According to the _Technical Writing_ book that I use as a reference "The semicolon is a stronger mark of separation than the comma, almost as strong as the period. It is chiefly used between independent clauses not connected with one of the coordinating conjunctions..."
Actually, although what you cited is technically correct, it is incomplete. One standard use of the semicolon in English (and most certainly in American English) is to separate items in a list, where each item may contain a comma. Therefore, the above example should be rewritten thus to conform with the standard rules of English punctuation:
Inventors: Ording, Bas (Sunnyvale, CA); Jobs, Steven P. (Palo Alto, CA); Lindsay, Donald J. (Mountain View, CA)
This is especially important since, while it is customary to cite last name first using a comma to delimit the last name from the first name and middle initial, there are multiple names in this list that are given in last-name-first format. And since we know that Mr. Jobs' first name is Steven, it is obvious that "Jobs" should go with "Steven P." and not with "Bas."
So you're right about one thing: the semicolon really is the stronger mark of separation than the comma, and therefore should go between the names of the people given in the list, not between the first and last names of each person! Putting a semicolon between someone's last and first name divides one from the other, visually and logically.
If you're going to argue from authority (which can lead to a logical fallacy), in this case by citing a technical writing book or manual of style, it helps to read the entire thing in context, understand it fully, and realize that no one source stands on its own -- it helps even more to have a command of the full English language.
Yeah, I have a writing degree -- a minor degree in creative writing and not technical writing, but still a degree. But that shouldn't matter -- just pick up a copy of Strunk and White, The Elements of Style.
Side note: I've noticed lately that the BBC has been omitting semicolons in lists of items that have commas embedded into them. I know that the UK changed its punctuation rules relatively recently, mainly to simplify the rules for handling quotation marks, but I didn't think they made the semicolon optional. (Maybe this is just editorial laziness?) Kind of a pity if true -- the semicolon is one of my favorite punctuation marks.
The impression I got of their internal development process was not so much that they were "porting" from PC to Mac, but rather that they were developing the game assets cross-platform, and writing an engine that was mostly cross-platform, with a few platform-specific bits safely sequestered away in their own code modules.
Based on that understanding (which might be wrong), it would seem that moving to Wine would change the current development model. It would also eliminate Mac-specific features, and make any game developed this way integrate less well with the OS.
The only real benefit here would be for Linux users -- assuming Blizzard even chose to support Linux. (Based on what happened with Spore, this is far from a foregone conclusion.) There is cost related to changing the development model.
This isn't just about Apple. The document cites, for example, that AT&T Mobility does not (or is not required to) subsidize the cost of the iPhone, contrary to standard industry practice, yet they still charge a $175 early termination fee.
I am with the court on this one! Early termination fees only make sense if the carrier is subsidizing the cost of the handset.
I enjoyed reading about all of these new hybrid vehicles, but the Popular Mechanics article about the Insight was almost unreadable in spots, to the point of being seriously misleading. Thankfully, I knew enough to figure out what the author of the article was trying to say. (In fairness, it could have been the result of an overzealous editor trimming for space and cutting too much in the process.)
Here's one gem from that article:
Some have dubbed IMA a "mild hybrid," or "mybrid," though company officials bridle at that description. The Civic Hybrid was the first to bear the IMA name, generating plenty of publicity but relatively paltry sales numbers. It was, for starters, a startlingly distinctive product, with a wraparound body designed to maximize fuel efficiency, which was further enhanced by the lightweight aluminum used for body panels and the chassis. But while it set fuel-economy records, the two-seater delivered limited functionality and decidedly poor performance.
The way this snippet is written, you'd think that the Civic Hybrid was a 2-seat car with an aluminum frame and side panels. However, the Civic Hybrid is neither -- it is mostly like a conventional Honda Civic (and I've ridden in one). The Insight is the 2-seater with an aluminum construction -- and I know this because I had a coworker who bought one when they first came out.
Re:But does it look like Photoshop yet?
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GIMP 2.6 Released
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I can use image editors, but the layout and thinking of Gimp is just left of center, far enough to make me uncomfortable in it.
Is there a particular reason you felt compelled to inject an apparent political pejorative into a non-political discussion of GIMP? I'm really amazed you got a pass from everyone else on this; a decade ago, this would not have been the case. I mean, there are so many other ways you could have expressed your displeasure with the UI that would have been far more germane and technically useful to a discussion about software, but you picked "left of center." That's about as non-descriptive as you can get in this context, but it clearly seems intended as a pejorative.
That said... Speaking as a person who used to make a living writing image format conversion software and developing other graphics software applications, but who is not a "graphics professional" in the sense that I don't use Photoshop or similar software for my daily work, I can say that GIMP seemed fairly non-intuitive when I tried it for some simply image editing tasks. Keep in mind that I used GIMP around 2001-2002, and I haven't really played with it much since, maybe only 2 or 3 times at less than an hour each time.
I had no preconceived notions of how GIMP's UI should look because I'm not a Photoshop jockey with years invested in automated workflows and the like, but I worked enough with graphics tools and with designing special-purpose graphics apps that I had a pretty good idea going into it of what I wanted to accomplish... and I had no clue how to accomplish what I intuitively knew I needed to do. Short of writing a one-off application to do the raster operations I needed to perform (not practical in this case), I was stuck with GIMP in the environment that I was in.
The end result of my tinkering wasn't very satisfactory, and eventually I wound up using GraphicConverter on an iBook I brought to the client's site to re-do everything that I tried in GIMP. Yeah, GC is a pretty weak app compared to Photoshop, and even compared to GIMP, but it's surprisingly functional, and most of the tools I need are easy to find. (Some are buried pretty deep, admittedly, so it's not a perfect tool by any stretch either.)
I think ultimately the problem that I have with GIMP, and with many Open Source apps in general, is that few people with human factors experience work on the UI -- and even when someone who does have the requisite usability background steps in, there's no guarantee that their work will not get undone later by some well-meaning contributor. Now, in the years since I last seriously used GIMP, it's possible that the UI has improved dramatically, and maybe some of this is due to the presence of contributors who have a clue about GUI design. I just haven't seen it.
Oh, like the developers are going to change GIMP to be a MacOS-only program????
Who said that? He said dump GTK and replace it with GNUStep or Cocoa. You do realize that GNUStep replicates the major functional bits of the Cocoa API for OS X, right? And that GNUStep exists on Windows and Linux, right? So he's not saying make GIMP a Mac-only program. That's just ridiculous. Way to misrepresent someone else's argument!
Of course, there are other legitimate issues with what the GP said, and others have already raised those issues.
Fuck DARPA and fuck the NSA. And before some idiot goes all "we'd have no Internet without...", (1) says who? the Internet was designed and implemented by a host of international contributors (2) so what? the end does not justify the means.
Implemented, maybe, but designed? Sorry, most of the fundamental work on the core network protocols (IP, TCP, UDP) was done by DARPA researchers. Vint Cerf has a lot of great stories to tell about his DARPA work in the early days, proving this stuff out.
Many of the things you'd consider core services are really ancillary protocols built on top of the basic stuff -- even the World Wide Web. So it really depends on what you mean by "the Internet." I'm old enough to remember a time when I used the Internet without there being a World Wide Web, or a Hyper-Text Transport Protocol.
As to your second point, that may well be true, but DARPA has generated a lot of useful technology that is frequently used outside the military sphere, and you're benefiting from those inventions whether you like the source or not. That doesn't make DARPA any nicer of an organization, but it does mitigate the evil they do somewhat. No organization is wholly good or wholly evil, IMHO. (And yeah, that's a loaded statement too... waiting for someone to Godwin me on this.)
Really? I don't see it that way, even based on the carefully chosen snippet you provided.
Here's what you originally wrote, which articulates your position:
Assuming that a person knows that he is developing a bomb which can totally level a metropolitan area, I fail to see how he is not excited about "extinguishing life", and a whole lot of it. And I am not even against killing, be it for fun or for profit. I am just pointing out that you must be dreaming if you think that those researchers were driven solely by the love of Physics.
So you're saying the scientists and mathematicians involved in the Manhattan project were excited about the prospect of mass killing, murder, whatever you want to call it. Then someone calls you on it, tells you to read a book for a different perspective, and you pick one snippet (which I won't bother re-quoting here, because you already did), and claim it supports your position.
Hogwash. You claim Feynman's motivation was strategic: bomb them before they bomb us. This is already different from what you originally asserted, which was a base, emotional desire to hurt "the other." Now you're modifying your claim to say that Feynman's motivation was strategic, which implies un-emotional calculation. The only commonality between your original position and your new position is that a love of physics and math was not the sole motivating factor of the participants in the Manhattan Project. However, the stated "extra motivation" is different in each claim that you make.
Furthermore, you never entertain the possibility that these scientists were largely convinced that the bomb they were developing would never be used in the theater of war, and was to be demonstrated to high ranking officials from Germany and Japan to coerce their surrender. Of course, this is not what happened, and many of the Manhattan Project contributors were horrified to realize that the bomb really had been deployed, and killed many civilians in the process. I'm not saying this was the case for all of them, but some certainly were convinced (or perhaps deluded) into thinking that the bomb would never become more than a bargaining chip.
And lastly, even in the carefully chosen snippet you cite, you never once mention Feynman's emotional state, which he states quite plainly: fear. Not blood-lust, anger, or anything of the sort, but plain and simple fear of what might happen if Germany under Hitler obtained nuclear weapons before the Allies did.
So yeah, the only part I would agree with you on is that love of physics wasn't the sole motivating factor for most of these people. But the alternate factors you cite, I don't think I'd agree with either of them.
Another example of the oral transformation of language by people who don't read much. "For all intents and purposes" is an old cliché which won't thrill anyone, but using the mistaken alternative is likely to elicit guffaws.
You know, I've witnessed this trend, and I wasn't sure what to make of it, but it is happening. I had a Motorola SLVR -- kind of an underpowered phone, but an attractive candybar style phone nevertheless. One feature it had which I liked was the ability to use voice dialing with a bluetooth headset.
When I upgraded to a Samsung A737, I got a phone which was much more capable in some ways (faster processor and more memory, thus faster at running Java apps and so forth), but I noticed that voice dialing was not built into the phone. If you want to do voice dialing, AT&T will be happy to charge you for the service -- the provider has moved that feature out of the phone and into their network, where they can monetize it.
So now I no longer do voice dialing, in part because I refuse to reward telco greed.
Only half right. There is no TPM chip on any motherboard in any retail-shipped Mac. (I qualified my statement that way because there was a TPM chip on one of the Pentium 4 based development machines that Apple gave some of the third parties to work with. And even then, the TPM chip was not used. Those machines were never sold commercially.)
So no, no TPM chip is required. Never has been.
I'd guess this dongle contains a TPM chip for use with EFi-based motherboards.
Or you could go to the website for the product instead of guessing, in which case you'd know that, for starters, the compatible motherboards are all Gigabyte motherboards, none of which have EFI. And there's no damned TPM chip, once again. And you'd know that the dongle plugs into a USB header on the motherboard, so there's no way it could include a TPM chip -- the TPM (when it's present) does not integrate via the USB bus.
The dongle acts as a boot drive. It contains bootloader code that lets you boot OS X, and contains enough of a HAL to allow booting the OS even on a system without EFI. (As such, it provides a means to emulate EFI device enumeration, etc. The code on the dongle needs to be updated to recognize newer devices and know how to present them to the OS, which helps explain the limited menu of compatible hardware.)
In short, it's a bit of a hack. Some clever bootloader software and EFI emulation.
Oh, and dude... it's E-F-I in all caps. I know dropping the I to lower-case is all the rage, and a lot of folks still use "ATi" instead of "ATI," but it's never been denoted "EFi." Now... get off my lawn.:-)
Ah, yes, nice way to slip in the old, oft-repeated chestnut about the "liberal bias" of the American media. There have been many rebuttals to this claim, such as this one, but even studies that ostensibly support the idea of a "liberal bias," such as this one from UCLA, include surprising nuggets that contradict conventional wisdom. (The UCLA report, for example, claims the Drudge Report is slightly left-leaning, despite its conservative reputation, while public television news reporting trends conservative, despite a widely-held belief that PBS news is left-leaning.)
Hold on there, sparky. I paid my $99, became a registered iPhone developer, but nowhere did I affix my signature to anything indicating my acceptance of any NDA. Most legal analysts I've read have opined that these agreements probably won't stand up in court -- but who's going to go to court to prove their case?
So be careful when asserting that someone "signed an NDA" when they became a registered developer. Now, if Apple wants to claim that some button click constitutes a digital signature, that's another story...
Furthermore, affixing a statement to an e-mail that it's somehow covered under non-disclosure is absurd, and probably not legally enforceable. There have been cases with other companies trying to make similar claims about e-mailed threats or information they sent out, and those e-mails got published anyway with scarcely a consequence (aside from legal saber-rattling). You can't create a legally binding contract by putting language on a document saying, in effect, "By reading this, you agree to it." It seems to me that these e-mails are precisely that sort of communication, and trying to heap extra contractual obligations onto the developer after the fact.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this isn't meant to be legal advice.
Neither of them compare to Symbian OS, or Java or even Windows Mobile for that matter.
You do realize that Android development is done in Java, right? You do realize that both Android and the iPhone are attempting to supplant Symbian and Windows Mobile in the mobile device space, right? So it's kind of missing the point to compare older, established technologies with the two new up-and-comers. That's a bit like saying, "Mac vs. Windows PC? Neither of them compare to IBM's big iron, or VAXen." You know, something that the "if it doesn't run COBOL, it's not a real computer" crowd would say.
iphone is really only a big deal in America. Outside of the US it is average to sub-par.
Care to qualify that statement? In what way is the iPhone sub-par? How do you define what constitutes a "better" handset outside North America? Are we talking about Europe or Japan? And what is being compared, anyway -- the user interface? The touch screen? Some other aspect of the hardware?
It takes up less space on the PCB, which means thinner and smaller handsets.
It allows customers to use a PHF with more than one control button without having to resort to a custom controller (a la the iPod)
It reduces the number of ports on a phone (as you have a single one for headphones, charging and syncing) which in turn reduces the size of the ID.
OK, I understood what PCB means in this context (printed circuit board), but I'm scratching my head on PHF. Public Health Foundation? Newport News Airport? Pleasant Home Foundation? Obviously, Google is not my friend when trying to find out what this abbreviation stands for. Perhaps you meant personal hands free, which I only found on one acronym finder site. (Another such site gave much less useful results.) Perhaps this is a regionalism? Nobody that I know in the States calls it "personal hands-free," they just call it "hands free."
If you do mean a hands-free unit, then what kind of custom control are you referencing in regards to an iPod/iPhone?
Same goes for ID in this context. Integrated... somethingorother... would be my guess. Obviously not IDentifier/IDentification, nor Intelligent Design. (The acronym finders referenced above each have over 200 possible meanings for ID, several of which are applicable to consumer electronic design and/or electrical engineering.)
A little less jargon, or a handy chart of relevant TLAs (three letter abbreviations), would be appreciated.
To address your second bullet point above ("No actual change to world within persistence of software?"), I've looked at some of the early demo videos of Diablo 3 in action, and they specifically showed off destructible environments. And that destruction appears to be persisted. So this has been addressed (at least partially) in Diablo 3.
Also, in WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard introduced a hack to simulate the (temporary) change of the game world, referred to by some as "phase technology." I watched a series of videos of someone playing the beta of WotLK, and it's pretty clear that there are some major world-altering plot points that can be played out. The only drawback is, these environment changes are only "persistent" for the people participating in those game events, and the effects don't appear to be permanent.
There are also events in WoW that are server-wide and can only be performed once on any given world server. A friend of mine participated in one of those, and reported that for many hours afterward, the animals in most areas were replaced by some type of insectoid creature.
The U.S. decisively does NOT have a national language.
Perhaps not a de jure national language, but most definitely a de facto national language -- English. All of our laws are written in English. Our Constitution is written in English. All of our road signage is in English.
When my grandfather came here from Greece, he was expected to learn English to the level of being functionally conversant and literate. When he started a family here, he did not speak Greek in the household, he spoke English. Back then, acculturation / cultural assimilation was considered normal and proper.
These days, I see mothers in grocery stores admonishing their children not to speak English -- I now live in Phoenix, very close to downtown. The cultural assimilation is happening anyway with the children of these immigrants, many of whom are illegal, but some of the parents are actively opposing it.
And, oh yeah, "Mexican" is not a racial group, it's an ethnic group. And I would question your demographic data, since what I could find shows that hispanics/latinos only make up 32.4% of the population of California, with Mexicans being 25%, while non-hispanic white people make up 46.7% of the population. All of this was derived from the 2000 census.
I second that. Scottsdale used to be bad about setting up speed traps at the foot of the Papgo Buttes, knowing full well that most drivers aren't conscious of the gravity boost their speed got until it was too late, or that they couldn't slow down fast enough, depending on where the trap was set up. I got nailed on McDowell Road at one of these traps, albeit by a human cop (who apparently felt the need to have a second squad car follow along to... I don't know, intimidate me or something).
Another couple times, I was nailed by photo radar vans, usually set up on stretches of road where no residences or businesses are -- in other words, areas where people are likely to speed because there is no danger to doing so. It got bad enough at one point that I refused to drive through or into Scottsdale for a couple months, simply because I couldn't deal with the feelings of paranoia it induced.
The 101 loop through Scottsdale, though, is a whole other animal -- stationary cameras that are permanently affixed. The slow-down and speed-up cycle of traffic is maddening. People will crawl along below the speed limit when they know there are cameras around, and then speed up way over the posted limit in between. It's ridiculous and infantile behavior on the part of the drivers, brought about by the nanny state city government treating us like children. Since photo ticket revenues have been drying up, the cities have been quietly lowering the threshold at which the cameras operate -- it used to be 11 mph over the limit, now it's 5 or 6.
When I took a recent defensive driving class, I was one of about 20 people -- roughly half the class -- who were nailed upon a particular stretch of road, Rural Road in Tempe. The instructor treated it as almost a joke, and at one point mentioned that he's all but stopped traveling that road simply to avoid the situation. They apparently lowered the speed limit to 35 mph due to the proximity to ASU, something I had not been aware of at the time of the infraction.
Now, whenever I need to drive along Rural Road, I immediately get paranoid whenever I see a flash. Check the speedometer -- whew, I'm doing 35, must be some other poor sap. But it's still jarring to my nerves.
This was apparently surprising only to people who don't work for companies that actually make it easy for developers to BUY software without having to get approval up the management chain all the way up to god himself. Half the software my co-workers and I use ends up being pirated, because our company makes it damn near impossible to buy anything that's not on the list of officially-sanctioned software (almost all of which is stuff that the "business" users need).
I don't really want to pick nits, but I kept re-reading that first sentence over and over, wondering why it seemed to contrary to intuition, until I read the rest of your post. Then I realized you were saying the opposite of what you meant. After all, it seems logical that Microsoft including a file generated by a pirated application would be a surprise to people who work for companies that do not make it difficult to purchase apps -- yet your first sentence states that it would be a surprise to people who don't work for such companies.
Anyway, nitpicking aside, I agree with you to some extent. I work for a company that is pretty tightly controlling of what goes on users' computers, and on the network, but there are mechanisms in place to get approvals for non-standard software (well, the stuff that you pay for). Open Source software that's free-as-in-beer seems to be totally acceptable, within some general limits. The approval mechanisms for the paid non-standard software are not too onerous, either, since they don't require the kind of approvals you describe -- no vice presidents involved, to my knowledge.
That said, the problem we run into is keeping the non-standard software whenever somebody gets the bright idea to reimage machines without asking (or without divulging what they're really up to), or to remove software remotely using LanDesk or some other management tool without really bothering to check and see if that software is there for a valid reason. And then there's the always fun "server move" which turns out to be more like "server virtualization," in which no user accounts get preserved, and no software seems to make the transition.
Tests designed to measure general proficiency in your field are quite permissible. General "intelligence tests" are not, and in fact are generally considered illegal in the United States.
Three examples from my own past:
I was interviewed for a software project at Insight, and they made me submit to a BrainBench test. BrainBench is pretty grueling, and spends a lot of its time focusing on minutiae. Since this was the Java exam, it spent a lot of time asking questions about piddling details of the more obscure class libraries you might look up in Javadocs, and not so much time testing general Java knowledge. I wound up scoring well (good mastery, able to mentor others), but apparently a tenth or a couple hundredths of a point (I forget the exact fraction) below some arbitrary cut-off. They still interviewed me in person, but passed on me. I'm told the project crashed and burned. Frankly, I was skeptical of their plans to let a bunch of VB programmers do the front-end and integrate with the back end using a Java-DCOM bridge, and I told them so. (I think the idea was to pay less for the UI people and pay more for the Java talent to write the critical business logic in the middle tier.) So much for their vaunted technical standards.
I interviewed at GoDaddy.com, but before I was even allowed to interview, I was given a test that they billed as a "pseudo IQ test." It was still a type of intelligence test, and probably illegal under either federal or state law. I knew this, and didn't try very hard on their "test." (They wound up scoring it completely contrary to the instructions in the master booklet anyway.) I told the frat bozo conducting the interview that I had nothing to prove, that I was an MIT graduate and I knew my IQ was 140 based on a prior test I had taken. I even offered to take a proficiency exam in Java since that's what the job was for, but they refused to progress the interview process because I didn't meet their ridiculously arbitrary criteria. From what I understand, they are a terrible company to work for, so this was an early indication. As if the black-uniformed thugs in BDUs and dungeon-like atmosphere weren't enough of an indicator.
At my current job, the interview was highly technical, and I did get ganged up on (metaphorically) by about 10 people. There wasn't one single proficiency test, but lots of mini-tests, and the people there were all smart enough to cut me plenty of slack for the things I didn't have memorized in the Javadocs; they were more interested in whether I had a grasp on the main concepts, and if I knew the language well enough to write code proficiently. I just passed the 3 year mark recently, and I'm still pretty happy.
a decision to end your life when you are not mentally sound is not a decision anyone else should respect
That's all well and good, but nowhere do I see you say anything about having compassion or understanding. Perhaps you've never struggled with mental illness. For those of us who have, it's not so easy to condemn David Foster Wallace for what he did.
Obviously, his suicide is regrettable, both for its impact on his survivors, and for the loss of what he could have done had he lived on. I don't think anyone would argue that it's "OK" when someone commits suicide when they're mentally ill. But don't be so quick to lash out at the deceased and condemn them. Mental illness is a perverse thing and it robs its sufferers of much of their mental faculties. Making any kind of rational decision under those circumstances can be nigh impossible.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that free will didn't enter into the picture. The question of free will in the case of the mentally ill is a tough nut to crack, and I don't pretend to have the answers -- but I also don't think anyone else does either, regardless of their claims of certitude.
So, yeah, I've "been there" before. It's easy for me now to look back on those events (which I can thankfully count on one hand) and say, "Wow, what the hell was I thinking?" And the truth is, in the middle of those suicidal times, my thought process seemed rational, albeit tinged with depression. I distinctly remember that peculiar feeling of hopelessness. Had it not been for the intervention of dear friends (and in a couple instances, authority figures), I never would have gotten through those situations. I survived, and I got help. I feel sad that some people, even well respected people (and here I'm thinking of folks like DFW and Pushpinder Singh), apparently didn't get the help they needed.
I attended a talk given by Vint Cerf at the local Google office (in Tempe, AZ, though it's referred to as "Google Phoenix"), and he discussed another application: text messaging between soldiers, and between soldiers and commanding officers, in battlefield conditions. The devices might not have exposure to a network all the time, so they relay messages to the next node when it becomes visible/available.
Vint Cerf said this was already being used in the field.
Of course, sending cheaper robotic probes out into the solar system becomes easier if you have a network of nodes spread throughout the solar system -- and of course, each new probe sent becomes yet another node for relaying traffic through, so none of the probes ever cease to be useful/functional. This is the proper way to leverage our past and present space efforts as infrastructure for the future! This has already helped us realize cost reductions for the most recent Mars landers we sent -- they were using satellites already in orbit around Mars to relay messages back to Earth, which reduces the size, weight, and power requirements of any radios built into the lander.
Hate to say this, but I've actually installed apps using drag-and-drop. Of course, I'm running with a full Admin account, but the point is, I can drag anything into the Applications folder without being prompted for my Admin password. In fact, I just did this earlier this evening. And I'm running the latest version of Leopard (10.5.4).
Tried it again just now. Nope, no admin password. Not sure what your settings are on your Mac, but on my MacBook Pro, the behavior you describe is not the case. Conclusion: do not assume that the admin password is merely required to alter the Applications folder.
I can already tell you that I installed the Spore Creature Creator, and it did a heck of a lot more than create a subfolder in Applications; I can see another folder,/Users/-loginID-/Library/Preferences/SPORE Creature Creator Preferences/p_drive/User/Application Data/SecuROM/UserData
That folder contains 4 files: readme.txt, securom_v7_01.bak, securom_v7_01.dat, and securom_v7_01.tmp
The thing I want to know is, what else got installed on the system, and where. And what background processes is SecuROM spawning that are being cloaked from view?
A friend of mine has a Mac Pro, and he installed the Creature Creator; he reports seeing some rogue network activity that he could not identify, when the game was not running. That's definitely of concern!
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Actually, although what you cited is technically correct, it is incomplete. One standard use of the semicolon in English (and most certainly in American English) is to separate items in a list, where each item may contain a comma. Therefore, the above example should be rewritten thus to conform with the standard rules of English punctuation:
This is especially important since, while it is customary to cite last name first using a comma to delimit the last name from the first name and middle initial, there are multiple names in this list that are given in last-name-first format. And since we know that Mr. Jobs' first name is Steven, it is obvious that "Jobs" should go with "Steven P." and not with "Bas."
So you're right about one thing: the semicolon really is the stronger mark of separation than the comma, and therefore should go between the names of the people given in the list, not between the first and last names of each person! Putting a semicolon between someone's last and first name divides one from the other, visually and logically.
If you're going to argue from authority (which can lead to a logical fallacy), in this case by citing a technical writing book or manual of style, it helps to read the entire thing in context, understand it fully, and realize that no one source stands on its own -- it helps even more to have a command of the full English language.
Yeah, I have a writing degree -- a minor degree in creative writing and not technical writing, but still a degree. But that shouldn't matter -- just pick up a copy of Strunk and White, The Elements of Style.
Side note: I've noticed lately that the BBC has been omitting semicolons in lists of items that have commas embedded into them. I know that the UK changed its punctuation rules relatively recently, mainly to simplify the rules for handling quotation marks, but I didn't think they made the semicolon optional. (Maybe this is just editorial laziness?) Kind of a pity if true -- the semicolon is one of my favorite punctuation marks.
The impression I got of their internal development process was not so much that they were "porting" from PC to Mac, but rather that they were developing the game assets cross-platform, and writing an engine that was mostly cross-platform, with a few platform-specific bits safely sequestered away in their own code modules.
Based on that understanding (which might be wrong), it would seem that moving to Wine would change the current development model. It would also eliminate Mac-specific features, and make any game developed this way integrate less well with the OS.
The only real benefit here would be for Linux users -- assuming Blizzard even chose to support Linux. (Based on what happened with Spore, this is far from a foregone conclusion.) There is cost related to changing the development model.
This isn't just about Apple. The document cites, for example, that AT&T Mobility does not (or is not required to) subsidize the cost of the iPhone, contrary to standard industry practice, yet they still charge a $175 early termination fee.
I am with the court on this one! Early termination fees only make sense if the carrier is subsidizing the cost of the handset.
I enjoyed reading about all of these new hybrid vehicles, but the Popular Mechanics article about the Insight was almost unreadable in spots, to the point of being seriously misleading. Thankfully, I knew enough to figure out what the author of the article was trying to say. (In fairness, it could have been the result of an overzealous editor trimming for space and cutting too much in the process.)
Here's one gem from that article:
The way this snippet is written, you'd think that the Civic Hybrid was a 2-seat car with an aluminum frame and side panels. However, the Civic Hybrid is neither -- it is mostly like a conventional Honda Civic (and I've ridden in one). The Insight is the 2-seater with an aluminum construction -- and I know this because I had a coworker who bought one when they first came out.
Is there a particular reason you felt compelled to inject an apparent political pejorative into a non-political discussion of GIMP? I'm really amazed you got a pass from everyone else on this; a decade ago, this would not have been the case. I mean, there are so many other ways you could have expressed your displeasure with the UI that would have been far more germane and technically useful to a discussion about software, but you picked "left of center." That's about as non-descriptive as you can get in this context, but it clearly seems intended as a pejorative.
That said... Speaking as a person who used to make a living writing image format conversion software and developing other graphics software applications, but who is not a "graphics professional" in the sense that I don't use Photoshop or similar software for my daily work, I can say that GIMP seemed fairly non-intuitive when I tried it for some simply image editing tasks. Keep in mind that I used GIMP around 2001-2002, and I haven't really played with it much since, maybe only 2 or 3 times at less than an hour each time.
I had no preconceived notions of how GIMP's UI should look because I'm not a Photoshop jockey with years invested in automated workflows and the like, but I worked enough with graphics tools and with designing special-purpose graphics apps that I had a pretty good idea going into it of what I wanted to accomplish... and I had no clue how to accomplish what I intuitively knew I needed to do. Short of writing a one-off application to do the raster operations I needed to perform (not practical in this case), I was stuck with GIMP in the environment that I was in.
The end result of my tinkering wasn't very satisfactory, and eventually I wound up using GraphicConverter on an iBook I brought to the client's site to re-do everything that I tried in GIMP. Yeah, GC is a pretty weak app compared to Photoshop, and even compared to GIMP, but it's surprisingly functional, and most of the tools I need are easy to find. (Some are buried pretty deep, admittedly, so it's not a perfect tool by any stretch either.)
I think ultimately the problem that I have with GIMP, and with many Open Source apps in general, is that few people with human factors experience work on the UI -- and even when someone who does have the requisite usability background steps in, there's no guarantee that their work will not get undone later by some well-meaning contributor. Now, in the years since I last seriously used GIMP, it's possible that the UI has improved dramatically, and maybe some of this is due to the presence of contributors who have a clue about GUI design. I just haven't seen it.
Who said that? He said dump GTK and replace it with GNUStep or Cocoa. You do realize that GNUStep replicates the major functional bits of the Cocoa API for OS X, right? And that GNUStep exists on Windows and Linux, right? So he's not saying make GIMP a Mac-only program. That's just ridiculous. Way to misrepresent someone else's argument!
Of course, there are other legitimate issues with what the GP said, and others have already raised those issues.
Implemented, maybe, but designed? Sorry, most of the fundamental work on the core network protocols (IP, TCP, UDP) was done by DARPA researchers. Vint Cerf has a lot of great stories to tell about his DARPA work in the early days, proving this stuff out.
Many of the things you'd consider core services are really ancillary protocols built on top of the basic stuff -- even the World Wide Web. So it really depends on what you mean by "the Internet." I'm old enough to remember a time when I used the Internet without there being a World Wide Web, or a Hyper-Text Transport Protocol.
As to your second point, that may well be true, but DARPA has generated a lot of useful technology that is frequently used outside the military sphere, and you're benefiting from those inventions whether you like the source or not. That doesn't make DARPA any nicer of an organization, but it does mitigate the evil they do somewhat. No organization is wholly good or wholly evil, IMHO. (And yeah, that's a loaded statement too... waiting for someone to Godwin me on this.)
Really? I don't see it that way, even based on the carefully chosen snippet you provided.
Here's what you originally wrote, which articulates your position:
So you're saying the scientists and mathematicians involved in the Manhattan project were excited about the prospect of mass killing, murder, whatever you want to call it. Then someone calls you on it, tells you to read a book for a different perspective, and you pick one snippet (which I won't bother re-quoting here, because you already did), and claim it supports your position.
Hogwash. You claim Feynman's motivation was strategic: bomb them before they bomb us. This is already different from what you originally asserted, which was a base, emotional desire to hurt "the other." Now you're modifying your claim to say that Feynman's motivation was strategic, which implies un-emotional calculation. The only commonality between your original position and your new position is that a love of physics and math was not the sole motivating factor of the participants in the Manhattan Project. However, the stated "extra motivation" is different in each claim that you make.
Furthermore, you never entertain the possibility that these scientists were largely convinced that the bomb they were developing would never be used in the theater of war, and was to be demonstrated to high ranking officials from Germany and Japan to coerce their surrender. Of course, this is not what happened, and many of the Manhattan Project contributors were horrified to realize that the bomb really had been deployed, and killed many civilians in the process. I'm not saying this was the case for all of them, but some certainly were convinced (or perhaps deluded) into thinking that the bomb would never become more than a bargaining chip.
And lastly, even in the carefully chosen snippet you cite, you never once mention Feynman's emotional state, which he states quite plainly: fear. Not blood-lust, anger, or anything of the sort, but plain and simple fear of what might happen if Germany under Hitler obtained nuclear weapons before the Allies did.
So yeah, the only part I would agree with you on is that love of physics wasn't the sole motivating factor for most of these people. But the alternate factors you cite, I don't think I'd agree with either of them.
Ummm... no, it is not:
See also this article, or this one.
You know, I've witnessed this trend, and I wasn't sure what to make of it, but it is happening. I had a Motorola SLVR -- kind of an underpowered phone, but an attractive candybar style phone nevertheless. One feature it had which I liked was the ability to use voice dialing with a bluetooth headset.
When I upgraded to a Samsung A737, I got a phone which was much more capable in some ways (faster processor and more memory, thus faster at running Java apps and so forth), but I noticed that voice dialing was not built into the phone. If you want to do voice dialing, AT&T will be happy to charge you for the service -- the provider has moved that feature out of the phone and into their network, where they can monetize it.
So now I no longer do voice dialing, in part because I refuse to reward telco greed.
Only half right. There is no TPM chip on any motherboard in any retail-shipped Mac. (I qualified my statement that way because there was a TPM chip on one of the Pentium 4 based development machines that Apple gave some of the third parties to work with. And even then, the TPM chip was not used. Those machines were never sold commercially.)
So no, no TPM chip is required. Never has been.
Or you could go to the website for the product instead of guessing, in which case you'd know that, for starters, the compatible motherboards are all Gigabyte motherboards, none of which have EFI. And there's no damned TPM chip, once again. And you'd know that the dongle plugs into a USB header on the motherboard, so there's no way it could include a TPM chip -- the TPM (when it's present) does not integrate via the USB bus.
The dongle acts as a boot drive. It contains bootloader code that lets you boot OS X, and contains enough of a HAL to allow booting the OS even on a system without EFI. (As such, it provides a means to emulate EFI device enumeration, etc. The code on the dongle needs to be updated to recognize newer devices and know how to present them to the OS, which helps explain the limited menu of compatible hardware.)
In short, it's a bit of a hack. Some clever bootloader software and EFI emulation.
Oh, and dude... it's E-F-I in all caps. I know dropping the I to lower-case is all the rage, and a lot of folks still use "ATi" instead of "ATI," but it's never been denoted "EFi." Now... get off my lawn. :-)
Ah, yes, nice way to slip in the old, oft-repeated chestnut about the "liberal bias" of the American media. There have been many rebuttals to this claim, such as this one, but even studies that ostensibly support the idea of a "liberal bias," such as this one from UCLA, include surprising nuggets that contradict conventional wisdom. (The UCLA report, for example, claims the Drudge Report is slightly left-leaning, despite its conservative reputation, while public television news reporting trends conservative, despite a widely-held belief that PBS news is left-leaning.)
Hold on there, sparky. I paid my $99, became a registered iPhone developer, but nowhere did I affix my signature to anything indicating my acceptance of any NDA. Most legal analysts I've read have opined that these agreements probably won't stand up in court -- but who's going to go to court to prove their case?
So be careful when asserting that someone "signed an NDA" when they became a registered developer. Now, if Apple wants to claim that some button click constitutes a digital signature, that's another story...
Furthermore, affixing a statement to an e-mail that it's somehow covered under non-disclosure is absurd, and probably not legally enforceable. There have been cases with other companies trying to make similar claims about e-mailed threats or information they sent out, and those e-mails got published anyway with scarcely a consequence (aside from legal saber-rattling). You can't create a legally binding contract by putting language on a document saying, in effect, "By reading this, you agree to it." It seems to me that these e-mails are precisely that sort of communication, and trying to heap extra contractual obligations onto the developer after the fact.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this isn't meant to be legal advice.
You do realize that Android development is done in Java, right?
You do realize that both Android and the iPhone are attempting to supplant Symbian and Windows Mobile in the mobile device space, right? So it's kind of missing the point to compare older, established technologies with the two new up-and-comers. That's a bit like saying, "Mac vs. Windows PC? Neither of them compare to IBM's big iron, or VAXen." You know, something that the "if it doesn't run COBOL, it's not a real computer" crowd would say.
Care to qualify that statement? In what way is the iPhone sub-par? How do you define what constitutes a "better" handset outside North America? Are we talking about Europe or Japan? And what is being compared, anyway -- the user interface? The touch screen? Some other aspect of the hardware?
OK, I understood what PCB means in this context (printed circuit board), but I'm scratching my head on PHF. Public Health Foundation? Newport News Airport? Pleasant Home Foundation? Obviously, Google is not my friend when trying to find out what this abbreviation stands for. Perhaps you meant personal hands free, which I only found on one acronym finder site. (Another such site gave much less useful results.) Perhaps this is a regionalism? Nobody that I know in the States calls it "personal hands-free," they just call it "hands free."
If you do mean a hands-free unit, then what kind of custom control are you referencing in regards to an iPod/iPhone?
Same goes for ID in this context. Integrated... somethingorother... would be my guess. Obviously not IDentifier/IDentification, nor Intelligent Design. (The acronym finders referenced above each have over 200 possible meanings for ID, several of which are applicable to consumer electronic design and/or electrical engineering.)
A little less jargon, or a handy chart of relevant TLAs (three letter abbreviations), would be appreciated.
To address your second bullet point above ("No actual change to world within persistence of software?"), I've looked at some of the early demo videos of Diablo 3 in action, and they specifically showed off destructible environments. And that destruction appears to be persisted. So this has been addressed (at least partially) in Diablo 3.
Also, in WoW: Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard introduced a hack to simulate the (temporary) change of the game world, referred to by some as "phase technology." I watched a series of videos of someone playing the beta of WotLK, and it's pretty clear that there are some major world-altering plot points that can be played out. The only drawback is, these environment changes are only "persistent" for the people participating in those game events, and the effects don't appear to be permanent.
There are also events in WoW that are server-wide and can only be performed once on any given world server. A friend of mine participated in one of those, and reported that for many hours afterward, the animals in most areas were replaced by some type of insectoid creature.
Perhaps not a de jure national language, but most definitely a de facto national language -- English. All of our laws are written in English. Our Constitution is written in English. All of our road signage is in English.
When my grandfather came here from Greece, he was expected to learn English to the level of being functionally conversant and literate. When he started a family here, he did not speak Greek in the household, he spoke English. Back then, acculturation / cultural assimilation was considered normal and proper.
These days, I see mothers in grocery stores admonishing their children not to speak English -- I now live in Phoenix, very close to downtown. The cultural assimilation is happening anyway with the children of these immigrants, many of whom are illegal, but some of the parents are actively opposing it.
And, oh yeah, "Mexican" is not a racial group, it's an ethnic group. And I would question your demographic data, since what I could find shows that hispanics/latinos only make up 32.4% of the population of California, with Mexicans being 25%, while non-hispanic white people make up 46.7% of the population. All of this was derived from the 2000 census.
I second that. Scottsdale used to be bad about setting up speed traps at the foot of the Papgo Buttes, knowing full well that most drivers aren't conscious of the gravity boost their speed got until it was too late, or that they couldn't slow down fast enough, depending on where the trap was set up. I got nailed on McDowell Road at one of these traps, albeit by a human cop (who apparently felt the need to have a second squad car follow along to ... I don't know, intimidate me or something).
Another couple times, I was nailed by photo radar vans, usually set up on stretches of road where no residences or businesses are -- in other words, areas where people are likely to speed because there is no danger to doing so. It got bad enough at one point that I refused to drive through or into Scottsdale for a couple months, simply because I couldn't deal with the feelings of paranoia it induced.
The 101 loop through Scottsdale, though, is a whole other animal -- stationary cameras that are permanently affixed. The slow-down and speed-up cycle of traffic is maddening. People will crawl along below the speed limit when they know there are cameras around, and then speed up way over the posted limit in between. It's ridiculous and infantile behavior on the part of the drivers, brought about by the nanny state city government treating us like children. Since photo ticket revenues have been drying up, the cities have been quietly lowering the threshold at which the cameras operate -- it used to be 11 mph over the limit, now it's 5 or 6.
When I took a recent defensive driving class, I was one of about 20 people -- roughly half the class -- who were nailed upon a particular stretch of road, Rural Road in Tempe. The instructor treated it as almost a joke, and at one point mentioned that he's all but stopped traveling that road simply to avoid the situation. They apparently lowered the speed limit to 35 mph due to the proximity to ASU, something I had not been aware of at the time of the infraction.
Now, whenever I need to drive along Rural Road, I immediately get paranoid whenever I see a flash. Check the speedometer -- whew, I'm doing 35, must be some other poor sap. But it's still jarring to my nerves.
I don't really want to pick nits, but I kept re-reading that first sentence over and over, wondering why it seemed to contrary to intuition, until I read the rest of your post. Then I realized you were saying the opposite of what you meant. After all, it seems logical that Microsoft including a file generated by a pirated application would be a surprise to people who work for companies that do not make it difficult to purchase apps -- yet your first sentence states that it would be a surprise to people who don't work for such companies.
Anyway, nitpicking aside, I agree with you to some extent. I work for a company that is pretty tightly controlling of what goes on users' computers, and on the network, but there are mechanisms in place to get approvals for non-standard software (well, the stuff that you pay for). Open Source software that's free-as-in-beer seems to be totally acceptable, within some general limits. The approval mechanisms for the paid non-standard software are not too onerous, either, since they don't require the kind of approvals you describe -- no vice presidents involved, to my knowledge.
That said, the problem we run into is keeping the non-standard software whenever somebody gets the bright idea to reimage machines without asking (or without divulging what they're really up to), or to remove software remotely using LanDesk or some other management tool without really bothering to check and see if that software is there for a valid reason. And then there's the always fun "server move" which turns out to be more like "server virtualization," in which no user accounts get preserved, and no software seems to make the transition.
Tests designed to measure general proficiency in your field are quite permissible. General "intelligence tests" are not, and in fact are generally considered illegal in the United States.
Three examples from my own past:
I'm told the project crashed and burned. Frankly, I was skeptical of their plans to let a bunch of VB programmers do the front-end and integrate with the back end using a Java-DCOM bridge, and I told them so. (I think the idea was to pay less for the UI people and pay more for the Java talent to write the critical business logic in the middle tier.) So much for their vaunted technical standards.
From what I understand, they are a terrible company to work for, so this was an early indication. As if the black-uniformed thugs in BDUs and dungeon-like atmosphere weren't enough of an indicator.
I just passed the 3 year mark recently, and I'm still pretty happy.
That's all well and good, but nowhere do I see you say anything about having compassion or understanding. Perhaps you've never struggled with mental illness. For those of us who have, it's not so easy to condemn David Foster Wallace for what he did.
Obviously, his suicide is regrettable, both for its impact on his survivors, and for the loss of what he could have done had he lived on. I don't think anyone would argue that it's "OK" when someone commits suicide when they're mentally ill. But don't be so quick to lash out at the deceased and condemn them. Mental illness is a perverse thing and it robs its sufferers of much of their mental faculties. Making any kind of rational decision under those circumstances can be nigh impossible.
I'm not sure I buy your claim that free will didn't enter into the picture. The question of free will in the case of the mentally ill is a tough nut to crack, and I don't pretend to have the answers -- but I also don't think anyone else does either, regardless of their claims of certitude.
So, yeah, I've "been there" before. It's easy for me now to look back on those events (which I can thankfully count on one hand) and say, "Wow, what the hell was I thinking?" And the truth is, in the middle of those suicidal times, my thought process seemed rational, albeit tinged with depression. I distinctly remember that peculiar feeling of hopelessness. Had it not been for the intervention of dear friends (and in a couple instances, authority figures), I never would have gotten through those situations. I survived, and I got help. I feel sad that some people, even well respected people (and here I'm thinking of folks like DFW and Pushpinder Singh), apparently didn't get the help they needed.
I attended a talk given by Vint Cerf at the local Google office (in Tempe, AZ, though it's referred to as "Google Phoenix"), and he discussed another application: text messaging between soldiers, and between soldiers and commanding officers, in battlefield conditions. The devices might not have exposure to a network all the time, so they relay messages to the next node when it becomes visible/available.
Vint Cerf said this was already being used in the field.
Of course, sending cheaper robotic probes out into the solar system becomes easier if you have a network of nodes spread throughout the solar system -- and of course, each new probe sent becomes yet another node for relaying traffic through, so none of the probes ever cease to be useful/functional. This is the proper way to leverage our past and present space efforts as infrastructure for the future! This has already helped us realize cost reductions for the most recent Mars landers we sent -- they were using satellites already in orbit around Mars to relay messages back to Earth, which reduces the size, weight, and power requirements of any radios built into the lander.
TFA claims that using the LED backlit LCD display adds 4 hours to the run time. I am highly skeptical of this claim -- when Apple introduced the LED backlight, they claimed a battery life benefit of anywhere from 30 minutes to 1 hour.
See my other comments later in this thread. However, you might also want to check out this thread on the Macrumors forums.
Hate to say this, but I've actually installed apps using drag-and-drop. Of course, I'm running with a full Admin account, but the point is, I can drag anything into the Applications folder without being prompted for my Admin password. In fact, I just did this earlier this evening. And I'm running the latest version of Leopard (10.5.4).
Tried it again just now. Nope, no admin password. Not sure what your settings are on your Mac, but on my MacBook Pro, the behavior you describe is not the case. Conclusion: do not assume that the admin password is merely required to alter the Applications folder.
I can already tell you that I installed the Spore Creature Creator, and it did a heck of a lot more than create a subfolder in Applications; I can see another folder, /Users/-loginID-/Library/Preferences/SPORE Creature Creator Preferences/p_drive/User/Application Data/SecuROM/UserData
That folder contains 4 files: readme.txt, securom_v7_01.bak, securom_v7_01.dat, and securom_v7_01.tmp
The thing I want to know is, what else got installed on the system, and where. And what background processes is SecuROM spawning that are being cloaked from view?
A friend of mine has a Mac Pro, and he installed the Creature Creator; he reports seeing some rogue network activity that he could not identify, when the game was not running. That's definitely of concern!