The display system underlying Mac OS X (Jaguar, Panther, etc.) is founded on PDF, so it can create a PDF of anything natively. No added tools, just print and specify PDF.
Part of "COOL" is pure economics. Scarcity increases value. Cool is generally something that someone else has, that you don't, and that, as a result, you want.
I'm sure that Apple's cool derives from a combination of its superior design, its relatively dear price, and its marginal market share. No matter how cool the design of Apple products are , they would necessarily seem to be common if they had even a third of MSFT's market share. If Apple were to drop its prices to where their products were truly competitive with comparable Wintel products, I'm sure some of the Jobs/Apple mystique would begin to wear off. No matter how cool PowerBooks seem now, they would soon become ho-hum if every third laptop owner had one.
With regard to Microsoft, cool can a product with 90+% market share be? Cool is almost by definition something possessed only by the few. This seems like a goal that is fundamentally incompatible with their standard world-domination stance. Once again, Microsoft shows itself to be the reductio-ad-absurdum of capitalism; if some is good, the more is better, and all is best. Anyone notice that the Bush White House seems to run a lot like Microsoft?
Where is your manager in all of this? Why should you be the one saying "No"? That should be the job of the person you report to. If you have to say "No" or negotiate something, it shouldn't be with just anyone in the company who has a demand of you, it should be your boss, and your boss should be the one telling others "No".
If your manager is allowing or has allowed the situation to develop whereby anyone in the company can dump on you, then he or she is doing a very poor job. Likewise if the manager just dumps on you continually.
Dilbert and PBH aside, there are good managers in this world and they don't just dump work on their subordinates, they push back at the levels above them.
You don't have to be "regular army" and do only what you are told, but business organizations are arranged hierarchically for a reason. If people in your company aren't observing the hierarchy, they should be made to. If people are constantly coming to you with demands, unless they are your manager, you should be referring them to your manager.
As far as I'm aware, nearly every current version of Windows comes with support for some kind of VB variant whether it is VB Script or VBA. In addition, due the ubiquity of the browser you can add Javascript to the mix.
Whether or not you consider these valid programming languages, the fact remains that both would be valid environments with which to teach the rudiments of computer programming. If the person found that they enjoyed it and had an aptitude for it they could then move on to the more heavy duty and robust programming environments.
I have no trouble at all recommending these two options to people looking to get their feet wet with programming.
Being a bad guy doesn't automatically rate a US invasion. Look at what happened in Rwanda in the '90s. 10s or 100s of thousands of people were hacked to pieces by their neighbors and the rest of the world just stood around and watched. I doubt that Saddam is even the worst on earth. Savagery comes surprisingly easily.
Saddam is simply an example to the world of the current administration's new foriegn policy. "Get on board, or get whacked"
As governor of Texas, GWB was "at the switch" so to speak. The former governor of Illinois, George Ryan, also held a similar switch and took a completely different course. After 13 death row inmates had been freed for wrongful convictions during the 80's and 90's, he imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in the state until some procedures could be put in place to reduce or eliminate the likelihood of wrongful executions.
George W. Bush had every opportunity to do something similar but instead did nothing, washing his hands and denying responsibility without, apparently, a moment's reflective thought.
Now you may have problems with George Ryan; he is on the verge of being in deep legal shit for corruption in the Illinois Secretary of State's office when he held that post, corruption that may have contributed to the deaths of a large number of children from a single family in a horrific traffic accident. All that being said, he did more to advance justice in Illinois that I am willing to bet George Bush ever did in Texas. It is my understanding that George Bush's big claim to fame was tort reform that reduced consumer's rights. Expect to see more of that on the national level.
Face it George Bush isn't a conservative, he is a warmed over Fascist.
I don't get it. Where do people get their perspective these days?
George Bush kills something like 100 people while he is governor of Texas and trashes 50 years worth of international diplomacy to get a two-bit dictator, and Al Gore still gets shit on for that stupid internet remark.
G. Pascal Zachary of the Wall Street Journal (maybe he isn't anymore, but was at one time) wrote a very good book back in the early to mid '90s called "Showstopper" that covered the very early development of Windows NT, starting with the Dave Cutler/Digital gang and going up to 3.1 or 3.5 if I recall correctly.
Don't get the impression that there is some sort of monolithic support here for what the Bushies are up to, there isn't. There is some, but I would put firm support at something less than 50%.
Also don't think that there is very firm support for Bush here. Without Sept. 11 I think his poll numbers would be well south of 50%. The support you see is the same as you see for Sharon in Israel. I'm convinced that most Israelis can't stand him. They don't necessarily support the man so much as they support the institution of the office that he holds. Same here.
The Bushies are quite a unique group. They rode into to town by throwing an election in which they did their damndest to appear a moderate as possible. They actually represent the most extreme wing of their party and have a propaganda machine that works massive overtime to candy coat and obfuscate the ideological underpinnings of everything they do. They are stealing the American people blind at the behest of corporate America and making us foot the bill besides.
As an American, I have to say that I think the Bush Adminstration is hell-bent on pursuing the most disaterous policies, both domestic and international, that I have seen in my lifetime. I have never before been frightened of my own government. I also believe that they secretly view 9/11 as a god-send to them. It was such a horrible act, that almost anything they do, no matter how wrong headed or contrary to long held American prinicples, and be justified as a proper response to that event.
I am really disturbed by the apparent disregard by the White House of the impact of their words and actions on the rest of the world. If I didn't know any better, I would have to think that our leaders in Washington were intentionally provoking conflict both in the Middle East and on the Korean penninsula and are quite aware, though unconcerned, at the prospect of bloodshed that may follow this provocation.
If it does, however, you can be sure that Ari Fleischer and Donald Rumsfeld will be right there on CNN to explain precisely how the entire situation is someone elses fault. You can carp about Bill Clinton all you want, but at least he had a less disruptive way of processing his testosterone.
My favorite error message (not really an error, more informational) came from a driver for a Cannon office printer (floor model copy machine + printer + fax) when requesting a size for a margin. The message stated "Enter an integer between 0 and 1.2"
I'm really sorry, but I don't believe a word of this. It has "fiction" written all over it. It is much too pat and sounds like it was written from the "one from column A, one from column B..." school of polemics.
No business turns there entire network upside down based on a single sales call. Even a stupid manager wouldn't be that stupid.
In my experience, most managers do everything they can to maintain the status quo so as not to either raise or lower performance expectations. The store related here is patently absurd.
I spent 10 years in the public sector doing municipal engineering, and 6 years in the private sector doing various IT work.
The public sector definitely has the appeal of stability, after all, the city/county/state/federal government isn't likely to pull up stakes and move to Mexico where the labor is cheaper, but with the stability comes stasis. There just isn't that much to be gained by taking risks in government.
The private sector has greater risks, but as every economist knows, with risk comes reward. Of the three companies that I've worked for in the past 6 years, one has been acquired by a European conglomerate occassioning a major cultural shift, and subsequent loss of morale in the general employee population, one just folded without warning (a month after I left, luckily enough) and my current employer has been slashing the head count steadily since 6 months after I started.
That has all been balanced by the fact that I've learned twice or three times as much in the past 6 years than I did in the previous 10. In addition, my first private employer picked up the tab for my Bachelor of Science, relieving me of the need to take out $15,000 in student loans, not to speak of the interest.
There is a place for public employment, my father spent his entire adult life working for Uncle Sam, first in the Air Force, then in the FAA, and then in Customs, and is sitting on a pretty nice retirement packageme. I'm not sure I could do that though. I haven't worked anywhere that I wasn't ready to leave within five years simply because there was nothing left there to maintain my interest.
This kind of question reminds of watching old science fiction movies. Entertainment that attempts to portray the "future" is always hamstrung by the fact that any vision is constrained by current knowledge and to connect to its audience in any meaningful way must include contemporary references, which necessarily dates the material immediately. Every "future" seems simply to be a forward looking time capsule of the period in which it is produced, and inevitably says more about its own time than the time it purports to portray.
The same with sci-fi. Who knows who will live on? I certainly wouldn't look at the best sellers to tell me. Look back and some old best-sellers lists from the 30's and 40's and see how many titles you recognize. You'll probably say, "who the hell was that?"
Some cases in point: Kafka was barely read at all during his time and directed that all his papers be burnt upon his death. It is only through the "faithlessness" of his executor that we are able to read him at all. Salieri(?) of 'Amadeus' fame. He was by all accounts one of the most popular composers of his day, but who knows of him now except through the play and movie in which he is portrayed as hopelessly mediocre. Bach led a very parochial life, never straying very far from his home town and church, yet wrote volumes of what is now considered to be some of the greatest works of all time. It is really only after his death and through other scholar's research that he has come to be so recognized.
Who will people be reading in 50 years? We probably aren't even reading them now.
If people are going to carp about Harry Potter winning for the novel, they should look down the list of other winners. How about "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for best film? That should give them a field day.
This is the first real sensible comment I've read on this topic. I also refuse to buy anything based on a mail-in rebate. As far as I am concerned, they are just another form of bait and switch.
Whoever is "editing" this thing needs to post an update, a retraction(?) or a correction, followed closely by actually reading the article to which it is linked.
Slashdot's rep in the world seems to zing back and forth between cutting-edge and crank. This is definitely push things towards the crank end. Clean up your act!! You are too valuable to be self-marginalizing.
This reminds me of the (book\movie) "(Six\Three) Days of the Condor" from the late 70's.
The protagonist worked for clandestine CIA branch and did nothing but read spy novels all day to either gather technique or uncover surreptitious intellegence hidden in the plot lines, I can't quite remember which, and I think it changed between the book and the movie. In the end something goes wrong and everyone but him in his office is murdered by another renegade agency branch (he happens to be out to lunch at the time.) He ends up running and hiding from the killers, using the techniques that he has picked up from reading the spy novels to fend them off.
Pretty good book, pretty good movie, wierd plot device. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it appears in this case, fiction got a 20+ year jump on truth.
I would like to propose that we no longer spell the word justice with the letter 's' but with a dollar sign: ju$tice.
My wife thinks that I am unbearably cynical, but the more I read about the trends in the industry and more particularly in politics, the more I'm coming around (maybe I'm already there) to the opinion that truth and justice and right and wrong and whatever don't mean nearly as much in the long run as $$$$$.
Re:It's a WebTV problem, not an MS problem
on
WebTV Security Hole
·
· Score: 1
No way, a basic tenet of business (and ideally any pursuit in life) is that if you own something, then you are responsible for its actions and the consequences thereof.
Microsoft has owned WebTV for well over a year, so it seems likely that some of this work may have been done under their watch.
I'm not clear on something here, doesn't this amount to a form of user surveillance? I'm sure that the WebTV contract must have some provisions prohibiting hacking the system, but this seems to go much farther than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Robert X Cringely wrote about the IBM/Sequent connection several months ago. See here -> http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030619. html
This story was posted on Mac boards at least a month ago.
I'd be willing to bet cash money that this guy also has a "Who is John Galt?" tattoo.
The display system underlying Mac OS X (Jaguar, Panther, etc.) is founded on PDF, so it can create a PDF of anything natively. No added tools, just print and specify PDF.
Part of "COOL" is pure economics. Scarcity increases value. Cool is generally something that someone else has, that you don't, and that, as a result, you want.
I'm sure that Apple's cool derives from a combination of its superior design, its relatively dear price, and its marginal market share. No matter how cool the design of Apple products are , they would necessarily seem to be common if they had even a third of MSFT's market share. If Apple were to drop its prices to where their products were truly competitive with comparable Wintel products, I'm sure some of the Jobs/Apple mystique would begin to wear off. No matter how cool PowerBooks seem now, they would soon become ho-hum if every third laptop owner had one.
With regard to Microsoft, cool can a product with 90+% market share be? Cool is almost by definition something possessed only by the few. This seems like a goal that is fundamentally incompatible with their standard world-domination stance. Once again, Microsoft shows itself to be the reductio-ad-absurdum of capitalism; if some is good, the more is better, and all is best. Anyone notice that the Bush White House seems to run a lot like Microsoft?
Where is your manager in all of this? Why should you be the one saying "No"? That should be the job of the person you report to. If you have to say "No" or negotiate something, it shouldn't be with just anyone in the company who has a demand of you, it should be your boss, and your boss should be the one telling others "No".
If your manager is allowing or has allowed the situation to develop whereby anyone in the company can dump on you, then he or she is doing a very poor job. Likewise if the manager just dumps on you continually.
Dilbert and PBH aside, there are good managers in this world and they don't just dump work on their subordinates, they push back at the levels above them.
You don't have to be "regular army" and do only what you are told, but business organizations are arranged hierarchically for a reason. If people in your company aren't observing the hierarchy, they should be made to. If people are constantly coming to you with demands, unless they are your manager, you should be referring them to your manager.
As far as I'm aware, nearly every current version of Windows comes with support for some kind of VB variant whether it is VB Script or VBA. In addition, due the ubiquity of the browser you can add Javascript to the mix.
Whether or not you consider these valid programming languages, the fact remains that both would be valid environments with which to teach the rudiments of computer programming. If the person found that they enjoyed it and had an aptitude for it they could then move on to the more heavy duty and robust programming environments.
I have no trouble at all recommending these two options to people looking to get their feet wet with programming.
Being a bad guy doesn't automatically rate a US invasion. Look at what happened in Rwanda in the '90s. 10s or 100s of thousands of people were hacked to pieces by their neighbors and the rest of the world just stood around and watched. I doubt that Saddam is even the worst on earth. Savagery comes surprisingly easily.
Saddam is simply an example to the world of the current administration's new foriegn policy. "Get on board, or get whacked"
As governor of Texas, GWB was "at the switch" so to speak. The former governor of Illinois, George Ryan, also held a similar switch and took a completely different course. After 13 death row inmates had been freed for wrongful convictions during the 80's and 90's, he imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in the state until some procedures could be put in place to reduce or eliminate the likelihood of wrongful executions.
George W. Bush had every opportunity to do something similar but instead did nothing, washing his hands and denying responsibility without, apparently, a moment's reflective thought.
Now you may have problems with George Ryan; he is on the verge of being in deep legal shit for corruption in the Illinois Secretary of State's office when he held that post, corruption that may have contributed to the deaths of a large number of children from a single family in a horrific traffic accident. All that being said, he did more to advance justice in Illinois that I am willing to bet George Bush ever did in Texas. It is my understanding that George Bush's big claim to fame was tort reform that reduced consumer's rights. Expect to see more of that on the national level.
Face it George Bush isn't a conservative, he is a warmed over Fascist.
I don't get it. Where do people get their perspective these days?
George Bush kills something like 100 people while he is governor of Texas and trashes 50 years worth of international diplomacy to get a two-bit dictator, and Al Gore still gets shit on for that stupid internet remark.
How does Rush do it?
G. Pascal Zachary of the Wall Street Journal (maybe he isn't anymore, but was at one time) wrote a very good book back in the early to mid '90s called "Showstopper" that covered the very early development of Windows NT, starting with the Dave Cutler/Digital gang and going up to 3.1 or 3.5 if I recall correctly.
Don't get the impression that there is some sort of monolithic support here for what the Bushies are up to, there isn't. There is some, but I would put firm support at something less than 50%.
Also don't think that there is very firm support for Bush here. Without Sept. 11 I think his poll numbers would be well south of 50%. The support you see is the same as you see for Sharon in Israel. I'm convinced that most Israelis can't stand him. They don't necessarily support the man so much as they support the institution of the office that he holds. Same here.
The Bushies are quite a unique group. They rode into to town by throwing an election in which they did their damndest to appear a moderate as possible. They actually represent the most extreme wing of their party and have a propaganda machine that works massive overtime to candy coat and obfuscate the ideological underpinnings of everything they do. They are stealing the American people blind at the behest of corporate America and making us foot the bill besides.
As an American, I have to say that I think the Bush Adminstration is hell-bent on pursuing the most disaterous policies, both domestic and international, that I have seen in my lifetime. I have never before been frightened of my own government. I also believe that they secretly view 9/11 as a god-send to them. It was such a horrible act, that almost anything they do, no matter how wrong headed or contrary to long held American prinicples, and be justified as a proper response to that event.
I am really disturbed by the apparent disregard by the White House of the impact of their words and actions on the rest of the world. If I didn't know any better, I would have to think that our leaders in Washington were intentionally provoking conflict both in the Middle East and on the Korean penninsula and are quite aware, though unconcerned, at the prospect of bloodshed that may follow this provocation.
If it does, however, you can be sure that Ari Fleischer and Donald Rumsfeld will be right there on CNN to explain precisely how the entire situation is someone elses fault. You can carp about Bill Clinton all you want, but at least he had a less disruptive way of processing his testosterone.
To paraphrase Charles Foster Kane, at that rate, they'll be able to keep selling XBoxes for another 50 years.
My favorite error message (not really an error, more informational) came from a driver for a Cannon office printer (floor model copy machine + printer + fax) when requesting a size for a margin. The message stated "Enter an integer between 0 and 1.2"
I'm really sorry, but I don't believe a word of this. It has "fiction" written all over it. It is much too pat and sounds like it was written from the "one from column A, one from column B..." school of polemics.
No business turns there entire network upside down based on a single sales call. Even a stupid manager wouldn't be that stupid.
In my experience, most managers do everything they can to maintain the status quo so as not to either raise or lower performance expectations. The store related here is patently absurd.
I've worked in both and I'll take private.
I spent 10 years in the public sector doing municipal engineering, and 6 years in the private sector doing various IT work.
The public sector definitely has the appeal of stability, after all, the city/county/state/federal government isn't likely to pull up stakes and move to Mexico where the labor is cheaper, but with the stability comes stasis. There just isn't that much to be gained by taking risks in government.
The private sector has greater risks, but as every economist knows, with risk comes reward. Of the three companies that I've worked for in the past 6 years, one has been acquired by a European conglomerate occassioning a major cultural shift, and subsequent loss of morale in the general employee population, one just folded without warning (a month after I left, luckily enough) and my current employer has been slashing the head count steadily since 6 months after I started.
That has all been balanced by the fact that I've learned twice or three times as much in the past 6 years than I did in the previous 10. In addition, my first private employer picked up the tab for my Bachelor of Science, relieving me of the need to take out $15,000 in student loans, not to speak of the interest.
There is a place for public employment, my father spent his entire adult life working for Uncle Sam, first in the Air Force, then in the FAA, and then in Customs, and is sitting on a pretty nice retirement packageme. I'm not sure I could do that though. I haven't worked anywhere that I wasn't ready to leave within five years simply because there was nothing left there to maintain my interest.
This kind of question reminds of watching old science fiction movies. Entertainment that attempts to portray the "future" is always hamstrung by the fact that any vision is constrained by current knowledge and to connect to its audience in any meaningful way must include contemporary references, which necessarily dates the material immediately. Every "future" seems simply to be a forward looking time capsule of the period in which it is produced, and inevitably says more about its own time than the time it purports to portray.
The same with sci-fi. Who knows who will live on? I certainly wouldn't look at the best sellers to tell me. Look back and some old best-sellers lists from the 30's and 40's and see how many titles you recognize. You'll probably say, "who the hell was that?"
Some cases in point: Kafka was barely read at all during his time and directed that all his papers be burnt upon his death. It is only through the "faithlessness" of his executor that we are able to read him at all. Salieri(?) of 'Amadeus' fame. He was by all accounts one of the most popular composers of his day, but who knows of him now except through the play and movie in which he is portrayed as hopelessly mediocre. Bach led a very parochial life, never straying very far from his home town and church, yet wrote volumes of what is now considered to be some of the greatest works of all time. It is really only after his death and through other scholar's research that he has come to be so recognized.
Who will people be reading in 50 years? We probably aren't even reading them now.
Here is a very interesting page from the BBC -> http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/talking_point/new sid_1537000/1537530.stm
It is a lot of first person accounts apparently from British citizens working in the US who witnessed the events in both DC and NYC.
It is a very interesting alternative to all the news reel footage on TV today.
If people are going to carp about Harry Potter winning for the novel, they should look down the list of other winners. How about "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" for best film? That should give them a field day.
This is the first real sensible comment I've read on this topic. I also refuse to buy anything based on a mail-in rebate. As far as I am concerned, they are just another form of bait and switch.
Whoever is "editing" this thing needs to post an update, a retraction(?) or a correction, followed closely by actually reading the article to which it is linked.
Slashdot's rep in the world seems to zing back and forth between cutting-edge and crank. This is definitely push things towards the crank end. Clean up your act!! You are too valuable to be self-marginalizing.
This reminds me of the (book\movie) "(Six\Three) Days of the Condor" from the late 70's.
The protagonist worked for clandestine CIA branch and did nothing but read spy novels all day to either gather technique or uncover surreptitious intellegence hidden in the plot lines, I can't quite remember which, and I think it changed between the book and the movie. In the end something goes wrong and everyone but him in his office is murdered by another renegade agency branch (he happens to be out to lunch at the time.) He ends up running and hiding from the killers, using the techniques that he has picked up from reading the spy novels to fend them off.
Pretty good book, pretty good movie, wierd plot device. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it appears in this case, fiction got a 20+ year jump on truth.
I would like to propose that we no longer spell the word justice with the letter 's' but with a dollar sign: ju$tice.
My wife thinks that I am unbearably cynical, but the more I read about the trends in the industry and more particularly in politics, the more I'm coming around (maybe I'm already there) to the opinion that truth and justice and right and wrong and whatever don't mean nearly as much in the long run as $$$$$.
One dollar, one vote, I say.
Another page I read (memepool) had a link to CopyLeft which is now selling t-shirts with the DeCSS source code silk-screened onto the back side and includes hard copy of DeCSS code with each T-shirt purchased. Is something like this impacted in any way by this case?
No way, a basic tenet of business (and ideally any pursuit in life) is that if you own something, then you are responsible for its actions and the consequences thereof.
Microsoft has owned WebTV for well over a year, so it seems likely that some of this work may have been done under their watch.
I'm not clear on something here, doesn't this amount to a form of user surveillance? I'm sure that the WebTV contract must have some provisions prohibiting hacking the system, but this seems to go much farther than that.