He said that Apple did something that WalMart wouldn't do. That's not the same as saying that Apple is more evil than WalMart. By that logic, I'm more evil than Hitler, because he was kind to children, and I'm always mean to them.
Jeez, learn to read. He said "Guess what--- Wal*Mart happens to sell that book. Even the Most Evil Corporation on the Planet (TM) hasn't stooped down to Apple's level." In other words, its WalMart he's calling evil.
And they are pretty bad. All big box stores cut ethical corners, but WalMart does it blatantly and consistently. And they get all self-righteous whenever anybody calls them on it, which makes things even worse.
But yeah, they don't punish publishers of books that criticize them. That would affect the bottom line -- and WalMart has the same relationship with the bottom line as that guy in Rome has with Jesus.
Jobs's action isn't wrong or unethical -- it's simply pathetic. He's misusing his position as Apple CEO to throw a snit -- and promote the very book his pissed about in the process. More proof that he's the second-most overrated technology CEO in the world.
OK, I'm a little taken aback to be modded up so quickly. I expected to be flamed and punished for attacking a geek icon. I guess George Lucas lost a lot of fans with Part 1 and Part 2.
No, Lucas was a film-school hack who's never made a really imaginative movie. His one claim to serious filmmaking was American Grafitti, which has some technical highpoints, but made no real attempt to tell a story. Then Joseph Campbell taught him how mine the mythological tradition -- which in practice came down to finding cool movies and ripping off their better scenes. The result was Star Wars, which I've always seen as the cinematic equivalent of a theme park ride. Which a lot of people seem to like -- but it's not an achievement that qualifies you as a "Maverik Filmmaker".
Get real. MAPS is a holy crusade, and all ISPs are presumed guilty until proven innocent. And proof ain't easy to come by.
The assumption of anti-spam activists seems to be that spam wouldn't be possible without the knowing collusion of evil ISPs. Obviously, evil, greedy people will only respond to threats to their income. So never mind negotiations -- blacklist 'em until they repent.
Which ignores the difficultly of enforcing a spam policy. You can't just terminate somebody's account the first time somebody accuses them of spamming -- it's not fair, and will probably get you sued. Having worked at an ISP, I can tell you they get lot of bogus spam complaints, mostly from people who don't know how to figure out who owns an IP block, or who misread mail logs. And in some cases, the owner of the IP block just rents rack space to the SMTP provider. Which may well do a poor job of policing spammers -- but you have to make some attempt to get them to improve before you ditch a customer who's paying you tens of thousands of dollars a month.
MAPS and their ilk also seem totally ignorant of Hanlon's Razor. Very often ISPs assign their abuse issues to unsocial geeks whose communication skills and capacity for objective thought is quite limited. So of course they return MAPS's arrogant ignorant anger with more of the same. The resulting interaction is not conducive to solving the problem.
So yeah, ISPs are not blameless. But they're not the greedy bastards the stupid bastards at MAPS like to get mad at.
Like you, I prefer a "real" tablet. But the thing does fold flat. The only downside of retaining the keyboard is the extra weight. Not a tradeoff I care for, but lots of people obviously do. Designing for them is a simple marketing decision, not some immense failure of nerve.
Ironically, this model ressurects a feature of one of the first Thinkpads. The Thinkpad 750 (the greyscale model, not the 750C) also folded flat and could be used as a tablet. Of course "tablets" hadn't been invented yet, so I thought of it as an oversized PDA.
That's why small kids love to be scared. When you're small and helpless, and the whole world is a strange place, making scary things into a game can be very comforting.
What's your issue with NSA Linux? I suppose it's natural to suspicious where the NSA is involved. But the software's open-source -- and the whole point of open source is that trust is based on independent review of the source code, not the promises of the software vendor.
A mail backlog can be an issue even without spam. I once had a job where I got dozens of emails a day. None of it was spam -- I never gave out my employee email outside the company. So where did it come from? Mailing list message from projects I was involved in. Software change notices, each of which might require me to write up a release note for the change. Messages from people who wanted me to document something, or had issues with documentation I'd already written. Etc.
I used the IMAP mailbox as an action item queue, and didn't remove messages until I acted on them. Of course, it wasn't always obvious whether an email required action on my part, so a lot of messages stayed in the queue until I had a chance to read them carefully. If I didn't pare down the mailbox on a regular basis, it could easily grow to thousands of messages.
I probably got more email than most of my co-workers, but email glut still seemed to be a problem for everybody. I once sent out a mailing to a long list of engineers, asking them to review release notes relating to their software. I didn't spam them -- I went to a bit of trouble to individualize the emails so each engineer would get a request specific to his particular area. Not a single response. This wasn't due to indifference -- I gave up on email and contacted the engineers in person or by phone, every single one was helpful and generous with his or her time. They just got so much email, that mine had no hope of attracting their attention.
Kylix is on my OS wish list. Then someone could rip out the old QT stuff and either update it or replace it with wxWidgets.
I wouldn't count on being able to do either of these things. Integrating a core new library with Kylix or Delphi is non-trivial, and relies on an internal API that's not well-documented.
...C++Builder(also dead)...
I recently talked to a former colleague at Borland, fairly high up the food chain, and he was pretty shocked when I repeated the stories on Slashdot about C++Builder being dead. Apparently this story is the result of Borland's usual poor communication and schedule slippage.
Yeah, not the most convincing bad guys. But remember that before it became late-night PBS fare, Dr. Who was a kiddie show, and thus couldn't make its horrors too conspicuously horrible. The main selling point of the Daleks was not that they were scary, but that it was a lot of fun to march down the streek, one arm pointing directly in front of you, and screaming in a high-pitched voice, "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"
Well, if your definition of a good western is Matt Dillon outdrawing the bad guy of the week (try that in real life, and you'll shoot your foot off), then yeah Firefly was a bad western. And if your idea of good SF is glossy Star Trek bullshit, or B5 thud and blunder, then yeah, Firefly failed there to.
But are TV shows required to just repeat the same old stuff over and over? I guess that's a dumb question -- of course they are. But every once in a while somebody who doesn't know any better tries to make a show that's sort of original. In this case, Whedon was trying to make an SF show about real people, who who don't have access to phasers and tricorders because the best technology belongs to rich people who don't share. What they end up with is a mixture of high-tech cast offs and revived 19th-century technology.
If you think in Hollywood stereotypes, than that's just a lame combination of "western" and "SF". But if you're into serious "hard" SF, or you know anyything about the history of technology, it's a thought provoking premise.
Gosh, I'm so tired of self-righteous Slashdotters. Sure, they make software that's full of bugs and screws up your computer. And yeah, they claim to protect IP with technology with software, but mostly do it with lawsuits. And OK, the way they con people into buying software they don't really need is a tad dishonest. And yeah, their embeded advertising is a pain in the posterior. But nobody's perfect!
Firefly was a victim of that: here at least, the first few episodes didn't bring in the ratings, so the rest of the series got put together in a muddled order and just wasn't given a chance.
No, the muddle started even before the first episode went on the air. The first episode made was a two-hour thing that introduced the characters and the backstory. It didn't get shown until 3 months after the show premiered and the decision had already been made to cancel.
At least the official decision. There's a lot of evidence that most Fox execs wanted Firefly to go away. SF shows cost a lot to make, so even if they have a broad appeal, they tend to lose money. And Firefly was too cerebral a show to have broad appeal. The suits might have been more charitable if Whedon had been willing to turn the show into a brainless shoot-em-up, but he had no interest in that.
The only reason Joss Whedon ever became an TV mogul is Gail Berman, who persuaded him to turn Buffy into a TV series when she was a big power at Fox studios, and backed Firefly when she was President of the Fox network. But it appears that she never really had control of the network, despite being its titular head.
As for movies, I don't see Whedon doing any better there. Movies are an even bigger economic gamble than TV shows, so they're more politically charged. Whedon sucks at politics.
I hate to say it, but I think Joss Whedon's 15 minutes are up. He done a lot of work I admire (and I few things I'm not so enthusiastic about), but he has not ability for working in the big organizations that make TV shows and movies. Every single project he's played a major role in has been marred by his inability to get others to understand his ideas. The Buffy movie basically got taken away from him, because he couldn't make people understand that it was a serious concept, and couldn't go along when it mutated into a campy comedy. X-Men dropped almost all his script contributions. The making of Alien Ressurection was marred by epic battles betwen Whedon and the director. And so on.
Even his one major success, Buffy, went into the toilet when he pulled back from day-to-day managment. This happened because he failed to educate anybody as to the ideas and backstory that made the show work. For that matter, Firefly had a lot of problems with details and premises that were never properly developed . Didn't matter in the end, because the show was doomed before it aired. But its another indication of Whedon's limitation.
I love the guy's past work, but I think we've already seen everything he can do that's really good.
... and not just for RPGers. I contribute to Wikipedia, which is really undersupplied with maps, due to copyright issues. Sometimes the only thing to do is draw it yourself. But I, for one, lack the skill.
Delphi is a powerful tool for the brilliant lone programmer, but its support for collaboration is half-hearted, at best. Which pretty much mirrors the attitudes of the people who work on the product.
Actually, they stopped publishing the hard copy long before I was hired. The current version of the API reference would be something like 10 or 12 volumes, would cost hundreds per hard-copy set -- and would be obsolete within a couple of years. And it'd be a pain to use. With a help engine, you can select an keyword in the IDE, press F1, and go immediately to the correct topic.
In theory anyway. When I joined, they still used the obsolete RTF-based help engine, fed by huge Word files that were a pure nightmare to maintain. So things got a little disorganized. The current XML-based help system might be better, but I'm too depressed by all things Delphi to check it out.
My mistake. I read the first sentence on the "about Lazurus" page, which says, "Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi," and stoped there.
Lazarus is just an OS alternative to the Delphi libraries. If you add Open Pascal, you do have an alternative for hacking out Delphi code. But without an OS equivalent of the Delphi IDE, your missing the one component everybody buys Delphi to use.
I can't see the usual set of motley OS volunteers creating and maintaining an alternative to Delphi. I used to help write the Delphi API documentation, and I can't begin the convey what a massive effort it is just to maintain that product. Not something you can do without the backing of somebody with deep pockets. If Borland chooses to get behind an OS version of Delphi (as they now have with JBuilder) it might be a different matter. Though it's worth noting that their previous attempt to open source a produce (Interbase) did not go well. Frankly, I don't think Borland's notoriously factious corporate culture makes them a good partner in an OS project.
You have a point. But a combination drive/card reader strikes me as one of those gadgets that combines two jobs but does neither of them really well. On the one hand, the speed of your USB drive is limited by the access time of the removable card. On the other hand, a combined gadget is much less convenient than a dedicated card reader -- and convenience is the only reason to buy a card reader, since all the gadgets that use the cards also have USB or Firewire ports.
If they're going to focus on USB2, why include a single 1.1 drive? The fact that it has a very bad built-in camera seems a poor excuse to waste space on it.
Although Corsair does claim that the Flash Voyager is water resistant (nobody claims "waterproof" anymore), the reviewer didn't consult the product literature. He just saw the rubber case and said, "Hey, let's see what happens if I drop it in a glass of water!" Not very bright.
Its pretty sad that none of the file management software reviewed appears to have Windows Shell integration. Or perhaps some do, and the reviewer didn't notice.
I've never heard a USB drive referred to as a "memory stick". The term usually refers to a kind of memory card.
The review of the SimpleTech Bonzai Upgradeable fails to note the most obvious flaw in the product -- a USB drive with removeable media doesn't make a lot economic sense. The USB interface isn't so expensive that you have any real savings in separating it from the media. But then, I made the mistake of buying an Iomega Peerless, so I'm in no position to sneer.
First, on many computers the only USB ports are on the back of the computer. This is a pain to try and stick the usb memory stick in a port behind the computer, when the computer might be pushed up against a wall, or under a table.
So you spend $30 on a USB hub that goes on top of the computer or on your desktop. Perhaps a USB port on the front of your machine is more convenient, but the fact some systems don't have them is hardly a major crisis.
What we need is another jump in floppy disks.
There have been jumps. I used to own an IBM laptop with a 2.4 MB floppy, and I've read about floppy drives with a capacity as high as 10 MB. Manufacturers just never got around to setting a new standard to replace the current 1.4 MB floppies. Which is hardly suprising -- they're in a low margin business, and there wasn't that much pressure to improve "sneakernet" technology.
If you can think of a way to persuade Dell, HP, and IBM (excuse me, I meant Lenovo) to ignore economics and add high-capacity floppies to all their systems, you're a lot smarter than I am.
The anwser is to keep the #1 standard of the past 20 years. Floppy drives were the standard, every PC had a floppy, you could take your disk and know with 100% certanty you could read the data.
Perhaps I misremember, but I seem to recall that 3-1/2-inch 1.2MB floppies have only been universal for the last ten years or so. Before that, a lot of people still used the older 5-1/4 inch floppies, which came in various formats and capacities, not entirely cross compatible. For example, pre-AT systems had 360K floppies that could be used, but not formatted, in the 1.2 MB drives that were standard in AT-compatibles. I remember seeing systems with three floppy drives, for people who needed to share disks with AT, pre-AT, and laptop users. Which still didn't solve the problems of sharing disks with Mac users (Apple had a proprietary floppy format) or with older laptops with low-capacity 3-1/2-inch drives.
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He said that Apple did something that WalMart wouldn't do. That's not the same as saying that Apple is more evil than WalMart. By that logic, I'm more evil than Hitler, because he was kind to children, and I'm always mean to them.
And they are pretty bad. All big box stores cut ethical corners, but WalMart does it blatantly and consistently. And they get all self-righteous whenever anybody calls them on it, which makes things even worse.
But yeah, they don't punish publishers of books that criticize them. That would affect the bottom line -- and WalMart has the same relationship with the bottom line as that guy in Rome has with Jesus.
Jobs's action isn't wrong or unethical -- it's simply pathetic. He's misusing his position as Apple CEO to throw a snit -- and promote the very book his pissed about in the process. More proof that he's the second-most overrated technology CEO in the world.
As for incompetant ISPs -- well, did you even read my post? If they're part of the problem, spam blacklists only make things worse.
OK, I'm a little taken aback to be modded up so quickly. I expected to be flamed and punished for attacking a geek icon. I guess George Lucas lost a lot of fans with Part 1 and Part 2.
No, Lucas was a film-school hack who's never made a really imaginative movie. His one claim to serious filmmaking was American Grafitti, which has some technical highpoints, but made no real attempt to tell a story. Then Joseph Campbell taught him how mine the mythological tradition -- which in practice came down to finding cool movies and ripping off their better scenes. The result was Star Wars, which I've always seen as the cinematic equivalent of a theme park ride. Which a lot of people seem to like -- but it's not an achievement that qualifies you as a "Maverik Filmmaker".
The assumption of anti-spam activists seems to be that spam wouldn't be possible without the knowing collusion of evil ISPs. Obviously, evil, greedy people will only respond to threats to their income. So never mind negotiations -- blacklist 'em until they repent.
Which ignores the difficultly of enforcing a spam policy. You can't just terminate somebody's account the first time somebody accuses them of spamming -- it's not fair, and will probably get you sued. Having worked at an ISP, I can tell you they get lot of bogus spam complaints, mostly from people who don't know how to figure out who owns an IP block, or who misread mail logs. And in some cases, the owner of the IP block just rents rack space to the SMTP provider. Which may well do a poor job of policing spammers -- but you have to make some attempt to get them to improve before you ditch a customer who's paying you tens of thousands of dollars a month.
MAPS and their ilk also seem totally ignorant of Hanlon's Razor. Very often ISPs assign their abuse issues to unsocial geeks whose communication skills and capacity for objective thought is quite limited. So of course they return MAPS's arrogant ignorant anger with more of the same. The resulting interaction is not conducive to solving the problem.
So yeah, ISPs are not blameless. But they're not the greedy bastards the stupid bastards at MAPS like to get mad at.
Ironically, this model ressurects a feature of one of the first Thinkpads. The Thinkpad 750 (the greyscale model, not the 750C) also folded flat and could be used as a tablet. Of course "tablets" hadn't been invented yet, so I thought of it as an oversized PDA.
That's why small kids love to be scared. When you're small and helpless, and the whole world is a strange place, making scary things into a game can be very comforting.
What's your issue with NSA Linux? I suppose it's natural to suspicious where the NSA is involved. But the software's open-source -- and the whole point of open source is that trust is based on independent review of the source code, not the promises of the software vendor.
I used the IMAP mailbox as an action item queue, and didn't remove messages until I acted on them. Of course, it wasn't always obvious whether an email required action on my part, so a lot of messages stayed in the queue until I had a chance to read them carefully. If I didn't pare down the mailbox on a regular basis, it could easily grow to thousands of messages.
I probably got more email than most of my co-workers, but email glut still seemed to be a problem for everybody. I once sent out a mailing to a long list of engineers, asking them to review release notes relating to their software. I didn't spam them -- I went to a bit of trouble to individualize the emails so each engineer would get a request specific to his particular area. Not a single response. This wasn't due to indifference -- I gave up on email and contacted the engineers in person or by phone, every single one was helpful and generous with his or her time. They just got so much email, that mine had no hope of attracting their attention.
Yeah, not the most convincing bad guys. But remember that before it became late-night PBS fare, Dr. Who was a kiddie show, and thus couldn't make its horrors too conspicuously horrible. The main selling point of the Daleks was not that they were scary, but that it was a lot of fun to march down the streek, one arm pointing directly in front of you, and screaming in a high-pitched voice, "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"
But are TV shows required to just repeat the same old stuff over and over? I guess that's a dumb question -- of course they are. But every once in a while somebody who doesn't know any better tries to make a show that's sort of original. In this case, Whedon was trying to make an SF show about real people, who who don't have access to phasers and tricorders because the best technology belongs to rich people who don't share. What they end up with is a mixture of high-tech cast offs and revived 19th-century technology.
If you think in Hollywood stereotypes, than that's just a lame combination of "western" and "SF". But if you're into serious "hard" SF, or you know anyything about the history of technology, it's a thought provoking premise.
Gosh, I'm so tired of self-righteous Slashdotters. Sure, they make software that's full of bugs and screws up your computer. And yeah, they claim to protect IP with technology with software, but mostly do it with lawsuits. And OK, the way they con people into buying software they don't really need is a tad dishonest. And yeah, their embeded advertising is a pain in the posterior. But nobody's perfect!
At least the official decision. There's a lot of evidence that most Fox execs wanted Firefly to go away. SF shows cost a lot to make, so even if they have a broad appeal, they tend to lose money. And Firefly was too cerebral a show to have broad appeal. The suits might have been more charitable if Whedon had been willing to turn the show into a brainless shoot-em-up, but he had no interest in that.
The only reason Joss Whedon ever became an TV mogul is Gail Berman, who persuaded him to turn Buffy into a TV series when she was a big power at Fox studios, and backed Firefly when she was President of the Fox network. But it appears that she never really had control of the network, despite being its titular head.
As for movies, I don't see Whedon doing any better there. Movies are an even bigger economic gamble than TV shows, so they're more politically charged. Whedon sucks at politics.
I hate to say it, but I think Joss Whedon's 15 minutes are up. He done a lot of work I admire (and I few things I'm not so enthusiastic about), but he has not ability for working in the big organizations that make TV shows and movies. Every single project he's played a major role in has been marred by his inability to get others to understand his ideas. The Buffy movie basically got taken away from him, because he couldn't make people understand that it was a serious concept, and couldn't go along when it mutated into a campy comedy. X-Men dropped almost all his script contributions. The making of Alien Ressurection was marred by epic battles betwen Whedon and the director. And so on.
Even his one major success, Buffy, went into the toilet when he pulled back from day-to-day managment. This happened because he failed to educate anybody as to the ideas and backstory that made the show work. For that matter, Firefly had a lot of problems with details and premises that were never properly developed . Didn't matter in the end, because the show was doomed before it aired. But its another indication of Whedon's limitation.
I love the guy's past work, but I think we've already seen everything he can do that's really good.
... and not just for RPGers. I contribute to Wikipedia, which is really undersupplied with maps, due to copyright issues. Sometimes the only thing to do is draw it yourself. But I, for one, lack the skill.
Delphi is a powerful tool for the brilliant lone programmer, but its support for collaboration is half-hearted, at best. Which pretty much mirrors the attitudes of the people who work on the product.
In theory anyway. When I joined, they still used the obsolete RTF-based help engine, fed by huge Word files that were a pure nightmare to maintain. So things got a little disorganized. The current XML-based help system might be better, but I'm too depressed by all things Delphi to check it out.
My mistake. I read the first sentence on the "about Lazurus" page, which says, "Lazarus is the class libraries for Free Pascal that emulate Delphi," and stoped there.
I can't see the usual set of motley OS volunteers creating and maintaining an alternative to Delphi. I used to help write the Delphi API documentation, and I can't begin the convey what a massive effort it is just to maintain that product. Not something you can do without the backing of somebody with deep pockets. If Borland chooses to get behind an OS version of Delphi (as they now have with JBuilder) it might be a different matter. Though it's worth noting that their previous attempt to open source a produce (Interbase) did not go well. Frankly, I don't think Borland's notoriously factious corporate culture makes them a good partner in an OS project.
You have a point. But a combination drive/card reader strikes me as one of those gadgets that combines two jobs but does neither of them really well. On the one hand, the speed of your USB drive is limited by the access time of the removable card. On the other hand, a combined gadget is much less convenient than a dedicated card reader -- and convenience is the only reason to buy a card reader, since all the gadgets that use the cards also have USB or Firewire ports.
If you can think of a way to persuade Dell, HP, and IBM (excuse me, I meant Lenovo) to ignore economics and add high-capacity floppies to all their systems, you're a lot smarter than I am.
Perhaps I misremember, but I seem to recall that 3-1/2-inch 1.2MB floppies have only been universal for the last ten years or so. Before that, a lot of people still used the older 5-1/4 inch floppies, which came in various formats and capacities, not entirely cross compatible. For example, pre-AT systems had 360K floppies that could be used, but not formatted, in the 1.2 MB drives that were standard in AT-compatibles. I remember seeing systems with three floppy drives, for people who needed to share disks with AT, pre-AT, and laptop users. Which still didn't solve the problems of sharing disks with Mac users (Apple had a proprietary floppy format) or with older laptops with low-capacity 3-1/2-inch drives.So much for floppy nostalgia.