I've done more than a little with AppleWorks in my time too; in fact, I used it some Tuesday night at gaming.
AppleWorks has (I've still got an install disk and updater, so neener) a nifty paradigm for documents. A document can hold text or graphics. The spreadsheet can be spread out on a drawing document in small pieces by opening views onto different parts of a spreadsheet. Thus, a document can be spread out across ten or eleven little boxes on a single page.
I thought that would make AppleWorks hard to give up, and combined with the other parts of it, I may still keep it around for a good long time (Intel processor on my next computer notwithstanding).
When I got Numbers, of course I could create as many two-and-three-column spreadsheets on the page as I wanted and link them together. A second sheet contained the "hidden" information which the other tables use for lookups. And the creative lookup scheme I was able to assemble made life a little easier.
So I've got a new character sheet. I'll still look back, but I don't regret the move.
dave420: I've found myself defending Microsoft quite a few times. It's not because I'm a die-hard Bill's-cock-sucking cheerleader, but because I actively like engaging in rational debate, and when someone says something to me, framed as fact, which is clearly not true, I will point out the inaccuracy of their statement. That's not being a fanboy, but being rational.
Indeed. Thus, you're not defending Microsoft, you're defending the facts, which in those cases just happen to support Microsoft. It's been known to happen from time to time.
Ahh, argumentation based on facts. I miss the good old days.
To be fair, for a while Naughty Dog's website had a streaming video-type trailer of their upcoming game. I don't know if it's there now since I haven't been there lately to look.
It looked a bit like Tomb Raider, except the main character is male, the setting is mundane, and the action scenes look a bit repetetive. Nothing in it really wowed me, so it was insufficient to sell me on a PS3, and Naughty Dog is one of the two companies that would have sold me on it if the price were lower. (The other was Insomniac.)
Ballots from 1988 and earlier (I believe; my memory is fuzze) were conducted with a purely mechanical system: you'd pull a big lever to draw the curtain, decide, pull down levers (which would bring down red plastic arrows indicating who you were voting for), and the act of pulling the lever to open the curtain would count the levers you'd pulled down. Being mechanical, they could be a little persnickety.
The 1996 and 2000 balloting where I was in Maryland was conducted using a standardized ballot, a black marker, and an optical scanner which fed the scanned ballot into a lockbox. It had the efficiency of an electronic system, but the ballot itself was clearly a paper record secured as it was counted. It seemed like a very good system. (Anyone else experience it?)
The 2004 ballot was conducted with Diebold machines. If they provided the Republicans any significant advantage, it wasn't in the presidency; the state went about 70-some% blue. I bring this up because, as I recall in 2004, balloting really wasn't so complicated or fraught with technical glitches.
Everyone else is gaping in astonishment at a Republican governor (amazingly a relief since Willy Don Schaefer, Governor of the State of Baltimore, was abrasive like tweed boxers) sounding off against Diebold-style electronic voting. I'm scratching my head and wondering what made voting so complicated this time.
Was the process quietly sabotaged by someone who wanted to see the state switch from electronic voting? If so, then I am now horribly conflicted.
Because they can! They own the TLDs uncontested, they can charge whatever they think the market will bear for service that had been decently regulated until that time.
Pretty much the same thing threatens net neutrality: because they can claim to be a part of it, telcos have a justification to charge for cross-traffic. It flies in the face of the equal-peerage internet that was the original intent, but there it is.
They are cashing in on the efforts of successful companies without any hard work of their own.
So? That's what makes their plan so brilliant. Companies are always seeking to increase profits and eliminate costs, to the point where they can spend nothing and do nothing but rake in the dough and brainstorm how to rake in more dough. It's morally bankrupt and ethically bereft, but as long as the actions are legal, such things are of little concern to the successful modern businessman.
I'm no network admin, but all I know is since I switched to Mac I have no Norton or Symantec software running and there's no signs of threats anywhere.
That may be, but you may still want to install some form of anti-virus solution on your machine, simply as a courtesy. Norton Antivirus for Mac will not just pick up Macintosh-specific viruses and those pesky Word macros. No, the database which NAV routinely updates contains the full suite of Windows viruses as well.
And let's face it, it would be bad to find your favorite machine on the network is a Typhoid Maccy.
I think apple knows it would lose tons of money in this saturated market.
<sarcasm>Hey, yeah. And remember that time when they opened up a chain of retail outlets despite the fact that many other such outlets were tanking and analysts were sure they were smoking something? Boy, did they screw the pooch in that deal!</sarcasm>
The thing you must never lose sight of is that Apple finds its own way of succeeding sometimes by doing things the way no other "sane" (read: "hidebound") person would do.
Will the iPhone become a reality? I'd say no, for completely different reasons than "everybody's doing it already."
Wal-Mart uses Amazon web services for their ecommerce...as does Target and Sears...So, they tend to look alike.
Uhhh, no. That's not quite how it works.
"Web services" are a back-end information protocol, often used to exchange product and pricing information and often done in XML or some derivative (which, given XML's nature, is also XML). It contains no formatting other than the semantic markup and tagging required to make sense of the data sent/received -- no matter what protocol you use for your web service, it's in your best interest to make it as simple and compact as possible to save bandwidth.
Once the requester gets the data, it can be presented to other users in any way it chooses. The fact that Wal-Mart's main page looks like a bad knock-off of an old Amazon layout is not due to Wal-Mart using Amazon's web services, it's because Wal-Mart's main page is a bad knock-off of an old Amazon layout.
Admittedly, it does dovetail nicely into just how bad the creativity drain over at Wal-Mart is...
(What, you thought they think with their heads? Hah!)
I just went to Wal-Mart's main site to look at this train-wreck of a marketing idea myself, and I couldn't see how to get to it.
Oh, incidentally, Amazon called--they want their page layout back. Wal-Mart's gettin' it ugly.
It's not at thehub.com; that site looks almost cool from a business perspective. (Any meeting space that serves sandwiches gets a nod from me.)
Finally, I had to fall back on Google (!!!) to find what subdomain they tucked it into, and...ack. Unlike most train-wrecks, I could take my eyes off of it. I suppose it's a mercy that the "Hub" is buried that way; it won't suck in the gullible and stupid.
The next generation is coming, but mascots are nowhere to be found
Who were/are the big mascots?
There's Sonic, who isn't so much the Genesys's or Dreamcast's mascot as it was Sega's, and if they released a new console tomorrow he'd probably show up there.
There's Mario, who has always been and will probably always be Nintendo's since the 8-bit days, and will probably put in a showing on the Wii as well.
Crash Bandicoot was the creation of then-independent developer Naughty Dog. He was adopted as Sony's mascot for the PS1 after it did so well in retail, two sequels and a well-received cart game. (After it blossomed into a franchise and was adopted by another developer, it went to seed.)
The PS2 has/had no mascot to speak of.
The Xbox had no mascot to speak of.
The Xbox360 has no mascot to speak of.
It looks like there was only one console that had a mascot, and that was a fluke. The other two are more corporate entities/ branding than any actual mascottage.
EA's sports titles on the Wii-mote sounds excellent to me. If they implement the analog control well, it might become the preferred platform for sports games. Seeing these titles excel on the Wii should boost Nintendo's street cred.
A lot of people are talking about EA "dropping the ball" by just introducing the same old crud on the Wii that they've introduced on every other platform, and that people won't want to buy the same games all over again. They're mostly correct, but they're not taking one thing into account: the wiimote.
Yes, the games are the same old thing they've had on many platforms before, but this would be its first time on the Wii. The control scheme is an important part of the game no matter what platform it's on, and if the control scheme is sufficiently different on the Wii (that is, if they use the fancy new control to its fullest), then people will buy it that all important one more time. And if it does really well, the Wii will become a choice platform for certain types of games over the PS3 and X360.
Do we really want have a goverment that can keep things secret? A state that can keep things from being investigated by having it totally secure, privileged eyes only, any leak easily traced?
Actually, yes we do. As long as we have to trust it with our things, we want it to be able to hold onto those things and not let just anybody see them or use them against us. If the government expects to claim that it's protecting us and our personal information, it has to deliver on that protection.
However, you're conflating security with transparency, when in fact they're both important. Security is the ability to keep the secret things secret against prying eyes. Transparency is the ability to unlock and inspect certain documents on demand to make sure that the government is functioning as it should. And ideally, the minimum amount of information should be classified secret: the smaller the pile of sensitive information is and the less it moves around, the less likely it'll get violated.
Democracy and free press are nasty things. They conflict immidiatly with the need to keep things hidden. Even such a simple thing as the skunk works is a direct violation of the principles of free press and accountable goverment. How the hell can we judge our goverment if they can keep what they are doing hidden from us?
The role of the free press is to report. It could be said that the role of the free press in a healthy democracy is to act as watchdog, to report when the system's security breaks so people can be warned and take measures for their own security, or to use the transparency to report problems. And it could be further argued that when transparency breaks down and secrets are kept unnecessarily, the best thing a reporter can do is intentionally break that bad kind of security. When the Pentagon Papers were exposed and the illegal acts of the Nixon administration were revealed, that was the free press's finest hour.
Nowadays, government security and government transparency are both oxymorons, and the "free press" provides spin, runs interference, and distracts people with the missing-blond-girl-du-jour (I'm looking at you, Fox "News"). Oh, and a significant portion of the people are okay with that.
My question is, where do we start the triage? Any one we start to fix will give us trouble from the other three.
The sad thing is that the majority of sexual harassments are not done by strangers, but by relatives and family.
Did anyone else get the same incredibly evil "we must think of the children!" flash of insight that I did?
Since a majority of sexual harassments are done by family and relatives, we must break up all families to eliminate all possibility of sexual harassment. Total segregation. Because we must, y'know, think of the children.
Perhaps a Chinese person could come to the conclusion that the US government is censoring information about the civil rights movement, because when "Lincoln Memorial" is typed into google.com, there is no mention of Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech in the top results.
Point of information...
If you put in "Lincoln Memorial" as the Google search, you get all manner of results (and as others pointed out, the Martin Luther King search result is a few pages in). But... if you phrase the search as "Lincoln Memorial" speech, the MLK speech is the top result. And the same is true of google.cn.
WARNING
This product contains popular culture known by the
state of California to cause brain damage. Always
wear earplugs and a blindfold when handling a disc.
In case of accidental exposure, you might as well
just kill yourself right there and get it over with.
That's a rather severe warning. Is Brittany even recording songs any more?
There's two very good reasons for Adobe denying easy PDF functionality to Microsoft Office users. One is obvious and good only for Adobe, but the other is subtle and better for everybody in the long run.
The obvious reason? Adobe wants to be able to sell Acrobat Pro to its users, and if Microsoft starts bundling the functionality in Office, Office users will have less reason to buy Acrobat or the Creative Suite.
Note: I said less reason, not no reason. See, Acrobat is more than Distiller. The full Acrobat program will let you take those PDFs you've created by whatever means, resequence the pages, add footnotes... organize the whole document. You could do that in Word, but you could end up with a single huge document, and Word isn't happy working that way. The full kit lets you shuffle pages, up to and including replacing single pages in a PDF if you must.
The other reason has to do with Microsoft's hamfisted, even predatory way of "supporting" other peoples' standards. How does that sequence go, again? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Extort? Picture the Microsoft PDF format, in the same ridiculing manner that you'd consider Microsoft RTF, Microsoft HTML, and Microsoft XML: misshapen parodies of their former, more open, more rational selves. By denying Microsoft the opportunity to implement the standard, Adobe protects it for themselves and anyone else who adheres to it.
The motion picture industry's line of thinking (if it can be called that) probably ran something like this:
Problem: People aren't paying for movies, either to see them in the theaters or for DVDs.
Observation: There are honest people out there that will pay for the media, as well as people who are almost ready to do so if only it were more convenient.
Solution: Make it more convenient. If people go see the movie and like it, they can buy a freshly burned copy in the lobby afterwards and take the experience home with them.
I'll agree, the idea is an interesting one. And if circumstances were different, I could see it taking off. There are already bands which record the concert live and then sell CDs after the concert. That seems to work fairly well. So yes, there could have been a chance for this model. (I did say that this would be a brief, feeble defense, yes?)
Now, where does this idea really fall flat? Well, the problem as stated is pretty much accurate. (It's solely their problem, but technically, to them, it is a problem.) Although, parsed through the lens of objectivity their problem actually reads, "People aren't paying enough for our movies." Meaning that making money hand-over-fist isn't enough for them, they want to make more money, both hands over three fists, damnit.
The observation is also correct: if the need is great enough and the item is unique enough, there will be someone honest enough to pay nearly any price. (As a corollary, there will also be someone crooked enough to never pay for the thing if there's any chance at all of getting it cheaper or for free elsewhere.) The sales rate to product going out may approach, but will never reach, either 0% or 100%.
I see the biggest problem in the solution, because they're providing a convenient sales mechanism for people who are already using this other sales mechanism, both of which are tanking in the marketplace! If the problem is people not buying DVDs or going to see movies, tying the two of them together is silly! It's like trying to build a flying machine by tying two bricks together.
I could also launch into a diatribe on the cost/benefit analysis of piracy vs. purchasing, but this isn't the place.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done more than a little with AppleWorks in my time too; in fact, I used it some Tuesday night at gaming.
AppleWorks has (I've still got an install disk and updater, so neener) a nifty paradigm for documents. A document can hold text or graphics. The spreadsheet can be spread out on a drawing document in small pieces by opening views onto different parts of a spreadsheet. Thus, a document can be spread out across ten or eleven little boxes on a single page.
I thought that would make AppleWorks hard to give up, and combined with the other parts of it, I may still keep it around for a good long time (Intel processor on my next computer notwithstanding).
When I got Numbers, of course I could create as many two-and-three-column spreadsheets on the page as I wanted and link them together. A second sheet contained the "hidden" information which the other tables use for lookups. And the creative lookup scheme I was able to assemble made life a little easier.
So I've got a new character sheet. I'll still look back, but I don't regret the move.
And MBAs, most venture capitalists, and half of marketing.
Indeed. Thus, you're not defending Microsoft, you're defending the facts, which in those cases just happen to support Microsoft. It's been known to happen from time to time.
Ahh, argumentation based on facts. I miss the good old days.
My ghod! Listen to yourself, man! You're trying to make television suck harder than it does now!!
Wait, wait, wait, wait. Where does one go to sell operating system exploits? And how hard would they be to shut down?
We may be onto something here: there may be a social solution to a technological problem.
To be fair, for a while Naughty Dog's website had a streaming video-type trailer of their upcoming game. I don't know if it's there now since I haven't been there lately to look.
It looked a bit like Tomb Raider, except the main character is male, the setting is mundane, and the action scenes look a bit repetetive. Nothing in it really wowed me, so it was insufficient to sell me on a PS3, and Naughty Dog is one of the two companies that would have sold me on it if the price were lower. (The other was Insomniac.)
I beg your pardon... taken over by an evil force? It was made by Sony!
On the bright side, perhaps you've stumbled upon a novel idea for a rootkit removal tool...
Ballots from 1988 and earlier (I believe; my memory is fuzze) were conducted with a purely mechanical system: you'd pull a big lever to draw the curtain, decide, pull down levers (which would bring down red plastic arrows indicating who you were voting for), and the act of pulling the lever to open the curtain would count the levers you'd pulled down. Being mechanical, they could be a little persnickety.
The 1996 and 2000 balloting where I was in Maryland was conducted using a standardized ballot, a black marker, and an optical scanner which fed the scanned ballot into a lockbox. It had the efficiency of an electronic system, but the ballot itself was clearly a paper record secured as it was counted. It seemed like a very good system. (Anyone else experience it?)
The 2004 ballot was conducted with Diebold machines. If they provided the Republicans any significant advantage, it wasn't in the presidency; the state went about 70-some% blue. I bring this up because, as I recall in 2004, balloting really wasn't so complicated or fraught with technical glitches.
Everyone else is gaping in astonishment at a Republican governor (amazingly a relief since Willy Don Schaefer, Governor of the State of Baltimore, was abrasive like tweed boxers) sounding off against Diebold-style electronic voting. I'm scratching my head and wondering what made voting so complicated this time.
Was the process quietly sabotaged by someone who wanted to see the state switch from electronic voting? If so, then I am now horribly conflicted.
Sure you can! All you need to do is cue up any song performed by William Shatner.
Oh, absolutely! The Republicans would never shut up about it.
Of course, that even assumes that we'll have an election in 2008.
Or even better, it assumes that the apparent tamper-permissiveness of these machines won't become an excuse not to have elections in 2008.
Because they can! They own the TLDs uncontested, they can charge whatever they think the market will bear for service that had been decently regulated until that time.
Pretty much the same thing threatens net neutrality: because they can claim to be a part of it, telcos have a justification to charge for cross-traffic. It flies in the face of the equal-peerage internet that was the original intent, but there it is.
So? That's what makes their plan so brilliant. Companies are always seeking to increase profits and eliminate costs, to the point where they can spend nothing and do nothing but rake in the dough and brainstorm how to rake in more dough. It's morally bankrupt and ethically bereft, but as long as the actions are legal, such things are of little concern to the successful modern businessman.
That may be, but you may still want to install some form of anti-virus solution on your machine, simply as a courtesy. Norton Antivirus for Mac will not just pick up Macintosh-specific viruses and those pesky Word macros. No, the database which NAV routinely updates contains the full suite of Windows viruses as well.
And let's face it, it would be bad to find your favorite machine on the network is a Typhoid Maccy.
<sarcasm>Hey, yeah. And remember that time when they opened up a chain of retail outlets despite the fact that many other such outlets were tanking and analysts were sure they were smoking something? Boy, did they screw the pooch in that deal!</sarcasm>
The thing you must never lose sight of is that Apple finds its own way of succeeding sometimes by doing things the way no other "sane" (read: "hidebound") person would do.
Will the iPhone become a reality? I'd say no, for completely different reasons than "everybody's doing it already."
Uhhh, no. That's not quite how it works.
"Web services" are a back-end information protocol, often used to exchange product and pricing information and often done in XML or some derivative (which, given XML's nature, is also XML). It contains no formatting other than the semantic markup and tagging required to make sense of the data sent/received -- no matter what protocol you use for your web service, it's in your best interest to make it as simple and compact as possible to save bandwidth.
Once the requester gets the data, it can be presented to other users in any way it chooses. The fact that Wal-Mart's main page looks like a bad knock-off of an old Amazon layout is not due to Wal-Mart using Amazon's web services, it's because Wal-Mart's main page is a bad knock-off of an old Amazon layout.
Admittedly, it does dovetail nicely into just how bad the creativity drain over at Wal-Mart is...
(What, you thought they think with their heads? Hah!)
I just went to Wal-Mart's main site to look at this train-wreck of a marketing idea myself, and I couldn't see how to get to it.
Oh, incidentally, Amazon called--they want their page layout back. Wal-Mart's gettin' it ugly.
It's not at thehub.com; that site looks almost cool from a business perspective. (Any meeting space that serves sandwiches gets a nod from me.)
Finally, I had to fall back on Google (!!!) to find what subdomain they tucked it into, and ...ack. Unlike most train-wrecks, I could take my eyes off of it. I suppose it's a mercy that the "Hub" is buried that way; it won't suck in the gullible and stupid.
Mind you, this has given me a wonderful idea...
Who were/are the big mascots?
It looks like there was only one console that had a mascot, and that was a fluke. The other two are more corporate entities/ branding than any actual mascottage.
A lot of people are talking about EA "dropping the ball" by just introducing the same old crud on the Wii that they've introduced on every other platform, and that people won't want to buy the same games all over again. They're mostly correct, but they're not taking one thing into account: the wiimote.
Yes, the games are the same old thing they've had on many platforms before, but this would be its first time on the Wii. The control scheme is an important part of the game no matter what platform it's on, and if the control scheme is sufficiently different on the Wii (that is, if they use the fancy new control to its fullest), then people will buy it that all important one more time. And if it does really well, the Wii will become a choice platform for certain types of games over the PS3 and X360.
Actually, yes we do. As long as we have to trust it with our things, we want it to be able to hold onto those things and not let just anybody see them or use them against us. If the government expects to claim that it's protecting us and our personal information, it has to deliver on that protection.
However, you're conflating security with transparency , when in fact they're both important. Security is the ability to keep the secret things secret against prying eyes. Transparency is the ability to unlock and inspect certain documents on demand to make sure that the government is functioning as it should. And ideally, the minimum amount of information should be classified secret: the smaller the pile of sensitive information is and the less it moves around, the less likely it'll get violated.
The role of the free press is to report. It could be said that the role of the free press in a healthy democracy is to act as watchdog, to report when the system's security breaks so people can be warned and take measures for their own security, or to use the transparency to report problems. And it could be further argued that when transparency breaks down and secrets are kept unnecessarily, the best thing a reporter can do is intentionally break that bad kind of security. When the Pentagon Papers were exposed and the illegal acts of the Nixon administration were revealed, that was the free press's finest hour.
Nowadays, government security and government transparency are both oxymorons, and the "free press" provides spin, runs interference, and distracts people with the missing-blond-girl-du-jour (I'm looking at you, Fox "News"). Oh, and a significant portion of the people are okay with that.
My question is, where do we start the triage? Any one we start to fix will give us trouble from the other three.
Now imagine a beowulf cluster of these (i.e. autofire).
Did anyone else get the same incredibly evil "we must think of the children!" flash of insight that I did?
Since a majority of sexual harassments are done by family and relatives, we must break up all families to eliminate all possibility of sexual harassment. Total segregation. Because we must, y'know, think of the children.
Point of information...
If you put in "Lincoln Memorial" as the Google search, you get all manner of results (and as others pointed out, the Martin Luther King search result is a few pages in). But... if you phrase the search as "Lincoln Memorial" speech, the MLK speech is the top result. And the same is true of google.cn.
It's kind of redundant. We both know Wall Street -- Apple's stock price dips if the sun rises.
That's a rather severe warning. Is Brittany even recording songs any more?
There's two very good reasons for Adobe denying easy PDF functionality to Microsoft Office users. One is obvious and good only for Adobe, but the other is subtle and better for everybody in the long run.
The obvious reason? Adobe wants to be able to sell Acrobat Pro to its users, and if Microsoft starts bundling the functionality in Office, Office users will have less reason to buy Acrobat or the Creative Suite.
Note: I said less reason, not no reason. See, Acrobat is more than Distiller. The full Acrobat program will let you take those PDFs you've created by whatever means, resequence the pages, add footnotes... organize the whole document. You could do that in Word, but you could end up with a single huge document, and Word isn't happy working that way. The full kit lets you shuffle pages, up to and including replacing single pages in a PDF if you must.
The other reason has to do with Microsoft's hamfisted, even predatory way of "supporting" other peoples' standards. How does that sequence go, again? Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, Extort? Picture the Microsoft PDF format, in the same ridiculing manner that you'd consider Microsoft RTF, Microsoft HTML, and Microsoft XML: misshapen parodies of their former, more open, more rational selves. By denying Microsoft the opportunity to implement the standard, Adobe protects it for themselves and anyone else who adheres to it.
The motion picture industry's line of thinking (if it can be called that) probably ran something like this:
I'll agree, the idea is an interesting one. And if circumstances were different, I could see it taking off. There are already bands which record the concert live and then sell CDs after the concert. That seems to work fairly well. So yes, there could have been a chance for this model. (I did say that this would be a brief, feeble defense, yes?)
Now, where does this idea really fall flat? Well, the problem as stated is pretty much accurate. (It's solely their problem, but technically, to them, it is a problem.) Although, parsed through the lens of objectivity their problem actually reads, "People aren't paying enough for our movies." Meaning that making money hand-over-fist isn't enough for them, they want to make more money, both hands over three fists, damnit.
The observation is also correct: if the need is great enough and the item is unique enough, there will be someone honest enough to pay nearly any price. (As a corollary, there will also be someone crooked enough to never pay for the thing if there's any chance at all of getting it cheaper or for free elsewhere.) The sales rate to product going out may approach, but will never reach, either 0% or 100%.
I see the biggest problem in the solution, because they're providing a convenient sales mechanism for people who are already using this other sales mechanism, both of which are tanking in the marketplace! If the problem is people not buying DVDs or going to see movies, tying the two of them together is silly! It's like trying to build a flying machine by tying two bricks together.
I could also launch into a diatribe on the cost/benefit analysis of piracy vs. purchasing, but this isn't the place.