The devil's in the details. This map app doesn't look too hot. And lacking a touchscreen (and virtual keyboard) my guess is it'll take a LONG time to do any amount of text entry with less than 20 buttons. Predictive text doesn't help much when it comes to names, email addresses, URLs, city names, etc.
But no mind, you just go on being a raving, frothing at the mouth Nokia fanboy, oblivious to what most people in the world actually want. (Note the proper use of 'oblivious.') We'll compare sales numbers in a year. The parent was specifically talking about "iPhone killers," and if the iPod has shown us anything, it is that feature counts alone don't sell products.
Java? Are you freaking kidding me?
I'm sure it's a great phone. I just wanted to bring you down to Earth, same as you wanted to bring down the parent.
Yup. Having worked with several tablets--which I love as a gadget, and they're really great for a few purposes, like walking around doing inventory with a customized web-app--the single biggest problem is data entry. Basically it comes down to this: how do you enter data on a device that you're supposed to hold in your hands? And I'm not talking about writing the great American novel on one. Unless you're doing nothing but opening, closing, dragging, and dropping files, you can't use a computer in any meaningful fashion for very long without doing some kind of data entry. With tablets, Palms, and even the iPhone, once you get past a couple hundred characters, you realize how excruciatingly slow it is. Even poking out a URL, switching between letters, numbers, and punctuation, you can't help but think "if I were at a desk, I'd already have this page loaded."
Voice recognition mostly sucks, and even if it worked fine, I don't want to be talking out loud to my computer most of time--not in the office, not in public.
Voice recognition is also out for anything that must be character-perfect: web addresses, email addresses, even renaming a file--miss a period and you'll be renaming it again.
Pen-based input is OK, accuracy- and speed-wise, but still nowhere near what you can do with a keyboard.
A chord keyboard would be ideal--they can be faster than conventional keyboards--but you're not gonna see something that complicated on a mass-market consumer product from Apple.
An iPhone-like virtual keyboard is obviously an option, but unlike the two-thumb operation of an iPhone, you'd be limited to poking with one index finger while you hold the tablet with your hand.
Which leads to the conclusion--as soon as you set the tablet down to use a conventional mouse and keyboard, it becomes equal to a regular laptop in all regards except it's slower, has a smaller screen, and is more expensive. Apple's last big flop was the Cube, which had the same specs (CPU, RAM, HD) as a PowerMac, was less expandable, and cost $200 more.
What I really want Apple to make is what I would call the "MacBook Elite": 2 pounds, 10- or 11-inch screen, Core Duo, no HD or optical drive, 1 or 2 GB RAM, 16-32 GB solid-state storage, very thin, and 12-24 hours of battery life. (Yes, I know there are PCs that more or less match these specs, but I want OS X and the industrial design from Apple.) You could use it as a basic standalone computer or you could sync it up with your desktop just like an iPhone. Obviously it wouldn't be the center of your digital life (especially in terms of mass storage of media and media creation) but it would be so good at so many other things.
The original submission: I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to an SMB share that disappeared...
Although the TRS-80 was launched the same year as the Apple II and the Commodore PET personal computers... it benefited from the distribution network and brand identity of Radio Shack.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. Is anyone else here old enough to remember when Radio Shack had a positive brand identity?
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
Well, since you came right out and asked...
I, for one, would welcome our new moon-mining robotic overlords.:-)
Cons: Postscript and PDF are both open standards. I am not sure I'd like to see Apple control their future.
Only underdogs* claim to like open standards. PDF is open but Adobe controls all the dominant tools and extends the spec every year or so whether it needs it or not. (Remember back when the "P" in "PDF" stood for "portable"? Have you tried to open the typical modern PDF in anything but Acrobat? Even my computers with Acrobat 5 and 6 pop up warnings on about half of the PDFs I get.) And Adobe quit giving a shit about SVG right after they bought Macromedia (Flash.)
Have you seen Photoshop CS3? Adobe has hardly been asleep. Auto-align and countless other features kick ass. Yes, for basic image editing, cheap/free tools are getting better and more common, but Adobe keeps moving forward with very difficult to create features that work freaking great. Do any of those free editors have anything that works as well as the Healing Brush? (Which came out over five years ago, BTW.) It took me literally seconds to erase a drawing, made with a fat purple felt marker, that was on my friend's arm in a photo, with that tool--something that would have taken much longer with the clone tool and would not have looked as good.
Cropping and resizing can be done from the command-line. A GUI app with Core Image effects is literally trivial to make. (Fer chrissakes, such a thing was DEMOED at the 2004 WWDC.) But Adobe still comes up with tons and tons of features in every release, and no cheap app can touch those with a ten foot pole.
I'm not saying that these apps aren't great. They're great for home users and light duties, like making images for the Web. But most home users don't buy Photoshop in the first place--it gets bought by companies who don't mind paying $1,000 a seat for an app that their employees will use day-in, day-out. And these companies are not going to touch any of the apps you mention.
Back on topic, there is not a single good reason for Apple to buy Adobe unless you just thinks it's cool if every single product you like is made by the same company. (I bet the author also wishes Apple would buy BMW and make a cute little White coupe.) Personally, I like competition--not just Apple vs. Adobe, but Apple vs. Windows. I like being able to run CS on the Windows box that's next to my Macs. Both platforms have their strengths and uses. I do not want to live in this world.
Hmm... it might take a lot. I made these images* by combining many still images and it reduced the noise but it would be a stretch to really increase the effective resolution. I suppose an array of phone recordings would sound better than stock but it would take a lot to get the quality up to anything reasonable, and I think even a hundred combined signals wouldn't be enough for anyone to mistake the result for a 48k studio piece.
* those pics were taken during a lunar eclipse with my DV camera (25x optical zoom.) I didn't even use a tripod--just pointed it and held it as steadily as I could, the combined the layers in Photoshop. "Shot 1" was the first picture taken, and "Shot 1 (4 layers)" was made by combining four subsequent frames. Later shots were made by combining 6 or 9 layers. There's one raw frame of the first shot for comparison. Long story short: frame noise is random, so combining frames averages it out.
Forematter: This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file. This story and the other stories in the volume are available at: http://craphound.com/overclocked You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20 In the words of Woody Guthrie: "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better. -- Introduction to Printcrime: Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents. My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry. I was less impressed. It's almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea. It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind. When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business. -- Printcrime (Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006) The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it. The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals--performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way. They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire. Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They
Recommended Usage Home / Home Office Processor Intel Celeron D 356(3.33GHz) Processor Main Features 64 bit Processor Cache Per Processor 512KB L2 Cache Memory 512MB DDR2 533 Hard Drive 120GB SATA 7200rpm
It always kills me to read the specs on a site like Dell.com and see all these machines described as "suitable for web browsing, email..." When I went to Siggraph in 1998, PII/400s were the new hotness and all the kickass machines that ran all the 3D apps had MAYBE 16 MB video cards. Today, they make it sound like a 3 GHz machine is usable only if you're a complete simpleton and will never have more than 2 apps open at once. Unbelievable.
And I still can't click on a column heading to sort by sender, date, size, etc. Search and labels are great, but they don't fulfill EVERY need. Why does gmail still lack such basic functionality that every other binary and web email client of the past decade has had?
For example: say I've got a few hundred messages and I want to find the few that have large attachments--ZIP files, a bunch of pictures, whatever. How do I do this with Gmail? Should I tag message with large attachments in a special way? If that's your suggestion, I'd like to point out that that is STUPID for two reasons: 1) the data is ALREADY THERE. Why should I manually tag messages? Aren't computers supposed to DO WORK FOR US? 2) that requires me to know ahead of time what ALL my needs will EVER be. What if I've been collecting this mail for years and then suddenly think "I'd like to find all these messages." But oops, I don't have my TIME MACHINE, so I can't go back and tag them all.
Agreed. Other problems: - Someone finds a sarcastic joke unfunny and it gets modded "troll" or "flamebait." - 3 people think I'm funny and I get a nice "+5, Funny" but one person thinks I'm not that funny and hits me with a "-1, Overrated." What crap. The guidelines say "focus on promoting, not demoting" but I don't think anyone reads those. Everyone just wants to form Slashdot into what they want to see, not realizing that it's (everyone hold hands now) all our differences that make Slashdot great. I see ideas and points-of-view here that I would never see in my own little world. (Usually by browsing at +3 early on.)
While they're at it, they need to add some new ratings like "-1, Factually incorrect."
Let not even discuss the sheer volumes of the little balloons that pop up in the bottom right.
And let's not forget the unholy marriage that was the original XP and wireless networking: "Hey, I found a network!" "Hey, I just joined a network!" "Signal strength: EXCELLENT!" (air guitars play) "Network connection lost."... moments later... "Hey, I found a network!"
And even that aside, those are the little things that SUCK OUT LOUD about Windows. Not only do they pop up a big ugly window (compared to how OS X just scrolls the name of the network in the menu bar for a moment) but you have two choices: A) leave the damn thing open until it decides to go away, or B) click on it to close it and take focus away from the foreground app. UGH! If I'm in Word and then run Calculator and then close Calculator, I'm back in Word. If I'm in Word and click a balloon, I've got to CLICK BACK ON WORD to make that app active.
Excellent post (and ignore the guy who doesn't get that "the Leopard" is part of the joke--this thing is packed with lots of subtle, subtle jokes) but you should have mentioned that you actually did write that--since you obviously didn't whip that up for a slashdot comment, I went to google to find the source so I could accuse you of plagiarism, only to be led here. Nicely done. But next time, give credit where credit is due--even if it's to yourself. A) you deserve it and B) it'll save me some time.:-)
Again, great job. The whole thing is great, top to bottom (and the punchline is a killer.) Well played. The style reminds me a bit of this guy with the way he gets details wrong and is unaware of some major things.
Ultimately it was the corporate headquarters of Outback Steakhouse who caught the thief with a bugged laptop that notified them when he re-connected it to the internet.
Which is funny as hell, because I've read several times on Slashdot (sorry, no time to search) about people who have their laptops set to do just that, but when they inform the police that their laptop is in use by a customer of this ISP with that IP address, they're told to go pound sand, that the police don't have time to go catch criminals that you can lead them to. It's trivial--especially with MacBooks--to have it send you not only the IP address but a picture of the theif if you want--but it seems to do no good.
Maybe the thing to do would be to get laptop insurance and then have the info emailed to the insurance company.
MS Access is a database but it's also a complete program with a nice GUI front-end and lots of other stuff. You can make a whole form-based application with Access. MySQL itself is just a raw DB with nothing but a command-line interface out-of-the-box--in that sense, MySQL is roughly comparable to JET. (Scalability, stability, etc. issues aside.) SQLite is a great little thing but it's really just a step up from a flat text file--it responds to SQL syntax but it's not strict at all. You can put arbitrary length strings into integer columns, floating point numbers in boolean columns, or dates in character columns. Overall, the three are not really directly comparable. For some things, you could use any one of the three and not notice the difference. For anything else, only one might do.
True. But it's not always about going out and buying a computer to run a new OS. A lot of times it's about making your old computer match your new one. When I bought my Mac mini, I used the 10.3 disk it came with to freshen up my iBook which came with 10.2. Apple has never (back to the System 7 days) asked for a serial number upon installation. (And it's not because they don't know how--QuickTime Pro, OS X Server, iWork, and their Pro apps--Final Cut, etc.--all require serial numbers. Come to think of it, that's pretty much everything except the OS and iLife.) They've always been tacitly OK with you "pirating" their OS for over a decade.
Yes, that's partly because (except for clones) it runs on hardware they sell, or sold in the past--so even if you put it on a five-year-old computer, you're putting it on a five-year-old Apple computer. They'd rather keep an old customer happy with a "free" update and have them return in the future than drive them away altogether. Furthermore, they've got exactly two versions of the OS (regular and server--an easy choice) and one price point ($129 for the non-server version--a bit more than Home Basic Upgrade, but less than any Premium or non-upgrade version) AND, if you're determined to live your life in perfect license compliance, you can buy a five-pack of OS X for $199.
But no matter the reason, a complete lack of serial numbers and activation schemes, to say nothing of problem-causing activation schemes like we're reading about here, is a great thing, for many reasons. Mainly, it's just one breed of problems that just don't exist on Macs. I will never lose a moment of productivity on a Mac due to activating it, let alone re-activating it if the scheme fails.
I won't go into detail about my solution here--not because it's a secret, but because it's more convoluted and complex than most people need to deal with. The simplest thing is to just get a few network-enabled cameras (from DLink or anyone else) and sprinkle them around your house as desired. Wired, wireless, indoor, outdoor, whatever works for you. Then use the built-in web server, open ports as needed on your router, and you're done.
If you want to get extra-fancy, get a few and run them on various ports--say, 8001, 8002, 8003, etc. Then, set up one master page that looks like... <img src="http:// your.name.here:8000/image.jpg"> <img src="http:// your.name.here:8001/image.jpg"> <img src="http:// your.name.here:8002/image.jpg"> to see them all at once.
Re:This is HIGHLY illegal in the US
on
eBay The Vote
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· Score: 1
...you will likely be charged by your local authorities to the tune of thousands of dollars in fines...
How much, exactly? I need to know how high to set my reserve.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you need to speak with the people you associate with about your expectations of privacy.
Another solution is to wear glasses like this.
The devil's in the details. This map app doesn't look too hot. And lacking a touchscreen (and virtual keyboard) my guess is it'll take a LONG time to do any amount of text entry with less than 20 buttons. Predictive text doesn't help much when it comes to names, email addresses, URLs, city names, etc.
But no mind, you just go on being a raving, frothing at the mouth Nokia fanboy, oblivious to what most people in the world actually want. (Note the proper use of 'oblivious.') We'll compare sales numbers in a year. The parent was specifically talking about "iPhone killers," and if the iPod has shown us anything, it is that feature counts alone don't sell products.
Java? Are you freaking kidding me?
I'm sure it's a great phone. I just wanted to bring you down to Earth, same as you wanted to bring down the parent.
- Voice recognition mostly sucks, and even if it worked fine, I don't want to be talking out loud to my computer most of time--not in the office, not in public.
- Voice recognition is also out for anything that must be character-perfect: web addresses, email addresses, even renaming a file--miss a period and you'll be renaming it again.
- Pen-based input is OK, accuracy- and speed-wise, but still nowhere near what you can do with a keyboard.
- A chord keyboard would be ideal--they can be faster than conventional keyboards--but you're not gonna see something that complicated on a mass-market consumer product from Apple.
- An iPhone-like virtual keyboard is obviously an option, but unlike the two-thumb operation of an iPhone, you'd be limited to poking with one index finger while you hold the tablet with your hand.
Which leads to the conclusion--as soon as you set the tablet down to use a conventional mouse and keyboard, it becomes equal to a regular laptop in all regards except it's slower, has a smaller screen, and is more expensive. Apple's last big flop was the Cube, which had the same specs (CPU, RAM, HD) as a PowerMac, was less expandable, and cost $200 more.What I really want Apple to make is what I would call the "MacBook Elite": 2 pounds, 10- or 11-inch screen, Core Duo, no HD or optical drive, 1 or 2 GB RAM, 16-32 GB solid-state storage, very thin, and 12-24 hours of battery life. (Yes, I know there are PCs that more or less match these specs, but I want OS X and the industrial design from Apple.) You could use it as a basic standalone computer or you could sync it up with your desktop just like an iPhone. Obviously it wouldn't be the center of your digital life (especially in terms of mass storage of media and media creation) but it would be so good at so many other things.
The original submission:
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to an SMB share that disappeared...
Although the TRS-80 was launched the same year as the Apple II and the Commodore PET personal computers... it benefited from the distribution network and brand identity of Radio Shack.
Oh yeah, I had forgotten about that. Is anyone else here old enough to remember when Radio Shack had a positive brand identity?
If you looked at the sky through a telescope and saw a tiny robot mining plant there, mining the moon for energy resources, would you be filled with a sense of wonder and pride about the ingenuity and courage of your fellow man, or with forbidding and dread that the moon was being raped?
:-)
Well, since you came right out and asked...
I, for one, would welcome our new moon-mining robotic overlords.
Cons: Postscript and PDF are both open standards. I am not sure I'd like to see Apple control their future.
Only underdogs* claim to like open standards. PDF is open but Adobe controls all the dominant tools and extends the spec every year or so whether it needs it or not. (Remember back when the "P" in "PDF" stood for "portable"? Have you tried to open the typical modern PDF in anything but Acrobat? Even my computers with Acrobat 5 and 6 pop up warnings on about half of the PDFs I get.) And Adobe quit giving a shit about SVG right after they bought Macromedia (Flash.)
* and open-source types
Have you seen Photoshop CS3? Adobe has hardly been asleep. Auto-align and countless other features kick ass. Yes, for basic image editing, cheap/free tools are getting better and more common, but Adobe keeps moving forward with very difficult to create features that work freaking great. Do any of those free editors have anything that works as well as the Healing Brush? (Which came out over five years ago, BTW.) It took me literally seconds to erase a drawing, made with a fat purple felt marker, that was on my friend's arm in a photo, with that tool--something that would have taken much longer with the clone tool and would not have looked as good.
Cropping and resizing can be done from the command-line. A GUI app with Core Image effects is literally trivial to make. (Fer chrissakes, such a thing was DEMOED at the 2004 WWDC.) But Adobe still comes up with tons and tons of features in every release, and no cheap app can touch those with a ten foot pole.
I'm not saying that these apps aren't great. They're great for home users and light duties, like making images for the Web. But most home users don't buy Photoshop in the first place--it gets bought by companies who don't mind paying $1,000 a seat for an app that their employees will use day-in, day-out. And these companies are not going to touch any of the apps you mention.
Back on topic, there is not a single good reason for Apple to buy Adobe unless you just thinks it's cool if every single product you like is made by the same company. (I bet the author also wishes Apple would buy BMW and make a cute little White coupe.) Personally, I like competition--not just Apple vs. Adobe, but Apple vs. Windows. I like being able to run CS on the Windows box that's next to my Macs. Both platforms have their strengths and uses. I do not want to live in this world.
Woah, woah, woah, wait... there's links on the Internet now?!??!
Hmm... it might take a lot. I made these images* by combining many still images and it reduced the noise but it would be a stretch to really increase the effective resolution. I suppose an array of phone recordings would sound better than stock but it would take a lot to get the quality up to anything reasonable, and I think even a hundred combined signals wouldn't be enough for anyone to mistake the result for a 48k studio piece.
* those pics were taken during a lunar eclipse with my DV camera (25x optical zoom.) I didn't even use a tripod--just pointed it and held it as steadily as I could, the combined the layers in Photoshop. "Shot 1" was the first picture taken, and "Shot 1 (4 layers)" was made by combining four subsequent frames. Later shots were made by combining 6 or 9 layers. There's one raw frame of the first shot for comparison. Long story short: frame noise is random, so combining frames averages it out.
You're not the first one with that thought.
Printcrime
by Cory Doctorow
Forematter:
This story is part of Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story collection "Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present," published by Thunder's Mouth, a division of Avalon Books. It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file.
This story and the other stories in the volume are available at:
http://craphound.com/overclocked
You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everywhere, including Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1560259817/downandoutint-20
In the words of Woody Guthrie:
"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."
Overclocked is dedicated to Pat York, who made my stories better.
--
Introduction to Printcrime:
Printcrime came out of a discussion I had with a friend who'd been to hear a spokesman for the British recording industry talk about the future of "intellectual property." The record exec opined the recording industry's great and hysterical spasm would form the template for a never-ending series of spasms as 3D printers, fabricators and rapid prototypers laid waste to every industry that relied on trademarks or patents.
My friend thought that, as kinky as this was, it did show a fair amount of foresight, coming as it did from the notoriously technosqueamish record industry.
I was less impressed.
It's almost certainly true that control over the production of trademarked and patented objects will diminish over the coming years of object-on-demand printing, but to focus on 3D printers' impact on trademarks is a stupendously weird idea.
It's as if the railroad were looming on the horizon, and the most visionary thing the futurists of the day can think of to say about it is that these iron horses will have a disastrous effect on the hardworking manufacturers of oat-bags for horses. It's true, as far as it goes, but it's so tunnel-visioned as to be practically blind.
When Nature magazine asked me if I'd write a short-short story for their back-page, I told them I'd do it, then went home, sat down on the bed and banged this one out. They bought it the next morning, and we were in business.
--
Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals--performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They
Recommended Usage Home / Home Office
Processor Intel Celeron D 356(3.33GHz)
Processor Main Features 64 bit Processor
Cache Per Processor 512KB L2 Cache
Memory 512MB DDR2 533
Hard Drive 120GB SATA 7200rpm
It always kills me to read the specs on a site like Dell.com and see all these machines described as "suitable for web browsing, email..." When I went to Siggraph in 1998, PII/400s were the new hotness and all the kickass machines that ran all the 3D apps had MAYBE 16 MB video cards. Today, they make it sound like a 3 GHz machine is usable only if you're a complete simpleton and will never have more than 2 apps open at once. Unbelievable.
I'm more of an /etc/hosts kind of guy, myself.
Oh yeah, that one too. Good catch. I didn't actually read the whole summary. ;-)
... that the story to cap the festivities would contain the awkward phrase "... we had well over 100s of parties..."
:-)
The proud Slashdot editorial tradition continues. Here's to over tens of more great years!
And I still can't click on a column heading to sort by sender, date, size, etc. Search and labels are great, but they don't fulfill EVERY need. Why does gmail still lack such basic functionality that every other binary and web email client of the past decade has had?
For example: say I've got a few hundred messages and I want to find the few that have large attachments--ZIP files, a bunch of pictures, whatever. How do I do this with Gmail? Should I tag message with large attachments in a special way? If that's your suggestion, I'd like to point out that that is STUPID for two reasons:
1) the data is ALREADY THERE. Why should I manually tag messages? Aren't computers supposed to DO WORK FOR US?
2) that requires me to know ahead of time what ALL my needs will EVER be. What if I've been collecting this mail for years and then suddenly think "I'd like to find all these messages." But oops, I don't have my TIME MACHINE, so I can't go back and tag them all.
With anything else, it's just a click or two.
Agreed. Other problems:
- Someone finds a sarcastic joke unfunny and it gets modded "troll" or "flamebait."
- 3 people think I'm funny and I get a nice "+5, Funny" but one person thinks I'm not that funny and hits me with a "-1, Overrated." What crap. The guidelines say "focus on promoting, not demoting" but I don't think anyone reads those. Everyone just wants to form Slashdot into what they want to see, not realizing that it's (everyone hold hands now) all our differences that make Slashdot great. I see ideas and points-of-view here that I would never see in my own little world. (Usually by browsing at +3 early on.)
While they're at it, they need to add some new ratings like "-1, Factually incorrect."
Save your money. Maybe in 2017 they'll auction off an IMG tag.
Let not even discuss the sheer volumes of the little balloons that pop up in the bottom right.
... moments later ...
And let's not forget the unholy marriage that was the original XP and wireless networking:
"Hey, I found a network!"
"Hey, I just joined a network!"
"Signal strength: EXCELLENT!" (air guitars play)
"Network connection lost."
"Hey, I found a network!"
And even that aside, those are the little things that SUCK OUT LOUD about Windows. Not only do they pop up a big ugly window (compared to how OS X just scrolls the name of the network in the menu bar for a moment) but you have two choices: A) leave the damn thing open until it decides to go away, or B) click on it to close it and take focus away from the foreground app. UGH! If I'm in Word and then run Calculator and then close Calculator, I'm back in Word. If I'm in Word and click a balloon, I've got to CLICK BACK ON WORD to make that app active.
Excellent post (and ignore the guy who doesn't get that "the Leopard" is part of the joke--this thing is packed with lots of subtle, subtle jokes) but you should have mentioned that you actually did write that--since you obviously didn't whip that up for a slashdot comment, I went to google to find the source so I could accuse you of plagiarism, only to be led here. Nicely done. But next time, give credit where credit is due--even if it's to yourself. A) you deserve it and B) it'll save me some time. :-)
Again, great job. The whole thing is great, top to bottom (and the punchline is a killer.) Well played. The style reminds me a bit of this guy with the way he gets details wrong and is unaware of some major things.
Ultimately it was the corporate headquarters of Outback Steakhouse who caught the thief with a bugged laptop that notified them when he re-connected it to the internet.
Which is funny as hell, because I've read several times on Slashdot (sorry, no time to search) about people who have their laptops set to do just that, but when they inform the police that their laptop is in use by a customer of this ISP with that IP address, they're told to go pound sand, that the police don't have time to go catch criminals that you can lead them to. It's trivial--especially with MacBooks--to have it send you not only the IP address but a picture of the theif if you want--but it seems to do no good.
Maybe the thing to do would be to get laptop insurance and then have the info emailed to the insurance company.
MS Access is a database but it's also a complete program with a nice GUI front-end and lots of other stuff. You can make a whole form-based application with Access. MySQL itself is just a raw DB with nothing but a command-line interface out-of-the-box--in that sense, MySQL is roughly comparable to JET. (Scalability, stability, etc. issues aside.) SQLite is a great little thing but it's really just a step up from a flat text file--it responds to SQL syntax but it's not strict at all. You can put arbitrary length strings into integer columns, floating point numbers in boolean columns, or dates in character columns. Overall, the three are not really directly comparable. For some things, you could use any one of the three and not notice the difference. For anything else, only one might do.
You just have to buy a Mac.
True. But it's not always about going out and buying a computer to run a new OS. A lot of times it's about making your old computer match your new one. When I bought my Mac mini, I used the 10.3 disk it came with to freshen up my iBook which came with 10.2. Apple has never (back to the System 7 days) asked for a serial number upon installation. (And it's not because they don't know how--QuickTime Pro, OS X Server, iWork, and their Pro apps--Final Cut, etc.--all require serial numbers. Come to think of it, that's pretty much everything except the OS and iLife.) They've always been tacitly OK with you "pirating" their OS for over a decade.
Yes, that's partly because (except for clones) it runs on hardware they sell, or sold in the past--so even if you put it on a five-year-old computer, you're putting it on a five-year-old Apple computer. They'd rather keep an old customer happy with a "free" update and have them return in the future than drive them away altogether. Furthermore, they've got exactly two versions of the OS (regular and server--an easy choice) and one price point ($129 for the non-server version--a bit more than Home Basic Upgrade, but less than any Premium or non-upgrade version) AND, if you're determined to live your life in perfect license compliance, you can buy a five-pack of OS X for $199.
But no matter the reason, a complete lack of serial numbers and activation schemes, to say nothing of problem-causing activation schemes like we're reading about here, is a great thing, for many reasons. Mainly, it's just one breed of problems that just don't exist on Macs. I will never lose a moment of productivity on a Mac due to activating it, let alone re-activating it if the scheme fails.
I won't go into detail about my solution here--not because it's a secret, but because it's more convoluted and complex than most people need to deal with. The simplest thing is to just get a few network-enabled cameras (from DLink or anyone else) and sprinkle them around your house as desired. Wired, wireless, indoor, outdoor, whatever works for you. Then use the built-in web server, open ports as needed on your router, and you're done.
If you want to get extra-fancy, get a few and run them on various ports--say, 8001, 8002, 8003, etc. Then, set up one master page that looks like...
<img src="http:// your.name.here:8000/image.jpg">
<img src="http:// your.name.here:8001/image.jpg">
<img src="http:// your.name.here:8002/image.jpg">
to see them all at once.
...you will likely be charged by your local authorities to the tune of thousands of dollars in fines...
How much, exactly? I need to know how high to set my reserve.