You want me to sit in one place in my car for a half a minute every time I start it? Even if it stalls at a light? Even if I'm being chased by pirates? Even at the gas pump?
You want me to take a breathalyzer test while underway? You've seen the all-out exertion needed on an admissable, accurate police test - you mean like that, while underway? I'm not supposed to be using a cell phone underway, but you want me to have to stop what I'm doing and use this? And if I fail, I'm drunk, and I'll do something real brilliant and try and outdrive my own flashing lights and honking horn (y'all watch "COPS", right?) And if I was going to fail, wasn't I already too close impaired to drive and take the test long before the test randomly popped up on the dash?
I saw a presentation by Jay Apt, one of the contributors/authors to the NatGeo "Orbit" book - that's copyrighted by NG as a work, but when Jay was giving his slide presentation, we weren't allowed to video the screen due to copyright restrictions. I was never clear on if these were his own photos outside of the NASA photos. NASA mission pics online, the classic lithos, etc are in the public domain as I understand it (try telling that to Kinko's, though), I had expected that what was taken on the mission would be also...
um, I'll check the math, but: the Mac in 1984 had a trash can before GEOS 1.0 in 1986... the Lisa had it a bit earlier on their desktop... and they may have been inspired by the Xerox Star / Elixir Desktop that traces back to 1981...
Before they went to the new glass cockpit (going from about 30 old displays to about a dozen digital ones) , the Shuttles had five identical general purpose computers (IBM or Honeywell, IIRC), four worked in parallel to compare the results of any given operation, with the fifth as a tie-breaker. One of those 30 was a mechanical cue-ball, too - Tony England tells the story of being in the Shuttle simulator one day and being interrupted because one of the cue-balls on the flying shuttles went out, and they had only the one in the sim to rip out and swap into a working shuttle, presumably they'd fix the dead one and put it back in the sim when they could.
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The Yugo is leading the pack, whereas the Trabant likely should take first prize. These were the ones with bodies made of a shellac/felt composite. They were so bad that at the german reunification East Germans were stopping at the border, leaving the car, and walking into West Germany, considering themselves better off car-less. This car is SO bad, that when the head of Kaman Aerospace tried to add one to his collection, the US government agreed after several rounds but ONLY if he render the car unstartable/undriveable (no great challenge) due to the engine, one that would make a lawnmower cringe in embarassment.
I had a Chevy Vega, and - yes - a Ford Pinto. The Pinto was a stange mix of tepid, wierd and just plain bad design in just about every aspect, the Vega seemed better than it was given credit for - more room than most cars of its ilk, as long as the cylinders surivived you were ahead of the game, and with the optional rear axle, it actually fared rather well in the snows of New England as long as your tires were up to it. Never got stuck in it or my 76 Chevette - which incongrously had 51% of its weight over the rear driving wheels - with studded snows I never failed to get to my job on a mountaintop.
OK - friends of mine actually bought a Yugo JUST to make the move from NY to CA, thinking they'd just abandon the car upon arrival, to find that it lasted them another five years with little or no mechanical trouble - but it rusted out from under them.
I can see it now - hijacked cafe antennas that repeatedly command you to walk to the counter, order another latte, swipe the card, and sip and enjoy with every mouse click...
1. The OSX elements could be as small as Classic elements and still work - we had big screens back then too.
2. The whole thing could be variable - a slider for control sizes seems workable.
3. The chooser had no RL analogue, but somehow worked once you got it - you were peeking thru a portal at the sorts of things you actually had to peek at - physical printers, servers, etc...
4. The 'cartoonie' observation is that since they have tweaked OSX UI elements for other reasons (aqua vs. brushed, the brilliance and shadows of window controls, etc.) that they could lose some puffiness which would distinguish them from the chunkier Playskool style of XP. To paraphrase Einstein, everything should be as small as it needs to be - but no smaller.
OK... Bruce is historically very right about lots of things - mostly about how damaged Windows had to be to not infringe upon Apple's look-and-feel too much in those heady lawsuit-happy years...
But... I'm not in agreement with his prolonged high-horse about Aqua/Finder and especially Dock. If there were prime directive(s?) in those days, it was that modes are bad, and a good GUI is permissive and forgiving. OSX expands those and 99% abides by them.
However... Yes, Aqua interface details do need to be smaller - Classic screen space seems gigantic compared to OSX, largely due to smaller controls. We hit them just fine before, and it's creeping towards Xp cartooniness; The dock is still better than the Launcher or the Taskbar in that it does solve the problems of (1) real estate of floating things and (2) kinesthetic problems of aiming inherent in window-bound menus; Dragging from the dock doesn't erase what you drag in the newbie/panic sense, it deletes the alias (which yes, is enough to invoke a newbie/panic) - your original is fine, MAYBE dragging it should place it on the desktop (or an alias or copy? what is wanted here?
I've been using MacOS since the 128K and have 17 years experinece in pre-OSX and three in OSX - I have to say that Classic now feels like Bambi-on-ice compared to what now can be done easier and with more forgiveness in OSX.
It's been a Mobil item for some time. Exxon is now equipping their stations faster and should catch up with Mobil-branded places. The RF chip is in the band, not the watch. I swapped the Timex watch body for a decent Casio The watch works much better at the POS terminals inside the stations/stores, where the key tags have always had mediocre luck. They both work well on the pumps.
Well, it's nice to see that Apple, who's been out-engineering and out-innovating MS for twenty years, finally has their bloody attention.
Twenty years ago, with very little attention paid to what and how things were getting engineered -as there was very little choice compared to today (ok, 2 vs. 3 OSs, maybe a half dozen media formats vs zero) formats. It was all internal politics, with fewer IP issues at hand.
At MWSF Steve praised and promoted Office 2004, and he understands that MS the OS company is a joke, whereas MS the app foundry is closer to acceptable and aside from some lessons in style and simplicity, is worth competing with.
I'm glad there is a chance for apple to tell MS to drop dead in this arena. It's healthy. MS needs to, like every company, fear the abilities and position of a competitor, with little recourse other than to pound the table and head back to the drawing board.
"I have a friend at this moment who is reloading OS-X and all her applications on her Mac for the third time this year (a 2-day to 3-day process)."
This is way out of line as far as I can tell, and I manage a few dozen macs under OSX. Anything from RevA iMacs to current iBooks & G4s. Except for upgrades, reinstall has only been needed once on two machines, and it's more like 2 hours to backup, install, and restore.
There needs to be a massive undiscovered problem on a Mac under OSX that needs three lobotomies inside of a year.
Even if so, get a cheap FW drive and simplify the whole thing.
... trooped out to let us know that they had some traction on using lasers to beat up missiles.
OK - but how much force does this actually take?
on
RSA-576 Factored
·
· Score: 1
So far they seem give you the dates of the completions, but not the time / cpu hours taken. Even the distributed.net doesn't seem to have seti-like stats on cpu hours used. This seems to take more than a single cpu and workaday time. Without those numbers on actual cpu time needed, this seems like flagpole-sitting. The public perception would be that anyone with a workstation and some time on their hands might do this if the methods are 'just math' and made public.
...I remember were (1) the excimer laser that was tested in the first star wars attempts, reagan era - they rolled a clip on the CBS evening news that showed a Titan II boilerplate launch vehicle on a pad, they fire the excimer at it, the middle third of this (100 ft tall, 10 ft diam) sucker disappears and the top 3rd of the Titan falls down on the bottom third.
Gulp.
Then there's (2) the shuttle-based LIDAR, which actually shoots a laser from the open shuttle bay to the ground, and ranges the distance to the ground, to sub-meter accuracy / 1-10 cm precision. This means a pretty darn bright laser is shot at the ground and typically ranges the tallest thing it finds - they hope for canopy for land cover work, but in an open area, it might be you. NASA usually told people it was "like radar" which it is in its methods...
but it uses laser light.
So somewhere tucked into the mission materials for the shuttle flights that contained it is a cute little disclaimer telling you that yes, it is a laser and yes, it could conceivably pass right over you and yes, if you looked up right into the path of the lidar you could get hurt - so FER CHRISSAKE DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SHUTTLE BAY LASER AS IT PASSES DIRECTLY OVERHEAD or words to that effect. But they put them somewhere where it was legally required, buit they did not pass out press materials that said a giant space laser might be shot at your house sometime in the next two weeks... they traded full disclosure for widespread panic.
That plus the innumerable people who would JUST HAFTA go outside armed with jpass and JUST HAFTA look right up the barrel... like looking in the garden hose to find out why the water ain't coming out. Here's your sign.
OK - first, when you hear the term "copyright", replace it with the phrase "right-to-copy". It gets easier to decode this stuff, and that's what it really means anyway.
They take every step of this too far. "Congress shall grant..." menas that they get to create a system of copyright. It does not mean that anyone who does other than an single exclusive agreement for publication is in violation of the mandate - that's because the mandate simply establishes that this all can be backed by the force of law rather than being merely contractual. But it is still contractual from the copyright holder on down.
Copyright is assigned / granted to an entity - the original author or its assignees. And that's the critical part. The holder of the copyright is allowed to then further enter any agreement they see fit for the use of the materials, as long as I don't violate other constitutional rights or established laws. The existence of copyright is law, its enforcement is stated in law, but the details of any specific agreement are contractual. I can say that only every fifth person who asks me can copy my stuff, but I can't say that only every white person can. I can't say Minnesotans can't, but Minnesotans can say they don't want to. I can say that anyone can or that no one can, the former kinda pointless for commerce, the latter absolutely pointless for commerce. But I can. I have the rights to copy.
By their logic, anything released to the public domain is in violation as well. Guess we start collecting royalties for singing the National Anthem. There's a nice scene for the Supreme Court.
"Copyleft" is a glib term designed to differentiate from the traditional limear, exclusive, adversarial/litigious implimentation of rights-to-copy. It is not literal "left" vs "right", but they seem to imply that. I find it hard to believe any lawyer worth their salt wouldn't have a problem with that intepretation.
They essentially claim that anyone who doesn't contract with others the way they assume they should is therefore not only guilty of bad taste, but in violation of the law establishing the system. Which is going way too far. By their logic, the military is in violation of the Consitution Article I, Section 8, Clauses 13 & 14 because they fly aircraft. The Constution only mentions the navy, militia, and land and sea forces.
Hard to believe their rabbit hole went this deep in the first place - and they're still digging.
Slashdot Mirror
You want me to sit in one place in my car for a half a minute every time I start it?
Even if it stalls at a light?
Even if I'm being chased by pirates?
Even at the gas pump?
You want me to take a breathalyzer test while underway?
You've seen the all-out exertion needed on an admissable, accurate police test - you mean like that, while underway?
I'm not supposed to be using a cell phone underway, but you want me to have to stop what I'm doing and use this?
And if I fail, I'm drunk, and I'll do something real brilliant and try and outdrive my own flashing lights and honking horn (y'all watch "COPS", right?)
And if I was going to fail, wasn't I already too close impaired to drive and take the test long before the test randomly popped up on the dash?
How does stuff like this get to "bill" status...
I saw a presentation by Jay Apt, one of the contributors/authors to the NatGeo "Orbit" book - that's copyrighted by NG as a work, but when Jay was giving his slide presentation, we weren't allowed to video the screen due to copyright restrictions. I was never clear on if these were his own photos outside of the NASA photos. NASA mission pics online, the classic lithos, etc are in the public domain as I understand it (try telling that to Kinko's, though), I had expected that what was taken on the mission would be also...
um, I'll check the math, but:
the Mac in 1984 had a trash can before GEOS 1.0 in 1986...
the Lisa had it a bit earlier on their desktop...
and they may have been inspired by the Xerox Star / Elixir Desktop that traces back to 1981...
Before they went to the new glass cockpit (going from about 30 old displays to about a dozen digital ones) , the Shuttles had five identical general purpose computers (IBM or Honeywell, IIRC), four worked in parallel to compare the results of any given operation, with the fifth as a tie-breaker.
One of those 30 was a mechanical cue-ball, too - Tony England tells the story of being in the Shuttle simulator one day and being interrupted because one of the cue-balls on the flying shuttles went out, and they had only the one in the sim to rip out and swap into a working shuttle, presumably they'd fix the dead one and put it back in the sim when they could.
Yikes.
So now we know what Wizard is used to create Windows help files.
Just let some sheep loose in the field.
They'll find the land mines and they're non-GM.
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Dual 2GHz PowerPC G5
512MB DDR400 ECC SDRAM - 2x256
80GB ADM (1x80GB Serial ATA)
Mac OS X Server, 10-seat License
6-8 weeks
$2,499.00
Subtotal $2,748,900.00
Please note that your subtotal does not include sales tax or rebates.
$2,748,900.00
Apple Part Number M9215LL/A
Find out how to get your order for $91,235.99 per month*.
The Yugo is leading the pack, whereas the Trabant likely should take first prize. These were the ones with bodies made of a shellac/felt composite. They were so bad that at the german reunification East Germans were stopping at the border, leaving the car, and walking into West Germany, considering themselves better off car-less. This car is SO bad, that when the head of Kaman Aerospace tried to add one to his collection, the US government agreed after several rounds but ONLY if he render the car unstartable/undriveable (no great challenge) due to the engine, one that would make a lawnmower cringe in embarassment.
I had a Chevy Vega, and - yes - a Ford Pinto. The Pinto was a stange mix of tepid, wierd and just plain bad design in just about every aspect, the Vega seemed better than it was given credit for - more room than most cars of its ilk, as long as the cylinders surivived you were ahead of the game, and with the optional rear axle, it actually fared rather well in the snows of New England as long as your tires were up to it. Never got stuck in it or my 76 Chevette - which incongrously had 51% of its weight over the rear driving wheels - with studded snows I never failed to get to my job on a mountaintop.
OK - friends of mine actually bought a Yugo JUST to make the move from NY to CA, thinking they'd just abandon the car upon arrival, to find that it lasted them another five years with little or no mechanical trouble - but it rusted out from under them.
I can see it now - hijacked cafe antennas that repeatedly command you to walk to the counter, order another latte, swipe the card, and sip and enjoy with every mouse click...
Yikes.
1. The OSX elements could be as small as Classic elements and still work - we had big screens back then too.
2. The whole thing could be variable - a slider for control sizes seems workable.
3. The chooser had no RL analogue, but somehow worked once you got it - you were peeking thru a portal at the sorts of things you actually had to peek at - physical printers, servers, etc...
4. The 'cartoonie' observation is that since they have tweaked OSX UI elements for other reasons (aqua vs. brushed, the brilliance and shadows of window controls, etc.) that they could lose some puffiness which would distinguish them from the chunkier Playskool style of XP. To paraphrase Einstein, everything should be as small as it needs to be - but no smaller.
OK...
Bruce is historically very right about lots of things - mostly about how damaged Windows had to be to not infringe upon Apple's look-and-feel too much in those heady lawsuit-happy years...
But...
I'm not in agreement with his prolonged high-horse about Aqua/Finder and especially Dock.
If there were prime directive(s?) in those days, it was that modes are bad, and a good GUI is permissive and forgiving. OSX expands those and 99% abides by them.
However...
Yes, Aqua interface details do need to be smaller - Classic screen space seems gigantic compared to OSX, largely due to smaller controls. We hit them just fine before, and it's creeping towards Xp cartooniness;
The dock is still better than the Launcher or the Taskbar in that it does solve the problems of (1) real estate of floating things and (2) kinesthetic problems of aiming inherent in window-bound menus;
Dragging from the dock doesn't erase what you drag in the newbie/panic sense, it deletes the alias (which yes, is enough to invoke a newbie/panic) - your original is fine, MAYBE dragging it should place it on the desktop (or an alias or copy? what is wanted here?
I've been using MacOS since the 128K and have 17 years experinece in pre-OSX and three in OSX - I have to say that Classic now feels like Bambi-on-ice compared to what now can be done easier and with more forgiveness in OSX.
*sigh* ok - I do miss the Chooser.
It's been a Mobil item for some time. Exxon is now equipping their stations faster and should catch up with Mobil-branded places.
The RF chip is in the band, not the watch.
I swapped the Timex watch body for a decent Casio
The watch works much better at the POS terminals inside the stations/stores, where the key tags have always had mediocre luck.
They both work well on the pumps.
Well, it's nice to see that Apple, who's been out-engineering and out-innovating MS for twenty years, finally has their bloody attention.
Twenty years ago, with very little attention paid to what and how things were getting engineered -as there was very little choice compared to today (ok, 2 vs. 3 OSs, maybe a half dozen media formats vs zero) formats. It was all internal politics, with fewer IP issues at hand.
At MWSF Steve praised and promoted Office 2004, and he understands that MS the OS company is a joke, whereas MS the app foundry is closer to acceptable and aside from some lessons in style and simplicity, is worth competing with.
I'm glad there is a chance for apple to tell MS to drop dead in this arena. It's healthy. MS needs to, like every company, fear the abilities and position of a competitor, with little recourse other than to pound the table and head back to the drawing board.
May the best apps | formats | package win.
"I have a friend at this moment who is reloading OS-X and all her applications on her Mac for the third time this year (a 2-day to 3-day process)."
This is way out of line as far as I can tell, and I manage a few dozen macs under OSX. Anything from RevA iMacs to current iBooks & G4s. Except for upgrades, reinstall has only been needed once on two machines, and it's more like 2 hours to backup, install, and restore.
There needs to be a massive undiscovered problem on a Mac under OSX that needs three lobotomies inside of a year.
Even if so, get a cheap FW drive and simplify the whole thing.
Anyone else bothered by the lack of product photos - just lots of (very well done) CG cartoons?
"Record Indefinately"
"...Lighting interfces, etc."
"You can also do email from any Obirter or Media Console and over the internet."
Apparently $15K doesn't buy you a freaking spell checker.
"lets him broadcast his voice through the TV's and stereo's so his voice can roar through the home while he watches the burglar run away,"
Ah, the "Home Alone 4" Security system.
Once they reorganized, things got better - not for MOT but for the new owners, and users... USA Today April 03...
this was the original Aerovironment design for the GM Impact - one motor in each front wheel.
GM nixed it because they said if one motor failed, the car would do endlesss tight donuts.
Of course, millions of cars will do this anyway if their traditional IC motor mounts fail, but hey.
The resulting Impact was less of a performer or as efficient as originally designed.
Planet Christmas knocked out of orbit by asteroid Slashdot122103
So now there's a golem in this story? Further fule to the rumor that Jews run the movie industry!
ok - let's see if there's really any commparison here.
count the holes;
count the time it took to plug the holes;
factor these in a meaningful way;
compare.
even a guesstimate here puts osx on top.
... trooped out to let us know that they had some traction on using lasers to beat up missiles.
So far they seem give you the dates of the completions, but not the time / cpu hours taken.
Even the distributed.net doesn't seem to have seti-like stats on cpu hours used.
This seems to take more than a single cpu and workaday time.
Without those numbers on actual cpu time needed, this seems like flagpole-sitting.
The public perception would be that anyone with a workstation and some time on their hands might do this if the methods are 'just math' and made public.
...I remember were (1) the excimer laser that was tested in the first star wars attempts, reagan era - they rolled a clip on the CBS evening news that showed a Titan II boilerplate launch vehicle on a pad, they fire the excimer at it, the middle third of this (100 ft tall, 10 ft diam) sucker disappears and the top 3rd of the Titan falls down on the bottom third.
Gulp.
Then there's (2) the shuttle-based LIDAR, which actually shoots a laser from the open shuttle bay to the ground, and ranges the distance to the ground, to sub-meter accuracy / 1-10 cm precision. This means a pretty darn bright laser is shot at the ground and typically ranges the tallest thing it finds - they hope for canopy for land cover work, but in an open area, it might be you. NASA usually told people it was "like radar" which it is in its methods...
but it uses laser light.
So somewhere tucked into the mission materials for the shuttle flights that contained it is a cute little disclaimer telling you that yes, it is a laser and yes, it could conceivably pass right over you and yes, if you looked up right into the path of the lidar you could get hurt - so FER CHRISSAKE DO NOT LOOK DIRECTLY INTO THE SHUTTLE BAY LASER AS IT PASSES DIRECTLY OVERHEAD or words to that effect. But they put them somewhere where it was legally required, buit they did not pass out press materials that said a giant space laser might be shot at your house sometime in the next two weeks... they traded full disclosure for widespread panic.
That plus the innumerable people who would JUST HAFTA go outside armed with jpass and JUST HAFTA look right up the barrel... like looking in the garden hose to find out why the water ain't coming out. Here's your sign.
illegal, subterfuge, etc.. all reasons not to.
every movie now has a trailer that tells you to turn off your phones and beepers. fair enough.
beyond that, at restaurants, etc. it's just a matter of taste and manners.
and you can't legislate that.
OK - first, when you hear the term "copyright", replace it with the phrase "right-to-copy". It gets easier to decode this stuff, and that's what it really means anyway.
They take every step of this too far. "Congress shall grant..." menas that they get to create a system of copyright. It does not mean that anyone who does other than an single exclusive agreement for publication is in violation of the mandate - that's because the mandate simply establishes that this all can be backed by the force of law rather than being merely contractual. But it is still contractual from the copyright holder on down.
Copyright is assigned / granted to an entity - the original author or its assignees. And that's the critical part. The holder of the copyright is allowed to then further enter any agreement they see fit for the use of the materials, as long as I don't violate other constitutional rights or established laws. The existence of copyright is law, its enforcement is stated in law, but the details of any specific agreement are contractual. I can say that only every fifth person who asks me can copy my stuff, but I can't say that only every white person can. I can't say Minnesotans can't, but Minnesotans can say they don't want to. I can say that anyone can or that no one can, the former kinda pointless for commerce, the latter absolutely pointless for commerce. But I can. I have the rights to copy.
By their logic, anything released to the public domain is in violation as well. Guess we start collecting royalties for singing the National Anthem. There's a nice scene for the Supreme Court.
"Copyleft" is a glib term designed to differentiate from the traditional limear, exclusive, adversarial/litigious implimentation of rights-to-copy. It is not literal "left" vs "right", but they seem to imply that. I find it hard to believe any lawyer worth their salt wouldn't have a problem with that intepretation.
They essentially claim that anyone who doesn't contract with others the way they assume they should is therefore not only guilty of bad taste, but in violation of the law establishing the system. Which is going way too far. By their logic, the military is in violation of the Consitution Article I, Section 8, Clauses 13 & 14 because they fly aircraft. The Constution only mentions the navy, militia, and land and sea forces.
Hard to believe their rabbit hole went this deep in the first place - and they're still digging.