After looking at the assorted websites and reviews (plus the "we're being/.ed so be kind to us" opener), I have to say that this is a cool piece of tech.
For $200, I may just buy one to piss off/delight (depending on the moon cycle) my girlfriend, who takes pride in keeping her slovenly geek-boy's living conditions pristine. (she deserves a medal for that, BTW).
I'm just waiting for version 2.0 (which you know is coming).
Combine the preset programs of it's current mode of operation with a second set of pathfinding and room mapping (tape lines for the inital ala some consumer 'bots?) instructions.
Then the thing would be able to use one mode to find its way to the middle of each room to be cleaned, and be able to drive itself back to the charger, switching between mapping/pathfinding modes as necessary.
Add some floor wax and oscillating brushes, and this thing will rank pretty close to some of those old Popular Science predictions.
Regardless, one hell of a great pilot release, and kudos on the price point!
Uh, hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing as "truth in advertising" -- it's all as gray as it gets. Do you really think that your waitress will come over and lick your hair if you use Maxim haircoloring? C'mon.
No easter bunny or Santa Claus, either.
And the Lone Gunmen are dead (while I'm busy ripping apart your consumer conditioning).
[even further offtopic: is LGD an acceptable acronym now?]
Seriously, though -- perception is reality.
In advertising & pr we're paid to sell our clients' shit. Shit being: image, brand or product. No more, no less. We're making the perception for the consumer. The consumer turns that perception into their own reality.
Did you know that ad and marketing people cruise discussion boards including/. IGN, Amazon to give positive reviews to movies, games, gear and other products? They call that particular form of spin "grassroots" or "planting a seed".
In bars, you'll have teams of women out together ordering and being vocal about some new drink that they love. Ever wonder how Red Bull & vodka came about?
In the media you see segments about...oh, I don't know... duct tape being a cure for warts. I got $20 that that's a packaged advertorial and the study was paid for by the manufacturer. You see prepackaged advertorial on CNN and your local news all the time.
As a matter of fact, copy and paste has made PR drones' lives much easier since most reporters and editors don't even bother editing press releases passed off as news.
These are just a few examples. But they're everywhere. And every publicly voiced opinion about anything (down to politics) is suspect.
In any job, sooner or later you're going to have to cut a corner that doesn't sit too well with you because of management or client pressure. As geeks/programmers, we should all know that far too well.
Your job in advertising is to sell. Period. If a widget sucks, you can't say that outright and expect sales, can you?
So the answer to the burning question is that yes, at first, there are sleepless nights. Then you get desensitied to the whole mess and realize that you're being paid for a service: to make the client happy, and to give them positive ROI. Later, you burn out on the whole mess and can't stand to watch TV or read an ad in the paper without getting hyper cynical.
For the record, that's the stage I'm in now (can you tell?) -- I've since left agency work and started my own business -- although I'll illustrate or code something freelance for agencies from time to time because I've got that connection.
There is a *lot* of burnout and churn in agency work for precisely those reasons -- not to mention the fact that if the client pays for and approves a job, then gets caught for using marketing tactics -- chances are very likely that the agency will be publicly humiliated -- for doing the job that's expected of them.
On the other hand, the term "hell client" gets new meaning when the client singles out an *employee* at the firm and publicly humiliates (sanctions? WTF? LMAO and all that) them for doing their job.
To answer your other question, I'm not catholic. As a matter of fact, I don't know many catholics in the advertising business. Perhaps you're on to something with the whole guilt thing?;-)
It's closer to "Ah, the new campaign is ready. 18 hours straight of sleep, then I'm gonna drink myself into a coma and sleep another 18 before I have to start the next job and not sleep for ANOTHER week until it's done."
I come from an advertising & PR background with several small to medium sized agencies.
First off: I'd wager that 90% of the testimonials you see in advertising are manufactured by the agency using their own employees. I've done it, and just about everyone I've known in the business at smaller agencies have done it. We also lend our voices to TV/Radio spots on occasion, and also appear in photo shoots from time to time when the budget or deadline are too tight to solicit (read: pay) professionals/real people.
Secondly: This is always done with the client's complete knowledge.
MS is playing a big game of CYA right now, and the agency is falling on their sword and taking the blame. That's how it works.
Their little stunt backfired on them, so they're spinning the blame to the PR/ad agency.
This sort of thing goes on every day, although not usually as high profile (or embarassing) as this particular case, which delights me to no end.
MS has been steal^H^H^H^H^H emulating Apple for how many years now? And they still can't get it right. Betcha 'ol Steve is laughing his turtlenecked ass off about this one, not to mention the folks at Chiat Day (Apple's agency).
Perhaps you should download a demo of PC MacLAN and install that on the XP machine.
You should be able to bind Appletalk to the Infrared port on MacLAN.
From there, you assign infrared on the Mac (in OS 9 or X) to be the current Appletalk port, restart file sharing and away you go.
Seriously, though: go for the Airport/Orinoco 802.11 card option. It's one hell of a lot faster and more reliable. You're not gonna be able to do Unreal Tourney or Warcraft matches (very well) over IR because the speed is too low and the latency is too high. You've also got line-of-sight issues. Just try synching a palm over IR and you'll see what I mean. It's freaking SLOW.
I'm also curious how you got an iBook with an IR port.;) USB add-on maybe?
"Seen at CNN, this article interviews Rick McCallum, longtime producer at LucasFilms will be responsible for the downfall of the movie industry..."
Is what I read at first, and I thought to myself, "Self, CNN: +1 (Insightful)"
Then I reread it.
At any rate, modern Hollywood is in many ways the bastard child of George Lucas. All of the wildly over-hyped 200 bajillion dollar "event movies" with their associated marketing tie-ins, and advertising budgets larger than the film's budget and action figures have been the downfall of *HOLLYWOOD*.
And just so we get this straight: Hollywood (usually) != good films. But Hollywood == the *current* US box office, in most markets.
My logic here is that the average american moviegoer has realized that "spectacle" films usually suck. Higher budgets = higher ticket prices and the same tripe playing on 100 screens in a single market. [insert witty stuff about the ripple effect down to the $8 tub of popcorn here]
Major studio pressure and their marketing dollars are the reason that I routinely have to take weekend road trips of 200 miles (or 1200 to NYC, as the case may be) to see Igby Goes Down, Chunhyang, Gods & Monsters, Henry Fool, Amelie, Metropolis or an actual worthwhile film in the theatre, because cinemas in Jacksonville, FL (technically a 3rd-tier city) rarely get anything indie or foreign any more, and when they do it's of the "feel-good-$nationality-wedding" variety. And those are NOT obscure films.
Lucasfilm (and Hollywood by emulating the Star Wars franchise for their big-money films) have dug their own grave. That strategy worked for 25 years. I've been hoping for at least 10 that the American consumer would get wise to it so I could get indie and foreign films in my market again.
So to Mr. McCallum: my deepest regrets that you only cleared $45 million on your opening weekend of Episode II.
Since this obviously wasn't satisfactory enough, do us all a favor and not even bother with Episode 3. I left the theatre after both your last two films feeling violated like a parking meter. Fool me twice, shame on me.
You're not getting me a third time.
Do yourself a favor and rent Amelie. It's a big-budget (for the French) film with heart, soul, style, 3 dimensional characters and a fucking story.
Compare that to anything coming out of the big studios and tell me with a straight face that DVD is what's killing the box office, besides the fact that most (sane) people won't fly to NYC for a weekend just to see a good film and will wait for video.
For Christ's sake, Warcraft III had better effects, character and story than Episode II. And that's a *VIDEO GAME* with a fraction of LDL's budget.
The power cords on the original iMacs (and every desktop Mac to date beforehand besides the cube) were industry-standard "D" plugs.
The new flat-panel iMac is also a "D" plug, but the plastic molding around it is shaped kinda funny in a cloverleaf pattern, and it plugs in flush with the back of the unit to keep from breaking any lines, design-wise.
You could take a dremel/exacto and a lot of patience to a standard power plug and it would work. But it would be really, really ugly.
If worse came to worse and my cord shorted out/got chewed up by something, I'd probably order the Apple part instead of trying a hack. The new iMacs are just so nice looking, it'd be a shame to detract from it.
most guys would not jump at the chance to beta test a video game in which the main character was an incredibly ripped half-naked man with thong underwear and an incredibly unrealistic buldge in his crotch clearly outlining every detail of his oversized genitals as they freely bounced around in ancient tombs.
Sounds like the Mark of Kree, just to pull the first image off the top of my head. Rygar? Conan?
You don't even need a hack. Fire up the terminal, cd to/Volumes/iPod/ and copy away.
The folder just has an invisible bit on it. Can't see it in the Finder (at least not without Tinkertool or other hacks), but it shows up in the BSD layer just fine.
See, Apple's got it right. The user base is smart enough to crack anything that comes out -- no matter how oppressive. Apple knows that, and they make a *very* *small* effort to appease the entertainment industry, because they have to -- at face.
You give people who are honest an incentive to remain honest (making it *slightly* annoying to get MP3s off the iPod, and putting "don't steal music" stickers on their gear/ads)
You don't worry about the rest of the people out there, because it's an excersise in futility akin to chasing your own tail.
Apple & Jobs still have more than a little bit of hippy in them, even if they seem draconian at times. And in this age of impending DRM-hell, I'm still glad I made the platform choice I made 15 years ago. Very, very glad.
I've found that most stuff I've wanted to do under the command line os GUI under OS X, from getting sendmail working properly on developer betas on to other, more specialized stuff can be found at one of the two following sites.
Piles of customization and installation information for all versions of X client/server. Almost always the hint I'm looking for is here, with/.-style user follow-up responses and clarifications.
Has custom-compiled packages of the biggies: PHP, Apache, mySQL, Postgres, ImageMagick and several others. Also has build instructions for the more difficult ones (ImageMagick comes to mind... I tried manually compiling it with different options for days and it would never link the correct libraries). He also has a hints section on his site.
Between these two sites and Google, I've been able to find answers to just about every problem/issue that I've come across in the 2+ years of using OS X.
That said, the OS X for Unix Geeks is a solid book, although so much changes between point releases of OS X (one of my major grievances... why must Apple always replace my custom PHP and Apache, or do weird, undocumented stuff to the default umask for the ftpd?) that you really need up-to-date info that just doesn't come in dead-tree form.
Flame on, I guess. Some of us have our monitors calibrated, and have been using the same gear for years. And we *WORK* on the computer as our medium. So I have to heartily disagree with your statement.
I can tag a PMS color off the top of my head, and can get within a few points of an accurate CMYK breakdown.
The point being that, with the exception of a matchproof or being blind until it something goes to press (or the Web for that matter), you have to have an intuitive knowledge of what that color from your machine is going to come out like in print. Or on a Windows 1.5 gamma box, or on a TV set.
Under your rationale, it would be impossible to color correct something by "feel" in Photoshop, and that's patently false. Illustrator and Quark, on the other hand -- when dealing with PMS approximations are WAY off. But I know that the "blue" swatch on screen is going to come out C 92, M 88, Y 5, K 10 -- a nice grape on paper, close to black on a Wintel box with a shitty monitor if converted to RGB and saved as a web background.
That's the line that separates the wannabes from the pros.
But I'll be damned if anything goes to press without a matchprint first.;)
The point I was trying to make earlier, is that when you're working in Photoshop, Quark, whatever -- you're approximating the color at hand and trying to achieve an artistic result.
Too much color and pulsing widgets in the interface are too distracting, and they skew your perception of the color of the matter at hand.
I know a lot of artists; I sort of move in a circle of friends who are all artists of one kind or another. Know how many of them like tweaking their Macs? None.
I'll bite on this one. I run in this particular circle of friends. And we *all* customize our Macs in one way or another.
You're right, though. The Mac is just a tool to us. That said, I have been known to put skate company stickers on my airbrushes and Xacto knives. To each their own.
One reason many artists don't use interface modifications is that historically they conflict or are flaky with key software: Quark or Photoshop in particular (under OS 9). Kaleidescope was aboslutely notorious for aberrant behavior (per the article).
Another reason is that it's damned hard to judge color if your desktop, menu and palettes look like Rainbow Brite's bedroom.
Most of the mods that artists and people who rely on stable OS9-era Macs go for are more of the Font Management, Input Control, Obnoxious Sound or Screensaver varieties.
It's been said already before, but I'll chime in and say it again:
Apple is very, very protective (and rightfully so) of their GUI. Hell, they do the bulk of the high-level human interface research for the industry. They need to be.
Apple, as of MacOS 10.2, "broke" the way that some applications/hacks got their hooks into the interface, particuarly the menu bar. And they changed the human interface guidelines to match.
Guess what? Those applications (including the absolutely indispensable ASM) were again functioning a week or two later.
I agree with Apple's rationale. Hacks ~= an unstable system, and clutter via icons on the menu bar == bad.
I also know that here, in the real world, dammit, I want my application menu back. And ASM gives that to me.
Do you guys REALLY think that Apple is going to build a *nix/BSD based OS and then lock users out of the *nix layer? How clueless is that? They're working with Linux/BSD developers to bring MORE unix software our way, cleaner.
If you're still not happy install whatever window manager you prefer. It'll work under X11. Although at that point, why are you using a Mac in the first place?
It just makes me nervous...
on
One Small Step
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· Score: 3, Funny
My personal favorite quote from the article:
We had an ambulance on site, just in case. This is surprisingly inexpensive, and should be considered by anyone doing something potentially dangerous.
Not sure if that was sarcasm, doe-eyed naivete or what, but it sure made me hella-nervous while I was waiting for the/.ed video feed to load.
Congrats, guys! Precautionary ambulances or not, it takes some big brass balls to do this stuff, much less succeed -- no matter how small the increment.
Just because someone's a CEO doesn't mean they have more money, power, lawyers (or brains, apparently) than you.
All it takes to become a CEO of an S-Corp or an LLC is to send your $50-300 plus paperwork, depending on your state.
I'm actually the CEO of a small web development boutique (read: 3 partners, a few freelancers, no employees) and have been threatened with a couple of lawsuits and the like in the past. We have very little capital (particularly in the current economic climate) to defend ourselves legally -- so we take the talking route until either the issue goes away (almost all the time) or things get verifiably ugly (lawyers/legal documents appear).
The trick is to talk politely but formally (read: certified mail, business-style) directly to the other individual involved, and keep records of every single piece of correspondence -- at this point you're trying to keep the odds of actually getting in a lawsuit to a minimum.
You explain your complete lack of culpability in the incident (including whatever documentation from Symantec/CERN/etc.), and state (FIRMLY) that you take the *threat* of a lawsuit very, very seriously and if necessary you will pursue that route in kind to reclaim lost time, money and any slander/libel damages that may be due to you.
More often than not (in my experience), when people threaten this type of action, they're looking for easy money in an out-of-court settlement -- or they're looking to scare you into submission (completing a project for free, etc.) Being firm and standing up to these kind of idiots gives them pause.
Obviously, taking this route, you need follow-through. The moment a lawyer or legal paperwork rears their respective ugly heads, all bets are off. Get thee a lawyer and be merciless.
Just keep in mind:
1. Just because they talk big doesn't mean they are 2. If they've got money to bring a frivolous lawsuit against you for something that they could verify easily with a google search -- they've got the money to pay out counterdamages. Most lawyers would be willing to take the case with very little retainer. </IANAL>
Hope release is more full-featured
on
iSync Beta Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
It seems like a great idea to be able to synchronize my contacts, calendars etc. over.Mac between all my Macs spread out at 3 different locations.
Problem is that currently, you have to manually run the Synch, and there isn't an automate option or even an Applescript hook yet (there isn't even an Applescript dictionary in this release). I've tried the usual suspects: synch, synchronize, dosynch. No luck.
I'll be playing the next day or two to see if I can create something cron-able to synch my stuff at 8am and 6pm.
I'm also interested to see if there's a way to hack this to work with other services -- iCal works (sorta) with WebDAV servers.
If you are using a computer, it isn't hard to type the entire word. Things like r -> are (or possibly our sometimes) don't save any time on a keyboard. Quite often I see abbreviations that work out only 1 character less than the actual word.
Wouldn't you think that after trolling chat rooms for so long, someone would learn to type like a freaking demon?
Here's my new typing course I'll be offering at the local community college:
Simply type: 18/F/Single
After a month or two, you'll be up to 90 WPM after stuggling to keep up with all your replies!
On the flip side, there's a place for shorthand in net games and SMS, I think.
I've set up an Unreal Tourney server for (the cooler) half of the ad agencies/design shops/web boutiques in my neck of the woods. These are mostly people who have a fair to excellent grasp of the language -- despite most having attended public school in the south.
Side rant: I personally attended public school in the south. I graduated 10 years ago. With the exception of a couple of great teachers (usually at "Gifted" or later at "AP" level), I had better language, spelling and grammar skills than most of my teachers, being an aspiring journalist (at the time) and well-read (for a kid). There's not much in this world more obnoxious than being graded down on an English paper because the teacher is using his/her own personal language rules.
Well... maybe it's more obnoxious to get turned down for AP Computer Science by your math teacher because "you're no good at math, how can you handle a computer?" when I was already administering the school LAN and journalism Mac Appletalk networks.
Suffice it to say that just about everything you've heard about southern public schools is probably true. And some of us are better people for it.
That damned spell check again... I meant *bitter* people.
Back to Unreal:
Come 6pm, our language skills vanish. It's a matter of economy in FPS games and SMS messaging.
Are you REALLY going to sit there and type "What did you do that for?" when a simple "WTF" would suffice?
If so, contact me and we'll let you in on our games. I've been lagging behind in the rankings lately, and we could use some fresh (*cough* slow *cough) blood!
Yet "Releases" will be packaged and for sale on the streets of Russia, China, Hong Kong oftentimes long before they hit the online geek "scene".
Actually, they'll be packaged up and for sale a little closer to home by then.
Next time you're in New York, do a walk down Broadway around Houston on a sunny Saturday/Sunday. (arguably the busiest shopping area in Manhattan)
Book Vendor, Book Vendor, Incense Vendor, Gucci Vendor, Adobe Vendor, Book Vendor, Microsoft Vendor, Ground Zero Photos Vendor.
I guess that my point is that we always think that the VCD/Warez street scene is way far removed from us in the US... it's not.
I'll even argue that it's not *always* a bad thing. I was personally able to get my hands on a good copy of Disney's "Song of the South" (a gift for a friend) -- which as you may know has been disowned and swept under the rug by the Mouse Conglomerate, due to fairly extreme racially insensitive content in an otherwise brilliant film. It's almost impossible to get your hands on this by other means than 16mm or Japanese laser disc.
Strange they based Splash Mountain on a disowned property.
Whenever I think you might have played out the whole geek-chic thing (as I'm a Hollywood-disillusioned-gen-X-type, to name my own label), you seem to come up with the most hysterical (and almost unsettlingly geeky) one-liners, like... ever.
Pretty damned reliably, too.
Proud to have you amongst our ranks (as there's no point burning Karma on a 5).
Not to knock you (or your site, which has an Asian slant *almost* surpassing my own;)...
I think you're missing the point.
We've already established that pr0n is one of the few ways to make a dependable buck on the net. So I'm taking that as granted.
(Bear with me...)
We've already established that Napster's BRAND is capable of pulling in publicity absolutely freaking everywhere... much to the chagrin of those of us who prefered our l337 undergr0und lynx, well... underground.
What is being purchased and marketed here is a brand. Plain and simple. It may be a way for a corp. to think that they're "legitimizing" the business by buying the brand name, but that's it.
They're marketing to the same people who have 4 different versions of Gator, Morpheus and other ad/spy/scum/ware loaded because they don't know any better.
Sheep, all of them. Controlled by the US media and news outlets... (which were both the windfall and downfall of P2P and the "real" Napster, if you guys remember your recent history...)
These are the same people who use Win because "everyone does," and don't know how to do a bloody thing besides surf the Web and play solitare.
It's also the largest market on the Web. In the US at least.
Read up on your PT Barnum quotes.
I think it's a brilliant marketing move, but a sad epitaph for a service that started out so promisingly, but made the mainstream far before its time.
--dr00gy
Re:From the article:
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Perhaps we should amend the constitution to make it illegal to display tattered, sun-bleached flags (and representations) thereof in public.
Yeah, that means bumper stickers too.
While we're at it, maybe we should make it illegal to wave around cheap knock-offs that don't even have the right number of stars because someone with a print shop/t-shirt shop smelled money in the post-9/11 pseudo-patriotic frenzy.
My point? Oh yeah...
It's considerably more disrespectful to display a shitty, worn flag or use it as a marketing tool.
At least burning the flag is a statement (or necessity ie disposal).
If you're gonna fly/rally 'round the flag, at least get a clue as to what it means.
Oh -- while you're flying or rallying round said flag, keep in mind that you're being manipulated as part of possibly the world's biggest ever marketing & pr campaign to accept what the government & military are up to now in the name of "patriotism".
We made our bed, and a year ago we were made to lie in it. We're making another one now.
The only way this cycle is going to end is if people get educated and speak up.
You could try OpenLDAP, but I haven't had very good luck with it in the past -- it's also overkill IMO. Oh yeah, and Entourage gets all sorts of flakey with non-MS LDAP servers.
Another option is to load up something like a PHP groupware solution... moregroupware is a really nice option, although German is the developers' first language;)This'll give you webmail, shared (and private) calendars and address books.
What I'd do personally is just set up a quick mySQL database and PHP or Perl front-end that gives you clickable mailto: links for people's records. There's a million packages like this on Zend. I wrote one similar to record incoming callerID info and join to a vcard-like mysql table. Took an hour or two.
On the other hand, if you want to use Apple's address book, you could try to find where on the disk the data files are saved and do a root cron job to copy those files either between accounts or machines.
With Apple pushing Rendzevous and iCal as much as they are, I'm sure an Apple solution will pop up pretty quickly.
As a matter of fact, I believe that Revolution can import Hyper/Super stacks with pretty decent accuracy -- plus dig the development and deployment platforms:
[snip]
Revolution supports these platforms for both development and deployment:
* Mac OS 7.1 and later
* Mac OS X
* Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000
* Unix flavors including:
* Linux (x86 and PPC)
* Digital UNIX
* BSD
* HP-UX
* SGI IRIX
* SCO Open DeskTop/UnixWare
* Solaris (x86 and SPARC)
* SunOS
[/snip]
Compare that to the Win32/MacOS Classic support in Director. Yeah, yeah... there was an OS/2 runtime environment for Director 4. But it never worked as well as running Dir 4 executables in Win compatibility mode.
Having used Director as my primary development platform during my "budding" years as a programmer, I'd be willing to bet that most people have absolutely no idea how powerful it is. I never came across a project that required more than it could deliver -- with the exception of the odd Xtra/Xobject.
In recent years, Director has started getting WAAAY too bloated, and the performance is down to a crawl -- on the Mac platform at least. Does anyone really use the 3D extensions that 8.5 provided?
I'm not even going to talk about how slow MM has been to carbonize Director, either.
Nope. Not gonna talk about that.
I've played with Revolution a bit recently -- specifically because it doesn't require the purchase of the authoring environment for multiple platforms if you wish to deliver on multiple platforms. I've been pretty impressed by it, and the company.
There's something to be said for supporting small Scottish companies with a sense of humour.
I have to say -- if I'm writing data-parsing utilities for my own/internal use -- I can get the job done in a fraction of the time (minutes vs. hours/days) using one of these tools vs perl/php or full-blown C projects.
This class of tools (and now Flash with Actionscript, and RealBasic I'd assume) is responsible for being the "training wheels" for oodles of budding programmers and shareware authors -- and the community support for this type of tool is awesome. Comparable with the PHP community.
Definitely worth a look if you're wanting to learn the basics of programming without having to deal with OS-level display toolboxes and the like.
At several times during past keynotes, Jobs has mentioned the possibilites of using new chips from both Moto and Intel.
I've personally heard him mention the possibility of transitioning quite a few times over the past few years -- usually mentioned as an afterthought.
Because of Jobs' pacing and delivery (and his famed RDF), the media hasn't picked up on it very much -- and whatever stir is caused dies down very quickly, and people forget again by the next time an expo rolls around.
I imagine during the last couple of years of OS 9, this was more of a veiled threat to Moto to try and keep up with clock speeds and the like, much like Apple's (non-veiled) threat against ATI.
Honestly -- with the exception of the CPU -- just about everything in modern Macs is a standard across the industry.
Now with Darwin for X86, it shouldn't be terribly difficult at all to transition to Intel -- and might be a welcome change of pace. I've had a 450mhz G4 tower for 4 years now, and machines have barely doubled in speed.
We've heard rumours of the G5 for, um like, 3 years now? Always 6-8 months out (just like today).
I'm as much of a Mac nazi as they get, but as long as the machine behaves the same and -- God forbid -- prices might drop a bit, I'm all for it.
The Mac is all about the user's experience. And, for the most part, the user could give a shit what's in his box as long as it behaves consistently and reliably.
Slashdot Mirror
After looking at the assorted websites and reviews (plus the "we're being /.ed so be kind to us" opener), I have to say that this is a cool piece of tech.
For $200, I may just buy one to piss off/delight (depending on the moon cycle) my girlfriend, who takes pride in keeping her slovenly geek-boy's living conditions pristine. (she deserves a medal for that, BTW).
I'm just waiting for version 2.0 (which you know is coming).
Combine the preset programs of it's current mode of operation with a second set of pathfinding and room mapping (tape lines for the inital ala some consumer 'bots?) instructions.
Then the thing would be able to use one mode to find its way to the middle of each room to be cleaned, and be able to drive itself back to the charger, switching between mapping/pathfinding modes as necessary.
Add some floor wax and oscillating brushes, and this thing will rank pretty close to some of those old Popular Science predictions.
Regardless, one hell of a great pilot release, and kudos on the price point!
Uh, hate to break it to you, but there's no such thing as "truth in advertising" -- it's all as gray as it gets. Do you really think that your waitress will come over and lick your hair if you use Maxim haircoloring? C'mon.
/. IGN, Amazon to give positive reviews to movies, games, gear and other products? They call that particular form of spin "grassroots" or "planting a seed".
;-)
No easter bunny or Santa Claus, either.
And the Lone Gunmen are dead (while I'm busy ripping apart your consumer conditioning).
[even further offtopic: is LGD an acceptable acronym now?]
Seriously, though -- perception is reality.
In advertising & pr we're paid to sell our clients' shit. Shit being: image, brand or product. No more, no less. We're making the perception for the consumer. The consumer turns that perception into their own reality.
Did you know that ad and marketing people cruise discussion boards including
In bars, you'll have teams of women out together ordering and being vocal about some new drink that they love. Ever wonder how Red Bull & vodka came about?
In the media you see segments about...oh, I don't know... duct tape being a cure for warts. I got $20 that that's a packaged advertorial and the study was paid for by the manufacturer. You see prepackaged advertorial on CNN and your local news all the time.
As a matter of fact, copy and paste has made PR drones' lives much easier since most reporters and editors don't even bother editing press releases passed off as news.
These are just a few examples. But they're everywhere. And every publicly voiced opinion about anything (down to politics) is suspect.
In any job, sooner or later you're going to have to cut a corner that doesn't sit too well with you because of management or client pressure. As geeks/programmers, we should all know that far too well.
Your job in advertising is to sell. Period. If a widget sucks, you can't say that outright and expect sales, can you?
So the answer to the burning question is that yes, at first, there are sleepless nights. Then you get desensitied to the whole mess and realize that you're being paid for a service: to make the client happy, and to give them positive ROI. Later, you burn out on the whole mess and can't stand to watch TV or read an ad in the paper without getting hyper cynical.
For the record, that's the stage I'm in now (can you tell?) -- I've since left agency work and started my own business -- although I'll illustrate or code something freelance for agencies from time to time because I've got that connection.
There is a *lot* of burnout and churn in agency work for precisely those reasons -- not to mention the fact that if the client pays for and approves a job, then gets caught for using marketing tactics -- chances are very likely that the agency will be publicly humiliated -- for doing the job that's expected of them.
On the other hand, the term "hell client" gets new meaning when the client singles out an *employee* at the firm and publicly humiliates (sanctions? WTF? LMAO and all that) them for doing their job.
To answer your other question, I'm not catholic. As a matter of fact, I don't know many catholics in the advertising business. Perhaps you're on to something with the whole guilt thing?
It's closer to "Ah, the new campaign is ready. 18 hours straight of sleep, then I'm gonna drink myself into a coma and sleep another 18 before I have to start the next job and not sleep for ANOTHER week until it's done."
Salud,
--dr00gy
I come from an advertising & PR background with several small to medium sized agencies.
First off: I'd wager that 90% of the testimonials you see in advertising are manufactured by the agency using their own employees. I've done it, and just about everyone I've known in the business at smaller agencies have done it. We also lend our voices to TV/Radio spots on occasion, and also appear in photo shoots from time to time when the budget or deadline are too tight to solicit (read: pay) professionals/real people.
Secondly: This is always done with the client's complete knowledge.
MS is playing a big game of CYA right now, and the agency is falling on their sword and taking the blame. That's how it works.
Their little stunt backfired on them, so they're spinning the blame to the PR/ad agency.
This sort of thing goes on every day, although not usually as high profile (or embarassing) as this particular case, which delights me to no end.
MS has been steal^H^H^H^H^H emulating Apple for how many years now? And they still can't get it right. Betcha 'ol Steve is laughing his turtlenecked ass off about this one, not to mention the folks at Chiat Day (Apple's agency).
Perhaps you should download a demo of PC MacLAN and install that on the XP machine.
;) USB add-on maybe?
You should be able to bind Appletalk to the Infrared port on MacLAN.
From there, you assign infrared on the Mac (in OS 9 or X) to be the current Appletalk port, restart file sharing and away you go.
Seriously, though: go for the Airport/Orinoco 802.11 card option. It's one hell of a lot faster and more reliable. You're not gonna be able to do Unreal Tourney or Warcraft matches (very well) over IR because the speed is too low and the latency is too high. You've also got line-of-sight issues. Just try synching a palm over IR and you'll see what I mean. It's freaking SLOW.
I'm also curious how you got an iBook with an IR port.
TiBook, yes. iBook, no for built-in.
"Seen at CNN, this article interviews Rick McCallum, longtime producer at LucasFilms will be responsible for the downfall of the movie industry..."
Is what I read at first, and I thought to myself, "Self, CNN: +1 (Insightful)"
Then I reread it.
At any rate, modern Hollywood is in many ways the bastard child of George Lucas. All of the wildly over-hyped 200 bajillion dollar "event movies" with their associated marketing tie-ins, and advertising budgets larger than the film's budget and action figures have been the downfall of *HOLLYWOOD*.
And just so we get this straight: Hollywood (usually) != good films. But Hollywood == the *current* US box office, in most markets.
My logic here is that the average american moviegoer has realized that "spectacle" films usually suck. Higher budgets = higher ticket prices and the same tripe playing on 100 screens in a single market. [insert witty stuff about the ripple effect down to the $8 tub of popcorn here]
Major studio pressure and their marketing dollars are the reason that I routinely have to take weekend road trips of 200 miles (or 1200 to NYC, as the case may be) to see Igby Goes Down, Chunhyang, Gods & Monsters, Henry Fool, Amelie, Metropolis or an actual worthwhile film in the theatre, because cinemas in Jacksonville, FL (technically a 3rd-tier city) rarely get anything indie or foreign any more, and when they do it's of the "feel-good-$nationality-wedding" variety. And those are NOT obscure films.
Lucasfilm (and Hollywood by emulating the Star Wars franchise for their big-money films) have dug their own grave. That strategy worked for 25 years. I've been hoping for at least 10 that the American consumer would get wise to it so I could get indie and foreign films in my market again.
So to Mr. McCallum: my deepest regrets that you only cleared $45 million on your opening weekend of Episode II.
Since this obviously wasn't satisfactory enough, do us all a favor and not even bother with Episode 3. I left the theatre after both your last two films feeling violated like a parking meter. Fool me twice, shame on me.
You're not getting me a third time.
Do yourself a favor and rent Amelie. It's a big-budget (for the French) film with heart, soul, style, 3 dimensional characters and a fucking story.
Compare that to anything coming out of the big studios and tell me with a straight face that DVD is what's killing the box office, besides the fact that most (sane) people won't fly to NYC for a weekend just to see a good film and will wait for video.
For Christ's sake, Warcraft III had better effects, character and story than Episode II. And that's a *VIDEO GAME* with a fraction of LDL's budget.
To coin a phrase: "Burn, Hollywood, burn..."
The power cords on the original iMacs (and every desktop Mac to date beforehand besides the cube) were industry-standard "D" plugs.
The new flat-panel iMac is also a "D" plug, but the plastic molding around it is shaped kinda funny in a cloverleaf pattern, and it plugs in flush with the back of the unit to keep from breaking any lines, design-wise.
You could take a dremel/exacto and a lot of patience to a standard power plug and it would work. But it would be really, really ugly.
If worse came to worse and my cord shorted out/got chewed up by something, I'd probably order the Apple part instead of trying a hack. The new iMacs are just so nice looking, it'd be a shame to detract from it.
Sounds like the Mark of Kree, just to pull the first image off the top of my head. Rygar? Conan?
The door swings both ways, people.
Errr... so go buy a USB keyboard with the keys you want, plug it in and quit yer bitching?
They do (to coin a phrase) "just work" on a Mac...
--dr00gy
You don't even need a hack. Fire up the terminal, cd to /Volumes/iPod/ and copy away.
The folder just has an invisible bit on it. Can't see it in the Finder (at least not without Tinkertool or other hacks), but it shows up in the BSD layer just fine.
See, Apple's got it right. The user base is smart enough to crack anything that comes out -- no matter how oppressive. Apple knows that, and they make a *very* *small* effort to appease the entertainment industry, because they have to -- at face.
You give people who are honest an incentive to remain honest (making it *slightly* annoying to get MP3s off the iPod, and putting "don't steal music" stickers on their gear/ads)
You don't worry about the rest of the people out there, because it's an excersise in futility akin to chasing your own tail.
Apple & Jobs still have more than a little bit of hippy in them, even if they seem draconian at times. And in this age of impending DRM-hell, I'm still glad I made the platform choice I made 15 years ago. Very, very glad.
I've found that most stuff I've wanted to do under the command line os GUI under OS X, from getting sendmail working properly on developer betas on to other, more specialized stuff can be found at one of the two following sites.
/.-style user follow-up responses and clarifications.
MacOSXHints
Piles of customization and installation information for all versions of X client/server. Almost always the hint I'm looking for is here, with
Marc Liyanage
Has custom-compiled packages of the biggies: PHP, Apache, mySQL, Postgres, ImageMagick and several others. Also has build instructions for the more difficult ones (ImageMagick comes to mind... I tried manually compiling it with different options for days and it would never link the correct libraries). He also has a hints section on his site.
Between these two sites and Google, I've been able to find answers to just about every problem/issue that I've come across in the 2+ years of using OS X.
That said, the OS X for Unix Geeks is a solid book, although so much changes between point releases of OS X (one of my major grievances... why must Apple always replace my custom PHP and Apache, or do weird, undocumented stuff to the default umask for the ftpd?) that you really need up-to-date info that just doesn't come in dead-tree form.
--dr00gy
Flame on, I guess. Some of us have our monitors calibrated, and have been using the same gear for years. And we *WORK* on the computer as our medium. So I have to heartily disagree with your statement.
;)
I can tag a PMS color off the top of my head, and can get within a few points of an accurate CMYK breakdown.
The point being that, with the exception of a matchproof or being blind until it something goes to press (or the Web for that matter), you have to have an intuitive knowledge of what that color from your machine is going to come out like in print. Or on a Windows 1.5 gamma box, or on a TV set.
Under your rationale, it would be impossible to color correct something by "feel" in Photoshop, and that's patently false. Illustrator and Quark, on the other hand -- when dealing with PMS approximations are WAY off. But I know that the "blue" swatch on screen is going to come out C 92, M 88, Y 5, K 10 -- a nice grape on paper, close to black on a Wintel box with a shitty monitor if converted to RGB and saved as a web background.
That's the line that separates the wannabes from the pros.
But I'll be damned if anything goes to press without a matchprint first.
The point I was trying to make earlier, is that when you're working in Photoshop, Quark, whatever -- you're approximating the color at hand and trying to achieve an artistic result.
Too much color and pulsing widgets in the interface are too distracting, and they skew your perception of the color of the matter at hand.
It's that simple.
I'll bite on this one. I run in this particular circle of friends. And we *all* customize our Macs in one way or another.
You're right, though. The Mac is just a tool to us. That said, I have been known to put skate company stickers on my airbrushes and Xacto knives. To each their own.
One reason many artists don't use interface modifications is that historically they conflict or are flaky with key software: Quark or Photoshop in particular (under OS 9). Kaleidescope was aboslutely notorious for aberrant behavior (per the article).
Another reason is that it's damned hard to judge color if your desktop, menu and palettes look like Rainbow Brite's bedroom.
Most of the mods that artists and people who rely on stable OS9-era Macs go for are more of the Font Management, Input Control, Obnoxious Sound or Screensaver varieties.
It's been said already before, but I'll chime in and say it again:
Apple is very, very protective (and rightfully so) of their GUI. Hell, they do the bulk of the high-level human interface research for the industry. They need to be.
Apple, as of MacOS 10.2, "broke" the way that some applications/hacks got their hooks into the interface, particuarly the menu bar. And they changed the human interface guidelines to match.
Guess what? Those applications (including the absolutely indispensable ASM) were again functioning a week or two later.
I agree with Apple's rationale. Hacks ~= an unstable system, and clutter via icons on the menu bar == bad.
I also know that here, in the real world, dammit, I want my application menu back. And ASM gives that to me.
Do you guys REALLY think that Apple is going to build a *nix/BSD based OS and then lock users out of the *nix layer? How clueless is that? They're working with Linux/BSD developers to bring MORE unix software our way, cleaner.
As far as customization, you want themes for OS X 10.2? Old-school windowshading? A more useful Apple Menu? Low-level control of CoreGraphics and Interface Plists? Interface sounds?
What was the issue again?
If you're still not happy install whatever window manager you prefer. It'll work under X11. Although at that point, why are you using a Mac in the first place?
My personal favorite quote from the article:
Not sure if that was sarcasm, doe-eyed naivete or what, but it sure made me hella-nervous while I was waiting for the /.ed video feed to load.
Congrats, guys! Precautionary ambulances or not, it takes some big brass balls to do this stuff, much less succeed -- no matter how small the increment.
Just because someone's a CEO doesn't mean they have more money, power, lawyers (or brains, apparently) than you.
All it takes to become a CEO of an S-Corp or an LLC is to send your $50-300 plus paperwork, depending on your state.
I'm actually the CEO of a small web development boutique (read: 3 partners, a few freelancers, no employees) and have been threatened with a couple of lawsuits and the like in the past. We have very little capital (particularly in the current economic climate) to defend ourselves legally -- so we take the talking route until either the issue goes away (almost all the time) or things get verifiably ugly (lawyers/legal documents appear).
The trick is to talk politely but formally (read: certified mail, business-style) directly to the other individual involved, and keep records of every single piece of correspondence -- at this point you're trying to keep the odds of actually getting in a lawsuit to a minimum.
You explain your complete lack of culpability in the incident (including whatever documentation from Symantec/CERN/etc.), and state (FIRMLY) that you take the *threat* of a lawsuit very, very seriously and if necessary you will pursue that route in kind to reclaim lost time, money and any slander/libel damages that may be due to you.
More often than not (in my experience), when people threaten this type of action, they're looking for easy money in an out-of-court settlement -- or they're looking to scare you into submission (completing a project for free, etc.) Being firm and standing up to these kind of idiots gives them pause.
Obviously, taking this route, you need follow-through. The moment a lawyer or legal paperwork rears their respective ugly heads, all bets are off. Get thee a lawyer and be merciless.
Just keep in mind:
1. Just because they talk big doesn't mean they are
2. If they've got money to bring a frivolous lawsuit against you for something that they could verify easily with a google search -- they've got the money to pay out counterdamages. Most lawyers would be willing to take the case with very little retainer.
</IANAL>
It seems like a great idea to be able to synchronize my contacts, calendars etc. over .Mac between all my Macs spread out at 3 different locations.
Problem is that currently, you have to manually run the Synch, and there isn't an automate option or even an Applescript hook yet (there isn't even an Applescript dictionary in this release). I've tried the usual suspects: synch, synchronize, dosynch. No luck.
I'll be playing the next day or two to see if I can create something cron-able to synch my stuff at 8am and 6pm.
I'm also interested to see if there's a way to hack this to work with other services -- iCal works (sorta) with WebDAV servers.
--dr00gy
Wouldn't you think that after trolling chat rooms for so long, someone would learn to type like a freaking demon?
Here's my new typing course I'll be offering at the local community college:
Simply type: 18/F/Single
After a month or two, you'll be up to 90 WPM after stuggling to keep up with all your replies!
On the flip side, there's a place for shorthand in net games and SMS, I think.
I've set up an Unreal Tourney server for (the cooler) half of the ad agencies/design shops/web boutiques in my neck of the woods. These are mostly people who have a fair to excellent grasp of the language -- despite most having attended public school in the south.
Side rant: I personally attended public school in the south. I graduated 10 years ago. With the exception of a couple of great teachers (usually at "Gifted" or later at "AP" level), I had better language, spelling and grammar skills than most of my teachers, being an aspiring journalist (at the time) and well-read (for a kid). There's not much in this world more obnoxious than being graded down on an English paper because the teacher is using his/her own personal language rules.
Well... maybe it's more obnoxious to get turned down for AP Computer Science by your math teacher because "you're no good at math, how can you handle a computer?" when I was already administering the school LAN and journalism Mac Appletalk networks.
Suffice it to say that just about everything you've heard about southern public schools is probably true. And some of us are better people for it.
That damned spell check again... I meant *bitter* people.
Back to Unreal:
Come 6pm, our language skills vanish. It's a matter of economy in FPS games and SMS messaging.
Are you REALLY going to sit there and type "What did you do that for?" when a simple "WTF" would suffice?
If so, contact me and we'll let you in on our games. I've been lagging behind in the rankings lately, and we could use some fresh (*cough* slow *cough) blood!
Actually, they'll be packaged up and for sale a little closer to home by then.
Next time you're in New York, do a walk down Broadway around Houston on a sunny Saturday/Sunday. (arguably the busiest shopping area in Manhattan)
Book Vendor, Book Vendor, Incense Vendor, Gucci Vendor, Adobe Vendor, Book Vendor, Microsoft Vendor, Ground Zero Photos Vendor.
I guess that my point is that we always think that the VCD/Warez street scene is way far removed from us in the US... it's not.
I'll even argue that it's not *always* a bad thing. I was personally able to get my hands on a good copy of Disney's "Song of the South" (a gift for a friend) -- which as you may know has been disowned and swept under the rug by the Mouse Conglomerate, due to fairly extreme racially insensitive content in an otherwise brilliant film. It's almost impossible to get your hands on this by other means than 16mm or Japanese laser disc.
Strange they based Splash Mountain on a disowned property.
But I digress...
Gotta hand it to ya, Wil...
;-)
Whenever I think you might have played out the whole geek-chic thing (as I'm a Hollywood-disillusioned-gen-X-type, to name my own label), you seem to come up with the most hysterical (and almost unsettlingly geeky) one-liners, like... ever.
Pretty damned reliably, too.
Proud to have you amongst our ranks (as there's no point burning Karma on a 5).
Err. Maybe I just did
Props & salúd!
--dr00gy
Not to knock you (or your site, which has an Asian slant *almost* surpassing my own ;)...
I think you're missing the point.
We've already established that pr0n is one of the few ways to make a dependable buck on the net. So I'm taking that as granted.
(Bear with me...)
We've already established that Napster's BRAND is capable of pulling in publicity absolutely freaking everywhere... much to the chagrin of those of us who prefered our l337 undergr0und lynx, well... underground.
What is being purchased and marketed here is a brand. Plain and simple. It may be a way for a corp. to think that they're "legitimizing" the business by buying the brand name, but that's it.
They're marketing to the same people who have 4 different versions of Gator, Morpheus and other ad/spy/scum/ware loaded because they don't know any better.
Sheep, all of them. Controlled by the US media and news outlets... (which were both the windfall and downfall of P2P and the "real" Napster, if you guys remember your recent history...)
These are the same people who use Win because "everyone does," and don't know how to do a bloody thing besides surf the Web and play solitare.
It's also the largest market on the Web. In the US at least.
Read up on your PT Barnum quotes.
I think it's a brilliant marketing move, but a sad epitaph for a service that started out so promisingly, but made the mainstream far before its time.
--dr00gy
Perhaps we should amend the constitution to make it illegal to display tattered, sun-bleached flags (and representations) thereof in public.
Yeah, that means bumper stickers too.
While we're at it, maybe we should make it illegal to wave around cheap knock-offs that don't even have the right number of stars because someone with a print shop/t-shirt shop smelled money in the post-9/11 pseudo-patriotic frenzy.
My point? Oh yeah...
It's considerably more disrespectful to display a shitty, worn flag or use it as a marketing tool.
At least burning the flag is a statement (or necessity ie disposal).
If you're gonna fly/rally 'round the flag, at least get a clue as to what it means.
Oh -- while you're flying or rallying round said flag, keep in mind that you're being manipulated as part of possibly the world's biggest ever marketing & pr campaign to accept what the government & military are up to now in the name of "patriotism".
We made our bed, and a year ago we were made to lie in it. We're making another one now.
The only way this cycle is going to end is if people get educated and speak up.
You could try OpenLDAP, but I haven't had very good luck with it in the past -- it's also overkill IMO. Oh yeah, and Entourage gets all sorts of flakey with non-MS LDAP servers.
;)This'll give you webmail, shared (and private) calendars and address books.
Another option is to load up something like a PHP groupware solution... moregroupware is a really nice option, although German is the developers' first language
What I'd do personally is just set up a quick mySQL database and PHP or Perl front-end that gives you clickable mailto: links for people's records. There's a million packages like this on Zend. I wrote one similar to record incoming callerID info and join to a vcard-like mysql table. Took an hour or two.
On the other hand, if you want to use Apple's address book, you could try to find where on the disk the data files are saved and do a root cron job to copy those files either between accounts or machines.
With Apple pushing Rendzevous and iCal as much as they are, I'm sure an Apple solution will pop up pretty quickly.
Best of luck.
Seems to me that both Macromedia Director and Revolution are offspring of the original Hypercard.
As a matter of fact, I believe that Revolution can import Hyper/Super stacks with pretty decent accuracy -- plus dig the development and deployment platforms: [snip]
[/snip]Compare that to the Win32/MacOS Classic support in Director. Yeah, yeah... there was an OS/2 runtime environment for Director 4. But it never worked as well as running Dir 4 executables in Win compatibility mode.
Having used Director as my primary development platform during my "budding" years as a programmer, I'd be willing to bet that most people have absolutely no idea how powerful it is. I never came across a project that required more than it could deliver -- with the exception of the odd Xtra/Xobject.
In recent years, Director has started getting WAAAY too bloated, and the performance is down to a crawl -- on the Mac platform at least. Does anyone really use the 3D extensions that 8.5 provided?
I'm not even going to talk about how slow MM has been to carbonize Director, either.
Nope. Not gonna talk about that.
I've played with Revolution a bit recently -- specifically because it doesn't require the purchase of the authoring environment for multiple platforms if you wish to deliver on multiple platforms. I've been pretty impressed by it, and the company.
There's something to be said for supporting small Scottish companies with a sense of humour.
I have to say -- if I'm writing data-parsing utilities for my own/internal use -- I can get the job done in a fraction of the time (minutes vs. hours/days) using one of these tools vs perl/php or full-blown C projects.
This class of tools (and now Flash with Actionscript, and RealBasic I'd assume) is responsible for being the "training wheels" for oodles of budding programmers and shareware authors -- and the community support for this type of tool is awesome. Comparable with the PHP community.
Definitely worth a look if you're wanting to learn the basics of programming without having to deal with OS-level display toolboxes and the like.
Wow, I've met a lot of Ambers and Asias and Tias and Saffrons and Gingers and Iveys and Candies.
:)
Can't say I've met any strippers named Infinity, though.
Would give creedence to the old tale of girl working her way through a PhD, though.
At several times during past keynotes, Jobs has mentioned the possibilites of using new chips from both Moto and Intel.
I've personally heard him mention the possibility of transitioning quite a few times over the past few years -- usually mentioned as an afterthought.
Because of Jobs' pacing and delivery (and his famed RDF), the media hasn't picked up on it very much -- and whatever stir is caused dies down very quickly, and people forget again by the next time an expo rolls around.
I imagine during the last couple of years of OS 9, this was more of a veiled threat to Moto to try and keep up with clock speeds and the like, much like Apple's (non-veiled) threat against ATI.
Honestly -- with the exception of the CPU -- just about everything in modern Macs is a standard across the industry.
Now with Darwin for X86, it shouldn't be terribly difficult at all to transition to Intel -- and might be a welcome change of pace. I've had a 450mhz G4 tower for 4 years now, and machines have barely doubled in speed.
We've heard rumours of the G5 for, um like, 3 years now? Always 6-8 months out (just like today).
I'm as much of a Mac nazi as they get, but as long as the machine behaves the same and -- God forbid -- prices might drop a bit, I'm all for it.
The Mac is all about the user's experience. And, for the most part, the user could give a shit what's in his box as long as it behaves consistently and reliably.