While having a monopoly may not be illegal, that certainly doesn't mean that I like MS b/c of it. I'd be much happier if no one monopolized the computing industry. And I'm perfectly entitled to complain about it. After all, _should_ it be the ultimate goal of the people who work at MS (in whose hands the decisions and responsibilities lie) to run the whole show? I think not. Were I in there shoes, I certainly wouldn't even try to; competition is too important to preserve.
Yes, it's certainly good that we have patents; why, before patents neither the wheel nor fire had even been developed. Why would anyone want to invent things if not for the reward of being able to deny them to others without compensation?
Yes, but they're in the same bundle of wires, just like SCSI has 50 wires all bound into the same cable. To the end user it's one cable, and that's what's important.
Here you'd have fiber, and a pair of electrical cables, and some sheathing to keep it intact. I wouldn't expect it to be bigger than a USB cable, and you wouldn't need to make it into a ribbon to avoid electrical interference.
Ah, well most of the replies to me deal with this issue, so I'll cover this here. (the cries of censorship merited their own responses of course)
I'm not saying that the NYT can survive without revenues. What I'm saying is that I am disturbed by the incessant need by them, by the advertisers who pay them, and very nearly everyone up and down the chain for more money. It seems to be increasingly rare, at least in my experience, that someone is willing to say that they've got enough.
While there are certainly great advantages to come out of capitalistic societies (though I don't think that this is a failing of capitalism exclusively) the exercise of moderation by the people who actually live within those societies also seems advantageous and desirable. Advertising is just one face of a much larger beast which generally is opposed to the moderation and consideration of external and long-term goods that we, as human beings, are capable of.
And because this system which pushes us to consider short-term benefits and selfishness above a view for the future and selflessness seems so utterly huge and unopposable, I think that a lot of people simply shrug and give up their rationality.
So when I'm saying that the NYT does not need to put more and more ads into their web site or into their paper, I say this because there are human beings who are capable of making that decision and weighing not just the immediate effects (loss of revenue) but the long-term effects (less masquarading of greed as a virtue, or unpreventable sin) yet are incomprehensibly absolving themselves of their responsibilities.
From my current position, the company that I work for is in the final stages of bringing to market a service which I regard as an abhorrent invasion of privacy. Several people, including (unfortunately imho) my boss, are gung-ho about it. Others are upset but are not taking any position. I at least am absolutely refusing to even participate - I recognize that I could lose my job over it, but I certainly would not want to see the kinds of things that they propose come to pass. (I'm not willing to actually interfere with it, but I'm not claiming to have a logically absolute position either; I expect I'll still be trying to figure things out until I expire)
Imagine if my brothers and sisters in DTP (I'm a designer) simply refused to go too far with advertising. Actually standing up for one's own beliefs, which indeed _do_ have a place in any activity one takes part in both personally and professionally, could have a dramatic impact. Although I was only talking about one particular instance of this earlier, a willingness for people to believe that they are capable of making things better in whatever way they think they can and a sense of personal responsibility for all of their actions could go far, imho.
Unfortunately pollution rarely works out this way. Firstly, there can be compelling interests to dictate what people may do on their own property - zoning laws tend to operate in this fashion. Secondly, due to the interconnectedness of things, what one person does on his own property may have dramatic effects on others: Imagine that you have a field of flowers and harvest them; when your neighbor spreads chemicals on his land that kill the bees that pollinate your flowers he's not directly touching your property, but is having an effect.
In the case of incessant advertising, the government does have the power to control commercial interests and has used this power to effectively limit their freedom of speech in the past, and it's quite constitutional. It's not absolute, and I'm not advocating total silence, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which businesses depend on government largess. Through this, they can be controlled. Would I want the same for real people? No, not really. But I draw a distinction between businesses and people; the latter have inalienable rights, the former may merely be granted some at whim or not at all.
Well, you just have to be careful about it. I'm certainly not for censorship, but that doesn't mean that I run around giving out my credit card information either.
So perhaps advertising that exceeded certain guidelines could result in the permanent revocation of the trademarks and copyrights held by the advertiser and used in that instance?
After all, advertisers aren't entitled to either - they're given by the government and it can take them away or attach strings. Do you really think that Nike or Microsoft would put their name in jeopardy?
I will say, however, that I'm disappointed that the people who are in a position to prevent the world from becoming saturated with advertising are unwilling to take a stand against it.
The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.' When we let businesses get away with pollution, they did it and defended their ability to do so as 'necessary. ' Even today this is claimed, when it doesn't have to be so.
It certainly wouldn't be impossible to enact legislation that barred some or many advertisements - it's been done before, and could simply be a prerequisite of having a business license.
Personally, I will continue my practice of not only using advertising-supported services, but of avoiding the advertisements themselves. I owe publishers nothing:
*I change channels on the tv and radio and kill the volume (mute buttons were hotly decried by advertisers when first introduced, I understand)
*I fast forward through commercials
*I flip straight past ads in magazines
*I ignore billboards (though I do like the efforts of legitmate taggers)
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription. I really don't care if they like it, and believe me, there's relatively little that could happen to impact me. (they really imagine that the/. community wouldn't spring up elsewhere if Andover went bankrupt?)
Feh - attackers cheat. They will likely go after the weakest link, which may end up being the hardware attached to the fiber, if you go that overboard. Honestly at the point when this is happening you've got much bigger problems: these guys are getting into your frickin' house, man.
Well the solution is well known. Install conduit, but have flamethrowers and crushers and such in it to keep things out unless they know just the right pattern to follow to get through unscathed;)
Wouldn't this mean that the first person (and his heirs) to develop the concept of fairness should be entitled to royalties for your use of their concept?
Information just doesn't work like that. It's practically as though God designed it to flow trivially to others. We have constructed a rickety artifice of copyright, patents, etc. (generally collectively known as Intellectual Property, though it is not actually property) around it, but that doesn't mean that they're particularly useful or fair or desirable.
I think that if we are extremely careful we can tolerate minor limitations as an aid, but it should always be viewed as a tool and the purpose never forgotten. Both seem no longer to be the case, as evidenced by your comment. Modern copyright laws (which are the case here) are generally bunk. They may be repairable, but they're doing a pretty lousy job at the moment.
Re:Mr. Dvorak isn't exactly reliable...
on
Calling Out TiVo
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· Score: 1
Heh heh heh. I see you weren't reading MacUser for a good stretch there in the late 80's and early 90's. Dvorak used to do the column in the back, and he is (or was until recently - I don't read him any more) a Mac user. He even did some promotional stuff with Apple around 92-93 when they started putting materials onto humorously named CDs. I still remember his column about computer theme parks, and the Steve Jobs Ride.
Really, I suspect he doesn't care much about any side. What he's interested in is stirring up trouble so that people read his columns and talk about them, and he can keep raking in money. Rather like PT Barnum, who didn't care if people praised him or pissed on him, as long as they spelled his name right.
I sincerely doubt that he dislikes the Tivo. Really, he's almost certainly counting on people generally loving the Tivo. This means that by griping (and not even having to do a good job of it b/c that would require too much effort) that he will remain a popular columnist and be able to make money from magazines who don't care if you agree with him, just as long as you saw their ads. (ironically enough)
The issue was that at the time, there just weren't any other materials that could be used to seal it that could withstand the heat et al later on in the flight. Rubber would never make it. In fact, they had to build the thing largely out of titanium which ironically was all imported from the Soviet Union. Lockheed had to learn a lot about how to work with titanium in a hurry, as I recall.
The scary thing is that the SR-71 (originally RS-71, but LBJ transposed the letters) was developed in the 60's, the F-117 in the 70's and the B-2 in the 80's. God knows what they've got now, and when we'll be let in on it.
Almost. The core tenet of UI is to make things more powerful and easier to use; part of the power is just unlocked by the ease of getting to it. But to actually suck away people's abilities to put tools to uses that the designers couldn't've imagined is quite contrary to good usability. If MS effectively controls microcomputing and PCs are turned into little more than terminals, that does not empower users.
512kB is four times as much as 128kB. Which doesn't matter a hell of a lot, b/c IIRC the Lisa shipped with a full MB in '83. That little feat wouldn't be equalled until the Mac Plus came along. (barring various hacks) Really the Mac should've shipped with 256 - 512kB when it came out - especially given how much they were overcharging for it.
So basically, it'll still be another few months from release to when it's done. Isn't it funny how OS X is NEVER done? Ever? Hell, it was supposed to be out in '99, but Steve weasled his way out of it with OS X Server.
So basically, it'll still be another few months from release to when it's done. Isn't it funny how OS X is NEVER done? Ever? Hell, it was supposed to be out in '99, but Steve weasled his way out of it with OS X Server.
And I had a home system that never crashed under 9, and a work system that crashes routinely under 9. If someone asked me 'Is 9 stable?' I'd tell them no: i've seen it crash way too much to call it stable.
And I'd have to give the same answer for X. I have no doubt that some people will never get a crash or a lockup or anything. But if you can thump on it hard enough and get one, that makes it basically unstable. Given that I'm not even doing anything intensive on the X system that I'm trying out (like booting, which has panicked twice) there really should not be crashes.
It's not an acceptable piece of software for many reasons, and the one advantage we've been sold on for a decade hasn't even materialized.
I don't know - I'd agree that OS X is a giant step backwards in UI. Aside from eliminating some of the nicer features that took years to evolve on the Mac with features that never even had the opportunity to grow on NeXT, the graphics system is so bogged down now that responsiveness is poor, which is a major screwup when it comes to good UI. (or else users tend to overcorrect, or perceive the system as slow even if it's only the graphics that are, or think it hangs)
I mean, I've been putting together a list over the past couple of weeks and the UI flaws outweigh UI improvements by about 10:1.
As for Quartz, DPS was often very slow at many things, so I'm hardly surprised. But try running the little Quartz utility in the dev tools. You'll see what thrashes around on the cpu and what doesn't, and how slow it can get.
Lastly, I've had maybe 10 freezes and 2 kernel panics with totally vanilla hardware.
OS X is a lame, lame OS. It's keeping me on MacOS 9 for now, for despite the crashiness, it's _useful_. The future will likely be Win2K, which is at least no worse than OS X, and a lot cheaper all around, with more stuff and more of a future, despite the evilness of the parent company.
You know, it's funny how people bitch about the ANWR as though the Democrats could do no wrong, yet fail to ever mention the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska (NPRA) which had been closed since Harding, but was opened up by Clinton.
Are you kidding? There were votes regarding the stadiums. And construction lost. But the local government went ahead and did it anyway! That's the problem. (along with Allen trying to purchase as much of the city as possible)
Re:The backup protection system
on
CPRM Lecture
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· Score: 2
You say that now. Imagine if this system had been put into place in 1980. Would you stick with your Apple II+ or C64? They're attacking us way the hell upstream, which gives them a substantial edge. And businesses are stupid and shortsighted, and motivated by money, so they have a reasonable chance of success.
The best attack is to not let it get implemented at all, ever. Ignoring by assuming that it can be cracked, or that it won't sell (even when there are no alternatives) is not going to help our side of things. We should also crack it, and also refuse to buy the hardware whenever possible, but that's not all that we should do.
DirecTV has done something similar; personally I've been expecting MS to introduce an autoupdate to Office at some point in the future that "slipped past QA testing" to force stragglers to adopt Office.Net. Naturally, updating won't be an option for the version or two immediately previous to.Net....
And viewers have no obligation to look at the ads. If they can block it out so that they never even become aware that there _are_ ads, they're entitled to. And since it's already paid for, you can even keep copies of the show forever. It's a great deal.
No one's making advertisers pay for TV either. If they can't adapt, too bad for them. It's certainly possible to have TV with no product ads - HBO's been doing it for years. They only advertise themselves....
Slashdot Mirror
While having a monopoly may not be illegal, that certainly doesn't mean that I like MS b/c of it. I'd be much happier if no one monopolized the computing industry. And I'm perfectly entitled to complain about it. After all, _should_ it be the ultimate goal of the people who work at MS (in whose hands the decisions and responsibilities lie) to run the whole show? I think not. Were I in there shoes, I certainly wouldn't even try to; competition is too important to preserve.
Yes, it's certainly good that we have patents; why, before patents neither the wheel nor fire had even been developed. Why would anyone want to invent things if not for the reward of being able to deny them to others without compensation?
Yes, but they're in the same bundle of wires, just like SCSI has 50 wires all bound into the same cable. To the end user it's one cable, and that's what's important.
Here you'd have fiber, and a pair of electrical cables, and some sheathing to keep it intact. I wouldn't expect it to be bigger than a USB cable, and you wouldn't need to make it into a ribbon to avoid electrical interference.
Ah, well most of the replies to me deal with this issue, so I'll cover this here. (the cries of censorship merited their own responses of course)
I'm not saying that the NYT can survive without revenues. What I'm saying is that I am disturbed by the incessant need by them, by the advertisers who pay them, and very nearly everyone up and down the chain for more money. It seems to be increasingly rare, at least in my experience, that someone is willing to say that they've got enough.
While there are certainly great advantages to come out of capitalistic societies (though I don't think that this is a failing of capitalism exclusively) the exercise of moderation by the people who actually live within those societies also seems advantageous and desirable. Advertising is just one face of a much larger beast which generally is opposed to the moderation and consideration of external and long-term goods that we, as human beings, are capable of.
And because this system which pushes us to consider short-term benefits and selfishness above a view for the future and selflessness seems so utterly huge and unopposable, I think that a lot of people simply shrug and give up their rationality.
So when I'm saying that the NYT does not need to put more and more ads into their web site or into their paper, I say this because there are human beings who are capable of making that decision and weighing not just the immediate effects (loss of revenue) but the long-term effects (less masquarading of greed as a virtue, or unpreventable sin) yet are incomprehensibly absolving themselves of their responsibilities.
From my current position, the company that I work for is in the final stages of bringing to market a service which I regard as an abhorrent invasion of privacy. Several people, including (unfortunately imho) my boss, are gung-ho about it. Others are upset but are not taking any position. I at least am absolutely refusing to even participate - I recognize that I could lose my job over it, but I certainly would not want to see the kinds of things that they propose come to pass. (I'm not willing to actually interfere with it, but I'm not claiming to have a logically absolute position either; I expect I'll still be trying to figure things out until I expire)
Imagine if my brothers and sisters in DTP (I'm a designer) simply refused to go too far with advertising. Actually standing up for one's own beliefs, which indeed _do_ have a place in any activity one takes part in both personally and professionally, could have a dramatic impact. Although I was only talking about one particular instance of this earlier, a willingness for people to believe that they are capable of making things better in whatever way they think they can and a sense of personal responsibility for all of their actions could go far, imho.
Unfortunately pollution rarely works out this way. Firstly, there can be compelling interests to dictate what people may do on their own property - zoning laws tend to operate in this fashion. Secondly, due to the interconnectedness of things, what one person does on his own property may have dramatic effects on others: Imagine that you have a field of flowers and harvest them; when your neighbor spreads chemicals on his land that kill the bees that pollinate your flowers he's not directly touching your property, but is having an effect.
In the case of incessant advertising, the government does have the power to control commercial interests and has used this power to effectively limit their freedom of speech in the past, and it's quite constitutional. It's not absolute, and I'm not advocating total silence, but you'd be surprised at the degree to which businesses depend on government largess. Through this, they can be controlled. Would I want the same for real people? No, not really. But I draw a distinction between businesses and people; the latter have inalienable rights, the former may merely be granted some at whim or not at all.
Dont' worry - XBox will likely have TiVo-esque functionality. (but probably not as good and crippled by agreements with the networks et al)
I have a post frome more recently that puts forth a theory of why precisely MS is really getting into consoles. It's not for games.
Well, you just have to be careful about it. I'm certainly not for censorship, but that doesn't mean that I run around giving out my credit card information either.
So perhaps advertising that exceeded certain guidelines could result in the permanent revocation of the trademarks and copyrights held by the advertiser and used in that instance?
After all, advertisers aren't entitled to either - they're given by the government and it can take them away or attach strings. Do you really think that Nike or Microsoft would put their name in jeopardy?
It is their option to do this, no argument there.
/. community wouldn't spring up elsewhere if Andover went bankrupt?)
I will say, however, that I'm disappointed that the people who are in a position to prevent the world from becoming saturated with advertising are unwilling to take a stand against it.
The NYTimes does not _need_ to advertise that heavily; it's shortsighted, greedy behavior and is akin to a sort of 'psychic pollution.' When we let businesses get away with pollution, they did it and defended their ability to do so as 'necessary. ' Even today this is claimed, when it doesn't have to be so.
It certainly wouldn't be impossible to enact legislation that barred some or many advertisements - it's been done before, and could simply be a prerequisite of having a business license.
Personally, I will continue my practice of not only using advertising-supported services, but of avoiding the advertisements themselves. I owe publishers nothing:
*I change channels on the tv and radio and kill the volume (mute buttons were hotly decried by advertisers when first introduced, I understand)
*I fast forward through commercials
*I flip straight past ads in magazines
*I ignore billboards (though I do like the efforts of legitmate taggers)
What's so special about the web? I'll be damned if they get _my_ eyeballs, or I pay a subscription. I really don't care if they like it, and believe me, there's relatively little that could happen to impact me. (they really imagine that the
Feh - attackers cheat. They will likely go after the weakest link, which may end up being the hardware attached to the fiber, if you go that overboard. Honestly at the point when this is happening you've got much bigger problems: these guys are getting into your frickin' house, man.
Well the solution is well known. Install conduit, but have flamethrowers and crushers and such in it to keep things out unless they know just the right pattern to follow to get through unscathed ;)
Why is it fair?
Wouldn't this mean that the first person (and his heirs) to develop the concept of fairness should be entitled to royalties for your use of their concept?
Information just doesn't work like that. It's practically as though God designed it to flow trivially to others. We have constructed a rickety artifice of copyright, patents, etc. (generally collectively known as Intellectual Property, though it is not actually property) around it, but that doesn't mean that they're particularly useful or fair or desirable.
I think that if we are extremely careful we can tolerate minor limitations as an aid, but it should always be viewed as a tool and the purpose never forgotten. Both seem no longer to be the case, as evidenced by your comment. Modern copyright laws (which are the case here) are generally bunk. They may be repairable, but they're doing a pretty lousy job at the moment.
Heh heh heh. I see you weren't reading MacUser for a good stretch there in the late 80's and early 90's. Dvorak used to do the column in the back, and he is (or was until recently - I don't read him any more) a Mac user. He even did some promotional stuff with Apple around 92-93 when they started putting materials onto humorously named CDs. I still remember his column about computer theme parks, and the Steve Jobs Ride.
Really, I suspect he doesn't care much about any side. What he's interested in is stirring up trouble so that people read his columns and talk about them, and he can keep raking in money. Rather like PT Barnum, who didn't care if people praised him or pissed on him, as long as they spelled his name right.
I sincerely doubt that he dislikes the Tivo. Really, he's almost certainly counting on people generally loving the Tivo. This means that by griping (and not even having to do a good job of it b/c that would require too much effort) that he will remain a popular columnist and be able to make money from magazines who don't care if you agree with him, just as long as you saw their ads. (ironically enough)
The issue was that at the time, there just weren't any other materials that could be used to seal it that could withstand the heat et al later on in the flight. Rubber would never make it. In fact, they had to build the thing largely out of titanium which ironically was all imported from the Soviet Union. Lockheed had to learn a lot about how to work with titanium in a hurry, as I recall.
The scary thing is that the SR-71 (originally RS-71, but LBJ transposed the letters) was developed in the 60's, the F-117 in the 70's and the B-2 in the 80's. God knows what they've got now, and when we'll be let in on it.
Almost. The core tenet of UI is to make things more powerful and easier to use; part of the power is just unlocked by the ease of getting to it. But to actually suck away people's abilities to put tools to uses that the designers couldn't've imagined is quite contrary to good usability. If MS effectively controls microcomputing and PCs are turned into little more than terminals, that does not empower users.
Wow, what an amazingly bad post.
128 * 2 = 256
512kB is four times as much as 128kB. Which doesn't matter a hell of a lot, b/c IIRC the Lisa shipped with a full MB in '83. That little feat wouldn't be equalled until the Mac Plus came along. (barring various hacks) Really the Mac should've shipped with 256 - 512kB when it came out - especially given how much they were overcharging for it.
So basically, it'll still be another few months from release to when it's done. Isn't it funny how OS X is NEVER done? Ever? Hell, it was supposed to be out in '99, but Steve weasled his way out of it with OS X Server.
So basically, it'll still be another few months from release to when it's done. Isn't it funny how OS X is NEVER done? Ever? Hell, it was supposed to be out in '99, but Steve weasled his way out of it with OS X Server.
And I had a home system that never crashed under 9, and a work system that crashes routinely under 9. If someone asked me 'Is 9 stable?' I'd tell them no: i've seen it crash way too much to call it stable.
And I'd have to give the same answer for X. I have no doubt that some people will never get a crash or a lockup or anything. But if you can thump on it hard enough and get one, that makes it basically unstable. Given that I'm not even doing anything intensive on the X system that I'm trying out (like booting, which has panicked twice) there really should not be crashes.
It's not an acceptable piece of software for many reasons, and the one advantage we've been sold on for a decade hasn't even materialized.
I don't know - I'd agree that OS X is a giant step backwards in UI. Aside from eliminating some of the nicer features that took years to evolve on the Mac with features that never even had the opportunity to grow on NeXT, the graphics system is so bogged down now that responsiveness is poor, which is a major screwup when it comes to good UI. (or else users tend to overcorrect, or perceive the system as slow even if it's only the graphics that are, or think it hangs)
I mean, I've been putting together a list over the past couple of weeks and the UI flaws outweigh UI improvements by about 10:1.
As for Quartz, DPS was often very slow at many things, so I'm hardly surprised. But try running the little Quartz utility in the dev tools. You'll see what thrashes around on the cpu and what doesn't, and how slow it can get.
Lastly, I've had maybe 10 freezes and 2 kernel panics with totally vanilla hardware.
OS X is a lame, lame OS. It's keeping me on MacOS 9 for now, for despite the crashiness, it's _useful_. The future will likely be Win2K, which is at least no worse than OS X, and a lot cheaper all around, with more stuff and more of a future, despite the evilness of the parent company.
You know, it's funny how people bitch about the ANWR as though the Democrats could do no wrong, yet fail to ever mention the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska (NPRA) which had been closed since Harding, but was opened up by Clinton.
Both major parties suck.
Plywood would seem to be the obvious choice: it's many small piece of wood working together. And very strong, but very dense. ;)
(as opposed to hardboard, which is total crap: heavy and weak)
Are you kidding? There were votes regarding the stadiums. And construction lost. But the local government went ahead and did it anyway! That's the problem. (along with Allen trying to purchase as much of the city as possible)
You say that now. Imagine if this system had been put into place in 1980. Would you stick with your Apple II+ or C64? They're attacking us way the hell upstream, which gives them a substantial edge. And businesses are stupid and shortsighted, and motivated by money, so they have a reasonable chance of success.
The best attack is to not let it get implemented at all, ever. Ignoring by assuming that it can be cracked, or that it won't sell (even when there are no alternatives) is not going to help our side of things. We should also crack it, and also refuse to buy the hardware whenever possible, but that's not all that we should do.
DirecTV has done something similar; personally I've been expecting MS to introduce an autoupdate to Office at some point in the future that "slipped past QA testing" to force stragglers to adopt Office.Net. Naturally, updating won't be an option for the version or two immediately previous to .Net....
And viewers have no obligation to look at the ads. If they can block it out so that they never even become aware that there _are_ ads, they're entitled to. And since it's already paid for, you can even keep copies of the show forever. It's a great deal.
No one's making advertisers pay for TV either. If they can't adapt, too bad for them. It's certainly possible to have TV with no product ads - HBO's been doing it for years. They only advertise themselves....