OK, but we're talking about replacing hard drives in Apple PowerBooks. What about all those PowerBooks Apple sells to people who want to run Final Cut Pro on location at a video shoot? You really want to do video editing on a piece of hardware that doesn't perform well on sequential reads?
Re:mod parent up! rights are socially constructed
on
Adopt a [Chinese] Blog
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· Score: 1
Perfect example. A boat is not buoyant in air, in fact it has very little function (except maybe as a kind of hut). If you came from a culture on a water planet, you might feel that every citizen has a right to a shipshape boat (because, after all, if you didn't have a boat you'd eventually sink and drown). If you came from a culture that lived in cloud cities, on the other hand, that "right" might seem pretty perplexing.
Nobody gives you rights. You have rights. There are only people trying to take them away.
That's one way of looking at it. Somebody else might say your opinion is total nonsense. Society grants you rights. What rights you have are completely determined by the prevailing culture around you. American culture might say women have the right to wear whatever they want, bare their midriffs in public etc. Fundamentalist Muslim culture might say men have a right not to be tempted to immoral action by the flagrant sexual advances of women who are not their wives. I think we can all agree that certain rights are inalienable and universal -- the right not to be murdered, for example. But after that there's a lot of gray area. The original rights the founding fathers of the United States thought were inalienable were not life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; they were life, liberty, and property. Clearly there was debate as to what was considered a "right" even back then.
I, as a print journalist, get annoyed when I'm tarred with the same brush as some lightweight passing off some prepackaged newstainment as journalism.
You think print journalism is immune to what I'm talking about? What do you call USA Today? The front page of an average issue of the San Francisco Chronicle consists mostly of material culled from wire services. You think that's not indicative of an overall decline in media quality?
Also, just because 60 Minutes was successful doesn't mean it was bad. On the contrary, I presume the reason it was so successful was because it did such an unprecedentedly good job of bringing real news to the television medium. If the heads of major media corporation started putting pressure on news outfits to make a profit, you can hardly blame the first one that did really well at a time when nobody expected the news to do so.
And besides, I'd argue that this kind of pressure only started getting levelled at news organizations after two things happened: 1.) the massive media consolidation we've seen in the past decade or so; and 2.) 24-hour cable news cannibalized the ad revenue of the traditional broadcast networks' evening news programs, causing panic among the producers in charge of those shows.
Curious to know what news outlet you work for. You may e-mail me that information if you prefer, but you'll have to figure out how.
Can't be too specific, but I'd say that the news media in this country was far superior during most of the 20th century, up to and including the launch of CNN, and you can probably use CNN as your gauge for when it started to suck. If you can turn on CNN and expect to see good news coverage (as opposed to 8 hours of coverage on the "Runaway Bride" in a single day), then you're living in the "time" I'm talking about.
The kind of bad journalism I'm thinking of isn't really the blatantly corrupt, partisan reporting of a Fox News, either. That's one part of it. But even if you agreed with the current political climate in the U.S., you still have the problem of the gradual shift away from news as an public informational resource toward the concept of news as entertainment media. News media alter their coverage, not because of their political aims, but because they're afraid the public will get bored and change the channel. That's bad.
Too much focus on tech
on
Codex
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The reviewer himself says that technology, open source, and so forth isn't really central to the story. And he's right, so it's odd to see everybody focusing so much on that.
Codex isn't a techno-thriller. Really, when I read it my immediate reaction was that it was part of this strange subgenre that seems to have popped up in "literary" fiction these days, namely suspense thrillers about books. I guess it's only natural, considering that the size of the reading populus seems to be ever-shrinking, that authors would eventually start writing fiction that involves characters who are more like today's readers -- in other words, people who are really into books.
Other books along these lines, off the top of my head, might include The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, or The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Tomason. I haven't read the last one but either of the first two is probably better than Codex, even though The Club Dumas has a notoriously frustrating ending.
When does Luke declare himself to be a Jedi? When he throws his weapon away. He STOPS FIGHTING. That was when he claimed is rightful status.
Not to be an apologist for Lucas because I think the new trilogy is weak in numerous ways, but... the two main Jedi of focus in the new trilogy are Anakin and Obi-Wan. You'll notice Anakin had the same scene in "Revenge of the Sith" as Luke had in "Return of the Jedi," only with Count Dooku. It's one of those "parellels" Lucas is always talking about. There's Anakin, he's beaten Dooku, there's Chancellor Palpatine in the background saying, "Kill him," and in this case Anakin doesn't throw away his weapon. That's the difference between Luke and Anakin... get it?
And as far as the cutting-off of heads, most of those "guys" are spindly little robots.
Seriously, we scientists, engineers and mathematicians should hold the media to task for its blatant disregard for truth and justice.
At one time, the media was held to codes of practice and ethics that were comparable to any standards to which scientists hold themselves. You could reasonably expect news from any respected news outlet to be well-researched, factual, and delivered in the interest of providing reasonably unbiased information to the public. Over time, the influence of American corporate culture on the media has eroded this ethic. (This is often referred to as "the commercial realities" of media, but this is only an apologist view of a very significant ideological shift that has taken place among the power elite over the last few decades.)
The really sad thing is, judging from some of the current headlines, the field of science is next.
Headline: "Bush Invents Cure For Cancer". Reaction: "Nice way to make us forget the people he killed in Iraq." I'd certainly applaud Bush if he came up with a cure for cancer. Probably that would be the best thing he could do for his legacy right now. If he managed it, then there would actually be some debate as to whether he saved more lives than he took.
Headline: "Bush Finds Way To Rebuild WTC For Free". Reaction: "Good, because he knocked them down in the first place." I'm not one of these "Bush was responsible for 9/11" people -- show me some evidence -- but if he was responsible (as you seem to be assuming here) then isn't that still one of the most monstrous acts ever perpetrated by a Western leader against his own people, short of Nero burning Rome? How would rebuilding the WTC erase that?
Headline: "Bush Dissolves Army, Discovers Unlimited Energy, and Unveils Free Health Care With Raising Taxes Plan". Reaction: "Bet Halliburton will make money off this!" Now you're inviting a philosophical debate. Is a systemically corrupt government acceptable if it achieves noble ends? In other words, does the end justify the means?
I thank you for raising these important moral and philosophical issues. You may find you have picked the wrong forum for them, however.
The difference is that putting a hole in a piece of paper may have been obvious, but doing it with a one-handed contraption that includes a coiled spring and a metal punch head, such that when you squeeze the levers it punches a hole and then returns the levers to their original position was not... and that's what you would have had to patent. "Method and system for putting a hole in a piece of paper using a metal punch" would not have cut it, and yet this is exactly the kind of patent they seem to be handing out to the software industry. Have you read the Amazon patent abstract? It basically says, "a client wants to buy something, so they send a request to the server, and the server assigns them an ID..."
Power Computing clones weren't better. They just used the faster processors sooner than Apple could get them to market. All that other stuff the clones brought, like supporting PS/2 keyboards and mice, was just cruft. Apple didn't supply drivers for the CD-ROM drives Power Computing shipped, so you had to run CD-ROM Toolkit. Build quality wasn't so hot either. Overall, those boxes may have been fast (for the time) but they were hardly better than Apples.
Apple cannot survive as a generic PC manufacturer unless it can beat everyone else on price, including Dell.
Lucky for Apple, then, that it's not a generic PC manufacturer. It has always been a supplier of high-end, premium hardware and there's no reason to suspect that's going to change. I'm actually shocked that there doesn't seem to be anyone with Apple's business model in the Wintel space. The premium hardware vendors are companies like AlienWare, targeting gamers. Powerful hardware, perhaps, but certainly not classy like a Mac. I'm sure Apple will find a welcome niche among a certain class of computer users, just as it always has. In fact, I'm not expecting very much to change about Apple's market, or its products, at all.
People have been saying for years that Apple would go belly-up if it didn't let third party OEMs manufacture Apple clones. The truth is that all the clones did was eat into Apple's customer base while at the same time damaging its platform's brand image among consumers (because many of the clones sort of sucked -- a Umax Mac may have been cheaper, but certainly was not better than a genuine Apple, by a long shot).
Apple's more financially successful now than it has been in years. Why would they bring back the clones now?
Remember, folks: Clones are a subversive plot by the evil Emperor. Vote no on Apple clones.
Intel is big into making all kinds of chips these days, not just CPUs. For a while they've been big on this "digital home" kick, too. Clearly they see the future for the semiconductor market being in more than just PCs. The only problem there is that Intel just has absolutely no clue how to market products to end consumers. They know how to move chips, not Webcams. If a partnership with Apple means Intel can get its chips into future digital consumer devices more easily and see those products become market leaders through Apple's genius product design and marketing, that can't be all bad.
InfoWorld still runs a column by yet another columnist who goes by the name Robert X. Cringeley. It's sort of an IT industry gossip/society column, and it's often actually pretty good.
They don't look square, they look as though it's a perspective drawing, which a map isn't supposed to be. Check out a similar Yahoo Map for comparison. If you put a protractor down on a printout of that map, you'd see 90 degree angles (more or less, I suspect). Not so on the Google version.
a SETTLEMENT in a criminal case after being found guilty? Unimaginable.
That may be your first clue that this wasn't a criminal case. Sun Microsystems brought a complaint to the Commission of European Communities claiming that Microsoft's business practices went against EU treaties. Hardly the same thing as being tried for robbery or murder. You can read the details of the case for more.
"His fellow students were so proud of him and congratulatory. They thought it was really, really cool. They didn't call him a nerd or anything," said Michael Bolling, a school official in Chesterfield County.
Damn, Mike, that's cold! Why don't you pick on somebody your own size, instead of a 12-year-old??
That's why all those RAW file formats for each camera are different from company to company. They gain the most benefit by locking you into a certain piece of software and forcing you along their upgrade path.
So shoot in JPEG. Seriously, I don't get the complaint here. If JPEG isn't good enough for you and RAW comes with some restrictions you find unpalatable and that prevent you from doing good work as a photographer, then it sounds like digital cameras aren't for you. Am I wrong? Why does everything have to be a draconian conspiracy theory? The camera companies want to close their RAW formats because they feel this is the best way to ensure themselves profits. If you can convince them that it would be more profitable in the long run to sell a camera with an open RAW file format, they'll do so. Obviously the demand isn't really there, except on forums like/. (And the caveat is, they'd open the file format but find another way to make a buck off you, because that's what companies do. Remember when you actually had to buy film and have it developed?)
Even if their denial of including hidden DRM tech is completely true, it justifies the original story, and the community reaction against the idea which clearly produced this denial.
In other words, "When will Intel stop beating its wife?"
This is "informative"? Care to cite a source for all this wisdom you're disseminating? I've heard nothing about special chips in any of the numerous Longhorn press releases (which keep getting re-issued as the ship date marches further and further forward). Microsoft's own page on Trustworthy Computing says they have no illusions that achieving "trustworthiness" will be a quick or easy thing, though it does say the initiative includes things as innovative as (whoah) integrating anti-spam and antivirus features into Outlook. Methinks you've got the tinfoil wrapped a little too tightly around your head.
...I want to know how this fee actually contributes to better recycling of computer parts. I live in California and I recently paid something like an $8 fee on the purchase of an LCD monitor, supposedly to cover recycling costs. Whose costs are these, exactly? As in... how does it help me recycle my monitor when I want to get rid of it? I think I looked it up once... there is one place that accepts monitors for recycling in San Francisco, and it's actually in South San Francisco (which is a whole different city, literally).
It reminds me a lot of the 2.5 cent deposit we pay on every bottle and can we buy in San Francisco. How do we recycle all those bottles and cans? We have curbside recycling. How does curbside recycling get paid for? Why, we pay for it, of course -- as in, it gets added to our garbage bill. So in other words, we pay 2.5 cents at the register as a deposit toward recycling, then we have to pay each month for the privilege of actually doing the recycling, and yet on top of that we don't ever see the deposit back. What gives? Where's this deposit going? And where's the $8 from my monitor sale going? Will it at least go toward establishing a facility in downtown San Francisco where I can take my old monitor? Because, so far as I know, it's illegal to put monitors in landfills in San Francisco now.
OK, that was a totally awesome example. It's only recently that I've switched from a Mac desktop to going pretty exclusively with Windows XP at home and at work, so I know exactly the kind of configuration loop-de-loops and rabbit hunts you're talking about. They seem to be everywhere in Windows, especially when you add additional layers like Media Center Edition (Nvidia driver configuration, anyone?)
But here's the thing: Say your car breaks down. When you call a mechanic, does he try to diagnose it on the phone? Does he have you go out to the driveway with your mobile phone, gun the engine and hold the phone up to the radiator grill, then tell you to slowly ease off the gas while you read numbers off the temperature gauge for him? No. The mechanic makes the diagnosis and does the repairs for you. That's his job.
A typical install of any of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux arguably has more layers of complexity to it than even a modern passenger car. Why are we assuming that the user will know how to make repairs on it just based on a chat on the phone about it with a qualified "mechanic"? That's silly. You should have somebody to work on your computer for you, just like you'd expect a qualified professional to work on your car.
The real problem might be the number of times the computer breaks down, versus the number of times a car does. A car won't break down just because you parked it next to somebody else's car while you went shopping for groceries. A computer, on the other hand, could very easily "break down" because you plugged it into the wrong network. If you put the wrong gas into a car, it might not perform as well as it used to. But once you switch back to Premium, everything should be fine again. Install RealPlayer, on the other hand, and suddenly Windows Media Player might not launch when you double click on MP3s anymore. What happened? Where has it gone? How to get it back?
These things are what makes computing a real drag. But they're not always the fault of Windows. Succeptibility to viruses is one thing, but the Mac OS isn't immune from the other kind of "broken," which is arguably more common. Should operating systems not launch default applications when you double click on document icons, and should it not be possible to change those defaults? Kudos to Apple for helping to reduce the apparent complexity of its systems, but menus, buttons, and widgets aren't the only source of frustration for end users.
Really, the only thing that makes it possible for me to operate computers -- Mac, Windows, and Linux -- better than most of the people I know is years and years and years of experience and education. Reducing complexity is a worthwhile goal but I can't see it ever being the real "solution."
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Perfect example. A boat is not buoyant in air, in fact it has very little function (except maybe as a kind of hut). If you came from a culture on a water planet, you might feel that every citizen has a right to a shipshape boat (because, after all, if you didn't have a boat you'd eventually sink and drown). If you came from a culture that lived in cloud cities, on the other hand, that "right" might seem pretty perplexing.
Also, just because 60 Minutes was successful doesn't mean it was bad. On the contrary, I presume the reason it was so successful was because it did such an unprecedentedly good job of bringing real news to the television medium. If the heads of major media corporation started putting pressure on news outfits to make a profit, you can hardly blame the first one that did really well at a time when nobody expected the news to do so.
And besides, I'd argue that this kind of pressure only started getting levelled at news organizations after two things happened: 1.) the massive media consolidation we've seen in the past decade or so; and 2.) 24-hour cable news cannibalized the ad revenue of the traditional broadcast networks' evening news programs, causing panic among the producers in charge of those shows.
Curious to know what news outlet you work for. You may e-mail me that information if you prefer, but you'll have to figure out how.
Can't be too specific, but I'd say that the news media in this country was far superior during most of the 20th century, up to and including the launch of CNN, and you can probably use CNN as your gauge for when it started to suck. If you can turn on CNN and expect to see good news coverage (as opposed to 8 hours of coverage on the "Runaway Bride" in a single day), then you're living in the "time" I'm talking about.
The kind of bad journalism I'm thinking of isn't really the blatantly corrupt, partisan reporting of a Fox News, either. That's one part of it. But even if you agreed with the current political climate in the U.S., you still have the problem of the gradual shift away from news as an public informational resource toward the concept of news as entertainment media. News media alter their coverage, not because of their political aims, but because they're afraid the public will get bored and change the channel. That's bad.
Codex isn't a techno-thriller. Really, when I read it my immediate reaction was that it was part of this strange subgenre that seems to have popped up in "literary" fiction these days, namely suspense thrillers about books. I guess it's only natural, considering that the size of the reading populus seems to be ever-shrinking, that authors would eventually start writing fiction that involves characters who are more like today's readers -- in other words, people who are really into books.
Other books along these lines, off the top of my head, might include The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, or The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Tomason. I haven't read the last one but either of the first two is probably better than Codex, even though The Club Dumas has a notoriously frustrating ending.
And as far as the cutting-off of heads, most of those "guys" are spindly little robots.
The really sad thing is, judging from some of the current headlines, the field of science is next.
- Headline: "Bush Invents Cure For Cancer". Reaction: "Nice way to make us forget the people he killed in Iraq."
-
Headline: "Bush Finds Way To Rebuild WTC For Free". Reaction: "Good, because he knocked them down in the first place."
- Headline: "Bush Dissolves Army, Discovers Unlimited Energy, and Unveils Free Health Care With Raising Taxes Plan". Reaction: "Bet Halliburton will make money off this!"
I thank you for raising these important moral and philosophical issues. You may find you have picked the wrong forum for them, however.I'd certainly applaud Bush if he came up with a cure for cancer. Probably that would be the best thing he could do for his legacy right now. If he managed it, then there would actually be some debate as to whether he saved more lives than he took.
I'm not one of these "Bush was responsible for 9/11" people -- show me some evidence -- but if he was responsible (as you seem to be assuming here) then isn't that still one of the most monstrous acts ever perpetrated by a Western leader against his own people, short of Nero burning Rome? How would rebuilding the WTC erase that?
Now you're inviting a philosophical debate. Is a systemically corrupt government acceptable if it achieves noble ends? In other words, does the end justify the means?
The difference is that putting a hole in a piece of paper may have been obvious, but doing it with a one-handed contraption that includes a coiled spring and a metal punch head, such that when you squeeze the levers it punches a hole and then returns the levers to their original position was not ... and that's what you would have had to patent. "Method and system for putting a hole in a piece of paper using a metal punch" would not have cut it, and yet this is exactly the kind of patent they seem to be handing out to the software industry. Have you read the Amazon patent abstract? It basically says, "a client wants to buy something, so they send a request to the server, and the server assigns them an ID..."
Power Computing clones weren't better. They just used the faster processors sooner than Apple could get them to market. All that other stuff the clones brought, like supporting PS/2 keyboards and mice, was just cruft. Apple didn't supply drivers for the CD-ROM drives Power Computing shipped, so you had to run CD-ROM Toolkit. Build quality wasn't so hot either. Overall, those boxes may have been fast (for the time) but they were hardly better than Apples.
But not the one that currently writes for InfoWorld. The one that does "I, Cringely" is the one who hosted the PBS shows.
People have been saying for years that Apple would go belly-up if it didn't let third party OEMs manufacture Apple clones. The truth is that all the clones did was eat into Apple's customer base while at the same time damaging its platform's brand image among consumers (because many of the clones sort of sucked -- a Umax Mac may have been cheaper, but certainly was not better than a genuine Apple, by a long shot).
Apple's more financially successful now than it has been in years. Why would they bring back the clones now?
Remember, folks: Clones are a subversive plot by the evil Emperor. Vote no on Apple clones.
Intel is big into making all kinds of chips these days, not just CPUs. For a while they've been big on this "digital home" kick, too. Clearly they see the future for the semiconductor market being in more than just PCs. The only problem there is that Intel just has absolutely no clue how to market products to end consumers. They know how to move chips, not Webcams. If a partnership with Apple means Intel can get its chips into future digital consumer devices more easily and see those products become market leaders through Apple's genius product design and marketing, that can't be all bad.
InfoWorld still runs a column by yet another columnist who goes by the name Robert X. Cringeley. It's sort of an IT industry gossip/society column, and it's often actually pretty good.
They don't look square, they look as though it's a perspective drawing, which a map isn't supposed to be. Check out a similar Yahoo Map for comparison. If you put a protractor down on a printout of that map, you'd see 90 degree angles (more or less, I suspect). Not so on the Google version.
This is "informative"? Care to cite a source for all this wisdom you're disseminating? I've heard nothing about special chips in any of the numerous Longhorn press releases (which keep getting re-issued as the ship date marches further and further forward). Microsoft's own page on Trustworthy Computing says they have no illusions that achieving "trustworthiness" will be a quick or easy thing, though it does say the initiative includes things as innovative as (whoah) integrating anti-spam and antivirus features into Outlook. Methinks you've got the tinfoil wrapped a little too tightly around your head.
...I want to know how this fee actually contributes to better recycling of computer parts. I live in California and I recently paid something like an $8 fee on the purchase of an LCD monitor, supposedly to cover recycling costs. Whose costs are these, exactly? As in ... how does it help me recycle my monitor when I want to get rid of it? I think I looked it up once... there is one place that accepts monitors for recycling in San Francisco, and it's actually in South San Francisco (which is a whole different city, literally).
It reminds me a lot of the 2.5 cent deposit we pay on every bottle and can we buy in San Francisco. How do we recycle all those bottles and cans? We have curbside recycling. How does curbside recycling get paid for? Why, we pay for it, of course -- as in, it gets added to our garbage bill. So in other words, we pay 2.5 cents at the register as a deposit toward recycling, then we have to pay each month for the privilege of actually doing the recycling, and yet on top of that we don't ever see the deposit back. What gives? Where's this deposit going? And where's the $8 from my monitor sale going? Will it at least go toward establishing a facility in downtown San Francisco where I can take my old monitor? Because, so far as I know, it's illegal to put monitors in landfills in San Francisco now.
OK, that was a totally awesome example. It's only recently that I've switched from a Mac desktop to going pretty exclusively with Windows XP at home and at work, so I know exactly the kind of configuration loop-de-loops and rabbit hunts you're talking about. They seem to be everywhere in Windows, especially when you add additional layers like Media Center Edition (Nvidia driver configuration, anyone?)
But here's the thing: Say your car breaks down. When you call a mechanic, does he try to diagnose it on the phone? Does he have you go out to the driveway with your mobile phone, gun the engine and hold the phone up to the radiator grill, then tell you to slowly ease off the gas while you read numbers off the temperature gauge for him? No. The mechanic makes the diagnosis and does the repairs for you. That's his job.
A typical install of any of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux arguably has more layers of complexity to it than even a modern passenger car. Why are we assuming that the user will know how to make repairs on it just based on a chat on the phone about it with a qualified "mechanic"? That's silly. You should have somebody to work on your computer for you, just like you'd expect a qualified professional to work on your car.
The real problem might be the number of times the computer breaks down, versus the number of times a car does. A car won't break down just because you parked it next to somebody else's car while you went shopping for groceries. A computer, on the other hand, could very easily "break down" because you plugged it into the wrong network. If you put the wrong gas into a car, it might not perform as well as it used to. But once you switch back to Premium, everything should be fine again. Install RealPlayer, on the other hand, and suddenly Windows Media Player might not launch when you double click on MP3s anymore. What happened? Where has it gone? How to get it back?
These things are what makes computing a real drag. But they're not always the fault of Windows. Succeptibility to viruses is one thing, but the Mac OS isn't immune from the other kind of "broken," which is arguably more common. Should operating systems not launch default applications when you double click on document icons, and should it not be possible to change those defaults? Kudos to Apple for helping to reduce the apparent complexity of its systems, but menus, buttons, and widgets aren't the only source of frustration for end users.
Really, the only thing that makes it possible for me to operate computers -- Mac, Windows, and Linux -- better than most of the people I know is years and years and years of experience and education. Reducing complexity is a worthwhile goal but I can't see it ever being the real "solution."