Combine that with the projection keyboard, and your PDA would turn into a laptop just by putting it on a table with a white wall behind it.
I'm sorry, I don't get your point.
on
RTF Vs. OOXML
·
· Score: 1
There's more than one input and output.
The input and output on the screen and keyboard are part of the processing from the point of view of the storage.
The input and output of the file storage are part of the processing from the point of view of the user.
User - I/O - Processing - I/O - Storage
In addition there's a third I/O interface for printing, and a forth for online publishing.
There's no reason that the storage format needs to be tightly coupled to the display format. And, also, an editor doesn't have an internal model of "what the user typed", it has an internal model of a document and updates that according to the user's commands. In Word, that internal format doesn't even match what the user sees very well... there's no such thing as "nesting" or a "list" internally, for example, there's just a set of styles and rules about what paragraphs follow each other and lists are created and manipulated by dynamically updating the paragraph styles and next-paragraph rules.
If Word can manage to take this and generate nested lists on the screen and in HTML, and accept user's requests to change nesting depths and go through and update all the paragraph styles to match, there's no reason it can't do the same thing in its storage format.
I hope you realize that an iMac is essentially a Macbook Pro with [...]
It's a macbook pro without the portability that you get a laptop for.
All the arguments about the form factor go out the window if you think laptops are okay.
Um, how do you figure? You think I use a laptop like I use a desktop? Or you do?
The "all in one" nature of the laptop is more or less essential if it's going to be a portable device, something you can carry with you, open up, and use anywhere. That's not true of a stationary desktop.
Yes, all-in-ones can be seen as a little more portable than headless desktops, but only a little, and it ain't even necessarily the case. I used the original Mac as a portable computer for a few years, but it was pretty inconvenient... even though it was more portable than an iMac today is... and I've found a Mini-ITX box is more portable when I can depend on being able to borrow a monitor at the customer's site.
Any laptop, made by Apple or not, is going to have the same characteristics, more or less (though the Thinkpad has a superior physical design). Desktops have a different set of characteristics, they have a different set of problems to solve, and Apple's desktops are far less well fitted to those problems:
The only headless model is crippled.
The midrange are only usable if you don't care about buying a new monitor every time you upgrade (since monitors become outdated far less quickly than computers), you don't care about having to replace the computer if the fragile monitor's damaged (which is why laptops are about the only computers I buy support contracts for) AND they're your only computer or you have ample desk space for multiple monitors.
I don't play Eve, what I'm going on is the OP's comment "As in real life, it is possible to scam people in such a market."
The first four words kind of implied that's what they were trying to simulate. Sorry for the confusion.
In any case, I wasn't suggesting they bring in RL police, but rather that the game should include whatever law enforcement makes sense in-game as part of the simulation.
They EOLed Classic with the switch to Intel, actually.
Because Classic requires a Power PC (or a 68000). I guess they decided two layers of emulation (CPU and OS) was too much to keep synchronized.
There are PPC emulators that will boot Mac OS 9 to keep access to those older files alive.
Open source software is not a universal preventative against data obsolescence, either. What keeps formats alive is continued support. Open source makes that easier, or at least makes it independent of a single company so you can take over if you need it, but there's plenty of old open source software that's basically rotted or been lost, where emulation of the old hardware is still by far the easiest way to access data files.
Jobs has consistently said that iTunes only supports DRM because it was required to by the content creators. He said that when the iTunes store opened, he said that when he asked content creators to back down on DRM this year, he said that when EMI went DRM-free.
The timeline doesn't fit, either.
The iTunes Music Store opened at the end of 1Q 2003.
Windows Media DRM shipped in 1999.
By the time iTMS opened, Windows Media Player 9 had already been augmented by kernel components to prevent even driver-level access to the media stream. That's stronger protection than Apple ever implemented in iTunes, *before* Apple shipped a version of iTunes with DRM.
New results from the labs of Jonathan Pritchard, Robert Moyzis, Pardis Sabeti, and others have suggested that thousands of genes, perhaps as much as ten percent of the human genome, have been under strong recent selection, and the selection may even have accelerated during the past several thousand years. The numbers are comparable to those for maize, which has been artificially selected beyond recognition during the past few millennia.
This shouldn't be surprising, even though it is. When you think about the human environment a little it suddenly seems inevitable.
Some decades ago, during the period where dolphin intelligence appeared to be an active topic in biology, at least from the point of view of a non-biologist, I recall reading an argument that the biggest force driving the evolution of the dolphin brain was other dolphins. That their society had become a feedback loop encouraging further changes.
What struck me at the time was that this was even more true for humans, that the biggest impact on the evolution of humans is other humans, especially since humans had these effective and efficient mechanisms for transmitting beliefs about other humans around... in words and later in writing. And they act on these beliefs in ways that impose heavy selection pressure on themselves and each other, through wars, religions, technology, and so on.
In fact a common metaphor for all these beliefs is that of "memes", mental genes. That these beliefs act *like* genetically transmitted material, that they compete and evolve. What this information is saying, to me at least, is that not only do they do that... but they also have an effect on genes as well. Now I'm not saying that memes are carried genetically... some memes even seem to have the effect of reducing the reproductive fitness of their carriers... but that their existence as a *common* selection mechanism for large groups of people is acting as a selection pressure for people who have the ability to survive and flourish in the presence of these memes. As memes change, then, the pressure changes, and other genetic factors become selected for.
The biggest force driving the evolution of the human species right now is other humans.
The transmission mechanism for this force is memes.
Anyone know how to download those movies and convert them to an open format so my Mac mini can actually play them? The flash format must be horribly inefficient, why do people use it?
THe public library used to be a place with a huge variety of books, both current and out-of-print. If you wanted to find an out-of-print book, the library was one of the big resources. Several years ago found our library giving away or selling for a dime apiece boxes and boxes of the kinds of books that I normally go the the library to find, and the library was reorienting itself as a kind of free browsing bookstore... spending money on bestsellers instead of reference books. As other people have noted, it really doesn't have the resources to compete with Barnes and Noble in variety or volume, but that seems to be what it was trying to do. Now, the library has decided it's going to be a free Internet cafe... will last years bestsellers be the next pile of freebies in the lobby?
Microsoft had the same problem to get people to upgrade from win2k to XP
In general, people didn't upgrade from 2k to XP until they had to, or they bought a new computer. As you say, it was the huge 9x/Me user base that drove the adoption of XP, and they don't have that this time.
I'm still using the old retail Windows 2k I got six years ago, and if Vista hadn't been such an appalling monster I'd have skipped XP completely. Now I'm considering upgrading from 2k to XP because as much as I dislike the subtracted value in XP I'm concerned I'll lose that option if I don't take it.
Yes, I really do. They are less reliable than separate boxes, because there are more integrated components to break and because the components are always specific to the model. If my Mac mini fails, I don't have to replace the monitor. If my monitor fails, I don't have to repair or replace my whole computer. And the only advantage of an all-in-one... that it's an all-in-one... is lost as soon as you need to expand it: external drives together with the necessary cables and power supplies add more clutter.
I have a small corner desk with no room about it. The Mac mini sits on a shelf, along with two external drives, and together with their cables and power supplies these physically take up more room than the equally quiet Mini-ITX sitting on the floor by my feet. I have opened up BOTH boxes the same number of times, and for the same reason... to add RAM. The only time the fact that the Mini-ITX box is on the floor is an issue is when I use the optical drive and (as you note) that's completely rare.
The fact that Apple hasn't had the equivalent of that Mini-ITX box since they dumped the Cube is the biggest problem in Apple's product line-up, in my opinion. Since they replaced the GPU in the Mini with the execrable Intel GMA-950 there simply is no Mac that I could envisage buying other than a laptop. The Mac Pro is huge and noisy, the mini is crippled by its very size, and the iMac is an all-in-one toy.
"Approval dialogs" do nothing to make a system secure. All they do is train people to click "Infect Me" when the "Do you want to install this virus?" dialog comes up.
Apple has started buying into this corrupt philosophy, but at least they've FINALLY made the "Pop up an 'Infect me' dialog?" option (AKA "Open 'safe' files") off by default.
Windows NT (2000, XP, Vista) isn't even an insecure operating system. What's insecure is the design of the shell and default browser... and fixing them doesn't involve making the system less convenient or slower. It's not security that's slowing Vista down, it's the extra layers of encryption and extra internal checks to make sure you're not ripping a copy of that DVD you just rented. And that kind of "security" doesn't do anything to help the consumer.
This is possibly another alternative to the two futures David Brin sees - the Transparent Society and the Surveillance State, a cross between the two... the corporate surveillance society. It seems to be the current trend.
The OP's point about NOT rewarding Apple for screwing up is just as valid. Apple is just a company, Jobs is just a man, they make mistakes and even if they're awfully passive-aggressive about admitting them they do seem to, eventually, learn from them.
If you had room on your desk for a Mac mini, you had room on it or under it for a mini-ITX. If you don't, then why did you need to bring up the Mac mini's performance?
The "desk space" argument doesn't make sense unless you're living in a college dorm: you don't need the computer on the desk, or even all that near the desk. All you need in front of you is the monitor and maybe a place to plug in USB devices.
Yes, the mini is underspecced, but there are plenty of small Mini-ITX boxes that have a comparable footprint to a mini and are much better value for money than anything Apple ships.
What I meant about the hardware just working is that I don't want to tinker anymore, so I have no need for a tower or anything else that isn't an all-in-one.
If you were actually looking for a Windows box, you can get boxes that are (apart from the software) just as much "it just works" as the iMac that aren't "all in one". It's not the hardware that really makes it "it just works", it's the software.
If you think public key is hard to break, wait until they have quantum encryption.
No, I don't know how it'll work, but I have faith that they'll come up with some operation they can use on qbits that you can't reverse using qc even if you can destroy the universe after every failed trial.
It's not as simple as that, though of course the Mac Tax does come into it. I found the same kind of enthusiastic employees selling Apple kit at other retail outlets like CompUSA (RIP) back before the Apple Stores opened, because they wanted to sell Apple kit, and I assume that most of them are working for Apple now.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'll type slower, so you can catch up.
I have a limited amount of desk space. I have room for a monitor. I don't have room for two monitors.
As I have previously noted in this thread, I have a KVM switch to connect to the other computers I need for work. Therefore the space on my desk for a monitor is already taken up, so there's no place for an iMac's display.
(not to mention that it's effectively wider than any comparable monitor because you have to leave room at the side to access the optical drive)
Have I made my reasoning sufficiently clear, or are you going to make another stupid remark that demonstrates nothing but your inability to read for content?
Apple REALLY needs to make a "Mac mini Pro", an iMac without the superfluous display, in a slightly-larger-than-mini-sized box.
I was talking to an employee at the Apple store near here, about the store.
The people working there weren't being particularly helpful, not their fault, there's not much you can do about a bad hard drive but replace it and I had a couple people ahead of me... and I was coming down with a cold, and feeling generally miserable, and really wanted to get my hard drive replaced and get home... but I was also wishing that I was feeling well enough to hang out there longer.
What was clear to me, but not apparently immediately clear to the young man, that the big difference between the people working at the Apple store and the people working at the other geek stores in the area is that they wanted to be working at the Apple store. The fact that they were working for Apple was what made all the difference to them, and that made all the difference to their customers. They wouldn't have been motivated selling Dells.
Now I'm not really a big fan of most of Apple's products... I really wish they'd unbundle so I didn't have to put up with a Mac so I could run OS X. But you can see the feedback going on, between the people who are into the whole Apple schtick, and the people who run the stores, and the style, and everything, and it all works together amazingly well. The reality distortion field lives in that feedback, too, and for an hour or so I was rather enjoying it.
Slashdot Mirror
Combine that with the projection keyboard, and your PDA would turn into a laptop just by putting it on a table with a white wall behind it.
There's more than one input and output.
The input and output on the screen and keyboard are part of the processing from the point of view of the storage.
The input and output of the file storage are part of the processing from the point of view of the user.
User - I/O - Processing - I/O - Storage
In addition there's a third I/O interface for printing, and a forth for online publishing.
There's no reason that the storage format needs to be tightly coupled to the display format. And, also, an editor doesn't have an internal model of "what the user typed", it has an internal model of a document and updates that according to the user's commands. In Word, that internal format doesn't even match what the user sees very well... there's no such thing as "nesting" or a "list" internally, for example, there's just a set of styles and rules about what paragraphs follow each other and lists are created and manipulated by dynamically updating the paragraph styles and next-paragraph rules.
If Word can manage to take this and generate nested lists on the screen and in HTML, and accept user's requests to change nesting depths and go through and update all the paragraph styles to match, there's no reason it can't do the same thing in its storage format.
I hope you realize that an iMac is essentially a Macbook Pro with [...]
... even though it was more portable than an iMac today is... and I've found a Mini-ITX box is more portable when I can depend on being able to borrow a monitor at the customer's site.
It's a macbook pro without the portability that you get a laptop for.
All the arguments about the form factor go out the window if you think laptops are okay.
Um, how do you figure? You think I use a laptop like I use a desktop? Or you do?
The "all in one" nature of the laptop is more or less essential if it's going to be a portable device, something you can carry with you, open up, and use anywhere. That's not true of a stationary desktop.
Yes, all-in-ones can be seen as a little more portable than headless desktops, but only a little, and it ain't even necessarily the case. I used the original Mac as a portable computer for a few years, but it was pretty inconvenient
Any laptop, made by Apple or not, is going to have the same characteristics, more or less (though the Thinkpad has a superior physical design). Desktops have a different set of characteristics, they have a different set of problems to solve, and Apple's desktops are far less well fitted to those problems:
The only headless model is crippled.
The midrange are only usable if you don't care about buying a new monitor every time you upgrade (since monitors become outdated far less quickly than computers), you don't care about having to replace the computer if the fragile monitor's damaged (which is why laptops are about the only computers I buy support contracts for) AND they're your only computer or you have ample desk space for multiple monitors.
And the high end are huge hulking monsters.
I don't play Eve, what I'm going on is the OP's comment "As in real life, it is possible to scam people in such a market."
The first four words kind of implied that's what they were trying to simulate. Sorry for the confusion.
In any case, I wasn't suggesting they bring in RL police, but rather that the game should include whatever law enforcement makes sense in-game as part of the simulation.
So does Eve have a virtual police and virtual jails to simulate the virtual results of committing virtual crimes?
If not, then how exactly are they simulating real life?
They EOLed Classic with the switch to Intel, actually.
Because Classic requires a Power PC (or a 68000). I guess they decided two layers of emulation (CPU and OS) was too much to keep synchronized.
There are PPC emulators that will boot Mac OS 9 to keep access to those older files alive.
Open source software is not a universal preventative against data obsolescence, either. What keeps formats alive is continued support. Open source makes that easier, or at least makes it independent of a single company so you can take over if you need it, but there's plenty of old open source software that's basically rotted or been lost, where emulation of the old hardware is still by far the easiest way to access data files.
If you are a social liberal and a fiscal conservative, shouldn't it be the other way around?
OP said he was a social conservative and not happy with the other way around.
Jobs has consistently said that iTunes only supports DRM because it was required to by the content creators. He said that when the iTunes store opened, he said that when he asked content creators to back down on DRM this year, he said that when EMI went DRM-free.
The timeline doesn't fit, either.
The iTunes Music Store opened at the end of 1Q 2003.
Windows Media DRM shipped in 1999.
By the time iTMS opened, Windows Media Player 9 had already been augmented by kernel components to prevent even driver-level access to the media stream. That's stronger protection than Apple ever implemented in iTunes, *before* Apple shipped a version of iTunes with DRM.
This shouldn't be surprising, even though it is. When you think about the human environment a little it suddenly seems inevitable.
Some decades ago, during the period where dolphin intelligence appeared to be an active topic in biology, at least from the point of view of a non-biologist, I recall reading an argument that the biggest force driving the evolution of the dolphin brain was other dolphins. That their society had become a feedback loop encouraging further changes.
What struck me at the time was that this was even more true for humans, that the biggest impact on the evolution of humans is other humans, especially since humans had these effective and efficient mechanisms for transmitting beliefs about other humans around... in words and later in writing. And they act on these beliefs in ways that impose heavy selection pressure on themselves and each other, through wars, religions, technology, and so on.
In fact a common metaphor for all these beliefs is that of "memes", mental genes. That these beliefs act *like* genetically transmitted material, that they compete and evolve. What this information is saying, to me at least, is that not only do they do that... but they also have an effect on genes as well. Now I'm not saying that memes are carried genetically... some memes even seem to have the effect of reducing the reproductive fitness of their carriers... but that their existence as a *common* selection mechanism for large groups of people is acting as a selection pressure for people who have the ability to survive and flourish in the presence of these memes. As memes change, then, the pressure changes, and other genetic factors become selected for.
The biggest force driving the evolution of the human species right now is other humans.
The transmission mechanism for this force is memes.
Vote for a democrat president and a republican congress?
Anyone know how to download those movies and convert them to an open format so my Mac mini can actually play them? The flash format must be horribly inefficient, why do people use it?
THe public library used to be a place with a huge variety of books, both current and out-of-print. If you wanted to find an out-of-print book, the library was one of the big resources. Several years ago found our library giving away or selling for a dime apiece boxes and boxes of the kinds of books that I normally go the the library to find, and the library was reorienting itself as a kind of free browsing bookstore... spending money on bestsellers instead of reference books. As other people have noted, it really doesn't have the resources to compete with Barnes and Noble in variety or volume, but that seems to be what it was trying to do. Now, the library has decided it's going to be a free Internet cafe... will last years bestsellers be the next pile of freebies in the lobby?
Microsoft had the same problem to get people to upgrade from win2k to XP
In general, people didn't upgrade from 2k to XP until they had to, or they bought a new computer. As you say, it was the huge 9x/Me user base that drove the adoption of XP, and they don't have that this time.
I'm still using the old retail Windows 2k I got six years ago, and if Vista hadn't been such an appalling monster I'd have skipped XP completely. Now I'm considering upgrading from 2k to XP because as much as I dislike the subtracted value in XP I'm concerned I'll lose that option if I don't take it.
Yes, I really do. They are less reliable than separate boxes, because there are more integrated components to break and because the components are always specific to the model. If my Mac mini fails, I don't have to replace the monitor. If my monitor fails, I don't have to repair or replace my whole computer. And the only advantage of an all-in-one... that it's an all-in-one... is lost as soon as you need to expand it: external drives together with the necessary cables and power supplies add more clutter.
I have a small corner desk with no room about it. The Mac mini sits on a shelf, along with two external drives, and together with their cables and power supplies these physically take up more room than the equally quiet Mini-ITX sitting on the floor by my feet. I have opened up BOTH boxes the same number of times, and for the same reason... to add RAM. The only time the fact that the Mini-ITX box is on the floor is an issue is when I use the optical drive and (as you note) that's completely rare.
The fact that Apple hasn't had the equivalent of that Mini-ITX box since they dumped the Cube is the biggest problem in Apple's product line-up, in my opinion. Since they replaced the GPU in the Mini with the execrable Intel GMA-950 there simply is no Mac that I could envisage buying other than a laptop. The Mac Pro is huge and noisy, the mini is crippled by its very size, and the iMac is an all-in-one toy.
You know, the ones where September 1993 continued through February 9, 2005.
"Approval dialogs" do nothing to make a system secure. All they do is train people to click "Infect Me" when the "Do you want to install this virus?" dialog comes up.
Apple has started buying into this corrupt philosophy, but at least they've FINALLY made the "Pop up an 'Infect me' dialog?" option (AKA "Open 'safe' files") off by default.
Windows NT (2000, XP, Vista) isn't even an insecure operating system. What's insecure is the design of the shell and default browser... and fixing them doesn't involve making the system less convenient or slower. It's not security that's slowing Vista down, it's the extra layers of encryption and extra internal checks to make sure you're not ripping a copy of that DVD you just rented. And that kind of "security" doesn't do anything to help the consumer.
What competition? IE remains the top malware delivery agent in the world!
This is possibly another alternative to the two futures David Brin sees - the Transparent Society and the Surveillance State, a cross between the two... the corporate surveillance society. It seems to be the current trend.
The OP's point about NOT rewarding Apple for screwing up is just as valid. Apple is just a company, Jobs is just a man, they make mistakes and even if they're awfully passive-aggressive about admitting them they do seem to, eventually, learn from them.
If you had room on your desk for a Mac mini, you had room on it or under it for a mini-ITX. If you don't, then why did you need to bring up the Mac mini's performance?
The "desk space" argument doesn't make sense unless you're living in a college dorm: you don't need the computer on the desk, or even all that near the desk. All you need in front of you is the monitor and maybe a place to plug in USB devices.
Yes, the mini is underspecced, but there are plenty of small Mini-ITX boxes that have a comparable footprint to a mini and are much better value for money than anything Apple ships.
What I meant about the hardware just working is that I don't want to tinker anymore, so I have no need for a tower or anything else that isn't an all-in-one.
If you were actually looking for a Windows box, you can get boxes that are (apart from the software) just as much "it just works" as the iMac that aren't "all in one". It's not the hardware that really makes it "it just works", it's the software.
What we really need is quantum computing.
If you think public key is hard to break, wait until they have quantum encryption.
No, I don't know how it'll work, but I have faith that they'll come up with some operation they can use on qbits that you can't reverse using qc even if you can destroy the universe after every failed trial.
It's not as simple as that, though of course the Mac Tax does come into it. I found the same kind of enthusiastic employees selling Apple kit at other retail outlets like CompUSA (RIP) back before the Apple Stores opened, because they wanted to sell Apple kit, and I assume that most of them are working for Apple now.
I know exactly what I'm talking about. I'll type slower, so you can catch up.
I have a limited amount of desk space. I have room for a monitor. I don't have room for two monitors.
As I have previously noted in this thread, I have a KVM switch to connect to the other computers I need for work. Therefore the space on my desk for a monitor is already taken up, so there's no place for an iMac's display.
(not to mention that it's effectively wider than any comparable monitor because you have to leave room at the side to access the optical drive)
Have I made my reasoning sufficiently clear, or are you going to make another stupid remark that demonstrates nothing but your inability to read for content?
Apple REALLY needs to make a "Mac mini Pro", an iMac without the superfluous display, in a slightly-larger-than-mini-sized box.
I was talking to an employee at the Apple store near here, about the store.
The people working there weren't being particularly helpful, not their fault, there's not much you can do about a bad hard drive but replace it and I had a couple people ahead of me... and I was coming down with a cold, and feeling generally miserable, and really wanted to get my hard drive replaced and get home... but I was also wishing that I was feeling well enough to hang out there longer.
What was clear to me, but not apparently immediately clear to the young man, that the big difference between the people working at the Apple store and the people working at the other geek stores in the area is that they wanted to be working at the Apple store. The fact that they were working for Apple was what made all the difference to them, and that made all the difference to their customers. They wouldn't have been motivated selling Dells.
Now I'm not really a big fan of most of Apple's products... I really wish they'd unbundle so I didn't have to put up with a Mac so I could run OS X. But you can see the feedback going on, between the people who are into the whole Apple schtick, and the people who run the stores, and the style, and everything, and it all works together amazingly well. The reality distortion field lives in that feedback, too, and for an hour or so I was rather enjoying it.