There's a great TeX/LaTeX front end for OS X that I use called TeXShop. Aqua-friendly, set up to generate PDFs instead of DVIs by default, etc., etc.
Having said that, the people who've observed that FrameMaker is the industry standard for technical writing aren't kidding. TeX has its strongholds in academia and research, but go to any major commercial job board and search for technical writing positions. FrameMaker is almost guaranteed to not only be the most common document production system you run across, but to be far and away in front of its competitors. (From my observations, Microsoft Word is a distant second, various SGML tools showing up next and Quark, InDesign and TeX showing up once in a blue moon.)
I think when people recommend "obvious alternatives" they tend to forget just how difficult it is to make a switch from a legacy application. If you're maintainining a few hundred technical documents in FrameMaker format with a group of a half-dozen technical writers all using Macs, figure out how much money you'll spend on converting all of those to LaTeX and on retraining your technical writers, even if you're using the nicest and friendliest front-end imaginable. Even an optimistic estimate in such a scenario would approach a thousand man-hours of work. Compare that with the cost of buying your half-dozen technical writers new PCs with new FrameMaker licenses and giving them a week to get up to speed on platform differences.
Personally, I don't know FM and I don't really want to have to learn it. But I want to move more deeply into technical writing than I'm at now, and even if I could conclusively demonstrate that LaTeX would do everything a prospective client needs, that won't win me the work.
While your point is a good one to remember, it's also important to note that it doesn't rebut the underlying argument that the character in "Network" was making. His argument was that in the modern world, companies are more important than nations. If we wrote a similar speech today the companies would be different, and that is indeed a sign of a dynamic economy -- but the fact that the big companies now are by and large bigger, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the ones at the time "Network" was written would seem to support the premise.
The movie really doesn't have anything to do with "I, Robot," as far as I know -- the original script for it was called, IIRC, "Hardwired." To be fair, it was supposed to be a pretty damn good script, but when it was bought by the studio that also had done some development work with "I, Robot" and owned the film rights to the name, they decided to merge the two concepts, because to someone with a Hollywood marketing executive's deep insight they're close enough (detective trying to solve murders committed by a robot). Really, though, it's still "Hardwired," with some of the names from the Asimov stories.
I'll be curious to see if it's still a good movie, but I don't expect it to be a good adaptation of anything related to Asimov's works. The fact that it's pretending to be is unfortunate marketing spin.
He destroys a PowerBook a year?! Gee, in my book, that means it sucks.
Or it means he throws them through windows a lot. My late-2001 model PowerBook is getting crufty-looking thanks to the well-known bubbling paint problem, and a drop it took that broke the latch was more than a bit annoying -- but the machine itself has been chugging along without a problem.
You and the original poster are talking about two different things. You own the physical copy of the music on the CD or album. You do not own the copyright to the music, which is actually what he was talking about when he said "the music."
The fact that you do own the copy and can do anything you want with it will be where I expect legal fights to take place at some point in the near future, though. I believe it's the "doctrine of first sale" says that when you buy a copy of something -- a book, an album, a movie -- you have absolute control over what you do with that copy as long as that doesn't involve creating another copy. You can sell it at a garage sale, give it to a friend, play it wherever you want, etc. It's been legally established that the copyright holder has no control over that, despite attempts in the past to establish that they do.
I'd actually nominate Macromedia Fireworks, one of the more underrated (and probably less well-understood) components of Macromedia's Studio MX series. Fireworks lets you do mockups similarly to Photoshop, but unlike Photoshop, everything on your canvas is an "object," essentially existing in its own layer. You can stack objects and apply effects to them individually.
And, Fireworks is built for the web. It's easy to create rollovers, dropdown menus and the like with it. It's easy to create partially working mockups by exporting them as HTML. And, it's easy to turn those mockups into the initial framework for the actual web site by setting and naming the export "slices" correctly.
I'm not a huge fan of Dreamweaver, the better-known tool from Macromedia. But I've created several complex web sites by starting them in Fireworks and exporting them, then working on the HTML directly with BBEdit or HomeSite. If you get into the really woo-woo web design stuff with multiple layers, Dreamweaver can come in handy, though. (And Dreamweaver MX, at least, deals pretty well with XHTML, CSS and accessibility issues, as long as the operator uses it that way. Both programs are pretty good at generating markup and Javascript that works well cross-browser, too.)
This is actually an old precedent in the industry. Back in the pre-x86 days, Zilog ate Intel's lunch by introducing the Z80 to kick out the 8080/8085. The Z80 manuals, IIRC, never mentioned they were using Intel's instruction set, and Zilog actually made up their own assembler mnemonics instead of using Intel's for the same opcodes. (And, more recently, I don't think IBM's PowerPC 970 literature ever explicitly says that its vector math extensions are Motorola's AltiVec.)
As for Itanium not selling, That's funny. Itanium sold over 100,000 cpus last year which is a big number for the enterprise server market (That's more than some other major RISC processors sold in 2003 (like Power 4)). If you don't believe me Google "Itanium" "100,000" and "Otellini" and you'll see lots of links to Intel pres Paul Otellini's announcement back in Nov that Intel would ship over 100,000 Itanium processors in 2003.
Yes, except that Itanium's biggest competitor in the enterprise server market isn't the Power4, its G5 cousin or any other RISC chip. The Itanium's lunch is being eaten by the Xeon. If you'd Googled on the less specific "itanium sales" your first hit would be IDC Waterfalls its Itanium Sales. As that article observes, "The [100,000] number may seem relatively huge, unless we do not take into account sales of Intel Xeon processors that amount in millions."
The problem, when push comes to shove, is that for "enterprise" customers, 64-bit CPUs are still a solution in search of a problem. As of right now there aren't any applications I can think of that most businesses use where the Itanium has a pure performance advantage that outweighs the Xeon's much higher price-performance advantage. The High Performance Computing market, which is what you really referred to above, is not the enterprise market, and as flashy as HPC is, it's not where the money is, either -- go into any business using Intel architecture machines and you will see server rooms filled with HP ProLiants and Dell PowerEdges, and all of those will be P4/Xeon boxes.
It doesn't matter whether Mr. Otellini tells people he's happy with "over" 100,000 Itanium processors being shipped or not. Compared to the amount of money Intel sank into the processor, this is peanuts. If they deliver a 64-bit x86 processor and it outsells the Itanium by an order of magnitude in its first year or two, which is not unlikely, it's going to be very hard to justify not end-of-lifing the Itanium line and migrating customers to the new processor.
He didn't say Apple invented home-video editing, but that they made it easy. Everyone acknowledges that the Amiga and the Video Toaster invented the desktop video market, but it wasn't a "home user" setup by any stretch: The Amiga+VT combination required you to drop about $5K, and you didn't get an NLE. Apple's iMovie isn't nearly as sophisticated, but it's far easier to use, and it's an NLE with near-real-time previewing -- as I recall, Newtek's Flyer NLE was a "breakthrough" at another $5K or so, wasn't it? It's fair to say that Apple put this technology into the home. Part of that is simply timing, in that Apple is around for digital video and DVD-Rs and Commodore wasn't, but the reality still stands--iMovie and iDVD are consumer applications in a way that the Video Toaster never was (and was never intended to be).
And, yes, it probably really is fair to say that Apple drove USB widely into the market. Again, nobody claimed that they invented it. It was around before Apple, sure, but nobody really gave a damn--it was Steve Jobs and his ever-lovin' singlemindedness that gave us the iMac and its requirement that absolutely all peripherals, from keyboards to mice to printers to scanners, be USB-compatible that kicked peripheral makers into high gear.
And you know what? The last few places I've been at, the new high-end HP network printers they ran supported Zeroconf. Guess whose fault that is.:)
I don't know. If Microsoft was particularly worried about Apple 'controlling' that market, they'd be more likely to buy a controlling interest in Avid, which they're already a heavy investor in. Remember, Microsoft actually owned Softimage for a few years.
I doubt the "private equity firm" is actually a major existing vendor in disguise, despite all the intrigue people can theorize on if it were. It's more likely to be a group like Vector Capital, the folks who bought Corel last year--in other words, a group that's, well, a private equity firm.
Caldera as a company was founded with the sole purpose of suing Microsoft over DR-DOS.
Unless you have insider evidence that proves otherwise, that's simply not true. Caldera was founded in 1994 by the programmers who were working on Novell's original Linux product in the early '90s, which Ray Noorda wanted to bundle with DR-DOS and make a "Windows 95 killer" before Windows 95 got to market. Infoworld did a fair amount of reporting on this back in the day, referring to it as "the Corsair Project." Caldera's original web site talked about this project originally, and had internal logos that they were using for the project, although they were referring to it as "Expose." When Noorda was forced out and the project was canned, the programmers took what they could and built a Linux distribution from it.
Caldera acquired DR-DOS in 1996 from Novell, and Novell had already laid out the groundwork for the litigation, which they had chosen not to pursue. Caldera did pursue it, and frankly, they were right to. At the time, I can assure you the general feeling on Slashdot was, "Yeah! You go!" Seven or eight years ago, these were the good guys. Caldera certainly wasn't sitting around and waiting for a big payoff, though--they were actively developing both Caldera Network Desktop and embedded systems based on Linux and DR-DOS.
Last but not least, what you really must remember is that the current SCO Group has no executives, no products--and quite possibly no employees at all--in common with Caldera Systems. For all practical purposes, they're a completely different company.
My pet theory is that the special editions and episoes 1 and 2 are precisely the kinds of movies Lucas wanted to make from the beginning.
Yep, I've gathered that. In early drafts of the first Star Wars script, the hero is named "Anakin Starkiller" and the plot is much, much closer to The Phantom Menace. Evidently people reading the initial script told Lucas that the story was just a big, sprawling mess that needed to have a much tighter focus around a single hero, who had to really be heroic. So Lucas went off to read Joseph Campbell and reconstructed the first script using The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Campbell's "monomyth" concept as a guidebook.
To be fair to the first trilogy, though, Lucas always had story and production control over them. Both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were written and directed by different people. If Lucas had written it entirely himself, it would have combined the banal dialogue of the first one with the banal story of the third, and been even worse than it was.:)
And nothing prevents literary criticism from being insightful. Deconstruction is one school of thought in humanities; in the literary criticism courses I took (at a liberal arts school which is considered either very prestigious or very left-wing, depending on who one asks), it was mentioned almost as an afterthought. It's valuable to keep in mind that language is an artificial construction and that words are invested with meaning by consensus, not by connection to an objective truth outside language--just like our perceptions of the world are, ultimately, subjective, not objective. Taking deconstructionism to its relentless end ultimately takes you nowhere useful, just as focusing too much on the subjectivity of perception eventually takes you past Zen into existential solipsism. But to essentially argue that because this line of thought can lead to navel-gazing that all thoughts remotely related to it (and intertextual criticism, which is at least as influential, is very remotely related indeed) must be abandoned is just as ridiculous as arguing that the Yellow Pages can be read as a great work of literature.
Looking over a lot of the replies here, I think "Engineer's Disease" is a pretty accurate assessment--essentially, the belief that any field that deals in the unquantifiable is of lesser value than fields that deal with the quantifiable. Science and engineering "toolkits" are not applicable to the task of analyzing stories--while "why do some stories stand the test of time and some do not" is a valid question for study, the scientific method isn't going to provide an answer. It's folly to think that there is any objective algorithm that can be generated to prove that William Faulkner is a better writer than J.R.R. Tolkien, that Neuromancer is 5% deeper The Old Man and the Sea, or that Annie Hall did, in fact, deserve to win the 1977 Best Picture Oscar instead of Star Wars. If you want to develop theories to answer those questions in an insightful, if ultimately still subjective, manner, they aren't going to be scientific theories. (In point of fact, the reason that the original Star Wars is beloved by fans is intertextual/mythic criticism--specifically, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Without evil ol' lit-crit, Star Wars would have joined THX 1138 in the "barely remembered curiosity" pile.)
I think you're using a different definition of "flop." Think of Broadway musicals: to be a truly grand turkey, the show has to have had amazing amounts of money sunk into it, has to actually get to the stage, and then has to disintegrate in a glorious bright mushroom cloud--not just to perform "under expectations," but to have theater-goers stampeding out of the building.
OS/2 had a lifespan of about a decade and a surprising amount of vertical market success. IBM and their competitors have only recently been able to pry dedicated customers like banks and airlines off it. In Broadway terms, OS/2 was Tim Rice's Chess -- a show that people seemed to generally like but everyone expected to do much better than it did.
Taligent, for practical purposes, never made it to market. Only people within the tech industry are likely to even remember it. In Broadway terms, this is the Batman musical, or the Scherezade rock production scheduled for London's West End. Haven't heard of them? That's because they never opened.
The "Disney Sound Doohicky" is like, well, any number of Broadway plays that open without much fanfare outside New York, hang around for a brief time without getting much notice, and then quietly vanish. They're hardly worth mentioning.
No, I think this list was pretty much on-target. It could be expanded or quibbled with, sure -- I'm not sure the Data Play is any worse than the Digital Compact Cassette fiasco, and I'd replace either of them with DIVX. But Microsoft Bob, the Click Internet Appliances as an entire concept (a moment of silence for the brilliant idiots at Be, Inc.) -- these are the Dance of the Vampires, the Carrie: The Musicals of the tech world. And that's what you look for in a good solid turkey.
I see this a lot in online discussions of LOTR and the Oscars, but I'm not sure fans are really thinking about the implications of that. If they gave a major Academy Award to the first movie, that would greatly reduce the chances, politically, for Oscars for either of the next two. The same director winning consecutive awards doesn't appear to have happened since 1949 and 1950--and as far as I know, there hasn't been any movie that's ever been an Academy Award nominee in which everyone knew it was a trilogy before the first movie came out. It's naive to think that that doesn't change the equation in the minds of Academy voters.
And, really, "The Oscars are irrelevant" has been an ongoing theme in movie criticism, from both fans and critics, for decades. Anyone can make what seems to be a solid case for it, but taken together the cases are somewhat contradictory. People rail against the Oscars for being anti-commercial and out of touch with the movie-going public when Star Wars doesn't win. People also rail against the Oscars whenTitanic, the most commercially successful film in history, does win. Which is it, guys? Spirited Away won the Best Animated Feature Film award last year, which I doubt many anime fans would disagree with--but since that wasn't a commercial success in America, was that irrelevant? (Maybe so--despite it being enough to get Disney to re-release the film to theatres with a new round of TV advertisements, audiences still stayed away from it in droves.)
Ultimately, what people mean when they say The Oscars are irrelevant is the Academy didn't vote the way I would have, those fools. I think Return of the King has more of a chance this year than the first two because there isn't going to be another movie next year, and because I'm not sure there's anything else on the horizon to give it truly serious competition. Possibly Cold Mountain, although reports on that are mixed; possibly Mystic River, but I suspect it will win other major awards but not best picture (and probably not best direction).
As far as I know, that's not a maglev project; both of the bids are more conventional "bullet train" technologies. I think one of the proposed bids is electric and the other is diesel, but neither of them is maglev.
The only working maglev train I'm aware of around Orlando is the Tomorrowland Transit Authority in Disney World, what was called the PeopleMover before. (The California Disneyland PeopleMover is using a differerent, non-maglev motor system. Or was; IIRC, it's been dismantled completely.)
Re:Partially correct... / is writable by group adm
on
PC Mag - Mac OS X Insecure
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· Score: 2, Informative
Um. As an administrator user, yes,
echo "foo" >/bar
works. What happens if I try to modify any meaningful directory, though?
Furthermore, your original test case appears to only work for an administrator. (People seem to forget that "administrator" is a separate concept from "root user" under OS X.) Create a standard user and try to create a file in the / directory; at least on my 10.3 system, it gets a "permission denied" error.
I'm not convinced you've made an airtight case against any "seasoned administrator" ever letting OS X into production.
The somewhat ironic thing is that Kermit did all of the things we associate with ZModem, too--it's just that except for the original Kermit program itself, most implementations of the protocol were based on the original spec, not the revisions concurrent with ZModem.
Kermit never matched ZModem's speed on good links. But I remember one time when I had to get files off a Unix machine which I could only connect to by dialing into an IBM mainframe which connected to a VAX on a remote campus, and telnetting from the VAX to the Unix machine. ZModem choked after a few blocks, XModem and YModem didn't even get that far, FTP wasn't available with that kind of nightmarish setup. Kermit worked flawlessly.
And that's probably why Kermit is still in use today in weird niche markets and ZModem, despite the fact that it was far more popular and in BBS applications--the main use home users had--a far better protocol, is largely a relic.
Yes, I've heard of it. And, by and large it was just another PC Clone. The best that could be said for it is that it was a harbinger of the drive to make cheap, turnkey home computers that were still full-featured. For what it was, it was a fine machine, but nothing anyone would have danced in the streets over--and as I recall, nothing anyone really raced to buy, which explains why so many other people here are going "The Tandy What?"
If I was going to put any of Radio Shack's machines for this list, the TRS-80 Model I (or more broadly the Model I/III/4 line) would be it. The CoCo 3 was probably the best machine in the "home computer you connect to a TV" class, but the TRS-80 Model I was the first mass-market home computer. (The Apple and Commodore PET machines were only available at specialty stores; TRS-80s were available, well, at Radio Shack. That made a huge, huge difference.) The Tandy Sensation gets a jellybean for being one of Tandy's long list of interesting failures, but their 80186-based, non-PC-compatible Model 2000 would definitely be at the top of that list....
Well, I don't agree.
It shows careless research, in failing to realize that XP is a descendant of NT. But lots of people think Windows 95/98 runs DOS underneath because it launches from DOS. But Windows actually takes over the machine except to run DOS-only programs at that point. (IIRC, this actually started with Windows for Workgroups 3.11.) Should everyone who doesn't know that be dismissed solely on those grounds?
More to the point, Cringely tends to be more of a "big picture" kind of columnist. You may think he's full of hot air, you may not, but--unless he's screwing up facts consistently, which I don't think people have accused him of--that shouldn't be based on whether you can call him on the occasional fact screwup. This is like deciding Steven Spielberg is a terrible filmmaker because of the infamous "I know this, this is Unix!" scene in Jurassic Park. The scene may well have been stupid, but it's a stretch to abstract from that to "Spielberg is a terrible director"--or even just to "Spielberg's terrible with technology," a point that could certainly be vigorously debated.
You may have other perfectly defensible reasons for dismissing Cringely (just like someone might for Spielberg), but focusing too much on this particular screwup really does strike me as a "missing the forest for the trees" thing.
What most "anti-greenies" don't understand, or at least the ones who'd use "greenies" as a derogative term (I certainly wouldn't have coined "anti-greenies" otherwise), is that can and should aren't synonyms. In some grand holistic sense, we could pour oil into every potable water supply and set fire to all the forests and that would be "a step in the alteration of life on this planet." So what? Maybe you'd call that evolution, but I'd call it fucking stupid.
I'm reminded of a quip from a couple years ago, along the lines of: analysts will suddenly stop recommending all jobs be outsourced overseas when market analysis starts being outsourced.
Having said that, though, I don't think profitable computer careers here are a thing of the past--I just think that the kind of careers, and the kind of salary levels, that we saw in 1998-2000 are a thing of the past. I'm not being entirely facetious when I say I regret not having moved to Silicon Valley in 1997, when employers were willing to throw $25, $30, even $40 or more an hour at people who knew what "HTML" stood for. Those days are over, though, and I don't think it's primarily because of outsourcing.
Until you discover that the trees have crosspollinated with others. Do some cursory research on the genetically modified corn that Monsanto came up with--which despite theoretically being sterile, "contaminated" the fields of neighboring farmers who weren't using it. As far as I know, the lawsuits are on that are still flying.
The point is that it isn't guaranteed to be easy to contain, because you don't know what all the variables are. You don't know how the exotic species is going to interact with the local environment because, by definition, you don't have any data on it. And with all due respect, being mockingly glib won't solve any potential problems.
The difference is that if a Ford concept car gets released "into the wild," it isn't a wild card in the ecosystem. Is the glow-in-the-dark gene one that can be passed on? Would natural crossbreeds of these fish glow faintly?
This came up in a discussion I ran across a year or two ago on the possibility of making glowing trees. It's a neat idea in its own silly way, sure--until it gets out into the wild, and cross-pollinates other similar trees, and proves to be a dominant trait. I agree these are some mighty big "ifs," but think for a moment how disruptive it would be to a nocturnal ecosystem if the trees gave off their own light. This could be catastrophic. We still don't know all the ways ecosystems interact with one another, but we do know that the systems get very, very complex, and throwing a huge honking monkey wrench into one isn't a good idea.
The argument that genetic research has obvious medical value is a fine one. I agree with you completely. But it is not an argument for using those techniques in living genetically-engineered consumer novelties. The instant those cute glowing fishes get thrown into a river by someone bored with their aquarium, an uncontrolled, unmonitored experiment on an ecosystem has just been started. Maybe there won't be any deleterious effects--but this isn't the way I'd like to see that theory tested.
While I don't want to put words in the mouth of the guy you're actually replying to, Bush didn't win the popular vote no matter how things are recounted--he won the electoral vote. And, the question of whether the way the election was actually decided was appropriate is a separate question from the vote count. Bush was, in effect, selected by the Supreme Court. Yes, you're right that subsequent investigation showed that Bush would have won the electoral vote regardless; that doesn't make me more comfortable with the way the election was resolved, because "it wouldn't have mattered anyway" isn't a sufficient rebuttal to a charge of not counting everyone's vote in a democracy.
There's a separate question that came up a lot as to whether the electoral college should even be used, a question which is bound to come up in the rare cases like this when it seems to "thwart" the will of the people. Of course, setting aside the questions revolving around the subsequent legal case, the electoral college did exactly what it was supposed to--its point is to keep rural, sparsely populated states from having their votes overwhelmed by major population centers. (Whether it ultimately serves or hinders democracy to effectively give each resident of, say, North Dakota a greater proportional weight than each resident of New York is another question.)
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There's a great TeX/LaTeX front end for OS X that I use called TeXShop. Aqua-friendly, set up to generate PDFs instead of DVIs by default, etc., etc.
Having said that, the people who've observed that FrameMaker is the industry standard for technical writing aren't kidding. TeX has its strongholds in academia and research, but go to any major commercial job board and search for technical writing positions. FrameMaker is almost guaranteed to not only be the most common document production system you run across, but to be far and away in front of its competitors. (From my observations, Microsoft Word is a distant second, various SGML tools showing up next and Quark, InDesign and TeX showing up once in a blue moon.)
I think when people recommend "obvious alternatives" they tend to forget just how difficult it is to make a switch from a legacy application. If you're maintainining a few hundred technical documents in FrameMaker format with a group of a half-dozen technical writers all using Macs, figure out how much money you'll spend on converting all of those to LaTeX and on retraining your technical writers, even if you're using the nicest and friendliest front-end imaginable. Even an optimistic estimate in such a scenario would approach a thousand man-hours of work. Compare that with the cost of buying your half-dozen technical writers new PCs with new FrameMaker licenses and giving them a week to get up to speed on platform differences.
Personally, I don't know FM and I don't really want to have to learn it. But I want to move more deeply into technical writing than I'm at now, and even if I could conclusively demonstrate that LaTeX would do everything a prospective client needs, that won't win me the work.
While your point is a good one to remember, it's also important to note that it doesn't rebut the underlying argument that the character in "Network" was making. His argument was that in the modern world, companies are more important than nations. If we wrote a similar speech today the companies would be different, and that is indeed a sign of a dynamic economy -- but the fact that the big companies now are by and large bigger, even in inflation-adjusted dollars, than the ones at the time "Network" was written would seem to support the premise.
The movie really doesn't have anything to do with "I, Robot," as far as I know -- the original script for it was called, IIRC, "Hardwired." To be fair, it was supposed to be a pretty damn good script, but when it was bought by the studio that also had done some development work with "I, Robot" and owned the film rights to the name, they decided to merge the two concepts, because to someone with a Hollywood marketing executive's deep insight they're close enough (detective trying to solve murders committed by a robot). Really, though, it's still "Hardwired," with some of the names from the Asimov stories.
I'll be curious to see if it's still a good movie, but I don't expect it to be a good adaptation of anything related to Asimov's works. The fact that it's pretending to be is unfortunate marketing spin.
He destroys a PowerBook a year?! Gee, in my book, that means it sucks.
Or it means he throws them through windows a lot. My late-2001 model PowerBook is getting crufty-looking thanks to the well-known bubbling paint problem, and a drop it took that broke the latch was more than a bit annoying -- but the machine itself has been chugging along without a problem.
You and the original poster are talking about two different things. You own the physical copy of the music on the CD or album. You do not own the copyright to the music, which is actually what he was talking about when he said "the music."
The fact that you do own the copy and can do anything you want with it will be where I expect legal fights to take place at some point in the near future, though. I believe it's the "doctrine of first sale" says that when you buy a copy of something -- a book, an album, a movie -- you have absolute control over what you do with that copy as long as that doesn't involve creating another copy. You can sell it at a garage sale, give it to a friend, play it wherever you want, etc. It's been legally established that the copyright holder has no control over that, despite attempts in the past to establish that they do.
I'd actually nominate Macromedia Fireworks, one of the more underrated (and probably less well-understood) components of Macromedia's Studio MX series. Fireworks lets you do mockups similarly to Photoshop, but unlike Photoshop, everything on your canvas is an "object," essentially existing in its own layer. You can stack objects and apply effects to them individually.
And, Fireworks is built for the web. It's easy to create rollovers, dropdown menus and the like with it. It's easy to create partially working mockups by exporting them as HTML. And, it's easy to turn those mockups into the initial framework for the actual web site by setting and naming the export "slices" correctly.
I'm not a huge fan of Dreamweaver, the better-known tool from Macromedia. But I've created several complex web sites by starting them in Fireworks and exporting them, then working on the HTML directly with BBEdit or HomeSite. If you get into the really woo-woo web design stuff with multiple layers, Dreamweaver can come in handy, though. (And Dreamweaver MX, at least, deals pretty well with XHTML, CSS and accessibility issues, as long as the operator uses it that way. Both programs are pretty good at generating markup and Javascript that works well cross-browser, too.)
This is actually an old precedent in the industry. Back in the pre-x86 days, Zilog ate Intel's lunch by introducing the Z80 to kick out the 8080/8085. The Z80 manuals, IIRC, never mentioned they were using Intel's instruction set, and Zilog actually made up their own assembler mnemonics instead of using Intel's for the same opcodes. (And, more recently, I don't think IBM's PowerPC 970 literature ever explicitly says that its vector math extensions are Motorola's AltiVec.)
As for Itanium not selling, That's funny. Itanium sold over 100,000 cpus last year which is a big number for the enterprise server market (That's more than some other major RISC processors sold in 2003 (like Power 4)). If you don't believe me Google "Itanium" "100,000" and "Otellini" and you'll see lots of links to Intel pres Paul Otellini's announcement back in Nov that Intel would ship over 100,000 Itanium processors in 2003.
Yes, except that Itanium's biggest competitor in the enterprise server market isn't the Power4, its G5 cousin or any other RISC chip. The Itanium's lunch is being eaten by the Xeon. If you'd Googled on the less specific "itanium sales" your first hit would be IDC Waterfalls its Itanium Sales. As that article observes, "The [100,000] number may seem relatively huge, unless we do not take into account sales of Intel Xeon processors that amount in millions."
The problem, when push comes to shove, is that for "enterprise" customers, 64-bit CPUs are still a solution in search of a problem. As of right now there aren't any applications I can think of that most businesses use where the Itanium has a pure performance advantage that outweighs the Xeon's much higher price-performance advantage. The High Performance Computing market, which is what you really referred to above, is not the enterprise market, and as flashy as HPC is, it's not where the money is, either -- go into any business using Intel architecture machines and you will see server rooms filled with HP ProLiants and Dell PowerEdges, and all of those will be P4/Xeon boxes.
It doesn't matter whether Mr. Otellini tells people he's happy with "over" 100,000 Itanium processors being shipped or not. Compared to the amount of money Intel sank into the processor, this is peanuts. If they deliver a 64-bit x86 processor and it outsells the Itanium by an order of magnitude in its first year or two, which is not unlikely, it's going to be very hard to justify not end-of-lifing the Itanium line and migrating customers to the new processor.
He didn't say Apple invented home-video editing, but that they made it easy. Everyone acknowledges that the Amiga and the Video Toaster invented the desktop video market, but it wasn't a "home user" setup by any stretch: The Amiga+VT combination required you to drop about $5K, and you didn't get an NLE. Apple's iMovie isn't nearly as sophisticated, but it's far easier to use, and it's an NLE with near-real-time previewing -- as I recall, Newtek's Flyer NLE was a "breakthrough" at another $5K or so, wasn't it? It's fair to say that Apple put this technology into the home. Part of that is simply timing, in that Apple is around for digital video and DVD-Rs and Commodore wasn't, but the reality still stands--iMovie and iDVD are consumer applications in a way that the Video Toaster never was (and was never intended to be).
And, yes, it probably really is fair to say that Apple drove USB widely into the market. Again, nobody claimed that they invented it. It was around before Apple, sure, but nobody really gave a damn--it was Steve Jobs and his ever-lovin' singlemindedness that gave us the iMac and its requirement that absolutely all peripherals, from keyboards to mice to printers to scanners, be USB-compatible that kicked peripheral makers into high gear.
And you know what? The last few places I've been at, the new high-end HP network printers they ran supported Zeroconf. Guess whose fault that is. :)
I don't know. If Microsoft was particularly worried about Apple 'controlling' that market, they'd be more likely to buy a controlling interest in Avid, which they're already a heavy investor in. Remember, Microsoft actually owned Softimage for a few years.
I doubt the "private equity firm" is actually a major existing vendor in disguise, despite all the intrigue people can theorize on if it were. It's more likely to be a group like Vector Capital, the folks who bought Corel last year--in other words, a group that's, well, a private equity firm.
Caldera as a company was founded with the sole purpose of suing Microsoft over DR-DOS.
Unless you have insider evidence that proves otherwise, that's simply not true. Caldera was founded in 1994 by the programmers who were working on Novell's original Linux product in the early '90s, which Ray Noorda wanted to bundle with DR-DOS and make a "Windows 95 killer" before Windows 95 got to market. Infoworld did a fair amount of reporting on this back in the day, referring to it as "the Corsair Project." Caldera's original web site talked about this project originally, and had internal logos that they were using for the project, although they were referring to it as "Expose." When Noorda was forced out and the project was canned, the programmers took what they could and built a Linux distribution from it.
Caldera acquired DR-DOS in 1996 from Novell, and Novell had already laid out the groundwork for the litigation, which they had chosen not to pursue. Caldera did pursue it, and frankly, they were right to. At the time, I can assure you the general feeling on Slashdot was, "Yeah! You go!" Seven or eight years ago, these were the good guys. Caldera certainly wasn't sitting around and waiting for a big payoff, though--they were actively developing both Caldera Network Desktop and embedded systems based on Linux and DR-DOS.
Last but not least, what you really must remember is that the current SCO Group has no executives, no products--and quite possibly no employees at all--in common with Caldera Systems. For all practical purposes, they're a completely different company.
My pet theory is that the special editions and episoes 1 and 2 are precisely the kinds of movies Lucas wanted to make from the beginning.
Yep, I've gathered that. In early drafts of the first Star Wars script, the hero is named "Anakin Starkiller" and the plot is much, much closer to The Phantom Menace. Evidently people reading the initial script told Lucas that the story was just a big, sprawling mess that needed to have a much tighter focus around a single hero, who had to really be heroic. So Lucas went off to read Joseph Campbell and reconstructed the first script using The Hero With a Thousand Faces and Campbell's "monomyth" concept as a guidebook.
To be fair to the first trilogy, though, Lucas always had story and production control over them. Both Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi were written and directed by different people. If Lucas had written it entirely himself, it would have combined the banal dialogue of the first one with the banal story of the third, and been even worse than it was. :)
And nothing prevents literary criticism from being insightful. Deconstruction is one school of thought in humanities; in the literary criticism courses I took (at a liberal arts school which is considered either very prestigious or very left-wing, depending on who one asks), it was mentioned almost as an afterthought. It's valuable to keep in mind that language is an artificial construction and that words are invested with meaning by consensus, not by connection to an objective truth outside language--just like our perceptions of the world are, ultimately, subjective, not objective. Taking deconstructionism to its relentless end ultimately takes you nowhere useful, just as focusing too much on the subjectivity of perception eventually takes you past Zen into existential solipsism. But to essentially argue that because this line of thought can lead to navel-gazing that all thoughts remotely related to it (and intertextual criticism, which is at least as influential, is very remotely related indeed) must be abandoned is just as ridiculous as arguing that the Yellow Pages can be read as a great work of literature.
Looking over a lot of the replies here, I think "Engineer's Disease" is a pretty accurate assessment--essentially, the belief that any field that deals in the unquantifiable is of lesser value than fields that deal with the quantifiable. Science and engineering "toolkits" are not applicable to the task of analyzing stories--while "why do some stories stand the test of time and some do not" is a valid question for study, the scientific method isn't going to provide an answer. It's folly to think that there is any objective algorithm that can be generated to prove that William Faulkner is a better writer than J.R.R. Tolkien, that Neuromancer is 5% deeper The Old Man and the Sea, or that Annie Hall did, in fact, deserve to win the 1977 Best Picture Oscar instead of Star Wars. If you want to develop theories to answer those questions in an insightful, if ultimately still subjective, manner, they aren't going to be scientific theories. (In point of fact, the reason that the original Star Wars is beloved by fans is intertextual/mythic criticism--specifically, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Without evil ol' lit-crit, Star Wars would have joined THX 1138 in the "barely remembered curiosity" pile.)
I think you're using a different definition of "flop." Think of Broadway musicals: to be a truly grand turkey, the show has to have had amazing amounts of money sunk into it, has to actually get to the stage, and then has to disintegrate in a glorious bright mushroom cloud--not just to perform "under expectations," but to have theater-goers stampeding out of the building.
OS/2 had a lifespan of about a decade and a surprising amount of vertical market success. IBM and their competitors have only recently been able to pry dedicated customers like banks and airlines off it. In Broadway terms, OS/2 was Tim Rice's Chess -- a show that people seemed to generally like but everyone expected to do much better than it did.
Taligent, for practical purposes, never made it to market. Only people within the tech industry are likely to even remember it. In Broadway terms, this is the Batman musical, or the Scherezade rock production scheduled for London's West End. Haven't heard of them? That's because they never opened.
The "Disney Sound Doohicky" is like, well, any number of Broadway plays that open without much fanfare outside New York, hang around for a brief time without getting much notice, and then quietly vanish. They're hardly worth mentioning.
No, I think this list was pretty much on-target. It could be expanded or quibbled with, sure -- I'm not sure the Data Play is any worse than the Digital Compact Cassette fiasco, and I'd replace either of them with DIVX. But Microsoft Bob, the Click Internet Appliances as an entire concept (a moment of silence for the brilliant idiots at Be, Inc.) -- these are the Dance of the Vampires, the Carrie: The Musicals of the tech world. And that's what you look for in a good solid turkey.
I see this a lot in online discussions of LOTR and the Oscars, but I'm not sure fans are really thinking about the implications of that. If they gave a major Academy Award to the first movie, that would greatly reduce the chances, politically, for Oscars for either of the next two. The same director winning consecutive awards doesn't appear to have happened since 1949 and 1950--and as far as I know, there hasn't been any movie that's ever been an Academy Award nominee in which everyone knew it was a trilogy before the first movie came out. It's naive to think that that doesn't change the equation in the minds of Academy voters.
And, really, "The Oscars are irrelevant" has been an ongoing theme in movie criticism, from both fans and critics, for decades. Anyone can make what seems to be a solid case for it, but taken together the cases are somewhat contradictory. People rail against the Oscars for being anti-commercial and out of touch with the movie-going public when Star Wars doesn't win. People also rail against the Oscars whenTitanic, the most commercially successful film in history, does win. Which is it, guys? Spirited Away won the Best Animated Feature Film award last year, which I doubt many anime fans would disagree with--but since that wasn't a commercial success in America, was that irrelevant? (Maybe so--despite it being enough to get Disney to re-release the film to theatres with a new round of TV advertisements, audiences still stayed away from it in droves.)
Ultimately, what people mean when they say The Oscars are irrelevant is the Academy didn't vote the way I would have, those fools. I think Return of the King has more of a chance this year than the first two because there isn't going to be another movie next year, and because I'm not sure there's anything else on the horizon to give it truly serious competition. Possibly Cold Mountain, although reports on that are mixed; possibly Mystic River, but I suspect it will win other major awards but not best picture (and probably not best direction).
As far as I know, that's not a maglev project; both of the bids are more conventional "bullet train" technologies. I think one of the proposed bids is electric and the other is diesel, but neither of them is maglev.
The only working maglev train I'm aware of around Orlando is the Tomorrowland Transit Authority in Disney World, what was called the PeopleMover before. (The California Disneyland PeopleMover is using a differerent, non-maglev motor system. Or was; IIRC, it's been dismantled completely.)
Um. As an administrator user, yes,
echo "foo" > /bar
works. What happens if I try to modify any meaningful directory, though?
dhcp150% echo "foo" >zsh: permission denied:
dhcp150% echo "foo" >
zsh: permission denied:
dhcp150% echo "foo" >
zsh: permission denied:
dhcp150% echo "foo" >
zsh: permission denied:
Furthermore, your original test case appears to only work for an administrator. (People seem to forget that "administrator" is a separate concept from "root user" under OS X.) Create a standard user and try to create a file in the / directory; at least on my 10.3 system, it gets a "permission denied" error.
I'm not convinced you've made an airtight case against any "seasoned administrator" ever letting OS X into production.
The somewhat ironic thing is that Kermit did all of the things we associate with ZModem, too--it's just that except for the original Kermit program itself, most implementations of the protocol were based on the original spec, not the revisions concurrent with ZModem.
Kermit never matched ZModem's speed on good links. But I remember one time when I had to get files off a Unix machine which I could only connect to by dialing into an IBM mainframe which connected to a VAX on a remote campus, and telnetting from the VAX to the Unix machine. ZModem choked after a few blocks, XModem and YModem didn't even get that far, FTP wasn't available with that kind of nightmarish setup. Kermit worked flawlessly.
And that's probably why Kermit is still in use today in weird niche markets and ZModem, despite the fact that it was far more popular and in BBS applications--the main use home users had--a far better protocol, is largely a relic.
Yes, I've heard of it. And, by and large it was just another PC Clone. The best that could be said for it is that it was a harbinger of the drive to make cheap, turnkey home computers that were still full-featured. For what it was, it was a fine machine, but nothing anyone would have danced in the streets over--and as I recall, nothing anyone really raced to buy, which explains why so many other people here are going "The Tandy What?"
If I was going to put any of Radio Shack's machines for this list, the TRS-80 Model I (or more broadly the Model I/III/4 line) would be it. The CoCo 3 was probably the best machine in the "home computer you connect to a TV" class, but the TRS-80 Model I was the first mass-market home computer. (The Apple and Commodore PET machines were only available at specialty stores; TRS-80s were available, well, at Radio Shack. That made a huge, huge difference.) The Tandy Sensation gets a jellybean for being one of Tandy's long list of interesting failures, but their 80186-based, non-PC-compatible Model 2000 would definitely be at the top of that list....
Well, I don't agree. It shows careless research, in failing to realize that XP is a descendant of NT. But lots of people think Windows 95/98 runs DOS underneath because it launches from DOS. But Windows actually takes over the machine except to run DOS-only programs at that point. (IIRC, this actually started with Windows for Workgroups 3.11.) Should everyone who doesn't know that be dismissed solely on those grounds? More to the point, Cringely tends to be more of a "big picture" kind of columnist. You may think he's full of hot air, you may not, but--unless he's screwing up facts consistently, which I don't think people have accused him of--that shouldn't be based on whether you can call him on the occasional fact screwup. This is like deciding Steven Spielberg is a terrible filmmaker because of the infamous "I know this, this is Unix!" scene in Jurassic Park. The scene may well have been stupid, but it's a stretch to abstract from that to "Spielberg is a terrible director"--or even just to "Spielberg's terrible with technology," a point that could certainly be vigorously debated. You may have other perfectly defensible reasons for dismissing Cringely (just like someone might for Spielberg), but focusing too much on this particular screwup really does strike me as a "missing the forest for the trees" thing.
What most "anti-greenies" don't understand, or at least the ones who'd use "greenies" as a derogative term (I certainly wouldn't have coined "anti-greenies" otherwise), is that can and should aren't synonyms. In some grand holistic sense, we could pour oil into every potable water supply and set fire to all the forests and that would be "a step in the alteration of life on this planet." So what? Maybe you'd call that evolution, but I'd call it fucking stupid.
I'm reminded of a quip from a couple years ago, along the lines of: analysts will suddenly stop recommending all jobs be outsourced overseas when market analysis starts being outsourced.
Having said that, though, I don't think profitable computer careers here are a thing of the past--I just think that the kind of careers, and the kind of salary levels, that we saw in 1998-2000 are a thing of the past. I'm not being entirely facetious when I say I regret not having moved to Silicon Valley in 1997, when employers were willing to throw $25, $30, even $40 or more an hour at people who knew what "HTML" stood for. Those days are over, though, and I don't think it's primarily because of outsourcing.
Until you discover that the trees have crosspollinated with others. Do some cursory research on the genetically modified corn that Monsanto came up with--which despite theoretically being sterile, "contaminated" the fields of neighboring farmers who weren't using it. As far as I know, the lawsuits are on that are still flying.
The point is that it isn't guaranteed to be easy to contain, because you don't know what all the variables are. You don't know how the exotic species is going to interact with the local environment because, by definition, you don't have any data on it. And with all due respect, being mockingly glib won't solve any potential problems.
The difference is that if a Ford concept car gets released "into the wild," it isn't a wild card in the ecosystem. Is the glow-in-the-dark gene one that can be passed on? Would natural crossbreeds of these fish glow faintly?
This came up in a discussion I ran across a year or two ago on the possibility of making glowing trees. It's a neat idea in its own silly way, sure--until it gets out into the wild, and cross-pollinates other similar trees, and proves to be a dominant trait. I agree these are some mighty big "ifs," but think for a moment how disruptive it would be to a nocturnal ecosystem if the trees gave off their own light. This could be catastrophic. We still don't know all the ways ecosystems interact with one another, but we do know that the systems get very, very complex, and throwing a huge honking monkey wrench into one isn't a good idea.
The argument that genetic research has obvious medical value is a fine one. I agree with you completely. But it is not an argument for using those techniques in living genetically-engineered consumer novelties. The instant those cute glowing fishes get thrown into a river by someone bored with their aquarium, an uncontrolled, unmonitored experiment on an ecosystem has just been started. Maybe there won't be any deleterious effects--but this isn't the way I'd like to see that theory tested.
While I don't want to put words in the mouth of the guy you're actually replying to, Bush didn't win the popular vote no matter how things are recounted--he won the electoral vote. And, the question of whether the way the election was actually decided was appropriate is a separate question from the vote count. Bush was, in effect, selected by the Supreme Court. Yes, you're right that subsequent investigation showed that Bush would have won the electoral vote regardless; that doesn't make me more comfortable with the way the election was resolved, because "it wouldn't have mattered anyway" isn't a sufficient rebuttal to a charge of not counting everyone's vote in a democracy.
There's a separate question that came up a lot as to whether the electoral college should even be used, a question which is bound to come up in the rare cases like this when it seems to "thwart" the will of the people. Of course, setting aside the questions revolving around the subsequent legal case, the electoral college did exactly what it was supposed to--its point is to keep rural, sparsely populated states from having their votes overwhelmed by major population centers. (Whether it ultimately serves or hinders democracy to effectively give each resident of, say, North Dakota a greater proportional weight than each resident of New York is another question.)