"...that USB thing, Firewire, ditching the floppy, colorful computers, photo management software, digital music players, WiFi, bluetooth, video editing, dvd burning..."
Hey, whippersnapper, you forgot something... or you're just too young to remember what a huge jolt true cheap WYSIWYG publishing was. THAT was apple's killer app... took MS years... no, decades to catch up on that one.
Apple continues to incorporate open software and strike that fine balance between the usefully proprietary (hardware, GUI) and interoperable standards. The MS dweebs that run the IT where I work keep frowning and scratching their heads when I explain that this or that new Apple implementations of free (beer/speech) software (zeroconf, LDAP, Apache, SSH, etc.) makes their lives easier and more secure. This just helps my arguments.
Nice thing about Jabber is that it's decentralized and has so much room to be elaborated into some nifty applications that go way beyond text messaging. I was annoyed at Apple for nailing iChat so firmly to AIM, and now it looks like they're fulfilling some of the promise behind having a default chat client that isn't tied to an Apple network.
I've paid for site licenses that had activation schemes designed to make us insane with deadline frenzy when the install (frequently) went bad and required a freakin' phone call and long wait to get a partial solution. I've paid for pro audio software that made it very difficult to move from one machine to another, despite it being an acceptable part of the license. I've paid for shareware, lost a portion of the reg # through no fault of ours, and the vendor remains incommunicado. I've used pro layout AND audio software that made it impossible to install without a dongle that was impossible to use. And so on.
In all cases I've resorted to asserting my legal rights using shady copies or shady numbers, since the developers were so customer-hostile. Immoral? Somewhat. Ethical? Of course. Legal? who cares, I have work to do and I paid the fee, OK?
RTFA. It's a Macintosh program. So there's no reason to expect that programs like X and Apache are even installed. (They can be installed, and a few are by default, but users might not care)
RtheseFA's if you think that Apache isn't built into every recent Mac. X11, however, is merely an option when you install the OS, but many of us have since it's so easy. Pheh! who modded that informative?
.. if you warn someone that you are armed and they should leave, and they do not, you have every reason to believe they are also armed, and willing to use whatever against you. You should then be sufficiently scared for your life that you can legally kill someone in your home.
Hmm, let's see: 1) deaf person having an emergency and trying to call 911, thought you weren't home, doesn't see you... 2) extreme manic depressive having a bad episode, merely wants to raid your fridge... 3) injured person seeking help, can't talk... 4) whacked out on something, picked the wrong door 'cause all the units look the same... 5) creep, peeping tom, not armed, just a drunk violating privacy in a potentially threatening manner, 6) etc.
These are all situations I've been witness to. 5) involved my roommate running into the street brandishing a machete and bellowing, wearing nothing but a condom (which he realized about a block away, heheheh), and there was something off with the guy because verbal challenges didn't work--he bolted when the machete started to sing; but the others were all resolved safely after some tense but careful assessment. Any killing would have been a major tragedy. Of course, this is Canada, and while we have lots and lots of guns up here, we don't expect them to be pistols (guns are for food, dummies! Jeez).
Allegations of "coddled criminals" don't withstand the lightest scrutiny. But it makes for damn fine politics..."My opponent is a wuss! I will be tough on crime!" Yeah, that's working really well.
No kidding. "If punishment worked, the prisons would be empty."
Try building a society with deep respect of others as a fundamental tenet, and people will pay attention and try to thwart sociopathic predators before they develop. (Somehow that suggestion seems to really unsettle the apple pie and ammunition crowd when I bring it up... honestly I don't get why, other than it implies a social safety net--I never said it had to be government.)
Donating money is not the best way for you to help.
Some people have more money than time, let them share it where they will... do it wisely, and donating money is always effective.
Everyone has a responsibility to develop a more open society, build a better caring world, expose corporate misconduct, eliminate corruption, blah blah blah no kidding.
Fundamental changes in oneself are also in order, not just economic institutions: a trans-patriotic internationalism that is based on the friendly competition we admire, and an effort to widen our own cultural framework to accept the mindset of other societies, and work on commonalities. Eliminate the tariffs in your mind. This is a particular challenge for melting pot societies like the USA, since there's a vested interest in bringing all that diversity under some umbrella norms that thus need to be invisible (I think this is the source of the legendary parochialism of the average US citizen). Until then, take advantage of your currency privilege and spread those yankee dollars around the globe in good effective projects!
It's all about the advertising. We are not voters. We are consumers. It's like Coke vs Pepsi, but all other cola is kept in the back.
There is no Coke, there is no Pepsi, there is no Spoon (TM). There is only one Real Product (TM) in the USA, and that is The Audience. You are the product. Have a pill, the red ones are nice.
Seriously, one of the tenets of media literacy is that the real product of mass media is not the program, newspaper, or magazine, but the audience. Revenues come from advertisers, not audiences; what is being bought is attention, not entertainment.
A poster above points out that democracy is not viable in such an environment, and because I'm a rabid egalitarian I have to agree. But maybe democracy would be better than anything run by a Bonesman. Skull-and-Bones Society: not a paragon of democratic virtues. Kerry and Bush both continue to be members: the only obvious conspiracy this results in is that they will strive to fulfil their blood oath and hire as many of the other 500 active Bonesmen as they can. But that's bad enough, when things look like a republic on the surface and like a kleptocracy underneath.
Yes, we the users know there are problems embedded in the whole process of public access to Wikipedia; we know that there are many gaps, holes, and unprofessional writing, and that sometimes vandalism or bias goes uncorrected for too long.
However, these problems are growing pains. Wikipedia is cool enough to attract a core of devotees who will counteract the worst trolls and vandals. The articles will slowly build up comprehensiveness (go add a few details to the 'permian' entry etc. if things are too sparse). Some articles have all the authority of a Brittania article, as they're written by an equivalent expert (or better, team). Some are just pure malarky and need help. It isn't always obvious, so cross-check. There is a reason encyclopedias are not acceptable for academic citations. They always need cross-references if being right is critical.
Most of us are simply looking for 'good enough' when we go to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is shaping up nicely in this respect--give it a few more years and it will approach a commercial encyclopedia in comprehensiveness and accuracy. Its dynamic, public nature is its strength and weakness, you merely have to take it into account the same way you would consider how much CNN is fomenting propaganda or making a play for "balance" in any article they offer. Evaluating the veracity of anything is just life in the 21st C--an essential skill, a fundamental part of media literacy.
We're trying to consolidate most of our files into single, related databases (right now there's a lot of unecessary duplication). So, we know the autoupdate is out there, it just won't help us get our DBs cleaned up.
Oh for crying out loud why didn't you say you were using a FMPro 2 style flat file db? That changes everything. Otherwise it looks like you just don't understand that FMP is reasonably relational, and conversion is simple.
I've been in your situation numerous times, and it would still be simpler / faster / cheaper to restructure the existing db with proper FMP style relationships. Much easier to do incrementally, your users will notice no down time, just improvements. You'll save hair, money, and face if you just start using FM properly. In fact, you don't even have update to FM7 yet to get a big gain, just start bringing your files up to v.3.0 quality!
We're always more comfortable with the smell of home, and skilled programmers often hate FMP and want to 'upgrade' to a 'real' solution, which unless the programmer's a real whiz means users lose flexibility, functionality, and uptime in order to have quicker screen redraws of a now ugly interface. FMPro is lousy for programmers but great for users, especially intermediate users who can build their own layouts. Since you can't trust users' answers to tech questions like "which would be better for you" you'll have to find out after the fact that there were all these things they took for granted in FMP that you'll now have to program in to your new system--many gotchas lurk there.
But honestly, it sounds to me like you shouldn't touch your system, unless it's too slow or has become hard to support. If you do replace it, do it slowly, in phases, and give yourself plenty of time to do the job right.
Repeating myself here, but I've bailed out a few 'mission critical' FMPro applications in the past and often they simply need some debugging and optimizing if they've slowed down. It's an effect of being too easy to develop in: some of the obvious solutions that users employ for calculations etc. are actually very inefficient and simply need changing. Two bad and dependent calculations that get fixed can speed up the entire interface.
FMPro should scale up to files (tables) containing 100K+ records without significant slowdown, if it's optimized. If your files contain millions of records each, then you should be looking for bigger iron for sure.
Of course, I don't know that all of your clients are on OS X, you don't mention. If you have a few OS 9 holdouts, you may want to go web-based or stay FileMaker.
One of the beauties of FMPro: develop on the mac, seamless pc/mac clients (watch your font usage), web interface for 'nix, all one cheap (time=$$) solution.
In my experience (since FMPro 2.x) the interface can handle 100k + entries in 'related' files easily without significant slowdowns -- as long as you're careful about how you place calculations, summaries, and screen updates (hint: store your serious calcs in a separate file). Even one complicated calculation on the screen in list view will bring the interface to its knees. Often, when a large crusty legacy FMP database bogs down, calculations should be replaced by scripts (or updated using more current functions).
I've seen the 'upgrade from crusty old FMPro to a real DB' vs. 'update the current software version and bring the files up to date' argument play itself out in a number of educational institutions now, with varying degrees of success and disaster. Given the operating environment of most schools (including post-sec) the best thing is usually to optimize the current db, debugging and streamlining etc. A big reason is touched on in the OP: doing all the (evolving) printable forms needed for a school is a major chore; they're fiddly even in FMP's excellent setup. The other is that people take for granted the data entry habits they've developed (FileMaker is reasonably capable at allowing the interface to guide good data hygiene) and switching to a new database can cause tremendous churn. The ease with which a user can develop their own printable forms can be a real boon, too, taking a big load off of the db admin. One of the main reasons, though, is the cost/benefit/risk equation: it's usually cheaper/faster/safer to stick with FMP and workarounds are often easy, since the interface development speed in that situation more than makes up for programming weaknesses when it comes to bottomline cost.
And since when did Terrorists attack where they were expected?
Guess you weren't among the millions of people who saw a plane attack on the world trade center months before 9/11 -- on The Lone Gunmen pilot episode! You can review the weird prescience of this show here.
A lot of the black kids there were very racist, that's certainly true, and quite a number of them felt that black people could not be racist by definition -- one even said as much. This is not good, by any stretch of the imagination.
Mostly this is a confusion over semantics, with a dollop of the possessor of power not being aware of its parameters.
Since 'race' is a dubious biological category for homo sapiens sapiens, its use is polluted by sociological meanings, which has led to 'racism' often meaning the system of power distribution which uses the concept of race to skew privielge in favour of the dominant group. When 'racism' is described in this way it is really only applicable to the dominant group (e.g. white folks' racism in Japan doesn't hold except in a global context). That doesn't preclude anyone from being prejudiced, it's just that racism is a special subset of prejudice that refers to the dominant power structure based on the debatable concept of races. Brown-skinned folks in the USA just can't be racist under that definition, since they'll never benefit from the dominant system -- all they can do is reproduce their own oppression, or react with prejudice.
His replacement seems to think privacy is not a right but simply a value, so that the 'right to privacy' is much less like the "right to vote" and much more like the value of good butter tarts.
Wholehearted agreement. I was merely being cynical for effect, but your analysis is insightful and borne out by recent events... wish I could mod you up.
It _is_ an excellent essay. It's quite ironic, then, that Radwanski himself abused the privacy he was granted (i.e. to be a prominent public servant yet unsupervised by the Access to Information Act) and signed his own highly excessive expense submissions.
But Althusser wrote wonderfully about the possibilities for human conviviality then chopped his wife into little bits.
We had to design a small media postproduction space with an adjoining office in a university. Three editing suites in an 18x18' room, with cabinets storing cameras and other gear, and two admin/graphics machines went into another room about 18x8'. The catch: no windows. Good for avoiding glare, bad for sanity.
Survival design tactics included an inky blue/gray colour for the editing space (to match the lacie monitors) with splashes of colour on the wall, halogen lighting for high-contrast spots, good ventilation, iso-racks to house noisy 'puters and hard drive arrays, headphones, and a good desk setup.
The office/admin area got a sunny yellow paint job, at first at the limits of what's bearable, but after all day without windows it really helps. Same high contrast lighting, some full-spectrum bulbs too. More sanity-building: agreement in musical taste before the headphones come off, and of course it helps that we're unaffected by viruses or downtime or petty frustrations, since we're using Macs for A/V work. Now we can cram 5 people into a two person space without any bloodshed.
Moofie typeth: "Violence is not the only solution. It is, however, the final solution, and sometimes the only viable one."
Sun Tzu points out that war is an inevitable condition of a State. War is a form of violence that doesn't need to involve bloodshed, however: "to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" -- and, "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight."
The general conclusion from the Art of War is that deception, spying, and manipulation from afar is skillful war, that bloodshed is a failure; and while war is an inevitability, its success (more like 'rightness') is tied to moral 'harmony'--a concept I believe is considerably complexified by the new global 'community,' to the point where initiating war is practically never justified.
Wow. I'm a canajun pacifist, eh, but that was just ridiculous. (Obviously you're ESL, otherwise I'd pick on your grammar too. Umm, english is NOT your first language, right? Please tell me I'm right.)
Some of the residents who predated Confederation joined with British forces to repel U.S. invasions (on the very spot on which I type, actually), but whatever. The CANDU system is not proven to be the 'best' program in the world, it has its own problems. We participate in many instances of international belligerence that have, in fact, made us enemies to various jihad-driven factions. And, while we don't make nuclear weapons, we'll happily supply the raw materials to those who do--and then rely on their protection.
Our military is small because it's relatively pointless as presently conceived: either use it for overseas operations--the so-called 'peacekeeping' missions or collaborating with the emerging meta-empire(s), or defend ourselves from what, the USA? If they found sufficient reason to roll across the border, what are we going to do about it in our present state of preparation?
You're right however about violence begetting violence, even if only deferred. The ones on top just don't get that, and then wonder why they're hated...
Yay, Apple! I gotta get me one of these 2.8TB thingy-doos. Of course, the noise eminating from the tower would be mind-blowingly loud if left to its own devices.
Today I got to play with a new G5 with two big internal disks and four 160GB firewire 800 external disks. It all lives inside a nice iso-rack so that we can hear ourselves edit video.
And, by the way, according to Avid, the speed of f/w 800 should be just fine--seems true so far.
Re:Oh no, not more features that look like faces!
on
Phoebe Pictures Released
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Not only is Iapetus one of the moons actually discovered by Cassini (in 1671), but it has one black hemisphere and one white hemisphere. It is thought that dust accumulated from Pheobe is responsible for the coating on the darker hemisphere.
Well, since the colour of Iapetus' dark hemisphere is a different hue than Phoebe's, that theory is in question. See Space.com's page on Iapetus.
macosxlabs.org is especially good --indispensable, actually -- for setting up lab machines (sounds like a lab of one, in your case).
Re:Thinking of Switching to a OSX for a laptop
on
Fix a Troubled Mac
·
· Score: 1
I use a clamshell iBook at work a good part of the day (and for awhile it doubled as a personal machine). It's exactly 4 years old and has been bashed around quite a bit, has had a battery and HD replacement, and the backlight is starting to dim. It only has an 800x600 screen (but Panther's Expose feature has made it useable again).
Really, it's amazing. It runs for months without a reboot, on Panther. Latchless spring loaded lid: close to sleep (instant), open to wake (2 seconds). An average of 10 applications (MS Office, networking, and 2D creative apps) running under normal use, on a 366MHz G3, without much swapping. On and off various networks, simple and easy (well, finder-integrated ftp is still lousy, and SMB can be quirky, and I don't get full Novell support from campus IT, whatever).
It's practically ruggedized, and has been dropped a few times and had toddlers pounding on it without mishap. I've slapped it down in the middle of a pub, pulled out a camera and firewire cable, and edited video on the spot. It's ugly but nice to touch and carry.
Co-workers suggest I upgrade, but they're filmmakers and have bleeding-edge-itis. If I need to render or use a time-based app., I have G5's and big displays. This thing still works hard at everything else, 4 years later. It originally cost about US$1,500, and 4 years later it's worth around $550. Probably one of the most reliable and economical computers (TCO, ROI, resale value) I've ever owned or worked on--and it was their low-end consumer model.
Plus I get to tease the WinXP-locked web designers here about being able to test sites on my own machine with a stock install of apache using a cross-platform array of worst-case scenario browsers (VirtualPC running Win98SE). Then they'll turn around and say that macs can hardly run any software! Wow.
Slashdot Mirror
"...that USB thing, Firewire, ditching the floppy, colorful computers, photo management software, digital music players, WiFi, bluetooth, video editing, dvd burning..."
Hey, whippersnapper, you forgot something... or you're just too young to remember what a huge jolt true cheap WYSIWYG publishing was. THAT was apple's killer app... took MS years... no, decades to catch up on that one.
Apple continues to incorporate open software and strike that fine balance between the usefully proprietary (hardware, GUI) and interoperable standards. The MS dweebs that run the IT where I work keep frowning and scratching their heads when I explain that this or that new Apple implementations of free (beer/speech) software (zeroconf, LDAP, Apache, SSH, etc.) makes their lives easier and more secure. This just helps my arguments.
Nice thing about Jabber is that it's decentralized and has so much room to be elaborated into some nifty applications that go way beyond text messaging. I was annoyed at Apple for nailing iChat so firmly to AIM, and now it looks like they're fulfilling some of the promise behind having a default chat client that isn't tied to an Apple network.
I've paid for site licenses that had activation schemes designed to make us insane with deadline frenzy when the install (frequently) went bad and required a freakin' phone call and long wait to get a partial solution. I've paid for pro audio software that made it very difficult to move from one machine to another, despite it being an acceptable part of the license. I've paid for shareware, lost a portion of the reg # through no fault of ours, and the vendor remains incommunicado. I've used pro layout AND audio software that made it impossible to install without a dongle that was impossible to use. And so on.
In all cases I've resorted to asserting my legal rights using shady copies or shady numbers, since the developers were so customer-hostile. Immoral? Somewhat. Ethical? Of course. Legal? who cares, I have work to do and I paid the fee, OK?
R these FA's if you think that Apache isn't built into every recent Mac. X11, however, is merely an option when you install the OS, but many of us have since it's so easy. Pheh! who modded that informative?
Hmm, let's see: 1) deaf person having an emergency and trying to call 911, thought you weren't home, doesn't see you... 2) extreme manic depressive having a bad episode, merely wants to raid your fridge... 3) injured person seeking help, can't talk... 4) whacked out on something, picked the wrong door 'cause all the units look the same... 5) creep, peeping tom, not armed, just a drunk violating privacy in a potentially threatening manner, 6) etc.
These are all situations I've been witness to. 5) involved my roommate running into the street brandishing a machete and bellowing, wearing nothing but a condom (which he realized about a block away, heheheh), and there was something off with the guy because verbal challenges didn't work--he bolted when the machete started to sing; but the others were all resolved safely after some tense but careful assessment. Any killing would have been a major tragedy. Of course, this is Canada, and while we have lots and lots of guns up here, we don't expect them to be pistols (guns are for food, dummies! Jeez).
No kidding. "If punishment worked, the prisons would be empty."
Try building a society with deep respect of others as a fundamental tenet, and people will pay attention and try to thwart sociopathic predators before they develop. (Somehow that suggestion seems to really unsettle the apple pie and ammunition crowd when I bring it up... honestly I don't get why, other than it implies a social safety net--I never said it had to be government.)
Some people have more money than time, let them share it where they will... do it wisely, and donating money is always effective.
Everyone has a responsibility to develop a more open society, build a better caring world, expose corporate misconduct, eliminate corruption, blah blah blah no kidding.
Fundamental changes in oneself are also in order, not just economic institutions: a trans-patriotic internationalism that is based on the friendly competition we admire, and an effort to widen our own cultural framework to accept the mindset of other societies, and work on commonalities. Eliminate the tariffs in your mind. This is a particular challenge for melting pot societies like the USA, since there's a vested interest in bringing all that diversity under some umbrella norms that thus need to be invisible (I think this is the source of the legendary parochialism of the average US citizen). Until then, take advantage of your currency privilege and spread those yankee dollars around the globe in good effective projects!
There is no Coke, there is no Pepsi, there is no Spoon (TM). There is only one Real Product (TM) in the USA, and that is The Audience. You are the product. Have a pill, the red ones are nice.
Seriously, one of the tenets of media literacy is that the real product of mass media is not the program, newspaper, or magazine, but the audience. Revenues come from advertisers, not audiences; what is being bought is attention, not entertainment.
A poster above points out that democracy is not viable in such an environment, and because I'm a rabid egalitarian I have to agree. But maybe democracy would be better than anything run by a Bonesman. Skull-and-Bones Society: not a paragon of democratic virtues. Kerry and Bush both continue to be members: the only obvious conspiracy this results in is that they will strive to fulfil their blood oath and hire as many of the other 500 active Bonesmen as they can. But that's bad enough, when things look like a republic on the surface and like a kleptocracy underneath.
However, these problems are growing pains. Wikipedia is cool enough to attract a core of devotees who will counteract the worst trolls and vandals. The articles will slowly build up comprehensiveness (go add a few details to the 'permian' entry etc. if things are too sparse). Some articles have all the authority of a Brittania article, as they're written by an equivalent expert (or better, team). Some are just pure malarky and need help. It isn't always obvious, so cross-check. There is a reason encyclopedias are not acceptable for academic citations. They always need cross-references if being right is critical.
Most of us are simply looking for 'good enough' when we go to an encyclopedia. Wikipedia is shaping up nicely in this respect--give it a few more years and it will approach a commercial encyclopedia in comprehensiveness and accuracy. Its dynamic, public nature is its strength and weakness, you merely have to take it into account the same way you would consider how much CNN is fomenting propaganda or making a play for "balance" in any article they offer. Evaluating the veracity of anything is just life in the 21st C--an essential skill, a fundamental part of media literacy.
Key point about the Finder's searchbox: command-option-f gets you there mouselessly.
Also: use the command and arrow keys to navigate up and down directories.
Oh for crying out loud why didn't you say you were using a FMPro 2 style flat file db? That changes everything. Otherwise it looks like you just don't understand that FMP is reasonably relational, and conversion is simple.
I've been in your situation numerous times, and it would still be simpler / faster / cheaper to restructure the existing db with proper FMP style relationships. Much easier to do incrementally, your users will notice no down time, just improvements. You'll save hair, money, and face if you just start using FM properly. In fact, you don't even have update to FM7 yet to get a big gain, just start bringing your files up to v.3.0 quality!
We're always more comfortable with the smell of home, and skilled programmers often hate FMP and want to 'upgrade' to a 'real' solution, which unless the programmer's a real whiz means users lose flexibility, functionality, and uptime in order to have quicker screen redraws of a now ugly interface. FMPro is lousy for programmers but great for users, especially intermediate users who can build their own layouts. Since you can't trust users' answers to tech questions like "which would be better for you" you'll have to find out after the fact that there were all these things they took for granted in FMP that you'll now have to program in to your new system--many gotchas lurk there.
Repeating myself here, but I've bailed out a few 'mission critical' FMPro applications in the past and often they simply need some debugging and optimizing if they've slowed down. It's an effect of being too easy to develop in: some of the obvious solutions that users employ for calculations etc. are actually very inefficient and simply need changing. Two bad and dependent calculations that get fixed can speed up the entire interface.
FMPro should scale up to files (tables) containing 100K+ records without significant slowdown, if it's optimized. If your files contain millions of records each, then you should be looking for bigger iron for sure.
Of course, I don't know that all of your clients are on OS X, you don't mention. If you have a few OS 9 holdouts, you may want to go web-based or stay FileMaker.
One of the beauties of FMPro: develop on the mac, seamless pc/mac clients (watch your font usage), web interface for 'nix, all one cheap (time=$$) solution.
In my experience (since FMPro 2.x) the interface can handle 100k + entries in 'related' files easily without significant slowdowns -- as long as you're careful about how you place calculations, summaries, and screen updates (hint: store your serious calcs in a separate file). Even one complicated calculation on the screen in list view will bring the interface to its knees. Often, when a large crusty legacy FMP database bogs down, calculations should be replaced by scripts (or updated using more current functions).
I've seen the 'upgrade from crusty old FMPro to a real DB' vs. 'update the current software version and bring the files up to date' argument play itself out in a number of educational institutions now, with varying degrees of success and disaster. Given the operating environment of most schools (including post-sec) the best thing is usually to optimize the current db, debugging and streamlining etc. A big reason is touched on in the OP: doing all the (evolving) printable forms needed for a school is a major chore; they're fiddly even in FMP's excellent setup. The other is that people take for granted the data entry habits they've developed (FileMaker is reasonably capable at allowing the interface to guide good data hygiene) and switching to a new database can cause tremendous churn. The ease with which a user can develop their own printable forms can be a real boon, too, taking a big load off of the db admin. One of the main reasons, though, is the cost/benefit/risk equation: it's usually cheaper/faster/safer to stick with FMP and workarounds are often easy, since the interface development speed in that situation more than makes up for programming weaknesses when it comes to bottomline cost.
Guess you weren't among the millions of people who saw a plane attack on the world trade center months before 9/11 -- on The Lone Gunmen pilot episode! You can review the weird prescience of this show here.
Mostly this is a confusion over semantics, with a dollop of the possessor of power not being aware of its parameters.
Since 'race' is a dubious biological category for homo sapiens sapiens, its use is polluted by sociological meanings, which has led to 'racism' often meaning the system of power distribution which uses the concept of race to skew privielge in favour of the dominant group. When 'racism' is described in this way it is really only applicable to the dominant group (e.g. white folks' racism in Japan doesn't hold except in a global context). That doesn't preclude anyone from being prejudiced, it's just that racism is a special subset of prejudice that refers to the dominant power structure based on the debatable concept of races. Brown-skinned folks in the USA just can't be racist under that definition, since they'll never benefit from the dominant system -- all they can do is reproduce their own oppression, or react with prejudice.
Wholehearted agreement. I was merely being cynical for effect, but your analysis is insightful and borne out by recent events... wish I could mod you up.
It _is_ an excellent essay. It's quite ironic, then, that Radwanski himself abused the privacy he was granted (i.e. to be a prominent public servant yet unsupervised by the Access to Information Act) and signed his own highly excessive expense submissions.
But Althusser wrote wonderfully about the possibilities for human conviviality then chopped his wife into little bits.
Humans. pfft.
Getting caught makes you a lousy spy.
We had to design a small media postproduction space with an adjoining office in a university. Three editing suites in an 18x18' room, with cabinets storing cameras and other gear, and two admin/graphics machines went into another room about 18x8'. The catch: no windows. Good for avoiding glare, bad for sanity.
Survival design tactics included an inky blue/gray colour for the editing space (to match the lacie monitors) with splashes of colour on the wall, halogen lighting for high-contrast spots, good ventilation, iso-racks to house noisy 'puters and hard drive arrays, headphones, and a good desk setup.
The office/admin area got a sunny yellow paint job, at first at the limits of what's bearable, but after all day without windows it really helps. Same high contrast lighting, some full-spectrum bulbs too. More sanity-building: agreement in musical taste before the headphones come off, and of course it helps that we're unaffected by viruses or downtime or petty frustrations, since we're using Macs for A/V work. Now we can cram 5 people into a two person space without any bloodshed.
Moofie typeth: "Violence is not the only solution. It is, however, the final solution, and sometimes the only viable one."
Sun Tzu points out that war is an inevitable condition of a State. War is a form of violence that doesn't need to involve bloodshed, however: "to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting" -- and, "He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight."
The general conclusion from the Art of War is that deception, spying, and manipulation from afar is skillful war, that bloodshed is a failure; and while war is an inevitability, its success (more like 'rightness') is tied to moral 'harmony'--a concept I believe is considerably complexified by the new global 'community,' to the point where initiating war is practically never justified.
Wow. I'm a canajun pacifist, eh, but that was just ridiculous. (Obviously you're ESL, otherwise I'd pick on your grammar too. Umm, english is NOT your first language, right? Please tell me I'm right.)
Some of the residents who predated Confederation joined with British forces to repel U.S. invasions (on the very spot on which I type, actually), but whatever. The CANDU system is not proven to be the 'best' program in the world, it has its own problems. We participate in many instances of international belligerence that have, in fact, made us enemies to various jihad-driven factions. And, while we don't make nuclear weapons, we'll happily supply the raw materials to those who do--and then rely on their protection.
Our military is small because it's relatively pointless as presently conceived: either use it for overseas operations--the so-called 'peacekeeping' missions or collaborating with the emerging meta-empire(s), or defend ourselves from what, the USA? If they found sufficient reason to roll across the border, what are we going to do about it in our present state of preparation?
You're right however about violence begetting violence, even if only deferred. The ones on top just don't get that, and then wonder why they're hated...
Today I got to play with a new G5 with two big internal disks and four 160GB firewire 800 external disks. It all lives inside a nice iso-rack so that we can hear ourselves edit video.
And, by the way, according to Avid, the speed of f/w 800 should be just fine--seems true so far.
Well, since the colour of Iapetus' dark hemisphere is a different hue than Phoebe's, that theory is in question. See Space.com's page on Iapetus.
I use a clamshell iBook at work a good part of the day (and for awhile it doubled as a personal machine). It's exactly 4 years old and has been bashed around quite a bit, has had a battery and HD replacement, and the backlight is starting to dim. It only has an 800x600 screen (but Panther's Expose feature has made it useable again).
Really, it's amazing. It runs for months without a reboot, on Panther. Latchless spring loaded lid: close to sleep (instant), open to wake (2 seconds). An average of 10 applications (MS Office, networking, and 2D creative apps) running under normal use, on a 366MHz G3, without much swapping. On and off various networks, simple and easy (well, finder-integrated ftp is still lousy, and SMB can be quirky, and I don't get full Novell support from campus IT, whatever).
It's practically ruggedized, and has been dropped a few times and had toddlers pounding on it without mishap. I've slapped it down in the middle of a pub, pulled out a camera and firewire cable, and edited video on the spot. It's ugly but nice to touch and carry.
Co-workers suggest I upgrade, but they're filmmakers and have bleeding-edge-itis. If I need to render or use a time-based app., I have G5's and big displays. This thing still works hard at everything else, 4 years later. It originally cost about US$1,500, and 4 years later it's worth around $550. Probably one of the most reliable and economical computers (TCO, ROI, resale value) I've ever owned or worked on--and it was their low-end consumer model.
Plus I get to tease the WinXP-locked web designers here about being able to test sites on my own machine with a stock install of apache using a cross-platform array of worst-case scenario browsers (VirtualPC running Win98SE). Then they'll turn around and say that macs can hardly run any software! Wow.