This makes sense, so long as they remain light. I own a netbook, exclusively, because of form factor. Up until recently, I had a 15" Macbook Pro, and liked it a lot. But even at 5.5 pounds -- even with its space-efficient form factor -- it was just too big. I didn't want to carry it with me unless I was travelling long distances for extended periods. So I traded it in, and now I have an HP110 netbook plus a desktop. It's easy to keep my documents synced between them. The netbook is powerful enough for me while I'm on the road (I mostly use it for writing academic-type articles). And for all of my heavy-lifting-type computing, I use the desktop at home. This, to me, is the perfect set-up. So I sincerely hope that netbooks are able to keep up with my needs in terms of portability.
From the perspective of somebody who teaches liberal arts courses at a small university, I am really not keen on PowerPoint. I can see the point of it for business or conference presentations. There, the goal is to impart as much information, in as organized a manner, as possible. And speed and interactivity aren't much of an issue. But I find that a certain amount of inefficiency -- a willingness to repeat myself or to digress when needed -- is important pedagogically. It allows students to interact with me -- to ask questions that don't just get cursory answers, but shape the content of the course. And it means, as the article suggests, that students have a chance to digest a little bit while I write the important points down.
The result is that more than many of my colleagues, I end up writing on the chalkboard. Though an even better solution from my perspective is to project a blank Word document, or a Word document with just a couple of notes in it, and edit it -- take notes -- as I go along. Typing is much quicker and more readable than writing on the board, which means that rather than writing one or two words at a time, I can write full-sentence ideas, or exact quotes from students, that better reflect what is going on in class.
I can see how this might not be an optimal solution for every professor. If I had a large quantity of information that I needed to impart to students, or if I had photos or diagrams to show, I would probably do PowerPoint as well. But from the perspective of establishing an active learning environment even in a lecture setting, PowerPoint is more often than not counterproductive.
I really like the idea, but not so much the implementation. Two observations, and one theoretical quibble:
1) On the hardware side, turning the multitouch interface into a second touch screen that could work as a mouse-like input device (like the video shows), or bring up a keyboard (like the lower half of the iphone, only taking up the whole space) would be preferable. A keyboard without physical feedback would be awkward at first, but after getting used to it, you could do away with a physical keyboard entirely. You could also stick meta-materials from the UI down there. You could have something like a system dock with quick links to open programs and switch windows. And you could have, say, the clock, wireless indicator, battery indicator, etc. down there. It would cut down on clutter on the main screen.
2) On the software side, I'm not sure that I see the advantage of their version of a linear window manager the way they have it set up. Instead, it seems more useful to fan applications in and out, turning the name bars on the side into tabs. Window one opens and slips into place with its name bar on the left side of the screen. Window two opens from the right, partially obscuring window one. Window three moves window two all the way to the left, leaving window one entirely obscured, except for a tab. And so on. That way, you have a visual representation of every window on the screen at all times. Much simpler to track than having to zoom out.
And my theoretical quibble: I know, it's odd coming from a longtime mac user, but I dislike the concept of a physical UI so closely tied to a particular software system that you have no alternative but to use them together. I look at this, and I fear "The Windows Computer of the Future." You buy a multi-touch computer that has Microsoft's future OS on it, and the hardware interface is so specific that you couldn't, if you wanted, chuck the software and install Linux. I can imagine a Linux-like alternative being written for this interface. But I can also imagine a set of patents that would encumber alternate OSes, such that you end up with a One Computer One OS system. Which is far, far too restrictive, and invites vertical monopolistic practices.
Gah! I can't believe this. The geekiest place on Earth, and only one reference to the incredible hulk?! What, is gamma radiation now such a serious topic that we can't make fun of the news with a reference to... unpopular culture?
I don't mention them as individuals inventing progress themselves, but rather as a group of (yes, truly outstanding) people who each contributed, along with innumerable other less memorable people, to a process larger than itself (a process, by the way, which was in part the invention of the notion of progress in the first place).
How has progress ever been linked to the power and vision of single people. Consider the "scientific revolution" and the shift toward "modernism" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sure, you could attribute the whole thing to the power and vision of a single person -- Bacon, perhaps, or Newton -- but you would be missing the larger picture. The shift toward a techno-centric world view -- toward an intellectual regime based on some concept of reason -- was a shift perpetrated by a large group of people who included the likes of (as we see in Neal Stevenson's new trilogy) Hooks, Wren, Boyle, Aubry, Hume, Locke, McPherson, Hobbes, Kant, Hagel, and yes, Bacon and Newton too. Science, language, economics all shifted dramatically, and all at the same time, not because any one person had a great master plan, but because a cluster of ideas gained currency from a multitude of sources in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that allowed for new critical examinations of society as it was, and new speculation on society as it should be.
I don't know. I have a real problem with prescriptive grammar in general. Not that I don't speak what others would call grammatically correct english, but I don't think that, say, African-American vernacular is less grammatically correct. It's just grammatically different, with its own stable rules of syntax. One thing to be aware of is that rules of grammar, as they are prescribed in U.S. english textbooks, are not as they have always been, nor are they the same as UK or Singapore grammatical rules. If you read Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even Thomas Payne or Nathaniel Hawthorne, you will find certain grammatical structures that are still recognizable today, but that are obsolete and considered grammatically wrong in contemporary writing. The same is true crossing borders: there are certain constructions that are common in the UK, for instance, that we would not use here.
I do appreciate the sentiment that people should learn to speak properly. Certain common colloquialisms do bother me. On the other hand, though, we have to understand that grammar is no fixed thing, and prescriptive grammar is never anything more than the rantings of those who feel that they are superior and deserve to be emulated.
What ever happened to reading "real" books, you know, the ones that don't require an artist to draw every scene out for you?
Whatever happened to you shut up now?
So Google Scholar seems like it will be a pretty good resource, but for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, it doesn't look like it has a whole lot to offer just yet. Certainly, it doesn't compare to subscriber-only resources like JSTOR and Project MUSE. I like Google and I like the interface, so I hope that this changes in the near future, but I'm not really holding my breath. I don't know what it's like in the sciences, but part of the problem that I see is that University Presses who put out Humanities and Social Science journals are unlikely to allow them to be indexed on Google without some kind of monetary compensation. Smaller independent journals, maybe, but in the disciplines that I'm familiar with (Anthropology, Folklore, English etc.), those aren't the important journals anyway.
Re:Misguided article
on
Humor in Games?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And don't forget the Spellcasting 101 / 201 / 301 series. I have fond memories of moments where I was laughing so hard that I had to take a break.
Chauncer? CHAUNCER?! Does the author of this story mean Geoffrey Chaucer? I don't know a Geoffrey Chauncer, but in the same period, Chaucer did write a treatise on the Astrolabe for his son.
And beyond the poor editing, how is this news? The treatise is included in all of the most widely used compilations of his complete works. See The Riverside Chaucer if you don't want to take my word for it.
Finally, not to be redundant, but while this is arguably the oldest tech manual in english, it is certainly not the oldest technical manual period. For something older, just for example, see Vitruvius' book on architecture. There's an older tech manual for you.
Gosh. You people really need a humanities / social sciences editor here.
It's not that "big words" are being used; it's that they're being used in a way that deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the text in order to protect the author from any attack that may result from saying anything definite. If you're an academic, you know it's true!
You're going to hate me for this, but I think that you're both right and not right. The issue with jargon, and especially with changing the meanings of words, is that academic discourse is in part historical, and if a certain discourse initially emerged using a certain vocabulary--unfortunate and obfuscated or not--it becomes very difficult to change it down the line. An excellent example of this is the term "performance." The common usage of performance implies a theatrical event. In socio-linguistics and folkloristics, however, it has come to mean pretty much any speech act in which the speaker is fully engaged in what he or she is saying. This is because when the linguist Dell Hymes proposed the term, it was in response to the idea put forth by Noam Chomsky that a language's deep structure is what is important, and not it's performance. Chomsky used the word, and Hymes responded in Chomsky's vocabulary. Now, almost fourty years later, the term performance has become a burdon because it differs so much from the colloquial usage, but because it has such a history as part of socio-linguistic and folkloristic discourses, it is difficult to abandon. Some scholars use this to their advantage, writing obfuscated prose so that they cannot be disputed. Others write in a straight forward manner, but use jargon where they feel they have to in order to participate in a particular discourse. It is important to understand that both kinds of scholars exist, and the best way to tell one from the other is to learn the jargon and read through what they have actually written. A smart reader will know a bullshitter immediately, I think.
. What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
I think that it is you who miss something about the postmodernist interpretations of science. What they say is not that there are alternative empirical facts, but rather that those facts are necessarily subject to the interpretations of the observer. Through the process of observation and the recording of data, the scientist is imposing his own set of interpretations based on the ideological framework with which he approaches the problem. Observation is not an uninterested act, but rather an essentially political one, because we, as observers, are not objective. That is why biologists can interpret fossil evidence as proof of evolution, while fundamentalist christians can interpret it as proof of creation. It isn't that they are observing different phenomena, but that they are observing it from different points of view.
We are conditioned by our educational institutions and by the media to believe that one particular point of view--in this case science--is correct. We have good reason to believe it. After all, based on scientific interpretation, we can make relatively accurate predictions. But it is not necessarily the only set of interpretations that will lead to accurate predictions, nor is it necessarily the most right interpretation if accurate prediction is not your goal. If your goal is to prove the bible, for instance, science is perhaps not the best way to interpret.
A lot of people, even practitioners of science, confuse their discipline with the world at large. Physics, for instance, is not the empirical world, but rather, a manufactured picture of that world. It is not reality, but merely one explanation of it.
Snopes.com is the work of the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson, who have taken their passion for urban myths to the Web since 1995."
As A Folklorist, I really cringe when people use the term "Urban Myth." In a folkloristic sense (and this would require a folkloristic sense, I suppose, as Snopes.com is a sight about folklore, used by folklorists quite a bit) a myth is a narrative told about pre-historical times that pretains to the way in which the world as we know it was formed. So for something to be an "Urban Myth," it would have to be a contemporary narrative that describes the way that the world as we know it was formed. Perhaps the big bang qualifies? I really hate the term "Urban Legend" too (I use the term "Contemporary Legend" instead), as most of what falls into this category is not exclusively urban at all, but it, at least, is an acceptable term. Please, please, please, can't we be as precise with humanities and social sciences terminology as we are with technological terminology here?
I thought that hard drive mp3 players with lots of storage was overkill too until I bought my Archos Jukebox Multimedia. It took me all of a week to fill the thing up. It just goes to show that you never know how much music you have until you start systematically ripping your CDs.
I have a copy of Kavalier and Clay on my shelf, waiting to be read as soon as the semester is over. I read his Mysteries of Pittsburgh some time ago, though, and I must say that he is one of the most comelling novelists whose work I've had the pleasure to read. Mysteries was a book with a plot and characters so ordinary that it was all extrordinary. The characters were smart and compelling, and all so sympathetic that I was rooting for both ends of the very bizare love triangle that was the center of the book. There really are not enough good things that I can say either about Chabon or the book. I fully recommend that anyone interested in him pick up Mysteries of Pittsburgh too.
Virtual PC is not only a program for mac. Connectix was already making a PC version for those who wanted to run other x86 operating systems inside a virtual machine from windows. It seems like a useful feature, especially if backwards compatability is broken in the next version of windows, to have that sort of a virtual machine running a previous version of the OS for the sake of running old programs. Virtual machine technology is useful for more than just emulation, after all.
The successor to Windows XP (due in 2004, and rapidly slipping to 2005) is currently code named Longhorn, and it will not be compatible with your existing software, hardware or methods. Microsoft has already stated that backward compatibility will not be a design feature
It seems that perhaps there is come credence to this statement. It occurs to me that perhaps the OS won't be backwards comatable at all, but MS just bought all of the Virtual PC technology from Connectix, and it makes a lot of sense that they would provide something similar to Classic in Mac OS X. The new OS would not be compatable with existing software, but the old software would still run in emulation. Not the perfect solution (as we've experienced with Classic), but not a bad solution either...
I haven't read the book, but I went to see the movie the night it came out (I was interested in the spectacle of people dressing up, and was sadly disappointed that there weren't more people in costume) and what surprised me the most was the way that this one played with european folklore in a way that the first one did not. For one thing, Chamber of Secrets followed the structure of a fairy tale in a way that I didn't see in the first movie. It had the hero/object-saught axis and the helper/villain axis pretty clearly defined, which is not something that you see in a film very often, even a film that does pay homage to the fairy tale. Also, Dobby and the manner in which he can be freed comes straight out of a European legend involving a household spirit who is presented with a set of clothes in appreciation for all his work, and then takes the set of clothes and leaves. Historically, clothes were often the payment at the end of a servant's term of service, so it was interesting to see that reflected in the movie. I had a whole list of other explicit references to folklore, but now I forget. Anyway, for me (as a folklorist I suppose), that was the most interesting part of the movie.
By the way, this movie got me excited to read the books (and for the next movie) in a way that the first did not.
You don't eject disks, you throw them in the trash can.
Actually, you do eject disks in OS X. When you hold a disk and begin to drag it, the trash can on the dock becomes an eject icon. Similarly, when you hold a CD-R and begin to drag it, the trash can becomes a CD burning icon. I agree with you that throwing disks away was a UI problem in 9, but Apple has really cleared that up.
Slashdot Mirror
This makes sense, so long as they remain light. I own a netbook, exclusively, because of form factor. Up until recently, I had a 15" Macbook Pro, and liked it a lot. But even at 5.5 pounds -- even with its space-efficient form factor -- it was just too big. I didn't want to carry it with me unless I was travelling long distances for extended periods. So I traded it in, and now I have an HP110 netbook plus a desktop. It's easy to keep my documents synced between them. The netbook is powerful enough for me while I'm on the road (I mostly use it for writing academic-type articles). And for all of my heavy-lifting-type computing, I use the desktop at home. This, to me, is the perfect set-up. So I sincerely hope that netbooks are able to keep up with my needs in terms of portability.
From the perspective of somebody who teaches liberal arts courses at a small university, I am really not keen on PowerPoint. I can see the point of it for business or conference presentations. There, the goal is to impart as much information, in as organized a manner, as possible. And speed and interactivity aren't much of an issue. But I find that a certain amount of inefficiency -- a willingness to repeat myself or to digress when needed -- is important pedagogically. It allows students to interact with me -- to ask questions that don't just get cursory answers, but shape the content of the course. And it means, as the article suggests, that students have a chance to digest a little bit while I write the important points down.
The result is that more than many of my colleagues, I end up writing on the chalkboard. Though an even better solution from my perspective is to project a blank Word document, or a Word document with just a couple of notes in it, and edit it -- take notes -- as I go along. Typing is much quicker and more readable than writing on the board, which means that rather than writing one or two words at a time, I can write full-sentence ideas, or exact quotes from students, that better reflect what is going on in class.
I can see how this might not be an optimal solution for every professor. If I had a large quantity of information that I needed to impart to students, or if I had photos or diagrams to show, I would probably do PowerPoint as well. But from the perspective of establishing an active learning environment even in a lecture setting, PowerPoint is more often than not counterproductive.
I really like the idea, but not so much the implementation. Two observations, and one theoretical quibble:
1) On the hardware side, turning the multitouch interface into a second touch screen that could work as a mouse-like input device (like the video shows), or bring up a keyboard (like the lower half of the iphone, only taking up the whole space) would be preferable. A keyboard without physical feedback would be awkward at first, but after getting used to it, you could do away with a physical keyboard entirely. You could also stick meta-materials from the UI down there. You could have something like a system dock with quick links to open programs and switch windows. And you could have, say, the clock, wireless indicator, battery indicator, etc. down there. It would cut down on clutter on the main screen.
2) On the software side, I'm not sure that I see the advantage of their version of a linear window manager the way they have it set up. Instead, it seems more useful to fan applications in and out, turning the name bars on the side into tabs. Window one opens and slips into place with its name bar on the left side of the screen. Window two opens from the right, partially obscuring window one. Window three moves window two all the way to the left, leaving window one entirely obscured, except for a tab. And so on. That way, you have a visual representation of every window on the screen at all times. Much simpler to track than having to zoom out.
And my theoretical quibble: I know, it's odd coming from a longtime mac user, but I dislike the concept of a physical UI so closely tied to a particular software system that you have no alternative but to use them together. I look at this, and I fear "The Windows Computer of the Future." You buy a multi-touch computer that has Microsoft's future OS on it, and the hardware interface is so specific that you couldn't, if you wanted, chuck the software and install Linux. I can imagine a Linux-like alternative being written for this interface. But I can also imagine a set of patents that would encumber alternate OSes, such that you end up with a One Computer One OS system. Which is far, far too restrictive, and invites vertical monopolistic practices.
Gah! I can't believe this. The geekiest place on Earth, and only one reference to the incredible hulk?! What, is gamma radiation now such a serious topic that we can't make fun of the news with a reference to ... unpopular culture?
I don't mention them as individuals inventing progress themselves, but rather as a group of (yes, truly outstanding) people who each contributed, along with innumerable other less memorable people, to a process larger than itself (a process, by the way, which was in part the invention of the notion of progress in the first place).
How has progress ever been linked to the power and vision of single people. Consider the "scientific revolution" and the shift toward "modernism" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sure, you could attribute the whole thing to the power and vision of a single person -- Bacon, perhaps, or Newton -- but you would be missing the larger picture. The shift toward a techno-centric world view -- toward an intellectual regime based on some concept of reason -- was a shift perpetrated by a large group of people who included the likes of (as we see in Neal Stevenson's new trilogy) Hooks, Wren, Boyle, Aubry, Hume, Locke, McPherson, Hobbes, Kant, Hagel, and yes, Bacon and Newton too. Science, language, economics all shifted dramatically, and all at the same time, not because any one person had a great master plan, but because a cluster of ideas gained currency from a multitude of sources in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that allowed for new critical examinations of society as it was, and new speculation on society as it should be.
I don't know. I have a real problem with prescriptive grammar in general. Not that I don't speak what others would call grammatically correct english, but I don't think that, say, African-American vernacular is less grammatically correct. It's just grammatically different, with its own stable rules of syntax. One thing to be aware of is that rules of grammar, as they are prescribed in U.S. english textbooks, are not as they have always been, nor are they the same as UK or Singapore grammatical rules. If you read Shakespeare or Chaucer, or even Thomas Payne or Nathaniel Hawthorne, you will find certain grammatical structures that are still recognizable today, but that are obsolete and considered grammatically wrong in contemporary writing. The same is true crossing borders: there are certain constructions that are common in the UK, for instance, that we would not use here.
I do appreciate the sentiment that people should learn to speak properly. Certain common colloquialisms do bother me. On the other hand, though, we have to understand that grammar is no fixed thing, and prescriptive grammar is never anything more than the rantings of those who feel that they are superior and deserve to be emulated.
What ever happened to reading "real" books, you know, the ones that don't require an artist to draw every scene out for you? Whatever happened to you shut up now?
So Google Scholar seems like it will be a pretty good resource, but for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, it doesn't look like it has a whole lot to offer just yet. Certainly, it doesn't compare to subscriber-only resources like JSTOR and Project MUSE. I like Google and I like the interface, so I hope that this changes in the near future, but I'm not really holding my breath. I don't know what it's like in the sciences, but part of the problem that I see is that University Presses who put out Humanities and Social Science journals are unlikely to allow them to be indexed on Google without some kind of monetary compensation. Smaller independent journals, maybe, but in the disciplines that I'm familiar with (Anthropology, Folklore, English etc.), those aren't the important journals anyway.
And don't forget the Spellcasting 101 / 201 / 301 series. I have fond memories of moments where I was laughing so hard that I had to take a break.
Adam.
Chauncer? CHAUNCER?! Does the author of this story mean Geoffrey Chaucer? I don't know a Geoffrey Chauncer, but in the same period, Chaucer did write a treatise on the Astrolabe for his son.
And beyond the poor editing, how is this news? The treatise is included in all of the most widely used compilations of his complete works. See The Riverside Chaucer if you don't want to take my word for it.
Finally, not to be redundant, but while this is arguably the oldest tech manual in english, it is certainly not the oldest technical manual period. For something older, just for example, see Vitruvius' book on architecture. There's an older tech manual for you.
Gosh. You people really need a humanities / social sciences editor here.
It's not that "big words" are being used; it's that they're being used in a way that deliberately obfuscates the meaning of the text in order to protect the author from any attack that may result from saying anything definite. If you're an academic, you know it's true!
You're going to hate me for this, but I think that you're both right and not right. The issue with jargon, and especially with changing the meanings of words, is that academic discourse is in part historical, and if a certain discourse initially emerged using a certain vocabulary--unfortunate and obfuscated or not--it becomes very difficult to change it down the line. An excellent example of this is the term "performance." The common usage of performance implies a theatrical event. In socio-linguistics and folkloristics, however, it has come to mean pretty much any speech act in which the speaker is fully engaged in what he or she is saying. This is because when the linguist Dell Hymes proposed the term, it was in response to the idea put forth by Noam Chomsky that a language's deep structure is what is important, and not it's performance. Chomsky used the word, and Hymes responded in Chomsky's vocabulary. Now, almost fourty years later, the term performance has become a burdon because it differs so much from the colloquial usage, but because it has such a history as part of socio-linguistic and folkloristic discourses, it is difficult to abandon. Some scholars use this to their advantage, writing obfuscated prose so that they cannot be disputed. Others write in a straight forward manner, but use jargon where they feel they have to in order to participate in a particular discourse. It is important to understand that both kinds of scholars exist, and the best way to tell one from the other is to learn the jargon and read through what they have actually written. A smart reader will know a bullshitter immediately, I think.
. What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
I think that it is you who miss something about the postmodernist interpretations of science. What they say is not that there are alternative empirical facts, but rather that those facts are necessarily subject to the interpretations of the observer. Through the process of observation and the recording of data, the scientist is imposing his own set of interpretations based on the ideological framework with which he approaches the problem. Observation is not an uninterested act, but rather an essentially political one, because we, as observers, are not objective. That is why biologists can interpret fossil evidence as proof of evolution, while fundamentalist christians can interpret it as proof of creation. It isn't that they are observing different phenomena, but that they are observing it from different points of view.
We are conditioned by our educational institutions and by the media to believe that one particular point of view--in this case science--is correct. We have good reason to believe it. After all, based on scientific interpretation, we can make relatively accurate predictions. But it is not necessarily the only set of interpretations that will lead to accurate predictions, nor is it necessarily the most right interpretation if accurate prediction is not your goal. If your goal is to prove the bible, for instance, science is perhaps not the best way to interpret.
A lot of people, even practitioners of science, confuse their discipline with the world at large. Physics, for instance, is not the empirical world, but rather, a manufactured picture of that world. It is not reality, but merely one explanation of it.
Snopes.com is the work of the husband-and-wife team of David and Barbara Mikkelson, who have taken their passion for urban myths to the Web since 1995."
As A Folklorist, I really cringe when people use the term "Urban Myth." In a folkloristic sense (and this would require a folkloristic sense, I suppose, as Snopes.com is a sight about folklore, used by folklorists quite a bit) a myth is a narrative told about pre-historical times that pretains to the way in which the world as we know it was formed. So for something to be an "Urban Myth," it would have to be a contemporary narrative that describes the way that the world as we know it was formed. Perhaps the big bang qualifies? I really hate the term "Urban Legend" too (I use the term "Contemporary Legend" instead), as most of what falls into this category is not exclusively urban at all, but it, at least, is an acceptable term. Please, please, please, can't we be as precise with humanities and social sciences terminology as we are with technological terminology here?
Wadam
http://wadam.blogspot.com
I thought that hard drive mp3 players with lots of storage was overkill too until I bought my Archos Jukebox Multimedia. It took me all of a week to fill the thing up. It just goes to show that you never know how much music you have until you start systematically ripping your CDs.
wadam.
I have a copy of Kavalier and Clay on my shelf, waiting to be read as soon as the semester is over. I read his Mysteries of Pittsburgh some time ago, though, and I must say that he is one of the most comelling novelists whose work I've had the pleasure to read. Mysteries was a book with a plot and characters so ordinary that it was all extrordinary. The characters were smart and compelling, and all so sympathetic that I was rooting for both ends of the very bizare love triangle that was the center of the book. There really are not enough good things that I can say either about Chabon or the book. I fully recommend that anyone interested in him pick up Mysteries of Pittsburgh too.
Wadam.
http://wadam.blogspot.com
Virtual PC is not only a program for mac. Connectix was already making a PC version for those who wanted to run other x86 operating systems inside a virtual machine from windows. It seems like a useful feature, especially if backwards compatability is broken in the next version of windows, to have that sort of a virtual machine running a previous version of the OS for the sake of running old programs. Virtual machine technology is useful for more than just emulation, after all.
Wadam.
The successor to Windows XP (due in 2004, and rapidly slipping to 2005) is currently code named Longhorn, and it will not be compatible with your existing software, hardware or methods. Microsoft has already stated that backward compatibility will not be a design feature
It seems that perhaps there is come credence to this statement. It occurs to me that perhaps the OS won't be backwards comatable at all, but MS just bought all of the Virtual PC technology from Connectix, and it makes a lot of sense that they would provide something similar to Classic in Mac OS X. The new OS would not be compatable with existing software, but the old software would still run in emulation. Not the perfect solution (as we've experienced with Classic), but not a bad solution either...
Wadam
I haven't read the book, but I went to see the movie the night it came out (I was interested in the spectacle of people dressing up, and was sadly disappointed that there weren't more people in costume) and what surprised me the most was the way that this one played with european folklore in a way that the first one did not. For one thing, Chamber of Secrets followed the structure of a fairy tale in a way that I didn't see in the first movie. It had the hero/object-saught axis and the helper/villain axis pretty clearly defined, which is not something that you see in a film very often, even a film that does pay homage to the fairy tale. Also, Dobby and the manner in which he can be freed comes straight out of a European legend involving a household spirit who is presented with a set of clothes in appreciation for all his work, and then takes the set of clothes and leaves. Historically, clothes were often the payment at the end of a servant's term of service, so it was interesting to see that reflected in the movie. I had a whole list of other explicit references to folklore, but now I forget. Anyway, for me (as a folklorist I suppose), that was the most interesting part of the movie.
By the way, this movie got me excited to read the books (and for the next movie) in a way that the first did not.
Adam
Actually, you do eject disks in OS X. When you hold a disk and begin to drag it, the trash can on the dock becomes an eject icon. Similarly, when you hold a CD-R and begin to drag it, the trash can becomes a CD burning icon. I agree with you that throwing disks away was a UI problem in 9, but Apple has really cleared that up.
Adam.