(AP - Cupertino, CA) Apple Computers has announced the release of the iBelly. An AirPort enabled device which will allow computer-users to monitor their stomach acid.
Through a Menubar Icon of a pulsating stomach, users can tell if their stomach is normal (a pepto-bismol pink) or overly-acidic (pulsing red).
Apple CEO Steven Jobs presented the iBelly in front of the O'Reilly and Associates Conference for Bioinformatics at Pepperdine University.
As he stood in front of the group he proudly claimed, "I put a iBelly in one of the free boxes of Smints we were giving out at the door. Then he proceeded to monitor the belly of one of the attendees.
The iBelly performed flawlessly. Jobs was able to identify the iBelly-equipped attendee by matching her coffee-sipping with the stomach acid.
I for one can't wait for Chimera to be as good as Mozilla RC3.
I know that people say that Mozilla is a failure because it didn't kill IE, and that it's big and bloated, but the good part about Mozilla is it's all open, baby. You want to build your own lean, mean browser? Have at it!
That's the benefit of the Mozilla project. It's a big open pile of browser-related code that will drive projects for the next decade.
Chimera is looking very good and has all the Aqua-ey bits. Ditching Mail, News, Composer, Chatzilla, XUL and the like is sure to make it smaller, faster and easier to maintain.
MS doesn't do a darned thing for Mac's IE. Their Mactopia webpage [link intentionally omitted] says "If you want IE, go load it off your CDs that came with your Mac". As far as I can tell, they limit their support to bugfixes. Seems to me they're not real interested in updating their 'best of class' browser.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that Chimera will be as good as the current IE in 1Q2003. In the meantime, Apple is cozying up with AOL (iChat, advertisements with Netscape in the dock). The stronger OpenOffice and Chimera are when the deal is made, the better position Apple will be. Apple and MS will figure out their relationship in some backroom. If MS loses IE to an open-source iBrowser, it won't be a big loss for MS, but it will be a big win for Chimera (and by extension Mozilla)
We've had successful cities for well over 2000 years and we've only had cars for about 100. The tendency to think cities = cars is what's wrong with a lot of modern city planning today.
For instance, a thriving business district in a city neighborhood is a precarious thing. There area ton of things you can do to screw it up:
Let's say you tear down a low-end commercial building and build a city parking lot. Your goal is to increase the number of people who can visit the area:
You reduce the number of possible destinations in that neighborhood.
Low-end buildings provide much of the unique character of a neighborhood (they never tear down the GAP store).
Low-end, smaller businesses usually represent local owners and economic strength. Removing them might cause others to move.
You create a traffic nexus that can screw up driving on all the streets near the parking lot.
Let's say you decide to ban parking along the business distruct people complain that it takes too long to drive through it.
You decrease the number of people who can visit the area (by reducing parking).
You channel people into the parking nexuses described above.
You make an implicit assumption about the mobility of your visitors (people with children and the elderly might not want to 'Park and Walk'.
You remove a perceived safety buffer (parked cars) which make pedestrians feel safer from street traffic.
You are decreasing actual safety by improving 'flow' (read increase speed) of the traffic. Pedestrains are more at risk from vehicle accidents.
The Fire service claims that they need to widen the street to get the new longer fire trucks through. It's only a couple feet per side so you take it off the sidewalk.
Well, Fire deaths are down (thanks to Smoke Alarms) and by widening the street you may increase the number of traffic fatalities. Is the benefit worth the risk?
Is the new giant truck really an improvement over a smaller vehicle or just the 'bragging rights' of your Fire Chief?
Narrowing sidewalks reduces the neighborhood's appeal. If you can't walk arm in arm with a child or a spouse, you're not going to hang out there.
The original poster made a good point, there's a lot of cities in the world and throughout history that do not follow the 'American Suburban Model' of Bubble Zoning that has brought sprawl.
SimCity was the original popular "simulator game". If they want to continue to surprise and delight us, they should better explore the relationship a neighborhoods success and transportation. In cities especially, people LIKE not using a car for every little thing. The continued suburbanification of cities won't make them more successful and SimCity should explore that.
The late Don Crabb always used to say on the Steve Dahl Show: Pornography Drives Technology. If/when video files can be tossed around like audio streams, THAT's when you'll get these problems ironed out.
Anyone who wants to understand RMS should read Free as In Freedom first. It's free as in beer and free as in speech.
The most chilling part of the whole book is a reference to Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. It's chilling really, to think of young Bill, writing this letter, unaware of where he will be in 25 some-odd years.
Two quotes from this letter are very interesting:
Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
I think he succeeded in the hiring and deluging, but some might want to qualify "good".
But ultimately, he got one thing terribly wrong...
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
It turns out that the Internet makes that thing possible. A math whiz at MIT, a graduate student in Finland, a couple hundred thousand computer hobbyists all over the world can do this.
Before you attack RMS for his wacky views, remember that he has committed his life to his views. He's committed his life to proving Gates' letter wrong.
Of course, you can buy tools from someone, and IMHO, that's okay. I can't grow bananas in my back yard, so I pay money for them. I suppose RMS would do without bananas.
But the GNU project is all about making the quality tools for free. The GPL enforces that notion with our own crazy copyright law. To extend my analogy, I do grow basil in a window box. You're welcome to some of my basil, but if you want to a whole lot of it, please give me some of your fine pesto sauce. You don't want to share, OK, then get your mitts off my plants.
More than many other modern occupations, programming is a craft: like gardening, or woodworking. Many people do it for fun. Some are lucky enough to get paid. The freedom RMS is fighting for is the freedom to share your code openly. You get my basil, I get your pesto, and everyone can get bananas. The conventional rules of scarcity don't apply with code. As we share, our tools get better, we become better craftsmen and perhaps we get our $208 back.
According to the US State department, Turkey was officially neutral during WWII.
After Hitler invaded Bulgaria and had conquered France, Turkey (probably wisely) decided to remain neutral. In 1941, nobody was going to come to their aid if they joined the Allies.
Ok, so 'Forever' might be a little strong... How about 'since WWII.
Also, the Ottoman Empire was the Ally in WWI, not Turkey. The Turkish Republic came into existence because of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire.
But you are right. The Armenian 'ethnic cleansing' / Genocide perpetrated by the Turks was inspiration for people from Hitler to Milosevic and Saddam.
I really like Turkey. I speak a little and I've visited twice. I think it's a really cool place to vacation, especially if you're short on cash.
There's just a couple of things you have to remember about Turkey:
1) Don't even think of using, buying, holding, or even thinking about illegal drugs (Midnight Express is a true story).
2) Turkey is a strongly secular state. Islam is the predominant religion and people are quite religious, but the populace is quite proud of their separation of church and state. They used to arrest people for wearing Fezzes (when we all know that laffing at them would have the same result)
3) The Founder of Modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk [yeah, I know I'm missing the umlaut], is revered in Turkey. He's like Washington, Lincoln and FDR combined. His face is on all the money; his picture is in most houses and businesses. He established Turkey as a republic after WW I, he secularized the government, he romanized the alphabet (and dramatically improved literacy) and sought to make Turkey a modern western nation. It's a crime to insult him, almost 80 years after his death.
4) Turkey is fiercely nationalistic. Their oppression of Armenians and Kurds is legendary and their invasion of Cyprus put them at war with fellow NATO ally Greece.
5) Like a friend of mine in Turkey once said "Turkey believes in a Free Market, but not a Free Press".
In other words, Turkey's been fighting all types of foreign influence ever since their independence. They've never been particularly keen on civil liberties, but they've been allies to the US forever because (a) their proximity to the Caucasus during the Cold War and (b) their proximity to the Middle East. [They border the former USSR, Iran, Iraq, and Syria].
A modern country: maybe, a free country: not really, a good place to be an anti-government protestor: no.
That stands for the Montgomery Scott School of Engineering...
Scotty: How long did you tell the captain the deflector work would take us?
LaForge: Two hours and we have barely more than that till the Borg cube arrives.
Scotty: And how long will it actually take us?
LaForge: Two hours-like I told him.
Scotty: Geordi, ye've got a lot to learn. You never tell captain's how long it will really take. How do you expect to earn a reputation as a miracle worker that way?
Well, my mom, with her dialup, probably won't ever bother to install Mac OS X, download XDarwin, install it, learn how X is different than Aqua, learn about different Window managers, tweak her dotfiles, and then download OpenOffice. I'll probably just tell her to continue to use Mac OS 9 and AppleWorks.
(Interesting aside: I know 5 mac users in my circle of non-geek friends, and I'm the only one that's running Mac OS X.)
FYI, I installed XDarwin by using Fink. It's simultaneously easier (Fink can d/l and install all sorts of groovy stuff and handles the dependencies for you) and harder (you actually have to fire up Terminal and sudo something).
Until OpenOffice is all yummy Aqua goodness, it's not going to be adopted by the Mac Multitudes. AppleWorks is gratis when you buy an Apple (at least it was on my computer) and is good enough for lots of people. The people who need the full power of MS Office probably have a company willing to pay the Microsoft Tax.
Doesn't mean that OpenOffice isn't cool or important, it's just that it's not ready for Prime Time.
I've noticed that when fun projects reach a certain level of completeness on *nix, the Cocoa developers come out of the woodwork. Take a look at Chimera, a cocoa port of Mozilla.
I know that getting XDarwin is a hassle for lots of "vanilla" Mac users, but this is going to be a must download for bleeding-edge Unix weenies.
I predict a Cocoa version will be under weigh by the time this message is posted and we will see an alpha by Xmas (ten-mas!).
AOL Time Warner is in the dumper, so they send the guy with the supposedly most independent and legitamate voice (the head of their independent news organization) to float this.
They're big in cable, maybe they'll add it to their terms and conditions.
Hey, AOL, you're losing money because you suck, not because I'm a thief. I resent the implication that I'm a criminal because Steve Case doesn't have more money than Costa Rica.
The theater company I worked with had a pretty basic setup (a tape deck, a microphone, a small radio shack mixer). We used to copy show music to cassette tapes, cue them up in the headset, and then play them over the PA. Some times we would lose a tape or it would get mangled. Othertimes we would screw up a cue because the tape wasn't rewound or it was miscued.
Last spring, I TD'ed a show where I also designed the sound. I ripped all the preshow music and sound cues to MP3s (at a pretty good bitrate -- I had plenty of space on the harddrive and the sound system was pretty lo-fi).
Then I renamed the tracks to match the Cue sheet and arranged them into a couple of playlists (preshow, first act, intermission, second act). I ran the whole thing over my laptop using -ick- Real Jukebox.
The nice thing about playlists is if you need to delay the start, or extend intermission, you can add a song in the middle, rather than at the end.
The sound out went into the mixing board, so I was able to control the fades with a slider, rather than mousing around. This was absolutely necessary, IMHO.
It went so well, that I donated my old PowerMac 7100 to the theater company. Since all you need is a decent MP3 player, most schools can get by with a low-end solution (late-90s desktop with good audio-out).
I wouldn't sign a contract with anyone unless I was sure it was fair. If I have any doubt, I get a lawyer.
A company offering you lots of training and then requiring you stay is either trying really hard to retain you (almost to the point of indentured servitude) or wants an excuse to get rid of you on 'technical grounds'. "He didn't take the in-house training we provided, therefore he's not a team player". A lawyer can tell you if it's coercive.
You never have to accept a contracts as written. I've negotiated contracts with employers before and if you can't get an agreement, at least you're free to say "no deal".
I recommend the book "Getting To Yes" for anyone who has to do some negotiating, especially if you're never done it before.
Ooh. It frosts my shorts to see how someone can use "Ecosystem" as a metaphor for a One Microsoft Way. Ecosystems require diversity to be self-regulating. Ecosystems survive ecological crises by having lots of different species, all evolving separately in their niche. When conditions change, some species suffer, while others thrive. That's a diversified ecosystem.
The open source community exhibits that kind of behavior. Some people ask "Why are there so many different Jabber clients? Shouldn't we all get together and concentrate on one good client for each OS? Not if you want a healthy 'ecosystem'... Let a thousand projects bloom... 10 might become great products. 'Natural selection' will cause a lot of them to fail, but the rest will succeed in their niche.
Opensource software development even allows for transgenic mutation, if the code is copyleft. The 'DNA' (our code), can move around, joining other projects, making robust solutions for each niche. If conditions change, some projects will suffer, but others will rise.
Bill Gates thinks that Capitalism and Innovation work, because it's worked for him. Meanwhile, $209 for Visio? What's up with THAT? It's MacDraw for Org Charts... Lemme out of "that" ecosystem pronto! =====
I really like the Heinlein quote. I think he hit the nail on the head. I'm sorry if I made it unclear if I liked the quote or not.
The internet has been 'popular' for about 10 years, and it takes about 10 years for a new technology to come into it's own (as people adapt their thinking to the possibilities of the technology). My parents both remember early television, and the difference between TV in 1948 and TV in 1958 was tremendous. Another example is the rise of the Personal Computer in the 80s. Those who could adapt quickly benefitted (Microsoft), even over those who had better technology but didn't know what they had (Xerox).
When new ideas shake up a society, people (and corporations) become discombobulated [sp?]. That's where you want to be: it's more fun, there are more challenges, and there is more opportunity. It might be tough, but it certainly aint boring...
Anyhow, I think I'll close with another quote:
Problems worthy of attack, Prove themselves by hitting back -- Piet Hein
"When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it."
Robert Heinlein, I had no idea you were still alive...
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert Heinlein
When you start IE on Mac OS X for the first time, your homepage is set to livepage.apple.com which used to go to Excite. But now it goes to Netscape.
And there in the corner is a big ole fancy come-on to download Netscape 6.2. I don't doubt for a minute that the agreement for hosting livepage.apple.com between Netscape and Apple included showing the Netscape browser in Apple ads.
I get such a kick out of seeing IE point to a Netscape page, that I kept it as my homepage on IE (since I use Mozilla for almost all my surfing).
Jon Lasser has an excellent book which assumes you're a computer user, but new to Unix. He starts out with "Unix Documentation" or "how to understand poorly written man pages" as I like to call it. Then he talks about "Files and Processes", "Redirection and Pipes", and "Networking". Later he gets into vi, regex, and shell programming. Finally he talks about the X Window System.
It's a good book. I learned Unix from reading it. The book would be a good starting point to creating an interesting class.
Elsewhere someone stated that Excel and Word both started on the Mac and someone else (the parent I hope?) said that Access was the only major MS product not introduced initially on the mac.
Not being a MS expert, I yield to your superior knowledge regarding the lack of continuity between Fox Pro and Access 1.1. I had assumed that they were much more closely related.
Thankfully, I didn't have to use Access until 2000.
Who knows what kind of ancestors you have. My uncle claims I am decended from Dutch immigrants who settled in America in the early 1700s. Sadly, I have no idea what kind of DBMS system they used. -----
Fox Pro had an early start on the Mac back in 1987. Previous versions were MSDOS dBASE clones. I'm not sure, but Fox Base may have been the first WIMP-based (Windows Icon Menu Pointer) DBMS.
I know that Fox Pro was gobbled up by MS and became MS FoxPro, which begat Access, yadda yadda... So you might be able to make the case that Access also had some Macintosh in its heritage.
Of course, I hate "Mac did it first" posts, so somebody mod me down okay? =) -----
It's a cocoa app and it supports tabbed browsing. I started using the last release and it did about 60% of what I need a browser for. When this one is done, I'll probably switch from Mozilla.
Slashdot Mirror
iBelly.
(AP - Cupertino, CA) Apple Computers has announced the release of the iBelly. An AirPort enabled device which will allow computer-users to monitor their stomach acid.
Through a Menubar Icon of a pulsating stomach, users can tell if their stomach is normal (a pepto-bismol pink) or overly-acidic (pulsing red).
Apple CEO Steven Jobs presented the iBelly in front of the O'Reilly and Associates Conference for Bioinformatics at Pepperdine University.
As he stood in front of the group he proudly claimed, "I put a iBelly in one of the free boxes of Smints we were giving out at the door. Then he proceeded to monitor the belly of one of the attendees.
The iBelly performed flawlessly. Jobs was able to identify the iBelly-equipped attendee by matching her coffee-sipping with the stomach acid.
I for one can't wait for Chimera to be as good as Mozilla RC3.
I know that people say that Mozilla is a failure because it didn't kill IE, and that it's big and bloated, but the good part about Mozilla is it's all open, baby. You want to build your own lean, mean browser? Have at it!
That's the benefit of the Mozilla project. It's a big open pile of browser-related code that will drive projects for the next decade.
Chimera is looking very good and has all the Aqua-ey bits. Ditching Mail, News, Composer, Chatzilla, XUL and the like is sure to make it smaller, faster and easier to maintain.
MS doesn't do a darned thing for Mac's IE. Their Mactopia webpage [link intentionally omitted] says "If you want IE, go load it off your CDs that came with your Mac". As far as I can tell, they limit their support to bugfixes. Seems to me they're not real interested in updating their 'best of class' browser.
I'm going out on a limb and guessing that Chimera will be as good as the current IE in 1Q2003. In the meantime, Apple is cozying up with AOL (iChat, advertisements with Netscape in the dock). The stronger OpenOffice and Chimera are when the deal is made, the better position Apple will be. Apple and MS will figure out their relationship in some backroom. If MS loses IE to an open-source iBrowser, it won't be a big loss for MS, but it will be a big win for Chimera (and by extension Mozilla)
For instance, a thriving business district in a city neighborhood is a precarious thing. There area ton of things you can do to screw it up:
Let's say you tear down a low-end commercial building and build a city parking lot. Your goal is to increase the number of people who can visit the area:
Let's say you decide to ban parking along the business distruct people complain that it takes too long to drive through it.
The Fire service claims that they need to widen the street to get the new longer fire trucks through. It's only a couple feet per side so you take it off the sidewalk.
The original poster made a good point, there's a lot of cities in the world and throughout history that do not follow the 'American Suburban Model' of Bubble Zoning that has brought sprawl.
SimCity was the original popular "simulator game". If they want to continue to surprise and delight us, they should better explore the relationship a neighborhoods success and transportation. In cities especially, people LIKE not using a car for every little thing. The continued suburbanification of cities won't make them more successful and SimCity should explore that.
The late Don Crabb always used to say on the Steve Dahl Show: Pornography Drives Technology. If/when video files can be tossed around like audio streams, THAT's when you'll get these problems ironed out.
Anyone who wants to understand RMS should read Free as In Freedom first. It's free as in beer and free as in speech.
The most chilling part of the whole book is a reference to Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists. It's chilling really, to think of young Bill, writing this letter, unaware of where he will be in 25 some-odd years.
Two quotes from this letter are very interesting:
Nothing would please me more than being able to hire ten programmers and deluge the hobby market with good software.
I think he succeeded in the hiring and deluging, but some might want to qualify "good".
But ultimately, he got one thing terribly wrong...
What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?
It turns out that the Internet makes that thing possible. A math whiz at MIT, a graduate student in Finland, a couple hundred thousand computer hobbyists all over the world can do this.
Before you attack RMS for his wacky views, remember that he has committed his life to his views. He's committed his life to proving Gates' letter wrong.
Of course, you can buy tools from someone, and IMHO, that's okay. I can't grow bananas in my back yard, so I pay money for them. I suppose RMS would do without bananas.
But the GNU project is all about making the quality tools for free. The GPL enforces that notion with our own crazy copyright law. To extend my analogy, I do grow basil in a window box. You're welcome to some of my basil, but if you want to a whole lot of it, please give me some of your fine pesto sauce. You don't want to share, OK, then get your mitts off my plants.
More than many other modern occupations, programming is a craft: like gardening, or woodworking. Many people do it for fun. Some are lucky enough to get paid. The freedom RMS is fighting for is the freedom to share your code openly. You get my basil, I get your pesto, and everyone can get bananas. The conventional rules of scarcity don't apply with code. As we share, our tools get better, we become better craftsmen and perhaps we get our $208 back.
According to the US State department, Turkey was officially neutral during WWII.
After Hitler invaded Bulgaria and had conquered France, Turkey (probably wisely) decided to remain neutral. In 1941, nobody was going to come to their aid if they joined the Allies.
Ok, so 'Forever' might be a little strong... How about 'since WWII.
Also, the Ottoman Empire was the Ally in WWI, not Turkey. The Turkish Republic came into existence because of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire.
But you are right. The Armenian 'ethnic cleansing' / Genocide perpetrated by the Turks was inspiration for people from Hitler to Milosevic and Saddam.
=========
I really like Turkey. I speak a little and I've visited twice. I think it's a really cool place to vacation, especially if you're short on cash.
There's just a couple of things you have to remember about Turkey:
1) Don't even think of using, buying, holding, or even thinking about illegal drugs (Midnight Express is a true story).
2) Turkey is a strongly secular state. Islam is the predominant religion and people are quite religious, but the populace is quite proud of their separation of church and state. They used to arrest people for wearing Fezzes (when we all know that laffing at them would have the same result)
3) The Founder of Modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk [yeah, I know I'm missing the umlaut], is revered in Turkey. He's like Washington, Lincoln and FDR combined. His face is on all the money; his picture is in most houses and businesses. He established Turkey as a republic after WW I, he secularized the government, he romanized the alphabet (and dramatically improved literacy) and sought to make Turkey a modern western nation. It's a crime to insult him, almost 80 years after his death.
4) Turkey is fiercely nationalistic. Their oppression of Armenians and Kurds is legendary and their invasion of Cyprus put them at war with fellow NATO ally Greece.
5) Like a friend of mine in Turkey once said "Turkey believes in a Free Market, but not a Free Press".
In other words, Turkey's been fighting all types of foreign influence ever since their independence. They've never been particularly keen on civil liberties, but they've been allies to the US forever because (a) their proximity to the Caucasus during the Cold War and (b) their proximity to the Middle East. [They border the former USSR, Iran, Iraq, and Syria].
A modern country: maybe, a free country: not really, a good place to be an anti-government protestor: no.
I read the article and it didn't say what leaked, the LCD? the battery?
I've had a palm for years and I've looked inside, there's no reservoir for any liquid inside...
So it's a Cellphone, Pager, PDA, e-mail client, AND a canteen?
:-)
==========
Toys"R"Us isn't live either, and I'm sure they're scammed that name right off the bat.
.
Scotty: How long did you tell the captain the deflector work would take us?
LaForge: Two hours and we have barely more than that till the Borg cube arrives.
Scotty: And how long will it actually take us?
LaForge: Two hours-like I told him.
Scotty: Geordi, ye've got a lot to learn. You never tell captain's how long it will really take. How do you expect to earn a reputation as a miracle worker that way?
Well, my mom, with her dialup, probably won't ever bother to install Mac OS X, download XDarwin, install it, learn how X is different than Aqua, learn about different Window managers, tweak her dotfiles, and then download OpenOffice. I'll probably just tell her to continue to use Mac OS 9 and AppleWorks.
(Interesting aside: I know 5 mac users in my circle of non-geek friends, and I'm the only one that's running Mac OS X.)
FYI, I installed XDarwin by using Fink. It's simultaneously easier (Fink can d/l and install all sorts of groovy stuff and handles the dependencies for you) and harder (you actually have to fire up Terminal and sudo something).
Until OpenOffice is all yummy Aqua goodness, it's not going to be adopted by the Mac Multitudes. AppleWorks is gratis when you buy an Apple (at least it was on my computer) and is good enough for lots of people. The people who need the full power of MS Office probably have a company willing to pay the Microsoft Tax.
Doesn't mean that OpenOffice isn't cool or important, it's just that it's not ready for Prime Time.
I've noticed that when fun projects reach a certain level of completeness on *nix, the Cocoa developers come out of the woodwork. Take a look at Chimera, a cocoa port of Mozilla.
I know that getting XDarwin is a hassle for lots of "vanilla" Mac users, but this is going to be a must download for bleeding-edge Unix weenies.
I predict a Cocoa version will be under weigh by the time this message is posted and we will see an alpha by Xmas (ten-mas!).
.
We were always that microbiologists wash their hands before going to the bathroom.
Stories like this make me glad I selected something microbe-free for a career.
.
I didn't get a copy of the EULA with my TV!!
AOL Time Warner is in the dumper, so they send the guy with the supposedly most independent and legitamate voice (the head of their independent news organization) to float this.
They're big in cable, maybe they'll add it to their terms and conditions.
Hey, AOL, you're losing money because you suck, not because I'm a thief. I resent the implication that I'm a criminal because Steve Case doesn't have more money than Costa Rica.
The theater company I worked with had a pretty basic setup (a tape deck, a microphone, a small radio shack mixer). We used to copy show music to cassette tapes, cue them up in the headset, and then play them over the PA. Some times we would lose a tape or it would get mangled. Othertimes we would screw up a cue because the tape wasn't rewound or it was miscued.
Last spring, I TD'ed a show where I also designed the sound. I ripped all the preshow music and sound cues to MP3s (at a pretty good bitrate -- I had plenty of space on the harddrive and the sound system was pretty lo-fi).
Then I renamed the tracks to match the Cue sheet and arranged them into a couple of playlists (preshow, first act, intermission, second act). I ran the whole thing over my laptop using -ick- Real Jukebox.
The nice thing about playlists is if you need to delay the start, or extend intermission, you can add a song in the middle, rather than at the end.
The sound out went into the mixing board, so I was able to control the fades with a slider, rather than mousing around. This was absolutely necessary, IMHO.
It went so well, that I donated my old PowerMac 7100 to the theater company. Since all you need is a decent MP3 player, most schools can get by with a low-end solution (late-90s desktop with good audio-out).
I wouldn't sign a contract with anyone unless I was sure it was fair. If I have any doubt, I get a lawyer.
A company offering you lots of training and then requiring you stay is either trying really hard to retain you (almost to the point of indentured servitude) or wants an excuse to get rid of you on 'technical grounds'. "He didn't take the in-house training we provided, therefore he's not a team player". A lawyer can tell you if it's coercive.
You never have to accept a contracts as written. I've negotiated contracts with employers before and if you can't get an agreement, at least you're free to say "no deal".
I recommend the book "Getting To Yes" for anyone who has to do some negotiating, especially if you're never done it before.
Ooh. It frosts my shorts to see how someone can use "Ecosystem" as a metaphor for a One Microsoft Way. Ecosystems require diversity to be self-regulating. Ecosystems survive ecological crises by having lots of different species, all evolving separately in their niche. When conditions change, some species suffer, while others thrive. That's a diversified ecosystem.
The open source community exhibits that kind of behavior. Some people ask "Why are there so many different Jabber clients? Shouldn't we all get together and concentrate on one good client for each OS? Not if you want a healthy 'ecosystem'... Let a thousand projects bloom... 10 might become great products. 'Natural selection' will cause a lot of them to fail, but the rest will succeed in their niche.
Opensource software development even allows for transgenic mutation, if the code is copyleft. The 'DNA' (our code), can move around, joining other projects, making robust solutions for each niche. If conditions change, some projects will suffer, but others will rise.
Bill Gates thinks that Capitalism and Innovation work, because it's worked for him. Meanwhile, $209 for Visio? What's up with THAT? It's MacDraw for Org Charts... Lemme out of "that" ecosystem pronto!
=====
I really like the Heinlein quote. I think he hit the nail on the head. I'm sorry if I made it unclear if I liked the quote or not.
The internet has been 'popular' for about 10 years, and it takes about 10 years for a new technology to come into it's own (as people adapt their thinking to the possibilities of the technology). My parents both remember early television, and the difference between TV in 1948 and TV in 1958 was tremendous. Another example is the rise of the Personal Computer in the 80s. Those who could adapt quickly benefitted (Microsoft), even over those who had better technology but didn't know what they had (Xerox).
When new ideas shake up a society, people (and corporations) become discombobulated [sp?]. That's where you want to be: it's more fun, there are more challenges, and there is more opportunity. It might be tough, but it certainly aint boring...
Anyhow, I think I'll close with another quote:
Problems worthy of attack,
Prove themselves by hitting back -- Piet Hein
"When a business model fails, it is not the government's responsability to make laws to sustain it."
Robert Heinlein, I had no idea you were still alive...
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." -- Robert Heinlein
When you start IE on Mac OS X for the first time, your homepage is set to livepage.apple.com which used to go to Excite. But now it goes to Netscape.
And there in the corner is a big ole fancy come-on to download Netscape 6.2. I don't doubt for a minute that the agreement for hosting livepage.apple.com between Netscape and Apple included showing the Netscape browser in Apple ads.
I get such a kick out of seeing IE point to a Netscape page, that I kept it as my homepage on IE (since I use Mozilla for almost all my surfing).
Um, it's in the title -- Think Unix.
:/
Sorry, I was being clever...
Jon Lasser has an excellent book which assumes you're a computer user, but new to Unix. He starts out with "Unix Documentation" or "how to understand poorly written man pages" as I like to call it. Then he talks about "Files and Processes", "Redirection and Pipes", and "Networking". Later he gets into vi, regex, and shell programming. Finally he talks about the X Window System.
It's a good book. I learned Unix from reading it. The book would be a good starting point to creating an interesting class.
Elsewhere someone stated that Excel and Word both started on the Mac and someone else (the parent I hope?) said that Access was the only major MS product not introduced initially on the mac.
Not being a MS expert, I yield to your superior knowledge regarding the lack of continuity between Fox Pro and Access 1.1. I had assumed that they were much more closely related.
Thankfully, I didn't have to use Access until 2000.
Who knows what kind of ancestors you have. My uncle claims I am decended from Dutch immigrants who settled in America in the early 1700s. Sadly, I have no idea what kind of DBMS system they used.
-----
Fox Pro had an early start on the Mac back in 1987. Previous versions were MSDOS dBASE clones. I'm not sure, but Fox Base may have been the first WIMP-based (Windows Icon Menu Pointer) DBMS.
I know that Fox Pro was gobbled up by MS and became MS FoxPro, which begat Access, yadda yadda... So you might be able to make the case that Access also had some Macintosh in its heritage.
Of course, I hate "Mac did it first" posts, so somebody mod me down okay? =)
-----
For a 0.2 release, it's quite good.
It's a cocoa app and it supports tabbed browsing. I started using the last release and it did about 60% of what I need a browser for. When this one is done, I'll probably switch from Mozilla.
-----