How certain are you that Entourage doesn't do the same things under the same conditions? I think you're overblowing the situation.
Many applications that write out their prefs upon quitting will get screwed up if you don't have sufficient disk space to write to. I admit it's a bit like buffer overflows (the programmers should re-think their assumptions), but I'd like to see a list of applications that *wouldn't* be guilty of this.
Also, Mail.app uses the AppleDouble encoding standard, and yeah, apparently, that zaps the resource fork. IIRC, it's long (System 7.5 days) been Apple's take on things that documents shouldn't have resource forks (maybe preferences were okay), and Word still uses this approach. Entourage also allows you to use AppleDouble encoding (is it the default setting?), and I suspect that you'll see exactly the same problem if you try that tack.
I see Entourage as having three main advantages over Mail.app.
1) Entourage allows you to choose your encoding method. (Although with Mail.app, all you have to do is zip or similarly encode/compress your attachments manually),
2) Entourage allows you to label your mail with user-specified colors and Categories, whereas Mail.app only lets you flag mails and set up colors based on Rule sets.
3) The intregration with the calendaring functionality is sweet and presumably will only get better with the next version's Outlook integration. I'd love to see Mail.app and iCal integrate as well!
Of course the main advantage of Mail.app over Entourage for me is that Mail.app hasn't repeatedly lost months of my mail. So far.
--Kimota!
PS: I agree with you on the marking items as read thing, though!
Others have mentioned that Apple sends out a number of test machines for developers to work with well in advance of the hardware's being officially acknowledged. What they didn't mention but is pretty well known in the Mac community is that new Mac hardware pretty much always requires revisions to the Mac OS (extensions, updates, shims or such). So it should only come as expected that the test hardware would be running on a version of the OS that we haven't seen before, namely Panther, which is after all the next milestone on Apple's OS roadmap.
Well, politeness counts with me, but doesn't change (inter)national policy. Please consider the following:
1. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/ 2003_04.shtml#001123 (which applies to China and Singapore, although the point of the article is how it applies to the US as well, despite Congress.) Can you guarantee that Canada doesn't do this sort of shadiness? I hope for your sake the answer's yes!
2. http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/05/02/us_pot_rxn030 502 (which shows the US is not at all averse to strong arming Canada to do what the US wants).
I just went searching for the Music Store's Beatles selection. They have some of the Tony Sheridan-era stuff, and Chet Atkins' album, but none of the major stuff. You know, from Apple Records.
If so, all the kids I know love http://www.isketch.net/
I'd recommend some supervision since some of the "rooms" are meant for adults, but otherwise, my stepkids and their friends just love the site, and I like the idea that they're being taught that spelling matters.
Where the hell do you get 8 ounce bottles or cans of Coke? The vending machines where I work were made to sell 16 ounce bottles but have been "fixed" to vend 20 ounce bottles instead, and I've only known one person who enjoyed warm Coke. It seems pretty clear to me that the Coca-Cola Corporation wants me to dose my body with 20 ounces of carbonated sugar water multiple times a day. Saying 8 ounces is a serving strikes me as a bit disingenuous, like saying a serving size of potato chips is 12 chips when the company motto is "you can't eat just one" and for all intents and purposes, you're not done until the bag's empty!
On the other hand, if you pour juice from a large container, you can always "cut it" with water to reduce calories without drastically reducing the flavor. You'd probably be surprised at how over-sweet most "natural" fruit juices are and how they still taste pretty darn good when mixed with 105 to even 30% water. This of course has the added economic benefit of making the juice cheaper/last longer. But yeah, I've heard arguments against fructose before, so I still try to stick with just water. If I could just lay off the beer and exercise, I'd be set!
System-wide metal interface
I hope not; it has more enemies than Aqua has had, and would represent an awfully rapid departure from Aqua, which Apple clearly used to love.
Support for 64-Bit architecture
This would be nice; it's truly OS-related and is likely to happen sooner or later.
QuickTime 6.5
Apple has historically shipped QT as its own product (and clearly as its own source of revenue). It might get rolled up with the shipping version of 10.3, but it won't be a major feature since you'll almost certainly be able to get it elsewhere.
iChat 2.0 with videoconferencing capabilities
Granted, OS X as a whole is still a new beastie, so Lord only knows the directions in which Apple will go, but I have a hard time believing that Apple will expect us to drop $120 or so for a bunch of updated applications (particularly when they could potentially sell a suite of updates as its own product a la iLife). Again, this might ship with 10.3. It might even be only supported under 10.3, but is not compelling enough to make 10.3 necessary. Still, H.323 support (or support for whatever its heir apparent is) within the OS is SORELY lacking, according to my videoconferencing friends, so I know they'll gleefully welcome this.
Final Safari release 1.0 GM
Same as above, but I really think this will probably be available as a standalone, free download.
Updated iApps (possible inclusion of iWorks?)
You should be able to anticipate my answer here. iWorks would change things, but I bet if it ends up really happening, it will be like Keynote, a standalone product. Or maybe I should have likened it to AppleWorks....
Enhanced Dock features
Again, not compelling.
Overall system speed enhancements
Something to be excited about, enough for some people to finally make the jump, but not enough on its own. Remember, since adoption of OS X has been pretty high, 10.3 has to appeal at least as much to people who are already running OS X as it does to people who have not upgraded from 9 or lower-- and also to people running Windows.
Optimized for the new systems (AMD, Itanium or PPC970??)
This would present a pretty radical departure and is one sort of exciting "event" that I have to assume Apple have plenty of with 10.3, but again, isn't compelling to people already owning Macs or already running Mac OS X 10.2.
I have to expect, simply from paying attention to the past:
1. several "new" GUI changes, perhaps re-inclusion of OS 7-9 features, such as labels, some maybe from other OSes, some we haven't seen before.
2. some application or GUI features the likes of which just about no one has anticipated. Just like Jack Kirby did, Apple is always forcing you to expect the unexpected.
>Communication companies use bits because it >lets them say bigger, more impressive sounding >numbers, and because it's the 'fundamental' >unit of information measuring
Along similar lines, I hear the whole justification for the Metric system was to offer bigger, more impressive sounding numbers for penis size. I'm surprised Mr. Autopr0n, of all people, didn't mention this.
Assuming I'm not missing what you're getting at, I'd have to say really, really old or woefully out of touch. Apple, IBM, and Motorola formed the PowerPC Alliance in, what, 1991? Still, you're right, it is kinda cool!
--Kimota!
PS: Why do I get two pairs of -- above my sig? Does anyone know?
1). Stay in shape. A little exercise most days of the week thoughout your life will pay off in big ways. Don't jump rope barefoot on concrete, though, because you'll end up paying for that.
2). Once you start working, save a thousand or two a year throughout adolescence, 10-17% after that.
3). You CAN, CAN, CAN work in college and grad school. There's no need to take out loans! Try to work jobs that will allow you to meet intelligent people or cool people or a large number of girls.
4). When your CS professor tells you that this "C" language you've heard about probably isn't the next big thing, ignore him, but stay in the CS program and learn it. For God's sakes, do nothing more than MINOR in English! You can still have a soul and an intellect without majoring in the humanities! Oh, and find out what "the Internet" is. You'll be glad you did sooner rather than later.
5). Two dates to remember: December 8, 1980 and September 11, 2001, and here's what you can do about them....
6). You'll hate yourself for any "unrequited love" you ever have. Get laid in high school, and more so throughout your 20s! (But don't be stupid about it.)
7). That religious urge you might get in your early 20s? Don't let it consume and destroy your life.
8). No matter what may happen in life, remember that happiness is a choice and your thoughts are important. Keep looking for a book called "Learned Optimism."
9). Don't sell your comics at 18. You'll only get back into them two years later when "Watchmen" gets big.
10). Work more on your social life without worrying about being popular. Don't err on the side of caution when it comes to figuring out if she likes you! Oh, and the appearance of confidence (whether you're confident or not) is sexy; you'll find that confidence grows the more you, um, assume that virtue.
11). Stop waiting for the day you feel like a grown-up; grown-ups are just making it up as they go along. Seriously. In fact, don't get complacent about the world overall. There's nothing new under the sun, yes, but history keeps unfolding nevertheless.
12). Stop looking without for heroes and role models; you'll find you don't actually need them. Read "To Kill A Mockingbird" and reading DC comics. You'll find that's more than enough. It took this version of me until the age of 30 to get this.
13). See XTC in concert within the next 18 months.
14). Tell your uncle Brian to always use a condom, no matter what. In early 1986 you'll know whether or not this has made a difference.
15). Keep this note for when you're 22:
a. Compare using the Internet with the Macintosh way of doing things. Act on what you end up thinking.
In regards to the idea of influenza as a consistently deadly virus, yeah it kills a lot of people each year, but doesn't it largely pick off the young and elderly? I'd say I've had the flu about half of my 34 years, and it's been remarkably consistent in NOT killing me. In fact, I've read in the past year that the great flu epidemic circa 1918 appears to have only been really lethal for those who had *already* been afflicted with tuberculosis.
It's been a few years since "12 Monkeys," and it seems the conventional wisdom of scientists has swung to the view that really fecund viruses will evolve into fairly tolerable ones, and really lethal viruses will be self-limiting in their ability to spread.
Likely end of the world scenarios, as I take it, still include meteorites, fundamentalists bent on immanentizing the eschaton by way of nukes, gamma ray bursts and grey goo. I think #s 1 and 3 are inevitable, but I can't shake the feeling that #2 will precede them....
Remember when CD-ROMs first started becoming popular, and no one was producing software that took up the entire disk? You ended up with "shovelware," where software makers added tons of, well, crap to a CD-ROM in order to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth.
Now, in the age of 100s of channels on cable TV, you're getting the television equivalent.
There's simply not enough content (yet) to drive all these channels, and the strategies for working around this fact are limited:
1. cross-link your shows (show a new episode of something first on ABC then a few nights later on USA or Lifetime).
2. Run marathons of anything *remotely* successful.
3. Run four hours worth of stuff and repeat it for the rest of the day (remember when Comedy Central and Sci-Fi did this all the time?)
4. Run infomercials all night long and well into the morning.
5. Run crap. (There aren't enough sports in the world, so ESPN2 runs logrolling competitions. All the time, apparently.
6. Run stuff that violates your "charter." Remember when MTV showed music videos? For that matter, remember when MTV2 showed a variety of music videos? It's all downhill once a 'documentary' type channel starts running fictional movies. Animal Planet's also running "Gentle Ben" movies, Court TV runs NYPD Blue, and the History Channel was showing "the Boys from Brazil" a week or so back! You can argue that these are basically "loss leaders" intended to pull in audiences, but we've already seen how American Movie Classics is showing Robocop and Halloween, how A&E is a lot more E than A, and in general, there's been a lowbrowing of cable TV in the last few years. Don't expect things to improve.
Transiit, by no means am I trying to prove you or the scientists you cite wrong, but I was curious about a thing or two. If things basically get bigger as they evolve, why have reptiles and mammals mostly shrunk over the last 60 million years, give or take a few? Does Cope have a rationale for why some species shrink? Um, maybe "species" is too specific. In regards to Dollo's law, does Dollo take into account, say, mammals that became see-farers (aren't whales thought to have started off on land and have vestigial feet?) or bats? Just curious!
New moon around Uranus--I know, let's call it Dingleberry!
ObIKnowTheyNameTheseThingsAfterShakespeareanChar ac ters: Wasn't that one of the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream? If not, let's just go with "Bottom." And then, of course, there's always "Coriolanus"!
>9/11 has nothing on Pearl Harbor, the way I see it most of the country isn't going to be affected much by the war on terrorism.
Interesting that you say this; a co-worker pointed out to me at lunch how on December 7, 1942, there weren't many commemorative activities for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Americans were too busy fighting a war!
>The show of pride in America seems to be a shallow gesture.
Yes, and no. There are plenty of shallow people in America. What else do you expect? Then there are plenty whose sense of patriotism isn't revealed by wearing red, white and blue today or desecrating the American flag by displaying one of those rapidly decaying flags on their car. A friend of mine who was being pressured to buy and wear a commemorative flag pin at his work responded by saying "I don't have to wear a flag pin to be proud of my country, and I was patriotic *before* September 11th!" Such people aren't well represented, particularly in the media.
>Nobody is banding together, or making sacrifices for their country they weren't before, except of course the armed forces involved.
That's a big "except." I know people who couldn't but wished they could go into the military to support their country. I know others that are going into the reserves, and there have been plenty of reports of the military having to turn people away for being too old, etc. I was hoping to support the new Homeland Security department until I saw it in a more cynical light. Also, the first time on September 11th last year that I started to tear up was when I saw how in about two hours' time, a van service had been set up at my university to get people to and from the blood bank. We've all heard how the Red Cross ended up with more blood than they knew what to do with. Granted, I don't know how many of those people are still regularly donating, but I'm hoping it's noticeably more than pre-9/11/01.
Alternately, we Americans are ALL letting our politicians sacrifice the Constitution in response to September 11, 2001, aren't we? If that's not big enough for you, what would be?
> I would rather see Americans love their neighbors than flags everywhere.
Good point. In all the ramping up to today's media event, I've seen no reminders of how many non-Americans died in the attacks or of the compassion we initially received from a tremendous number of sources (Britain referring to us as their offspring, playing the American national anthem at the changing of the guard, the Russian town that held a funereal procession, the German(?) submarine that rose to lets its sailors salute our Navy, etc., etc. (Unfortunately, I have no sources for any of these; most of them were anecdotal. I'm hopeful they were in fact true.) It'd be nice if the media would manufacture an international day of thanks when countries could, um, give thanks to each other for their support throughout the generations....
1. Okay, haven't read the article yet because the site is effectively Slashdotted, but... During the Renaissance, I think it was (or maybe the 1700s), there was a genre of painting/drawing that involved using a highly reflective cylinder in the center of the work while creating it. The result was that the picture was distorted until you placed the cylinder in the center--then you could see in the cylinder itself the undistorted image. I've seen photos, but can't recall the name or the source. Anyhoo, that's what I thought of as soon as I saw this work. I'd be curious to know what shape cylinder you'd need, though, to make these images look normal!
2. My favorite work of art is Durer's (I don't know how to get an umlaut on that u) Melancholia I. It's got an angel of indiscriminate gender (when did we shift from thinking of angels as exclusively male to using the name "Angel" for women?), platonic solids, a magic square, a comet, a rainbow, drawing/navigational tools, and carpentry tools. But what is it about? I find it endlessly fascinating. Check it out at http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Misc el laneous/Durer/Melancholia.html
3. Another example of mathematical interesting... um, -ness, in art is Celtic design. You can check out a discussion of it in "Turbulent Mirror" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060916966/qid=1028039334/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5270790-4159 806)
This may be off topic in that you specified Mac OS X. If so, sorry! Anyhoo, Apple offered for the Classic Mac OS a developer tool called "Virtual User," which as I understand it does what you're asking for, and for all I know might just work on a Carbon application. It's available at ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Testing _- _Debugging/Virtual_User_Tools/
Simon, would you argue that a sys admin who's left a box wide open should be found guilty of criminal neglect (assuming consequential loss of data/money)? I'm curious to hear insightful arguments for and against this.
I'd say it's one thing to accidentally leave your business's front door unlocked one night and quite another to quite visibly never have installed a door at all.
Slashdot Mirror
How certain are you that Entourage doesn't do the same things under the same conditions? I think you're overblowing the situation.
Many applications that write out their prefs upon quitting will get screwed up if you don't have sufficient disk space to write to. I admit it's a bit like buffer overflows (the programmers should re-think their assumptions), but I'd like to see a list of applications that *wouldn't* be guilty of this.
Also, Mail.app uses the AppleDouble encoding standard, and yeah, apparently, that zaps the resource fork. IIRC, it's long (System 7.5 days) been Apple's take on things that documents shouldn't have resource forks (maybe preferences were okay), and Word still uses this approach. Entourage also allows you to use AppleDouble encoding (is it the default setting?), and I suspect that you'll see exactly the same problem if you try that tack.
I see Entourage as having three main advantages over Mail.app.
1) Entourage allows you to choose your encoding method. (Although with Mail.app, all you have to do is zip or similarly encode/compress your attachments manually),
2) Entourage allows you to label your mail with user-specified colors and Categories, whereas Mail.app only lets you flag mails and set up colors based on Rule sets.
3) The intregration with the calendaring functionality is sweet and presumably will only get better with the next version's Outlook integration. I'd love to see Mail.app and iCal integrate as well!
Of course the main advantage of Mail.app over Entourage for me is that Mail.app hasn't repeatedly lost months of my mail. So far.
--Kimota!
PS: I agree with you on the marking items as read thing, though!
Dude, *clearly* you did not see him playing Saved By the Bell's "Screech" on Saturday Night Live.
--Kimota!
Dr. Mojura,
Others have mentioned that Apple sends out a number of test machines for developers to work with well in advance of the hardware's being officially acknowledged. What they didn't mention but is pretty well known in the Mac community is that new Mac hardware pretty much always requires revisions to the Mac OS (extensions, updates, shims or such). So it should only come as expected that the test hardware would be running on a version of the OS that we haven't seen before, namely Panther, which is after all the next milestone on Apple's OS roadmap.
--Kimota!
Q: When will the US go IPv6?
A: The day after the US goes metric!
--Kimota!
Well, politeness counts with me, but doesn't change (inter)national policy. Please consider the following:
/ 2003_04.shtml#001123 (which applies to China and Singapore, although the point of the article is how it applies to the US as well, despite Congress.) Can you guarantee that Canada doesn't do this sort of shadiness? I hope for your sake the answer's yes!
0 502 (which shows the US is not at all averse to strong arming Canada to do what the US wants).
1. http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives
2. http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/05/02/us_pot_rxn03
--Kimota!
I just went searching for the Music Store's Beatles selection. They have some of the Tony Sheridan-era stuff, and Chet Atkins' album, but none of the major stuff. You know, from Apple Records.
Who saw that coming?
--Kimota!
If so, all the kids I know love http://www.isketch.net/
I'd recommend some supervision since some of the "rooms" are meant for adults, but otherwise, my stepkids and their friends just love the site, and I like the idea that they're being taught that spelling matters.
--Kimota!
Where the hell do you get 8 ounce bottles or cans of Coke? The vending machines where I work were made to sell 16 ounce bottles but have been "fixed" to vend 20 ounce bottles instead, and I've only known one person who enjoyed warm Coke. It seems pretty clear to me that the Coca-Cola Corporation wants me to dose my body with 20 ounces of carbonated sugar water multiple times a day. Saying 8 ounces is a serving strikes me as a bit disingenuous, like saying a serving size of potato chips is 12 chips when the company motto is "you can't eat just one" and for all intents and purposes, you're not done until the bag's empty!
On the other hand, if you pour juice from a large container, you can always "cut it" with water to reduce calories without drastically reducing the flavor. You'd probably be surprised at how over-sweet most "natural" fruit juices are and how they still taste pretty darn good when mixed with 105 to even 30% water. This of course has the added economic benefit of making the juice cheaper/last longer. But yeah, I've heard arguments against fructose before, so I still try to stick with just water. If I could just lay off the beer and exercise, I'd be set!
--Kimota!
>but I have to agree, how can you teach something without an intimate knowledge of subject?
Exactly. Why don't universities ever offer any classes about the ethics of half-assed teaching?
--Kimota!
I hope not; it has more enemies than Aqua has had, and would represent an awfully rapid departure from Aqua, which Apple clearly used to love.
Support for 64-Bit architecture
This would be nice; it's truly OS-related and is likely to happen sooner or later.
QuickTime 6.5
Apple has historically shipped QT as its own product (and clearly as its own source of revenue). It might get rolled up with the shipping version of 10.3, but it won't be a major feature since you'll almost certainly be able to get it elsewhere.
iChat 2.0 with videoconferencing capabilities
Granted, OS X as a whole is still a new beastie, so Lord only knows the directions in which Apple will go, but I have a hard time believing that Apple will expect us to drop $120 or so for a bunch of updated applications (particularly when they could potentially sell a suite of updates as its own product a la iLife). Again, this might ship with 10.3. It might even be only supported under 10.3, but is not compelling enough to make 10.3 necessary. Still, H.323 support (or support for whatever its heir apparent is) within the OS is SORELY lacking, according to my videoconferencing friends, so I know they'll gleefully welcome this.
Final Safari release 1.0 GM
Same as above, but I really think this will probably be available as a standalone, free download.
Updated iApps (possible inclusion of iWorks?)
You should be able to anticipate my answer here. iWorks would change things, but I bet if it ends up really happening, it will be like Keynote, a standalone product. Or maybe I should have likened it to AppleWorks....
Enhanced Dock features
Again, not compelling.
Overall system speed enhancements
Something to be excited about, enough for some people to finally make the jump, but not enough on its own. Remember, since adoption of OS X has been pretty high, 10.3 has to appeal at least as much to people who are already running OS X as it does to people who have not upgraded from 9 or lower-- and also to people running Windows.
Optimized for the new systems (AMD, Itanium or PPC970??)
This would present a pretty radical departure and is one sort of exciting "event" that I have to assume Apple have plenty of with 10.3, but again, isn't compelling to people already owning Macs or already running Mac OS X 10.2.
I have to expect, simply from paying attention to the past:
1. several "new" GUI changes, perhaps re-inclusion of OS 7-9 features, such as labels, some maybe from other OSes, some we haven't seen before.
2. some application or GUI features the likes of which just about no one has anticipated. Just like Jack Kirby did, Apple is always forcing you to expect the unexpected.
--Kimota!
>Communication companies use bits because it >lets them say bigger, more impressive sounding >numbers, and because it's the 'fundamental' >unit of information measuring
Along similar lines, I hear the whole justification for the Metric system was to offer bigger, more impressive sounding numbers for penis size. I'm surprised Mr. Autopr0n, of all people, didn't mention this.
does this version allow one to run Cisco's CiscoWorks? Please, someone give me an honest yes!
--Kimota!
Assuming I'm not missing what you're getting at, I'd have to say really, really old or woefully out of touch. Apple, IBM, and Motorola formed the PowerPC Alliance in, what, 1991? Still, you're right, it is kinda cool!
--Kimota!
PS: Why do I get two pairs of -- above my sig? Does anyone know?
--Kimota!
Not, actually, a member of ZPG
Seriously, though, there's something to "Vita brevis, ars longa."
1). Stay in shape. A little exercise most days of the week thoughout your life will pay off in big ways. Don't jump rope barefoot on concrete, though, because you'll end up paying for that.
2). Once you start working, save a thousand or two a year throughout adolescence, 10-17% after that.
3). You CAN, CAN, CAN work in college and grad school. There's no need to take out loans! Try to work jobs that will allow you to meet intelligent people or cool people or a large number of girls.
4). When your CS professor tells you that this "C" language you've heard about probably isn't the next big thing, ignore him, but stay in the CS program and learn it. For God's sakes, do nothing more than MINOR in English! You can still have a soul and an intellect without majoring in the humanities! Oh, and find out what "the Internet" is. You'll be glad you did sooner rather than later.
5). Two dates to remember: December 8, 1980 and September 11, 2001, and here's what you can do about them....
6). You'll hate yourself for any "unrequited love" you ever have. Get laid in high school, and more so throughout your 20s! (But don't be stupid about it.)
7). That religious urge you might get in your early 20s? Don't let it consume and destroy your life.
8). No matter what may happen in life, remember that happiness is a choice and your thoughts are important. Keep looking for a book called "Learned Optimism."
9). Don't sell your comics at 18. You'll only get back into them two years later when "Watchmen" gets big.
10). Work more on your social life without worrying about being popular. Don't err on the side of caution when it comes to figuring out if she likes you! Oh, and the appearance of confidence (whether you're confident or not) is sexy; you'll find that confidence grows the more you, um, assume that virtue.
11). Stop waiting for the day you feel like a grown-up; grown-ups are just making it up as they go along. Seriously. In fact, don't get complacent about the world overall. There's nothing new under the sun, yes, but history keeps unfolding nevertheless.
12). Stop looking without for heroes and role models; you'll find you don't actually need them. Read "To Kill A Mockingbird" and reading DC comics. You'll find that's more than enough. It took this version of me until the age of 30 to get this.
13). See XTC in concert within the next 18 months.
14). Tell your uncle Brian to always use a condom, no matter what. In early 1986 you'll know whether or not this has made a difference.
15). Keep this note for when you're 22:
a. Compare using the Internet with the Macintosh way of doing things. Act on what you end up thinking.
b. register "business.com" and "drugs.com" ASAP.
--Kimota!
Aargh!
It's Cliffs Notes, not Cliff, not Cliff's not even Cliffs', okay?
You can check the web site:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/
Thank you.
-Mr. Cliffs (no, not really)
In regards to the idea of influenza as a consistently deadly virus, yeah it kills a lot of people each year, but doesn't it largely pick off the young and elderly? I'd say I've had the flu about half of my 34 years, and it's been remarkably consistent in NOT killing me. In fact, I've read in the past year that the great flu epidemic circa 1918 appears to have only been really lethal for those who had *already* been afflicted with tuberculosis.
It's been a few years since "12 Monkeys," and it seems the conventional wisdom of scientists has swung to the view that really fecund viruses will evolve into fairly tolerable ones, and really lethal viruses will be self-limiting in their ability to spread.
Likely end of the world scenarios, as I take it, still include meteorites, fundamentalists bent on immanentizing the eschaton by way of nukes, gamma ray bursts and grey goo. I think #s 1 and 3 are inevitable, but I can't shake the feeling that #2 will precede them....
Remember when CD-ROMs first started becoming popular, and no one was producing software that took up the entire disk? You ended up with "shovelware," where software makers added tons of, well, crap to a CD-ROM in order to make you feel like you're getting your money's worth.
Now, in the age of 100s of channels on cable TV, you're getting the television equivalent.
There's simply not enough content (yet) to drive all these channels, and the strategies for working around this fact are limited:
1. cross-link your shows (show a new episode of something first on ABC then a few nights later on USA or Lifetime).
2. Run marathons of anything *remotely* successful.
3. Run four hours worth of stuff and repeat it for the rest of the day (remember when Comedy Central and Sci-Fi did this all the time?)
4. Run infomercials all night long and well into the morning.
5. Run crap. (There aren't enough sports in the world, so ESPN2 runs logrolling competitions. All the time, apparently.
6. Run stuff that violates your "charter." Remember when MTV showed music videos? For that matter, remember when MTV2 showed a variety of music videos? It's all downhill once a 'documentary' type channel starts running fictional movies. Animal Planet's also running "Gentle Ben" movies, Court TV runs NYPD Blue, and the History Channel was showing "the Boys from Brazil" a week or so back! You can argue that these are basically "loss leaders" intended to pull in audiences, but we've already seen how American Movie Classics is showing Robocop and Halloween, how A&E is a lot more E than A, and in general, there's been a lowbrowing of cable TV in the last few years.
Don't expect things to improve.
--Kimota!
Transiit, by no means am I trying to prove you or the scientists you cite wrong, but I was curious about a thing or two. If things basically get bigger as they evolve, why have reptiles and mammals mostly shrunk over the last 60 million years, give or take a few? Does Cope have a rationale for why some species shrink? Um, maybe "species" is too specific. In regards to Dollo's law, does Dollo take into account, say, mammals that became see-farers (aren't whales thought to have started off on land and have vestigial feet?) or bats? Just curious!
Thanks,
--Kimota!
New moon around Uranus--I know, let's call it Dingleberry!
r ac ters: Wasn't that one of the fairies in Midsummer Night's Dream? If not, let's just go with "Bottom." And then, of course, there's always "Coriolanus"!
ObIKnowTheyNameTheseThingsAfterShakespeareanCha
>9/11 has nothing on Pearl Harbor, the way I see it most of the country isn't going to be affected much by the war on terrorism.
Interesting that you say this; a co-worker pointed out to me at lunch how on December 7, 1942, there weren't many commemorative activities for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Americans were too busy fighting a war!
>The show of pride in America seems to be a shallow gesture.
Yes, and no. There are plenty of shallow people in America. What else do you expect? Then there are plenty whose sense of patriotism isn't revealed by wearing red, white and blue today or desecrating the American flag by displaying one of those rapidly decaying flags on their car. A friend of mine who was being pressured to buy and wear a commemorative flag pin at his work responded by saying "I don't have to wear a flag pin to be proud of my country, and I was patriotic *before* September 11th!" Such people aren't well represented, particularly in the media.
>Nobody is banding together, or making sacrifices for their country they weren't before, except of course the armed forces involved.
That's a big "except." I know people who couldn't but wished they could go into the military to support their country. I know others that are going into the reserves, and there have been plenty of reports of the military having to turn people away for being too old, etc. I was hoping to support the new Homeland Security department until I saw it in a more cynical light. Also, the first time on September 11th last year that I started to tear up was when I saw how in about two hours' time, a van service had been set up at my university to get people to and from the blood bank. We've all heard how the Red Cross ended up with more blood than they knew what to do with. Granted, I don't know how many of those people are still regularly donating, but I'm hoping it's noticeably more than pre-9/11/01.
Alternately, we Americans are ALL letting our politicians sacrifice the Constitution in response to September 11, 2001, aren't we? If that's not big enough for you, what would be?
> I would rather see Americans love their neighbors than flags everywhere.
Good point. In all the ramping up to today's media event, I've seen no reminders of how many non-Americans died in the attacks or of the compassion we initially received from a tremendous number of sources (Britain referring to us as their offspring, playing the American national anthem at the changing of the guard, the Russian town that held a funereal procession, the German(?) submarine that rose to lets its sailors salute our Navy, etc., etc. (Unfortunately, I have no sources for any of these; most of them were anecdotal. I'm hopeful they were in fact true.) It'd be nice if the media would manufacture an international day of thanks when countries could, um, give thanks to each other for their support throughout the generations....
1. Okay, haven't read the article yet because the site is effectively Slashdotted, but... During the Renaissance, I think it was (or maybe the 1700s), there was a genre of painting/drawing that involved using a highly reflective cylinder in the center of the work while creating it. The result was that the picture was distorted until you placed the cylinder in the center--then you could see in the cylinder itself the undistorted image. I've seen photos, but can't recall the name or the source. Anyhoo, that's what I thought of as soon as I saw this work. I'd be curious to know what shape cylinder you'd need, though, to make these images look normal!
c el laneous/Durer/Melancholia.html
6 /qid=1028039334/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-5270790-4159 806)
2. My favorite work of art is Durer's (I don't know how to get an umlaut on that u) Melancholia I. It's got an angel of indiscriminate gender (when did we shift from thinking of angels as exclusively male to using the name "Angel" for women?), platonic solids, a magic square, a comet, a rainbow, drawing/navigational tools, and carpentry tools. But what is it about? I find it endlessly fascinating. Check it out at
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mis
3. Another example of mathematical interesting... um, -ness, in art is Celtic design. You can check out a discussion of it in "Turbulent Mirror" (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006091696
This may be off topic in that you specified Mac OS X. If so, sorry! Anyhoo, Apple offered for the Classic Mac OS a developer tool called "Virtual User," which as I understand it does what you're asking for, and for all I know might just work on a Carbon application. It's available atg _- _Debugging/Virtual_User_Tools/
ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Testin
Hope that helps!
--Kimota
I'd say it's one thing to accidentally leave your business's front door unlocked one night and quite another to quite visibly never have installed a door at all.