Furthermore, it is against consumer interests because:
(1) using more writeable DVDs will drive up the price of writeable DVDs, and *then* where will you be? (2) more writeable DVDs will increase the reflective potential of the earth, contributing even further to global dimming (3) your friends may choose to watch your movies *without you* because, hey, you've got two copies, they only need one, not you.
I for one, applaud the effort of the MPAA to protect our interests, even if they cannot actually make films that can hold them more than 10% of the time.
Also, it serves to seperate the *real* geeks from those people who just want to get in on *our* sekrit techie news!
(And us more aesthetically gifted geeks tend to just invoke the simplified layout, where we get everything on a white background and don't *have* to see the eyeball-burning "design".)
That's an ad hominem attack, and one common among liberals. Can't fight the facts? Fight the "motivation" of the people who presented them.
Both the people commonly called "liberals" and "conservatives" view other worldviews with a high degree of suspicion, and so this sort of attack is rather common in both camps.
State bureaucracies only grow when they have something that "needs doing", so of course a state environmental agency will find problems in the environment.
This is roughly equivalent to saying people tend to find what they're looking for, rather than being a specific indictment of problems with government organizations.
And the truth of that core statement makes having a state or at the very least non-profit organization that watches out for the environment imperative. Because businesses are looking for profits, and tend to socialize costs while privatizing profits. They'll be the last organizations who, by the "you see what you look for" law of human nature, are going to find (much less pay attention) to environmental issues. If there are going to be effective environmental organizations, they're going to have to exist in the public sector.
You might be able to create an n-bit hash from document appearances and combine that with some unique identifier for the document. Then, any copier/reader in the area the document is not allowed to leave, has to recognize both the document id and match its hash in order to do any copying....
Of course, then there's the challenge of keeping the document in the area (could have the tag snipped out and be removed) or keeping unauthorized document copiers out of said area. So it's not perfect.
Finally I started chatting with girls, and yes I was pathetic.. I had no idea what to say or how to say it.. But with persistence (what did I have to loose? They had no idea who I was anyway) I started figuring out girls and what they want to hear and eventually became really good at it, and eventually I reached a point where if there was a girl on net that I wanted to talk to I could get her attention in no time and could get her phone # in first or second chat..
Where in the hell are you finding places you can actually chat with real women (ie, not paid to chat, not guys pretending to be women)?
Dude, Osama bin Laden is so damn cool. Did you see how on Sept. 11 he orchestrated a complex attack on the US, involving a collection of covert actions intricately interwoven to form a subtle web
This is actually quite true. The terrorist actions were bold and devastatingly effective, the result of some clever thinking combined with a willingness to die.
Cool in the same way a nuclear bomb is cool. Horrifying, something you want to totally reject, even as it is impressive.
Apple routinely rapes its core of customers, who'll gladly bend over and take it rather than taking the ten minutes to learn a different way.
Totally, totally backwards. The portion of Mac users vs portion of PC users who've given more than one platform a shot isn't even in the same order of magnitude. Apple customers, by and large, are the people who think there's gotta be a better way.
I've worked on VAXen, DOS through Windows XP, a few flavors of UNIX, and the Mac since 1988 (not to mention the various home computers of the 80's... TI/994a, Commodore stuff, Apple ][s..) and I keep buying Apple Hardware. I know it generally has a worse price performance/ratio. I don't care. Most of the time the extra thought they put into their products saves me time and aggravation -- time and aggravation that I'm happy to let others pay me for when I'm working on their systems, but when I'm on my time, I prefer that things just work. And most of the time, they do.
I don't think I'm unrepresentative of the Mac user base -- perhaps a bit more tech savvy, but even among the design staff where I work, over half of the designers are familiar with both Macs and PCs. There's one or two who are familiar with PCs only, and they, I find (not the Mac users!), are the ones who curse and scream when they have to take "ten minutes to learn a different way."
Apple *does* make mistakes, and this iPod battery fiasco is one. The halt-and-catch-fire powerbooks of years ago are another. The "wind tunnel" noise level fans on the G4s are another. Motorolla as a primary chip supplier was one. There were some durability issues with the early Titanium powerbooks. I could go on, but that's not the point. I don't care. Apple, by and large, tries harder and gets to a higher level of product design than most PC manufacturers, who then follow with more proletarian and pedestrian implementations months later. They, probably as much or more than other companies, do respond to consumer pressure (the iPod problem is now solved, the Motoralla supply issues are being addressed, the exploding batteries were recalled, the TiBooks were fixed, the wind tunnel issue was compensated after some pressure).
they will require people to use it, to produce content for it, to give its output the same kind of appeal that the Flash gurus produce. Now, if the majority of the talent is Mac-based, and can't author "Sparkle" content from a Mac, then there won't be as much pretty, attractive output to convince people to adopt.
I'd like to believe this, but the fact seems to be that powerpoint presenationts -- most of which belong in a special corner of hell -- outnumber flash presentations by a long shot. Imagine what might happen if MS made Sparkle a target via export from Powerpoint... (*shudder*)
Szulik gave an example of his 90-year-old father going to a local retailer in order to purchase a computer with Linux: "We know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or puts a lot of pressure on your support systems," he said.
Thing is, lots of consumers have exactly the same sort of experience with Windows. But with Window's they're the market leader, not some minority emergin alternative. People are far more likely to think there's something wrong with them when they can't make Windows work as they expect, and the reverse is true for Linux.
If you're going to frame this as an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" situation, Netscape vs Ebay or Amazon is wrong. It should either be:
Webvan/Dr. Koop vs Ebay or Amazon (web companies with viable models vs web companies w/o viable models)
or
Netscape vs Intuit (people who got in the path of Microsoft and were destroyed vs people who got in the path of Microsoft and did just fine)
The two axes are totally orthogonal -- all kinds of combinations are possible.
I think it's safe to say that Google has a viable basic model: provide high-quality search, sell placed ads. It works. So the questions should really be: are they going to make stupid mistakes while being crushed by pressure from Microsoft, like Netscape, or are they going to keep their lead, like Intuit, who's resisted all attempts to be destroyed by MS?
My prediction: if the smart people stay running it, they'll stay ahead of MS. This is where the IPO comes in: in a public company, majority shareholders can take control and replace the smart folks with someone else who they think will do the job more like they'd like it. And it's easy to see what could happen then...
Yeah, because if the federal government does it, it is efficient, reliable, and effective.
Blah blah -- the government boondoggle meme strikes again. Yes, it has its roots in some truths, and that's why it exists. But...
The problem is, there are in fact examples of government programs and agencies working and working well. Our, poor, terribly innefficient government programs are responsible for creating the world's best military. My locality might be an exception, but we've got incredible public library resources that I'm so happy with I'm *glad* when I get library fines. The Interstate Highway system makes cross country travel effecient and quick -- which keeps the cost of goods lower -- at least, those you buy that were shipped from somewhere else.
Yep -- I know, private firms were involved in the creation of each of those things. Doesn't change the fact that some branch of our poor, incapable, incompetent government commissioned and managed those projects.
And yes, I know -- the DMV is frustrating to deal with. But I can tell you that the service of the DMV and even the IRS looks positively stellar compared to any number of private entitities -- several health insurance companies, Sprint, Microsoft Customer support, and the hosting company I called last week (no, not some dinky provider either -- I'm talking freakin' Interland here). All of whom should have, in theory, been erased by the invisible hand or otherwise kicked in the pants by the market. But in fact, these beaurocracies are no better than most mediocre government beaurocracies.
So it's fun to repeat, but remember to look at the facts while you're thinking about it. Our beloved commercial driven-to-efficiency-by-the-market companies have produced an absolute steaming heap of bovine excrement when it comes to an e-voting product. And yes, it's still taxpayer subsidized, because our governments are paying for these products -- and not just the costs, but also the profits.
Sure. Even anarchists have a logo, for god's sake!
Are we talking about the "peace sign"? If we do get a logo, it will become trendy, probably in a way worse than all-your-base and "profit!" and the like and then...
One problem I see with a logo though, is that hackers tend to hate posers (since hacking is more about competence than simply attitude). And it's easier to pose with a logo.
Exactly. It will become like 1337 speak -- something that people who think they're on the inside often use, something posers flaunt.
Penguings and Devils aren't about some obscure, fleeting concept as a movement or culture. They belong to some useful pieces of software. They're different than the obscure concept ESR wants to give a visual brand to.
(Although I'll hand it to him, if there was anything that'd do it, that'd be it.)
Well -- they get published (obviously), but the bad books don't get finished. Hey, I'd assume that bad books don't even make it past the "peruse at Borders/B&N before buying" pass I'd guess that most literate geeks would make before buying. Either way, the books are discarded long before the reader has enough material to write a review on.
Also on a side personal note - I don't like seeing Vector tools in web programs, nothing on the web is going to be Vectorized
While that's true, for some things it's much, much easier to work with vector objects than photoshop layers. Fireworks hits the sweet spot between a raster and vector tool, and then makes it extremely easy to take the combination to web-ready graphics. Illustrator and Photoshop together are overkill (and clumsy to go back and forth between); either one alone is not enough.
In fact, I'd say Fireworks is *more* important than Dreamweaver on Linux -- certainly it would be to me. Because the strength of Dreamweaver centers around two things: (1) It makes it easy to design/edit web pages when you don't know HTML and (2) It makes it easy to futz about with design before you've settled on one.
Thing is, for most Linux users, #1 isn't going to be much of an issue. And #2 is better done in a graphics program suited to it. Which is exactly what Fireworks is. It's *much* better than Photoshop, because of the wide variety of vector oriented tools, better slicing facilities, all while having a good set of raster/bitmap tools and effects as well.
I'd also imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Macromedia. Their products seem to give the impression of a unified underlying toolset/library, though I couldn't speak authoritatively to that.
You're obviously correct, since every version iTunes at least for a while ran under OS 9... but I wonder about two things:
(1) I don't know if the latest versions of iTunes still go under OS 9. For one thing, I think that any version (4+?) with access to the iTunes store uses the KHTML/WebCore, which I understand is OS X/Cocoa only...
(2) Perhaps the Carbon libraries were actually a common API/wrapper to both existing legacy Mac Toolbox routines and Cocoa? If so, even a carbon app might be adaptable for Yellow Box for Windows....
1. Scaling != performance. Scaling simply means that if you multiply the hardware by n you should be getting (ideally) close to throughput *n.
Isn't this just the same as saying "scaling" means that the software uses the hardware efficiently -- which would then be true for both PHP and Java to similar degrees?
2. DB is the bottleneck for most websites. A good connection pooling and caching system are critical. Ahem... last time I checked, Java did considerably better than PHP in terms of both.
You know, I was going to respond to this, but then I realized I didn't know what connection pooling actually means....
I'm not familiar with Maya or any kind of 3D modelling/rendering/animation app, so I can't really speak to the specifics directly, but I am familiar with a few other kinds of creative software: Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop. I have licensed copies of some of these, and unlicensed copies of 1 of them.
In each case, my finished project is a sound or graphics file that I could have created with any number of apps. Sometimes I use this stuff for work I get paid for... so my question is, how is the company that produces this software supposed to shake me down?
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Furthermore, it is against consumer interests because:
(1) using more writeable DVDs will drive up the price of writeable DVDs, and *then* where will you be?
(2) more writeable DVDs will increase the reflective potential of the earth, contributing even further to global dimming
(3) your friends may choose to watch your movies *without you* because, hey, you've got two copies, they only need one, not you.
I for one, applaud the effort of the MPAA to protect our interests, even if they cannot actually make films that can hold them more than 10% of the time.
High != High
Also, it serves to seperate the *real* geeks from those people who just want to get in on *our* sekrit techie news!
(And us more aesthetically gifted geeks tend to just invoke the simplified layout, where we get everything on a white background and don't *have* to see the eyeball-burning "design".)
Best I can do w/o mods!
Not only that, the worst part is, your kids will know it all!
That's an ad hominem attack, and one common among liberals. Can't fight the facts? Fight the "motivation" of the people who presented them.
Both the people commonly called "liberals" and "conservatives" view other worldviews with a high degree of suspicion, and so this sort of attack is rather common in both camps.
State bureaucracies only grow when they have something that "needs doing", so of course a state environmental agency will find problems in the environment.
This is roughly equivalent to saying people tend to find what they're looking for, rather than being a specific indictment of problems with government organizations.
And the truth of that core statement makes having a state or at the very least non-profit organization that watches out for the environment imperative. Because businesses are looking for profits, and tend to socialize costs while privatizing profits. They'll be the last organizations who, by the "you see what you look for" law of human nature, are going to find (much less pay attention) to environmental issues. If there are going to be effective environmental organizations, they're going to have to exist in the public sector.
Yeah, but considering that Apple caused it's own demise by sticking to proprietary hardware
Demise?
Net sales increased $465 million or 8% during 2003 compared to 2002...Gross Margin of 1.7 billion...recent innovation....
Helluva death. One that a lot of companies would like to be enjoying.
You might be able to create an n-bit hash from document appearances and combine that with some unique identifier for the document. Then, any copier/reader in the area the document is not allowed to leave, has to recognize both the document id and match its hash in order to do any copying....
Of course, then there's the challenge of keeping the document in the area (could have the tag snipped out and be removed) or keeping unauthorized document copiers out of said area. So it's not perfect.
I was expecting the General Protection Fault License.
Finally I started chatting with girls, and yes I was pathetic.. I had no idea what to say or how to say it.. But with persistence (what did I have to loose? They had no idea who I was anyway) I started figuring out girls and what they want to hear and eventually became really good at it, and eventually I reached a point where if there was a girl on net that I wanted to talk to I could get her attention in no time and could get her phone # in first or second chat..
Where in the hell are you finding places you can actually chat with real women (ie, not paid to chat, not guys pretending to be women)?
Dude, Osama bin Laden is so damn cool. Did you see how on Sept. 11 he orchestrated a complex attack on the US, involving a collection of covert actions intricately interwoven to form a subtle web
This is actually quite true. The terrorist actions were bold and devastatingly effective, the result of some clever thinking combined with a willingness to die.
Cool in the same way a nuclear bomb is cool. Horrifying, something you want to totally reject, even as it is impressive.
Apple routinely rapes its core of customers, who'll gladly bend over and take it rather than taking the ten minutes to learn a different way.
... TI/994a, Commodore stuff, Apple ][s..) and I keep buying Apple Hardware. I know it generally has a worse price performance/ratio. I don't care. Most of the time the extra thought they put into their products saves me time and aggravation -- time and aggravation that I'm happy to let others pay me for when I'm working on their systems, but when I'm on my time, I prefer that things just work. And most of the time, they do.
Totally, totally backwards. The portion of Mac users vs portion of PC users who've given more than one platform a shot isn't even in the same order of magnitude. Apple customers, by and large, are the people who think there's gotta be a better way.
I've worked on VAXen, DOS through Windows XP, a few flavors of UNIX, and the Mac since 1988 (not to mention the various home computers of the 80's
I don't think I'm unrepresentative of the Mac user base -- perhaps a bit more tech savvy, but even among the design staff where I work, over half of the designers are familiar with both Macs and PCs. There's one or two who are familiar with PCs only, and they, I find (not the Mac users!), are the ones who curse and scream when they have to take "ten minutes to learn a different way."
Apple *does* make mistakes, and this iPod battery fiasco is one. The halt-and-catch-fire powerbooks of years ago are another. The "wind tunnel" noise level fans on the G4s are another. Motorolla as a primary chip supplier was one. There were some durability issues with the early Titanium powerbooks. I could go on, but that's not the point. I don't care. Apple, by and large, tries harder and gets to a higher level of product design than most PC manufacturers, who then follow with more proletarian and pedestrian implementations months later. They, probably as much or more than other companies, do respond to consumer pressure (the iPod problem is now solved, the Motoralla supply issues are being addressed, the exploding batteries were recalled, the TiBooks were fixed, the wind tunnel issue was compensated after some pressure).
Remember the people who paid $8000 for a Lisa?
Weren't most IBM PCs $4000 back then?
they will require people to use it, to produce content for it, to give its output the same kind of appeal that the Flash gurus produce. Now, if the majority of the talent is Mac-based, and can't author "Sparkle" content from a Mac, then there won't be as much pretty, attractive output to convince people to adopt.
I'd like to believe this, but the fact seems to be that powerpoint presenationts -- most of which belong in a special corner of hell -- outnumber flash presentations by a long shot. Imagine what might happen if MS made Sparkle a target via export from Powerpoint... (*shudder*)
Szulik gave an example of his 90-year-old father going to a local retailer in order to purchase a computer with Linux: "We know painfully well what happens. He will try to get it installed and either doesn't have a positive experience or puts a lot of pressure on your support systems," he said.
Thing is, lots of consumers have exactly the same sort of experience with Windows. But with Window's they're the market leader, not some minority emergin alternative. People are far more likely to think there's something wrong with them when they can't make Windows work as they expect, and the reverse is true for Linux.
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If you're going to frame this as an "on the one hand" and "on the other hand" situation, Netscape vs Ebay or Amazon is wrong. It should either be:
Webvan/Dr. Koop vs Ebay or Amazon (web companies with viable models vs web companies w/o viable models)
or
Netscape vs Intuit (people who got in the path of Microsoft and were destroyed vs people who got in the path of Microsoft and did just fine)
The two axes are totally orthogonal -- all kinds of combinations are possible.
I think it's safe to say that Google has a viable basic model: provide high-quality search, sell placed ads. It works. So the questions should really be: are they going to make stupid mistakes while being crushed by pressure from Microsoft, like Netscape, or are they going to keep their lead, like Intuit, who's resisted all attempts to be destroyed by MS?
My prediction: if the smart people stay running it, they'll stay ahead of MS. This is where the IPO comes in: in a public company, majority shareholders can take control and replace the smart folks with someone else who they think will do the job more like they'd like it. And it's easy to see what could happen then...
Yeah, because if the federal government does it, it is efficient, reliable, and effective.
Blah blah -- the government boondoggle meme strikes again. Yes, it has its roots in some truths, and that's why it exists. But...
The problem is, there are in fact examples of government programs and agencies working and working well. Our, poor, terribly innefficient government programs are responsible for creating the world's best military. My locality might be an exception, but we've got incredible public library resources that I'm so happy with I'm *glad* when I get library fines. The Interstate Highway system makes cross country travel effecient and quick -- which keeps the cost of goods lower -- at least, those you buy that were shipped from somewhere else.
Yep -- I know, private firms were involved in the creation of each of those things. Doesn't change the fact that some branch of our poor, incapable, incompetent government commissioned and managed those projects.
And yes, I know -- the DMV is frustrating to deal with. But I can tell you that the service of the DMV and even the IRS looks positively stellar compared to any number of private entitities -- several health insurance companies, Sprint, Microsoft Customer support, and the hosting company I called last week (no, not some dinky provider either -- I'm talking freakin' Interland here). All of whom should have, in theory, been erased by the invisible hand or otherwise kicked in the pants by the market. But in fact, these beaurocracies are no better than most mediocre government beaurocracies.
So it's fun to repeat, but remember to look at the facts while you're thinking about it. Our beloved commercial driven-to-efficiency-by-the-market companies have produced an absolute steaming heap of bovine excrement when it comes to an e-voting product. And yes, it's still taxpayer subsidized, because our governments are paying for these products -- and not just the costs, but also the profits.
Sure. Even anarchists have a logo, for god's sake!
Are we talking about the "peace sign"? If we do get a logo, it will become trendy, probably in a way worse than all-your-base and "profit!" and the like and then...
One problem I see with a logo though, is that hackers tend to hate posers (since hacking is more about competence than simply attitude). And it's easier to pose with a logo.
Exactly. It will become like 1337 speak -- something that people who think they're on the inside often use, something posers flaunt.
Penguings and Devils aren't about some obscure, fleeting concept as a movement or culture. They belong to some useful pieces of software. They're different than the obscure concept ESR wants to give a visual brand to.
(Although I'll hand it to him, if there was anything that'd do it, that'd be it.)
Well -- they get published (obviously), but the bad books don't get finished. Hey, I'd assume that bad books don't even make it past the "peruse at Borders/B&N before buying" pass I'd guess that most literate geeks would make before buying. Either way, the books are discarded long before the reader has enough material to write a review on.
Also on a side personal note - I don't like seeing Vector tools in web programs, nothing on the web is going to be Vectorized
While that's true, for some things it's much, much easier to work with vector objects than photoshop layers. Fireworks hits the sweet spot between a raster and vector tool, and then makes it extremely easy to take the combination to web-ready graphics. Illustrator and Photoshop together are overkill (and clumsy to go back and forth between); either one alone is not enough.
In fact, I'd say Fireworks is *more* important than Dreamweaver on Linux -- certainly it would be to me. Because the strength of Dreamweaver centers around two things: (1) It makes it easy to design/edit web pages when you don't know HTML and (2) It makes it easy to futz about with design before you've settled on one.
Thing is, for most Linux users, #1 isn't going to be much of an issue. And #2 is better done in a graphics program suited to it. Which is exactly what Fireworks is. It's *much* better than Photoshop, because of the wide variety of vector oriented tools, better slicing facilities, all while having a good set of raster/bitmap tools and effects as well.
I'd also imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Macromedia. Their products seem to give the impression of a unified underlying toolset/library, though I couldn't speak authoritatively to that.
It was actually a question, with which I hoped to be (and was) rewarded with an explanation.... and maybe mocking. Lots of mocking.
iTunes for MacOS X is a Carbon app
You're obviously correct, since every version iTunes at least for a while ran under OS 9... but I wonder about two things:
(1) I don't know if the latest versions of iTunes still go under OS 9. For one thing, I think that any version (4+?) with access to the iTunes store uses the KHTML/WebCore, which I understand is OS X/Cocoa only...
(2) Perhaps the Carbon libraries were actually a common API/wrapper to both existing legacy Mac Toolbox routines and Cocoa? If so, even a carbon app might be adaptable for Yellow Box for Windows....
1. Scaling != performance. Scaling simply means that if you multiply the hardware by n you should be getting (ideally) close to throughput *n.
... last time I checked, Java did considerably better than PHP in terms of both.
Isn't this just the same as saying "scaling" means that the software uses the hardware efficiently -- which would then be true for both PHP and Java to similar degrees?
2. DB is the bottleneck for most websites. A good connection pooling and caching system are critical. Ahem
You know, I was going to respond to this, but then I realized I didn't know what connection pooling actually means....
I'm not familiar with Maya or any kind of 3D modelling/rendering/animation app, so I can't really speak to the specifics directly, but I am familiar with a few other kinds of creative software: Pro Tools, Digital Performer, Fireworks, Flash, Photoshop. I have licensed copies of some of these, and unlicensed copies of 1 of them.
In each case, my finished project is a sound or graphics file that I could have created with any number of apps. Sometimes I use this stuff for work I get paid for... so my question is, how is the company that produces this software supposed to shake me down?