own.
One size fits all went out with Henry Ford.
D
PS Social Security hurts the poor more than anyone else, since they don't have the investment money we do. SS
Taxes of 12-odd percent of our income are taken for SS.
If you invested that money in private accounts, you'd be wealthy by the time you retired, even if you made some seriously bad investment decisions.
Private accounts are the only way to PREVENT government from plundering SS! If you own money, you own it and the government isn't going to be able to change the terms.
Whether the SS system can pay promised benefits is not the point. The point is that the SS system is an enomous, unacceptable ripoff for the people in it now.
It's great for current retirees, but anyone in the system now will get negative returns on their "investment".
I know it's a social program, it's about the social contract and so on, but if the social contract is as one-sided as SS is, well, I want out. Period.
I believed that when I was barely getting by and I believed that when I was making $100k plus. My view has not changed. Private accounts would take something that ripped off 99% of participants and make it into a much less unfair system.
I'd really like to know how anyone could sleep at night after dooming people to poverty in their retirement thanks to a money-sucking horror of a system. Social Security as it stands is robbing blind 99% of the people in it, and they don't even realize it.
D
You are making a product.
We (Mac users) are your customers.
We can choose to take your product for free, or we can pay $150-odd for the Student/Teacher edition of Microsoft Office, which only requires that you're not the owner of a large business.
You should consider an alliance with Mac users because they have already decided to "think different". They just want a product worthy of different thinking.
Using a Windows-style GUI isn't going to cut it. After all, we didn't choose Windows, so the odds are pretty good that we don't want a me-too imitation. That's why the Microsoft Mac Business Unit creates a program that looks nothing like Windows.
Ironically enough, we'd rather have that product than yours, which, if my memory serves, has all the gray depressive feel of Windows 98.
(When I was IT manager (among other hats) at a mid-sized 200-employee company, I tried introducing OpenOffice and it bombed since it messed up the reading of even simple Office documents. It was a gigantic embarassment to me. All the hard work in the world doesn't pay off if it doesn't show in the product. Sorry, guys).
D
What does this mean for Omniweb and their other products? I always assumed you did development on that.
I love the latest Omniweb. For some strange reason it loved to crash for the first month or so I had it but it seems much more stable now. Not even sure what happened to fix it.
And what ever happened to Little Kimberly Anne? I still remember her AOL disk addiction. Seeing her web page many years ago was the first time I ever heard of Omni. Not the last, fortunately.
(Isn't it funny what people remember, even after years?)
I enjoy your license agreement. More people should have ones like that.
Best of good fortune in your new venture!
D
If you're browsing with Lynx, I don't see how you'd have a lot of use for their product, which is a neat combination of glitzy, visually oriented features.
If you dislike Flash enough to not have it working on your computer, you're a pretty unlikely customer for what they're selling.
D
This information, as a general rule, seems to come out less than a month before the actual product introductions, so I doubt that it's of that much help to competitors.
It does make the keynote a lot less fun for Steve, as some have pointed out on the message boards, and I can't help but wonder if that's the real reason for the legal manuvering. Steve wants to keep his podium place, and nobody's going to watch him if he has no undisclosed goodies to share.
However, usually Steve has a few surprises anyway (nobody broke the $99 price for the iPod shuttle, for example), and so I don't think people will stop listening to Steve any time soon. But that's probably what he thinks.
Think Secret's accuracy is probably its main problem - recently, if it's reported by them, you can pretty much take that knowledge to the bank.
D
I was thinking that your typing fingers will be confused because they will "think" the wrong things, and that might get people in trouble.
:-).
That being said, you should know I'm a very happy G5 owner, so your reasoning doesn't apply to me
D
People are going to be pretty confused about the different key names when they use a regular PC keyboard with the Mini. I'm not sure if this was such a good decision, and it feels cheap.
On the other hand, I think I know why it was done: The cool factor of the iPod-style packaging. Make it look like an iPod, people subconsciously think it will be just like one. Clever marketing move, and you can buy the keyboard and mouse right at the Apple store.
D
People come to Slashdot to get coverage of non-Microsoft platforms, with a special focus on open source.
Therefore, it should not be at all surprising that anti-Microsoft news is covered, nor that most of the stories are about, well, non-Microsoft platforms.
Wired happens to be a publication which reports on issues dear to Slashdot readers, including "your rights online" stuff and online business. Since these are subjects of interest to Slashdot readers, I'm not at all surprised or disappointed that these articles are posted.
Slashdot is, in my opinion, biased in the same way its readers are biased. I'm actually surprised at how balanced it is; positive Microsoft news, for example, is still covered. Even if we don't like Longhorn, we find out about it here.
There is too much technical news to not have some kind of bias or focus. If you really want pro-Microsoft news, well, read one of millions of sites devoted to Windows.
D
If you have any kind of home-based business, it's perfectly safe to deduct the cost of a computer through Section 179 of the tax code. (In English, that simply means that you deduct the money you pay for the computer instead of spreading the deduction over your years of ownership, as larger businesses have to do).
If you're doing any form of computer consulting and can book even fairly minimal revenue, the deduction is not generally questioned. Of course if you're working for an employer only you generally can't do it.
Hope that helps. I am not a lawyer or tax advisor; check your tax advisor or book for details, etc.
D
I'd certainly count Aqua and Quartz as being innovative. They had the guts to jettison ugly old X-Windows and replace it with something beautiful that is now pretty fast. Quartz Extreme is an innovative way to optimize its performance; we won't see anything like that in Windows until Longhorn and maybe not even then.
The creation of a Unix-based operating system that was accessible to the common man, with no compromises, deserves major kudos for innovation. At the time it was introduced, Linux was still stumbling badly in that category. (I don't know if it's caught up even now since it's been a while since I've used a new Linux distribution).
They were first to build wireless network access into their computers, and the first to use the new high-speed standard.
The cooling system of the G5, with multiple variable speed fans to cut down noise, is innovative.
Expose was innovative.
Producing an operating system that actually got faster with each release, instead of more bloated and sluggish (like Windows and even Linux) is innovative.
I'm sure there are a lot more things, but that's a pretty respectable list as it is.
D
You're referring to Osbourne Computer. The Osbourne I had something like a 52-column screen and when its owner leaked that the II would have an 80-column screen, sales of the I collapsed, bankrupting the company.
That being said, everyone knowledgeable enough to visit rumor sites knows that you don't buy a new Mac before January 11, when lots of new stuff gets announced. Ironically enough, the damage done by Think Secret is that they are now such a credible source that the mainstream media, like C|Net, picked up the story and distributed it to the world. This might have caused Apple real damage.
D
They do charge $10 for the SSH client, which I think is pretty reasonable considering that not many customers on a percentage basis are going to want it.
I have the T-Mobile Sidekick and I can say that it's a great feeling being able to SSH on my cellphone without worrying about the enormous monthly fees associated with other carriers.
But there are a few downsides. The main one is that T-Mobile service is pretty bad in many places, including Los Angeles, where I live. When it works, it's great. When it doesn't work, you can find yourself staring at a broken antenna icon for rather longer than I would hope.
Verizon has somewhat better service, from what I understand, but all cellphones seem to have trouble at one time or another. I will say that T-Mobile customer service is pretty good, and you can get the SideKick II and start service for very little out of pocket money. (Watch out for those cancellation penalties, though!)
The SSH client does work and it has saved my bacon a few times already. So I recommend it with reservations about service. If you can, check with fellow Sidekick users in your area before buying.
D
could someone tell me what this device is, what it does, and why it should be interesting to us?
The web site certainly wasn't much help, and the jargon-laden responses I've seen so far aren't much help either.
Many thanks.
D
There are enough programs for both Windows and Macintosh that any one individual could not possibly try all of them in her lifetime.
Unless you want software specifically targeted at some obscure niche, like an accounting system geared towards left-handed people who work in the trout farming industry, you'll find plenty of Mac software available.
Well, or unless you want ten million ways to wander around rooms and kill off robotic monsters, instead of only one million. Then I can't help you.
D
Get a laptop and create a folder for each court.
Take notes using your computer and save them into the appropriate folder. That eliminates the "scrawl" problem.
If you're going to visit the court many times, include the date in your file name.
If you have the need to do a lot of diagrams, this is one instance where a tablet PC or equivalent might be useful. I normally don't like them, but I'm the type of guy who can't read what he's scribbled five minutes after doing the scribbling.
Hope that helps.
D
I ran old SGI systems for a few years and really loved them. I was never really into the graphics stuff, because most of the software was way too expensive, and the cheap software (Blender) was incomprehensible. But I loved the machines and used them for web stuff. Sure, they were allegedly insecure, but you could tighten them up pretty easily, and nowadays all the breakins are automated exploits of commodity systems. So now I'd say a SGI is a lot more secure than the average system just because they have such a tiny market share.
I thought the operating system and GUI were really slickly designed at the time. They certainly had the most attractive implementation of virtual desktops I've ever seen. Linux has them, but not with the style SGI does and I have to admit that style wins points with me - especially when Linux was still lost in the world of horrible, unreadable fonts while SGI did a great job making them legible and attractive.
But then came Apple and MacOS X, which really showed the world what a truly slick Unix desktop could be like, and I switched almost immediately, leaving my Windows, SGI and Linux machines in the dust. After all, Apple could do it all in one slickly designed system.
I'm sorry SGI never took off; I think they could have been a nice consumer alternative if they could have figured out how to keep costs down. I tried to install Mozilla on my old Indigo2 about six months ago and I got bogged down in dependencies and quit, so it's just sitting in the corner.
People talk about proprietary systems being bad, and the future being in open systems and commodity hardware. And there are bad things about proprietary systems, but I love the spirit that created them, the desire to create something that was designed, not built out of tinkertoy blocks. The desire to create something where the operating system and hardware were built together in one seamless, coherent way.
Because of this, I shed a tear for the proprietary systems, built when men were men, women were women, and computers were something special instead of crudely-designed commodities.
Those days, of course, live on in the Apple world. Which, if you think of it, may be the best of both worlds - the price has been forced down by commodity machines, but it's still very much a sleek, designer experience.
Because after all, that's what I want a computer to be: Something special.
D
I have a HP Colour LaserJet 3500, which I bought for $999 and I really love using it. Colour printing is very cool, and the cartridges last forever unless you print lots of photos. Even if you do tons of photo printing, it's still something like $0.50 per photo instead of $2.00. And it's really nice to be able to print the PDF instruction manuals programs like Apple Motion provide in colour. I wish they'd offer real printed manuals becauset they're easier to deal with, but they sure do look at lot better in colour than black and white. (Printing them on an inkjet, of course, would not be cost-effective at all).
Quality isn't quite as good as the high-end photo inkjets, so they still have their uses. As others have said, I recommend Canon. They're a company with integrity; their print cartridge system is simple, you buy individual ink tanks when they empty for reasonable sums, and they sell their printers with full cartridges, not starters.
D
There are no allegations (that I'm aware of, anyway) that you or I had any link to 9/11. There are allegations that say that Al Queda may have obtained funding and/or logistical support from Saddam. Those allegations are not proven, but they are at least worth exploring in more depth, no?
The primary reason I personally support the war, from the beginning, was that I have read extensively about Saddam's atrocities, including his invasion of Kuwait and believe his behaviour is beyond the pale. I don't like the fact that protest groups such as International ANSWER act as though Saddam and his regime were nice, peaceful folks who just wanted to be left alone. Saddam deserved to go, and as long as you agree with that proposition, the war was a moral positive.
I appreciate the idealism of neoconservatism, although I'm more a Libertarian outside of the war issue. And I don't like the multilateral defeatism of John Kerry and his pals. To me, the only right way to solve problems in the middle east is get rid of the despot regimes and replace them with something based on democratic principles. That's what Bush is doing and I salute him for it.
Every war has problems. And every defeated despot has people enriched by the regime who wish he was still around. What's going on in Iraq is that, at least for now, history is being told by those people, not by the millions of Iraqis who are now free and far better off than they were before.
I'd like to introduce you to one of them with one of the most moving and hilarious things I've ever read.
The Jimmy Carters and John Kerrys of the world have sophisticated knowledge, which appeals to slashdotters. But oddly enough the people with principles but limited knowledge seem to do a lot better as Presidents. Does Jimmy Carter have one lasting foreign policy triumph to his credit? Now look at Ronald Reagan, who believed consistently in what he said, and had a leading role in toppling an empire. And look at George W Bush: We know what he believes in and we know he's doing his level best to achieve concrete results. It's way too early to know if he's succeeded or failed, but he's slogging through and I think the odds are on his side, if he's allowed to stay the course.
I'm not even sure what John Kerry wants to do as President, but based on the Democratic convention, I'd say his campaign has been based on lies and hypocracy from the start. He truly was for the war when he thought it was politically necessary, and now he's against the war, and he has a Plan that he refuses to tell us, but we know it's a perfect plan, because that's what he says. Surely we can both agree that this is utter bosh.
If I were against the war, I probably wouldn't vote, or would vote for Nader. Kerry's lying to one or both sides of this issue. You can't trust him, he's insulted our real allies ("coalition of the bribed" etc) and that's one lousy Presidentical candidate.
Personally, I think he just wants to fly on the big plane surrounded by sycopants. He doesn't have a clue about the big picture, and that should scare all of us.
D
I don't judge people based on being kids or adults. I judge them based on their actions.
A 15 year old killer is every bit as evil as a 28 year old killer.
Read the article I linked to and you'll get the picture a little better. The Palistinian Authority trains kids to be killers, and they are sent out on suicide missions starting at around 14.
These kids were 15, and they were handling explosive substances 200 meters away from an Israeli tank position.
You could say that the kids were not to blame for their indocriniation, but once they become killers, the duty of the Israeli Defence Forces is to destroy them before they kill innocents.
My conclusion is that the Israeli action was correct.
D
If you're playing soldier within 200 meters of actual soldiers, and your role in play is to be their enemy, I'd put you up for a Darwin Award. And that's exactly what this article claims.
Sure sounds to me like they were "seeking Shahada", and got what they wanted. If that's their attitude, quite honestly I see no moral problem with bringing them their wish before they strap on a suicide bomb and kill innocents.
That aside, the drone was almost certainly like any other drone -- remote controlled by IDF soldiers, not an AI.
D
Now moved on to the Mac and a 420SEL, but yes, same person :-).
Data entry in the Sidekick is very good. It's much slower than a real keyboard, of course, but it's many times faster than trying to peck letters out on a phone keyboard.
I belong to a political group that does street theater-style protests, and I've typed a few after-action reports on it successfully. It handles web forms exceptionally well.
One thing I didn't say in the above review (because I forgot, more than anything) was that I tried web forms with the Treo and it worked horribly. It just was not designed with that in mind at all.
What do you hear about the Sidekick camera? Have you seen decent pictures off it? I could almost convince myself to upgrade if I could get decent quality photos off the thing and use it as a "always there" camera.
What's the 7100T? Is that a Blackberry?
D
That's actually a good answer, but I doubt that you'd put deceptive links in your postings to get people to use your spam engine!
:-(. You said why people might write it but not why they'd disseminate it in the destructive fashion in which they do.
So no, you didn't answer my question at all
D
Not a direct reply to your message, but I thought this might interest you and people who liked your post.
...
My Colour Sidekick's scroll wheel broke, and since I'm having problems with the carrier, I decided to look at the Treo versus the Sidekick. Of course the phone I saw was the 600, not the 650, but a lot of things don't seem to have changed much.
Overall, the Sidekick seems to have by far the better ergonomic design. The keyboard's big enough to type on decently, while the Treo 600's was way too small for my biggish fingers. They apparently changed this a bit with the 650, but frankly it doesn't appear from the pictures like it would make much difference.
The old Sidekick had clear build quality problems, culminating in the broken scroll wheel that forced me to contemplate a replacement. The new Sidekick is much better made, by a far higher quality manufacturer. But the Treo, with its metal chassis, had an almost jewel-like feel that easily carried the day.
The Treo 600's screen was truly awful, the worst thing about the device. This is one place where the new model is an obvious massive improvement. On the screen alone, I would definitely wait for the new model. That being said, with the small form factor and the keyboard being part of the raw size (instead of a foldout like the SideKick), the screen's still going to be tiny and that's still going to make web sites very difficult to read.
The camera on the Sidekick II was a bit confusing to use - I had to have the guy at the store tell me the secret - but seemed to take a decent picture in the light available at the store. The Treo's camera didn't work nearly as well, although none of them are going to be serious competition for my Canon EOS D30. The Treo 650's camera looked to be higher resolution but still pretty bad, I think worse than the Sidekick II's.
The Colour Sidekick II costs $299 to buy or $199 to upgrade from the old model. The Treo costs $450 with a Verizon signup but apparently the phone carrier will reduce that to around $350 if you scream and yell enough.
In the end, I had to side with the Sidekick II as by far the better device. Unfortunately, Verizon had by far the best phone service, so I may consider buying the Treo 650 at a later date.
So what did I do about my scroll wheel-impaired SideKick? I called up T-Mobile and they are sending me a free warranty replacement. I wanted to get a SideKick II if they'd given me a half-decent price on it, but the deal they offered was actually worse than the $199 upgrade deal I would have gotten at the T-Mobile store. This was interesting considering that the T-Mobile guy was positively embarassed he couldn't do better for me than the $199. I think it's a pity T-Mobile ignored an excellent opportunity to upgrade my machine and still make a few bucks instead of sending out one of their old models.
So for the time being, I'm back in the T-Mobile court. I'd be happy there if only the Sidekick's reception wasn't lousy
D
Could someone kindly tell me why people do this?
It seems like a lot of hard work was put into getting this "right", and the end result is a stupid form of perverse cruelty.
Surely we have better things to do with our lives than this sort of thing.
Viewing this kind of stuff in the privacy of your own home is just fine. Foisting it on unsuspecting people, and going to a lot of trouble to prevent them from closing the windows, is, well, sick.
Why do it?
D