When the original person signs the NDA, they are entering into a LEGAL contract with the company. They do this voluntarily. This contract is enforced with the help of the government.
How is a company corrupt because it expects its own employees to keep the company's secrets?
Take off the tinfoil hat - the person that spoke to the journalist broke a contract that the person entered into. Apple is asking the court system to do exactly what the court system was put into place to do - enforce contracts signed into by two parties.
If the employee did not agree with the agreement to keep quiet, they should have never signed into the contract.
Or are you suggesting that it should be illegal for companies to expect their employees to keep quiet about [entirely legal] confidential company information? If that is your suggestion, I want you to think long and hard about the ramifications of such a decision.
Or are you going as far as to say that contracts should be made illegal? If so, the cross-cultural impact of that would be staggering. Forget property rights, and a company might just not pay you for work you have done.
Or are you suggesting that the government should limit me to what sort of contracts I can sign? That sounds a lot like the arguments made against gay marriage. No, if two legally-able parties want to sign into a contract, I am not sure the government should step in and say that two parties cannot agree to it (within reason).
Or are you suggesting that the government should not help enforce contracts? Does that mean then that private businesses should take it upon themselves to become their own bill collectors when a debt is overdue? That sounds a lot like mafia-style culture. Surely we are more civilized than that?
You just seem to want to jump on the "corporations are bad, and they are paying off the government" bandwagon, without anything really backing you up.
Journalists do not give up their source so that they might protect the source's right to anonymity.
The only problem is that someone breaking a trade secret and giving it to a journalists never has a right to anonymity in this case.
It is similar to you telling your lawyer or psychiatrist that you intend to go hurt someone. Not only do you lose your right to confidentiality (these two professions are normally protected by attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient privilege), but in that case both of those people are even REQUIRED to inform the correct people.
This is not a case of telling a journalist *ABOUT* an illegal act, this is a case where telling the journalists *IS* the illegal act, and the journalist was party to this illegal act.
The sources are the ones that are breaking the confidentiality agreements and leaking the information to the media. The journalists are then doing their job and reporting the information to the world.
One problem - the journalist, at the same time, is knowingly accepting information they know to be protected by an NDA, and that makes the actual act illegal.
There is a big difference, in my head, between telling a journalist anonymously about a crime, and telling a journalist something illegal to be told.
I started out with a Handspring Platinum. I eventually upgraded to a Sony Clie T665C after falling in love with the PalmOS.
I really like the PalmOS (even running old PalmOS 4) and I have several small applications that I love and do not want to give up (Vindigo, AvantGo, MetrO).
The battery life on my Clie is getting worse and worse, so I keep looking at Palm to see what is new and exciting.
There is nothing that makes me willing to pull my wallet out and buy a new one. Modern Palms seem to have basically the same feature set as my current Clie, and want me to pay up to twice as much as I paid for the Clie a couple of years ago.
A decent color screen, no keyboard, and Bluetooth. That is all I want. How is that $349? How is Bluetooth a $150 option? Cell phones with Bluetooth can be had for free, and Palm treats Bluetooth the same way SprintPCS does - an overly expensive option.
I would not mind paying $349 if the Palm at that price point if it had other desirable features. Other than Bluetooth, it seems identical to my Clie, though.
A lot of people are talking about hooking up a Mac mini in their living rooms to be used as a home multi-media server. These people have the right idea but are too stuck using older paradigms.
They complain about small hard drives. They complain about the hard drives being slow (4200 rpm) They complain about the possibility of noise. They complain about non-expandability.
Most of these people are not thinking using the obvious features of OS X. Want to load MP3s onto the mini sitting in the living room? Why? Just use a huge server somewhere else in the house. iTunes supports streaming. it is the easiest thing in the world to set up.
Want to show photos and slide shows on your big television? What do you know - iPhoto supports photo sharing. You can have 100 gigs worth of photos sitting on your huge desktop in your office, and with one checkbox you can view them all on the mini in the living room.
People that have not played around with Rendezvous and iTunes/iPhoto sharing under OS X have no idea how easy this is. Two checkboxes. No networking knowledge needed *at all*.
The only thing right now you cannot do out of the box is stream video. There is a solution to that, though, as well - VideoLAN.
The advantages of these solutions is also to keep noise down in the actual living room. No big server hard drive going means it is more quiet, and means that the Mac mini can remain small.
There is already a remote for the iPod, but it is IR, not RF. It is also priced at $49 (I believe) which makes the Griffin remote a little better the cheaper, to boot.
The big thing that all the iPod remotes I have seen are missing is the ability to jump playlists.
Keyspan has their new Express Remote which can plug into an Airport Express and offers a lot more power. I have a Keyspan Digital Media Remote attached to my computer and I love it. I simply mapped two of the buttons to an AppleScript that advances ahead a playlist and then text-to-speeches the name of the new playlist.
I am wondering if the ability to skip ahead a playlist is built into the functionality of the iPod.
As other have pointed out, Keyspan has the exact product already (although they refer to the Express Remote, which is a newer, better version of the Digital Remote).
I have had mine for about two years now. The nice thing is that these devices can be programmed to run an AppleScript when buttons are pressed. Of course AppleScripts can also run shell scripts. You can also launch an application if you want.
This gives you a lot of power. 17 keys gives you a lot of flexibility.
I highly recommend the product. I think I got mine for about $30.
Given that both TextEdit (Apple's Notepad equivalent) and AppleWorks were as compatible as they could be (without MS revealing file specs), I would strongly guess it would be.
I am currently in the market to switch cell phone providers. I am a person who will go over the terms and conditions with a fine tooth comb.
On Cingular's brochure, it had details about the text messaging service. Without a plan, each message SENT OR RECEIVED would cost $.10. You could turn off text messaging, but Cingular would be unable to guarantee that you would not receive any incoming messages.
Huh? I would turn it off, saying I do not want any, and Cingular would still charge me ten cents if they were unable to block an incoming message? How in the hell?
Text messaging seems cool to me, but the outrageous prices here in the U.S. make it unreasonable. Make it $2 for unlimited and I would be interested.
[Note: I tried to find the same paragraph on Cingular's site but they say to the see the appropriate brochure for terms and conditions of featured services like text messaging.]
Everyone is writing in about how everything will be put up online as soon as it happens anyway by people doing transcription sitting in the audience.
If Apple wanted to limit Internet coverage, though, for whatever reason, they could easily shut down the publicly-available WAP in the convention hall. Do not tell anyone about it and then turn it off at the start of the keynote speech.
Sure, some people could get around that using cell phones, but the scramble would limit a lot of the "blow-by-blow" coverage on websites and IRC channels.
Wow, and to think you answered your own question without realizing it.
Given the choice between a $1000 Mac with 256MB and a $1100 Mac with 512MB, which would you choose? Now factor in that you could probably get another 512MB for the machine, third-party, for less than $100 (taking the machine to 768MB).
If Apple throws in more RAM, they are going to charge more for it than a third-party vendor will charge for it. Given the choice between Apple shipping with less (for cheaper) and Apple charging me more (and not giving me the choice in the matter), which would you choose?
I would rather they ship with less RAM and then allowing me to buy third-party.
About a month ago I started using AvantGo on my Palm (Sony Clie, actually) for my 45 minute commute to work.
Syncs with New York Times Top Stories, Business, and Technology news. I also have it syncing with Reuters, which actually gives a better column at times. The coverage is more complete, at least.
Those two channels pretty much fill up my commute. I also have C|Net and a couple of others. More than enough news for most any commute.
It is not perfect, but it is free and it works.
Between that program, Vidigo, Metro, and MBTA on Palm my Clie is a very valuable resource commuting and just going around town.
I began posting to Usenet back in about 1994. Once Spam hit the Internet, it was very common knowledge that harvesting from Usenet was a favorite email-gathering tool of Spammers.
As such, if a person has their actual email address on top of their post, it was pretty much a de facto acknowledgment that "yes, I understand I will get Spammed on this address."
Yes, you can certainly argue that some people did not know that, but...
There was a lot of discussion in Usenet groups about what sorts of address-masking you should do. Most people who want to avoid Spam who were posting to usenet on any regular basis were masking their real email address anyway.
Google seems to be breaking that for no good reason at all.
I also wanted to point out that the Trekkies 2 soundtrack is available on the Apple Music Store (Easy link).
Unfortunately Gorn is not on it, it would seem.
Well, there was another choice.
on
NeXTSTEP To Mac OS X
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The blurb is not quite complete. Apple decided it did not have time to develop a next-generation operating system. Copland was pretty much dead in the water.
At the time, also available was the BeOS. A lot of Mac die-hards at the time, myself included, thought that Apple purchasing Be and using that would make the most sense.
From my memory, I seem to remember that Be wanted more money than Apple was willing to spend. It could have also had something to do with the fact that the head of Be, Jean Louis Gassée, was a former Apple man and there was probably some politics there. In addition, NeXT had Steve Jobs and all the personality that went along with that.
I would be interested in reading some of the discussions that went along with passing up Be in favor of NeXT.
It would be interesting reading to see what might have developed out of a Macintosh + Be combination (as opposed to the Macintosh + NeXT we have now).
I am glad to see Bluetooth development continues. It seems like a technology that was released just a little before its time.
I have written before on my desire to see a true PAN (Personal Area Network), and there does seem to be some work being done on this idea.
Instead of going to all-in-one units (the PDA/phone/camera/game machine Slashdot users like to rant against), why not have individual pieces that work together seamlessly?
Imagine a phone being broken into three pieces - a headset (similar to the Bluetooth ones you are seeing now), the actual phone receiver (for interacting with your provider) that is nothing more than a small matchbook sized piece without any UI, and then a full PDA to contain addresses and phone numbers. Want to call someone? Grab your PDA and hit a phone number. it uses the PAN to tell the phone what to dial, which then uses the PAN to interact with the headset.
Do not want to carry the PDA that day? Fine, leave it at home. It is always synced with the phone device, which can be controlled using your voice (voice dialing).
Taking pictures? Listening to music? Why should my digital camera be limited to the 128-512 meg flash card I put into it? I have my iPod/MP3 player with hard drive on me! The camera could use the PAN to save images to the hard drive on the MP3 player. You could even separate the MP3 player from the hard drive, and use the PAN to stream from hard drive to a set of PAN-enabled headphones (or to an MP3 control device hooked up to the headphones).
So you put pictures you took with your digital camera onto the hard drive. Want to view them? Take out your PDA with its nice screen and view them on that via the PAN.
Want to get online? Pull out your PDA (or laptop) and have it interact seamlessly with your phone device to get online.
Walk up to a computer? Have it PAN-enabled so it detects who you are before you sit down (or not, depending on how security-minded you are).
The advantage of Bluetooth over 802.11[x] is the power constraints. Bluetooth and similar technologies are designed with battery life in mind. I do not want to have to charge every PAN device I have every night to make sure I do not run out of battery just walking around.
The technology to do all of this currently exists. I think this is the next step Bluetooth (or a Bluetooth replacement) needs to take.
Four years ago, every American learned that there are problems with how votes are tallied in the United States.
We have had four years to come up with a replacement.
In four years, the powers-that-be *have not come up with an acceptable replacement*.
*That* is the problem - there are huge problems remaining with the voting system in America (in addition to the huge problems that have been put into place with some of the replacement system put into place since 2000).
Both Democrats and Republicans have begun planning for the legal battle that will ensue after the November election. What they will not tell you is that not only is it their fault (meaning both parties) that there are still problems, but that they have a vested interest in making sure the problems are not fixed.
It seems that the two parties would rather the election be decided in the courts after the election than by the actual voters.
I have been running a dual monitor set-up for at least the last five years. I started off with twin 15" CRTs. Of course I was running on a Mac.
I am up to a 17" LCD and a 15" LCD. I am looking to replace the 17" with a 20" LCD.
Depending on what I am doing, dual monitors range from "useful" to "wow, I cannot imagine not having two monitors". In college, working on a paper, I could have research notes open on one screen and my paper on the other.
Following directions listed on a web page? Simple - just yank the web page over to the second monitor, and do the actual work on the main screen.
A problem I have run into: I have yet to find a video program that will run on the main screen in OS X (the display with the dock and menu bar), run full-screen, and will block the menu bar even if it is not the front-most application.
Explanation: I run my AIM and IRC clients on the smaller monitor. On occasion, at night, I like to watch a movie and AIM/IRC at the same time. I can full-screen the movie on the 17" LCD, but as soon as I make the AIM client the active application, the menu bar appears on the 17".
Now, I could just make the smaller screen the primary display when I want to do this, but it would be far better for me to find an application (VLC, you listening?) that would hide the menu bar unless I moused over that area.
The only other drawback to dual displays? Knowing that on occasion you will have to use a computer with only one display.
Ehh, If you are talking the same time as IE, you are not thinking old enough. Once Netscape 3.x came out (which, if I remember correctly, was about the time IE was first released), it was pretty bulky.
Back when you were able to get just Netscape Navigator (the stand-alone browser without the HTML editor, mail client, and so on), it was pretty smooth. I remember running 2.2N on my Mac for a long time (up until about Netscape 4.1.7 or so)
Of course, that was some time after Netscape hit the scene. I remember downloading Mosaic for the first time sometime around Christmas break of 1993-1994. Netscape 0.9 was sometime after that.
I liked to tell my students (when I was working in a high school) that there used to be a page called "What is new on the Internet" that would list all new pages to go up.
Netscape started out a good browser, but the 3.x bloat really slowed progress down. That was back when Netscape seemed on top of the world, though. Portal, web server, web browser, mail client, news client, you name it. For the briefest amount of time, before Microsoft woke up, they seemed to control the Internet.
It is interesting to see projects like Firefox finally getting back to the simplicity of the original Netscape browsers.
I am not going to go to quite the extreme you do (Bush is a Dem who is pro-life), I vote Libertarian in hopes that a party will start to court my vote because they keep losing otherwise.
In 2000, both Gore and Bush ran a fairly Centrist campaign. Bush did it slightly better. Gore's centrist movements lost him the Nader votes. Maybe if he had stayed closer to his true left, he would have lost the centrist vote, but picked up enough of the farther left vote to make up for that.
In a way, I was glad Democrats were complaining about Nader in 2000. I figured that whomever ran in 2004 would learn the (to me, at least) fairly obvious lesson.
So we have Kerry, and he seems to be trying the exact same thing that Gore tried. Is there little question that we are seeing much the same result?
Instead of trying to court Nader voters, Democrats are suing to keep him off the ballot!
Have the Democrats learned their lesson? No.
The lesson? Those that cannot learn from history are destinied to repeat it.
I maintain(ed) a Usenet FAQ for about six years or so for Eudora/Mac
It takes effort. Since the application I was writing for was still being released, information would change with every new version. Of course, you had to keep questions specific to a certain beta version as long as they remained "frequently asked".
It also requires following the newsgroup on a very regular basis, and watching for the trends (and the questions that are getting asked a bit).
For a while I looked at things to turn the flat text file I was posting to the group into a nice HTML version. I ended up doing what I think that 90% of Usenet FAQ-writers did - did most of by hand. I just wrote the FAQ in HTML and then exported to plain-text to post and email.
Some suggestions tp anyone thinking about maintaining a Usenet FAQ: 1) Do not list your email address anywhere in it unless you want people contacting you with every question imaginable.
1a) Refer everyone who emails you to the newsgroup, even if it is an easy question. If you answer the quick question, then they email you back with a more complicated one.
2) Be honest and succinct.
3) Find a program or script to regularly post the FAQ to the newsgroup.
4) Get it set up so that you can post the FAQ to *.answers This will help with propagation and will automatically get several copies up on the web.
I have had a profile up on a Spring Street Networks affiliate. I signed up through Nerve.com about three years ago. That means I have had a profile up on that site longer than most other people.
Springstreet handles the personals for a billion sites, including boston.com, the Onion, Fark, and others.
I have gone on about a dozen "dates" during that time, and met some really cool people. I dated a couple for over three months. Springstreet does cater to a somewhat older crowd than your typical Yahoo! personals. It also has a wide variety, since it pulls from so many sites.
I also have a profile on okcupid.com. It is a little more cheesy, but... I have met a few people off of there. More of them are going for "online penpals", to some degree.
Some suggestions: As a male, you have to really work to set your profile apart from others. Be funny, be original. Look at a bunch of ads and see what catches your eye. Look through both males and females. Copy that. Change it regularly. Quantity is good.
PUT UP A PICTURE. Make it a normal headshot, nothing too strange.
BE HONEST! If you are planning on ever meeting these people, they will figure out what is true and not very quickly. Also, honesty helps make your profile even more appealing. It makes you more human, and more approachable.
Read through personals. Read a lot of them before you ever write to someone. Figure out what you like and what you do not like.
When you start writing to someone, comment on their profile. Ask them questions about it. Usually after about 4-5 days of conversing online (usually via email), I will suggest meeting in person. Suggest going out for coffee, at a public location. Make them feel safe. Do not have a first meeting be too involved - dinner might be too much commitment to someone they have never met. Maybe miniature golf. Something where you are able to talk - a movie is not a good idea.
DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY DISMISS ANYONE! if someone writes you, take the courtesy of writing back. I always wait until I meet them in person before making my final decision. Some people just go not come across well online.
BE PATIENT! I have responded to a ton of people, and had a ton of people respond to me (I was a "featured personal of the day" on boston.com one weekend. Got about eight responses in as many hours). A lot of times they do not pan out. The emails stop, or the first meeting is awkward, or... Get used to rejection. Remember - practice makes perfect! Each time I meet a new person for the first time, it is easier than the last. I am now pretty conformable with it, and I am comfortable when I know it is not going well.
[Oh, and I met one person this past weekend. It did not go really well. I am meeting one person tomorrow for the first time (we first started talking back in June!), and another one this Saturday. That is right, I am single again!]
I have a wallet made from hemp from Hemp Basics (link to a bi-fold, they also have a tri-fold.
I am on my second one now. They last forever. I get a lot of comments on it.
I wish they had one without velcro (I feel like a high school student opening my wallet), but it is still very nice.
As far as contents, minimal is the way to go. License, health insurance card, student ID, one video-rental chain card, one debit card. Some loose cash (organized from smallest denomination to largest going front to back).
Slashdot Mirror
When the original person signs the NDA, they are entering into a LEGAL contract with the company. They do this voluntarily. This contract is enforced with the help of the government.
How is a company corrupt because it expects its own employees to keep the company's secrets?
Take off the tinfoil hat - the person that spoke to the journalist broke a contract that the person entered into. Apple is asking the court system to do exactly what the court system was put into place to do - enforce contracts signed into by two parties.
If the employee did not agree with the agreement to keep quiet, they should have never signed into the contract.
Or are you suggesting that it should be illegal for companies to expect their employees to keep quiet about [entirely legal] confidential company information? If that is your suggestion, I want you to think long and hard about the ramifications of such a decision.
Or are you going as far as to say that contracts should be made illegal? If so, the cross-cultural impact of that would be staggering. Forget property rights, and a company might just not pay you for work you have done.
Or are you suggesting that the government should limit me to what sort of contracts I can sign? That sounds a lot like the arguments made against gay marriage. No, if two legally-able parties want to sign into a contract, I am not sure the government should step in and say that two parties cannot agree to it (within reason).
Or are you suggesting that the government should not help enforce contracts? Does that mean then that private businesses should take it upon themselves to become their own bill collectors when a debt is overdue? That sounds a lot like mafia-style culture. Surely we are more civilized than that?
You just seem to want to jump on the "corporations are bad, and they are paying off the government" bandwagon, without anything really backing you up.
Journalists do not give up their source so that they might protect the source's right to anonymity.
The only problem is that someone breaking a trade secret and giving it to a journalists never has a right to anonymity in this case.
It is similar to you telling your lawyer or psychiatrist that you intend to go hurt someone. Not only do you lose your right to confidentiality (these two professions are normally protected by attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient privilege), but in that case both of those people are even REQUIRED to inform the correct people.
This is not a case of telling a journalist *ABOUT* an illegal act, this is a case where telling the journalists *IS* the illegal act, and the journalist was party to this illegal act.
The sources are the ones that are breaking the confidentiality agreements and leaking the information to the media. The journalists are then doing their job and reporting the information to the world.
One problem - the journalist, at the same time, is knowingly accepting information they know to be protected by an NDA, and that makes the actual act illegal.
There is a big difference, in my head, between telling a journalist anonymously about a crime, and telling a journalist something illegal to be told.
I started out with a Handspring Platinum. I eventually upgraded to a Sony Clie T665C after falling in love with the PalmOS.
I really like the PalmOS (even running old PalmOS 4) and I have several small applications that I love and do not want to give up (Vindigo, AvantGo, MetrO).
The battery life on my Clie is getting worse and worse, so I keep looking at Palm to see what is new and exciting.
There is nothing that makes me willing to pull my wallet out and buy a new one. Modern Palms seem to have basically the same feature set as my current Clie, and want me to pay up to twice as much as I paid for the Clie a couple of years ago.
A decent color screen, no keyboard, and Bluetooth. That is all I want. How is that $349? How is Bluetooth a $150 option? Cell phones with Bluetooth can be had for free, and Palm treats Bluetooth the same way SprintPCS does - an overly expensive option.
I would not mind paying $349 if the Palm at that price point if it had other desirable features. Other than Bluetooth, it seems identical to my Clie, though.
A lot of people are talking about hooking up a Mac mini in their living rooms to be used as a home multi-media server. These people have the right idea but are too stuck using older paradigms.
They complain about small hard drives.
They complain about the hard drives being slow (4200 rpm)
They complain about the possibility of noise.
They complain about non-expandability.
Most of these people are not thinking using the obvious features of OS X. Want to load MP3s onto the mini sitting in the living room? Why? Just use a huge server somewhere else in the house. iTunes supports streaming. it is the easiest thing in the world to set up.
Want to show photos and slide shows on your big television? What do you know - iPhoto supports photo sharing. You can have 100 gigs worth of photos sitting on your huge desktop in your office, and with one checkbox you can view them all on the mini in the living room.
People that have not played around with Rendezvous and iTunes/iPhoto sharing under OS X have no idea how easy this is. Two checkboxes. No networking knowledge needed *at all*.
The only thing right now you cannot do out of the box is stream video. There is a solution to that, though, as well - VideoLAN.
The advantages of these solutions is also to keep noise down in the actual living room. No big server hard drive going means it is more quiet, and means that the Mac mini can remain small.
Strange, the same buttons are also on the bottom-right of the main part of the keyboard. Should be about the same for lefties...
There is already a remote for the iPod, but it is IR, not RF. It is also priced at $49 (I believe) which makes the Griffin remote a little better the cheaper, to boot.
The big thing that all the iPod remotes I have seen are missing is the ability to jump playlists.
Keyspan has their new Express Remote which can plug into an Airport Express and offers a lot more power. I have a Keyspan Digital Media Remote attached to my computer and I love it. I simply mapped two of the buttons to an AppleScript that advances ahead a playlist and then text-to-speeches the name of the new playlist.
I am wondering if the ability to skip ahead a playlist is built into the functionality of the iPod.
As other have pointed out, Keyspan has the exact product already (although they refer to the Express Remote, which is a newer, better version of the Digital Remote).
I have had mine for about two years now. The nice thing is that these devices can be programmed to run an AppleScript when buttons are pressed. Of course AppleScripts can also run shell scripts. You can also launch an application if you want.
This gives you a lot of power. 17 keys gives you a lot of flexibility.
I highly recommend the product. I think I got mine for about $30.
Given that both TextEdit (Apple's Notepad equivalent) and AppleWorks were as compatible as they could be (without MS revealing file specs), I would strongly guess it would be.
I am currently in the market to switch cell phone providers. I am a person who will go over the terms and conditions with a fine tooth comb.
On Cingular's brochure, it had details about the text messaging service. Without a plan, each message SENT OR RECEIVED would cost $.10. You could turn off text messaging, but Cingular would be unable to guarantee that you would not receive any incoming messages.
Huh? I would turn it off, saying I do not want any, and Cingular would still charge me ten cents if they were unable to block an incoming message? How in the hell?
Text messaging seems cool to me, but the outrageous prices here in the U.S. make it unreasonable. Make it $2 for unlimited and I would be interested.
[Note: I tried to find the same paragraph on Cingular's site but they say to the see the appropriate brochure for terms and conditions of featured services like text messaging.]
Everyone is writing in about how everything will be put up online as soon as it happens anyway by people doing transcription sitting in the audience.
If Apple wanted to limit Internet coverage, though, for whatever reason, they could easily shut down the publicly-available WAP in the convention hall. Do not tell anyone about it and then turn it off at the start of the keynote speech.
Sure, some people could get around that using cell phones, but the scramble would limit a lot of the "blow-by-blow" coverage on websites and IRC channels.
Wow, and to think you answered your own question without realizing it.
Given the choice between a $1000 Mac with 256MB and a $1100 Mac with 512MB, which would you choose? Now factor in that you could probably get another 512MB for the machine, third-party, for less than $100 (taking the machine to 768MB).
If Apple throws in more RAM, they are going to charge more for it than a third-party vendor will charge for it. Given the choice between Apple shipping with less (for cheaper) and Apple charging me more (and not giving me the choice in the matter), which would you choose?
I would rather they ship with less RAM and then allowing me to buy third-party.
About a month ago I started using AvantGo on my Palm (Sony Clie, actually) for my 45 minute commute to work.
Syncs with New York Times Top Stories, Business, and Technology news. I also have it syncing with Reuters, which actually gives a better column at times. The coverage is more complete, at least.
Those two channels pretty much fill up my commute. I also have C|Net and a couple of others. More than enough news for most any commute.
It is not perfect, but it is free and it works.
Between that program, Vidigo, Metro, and MBTA on Palm my Clie is a very valuable resource commuting and just going around town.
If only Sony was still making them...
I began posting to Usenet back in about 1994. Once Spam hit the Internet, it was very common knowledge that harvesting from Usenet was a favorite email-gathering tool of Spammers.
As such, if a person has their actual email address on top of their post, it was pretty much a de facto acknowledgment that "yes, I understand I will get Spammed on this address."
Yes, you can certainly argue that some people did not know that, but...
There was a lot of discussion in Usenet groups about what sorts of address-masking you should do. Most people who want to avoid Spam who were posting to usenet on any regular basis were masking their real email address anyway.
Google seems to be breaking that for no good reason at all.
I also wanted to point out that the Trekkies 2 soundtrack is available on the Apple Music Store (Easy link).
Unfortunately Gorn is not on it, it would seem.
The blurb is not quite complete. Apple decided it did not have time to develop a next-generation operating system. Copland was pretty much dead in the water.
At the time, also available was the BeOS. A lot of Mac die-hards at the time, myself included, thought that Apple purchasing Be and using that would make the most sense.
From my memory, I seem to remember that Be wanted more money than Apple was willing to spend. It could have also had something to do with the fact that the head of Be, Jean Louis Gassée, was a former Apple man and there was probably some politics there. In addition, NeXT had Steve Jobs and all the personality that went along with that.
I would be interested in reading some of the discussions that went along with passing up Be in favor of NeXT.
It would be interesting reading to see what might have developed out of a Macintosh + Be combination (as opposed to the Macintosh + NeXT we have now).
I am glad to see Bluetooth development continues. It seems like a technology that was released just a little before its time.
I have written before on my desire to see a true PAN (Personal Area Network), and there does seem to be some work being done on this idea.
Instead of going to all-in-one units (the PDA/phone/camera/game machine Slashdot users like to rant against), why not have individual pieces that work together seamlessly?
Imagine a phone being broken into three pieces - a headset (similar to the Bluetooth ones you are seeing now), the actual phone receiver (for interacting with your provider) that is nothing more than a small matchbook sized piece without any UI, and then a full PDA to contain addresses and phone numbers. Want to call someone? Grab your PDA and hit a phone number. it uses the PAN to tell the phone what to dial, which then uses the PAN to interact with the headset.
Do not want to carry the PDA that day? Fine, leave it at home. It is always synced with the phone device, which can be controlled using your voice (voice dialing).
Taking pictures? Listening to music? Why should my digital camera be limited to the 128-512 meg flash card I put into it? I have my iPod/MP3 player with hard drive on me! The camera could use the PAN to save images to the hard drive on the MP3 player. You could even separate the MP3 player from the hard drive, and use the PAN to stream from hard drive to a set of PAN-enabled headphones (or to an MP3 control device hooked up to the headphones).
So you put pictures you took with your digital camera onto the hard drive. Want to view them? Take out your PDA with its nice screen and view them on that via the PAN.
Want to get online? Pull out your PDA (or laptop) and have it interact seamlessly with your phone device to get online.
Walk up to a computer? Have it PAN-enabled so it detects who you are before you sit down (or not, depending on how security-minded you are).
The advantage of Bluetooth over 802.11[x] is the power constraints. Bluetooth and similar technologies are designed with battery life in mind. I do not want to have to charge every PAN device I have every night to make sure I do not run out of battery just walking around.
The technology to do all of this currently exists. I think this is the next step Bluetooth (or a Bluetooth replacement) needs to take.
Here is the deal:
Four years ago, every American learned that there are problems with how votes are tallied in the United States.
We have had four years to come up with a replacement.
In four years, the powers-that-be *have not come up with an acceptable replacement*.
*That* is the problem - there are huge problems remaining with the voting system in America (in addition to the huge problems that have been put into place with some of the replacement system put into place since 2000).
Both Democrats and Republicans have begun planning for the legal battle that will ensue after the November election. What they will not tell you is that not only is it their fault (meaning both parties) that there are still problems, but that they have a vested interest in making sure the problems are not fixed.
It seems that the two parties would rather the election be decided in the courts after the election than by the actual voters.
I have been running a dual monitor set-up for at least the last five years. I started off with twin 15" CRTs. Of course I was running on a Mac.
I am up to a 17" LCD and a 15" LCD. I am looking to replace the 17" with a 20" LCD.
Depending on what I am doing, dual monitors range from "useful" to "wow, I cannot imagine not having two monitors". In college, working on a paper, I could have research notes open on one screen and my paper on the other.
Following directions listed on a web page? Simple - just yank the web page over to the second monitor, and do the actual work on the main screen.
A problem I have run into: I have yet to find a video program that will run on the main screen in OS X (the display with the dock and menu bar), run full-screen, and will block the menu bar even if it is not the front-most application.
Explanation: I run my AIM and IRC clients on the smaller monitor. On occasion, at night, I like to watch a movie and AIM/IRC at the same time. I can full-screen the movie on the 17" LCD, but as soon as I make the AIM client the active application, the menu bar appears on the 17".
Now, I could just make the smaller screen the primary display when I want to do this, but it would be far better for me to find an application (VLC, you listening?) that would hide the menu bar unless I moused over that area.
The only other drawback to dual displays? Knowing that on occasion you will have to use a computer with only one display.
Ehh, If you are talking the same time as IE, you are not thinking old enough. Once Netscape 3.x came out (which, if I remember correctly, was about the time IE was first released), it was pretty bulky.
Back when you were able to get just Netscape Navigator (the stand-alone browser without the HTML editor, mail client, and so on), it was pretty smooth. I remember running 2.2N on my Mac for a long time (up until about Netscape 4.1.7 or so)
Of course, that was some time after Netscape hit the scene. I remember downloading Mosaic for the first time sometime around Christmas break of 1993-1994. Netscape 0.9 was sometime after that.
I liked to tell my students (when I was working in a high school) that there used to be a page called "What is new on the Internet" that would list all new pages to go up.
Netscape started out a good browser, but the 3.x bloat really slowed progress down. That was back when Netscape seemed on top of the world, though. Portal, web server, web browser, mail client, news client, you name it. For the briefest amount of time, before Microsoft woke up, they seemed to control the Internet.
It is interesting to see projects like Firefox finally getting back to the simplicity of the original Netscape browsers.
Slashdot had an article about the third-party debate at Cornell University. unfortunately, it was not broadcast.
I am not a big fan of their platform, but the Constitution Party has posted a page with a link to a download of the debate. (warning: the movie is a 67.4MB download).
I just got done watching it. It is a good debate, and a good chance to learn about some of the third-parties.
I am not going to go to quite the extreme you do (Bush is a Dem who is pro-life), I vote Libertarian in hopes that a party will start to court my vote because they keep losing otherwise.
In 2000, both Gore and Bush ran a fairly Centrist campaign. Bush did it slightly better. Gore's centrist movements lost him the Nader votes. Maybe if he had stayed closer to his true left, he would have lost the centrist vote, but picked up enough of the farther left vote to make up for that.
In a way, I was glad Democrats were complaining about Nader in 2000. I figured that whomever ran in 2004 would learn the (to me, at least) fairly obvious lesson.
So we have Kerry, and he seems to be trying the exact same thing that Gore tried. Is there little question that we are seeing much the same result?
Instead of trying to court Nader voters, Democrats are suing to keep him off the ballot!
Have the Democrats learned their lesson? No.
The lesson? Those that cannot learn from history are destinied to repeat it.
I maintain(ed) a Usenet FAQ for about six years or so for Eudora/Mac
It takes effort. Since the application I was writing for was still being released, information would change with every new version. Of course, you had to keep questions specific to a certain beta version as long as they remained "frequently asked".
It also requires following the newsgroup on a very regular basis, and watching for the trends (and the questions that are getting asked a bit).
For a while I looked at things to turn the flat text file I was posting to the group into a nice HTML version. I ended up doing what I think that 90% of Usenet FAQ-writers did - did most of by hand. I just wrote the FAQ in HTML and then exported to plain-text to post and email.
Some suggestions tp anyone thinking about maintaining a Usenet FAQ:
1) Do not list your email address anywhere in it unless you want people contacting you with every question imaginable.
1a) Refer everyone who emails you to the newsgroup, even if it is an easy question. If you answer the quick question, then they email you back with a more complicated one.
2) Be honest and succinct.
3) Find a program or script to regularly post the FAQ to the newsgroup.
4) Get it set up so that you can post the FAQ to *.answers This will help with propagation and will automatically get several copies up on the web.
5) Realize it is largely a thankless job.
From the Cornell site: "Independent candidate Ralph Nader declined the Mock Election group's invitation."
Nader turned them down, for whatever reason. No great conspiracy going on here.
I have had a profile up on a Spring Street Networks affiliate. I signed up through Nerve.com about three years ago. That means I have had a profile up on that site longer than most other people.
Springstreet handles the personals for a billion sites, including boston.com, the Onion, Fark, and others.
I have gone on about a dozen "dates" during that time, and met some really cool people. I dated a couple for over three months. Springstreet does cater to a somewhat older crowd than your typical Yahoo! personals. It also has a wide variety, since it pulls from so many sites.
I also have a profile on okcupid.com. It is a little more cheesy, but... I have met a few people off of there. More of them are going for "online penpals", to some degree.
Some suggestions: As a male, you have to really work to set your profile apart from others. Be funny, be original. Look at a bunch of ads and see what catches your eye. Look through both males and females. Copy that. Change it regularly. Quantity is good.
PUT UP A PICTURE. Make it a normal headshot, nothing too strange.
BE HONEST! If you are planning on ever meeting these people, they will figure out what is true and not very quickly. Also, honesty helps make your profile even more appealing. It makes you more human, and more approachable.
Read through personals. Read a lot of them before you ever write to someone. Figure out what you like and what you do not like.
When you start writing to someone, comment on their profile. Ask them questions about it. Usually after about 4-5 days of conversing online (usually via email), I will suggest meeting in person. Suggest going out for coffee, at a public location. Make them feel safe. Do not have a first meeting be too involved - dinner might be too much commitment to someone they have never met. Maybe miniature golf. Something where you are able to talk - a movie is not a good idea.
DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY DISMISS ANYONE! if someone writes you, take the courtesy of writing back. I always wait until I meet them in person before making my final decision. Some people just go not come across well online.
BE PATIENT! I have responded to a ton of people, and had a ton of people respond to me (I was a "featured personal of the day" on boston.com one weekend. Got about eight responses in as many hours). A lot of times they do not pan out. The emails stop, or the first meeting is awkward, or... Get used to rejection. Remember - practice makes perfect! Each time I meet a new person for the first time, it is easier than the last. I am now pretty conformable with it, and I am comfortable when I know it is not going well.
[Oh, and I met one person this past weekend. It did not go really well. I am meeting one person tomorrow for the first time (we first started talking back in June!), and another one this Saturday. That is right, I am single again!]
I have a wallet made from hemp from Hemp Basics (link to a bi-fold, they also have a tri-fold.
I am on my second one now. They last forever. I get a lot of comments on it.
I wish they had one without velcro (I feel like a high school student opening my wallet), but it is still very nice.
As far as contents, minimal is the way to go. License, health insurance card, student ID, one video-rental chain card, one debit card. Some loose cash (organized from smallest denomination to largest going front to back).