Thank you. I'm glad SOMEBODY else brought this up. The poor design of the Mac OS X Finder is one of several reasons that I honestly miss Mac OS 9. It just isn't as friendly to advanced users as the old Mac OS Finder was. While I don't hate it as much as the Dock, I still dislike it enough to pretty much do all file handling and application opening through the terminal.
The days of the desktop metaphor were brought to an end with Mac OS X. People deserve better from the company that was famous for and got it's strongest following for good GUI design.
What an amazing statement. I take it you don't do any remote banking, your workplace doesn't use one of the Web based CRM or system management apps, etc.
Actually, I use both online banking and web apps at work. I see your point. Fair enough.
I tend to think of the web essentially as a data store and batch system whereas most of the interactive content creation tools are all still based on the local PC which requires more expensive and capable hardware than the thin-client model says is necessary. Until PCs do almost nothing and next to no data is locally owned, then McNealy's vision of the future still hasn't come true.
Perhaps your Lisp programming stint was rather cursory or you weren't using a Lisp aware editor?
I'll admit that Lisp is the language where my knowledge is most weak. I failed to really learn the language for my AI class because I could not figure out a way to format the code such that it was readily apparent what was going on. I understand most of the fundamental concepts of functional programming and use them frequently in my Python scripts, but I can't get past the rigid requirements of 100% functional programming and the consequences on function layout and readability.
However, I do not want to hear any garbage about a "Lisp aware editor." If your code requires machine assistance to read (like hitting % in vi), then you either aren't writing it clearly, or it can't be written clearly in the first place.
My experience with LISP was that it fell into the latter category since there's frequently no good place to break the code up into subunits or blocks within the definition of a function. If you have a Lisp formatting style guide that helps to make code reasonable to understand, then by all means please share with me, but don't give me the co-op of a language aware editor. If you have to manually count opening and closing characters to know where you are, something has gone dreadfully wrong.
Now pickup Stroustrup, or a Java book or Perl or Python. What hits you is the cacaphony of discord, the single pure note lost amongst the poor orchestration..
Python is one of the cleanest and easy to program in languages ever designed. It's extremely descriptive, enforces readability, and as an added bonus contains functional programming tools that let it do pretty much anything you can do with LISP. In my opinion, Python is what students should first be taught. It lets you get straight to the high level concepts without have to first go through much of the bookkeeping nonsense that lower level languages force on you.
Plus, your alternatives are terrible. You pick Smalltalk, a language that comes with the baggage of a terribly outdated set of libraries. You pick LISP, a language whose syntax makes it utterly impossible to generate easily readable code. (No, seriously. If you have a formatting scheme that makes LISP easily readable, I'd love to hear it.) You pick C, which is good for low-level programming but requires way too much bookkeeping about memory to be safe for general purpose applications.
Incidentally, unlike you apparently, I've programmed in every single language you've mentioned. I'm well aware of their strengths and weaknesses. However, anyone who thinks Python is unclean and disorganized is shooting their mouth off on a subject they've obviously never studied.
His taking sole credit for the creation of millions of jobs is self-aggrandizing and doesn't deserve anything but a shaking of the head for his narrow-minded conclusions.
Well, it's not really self-aggrandizing. McNealy didn't say it himself; it was said to him by an employee buttering him up after some bad press.
I don't agree with the conclusion either. Honestly, the article itself even admits that no one was listening to McNealy when he was pushing the whole "the network is the computer" idea. Everyone saw it as a transparent bid to get people to buy expensive servers and expensive dumb workstations as part of the repeatedly "next thing" thin-client model.
Even today when people spend 90% of their time on their PCs surfing the web, checking email, etc., the network isn't the computer. Applications are all still hosted on the local machine with the exception of webmail clients. There's a growing industry of AJAX-based application services websites, but they haven't come to dominate yet, and they're over 10 years too late and way too different from Sun's marketed model for McNealy to claim any credit anymore than Jules Verne could take credit for us finally going to the moon.
Why would I want to work during my vacation? IT'S MY VACATION!
What's more important -- that you enjoy yourself as much as possible for 2-3 days or that you have a fulfilling career that prevents you from being miserable for the rest of your life? Isn't it better to squander a few days during a job that sucks to give yourself the courage and peace of mind to leave it for a job that you actually look forward to going to each day?
Geez. Some people are just completely incapable of taking the long view.
Hmmm. Since 1999, huh? I wonder if they know that their name was passed on by several companies and widely ridiculed within the so-calling naming industry before they got it?
Cool. It's a great city. I spent my three weeks in Sendai as part of the final immersion classes offered at my college. I stayed with a host family in the Yaotome region, and commuted every day to Touhoku University for classes. I'd love to go back someday, but who has the time, you know?
Having seen acne scars, pox scars, and a picture of the guy Cheney shot in the face with birdshot, I'm going to have to shy away from the "battle scars" theory.
There is in fact a difference between a "special interest" and the "public interest." A "special interest" works to get what good for their minority slice of society, whereas the "public interest" seeks to benefit the majority's interests.
This is not inherently a value judgement, though it often is as special interests often work at the expense of the majority's rights. The civil rights movement is a good counter-example of a special interest working for rights that do not negatively impact the majority's rights.
Consumer rights is not a special interest. It is clearly the public interest since we are all consumers.
I will say, that I've never been more disgusted with Dianne Feinstein right now. She's clearly putting the interests of her campaign funders above the interest of the public. I think she brings shame to the Democrats in an election year where the theme of the power of lobbying interests is a central strength for the party. Then again, Hollywood and the recording industry have been a big bribers of the Democrats long before they because bipartisan bribers.
The longer answer is that Japanese obsoleted the "wi" sound many years ago, and the most common way of making similar sounds in loan words and sound effects is to use the two characters "u-i" instead. As there are no suriving Japanese words that start with "wi," unless there's some ancient meaning that only a classical language scholar would recognize, this is just nothing but a sound effect word, like "Wheee!"
Oh. I just saw the bit about asking us to lie. Hmmm....
Yes, "wii" is the way that nobles in the Sendai region used to say "ii" or "good." The use of ancient Sendai dialect evokes images of both the area's Tanabata festival and the legendary samurai Date Masamune. It is the spirit of big, brightly pastel colored floats and badass, one-eyed, moon-helmetted warlords that Nintendo seeks to evoke.
10:1 odds, though, that the console's name in Japanese is spelled with the katakana 'u-i-i' instead of 'wi-i.' I doubt that more that 20% of Japanese even remember how to write a 'wi' character. My Japanese professors didn't.
I never did understand that language change. Of course, I never understood why the language never had characters for 'yi,' 'ye,' and 'wu' either. Personally, I would've been okay if they'd called the system Nintendo We, but apparently someone does in fact need to be fired.
Well, it's not like Internet Explorer's the only choice and it still manages to dominate the market in spite of its lack of features and poor security. A monopoly due to customer apathy is still a monopoly, especially when we're talking about a B2B lawsuit.
While the whole Claria & Microsoft deal is pretty sketchy in my book, it doesn't raise the same level of red flags as if IE had an web ad-blocker that distinguished between Microsoft partners and Microsoft rivals.
I think you'd have a harder time winning that antitrust case than if Microsoft were doing the latter. Personally, that's an antitrust case that I don't even want to go to court on the slim possibility that it could be ruled that MS had to let all spyware through.
Can you back that up? I've never heard of any sort of ad-filtering program from Microsoft. If MS bought ad companies or made special arrangements with them to get through their own ad-blocking software then that stinks of anti-trust violations to me.
Agreed. I've played card-battle RPGs, and they almost universally suck.
Chain of Memories is an action RPG where your deck determines the sequence of your available actions and their strength. It's at heart a game of jumping and swinging a sword, though, and not a stragetic card game. To call it a card-battler means that Zonk either hasn't played KH:CoM or hasn't played a card-battler.
The challenge level is almost non-existent, though, from after about the second stage until the end if you stack your deck almost exclusively with strength 7-9 cards. The end, though, gets a little rough. I'm still trying to beat Marluxia with little success; going an entire game without having to develop skills makes you too soft for the end.
Why exactly are we fondly remembering this guy? Everyone seems to be forgetting that one of his more notorious quotes was, "Privacy is dead; get over it." Rather than try to fix privacy problems, McNealy argued that we should just accept it, move on, and embrace the new privacy-less future (especially if it involves systems powered by Sun hardware).
Don't forget that in the wake of September 11th, both him and Ellison were ponying up to offer their company's services in helping to create a national ID. He even calls lining up at airport security an "efficiency tax" that biometric IDs would somehow maaaaagically fix.
Hey, to be fair with the exception of a Windows text editor that I still use, all the shareware I've ever used was on a Mac. Eventually, I replaced it all with freeware under Mac OS X, but an awful lot of it is still on my hard drive.
Old Mac freeware used to be slightly easier to find than Windows freeware, but most good apps were shareware back in the good old days.
Install a virtual desktop manager. Move nag screen to an unused desktop. Voila, problem gone (or at least out of sight).
You, sir, are brilliant.
Of course, that's assuming that the dialog isn't modal and that it obeys whatever scheme you're using to hide the other Windows and never deliberately pops to the front of all desktops.... But Microsoft would never break functionality to wring more revenue out of....
Alright. I see your point. You're in a different market from me if you're looking to completely minimize TCO. (By the way, I think the Echo's been discontinued. You might want to look at the new 2007 Yaris for a comparable vehicle. Also, the Corolla's always good too.)
I always approach the hybrid question from the POV how much just the hybrid engine itself costs. It is a little irritating, now that you point it out, that there's never a budget hybrid. They're always marketed towards people who want a lot of luxury features.
I don't believe 9-11 conspiracies. They require a level of competence and foresight that this government has consistently shown that they do not possess. Let Hanlon's Razor be your guide: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
On the other hand, I haven't seen this video, and the idea that the administration could care more about the financial and public morale interests in getting NY reopened ASAP than about the environmental and health implications of all that dust seems extremely likely to me. Then again, I'm not sure what the implications would've been of doing otherwise, and I'm very certain that many politicians would've considered the morale question more important on September 13th, 2001 than an unknown potential health problem.
I don't think you're helping your argument by comparing a Prius and an Echo. An Echo is a very stripped-down ultra budget car, and the Prius is a gadget car. Just because they look similar doesn't mean that they're the same class of car.
You're better of comparing hybrid vs. non-hybrid versions of the same vehicle. Take the 2007 Camry Hybrid. The basic, no frills 2007 Camry will be $18,270 MSRP. The Hybrid version (with an unknown trim level above the no-frills version) will be $25,900. However, comparing the Hybrid to the CE is disingenuous. According to this article:
The Hybrid comes with the most complete list of features. Other than the power moonroof, the navigation system, the leather interior and the heated front seats (available with the leather trim), the Hybrid comes fully loaded. It's fitted with 16-inch alloy wheels. The moonroof, navigation system, leather seats and heated front seats are optional.
In this case, it's better to compare the Hybrid to the LE or XLE at $19,450 or $24,425. This puts the hybrid overhead between $6,450 to $1,475.
According to Forbes' auto website, the feature list on the 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid is comparable to the EX model. If you pick the models without satellite navigation, that's $22,150 MSRP for the hybrid with a CVT vs. $19,260.00 for an EX with a regular automatic transmission. That's less than a $3000 difference.
However, your point about the superior savings of an electric are valid if true. Where do you get the $0.25 per "gallon" number?
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Thank you. I'm glad SOMEBODY else brought this up. The poor design of the Mac OS X Finder is one of several reasons that I honestly miss Mac OS 9. It just isn't as friendly to advanced users as the old Mac OS Finder was. While I don't hate it as much as the Dock, I still dislike it enough to pretty much do all file handling and application opening through the terminal.
The days of the desktop metaphor were brought to an end with Mac OS X. People deserve better from the company that was famous for and got it's strongest following for good GUI design.
What an amazing statement. I take it you don't do any remote banking, your workplace doesn't use one of the Web based CRM or system management apps, etc.
Actually, I use both online banking and web apps at work. I see your point. Fair enough.
I tend to think of the web essentially as a data store and batch system whereas most of the interactive content creation tools are all still based on the local PC which requires more expensive and capable hardware than the thin-client model says is necessary. Until PCs do almost nothing and next to no data is locally owned, then McNealy's vision of the future still hasn't come true.
Perhaps your Lisp programming stint was rather cursory or you weren't using a Lisp aware editor?
I'll admit that Lisp is the language where my knowledge is most weak. I failed to really learn the language for my AI class because I could not figure out a way to format the code such that it was readily apparent what was going on. I understand most of the fundamental concepts of functional programming and use them frequently in my Python scripts, but I can't get past the rigid requirements of 100% functional programming and the consequences on function layout and readability.
However, I do not want to hear any garbage about a "Lisp aware editor." If your code requires machine assistance to read (like hitting % in vi), then you either aren't writing it clearly, or it can't be written clearly in the first place.
My experience with LISP was that it fell into the latter category since there's frequently no good place to break the code up into subunits or blocks within the definition of a function. If you have a Lisp formatting style guide that helps to make code reasonable to understand, then by all means please share with me, but don't give me the co-op of a language aware editor. If you have to manually count opening and closing characters to know where you are, something has gone dreadfully wrong.
Now pickup Stroustrup, or a Java book or Perl or Python. What hits you is the cacaphony of discord, the single pure note lost amongst the poor orchestration..
Python is one of the cleanest and easy to program in languages ever designed. It's extremely descriptive, enforces readability, and as an added bonus contains functional programming tools that let it do pretty much anything you can do with LISP. In my opinion, Python is what students should first be taught. It lets you get straight to the high level concepts without have to first go through much of the bookkeeping nonsense that lower level languages force on you.
Plus, your alternatives are terrible. You pick Smalltalk, a language that comes with the baggage of a terribly outdated set of libraries. You pick LISP, a language whose syntax makes it utterly impossible to generate easily readable code. (No, seriously. If you have a formatting scheme that makes LISP easily readable, I'd love to hear it.) You pick C, which is good for low-level programming but requires way too much bookkeeping about memory to be safe for general purpose applications.
Incidentally, unlike you apparently, I've programmed in every single language you've mentioned. I'm well aware of their strengths and weaknesses. However, anyone who thinks Python is unclean and disorganized is shooting their mouth off on a subject they've obviously never studied.
His taking sole credit for the creation of millions of jobs is self-aggrandizing and doesn't deserve anything but a shaking of the head for his narrow-minded conclusions.
Well, it's not really self-aggrandizing. McNealy didn't say it himself; it was said to him by an employee buttering him up after some bad press.
I don't agree with the conclusion either. Honestly, the article itself even admits that no one was listening to McNealy when he was pushing the whole "the network is the computer" idea. Everyone saw it as a transparent bid to get people to buy expensive servers and expensive dumb workstations as part of the repeatedly "next thing" thin-client model.
Even today when people spend 90% of their time on their PCs surfing the web, checking email, etc., the network isn't the computer. Applications are all still hosted on the local machine with the exception of webmail clients. There's a growing industry of AJAX-based application services websites, but they haven't come to dominate yet, and they're over 10 years too late and way too different from Sun's marketed model for McNealy to claim any credit anymore than Jules Verne could take credit for us finally going to the moon.
Why would I want to work during my vacation? IT'S MY VACATION!
What's more important -- that you enjoy yourself as much as possible for 2-3 days or that you have a fulfilling career that prevents you from being miserable for the rest of your life? Isn't it better to squander a few days during a job that sucks to give yourself the courage and peace of mind to leave it for a job that you actually look forward to going to each day?
Geez. Some people are just completely incapable of taking the long view.
The first thing I did after reading the article was to Google for Jamcracker.
Guess what the first link was?
Hmmm. Since 1999, huh? I wonder if they know that their name was passed on by several companies and widely ridiculed within the so-calling naming industry before they got it?
Cool. It's a great city. I spent my three weeks in Sendai as part of the final immersion classes offered at my college. I stayed with a host family in the Yaotome region, and commuted every day to Touhoku University for classes. I'd love to go back someday, but who has the time, you know?
That's clever and all, but "ii" used to be "yi", which itself is long obsoleted
Are you sure you're not thinking of "yoi," which is the root of yoku, yokatta, etc.? I'm pretty sure there's never been kana for "yi."
Having seen acne scars, pox scars, and a picture of the guy Cheney shot in the face with birdshot, I'm going to have to shy away from the "battle scars" theory.
There is in fact a difference between a "special interest" and the "public interest." A "special interest" works to get what good for their minority slice of society, whereas the "public interest" seeks to benefit the majority's interests.
This is not inherently a value judgement, though it often is as special interests often work at the expense of the majority's rights. The civil rights movement is a good counter-example of a special interest working for rights that do not negatively impact the majority's rights.
Consumer rights is not a special interest. It is clearly the public interest since we are all consumers.
I will say, that I've never been more disgusted with Dianne Feinstein right now. She's clearly putting the interests of her campaign funders above the interest of the public. I think she brings shame to the Democrats in an election year where the theme of the power of lobbying interests is a central strength for the party. Then again, Hollywood and the recording industry have been a big bribers of the Democrats long before they because bipartisan bribers.
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is that Japanese obsoleted the "wi" sound many years ago, and the most common way of making similar sounds in loan words and sound effects is to use the two characters "u-i" instead. As there are no suriving Japanese words that start with "wi," unless there's some ancient meaning that only a classical language scholar would recognize, this is just nothing but a sound effect word, like "Wheee!"
Oh. I just saw the bit about asking us to lie. Hmmm....
Yes, "wii" is the way that nobles in the Sendai region used to say "ii" or "good." The use of ancient Sendai dialect evokes images of both the area's Tanabata festival and the legendary samurai Date Masamune. It is the spirit of big, brightly pastel colored floats and badass, one-eyed, moon-helmetted warlords that Nintendo seeks to evoke.
10:1 odds, though, that the console's name in Japanese is spelled with the katakana 'u-i-i' instead of 'wi-i.' I doubt that more that 20% of Japanese even remember how to write a 'wi' character. My Japanese professors didn't.
I never did understand that language change. Of course, I never understood why the language never had characters for 'yi,' 'ye,' and 'wu' either. Personally, I would've been okay if they'd called the system Nintendo We, but apparently someone does in fact need to be fired.
Well, it's not like Internet Explorer's the only choice and it still manages to dominate the market in spite of its lack of features and poor security. A monopoly due to customer apathy is still a monopoly, especially when we're talking about a B2B lawsuit.
While the whole Claria & Microsoft deal is pretty sketchy in my book, it doesn't raise the same level of red flags as if IE had an web ad-blocker that distinguished between Microsoft partners and Microsoft rivals.
I think you'd have a harder time winning that antitrust case than if Microsoft were doing the latter. Personally, that's an antitrust case that I don't even want to go to court on the slim possibility that it could be ruled that MS had to let all spyware through.
Can you back that up? I've never heard of any sort of ad-filtering program from Microsoft. If MS bought ad companies or made special arrangements with them to get through their own ad-blocking software then that stinks of anti-trust violations to me.
Agreed. I've played card-battle RPGs, and they almost universally suck.
Chain of Memories is an action RPG where your deck determines the sequence of your available actions and their strength. It's at heart a game of jumping and swinging a sword, though, and not a stragetic card game. To call it a card-battler means that Zonk either hasn't played KH:CoM or hasn't played a card-battler.
The challenge level is almost non-existent, though, from after about the second stage until the end if you stack your deck almost exclusively with strength 7-9 cards. The end, though, gets a little rough. I'm still trying to beat Marluxia with little success; going an entire game without having to develop skills makes you too soft for the end.
Why exactly are we fondly remembering this guy? Everyone seems to be forgetting that one of his more notorious quotes was, "Privacy is dead; get over it." Rather than try to fix privacy problems, McNealy argued that we should just accept it, move on, and embrace the new privacy-less future (especially if it involves systems powered by Sun hardware).
Don't forget that in the wake of September 11th, both him and Ellison were ponying up to offer their company's services in helping to create a national ID. He even calls lining up at airport security an "efficiency tax" that biometric IDs would somehow maaaaagically fix.
I say good riddance.
Hey, to be fair with the exception of a Windows text editor that I still use, all the shareware I've ever used was on a Mac. Eventually, I replaced it all with freeware under Mac OS X, but an awful lot of it is still on my hard drive.
Old Mac freeware used to be slightly easier to find than Windows freeware, but most good apps were shareware back in the good old days.
Install a virtual desktop manager. Move nag screen to an unused desktop. Voila, problem gone (or at least out of sight).
You, sir, are brilliant.
Of course, that's assuming that the dialog isn't modal and that it obeys whatever scheme you're using to hide the other Windows and never deliberately pops to the front of all desktops.... But Microsoft would never break functionality to wring more revenue out of....
Eh, never mind. Maybe not.
Hey, why not? After all, I'm sure you're like me and you've registered every bit of shareware that had nag screens, right?
Alright. I see your point. You're in a different market from me if you're looking to completely minimize TCO. (By the way, I think the Echo's been discontinued. You might want to look at the new 2007 Yaris for a comparable vehicle. Also, the Corolla's always good too.)
I always approach the hybrid question from the POV how much just the hybrid engine itself costs. It is a little irritating, now that you point it out, that there's never a budget hybrid. They're always marketed towards people who want a lot of luxury features.
Gray Davis lost his election over the energy crisis...
s/lost his election/was forced out of office/
I don't believe 9-11 conspiracies. They require a level of competence and foresight that this government has consistently shown that they do not possess. Let Hanlon's Razor be your guide: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
On the other hand, I haven't seen this video, and the idea that the administration could care more about the financial and public morale interests in getting NY reopened ASAP than about the environmental and health implications of all that dust seems extremely likely to me. Then again, I'm not sure what the implications would've been of doing otherwise, and I'm very certain that many politicians would've considered the morale question more important on September 13th, 2001 than an unknown potential health problem.
I don't think you're helping your argument by comparing a Prius and an Echo. An Echo is a very stripped-down ultra budget car, and the Prius is a gadget car. Just because they look similar doesn't mean that they're the same class of car.
You're better of comparing hybrid vs. non-hybrid versions of the same vehicle. Take the 2007 Camry Hybrid. The basic, no frills 2007 Camry will be $18,270 MSRP. The Hybrid version (with an unknown trim level above the no-frills version) will be $25,900. However, comparing the Hybrid to the CE is disingenuous. According to this article:
In this case, it's better to compare the Hybrid to the LE or XLE at $19,450 or $24,425. This puts the hybrid overhead between $6,450 to $1,475.
According to Forbes' auto website, the feature list on the 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid is comparable to the EX model. If you pick the models without satellite navigation, that's $22,150 MSRP for the hybrid with a CVT vs. $19,260.00 for an EX with a regular automatic transmission. That's less than a $3000 difference.
However, your point about the superior savings of an electric are valid if true. Where do you get the $0.25 per "gallon" number?