That fear resurfaced during the 1954 "Bravo" shot. It was twice as powerful as expected, and as physicists watched and saw the cloud keep expanding and expanding and expanding, with no signs of stopping, at least some of them momentarily wondered whether the atmosphere had been ignited after all.
But don't worry. Physicists will never make a mistake again. And, hey, the atmosphere didn't ignite, so, no problem.
It won't work on my computer (Mac Mini), my wife's computer (Windows 98), my son's computer (Windows XP... over dialup), my daughter's old computer (WIndows 2000 Home Edition), or my daughter's new computer (Mac Mini).
Will Amazon also give me a free trial of a brand-new PC (with 2.4 gigahertz processor, and a gig of RAM, and a "DirectX 9.0 complaint Video" [sic]?
I don't get at all. Why are companies so bent on copying failure instead of success?
DIVX disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, and cost less than straight DVDs. And failed.
FlexPlay disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, cost less than straight DVDs, and failed.
Amazon Unbox WON'T play on ordinary DVD player, won't play on my almost-spiffy almost-new Mac Mini, won't play on my wife's PC (Windows 98), wouldn't have played on the Hewlett-Packard PC my daughter's family uses (WIndows 2000 Home Edition) before it crapped out a few months ago, won't play on the spiffy new Mac Mini she replaced it with, apparently won't play on any portable video device......is time-limited, and costs about the same as straight DVDs.
And up to now I thought Jeff Bezos was a smart guy.
"Delaying the introduction in Europe, [members of the European Parliament] said in a letter made public by Microsoft on Thursday, 'would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies."
I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's story, "Superiority," in which technologically superior space empire loses to its technologically backward enemy... because it keeps rolling out fantastic new military superweapons which, unfortunately, aren't quite fully perfected. Each superweapon has its little glitches, small things really and easily fixed--but which initially make them ineffective in the field. Because the boffins keep rolling out improvements, the weapons actually being used are always in that initial, ineffective stage.
I think it is very likely it is the corporations and nations that deploy Vista within its first year of introduction will, in fact, put itself at a competitive disadvantage with those that wait for Service Pack 1 or 2.
"First, users often were not comfortable with others knowing what they were doing. The Grapevine service provided complete control over who could observe which elements of context, and users commonly blocked all others from viewing their computer activity all of the time. Although the service allowed observer-by-observer blocking, it was rarely used. This is an area for further research."
And in further news, the Thought Police reported today that Winston Smith has rented an apartment without a telescreen.
The biggest obstacles appear to be FCC inaction and DHS failure to supply funding. The problems were apparent and being widely discussed days after 9/11.
One year after 9/11, lack of progress could be fairly attributed to the complexity of the problem.
Five years after, it begins to look like incompetence... or lack of will... or both.
The Manhattan Project took four years from start to successful use of the finished product in wartime conditions.
When I was in the emergency room with chest pain and they handed me a form, with a place for my SSN on it, and I asked if I had to give it, and they said "you won't be seen until you fill it out," what would you have done? Argued with them? Called a lawyer? Whipped out a copy of the law that says they can't do this? Asked them to get an ambulance to take me to another ER? Raise the ante and see whether they were bluffing? No, I did what I thought would affect my blood pressure least, and get me seen soonest, which was... to cave in. I gave it to them, and I believe anyone with any sense would have done the same thing. Worry about it later. I had more important things to worry about.
And I think I'm _reasonably_ assertive about such things. Back Massachusetts drivers' licenses had SSN's by default, I was one of the people who always asked for and got a different number. When the Red Cross wanted my SSN for blood donations, I said I wouldn't give it to them and they issued me a donor card with a non-SSN.
When my company's medical insurance wanted my SSN, I said I wouldn't provide it. They said fine, but we won't insure you. So I called the Social Security office, and said "do I have to give it to them?" And their answer, practically verbatim, was, "No, you certainly don't. However, they are under no obligation to provide you with insurance unless you do."
Whenever I'm asked for my SSN, I always ask if there's an alternative. (And wait while they check with their supervisor). I succeed maybe half the time. The other half, well, I usually cave.
If you can get along without credit cards, auto loans, medical insurance, and emergency rooms, more power to you.
That line on every social security card that says "Not For Identification Purposes" is a lie, plain and simple.
Records: Handel in Quad; John Rockwell; The New York Times February 19, 1973, p. 29
'Music for Royal Fireworks' Sounded Better in an Early Stereo Version
Whatever its ultimate artistic and technological merits may be, quadraphonic sound understandable has the classical-record business rubbing its collective hands together with glee. The classical repertory has its limits, after all, and the standard pieces have been recorded to death in stereo. Now, at long last, a new gimmick is at hand.
Not only it is presumed that the American public will spend millions on equipment, but all the hoary old warhorses and hi-fi spectaculars can be done over again in four-channel sound....
--- Truth in advertising... Rockwell acknowledges he was listening to the new release in "plain old stereo." A March 12, 1972 review by an audio reviewer, Don Heckman, listening in quad is, however, only slightly more encouraging:
"Just what was there to hear on all this gleaming new electronic exotica? Ah, there's the rub. Until just a few months ago, quadraphonic disks were dominated by the sound effects of falling trees, puffing choo-choos and gurgling whirlpools... [now there are more and] in some cases the rewards can be quite spectacular... a room-filling, near-concert-hall effect.... Pop music programs like Joan Baez... [and] Barbra Streisand are straightforward presentations in which one is less aware of a four-dimensional effect than of a kind of opening up of the sound.... [In one track on a Vanguard demonstration disk] the organ sound is quite extraordinary.... Switched-On Bach will probably have its sales surge as listeners discover that it sounds even more fascinating when these weirdly-distorted and re-timbred snippets of Bach go whipping around four, rather than two speakers."
Scientific classifications change all the time...
on
Pluto Making a Comeback
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
...I just don't get why this is raising such a fuss.
When I was a kid, there were Baltimore Orioles. Then they decided that they were really the same species as Bullock's Oriole and both of them got renamed the "Northern Oriole." Then molecular genetics studies suggested they were really all that similar and now there are Baltimore Orioles again.
My science teachers were old enough to remember when _their_ sciences teachers had said "There are ninety-two elements. There have always been ninety-two elements. There will always be ninety-two elements." And "elementary" particles? Don't get me started...
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus. Then it was Xiphosura polyphemus. Now it ''seems'' to be Limulus again... or is it?
Classification is prescientific activity. It's very important but it's always arbitrary and subject to change.
Ever since spam became a major nuisance, every of the ISP's I've used have instituted spam-blocking... and the nature of the block will vary from time to time, and they never tell you exactly what they're doing or what's being blocked or what you should do about it. Most of the time it's fairly reasonable, but I've suffered numerous multi-day "outages" during which overzealous spam filtering blocked messages from friends. Since the chances of learning about a blocked message is very small unless it's someone you're in regular non-email contact with, I'll bet that there have been a hundred valid messages blocked for every one that I know about.
What I don't understand is why ISP's can't send me an email every few days listing the subject lines and senders of everything they've blocked, with a link to click on to retrieve the blocked messages.
I'm sure it's of philosophical interest, but I can't believe that the elimination of a fee of $20 a year--$50 a year for the "gold" service--is going to have much effect on the Linspire software ecosystem.
Admittedly it may look different if you're actually developing software for Linspire, which I'm not, but still... I find it hard to believe $20 annuual fee is actually stopping anyone from making software available... unless it's The Principle Of The Thing.
Heck, it costs $20 to buy a spindle of CD-R's... to replace the ink cartridges in the printer... to buy the latest O'Reilly book from Amazon, with SuperSaver shipping... all stuff you need to do to develop software. I'd think even the most casual of developers could afford a $20/year fee.
...I like some of the things IBM is doing now, but never forget they are a very, very big company whose agenda always directed at making money for their shareholders. They have a business motive behind everything they do.
IBM is a big champion of Linux now, but it wasn't all that long ago that they were issuing stern warnings to those who foresake the safety of proprietary software about the dangers of getting "locked into open source."
IBM would probably happily lock people into Linux... whatever, exactly, that would mean... if they can figure out how to do it and can see an advantage to IBM in doing it.
"We really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements." Translation: Our work on CSS and HTML is incomplete.
"In IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards." Translation: we are not committing to being compliant with Web standards.
"We certainly spent a bunch of work trying to improve our standards support." Translation: We're over budget on standards support.
"I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though." Translation: we're not compliant.
"Well as you saw I got a little frustrated with the Slashdot post." Translation: I can't point to factual inaccuracies in the Slashdot post, but I sure don't like the spin.
"The target for that was not just passing any one particular test." Translation: We don't pass that particular test.
trial by ordeal? Or having the airline boarding agent stare into the eyes of every brownish-skinned male aged 15-30 and denying boarding to the ones with shifty eyes? Or seeing which passengers little Fido (he's so intuitive, he can just sense these things) growls at?
It's obscene that something like this is even being considered. This is nothing but a polygraph test... a rush-job polygraph test conducted under poor conditions.
Even on the face of it--and one can be sure that these company's tests and reported results put their best foot forward--the system is useless. If one in ten million passengers is a terrorist, then according to the cited results it will yield 80,000 false alarms for every actual detection. In the old fable, "the boy who cried wolf" was ignored after only three false alarms.
For the better part of a century, radioactive decay is what scientists always use when they want to invoke a natural process that is "random." But is radioactive decay really random... that is, are there, say, well-established quantum-mechanical equations that predict this? Or is it merely chaotic, or not known to be predictable... like the popping of kernels of popcorn in a microwave, or, for that matter, the spins of a roulette wheel?
Naftule Brandwein, the Klezmer clarinet virtuoso, turned his back on the audience in order to keep the secret of the finger he used to achieve certain effects.
Of course, we're talking "trade secret," not "copyright" here.
I wonder whether he ever considered patenting his fingerings? I wonder whether that's possible. It seems to me that it might be.
The manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves trying to bring flawed, faulty, and generally unfinished products to market... presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences.
I do believe Blu-Ray and HDDVD are well on their way to becoming the quadraphonic sound of the new millennium.
Thurott's column is, IMHO, pretty much on the mark. In fact it seems to me that from about 1996 on, many of the things Apple has done have been, if not copying Wintel, nevertheless moving closer and closer to it. The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.
And, yes, Jobs' presentations are rather dishonest... starting from the day in 1984 when he pulled a Mac out of a bag and demonstrated things like MacinTalk, never bothering to mention that he was using a prototype Mac with 512K of RAM and that of his demos would run on the shipping Mac (which had 128K).
Still, it is important to recognize that what Apple has been good at is innovation, which is not the same as invention. Most of Apple's innovations were not invented by Apple, but Apple wrapped them up, made them work, gave them fit and finish, made sure they would work for your mom and not some geek in a lab.
To use an old-fashioned word, Apple is great at perfecting things.
This shows up particularly in the world of.mp3 players. I must have read two dozen reviews that all begin the same way: This could be the iPod killer. The reviewer always says that it has, you know, twice the storage, more features, longer battery life, a lower price, whatever. Then as the review goes on it becomes painfully obvious that the reviewer encountered a number of serious problems--invariably dismissed as "glitches." It wouldn't play, or it crashed, or it wouldn't sync properly to the PC, or it wouldn't play music that the reviewer had paid for. Invariably the reviewer mentions that despite having just as many knobs and buttons as an iPod, the menu system was difficult to use, and so forth.
To put it bluntly, the iPod was an Apple innovation. It didn't actually do anything that Creative and other companies hadn't been doing for years... but it worked, and people liked it, and for an awful lot of people it was the first.mp3 player they'd ever seen... because it was the first one that had been "perfected."
...I think it was Computerworld, possibly Datamation... circa the early eighties.
The caption was: "So, how are your company's PC users doing?"
The picture shows a guy in a suit behind a desk. In front of him is some kind of PC which has more or less exploded; there is smoke coming from it, the top of the case has a jagged hole in it, there are fragments of something or other all over his desk.
He is showing not a sign of emotion: just a dispassionate poker face. There is a thought balloon over his head, and he is thinking "It's never done that before." No exclamation point, no italics.
IMHO it is very likely that the jacket illustration was, uh, "inspired" by that old Computerworld cartoon... which in my opinion, was funnier.
"Especially in cases of vital infrastructure, like hospitals and power utilities, an overly restrictive license might not hold up in court."
I enjoy contemplating the possibility that the COO of Robotic Parking might need to undergo surgery using the latest technology...
"Well, Mrs. Clarke, the bad news is that due to a software license dispute our robotic prostate surgery machine has just stopped working right in the middle of your husband's operation... but the good news is, the overly restrictive license might not hold up in court."
We've experienced those brief and tempestuous infatuations with flowcharts, Warnier-Ott diagrams, top-down programming, structured programming, Jackson structured programming, source code control, the waterfall model, Royce's Final Model, the spiral model, the sashimi model, object-oriented programming, CASE tools, Rational Unified Process, SEI's Capability Maturity Model for Software, SEI's CMMI, feature points, function points, agile methodologies, and Extreme Programming, and... well... they were just trips to the moon on gossamer wings.
But this. This is different. Totally different. It's the real thing this time.
Slashdot Mirror
That fear resurfaced during the 1954 "Bravo" shot. It was twice as powerful as expected, and as physicists watched and saw the cloud keep expanding and expanding and expanding, with no signs of stopping, at least some of them momentarily wondered whether the atmosphere had been ignited after all.
But don't worry. Physicists will never make a mistake again. And, hey, the atmosphere didn't ignite, so, no problem.
How can I try it?
It won't work on my computer (Mac Mini), my wife's computer (Windows 98), my son's computer (Windows XP... over dialup), my daughter's old computer (WIndows 2000 Home Edition), or my daughter's new computer (Mac Mini).
Will Amazon also give me a free trial of a brand-new PC (with 2.4 gigahertz processor, and a gig of RAM, and a "DirectX 9.0 complaint Video" [sic]?
I don't get at all. Why are companies so bent on copying failure instead of success?
...is time-limited, and costs about the same as straight DVDs.
DIVX disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, and cost less than straight DVDs. And failed.
FlexPlay disks played on ordinary DVD players, were time-limited, cost less than straight DVDs, and failed.
Amazon Unbox WON'T play on ordinary DVD player, won't play on my almost-spiffy almost-new Mac Mini, won't play on my wife's PC (Windows 98), wouldn't have played on the Hewlett-Packard PC my daughter's family uses (WIndows 2000 Home Edition) before it crapped out a few months ago, won't play on the spiffy new Mac Mini she replaced it with, apparently won't play on any portable video device...
And up to now I thought Jeff Bezos was a smart guy.
"Delaying the introduction in Europe, [members of the European Parliament] said in a letter made public by Microsoft on Thursday, 'would put European companies at a competitive disadvantage with every other company around the world who does have access to these new technologies."
I am reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's story, "Superiority," in which technologically superior space empire loses to its technologically backward enemy... because it keeps rolling out fantastic new military superweapons which, unfortunately, aren't quite fully perfected. Each superweapon has its little glitches, small things really and easily fixed--but which initially make them ineffective in the field. Because the boffins keep rolling out improvements, the weapons actually being used are always in that initial, ineffective stage.
I think it is very likely it is the corporations and nations that deploy Vista within its first year of introduction will, in fact, put itself at a competitive disadvantage with those that wait for Service Pack 1 or 2.
"First, users often were not comfortable with others knowing what they were doing. The Grapevine service provided complete control over who could observe which elements of context, and users commonly blocked all others from viewing their computer activity all of the time. Although the service allowed observer-by-observer blocking, it was rarely used. This is an area for further research."
And in further news, the Thought Police reported today that Winston Smith has rented an apartment without a telescreen.
The biggest obstacles appear to be FCC inaction and DHS failure to supply funding. The problems were apparent and being widely discussed days after 9/11.
One year after 9/11, lack of progress could be fairly attributed to the complexity of the problem.
Five years after, it begins to look like incompetence... or lack of will... or both.
The Manhattan Project took four years from start to successful use of the finished product in wartime conditions.
Yeah, right, never give out your SSN.
When I was in the emergency room with chest pain and they handed me a form, with a place for my SSN on it, and I asked if I had to give it, and they said "you won't be seen until you fill it out," what would you have done? Argued with them? Called a lawyer? Whipped out a copy of the law that says they can't do this? Asked them to get an ambulance to take me to another ER? Raise the ante and see whether they were bluffing? No, I did what I thought would affect my blood pressure least, and get me seen soonest, which was... to cave in. I gave it to them, and I believe anyone with any sense would have done the same thing. Worry about it later. I had more important things to worry about.
And I think I'm _reasonably_ assertive about such things. Back Massachusetts drivers' licenses had SSN's by default, I was one of the people who always asked for and got a different number. When the Red Cross wanted my SSN for blood donations, I said I wouldn't give it to them and they issued me a donor card with a non-SSN.
When my company's medical insurance wanted my SSN, I said I wouldn't provide it. They said fine, but we won't insure you. So I called the Social Security office, and said "do I have to give it to them?" And their answer, practically verbatim, was, "No, you certainly don't. However, they are under no obligation to provide you with insurance unless you do."
Whenever I'm asked for my SSN, I always ask if there's an alternative. (And wait while they check with their supervisor). I succeed maybe half the time. The other half, well, I usually cave.
If you can get along without credit cards, auto loans, medical insurance, and emergency rooms, more power to you.
That line on every social security card that says "Not For Identification Purposes" is a lie, plain and simple.
Records: Handel in Quad; John Rockwell; The New York Times February 19, 1973, p. 29
'Music for Royal Fireworks' Sounded Better in an Early Stereo Version
Whatever its ultimate artistic and technological merits may be, quadraphonic sound understandable has the classical-record business rubbing its collective hands together with glee. The classical repertory has its limits, after all, and the standard pieces have been recorded to death in stereo. Now, at long last, a new gimmick is at hand.
Not only it is presumed that the American public will spend millions on equipment, but all the hoary old warhorses and hi-fi spectaculars can be done over again in four-channel sound....
---
Truth in advertising... Rockwell acknowledges he was listening to the new release in "plain old stereo." A March 12, 1972 review by an audio reviewer, Don Heckman, listening in quad is, however, only slightly more encouraging:
"Just what was there to hear on all this gleaming new electronic exotica? Ah, there's the rub. Until just a few months ago, quadraphonic disks were dominated by the sound effects of falling trees, puffing choo-choos and gurgling whirlpools... [now there are more and] in some cases the rewards can be quite spectacular... a room-filling, near-concert-hall effect.... Pop music programs like Joan Baez... [and] Barbra Streisand are straightforward presentations in which one is less aware of a four-dimensional effect than of a kind of opening up of the sound.... [In one track on a Vanguard demonstration disk] the organ sound is quite extraordinary.... Switched-On Bach will probably have its sales surge as listeners discover that it sounds even more fascinating when these weirdly-distorted and re-timbred snippets of Bach go whipping around four, rather than two speakers."
...I just don't get why this is raising such a fuss.
When I was a kid, there were Baltimore Orioles. Then they decided that they were really the same species as Bullock's Oriole and both of them got renamed the "Northern Oriole." Then molecular genetics studies suggested they were really all that similar and now there are Baltimore Orioles again.
My science teachers were old enough to remember when _their_ sciences teachers had said "There are ninety-two elements. There have always been ninety-two elements. There will always be ninety-two elements." And "elementary" particles? Don't get me started...
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus. Then it was Xiphosura polyphemus. Now it ''seems'' to be Limulus again... or is it?
Classification is prescientific activity. It's very important but it's always arbitrary and subject to change.
Ever since spam became a major nuisance, every of the ISP's I've used have instituted spam-blocking... and the nature of the block will vary from time to time, and they never tell you exactly what they're doing or what's being blocked or what you should do about it. Most of the time it's fairly reasonable, but I've suffered numerous multi-day "outages" during which overzealous spam filtering blocked messages from friends. Since the chances of learning about a blocked message is very small unless it's someone you're in regular non-email contact with, I'll bet that there have been a hundred valid messages blocked for every one that I know about.
What I don't understand is why ISP's can't send me an email every few days listing the subject lines and senders of everything they've blocked, with a link to click on to retrieve the blocked messages.
Is there some reason you don't mention what name you chose... or provide a link to the article in question? Just wondering.
I'm sure it's of philosophical interest, but I can't believe that the elimination of a fee of $20 a year--$50 a year for the "gold" service--is going to have much effect on the Linspire software ecosystem.
Admittedly it may look different if you're actually developing software for Linspire, which I'm not, but still... I find it hard to believe $20 annuual fee is actually stopping anyone from making software available... unless it's The Principle Of The Thing.
Heck, it costs $20 to buy a spindle of CD-R's... to replace the ink cartridges in the printer... to buy the latest O'Reilly book from Amazon, with SuperSaver shipping... all stuff you need to do to develop software. I'd think even the most casual of developers could afford a $20/year fee.
...I like some of the things IBM is doing now, but never forget they are a very, very big company whose agenda always directed at making money for their shareholders. They have a business motive behind everything they do.
IBM is a big champion of Linux now, but it wasn't all that long ago that they were issuing stern warnings to those who foresake the safety of proprietary software about the dangers of getting "locked into open source."
IBM would probably happily lock people into Linux... whatever, exactly, that would mean... if they can figure out how to do it and can see an advantage to IBM in doing it.
"We really only did standards improvements - particularly CSS and HTML improvements." Translation: Our work on CSS and HTML is incomplete.
"In IE7 we really are trying to support Web standards." Translation: we are not committing to being compliant with Web standards.
"We certainly spent a bunch of work trying to improve our standards support." Translation: We're over budget on standards support.
"I don't think we're at 90%, I think we're above 50% though." Translation: we're not compliant.
"Well as you saw I got a little frustrated with the Slashdot post." Translation: I can't point to factual inaccuracies in the Slashdot post, but I sure don't like the spin.
"The target for that was not just passing any one particular test." Translation: We don't pass that particular test.
trial by ordeal? Or having the airline boarding agent stare into the eyes of every brownish-skinned male aged 15-30 and denying boarding to the ones with shifty eyes? Or seeing which passengers little Fido (he's so intuitive, he can just sense these things) growls at?
It's obscene that something like this is even being considered. This is nothing but a polygraph test... a rush-job polygraph test conducted under poor conditions.
Even on the face of it--and one can be sure that these company's tests and reported results put their best foot forward--the system is useless. If one in ten million passengers is a terrorist, then according to the cited results it will yield 80,000 false alarms for every actual detection. In the old fable, "the boy who cried wolf" was ignored after only three false alarms.
...be a program that creates an "encyclopedia" website and invites humans to contribute to it?
For the better part of a century, radioactive decay is what scientists always use when they want to invoke a natural process that is "random." But is radioactive decay really random... that is, are there, say, well-established quantum-mechanical equations that predict this? Or is it merely chaotic, or not known to be predictable... like the popping of kernels of popcorn in a microwave, or, for that matter, the spins of a roulette wheel?
Naftule Brandwein, the Klezmer clarinet virtuoso, turned his back on the audience in order to keep the secret of the finger he used to achieve certain effects.
Of course, we're talking "trade secret," not "copyright" here.
I wonder whether he ever considered patenting his fingerings? I wonder whether that's possible. It seems to me that it might be.
Watch your productivity soar as you program simple three-key combinations to bring up your favorite Windows function.
To remember which is which, you can just put a yellow Post-It note over the phone's LCD screen.
...how did you like the play?"
The manufacturers seems to be falling over themselves trying to bring flawed, faulty, and generally unfinished products to market... presumably oblivious to the possibility the first kid on the block to get one will tell all his friends about his experiences.
I do believe Blu-Ray and HDDVD are well on their way to becoming the quadraphonic sound of the new millennium.
Thurott's column is, IMHO, pretty much on the mark. In fact it seems to me that from about 1996 on, many of the things Apple has done have been, if not copying Wintel, nevertheless moving closer and closer to it. The miserable Dock is functionally very much like the WIndows 95 taskbar, the Finder and OS now handle file extensions about the same way Windows does, and so forth.
.mp3 players. I must have read two dozen reviews that all begin the same way: This could be the iPod killer. The reviewer always says that it has, you know, twice the storage, more features, longer battery life, a lower price, whatever. Then as the review goes on it becomes painfully obvious that the reviewer encountered a number of serious problems--invariably dismissed as "glitches." It wouldn't play, or it crashed, or it wouldn't sync properly to the PC, or it wouldn't play music that the reviewer had paid for. Invariably the reviewer mentions that despite having just as many knobs and buttons as an iPod, the menu system was difficult to use, and so forth.
.mp3 player they'd ever seen... because it was the first one that had been "perfected."
And, yes, Jobs' presentations are rather dishonest... starting from the day in 1984 when he pulled a Mac out of a bag and demonstrated things like MacinTalk, never bothering to mention that he was using a prototype Mac with 512K of RAM and that of his demos would run on the shipping Mac (which had 128K).
Still, it is important to recognize that what Apple has been good at is innovation, which is not the same as invention. Most of Apple's innovations were not invented by Apple, but Apple wrapped them up, made them work, gave them fit and finish, made sure they would work for your mom and not some geek in a lab.
To use an old-fashioned word, Apple is great at perfecting things.
This shows up particularly in the world of
To put it bluntly, the iPod was an Apple innovation. It didn't actually do anything that Creative and other companies hadn't been doing for years... but it worked, and people liked it, and for an awful lot of people it was the first
No, this was in the days before Dell existed... or if it did, it was as PCs Limited. These were the days of Eagle, Columbia, Osborne, etc.
...I think it was Computerworld, possibly Datamation... circa the early eighties.
The caption was: "So, how are your company's PC users doing?"
The picture shows a guy in a suit behind a desk. In front of him is some kind of PC which has more or less exploded; there is smoke coming from it, the top of the case has a jagged hole in it, there are fragments of something or other all over his desk.
He is showing not a sign of emotion: just a dispassionate poker face. There is a thought balloon over his head, and he is thinking "It's never done that before." No exclamation point, no italics.
IMHO it is very likely that the jacket illustration was, uh, "inspired" by that old Computerworld cartoon... which in my opinion, was funnier.
"Especially in cases of vital infrastructure, like hospitals and power utilities, an overly restrictive license might not hold up in court."
I enjoy contemplating the possibility that the COO of Robotic Parking might need to undergo surgery using the latest technology...
"Well, Mrs. Clarke, the bad news is that due to a software license dispute our robotic prostate surgery machine has just stopped working right in the middle of your husband's operation... but the good news is, the overly restrictive license might not hold up in court."
We've experienced those brief and tempestuous infatuations with flowcharts, Warnier-Ott diagrams, top-down programming, structured programming, Jackson structured programming, source code control, the waterfall model, Royce's Final Model, the spiral model, the sashimi model, object-oriented programming, CASE tools, Rational Unified Process, SEI's Capability Maturity Model for Software, SEI's CMMI, feature points, function points, agile methodologies, and Extreme Programming, and... well... they were just trips to the moon on gossamer wings.
But this. This is different. Totally different. It's the real thing this time.