I'm actually a manga fan, but most of the anime I've seen is just too damn cheap/shallow/puerile. It's particularly bad when a good manga is adapted into an anime, as it almost always completely omits everything that was good about the original manga.
[My current hate is "Futatsu no supika": the manga's storyline is sometimes over-melodramatic and slightly silly, but often quite touching, the pacing is great, and the art is moody and contemplative. Basically it works because the author gets the details right. The anime -- which is apparently quite popular, and is very heavily advertised -- of course throws out all this and makes the story even more shallow; it's like reading the Cliff's Notes version.]
However I think it's easy to get even more negative impression of anime (or manga for that matter) if you only look at what's popular in the U.S. -- anime/manga are fairly diverse in Japan, but a disturbingly large proportion of what's imported into the U.S. seems to be essentially low-brow sex-comedy. [Of course there's lots of freaky and embarrassing stuff in Japan too, but that's true of any medium anywhere I think.]
Re:In a word - "Yes". In two, "Not Yet".
on
Are CRTs History?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's extremely dependent on exact model of LCD you choose. Current mid-range LCD displays seem to have none of the problems you mention except price. In particular, the one my work got me is an NEC LCD1760, which has excellent contrast, no blurring at all, and syncs perfectly (and yes, I'm still using sub-pixel rendering for fonts).
The analogue syncing was my greatest concern (because early LCDs were so incredibly crappy when running off a standard analogue video signal), and the reason I didn't switch to LCD earlier, but they seem to have it sussed. One pixel lines are one pixel exactly on the display, no fringes at all.
Except for those on a tight budget, I think there's little reason for most computer users to choose a CRT these days.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 1
Those are good points. One way of dealing with them might be to restore to a previous "checkpoint position", e.g., the entrance/beginning of the room/area you were in when you saved (enemies are normally reset at that point anyway), and provide a minimal amount of health if you were at zero. This would provide more flexibility than a typical "save room" system, but fewer than true "save anywhere".
[Zelda Wind-Waker on the Gamecube uses a sort of dual system -- you can save anywhere, and in the outside world restoring will restore your exact time/position, but in dungeons you're restored to the beginning of the dungeon (they deal with annoying trudges to some extent by offering unlockable shortcuts near the entrance). In either case, it will make sure you have some minimum amount of health (not full, so it's less attractive to cheat using this).]
You are right: that sort of portability (supporting many types of platforms using [broadly] standard interfaces) does often help code quality etc.
However I suspect that what Ulrich may be talking about (of course I didn't read the article:-) is not that, but rather the practice of trying to support completely alien systems that don't implement the common interfaces you normally depend on. This kind of "portability" often results in a huge festering pile of kludges and massive duplication of code. A popular example is MS-DOS; many packages end up with ".bat" files duplicating their makefiles, use painfully awkward filenames to avoid upsetting 8.3 filename restrictions, have special cases for MS-DOS scattered throughout the code, etc.
Of course if you really go all out, the effort may end up helping your package by forcing you to thoroughly refactor your code for maximum flexibility, etc. But in many cases the benefit is not worth the pain, and the developers instead go the lots-of-kludges route, and the net effect is negative.
Re:Gamers never know what's good for them
on
A Gamer's Manifesto
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly.... anyway, it would make more sense to me if you could save anywhere except that there would be certain "no save" periods, for instance during boss fights. [Probably it should allow you to save then too, but restore your save to the beginning of the no-save period you were in.]
One thing that drives me absolutely nuts is when there's a hard boss, but also a 10 minute annoying trudge from the last save point to the beginning of the boss. I can deal with the boss fight (well, actually I like it), but the pre-boss trudge is just stupid (same thing goes for extended FMV sequences which often precede a boss). There are many games I've just given up on rather than repeat the same mind-numbing walk to the boss for the 27th time. A more user-oriented save system could help alleviate such bogosities.
That's complete bullshit. There's certainly racism etc. in Japan, but the xbox's failure had little or nothing to do with it (indeed MS windows is as much a monopoly in japan as anyplace). Microsoft simply failed to provide sufficient reasons for anybody to prefer it to the juggernaut that was Sony and the comfortable familiarity of Nintendo. [If it had been smaller and cheaper maybe more would have picked it up anyway -- but it wasn't.]
Not only were xbox games (especially the initial ones) targeted at rather different U.S. tastes, but the over-the-top "bigger and louder is better" bombast of typical xbox marketing, which works so well with U.S. teenagers, is far less suited to japan (this is also a reason why the gamecube was much more successful: being small and cute isn't a liability in japan).
I'm on the nyt email list for this stuff, and I've always been amazed by this guy in particular -- he seems to be an honest guy, and genuinely trying to be an impartial commentator, but he's er, very naive; he happily swallows everything marketing says and earnestly works at drawing conclusions from it. In a way it's very informative though: by examining his reactions, you get a picture of what the industry wants the public to think...
It should be easy to win the Japanese tournament: Just be the one guy in Japan that owns an xbox!
[The other day I saw a big display in Shibuya station to push (tepco) broadband service, and they were offering a completely free xbox to the first n-hundred customers to sign up. I watched for a while, and it was pretty funny: they'd get some guy to sign up, and ask him "Thanks for signing up; would you like your free xbox?" (they literally had a pile of xboxes there to hand over) -- and every single time, the answer would be something like "Oh, no I don't need one". They can't even give them away...]
Is killing wifi enough, though? There are certainly enough people who camp out with their laptops even without wifi access, and I think it has the same off-putting effect on the vibe of a cafe (I've a few particular people in mind actually, that seem to show up at about 8am, grab the best seat, and sit there working on their laptop all day long).
I'm not sure what makes a bunch of people camped out with a laptop worse than those reading books or studying (I've certainly sat down and read all day in a cafe before), but it definitely makes a place feel less inviting if you walk in and there are tons of people staring at laptops -- and I'm a slashdot reader and life-long hacker!
[Let's not forget, though, that there is something far worse: The Guy With The Loud Annoying Voice Droning On Endlessly. Death is too good for that guy.]
Re:Why would you assume the PS3 would spank the Xb
on
Inside the Xbox 360
·
· Score: 1
For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience?
BTW, an interesting tidbit I've heard: the "father" of NEC's supercomputer effort was hired by Sony, and was basically responsible for the PS3's design.
It's hard to say what it means for the PS3 -- there's certainly a vast difference between a sub-$500 consumer device and cost-is-no-object room-filling massive machines like the NEC supercomputers. His experience with high-end machines may even be a liability because of the incredibly different constraints on the PS3. I agree that Sony/SCE often serve up more hot air than they do substance (the PR benefit was no doubt a part of the reason for hiring this guy). Still, it shows they did try to do something to avoid an embarrassment like the PS2.
[Take all this with a grain of salt; I work at NEC, and know people who work at Sony (SCE) on the PS3, and this is the scuttlebutt...]
The main thing that drives me nuts about the PSP is the controls, specifically the !@#$ "analogue nub", which is in just about the worst location possible; the hand position required to use it is Not Comfortable (whereas the digital pad, which no games actually seem to use, is in a great location, taking up lots of space).
It seems pretty clear that Sony stuck the nub in at the last minute without much thought or user testing. What sucks even more is that they'll likely keep the same layout for any subsequent handhelds they make, just like they kept the crappy layouts on the PS/PS2 controller (at least with the PS2, you can get third-party controllers with a better layout; no such luck with a handheld). The sad fact is, they just don't seem to care about such things.
I dunno, I've been pretty unimpressed with the google map images (beyond such obvious problems as U.S. only coverage) -- the quality is so variable it gets annoying, even for a casual use.
Indeed with regard to this story, the angle of view can vary dramatically over a small area, sometimes you see the north side of one building, and the south side of a neighboring building! [I guess in such cases maybe they used aerial imagery instead of satellite photos.]
Certainly quality control is a hard problem with such a massive project and they're probably trying to do it as cheaply as possible, but... well I guess some competition from MS may be a good thing from the users' point view.
Of course for many, it will simply mean never changing the channel, with fond reminiscencing about that time you almost changed the channel back in '93...
Amen... I've been reading NYT online since 1995/6, and I really like their Op-Ed page -- it's the one place I consistently visit on their site -- but I'm not going to pay $50 a year to read it. It's not that good...
especially the refuse spewed out by KarlRove-lite David Brooks, aren't worth the energy of clicking the mouse button
Yeah, agree here too. I really liked William Safire (the NYT's previous "token conservative" columnist). His viewpoint sometimes drove me nuts, but he was a great read: intelligent, did a good job of backing up his arguments, and simply had a sense of style (he'd be a great person to argue with over dinner!). I suppose David Brooks is his replacement, but man he's pretty pathetic compared to Safire.
Exactly. Many people were fooled by the early PS2/xbox hype and blather into thinking they would be far more powerful than the GC... but reality turned out to be quite different.
Sony is particularly guilty of this of course, and seems to be repeating themselves with all the cell hype. Don't fool yourself -- Sony is no magician, and they aren't going to beat the technology curve by any significant margin. They may be able to get great numbers in very narrow artificial benchmarks, but it's much, much harder (read: it isn't going to happen) to make the end results reflect this. This seems particularly true for Sony/SCE, who have never shown much skill at good balanced system design.
Most of the proponents of Text-only email commonly ignore usability as a factor in their arguments.
On the contrary: one of the most annoying things about html email is that it's typically far less readable than the equivalent plain-text email.
The reason is that most clients handle it quite badly by doing such things as forcing the font choice (overriding the default font, which the user has explicitly chosen to be readable), substituting flashy graphics for more readable (but more boring) textual conventions.
If someone worked carefully to construct good html, this could be worked around -- but people don't do this, they use the defaults, which, 99% of the time, suck.
Ask anyone in the publishing world and they will tell you that a good layout is vital.
Most people in the publishing world these days don't know a damn thing about usability, they care about flash and bling, grabbing the user's eye rather than helping him actually understand and read the content. It's pathetic, to be sure, but it's true.
I certainly don't religiously keep up with things, but I love periodically going to the library and checking out the latest journals etc. because there's always something cool to read.
I do seem to find the most interesting stuff through references from other sources though, e.g., someone will mention a paper on a mailing list I read, or I'll do a google search on some term I see in patch which will turn up relevant publications.
So my impression is that you can keep abreast of things pretty well simply by "remaining engaged" in whatever activity/community interests you, and that the current interesting ideas and research will inevitably pop up if you do. Reading journals and conference proceedings (or at least browsing through the contents to find the cool stuff) can be part of that, but it hardly seems necessary to worry about it too much.
Re:Its only the bad things we head about?
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 0
Of course Apple has the right to do what they did, but it's definitely not very gracious behavior, and arguably in the end it's going to hurt Apple as well.
This sort of thing is a frequent and somewhat understandable problem with large companies using FOSS -- it's hard to develop software independently and cooperatively at the same time, and at companies, short-term commercial goals often take precedence. Because they can afford to maintain high rates of change, by the time someone gets around to thinking about how they're going to deal with synchronizing their changes it's become very difficult to do so.
To do things right, you have to think about the problem from the start, have standards in place to keep careful track of changes (maybe even make it someone's job), etc. However with the intense pressure from above to "just make it work", it's not easy.
The Librie also has an enormously sucky user-interface -- the eink display is very slow to update but the UI makes no attempt to deal with this issue, and the result is almost unusable.
Combined with the DRM'd content, yeah, it's a screwup. I suspect it was released as a product just to satisfy some company policy or quota, and that they don't actually expect to sell many of them.
I try to follow the "it's ok to eat anything that's really stupid" rule, which I figure allows fish, chicken, etc. From what I hear, maybe I should be conflicted about pork though....
[Of course as a degenerate case this rule allows the eating of severely retarded people, but I just reject that separately on sentimental grounds.:-]
In fact, the actual property I think is worth preserving (and thus not eating) is human-like sentience, which I presume to be broadly correlated with intelligence.
Chicago mass transit is obviously not anywhere near as good as that in Japan, but it's fairly decent for a U.S. city if your destination is in the city itself. It gets progressively worse the farther into suburbia you get (which is also true to a slight extent in Japan, but very few places are not reachable by a fairly reasonable combination of train+bus).
As the Chicago long-distance train station is downtown, at the hub of all the other transport, it is very convenient for public transport. O'Hare airport is also directly accessible by local train, but is significantly less convenient because it's not at the center of the network (though it is closer than Narita is to Tokyo).
I've actually taken both train and plane to and from Chicago, and the train is a far more relaxing experience on arrival/departure (the trains themselves of course are rather less nice than a typical airplane:-).
If the eventual destination is a suburb with sucky public transit, then I suppose the superior car-rental infrastructure at the airport might be a big advantage. [Everybody I've ever known in Chicago has lived in the city itself.]
Sure the energy and pollution things are downsides of cars, but the real problem IMO, is that they require sooo much space, both for operation and storage; it severely distorts the way that cities develop in mostly negative ways (for sparsely populated countryside, of course, it doesn't matter much). If you look at almost any city developed with the car in mind, they're bizarrely unfriendly places for anything except cars (which means not just public transport, but people).
Another problem with cars is the way they isolate people -- both from each other during travel, and from the areas being travelled though. They put you in this cocoon of metal, and the car within a "cocoon of concrete", and the point-to-point nature of most car travel postpones public interaction the last possible point. I agree without that motorcycles (and scooters, bicycles, etc) are superior for this and many other reasons.
Of course the unpleasantness of car-designed cities tends to make people want to stay in their car, which makes them lobby for increased car-friendliness; it's a vicious cycle.
Unfortunately, as many have said, it's hard to build up a decent public transportation system and even that's not enough -- you really have to change the entire nature of a city to make it really work with public transport. Many foreign cities, for reasons of history, culture, or whatever, already have the infrastructure, but few U.S. cities seem to, and change is slow and frustrating.
Actually I've seen similar complaints on the gcc mailing list about Apple's gcc work, though to a much lesser degree -- it's not that the Apple team is really being unfriendly or trying to hide anything, it's just that they're focused on their own immediate goals (making a release, satisfying the demands of customers [largely other software makers in the case of gcc]). The Apple gcc team does seem to have tried mightily to make things right, but there's still clearly something of an impedance mismatch present.
This is fairly typical of commercial use of FOSS, in my experience: they often want to "cooperate" (in the long run, it's usually to their benefit), but the ugly reality of deadlines and users can interfere greatly, and the longer the code-bases remain out of sync, the harder it is to make things nice again... and users and deadlines never give you much break.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too.
I'm actually a manga fan, but most of the anime I've seen is just too damn cheap/shallow/puerile. It's particularly bad when a good manga is adapted into an anime, as it almost always completely omits everything that was good about the original manga.
[My current hate is "Futatsu no supika": the manga's storyline is sometimes over-melodramatic and slightly silly, but often quite touching, the pacing is great, and the art is moody and contemplative. Basically it works because the author gets the details right. The anime -- which is apparently quite popular, and is very heavily advertised -- of course throws out all this and makes the story even more shallow; it's like reading the Cliff's Notes version.]
However I think it's easy to get even more negative impression of anime (or manga for that matter) if you only look at what's popular in the U.S. -- anime/manga are fairly diverse in Japan, but a disturbingly large proportion of what's imported into the U.S. seems to be essentially low-brow sex-comedy. [Of course there's lots of freaky and embarrassing stuff in Japan too, but that's true of any medium anywhere I think.]
I think it's extremely dependent on exact model of LCD you choose. Current mid-range LCD displays seem to have none of the problems you mention except price. In particular, the one my work got me is an NEC LCD1760, which has excellent contrast, no blurring at all, and syncs perfectly (and yes, I'm still using sub-pixel rendering for fonts).
The analogue syncing was my greatest concern (because early LCDs were so incredibly crappy when running off a standard analogue video signal), and the reason I didn't switch to LCD earlier, but they seem to have it sussed. One pixel lines are one pixel exactly on the display, no fringes at all.
Except for those on a tight budget, I think there's little reason for most computer users to choose a CRT these days.
Those are good points. One way of dealing with them might be to restore to a previous "checkpoint position", e.g., the entrance/beginning of the room/area you were in when you saved (enemies are normally reset at that point anyway), and provide a minimal amount of health if you were at zero. This would provide more flexibility than a typical "save room" system, but fewer than true "save anywhere".
[Zelda Wind-Waker on the Gamecube uses a sort of dual system -- you can save anywhere, and in the outside world restoring will restore your exact time/position, but in dungeons you're restored to the beginning of the dungeon (they deal with annoying trudges to some extent by offering unlockable shortcuts near the entrance). In either case, it will make sure you have some minimum amount of health (not full, so it's less attractive to cheat using this).]
You are right: that sort of portability (supporting many types of platforms using [broadly] standard interfaces) does often help code quality etc.
:-) is not that, but rather the practice of trying to support completely alien systems that don't implement the common interfaces you normally depend on. This kind of "portability" often results in a huge festering pile of kludges and massive duplication of code. A popular example is MS-DOS; many packages end up with ".bat" files duplicating their makefiles, use painfully awkward filenames to avoid upsetting 8.3 filename restrictions, have special cases for MS-DOS scattered throughout the code, etc.
However I suspect that what Ulrich may be talking about (of course I didn't read the article
Of course if you really go all out, the effort may end up helping your package by forcing you to thoroughly refactor your code for maximum flexibility, etc. But in many cases the benefit is not worth the pain, and the developers instead go the lots-of-kludges route, and the net effect is negative.
Exactly.... anyway, it would make more sense to me if you could save anywhere except that there would be certain "no save" periods, for instance during boss fights. [Probably it should allow you to save then too, but restore your save to the beginning of the no-save period you were in.]
One thing that drives me absolutely nuts is when there's a hard boss, but also a 10 minute annoying trudge from the last save point to the beginning of the boss. I can deal with the boss fight (well, actually I like it), but the pre-boss trudge is just stupid (same thing goes for extended FMV sequences which often precede a boss). There are many games I've just given up on rather than repeat the same mind-numbing walk to the boss for the 27th time. A more user-oriented save system could help alleviate such bogosities.
That's complete bullshit. There's certainly racism etc. in Japan, but the xbox's failure had little or nothing to do with it (indeed MS windows is as much a monopoly in japan as anyplace). Microsoft simply failed to provide sufficient reasons for anybody to prefer it to the juggernaut that was Sony and the comfortable familiarity of Nintendo. [If it had been smaller and cheaper maybe more would have picked it up anyway -- but it wasn't.]
Not only were xbox games (especially the initial ones) targeted at rather different U.S. tastes, but the over-the-top "bigger and louder is better" bombast of typical xbox marketing, which works so well with U.S. teenagers, is far less suited to japan (this is also a reason why the gamecube was much more successful: being small and cute isn't a liability in japan).
I'm on the nyt email list for this stuff, and I've always been amazed by this guy in particular -- he seems to be an honest guy, and genuinely trying to be an impartial commentator, but he's er, very naive; he happily swallows everything marketing says and earnestly works at drawing conclusions from it. In a way it's very informative though: by examining his reactions, you get a picture of what the industry wants the public to think...
It should be easy to win the Japanese tournament: Just be the one guy in Japan that owns an xbox!
[The other day I saw a big display in Shibuya station to push (tepco) broadband service, and they were offering a completely free xbox to the first n-hundred customers to sign up. I watched for a while, and it was pretty funny: they'd get some guy to sign up, and ask him "Thanks for signing up; would you like your free xbox?" (they literally had a pile of xboxes there to hand over) -- and every single time, the answer would be something like "Oh, no I don't need one". They can't even give them away...]
Is killing wifi enough, though? There are certainly enough people who camp out with their laptops even without wifi access, and I think it has the same off-putting effect on the vibe of a cafe (I've a few particular people in mind actually, that seem to show up at about 8am, grab the best seat, and sit there working on their laptop all day long).
I'm not sure what makes a bunch of people camped out with a laptop worse than those reading books or studying (I've certainly sat down and read all day in a cafe before), but it definitely makes a place feel less inviting if you walk in and there are tons of people staring at laptops -- and I'm a slashdot reader and life-long hacker!
[Let's not forget, though, that there is something far worse: The Guy With The Loud Annoying Voice Droning On Endlessly. Death is too good for that guy.]
For that matter, if the PS2/PS3 are so great, why aren't they _actually_ in the Top500 list? The best supercomputers from Japan aren't made by Sony - they're made by NEC. Where is their supercomputing architectural experience?
BTW, an interesting tidbit I've heard: the "father" of NEC's supercomputer effort was hired by Sony, and was basically responsible for the PS3's design.
It's hard to say what it means for the PS3 -- there's certainly a vast difference between a sub-$500 consumer device and cost-is-no-object room-filling massive machines like the NEC supercomputers. His experience with high-end machines may even be a liability because of the incredibly different constraints on the PS3. I agree that Sony/SCE often serve up more hot air than they do substance (the PR benefit was no doubt a part of the reason for hiring this guy). Still, it shows they did try to do something to avoid an embarrassment like the PS2.
[Take all this with a grain of salt; I work at NEC, and know people who work at Sony (SCE) on the PS3, and this is the scuttlebutt...]
The main thing that drives me nuts about the PSP is the controls, specifically the !@#$ "analogue nub", which is in just about the worst location possible; the hand position required to use it is Not Comfortable (whereas the digital pad, which no games actually seem to use, is in a great location, taking up lots of space).
It seems pretty clear that Sony stuck the nub in at the last minute without much thought or user testing. What sucks even more is that they'll likely keep the same layout for any subsequent handhelds they make, just like they kept the crappy layouts on the PS/PS2 controller (at least with the PS2, you can get third-party controllers with a better layout; no such luck with a handheld). The sad fact is, they just don't seem to care about such things.
I dunno, I've been pretty unimpressed with the google map images (beyond such obvious problems as U.S. only coverage) -- the quality is so variable it gets annoying, even for a casual use.
... well I guess some competition from MS may be a good thing from the users' point view.
Indeed with regard to this story, the angle of view can vary dramatically over a small area, sometimes you see the north side of one building, and the south side of a neighboring building! [I guess in such cases maybe they used aerial imagery instead of satellite photos.]
Certainly quality control is a hard problem with such a massive project and they're probably trying to do it as cheaply as possible, but
Of course for many, it will simply mean never changing the channel, with fond reminiscencing about that time you almost changed the channel back in '93...
Amen... I've been reading NYT online since 1995/6, and I really like their Op-Ed page -- it's the one place I consistently visit on their site -- but I'm not going to pay $50 a year to read it. It's not that good...
especially the refuse spewed out by KarlRove-lite David Brooks, aren't worth the energy of clicking the mouse button
Yeah, agree here too. I really liked William Safire (the NYT's previous "token conservative" columnist). His viewpoint sometimes drove me nuts, but he was a great read: intelligent, did a good job of backing up his arguments, and simply had a sense of style (he'd be a great person to argue with over dinner!). I suppose David Brooks is his replacement, but man he's pretty pathetic compared to Safire.
Exactly. Many people were fooled by the early PS2/xbox hype and blather into thinking they would be far more powerful than the GC ... but reality turned out to be quite different.
Sony is particularly guilty of this of course, and seems to be repeating themselves with all the cell hype. Don't fool yourself -- Sony is no magician, and they aren't going to beat the technology curve by any significant margin. They may be able to get great numbers in very narrow artificial benchmarks, but it's much, much harder (read: it isn't going to happen) to make the end results reflect this. This seems particularly true for Sony/SCE, who have never shown much skill at good balanced system design.
Most of the proponents of Text-only email commonly ignore usability as a factor in their arguments.
On the contrary: one of the most annoying things about html email is that it's typically far less readable than the equivalent plain-text email.
The reason is that most clients handle it quite badly by doing such things as forcing the font choice (overriding the default font, which the user has explicitly chosen to be readable), substituting flashy graphics for more readable (but more boring) textual conventions.
If someone worked carefully to construct good html, this could be worked around -- but people don't do this, they use the defaults, which, 99% of the time, suck.
Ask anyone in the publishing world and they will tell you that a good layout is vital.
Most people in the publishing world these days don't know a damn thing about usability, they care about flash and bling, grabbing the user's eye rather than helping him actually understand and read the content. It's pathetic, to be sure, but it's true.
I certainly don't religiously keep up with things, but I love periodically going to the library and checking out the latest journals etc. because there's always something cool to read.
I do seem to find the most interesting stuff through references from other sources though, e.g., someone will mention a paper on a mailing list I read, or I'll do a google search on some term I see in patch which will turn up relevant publications.
So my impression is that you can keep abreast of things pretty well simply by "remaining engaged" in whatever activity/community interests you, and that the current interesting ideas and research will inevitably pop up if you do. Reading journals and conference proceedings (or at least browsing through the contents to find the cool stuff) can be part of that, but it hardly seems necessary to worry about it too much.
Of course Apple has the right to do what they did, but it's definitely not very gracious behavior, and arguably in the end it's going to hurt Apple as well.
This sort of thing is a frequent and somewhat understandable problem with large companies using FOSS -- it's hard to develop software independently and cooperatively at the same time, and at companies, short-term commercial goals often take precedence. Because they can afford to maintain high rates of change, by the time someone gets around to thinking about how they're going to deal with synchronizing their changes it's become very difficult to do so.
To do things right, you have to think about the problem from the start, have standards in place to keep careful track of changes (maybe even make it someone's job), etc. However with the intense pressure from above to "just make it work", it's not easy.
The Librie also has an enormously sucky user-interface -- the eink display is very slow to update but the UI makes no attempt to deal with this issue, and the result is almost unusable.
Combined with the DRM'd content, yeah, it's a screwup. I suspect it was released as a product just to satisfy some company policy or quota, and that they don't actually expect to sell many of them.
I try to follow the "it's ok to eat anything that's really stupid" rule, which I figure allows fish, chicken, etc. From what I hear, maybe I should be conflicted about pork though....
:-]
[Of course as a degenerate case this rule allows the eating of severely retarded people, but I just reject that separately on sentimental grounds.
In fact, the actual property I think is worth preserving (and thus not eating) is human-like sentience, which I presume to be broadly correlated with intelligence.
My concern about Unbuntu is that they still do not have a viable business model.
Actually they have a pretty darn good one: The "Wealthy Patron" model...
6. Finally get act together, vow to be informed consumer
7. Realize that in the meantime, wally world has driven all competitors out of business except WW clones
8. Welcome to Hell
Isn't there public transit in Chicago?
:-).
Chicago mass transit is obviously not anywhere near as good as that in Japan, but it's fairly decent for a U.S. city if your destination is in the city itself. It gets progressively worse the farther into suburbia you get (which is also true to a slight extent in Japan, but very few places are not reachable by a fairly reasonable combination of train+bus).
As the Chicago long-distance train station is downtown, at the hub of all the other transport, it is very convenient for public transport. O'Hare airport is also directly accessible by local train, but is significantly less convenient because it's not at the center of the network (though it is closer than Narita is to Tokyo).
I've actually taken both train and plane to and from Chicago, and the train is a far more relaxing experience on arrival/departure (the trains themselves of course are rather less nice than a typical airplane
If the eventual destination is a suburb with sucky public transit, then I suppose the superior car-rental infrastructure at the airport might be a big advantage. [Everybody I've ever known in Chicago has lived in the city itself.]
Sure the energy and pollution things are downsides of cars, but the real problem IMO, is that they require sooo much space, both for operation and storage; it severely distorts the way that cities develop in mostly negative ways (for sparsely populated countryside, of course, it doesn't matter much). If you look at almost any city developed with the car in mind, they're bizarrely unfriendly places for anything except cars (which means not just public transport, but people).
Another problem with cars is the way they isolate people -- both from each other during travel, and from the areas being travelled though. They put you in this cocoon of metal, and the car within a "cocoon of concrete", and the point-to-point nature of most car travel postpones public interaction the last possible point. I agree without that motorcycles (and scooters, bicycles, etc) are superior for this and many other reasons.
Of course the unpleasantness of car-designed cities tends to make people want to stay in their car, which makes them lobby for increased car-friendliness; it's a vicious cycle.
Unfortunately, as many have said, it's hard to build up a decent public transportation system and even that's not enough -- you really have to change the entire nature of a city to make it really work with public transport. Many foreign cities, for reasons of history, culture, or whatever, already have the infrastructure, but few U.S. cities seem to, and change is slow and frustrating.
Actually I've seen similar complaints on the gcc mailing list about Apple's gcc work, though to a much lesser degree -- it's not that the Apple team is really being unfriendly or trying to hide anything, it's just that they're focused on their own immediate goals (making a release, satisfying the demands of customers [largely other software makers in the case of gcc]). The Apple gcc team does seem to have tried mightily to make things right, but there's still clearly something of an impedance mismatch present.
... and users and deadlines never give you much break.
This is fairly typical of commercial use of FOSS, in my experience: they often want to "cooperate" (in the long run, it's usually to their benefit), but the ugly reality of deadlines and users can interfere greatly, and the longer the code-bases remain out of sync, the harder it is to make things nice again