While having (not one but) two corporations run this recycling program gives me some initial confidence, what makes me think that they'll dispose in a eco-friendly manner at all?
Many local governments where I live have zero regulations about proper disposal of large electronics, heavy metal laden motherboards, and leaded glass in crt's and tv's. If anything they have a maximum weight limit which is easily circumvented by some creative crushing and re-partitioning.
My local governement is very anal about their disposal regulations because of having to build a new landfill within the past few years. What's to stop the local Office Depot from taking all the hazardous/heavy/dangerous junk and shipping it one county over where the regulations are non-existent.
Office Depot is trying to cop some good materials in the same way they'll trade a pack of paper for a used ink cartridge. The resale of those cartridges (once discected and reconstructed with knockoff inks/carts) is very lucrative. What's the profit angle on the used computers? There's probably something quite profitable here (beyond just getting people into stores who may be in the market for a new computer).
I think that there are many places computer science and computers could help the average joe understand something in the same way the pocket calculator helped give the math innumerate a tool to keep from getting lost in day to day life.
When the Michigan Senator (D) in the (highly recommended) movie Fahrenheit 9/11 responded bluntly to the question "Why didn't you read the Patriot Act before passing it?" with the response "Sit down my son, we don't read most of the bills we pass." It was quite laughable but very chilling.
Legal ignorance is at an appalling level, even among people paid and elected to represent us. Computers are good at pattern recognition; and most people despise reading the mumbo-jumbo lawyers hide their meaning within.
Perhaps a "pocket lawyer" to help parse legal mumbo jumbo is a worthwhile thing. For most people law is a one-way street, you have to read what the IRS, city, and state send to you but you rarely have to write anything yourself. (Though Nolo and some other "mad lib" style books do a wonderful job of this).
While there are lawyers who are trying to be devious and hide their real purpose in contorted language, government agencies should have no need to do so. Require that court rulings, city councils, and any record of law be stated in English and Backus-Naur form. Rely less on the vagueries of English to preserve or hide your meaning while the OED is changing the language (bling-bling? vavavoom?) and hence changing the law through its evolution.
The language Squeak wasn't my introduction to object-oriented programming, but having stumbled on Java I found Squeak to really be a much better object oriented learning environment. No language treats "everything" as an object despite their claims, but Squeak really comes darn close.
The Squeak programming environment along with the Korienek, Wrensch, and Dechow book were what made the idea of Object-Oriented programming really click in my brain. Even if you never program a "real" program with Squeak, the value of Squeak is that you can really learn OO principles without the baggage of a C heritage and designers who've shortcut language consistency in the name of efficiency. All are good things you may want to make the trade off for when programming a "real" program, but not things you want to short yourself on during your education.
So Dick Cheyney's half-thought, irrational, emotional outburts are fine for public coverage yet the use of the same expletives for a well-considered, precisely-scripted, time-consumingly produced fictional presentation are NOT acceptable is absurd.
Fiction is the ideal place to expose new ideas that aren't taught in school (profanity, sex, violence). Simply declaring that all bad words are "bleeped" and all nudity is blocked is doing a severe disservice to the (yes, real) humans watching television.
What really stinks about comics are the way the one genre of teenage masturbatory power fantasy has taken over everything. I quite enjoyed those as well, but if 97% of the marketplace recycles the same plot pieces then it gets really boring. Imagine how boring a world with 97% of one genre of music would be (rap/country/classical). Whatever appreciation you had for the genre will die in over-exposure, simplistic plot lines without end, and just plain ennui.
Looking at movie storyboards (and by extension movies), it's curious why they're so varied in content while comics come no where near that level of diversity. As much as I like Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, they aren't really groundbreaking. They use some variations of the suparearo genre that aren't typically allowed (aging characters, indifference to humanity, continuity ended).
I was in Best Buy and the only cashier on duty was holding up the line trying to sell an extended warranty on a Playstation 2 to a person who did not speak English. As typical for idiots compensating for a language barrier, she chose to speak louder as her solution.
"YOU are going to PLAY LOTS" ? "LOTS!" "no. play stay shun" "GAMES! MANY GAMES!" "games. yes." "You WILL BENEFIT from EXTENDED WARRANTY if not WORK" "i work. now play."
The fellow was paying cash and trying to hand over the money. He thought he was being accused of something after a while. She called over an interpreter who had a year of high school spanish. He was unable to communicate with the man because he couldn't phrase the speech into anything but very poor Castillian Spanish which confused the fellow even further (foreign language legal terms > foreign language > Unkown language with terms and words that sound like native language).
They wouldn't take his money until he either agreed or refused the warranty. I started to complain to the cashier and call for the manager. The manager of course said the cashier was being completely proper and that she had to complete the warranty transaction with all customers and I should be considering the benefits of buying an extended warranty for my own purchases.
At that point I walked up to the fellow and said "Say This: No Warranty. No Warranty. No Warranty."
I then handed my $400 item to the cashier and walked out the door vowing never to voluntarily return to that exploitative wasteland again.
This is probably the only thing on this thread that I feel I can comment on without possibly violating my NDA. As an aside, Apple seemed very strict on NDA enforcement this year.
The 30" dual display setup is quite cool. Corner to corner very bright and even in temprement. Power and contrast ontrols are on the right hand side. If you have a dual monitor set up like this you might think at first that it would be hard to adjust the left monitor, but the screens tilt swivel quite effortlessly which makes the controls easilly accessible. Of course, power is controlled by the G5 and contrast usually doesn't have to be reset all that often so it's not a big deal.
The bezels are about a half inch so the two together make for an inch between the screens. You probably don't want to have windows straddling the gap, but for a window heavy app like Final Cut or Interface Builder it's not a big deal. The toned down bezel materials draw less attention (which is a good thing for a monitor).
A full screenshot from just one of these 2560x1600 pixel displays is 5,119,035 bytes. If you take lots of screenshots you might be wary about these 10MB dual monitor files will fill your hard disk (it's saved as a two page PDF file).
I was trying to find a neat OpenGL effect (screensaver, visualizer, etc) that used both displays. iTunes just ran it's visualizer on the monitor with it's library panel and the screensaver would do a "flurry" or other effect on the two displays independently (two flurries). I did finally find that you could get just an overwhelming image that straddled both monitors if you turned on zoom display image (cmd-opt-+). There was a photo of a little kid on screen under the mouse and activating that caused the photo to get positively huge with each eye on a monitor and the nose straddling the bezels. Very funny and perhaps a little scary (like being inside a dolls house in a giant's nursery).
The lowest resolution you can crank it down to in the displays panel is 640x480 (each can be set independently). The lowest one I found that didn't leave black edges was 1024x768. That makes the menubar readable from 10 feet away at least. Not that you'd do this often but if you were trying to justify this screen versus a projector for small crowds, that makes a very impressive and visible alternative for small groups.
Feeling the temperature of the aluminum was mildly warm after it had been on a full day, but it was by no means hot (which is good if you're worried about thermal problems throwing off color after a few years of use).
Even though Expose is a very neat feature on my machine, after I opened some windows on these displays, activating Expose seemed to barely shrink anything. It just moved a few things around. I'm used to a much more major game of 52 card pickup when I activate Expose on my 15" powerbook monitor.
On another stand they had the 17" Powerbooks hooked up to the 23" inch displays. I speculated to the Apple rep standing there that they didn't put the 30" display there because the "huge" Powerbook display seems puny next to the 23". He said though that the issues were with the graphics card in the PowerBook that were being worked on. He wouldn't say if that was heat problems or transfer speed (or what), but if PowerBooks can't drive these monitors that'll leave just DVI based machines. (including Windows machines).
Some things I can't say were related to these displays... There were at least 3 (nda) sessions I attended where I kept thinking mentally. "It's about time. I wonder if the 30" displays made the engineering teams decide to finally add this to Mac OS X". The Mac has always said that they have a well engineered foundation for graphics, but I think making these displays a reality will be a nice impetus for getting some of those ideas out of the realm of theory and into reality as well:-)
These displays are a great thing that will benefit Mac users even if you don't have a 30" display.
Most gamers won't give a second thought to the large lot of Apple/Bandi Pippin game console items since the Pippin never had a successful launch in this hemisphere (not sure it did anywhwere actually).
There are still an army of Apple enthusiasts who would pay through the nose for the Pippin stuff if it had been sold bundled by itself.
So if your boss calls you over for a second to talk to him in the lunch room, it'll probably be because he's trying to get a free meal off of your proximity to the cashier.
When this idea is suggested for computer password replacements I always think of my sleazy coworkers from four jobs ago who would have someone distract me near my cubicle ("Can you dig that pen out from behind the desk? It's my favorite!") while someone else uses my logged in computer.
I live next to a golf course with a lightning detector to warn golfers of electrical activity in the vicinity. I'm not trying to paint all such products with the same brush, but the detector only seems to trigger the warning sirens just after a thunderclap so I've been somewhat skeptical of the utility of these devices.
Still the noise from the detector is better than golf balls hitting my roof so anything that gets people off the course and give me peace is welcome.
Intel could give many kickbacks to university programs, but they appear to get criticized for chips with too much baggage and backward compatability.
The RISC PowerPC processor has potential, but the number of consumer desktops with it has been on the decline (Is anyone but Apple left?). Computers might be too expensive for some students.
A Palm Pilot / Handheld sounds like a great choice to me. They're cheap and can be synced with whatever consumer desktop the user has (I can't imagine coding assembly in Graffiti). The limited hardware is probably a plus for academic purposes.
I think this fellow makes some great points, but what platform and tools would you choose to learn assembly with?
What happens if there's a management turnover at Novel and the new guys in charge decide to take up the SCO litigation business model only with the added benefit that these decisions show they own the copyrights?
In some ways I find it bothersome that these cases are being fought along lines other than "Can someone who's worked on or licensed Unix ever legally contribute to Open Source".
Yes, I realize that it's an insane from the perspective of a computer scholar, but that doesn't mean that court rulings could change the legal reality.
It's great that SCO is being euthanized from these legal proceedings, but recall that it wasn't too long ago that SCO was an big open source ally and proponent. Will Novel be next to fall to bad management, investment pandering, and absurd legal advice?
People have commented here that they can't understand why it's taken so long to come to this ruling with the facts so clear cut.
Just remember that it's easier for a person to prove they own something than prove that someone else doesn't own it. If SCO had a legal document showing clear ownership they could have had this wrapped up much faster. On the other hand, Novel is saying "We have these documents that do NOT show SCO ownership." which doesn't prove your side; it only disproves the other.
Camino.8 only reached beta status on May 17, 2004.
Camino's release numbering is independent. Camino 0.8 doesn't correspond to Firefox 0.8
They made a fork of the Mozilla 1.7 final code only on April 19, 2004
There's also a great quote from Mike Pinkerton back on September 2, 2003 about just how Camino got to a point where its own success was one of its biggest problems.
Initially, Camino (then Chimera) did release early and often and it garnered a loyal following who couldn't wait to get their hands on the next release. The problem stems from our own success. Camino 0.7 was so stable and polished that people came to treat it as they would a 1.0 product. Releasing another version of lesser quality would be seen as a black-eye to the project as a whole, that quality was slipping, and what once was a promising product was now beginning to collapse under its own weight.
Secondly, While "listen to your users" has a wonderful ring to it, Mozilla is a perfect example of what happens when you delegate UI to a self-selecting group of developers. Camino needs strong direction and someone in charge who has no qualms about saying "that sucks, fuck off". Bad ideas aren't suddenly good ideas just because they come from the open-source community. The project has succeeded because those of us in charge had a singular vision to keep it simple. Apple saw the benefit themselves and Safari shares the same belief.
...
Right now it seems we're stuck in a catch-22: we can't gather developer interest without shipping a version and we can't ship a version without developer interest. We're triaging bugs because being able to point developers to a single list that we can drive to zarro boogs is, in my opinion, the best way to engage the development community, and what this project has been lacking since AOL began to fund its development. Now that AOL has fully withdrawn all support (even for Gecko itself), we need developers more than ever. I understand that the end-users on the various lists don't give a donkey about bug triage, they simply want new bits to play with. I just don't think we can get them bits without focused development.
Being an eBook I wasn't aware of this book's existence at all. I have to say that I'm both intrigued and put off by this. A physical book has a long production time and is read and commented on by experts and non-users heavily. Is there any editing to this electronic version? From the review it sounds like it could be a bit disorganized or even contradictory if there was only limited editing/review by others.
The reviewer mentions "The Tao of Macintosh" as an appropos subtitle, but this was already used by a book in the System 6 / System 7 days. I had that book at one time and found it to be all philosophy and very, very little usable advice. A good subway read, but definitely not a "useful" or "must have" book. I'm a bit concerned by the extensive philosophy the author says is focused on in early chapters. Is it readable? Is it obvious? Does it draw too many metaphors to other things and leave you to apply the lesson to your job?
I'm also a little disturbed that the advice that was taken from the internet sources hasn't been digested and distilled by the author and instead simply reprinted directly. One advantage of many books versus scanning the internet is getting the voice and perspective of one author. Besides just tone and readability, as you read a book author you set your own perspective of what this person thinks is "too risky" or what procedures are a "useless waste of time". You don't get that perspective on the internet and it would be nice for the author to have tried to digest the information and filter it through his own experience and mindset.
As far as some of the technial issues, I'm a bit concerned it tries to cover everything and by being too broad, lets things escape in the cracks. I used to know a cornucopia of Mac OS 9 troubleshooting tips and tricks ("Hold the command and option keys down while opening the latest memory control panel and you'll see an advanced config screen"). Now I don't even bother. Apple isn't going to update Mac OS 9 so it's just easier to refresh the disk from an image than try to troubleshoot quirky problems. Additionally, the mindset for dealing with OS 9 problems is much different from OS X ones. I quickly find I wind up with privilege problems or corrupt resource forks if I mistakenly apply tricks from one OS to the other.
The cross-referencing in an ebook sounds great. I'd love to have this in real books. But good cross-references take time to build. You say that many chapters refer to the "building a firewire rescue drive". But if I have iBooks that have no Firewire ports, then I'll find these cross-references more of a bother than a help.
I hope my comments don't sound overly harsh. It does sound like there's some good information in this tome. I'm glad that this review brought it to my attention, but I'm still a bit wary of whether it'll be applicable for my needs.
It's a long article. I read it expecting a puff piece that tries to funnel some of the Shrek fervor to the Incredibles coming in the fall. It only barely touched on the Incredibles.
My favorite bits (in no particular order):
Mention of the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II
The stories of Disney's rejections and failures trying to assembly-line movie production
A feeling of satisfaction reading about how rejects from Warner and Disney found their utopia
A left-brained acknowledgement of the tools and their makers.
A right-brained acknowledgement of the creative stories and their creators.
Having lost interest in superhero power fantasies for a number of years, I had zero interest in seeing The Incredibles. From what little bits anyone knew about this movie it sounded like the first Pixar loser story. "Rev up the digital effects Joe! Another superhero movie broke box office records. Get the writer to draft something where the good guy uses the new fire effect!" I'm now quite intrigued to see just what sort of spin Pixar plans to put on superheroes.
Call me a sucker, but Pixar really does seem to know what can make or break a good movie. Now let's just hope they aren't beaten by the quantity over quality rules that other animation houses may adopt.
Another Addison-Wesley book called Design Patterns, Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software written by a gang of four programmers might explain the advantages and limitations behind something like the Model/View/Controller pattern more clearly than Apple's or Mr. Hillegass's references
The Currency Coverter is really designed to show this pattern at it's most simple. Sure there are all sorts of short cuts you can take if you are really writing a simple currency converter, but the point of the exercise is to show those people who already find value in this common pattern how to go about doing something this basic.
Actually, there's another book that many Cocoa programmers should probably check out besides the Gamma book. It's an Addison-Wesley book called The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion and it's pretty easy to make the mental leap and convert their design advice to Objective-C. (There are other books that probably do this better if your interest is Java).
As an aside, there's a lot of great advice in these two books that Apple clearly had in mind when developing Cocoa. As much as I brissle at the original poster's comment about the "value" of MVC, it disappoints me how few Cocoa programmers recognize their applicability. Please don't limit your Cocoa education to simply books that have Cocoa in the title.
Perhaps O'Reilly feels that this book's audience too closely overlaps the one for their "Learning Cocoa on Mac OS X" book.
Perhaps O'Reilly paid through the nose to be the exclusive "Apple Developer Connection Approved Documentation" label (or whatever the exact phrase is) and simply doesn't want to share.
Perhaps there is some bad blood betwixt Mr. Hillegass and his former employer (Apple/NeXT).
There are many possibilities, but my suspicion is that you won't see this great Addison-Wesley book show up on the O'Reilly website.
I think Spencerian probably answers 90% of the questions most people have about this book: author qualification, tools required, prequisite expertise required, and changes from the original. I won't get involved in the flame wars about Objective-C versus Java and Mac OS X versus GnuStep, but I do have some additional comments (maybe better stated as additional opinions).
Tools: You must have Panther (10.3) or later to use this book. It was possible to read the first edition (written for 10.1) and make some mental leaps forward, but the reverse is impossible. Besides the differentces between XCode and the GUI screenshots, Apple deprecated a number of methods (like takeValue:forKey:) in favor of much cleaner names (e.g. setValue:forKey:). Aaron doesn't mention the deprecated names (quite rightly IMHO) so that will make the Jaguar programmer have to refer to Apple's website to do the translation back to the older APIs. You may need to do mental exercises like that when you have to read someone elses code or when you're back porting your app, but if you're still learning, be sure to get Panther before trying to use this book.
Presentation: Many of the books screenshots look much cleaner than the prior version. I think that's mainly attributable to Apple deciding to tone down much of the visual clutter in the Aqua theme. The lack of the pinstripes in windows and menus really makes the documentation much easier on the eyes. The change is really much more dramatic and makes for a much more readable book.
If You Read the First Edition: I've read the first edition, and I have to say that I got impatient with much of the earlier portions of the book. I wanted the examples for Bindings and other new additions to Cocoa. I was already comfortable with the trivial examples in the early chapters, so it was hard to force myself to go back and really read and work through them. Do it. I remember most of the big points made, but some of the subtler points make more sense now. Whether these were in the last edition, I'm not certain but it was still good a good review.
Applicability to a New Programmer: I'll underscore that this isn't for a new programmer. If you are new to C, I'd suggest reading the non-GUI text "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen G. Kochan. An extensive background in object-oriented programming isn't as necessary (and in fact may be detrimental if your background is multiple inhereitance of the C++ world). But it does include some tips and advice on good OO techniques that Objective-C programmers use. You won't see any explanation on pointer tricks, handles, NULL, or many of the other plain C conventions. If you are a strong Unix programmer, you may feel more comfortable reading the Aaron Hillegass and Mark Dalrymple's "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming" first. That book is billed as the sequel to this one (and it does use a little bit of Objective-C code), but it probably addresses your interests far more than this Application-centric book does.
The lessons of this book are quite worthwhile to certain audiences, but finding whether you are a target for it's wisdom may be tricky. Don't get frustrated. If you find it to be over your head, read another intro book but I'd definitely come back to this one at some point in the future.
People in government are accustomed to a strict heirarchy of power that comes from the law makers and big lobbyists (and, I suppose, indirectly from the people). But when it comes to computers and standards, they seem ignorant of how much power they really have.
Governments are in a position to establish vendor neutral specs that could dominate the industry. If the IRS established XML specs for tax forms (rather than letting Intuit or another vendor dictate proprietary formats as the standards) then they can drive real competetion for good software that implements the standards. If this sort of thing expands it could make communication of data about patents, censuses, and parking tickets as easy to find as looking up a zip code is online today.
Governments don't seem to recognize that by giving power to the little dictators and their proprietary products they are ceding their own power as the neutral referee and protector of their people.
The armed forces don't care if a solution is proprietary or open. They can get whatever budgets for technology they want ("Senator, you'll be a traitor if you don't approve our stripped-down trillion dollar clothing budget for our new RoboMilitia!")
More likely, the government simply puts Microsoft OS products on par with Gnu Hurd and Amiga OS: "Not quite ready for our needs." There are still many other proprietary OS options available considering the levels of money the war mongers are willing to throw around.
_Eighteen_months_ from now a lawsuit will be filed by _a_networking_manufacturer_ claiming that Microsoft violated a private, previously undisclosed agreement to exit the _Wi-Fi_hardware_ market if this company would _(pick_from_list_below_)_
end support for MS competitors
allow MS exclusive license this company's new technology
provide legal support in a Microsoft trial or contract dispute
In the light of Microsoft's business tactics since the agreement, this company now regrets the contract and believes that Microsoft _violated_the_spirit_of_the_agreement_.
Slashdot Mirror
While having (not one but) two corporations run this recycling program gives me some initial confidence, what makes me think that they'll dispose in a eco-friendly manner at all?
Many local governments where I live have zero regulations about proper disposal of large electronics, heavy metal laden motherboards, and leaded glass in crt's and tv's. If anything they have a maximum weight limit which is easily circumvented by some creative crushing and re-partitioning.
My local governement is very anal about their disposal regulations because of having to build a new landfill within the past few years. What's to stop the local Office Depot from taking all the hazardous/heavy/dangerous junk and shipping it one county over where the regulations are non-existent.
Office Depot is trying to cop some good materials in the same way they'll trade a pack of paper for a used ink cartridge. The resale of those cartridges (once discected and reconstructed with knockoff inks/carts) is very lucrative. What's the profit angle on the used computers? There's probably something quite profitable here (beyond just getting people into stores who may be in the market for a new computer).
When the Michigan Senator (D) in the (highly recommended) movie Fahrenheit 9/11 responded bluntly to the question "Why didn't you read the Patriot Act before passing it?" with the response "Sit down my son, we don't read most of the bills we pass." It was quite laughable but very chilling.
Legal ignorance is at an appalling level, even among people paid and elected to represent us. Computers are good at pattern recognition; and most people despise reading the mumbo-jumbo lawyers hide their meaning within.
Perhaps a "pocket lawyer" to help parse legal mumbo jumbo is a worthwhile thing. For most people law is a one-way street, you have to read what the IRS, city, and state send to you but you rarely have to write anything yourself. (Though Nolo and some other "mad lib" style books do a wonderful job of this).
While there are lawyers who are trying to be devious and hide their real purpose in contorted language, government agencies should have no need to do so. Require that court rulings, city councils, and any record of law be stated in English and Backus-Naur form. Rely less on the vagueries of English to preserve or hide your meaning while the OED is changing the language (bling-bling? vavavoom?) and hence changing the law through its evolution.
The language Squeak wasn't my introduction to object-oriented programming, but having stumbled on Java I found Squeak to really be a much better object oriented learning environment. No language treats "everything" as an object despite their claims, but Squeak really comes darn close.
The Squeak programming environment along with the Korienek, Wrensch, and Dechow book were what made the idea of Object-Oriented programming really click in my brain. Even if you never program a "real" program with Squeak, the value of Squeak is that you can really learn OO principles without the baggage of a C heritage and designers who've shortcut language consistency in the name of efficiency. All are good things you may want to make the trade off for when programming a "real" program, but not things you want to short yourself on during your education.
So Dick Cheyney's half-thought, irrational, emotional outburts are fine for public coverage yet the use of the same expletives for a well-considered, precisely-scripted, time-consumingly produced fictional presentation are NOT acceptable is absurd.
Fiction is the ideal place to expose new ideas that aren't taught in school (profanity, sex, violence). Simply declaring that all bad words are "bleeped" and all nudity is blocked is doing a severe disservice to the (yes, real) humans watching television.
What really stinks about comics are the way the one genre of teenage masturbatory power fantasy has taken over everything. I quite enjoyed those as well, but if 97% of the marketplace recycles the same plot pieces then it gets really boring. Imagine how boring a world with 97% of one genre of music would be (rap/country/classical). Whatever appreciation you had for the genre will die in over-exposure, simplistic plot lines without end, and just plain ennui.
Looking at movie storyboards (and by extension movies), it's curious why they're so varied in content while comics come no where near that level of diversity. As much as I like Alan Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns, they aren't really groundbreaking. They use some variations of the suparearo genre that aren't typically allowed (aging characters, indifference to humanity, continuity ended).
There is a spark left with titles like In the Shadow of No Towers, 52 Timil Deeps, Larry Gonnick's Cartoon History series.
I just wish it didn't seem like the whole of mainstream comics was awash with variations on the 47 plotlines dealing with superpowers.
I was in Best Buy and the only cashier on duty was holding up the line trying to sell an extended warranty on a Playstation 2 to a person who did not speak English. As typical for idiots compensating for a language barrier, she chose to speak louder as her solution.
"YOU are going to PLAY LOTS"
?
"LOTS!"
"no. play stay shun"
"GAMES! MANY GAMES!"
"games. yes."
"You WILL BENEFIT from EXTENDED WARRANTY if not WORK"
"i work. now play."
The fellow was paying cash and trying to hand over the money. He thought he was being accused of something after a while. She called over an interpreter who had a year of high school spanish. He was unable to communicate with the man because he couldn't phrase the speech into anything but very poor Castillian Spanish which confused the fellow even further (foreign language legal terms > foreign language > Unkown language with terms and words that sound like native language).
They wouldn't take his money until he either agreed or refused the warranty. I started to complain to the cashier and call for the manager. The manager of course said the cashier was being completely proper and that she had to complete the warranty transaction with all customers and I should be considering the benefits of buying an extended warranty for my own purchases.
At that point I walked up to the fellow and said "Say This: No Warranty. No Warranty. No Warranty."
I then handed my $400 item to the cashier and walked out the door vowing never to voluntarily return to that exploitative wasteland again.
This is probably the only thing on this thread that I feel I can comment on without possibly violating my NDA. As an aside, Apple seemed very strict on NDA enforcement this year.
:-)
The 30" dual display setup is quite cool. Corner to corner very bright and even in temprement. Power and contrast ontrols are on the right hand side. If you have a dual monitor set up like this you might think at first that it would be hard to adjust the left monitor, but the screens tilt swivel quite effortlessly which makes the controls easilly accessible. Of course, power is controlled by the G5 and contrast usually doesn't have to be reset all that often so it's not a big deal.
The bezels are about a half inch so the two together make for an inch between the screens. You probably don't want to have windows straddling the gap, but for a window heavy app like Final Cut or Interface Builder it's not a big deal. The toned down bezel materials draw less attention (which is a good thing for a monitor).
A full screenshot from just one of these 2560x1600 pixel displays is 5,119,035 bytes. If you take lots of screenshots you might be wary about these 10MB dual monitor files will fill your hard disk (it's saved as a two page PDF file).
I was trying to find a neat OpenGL effect (screensaver, visualizer, etc) that used both displays. iTunes just ran it's visualizer on the monitor with it's library panel and the screensaver would do a "flurry" or other effect on the two displays independently (two flurries). I did finally find that you could get just an overwhelming image that straddled both monitors if you turned on zoom display image (cmd-opt-+). There was a photo of a little kid on screen under the mouse and activating that caused the photo to get positively huge with each eye on a monitor and the nose straddling the bezels. Very funny and perhaps a little scary (like being inside a dolls house in a giant's nursery).
The lowest resolution you can crank it down to in the displays panel is 640x480 (each can be set independently). The lowest one I found that didn't leave black edges was 1024x768. That makes the menubar readable from 10 feet away at least. Not that you'd do this often but if you were trying to justify this screen versus a projector for small crowds, that makes a very impressive and visible alternative for small groups.
Feeling the temperature of the aluminum was mildly warm after it had been on a full day, but it was by no means hot (which is good if you're worried about thermal problems throwing off color after a few years of use).
Even though Expose is a very neat feature on my machine, after I opened some windows on these displays, activating Expose seemed to barely shrink anything. It just moved a few things around. I'm used to a much more major game of 52 card pickup when I activate Expose on my 15" powerbook monitor.
On another stand they had the 17" Powerbooks hooked up to the 23" inch displays. I speculated to the Apple rep standing there that they didn't put the 30" display there because the "huge" Powerbook display seems puny next to the 23". He said though that the issues were with the graphics card in the PowerBook that were being worked on. He wouldn't say if that was heat problems or transfer speed (or what), but if PowerBooks can't drive these monitors that'll leave just DVI based machines. (including Windows machines).
Some things I can't say were related to these displays... There were at least 3 (nda) sessions I attended where I kept thinking mentally. "It's about time. I wonder if the 30" displays made the engineering teams decide to finally add this to Mac OS X". The Mac has always said that they have a well engineered foundation for graphics, but I think making these displays a reality will be a nice impetus for getting some of those ideas out of the realm of theory and into reality as well
These displays are a great thing that will benefit Mac users even if you don't have a 30" display.
Get a boyfriend instead. Plenty of joysticks to play with. ;-)
Most gamers won't give a second thought to the large lot of Apple/Bandi Pippin game console items since the Pippin never had a successful launch in this hemisphere (not sure it did anywhwere actually).
There are still an army of Apple enthusiasts who would pay through the nose for the Pippin stuff if it had been sold bundled by itself.
So if your boss calls you over for a second to talk to him in the lunch room, it'll probably be because he's trying to get a free meal off of your proximity to the cashier.
When this idea is suggested for computer password replacements I always think of my sleazy coworkers from four jobs ago who would have someone distract me near my cubicle ("Can you dig that pen out from behind the desk? It's my favorite!") while someone else uses my logged in computer.
Grrr...
I live next to a golf course with a lightning detector to warn golfers of electrical activity in the vicinity. I'm not trying to paint all such products with the same brush, but the detector only seems to trigger the warning sirens just after a thunderclap so I've been somewhat skeptical of the utility of these devices.
Still the noise from the detector is better than golf balls hitting my roof so anything that gets people off the course and give me peace is welcome.
What platforms would you use to teach assembly?
Intel could give many kickbacks to university programs, but they appear to get criticized for chips with too much baggage and backward compatability.
The RISC PowerPC processor has potential, but the number of consumer desktops with it has been on the decline (Is anyone but Apple left?). Computers might be too expensive for some students.
A Palm Pilot / Handheld sounds like a great choice to me. They're cheap and can be synced with whatever consumer desktop the user has (I can't imagine coding assembly in Graffiti). The limited hardware is probably a plus for academic purposes.
I think this fellow makes some great points, but what platform and tools would you choose to learn assembly with?
What happens if there's a management turnover at Novel and the new guys in charge decide to take up the SCO litigation business model only with the added benefit that these decisions show they own the copyrights?
In some ways I find it bothersome that these cases are being fought along lines other than "Can someone who's worked on or licensed Unix ever legally contribute to Open Source".
Yes, I realize that it's an insane from the perspective of a computer scholar, but that doesn't mean that court rulings could change the legal reality.
It's great that SCO is being euthanized from these legal proceedings, but recall that it wasn't too long ago that SCO was an big open source ally and proponent. Will Novel be next to fall to bad management, investment pandering, and absurd legal advice?
People have commented here that they can't understand why it's taken so long to come to this ruling with the facts so clear cut.
Just remember that it's easier for a person to prove they own something than prove that someone else doesn't own it. If SCO had a legal document showing clear ownership they could have had this wrapped up much faster. On the other hand, Novel is saying "We have these documents that do NOT show SCO ownership." which doesn't prove your side; it only disproves the other.
SCO might always find a previously unknown document showing clear copyright conveyance.
I thought the Hamburglar was already working with SCO.
Would this be a conflict of interest?
- Camino
.8 only reached beta status on May 17, 2004.
- Camino's release numbering is independent. Camino 0.8 doesn't correspond to Firefox 0.8
- They made a fork of the Mozilla 1.7 final code only on April 19, 2004
There's also a great quote from Mike Pinkerton back on September 2, 2003 about just how Camino got to a point where its own success was one of its biggest problems.The article (and references) note that Zuse's computers stored their programs on old movie film because paper was in short supply.
;-)
Please keep this fact quiet, lest the MPAA has will make inroards to claiming intellectual property rights to the entire modern computer industry
Being an eBook I wasn't aware of this book's existence at all. I have to say that I'm both intrigued and put off by this. A physical book has a long production time and is read and commented on by experts and non-users heavily. Is there any editing to this electronic version? From the review it sounds like it could be a bit disorganized or even contradictory if there was only limited editing/review by others.
The reviewer mentions "The Tao of Macintosh" as an appropos subtitle, but this was already used by a book in the System 6 / System 7 days. I had that book at one time and found it to be all philosophy and very, very little usable advice. A good subway read, but definitely not a "useful" or "must have" book. I'm a bit concerned by the extensive philosophy the author says is focused on in early chapters. Is it readable? Is it obvious? Does it draw too many metaphors to other things and leave you to apply the lesson to your job?
I'm also a little disturbed that the advice that was taken from the internet sources hasn't been digested and distilled by the author and instead simply reprinted directly. One advantage of many books versus scanning the internet is getting the voice and perspective of one author. Besides just tone and readability, as you read a book author you set your own perspective of what this person thinks is "too risky" or what procedures are a "useless waste of time". You don't get that perspective on the internet and it would be nice for the author to have tried to digest the information and filter it through his own experience and mindset.
As far as some of the technial issues, I'm a bit concerned it tries to cover everything and by being too broad, lets things escape in the cracks. I used to know a cornucopia of Mac OS 9 troubleshooting tips and tricks ("Hold the command and option keys down while opening the latest memory control panel and you'll see an advanced config screen"). Now I don't even bother. Apple isn't going to update Mac OS 9 so it's just easier to refresh the disk from an image than try to troubleshoot quirky problems. Additionally, the mindset for dealing with OS 9 problems is much different from OS X ones. I quickly find I wind up with privilege problems or corrupt resource forks if I mistakenly apply tricks from one OS to the other.
The cross-referencing in an ebook sounds great. I'd love to have this in real books. But good cross-references take time to build. You say that many chapters refer to the "building a firewire rescue drive". But if I have iBooks that have no Firewire ports, then I'll find these cross-references more of a bother than a help.
I hope my comments don't sound overly harsh. It does sound like there's some good information in this tome. I'm glad that this review brought it to my attention, but I'm still a bit wary of whether it'll be applicable for my needs.
My favorite bits (in no particular order):
- Mention of the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II
- The stories of Disney's rejections and failures trying to assembly-line movie production
- A feeling of satisfaction reading about how rejects from Warner and Disney found their utopia
- A left-brained acknowledgement of the tools and their makers.
- A right-brained acknowledgement of the creative stories and their creators.
Having lost interest in superhero power fantasies for a number of years, I had zero interest in seeing The Incredibles. From what little bits anyone knew about this movie it sounded like the first Pixar loser story. "Rev up the digital effects Joe! Another superhero movie broke box office records. Get the writer to draft something where the good guy uses the new fire effect!" I'm now quite intrigued to see just what sort of spin Pixar plans to put on superheroes.Call me a sucker, but Pixar really does seem to know what can make or break a good movie. Now let's just hope they aren't beaten by the quantity over quality rules that other animation houses may adopt.
The Currency Coverter is really designed to show this pattern at it's most simple. Sure there are all sorts of short cuts you can take if you are really writing a simple currency converter, but the point of the exercise is to show those people who already find value in this common pattern how to go about doing something this basic.
Actually, there's another book that many Cocoa programmers should probably check out besides the Gamma book. It's an Addison-Wesley book called The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion and it's pretty easy to make the mental leap and convert their design advice to Objective-C. (There are other books that probably do this better if your interest is Java).
As an aside, there's a lot of great advice in these two books that Apple clearly had in mind when developing Cocoa. As much as I brissle at the original poster's comment about the "value" of MVC, it disappoints me how few Cocoa programmers recognize their applicability. Please don't limit your Cocoa education to simply books that have Cocoa in the title.
Perhaps O'Reilly feels that this book's audience too closely overlaps the one for their "Learning Cocoa on Mac OS X" book.
Perhaps O'Reilly paid through the nose to be the exclusive "Apple Developer Connection Approved Documentation" label (or whatever the exact phrase is) and simply doesn't want to share.
Perhaps there is some bad blood betwixt Mr. Hillegass and his former employer (Apple/NeXT).
There are many possibilities, but my suspicion is that you won't see this great Addison-Wesley book show up on the O'Reilly website.
I think Spencerian probably answers 90% of the questions most people have about this book: author qualification, tools required, prequisite expertise required, and changes from the original. I won't get involved in the flame wars about Objective-C versus Java and Mac OS X versus GnuStep, but I do have some additional comments (maybe better stated as additional opinions).
Tools:
You must have Panther (10.3) or later to use this book. It was possible to read the first edition (written for 10.1) and make some mental leaps forward, but the reverse is impossible. Besides the differentces between XCode and the GUI screenshots, Apple deprecated a number of methods (like takeValue:forKey:) in favor of much cleaner names (e.g. setValue:forKey:). Aaron doesn't mention the deprecated names (quite rightly IMHO) so that will make the Jaguar programmer have to refer to Apple's website to do the translation back to the older APIs. You may need to do mental exercises like that when you have to read someone elses code or when you're back porting your app, but if you're still learning, be sure to get Panther before trying to use this book.
Presentation:
Many of the books screenshots look much cleaner than the prior version. I think that's mainly attributable to Apple deciding to tone down much of the visual clutter in the Aqua theme. The lack of the pinstripes in windows and menus really makes the documentation much easier on the eyes. The change is really much more dramatic and makes for a much more readable book.
If You Read the First Edition:
I've read the first edition, and I have to say that I got impatient with much of the earlier portions of the book. I wanted the examples for Bindings and other new additions to Cocoa. I was already comfortable with the trivial examples in the early chapters, so it was hard to force myself to go back and really read and work through them. Do it. I remember most of the big points made, but some of the subtler points make more sense now. Whether these were in the last edition, I'm not certain but it was still good a good review.
Applicability to a New Programmer:
I'll underscore that this isn't for a new programmer. If you are new to C, I'd suggest reading the non-GUI text "Programming in Objective-C" by Stephen G. Kochan. An extensive background in object-oriented programming isn't as necessary (and in fact may be detrimental if your background is multiple inhereitance of the C++ world). But it does include some tips and advice on good OO techniques that Objective-C programmers use. You won't see any explanation on pointer tricks, handles, NULL, or many of the other plain C conventions. If you are a strong Unix programmer, you may feel more comfortable reading the Aaron Hillegass and Mark Dalrymple's "Core Mac OS X and Unix Programming" first. That book is billed as the sequel to this one (and it does use a little bit of Objective-C code), but it probably addresses your interests far more than this Application-centric book does.
The lessons of this book are quite worthwhile to certain audiences, but finding whether you are a target for it's wisdom may be tricky. Don't get frustrated. If you find it to be over your head, read another intro book but I'd definitely come back to this one at some point in the future.
Governments are in a position to establish vendor neutral specs that could dominate the industry. If the IRS established XML specs for tax forms (rather than letting Intuit or another vendor dictate proprietary formats as the standards) then they can drive real competetion for good software that implements the standards. If this sort of thing expands it could make communication of data about patents, censuses, and parking tickets as easy to find as looking up a zip code is online today.
Governments don't seem to recognize that by giving power to the little dictators and their proprietary products they are ceding their own power as the neutral referee and protector of their people.
The armed forces don't care if a solution is proprietary or open. They can get whatever budgets for technology they want ("Senator, you'll be a traitor if you don't approve our stripped-down trillion dollar clothing budget for our new RoboMilitia!")
More likely, the government simply puts Microsoft OS products on par with Gnu Hurd and Amiga OS: "Not quite ready for our needs." There are still many other proprietary OS options available considering the levels of money the war mongers are willing to throw around.
_Eighteen_months_ from now a lawsuit will be filed by _a_networking_manufacturer_ claiming that Microsoft violated a private, previously undisclosed agreement to exit the _Wi-Fi_hardware_ market if this company would _(pick_from_list_below_)_
- end support for MS competitors
- allow MS exclusive license this company's new technology
- provide legal support in a Microsoft trial or contract dispute
In the light of Microsoft's business tactics since the agreement, this company now regrets the contract and believes that Microsoft _violated_the_spirit_of_the_agreement_.