lord, it's the worst terminal program i've ever used.
This is unnecissarily hyperbolic. Apple's Terminal.app is fairly no-frills, but it still has some nice features, such as transforming a folder or file dropped from the Finder (or any title bar avatar) into a pathname. You can drag and copy and paste just like any other app. You can change fonts (even to non-monospace fonts). It'll emulate a number of terminals (e.g. VT-100, xterm-color, etc.) You can customize the title bar display. Set the transparency of the window itself (eye-candy). It has an unlimited scrollback buffer. It'll handle multibyte scripts (e.g. Kanji or Chinese), as well as handle a number of character encodings. It has customizable command keys.
It's leaps and bounds beyond cmd.exe. But perhaps you've had the good fortune never to have encountered that.
The original poster plays up one line in the Business Week article and completely skews the tenor of the article. To wit: Linux is becoming attractive in "business" -- never an Apple strength. The article's mention of Macintosh marketshare is a journalistic technique used to provide a frame of reference. Iraq is roughly the size of California, etc.
But Macintosh and Linux have more than marketshare in common. Both platforms are committed to open standards and interoperability, the former out of necessity due to its historical role as outsider, and the latter out of philosophical conviction of its adherents. If Linux leaks into the business world, IT folks will find that the formats and APIs they're using work just as well on Macs. This could lead to a more equitable situation where people use the tools they like, rather than the tools that Bill Gates wants them to use. Joe the Administrative assistant will while away on Windows, Jane the database nerd loves her Linux cluster, and Johan the turtlenecked web designer makes merry on his Mac.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic. IT monoculture is so annoying.
It's not rabid anti-Bush propaganda. The Bush administration fully acknowledges the massive debt we're sinking into. Future generations of taxpayers will have to pay it off. The MoveOn ad's portrayal of this reality is artistic license, may even be anti-Bush, but hardly "rabid," and definitely not propaganda. Look to ONDCP's drug ads for better examples of propaganda.
When I wanted to set up a personal server in my small studio apartment, I looked at Apple G4 Cubes and Shuttles, among others. I ended up buying an SB51G after reading a favorable review last year in Slashdot, and I couldn't be happier.
I'm not playing DOOM or Quake, just playing with FreeBSD, and I didn't want some ugly PC monstrosity. I paid a little more for the Shuttle, but in exchange I got an attractive, quiet server that fits beneath the telephone stand. Size and looks wouldn't mean as much to me if I had a separate AC'ed server room, but I share living space with my computers and having something aesthetically pleasing is important.
Incidentally, I think the comparisons with Apples are valid. These Shuttles appeal to people who are looking for something different from the average beige box. They look so much better than any consumer PC, save perhaps for Apple's and Sony's.
For what it's worth, the RIAA is not suing other artists who might be basing their works on those of RIAA artists. Rather, the RIAA is suing individuals who pose a direct threat to the RIAA's main source of revenue: the distribution bottleneck. Concerns about actual content (who borrowed what from whom) are secondary.
No doubt that artists, in turn, have benefitted from this bottleneck, but the real-world barriers to distribution of music have been evaporating rapidly for quite some time and the only thing keeping the pre-point-to-point consumer-publisher-artist economy afloat is the law.
glad this dudes not my dad. his kids will make nice ditch diggers or McEmployee's at a nice fast food restaurant. you need to know how to use a computer to do any job these days, not just IT.
The tools we use change rapidly but the concepts behind them remain durable. A good education is mostly learning how to learn, and you can do that with or without a computer.
There are millions of people who "know how to use a computer," but all that really means is that they learned Word in high school. And that "skill" doesn't necessarily mean they're able to write a program or cogent prose. It just means they know how to set tabs and move a mouse. On the other hand, someone who takes a course in data structures, geometry, or even critical writing, with attention to proof, structure and method, has a much more solid base for organized thought (and by extension, the good jobs) than someone who ignores those things and jumps straight into PHP and HTML.
Then again, that 50 number for Mac systems is low if you count
historical viruses that would no longer work on modern Mac systems.
The 50 viruses figure is a total, I believe, of all viruses on the Mac over its 19-year existence. "50" may be a low-end estimate, but if it's much more, it's still within the same order of magnitude -- insignificant relative to the thousands for Windows. When John Norstad's Disinfectant was still being developed, it would be updated for every new virus that came out. It wasn't updated very often. It never addressed Word macro viruses, but I wouldn't call those Mac viruses anyway -- Macs weren't the targets in mind in those cases, and the platform was specifically MS Office apps.
I remember my high school computer teacher in 1991 telling us that we needed to learn DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 because "that's what they use in industry." He always said "industry" as if it was this mythical, magical place, the one place where people paid for computer skills, the monolithic arbiter of everything good and meaningless.
Of course, I used a Mac. And his explanations about our need for DOS seemed strange. We used WordPerfect in computer class, and I wrote my English, Biology, and History papers at home in MacWrite and PageMaker. I learned how to program a simple ASCII charting program in GW-BASIC at school, then went home and wrote a grade record tracking program in HyperCard.
I was, of course, told that my efforts were wasted, because "industry" didn't use Macs. That turned out to be mostly true. But it seemed awfully strange, a year later, taking the second "advanced" computer course to be using Windows, the "future" of the industry and finding myself completely bored to tears. I wrote a simple word processor in C in my spare time from samples in a Mac programming book. The geeks in my school never learned from Windows. They used Macs or they used DOS, and most everybody respected the motive, if not the platform. I learned more from the Mac geeks, though. They just seemed to have more fun, without having to rely on "games."
When the SoftArc FirstClass bulletin board/email system was really hitting its stride in 1993, I proposed to the school principal and the head of the computer program the idea of creating a school-wide bulletin board hooked up to OneNet and then, eventually, the Internet. I demoed it on my Mac IIsi. All they could see was the Mac. "They don't use Macs in industry," the computer teacher said. "PCs don't do graphics like that," the principal said. It was all very disappointing. I was trying to point out the possibilities of interaction. All they saw was something that they couldn't do (they could, but they just didn't know) with their Intel-Microsoft computers. I learned that day that it didn't take a lot of imagination to be a teacher or an administrator, and that's why I sift dumpsters for food and clothing now, rather than teach.
Jesus H. SPAM... it wasn't that long ago... amazing how the story changes.
Sagan took umbrage with Apple's use of his name on one of the three original PowerPC 601-based Macintoshes in 1994. The pizza-box 6100/60 was Piltdown Man, the 8100/80 was Cold Fusion, and the 7100/66 was Carl Sagan.
Piltdown Man was a hoax; a set of fossils discovered in Britain purported to be a missing link between apes and humans, but later exposed as a fraud. Five years before the advent of PowerMacs, two university of Utah chemists announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperatures, promising a radical upheaval to the way we think about energy. That was a hoax, too. Carl Sagan, seeing the company with which irreverant Apple engineers had placed him, complained.
That wasn't the end though, as Apple spitefully changed the code name of the 7100/66 to "BHA," which reputedly stood for "Butt-Head Astronomer." Sagan sued for defamation of character. A federal judge ruled that Apple's use of the name was not defamatory, but Sagan appealed. They later settled out of court.
Sometime in the midst of the ruckus, the code name of the 7100/66 was changed to "LAW" which stood for "Lawyers are Wimps."
How do I know this? I used to be a college student with nothing but time and a PowerMac 7100/66 with dorm room ethernet. But seriously, google for "carl sagan apple code name."
I still spend most of my time in either a development tool or the command line, so I'm not that big into Finder and the like. (A good old ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB] gets me to my ~/Documents/Projects folder quite fast enough).
The Finder has tab-completion as well. Hold command-shift-G to get the "Go to Folder..." dialog box (in the Go menu). Then press ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB]. It will expand to ~/Documents/Projects (and it's not particular about capitalization).
The Greek letter Chi, the first letter of the word "Christ" -- "Christos" is identical to the letter "X."
The Greek abbreviation for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior," in Greek, "Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter" ends up spelling the Greek word for fish IChThUS hence the use of that icon.
Don't feel bad; a lot of contemporary Christians don't know Greek, and are kinda blank on history and see this usage as a slag when in fact it's a widely-used and entirely respectful abbreviation. I have several close relatives who are extremely devout, daily students of the Bible who thought that the fish symbol was primarily because of some disciples' occupations and a choice turn of phrase by the Big I.X.
The question of Apple Macintosh computer viruses is best answered with
reference to the Ramones' and Talking Heads' first European tour in
1977.
When Talking Heads (the now sadly-defunct vehicle for David Byrne's
hips) played to audiences in Britain they discovered a music scene that
was amongst other things notable for the disgusting and unhygenic custom
of 'gobbing'. Chiefly this was a signal employed by audiences to
demonstrate their approval of the band, at whom - indeed, in whose faces
- the gobbing was directed, but some bands at any rate bands were often
happy to reciprocate. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols would accede to
requests for an autograph by gobbing on the hand of requester.
Some bands, such as the Ramones, seemed to attract veritable rainstorms
of gob. Joey Ramone had to pull his long fringe over his face and carry
on grimly as the gob flew past. But when Talking Heads played for some
reason the gobbing stopped. "Possibly the spitters were lurking in the
back of the audience during their set," Tommy Ramone said once, "but I
don't think so. They just didn't make you want to spit."
I think the situation is on the whole similar with the Mac: it just
doesn't make you want to write viruses.
I don't pretend that this is a realistic answer; but it is an interesting take.
Microsoft (and Netscape) essentially tried the same thing with HTML. Sure, we're using HTML, but to actually view our HTML, you have to use our browser.
Adoption of a "standard" is no guarantee of interoperability. Understanding the conceptual underpinnings of the standard is just as important. The question is, when Microsoft says they are using XML as a document format, are they doing it because they believe in the principles underlying it, or solely for the cynical "this is what is selling now" aspect?
The body of HTML out there is an paresable, babble of a mess, largely because the two dominant browser makers did not respect many of the underlying notions of markup and hypertext to begin with. The state of the art progressed, but not in the way a lot of people wanted it to go.
This could bode poorly if the meme survives somehow that the Office format is now equivalent to XML. When it "doesn't work," who knows where the blame will fall?
Just because we have the means to digitize every bit of information that comes our way doesn't mean that information is inherently worth anything.
I'm not talking about the libraries of congress. I'm talking about those photos you took last summer that look like shit, but you figured you'd keep 'em cause, hey, it's digital, no penalty. The Star Wars script. Linux source code. If it's your own stuff, fine. If you use it, fine. But if you're just a digital packrat, consider chucking it all.
Learn a poem and recite it. That will last for millennia.
Her TV ad is no longer up on Apple's site, but hers was among the first wave of Switchers ads.
Somebody ought to make a site that at least establishes that each and every one of the Switchers are real just to have a pointer for the occasional clueless nitwit.
Apple's Switchers are at least as credible as Jesus, who doesn't have a weblog, or resume, or even a photo anywhere on the web.
And getting people to switch from their Mac to Windows? Why even spend money on that effort? Windows machines may have been more difficult to use 15 years ago, but they've caught up... anyone who still thinks they are more difficult to use hasn't tried one.
There's crappy software on the Mac, and there's crappy software on the PC. The difference is that crappy software on the Mac fades away, while crappy software on the PC becomes standard.
This is totally subjective. I've used both for many years side-by-side. In my opinion, Windows is superficially easy to use, and it looks a lot like a Mac, but it suffers from many boneheaded design decisions. I could name a lot of things (MDI, tiny unclickable scroll thumbs, a task bar which is useless beyond a few open windows, the hierarchical menu as primary interface to everything on your computer spring immediately to mind) that make day-to-day interaction with Windows less than a happy experience for someone who has played with more coherent interfaces (BeOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, and I daresay bash all qualify).
To maintain its marketshare, Microsoft doesn't have to concentrate so much on interface, though. They know that the bulk of their sales are to people who have
"done the numbers" and determined the cheapest way they can get a word processor and spreadsheet into the hands of their accountants, secretaries, wives, and schoolchildren. There's quite a lot to be said about this very egalitarian "everyone can have a PC" approach, but it doesn't necessarily buy you a great UI.
IMO, in the last two years, Apple has made great strides towards making a great geek platform that is easy to use. Ever since I was accessing shell accounts with Microphone, I've liked the idea of the Mac as a front-end to Unix. Now it's all here in one box. Excuse me while I wipe drool off my chin.
What Unbeliever says above here more or less jibes with what my dad, a 38-year JPL veteran and one of the higher-ups involved with TAP and its descendants told me. That is, there's no reorganization or even necessarily a refocus. JPL has always done commercial projects.
This is press/PR opportunity and little more. There may even be a new phone number and URL, but little else.
JPL continues on as before, so don't anyone get their panties in a bunch over a lab selling out or "going commercial" -- it's as it ever was.
JPL is a NASA lab, but operated by CalTech employees. It's neither entirely public sector nor private sector. JPL maintains some contracts with NASA, but is free to use its development for other purposes as well. Much of that has gone into other government-related work for DOE and the military, but there have been private contracts as well.
It must always be remembered that laws ultimately have oversight by a judge or jury. In the U.S. at least, this is the model. The people who make the laws remain separate from the people who enforce the laws, separate from the people who decide whether law was broken, and how justice should be meted out. (unless we're talking about terrorism or drugs, of course; then it's all up to John Ashcroft)
Computers can only do a fraction of the enforcement part and none of the legislation or judgement.
Rather than fix the horrible state of copyright law, let's simply add a few more, enveloping and codifying in a limited manner the rights we already have. Makes sense to me.
I guess I don't understand why this is so scary new. Slang is slang is slang, whether it comes from dock workers, or black people, or chat rooms. Do a unit on it. Assign an essay that uses as much obtuse chat-room slang as possible. Sometimes you learn a lot about doing things the right way when you do them the wrong way. That could be a lot of fun for both the students and the teachers. Adults have contests to do this in computer code. Use the opportunity to study patois, slang, pidgin, throw in some Twain and Chaucer. It's a rich cultural learning opportunity, not the end of the world.
The slang distinction really shouldn't be a problem. As others have pointed out, many of us grew up (I'm 26) using BBSes and chat rooms, and somehow managed to turn out grammatically and orthographically correct papers. Kids aren't any more stupid or smart today than they were 10, 20 years ago. They can hack the context switches.
[underlying: but! but! but! it's different! its computers, therefore scary. ooo "War Games". whatever. big whoop]
Slashdot Mirror
This is unnecissarily hyperbolic. Apple's Terminal.app is fairly no-frills, but it still has some nice features, such as transforming a folder or file dropped from the Finder (or any title bar avatar) into a pathname. You can drag and copy and paste just like any other app. You can change fonts (even to non-monospace fonts). It'll emulate a number of terminals (e.g. VT-100, xterm-color, etc.) You can customize the title bar display. Set the transparency of the window itself (eye-candy). It has an unlimited scrollback buffer. It'll handle multibyte scripts (e.g. Kanji or Chinese), as well as handle a number of character encodings. It has customizable command keys.
It's leaps and bounds beyond cmd.exe. But perhaps you've had the good fortune never to have encountered that.
The original poster plays up one line in the Business Week article and completely skews the tenor of the article. To wit: Linux is becoming attractive in "business" -- never an Apple strength. The article's mention of Macintosh marketshare is a journalistic technique used to provide a frame of reference. Iraq is roughly the size of California, etc.
But Macintosh and Linux have more than marketshare in common. Both platforms are committed to open standards and interoperability, the former out of necessity due to its historical role as outsider, and the latter out of philosophical conviction of its adherents. If Linux leaks into the business world, IT folks will find that the formats and APIs they're using work just as well on Macs. This could lead to a more equitable situation where people use the tools they like, rather than the tools that Bill Gates wants them to use. Joe the Administrative assistant will while away on Windows, Jane the database nerd loves her Linux cluster, and Johan the turtlenecked web designer makes merry on his Mac.
Maybe I'm overly optimistic. IT monoculture is so annoying.
It's not rabid anti-Bush propaganda. The Bush administration fully acknowledges the massive debt we're sinking into. Future generations of taxpayers will have to pay it off. The MoveOn ad's portrayal of this reality is artistic license, may even be anti-Bush, but hardly "rabid," and definitely not propaganda. Look to ONDCP's drug ads for better examples of propaganda.
When I wanted to set up a personal server in my small studio apartment, I looked at Apple G4 Cubes and Shuttles, among others. I ended up buying an SB51G after reading a favorable review last year in Slashdot, and I couldn't be happier.
I'm not playing DOOM or Quake, just playing with FreeBSD, and I didn't want some ugly PC monstrosity. I paid a little more for the Shuttle, but in exchange I got an attractive, quiet server that fits beneath the telephone stand. Size and looks wouldn't mean as much to me if I had a separate AC'ed server room, but I share living space with my computers and having something aesthetically pleasing is important.
Incidentally, I think the comparisons with Apples are valid. These Shuttles appeal to people who are looking for something different from the average beige box. They look so much better than any consumer PC, save perhaps for Apple's and Sony's.
os < 10 : Drop it in the Startup Items folder, nitwit.
os >= 10 : Use System Preferences > Login Items, nitwit.
For what it's worth, the RIAA is not suing other artists who might be basing their works on those of RIAA artists. Rather, the RIAA is suing individuals who pose a direct threat to the RIAA's main source of revenue: the distribution bottleneck. Concerns about actual content (who borrowed what from whom) are secondary.
No doubt that artists, in turn, have benefitted from this bottleneck, but the real-world barriers to distribution of music have been evaporating rapidly for quite some time and the only thing keeping the pre-point-to-point consumer-publisher-artist economy afloat is the law.
Hence the RIAA's last redoubt.
The tools we use change rapidly but the concepts behind them remain durable. A good education is mostly learning how to learn, and you can do that with or without a computer.
There are millions of people who "know how to use a computer," but all that really means is that they learned Word in high school. And that "skill" doesn't necessarily mean they're able to write a program or cogent prose. It just means they know how to set tabs and move a mouse. On the other hand, someone who takes a course in data structures, geometry, or even critical writing, with attention to proof, structure and method, has a much more solid base for organized thought (and by extension, the good jobs) than someone who ignores those things and jumps straight into PHP and HTML.
Never confuse vocation with education.
The 50 viruses figure is a total, I believe, of all viruses on the Mac over its 19-year existence. "50" may be a low-end estimate, but if it's much more, it's still within the same order of magnitude -- insignificant relative to the thousands for Windows. When John Norstad's Disinfectant was still being developed, it would be updated for every new virus that came out. It wasn't updated very often. It never addressed Word macro viruses, but I wouldn't call those Mac viruses anyway -- Macs weren't the targets in mind in those cases, and the platform was specifically MS Office apps.
I remember my high school computer teacher in 1991 telling us that we needed to learn DOS and Wordperfect 5.1 because "that's what they use in industry." He always said "industry" as if it was this mythical, magical place, the one place where people paid for computer skills, the monolithic arbiter of everything good and meaningless.
Of course, I used a Mac. And his explanations about our need for DOS seemed strange. We used WordPerfect in computer class, and I wrote my English, Biology, and History papers at home in MacWrite and PageMaker. I learned how to program a simple ASCII charting program in GW-BASIC at school, then went home and wrote a grade record tracking program in HyperCard.
I was, of course, told that my efforts were wasted, because "industry" didn't use Macs. That turned out to be mostly true. But it seemed awfully strange, a year later, taking the second "advanced" computer course to be using Windows, the "future" of the industry and finding myself completely bored to tears. I wrote a simple word processor in C in my spare time from samples in a Mac programming book. The geeks in my school never learned from Windows. They used Macs or they used DOS, and most everybody respected the motive, if not the platform. I learned more from the Mac geeks, though. They just seemed to have more fun, without having to rely on "games."
When the SoftArc FirstClass bulletin board/email system was really hitting its stride in 1993, I proposed to the school principal and the head of the computer program the idea of creating a school-wide bulletin board hooked up to OneNet and then, eventually, the Internet. I demoed it on my Mac IIsi. All they could see was the Mac. "They don't use Macs in industry," the computer teacher said. "PCs don't do graphics like that," the principal said. It was all very disappointing. I was trying to point out the possibilities of interaction. All they saw was something that they couldn't do (they could, but they just didn't know) with their Intel-Microsoft computers. I learned that day that it didn't take a lot of imagination to be a teacher or an administrator, and that's why I sift dumpsters for food and clothing now, rather than teach.
Jesus H. SPAM... it wasn't that long ago... amazing how the story changes.
Sagan took umbrage with Apple's use of his name on one of the three original PowerPC 601-based Macintoshes in 1994. The pizza-box 6100/60 was Piltdown Man, the 8100/80 was Cold Fusion, and the 7100/66 was Carl Sagan.
Piltdown Man was a hoax; a set of fossils discovered in Britain purported to be a missing link between apes and humans, but later exposed as a fraud. Five years before the advent of PowerMacs, two university of Utah chemists announced that they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperatures, promising a radical upheaval to the way we think about energy. That was a hoax, too. Carl Sagan, seeing the company with which irreverant Apple engineers had placed him, complained.
That wasn't the end though, as Apple spitefully changed the code name of the 7100/66 to "BHA," which reputedly stood for "Butt-Head Astronomer." Sagan sued for defamation of character. A federal judge ruled that Apple's use of the name was not defamatory, but Sagan appealed. They later settled out of court.
Sometime in the midst of the ruckus, the code name of the 7100/66 was changed to "LAW" which stood for "Lawyers are Wimps."
How do I know this? I used to be a college student with nothing but time and a PowerMac 7100/66 with dorm room ethernet. But seriously, google for "carl sagan apple code name."
Regarding this one point:
The Finder has tab-completion as well. Hold command-shift-G to get the "Go to Folder..." dialog box (in the Go menu). Then press ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB]. It will expand to ~/Documents/Projects (and it's not particular about capitalization).
The Greek letter Chi, the first letter of the word "Christ" -- "Christos" is identical to the letter "X."
The Greek abbreviation for "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior," in Greek, "Iesous Christos, Theou Huios, Soter" ends up spelling the Greek word for fish IChThUS hence the use of that icon.
Don't feel bad; a lot of contemporary Christians don't know Greek, and are kinda blank on history and see this usage as a slag when in fact it's a widely-used and entirely respectful abbreviation. I have several close relatives who are extremely devout, daily students of the Bible who thought that the fish symbol was primarily because of some disciples' occupations and a choice turn of phrase by the Big I.X.
I recalled a similar question a few years ago in comp.sys.mac.advocacy. With the help of Google, I was able to pull D.M. Procida's comparisons between gobbing and writing viruses:
I don't pretend that this is a realistic answer; but it is an interesting take.
Make that "unparseable babble of a mess..."
Microsoft (and Netscape) essentially tried the same thing with HTML. Sure, we're using HTML, but to actually view our HTML, you have to use our browser.
Adoption of a "standard" is no guarantee of interoperability. Understanding the conceptual underpinnings of the standard is just as important. The question is, when Microsoft says they are using XML as a document format, are they doing it because they believe in the principles underlying it, or solely for the cynical "this is what is selling now" aspect?
The body of HTML out there is an paresable, babble of a mess, largely because the two dominant browser makers did not respect many of the underlying notions of markup and hypertext to begin with. The state of the art progressed, but not in the way a lot of people wanted it to go.
This could bode poorly if the meme survives somehow that the Office format is now equivalent to XML. When it "doesn't work," who knows where the blame will fall?
Just because we have the means to digitize every bit of information that comes our way doesn't mean that information is inherently worth anything.
I'm not talking about the libraries of congress. I'm talking about those photos you took last summer that look like shit, but you figured you'd keep 'em cause, hey, it's digital, no penalty. The Star Wars script. Linux source code. If it's your own stuff, fine. If you use it, fine. But if you're just a digital packrat, consider chucking it all.
Learn a poem and recite it. That will last for millennia.
A more compact version of the sociological complex propagated by one big mutha of a software company:
Install on as many machines as you can; make interoperability as difficult as possible for those on which you cannot.
Liza Richardson-- Apple, Bio at KCRW and The Drop, her radio show.
Her TV ad is no longer up on Apple's site, but hers was among the first wave of Switchers ads.
Somebody ought to make a site that at least establishes that each and every one of the Switchers are real just to have a pointer for the occasional clueless nitwit.
Apple's Switchers are at least as credible as Jesus, who doesn't have a weblog, or resume, or even a photo anywhere on the web.
httpamphibio.us wrote:
There's crappy software on the Mac, and there's crappy software on the PC. The difference is that crappy software on the Mac fades away, while crappy software on the PC becomes standard.
This is totally subjective. I've used both for many years side-by-side. In my opinion, Windows is superficially easy to use, and it looks a lot like a Mac, but it suffers from many boneheaded design decisions. I could name a lot of things (MDI, tiny unclickable scroll thumbs, a task bar which is useless beyond a few open windows, the hierarchical menu as primary interface to everything on your computer spring immediately to mind) that make day-to-day interaction with Windows less than a happy experience for someone who has played with more coherent interfaces (BeOS, Mac OS, Mac OS X, and I daresay bash all qualify).
To maintain its marketshare, Microsoft doesn't have to concentrate so much on interface, though. They know that the bulk of their sales are to people who have "done the numbers" and determined the cheapest way they can get a word processor and spreadsheet into the hands of their accountants, secretaries, wives, and schoolchildren. There's quite a lot to be said about this very egalitarian "everyone can have a PC" approach, but it doesn't necessarily buy you a great UI.
IMO, in the last two years, Apple has made great strides towards making a great geek platform that is easy to use. Ever since I was accessing shell accounts with Microphone, I've liked the idea of the Mac as a front-end to Unix. Now it's all here in one box. Excuse me while I wipe drool off my chin.
That sounds about right for a decent 1BR in a tolerable neighborhood in L.A.
What Unbeliever says above here more or less jibes with what my dad, a 38-year JPL veteran and one of the higher-ups involved with TAP and its descendants told me. That is, there's no reorganization or even necessarily a refocus. JPL has always done commercial projects.
This is press/PR opportunity and little more. There may even be a new phone number and URL, but little else.
JPL continues on as before, so don't anyone get their panties in a bunch over a lab selling out or "going commercial" -- it's as it ever was.
JPL is a NASA lab, but operated by CalTech employees. It's neither entirely public sector nor private sector. JPL maintains some contracts with NASA, but is free to use its development for other purposes as well. Much of that has gone into other government-related work for DOE and the military, but there have been private contracts as well.
It must always be remembered that laws ultimately have oversight by a judge or jury. In the U.S. at least, this is the model. The people who make the laws remain separate from the people who enforce the laws, separate from the people who decide whether law was broken, and how justice should be meted out. (unless we're talking about terrorism or drugs, of course; then it's all up to John Ashcroft)
Computers can only do a fraction of the enforcement part and none of the legislation or judgement.
Rather than fix the horrible state of copyright law, let's simply add a few more, enveloping and codifying in a limited manner the rights we already have. Makes sense to me.
I guess I don't understand why this is so scary new. Slang is slang is slang, whether it comes from dock workers, or black people, or chat rooms. Do a unit on it. Assign an essay that uses as much obtuse chat-room slang as possible. Sometimes you learn a lot about doing things the right way when you do them the wrong way. That could be a lot of fun for both the students and the teachers. Adults have contests to do this in computer code. Use the opportunity to study patois, slang, pidgin, throw in some Twain and Chaucer. It's a rich cultural learning opportunity, not the end of the world.
The slang distinction really shouldn't be a problem. As others have pointed out, many of us grew up (I'm 26) using BBSes and chat rooms, and somehow managed to turn out grammatically and orthographically correct papers. Kids aren't any more stupid or smart today than they were 10, 20 years ago. They can hack the context switches.
[underlying: but! but! but! it's different! its computers, therefore scary. ooo "War Games". whatever. big whoop]