"rather, you'll simply tell Windows the DPI of your monitor and it will be able to scale the entire system UI to fit - from icons to text to graphical elements in the GUI."
Isn't this pretty much what X Windows and OSF/Motif and Display PostScript and so forth were doing in the early 1990s?
Why on earth should that require any more graphics processing power than is available in the humblest modern CPU?
...Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, see a row of machines in Best Buy all sporting the spiffy Aero look and read a barrage of publicity about how great the new system is....They buy a cheap machine at Costco with Vista Home preinstalled, fire it up, and think they've been cheated or given the wrong OS because it looks just the machine they dropped off at the annual hazardous waste disposal day;...Call Microsoft to find out what's wrong and get barraged by a hostile cross-examination about the provenance of their system.
Analogies are like dandelions.
on
Google's DNA
·
· Score: 5, Funny
They grow everywhere. They are showy and fun for kids to play with. They are showy and superficially attractive, but in reality are destructive weeds that need to be mercilessly extirpated. They can lead to false conclusions, such as that there must be a way to brew wine from analogies. In the end, their seeds are carried by the wind and, thus, they blow.
If you do not know Chiapaint, go immediately to www.bricklin.com/chiapaint.htm and download this hysterically funny 1996 demo which "is most funny to people who understand the technical problems (and who haven't made major financial commitments to downloadable component software)"
If you've tried AjaxWrite--I have--you'll see that most of Bricklin's remarks are still dead on the money. I, for one, waste twenty minutes trying to find a Mac browser that would work with this supposedly cross-platform application. I gave up, went to a Windows machine, spent a little more time download browser updates until I found one that worked.
(And then, of course... I proceded to load, not just any Word document, but the precise Word document I was actually working on at work that day. Nothing deliberately outrageous in it, nothing deliberately intended to test compatibility, but, sure, it used a Word style sheet and it had some pictures in it. I think the best way I can characterize the experience is to say that AjaxWrite didn't do as good a job at rendering a Word document as Mac OS X's TextEdit program does... and neither of them was acceptable).
...at least, when I was at MIT mumble years ago, that's what it was called... and I, too, thought the primary job of the Campus Patrol was to make sure we didn't get arrested by the Cambridge Police.
Of course that might have been Campus Patrol propaganda.
For what it's worth, I don't subscribe to cable or dish television.
And that is partly because having to pay for content with commercials did tick me off when when I had cable. But don't take your hat off to me, because I'd be lying if I said that's the only reason, or even the main reason.
And, yeah, I do go to movie theatres. I get hot under the collar when they run commercials, but I still go. To tell the truth I only object to the motion-picture or video commercials that have sound. The silent slide-shows with ads for local restaurants seem like a nostalgic throwback to the silent film era (just for the record, that was way before my time). Whenever I see a slide that says "Please turn of cell phones" it reminds me of the old slides that said "Ladies please remove their hats."
I gave regularly to my local NPR/PBS stations for over fifteen years. They were listener-supported then and I was happy to support them. Then someone, named Ives IIRC, announced that they were "considering" running short commercials, which some other stations were "experimenting" with. I wrote to him and said that if they did, I would stop donating. They did. So I did.
I'll pay for commercial-free programming. I'll tolerate commercials on free programming. But I am damned if I'll voluntarily pay for programming with commercials in it.
Although NPR believes that there is some meaningful distinction between their sponsorship announcements and just-plain-old advertising, it still makes them beholden to their corporate sponsors. And the effects have been noticeable. (On TV, first they had brief little announcements. Then the announcements started to twinkle and sparkle and dance. Then they started to include corporate slogans. Then suddenly a lot of homeowner and "how-to" shows started to spring up, and the camera suddenly and for no apparent reason started zooming in on cans of paint and other products that just happened to have their labels turned toward us--that just happened to be manufactured by the companies named as having so generously given their support).
Other weird stuff started to happen, too, like one FM station dropping all their classical music programs in favor of news and talk--and the other FM station dropping their drive-time classical music programming in order to broadcast the identical news programming at the same time as the other station.
I am sure I am not the only listener who feels that "public" broadcasters cannot serve two masters. If they are going to serve the public, well and good, and I'll be glad to pay my share. On the other hand, if they are going to take money from Babson Executive Education, Top-Ranked by the Financial Times, Enrolling Now for its Executive Managing Knowledge Program, on the web at Babson Dot Eee Dee You, and Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket-of-the-World--and Keane, Outsourcing Your Job to India, We Get IT Done--and broadcast their slogans--that is all well and good, but that is a different choice and they do not need my money.
War on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror... now war on the Internet...
And here I always thought a "war" was "a state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties."
Well, the Internet is sort of like a party, I guess.
I also always thought that it was Congress that had the power to declare war, and that it wasn't war until Congress said it was war.
But, OK, Bush had is way on the war thing, but just let him try issuing a letter of marque and reprisal and a betcha Congress will hit him upside the head with a check and a balance.
One of the reasons why iTunes Music Store works is that although music is priced at about the same price per minute as the same content on CD, you have the option of buying individual songs. And in fact this works very well for me. I have probably purchased between fifty and a hundred individual songs where I want the individual songs but do not like the artists well enough to want eleven more.
So... maybe they should try offering individual scenes from movies.
This wouldn't work for every movie, but "Basic Instinct" would probably lend well itself to this treatment.
...we'll see machines that are billed as "Vista-capable" but don't give a very good experience?
We don't need benchmarks for speed. We need published, reliable benchmarks to serve as good, real-world guidelines about how much RAM the average user really needs to buy.
System requirements are depressingly unreliable, because it's one place where a company can sweep its underperformance under the rug. It's a soft requirement. Everyone will know whether Vista ships late. Everyone will know whether Vista has the feature they said it would have. But nobody will know whether some round of testing or tightening didn't get done, or whether engineering warned management that the goal for the system requirements can't be met and the requirements need to be bumped up. With the PC vendors pushing for a way to hit low price points for the entry systems...
For me, the timeline has been depressingly similar, over about two decades, in both the PC and the Mac world, whenever a new OS is introduced:
--The stated system RAM requirement is X, the entry-level systems are equipped with X, the midline systems are equipped with 2X. I buy 2X, but all my "I'm-not-a-computer-genius" friends who buy a machine at Best Buy and come to me for advice bought X.
--If you only have X, the system will, in fact, boot and very basic functions like displaying directories in the shell or running trivial programs like Wordpad seem OK. Typical purchased software (Office, Photoshop Elements, etc). seem to run sorta OK, but as soon as you see what they are like on a system with 2X you realize that X was actually underpowered from the word go.
--You can't tell your friends, "no big deal, buy another X RAM chip, it's only $49.95" unless you plan to go with them to buy it and plan to go to their house and install it for them.
--Even if the system works adequately, about eight months after it is released an automatic patch that is billed as "recommended for ALL systems" will, without clear notification, increase the RAM footprint by about 15% of X, which is just enough to push the systems that used to work sorta-kinda-OK into dogs, and the systems with 2X, which really did work OK, into systems that work noticeably slowly. Nothing that you can't fix if you're willing to spend a week or so tuning...
--All the advice articles saying admiringly that the system "loves RAM" and that it will work like a charm if you have 4X in.
--About a year after release, all the add-on software that runs under the OS starts to get point updates, which, unannounced, suddenly require more RAM. If you bought your system with 4X, or have upgraded to 4X, you don't even notice. If you bought even a midline system, you suddenly notice the upgrade has made an application that used to work fine dog-slow.
--About two years into release is your last good opportunity to throw RAM at the problem. If you miss the opportunity, by the time you are in the three to four year period you will find that RAM technology has moved forward, nobody quite remembers what kind of RAM your system needed, or how much you can add,or whether a slot billed as requiring Y MHz will work properly with a new stick marked 1.5Y MHz. After you put it in your machine will start to crash twice a day, and it will take several days of swapping RAM to figure out whether the new RAM was bad, or you needed to buy RAM that was an identical match for the old RAM, or you needed to remove and throw out the old RAM, or whether the empty RAM slot you put the new RAM into is unreliable or has gotten dirty from being left unfilled... and have to start dodging pointed questions from the RAM vendor who keeps asking whether you opened the package while wearing a wrist strap in a clean room, and when your lab last tested your wrist strap.
...and the IBM Portable, and Micro Channel, and, of course, the IBM 4" diskette drive (you know... the one that was going to blow the Seagate 3" diskette drive, the Hitachi 3-1/4" diskette drive, and the Sony 3-1/2" diskette drive out of the water?)
How about Microsoft Bob? and Windows ME? and Windows for Pen Computing?
The biggest thing the IBMs and Microsofts of the world have going for them is the perception of infallibility. Their flops are instantly forgotten, and all the business folk accept the idea that they will inevitably sweep aside the competition at anything they do.
In this confusing world, the one comforting, constant, bedrock, fundamental certainty has been that the pundits would explain how Apple is moribund, in a death spiral, and will be gone in about a year. The first time I heard that was in 1985. Not counting, of course, the people in 1984 that said the Mac was dead on arrival because it didn't have an 80-column screen and cursor keys.
Circa 1990, I worked in a Fortune 500 company which cancelled all its Mac skunkworks projects, due to Apple's imminent demise, scaled back all its Windows projects, and beefed up all its OS/2 projects, because Gartner's colorful graphs showed OS/2 would pass not only the Mac but MS-DOS and Windows in, if I recall correctly, less than two years, and would dominate the market by 1995.
Nobody is saying Apple is dead? Uh-oh, I'm worried. Maybe it's time to start short-selling Apple stock.
Don't the people who worry about iPod volume levels realize that headphones differ enormously in sensitivity?
I have a pair of wonderful Sennheiser HD570 headphones which, unfortunately, are much less sensitive than those that come with the iPod. Using these headphones, perhaps 2/3 of my music sounds about right with the iPod volume set to its maximum. If I could just boost the output up about 6 db or so, it would work with all of them.
...take the current version of XP; change the default color for the desktop, scramble the order of every feature in every menu, and add some spiffy new splash screens and logos and a new package.
Every significant feature of Vista has already been removed, they might as well remove the rest.
Voila! They make their ship date, PC manufacturers have a merry Christmas, everybody is thrilled at how backward-compatible it is and how little retraining is necessary.
Nobody will get upset but a few literal-minded techies. Anybody dissatisfied with Windows as we know it migrated away years ago.
...every time Microsoft says "this is a completely new operating system." (I forget exactly how they worded the claims, but they managed to give a strong impression that they were claiming that MS-DOS was not part of Windows 95... just like Clinton gave the impression he was saying he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky, or like Bush gave the impression he was saying Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11).
Every time they say that the new OS is secure.
Every time they say that the new OS is easy to use and doesn't crash.
It's like Lucy telling Charlie Brown that she's going to let him kick the football this time. She never does, and he never seems to learn.
Hmm... Lucy... Charlie Brown... what we need is a Linus.
"The new system will serve up personalized content and advertising to opt-in users."
In other words, adware......which is always (claimed to be) opt-in? Usually in a confusing, most people would feel deceptive way, but at some point in the process you have clicked "yes" on a button, with or without having paid any attention to a complicated notice in obfuscated legalese...
You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.
But... the more things change...
In 1945, The World Publishing Company published a nice little volume, The Atomic Age Opens edited by one Gerald Wendt and helping explain to the public what recent events meant. Along with quotations by military people who had witnessed the Trinity test, tutorials on neutrons and protons "doing their stuff" (as George Orwell once phrased it), and so forth, were some predictions for the future:
"Dr. R. M. Langer, physics research associate at the California Institute of Technology, said five years ago in _Collier's_ magazine that U-235 could create a civilization in which man would dwell underground for better living....
[In the future] 'Light is generated by fluorescence which occurs around U-235 and is piped under the house through transparent plastic sheets along the interiors of rooms,' Langer said. 'The household supply of U-235 is stored and used slowly in the chamber where plants are grown. Appropriate portions are automatically delivered through a tube-distribution system to stations where they are needed to provide heat or power for machinery or cooking....'
Families will travel short distances in automobiles powered by small chunks of U-235 in a water tank inside the car, he said....
Admitting that none of the ideas he envisioned have yet been worked out in practice, Langer declared that the difficulties were those of detail...."
Won't work. Geometric distortion is the fatal flaw in all screen-and-glasses systems. The geometry of the image only looks natural from a very small number of seats, and only if the camera is photographing with a "normal" focal-length lens. Under all other conditions, the 3D image has distorted geometry. Actually this is true even with flat images, but it is much more acceptable in those situations.
3D movies work for "fantasy" movies, where Cabinet-of-Dr-Caligari-like distortions don't affect (or even enhance) the viewing experience. They work for short novelty films and roller-coaster-like "This-Is-Cinerama"-type spectacles. But when you want a sustained, realistic impression of physical presence, the distortions much more serious.
Think of it this way. Can you enjoy sports in black-and-white? Yes. Can you enjoy sports in reasonably faithful color? Yes. Could you enjoy sports in psychedelic, distorted color? I doubt it, although such distortions might not matter in a comedy or a cartoon.
Why is this distortion inevitable? It's because in a live theatre every single eyeball gets a different view of the stage, one for every eyeball in the audience. Someone sitting front left sees a stereo pair, someone sitting rear right sees a stereo pair, but they are different stereo pairs. In a 3D movie, everyone sees the same pair of images. Put a 3D camera in a live theatre, then screen the results: the only person with an undistorted view is the person sitting in the same seat the camera was in when it shot the scene.
Another way to think of it. Suppose that in a 3D movie Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and suppose she pitches a handkerchief directly toward the camera and it lands ten feet away. When the results are screened, whereever you are sitting you are going to see that handkerchief come straight toward you and land halfway between you and the screen. If you're sitting ten feet from the screen at the right, that handkerchief will come toward the right and land five feet away--and all the depth in the scene will be half as deep as it should be, and every cube in the scene will be a parallelopiped skrooged toward the right.
If you're sitting forty feet from the screen at the left, that handkerchief will come toward the left and land twenty feet away. And all the depth in the scene will be exaggerated, twice as deep as it should be. And everything that's square will turn into a rhombus, skrooged toward the left.
And it gets even worse if you add wide-angle and telephoto shots. Telephoto shots flatten depth; in a baseball game, the batter seems to be standing only ten feet from the pitcher. But it's not that obvious in a 2D image. In a 3D image, you will get the same effect and you won't be able to ignore it.
Do you think this sort of thing is likely to affect your enjoyment of a sports event, which consists (in part) of appreciating the precise geometry of the playing field and the skill of the players in judging distances? I do.
...because I see no reason at all to pay a third party to do what I can easily do myself. I'd like to e-file directly with the IRS, but that does not appear to be an option.
I think it's scandalous that the IRS spends tax dollars sending out mailings promoting e-filing when, according to their own description, this method of submission is available only from the private sector, as a for-profit commercial enterprise. If the H&R Blocks of the world are making money off of e-filing, let them promote it themselves.
Yale is suing U. S. News and World Report for unfairly depriving the university of applicants by downgrading its overall ranking to #3, having formerly ranked it as tied with Harvard for #1, without reason or warning...
Pluto is suing the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City for depriving it of attention by school children by downgrading its status from "planet" to "biggest object in the Kuiper belt," without reason or warning...
and Texas is suing Alaska for unfairly depriving it of bragging rights by downgrading its rank among states listed by area, without reason or warning.
Slashdot Mirror
"rather, you'll simply tell Windows the DPI of your monitor and it will be able to scale the entire system UI to fit - from icons to text to graphical elements in the GUI."
Isn't this pretty much what X Windows and OSF/Motif and Display PostScript and so forth were doing in the early 1990s?
Why on earth should that require any more graphics processing power than is available in the humblest modern CPU?
...Mr. and Mrs. Consumer, see a row of machines in Best Buy all sporting the spiffy Aero look and read a barrage of publicity about how great the new system is. ...They buy a cheap machine at Costco with Vista Home preinstalled, fire it up, and think they've been cheated or given the wrong OS because it looks just the machine they dropped off at the annual hazardous waste disposal day; ...Call Microsoft to find out what's wrong and get barraged by a hostile cross-examination about the provenance of their system.
They grow everywhere. They are showy and fun for kids to play with. They are showy and superficially attractive, but in reality are destructive weeds that need to be mercilessly extirpated. They can lead to false conclusions, such as that there must be a way to brew wine from analogies. In the end, their seeds are carried by the wind and, thus, they blow.
If you do not know Chiapaint, go immediately to www.bricklin.com/chiapaint.htm and download this hysterically funny 1996 demo which "is most funny to people who understand the technical problems (and who haven't made major financial commitments to downloadable component software)"
If you've tried AjaxWrite--I have--you'll see that most of Bricklin's remarks are still dead on the money. I, for one, waste twenty minutes trying to find a Mac browser that would work with this supposedly cross-platform application. I gave up, went to a Windows machine, spent a little more time download browser updates until I found one that worked.
(And then, of course... I proceded to load, not just any Word document, but the precise Word document I was actually working on at work that day. Nothing deliberately outrageous in it, nothing deliberately intended to test compatibility, but, sure, it used a Word style sheet and it had some pictures in it. I think the best way I can characterize the experience is to say that AjaxWrite didn't do as good a job at rendering a Word document as Mac OS X's TextEdit program does... and neither of them was acceptable).
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
(Enough said)
...at least, when I was at MIT mumble years ago, that's what it was called... and I, too, thought the primary job of the Campus Patrol was to make sure we didn't get arrested by the Cambridge Police.
Of course that might have been Campus Patrol propaganda.
when in an internal memo, Bill Gates said "We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing."
Remind me, again... how many major OS releases and services packs and IE versions have been released since then?
For what it's worth, I don't subscribe to cable or dish television.
And that is partly because having to pay for content with commercials did tick me off when when I had cable. But don't take your hat off to me, because I'd be lying if I said that's the only reason, or even the main reason.
And, yeah, I do go to movie theatres. I get hot under the collar when they run commercials, but I still go. To tell the truth I only object to the motion-picture or video commercials that have sound. The silent slide-shows with ads for local restaurants seem like a nostalgic throwback to the silent film era (just for the record, that was way before my time). Whenever I see a slide that says "Please turn of cell phones" it reminds me of the old slides that said "Ladies please remove their hats."
I gave regularly to my local NPR/PBS stations for over fifteen years. They were listener-supported then and I was happy to support them. Then someone, named Ives IIRC, announced that they were "considering" running short commercials, which some other stations were "experimenting" with. I wrote to him and said that if they did, I would stop donating. They did. So I did.
I'll pay for commercial-free programming. I'll tolerate commercials on free programming. But I am damned if I'll voluntarily pay for programming with commercials in it.
Although NPR believes that there is some meaningful distinction between their sponsorship announcements and just-plain-old advertising, it still makes them beholden to their corporate sponsors. And the effects have been noticeable. (On TV, first they had brief little announcements. Then the announcements started to twinkle and sparkle and dance. Then they started to include corporate slogans. Then suddenly a lot of homeowner and "how-to" shows started to spring up, and the camera suddenly and for no apparent reason started zooming in on cans of paint and other products that just happened to have their labels turned toward us--that just happened to be manufactured by the companies named as having so generously given their support).
Other weird stuff started to happen, too, like one FM station dropping all their classical music programs in favor of news and talk--and the other FM station dropping their drive-time classical music programming in order to broadcast the identical news programming at the same time as the other station.
I am sure I am not the only listener who feels that "public" broadcasters cannot serve two masters. If they are going to serve the public, well and good, and I'll be glad to pay my share. On the other hand, if they are going to take money from Babson Executive Education, Top-Ranked by the Financial Times, Enrolling Now for its Executive Managing Knowledge Program, on the web at Babson Dot Eee Dee You, and Archer Daniels Midland, Supermarket-of-the-World--and Keane, Outsourcing Your Job to India, We Get IT Done--and broadcast their slogans--that is all well and good, but that is a different choice and they do not need my money.
War on poverty, war on drugs, war on terror... now war on the Internet...
And here I always thought a "war" was "a state of open, armed, often prolonged conflict carried on between nations, states, or parties."
Well, the Internet is sort of like a party, I guess.
I also always thought that it was Congress that had the power to declare war, and that it wasn't war until Congress said it was war.
But, OK, Bush had is way on the war thing, but just let him try issuing a letter of marque and reprisal and a betcha Congress will hit him upside the head with a check and a balance.
One of the reasons why iTunes Music Store works is that although music is priced at about the same price per minute as the same content on CD, you have the option of buying individual songs. And in fact this works very well for me. I have probably purchased between fifty and a hundred individual songs where I want the individual songs but do not like the artists well enough to want eleven more.
So... maybe they should try offering individual scenes from movies.
This wouldn't work for every movie, but "Basic Instinct" would probably lend well itself to this treatment.
...we'll see machines that are billed as "Vista-capable" but don't give a very good experience?
,or whether a slot billed as requiring Y MHz will work properly with a new stick marked 1.5Y MHz. After you put it in your machine will start to crash twice a day, and it will take several days of swapping RAM to figure out whether the new RAM was bad, or you needed to buy RAM that was an identical match for the old RAM, or you needed to remove and throw out the old RAM, or whether the empty RAM slot you put the new RAM into is unreliable or has gotten dirty from being left unfilled... and have to start dodging pointed questions from the RAM vendor who keeps asking whether you opened the package while wearing a wrist strap in a clean room, and when your lab last tested your wrist strap.
We don't need benchmarks for speed. We need published, reliable benchmarks to serve as good, real-world guidelines about how much RAM the average user really needs to buy.
System requirements are depressingly unreliable, because it's one place where a company can sweep its underperformance under the rug. It's a soft requirement. Everyone will know whether Vista ships late. Everyone will know whether Vista has the feature they said it would have. But nobody will know whether some round of testing or tightening didn't get done, or whether engineering warned management that the goal for the system requirements can't be met and the requirements need to be bumped up. With the PC vendors pushing for a way to hit low price points for the entry systems...
For me, the timeline has been depressingly similar, over about two decades, in both the PC and the Mac world, whenever a new OS is introduced:
--The stated system RAM requirement is X, the entry-level systems are equipped with X, the midline systems are equipped with 2X. I buy 2X, but all my "I'm-not-a-computer-genius" friends who buy a machine at Best Buy and come to me for advice bought X.
--If you only have X, the system will, in fact, boot and very basic functions like displaying directories in the shell or running trivial programs like Wordpad seem OK. Typical purchased software (Office, Photoshop Elements, etc). seem to run sorta OK, but as soon as you see what they are like on a system with 2X you realize that X was actually underpowered from the word go.
--You can't tell your friends, "no big deal, buy another X RAM chip, it's only $49.95" unless you plan to go with them to buy it and plan to go to their house and install it for them.
--Even if the system works adequately, about eight months after it is released an automatic patch that is billed as "recommended for ALL systems" will, without clear notification, increase the RAM footprint by about 15% of X, which is just enough to push the systems that used to work sorta-kinda-OK into dogs, and the systems with 2X, which really did work OK, into systems that work noticeably slowly. Nothing that you can't fix if you're willing to spend a week or so tuning...
--All the advice articles saying admiringly that the system "loves RAM" and that it will work like a charm if you have 4X in.
--About a year after release, all the add-on software that runs under the OS starts to get point updates, which, unannounced, suddenly require more RAM. If you bought your system with 4X, or have upgraded to 4X, you don't even notice. If you bought even a midline system, you suddenly notice the upgrade has made an application that used to work fine dog-slow.
--About two years into release is your last good opportunity to throw RAM at the problem. If you miss the opportunity, by the time you are in the three to four year period you will find that RAM technology has moved forward, nobody quite remembers what kind of RAM your system needed, or how much you can add
...and the IBM Portable, and Micro Channel, and, of course, the IBM 4" diskette drive (you know... the one that was going to blow the Seagate 3" diskette drive, the Hitachi 3-1/4" diskette drive, and the Sony 3-1/2" diskette drive out of the water?)
How about Microsoft Bob? and Windows ME? and Windows for Pen Computing?
The biggest thing the IBMs and Microsofts of the world have going for them is the perception of infallibility. Their flops are instantly forgotten, and all the business folk accept the idea that they will inevitably sweep aside the competition at anything they do.
Right. Apple produces the Lisa and everyone says "dumb Apple, what a dud."
Microsoft produces Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0 and everyone says "Got to admire Microsoft, they stick to it until they get it right."
Now I'm worried.
In this confusing world, the one comforting, constant, bedrock, fundamental certainty has been that the pundits would explain how Apple is moribund, in a death spiral, and will be gone in about a year. The first time I heard that was in 1985. Not counting, of course, the people in 1984 that said the Mac was dead on arrival because it didn't have an 80-column screen and cursor keys.
Circa 1990, I worked in a Fortune 500 company which cancelled all its Mac skunkworks projects, due to Apple's imminent demise, scaled back all its Windows projects, and beefed up all its OS/2 projects, because Gartner's colorful graphs showed OS/2 would pass not only the Mac but MS-DOS and Windows in, if I recall correctly, less than two years, and would dominate the market by 1995.
Nobody is saying Apple is dead? Uh-oh, I'm worried. Maybe it's time to start short-selling Apple stock.
The sooner the format tanks, the rarer it will be, and the sooner the early units will become valuable.
Buy it now and put it in your garage next to your jar of mint-condition Susan B. Anthony dollars, your Coleco Adam, and your Gemstar REB-1100 eBook.
Bound to be worth a fortune; your grandchildren will be so grateful.
Don't the people who worry about iPod volume levels realize that headphones differ enormously in sensitivity?
I have a pair of wonderful Sennheiser HD570 headphones which, unfortunately, are much less sensitive than those that come with the iPod. Using these headphones, perhaps 2/3 of my music sounds about right with the iPod volume set to its maximum. If I could just boost the output up about 6 db or so, it would work with all of them.
...take the current version of XP; change the default color for the desktop, scramble the order of every feature in every menu, and add some spiffy new splash screens and logos and a new package.
Every significant feature of Vista has already been removed, they might as well remove the rest.
Voila! They make their ship date, PC manufacturers have a merry Christmas, everybody is thrilled at how backward-compatible it is and how little retraining is necessary.
Nobody will get upset but a few literal-minded techies. Anybody dissatisfied with Windows as we know it migrated away years ago.
...every time Microsoft says "this is a completely new operating system." (I forget exactly how they worded the claims, but they managed to give a strong impression that they were claiming that MS-DOS was not part of Windows 95... just like Clinton gave the impression he was saying he did not have sex with Monica Lewinsky, or like Bush gave the impression he was saying Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11).
Every time they say that the new OS is secure.
Every time they say that the new OS is easy to use and doesn't crash.
It's like Lucy telling Charlie Brown that she's going to let him kick the football this time. She never does, and he never seems to learn.
Hmm... Lucy... Charlie Brown... what we need is a Linus.
"The new system will serve up personalized content and advertising to opt-in users."
...which is always (claimed to be) opt-in? Usually in a confusing, most people would feel deceptive way, but at some point in the process you have clicked "yes" on a button, with or without having paid any attention to a complicated notice in obfuscated legalese...
In other words, adware...
You have to admit, subjecting these claims to the marketplace should prove whether or not there's anything to them. The number of people willing to believe their houses are warm when they are cold is probably a lot smaller than the number of people willing to believe they've been cured by quack medicine.
But... the more things change...
In 1945, The World Publishing Company published a nice little volume, The Atomic Age Opens edited by one Gerald Wendt and helping explain to the public what recent events meant. Along with quotations by military people who had witnessed the Trinity test, tutorials on neutrons and protons "doing their stuff" (as George Orwell once phrased it), and so forth, were some predictions for the future:
"Dr. R. M. Langer, physics research associate at the California Institute of Technology, said five years ago in _Collier's_ magazine that U-235 could create a civilization in which man would dwell underground for better living....
[In the future] 'Light is generated by fluorescence which occurs around U-235 and is piped under the house through transparent plastic sheets along the interiors of rooms,' Langer said. 'The household supply of U-235 is stored and used slowly in the chamber where plants are grown. Appropriate portions are automatically delivered through a tube-distribution system to stations where they are needed to provide heat or power for machinery or cooking....'
Families will travel short distances in automobiles powered by small chunks of U-235 in a water tank inside the car, he said....
Admitting that none of the ideas he envisioned have yet been worked out in practice, Langer declared that the difficulties were those of detail...."
Won't work. Geometric distortion is the fatal flaw in all screen-and-glasses systems. The geometry of the image only looks natural from a very small number of seats, and only if the camera is photographing with a "normal" focal-length lens. Under all other conditions, the 3D image has distorted geometry. Actually this is true even with flat images, but it is much more acceptable in those situations.
3D movies work for "fantasy" movies, where Cabinet-of-Dr-Caligari-like distortions don't affect (or even enhance) the viewing experience. They work for short novelty films and roller-coaster-like "This-Is-Cinerama"-type spectacles. But when you want a sustained, realistic impression of physical presence, the distortions much more serious.
Think of it this way. Can you enjoy sports in black-and-white? Yes. Can you enjoy sports in reasonably faithful color? Yes. Could you enjoy sports in psychedelic, distorted color? I doubt it, although such distortions might not matter in a comedy or a cartoon.
Why is this distortion inevitable? It's because in a live theatre every single eyeball gets a different view of the stage, one for every eyeball in the audience. Someone sitting front left sees a stereo pair, someone sitting rear right sees a stereo pair, but they are different stereo pairs. In a 3D movie, everyone sees the same pair of images. Put a 3D camera in a live theatre, then screen the results: the only person with an undistorted view is the person sitting in the same seat the camera was in when it shot the scene.
Another way to think of it. Suppose that in a 3D movie Ann Miller is twenty feet from the camera, and suppose she pitches a handkerchief directly toward the camera and it lands ten feet away. When the results are screened, whereever you are sitting you are going to see that handkerchief come straight toward you and land halfway between you and the screen. If you're sitting ten feet from the screen at the right, that handkerchief will come toward the right and land five feet away--and all the depth in the scene will be half as deep as it should be, and every cube in the scene will be a parallelopiped skrooged toward the right.
If you're sitting forty feet from the screen at the left, that handkerchief will come toward the left and land twenty feet away. And all the depth in the scene will be exaggerated, twice as deep as it should be. And everything that's square will turn into a rhombus, skrooged toward the left.
And it gets even worse if you add wide-angle and telephoto shots. Telephoto shots flatten depth; in a baseball game, the batter seems to be standing only ten feet from the pitcher. But it's not that obvious in a 2D image. In a 3D image, you will get the same effect and you won't be able to ignore it.
Do you think this sort of thing is likely to affect your enjoyment of a sports event, which consists (in part) of appreciating the precise geometry of the playing field and the skill of the players in judging distances? I do.
...because I see no reason at all to pay a third party to do what I can easily do myself. I'd like to e-file directly with the IRS, but that does not appear to be an option.
I think it's scandalous that the IRS spends tax dollars sending out mailings promoting e-filing when, according to their own description, this method of submission is available only from the private sector, as a for-profit commercial enterprise. If the H&R Blocks of the world are making money off of e-filing, let them promote it themselves.
Yale is suing U. S. News and World Report for unfairly depriving the university of applicants by downgrading its overall ranking to #3, having formerly ranked it as tied with Harvard for #1, without reason or warning...
Pluto is suing the Rose Center for Earth and Space in New York City for depriving it of attention by school children by downgrading its status from "planet" to "biggest object in the Kuiper belt," without reason or warning...
and Texas is suing Alaska for unfairly depriving it of bragging rights by downgrading its rank among states listed by area, without reason or warning.