We have two dogs, one of which almost always goes about fifteen feet away from us before shaking. She's really smart in a lot of ways.
The other dog is really friendly and endearing, at least.
And just how many Apple users know how to write a simple shell script? Or do regular expression matching/text replacement in sed & awk? Or even know how to use vi or emacs?
Why should anyone care? You may have an emotional attachment to those tools, but many people prefer other tools. Given the historic antipathy between the vi and emacs crowd, I find it interesting that you lump them on the same side of this (false) dichotomy. I can still use vi if I have to, but I much prefer using BBEdit, a nice GUI text editor that comes with command line tools to invoke it. I can (and have) written shell scripts with BBEdit, but who cares?
For a device that is touted as "consuming internet media content", it has a walled internet.
Wait... you're saying that the lack of Flash, a proprietary third party plug-in, means that the iOS devices have a "walled internet?" I don't think so.
The grand finale episode of MacGuffin Island. No real answers, just emotional manipulation. Essentially the same ending as a recent cop show on the BBC, fwiw. J.J. Abrams has a TED talk where he talks about his mystery box. Because he never opened it, he doesn't know what's inside, he prefers the mystery to the reality. It seems like he treats his shows the same way; he doesn't know what the mystery really is, just that mystery itself is interesting.
I don't understand why they bothered to wrap everything in Science Fiction clothes if they weren't going to respect that and instead resolve with a character-driven "spiritual" conclusion. With the ending they gave, the bulk of the series could have been a western, a cop show, a medical show... The LOST writers seemed to have used science fiction trappings only to tell a story in a "weird" way. I would have found the "Bardo church" conclusion much more acceptable, if they had at least _tried_ to address some of the science fiction/mystery aspects first. I think that they really dropped the ball by treating almost everything that drove the characters for the past five seasons as _only_ being a crucible for the formation of relationships. When you have a myth that spans millennia, to have its importance reduced to the relationships between a busload of people does the myth a disservice, as well as being disrespectful to the audience. What made this a "water-cooler" show was not the relationships, but the mysteries.
I can almost picture it... Early on, one of the show runners sticks his head into the writers room and says "We're going to base this partially on that thing by Ambrose Bierce." The writers say "Great!" and then head to the bookstore. The only trouble is that they aren't sure what "thing" the show runner meant, so half of them pick up "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and the other half pick up "The Devil's Dictionary." They'll fix it in post.
The LOST finale was _almost_ like you had been keeping up with Sherlock Holmes stories, but in those Sherlock Holmes stories there was never any resolution to the mysteries contained within. There was a promised extra long finale story that was going to prove that the author(s) knew what they were doing all along. When that finale arrives, you discover that the mysteries had no real solutions, and that the stories were written to get Holmes and Watson laid a lot. If you were only really committed to Holmes and Watson, you found this a satisfying ending, but if the mysteries were much of the reason you were following things, you felt cheated.
It strikes me that they could have explained a couple things fairly easily that would have made for a more balanced myth/character conclusion. Even some expository lump, vague hand waving about the origin of the Dharma Initiative and the relationships between Dharma / Hanso Foundation / Widmore Industries, etc. would have gone a long way, for me. I would have happily traded half the time from the Richard Alpert backstory for some Dharma / Hanso backstory. They've had a few seasons to plan for this, why did it feel slap-dash and rushed?
What's that writing rule? Something like If you see a gun in the first act, it has to be used by the third? The trouble with LOST was that it showed so many "guns" early on, then in subsequent acts those guns turned out to be spears, or maybe fish, and eventually they didn't even matter, anyway. It's funny that almost all the things that fans obsessed over for the last six seasons don't matter, given this ending. Maybe that's the point: let go. Still, LOST was the only show that has been worth talking/thinking about for a long time. This ending only partially makes me regret watching the series.
The Chalkboard from the Simpsons on the same night as the finale: "End of 'LOST': It was all the dog's dream. Watch us." If only that had been true.
I had this great idea when I was in college, a program to convert sounds into images, edit the images and turn them back into sounds
Yeah, but this is not a new idea either. Metasynth does more-or-less the same thing, and to a lesser degree IRCAM's AudioSculpt does too. It's very rarely the idea itself that's important, but the implementation.
Software is not a product, it's a process.
The English deported their religious fanatics to America and their criminals to Australia. I think we, the Americans, got the short end of the stick on that one.
Let's assume that the staff are aware of the issue. So what?
I still don't understand what the FSF hopes to achieve by this action. They'll piss off Apple a little bit, by spending their money frivolously, they'll piss off any customers who will be inconvenienced by the human DoS attack. I can't imagine that they'll get much positive press out of such a stunt.
To me it smacks of desperation. The FSF isn't winning through any technical merits, so it resorts to the human DoS.
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
The patent issues surrounding Vorbis is sort of like Schrodinger's cat. Until there's a challenge, I don't think we'll know whether the existing perceptual codec patent holders (Fraunhoffer, Thomson, Dolby, etc.) are going to claim that Vorbis infringes or not.
I think that there is a pretty good chance that once someone with real resources uses Vorbis, patent holders will try and strike it down. The patent pool involved with perceptual codecs is both wide and deep.
Just because Vorbis has no patent protection of its own, does not mean that that there won't be patent suits involved. I wouldn't want to be the first deep-pockets manufacturer to make a Vorbis player.
I'm sure this is seen as some sort of civil/corporate disobedience by the promoters, but to me it seems very childish. It's mostly harassment of employees who don't set the policies, and probably aren't allowed to talk for the company about such things, anyway.
This stupid denial of services prank also inconveniences people who have legitimate need of the Genius Bar services. Who are they trying to win over, exactly, and how do they think this is going to help?
The FSF may have started with high ideals, but has devolved into just another stupid religion. The only thing I'm having trouble deciding is if Stallman is more like the pope, or L. Ron Hubbard.
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We have two dogs, one of which almost always goes about fifteen feet away from us before shaking. She's really smart in a lot of ways. The other dog is really friendly and endearing, at least.
Especially when that character is wearing a tutu!
Which he probably bought on eBay.
Well... it's arguably the most long lived antisocial website.
And just how many Apple users know how to write a simple shell script? Or do regular expression matching/text replacement in sed & awk? Or even know how to use vi or emacs?
Why should anyone care? You may have an emotional attachment to those tools, but many people prefer other tools. Given the historic antipathy between the vi and emacs crowd, I find it interesting that you lump them on the same side of this (false) dichotomy. I can still use vi if I have to, but I much prefer using BBEdit, a nice GUI text editor that comes with command line tools to invoke it. I can (and have) written shell scripts with BBEdit, but who cares?
But if you take property from group A and keep it, you're either a capitalist or a thief, depending on your PR person and/or lawyer.
For a device that is touted as "consuming internet media content", it has a walled internet.
Wait... you're saying that the lack of Flash, a proprietary third party plug-in, means that the iOS devices have a "walled internet?" I don't think so.
Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Considering PR and marketing is one of Apple's strongest areas...
Marketing, yes, handling PR crisies, not so much. They've always been pretty ham-fisted with PR.
But plug it into your HDTV and control it with screen sharing, and it's pretty cool.
The "dot gain" when printing on a lot of surfaces helps hide this, though it's still visible.
They should also teach about Tarvu. I mean... it's so easy to join.
You'll never know. They all "moved on" without leaving a forwarding address.
The grand finale episode of MacGuffin Island. No real answers, just emotional manipulation. Essentially the same ending as a recent cop show on the BBC, fwiw. J.J. Abrams has a TED talk where he talks about his mystery box. Because he never opened it, he doesn't know what's inside, he prefers the mystery to the reality. It seems like he treats his shows the same way; he doesn't know what the mystery really is, just that mystery itself is interesting.
I don't understand why they bothered to wrap everything in Science Fiction clothes if they weren't going to respect that and instead resolve with a character-driven "spiritual" conclusion. With the ending they gave, the bulk of the series could have been a western, a cop show, a medical show... The LOST writers seemed to have used science fiction trappings only to tell a story in a "weird" way. I would have found the "Bardo church" conclusion much more acceptable, if they had at least _tried_ to address some of the science fiction /mystery aspects first. I think that they really dropped the ball by treating almost everything that drove the characters for the past five seasons as _only_ being a crucible for the formation of relationships. When you have a myth that spans millennia, to have its importance reduced to the relationships between a busload of people does the myth a disservice, as well as being disrespectful to the audience. What made this a "water-cooler" show was not the relationships, but the mysteries.
I can almost picture it... Early on, one of the show runners sticks his head into the writers room and says "We're going to base this partially on that thing by Ambrose Bierce." The writers say "Great!" and then head to the bookstore. The only trouble is that they aren't sure what "thing" the show runner meant, so half of them pick up "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" and the other half pick up "The Devil's Dictionary." They'll fix it in post.
The LOST finale was _almost_ like you had been keeping up with Sherlock Holmes stories, but in those Sherlock Holmes stories there was never any resolution to the mysteries contained within. There was a promised extra long finale story that was going to prove that the author(s) knew what they were doing all along. When that finale arrives, you discover that the mysteries had no real solutions, and that the stories were written to get Holmes and Watson laid a lot. If you were only really committed to Holmes and Watson, you found this a satisfying ending, but if the mysteries were much of the reason you were following things, you felt cheated.
It strikes me that they could have explained a couple things fairly easily that would have made for a more balanced myth/character conclusion. Even some expository lump, vague hand waving about the origin of the Dharma Initiative and the relationships between Dharma / Hanso Foundation / Widmore Industries, etc. would have gone a long way, for me. I would have happily traded half the time from the Richard Alpert backstory for some Dharma / Hanso backstory. They've had a few seasons to plan for this, why did it feel slap-dash and rushed?
What's that writing rule? Something like If you see a gun in the first act, it has to be used by the third? The trouble with LOST was that it showed so many "guns" early on, then in subsequent acts those guns turned out to be spears, or maybe fish, and eventually they didn't even matter, anyway. It's funny that almost all the things that fans obsessed over for the last six seasons don't matter, given this ending. Maybe that's the point: let go. Still, LOST was the only show that has been worth talking/thinking about for a long time. This ending only partially makes me regret watching the series.
The Chalkboard from the Simpsons on the same night as the finale: "End of 'LOST': It was all the dog's dream. Watch us." If only that had been true.
I had this great idea when I was in college, a program to convert sounds into images, edit the images and turn them back into sounds
Yeah, but this is not a new idea either. Metasynth does more-or-less the same thing, and to a lesser degree IRCAM's AudioSculpt does too. It's very rarely the idea itself that's important, but the implementation.
Software is not a product, it's a process.
California could survive nicely, thank you.
"Tenser', said the Tensor; 'tension, apprehension, and dissension have begun"
A madeline for this gentleman!
Vastly more legal? When was the last time anyone in intelligence cared about that?
The English deported their religious fanatics to America and their criminals to Australia. I think we, the Americans, got the short end of the stick on that one.
Amen.
Yes, it's really a FSF program, and yes it's sad that they've stooped to this sort of tactic.
Free Software has never been about technical merit, but rather ethics.
And just how do you rationalize that this human DoS attack is ethical?
Let's assume that the staff are aware of the issue. So what?
I still don't understand what the FSF hopes to achieve by this action. They'll piss off Apple a little bit, by spending their money frivolously, they'll piss off any customers who will be inconvenienced by the human DoS attack. I can't imagine that they'll get much positive press out of such a stunt.
To me it smacks of desperation. The FSF isn't winning through any technical merits, so it resorts to the human DoS.
If Jobs really wants to see open formats, why doesn't the iPhone play Ogg Vorbis, Ogg Theora video and FLAC?
Anyone who says "because it would cost money" is a moron. All of these formats have free implementations -- in fact, as far as I know, all of them have free, patent-free, royalty-free, and MIT license at worst, which means if iTunes is at all pluggable, it should take one engineer maybe two hours to add support for them, if that.
The patent issues surrounding Vorbis is sort of like Schrodinger's cat. Until there's a challenge, I don't think we'll know whether the existing perceptual codec patent holders (Fraunhoffer, Thomson, Dolby, etc.) are going to claim that Vorbis infringes or not.
I think that there is a pretty good chance that once someone with real resources uses Vorbis, patent holders will try and strike it down. The patent pool involved with perceptual codecs is both wide and deep.
Just because Vorbis has no patent protection of its own, does not mean that that there won't be patent suits involved. I wouldn't want to be the first deep-pockets manufacturer to make a Vorbis player.
I'm sure this is seen as some sort of civil/corporate disobedience by the promoters, but to me it seems very childish. It's mostly harassment of employees who don't set the policies, and probably aren't allowed to talk for the company about such things, anyway.
This stupid denial of services prank also inconveniences people who have legitimate need of the Genius Bar services. Who are they trying to win over, exactly, and how do they think this is going to help?
The FSF may have started with high ideals, but has devolved into just another stupid religion. The only thing I'm having trouble deciding is if Stallman is more like the pope, or L. Ron Hubbard.
$80 is nowhere near "about $100".
Sure it is, it's about 80% of the way there.