That web site is really wince-inducing, I'm sorry. Maybe Ms. Stewart has something to her claims, but the fact that she also is apparently claiming that the "Terminator" stories were ripped off from her seriously undercuts her credibility. We've already been through this once, folks: Harlan Ellison sued Cameron for taking the idea of "Terminator" from two of his Outer Limits episodes, and Cameron settled out of court. Perhaps Ms. Stewart should be suing Mr. Ellison for obviously stealing her stories for his TV scripts.
Or, perhaps "a Christ-like figure fighting against the dark side of humanity's own creations" is not such a strikingly original concept in fiction. Hmm.
The problem was not people getting paid too much, but (a) government + unions making employees more expensive than they should be and (b) a talented pool of cheaper labor becoming more feasible elsewhere.
I'd certainly agree with (b). But I've been in telecom and high-tech fields since 1995 and have never been in a position where I could have joined a union even if I wanted to. There may well be industries where union pressure is keeping wages up, but software engineering is not one of them, and it's hard to make a good argument for unions having some kind of "indirect effect" on my salary. (If anything, upward wage pressure from unionized employees would create tacit downward wage pressure for non-unionized ones to compensate.)
The problem is the same one that fueled the whole "dotcom mentality," which took the maxim you've got to spend money to make money and ran completely off the rails with it. Tech companies let all their expenses, including salaries, hyperinflate, on the assumption that there would be such a huge pile of cash waiting for them on the other side of the rainbow that it would be justified.
This isn't a "government versus corporation" thing or a green versus libertarian thing. It's a good business sense versus bad business sense thing. A lot of the salaries circa 1999-2000 in our industry were by-products of monumentally bad business sense. And, unfortunately, that set up some really inflated expectations -- even in Silicon Valley, the median combined household income is around $70K, or around $35 an hour, yet it's still not at all uncommon to come across people on Slashdot who seem to honestly believe that $40 an hour is slave wages. (Clearly none of these people have any friends who work in non-tech industries.)
Generally, you switch on the user agent now because you're trying to account for IE's quirks. Some of them you can get around with sufficiently convoluted CSS -- the "broken box model" where it doesn't compute the widths of elements correctly -- but AFAIK, that trick actually works only because IE doesn't implement all of CSS, either. But when I needed to use a PNG image that uses alpha transparency, I had the server send the weird hack IE 5.5+ needs to display that to IE 5.5+ clients and just send a normal IMG tag to everybody else. The alternative would have been some really hairy Javascript that rewrote the IMG tags on the client side to convert them to the IE hack.
Really, at this point in time, it's usually not about what kind of content the client claims to support -- it's about how well the client actually supports what it claims to. And as much as "send the standard and screw the client if it doesn't handle it correctly" has appeal, in practice that's rarely a viable option.
Well, I don't actually have a problem with "modern conservative morality" except to the degree that anyone who disagrees with it must, apparently, be treated in a patronizing fashion. And you performed the hat trick of accusing me of wishy-washy liberal relativism, at the same time you berated me for applying absolute moral standards. Then, of course, you went on to make gross generalizations about the Japanese people based on their leaders.
And I never even mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan, beyond observing that terrorism boils down to acts of war committed against non-combatants. This is your idea of a rant? Silly me. I thought a rant would be something like putting words in someone's mouth and writing in ALL CAPITALS to show how much I want to FROTH at the STUPIDITY of anyone who could POSSIBLY question my viewpoint.
But, not belittling those who disagree with you is one of those crazy modern liberal notions, too, isn't it? Thanks for setting me straight on that.
The question that seems to be lost in the noise here is whether civilians represent valid targets in war. Yes, I know there were military targets within those cities, but the nature of the weapons meant that the vast majority of deaths would be non-combatants.
And frankly, "the Japanese military did awful things" isn't an answer to that question, because that's not in dispute. Is there some line past which a country's leadership can go, beyond which it's okay to attack the civilian population? These are very uncomfortable questions, because the basic truth is that massive attacks on a civilian population to make the leaders acquiesce is a reasonable definition of a terrorist attack. We don't like having to face the implications. "Oh, it's only terrorism when the bad people do it, not when we do it."
That Japan might not have surrendered "as well" may indeed be true. But that doesn't fundamentally address the ethics of the situation. If America really does stand for a certain set of moral values and ethical principles, then sometimes we'll have to choose to stand by those principles even when doing so does not produce the optimal outcome.
So with all due respect, don't lecture me when I ask aloud whether those tens of thousands of Japanese civilian lives were worth ending the war, let alone--as many have argued here--simply getting better terms of surrender for ending it. Maybe the answer is "yes." But no one should dare suggest that asking the question shows ignorance or naivete. Asking the question is fundamental to what kind of country we want to be.
The simple answer: he didn't. In the original prints of "Star Wars," there is no "Episode IV: A New Hope" caption at the start of the scrawl. The reason the first "Star Wars" movie functions as a complete standalone story is because it was intended as a complete standalone story.
I'm not accusing Lucas of completely blowing smoke out his ass; if you look around on the net, you can find earlier drafts of the script for "Star Wars," and the first draft has a lot more in common with "The Phantom Menace" than it does with "Star Wars." But when push comes to shove, the reason for the divergence beween the first draft and the shooting script has less to do with a grand plan for a generation-spanning epic than it does with Lucas's associates telling him that the first drafts came across like low-rent "Dune" wannabes and he needed a much tighter focus on a hero -- and Lucas recast everything using Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a template. (Campbell later championed "Star Wars" as a great example of his concept of the Hero's Journey, which was, if you ask me, way too recursive of him.)
So the idea that Anakin was "always meant to be the focal character" that I've seen advocated here really isn't supported by history, either. In that first draft the main character was indeed named "Anakin Starkiller," but the novelization of the first film did carry the subtitle "From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker," suggesting that Lucas (a) hoped for sequels and (b) fully expected Luke to be the hero. It's also worth noting in passing that both that novel and what was meant to be the official sequel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, were written by Alan Dean Foster; Lucas decided, for whatever reason, to go with a completely different story for the sequel rather than Foster's. It's my guess that he did that because it's after Foster's sequel was written that Lucas decided he was actually producing a great epic; Foster's take was treating it more like the next chapter in a pulp serial adventure. Splinter isn't a great book but it's an interesting look at an "alternate universe" path the series could have taken.
While I can only speak for my own experience, I ran FreeBSD for several years, at both home and work, and found that most users of the OS were pretty laid back and pragmatic, and didn't have anything against Linux users -- they just thought BSD was better, and if you asked them why, they'd tell you.
And, honestly, I think that's the main reason they've taken flack. I've observed the same thing between Mac and Windows users, but even more so. I'm a Mac user now, and I don't go around bashing Windows or Linux or PC users in general. I don't have anything against them and I'm not particularly interested in evangelizing. But the simple fact is that by going through all the expense and bother of owning a Mac in the first place, I've made a very clear statement that I like OS X more than Windows (or Linux, or for that matter, FreeBSD) to go through that expense and bother in the first place. And that alone will piss people off.
Before FreeBSD (and later the Mac), I ran Linux since the 0.99 kernel days. And I have to tell you, I ran into more arrogance than I liked among users on the platform, who seemed to genuinely believe that if something was painful for them to figure out, it should be painful for everyone else to figure out, too. I got answers from FreeBSD folks that were sometimes very curt, but I never got insulted by them.
There've certainly been Bitter, Obstinate Zealots around in the Mac community for a while now. They're the ones who've railed against every move that Apple has made that shakes their world view. The amount of flamage directed from the "old guard" at OS X went on for years. Putting the application title in the menu makes the system completely unusable! What idiot came up with the Dock? Where's my control strip? If the trash can isn't on the desktop it's no good! And -- my God -- the Finder isn't perfectly "spatial" anymore! Wah! Wah! Wah! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law!
Jesus Christ, people, give it a rest.
You know what? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they've actually, y'know, put some thought into this decision and aren't just doing it because they think x86 chips will look prettier in those brushed aluminum cases isn't blind zealotry. Saying that, yes, you'll be willing to look at Intel Macs when they come out isn't blind zealotry. But rending your clothes and beating your chest and screaming, "No! Never! I'll keep my PowerMac until you pry my cold, dead fingers from my mouse, and goddammit, my mouse has only one button!"... that's blind zealotry.
Mr. Kheit, for your long and distinguished service in saying "Hell No, We Won't Go" to every single change Apple has made, I award you the Big Red Clown Nose of Bozo Punditry.
(And, don't worry, Dvorak fans! I have faith he'll reclaim it soon.)
Actually, Apple's developer docs specifically say it won't be using Open Firmware. I think the idea of being able to run Windows on Apple hardware is actually part of the plan, even if officially it'll be "unsupported." They want OS X to be the best user experience, of course, and it's a reasonable assumption that if somebody is buying a "Mactel" machine they're doing it specifically to run OS X... but there'll be a lot of people who'd like to be able to dual-boot. Or at least use VirtualPC with near-native speed, which will obviously be a lot easier on an Intel CPU.
Phil Schiller's comments about "OS X only on Apple hardware" not withstanding, I think it's telling that they were already demoing OS X on Intel during that keynote. While I could be wrong, I bet it was running on pretty standard PC hardware, not some special woo-woo magic Apple box. Apple's being very careful not to pose this as a challenge to Microsoft... but dissatisfaction with Microsoft is at an all-time high and Apple's brand recognition and buzz factor also seems to be at an all-time high. If there's ever been a time to challenge Windows head on and a company capable of actually pulling it off, it's today's Apple.
You're absolutely right. But I think a lot of the "I have met Bell Labs, and you, Google, are no Bell Labs" commentary I see in a responses here are missing the flip side of the equation here.
If the article is correct, this is a vote of confidence in Google from a lot of bright people going to work there. The fact that what they're doing right now is just making snazzy web applications doesn't mean that they're not amassing some pretty serious talent. Whether that potential is going to go anywhere remains to be seen, sure. (Although I suspect that all of the people snarking about this are using Google "products" every day, repeatedly, and that many of us have switched from competing "products" as Google's roll out. They may simply be building better mousetraps, but the world is indeed beating a path to their door.)
But what's a more interesting point here is that this is a vote of no confidence in some of the grand old think tanks of the computer era. PARC is still around but it's a shell. 15 years ago everyone wanted to catch up to SGI in their fields; now SGI is a historical footnote, and SUn is well on their way to following. And, Bell Labs, the grandest of the grand, has clearly withered in the Lucent years.
Will Google be the "next Bell Labs?" Who knows. Desire and loads of money aren't enough -- Microsoft Research tried that route, but clearly hasn't been that successful (hi, Clippy!). But somebody has to be the next Bell Labs, because the old one isn't going anywhere anymore.
Then there are those of us who just bought 2.5GHz Power Mac G5's and expected them to last 4 years while working with the latest software...
I don't think we're going to have many problems with that. To develop for Intel at all, developers need the version of XCode that produces the 'fat binaries,' which means the resource cost to maintain up-to-date PPC versions of the code should be very minimal.
If I was going to predict an 'inflection point' when the old Macs genuinely start getting screwed, it'll be when a version of OS X ships that has new API features that are, for whatever reason, Intel-only. I'm expecting that Leopard will not have such features, but by Lion or Cheetah or Garfield or whatever the hell the 10.6 release will be called, probably in mid-2008, it wouldn't surprise me.
While your general point has merit, you should never overgeneralize: "no musician lives off of his or her CD royalties -- the ones who make music full-time live off their ticket sales"? Well, maybe a lot do, but I know you've heard the term studio musician before. What about Brian Eno? Or Alan Parsons? His group almost never toured. I don't know that he was living off CD royalties exclusively, but he sure hasn't been living off concert revenue, either. (I'm also reminded of a quip from singer-songwriter Don McLean: when asked for the umpteenth time what his song "American Pie" really meant, he replied that it meant he'd never have to work again if he didn't want to.)
Someone else nailed what I think the real issue here is -- the point of copyright is for the creator to have control over how their work is distributed. I may not mind having my work out there for free, but I'm not pleased with the assertion (which you didn't make, but some pretty much have) that I have no right to even have a say in that distribution.
While I'm not a gamer, it's worth noting in passing that my trackball at home has four buttons plus a "scroll ring" (a wheel around the trackball itself).
I think much of the problem people have with trackballs isn't inherent to the concept of trackballs... it's that a lot of cheap trackballs suck. I was pretty hesitant about spending $99 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, but after just a week with it at home, nothing else feels right. (At work I'm using the cheaper two-button Kensington Orbit, which is essentially their version of the Logitech Marble Mouse -- I think a little better than Logitech's, though, in both construction and driver support.)
Pages not only kicks Word's ass, it even frees most Mac users who do page layout from needing Quark.
You don't do much word processing or desktop publishing, do you? I'm sorry, but as pretty as Pages is, it's pretty anemic as far as all but very basic word processing tasks go. If what you're looking for is a Mac equivalent to Microsoft Publishers, Pages is your program--it's better and far more usable. But for actually, y'know, processing words rather than doing a cute club newsletter, grab the freeware "WordService" add-in for OS X and use TextEdit, and you'll get more functionality. I'm serious.
And as someone who's done desktop publishing professionally: no offense, but Pages isn't even fit to tie the shoelaces of a program like InDesign or Xpress (or, for that matter, LaTeX).
The ending was, AFAIK, pretty much derived from Kubrick's original script: "Kubrick and Aldiss developed the story further, expanding the timeline so that thousands of years later, David would be discovered by advanced androids that would resuscitate him and learn about their extinct human heritage." (Quoted on AI: The Kubrick Edit.) In fact, Aldiss really didn't like the whole "Pinocchio" reframing and stopped being associated with the project early on... and that reframing was Kubrick's.
Spielberg wasn't called in at the last minute to finish Kubrick's last masterpiece -- he was chosen by Kubrick to direct the film. This was the only version we were ever going to get. The guy who did "The Kubrick Edit" tried to make it closer to Kubrick's earlier draft script, but there was never ging to be a non-Spielberg "A.I."
If Kubrick had made it, would it have been a different, darker film? Yes. Would it have been a significantly better film? I'm dubious. Kubrick was a great director but his storytelling sense has always struck me as quirky, from "2001" through "The Shining." (The later TV miniseries "The Shining" struck Kubrick fans as completely without merit, I'm sure, but as Stephen King diplomatically put it, "The first one was a Kubrick film, and the second one is a Stephen King story.") Most of what people disliked about "A.I." was stuff they assume is Spielberg's doing, but more often than not, that assumption is wrong.
So what you're saying, basically, is that you believe only crazy leftists want a media that's distrustful of unchecked power, encourages criticism and self-examination, and corrects mistakes? Yes, that list definitely suffers from Earnest Politically Correct Buzzword Syndrome, but the core idea of digging for facts and--as much as the phrase often irritates me--speaking truth to power is the core idea of a responsible media.
Always turn a story around: I want my reporters being willing to call bullshit on Clinton as well as Bush. Don't you, regardless of who's sitting in office? Telling us "just the facts"--in other words, just what the primary source says the facts are--without context and checking is not only what leads to most of the problems in the media that "leftists" complain about, but to not-so-left problems like CBS's memo story. Isn't the core problem with that story that they didn't encourage criticism and self-examination, didn't take the time to think, and didn't challenge "group think"?
The iTunes Music Store is a service, but the songs you buy are products. (These are defined in the license terms, in fact.) As far as I know, if Apple's HQ was hit by an iMeteor* tomorrow, nothing I've bought from the iTMS would stop working. It contacts Apple to "authorize" music when it's first copied onto a machine, but not to play it each time, which is a critical difference between iTMS and subscription-based services.
As is occasionally pointed out, if you don't like new changes in a new version of iTunes, the solution is: don't upgrade. You'll lose access to iTMS, more than likely, but not to any of the music you've bought with it.
I don't have a problem with making the occasional purchase from iTMS, but the chances are that I'd never sign up for a subscription service; the chances are that it wouldn't be worth it to me, and while I'm willing to put up with Apple's DRM-induced limitations, the subscription-based ones are too annoying for me. My main worry about DRM isn't its existence in itself, it's the drive on the part of media companies to try to limit non-DRM alternatives. I have no problem with "you can get this album for $10 as an immediate download with the following restrictions, or $15 on CD with no restrictions"; I do have a problem with "there is no way to get this album without restrictions, period."
Is it possible that Apple will change things and cross my annoyance threshold? Sure. But I don't see a very likely scenario where my (relatively few) purchases will stop working if I stop being an iTMS customer -- with Napster and Yahoo!, that's explicitly the case. People have pointed out that those stores can be used to purchase $1 tracks, too, with limitations closer to Apple's... but, of course, at that point, they lose to iTMS based on selection.
Ironically, having ordered good earphones for my iPod will probably make me more inclined to stick with CDs for ripping, less over DRM concerns than sound quality concerns.
Your summary's pretty good, with one error. The company that used to be known as SCO is now known as Tarantella. Transmeta is a very different company.:)
From where I work at Cisco, I'm within five minutes' drive of two shopping centers with restaurants, one Asian mall, and a collection of restaurants in Milpitas. It's only another ten minutes to get to a good chunk of San Jose, Fremont or Santa Clara. Obviously every fast food and sandwich shop chain exists within that radius, but so does everything from taquerias to burger dives to good sushi to the occasional "five star" restaurant like Parcel 104. (And, yes, I do actually eat at Cisco's cafe, which is pretty good.)
I've also worked in south San Jose, and earlier on the outskirts of Menlo Park, where that ten-minute radius included Palo Alto, Woodside and Redwood City. The range of lunch choices there was phenomenal--noodle houses to classic diners and great rather than merely good sushi.
I'm sorry your experiences have made you such a bitter, bitter guy, but if you're taking 45 minutes one way to get to a deli sandwich, either you don't work anywhere near Silicon Valley or you're refusing to eat anywhere but the One True Deli, in which case: you're a really fucking picky eater for a wage slave, aren't you?
To bring this to another level of unnecessarily pedantic trivia: I'd bet he used TECO to write Emacs. If I recall correctly, Emacs actually started out as a set of macros for TECO.
This is actually what Flash could be good for. No, don't laugh, seriously.
More recent versions of Flash (since version 5, I think) have pretty capable connectivity for various server-driven databases, and Macromedia obviously intended for it to be able to do on the client side what Java's always failed to do. (In these scenarios, Java would normally be running on the server side -- or ColdFusion, of course, but it's actually written in Java anyway.) Flash could allow web applications as responsive as normal desktop applications, and it's really a shame that it's gotten stuck in the "annoying web animation" niche.
You can see an actual useful page done in Flash for a hotel reservation system at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. It's a small system, to be sure, but it gives an idea of how Flash can actually be used for good instead of evil.
That's not really fair. FrameMaker is still being produced on Windows (and, IIRC, Solaris); they cancelled the Mac version, for reasons I find dubious, but the program itself is still in production. PageMaker was deprecated in favor of InDesign, and frankly, InDesign is a far superior product.
I'd be surprised if there's going to be any short-term integration plans; every product currently produced will probably finish out its next release cycle, at the least, before any changes are made. I wouldn't be surprised to see GoLive eventually be dropped in favor of Dreamweaver, and Freehand eventually be dropped in favor of illustrator; beyond that, there's not that much product overlap. (I know C|NET suggests that Fireworks and Photoshop are competitors, but they're different enough products that I could see Fireworks being kept around. Granted, given that I vastly prefer Fireworks for web graphics work, I'm biased.)
You picked a bad example there. It is nice to be able to open large files in TextEdit. This reads like another case of '64k is enough for anyone' syndrome.
This is a common misconception around here, I think--the number of bits the processor can handle simultaneously has no direct bearing on a lot of common operations.
32-bit addressing has a cap of 4 gigabytes that are directly addressable, but we've known how to do memory/file paging for a very, very long time. 16-bit addressing (which most 8-bit CPUs like the Z80 used!) only directly let you handle 64K of RAM, but WordStar could edit files of up to 128K or so even on a machine with 32K of RAM.
On Macs, HFS+ already has a maximum file size based on 64 bits. The only advantage 64 bits for memory addressing gets you is that, if your text editor loads the whole file into memory at once and you have more than 4G of RAM in your system, the CPU won't have to do any paging of memory. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that for a text editor, you're probably not going to be noticing a whole lot of lag in page switching between memory banks anyway.
It would also be dead on to say that most Democratic rank-and-files support free speech.
"Political correctness" is a bogeyman of conservatives, but the phrase has lost its original meaning -- tailoring your message to the audience in a way which they will find "correct." Most of the examples of attempts to suppress "offensive" speech tend to come from schools and universities, and this applies just as much to conservatives trying to force creationism curricula on students and trying to ban every book that offends them on religious grounds as it does to somebody trying to get rid of Tom Sawyer because it contains "the N-word."
Most Democrats tend to be extremely supportive of free speech. I'm not going to claim that they're more so than most Republicans, but I'm going to call bullshit on anyone who claims they're less so. Sorry, but if I don't get to say, "well, on our side it's just the easily-offended wackos, but on your side it's clearly most of you," then you don't, either. That kind of caricaturizing of your opponents is why political conversation in this country is so ridiculously vitriolic right now. Don't add to it.
And, if anyone would actually bother to read the ordinance here, it's clear that its intent is to require full disclosure when someone is paying you for political communication. There's a bit of that in the news right now, you might have noticed, about columnists being paid to promote government programs without acknowledging that they're essentially functioning as advertisers. One can debate whether transparency is a worthy goal of regulation (I think it's one of the few worthy goals for regulations to have, actually), but this is not about suppressing speech, political or otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
That web site is really wince-inducing, I'm sorry. Maybe Ms. Stewart has something to her claims, but the fact that she also is apparently claiming that the "Terminator" stories were ripped off from her seriously undercuts her credibility. We've already been through this once, folks: Harlan Ellison sued Cameron for taking the idea of "Terminator" from two of his Outer Limits episodes, and Cameron settled out of court. Perhaps Ms. Stewart should be suing Mr. Ellison for obviously stealing her stories for his TV scripts.
Or, perhaps "a Christ-like figure fighting against the dark side of humanity's own creations" is not such a strikingly original concept in fiction. Hmm.
The problem was not people getting paid too much, but (a) government + unions making employees more expensive than they should be and (b) a talented pool of cheaper labor becoming more feasible elsewhere.
I'd certainly agree with (b). But I've been in telecom and high-tech fields since 1995 and have never been in a position where I could have joined a union even if I wanted to. There may well be industries where union pressure is keeping wages up, but software engineering is not one of them, and it's hard to make a good argument for unions having some kind of "indirect effect" on my salary. (If anything, upward wage pressure from unionized employees would create tacit downward wage pressure for non-unionized ones to compensate.)
The problem is the same one that fueled the whole "dotcom mentality," which took the maxim you've got to spend money to make money and ran completely off the rails with it. Tech companies let all their expenses, including salaries, hyperinflate, on the assumption that there would be such a huge pile of cash waiting for them on the other side of the rainbow that it would be justified.
This isn't a "government versus corporation" thing or a green versus libertarian thing. It's a good business sense versus bad business sense thing. A lot of the salaries circa 1999-2000 in our industry were by-products of monumentally bad business sense. And, unfortunately, that set up some really inflated expectations -- even in Silicon Valley, the median combined household income is around $70K, or around $35 an hour, yet it's still not at all uncommon to come across people on Slashdot who seem to honestly believe that $40 an hour is slave wages. (Clearly none of these people have any friends who work in non-tech industries.)
Generally, you switch on the user agent now because you're trying to account for IE's quirks. Some of them you can get around with sufficiently convoluted CSS -- the "broken box model" where it doesn't compute the widths of elements correctly -- but AFAIK, that trick actually works only because IE doesn't implement all of CSS, either. But when I needed to use a PNG image that uses alpha transparency, I had the server send the weird hack IE 5.5+ needs to display that to IE 5.5+ clients and just send a normal IMG tag to everybody else. The alternative would have been some really hairy Javascript that rewrote the IMG tags on the client side to convert them to the IE hack.
Really, at this point in time, it's usually not about what kind of content the client claims to support -- it's about how well the client actually supports what it claims to. And as much as "send the standard and screw the client if it doesn't handle it correctly" has appeal, in practice that's rarely a viable option.
No viable corporation would run an operation so inefficiently as the government of the United States.
:)
You haven't worked for any really big corporations, have you?
Well, I don't actually have a problem with "modern conservative morality" except to the degree that anyone who disagrees with it must, apparently, be treated in a patronizing fashion. And you performed the hat trick of accusing me of wishy-washy liberal relativism, at the same time you berated me for applying absolute moral standards. Then, of course, you went on to make gross generalizations about the Japanese people based on their leaders.
And I never even mentioned Iraq and Afghanistan, beyond observing that terrorism boils down to acts of war committed against non-combatants. This is your idea of a rant? Silly me. I thought a rant would be something like putting words in someone's mouth and writing in ALL CAPITALS to show how much I want to FROTH at the STUPIDITY of anyone who could POSSIBLY question my viewpoint.
But, not belittling those who disagree with you is one of those crazy modern liberal notions, too, isn't it? Thanks for setting me straight on that.
The question that seems to be lost in the noise here is whether civilians represent valid targets in war. Yes, I know there were military targets within those cities, but the nature of the weapons meant that the vast majority of deaths would be non-combatants.
And frankly, "the Japanese military did awful things" isn't an answer to that question, because that's not in dispute. Is there some line past which a country's leadership can go, beyond which it's okay to attack the civilian population? These are very uncomfortable questions, because the basic truth is that massive attacks on a civilian population to make the leaders acquiesce is a reasonable definition of a terrorist attack. We don't like having to face the implications. "Oh, it's only terrorism when the bad people do it, not when we do it."
That Japan might not have surrendered "as well" may indeed be true. But that doesn't fundamentally address the ethics of the situation. If America really does stand for a certain set of moral values and ethical principles, then sometimes we'll have to choose to stand by those principles even when doing so does not produce the optimal outcome.
So with all due respect, don't lecture me when I ask aloud whether those tens of thousands of Japanese civilian lives were worth ending the war, let alone--as many have argued here--simply getting better terms of surrender for ending it. Maybe the answer is "yes." But no one should dare suggest that asking the question shows ignorance or naivete. Asking the question is fundamental to what kind of country we want to be.
The simple answer: he didn't. In the original prints of "Star Wars," there is no "Episode IV: A New Hope" caption at the start of the scrawl. The reason the first "Star Wars" movie functions as a complete standalone story is because it was intended as a complete standalone story.
I'm not accusing Lucas of completely blowing smoke out his ass; if you look around on the net, you can find earlier drafts of the script for "Star Wars," and the first draft has a lot more in common with "The Phantom Menace" than it does with "Star Wars." But when push comes to shove, the reason for the divergence beween the first draft and the shooting script has less to do with a grand plan for a generation-spanning epic than it does with Lucas's associates telling him that the first drafts came across like low-rent "Dune" wannabes and he needed a much tighter focus on a hero -- and Lucas recast everything using Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces as a template. (Campbell later championed "Star Wars" as a great example of his concept of the Hero's Journey, which was, if you ask me, way too recursive of him.)
So the idea that Anakin was "always meant to be the focal character" that I've seen advocated here really isn't supported by history, either. In that first draft the main character was indeed named "Anakin Starkiller," but the novelization of the first film did carry the subtitle "From the Adventures of Luke Skywalker," suggesting that Lucas (a) hoped for sequels and (b) fully expected Luke to be the hero. It's also worth noting in passing that both that novel and what was meant to be the official sequel, Splinter of the Mind's Eye, were written by Alan Dean Foster; Lucas decided, for whatever reason, to go with a completely different story for the sequel rather than Foster's. It's my guess that he did that because it's after Foster's sequel was written that Lucas decided he was actually producing a great epic; Foster's take was treating it more like the next chapter in a pulp serial adventure. Splinter isn't a great book but it's an interesting look at an "alternate universe" path the series could have taken.
While I can only speak for my own experience, I ran FreeBSD for several years, at both home and work, and found that most users of the OS were pretty laid back and pragmatic, and didn't have anything against Linux users -- they just thought BSD was better, and if you asked them why, they'd tell you.
And, honestly, I think that's the main reason they've taken flack. I've observed the same thing between Mac and Windows users, but even more so. I'm a Mac user now, and I don't go around bashing Windows or Linux or PC users in general. I don't have anything against them and I'm not particularly interested in evangelizing. But the simple fact is that by going through all the expense and bother of owning a Mac in the first place, I've made a very clear statement that I like OS X more than Windows (or Linux, or for that matter, FreeBSD) to go through that expense and bother in the first place. And that alone will piss people off.
Before FreeBSD (and later the Mac), I ran Linux since the 0.99 kernel days. And I have to tell you, I ran into more arrogance than I liked among users on the platform, who seemed to genuinely believe that if something was painful for them to figure out, it should be painful for everyone else to figure out, too. I got answers from FreeBSD folks that were sometimes very curt, but I never got insulted by them.
There've certainly been Bitter, Obstinate Zealots around in the Mac community for a while now. They're the ones who've railed against every move that Apple has made that shakes their world view. The amount of flamage directed from the "old guard" at OS X went on for years. Putting the application title in the menu makes the system completely unusable! What idiot came up with the Dock? Where's my control strip? If the trash can isn't on the desktop it's no good! And -- my God -- the Finder isn't perfectly "spatial" anymore! Wah! Wah! Wah! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law! Fitt's Law!
... that's blind zealotry.
Jesus Christ, people, give it a rest.
You know what? Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt that they've actually, y'know, put some thought into this decision and aren't just doing it because they think x86 chips will look prettier in those brushed aluminum cases isn't blind zealotry. Saying that, yes, you'll be willing to look at Intel Macs when they come out isn't blind zealotry. But rending your clothes and beating your chest and screaming, "No! Never! I'll keep my PowerMac until you pry my cold, dead fingers from my mouse, and goddammit, my mouse has only one button!"
Mr. Kheit, for your long and distinguished service in saying "Hell No, We Won't Go" to every single change Apple has made, I award you the Big Red Clown Nose of Bozo Punditry.
(And, don't worry, Dvorak fans! I have faith he'll reclaim it soon.)
Actually, Apple's developer docs specifically say it won't be using Open Firmware. I think the idea of being able to run Windows on Apple hardware is actually part of the plan, even if officially it'll be "unsupported." They want OS X to be the best user experience, of course, and it's a reasonable assumption that if somebody is buying a "Mactel" machine they're doing it specifically to run OS X... but there'll be a lot of people who'd like to be able to dual-boot. Or at least use VirtualPC with near-native speed, which will obviously be a lot easier on an Intel CPU.
Phil Schiller's comments about "OS X only on Apple hardware" not withstanding, I think it's telling that they were already demoing OS X on Intel during that keynote. While I could be wrong, I bet it was running on pretty standard PC hardware, not some special woo-woo magic Apple box. Apple's being very careful not to pose this as a challenge to Microsoft... but dissatisfaction with Microsoft is at an all-time high and Apple's brand recognition and buzz factor also seems to be at an all-time high. If there's ever been a time to challenge Windows head on and a company capable of actually pulling it off, it's today's Apple.
You're absolutely right. But I think a lot of the "I have met Bell Labs, and you, Google, are no Bell Labs" commentary I see in a responses here are missing the flip side of the equation here.
If the article is correct, this is a vote of confidence in Google from a lot of bright people going to work there. The fact that what they're doing right now is just making snazzy web applications doesn't mean that they're not amassing some pretty serious talent. Whether that potential is going to go anywhere remains to be seen, sure. (Although I suspect that all of the people snarking about this are using Google "products" every day, repeatedly, and that many of us have switched from competing "products" as Google's roll out. They may simply be building better mousetraps, but the world is indeed beating a path to their door.)
But what's a more interesting point here is that this is a vote of no confidence in some of the grand old think tanks of the computer era. PARC is still around but it's a shell. 15 years ago everyone wanted to catch up to SGI in their fields; now SGI is a historical footnote, and SUn is well on their way to following. And, Bell Labs, the grandest of the grand, has clearly withered in the Lucent years.
Will Google be the "next Bell Labs?" Who knows. Desire and loads of money aren't enough -- Microsoft Research tried that route, but clearly hasn't been that successful (hi, Clippy!). But somebody has to be the next Bell Labs, because the old one isn't going anywhere anymore.
Then there are those of us who just bought 2.5GHz Power Mac G5's and expected them to last 4 years while working with the latest software...
I don't think we're going to have many problems with that. To develop for Intel at all, developers need the version of XCode that produces the 'fat binaries,' which means the resource cost to maintain up-to-date PPC versions of the code should be very minimal.
If I was going to predict an 'inflection point' when the old Macs genuinely start getting screwed, it'll be when a version of OS X ships that has new API features that are, for whatever reason, Intel-only. I'm expecting that Leopard will not have such features, but by Lion or Cheetah or Garfield or whatever the hell the 10.6 release will be called, probably in mid-2008, it wouldn't surprise me.
While your general point has merit, you should never overgeneralize: "no musician lives off of his or her CD royalties -- the ones who make music full-time live off their ticket sales"? Well, maybe a lot do, but I know you've heard the term studio musician before. What about Brian Eno? Or Alan Parsons? His group almost never toured. I don't know that he was living off CD royalties exclusively, but he sure hasn't been living off concert revenue, either. (I'm also reminded of a quip from singer-songwriter Don McLean: when asked for the umpteenth time what his song "American Pie" really meant, he replied that it meant he'd never have to work again if he didn't want to.)
Someone else nailed what I think the real issue here is -- the point of copyright is for the creator to have control over how their work is distributed. I may not mind having my work out there for free, but I'm not pleased with the assertion (which you didn't make, but some pretty much have) that I have no right to even have a say in that distribution.
While I'm not a gamer, it's worth noting in passing that my trackball at home has four buttons plus a "scroll ring" (a wheel around the trackball itself).
I think much of the problem people have with trackballs isn't inherent to the concept of trackballs... it's that a lot of cheap trackballs suck. I was pretty hesitant about spending $99 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, but after just a week with it at home, nothing else feels right. (At work I'm using the cheaper two-button Kensington Orbit, which is essentially their version of the Logitech Marble Mouse -- I think a little better than Logitech's, though, in both construction and driver support.)
Pages not only kicks Word's ass, it even frees most Mac users who do page layout from needing Quark.
You don't do much word processing or desktop publishing, do you? I'm sorry, but as pretty as Pages is, it's pretty anemic as far as all but very basic word processing tasks go. If what you're looking for is a Mac equivalent to Microsoft Publishers, Pages is your program--it's better and far more usable. But for actually, y'know, processing words rather than doing a cute club newsletter, grab the freeware "WordService" add-in for OS X and use TextEdit, and you'll get more functionality. I'm serious.
And as someone who's done desktop publishing professionally: no offense, but Pages isn't even fit to tie the shoelaces of a program like InDesign or Xpress (or, for that matter, LaTeX).
The ending was, AFAIK, pretty much derived from Kubrick's original script: "Kubrick and Aldiss developed the story further, expanding the timeline so that thousands of years later, David would be discovered by advanced androids that would resuscitate him and learn about their extinct human heritage." (Quoted on AI: The Kubrick Edit.) In fact, Aldiss really didn't like the whole "Pinocchio" reframing and stopped being associated with the project early on... and that reframing was Kubrick's.
Spielberg wasn't called in at the last minute to finish Kubrick's last masterpiece -- he was chosen by Kubrick to direct the film. This was the only version we were ever going to get. The guy who did "The Kubrick Edit" tried to make it closer to Kubrick's earlier draft script, but there was never ging to be a non-Spielberg "A.I."
If Kubrick had made it, would it have been a different, darker film? Yes. Would it have been a significantly better film? I'm dubious. Kubrick was a great director but his storytelling sense has always struck me as quirky, from "2001" through "The Shining." (The later TV miniseries "The Shining" struck Kubrick fans as completely without merit, I'm sure, but as Stephen King diplomatically put it, "The first one was a Kubrick film, and the second one is a Stephen King story.") Most of what people disliked about "A.I." was stuff they assume is Spielberg's doing, but more often than not, that assumption is wrong.
So what you're saying, basically, is that you believe only crazy leftists want a media that's distrustful of unchecked power, encourages criticism and self-examination, and corrects mistakes? Yes, that list definitely suffers from Earnest Politically Correct Buzzword Syndrome, but the core idea of digging for facts and--as much as the phrase often irritates me--speaking truth to power is the core idea of a responsible media.
Always turn a story around: I want my reporters being willing to call bullshit on Clinton as well as Bush. Don't you, regardless of who's sitting in office? Telling us "just the facts"--in other words, just what the primary source says the facts are--without context and checking is not only what leads to most of the problems in the media that "leftists" complain about, but to not-so-left problems like CBS's memo story. Isn't the core problem with that story that they didn't encourage criticism and self-examination, didn't take the time to think, and didn't challenge "group think"?
The iTunes Music Store is a service, but the songs you buy are products. (These are defined in the license terms, in fact.) As far as I know, if Apple's HQ was hit by an iMeteor* tomorrow, nothing I've bought from the iTMS would stop working. It contacts Apple to "authorize" music when it's first copied onto a machine, but not to play it each time, which is a critical difference between iTMS and subscription-based services.
As is occasionally pointed out, if you don't like new changes in a new version of iTunes, the solution is: don't upgrade. You'll lose access to iTMS, more than likely, but not to any of the music you've bought with it.
I don't have a problem with making the occasional purchase from iTMS, but the chances are that I'd never sign up for a subscription service; the chances are that it wouldn't be worth it to me, and while I'm willing to put up with Apple's DRM-induced limitations, the subscription-based ones are too annoying for me. My main worry about DRM isn't its existence in itself, it's the drive on the part of media companies to try to limit non-DRM alternatives. I have no problem with "you can get this album for $10 as an immediate download with the following restrictions, or $15 on CD with no restrictions"; I do have a problem with "there is no way to get this album without restrictions, period."
Is it possible that Apple will change things and cross my annoyance threshold? Sure. But I don't see a very likely scenario where my (relatively few) purchases will stop working if I stop being an iTMS customer -- with Napster and Yahoo!, that's explicitly the case. People have pointed out that those stores can be used to purchase $1 tracks, too, with limitations closer to Apple's... but, of course, at that point, they lose to iTMS based on selection.
Ironically, having ordered good earphones for my iPod will probably make me more inclined to stick with CDs for ripping, less over DRM concerns than sound quality concerns.
Your summary's pretty good, with one error. The company that used to be known as SCO is now known as Tarantella. Transmeta is a very different company. :)
From where I work at Cisco, I'm within five minutes' drive of two shopping centers with restaurants, one Asian mall, and a collection of restaurants in Milpitas. It's only another ten minutes to get to a good chunk of San Jose, Fremont or Santa Clara. Obviously every fast food and sandwich shop chain exists within that radius, but so does everything from taquerias to burger dives to good sushi to the occasional "five star" restaurant like Parcel 104. (And, yes, I do actually eat at Cisco's cafe, which is pretty good.)
I've also worked in south San Jose, and earlier on the outskirts of Menlo Park, where that ten-minute radius included Palo Alto, Woodside and Redwood City. The range of lunch choices there was phenomenal--noodle houses to classic diners and great rather than merely good sushi.
I'm sorry your experiences have made you such a bitter, bitter guy, but if you're taking 45 minutes one way to get to a deli sandwich, either you don't work anywhere near Silicon Valley or you're refusing to eat anywhere but the One True Deli, in which case: you're a really fucking picky eater for a wage slave, aren't you?
To bring this to another level of unnecessarily pedantic trivia: I'd bet he used TECO to write Emacs. If I recall correctly, Emacs actually started out as a set of macros for TECO.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TecoEditor
This is actually what Flash could be good for. No, don't laugh, seriously.
More recent versions of Flash (since version 5, I think) have pretty capable connectivity for various server-driven databases, and Macromedia obviously intended for it to be able to do on the client side what Java's always failed to do. (In these scenarios, Java would normally be running on the server side -- or ColdFusion, of course, but it's actually written in Java anyway.) Flash could allow web applications as responsive as normal desktop applications, and it's really a shame that it's gotten stuck in the "annoying web animation" niche.
You can see an actual useful page done in Flash for a hotel reservation system at The Broadmoor in Colorado Springs. It's a small system, to be sure, but it gives an idea of how Flash can actually be used for good instead of evil.
That's not really fair. FrameMaker is still being produced on Windows (and, IIRC, Solaris); they cancelled the Mac version, for reasons I find dubious, but the program itself is still in production. PageMaker was deprecated in favor of InDesign, and frankly, InDesign is a far superior product.
I'd be surprised if there's going to be any short-term integration plans; every product currently produced will probably finish out its next release cycle, at the least, before any changes are made. I wouldn't be surprised to see GoLive eventually be dropped in favor of Dreamweaver, and Freehand eventually be dropped in favor of illustrator; beyond that, there's not that much product overlap. (I know C|NET suggests that Fireworks and Photoshop are competitors, but they're different enough products that I could see Fireworks being kept around. Granted, given that I vastly prefer Fireworks for web graphics work, I'm biased.)
This is a common misconception around here, I think--the number of bits the processor can handle simultaneously has no direct bearing on a lot of common operations.
32-bit addressing has a cap of 4 gigabytes that are directly addressable, but we've known how to do memory/file paging for a very, very long time. 16-bit addressing (which most 8-bit CPUs like the Z80 used!) only directly let you handle 64K of RAM, but WordStar could edit files of up to 128K or so even on a machine with 32K of RAM.
On Macs, HFS+ already has a maximum file size based on 64 bits. The only advantage 64 bits for memory addressing gets you is that, if your text editor loads the whole file into memory at once and you have more than 4G of RAM in your system, the CPU won't have to do any paging of memory. And I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that for a text editor, you're probably not going to be noticing a whole lot of lag in page switching between memory banks anyway.
It would also be dead on to say that most Democratic rank-and-files support free speech.
"Political correctness" is a bogeyman of conservatives, but the phrase has lost its original meaning -- tailoring your message to the audience in a way which they will find "correct." Most of the examples of attempts to suppress "offensive" speech tend to come from schools and universities, and this applies just as much to conservatives trying to force creationism curricula on students and trying to ban every book that offends them on religious grounds as it does to somebody trying to get rid of Tom Sawyer because it contains "the N-word."
Most Democrats tend to be extremely supportive of free speech. I'm not going to claim that they're more so than most Republicans, but I'm going to call bullshit on anyone who claims they're less so. Sorry, but if I don't get to say, "well, on our side it's just the easily-offended wackos, but on your side it's clearly most of you," then you don't, either. That kind of caricaturizing of your opponents is why political conversation in this country is so ridiculously vitriolic right now. Don't add to it.
And, if anyone would actually bother to read the ordinance here, it's clear that its intent is to require full disclosure when someone is paying you for political communication. There's a bit of that in the news right now, you might have noticed, about columnists being paid to promote government programs without acknowledging that they're essentially functioning as advertisers. One can debate whether transparency is a worthy goal of regulation (I think it's one of the few worthy goals for regulations to have, actually), but this is not about suppressing speech, political or otherwise.