Note: this is one of the very, very few buckling-spring keyboards you can get new these days, instead of prowling through thrift stores, eBay, and university dumpsters.
It's ThousandStars, the original submitter here. Note that you can also get a reborn Apple Extended II keyboard called the Matias Tactile Pro 2.0; I also reviewed it, but unfavorably, and it suffers from a number of deficiencies the Customizer doesn't. Even Mac users (I am one) are better off with the Customizer.
You'd just clear it up with penicillin. Which makes me think, perhaps the Linux community has been going about advocacy the wrong way. Perhaps something like: "Linux: The Penicillin for Computers" would get the word out, especially given SE Linux.
My problem is chiefly with the content distribution rather than the hardware: I'm just not willing to invest substantial amounts of money in a service that might disappear, or that I might not be able to access, or that might force to pay future service fees, or whatever. As the first link states, one reason the iPod took off was that people had a huge amount of unencumbered music ready to go, and they could rip CDs with ease. If the same were true of books, I'd happily buy a Kindle, but it isn't, and I'm not willing to go the proprietary route until I'm sure it's worthwhile.
It's also because they're too stupid to read Joel on Software regarding offices and his own office. Instead, many of them keep doing things that are poison to "knowledge workers," a phrase I hate but that nonetheless describes the kind of people discussed here.
Most Yahoo and MSN are going south and Google is going north.
Funny, I was thinking about how Canada gets the good stuff while Mexico gets the backwash. This must be why the Democratic candidates are bashing NAFTA.
As for what's causing all this, the US deserves a big heaping portion of the blame, but there are also ~3 other major contributing factors, like the ongoing droughts in Australia and Russia and changing eating habits by the Indian & Chinese middle class.
This is why it's hard to read/. comments at times: highly moderated comments with no substance to back them up. The problems with world food distribution have far more to do with trade barriers than food production or any other issue save perhaps inflation. To the extent the U.S. is responsible, it's responsible for its food bill (explained in some detail here and its anti-trade stance.
Apparently everyone has forgotten the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff and never learned basic economic theory to begin with.
The first time I asked one of the sales people a question I knew the answer to. I could see in her face she didn't know the answer. Instead of telling me that she gave me wrong information that could have cost me money. The 3rd time I went back I spent a lot of time playing on one of their systems to get a feel for it. I liked it very much. I didn't like the idea of having to relearn everything to migrate and I thought Ubuntu is very nice. Then a young clerk with a snotty attitude asked me to get off the chair I was using to check out the computer.
If you go to any retail store that sells computers, you're going to have virtually the same experience. The difference between the guys making minimum wage - $12/hour among retail stores, including Apple's, is marginal. Occasionally you might end up with someone knowledgeable at an Apple store or elsewhere, but that seems to be luck of the draw more than anything else. If you used the same strategy elsewhere as you did at the Apple store, you'd never have a computer.
Then I read a few "fuck you" articles from the mac high priesthood addressed to linux people who used iPods.
I normally buy things for what they do for me, not because of what salespeople or Internet flamers say.
Note that I'm not defending Apple or its sales practices, but I am saying that they're at the very least no worse than those you'll find elsewhere.
Which means absolutely nothing without a) context and b) citation. Is it 7% by what? Volume of phones? Dollars spent? Number of subscribers? What? And without some kind of citation, it could just be another example of how 74% of statistics are made up on the spot.
It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that's bad -- not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web."
Optional Safari installs undermine the hegemony of Internet Explorer, and that's good -- not just for the individual who uses Safari, but for the security of the whole Web.
Apple is part of the reason alternatives to Windows on the web and regarding media formats exist; to be sure, Linux is also part of the reason, but offering things like Safari via the iTunes download can, it seems, only help the greater effort for Internet freedom.
"even WIRED got it wrong" (referring to telling Apple to get out of the hardware business).
Well, yes and no: Apple is more a hardware packager than maker, since it now just takes utterly standard components and puts them together. At one point it used unusual chips, had its own peripheral standard, etc., so Apple has taken many of the suggestions from others and conformed itself more to standard PCs.
In addition, it's not clear whether Apple would be even more successful if it licensed its operating system to other companies willing to make less expensive boxes.
The individual sections of The Silmarillion at least had some narrative cohesion behind them and some development, however minor, of the characters, and it was also designed more a history than a story. This made it different from LOTR and also showed enough narrative to demonstrate how Tolkien could have made it into a real novel; Letter 347 shows that Tolkien continued to work on The Silmarillion or on similar material to the end of his life.
Children of Hurin is closer to the weakest sections of The Lost Tales. If you actually liked Children of Hurin, I'm glad for you: but even Tolkien thought of its material as sketches/background rather than being fit for publication, and there was a very good reason he did.
Sure it could, over the late medium- to long-term. But my iMac has a 500 GB HD in it while a 64 GB SSD would represent 2/3 of the iMac's price. Even with Intel's announcement, we're not going to see any price/GB ratios that will make heavy inroads through desktops for a long time.
Laptops... maybe, but we're still a few years away from seeing this approach the mainstream.
The problem is that Children of Hurin has little plot, coherence, or structure. I wrote about it here, which sums my (negative) feelings about the book.
The general's answers were also interesting because they demonstrate the gap between what we're used to reading on blogs and in/. comments: unfiltered, highly opinionated pseudo-anonymous people who speak only for themselves. There are no or few repercussions for most people if they make a foolish statement or unfairly lay into someone or whatever. But public officials -- and a general is at the very least a semi-public official -- don't have that luxury. So what such a public official will say will be different in tone and content than what we're used to.
This indicates something of a culture gap between the kind of hackers who the general presumably wants to recruit and the generals themselves. Paul Graham states it well:
Most imaginative people seem to share a certain prickly independence, whenever and wherever they lived. You see it in Diogenes telling Alexander to get out of his light and two thousand years later in Feynman breaking into safes at Los Alamos. Imaginative people don't want to follow or lead. They're most productive when everyone gets to do what they want.
Such "prickly independence" is the opposite of the stereotype of the military that's lodged in my mind. Now, I know that stereotype is somewhat inaccurate, but nonetheless the rebel/renegade streak that runs through many -- though by no means all -- of the creative, intelligent people who often know technology well. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Paul Graham's "most," but I'm definitely going to use "many."
Finally, regarding the tone of the answers, remember too that it's easier for an individual speaking for himself (Neal Stephenson, anyone?) to answer candidly than it is for someone who represents millions, especially because the military sometimes has PR problems. If the general says anything forceful, it will be spun around the Internet, quoted -- perhaps out of context -- in newspapers, and generally leave the military open to the PR of others.
I'm not sure how to solve such cultural problems between hacker types who need direct unvarnished honesty ("Where is the mistake in this?") versus PR types in public ("How do I make sure my words won't be used against me?").
The way to shield ourselves from these attacks is to be at the forefront of technology, tactics and procedures relating to operating in cyberspace. We have systems and software that are protected by multiple layers of security and functional redundancy. We train our people to be on the cutting edge of this technology, and we find ways secure our information.
The issue of Internet security and being on forefront of technology seems to me like it has much more to do with education and intelligence than with the military directly. If you want the country as a whole to be on the forefront of technology, you have to have the highly educated people who create and master said technology. To my mind, this issue becomes more of how we can improve abysmal public schools and the like than what the military can do.
I'm reminded of Foucault, who in Power/Knowledge discussed the idea of power in the context of a network or society. The military is embedded in the network of American power, and in the domain of Internet security and the like it seems to rely even more on other parts of the network than it does in other forms of operation like physical combat.
More generally -- this isn't really a direct response to you -- I think the problem with articles like this one and many of the comments in this thread revolves around what people mean by shortage. I've got no doubt that there's a shortage of amazing developers at the pinnacle of software skill who also have the other skills employers demand: the ability to read and write well, mesh with others, etc. There's a shortage now... and there always will be. The same is true of virtually any intellectual profession, including law, architecture, writing, etc. Companies who need the all-stars will naturally have trouble finding them because there aren't many of them, as Joel explains, and most of them won't put up with much of the bullshit that comes from many workplaces. So you get articles about the "shortage" of talent, and people on/. refuting them, and no one paying attention to what the other means.
Anyhow, this is late in the discussion and unlikely to be modded up, so I guess the yelling-fest can continue.
Rather, they identify what they want, then find the cheapest supplier, and provided that there is no compelling reason to avoid the supplier, do the deal.
I think the bigger problem is that consumers of all kinds of goods get hit with hidden fees so often, as the linked Seattle Times article discusses. Companies that use deceptive advertisements, like Clearwire (see the first link) shouldn't be allowed to use specious advertisements and then bury nasty surprises in pages and pages of small print.
I agree with much of your comment and made similar points here. And I think the distinction you make between community vs university libraries is important because the two serve different functions, but at least in my field (English), many research resources are still in print and not available online. It's not clear if or when University Presses will start making criticism online en masse, and even if they do, so much of the twentieth century's critical output will remain in dead tree form that, at least for some, the library isn't going anywhere.
Thanks for posting this, as I agree with much of it. But I'd like to note that, at least in Seattle, the computer and other stations supplement rather than supplant traditional library functions. I live close enough to the Seattle central library mentioned in the article to use it somewhat regularly. The entrance off fifth street, which is the main one, has a lot of tables, some computers, free wi-fi, new/interesting book stacks that are quite low (such that you can see over them), and magazine racks. There are also some fiction racks. But there are also many, many floors of books -- more than you can read in a lifetime. And that's just in the central library, let alone the many branch libraries.
Physical libraries aren't going anywhere yet, even if many people only use them as a kind of public Netflix queue (you can reserve books online at the Seattle Library Site). We're still a long way from a paper- and DVD-less society, and even if the Internet has "volumes of reading material I could freely download," there still isn't much of the well-edited, well-written material that's in books. Yes, yes, there's lots of good stuff on the Internet and lots of bad stuff in books, but I've not found any free, legal site featuring modern fiction that I would actually want to read, for example. To be sure, some books have been obviated by the Internet, which I discuss in the context of Tim Harford's The Logic of Life , in contrast to Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational .
But the Internet isn't there yet; both books I mention have blogs and websites associated with them, complementing the physical book, just as libraries have computers to complement their book selection.
Slashdot Mirror
It's ThousandStars, the original submitter here. Note that you can also get a reborn Apple Extended II keyboard called the Matias Tactile Pro 2.0; I also reviewed it, but unfavorably, and it suffers from a number of deficiencies the Customizer doesn't. Even Mac users (I am one) are better off with the Customizer.
I'd like an "act of God" to cause you to get the joke.
You'd just clear it up with penicillin. Which makes me think, perhaps the Linux community has been going about advocacy the wrong way. Perhaps something like: "Linux: The Penicillin for Computers" would get the word out, especially given SE Linux.
My problem is chiefly with the content distribution rather than the hardware: I'm just not willing to invest substantial amounts of money in a service that might disappear, or that I might not be able to access, or that might force to pay future service fees, or whatever. As the first link states, one reason the iPod took off was that people had a huge amount of unencumbered music ready to go, and they could rip CDs with ease. If the same were true of books, I'd happily buy a Kindle, but it isn't, and I'm not willing to go the proprietary route until I'm sure it's worthwhile.
I've also been in Microsoft's Redmond campus, where a lot of people having pretty sweet offices.
It's also because they're too stupid to read Joel on Software regarding offices and his own office. Instead, many of them keep doing things that are poison to "knowledge workers," a phrase I hate but that nonetheless describes the kind of people discussed here.
Funny, I was thinking about how Canada gets the good stuff while Mexico gets the backwash. This must be why the Democratic candidates are bashing NAFTA.
This is why it's hard to read /. comments at times: highly moderated comments with no substance to back them up. The problems with world food distribution have far more to do with trade barriers than food production or any other issue save perhaps inflation. To the extent the U.S. is responsible, it's responsible for its food bill (explained in some detail here and its anti-trade stance.
Apparently everyone has forgotten the infamous Smoot-Hawley Tariff and never learned basic economic theory to begin with.
If you go to any retail store that sells computers, you're going to have virtually the same experience. The difference between the guys making minimum wage - $12/hour among retail stores, including Apple's, is marginal. Occasionally you might end up with someone knowledgeable at an Apple store or elsewhere, but that seems to be luck of the draw more than anything else. If you used the same strategy elsewhere as you did at the Apple store, you'd never have a computer.
Then I read a few "fuck you" articles from the mac high priesthood addressed to linux people who used iPods.
I normally buy things for what they do for me, not because of what salespeople or Internet flamers say.
Note that I'm not defending Apple or its sales practices, but I am saying that they're at the very least no worse than those you'll find elsewhere.
Good thing you offered this caveat, as this forum is notoriously tough on Microsoft bashers.
Which means absolutely nothing without a) context and b) citation. Is it 7% by what? Volume of phones? Dollars spent? Number of subscribers? What? And without some kind of citation, it could just be another example of how 74% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Optional Safari installs undermine the hegemony of Internet Explorer, and that's good -- not just for the individual who uses Safari, but for the security of the whole Web.
Apple is part of the reason alternatives to Windows on the web and regarding media formats exist; to be sure, Linux is also part of the reason, but offering things like Safari via the iTunes download can, it seems, only help the greater effort for Internet freedom.
Well, yes and no: Apple is more a hardware packager than maker, since it now just takes utterly standard components and puts them together. At one point it used unusual chips, had its own peripheral standard, etc., so Apple has taken many of the suggestions from others and conformed itself more to standard PCs.
In addition, it's not clear whether Apple would be even more successful if it licensed its operating system to other companies willing to make less expensive boxes.
The individual sections of The Silmarillion at least had some narrative cohesion behind them and some development, however minor, of the characters, and it was also designed more a history than a story. This made it different from LOTR and also showed enough narrative to demonstrate how Tolkien could have made it into a real novel; Letter 347 shows that Tolkien continued to work on The Silmarillion or on similar material to the end of his life.
Children of Hurin is closer to the weakest sections of The Lost Tales. If you actually liked Children of Hurin, I'm glad for you: but even Tolkien thought of its material as sketches/background rather than being fit for publication, and there was a very good reason he did.
Laptops... maybe, but we're still a few years away from seeing this approach the mainstream.
The problem is that Children of Hurin has little plot, coherence, or structure. I wrote about it here, which sums my (negative) feelings about the book.
This indicates something of a culture gap between the kind of hackers who the general presumably wants to recruit and the generals themselves. Paul Graham states it well:
Such "prickly independence" is the opposite of the stereotype of the military that's lodged in my mind. Now, I know that stereotype is somewhat inaccurate, but nonetheless the rebel/renegade streak that runs through many -- though by no means all -- of the creative, intelligent people who often know technology well. I'm not sure I'd go as far as Paul Graham's "most," but I'm definitely going to use "many."
Finally, regarding the tone of the answers, remember too that it's easier for an individual speaking for himself (Neal Stephenson, anyone?) to answer candidly than it is for someone who represents millions, especially because the military sometimes has PR problems. If the general says anything forceful, it will be spun around the Internet, quoted -- perhaps out of context -- in newspapers, and generally leave the military open to the PR of others.
I'm not sure how to solve such cultural problems between hacker types who need direct unvarnished honesty ("Where is the mistake in this?") versus PR types in public ("How do I make sure my words won't be used against me?").
The issue of Internet security and being on forefront of technology seems to me like it has much more to do with education and intelligence than with the military directly. If you want the country as a whole to be on the forefront of technology, you have to have the highly educated people who create and master said technology. To my mind, this issue becomes more of how we can improve abysmal public schools and the like than what the military can do.
I'm reminded of Foucault, who in Power/Knowledge discussed the idea of power in the context of a network or society. The military is embedded in the network of American power, and in the domain of Internet security and the like it seems to rely even more on other parts of the network than it does in other forms of operation like physical combat.
Indeed: the problem has been discussed extensively by Joel on Software.
More generally -- this isn't really a direct response to you -- I think the problem with articles like this one and many of the comments in this thread revolves around what people mean by shortage. I've got no doubt that there's a shortage of amazing developers at the pinnacle of software skill who also have the other skills employers demand: the ability to read and write well, mesh with others, etc. There's a shortage now... and there always will be. The same is true of virtually any intellectual profession, including law, architecture, writing, etc. Companies who need the all-stars will naturally have trouble finding them because there aren't many of them, as Joel explains, and most of them won't put up with much of the bullshit that comes from many workplaces. So you get articles about the "shortage" of talent, and people on /. refuting them, and no one paying attention to what the other means.
Anyhow, this is late in the discussion and unlikely to be modded up, so I guess the yelling-fest can continue.
If you're in the United States, there are only nine cities with a population greater than 1 M.
You got it. And I fell for it, as I said in this comment.
Indeed: I made this mistake with Internet access, and now I'm paying (haha!) the price for it.
I think the bigger problem is that consumers of all kinds of goods get hit with hidden fees so often, as the linked Seattle Times article discusses. Companies that use deceptive advertisements, like Clearwire (see the first link) shouldn't be allowed to use specious advertisements and then bury nasty surprises in pages and pages of small print.
So, can you find it online? No? So we'd have to venture outside to go to the library?
I agree with much of your comment and made similar points here. And I think the distinction you make between community vs university libraries is important because the two serve different functions, but at least in my field (English), many research resources are still in print and not available online. It's not clear if or when University Presses will start making criticism online en masse, and even if they do, so much of the twentieth century's critical output will remain in dead tree form that, at least for some, the library isn't going anywhere.
Physical libraries aren't going anywhere yet, even if many people only use them as a kind of public Netflix queue (you can reserve books online at the Seattle Library Site). We're still a long way from a paper- and DVD-less society, and even if the Internet has "volumes of reading material I could freely download," there still isn't much of the well-edited, well-written material that's in books. Yes, yes, there's lots of good stuff on the Internet and lots of bad stuff in books, but I've not found any free, legal site featuring modern fiction that I would actually want to read, for example. To be sure, some books have been obviated by the Internet, which I discuss in the context of Tim Harford's The Logic of Life , in contrast to Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational .
But the Internet isn't there yet; both books I mention have blogs and websites associated with them, complementing the physical book, just as libraries have computers to complement their book selection.