Just because one far-fetched rumor actually became reality doesn't mean we should believe any others. Apple is currently pretty busy with the Intel transition; I doubt they're looking for any additional challenges.
The possibilities of combining the best features from FreeHand and Illustrator are kind of exciting, but I'm not holding my breath. I use Illustrator all the time, but I've used FreeHand in the past as well. While I consider Illustrator the better of the two, FreeHand definitely has its advantages. It's leaps and bounds ahead of Illustrator when it comes to styles, especially with text. Illustrator's styles capabilities are pretty limited, to say the least.
Meanwhile, I'd like to see a resurgence of Aldus FreeHand! FreeHand has kept Illustrator on its toes; if Illustrator has no more competition (CorelDRAW hardly counts), I foresee stagnation in the vector drawing program arena. BAD!
Adobe has obviously been insanely jealous of Flash's success for quite some time. Everything else Macromedia has, with the possible exception of Dreamweaver, I imagine is expendable in Adobe's eyes. Maybe they'll sell off FreeHand, et al and they will live on. Or maybe Adobe will revel in killing all their competition. That would leave a lot of people high and dry. I can't see Adobe being interested in keeping Macromedia's competing products alive for more than a token product cycle or two.
(for that matter, why does NAVTEQ do everyone's maps?)
Because Navteq has invested millions and millions of dollars into GIS street data. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just license it? There are only two big, big sources of street data out there - Navteq and TeleAtlas. Virtually every online mapping service under the sun uses one or both of those sources. So does onboard GPS software. Increasingly, so do printed maps. Rand McNally's new line of local and regional maps (the ones with pastel covers) are based on Navteq data. They even boast about it. Look closely at other brands of printed maps and atlases and you'll notice often they don't even make the maps at all - you're likely to see MapQuest copyrights all over the place if you look closely. And MapQuest of course in turn uses Navteq and/or TeleAtlas data.
However, Navteq doesn't necessarily "do" everyone's maps. They provide the data and then the company comes up with a specification for linework, fills, etc. and adds or subtracts Points of Interest, boundaries, etc. A lot more goes into making a map than just the raw data. Let someone else do that.
The mapping industry has become one big consolidated relicensing operation. If good data already exists, it's foolish not to just use it. Believe me, there would be a hell of a lot more errors if everyone was creating their own data rather than using one or two reasonably good sources.
Outside the hallowed geek world of Slashdot, you'll find that a heck of a lot of people use webmail (e.g., Yahoo, Hotmail), at least for personal use. And at work they use whatever they're told to use, which is almost certainly not Thunderbird.
The abundance of other well-established email programs definitely diminishes Thunderbird's importance, but don't forget about the millions of people who don't use "real" email clients at all! The "browser as an interface" (or even an OS) is becoming more and more of a reality every day. Thus, Firefox's popularity is far more important and predictable.
I actually think that the comparison of Hitler to Bush is a pretty good one. Hitler didn't just come up overnight and seize the German government. Bad things were happening to Germany (WWI reparations) and Hitler was trying to steer the country back to solid ground. He became very powerful because at first his actions were in fact helping Germany recover from WWI, but eventually Hitler went way off track and, well, we know where that ended up - the holocaust. The German people went along with it because they were blinded by Hitler's power at that point.
Compare that to Bush. Very bad things happened to the US (terrorist attacks), and Bush's administration is trying to steer our country back to solid ground. I think right now the Bush Administration is heading drastically off-course from solid ground, just as the Nazis did. And the majority of American people are coming along willingly because they have been blinded by the Bush Administration's leadership.
History has a nasty tendency of repeating itself. And it will be obvious in retrospect that what the Bush Administration is doing to our country is along the same lines as what the Nazis did to Germany.
One thing that Hitler and Bush don't have in common is that Hitler was a very, very good orator....
Very important semantic difference - it does not say you can delete specific searches, it says you can hide them. Amazon still has the data stored somewhere. That's not a good thing, IMO.
I was watching Charlie Ergen's chat show the other night and he explained a lot of things that you don't normally hear explained by a big company, let alone from the CEO. I am actually a bigger fan of Dish now than I was before. I really dig the fact that he comes on the air and takes calls and emails from his customers.
Regarding the packaging of channels, Charlie said that he wishes Dish could do ala carte, but they can't because companies like Viacom won't let them. Viacom (and Disney, and all the rest) explicitly lay out in their contracts with distributors which channels have to be bundled with other specific channels. It's not a matter of Charlie having double standards - he's simply not allowed to break up packages any more than you can.
I switched from Sprint PCS to Cingular just recently so that I could take advantage of the SBC "Total Connections" package, which includes SBC for local & toll calling, DSL, and Cingular wireless. I must say that I've been very pleasantly surprised at the quality of customer service I've received from both SBC and Cingular.
Signing up for all the services has been far from smooth, but every time I've called CS I've gotten through very quickly and spoken to very courteous people who took care of the problem(s). I know, I know... hard to believe. I swear it's true.
Contrast that to Sprint's service. After my Sprint PCS service had been terminated I still had a billing issue with them but I couldn't talk to anyone because their damn automated phone menu won't let you through unless you have a valid Sprint number; mine was already deactivated. I finally snuck in through some back door, which I couldn't recreate.
Anyway... the one thing I will say about Sprint PCS is that their plans and bills are very straightforward. Cingular's are completely cryptic. It's a trade off though... their CS was crap compared to Cingular's.
If you're going to spout a bunch of companies, you should at least do some homework first.
AT&T at the time of its breakup in 1984 consisted of 22 local "Bell" companies, plus its long distance service. AT&T local service was broken up into 7 companies:
Ameritech (IL, IN, OH, MI, WI) Bell Atlantic (NJ, PA, DC, DE, MD, VA, WV) Bell South (FL, GA, NC, SC, AL, KY, LA, MS, TN) NYNEX (NY, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT) Pacific Telesis (NV, CA) SBC Comm (AR, IA, KS, MO, OK, TX) US West (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, UT, WY, MN, ND, SD, NE, OR, WA)
Plus a few independent phone companies like GTE, SNET (Connecticut), and Sprint (only in this context could Sprint be considered "independent").
Over the last 20 years, the original 7 "baby Bells" have gobbled up independents and each other leaving the current 4 Big Bells:
Bell South (Bell South) SBC (Ameritech, SBC, Pacific Telesis, SNET) Quest (US West) Verizon (NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, GTE)
Sprint and a handful of other independents remain the incumbent carriers in pockets around the country.
For more history and info about the phone companies, check out www.teletruth.org.
And of course, all of that is completely separate from the wireless carriers. The history of that is much more complicated, but of the five now remaining:
Cingular is owned by SBC (60%) and Bell South (40%) Verizon is owned by Verizon (which is 45% owned by Vodafone, a huge UK phone company) Sprint owns Sprint (obviously) Nextel is actually an independent company (AFAIK) T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom
If you're not supporting a huge US corporation, you're helping a huge foreign one instead. Pick your poison.
Well, when I make an ass of myself for posting a comment, at least I find out what's really going on. Thanks. By the way, how the hell is one supposed to know that the "X" is Chi? Or that in other cases, the "X" is Ten? In this age of internet-exclusive communication (read:read), Apple seems to make close to zero effort explaining how their products are supposed to be pronounced. Am I supposed to be in attendance at MacWorld to HEAR the keynote presentations?
Now, with the Mac zealots insisting that it's OS TEN - not OS ECKS - how is XGrid pronounced? TEN Grid? Or does this not bolster my theory that calling it OS TEN is retarded?
I keep thinking about the fact that this trial doesn't even start until April 2005... what are the chances that the offending code won't already have been leaked and fixed by then? What ramifications will that have in the trial?
where do you think Rand-McNally gets its data to make maps?
I'm not sure how much data Rand McNally gets from USGS... if they used USGS topos for their base maps, I'd expect their maps to be a little more accurate!
I use USGS topo maps as base maps all the time. Actually, I never use anything else without at least comparing its inaccuracies to USGS topos and DOQQs. Long live USGS.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, for you visual learners, here's a map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:RBOC_map.png
Don't worry, I'm sure
Would you care to explain, then, why Microsoft produces Office for Mac?
Just because one far-fetched rumor actually became reality doesn't mean we should believe any others. Apple is currently pretty busy with the Intel transition; I doubt they're looking for any additional challenges.
The possibilities of combining the best features from FreeHand and Illustrator are kind of exciting, but I'm not holding my breath. I use Illustrator all the time, but I've used FreeHand in the past as well. While I consider Illustrator the better of the two, FreeHand definitely has its advantages. It's leaps and bounds ahead of Illustrator when it comes to styles, especially with text. Illustrator's styles capabilities are pretty limited, to say the least.
Meanwhile, I'd like to see a resurgence of Aldus FreeHand! FreeHand has kept Illustrator on its toes; if Illustrator has no more competition (CorelDRAW hardly counts), I foresee stagnation in the vector drawing program arena. BAD!
Adobe has obviously been insanely jealous of Flash's success for quite some time. Everything else Macromedia has, with the possible exception of Dreamweaver, I imagine is expendable in Adobe's eyes. Maybe they'll sell off FreeHand, et al and they will live on. Or maybe Adobe will revel in killing all their competition. That would leave a lot of people high and dry. I can't see Adobe being interested in keeping Macromedia's competing products alive for more than a token product cycle or two.
According to the "to do" list in the release notes, the developer is looking into that.
It might not be quite the equivalent of IE's FTP functionality, but you should check out fireFTP.
You mean Finnish?
Or, well, you know... this is Slashdot. I guess Finlandish is close enough.
Because Navteq has invested millions and millions of dollars into GIS street data. Why reinvent the wheel when you can just license it? There are only two big, big sources of street data out there - Navteq and TeleAtlas. Virtually every online mapping service under the sun uses one or both of those sources. So does onboard GPS software. Increasingly, so do printed maps. Rand McNally's new line of local and regional maps (the ones with pastel covers) are based on Navteq data. They even boast about it. Look closely at other brands of printed maps and atlases and you'll notice often they don't even make the maps at all - you're likely to see MapQuest copyrights all over the place if you look closely. And MapQuest of course in turn uses Navteq and/or TeleAtlas data.
However, Navteq doesn't necessarily "do" everyone's maps. They provide the data and then the company comes up with a specification for linework, fills, etc. and adds or subtracts Points of Interest, boundaries, etc. A lot more goes into making a map than just the raw data. Let someone else do that.
The mapping industry has become one big consolidated relicensing operation. If good data already exists, it's foolish not to just use it. Believe me, there would be a hell of a lot more errors if everyone was creating their own data rather than using one or two reasonably good sources.
Outside the hallowed geek world of Slashdot, you'll find that a heck of a lot of people use webmail (e.g., Yahoo, Hotmail), at least for personal use. And at work they use whatever they're told to use, which is almost certainly not Thunderbird.
The abundance of other well-established email programs definitely diminishes Thunderbird's importance, but don't forget about the millions of people who don't use "real" email clients at all! The "browser as an interface" (or even an OS) is becoming more and more of a reality every day. Thus, Firefox's popularity is far more important and predictable.
If you think all the answers lie in Area 51, I'd suggest you head toward Groom Lake, Nevada - not Roswell.
I actually think that the comparison of Hitler to Bush is a pretty good one. Hitler didn't just come up overnight and seize the German government. Bad things were happening to Germany (WWI reparations) and Hitler was trying to steer the country back to solid ground. He became very powerful because at first his actions were in fact helping Germany recover from WWI, but eventually Hitler went way off track and, well, we know where that ended up - the holocaust. The German people went along with it because they were blinded by Hitler's power at that point.
Compare that to Bush. Very bad things happened to the US (terrorist attacks), and Bush's administration is trying to steer our country back to solid ground. I think right now the Bush Administration is heading drastically off-course from solid ground, just as the Nazis did. And the majority of American people are coming along willingly because they have been blinded by the Bush Administration's leadership.
History has a nasty tendency of repeating itself. And it will be obvious in retrospect that what the Bush Administration is doing to our country is along the same lines as what the Nazis did to Germany.
One thing that Hitler and Bush don't have in common is that Hitler was a very, very good orator....
Very important semantic difference - it does not say you can delete specific searches, it says you can hide them. Amazon still has the data stored somewhere. That's not a good thing, IMO.
I was watching Charlie Ergen's chat show the other night and he explained a lot of things that you don't normally hear explained by a big company, let alone from the CEO. I am actually a bigger fan of Dish now than I was before. I really dig the fact that he comes on the air and takes calls and emails from his customers.
Regarding the packaging of channels, Charlie said that he wishes Dish could do ala carte, but they can't because companies like Viacom won't let them. Viacom (and Disney, and all the rest) explicitly lay out in their contracts with distributors which channels have to be bundled with other specific channels. It's not a matter of Charlie having double standards - he's simply not allowed to break up packages any more than you can.
Have we not all seen the movie Real Genius? High powered lasers in space is a bad idea! :)
I switched from Sprint PCS to Cingular just recently so that I could take advantage of the SBC "Total Connections" package, which includes SBC for local & toll calling, DSL, and Cingular wireless. I must say that I've been very pleasantly surprised at the quality of customer service I've received from both SBC and Cingular.
Signing up for all the services has been far from smooth, but every time I've called CS I've gotten through very quickly and spoken to very courteous people who took care of the problem(s). I know, I know... hard to believe. I swear it's true.
Contrast that to Sprint's service. After my Sprint PCS service had been terminated I still had a billing issue with them but I couldn't talk to anyone because their damn automated phone menu won't let you through unless you have a valid Sprint number; mine was already deactivated. I finally snuck in through some back door, which I couldn't recreate.
Anyway... the one thing I will say about Sprint PCS is that their plans and bills are very straightforward. Cingular's are completely cryptic. It's a trade off though... their CS was crap compared to Cingular's.
If you're going to spout a bunch of companies, you should at least do some homework first.
AT&T at the time of its breakup in 1984 consisted of 22 local "Bell" companies, plus its long distance service. AT&T local service was broken up into 7 companies:
Ameritech (IL, IN, OH, MI, WI)
Bell Atlantic (NJ, PA, DC, DE, MD, VA, WV)
Bell South (FL, GA, NC, SC, AL, KY, LA, MS, TN)
NYNEX (NY, ME, MA, NH, RI, VT)
Pacific Telesis (NV, CA)
SBC Comm (AR, IA, KS, MO, OK, TX)
US West (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NM, UT, WY, MN, ND, SD, NE, OR, WA)
Plus a few independent phone companies like GTE, SNET (Connecticut), and Sprint (only in this context could Sprint be considered "independent").
Over the last 20 years, the original 7 "baby Bells" have gobbled up independents and each other leaving the current 4 Big Bells:
Bell South (Bell South)
SBC (Ameritech, SBC, Pacific Telesis, SNET)
Quest (US West)
Verizon (NYNEX, Bell Atlantic, GTE)
Sprint and a handful of other independents remain the incumbent carriers in pockets around the country.
For more history and info about the phone companies, check out www.teletruth.org.
And of course, all of that is completely separate from the wireless carriers. The history of that is much more complicated, but of the five now remaining:
Cingular is owned by SBC (60%) and Bell South (40%)
Verizon is owned by Verizon (which is 45% owned by Vodafone, a huge UK phone company)
Sprint owns Sprint (obviously)
Nextel is actually an independent company (AFAIK)
T-Mobile is owned by Deutsche Telekom
If you're not supporting a huge US corporation, you're helping a huge foreign one instead. Pick your poison.
Well, when I make an ass of myself for posting a comment, at least I find out what's really going on. Thanks. By the way, how the hell is one supposed to know that the "X" is Chi? Or that in other cases, the "X" is Ten? In this age of internet-exclusive communication (read:read), Apple seems to make close to zero effort explaining how their products are supposed to be pronounced. Am I supposed to be in attendance at MacWorld to HEAR the keynote presentations?
Now, with the Mac zealots insisting that it's OS TEN - not OS ECKS - how is XGrid pronounced? TEN Grid? Or does this not bolster my theory that calling it OS TEN is retarded?
I keep thinking about the fact that this trial doesn't even start until April 2005... what are the chances that the offending code won't already have been leaked and fixed by then? What ramifications will that have in the trial?
There is no Linux equivalent to MSWord. Yes, yes, yes: I *know* there is StarOffice and others. But they aren't MSWord.
However, there is WordPerfect for Linux, and anyone who prefers to keep their hair in their follicles uses WP rather than Word, even on Windows.
You can get a program from Steve Gibson that detects any spyware on your system.
grc.com/optout.htm
This guy has all types of great security and privacy software.
where do you think Rand-McNally gets its data to make maps?
I'm not sure how much data Rand McNally gets from USGS... if they used USGS topos for their base maps, I'd expect their maps to be a little more accurate!
I use USGS topo maps as base maps all the time. Actually, I never use anything else without at least comparing its inaccuracies to USGS topos and DOQQs. Long live USGS.
Well who the hell other than Apple would have won the bid to provide Apple iBooks and Airports?