Flash is not just graphics. 99% of Flash applications only *use* it for animation, but it can actually do a lot more. The best online hotel reservation system I've ever seen was a Flash application -- no dramatic bells and whistles it, but rather a very solid, fully-responsive UI. Most "web applications" are pretty much reincarnations of IBM mainframe programs, just with graphics instead of console text -- everything is all still processed on the server after you fill out the screen and press [ENTER]. Flash-based applications can actually behave like, well, applications, and for client-side work they're much more lightweight than Java (and as much as it will irritate Java advocates, for practical purposes Flash is nearly as portable).
Jon Katz is not writing technical articles anymore, AFAIK. He's writing books about dogs. While there are probably innumerable jokes that people could make playing off this, unlike his Slashdot writing or some of his quasi-philosophy books written in the dotcom era, his dog books seem to be pretty well-received by their target audience, and they've been generally well-reviewed.
I think you're also being a little too harsh on the person who actually wrote this article. You need a lead-in for a story, this was a fine enough lead-in, and if Wired occasionally writes somewhat whimsical articles like this, so what? Wired was always about features, not news, and somewhat silly features are hardly new to them. And it's a kind of amusing story. Don't be such a sourpuss.
Um.
LG's 23" cinema display does seem to be very similar to Apple's previous model, all right (the brightness figure for the Apple monitor is higher, though, which makes me suspect they're doing more than just slapping a different case on it), except in one noticeable respect.
Apple's monitor is $1999, and has been for quite some time now.
A just-done search with Froogle on "L2320A" doesn't show the LG model for less than $2480.
You sure about that markup figure you quoted?
Um, the Sun display you linked to has a resolution of 1920x1200 and is 24". This is basically comparable to Apple's 23" Cinema Display, not the 30" one, and thus doesn't need a special card, either. Sun's display does have more input connectors, granted, and 2 extra USB ports. If to you, that's really worth $3600 instead of Apple's $2000, more power to you.:)
At least, that's not quite the way I read it, although there's obvious functionality overlap. It looks like Spotlight is taking advantage of the metadata search system in Tiger -- this sounds to me a lot like an implementation of BeOS's beautiful search functionality. (Panther is there in the speed, but BeOS allowed all that useful metadata searching that Panther's system doesn't -- Tiger's apparently does.)
I've actually very recently switched from Safari to Firefox as my Mac default. Every so often I miss SnapBack -- but all the major features are very comparable, the rendering engines seem equivalent in speed, and Firefox's typeahead link selection can really be a great thing. The bookmark importer that I found even set up the toolbar bookmarks about the same way mine were set up in Safari, so I don't notice the UI change as a dramatic difference. Once Firefox is set up as the browser default it's just as "integrated" with the OS as Safari is. And, Firefox's current iterations are quite pretty.
You can find DVD players for under $200 that support SACD, and while the selection isn't huge, I see new albums coming out in the format fairly regularly -- and despite what a few posters seem to think, SACD prices are no higher than CD prices. (Most of the SACDs I've bought I paid about $15 for.)
SACD is designed to have a "hybrid" format that can be played on both CD players and SACD players, which unfortunately a lot of manufacturers aren't taking advantage of. From a technical standpoint there's no reason why all new CDs couldn't be dual-format CD/SACD, though -- the big impediment to this has little to do with the format and a lot to do with RIAA-ish politics, one suspects.
I admit it's been a while since I used X regularly, but as I recall, you often didn't have a choice of which system to use -- many programs only responded to one or the other. This is what can be irksome. I distinctly remember some combination I had when I was running under XFce where I couldn't move a URL from the terminal window to Mozilla, period. Each of them knew about their own clipboard style, and that was it.
I admit I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the X windows system can "work across different terminal sessions whereas KDE/GNOME's cannot." If you simply had one unified clipboard, wouldn't this still be the case (if it was done correctly?) That's the way it works in OS X. This sounds like a problem with KDE/GNOME's implementation, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
Just wondering -- has anyone else tried this, successfully? I downloaded the demo disk and ran the OS X install script, and when the script got to the part where it started running the "emu" binary, all sorts of fascinating and wonderful errors began, starting with malloc messages. I finally ended up having to kill the process.
I got the sense that the series had probably been through two or three shark jumps...
Yes. The show was never great television, but really, the first season had more promise than I think people like to give it credit for. The show's head writer (and the real creator, despite the Roddenberry name), Robert Hewitt Wolfe, was floundering toward a long story arc with a dark, complex background. The first season had perhaps too much of a penchant for visiting old Trek tropes, but it frequently found rather clever, interesting takes on them -- no tractor beams, but Buckytube tow cables; no transporter technology, and an episode with the engineer trying to invent it, blowing up watermelons as he tried to send them from one side of the room to the other. The writing was uneven but when it was good, it was, well, good. The universe got more complex the more we saw of it, and it was clear Wolfe had a direction he wanted to go in, an epic story he wanted to tell over several seasons.
Then, halfway through the second season, the producers -- notably Sorbo himself -- decided that Wolfe was asking viewers to think too much. Really. IIRC, I'm not paraphrasing by very much. Wolfe got the boot and the show just veered right off into the twilight zone. I watched about ten minutes of a new episode a month ago, and it clearly wasn't even a related show to the first season.
It may have always been cheese, but in the beginning it had aspirations to be Blue Stilton. It ended up as day-old nacho sauce.
I haven't seen anyone credible suggest that we turn back the clock. What I've seen, primarily, is suggestions that we find ways to reduce our impact on our environment. The "global warming skeptics" tend to use language similar to yours, about simple black-vs.-white worldviews... and then go on to paint everyone arguing for restrictions, changes or even just more careful planning as anti-technology neanderthals. This is just as much of an excluded middle fallacy as what the skeptics are accusing the scientists of. (And please notice how frequently we're asked to accept that reports produced by environmental NGOs are tainted because they have an "agenda," but reports produced by industry groups with an unquestionable interest in the specific outcome they always find are good science.)
According to the EPA (which you'll recall is routinely attacked by the "alarmist environmentalists" for being far too conservative), "There is certainty that human activities are rapidly adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and that these gases tend to warm our planet"; the IGCC concluded in 2001 that the observed warming trend is "unlikely to be natural in origin." Slashdottians keep fighting a battle which is already over. There are many legitimate questions as to how much we are contributing to the warming trend, but the question of whether human activity is contributing is a done deal. You're right -- there's no point in "wasting energy trying to decide who's to blame," but it does not follow that there is no point in moderating our contributions to that warming trend whether or not we are a primary cause (or even a major contributor).
The other point that tends to get lost on Slashdot discussions of this topic is that technologists and scientists are providing solutions to these problems, not merely bemoaning them. It is sadly ironic that those promoting new developments in renewable energy, low-impact building techniques and resource conservation practices are, apparently, being so successfully painted as the luddites. This is not about "the evils of technology," this is about keeping up with it.
If you want us to "prepare for the worst and try our best to ride out the storm," then you should be in agreement with most of those tree-huggin' Nobel Prize winners and "green capitalists" like Amory Lovins. What's blocking us from those preparations aren't the environmentalists and climatologists -- it's the people who have a vested interest in current, higher-pollution methods and products.
And it doesn't have to be that way. BP Energy's power plants have actually been lower than what the supposedly industry-destroying Kyoto Protocol would have required for over two years now, and they did at no net cost to the company.
[BP CEO] Browne calls the net economic benefit "a positive surprise -- because it begins to answer the fears expressed by those who believed that the costs of taking precautionary action would be huge and unsustainable." In the United States, these false fears have been fed to the public by the coal industry lobby and by many electric power and oil companies. They back their claims by using the work of economists whose climate policy models assume that only a large energy tax -- the "magic bullet" that Browne decries -- will cut emissions. Not surprisingly, these abstract models project high costs, but they are diametrically opposed to BP's empirical evidence of what works and how much it will cost.
Look. Could human-affected global warming be a repeat of the Y2K Bug scare, in which, after nothing happened, people derided all the Chicken Littles for believing in impending doom? I certainly hope so! The thing is, we'll never be able to "prove" whether the reason nothing serious happened is because people listened to those Chicken Littles and scrambled like hell to fix problems that could be identified and addressed.
Point. But I'm describing libertarians as what I think has historically been the strongest political leaning in the Slashdot readership (and historically on the internet in general). There are clearly people of other political leanings here in some number, that some of them post, and that some of them even post thoughtfully and get moderated up wasn't something I intended to dispute. And, for the record, I wasn't intending to imply libertarians are wingnuts. I'm not a capital-L Libertarian, but I have a fairly strong overlap with them, particularly when it comes to civil liberties issues. (Some libertarians are certainly wingnuts, but that's endemic to every political persuasion.)
To respond to a couple comments below yours: It's possible to make the case that Slashdot has appeared to turn to the left over the last few years, but it's also possible to make the case that some of the ideas that were "fringe left" a few years have made their way into more of the political mainstream. It's not just people whose idea of a fun weekend is chaining themselves to redwoods who are protesting against Wal-Mart these days, and it's not just the campus socialists who are wondering if the close relationship between big business and big government is a bad thing. Five years ago, only people who listened to Pacifica Radio talked about "corporate welfare"; now you can hear it used, at least occasionally, by libertarian thinktanks, with much the same intent that the lefties have had.
As for whether or not I'm partisan because I'm clearly not a big supporter of Bush, which was clearly the implication of one slightly snide comment: yes, I suppose so, but I wouldn't be a big supporter of Bush were I substantially more conservative than I am. I also wasn't a particularly big supporter of President Clinton, whose administration hardly championed the rights of individual liberty and privacy.
The predominant politics on Slashdot are clearly, at least to anyone who's actually paying attention, libertarian. Socially very liberal in the "government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner, and economically very conservative in the "government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner.
If you think this is a bunch of UC Berkeley students doing moderation, I'd like you to find just about any article on Slashdot about global warming -- or nearly anything which has the temerity to suggest that government regulation may be better at protecting the environment than an unencumbered, for-profit market is -- and compare it with anything from a northern California environmental group. See all those similarities? Of course you don't! THEY'RE NOT THERE!
Take off your partisan blinders here. I've been on Slashdot for a long time and I don't recall people fanboying over President Clinton here particularly out of proportion with his popularity rating with the rest of the country. Statements that are critical of the Bush administration may just be getting modded up here a lot because Bush really isn't as popular across the American populace right now as Clinton, on average, was through his term, and -- again keeping in mind that libertarianism tends to be a dominant philosophy here -- Bush is hardly any more of a poster child for the Cato Institute than Clinton was. Bush's economic record is mediocre at best -- non-military discretionary spending has substantially increased under him compared to the supposedly spendthrift Democrats and, as if to repudiate Clinton's famous "the era of big government is over" line, Bush has presided over the largest expansion in the federal government in four decades. Worse, from a civil liberties standpoint, many people who aren't remotely "liberal" in the way Rush Limbaugh throws about the term feel the Bush administration has been the biggest disaster in several generations.
While this will make me sound like a shill for Kensington given that I was talking up their keyboard earlier today on a different thread, they have a trackball called the "Orbit" that's very similar to Logitech's Marble Mouse. It's not quite the same thing as the TrackMan, but it's worth looking at -- I bought one as a replacement for a Marble Mouse (which I've always liked) and have found it slightly superior to Logitech's. It does have the potential drawback that it only has two buttons, though. (Windows and Mac drivers for it do a surprisingly good job of getting around that limitation, but I've never tried it under other operating systems.)
If you're willing to pony up the extra money, everyone who's tried Kensington's $99 "Expert Mouse" trackball seems to love it. So far I haven't been willing.:)
Kensington has been selling a $90 keyboard like this for about a year now called the Studioboard -- in fact, it looks identical to the tactilepro keyboard, save that Kensington doesn't put the option and shift-option symbols on the keys. (I'm not sure whether the information value of that truly outweighs the clutter, but I know that's awfully subjective.)
I don't know whether Kensington uses the Alps switches, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if both of these keyboards are actually OEMed by the same company. It looks like Matias has just done a much better job of promotion than Kensington did. I've had one of the Studioboards for nearly six months now (I bought it when I bought my G5, a purchase in a moment of weakness at the Panther release party--10% off! Now it's only overpriced! Shiny!) and it's been great so far.
I did actually install RealPlayer 10 recently to listen to some stream that was only available in that format. I do have to give Real a point back for no longer hiding the free player links, and a run of Ad-Aware 6 with a freshly-updated spyware database immediately after the Real installation didn't show any hits.
I try to avoid RealPlayer in general -- particularly at home, since I have OS X there and the OS X port of their player is pretty abysmal -- but this incarnation of it so far seems to be... uh... the least intrusive one they've had in years, even though it's still got its fair share of annoyances. (Which all the commercial media players seem to -- why can't one just have a straightforward UI using the standard guidelines for its platform?)
The ironic thing is that I still couldn't use RealPlayer to listen to that stream, for the technical reasons that you [Buffering...] outlined. I remember circa 1997-98 it seemed to be the best streaming technology (particularly at low bit rates), but even setting aside all the adware problems, there is something that's just... much... flakier now.
I remember Improv and thought it had some great ideas. (There's an 'experimental' spreadsheet for Mac OS X I've seen modeled on it, but unfortunately it hasn't really gone past the basic core concept yet.) And nobody should claim that Excel is a replacement for Matlab or SPSS or even TK!Solver, no.
But I think a lot of the Slashdotians bashing Excel really haven't dug into it very deeply. For data analysis, rather than statistical analysis, Excel can frequently compete with or even trump programs like Crystal Reports. Pivot Tables are amazing for quick data summary and analysis, and as far as I know Excel was the first spreadsheet to implement them. And to earlier comments I saw talking about how data should be stored in databases, that's mostly what I used Excel for at two different jobs: reporting on data stored in SQL databases. Excel can query directly (or through the rather unlovely Microsoft Query). Recent versions of Excel can even create OLAP-style cubes for summarizing great amounts of data.
The discussion about Monte Carlo simulations sort of groped toward a limitation of the spreadsheet model -- they have deterministic inputs, and without extensions they can't run simulations very well. (I imagine it'd be possible to address that to some degree using Visual Basic, but it'd be painful; using a plugin like Crystal Ball 2000 would make it much less so.) But this isn't a criticism of Excel. It's a criticism of using Excel for tasks it's not appropriate for. I have a lot of dislike for Microsoft Word, but for the most part, I don't begrudge the fact that it can't do true digital typesetting. The fact that people try to use it for typesetting and layout anyway is an indictment of people who try to use it in that manner. (That people are frequently conditioned to believe that there is no world of business applications past Microsoft Office is a valid concern, but I think it's still a different issue.)
Yeah, if it wasn't for those damn hippies at Greenpeace, we'd all have our flying cars by now, zipping merrily between our domed arcologies that provided beautiful utopian islands against the ravaged Mad Max desert the rest of the planet's surface had become. Fucking tree-huggers.
Someday maybe I'll understand what drives the peculiar mindset that can't abide even the suggestion that sometimes you might want to protect the environment even when there's quantifiable economic loss. I recall a study years ago observing that from a strictly financial standpoint, "conserving" whales for future generations of whalers wouldn't make you as much money in a generation as killing all of them as fast as possible and investing a portion of the proceeds. Either you decide whales have intrinsic value or you don't.
And you know what? It's not only offensive but moronic to glibly profess that people like me are anti-progress luddites because we do see intrinsic value in saving whales and old-growth forests, or even because we sometimes say, "Hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to have a better understanding of the effects of our actions on the ecosystem, rather than continually taking the attitude that we can do whatever the hell we want whenever we want and trust that a few generations from now our descendants can clean up any messes we make." Funny how I usually hear that from the technolibertarians who are so keen on individual responsibility in other circumstances. (A cynic might observe that they often seem to be more interested in grousing about other people's irresponsibility than in actually being inconvenienced by taking responsibility themselves.)
If you've read the article as carefully as you project you have, then you're surely aware -- as the Slashdot editors may not be, given their article summary -- that Farber didn't write these six points, but was himself summarizing a talk on them given by former Oracle executive Ray Lane. I'm also not sure people understand that "six barriers to adopting open source" != "six reasons why you shouldn't use open source," and the article is about the perceptions of open source software in the enterprise and what Lane thinks needs to be done to address those perceptions.
Saying that this leaflet was created on a Mac doesn't help the OpenOffice cause, it reinforces the Microsoft one.
Actually, I'm not sure it says much about either office suite: as someone noted above, the Document Properties reveal that the leaflet was created on a Mac using Quark Xpress.
From the Free Software world, I have hope for AbiWord 2.2 being a usable Mac-like application, and I'm curious about the QT/Mac port of KWord that's in progress. In practice, though, I actually broke down and bought Mariner Write recently. (I'd have bought Gobe Productive if they'd made a Mac port, but Gobe's developers, most of whom came from Claris, failed to recognize what I think would have been a great opportunity for them to eat Appleworks 6's lunch.)
If your client didn't need anything more advanced than HTML, then bully for them, and bully for you -- they didn't need FrameMaker. The people who do need it are using it for things that HTML can't do. We're not talking about formatting capability, we're talking about indexing and cross-referencing and style sheets that can be defined as "11-point Times except when the letters 'HP' appear together capitalized, which should be made bold small caps."
There's a reason people are talking about LaTeX as the alternative -- it's not that there aren't really any other free {speech|beer} alternatives, it's that there aren't many commercial alternatives. And even if someone found a viable alternative, converting the documents between formats would be extremely non-trivial.
Do people read the posts before replying to them on Slashdot?
Judging by your user number, you're relatively new around here, so we forgive you for asking. But really, next thing you'll be asking if people read the linked articles.
It looked to me like ITexMac and TeXShop were pretty similar in not only concept but execution. I tried both and preferred TeXShop but it might well be because I found that one first and got a little more used to its approach. I've heard ITexMac does a bit more (particularly with internationalization), and also heard that this is less true with the current versions than it used to be.
Slashdot Mirror
Flash is not just graphics. 99% of Flash applications only *use* it for animation, but it can actually do a lot more. The best online hotel reservation system I've ever seen was a Flash application -- no dramatic bells and whistles it, but rather a very solid, fully-responsive UI. Most "web applications" are pretty much reincarnations of IBM mainframe programs, just with graphics instead of console text -- everything is all still processed on the server after you fill out the screen and press [ENTER]. Flash-based applications can actually behave like, well, applications, and for client-side work they're much more lightweight than Java (and as much as it will irritate Java advocates, for practical purposes Flash is nearly as portable).
Jon Katz is not writing technical articles anymore, AFAIK. He's writing books about dogs. While there are probably innumerable jokes that people could make playing off this, unlike his Slashdot writing or some of his quasi-philosophy books written in the dotcom era, his dog books seem to be pretty well-received by their target audience, and they've been generally well-reviewed. I think you're also being a little too harsh on the person who actually wrote this article. You need a lead-in for a story, this was a fine enough lead-in, and if Wired occasionally writes somewhat whimsical articles like this, so what? Wired was always about features, not news, and somewhat silly features are hardly new to them. And it's a kind of amusing story. Don't be such a sourpuss.
Um. LG's 23" cinema display does seem to be very similar to Apple's previous model, all right (the brightness figure for the Apple monitor is higher, though, which makes me suspect they're doing more than just slapping a different case on it), except in one noticeable respect. Apple's monitor is $1999, and has been for quite some time now. A just-done search with Froogle on "L2320A" doesn't show the LG model for less than $2480. You sure about that markup figure you quoted?
Um, the Sun display you linked to has a resolution of 1920x1200 and is 24". This is basically comparable to Apple's 23" Cinema Display, not the 30" one, and thus doesn't need a special card, either. Sun's display does have more input connectors, granted, and 2 extra USB ports. If to you, that's really worth $3600 instead of Apple's $2000, more power to you. :)
At least, that's not quite the way I read it, although there's obvious functionality overlap. It looks like Spotlight is taking advantage of the metadata search system in Tiger -- this sounds to me a lot like an implementation of BeOS's beautiful search functionality. (Panther is there in the speed, but BeOS allowed all that useful metadata searching that Panther's system doesn't -- Tiger's apparently does.)
I've actually very recently switched from Safari to Firefox as my Mac default. Every so often I miss SnapBack -- but all the major features are very comparable, the rendering engines seem equivalent in speed, and Firefox's typeahead link selection can really be a great thing. The bookmark importer that I found even set up the toolbar bookmarks about the same way mine were set up in Safari, so I don't notice the UI change as a dramatic difference. Once Firefox is set up as the browser default it's just as "integrated" with the OS as Safari is. And, Firefox's current iterations are quite pretty.
You can find DVD players for under $200 that support SACD, and while the selection isn't huge, I see new albums coming out in the format fairly regularly -- and despite what a few posters seem to think, SACD prices are no higher than CD prices. (Most of the SACDs I've bought I paid about $15 for.)
SACD is designed to have a "hybrid" format that can be played on both CD players and SACD players, which unfortunately a lot of manufacturers aren't taking advantage of. From a technical standpoint there's no reason why all new CDs couldn't be dual-format CD/SACD, though -- the big impediment to this has little to do with the format and a lot to do with RIAA-ish politics, one suspects.
I admit it's been a while since I used X regularly, but as I recall, you often didn't have a choice of which system to use -- many programs only responded to one or the other. This is what can be irksome. I distinctly remember some combination I had when I was running under XFce where I couldn't move a URL from the terminal window to Mozilla, period. Each of them knew about their own clipboard style, and that was it.
I admit I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the X windows system can "work across different terminal sessions whereas KDE/GNOME's cannot." If you simply had one unified clipboard, wouldn't this still be the case (if it was done correctly?) That's the way it works in OS X. This sounds like a problem with KDE/GNOME's implementation, unless I'm misunderstanding you.
Just wondering -- has anyone else tried this, successfully? I downloaded the demo disk and ran the OS X install script, and when the script got to the part where it started running the "emu" binary, all sorts of fascinating and wonderful errors began, starting with malloc messages. I finally ended up having to kill the process.
games like Tomb Raider held my attention much longer than some basic arcade style game.
Be honest. Was that really because of the compelling, witty story, or because Lara Croft had amazingly well-developed polygons?
Yes. The show was never great television, but really, the first season had more promise than I think people like to give it credit for. The show's head writer (and the real creator, despite the Roddenberry name), Robert Hewitt Wolfe, was floundering toward a long story arc with a dark, complex background. The first season had perhaps too much of a penchant for visiting old Trek tropes, but it frequently found rather clever, interesting takes on them -- no tractor beams, but Buckytube tow cables; no transporter technology, and an episode with the engineer trying to invent it, blowing up watermelons as he tried to send them from one side of the room to the other. The writing was uneven but when it was good, it was, well, good. The universe got more complex the more we saw of it, and it was clear Wolfe had a direction he wanted to go in, an epic story he wanted to tell over several seasons.
Then, halfway through the second season, the producers -- notably Sorbo himself -- decided that Wolfe was asking viewers to think too much. Really. IIRC, I'm not paraphrasing by very much. Wolfe got the boot and the show just veered right off into the twilight zone. I watched about ten minutes of a new episode a month ago, and it clearly wasn't even a related show to the first season.
It may have always been cheese, but in the beginning it had aspirations to be Blue Stilton. It ended up as day-old nacho sauce.
Here's an actual helpful suggestion from Word 2000 in a manual I'm writing.
I think the problem with the sentence you highlighted may be that Word's grammar checker is the one being used.
I haven't seen anyone credible suggest that we turn back the clock. What I've seen, primarily, is suggestions that we find ways to reduce our impact on our environment. The "global warming skeptics" tend to use language similar to yours, about simple black-vs.-white worldviews... and then go on to paint everyone arguing for restrictions, changes or even just more careful planning as anti-technology neanderthals. This is just as much of an excluded middle fallacy as what the skeptics are accusing the scientists of. (And please notice how frequently we're asked to accept that reports produced by environmental NGOs are tainted because they have an "agenda," but reports produced by industry groups with an unquestionable interest in the specific outcome they always find are good science.)
According to the EPA (which you'll recall is routinely attacked by the "alarmist environmentalists" for being far too conservative), "There is certainty that human activities are rapidly adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and that these gases tend to warm our planet"; the IGCC concluded in 2001 that the observed warming trend is "unlikely to be natural in origin." Slashdottians keep fighting a battle which is already over. There are many legitimate questions as to how much we are contributing to the warming trend, but the question of whether human activity is contributing is a done deal. You're right -- there's no point in "wasting energy trying to decide who's to blame," but it does not follow that there is no point in moderating our contributions to that warming trend whether or not we are a primary cause (or even a major contributor).
The other point that tends to get lost on Slashdot discussions of this topic is that technologists and scientists are providing solutions to these problems, not merely bemoaning them. It is sadly ironic that those promoting new developments in renewable energy, low-impact building techniques and resource conservation practices are, apparently, being so successfully painted as the luddites. This is not about "the evils of technology," this is about keeping up with it.
If you want us to "prepare for the worst and try our best to ride out the storm," then you should be in agreement with most of those tree-huggin' Nobel Prize winners and "green capitalists" like Amory Lovins. What's blocking us from those preparations aren't the environmentalists and climatologists -- it's the people who have a vested interest in current, higher-pollution methods and products.
And it doesn't have to be that way. BP Energy's power plants have actually been lower than what the supposedly industry-destroying Kyoto Protocol would have required for over two years now, and they did at no net cost to the company.
Look. Could human-affected global warming be a repeat of the Y2K Bug scare, in which, after nothing happened, people derided all the Chicken Littles for believing in impending doom? I certainly hope so! The thing is, we'll never be able to "prove" whether the reason nothing serious happened is because people listened to those Chicken Littles and scrambled like hell to fix problems that could be identified and addressed.
Point. But I'm describing libertarians as what I think has historically been the strongest political leaning in the Slashdot readership (and historically on the internet in general). There are clearly people of other political leanings here in some number, that some of them post, and that some of them even post thoughtfully and get moderated up wasn't something I intended to dispute. And, for the record, I wasn't intending to imply libertarians are wingnuts. I'm not a capital-L Libertarian, but I have a fairly strong overlap with them, particularly when it comes to civil liberties issues. (Some libertarians are certainly wingnuts, but that's endemic to every political persuasion.)
To respond to a couple comments below yours: It's possible to make the case that Slashdot has appeared to turn to the left over the last few years, but it's also possible to make the case that some of the ideas that were "fringe left" a few years have made their way into more of the political mainstream. It's not just people whose idea of a fun weekend is chaining themselves to redwoods who are protesting against Wal-Mart these days, and it's not just the campus socialists who are wondering if the close relationship between big business and big government is a bad thing. Five years ago, only people who listened to Pacifica Radio talked about "corporate welfare"; now you can hear it used, at least occasionally, by libertarian thinktanks, with much the same intent that the lefties have had.
As for whether or not I'm partisan because I'm clearly not a big supporter of Bush, which was clearly the implication of one slightly snide comment: yes, I suppose so, but I wouldn't be a big supporter of Bush were I substantially more conservative than I am. I also wasn't a particularly big supporter of President Clinton, whose administration hardly championed the rights of individual liberty and privacy.
The predominant politics on Slashdot are clearly, at least to anyone who's actually paying attention, libertarian. Socially very liberal in the "government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner, and economically very conservative in the "government shouldn't interfere with us in any way" manner.
If you think this is a bunch of UC Berkeley students doing moderation, I'd like you to find just about any article on Slashdot about global warming -- or nearly anything which has the temerity to suggest that government regulation may be better at protecting the environment than an unencumbered, for-profit market is -- and compare it with anything from a northern California environmental group. See all those similarities? Of course you don't! THEY'RE NOT THERE!
Take off your partisan blinders here. I've been on Slashdot for a long time and I don't recall people fanboying over President Clinton here particularly out of proportion with his popularity rating with the rest of the country. Statements that are critical of the Bush administration may just be getting modded up here a lot because Bush really isn't as popular across the American populace right now as Clinton, on average, was through his term, and -- again keeping in mind that libertarianism tends to be a dominant philosophy here -- Bush is hardly any more of a poster child for the Cato Institute than Clinton was. Bush's economic record is mediocre at best -- non-military discretionary spending has substantially increased under him compared to the supposedly spendthrift Democrats and, as if to repudiate Clinton's famous "the era of big government is over" line, Bush has presided over the largest expansion in the federal government in four decades. Worse, from a civil liberties standpoint, many people who aren't remotely "liberal" in the way Rush Limbaugh throws about the term feel the Bush administration has been the biggest disaster in several generations.
While this will make me sound like a shill for Kensington given that I was talking up their keyboard earlier today on a different thread, they have a trackball called the "Orbit" that's very similar to Logitech's Marble Mouse. It's not quite the same thing as the TrackMan, but it's worth looking at -- I bought one as a replacement for a Marble Mouse (which I've always liked) and have found it slightly superior to Logitech's. It does have the potential drawback that it only has two buttons, though. (Windows and Mac drivers for it do a surprisingly good job of getting around that limitation, but I've never tried it under other operating systems.) If you're willing to pony up the extra money, everyone who's tried Kensington's $99 "Expert Mouse" trackball seems to love it. So far I haven't been willing. :)
Kensington has been selling a $90 keyboard like this for about a year now called the Studioboard -- in fact, it looks identical to the tactilepro keyboard, save that Kensington doesn't put the option and shift-option symbols on the keys. (I'm not sure whether the information value of that truly outweighs the clutter, but I know that's awfully subjective.)
I don't know whether Kensington uses the Alps switches, too, but I wouldn't be surprised if both of these keyboards are actually OEMed by the same company. It looks like Matias has just done a much better job of promotion than Kensington did. I've had one of the Studioboards for nearly six months now (I bought it when I bought my G5, a purchase in a moment of weakness at the Panther release party--10% off! Now it's only overpriced! Shiny!) and it's been great so far.
I did actually install RealPlayer 10 recently to listen to some stream that was only available in that format. I do have to give Real a point back for no longer hiding the free player links, and a run of Ad-Aware 6 with a freshly-updated spyware database immediately after the Real installation didn't show any hits.
I try to avoid RealPlayer in general -- particularly at home, since I have OS X there and the OS X port of their player is pretty abysmal -- but this incarnation of it so far seems to be... uh... the least intrusive one they've had in years, even though it's still got its fair share of annoyances. (Which all the commercial media players seem to -- why can't one just have a straightforward UI using the standard guidelines for its platform?)
The ironic thing is that I still couldn't use RealPlayer to listen to that stream, for the technical reasons that you [Buffering...] outlined. I remember circa 1997-98 it seemed to be the best streaming technology (particularly at low bit rates), but even setting aside all the adware problems, there is something that's just... much... flakier now.
I remember Improv and thought it had some great ideas. (There's an 'experimental' spreadsheet for Mac OS X I've seen modeled on it, but unfortunately it hasn't really gone past the basic core concept yet.) And nobody should claim that Excel is a replacement for Matlab or SPSS or even TK!Solver, no.
But I think a lot of the Slashdotians bashing Excel really haven't dug into it very deeply. For data analysis, rather than statistical analysis, Excel can frequently compete with or even trump programs like Crystal Reports. Pivot Tables are amazing for quick data summary and analysis, and as far as I know Excel was the first spreadsheet to implement them. And to earlier comments I saw talking about how data should be stored in databases, that's mostly what I used Excel for at two different jobs: reporting on data stored in SQL databases. Excel can query directly (or through the rather unlovely Microsoft Query). Recent versions of Excel can even create OLAP-style cubes for summarizing great amounts of data.
The discussion about Monte Carlo simulations sort of groped toward a limitation of the spreadsheet model -- they have deterministic inputs, and without extensions they can't run simulations very well. (I imagine it'd be possible to address that to some degree using Visual Basic, but it'd be painful; using a plugin like Crystal Ball 2000 would make it much less so.) But this isn't a criticism of Excel. It's a criticism of using Excel for tasks it's not appropriate for. I have a lot of dislike for Microsoft Word, but for the most part, I don't begrudge the fact that it can't do true digital typesetting. The fact that people try to use it for typesetting and layout anyway is an indictment of people who try to use it in that manner. (That people are frequently conditioned to believe that there is no world of business applications past Microsoft Office is a valid concern, but I think it's still a different issue.)
Yeah, if it wasn't for those damn hippies at Greenpeace, we'd all have our flying cars by now, zipping merrily between our domed arcologies that provided beautiful utopian islands against the ravaged Mad Max desert the rest of the planet's surface had become. Fucking tree-huggers.
Someday maybe I'll understand what drives the peculiar mindset that can't abide even the suggestion that sometimes you might want to protect the environment even when there's quantifiable economic loss. I recall a study years ago observing that from a strictly financial standpoint, "conserving" whales for future generations of whalers wouldn't make you as much money in a generation as killing all of them as fast as possible and investing a portion of the proceeds. Either you decide whales have intrinsic value or you don't.
And you know what? It's not only offensive but moronic to glibly profess that people like me are anti-progress luddites because we do see intrinsic value in saving whales and old-growth forests, or even because we sometimes say, "Hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to have a better understanding of the effects of our actions on the ecosystem, rather than continually taking the attitude that we can do whatever the hell we want whenever we want and trust that a few generations from now our descendants can clean up any messes we make." Funny how I usually hear that from the technolibertarians who are so keen on individual responsibility in other circumstances. (A cynic might observe that they often seem to be more interested in grousing about other people's irresponsibility than in actually being inconvenienced by taking responsibility themselves.)
If you've read the article as carefully as you project you have, then you're surely aware -- as the Slashdot editors may not be, given their article summary -- that Farber didn't write these six points, but was himself summarizing a talk on them given by former Oracle executive Ray Lane. I'm also not sure people understand that "six barriers to adopting open source" != "six reasons why you shouldn't use open source," and the article is about the perceptions of open source software in the enterprise and what Lane thinks needs to be done to address those perceptions.
Saying that this leaflet was created on a Mac doesn't help the OpenOffice cause, it reinforces the Microsoft one.
Actually, I'm not sure it says much about either office suite: as someone noted above, the Document Properties reveal that the leaflet was created on a Mac using Quark Xpress.
From the Free Software world, I have hope for AbiWord 2.2 being a usable Mac-like application, and I'm curious about the QT/Mac port of KWord that's in progress. In practice, though, I actually broke down and bought Mariner Write recently. (I'd have bought Gobe Productive if they'd made a Mac port, but Gobe's developers, most of whom came from Claris, failed to recognize what I think would have been a great opportunity for them to eat Appleworks 6's lunch.)
If your client didn't need anything more advanced than HTML, then bully for them, and bully for you -- they didn't need FrameMaker. The people who do need it are using it for things that HTML can't do. We're not talking about formatting capability, we're talking about indexing and cross-referencing and style sheets that can be defined as "11-point Times except when the letters 'HP' appear together capitalized, which should be made bold small caps."
There's a reason people are talking about LaTeX as the alternative -- it's not that there aren't really any other free {speech|beer} alternatives, it's that there aren't many commercial alternatives. And even if someone found a viable alternative, converting the documents between formats would be extremely non-trivial.
Do people read the posts before replying to them on Slashdot?
Judging by your user number, you're relatively new around here, so we forgive you for asking. But really, next thing you'll be asking if people read the linked articles.
It looked to me like ITexMac and TeXShop were pretty similar in not only concept but execution. I tried both and preferred TeXShop but it might well be because I found that one first and got a little more used to its approach. I've heard ITexMac does a bit more (particularly with internationalization), and also heard that this is less true with the current versions than it used to be.