I agree that TS and AI are the two best rumor sites out there. I'm continually amazed by their stuff. However, I wouldn't totally write off MacOSRumors. If you look at their archives, you'll see that they had details about this headless Mac as far back as April and most of the details appear to be what TS and AI are now reporting. I think the "flinging poo" approach will get you a few accurate hits from time-to-time, but I don't think that approach will yield details as specific as what they have been posting over the last year. I watch that site along with TS and AI and their details on the headless Mac has been consistent. If they were just "flinging poo" then their details would be sketchy and all over the board, but they're not. They've stuck by their reports and those details are very similar to what AI and TS are now confirming.
"Confirmed" seems a strong word, but I hope this is more than wishful thinking.
AppleInsider also has their own version of this rumor with slightly different details, and MacOSRumors has been reporting tidbits for the last year. These three sites have a startlingly high degree of accuracy in their rumor reports. When these three sites all agree on the basic concept, you can pretty much consider it "confirmed."
Usually when they appear to be "wrong" about something, it's the result of Apple holding off on a product announcement for some unforeseen reason. Barring those cases, you can bet if these sites are reporting it, it's in the works.
I went through a massive obsession with Marathon while the rest of the planet was stuck on Doom and the endless levels that followed. (I thought Doom was fun too, but it paled next to the attention to detail put into Marathon, especially the story.) Marathon was the first time I fell in love with an FPS and was also the first game that gave me a taste of network frag-fests. Amazing stuff. As the Marathon sequels came out and brilliance like Myth and Oni followed, I thought the guys at Bungie were set to join my own personal pantheon of gods-on-earth. And then those sneak peeks at Halo... holy shit!
Alas, my "gods" turned out to be only too mortal after all and sold their souls to the devil, forsaking those of us who supported them by buying all their games, and relegating their brilliance to the position of yet-another-tentacle on the ever-growing beast whose interest had turned to video games, another market it had no interest in enriching, only dominating.
It won't take away my fond memories of Marathon and those early games, but I have no interest in Halo. That's not Bungie! Don't let the logo fool you. If you like the game, great, but it's not Bungie. The spirit has gone elsewhere.
Not my point. The basic ideas didn't come from Netscape.
Anybody designed a viable alternative to the P4 in a garage lately?
No, of course not for many reasons. Like I said, corporations are good at making things bigger and better; they excel at that. Also we currently live in a culture that informs young people that they can't singlehandedly outdo corporations so a lot of potential garage tinkerers are probably put off by that premise. (I wonder how Steve Wozniak would have fared in today's society.)
However, the next great idea that fundamentally changes how you (and I) view "viable alternatives" to the P4 will not come from a corporate team. I can guarantee you that. It never does.
So you "lay waste" to the corporations by getting bought up?
That's not what I said and not what I meant. A person with a great vision and a little know-how can (and do) lay waste to corporate teams. A corporate boardroom did not dream up eBay, for example. A corporate boardroom did not dream up blogging. A corporate boardroom did not dream up Yahoo or Web search engines. A corporate boardroom did not dream up 3D gaming. A corporate boardroom didn't dream up the Web and browsers. A corporate boardroom didn't dream up open source. But these are all great ideas that have fundtamentally changed the landscape. Corporate boardrooms don't usually come up ideas like that and instead resort to buying them up (which is the point of what I was saying. I wasn't saying that "laying waste" meant being bought up.)
Corporations manage to attract some very smart people too.
They attract them but what usually happens to people like that? Talk to some of those people. I know many. In most cases, they felt oppressed by the atmosphere and impeded by the corporate culture, so they milk it for all the cash they can get and bail out.
I'm not saying all companies are bad, but the great ideas aren't coming from corporate America. This presumption that the garage tinkerer is history is ludicrous. Corporations usually take a good idea and make it bigger and better. I'll give them that, but the basic Great Ideas that really change things almost never come from corporations.
well-funded and well-staffed corporate design teams dominate chip design
One only need to have been part of one of these mythical "well-funded and well-staffed" corporate teams (or to know someone who has been part of one) to know that the garage-based tech hobbyist is nowhere near extinction. High-power staffing and funds are nothing--NOTHING--next to the power of a real vision. A single person with a great idea and a little know-how can lay waste to any corporate team. Don't get so caught up with the corporate facade that you start to doubt it. Watch how many little companies with great ideas that corporations buy up. They do it so regularly that it hardly makes the news anymore. The real ideas aren't coming out of boardroom discussions.
And remember that IBM was once the indomitable corporate force and Apple and Microsoft were the little start-ups. That's why people who talk about how Linux won't change anything make me laugh. I don't even use Linux, not even a big fan of it, and I know it has yet to make its biggest impact. That's how this stuff works. Give it time. History repeats itself.
I just did the Citibank test on the site and the pop-up showed me Citibank content, i.e., Safari 1.2.3 running Panther 10.3.5 seems to be safe from this exploit.
Now I'll go back to resisting the urge to kiss my Mac.:^)
They said if you compare a kid who uses a computer from a similar background to one that doesn't, the kid who doesn't use a computer does better.
There are so many factors involved in what causes a kid to do well and to do poorly, I find it difficult to believe that they managed to isolate the effects of using a computer. For example, you can take a large sampling of kids with and without computers and find a pattern, but how do you know for certain that the computer is the cause, not an effect? What if there is a tendency amongst parents who own computers to use the computer as a diversion, to spend less time with the child and to rely on it as a TV-type "babysitter" ("Daddy's busy... go play on the computer.") You can't reasonably come to the conclusion that the computer usage is what causes it. To me, this study would be a good starting point for exploring parental involvement as a factor in a child's ability to learn and development, a much more likely cause, IMO.
The study does suggest that in the parallel universe, the one where you don't allow your daughter to use a computer, she's doing even better intellectually.
And this underscores a problem with the conclusion: that it basically cannot be tested and borders on hypothetical. You can't back up and re-raise a child without a computer to see if they do better or not. There's really no way to definitively prove this one way or the other.
Of course not, and that's not what I said. If you read what I wrote a little more carefully (and maybe less cynically) you'll see that I'm questioning these "studies" because they so rarely seem to match up to reality. I gave my own example. I can think of many others.
I wasn't just referring to this study alone. Watch Slashdot for a couple years and you'll see occasional links to these kinds of authoritative statements about the negative impact of things like computers and video games. And yet, I can't recall a good example in my own life or circle of friends that supports any of these conclusions. I just get the sense that there is some kind of agenda behind these things. You know, it's the old Cheech and Chong, "smells like shit, looks like shit, tastes like shit... must be shit" line of reasoning.
You would think if there was anything to these studies, I would see an occasional example or two to support them in my own life. I never do.
These kinds of studies always strike me as tainted by some political or social agenda. They never seem to match up with reality.
My daughter is 8-years-old. She has been using the computer (mostly for games) for several years. I used to sit with her and play the Jumpstart Toddler series with her when she was 2. Most of what she plays is educational, but I also let her play video games on the computer, including games on the GameCube, her GameBoy and our old N64.
So, the verdict? She's consistently ahead in school, reading and math skills are 1-2 grades ahead. She has no weak areas, no areas of concern and no behavior issues; she has a creative mind and is a whiz at problem solving and her verbal skills are remarkable at times. I couldn't ask for better. Her teachers are always happy to have conferences with my wife and me, and they have always spent the half-hour praising her and quizzing us on what we're doing at home.
I think it has less to do with the amount of time a child spends on the computer and more to do with what they're doing on it specifically. My daughter does educational stuff along with the occasional video games with no graphic violence. I also monitor what she does and help her get the most out of it. I just recently showed her the basics of how to create web pages and she's been coding her own pages by hand. No report anywhere will convince me that those kinds of activities are hurting her learning abilities.
It's just like TV. You can do it right or wrong. I don't think you can blame the computer itself.
Ooh... I bet you're really Canadian, eh. All the Canadians I know put an "eh" at the end of everything they say, eh. Even when they're writing, eh. That's the truth, eh. I know it, eh. I've been there, eh. They do it all the time, eh. See ya later, eh.
I knew this kind of thing would be coming soon which is why I didn't waste my time signing up.
But then, I don't waste my time with telemarketers either. Here's how the average telemarketing call to my house goes:
Me: Hello?
TM: Hello, can I speak with [horrible attempt to pronounce my name]--"
click!
Nothing personal, but I don't let them get the first sentence out. And I've noticed that I get much fewer calls than before. I suspect a refusal to listen gets noted somewhere in some database and eventually you get fewer calls as a result. Try it. Unless it involves bombing a third-world nation somewhere, you probably shouldn't rely on a government run by George W. Bush to get something like this done right.
It's amazing to me that we have this fantastic thing called the Internet in our lifetimes, allowing us instant and cheap communication, the ability to move information from one place to another, to exchange ideas and all of this at lightning fast speeds and on a global scale. This has never been done before in human history. In a very real sense, the Internet is the outward extension of the next evolutionary step in human development, being on the verge of a worldwide convergence of cultures, languages, ideas and communication. Who knew that in your lifetime you could read any of the world's newspapers at any time, even while sipping a drink at a local coffee shop. The possibilities are mind-boggling and we've only just started to tap them. One of my favorite stories about the Internet was from 5-6 years ago, where American physicians and surgeons in the US were wired up with surgeons in Africa via a live webcam and were able to observe and advise during a tricky operation. What an inspiring story.
And yet, what do most people us this wonder for? Porn. Movies. TV shows.
I'm not condemning it. It's human, and humanizing all this technology is a good thing, but, in the grand scheme, it's terribly funny to me.
All of you who say that you're concerned about the accuracy of the vote solely because you're interested in fair elections would NOT BE SAYING A THING if Kerry had won.
This presupposes that winning is more important than principles. That's not true for everyone, but you should ask yourself why you're so quick to assume that about others.
I would be saying the same thing for exactly the reason I stated before which is that if my guy wins, I want the full force of a credible election system behind that. I don't want a presidency riddled with doubts about legitimacy and whether or not he was actually fairly elected.
Be honest with yourself and us. You wouldn't have cared a rat's ass, and you would have been dismissing our claims about fraud.
No, I wouldn't. I don't want a system where the winner of any election has to work in an atmosphere of doubt, where the rest of the planet views your choice of leadership as illegitimate and lacking in authority--in short, a joke. That's the sort of election system you would expect in a third-world country. I don't care who wins as long as we're not putting our leaders in place with the same system that people like... oh, I dunno... Saddam Hussein used. You're with me on that, right? Are you keen on seeing the USA use a third-world sham to win elections? I assume that to be the case since your response is to lash out at those who raise what appears to be reasonable issues with the election.
Hypocrites - the whole bunch.
That means so much coming from someone whose words emanate from behind the safety of an "anonymous coward" post.
Why do you think people here aren't open to that possibility? I'm a left-leaning Democrat and I too have given this a consideration that Bush may simply have won, but that's precisely why it should matter to Republicans. If your guy wins, don't you want the weight of a fair and reasonably infallible system behind it? You don't want an atmosphere where it's too easy for intelligent and informed people to question it and doubt it (and believe me, it's not just the conspiracy theorists out there doing it... there are a lot of anomalies in this election that simply make no sense.) I don't understand why there is any partisan bickering going on over the questioning of Bush's win. Everyone should want to be reasonably secure in the knowledge that the system is solid. I think the rush to use electronic voting devices is going to be the source of some serious anger amongst voters in the near future.
...how about a link to my previous comments about this (which was modded "insightful")? It still seems relevant, especially given that there are people here insisting that this is analogous to the early Mac days. That doesn't hold up. There are so many differences. Apple has learned its lesson.
No, I disagree. CG animation is just having a "honeymoon" period. People will get over it much in the same way people got over the endless glut of flashy special effect-driven sci-fi adventure films that flooded the market after the first Star Wars film came out. (Ever want proof that Star Wars is indeed a great film? Go look at the inconsistent Hollywood junk that followed it... bleh!)
2D animation is at a low-point in the US, but it's alive and well in Japan. And good thing too. I love CG animation, but there's just something about hand-drawn stuff that cannot be duplicated with computers. I took my daughter to see Spirited Away a couple years ago when it came out and I was so caught up in the amazing visuals of it that it took me until the time I bought the DVD to realize that the story basically blows chunks. Still, I can sit and watch good quality hand drawn animation the same way I might admire a great painting. The plot and script barely even enter into it. I don't really get that same thing off CG films. They're visually impressive, but not nearly as impressive as knowing that someone actually drew each frame by hand. CG has its strengths too, but there's just no way to match excellent hand drawn animation.
I think this more of a political move than anything else (in the generic sense.) Disney is probably doing this to call Pixar's bluff or try to scare them into doing Toy Story 3.
The only glitch in this scheme is Steve Jobs. Most of us know a little about Apple's history and know how bullheaded Jobs can be. Disney better be prepared to bite the bullet and go all the way with this ruse because I tend to doubt that Pixar will budge one inch under Jobs--no matter how much Disney is set to ruin Toy Story.
"If you sit down next to me and say you have 1,000 songs and you pay $10 a month, how cool will I feel to say I paid $1,000 for 1,000 songs," asked Jonathan Sasse, the president of iRiver America, a subsidiary of ReignCom, a Korean maker of portable players that has endorsed Microsoft's format for subscription services.
Mr. Sasse... nobody buys a 1000 songs a month. Your analogy is stupid. How cool is that?
Subscription services will have a place in the future of music, but most of us, I'm guessing, don't have the time to listen to 1000 new songs a month. I think most people are just like me: you get one or two songs or a band or album stuck in your head and you put that into heavy rotation for a while.
Jesus, I know nothing about business, have no sense of this stuff, but I find it hard to believe that these guys can actually be this self-deluded.
Slashdot Mirror
AppleInsider also has their own version of this rumor with slightly different details, and MacOSRumors has been reporting tidbits for the last year. These three sites have a startlingly high degree of accuracy in their rumor reports. When these three sites all agree on the basic concept, you can pretty much consider it "confirmed."
Usually when they appear to be "wrong" about something, it's the result of Apple holding off on a product announcement for some unforeseen reason. Barring those cases, you can bet if these sites are reporting it, it's in the works.
Alas, my "gods" turned out to be only too mortal after all and sold their souls to the devil, forsaking those of us who supported them by buying all their games, and relegating their brilliance to the position of yet-another-tentacle on the ever-growing beast whose interest had turned to video games, another market it had no interest in enriching, only dominating.
It won't take away my fond memories of Marathon and those early games, but I have no interest in Halo. That's not Bungie! Don't let the logo fool you. If you like the game, great, but it's not Bungie. The spirit has gone elsewhere.
Sad and dishonorable end to a great game company.
Oh well... good memories just the same.
Riiiiiiight...
Not my point. The basic ideas didn't come from Netscape.
Anybody designed a viable alternative to the P4 in a garage lately?
No, of course not for many reasons. Like I said, corporations are good at making things bigger and better; they excel at that. Also we currently live in a culture that informs young people that they can't singlehandedly outdo corporations so a lot of potential garage tinkerers are probably put off by that premise. (I wonder how Steve Wozniak would have fared in today's society.)
However, the next great idea that fundamentally changes how you (and I) view "viable alternatives" to the P4 will not come from a corporate team. I can guarantee you that. It never does.
That's not what I said and not what I meant. A person with a great vision and a little know-how can (and do) lay waste to corporate teams. A corporate boardroom did not dream up eBay, for example. A corporate boardroom did not dream up blogging. A corporate boardroom did not dream up Yahoo or Web search engines. A corporate boardroom did not dream up 3D gaming. A corporate boardroom didn't dream up the Web and browsers. A corporate boardroom didn't dream up open source. But these are all great ideas that have fundtamentally changed the landscape. Corporate boardrooms don't usually come up ideas like that and instead resort to buying them up (which is the point of what I was saying. I wasn't saying that "laying waste" meant being bought up.)
Corporations manage to attract some very smart people too.
They attract them but what usually happens to people like that? Talk to some of those people. I know many. In most cases, they felt oppressed by the atmosphere and impeded by the corporate culture, so they milk it for all the cash they can get and bail out.
I'm not saying all companies are bad, but the great ideas aren't coming from corporate America. This presumption that the garage tinkerer is history is ludicrous. Corporations usually take a good idea and make it bigger and better. I'll give them that, but the basic Great Ideas that really change things almost never come from corporations.
One only need to have been part of one of these mythical "well-funded and well-staffed" corporate teams (or to know someone who has been part of one) to know that the garage-based tech hobbyist is nowhere near extinction. High-power staffing and funds are nothing--NOTHING--next to the power of a real vision. A single person with a great idea and a little know-how can lay waste to any corporate team. Don't get so caught up with the corporate facade that you start to doubt it. Watch how many little companies with great ideas that corporations buy up. They do it so regularly that it hardly makes the news anymore. The real ideas aren't coming out of boardroom discussions.
And remember that IBM was once the indomitable corporate force and Apple and Microsoft were the little start-ups. That's why people who talk about how Linux won't change anything make me laugh. I don't even use Linux, not even a big fan of it, and I know it has yet to make its biggest impact. That's how this stuff works. Give it time. History repeats itself.
</sarcasm>
Now I'll go back to resisting the urge to kiss my Mac. :^)
There are so many factors involved in what causes a kid to do well and to do poorly, I find it difficult to believe that they managed to isolate the effects of using a computer. For example, you can take a large sampling of kids with and without computers and find a pattern, but how do you know for certain that the computer is the cause, not an effect? What if there is a tendency amongst parents who own computers to use the computer as a diversion, to spend less time with the child and to rely on it as a TV-type "babysitter" ("Daddy's busy... go play on the computer.") You can't reasonably come to the conclusion that the computer usage is what causes it. To me, this study would be a good starting point for exploring parental involvement as a factor in a child's ability to learn and development, a much more likely cause, IMO.
The study does suggest that in the parallel universe, the one where you don't allow your daughter to use a computer, she's doing even better intellectually.
And this underscores a problem with the conclusion: that it basically cannot be tested and borders on hypothetical. You can't back up and re-raise a child without a computer to see if they do better or not. There's really no way to definitively prove this one way or the other.
I wasn't just referring to this study alone. Watch Slashdot for a couple years and you'll see occasional links to these kinds of authoritative statements about the negative impact of things like computers and video games. And yet, I can't recall a good example in my own life or circle of friends that supports any of these conclusions. I just get the sense that there is some kind of agenda behind these things. You know, it's the old Cheech and Chong, "smells like shit, looks like shit, tastes like shit... must be shit" line of reasoning.
You would think if there was anything to these studies, I would see an occasional example or two to support them in my own life. I never do.
My daughter is 8-years-old. She has been using the computer (mostly for games) for several years. I used to sit with her and play the Jumpstart Toddler series with her when she was 2. Most of what she plays is educational, but I also let her play video games on the computer, including games on the GameCube, her GameBoy and our old N64.
So, the verdict? She's consistently ahead in school, reading and math skills are 1-2 grades ahead. She has no weak areas, no areas of concern and no behavior issues; she has a creative mind and is a whiz at problem solving and her verbal skills are remarkable at times. I couldn't ask for better. Her teachers are always happy to have conferences with my wife and me, and they have always spent the half-hour praising her and quizzing us on what we're doing at home.
I think it has less to do with the amount of time a child spends on the computer and more to do with what they're doing on it specifically. My daughter does educational stuff along with the occasional video games with no graphic violence. I also monitor what she does and help her get the most out of it. I just recently showed her the basics of how to create web pages and she's been coding her own pages by hand. No report anywhere will convince me that those kinds of activities are hurting her learning abilities.
It's just like TV. You can do it right or wrong. I don't think you can blame the computer itself.
Ooh... I bet you're really Canadian, eh. All the Canadians I know put an "eh" at the end of everything they say, eh. Even when they're writing, eh. That's the truth, eh. I know it, eh. I've been there, eh. They do it all the time, eh. See ya later, eh.
But then, I don't waste my time with telemarketers either. Here's how the average telemarketing call to my house goes:
Me: Hello?
TM: Hello, can I speak with [horrible attempt to pronounce my name]--"
click!
Nothing personal, but I don't let them get the first sentence out. And I've noticed that I get much fewer calls than before. I suspect a refusal to listen gets noted somewhere in some database and eventually you get fewer calls as a result. Try it. Unless it involves bombing a third-world nation somewhere, you probably shouldn't rely on a government run by George W. Bush to get something like this done right.
And yet, what do most people us this wonder for? Porn. Movies. TV shows.
I'm not condemning it. It's human, and humanizing all this technology is a good thing, but, in the grand scheme, it's terribly funny to me.
This presupposes that winning is more important than principles. That's not true for everyone, but you should ask yourself why you're so quick to assume that about others.
I would be saying the same thing for exactly the reason I stated before which is that if my guy wins, I want the full force of a credible election system behind that. I don't want a presidency riddled with doubts about legitimacy and whether or not he was actually fairly elected.
Be honest with yourself and us. You wouldn't have cared a rat's ass, and you would have been dismissing our claims about fraud.
No, I wouldn't. I don't want a system where the winner of any election has to work in an atmosphere of doubt, where the rest of the planet views your choice of leadership as illegitimate and lacking in authority--in short, a joke. That's the sort of election system you would expect in a third-world country. I don't care who wins as long as we're not putting our leaders in place with the same system that people like... oh, I dunno... Saddam Hussein used. You're with me on that, right? Are you keen on seeing the USA use a third-world sham to win elections? I assume that to be the case since your response is to lash out at those who raise what appears to be reasonable issues with the election.
Hypocrites - the whole bunch.
That means so much coming from someone whose words emanate from behind the safety of an "anonymous coward" post.
It didn't have to be that way.
2D animation is at a low-point in the US, but it's alive and well in Japan. And good thing too. I love CG animation, but there's just something about hand-drawn stuff that cannot be duplicated with computers. I took my daughter to see Spirited Away a couple years ago when it came out and I was so caught up in the amazing visuals of it that it took me until the time I bought the DVD to realize that the story basically blows chunks. Still, I can sit and watch good quality hand drawn animation the same way I might admire a great painting. The plot and script barely even enter into it. I don't really get that same thing off CG films. They're visually impressive, but not nearly as impressive as knowing that someone actually drew each frame by hand. CG has its strengths too, but there's just no way to match excellent hand drawn animation.
The only glitch in this scheme is Steve Jobs. Most of us know a little about Apple's history and know how bullheaded Jobs can be. Disney better be prepared to bite the bullet and go all the way with this ruse because I tend to doubt that Pixar will budge one inch under Jobs--no matter how much Disney is set to ruin Toy Story.
Mr. Sasse... nobody buys a 1000 songs a month. Your analogy is stupid. How cool is that?
Subscription services will have a place in the future of music, but most of us, I'm guessing, don't have the time to listen to 1000 new songs a month. I think most people are just like me: you get one or two songs or a band or album stuck in your head and you put that into heavy rotation for a while.
Jesus, I know nothing about business, have no sense of this stuff, but I find it hard to believe that these guys can actually be this self-deluded.