So lose your internet connection and your PC becomes just a heavy paperweight? Gee, thanks but no thanks.
And this is so much different than what happens if Google didn't host your files?
More seriously, I think arguments about how screwed you are when you lose your internet connection sound a bit like arguments That Crazy Old Man used to make about electricity, and why those new-fangled electric gadgets were never going to catch on.
The dude said recent back there. CSS 1.0
dates from 1996 with a revision in 1999. CSS 1.0 is now finally reasonably well-supported by modern browsers. CSS 2.0 was first a recommendation in 1998, but wasn't able to be completely implemented until the standard was fixed. CSS may be brilliant, but CSS 2.0 is a 1998 idea. Somebody born in 1998 would be turning 7 this year. CSS 3.0 is still be hashed out. Recent W3C standards have not (yet) had anything like the effect of CSS, and even CSS 2.0 was very slow to get above a threshold of support.
Only one thing irritated me about Keynote 1. It didn't automatically resize text (font and line spacing) in bulleted lists to fit the box. Does 2.0 do this?
I feel your pain, but the answer is "no". And, in Apple's defense, I think you could argue this is a feature and not a bug. If Keynote did what you would like, it would be an invitation to create all those maddening Powerpoint presentations with unreadably small text (when projected in an actual venue). I've learned to accept using a continuation slide if what I really want to do requires more bullets than space.
...has issues. Here are the great things about Keynote 2.0:
Like all Cocoa apps, you get emacs-style editing keys for free.
99% of the infuriating bugs in Keynote 1.0 have been fixed.
"Paste and match style" (not the exact name of the feature)
Vastly improved table handling.
Better inspectors
Improvements in load/save times
Interactive quicktime export
Can eat its own dogfood: check out the interactive
introduction to Pages and Keynote that comes with the package.
Basically, if you liked Keynote, you will really, REALLY like Keynote 2.0. If you hated Keynote, you're much more likely to be satisfied. Unfortunately, it still doesn't do HTML Export.
Pages is an interesting concept. It does have the same emacs-style editing keys, paste with style, and an innovative templating idea. But its Word input is *very* buggy for documents with lots of placed graphics. It can't round-trip Word documents.
Its HTML import is decent, but its export is very disappointing; it does use CSS, but then also garbages up many of the tags with ad hoc style entities. It doesn't round-trip HTML. The basic notion of styles is very nice, but rudimentary, and it doesn't let you define your own style sheet in CSS 2 or CSS 3 and be done with it. It was nice that they included letter templates, but the styles on those were mostly pretty twee; it would be easy enough, though, to template your own letterhead. The nucleus of a very good idea (similar file format for Pages and Keynote) right now mostly benefits Keynote over Pages.
The nicest things I can say about Pages are that it would be a nice choice for any document you have that is shorter than about 8 pages or so and/or happens to match a pre-existing template well. It will be the King of Flyers and mailers. Also, there is the distinct possibility that some things will be fixed in dot versions, and that Pages 2.0 will be as improved as Keynote 2.0. If they introduce that next big upgrade *next January*, they might really have something.
So iWork was completely worth my $39 (edu pricing) just for the vastly improved Keynote. It would have been worth $79 (regular list) for the same reason. Many people who would be tempted to do plainish documents in Pages might be better off using TextEdit, which is actually a service under Mac OS X 10.3
I'm baffled at people's failure to see how this would trivially make a fair amount of money.
Google already gets a ton of revenue from targetted advertising. People really do click on those ad links, and Google really does get a cut. But note first that there is a big difference between clicking on the link and actually ordering a product. Note second that the difference between calling the vendor and buying the product is smaller. I'm sure that many vendors would be much happier to have people call them, where they can pitch them more easily than any web page. But to make sure people use this a lot, you have to make it easy, and no different from making a phonecall. But then, once you've gone that far, you might as well offer the VOIP for cheap or for free and use what amounts to an interactive Yellow Pages funding model.
You probably do have to cap people's calling at some amount, but if they make the service anything like gmail, it will be a nice, high number. And this won't replace cell-phones for many people. But local and long distance phone prices, which have been down to 3 cents or fewer per minute, probably just did crash all the way to zero.
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the place that actually values skills plus plus experience plus maturity plus the desire to have a normal family life is nowhere to be found on either coast, as far as I can tell.
But there are lots of interesting opportunities out there off the coasts. The money is not as good, but neither are housing prices, and if you can earn enough, you can always fly away to whatever it is you miss most about where you are. The places to be include the obvious (e.g., Minneapolis) and the possibly less obvious (e.g., college towns like Ann Arbor, MI, Madison, WI Lawrence KS, and Columbia, MO) There is something to be said for a place that has both Trader Joe's and a very nice house under $250K.
I'm replying to you on a G4 iBook which was given to me for free, simply because the folks at Apple decided that my old G3 700 iBook (the one with the notorious video problem) had to go in for repairs one time too many.
Oh, you just *suck*. Mine was in for this only twice, and you're telling me that if I'd been just a bit more annoying, I'd have gotten a G4 iBook instead? Grrr... Now, I can predict that if mine blows a third time, they're not going to give me the G4, so when that happens, I'll just send you email, and you'll give me mine. Okay?
You want this one instead, its got loads more info on what it does and how it works, plus some code examples for the gimps.
Gosh, yes. That's a much better link. Specifically, and most impressively, you could read about:
Command-Line Integration
There's one more thing about Spotlight that should be mentioned. Since the core of Spotlight lives at the very lowest levels of the operating system, it is only natural that there are some command-line tools for power-users to work with file system meta-data and perform queries.
The first command is mdls. Just as traditional Unix ls command will list all of the files in a directory, mdls will list all of the meta-data attributes for a file. Here's an example of running the command on an image:
And then it goes on to discuss mdls and the just as cool "mdfind". I'm sorry, but this looks like the bomb. 2005 may become the year when people will feel like they have to start justifying the purchase of a Windows box instead of a Mac rather than the other way around.
OS X is great, but it certainly isn't perfect. For one thing it is still (and was in OS
Actually, you don't want Single Finder. What you really want is Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher. That just replaced your whole screen with a new screen full of the second app. Basically, it was a hack that ran Mac OS n times in RAM and just jumped between sessions. But, Lord, was it great! No confusion, full-sceeen applicationj goodness...these days, you can *almost* run your Mac OS X system this way with cmd-Tab and maximized windows. Imagine if all apps ran in full screen mode (like Preview) except with the friendly menu bar and what you saw is where you were...and everything could be done from the keyboard.
Now that's funny. The funniest lines from this article are about the 96% forecast miss made by IDC about Itanium server sales:
Remember IDC specializes in crunching numbers and predicting where various markets will go. It could be suggested that a monkey with a nasty crack habit could have been at least 90 percent wrong about Itanic.
That would have been even funnier if they had gotten the wording right; we needed to read no worse than 90 percent wrong about the Itanic.
Good thing that a quality outfit like HP wasn't intimately involved in this disaster of a chip design. Oh, wait a minute...
Anonymous Coward asks:
Where does it say that no two letters can have the same value?
It doesn't, here, but that's a general rule for cryptarithmetic. Think of it as a substitution cipher for arithmetic.
Solve this cryptic equation, realizing of course that values for M and E could be interchanged. No leading zeroes are allowed.
WWWDOT - GOOGLE = DOTCOM
Ah, this takes me back to my CMU days.:-)
The stipulation about leading zeros, plus the fact that zero never causes a carry so that x - 0 = x means that nothing but L could be zero. Inspection indicates that L can't be anything but zero, so: L = 0.
Because no two letters can have the same value, and because W > G (first column), W > 2. Trying W=3 creates a problem because 3 - G = D, so G and D are 1, and 2 respectively except then C is also 1. (Trying G and D the other way also gets you stuck on the W - 0 column later.) Trying W=4 creates a simliar problem because G and D become 1 and 3 respectively, giving you C=2 but then 0 = 2. Spotting the problem with low values for W, but also seeing that W cannot be 9 or 8 since at least one of the two subtractions of W-0 must generate a borrow (logic omitted), you now try W=7. Since that meens 0 > 7, you try 0 = 8; that gives you the values T = 9 while G and D are 5 and 1, so C = 4 and M = 3. Nothing = 2.
So 777589 - 188106 = 589483
Herb Simon would have been amused that somebody was using cryptarithmetic in a job interview situation.
and it now appears that my best chance to get an invite is to engage in
unrewarded bar-press behavior until I get a lucky number. I should know better, but excuse me while I refresh this other page here a few thousand more times...
Or, not. The refresh time on that site is now down to 5 seconds a pull, and the RNG is dishing out numbers up to 100,000. So the expectation would be to get a "hit" once every...hey,
let's ask Google...ah, 5.78 days. I think I'll try a different technique.
Here I am, a hardcore email user since...1986. I have sent more email to more people for a longer time than 99.9% of everybody, and I can't get a gmail invite inside of two months? Heck, I give one lecture per semester on the glories of Google. But what makes it extra-ironic is that I'm a psychology professor, and it now appears that my best chance to get an invite is to engage in unrewarded bar-press behavior until I get a lucky number. I should know better, but excuse me while I refresh this other page here a few thousand more times...
Note that the source for the "brain-damaged" comment is not exactly one I would trust as an authority:
James Kellaris, a professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati and author of a study about tunes that stick in your head, said the appeal of random shuffle is likely generational. Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
Now, call me a cynic, but I'm not sure I really believe that a professor of marketing is the best source of information on what is more reasonably a neuropsychology or cognitive neuroscience question. (OK, so maybe marketing experts have some deep connection with brain damage, but I'm *trying* to be kind here.)
I can state this with authority because, marketing, after all, is not exactly brain surgery.:-)
I just hope that the fan isn't as loud as in the previous model. It uses the newer G4, so there is some hope. But the quiet old fanless iMacs were really nice.
Yes, the fan noise of the early eMac is my *only* complaint about the thing. Hell, even the speakers aren't *completely* sucky. I agree with you that the fanless iMacs were incredibly nice...but they weren't silent unless you got one with a hard drive much quieter than the one I have. I'm guessing this one will be very similar in noise properties to the current models, so the question goes out:
How loud is the current eMac in a quiet room?
By my reckoning, if it is half of the apparent loudness of a first generation eMac, the SuperDrive model would be a stupendous machine for any situation where you don't need to lug it around. People are *not* kiddling when they point out this sucker is heavy and handle-less.
Re:Does anyone here HAVE a Gmail account?
on
Google's Next Steps
·
· Score: 1
I have a Gmail account, but then I helped build the thing.
No, current users aren't under an NDA.
He helped build it? Well in that case, I have a few quick questions that can't be answered without either access to an account or access to the mental states of the developers.:-)
Any particular reason for no Safari support yet? Are they missing some javascript features or something?
People have mentioned that message selection functions etc. are vi-like. Does this include a / search function for the current message?
Is it possible to toggle to emacs- (or pine-) like keys?
I'm guessing the search function includes new handy keywords like:subject? (I keep on hoping for that one in deja^H^H^H^HGoogle Groups)
Does it keep the (not-well-documented) boolean search capabilities intact?
Does:site work for:from queries?
It strikes me that gmail could also be ideal for mailing list archives in some situations. Is that supported or contemplated?
Can information in the To:, From:, or Subject: line be used to label messages automatically?
If keystrokes are being trapped for the interface, are editing keys still available in the message composition window? In Safari (by default) and other brosers you can get emacs-style editing keys in text boxes, and these would be hard for me to lose.
And (finally) can html content be automatically suppressed or converted to text?
Sorry for all of the questions, but I thought they might be of interest. If for some reason a direct reply to me is more appropriate, my current(/former?) email address is easily found if you google "Jonathan W. King".
Sorry, but this list is severely lacking. Volkswagen is once again doing a decent business in this country, but we should never forget the car that nearly drove them from the North American continent: the "built in the USA" VW Rabbit.
Oh. My. God. This was the car that had...well, nothing really. The electrical system in particular was a pathetic joke. The Bunny was built in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania until they mercifully shut the plant down in the late 80s. The 1979 Rabbit at one time held, I believe the Consumer Reports title for least reliable car they tracked. Horrible. Just horrible. OK, so you could get a GTi version that was fast. Still a bad car until they turned it into the Jetta, and the Jetta was nothing great in the early years either.
And let's not overlook the humble 12" iBook, unquestionably the best value in light laptops.
Yup. I got my wife one of these for Christmas. Although I have to admit, I'm using it right now. The only tips I have on this one are:
Spend the money to get the 60 gig hard drive; you'll be very happy you did later.
While Mac OS X is usable with 256 MB, I think most Slashdot users would want to bink that up to 640 MB right away.
Obviously you're getting the thing with Airport Extreme.
This does push up the cost some, but it's still very impressive. I got mine er...my wife's for $999 (base) + $65 (HD upgrade) + $89 (Airport Extreme) + tax. That is an educational price. Obviously, nowhere near as fast as a G5 anything, but easily fast enough to take full advantage of the goodness of Mac OS X 10.3, which even my Windows-using friends will concede is "way cool".
Having these kinds of courses is great news for university students. But how specific to Apple UI programming is it? For a university like Stanford, I would sincerely hope that they are focusing on good generic UI design (which just so happens to run on OS X) rather than a "how to write OS X code" type of course. That sort of training belongs in the technical schools, where they teach you the "what" and "how" instead of the "why".
This is Stanford, so I'm guessing they will make it more than just a course where you happen to write some programs for the Mac.
But the real question *I* have for the poster is WHY did you post this this comment under the subject line: gay linux fanboys love the frosty pisshole FP FP? Your comment had *nothing* to do with the subject line...
KDE 3.2 will come out in about a month and Konqueror will come with SVG support out of the box.
OK, so I just checked the
KDE Release Time Line
and the latest word is that KDE 3.2 will be out on February 2, 2004. Beta 1 is out now, Beta 2 is expected out December 4, 2003, and RC1 is January 17, 2004. Obviously, more slippage could occur, but this is still good news. Looking through what SVG they now do support, it strikes me that the essentially full SVG support really could take until 2005. That should still beat Longhorn, however. Now if I only knew what Mac OS X was planning...
KDE 3.2 will come out in about a month and Konqueror will come with SVG support out of the box. IE will have something similar later. The sad fact is that Mozilla's minority complex is so big that they simply won't incorporate anything that isn't in other browsers in a usable form, so Mozilla users will have to wait for Konqueror to hope for a useful SVG-implementation in default-Mozilla.
Wait a minute. What you just said back there suggests that Konqueror is about to support SVG? (Surf, surf, surf) OK, so the real story is that SVG support will come about by it being included in kdegraphics, not (alas) khtml. Also, the level of support promised in KDE 3.2 is well short of the complete spec. What doesn't work yet includes:
Filters
Masking
CSS
Animations
Clearly, a lot of simple (and useful) stuff will work, but a lack of CSS support is pretty unfortunate. As has been pointed out, SVG uses an XML encoding (is this pedantically correct?) and that can get pretty verbose, but CSS can help the situation a lot, as well as making dynamic pages easier to create.
For a moment there, I thought maybe you were suggesting that a complete SVG implementation would be added to khtml, which could have meant that Safari would support SVG, and that would be seriously big news. As it is, I still wonder whether Apple is or will be working on SVG for incorporation into future products. If they are, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this will be released as Open Source.
Still, KDE supporting SVG is probably the best news that SVG has had for quite some time.
4) spending bills are generally considered confidential and usually are not subject to public debate
One nit: it is only the Intelligence spending bills that are considered sensitive in this way. Obviously, sometimes people want to hush up stuff like porkbarrel spending in their districts until after the fact, but this isn't the same thing as what happens to intelligence spending bills. The problem here, of course, is that the new rules had nothing much to do with spending, but were only sneaking along for the ride.
I've noticed Presidents usually keep a lot of their predecessors' policies intact.
Interesting. Have you noticed anything else interesting on your planet?
Not to be obnoxious, but do tell me which Clinton administration policies the Bush administration "kept intact". OK, so they kept Mineta on in the Department of Transportation.
But, that was it. When Bush won the Whitehouse despite not winning even a plurality of the votes, the first thing he did was install a completely different regime that was far to the right of the one he was replacing and consistently to the right of the administration he was promising in his campaign. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Don't count on any Democratic successor to Bush to make a serious attempt to repeal any of this Patriot Act crap.
One should certainly never count on anything, but if Bush actually does end up losing the election, it will be because there was a broad-based consensus that his administration was broadly over-reaching and involved us in a series of tremendously costly policies. In that environment, you can expect a fair amount of pull-back.
IIRC, wasn't the "clipper chip" an idea initiated under the Clinton regime? Democrats may be "liberal" but they're just as quick to trade our privacy and freedoms for so-called security if they think it'll score points with voters.
The Clipper Chip is indeed a fascinating little story of how the political process works, but it is also a story that was played out primarily in the open, and with a lot of open debate. The original Patriot Act was written by Justice and rushed into a vote in the House in a situation where hardly anybody in Congress had even seen the thing, but nobody much could really afford to vote against it given the political climate. Moreover, there is a really good reason that the current legislation was tacked onto the Intelligence Agency funding bill, which is that this bill is written in secret and not generally debated at length. A valid case for secrecy in writing parts of the funding bill should be clear, but the reason why a tremendous increase in federal secret subpoena powers needed to be done quietly is only clear once you realize that the same proposals were a non-starter when Patriot II was leaked previously this year. The provisions passed in secret were unpopular with voters and will not be campaigned on. Bush will campaign on fighting the war on terror and giving everybody tax breaks, which will make oppositions on those terms very difficult.
It is therefore vital that readers of slashdot and others who can understand the implications of what is happening in secret make sure that news like this gets out and becomes uncomfortable for the administration. They might blink, but if they don't blink, they will at least be forced to explain why they feel they must be allowed to view pawn shop receipts and your ISP's weblogs without probable cause. No offense, but the implications of the Patriot Act make the Clipper Chip look positively cartoonish in comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
And this is so much different than what happens if Google didn't host your files?
More seriously, I think arguments about how screwed you are when you lose your internet connection sound a bit like arguments That Crazy Old Man used to make about electricity, and why those new-fangled electric gadgets were never going to catch on.
The dude said recent back there. CSS 1.0 dates from 1996 with a revision in 1999. CSS 1.0 is now finally reasonably well-supported by modern browsers. CSS 2.0 was first a recommendation in 1998, but wasn't able to be completely implemented until the standard was fixed. CSS may be brilliant, but CSS 2.0 is a 1998 idea. Somebody born in 1998 would be turning 7 this year. CSS 3.0 is still be hashed out. Recent W3C standards have not (yet) had anything like the effect of CSS, and even CSS 2.0 was very slow to get above a threshold of support.
I feel your pain, but the answer is "no". And, in Apple's defense, I think you could argue this is a feature and not a bug. If Keynote did what you would like, it would be an invitation to create all those maddening Powerpoint presentations with unreadably small text (when projected in an actual venue). I've learned to accept using a continuation slide if what I really want to do requires more bullets than space.
Basically, if you liked Keynote, you will really, REALLY like Keynote 2.0. If you hated Keynote, you're much more likely to be satisfied. Unfortunately, it still doesn't do HTML Export.
Pages is an interesting concept. It does have the same emacs-style editing keys, paste with style, and an innovative templating idea. But its Word input is *very* buggy for documents with lots of placed graphics. It can't round-trip Word documents.
Its HTML import is decent, but its export is very disappointing; it does use CSS, but then also garbages up many of the tags with ad hoc style entities. It doesn't round-trip HTML. The basic notion of styles is very nice, but rudimentary, and it doesn't let you define your own style sheet in CSS 2 or CSS 3 and be done with it. It was nice that they included letter templates, but the styles on those were mostly pretty twee; it would be easy enough, though, to template your own letterhead. The nucleus of a very good idea (similar file format for Pages and Keynote) right now mostly benefits Keynote over Pages.
The nicest things I can say about Pages are that it would be a nice choice for any document you have that is shorter than about 8 pages or so and/or happens to match a pre-existing template well. It will be the King of Flyers and mailers. Also, there is the distinct possibility that some things will be fixed in dot versions, and that Pages 2.0 will be as improved as Keynote 2.0. If they introduce that next big upgrade *next January*, they might really have something.
So iWork was completely worth my $39 (edu pricing) just for the vastly improved Keynote. It would have been worth $79 (regular list) for the same reason. Many people who would be tempted to do plainish documents in Pages might be better off using TextEdit, which is actually a service under Mac OS X 10.3
And here ends my core dump. :-)
I'm baffled at people's failure to see how this would trivially make a fair amount of money.
Google already gets a ton of revenue from targetted advertising. People really do click on those ad links, and Google really does get a cut. But note first that there is a big difference between clicking on the link and actually ordering a product. Note second that the difference between calling the vendor and buying the product is smaller. I'm sure that many vendors would be much happier to have people call them, where they can pitch them more easily than any web page. But to make sure people use this a lot, you have to make it easy, and no different from making a phonecall. But then, once you've gone that far, you might as well offer the VOIP for cheap or for free and use what amounts to an interactive Yellow Pages funding model. You probably do have to cap people's calling at some amount, but if they make the service anything like gmail, it will be a nice, high number. And this won't replace cell-phones for many people. But local and long distance phone prices, which have been down to 3 cents or fewer per minute, probably just did crash all the way to zero.
But there are lots of interesting opportunities out there off the coasts. The money is not as good, but neither are housing prices, and if you can earn enough, you can always fly away to whatever it is you miss most about where you are. The places to be include the obvious (e.g., Minneapolis) and the possibly less obvious (e.g., college towns like Ann Arbor, MI, Madison, WI Lawrence KS, and Columbia, MO) There is something to be said for a place that has both Trader Joe's and a very nice house under $250K.
But I'll admit, it's not for everybody.
Oh, you just *suck*. Mine was in for this only twice, and you're telling me that if I'd been just a bit more annoying, I'd have gotten a G4 iBook instead? Grrr... Now, I can predict that if mine blows a third time, they're not going to give me the G4, so when that happens, I'll just send you email, and you'll give me mine. Okay?
Gosh, yes. That's a much better link. Specifically, and most impressively, you could read about:
And then it goes on to discuss mdls and the just as cool "mdfind". I'm sorry, but this looks like the bomb. 2005 may become the year when people will feel like they have to start justifying the purchase of a Windows box instead of a Mac rather than the other way around.
Actually, you don't want Single Finder. What you really want is Andy Hertzfeld's Switcher. That just replaced your whole screen with a new screen full of the second app. Basically, it was a hack that ran Mac OS n times in RAM and just jumped between sessions. But, Lord, was it great! No confusion, full-sceeen applicationj goodness...these days, you can *almost* run your Mac OS X system this way with cmd-Tab and maximized windows. Imagine if all apps ran in full screen mode (like Preview) except with the friendly menu bar and what you saw is where you were...and everything could be done from the keyboard.
It would be pure poetry.
That would have been even funnier if they had gotten the wording right; we needed to read no worse than 90 percent wrong about the Itanic.
Good thing that a quality outfit like HP wasn't intimately involved in this disaster of a chip design. Oh, wait a minute...
Anonymous Coward asks: Where does it say that no two letters can have the same value? It doesn't, here, but that's a general rule for cryptarithmetic. Think of it as a substitution cipher for arithmetic.
Ah, this takes me back to my CMU days. :-)
The stipulation about leading zeros, plus the fact that zero never causes a carry so that x - 0 = x means that nothing but L could be zero. Inspection indicates that L can't be anything but zero, so: L = 0.
Because no two letters can have the same value, and because W > G (first column), W > 2. Trying W=3 creates a problem because 3 - G = D, so G and D are 1, and 2 respectively except then C is also 1. (Trying G and D the other way also gets you stuck on the W - 0 column later.) Trying W=4 creates a simliar problem because G and D become 1 and 3 respectively, giving you C=2 but then 0 = 2. Spotting the problem with low values for W, but also seeing that W cannot be 9 or 8 since at least one of the two subtractions of W-0 must generate a borrow (logic omitted), you now try W=7. Since that meens 0 > 7, you try 0 = 8; that gives you the values T = 9 while G and D are 5 and 1, so C = 4 and M = 3. Nothing = 2.
So 777589 - 188106 = 589483
Herb Simon would have been amused that somebody was using cryptarithmetic in a job interview situation.
But puzzle ain't really puzzle unless they've got the voice of that geek saying "tadah!" when you win. :-)
Or, not. The refresh time on that site is now down to 5 seconds a pull, and the RNG is dishing out numbers up to 100,000. So the expectation would be to get a "hit" once every...hey, let's ask Google...ah, 5.78 days. I think I'll try a different technique.
Here I am, a hardcore email user since...1986. I have sent more email to more people for a longer time than 99.9% of everybody, and I can't get a gmail invite inside of two months? Heck, I give one lecture per semester on the glories of Google. But what makes it extra-ironic is that I'm a psychology professor, and it now appears that my best chance to get an invite is to engage in unrewarded bar-press behavior until I get a lucky number. I should know better, but excuse me while I refresh this other page here a few thousand more times...
Now, call me a cynic, but I'm not sure I really believe that a professor of marketing is the best source of information on what is more reasonably a neuropsychology or cognitive neuroscience question. (OK, so maybe marketing experts have some deep connection with brain damage, but I'm *trying* to be kind here.)
I can state this with authority because, marketing, after all, is not exactly brain surgery. :-)
Yes, the fan noise of the early eMac is my *only* complaint about the thing. Hell, even the speakers aren't *completely* sucky. I agree with you that the fanless iMacs were incredibly nice...but they weren't silent unless you got one with a hard drive much quieter than the one I have. I'm guessing this one will be very similar in noise properties to the current models, so the question goes out:
How loud is the current eMac in a quiet room?
By my reckoning, if it is half of the apparent loudness of a first generation eMac, the SuperDrive model would be a stupendous machine for any situation where you don't need to lug it around. People are *not* kiddling when they point out this sucker is heavy and handle-less.
He helped build it? Well in that case, I have a few quick questions that can't be answered without either access to an account or access to the mental states of the developers. :-)
Sorry for all of the questions, but I thought they might be of interest. If for some reason a direct reply to me is more appropriate, my current(/former?) email address is easily found if you google "Jonathan W. King".
Oh. My. God. This was the car that had...well, nothing really. The electrical system in particular was a pathetic joke. The Bunny was built in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania until they mercifully shut the plant down in the late 80s. The 1979 Rabbit at one time held, I believe the Consumer Reports title for least reliable car they tracked. Horrible. Just horrible. OK, so you could get a GTi version that was fast. Still a bad car until they turned it into the Jetta, and the Jetta was nothing great in the early years either.
Yup. I got my wife one of these for Christmas. Although I have to admit, I'm using it right now. The only tips I have on this one are:
This does push up the cost some, but it's still very impressive. I got mine er...my wife's for $999 (base) + $65 (HD upgrade) + $89 (Airport Extreme) + tax. That is an educational price. Obviously, nowhere near as fast as a G5 anything, but easily fast enough to take full advantage of the goodness of Mac OS X 10.3, which even my Windows-using friends will concede is "way cool".
This is Stanford, so I'm guessing they will make it more than just a course where you happen to write some programs for the Mac.
But the real question *I* have for the poster is WHY did you post this this comment under the subject line: gay linux fanboys love the frosty pisshole FP FP? Your comment had *nothing* to do with the subject line...
OK, so I just checked the KDE Release Time Line and the latest word is that KDE 3.2 will be out on February 2, 2004. Beta 1 is out now, Beta 2 is expected out December 4, 2003, and RC1 is January 17, 2004. Obviously, more slippage could occur, but this is still good news. Looking through what SVG they now do support, it strikes me that the essentially full SVG support really could take until 2005. That should still beat Longhorn, however. Now if I only knew what Mac OS X was planning...
Wait a minute. What you just said back there suggests that Konqueror is about to support SVG? (Surf, surf, surf) OK, so the real story is that SVG support will come about by it being included in kdegraphics, not (alas) khtml. Also, the level of support promised in KDE 3.2 is well short of the complete spec. What doesn't work yet includes:
Clearly, a lot of simple (and useful) stuff will work, but a lack of CSS support is pretty unfortunate. As has been pointed out, SVG uses an XML encoding (is this pedantically correct?) and that can get pretty verbose, but CSS can help the situation a lot, as well as making dynamic pages easier to create.
For a moment there, I thought maybe you were suggesting that a complete SVG implementation would be added to khtml, which could have meant that Safari would support SVG, and that would be seriously big news. As it is, I still wonder whether Apple is or will be working on SVG for incorporation into future products. If they are, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that this will be released as Open Source.
Still, KDE supporting SVG is probably the best news that SVG has had for quite some time.
One nit: it is only the Intelligence spending bills that are considered sensitive in this way. Obviously, sometimes people want to hush up stuff like porkbarrel spending in their districts until after the fact, but this isn't the same thing as what happens to intelligence spending bills. The problem here, of course, is that the new rules had nothing much to do with spending, but were only sneaking along for the ride.
Interesting. Have you noticed anything else interesting on your planet?
Not to be obnoxious, but do tell me which Clinton administration policies the Bush administration "kept intact". OK, so they kept Mineta on in the Department of Transportation.
But, that was it. When Bush won the Whitehouse despite not winning even a plurality of the votes, the first thing he did was install a completely different regime that was far to the right of the one he was replacing and consistently to the right of the administration he was promising in his campaign. And the rest, as they say, is history.
One should certainly never count on anything, but if Bush actually does end up losing the election, it will be because there was a broad-based consensus that his administration was broadly over-reaching and involved us in a series of tremendously costly policies. In that environment, you can expect a fair amount of pull-back.
The Clipper Chip is indeed a fascinating little story of how the political process works, but it is also a story that was played out primarily in the open, and with a lot of open debate. The original Patriot Act was written by Justice and rushed into a vote in the House in a situation where hardly anybody in Congress had even seen the thing, but nobody much could really afford to vote against it given the political climate. Moreover, there is a really good reason that the current legislation was tacked onto the Intelligence Agency funding bill, which is that this bill is written in secret and not generally debated at length. A valid case for secrecy in writing parts of the funding bill should be clear, but the reason why a tremendous increase in federal secret subpoena powers needed to be done quietly is only clear once you realize that the same proposals were a non-starter when Patriot II was leaked previously this year. The provisions passed in secret were unpopular with voters and will not be campaigned on. Bush will campaign on fighting the war on terror and giving everybody tax breaks, which will make oppositions on those terms very difficult.
It is therefore vital that readers of slashdot and others who can understand the implications of what is happening in secret make sure that news like this gets out and becomes uncomfortable for the administration. They might blink, but if they don't blink, they will at least be forced to explain why they feel they must be allowed to view pawn shop receipts and your ISP's weblogs without probable cause. No offense, but the implications of the Patriot Act make the Clipper Chip look positively cartoonish in comparison.