I know you're kidding but it's still a sad commentary on the way the legal profession has undermined the economy.
Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money. Granted some of that money came from outfits with questionable morals themselves, like The Canopy Group, but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products and their competitive position in the market. SCO was once a reputable company, after all.
Here's a question for some legal expert. Since Boies et al were paid in stock a while back, they are now a major stockholder in SCO, 25% as I recall. I wonder if they can therefore be sued by any parties who have a grievance against SCO? Like practically the entire open source development community, IBM, Redhat, Novell, etc.
I have personal experience with the damage they have caused; I have dealt with people in the embedded market who were avoiding embedded Linux because of "the lawsuit". The very lawyers who represent this rogue company are its owners; they are purely and openly in it for the profit regardless of right and wrong.
Thank you for proving my point; parent post reads like a commentary right out of The Nation--it's pure opinion with almost no facts cited and is considered "insightful" at the moment. But people who follow The Nation (or The New Republic, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, Boston Globe, CBS, and other mainstream left-leaning editorial vehicles and broadcasters) don't have a need for facts, especially inconvenient ones, in this emotion-driven election year.
Expecting Iraq to be "a perfect war" is a typically American way of thinking--people are impatient and don't remember history. Wars in fact are messy, imperfect, and foggy; it dehumanizes the conquered and the conquerors alike. Post-war Europe 59 years ago was a horrible mess with rampant looting, rape, and general lawless behavior by soldiers and civilians alike. There were the "displaced persons" camps that were little better than the concentration camps they replaced and the shameful incidents of ships full of Jewish refugees being turned away from safe havens. But the "Good War" conviction was so deeply engrained in Americans' minds by then that they simply disregarded such things, if indeed they even heard about them.
I don't see Iraq as a failure of the Bush administration so much as a failure of the Arab people, who in shockingly large numbers have behaved more like a pack of murderously psychotic savages than the civilized people one would have expected from such an ancient civilization.
The U.S. military forces in fact were shockingly successful; they smashed the Iraqi army and took the country in record time, with an absolute minimum of civilian casualties compared to any similar campaign in history. Expecting the Americans to prevent any of a thousand different problems is like expecting the police in your city to prevent all burglaries and murders. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that the Americans (and British and other partners) have in fact done a pretty competent job under the circumstances. Consider the "tons of looted explosives" incident that Kerry is making political hay over: far from ignoring the dump, the Americans in fact took 250 tons of munitions away from that site, unless the officer in charge of the project was simply lying through his teeth to the Associated Press.
The problem that no one seems ready to recognize is simply that Iraqis weren't ready to be liberated. They have apparently no concept of rule of law and the savagery we now see, with armed thugs blowing up children and the hostage fiasco, is a statement about them, not us. I increasingly believe that Americans and Europeans in our soft, peaceful societies can't fathom how people could stoop to such levels, so we simply blame the invading forces as a substitute for honest analysis.
Regarding the economy, it's driven by macroeconomic forces that Bush could not in 4 years possibly have affected, perhaps not even in 10 years. It's absurd to assign blame or praise to the person currently sitting in the White House for 20-year cycles of boom and bust. Similarly, Clinton lucked out with a post-recession rebound and a tech boom that had less to do with him than with forces that had been set in motion 20 years before he took office. Heck, the 90s boom and US budget surplus was probably more thanks to Reaganomics and the rebound from the 1980 recession than to anything the Democrats ever did--in fact, it was despite anything they ever did.
wtf? Why are seemingly all the pro-Bush, or at least not pro-Kerry comments being modded down? I don't necessarily agree with all of his points but this fellow's posting seemed reasonable enough. I hope a few people take the trouble to metamoderate some of these questionable ratings.
What has turned me off of John Kerry is not so much his liberal ideas about raising taxes and increasing social spending as his rather transparent and hypocritical attacks on Bush. To hear Kerry talk, he seems to believe that Bush is dishonest and incompetent and has accomplished nothing of note either domestically or in his foreign policy. He blames Bush for everything but the weather. Heck, he blames him for global warming. He's got some pie-in-the-sky health care reform plan and he's got a malpractice lawyer for a running mate.
If the Dems presented a candidate with credible foreign policy credentials and some concept of how to spur economic growth, I'd be all over him. As it is, I'm worried Kerry will become a 2nd term Clinton with a hostile Congress and no real mandate to govern other than "Whew at least I'm not George W. Bush!!"
While I don't dispute your analysis, I would offer a "devil's advocate" reason why AOL would put out this IE-based browser. They've been using IE for years and surely they have put a lot of time and, perhaps more importantly, money into adapting it to their purposes.
Some bean counters in their marketing department are going to say, we've invested all this money in this IE-based thing so let's get something out of it, put out an AOL-branded browser just to keep up the name brand recognition. Who knows, perhaps MS paid them to do it.
I believe that they didn't buy Netscape for the browser so much as for the portal and name recognition. Even today, Netscape is a household name and that's worth gold in the strange, illogical world of marketing. Remember also that Netscape open-sourced its browser before it got acquired by AOL (as I recall). AOL didn't need to buy them just to get its hands on the browser source.
We techies may think they have made a dumb mistake but it's worth watching and waiting to see how the market responds. AOL may have fallen greatly since the market boom days, but they're still a marketing force to reckon with. We techies wish they'd adopt the "good guys" like Gecko and Firefox but they have to be convinced they'll make money off it first.
This is a great idea. Why aren't we fully exploiting the power of the wind?
This is an example of the obstacles that American power generating windmills are facing. If ever there was a NIMBY group it's these people. Someone wants to build an offshore set of windmills to power about 3/4 of Cape Cod and surrounding areas in Massachusetts. Since Massachusetts is heavily dependent on important electricity and oil, this seems like a great solution.
Undoubtedly there are some ecological implications, but the NIMBY group clearly is magnifying these issues in order to shoot down the whole idea; they're fishing for excuses. They don't want to have to look at windmills. This is where some federal leadership may be required in order to get the U.S. off its foreign energy dependency.
Maybe while they're at it they should fire their legal counsel and get someone with a little more backbone.
It's common for lawyers to present a cost benefit analysis of this type of situation and quite often they will encourage a settlement, similar to the way a family pays off kidnappers to free a hostage or a retail business pays protection money to some street gang.
One wonders whether there is in fact a conspiracy in the legal world to encourage settlements, because if people challenged every questionable lawsuit that came down the pike, perhaps there would ultimately be fewer such suits, just as if all businesses refused to pay protection money there would be no protection racket (albeit, after some bouts of violence) and there would be no incentive to kidnap hostages either.
The electoral college helps protect smaller states from being dominated by larger states. At one time, Americans identified more with their state than with their country; e.g., Thomas Jefferson declared that "I am a Virginian", not an American. The smaller states feared that the large population centers would swamp them and effectively reduce their voice in government. Therefore, the electoral college sometimes allows a candidate to win who did not win the collective majority.
In 2000, George W. Bush carried 30 states, though most of the most populous states did not favor him. This is truly an example of what the electoral college was designed to do.
These arguments people make today about stealing elections and the unfairness of the system really stem from an ignorance of American history. True, the electoral college system is not perfect and perhaps should be replaced with a simple absolute majority in this age when people no longer identify so strongly with their locales.
Someone else pointed out that there were several presidents who did not win an absolute majority of the vote, but very few actually lost the popular vote. Clinton did not win an absolute majority; more people wanted either GHW Bush or Perot than wanted Clinton by quite a large margin, i.e. about 57% to 43%. However the electoral college gave it to Clinton. Interestingly, no one talks about how unfair it was that Clinton got elected, perhaps because he was lucky enough to preside over a great economic boom that ended just as he was leaving office.
Imagine a group of ten people walking casually into a store, in onesies and twosies, and then suddenly and instantaneously knocking over three shelves, shooting out two security cams, surrounding the cashier and four customers and emptying their cash registers and wallets as the case may be, all without speaking and done so fast that the store clerks don't even have time to register that this is a robbery.
This kind of stuff is scary. A friend described a group of people doing some sort of flash mob stuff in a park in San Francisco recently. Presumably they were just doing it for fun, or because they don't have a life, but suppose they were rehearsing to overwhelm the flight attendants on a plane or the bank tellers in a bank through nearly instantaneous mob action.
On the other hand, security personnel could easily implement the same techniques, and perhaps even do it better using sophisticated in-ear comm devices and a "mob meister" orchestrating the whole thing from a server room somewhere. For example, plainclothes police could suddenly pounce on an entire street gang, thus avoiding giving them a chance to flee the scene. There are lots of possibilities.
Hmm. This is disturbing. I'm going to stay away from crowds from now on;-)
I'd really like to see this type of technology implemented to store nuclear waste and perhaps other kinds of toxic compounds that are otherwise too expensive to treat.
200,000 years sounds long enough that we'll either not care by then or have evolved into beings that can withstand the radiation.
Perhaps this combined with
pebble bed nuclear reactors will at last make nukes a realistic and safe alternative to oil.
A hundred nuclear fission plants using the safer pebble technology and a really solid waste storage approach would go a long way to weaning the U.S. and its allies off the Wahhabi oil machine. They could generate hydrogen during low demand times for use in fuel cell vehicles and straight power for peak time use, and solar power could fill in the gaps.
Well, if the U.S. had not entered Europe then Stalin would probably have beat Hitler on his own. Whether or not US aid made a difference is a separate question, I guess.
As for Japan, Mao's guerillas and the Nationalist army had fought the Japanese to a standstill; Japan was only in control of the big cities at the height of its conquest. It's possible that if Japan had not attacked the US it might have been able to conquer a chunk of China but it really had bitten off more than it could chew.
I would say, it's doubtful that Japan and Germany would have gone on to conquer the U.S.; they were so overextended and unrealistic in their goals. People talk about the limits of American power today, but it would have been even more true of these governments back then.
Anyway, my basic point was that the U.S. is kin and cousin to Europe and has helped promote democracy on every continent. The vitriol and hostility emanating from Western Europe today as regards U.S. military actions in the world are therefore all the more poignant.
I guess the person who modded my original post as "troll" disagrees with Bush's policies. Heh. He just helped make my point; the country is really divided down the middle, and bitterly.
The Europeans are so righteous when it comes to democracy. They also happen to be jealous of the United States and its freedom to act in the world, so they (probably mainly driven by the French) now seek to belittle the US in the eyes of the world.
Remind me again, why did over 295,000 Americans give their lives to free France from the Nazis and why did the U.S. spend countless billions of dollars protecting these people from Stalinism?
What people seem to be missing is that democracy works in the U.S. The Florida election was flawed but it did not result in a military coup or power grab; the competing candidates waited for the courts to decide the outcome. That half the people would be unhappy with the outcome was a given no matter who won.
Indeed, as a direct result of the 2000 elections, record numbers of new voters have been registered in swing states and among traditionally non-voting strata. It's going to be a lively contest even without a bunch of holier-than-thou Euros running around.
I'm also an aspiring sci-fi writer, halfway through my first novel, which deals with apocalyptic uses of nanotech in the near future (next hundred years or so). I believe the article was referring not so much to the quality of current science fiction but rather the declining interest among the general public. Analog's readership, for example, has declined dramatically, and 100K sales of new titles twenty years ago have declined to 20K today.
So far I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why this decline is occurring. It's not even clear it's a decline so much as a shift; fantasy seems to be going strong, and Harry Potter is the poster child for a whole new generation of fantasy fiction.
If I were to speculate (after all, we're talking about what they used to call speculative fiction) I would suggest that the Baby Boomers with their hugely influential buying habits have shifted away from the science fiction of their youth in the 50's, 60's, and 70's and are busy raising kids, saving for their retirement, and vegging out in front of the 300-channel home theater every night. There's just no time anymore for science fiction. They have grown beyond it.
I got back into sci-fi during the 90s after a long hiatus, and while I enjoy some of it, I find the overall literary quality to be below that of mainstream fiction. I still love a good yarn but very, very few authors are capable of building a truly convincing world--Vinge comes close, Asimov is forever, I like David Brin's scientific underpinnings if not his shallow characters, a few others. Philip K. Dick and Clifford Simak are for me the greats of the 60s-70s era; they wrote straight sci-fi yarns with vision, and they chose not to get bogged down in scientific details as some of the newer "techie" authors make the mistake of doing.
The pendulum will swing back again. The Harry Potter generation will branch out and "discover" science fiction next to the fantasy books and reinvigorate the genre. Magazines don't do very well anymore in any field, and people would rather surf the web than read, so perhaps in the future we'll read Acrobat files for $2.99. Who knows. The future is wide open.
It's all worth it. I hate mosquitos. Let's wipe them off the face of the earth. Squish, squish, squish! Ditto for midges, no-see-ums, ticks, biting flies, horseflies, and tapeworms. Let's get rid of wasps and fire ants as well; who the heck needs'em?
I'd like someone to build a machine that honeypots mosquitos and ticks and destroys them. A pink, flesh-like substance that coats the robot and exudes CO2 and sweat-like vapor, walks on two stump-like legs coated with the same "flesh", and poisons parasites that attack it. Release millions of them every year in forests, wetlands, river banks, etc., and let them gradually suck up all the ticks and crap that infest these areas until they are gone. Of course you'll have to put up with these weird, naked stumps wandering around when you go out hiking, but that's a small price to pay.
Ah, to be able to lie in the grass again and watch the sun go down without having to be drenched in Deet.
It probably doesn't work with TT and T2 for the same reasons that the existing Sandisk product doesn't: the power requirements of the card. It's a bit of an engineering problem because the TT and T2 SDIO sockets apparently were not designed for this kind of use, and Sandisk has been laboring to get their wifi card to work with even the Zire 71.
You can read more about the Sandisk situation here.
It's not really news that a wifi card has been released for a limited selection of Palm handhelds, since a product's already out there from Sandisk.
An interesting news story would be an interview with Palm executives on why the heck it's taken so long and why support for wifi is so limited. One can guess that they're committing the typical blunder of trying not to hurt sales of the Tungsten C, which has built in wifi. I wish the people who ran Handera would take over Palm (or PalmOne, or whatever they're calling themselves this month).
I hate the fact that I'm going to have to consider an iPaq for my next handheld because I've lost faith in Palm to deliver great products. I prefer PalmOS to the Windows Pocket thingy. Say, maybe it's time to take another look at Zaurus
I saw a panel discussion on this topic by some of the Harvard folks involved in setting up the Harvard stem cell research center. Bush's initial decision was to bar all federal spending on embryo related work. A panel of experts from Harvard and other institutions went there to negotiate a compromise with him, and he then agreed to allow continued work with existing cell cultures but not to allow any new ones. There were 60 stem cell lines available at the time, but only 18 of these were actually available for various reasons.
This was not much of a compromise because new cultures are needed, and researchers who do develop their own cultures must keep all their lab equipment separate and make sure they are not using any federally-funded test tubes or whatever to do this work. Kind of like keeping a kosher kitchen. It's a bit ridiculous from the researcher's point of view, and of course this way Bush can claim to be "pro science".
Regarding creationism, there have been some pretty big school systems that have either adopted or are considering adopting creationism. Google for "teaching creationism in school" and you will learn that the Cobb county school system in Georgia, the state's second largest, mandated creationism be taught a couple of years ago, and the Kansas State Board of Education in 1999 also did so, though I believe both systems have since modified their stance under the pressure of lawsuits from civil liberties groups. Similar things have occurred in Ohio and Colorado. It would be funny if it weren't so serious; evolutionary theory is the basis of modern biology, and to mandate some loony alternative theory is to undermine science education.
Basically I'm worried that American science is today simply drifting along on its own momentum with no national leadership. Some could argue that's a good thing. Let the researchers seek private funding and just do what they damn well please. The free market rules. But without the billions of dollars of federal funding to jump start major projects such as Fermilab and the space program, some of the great achievements that lie ahead will probably take place elsewhere. Of course it doesn't help that students today shun science and that there's a shortage of good science teachers in public schools. America has turned away from science.
The U.S. was once the mecca of science in the world. Students flocked here from many other countries to learn from the best teachers and to work in the best facilities. Great experiments were conducted into the nature of matter at places like the Berkeley physics lab, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Pioneering visionaries planned, funded, and executed great projects like the manned landings on the Moon. Nuclear energy was exploited, with all its pros and cons.
Today, the U.S. has retreated from its leadership role and now tries to participate in science on the cheap, by roping in questionable allies such as France and China to help pay for experiments such as ITER that once would have been a purely American sandbox. The already meagre space budget has been sapped by an irrelevant and compromised space station and the oversold space shuttle. The president has barred the funding of promising biological research using embryonic stem cells, thus driving stem cell researchers to other countries to continue their work, and communities across the country are forcing schools to teach "creationism" in biology courses. School kids avoid hard subjects like science and foreign graduate students in the sciences are now the majority--and will they want to stay after they graduate?
In my opinion, the U.S. should turn its attention to science once again and realize that it is in a race with Europe and east Asia to regain and retain the critical lead in science and technological development. The nationstates and alliances of nations which stay focused on scientific achievement will be the economic leaders of the 21st century, while the lazy others will fall behind and become irrelevant.
Thanks for the information; that's good to know. An informative post in a days-old topic. Baen Books is really a pioneer; I hope they continue to do well.
One thing I would add is that it's nice to have a searchable format in addition to the hard copy format. Most science fiction novels (my primary entertainment reading) don't come with extensive indices but once in a while, with my very poor short term memory, I really want to go back and find something and it can take quite a lot of grubbing around.
Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.
I would love to have the electronic version of whatever book I'm currently reading; I'll always have it on my handy pocket-sized Palm, so I'll be more likely to read bits of it while waiting for the bus, on the toilet at the office, and other places where I'm not likely to have the physical book handy.
Of course, it's not likely ever to happen since people will inevitably upload the books and ruin it for everyone, but wouldn't it be nice if an honor system actually worked? (same principle as, if you see a wallet lying on the street, you leave it because the owner will eventually retrace their steps and find it.)
But on the other
hand, by tricking the 419 scammer out of his money, we are breaking
OUR laws (be that in the US, Europe, or wherever you are...
That's fuzzy thinking.
What law did this fellow break, exactly? He asked someone to send him some money, they did, and he kept it. There was no legal, signed contract between them. There was no handshake or face-to-face meeting or phone call or anything. Just an unsolicited email requesting money that was answered with an equally unsolicited request for money.
If someone walks up to you on the street and says, "Please give me your bank account number so that I can share millions of dollars with you" and you say "OK, but it will cost you $80" and they hand you $80, have you stolen their money if you then don't share your bank account number with them, which they want for obviously nefarious purposes? I know of no law that covers this sort of behavior between two private individuals.
Morally speaking you have more of a point. The question is, is it immoral to steal from a thief, or rather in this case to trick a thief into giving you some of their ill-gotten gains? Questionable.
Yeah, that's true, but still, they did say, "we're also seeking ideas that will make Firefox 2.0 blow every other browser out of the water" and I took that as an open invitation, which dozens of other people did as well if you read further down the page. That said, several of my ideas do involve some sort of intelligent or adaptive behavior on the part of the browser.
Frankly I'm not convinced that "machine learning" (whatever that is) is the key to making a killer browser. Sure, make it reasonably smart so that you don't have to repeatedly instruct it to do trivial things, but mainly make it so slick and well oiled that it stays out of your way and lets you surf with ease.
It's sometimes the little things that make the big difference. Marketing people have known that for years. The best tech doesn't win; the best presentation does. Software features that seem trivial or unnecessary sometimes turn out to be so popular with users that they make or break the product. It's probably not fair but that's life.
- "browse-ahead" -- background loading of likely next page in a multi-screen document, e.g. "next", "2", "click here for next page", etc. Mozilla does have "Link Prefetching" but I'm not sure any sites have implemented it.
- Opera-like hotkey access to useful actions, e.g.: "G" toggles images on the page, "U" toggles user defined style sheet (to get rid of ridiculous colors or unreadable fonts)
- Prefbar (waiting for the port; it's the main thing keeping me from switching from Mozilla). But go ahead and make it part of the distribution rather than an obscure download that non-techies don't even know about.
- Annotate Mode -- changes current page into read/write mode, like word processor, to type in little annotations and notes on a page. Can then email the page, print it, or save it locally for future reference. Simpler than the tedious edit-source or copy-and-paste-into-editor approaches and it would lower the threshold to read interactively and critically. Maybe a way to easy-email edits back to the web page's author, too.
- Related to Annotate Mode: allow user to drag elements of a page around to suit one's taste. E.g., drag the Flash ad box down to the bottom of the page, causing the text to realign. This may be a solution in need of a problem, but it would be fun anyway. Anything to empower the user a bit more is a good thing.
- Thumbnail an entire site, the way some site management tools do: create a sitemap with miniature images of each page arranged in a tree map. Sometimes it's impossible to find a particular page on a large and poorly organized site, and this might help with that.
- Optionally, play a sound when a page has finished loading.
- Intelligent form fill in. Mozilla currently does have form completion but it seems rough and unfinished; it does stupid things like putting my street address twice if there's a second street address field. It also always asks me if I want it to remember the fields I've filled in, even though I've sayed "yes" to that question for the exact same form and exact same data dozens of times before. Of all things I can think of, this would truly be the useful "AI" feature.
- Related to intelligent form fill in, add a "keystroke recorder" feature for scripting purposes, somewhat like MS Word's macro recorder or the Emacs keystroke recorder. This is for automating tedious and repetitive tasks such as going to a particular site, logging in, filling in some form, getting to a particular screen, capturing the information, etc.
- Ship a few exemplary themes with the browser. Currently the user has to download any alternative themes. Of course, keep the "get new themes" command but make it a bit easier for the non-techies.
- Multi-line bookmark button bar. When you add too many bookmarks to the "personal toolbar" it just spills over the right edge with a little indicator arrow.
- Word wrapping in the browser. It's incredible to me that the browser doesn't already have this. Opera has had this feature for years in the form of a user-defined style sheet that you can toggle to instantly wrap long lines to the width of the browser window.
- Intelligent typo interpretation. Some kind of mechanism that, if the user wishes, will browse to the correct place despite a typo such as "yahoo.cmo", with a meaningful symbol or message describing why it did what it did. Also, an easy way to abbreviate links, such as "g" for "groups.google.com" and so forth. This feature exists in the bookmark handler, but I mean an easy one-step kind of thing that lowers the barrier to using it, like a "define code" button right next to the location bar.
Suggest you get a part time job at your local megaplex, so you can get paid to see the movie. It's great fun, worth seeing. My wife and I went and saw the matinee today; saved a few bucks and had a great time. I don't care about the plot holes; I suspended disbelief the moment I walked in the theatre.
It's not the same as the comicbook and actually I'm glad. It's nice to see a creative, superbly executed interpretation. The comics have a nostalgic place in my heart (and millions of other boomers') but I kind of like this modernized version. In the old Spidey comicbooks, it was the early Sixties and Peter and his fellow male H.S. students wore ties , V-neck sweaters and nice pants; this was a public school for chrissakes.
I don't miss the web devices; it was a bit of a kludge to complete the arachnid effect. It's about as believable that webbing shoots out of his wrists as any of his other powers. As some others have pointed out, the amount of energy he burns must be tremendous; yet, he never seems to eat--well, except for a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk served by his landlord's daughter. (There's a plot thread that they never followed up on. She's clearly interested in Peter but maybe we have to wait until the next movie to drop the other shoe.)
The in-air battle scenes between Spidey and Doc Ock were phenomenal, better than the ones with Green Goblin (though we may get a reprise of a Spidey vs. Gobby battle or two in 2007).
I liked the fact that MJ and Aunt May were rather spunky and took a few swats at the bad guys themselves. The women in a lot of these super hero movies seem to be mere decoration, but these two are the exceptions.
Go see it in a theatre with a large screen, decent surround sound, sub woofers etc. It's better than watching a downloaded AVI on your computer screen and more social, besides;-)
A Palm with multimedia features (Tungsten, Zire 72, etc.) works nicely. I have a 512MB card in my T|T that is good for a few CDs' worth of MP3 music, but I have a few other things that I like to keep on the card that take up a bit of space: my entire wedding photo album viewable with Acid Image, BackupMan backup images, a few documents, dictionaries, Voice Memo recordings of various events.
I would love to put a few more CDs on the card. Actually, even 2G seems a bit small and I hope they bump it up to 4G in a year or so. That would start to be a serious library of music.
Flash storage is a synergistic part of a PDA and can grow arbitrarily large as you think of more ways to virtualize your life onto the card. For example, physicians are already loading upwards of a dozen large medical references and databases. Lawyers are carrying electronic law libraries around, and I could see real estate agents putting hundreds of houses with images and stats into a nice handheld database that they sync with a desktop every day.
Now combine this monster with an email-enabled phone and you have an all purpose personal information device. Bring it on!
Well, each person's needs are different. Since you don't need it, you can save your $60. But I still have a lot of uses for Windows software, and Crossover has saved me from having to go boot up my Windows laptop, to wit:
- IE 6.0 -- some sites simply won't work with Mozilla. Rather than mess around, I can easily run IE now right on my Linux desktop, view the offending page, and later whip off a scolding message to their webmaster.
- MS Word 2000 -- sometimes I have to save a document in Word format, and I need a way to confirm that Open Office did the right thing. Word 97 Viewer is useful but I feel safer when I can easily edit a document using the native tool.
- Photoshop 6.0 -- works terrifically! I am an enthusiastic GIMP user, but it's nice to have all the best tools for a job, not just some of them.
- Finale 2001 -- Finally, I can view and print my music from Linux! Works like a charm. Think I'll d/l Finale 2004 and see if that works....
- MS Excel 2000 -- for occasional use.
- MS Powerpoint
- Efax Viewer -- I wish they'd send faxes in some more obvious format like jpeg but anyway this works great with crossover.
- H&R Taxcut 2002 - the only thing wrong with it was that it would crash when I clicked "Help". Now if Turbotax worked, I'd be happy as a clam.
- Palm apps that come packaged as.EXE or use a SETUP.EXE, like f'r'instance Adobe Acrobat for Palm. I can safely execute these programs, let them "install" to my fake_windows directory, then grab the Palm.prc files and manually install them.
- Little Windows freeware or shareware utilities that do stupid little things and expect you to send $20, like finding all the images inside a DLL or EXE. I can d/l these, try them out, etc., from the convenience of my Linux desktop. Often they have strange glitches but the general functionality is usually intact.
I wish Dreamweaver MX 2004 worked in wine. Maybe Crossover 3.1???
Would you care to name the book and identify the things about it that caused it to be "universally despised"?
I'm genuinely curious, not having read Tanenbaum's books but respecting him for creating Minix.
I haven't noticed that he's particularly enthralled with himself; he simply stated facts about his background and accomplishments and rather mercilessly savaging this Brown character, who obviously deserves it.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're kidding but it's still a sad commentary on the way the legal profession has undermined the economy.
Those lawyers have done nothing for SCO and yet they have greatly enriched themselves from shareholders' money. Granted some of that money came from outfits with questionable morals themselves, like The Canopy Group, but that's also money that could have been invested in hiring software people to help improve their products and their competitive position in the market. SCO was once a reputable company, after all.
Here's a question for some legal expert. Since Boies et al were paid in stock a while back, they are now a major stockholder in SCO, 25% as I recall. I wonder if they can therefore be sued by any parties who have a grievance against SCO? Like practically the entire open source development community, IBM, Redhat, Novell, etc.
I have personal experience with the damage they have caused; I have dealt with people in the embedded market who were avoiding embedded Linux because of "the lawsuit". The very lawyers who represent this rogue company are its owners; they are purely and openly in it for the profit regardless of right and wrong.
Thank you for proving my point; parent post reads like a commentary right out of The Nation--it's pure opinion with almost no facts cited and is considered "insightful" at the moment. But people who follow The Nation (or The New Republic, Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, Boston Globe, CBS, and other mainstream left-leaning editorial vehicles and broadcasters) don't have a need for facts, especially inconvenient ones, in this emotion-driven election year.
Expecting Iraq to be "a perfect war" is a typically American way of thinking--people are impatient and don't remember history. Wars in fact are messy, imperfect, and foggy; it dehumanizes the conquered and the conquerors alike. Post-war Europe 59 years ago was a horrible mess with rampant looting, rape, and general lawless behavior by soldiers and civilians alike. There were the "displaced persons" camps that were little better than the concentration camps they replaced and the shameful incidents of ships full of Jewish refugees being turned away from safe havens. But the "Good War" conviction was so deeply engrained in Americans' minds by then that they simply disregarded such things, if indeed they even heard about them.
I don't see Iraq as a failure of the Bush administration so much as a failure of the Arab people, who in shockingly large numbers have behaved more like a pack of murderously psychotic savages than the civilized people one would have expected from such an ancient civilization.
The U.S. military forces in fact were shockingly successful; they smashed the Iraqi army and took the country in record time, with an absolute minimum of civilian casualties compared to any similar campaign in history. Expecting the Americans to prevent any of a thousand different problems is like expecting the police in your city to prevent all burglaries and murders. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that the Americans (and British and other partners) have in fact done a pretty competent job under the circumstances. Consider the "tons of looted explosives" incident that Kerry is making political hay over: far from ignoring the dump, the Americans in fact took 250 tons of munitions away from that site, unless the officer in charge of the project was simply lying through his teeth to the Associated Press.
The problem that no one seems ready to recognize is simply that Iraqis weren't ready to be liberated. They have apparently no concept of rule of law and the savagery we now see, with armed thugs blowing up children and the hostage fiasco, is a statement about them, not us. I increasingly believe that Americans and Europeans in our soft, peaceful societies can't fathom how people could stoop to such levels, so we simply blame the invading forces as a substitute for honest analysis.
Regarding the economy, it's driven by macroeconomic forces that Bush could not in 4 years possibly have affected, perhaps not even in 10 years. It's absurd to assign blame or praise to the person currently sitting in the White House for 20-year cycles of boom and bust. Similarly, Clinton lucked out with a post-recession rebound and a tech boom that had less to do with him than with forces that had been set in motion 20 years before he took office. Heck, the 90s boom and US budget surplus was probably more thanks to Reaganomics and the rebound from the 1980 recession than to anything the Democrats ever did--in fact, it was despite anything they ever did.
wtf? Why are seemingly all the pro-Bush, or at least not pro-Kerry comments being modded down? I don't necessarily agree with all of his points but this fellow's posting seemed reasonable enough. I hope a few people take the trouble to metamoderate some of these questionable ratings.
What has turned me off of John Kerry is not so much his liberal ideas about raising taxes and increasing social spending as his rather transparent and hypocritical attacks on Bush. To hear Kerry talk, he seems to believe that Bush is dishonest and incompetent and has accomplished nothing of note either domestically or in his foreign policy. He blames Bush for everything but the weather. Heck, he blames him for global warming. He's got some pie-in-the-sky health care reform plan and he's got a malpractice lawyer for a running mate.
If the Dems presented a candidate with credible foreign policy credentials and some concept of how to spur economic growth, I'd be all over him. As it is, I'm worried Kerry will become a 2nd term Clinton with a hostile Congress and no real mandate to govern other than "Whew at least I'm not George W. Bush!!"
While I don't dispute your analysis, I would offer a "devil's advocate" reason why AOL would put out this IE-based browser. They've been using IE for years and surely they have put a lot of time and, perhaps more importantly, money into adapting it to their purposes.
Some bean counters in their marketing department are going to say, we've invested all this money in this IE-based thing so let's get something out of it, put out an AOL-branded browser just to keep up the name brand recognition. Who knows, perhaps MS paid them to do it.
I believe that they didn't buy Netscape for the browser so much as for the portal and name recognition. Even today, Netscape is a household name and that's worth gold in the strange, illogical world of marketing. Remember also that Netscape open-sourced its browser before it got acquired by AOL (as I recall). AOL didn't need to buy them just to get its hands on the browser source.
We techies may think they have made a dumb mistake but it's worth watching and waiting to see how the market responds. AOL may have fallen greatly since the market boom days, but they're still a marketing force to reckon with. We techies wish they'd adopt the "good guys" like Gecko and Firefox but they have to be convinced they'll make money off it first.
This is a great idea. Why aren't we fully exploiting the power of the wind?
This is an example of the obstacles that American power generating windmills are facing. If ever there was a NIMBY group it's these people. Someone wants to build an offshore set of windmills to power about 3/4 of Cape Cod and surrounding areas in Massachusetts. Since Massachusetts is heavily dependent on important electricity and oil, this seems like a great solution.
Undoubtedly there are some ecological implications, but the NIMBY group clearly is magnifying these issues in order to shoot down the whole idea; they're fishing for excuses. They don't want to have to look at windmills. This is where some federal leadership may be required in order to get the U.S. off its foreign energy dependency.
Maybe while they're at it they should fire their legal counsel and get someone with a little more backbone.
It's common for lawyers to present a cost benefit analysis of this type of situation and quite often they will encourage a settlement, similar to the way a family pays off kidnappers to free a hostage or a retail business pays protection money to some street gang.
One wonders whether there is in fact a conspiracy in the legal world to encourage settlements, because if people challenged every questionable lawsuit that came down the pike, perhaps there would ultimately be fewer such suits, just as if all businesses refused to pay protection money there would be no protection racket (albeit, after some bouts of violence) and there would be no incentive to kidnap hostages either.
The electoral college helps protect smaller states from being dominated by larger states. At one time, Americans identified more with their state than with their country; e.g., Thomas Jefferson declared that "I am a Virginian", not an American. The smaller states feared that the large population centers would swamp them and effectively reduce their voice in government. Therefore, the electoral college sometimes allows a candidate to win who did not win the collective majority.
In 2000, George W. Bush carried 30 states, though most of the most populous states did not favor him. This is truly an example of what the electoral college was designed to do.
These arguments people make today about stealing elections and the unfairness of the system really stem from an ignorance of American history. True, the electoral college system is not perfect and perhaps should be replaced with a simple absolute majority in this age when people no longer identify so strongly with their locales.
Someone else pointed out that there were several presidents who did not win an absolute majority of the vote, but very few actually lost the popular vote. Clinton did not win an absolute majority; more people wanted either GHW Bush or Perot than wanted Clinton by quite a large margin, i.e. about 57% to 43%. However the electoral college gave it to Clinton. Interestingly, no one talks about how unfair it was that Clinton got elected, perhaps because he was lucky enough to preside over a great economic boom that ended just as he was leaving office.
Imagine a group of ten people walking casually into a store, in onesies and twosies, and then suddenly and instantaneously knocking over three shelves, shooting out two security cams, surrounding the cashier and four customers and emptying their cash registers and wallets as the case may be, all without speaking and done so fast that the store clerks don't even have time to register that this is a robbery.
;-)
This kind of stuff is scary. A friend described a group of people doing some sort of flash mob stuff in a park in San Francisco recently. Presumably they were just doing it for fun, or because they don't have a life, but suppose they were rehearsing to overwhelm the flight attendants on a plane or the bank tellers in a bank through nearly instantaneous mob action.
On the other hand, security personnel could easily implement the same techniques, and perhaps even do it better using sophisticated in-ear comm devices and a "mob meister" orchestrating the whole thing from a server room somewhere. For example, plainclothes police could suddenly pounce on an entire street gang, thus avoiding giving them a chance to flee the scene. There are lots of possibilities.
Hmm. This is disturbing. I'm going to stay away from crowds from now on
I'd really like to see this type of technology implemented to store nuclear waste and perhaps other kinds of toxic compounds that are otherwise too expensive to treat.
200,000 years sounds long enough that we'll either not care by then or have evolved into beings that can withstand the radiation.
Perhaps this combined with pebble bed nuclear reactors will at last make nukes a realistic and safe alternative to oil.
A hundred nuclear fission plants using the safer pebble technology and a really solid waste storage approach would go a long way to weaning the U.S. and its allies off the Wahhabi oil machine. They could generate hydrogen during low demand times for use in fuel cell vehicles and straight power for peak time use, and solar power could fill in the gaps.
Well, if the U.S. had not entered Europe then Stalin would probably have beat Hitler on his own. Whether or not US aid made a difference is a separate question, I guess.
As for Japan, Mao's guerillas and the Nationalist army had fought the Japanese to a standstill; Japan was only in control of the big cities at the height of its conquest. It's possible that if Japan had not attacked the US it might have been able to conquer a chunk of China but it really had bitten off more than it could chew.
I would say, it's doubtful that Japan and Germany would have gone on to conquer the U.S.; they were so overextended and unrealistic in their goals. People talk about the limits of American power today, but it would have been even more true of these governments back then.
Anyway, my basic point was that the U.S. is kin and cousin to Europe and has helped promote democracy on every continent. The vitriol and hostility emanating from Western Europe today as regards U.S. military actions in the world are therefore all the more poignant.
I guess the person who modded my original post as "troll" disagrees with Bush's policies. Heh. He just helped make my point; the country is really divided down the middle, and bitterly.
The Europeans are so righteous when it comes to democracy. They also happen to be jealous of the United States and its freedom to act in the world, so they (probably mainly driven by the French) now seek to belittle the US in the eyes of the world.
Remind me again, why did over 295,000 Americans give their lives to free France from the Nazis and why did the U.S. spend countless billions of dollars protecting these people from Stalinism?
What people seem to be missing is that democracy works in the U.S. The Florida election was flawed but it did not result in a military coup or power grab; the competing candidates waited for the courts to decide the outcome. That half the people would be unhappy with the outcome was a given no matter who won.
Indeed, as a direct result of the 2000 elections, record numbers of new voters have been registered in swing states and among traditionally non-voting strata. It's going to be a lively contest even without a bunch of holier-than-thou Euros running around.
I'm also an aspiring sci-fi writer, halfway through my first novel, which deals with apocalyptic uses of nanotech in the near future (next hundred years or so). I believe the article was referring not so much to the quality of current science fiction but rather the declining interest among the general public. Analog's readership, for example, has declined dramatically, and 100K sales of new titles twenty years ago have declined to 20K today.
So far I haven't seen any convincing arguments for why this decline is occurring. It's not even clear it's a decline so much as a shift; fantasy seems to be going strong, and Harry Potter is the poster child for a whole new generation of fantasy fiction.
If I were to speculate (after all, we're talking about what they used to call speculative fiction) I would suggest that the Baby Boomers with their hugely influential buying habits have shifted away from the science fiction of their youth in the 50's, 60's, and 70's and are busy raising kids, saving for their retirement, and vegging out in front of the 300-channel home theater every night. There's just no time anymore for science fiction. They have grown beyond it.
I got back into sci-fi during the 90s after a long hiatus, and while I enjoy some of it, I find the overall literary quality to be below that of mainstream fiction. I still love a good yarn but very, very few authors are capable of building a truly convincing world--Vinge comes close, Asimov is forever, I like David Brin's scientific underpinnings if not his shallow characters, a few others. Philip K. Dick and Clifford Simak are for me the greats of the 60s-70s era; they wrote straight sci-fi yarns with vision, and they chose not to get bogged down in scientific details as some of the newer "techie" authors make the mistake of doing.
The pendulum will swing back again. The Harry Potter generation will branch out and "discover" science fiction next to the fantasy books and reinvigorate the genre. Magazines don't do very well anymore in any field, and people would rather surf the web than read, so perhaps in the future we'll read Acrobat files for $2.99. Who knows. The future is wide open.
It's all worth it. I hate mosquitos. Let's wipe them off the face of the earth. Squish, squish, squish! Ditto for midges, no-see-ums, ticks, biting flies, horseflies, and tapeworms. Let's get rid of wasps and fire ants as well; who the heck needs'em?
I'd like someone to build a machine that honeypots mosquitos and ticks and destroys them. A pink, flesh-like substance that coats the robot and exudes CO2 and sweat-like vapor, walks on two stump-like legs coated with the same "flesh", and poisons parasites that attack it. Release millions of them every year in forests, wetlands, river banks, etc., and let them gradually suck up all the ticks and crap that infest these areas until they are gone. Of course you'll have to put up with these weird, naked stumps wandering around when you go out hiking, but that's a small price to pay.
Ah, to be able to lie in the grass again and watch the sun go down without having to be drenched in Deet.
It probably doesn't work with TT and T2 for the same reasons that the existing Sandisk product doesn't: the power requirements of the card. It's a bit of an engineering problem because the TT and T2 SDIO sockets apparently were not designed for this kind of use, and Sandisk has been laboring to get their wifi card to work with even the Zire 71.
You can read more about the Sandisk situation here.
It's not really news that a wifi card has been released for a limited selection of Palm handhelds, since a product's already out there from Sandisk.
An interesting news story would be an interview with Palm executives on why the heck it's taken so long and why support for wifi is so limited. One can guess that they're committing the typical blunder of trying not to hurt sales of the Tungsten C, which has built in wifi. I wish the people who ran Handera would take over Palm (or PalmOne, or whatever they're calling themselves this month).
I hate the fact that I'm going to have to consider an iPaq for my next handheld because I've lost faith in Palm to deliver great products. I prefer PalmOS to the Windows Pocket thingy. Say, maybe it's time to take another look at Zaurus
Re embryo research:
I saw a panel discussion on this topic by some of the Harvard folks involved in setting up the Harvard stem cell research center. Bush's initial decision was to bar all federal spending on embryo related work. A panel of experts from Harvard and other institutions went there to negotiate a compromise with him, and he then agreed to allow continued work with existing cell cultures but not to allow any new ones. There were 60 stem cell lines available at the time, but only 18 of these were actually available for various reasons.
This was not much of a compromise because new cultures are needed, and researchers who do develop their own cultures must keep all their lab equipment separate and make sure they are not using any federally-funded test tubes or whatever to do this work. Kind of like keeping a kosher kitchen. It's a bit ridiculous from the researcher's point of view, and of course this way Bush can claim to be "pro science".
Regarding creationism, there have been some pretty big school systems that have either adopted or are considering adopting creationism. Google for "teaching creationism in school" and you will learn that the Cobb county school system in Georgia, the state's second largest, mandated creationism be taught a couple of years ago, and the Kansas State Board of Education in 1999 also did so, though I believe both systems have since modified their stance under the pressure of lawsuits from civil liberties groups. Similar things have occurred in Ohio and Colorado. It would be funny if it weren't so serious; evolutionary theory is the basis of modern biology, and to mandate some loony alternative theory is to undermine science education.
Basically I'm worried that American science is today simply drifting along on its own momentum with no national leadership. Some could argue that's a good thing. Let the researchers seek private funding and just do what they damn well please. The free market rules. But without the billions of dollars of federal funding to jump start major projects such as Fermilab and the space program, some of the great achievements that lie ahead will probably take place elsewhere. Of course it doesn't help that students today shun science and that there's a shortage of good science teachers in public schools. America has turned away from science.
The U.S. was once the mecca of science in the world. Students flocked here from many other countries to learn from the best teachers and to work in the best facilities. Great experiments were conducted into the nature of matter at places like the Berkeley physics lab, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT. Pioneering visionaries planned, funded, and executed great projects like the manned landings on the Moon. Nuclear energy was exploited, with all its pros and cons.
Today, the U.S. has retreated from its leadership role and now tries to participate in science on the cheap, by roping in questionable allies such as France and China to help pay for experiments such as ITER that once would have been a purely American sandbox. The already meagre space budget has been sapped by an irrelevant and compromised space station and the oversold space shuttle. The president has barred the funding of promising biological research using embryonic stem cells, thus driving stem cell researchers to other countries to continue their work, and communities across the country are forcing schools to teach "creationism" in biology courses. School kids avoid hard subjects like science and foreign graduate students in the sciences are now the majority--and will they want to stay after they graduate?
In my opinion, the U.S. should turn its attention to science once again and realize that it is in a race with Europe and east Asia to regain and retain the critical lead in science and technological development. The nationstates and alliances of nations which stay focused on scientific achievement will be the economic leaders of the 21st century, while the lazy others will fall behind and become irrelevant.
Thanks for the information; that's good to know. An informative post in a days-old topic. Baen Books is really a pioneer; I hope they continue to do well.
One thing I would add is that it's nice to have a searchable format in addition to the hard copy format. Most science fiction novels (my primary entertainment reading) don't come with extensive indices but once in a while, with my very poor short term memory, I really want to go back and find something and it can take quite a lot of grubbing around.
Even easier: if you buy the hard copy of a book, you get a free download of the e-book. Sort of like providing the source code with a software application.
I would love to have the electronic version of whatever book I'm currently reading; I'll always have it on my handy pocket-sized Palm, so I'll be more likely to read bits of it while waiting for the bus, on the toilet at the office, and other places where I'm not likely to have the physical book handy.
Of course, it's not likely ever to happen since people will inevitably upload the books and ruin it for everyone, but wouldn't it be nice if an honor system actually worked? (same principle as, if you see a wallet lying on the street, you leave it because the owner will eventually retrace their steps and find it.)
That's fuzzy thinking.
What law did this fellow break, exactly? He asked someone to send him some money, they did, and he kept it. There was no legal, signed contract between them. There was no handshake or face-to-face meeting or phone call or anything. Just an unsolicited email requesting money that was answered with an equally unsolicited request for money.
If someone walks up to you on the street and says, "Please give me your bank account number so that I can share millions of dollars with you" and you say "OK, but it will cost you $80" and they hand you $80, have you stolen their money if you then don't share your bank account number with them, which they want for obviously nefarious purposes? I know of no law that covers this sort of behavior between two private individuals.
Morally speaking you have more of a point. The question is, is it immoral to steal from a thief, or rather in this case to trick a thief into giving you some of their ill-gotten gains? Questionable.
Yeah, that's true, but still, they did say, "we're also seeking ideas that will make Firefox 2.0 blow every other browser out of the water" and I took that as an open invitation, which dozens of other people did as well if you read further down the page. That said, several of my ideas do involve some sort of intelligent or adaptive behavior on the part of the browser.
Frankly I'm not convinced that "machine learning" (whatever that is) is the key to making a killer browser. Sure, make it reasonably smart so that you don't have to repeatedly instruct it to do trivial things, but mainly make it so slick and well oiled that it stays out of your way and lets you surf with ease.
It's sometimes the little things that make the big difference. Marketing people have known that for years. The best tech doesn't win; the best presentation does. Software features that seem trivial or unnecessary sometimes turn out to be so popular with users that they make or break the product. It's probably not fair but that's life.
Here are some of my ideas for improving Firefox:
- "browse-ahead" -- background loading of likely next page in a multi-screen document, e.g. "next", "2", "click here for next page", etc. Mozilla does have "Link Prefetching" but I'm not sure any sites have implemented it.
- Opera-like hotkey access to useful actions, e.g.: "G" toggles images on the page, "U" toggles user defined style sheet (to get rid of ridiculous colors or unreadable fonts)
- Prefbar (waiting for the port; it's the main thing keeping me from switching from Mozilla). But go ahead and make it part of the distribution rather than an obscure download that non-techies don't even know about.
- Annotate Mode -- changes current page into read/write mode, like word processor, to type in little annotations and notes on a page. Can then email the page, print it, or save it locally for future reference. Simpler than the tedious edit-source or copy-and-paste-into-editor approaches and it would lower the threshold to read interactively and critically. Maybe a way to easy-email edits back to the web page's author, too.
- Related to Annotate Mode: allow user to drag elements of a page around to suit one's taste. E.g., drag the Flash ad box down to the bottom of the page, causing the text to realign. This may be a solution in need of a problem, but it would be fun anyway. Anything to empower the user a bit more is a good thing.
- Thumbnail an entire site, the way some site management tools do: create a sitemap with miniature images of each page arranged in a tree map. Sometimes it's impossible to find a particular page on a large and poorly organized site, and this might help with that.
- Optionally, play a sound when a page has finished loading.
- Intelligent form fill in. Mozilla currently does have form completion but it seems rough and unfinished; it does stupid things like putting my street address twice if there's a second street address field. It also always asks me if I want it to remember the fields I've filled in, even though I've sayed "yes" to that question for the exact same form and exact same data dozens of times before. Of all things I can think of, this would truly be the useful "AI" feature.
- Related to intelligent form fill in, add a "keystroke recorder" feature for scripting purposes, somewhat like MS Word's macro recorder or the Emacs keystroke recorder. This is for automating tedious and repetitive tasks such as going to a particular site, logging in, filling in some form, getting to a particular screen, capturing the information, etc.
- Ship a few exemplary themes with the browser. Currently the user has to download any alternative themes. Of course, keep the "get new themes" command but make it a bit easier for the non-techies.
- Multi-line bookmark button bar. When you add too many bookmarks to the "personal toolbar" it just spills over the right edge with a little indicator arrow.
- Word wrapping in the browser. It's incredible to me that the browser doesn't already have this. Opera has had this feature for years in the form of a user-defined style sheet that you can toggle to instantly wrap long lines to the width of the browser window.
- Intelligent typo interpretation. Some kind of mechanism that, if the user wishes, will browse to the correct place despite a typo such as "yahoo.cmo", with a meaningful symbol or message describing why it did what it did. Also, an easy way to abbreviate links, such as "g" for "groups.google.com" and so forth. This feature exists in the bookmark handler, but I mean an easy one-step kind of thing that lowers the barrier to using it, like a "define code" button right next to the location bar.
Suggest you get a part time job at your local megaplex, so you can get paid to see the movie. It's great fun, worth seeing. My wife and I went and saw the matinee today; saved a few bucks and had a great time. I don't care about the plot holes; I suspended disbelief the moment I walked in the theatre.
;-)
It's not the same as the comicbook and actually I'm glad. It's nice to see a creative, superbly executed interpretation. The comics have a nostalgic place in my heart (and millions of other boomers') but I kind of like this modernized version. In the old Spidey comicbooks, it was the early Sixties and Peter and his fellow male H.S. students wore ties , V-neck sweaters and nice pants; this was a public school for chrissakes.
I don't miss the web devices; it was a bit of a kludge to complete the arachnid effect. It's about as believable that webbing shoots out of his wrists as any of his other powers. As some others have pointed out, the amount of energy he burns must be tremendous; yet, he never seems to eat--well, except for a piece of chocolate cake and a glass of milk served by his landlord's daughter. (There's a plot thread that they never followed up on. She's clearly interested in Peter but maybe we have to wait until the next movie to drop the other shoe.)
The in-air battle scenes between Spidey and Doc Ock were phenomenal, better than the ones with Green Goblin (though we may get a reprise of a Spidey vs. Gobby battle or two in 2007).
I liked the fact that MJ and Aunt May were rather spunky and took a few swats at the bad guys themselves. The women in a lot of these super hero movies seem to be mere decoration, but these two are the exceptions.
Go see it in a theatre with a large screen, decent surround sound, sub woofers etc. It's better than watching a downloaded AVI on your computer screen and more social, besides
A Palm with multimedia features (Tungsten, Zire 72, etc.) works nicely. I have a 512MB card in my T|T that is good for a few CDs' worth of MP3 music, but I have a few other things that I like to keep on the card that take up a bit of space: my entire wedding photo album viewable with Acid Image, BackupMan backup images, a few documents, dictionaries, Voice Memo recordings of various events.
I would love to put a few more CDs on the card. Actually, even 2G seems a bit small and I hope they bump it up to 4G in a year or so. That would start to be a serious library of music.
Flash storage is a synergistic part of a PDA and can grow arbitrarily large as you think of more ways to virtualize your life onto the card. For example, physicians are already loading upwards of a dozen large medical references and databases. Lawyers are carrying electronic law libraries around, and I could see real estate agents putting hundreds of houses with images and stats into a nice handheld database that they sync with a desktop every day.
Now combine this monster with an email-enabled phone and you have an all purpose personal information device. Bring it on!
Well, each person's needs are different. Since you don't need it, you can save your $60. But I still have a lot of uses for Windows software, and Crossover has saved me from having to go boot up my Windows laptop, to wit:
.EXE or use a SETUP.EXE, like f'r'instance Adobe Acrobat for Palm. I can safely execute these programs, let them "install" to my fake_windows directory, then grab the Palm .prc files and manually install them.
- IE 6.0 -- some sites simply won't work with Mozilla. Rather than mess around, I can easily run IE now right on my Linux desktop, view the offending page, and later whip off a scolding message to their webmaster.
- MS Word 2000 -- sometimes I have to save a document in Word format, and I need a way to confirm that Open Office did the right thing. Word 97 Viewer is useful but I feel safer when I can easily edit a document using the native tool.
- Photoshop 6.0 -- works terrifically! I am an enthusiastic GIMP user, but it's nice to have all the best tools for a job, not just some of them.
- Finale 2001 -- Finally, I can view and print my music from Linux! Works like a charm. Think I'll d/l Finale 2004 and see if that works....
- MS Excel 2000 -- for occasional use.
- MS Powerpoint
- Efax Viewer -- I wish they'd send faxes in some more obvious format like jpeg but anyway this works great with crossover.
- H&R Taxcut 2002 - the only thing wrong with it was that it would crash when I clicked "Help". Now if Turbotax worked, I'd be happy as a clam.
- Palm apps that come packaged as
- Little Windows freeware or shareware utilities that do stupid little things and expect you to send $20, like finding all the images inside a DLL or EXE. I can d/l these, try them out, etc., from the convenience of my Linux desktop. Often they have strange glitches but the general functionality is usually intact.
I wish Dreamweaver MX 2004 worked in wine. Maybe Crossover 3.1???
Would you care to name the book and identify the things about it that caused it to be "universally despised"?
I'm genuinely curious, not having read Tanenbaum's books but respecting him for creating Minix.
I haven't noticed that he's particularly enthralled with himself; he simply stated facts about his background and accomplishments and rather mercilessly savaging this Brown character, who obviously deserves it.