Well, I cut my teeth on a Digital 8e with teletype terminal. 8^)
I don't know what you're doing on your machine to be able to consider OS X "snappy", but it can't be much.
Surfing while burning CDs in the background, while passing large amounts of data over FireWire to an external HD, moving data while image editing, etc. Things get sluggish sometimes but a logout/login usually fixes it (or, if not, a restart). OS X is a work in progress and it will get better. But, I can't help loving it even now. So sue me.
Bought a 500mhz iBook2 mostly on the promise of OSX and its BSD base. Even with 320 megs RAM, OSX is basically unusable.
And OSX, for all its eye candy, is useless unless you've got a completely new G4.
I've seen usable installations of OS X on beige G3s. You must be doing something wrong.
I've been running OS X on my 500MHz iBook (640MB RAM) and performance is snappy. I have very few complaints about OS X. Not sure what your problem is, but your experience is certainly not universal. I do notice some delays with page rendering but it's nothing I can't live with for now; I am looking forward to continued improvements.
By the same token, nobody guaranteed them perpetual customers.
Take away my flat rate and I'll be gone not only as a broadband internet customer, but as a cable TV and digital phone customer as well. And instead of telling my friends how great it is to have a cable modem hookup, I'll instead warn them to stay well away from it.
I don't mind paying more for "unlimited", but the option's gotta be there or the whole sevice loses most of its value for me.
I thought I would throw some counter arguments out there, and see what our responses to them would be:
How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
The same way that illegal distribution has always been stemmed: by going after the illegal distributors themselves. Useful technology cannot be prohibited simply because it might be used for illegal purposes.
Of course many people say that there's no point trying to restrict copying at all, that it flies in the face of the technology and that that particular genie is out of the bottle and won't go back. They argue that content producers should acknowledge this and simply find a revenue model that doesn't rely on copyright. Well the only one I can think of is the live concert/theatrical showing model - which would mean very significantly reduced revenues
This is not necessarily a bad thing. These people have been making money hand over fist for years and years. Do our top-name "entertainers" deserve these millions upon millions of dollars? Who do they think they are anyway, sports stars?
More to the point, do we need to impose draconian anti-copying fair-use-destroying laws that inhibit our ability to use available technology, just so these fat cats of the entertainment industry can continue to rake in the bucks? What makes them more deserving of all this moola than, say, ambulance drivers? Teachers? Firefighters? Are they so important to society?
and possibly no official content at all.
They would have their first-sale profit, and revenue from live/theatrical performances. They can and should also go after large-scale piracy operations, as they do under current laws (pre-DMCA). That ought to be enough. If they can't make as much money, that's too damn bad.
What your professor friend probably wants is to give you information. But first, you have to admit that you have a problem.
Heh. My problem is that I want to be able to watch a film and let myself get swept up in it, rather than subjecting every last bit of minutiae to tedious overanalysis.
The "experts" may know what they're talking about, but they don't seem to have as much fun.
No one should be allowed to rate movies until one has seen a broad enough range of movies to make a valid judgement. This must include a grounding in early cinema, silent pictures, non-American cinema, classic Hollywood cinema, cinema noir, angry-young-man school, B pictures, new wave cinema, independent cinema, amateur movies, etc.
I have a friend who's a university film professor, and he says things just like this.
He's also the last person in the world I'd want to see any movie with, because he doesn't like anything.
It just be super-revolutionary,but do we all really beleive Steve Job's comment that "cities will be built around it?" taking a looking at Time's 'scoop', i find that hardly possible.
In a way he was right. Cities will/have/ to be built around it for it to be practical. Just think of all the new locking "Segway racks" alongside (replacing?) the bike racks. Wider sidewalks and/or "Segway lanes" to accomodate the traffic.
I walk around the city every day. I own no car. There are already enough inconsiderate pedestrians out there who think they own the whole damn sidewalk. It's bad now, but imagine how obnoxious the people on these Segway things are going to be. They are going to be expecting ordinary pedestrians to do an irish jig to get out of the way every time one of them cruises by. Angry curse-laden bottlenecks will occur at handicapped ramps everywhere. It's a new class war waiting to happen, haves versus have-nots.
So, while the whole gyroscopic balancing thing is tres cool, I have to say keep these monstrosities OFF the sidewalks. They belong on the streets with the other wheeled vehicles.
Or on specialized courses... has anyone tried going Tony Hawk on one of these things yet?
The FCC would just LOVE to auction off the ham radio portions of the spectrum and make millions off of it. Indeed, with waning interest in ham radio, the FCC will be under heavy pressure to free up that spectrum. It'll probably start out with switching them over to "shared use", but once they have their feet in the door, a few years down the road the ham bands will start disappearing. This is just another case of big money having more political influence than the public interest.
Fortunately however, the ham bands are internationally regulated. The USA (or any individual nation) could not reallocate these frequencies to other services without securing those frequencies through ITU proceedings, which would be far more difficult than simply giving the FCC "heavy pressure".
It is important to remember that radio, particularly HF radio, knows no borders, and the FCC is not an international authority.
Most people probably don't realize that the Tick is a direct adaptation of the "Roach" superhero parody character from Dave Sim's Cerebus. Do you still keep up with Cerebus despite the fact that the Roach (and his attendant humor) have been missing from the story for 100 or so issues now? What do you think of how Cerebus has unfolded? Has Dave Sim, a notorious hater of the television medium, given you any grief over the new series?
It's quite the opposite in the UK... we never really had them and we don't want them!
Well I don't know about the UK, but I spent a few weeks in Holland, Belgium and Germany in early 1991 and had a number of opportunities to channel surf from hotel rooms, and I was amazed by the ubiquitousness of the "bug" on the European channels. These were big, bright, opaque and on-all-the-time logos. In 1991 the bugs were still a novelty in the US (with the exception of TBS). I surmised that in Europe, the fact that there were so many channels in so many languages in countries so close together was part of the justification for it, and I hoped that it wouldn't catch on in the USA.
As bad as they are, most are nowhere near as annoying as those European ones were. But, give them a few more years to refine them and they'll make them even worse.
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I find it amazing people can actually say this with a straight face.
I find it amazing that you can so blithely dismiss the testimonials of others simply because they do not coincide with your own experiences.
Well, I cut my teeth on a Digital 8e with teletype terminal. 8^)
I don't know what you're doing on your machine to be able to consider OS X "snappy", but it can't be much.
Surfing while burning CDs in the background, while passing large amounts of data over FireWire to an external HD, moving data while image editing, etc. Things get sluggish sometimes but a logout/login usually fixes it (or, if not, a restart). OS X is a work in progress and it will get better. But, I can't help loving it even now. So sue me.
And OSX, for all its eye candy, is useless unless you've got a completely new G4.
I've seen usable installations of OS X on beige G3s. You must be doing something wrong.
I've been running OS X on my 500MHz iBook (640MB RAM) and performance is snappy. I have very few complaints about OS X. Not sure what your problem is, but your experience is certainly not universal. I do notice some delays with page rendering but it's nothing I can't live with for now; I am looking forward to continued improvements.
By the same token, nobody guaranteed them perpetual customers.
Take away my flat rate and I'll be gone not only as a broadband internet customer, but as a cable TV and digital phone customer as well. And instead of telling my friends how great it is to have a cable modem hookup, I'll instead warn them to stay well away from it.
I don't mind paying more for "unlimited", but the option's gotta be there or the whole sevice loses most of its value for me.
Answer: we don't. It's bad laws like that which have opened the door to these other attempts to prohibit technology based on its potential uses.
(Note: do not use above argument with pro-gun-control legislators.)
How do you propose we stem illegal distribution of copyrighted material, other than mandating that copy-thwarting be built into any device that can read the original work?
The same way that illegal distribution has always been stemmed: by going after the illegal distributors themselves. Useful technology cannot be prohibited simply because it might be used for illegal purposes.
This would only work at my local pub if it was configured to give the bartender an electric shock.
That guy Novak seems so lawsuit-happy I wouldn't be surprised if he were drawing up his pro se papers against Salon and /. at this very moment.
Those who are driven to create will do so, whether or not there is monetary gain to be had. Art is not defined as a business.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. These people have been making money hand over fist for years and years. Do our top-name "entertainers" deserve these millions upon millions of dollars? Who do they think they are anyway, sports stars?
More to the point, do we need to impose draconian anti-copying fair-use-destroying laws that inhibit our ability to use available technology, just so these fat cats of the entertainment industry can continue to rake in the bucks? What makes them more deserving of all this moola than, say, ambulance drivers? Teachers? Firefighters? Are they so important to society?
and possibly no official content at all.
They would have their first-sale profit, and revenue from live/theatrical performances. They can and should also go after large-scale piracy operations, as they do under current laws (pre-DMCA). That ought to be enough. If they can't make as much money, that's too damn bad.
Yes, stay right there in your hobbit-hole with your books and don't even think about going on any adventures in the scary wild world! It's not safe!
Sheesh. If Bilbo had kept thinking like that, we wouldn't have had any story at all!
Heh. My problem is that I want to be able to watch a film and let myself get swept up in it, rather than subjecting every last bit of minutiae to tedious overanalysis.
The "experts" may know what they're talking about, but they don't seem to have as much fun.
I have a friend who's a university film professor, and he says things just like this.
He's also the last person in the world I'd want to see any movie with, because he doesn't like anything.
In a way he was right. Cities will /have/ to be built around it for it to be practical. Just think of all the new locking "Segway racks" alongside (replacing?) the bike racks. Wider sidewalks and/or "Segway lanes" to accomodate the traffic.
I walk around the city every day. I own no car. There are already enough inconsiderate pedestrians out there who think they own the whole damn sidewalk. It's bad now, but imagine how obnoxious the people on these Segway things are going to be. They are going to be expecting ordinary pedestrians to do an irish jig to get out of the way every time one of them cruises by. Angry curse-laden bottlenecks will occur at handicapped ramps everywhere. It's a new class war waiting to happen, haves versus have-nots.
So, while the whole gyroscopic balancing thing is tres cool, I have to say keep these monstrosities OFF the sidewalks. They belong on the streets with the other wheeled vehicles.
Or on specialized courses... has anyone tried going Tony Hawk on one of these things yet?
Fortunately however, the ham bands are internationally regulated. The USA (or any individual nation) could not reallocate these frequencies to other services without securing those frequencies through ITU proceedings, which would be far more difficult than simply giving the FCC "heavy pressure".
It is important to remember that radio, particularly HF radio, knows no borders, and the FCC is not an international authority.
Most people probably don't realize that the Tick is a direct adaptation of the "Roach" superhero parody character from Dave Sim's Cerebus. Do you still keep up with Cerebus despite the fact that the Roach (and his attendant humor) have been missing from the story for 100 or so issues now? What do you think of how Cerebus has unfolded? Has Dave Sim, a notorious hater of the television medium, given you any grief over the new series?
Well I don't know about the UK, but I spent a few weeks in Holland, Belgium and Germany in early 1991 and had a number of opportunities to channel surf from hotel rooms, and I was amazed by the ubiquitousness of the "bug" on the European channels. These were big, bright, opaque and on-all-the-time logos. In 1991 the bugs were still a novelty in the US (with the exception of TBS). I surmised that in Europe, the fact that there were so many channels in so many languages in countries so close together was part of the justification for it, and I hoped that it wouldn't catch on in the USA.
As bad as they are, most are nowhere near as annoying as those European ones were. But, give them a few more years to refine them and they'll make them even worse.