Great posting, but it's obvious that you haven't used Powerpoint XP, which has both multiple masters and rather better handling of EMF files than 2000 had. No, it doesn't meet the rest of your requirements; I imagine it would take MS another decade to get up to that point.
How is the animation in Keynote? Powerpoint's animation is getting to be useful, and I don't want to have to use flash to do some of the stuff I need to do.
Perhaps they know of the curse of the DEC. Now that HP has absorbed Compaq they have also taken on the mantle of the owner of Digital Equipment's corpse, whose wretched santeria can fell the mightiest of companies.
Okay, just kidding.
Sounds more like HHOS to me. I've always said the same thing. Once upon a time, DEC was a very good company to work for. Hopefully these other companies won't go the same way DEC did.
My own employer belongs on that list, but with less than a 1,000 people it probably wasn't eligible.
I'm disappointed that Apple didn't convert Chimera to Safari and so provide improvements to the Gecko engine. On the other hand, given David Hyatt's presence on the Safari team, I assume they at least made an informed decision.
As I see it, the disadvantages to using Gecko are mainly 1. the huge size of the code base, 2. the relationship with AOL/TW, 3. the slowness of the engine (relative to KHTML, if my day's work with Safari is any guide).
The disadvantages to using KHTML: not as standards compliant (though it is standards-based, like Gecko and Opera and OmniWeb; it is more compliant I believe than OmniWeb is).
The disadvantages of Safari over Chimera: no tabs; don't like the bookmarks UI much, not as configurable, and I like having a status bar.
The Safari beta seems more stable than Chimera. That's not saying much, though, as Chimera's one problem is stability.
Ultimately the presence of a KHTML-based Apple browser is good for open source, and what's good for open source is good for Mozilla. The competition may also be good for Chimera (and I doubt Apple sees Chimera as something it wants quashed). Also, the entry of a new non-IE browser with instant market share (I'd love to know how many Safari users there are already, just this evening) is good for web standards.
The time has changed AGAIN. It is now being shown at 8PM EST/PST and 7PM CST
I do believe that SciFi changed Farscape's scheduled viewing hour for the second time this season to further cut down on viewership so the suits could point to even lower Nielsen Ratings as a reason for cancellation.
On the other hand, perhaps 8pm is a better time slot. I know I'm more liikely to watch something at that time, and go out at 9.
None of these things are true for an iVideoPod. The only place you could use such a thing would be on a bus or train or something, where most of the passengers tend to be older and poor
Commuter rail in a big city: most users have money but are either ecologically minded or hate spending $20 a day on parking.
Back seat of a SUV.
Airplanes.
Interesting thing is, a video iPod and a Nexton could be the same product: they'd have pretty much the same form factor, after all. Only difference would be the OS, the processor, and the RAM.
Ninewands - thanks for the correction re: gemstone-quality diamonds, which were the only diamonds I was considering in my postings.
The rest of your posting is an excellent example of how properly to argue with someone you disagree with, and maintain the respect of your interlocutor.
Yes, a translation is copyright. Any issues of rights of the original edition are separate (and obviously in this case the original edition is a few centuries out of copyright).
However, particular modern scholarly editions are copyright by the editors who prepare them. This is because for many works, particularly those published from manuscript, the textual editing required to prepare a usable edition generates a copyrightable text. (Take a look at a scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament sometime, you'll be shocked at how many different readings there are of each part of the text.) For scholarly purposes, a translator usually makes use of more than one edition to prepare his translation so that (s)he can consider all the possible readings; this also helps to protect the translator from a test as to how far the copyright of a scholarly edition extends. (When I worked for a journal that published this stuff, we had many cases of publishers trying to push the outside of the envelope in this way, and we tended to cave.)
I understand that the MS of Beowulf is unique, and is quite a mess, requiring a great deal of scholarly intervention.
Tolkien also translated the Middle English Pearl MS texts.
Dummy, the reason why he is saying that diamonds are expensive is because they are being sold by a price fixing monopoly and they can get away with it. But products, in there native state (unfinished for diamonds, bits on media for windows), are essentially worthless.
His argument was that the ONLY reason that the price is high is because of the monopoly, and made a comparison to Windows 2000. This would only be a valid analogy if gemstone-quality cut diamonds could be created ex nihilo and replicated at zero cost, which Windows 2000 can be. But gemstone-quality cut diamonds cannot be created ex nihilo, they can only be created by cutting natural diamonds via a laborious process that is different for each natural diamond [i.e., you cannot just run a loop of disk copies to make millions of identical gemstone-quality cut diamonds like you can to create millions of identical desktop-quality {RIGHT....} Win2K CDs]. And if natural diamonds are so bloody common - why does De Beers have a monopoly on them? If they were so common, they could be dug out of the ground almost anywhere; and yet De Beers doesn't have a monopoly on real estate.
In other words, the form of monopoly here is hydraulic despotism: De Beers has complete control over a limited resource. The form of monopoly MS has is quite different. Therefore, the poster's argument proceeds via false analogy, and is impeached thereby. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Diamonds are expensive for the same reason that Win2k costs $200 per seat
Uh, no. Artificial diamonds look wrong. And natural diamonds cannot be compared with a human product like Win2K.
Re:I know this won't be popular...
on
Linus Is A Hero
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As unpopular as they and their creations are to a lot of people here, I think it's unfair to ignore how they were able to bring the internet to millions of users who, without Windows and/or AOL, would have never been able to do so.
Apple+Prodigy, or Apple+CompuServe, would have done it. AOL's real genius (whether they were Steve Case's ideas, or more likely those of his staff) was making the Internet connection in AOL work more simply than in the other online services, and in coming out with the unlimited connection plan when he did (despite the horrible user experience that led to for the first year or so after the change). Microsoft's real genius wrt the Internet (whether they were Bill Gates's ideas, or more likely those of his staff) was in recognizing the threat that Netscape posed to the Microsoft model and quickly leveraging free code into a "dumped" product (IE 2; don't talk to me about IE 1) that usurped Netscape's place and either per accidens or purposefully (the latter would be more complimentary to Microsoft) integrated the user's experience of the Web and the 'Net with the user's experience of the operating system.
In some ways, what MS is talking about now is what Sun was talking about 5 years ago. Moving the real work onto the network and off the desktop.
Re:Just ignorance, nothing more
on
Linus Is A Hero
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· Score: 2
The poster implied that all Linus Torvalds contributed to GNU/Linux was a bootloader. Seems quite trollish to me. How many years would free software have been held back if it had to wait for Hurd to be ready for prime time? There could be no Linux (or GNU/Linux) without GNU; but until quite recently GNU would have been just a bunch of free tools for non-free operating systems (or the free BSDs) without Linux.
Maybe eventually Hurd will displace Linux, maybe eventually the *BSDs will displace them both; but for now, Linux + GNU is the crown jewel of Open Source.
Re:Just ignorance, nothing more
on
Linus Is A Hero
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· Score: 2
No one says Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. I've never seen any media claim TBL invented the Internet. Everyone says, rightly, that he invented the World Wide Web (though I don't think they understand what that means, that he invented the set of protocols used by web browsers and web servers).
Besides, everyone knows that Al Gore invented the Internet.
In all seriousness, you've got everyone and his brother claiming to have invented the Internet, when what matters is who invented TCP/IP.
It is the same way with Linus and RMS, with RMS creating most of the base for Linux, but since Linus was the original bootloader writer, people assume he "invented" Linux, while overlooking the more important luminaries.
I think the Linux kernel is a lot more than a bootloader. Hurd was taking forever, and folks decided to try LT's Linux kernel with GNU's tools. And thus GNU/Linux was born.
You sure you're not misremembering? I always remember there being a scene in Return of the Jedi that isn't there (Luke "installing" the light saber in R2D2, only you only see Luke's hands, so you're not sure what you're seeing until the lightsaber shoots out). Near as I can tell, I must have read something like it in the novelization.
The ghoti example is from Shaw. And the novelization was probably written by a dimwit who didn't know how to spell gigawatt. And the "jigawatt" pronounciation would be entirely a modernism (and mostly an English/French thing), as the word it is from is from a language that never pronounces the "g" softly (Greek).
Giga is from the Greek word "gigantes," "giants." In Greek, gamma (=g) is always pronounced as a hard G like in Greek, not as in Giant. So, no, it's not jiga.
Exactly the problem I had with the first movie. What the hell do the battery-people have to look forward to? If the Matrix was as smart as it should be, why not make the lives of all of the people in the Matrix even more glamorous than they already are? Let them all fly, leap buildings, etc.
Morpheus explains that the Matrix took decades to figure out that this very idea wouldn't work; that in an Edenic Matrix, the "batteries" kept wigging out because there was no conflict in their lives.
Posts like Parent suggest a a new/. mod type may be in order: "Uninformed".
OS X has PERL. If you want to write code to allow apps in OS X to interact with one another without passing large amounts of information, you use AppleScript. If you want to do a lot of textual heavy lifting, you use PERL. You want to write an application, you can use Objective C, Java, or use C with the Carbon libraries.
Real Mac users miss OS 9.2.1, it's only the people with Mac's GUI envy that have migrated to OS-X or Mac people who refuse to use Windows (can't blame them). There are very few Mac users who really understand and appreciate the value of Linux or building your own machine.
Yeah, right, this is the kind of user who's going to want to build their own Mac. Wake up and smell the coffee.
You seem to be a pretty easygoing guy, humble and inoffensive. Me, on the other hand... if I haven't pissed somebody off, I must not be telling it like it is.
I'm sure that's part of the reason mod points are set to 5 only: to prevent vendettas.
I have to wonder what kind of loser gets his jollies off modding anyone down for the sake of saying they modded that person down, though. Regardless of what their rep is.
I know a lot of MAC enthusiasts here will start commenting that "See you can build a mac just like you can a pc!
Funny, I don't know any Mac people who would say that. What they're more likely to say is "Sure, if I want a homebuilt job, I'll just do an Intel box and throw Linux on it. Should work well, and be damned powerful if I want to spend the $$$. But it won't be as sweet as my PowerBook|iBook|PowerMac|iMac."
Re:Reliability and ease of use? Surely you jest!
on
Build Your Own Mac
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· Score: 2
Have you EVER used a Mac, man? I used PCs from 1987 to 2001. That's 14 years. I've used Mac for 1 1/2 years. (Though in both cases I've used the other one, and UNIX, a fraction of the time. Before the PCs and UNIX, it was VMS and a VT100 terminal.) The Mac is easier to use, hands down. That's not familiarity, that's design.
Stability? I keep my iBook on almost all the time; I sleep it closed when I'm not using it, charge it at home at night. Doesn't crash. Even though I switch back and forth between 802.11b and Ethernet.
I think you're still thinking of System 7, which crashed every time you looked at it crosseyed. OS X is spectacular. When it comes to quality, XP:98::OSX:2(OS9) (and XP=1/2(OS X)).
Slashdot Mirror
Great posting, but it's obvious that you haven't used Powerpoint XP, which has both multiple masters and rather better handling of EMF files than 2000 had. No, it doesn't meet the rest of your requirements; I imagine it would take MS another decade to get up to that point.
How is the animation in Keynote? Powerpoint's animation is getting to be useful, and I don't want to have to use flash to do some of the stuff I need to do.
Hear, hear. My company is fantastic, and under 1,000. Can't post its name, though, as that would betray my secret identity.
Perhaps they know of the curse of the DEC. Now that HP has absorbed Compaq they have also taken on the mantle of the owner of Digital Equipment's corpse, whose wretched santeria can fell the mightiest of companies.
Okay, just kidding.
Sounds more like HHOS to me. I've always said the same thing. Once upon a time, DEC was a very good company to work for. Hopefully these other companies won't go the same way DEC did.
My own employer belongs on that list, but with less than a 1,000 people it probably wasn't eligible.
I'm disappointed that Apple didn't convert Chimera to Safari and so provide improvements to the Gecko engine. On the other hand, given David Hyatt's presence on the Safari team, I assume they at least made an informed decision.
As I see it, the disadvantages to using Gecko are mainly 1. the huge size of the code base, 2. the relationship with AOL/TW, 3. the slowness of the engine (relative to KHTML, if my day's work with Safari is any guide).
The disadvantages to using KHTML: not as standards compliant (though it is standards-based, like Gecko and Opera and OmniWeb; it is more compliant I believe than OmniWeb is).
The disadvantages of Safari over Chimera: no tabs; don't like the bookmarks UI much, not as configurable, and I like having a status bar.
The Safari beta seems more stable than Chimera. That's not saying much, though, as Chimera's one problem is stability.
Ultimately the presence of a KHTML-based Apple browser is good for open source, and what's good for open source is good for Mozilla. The competition may also be good for Chimera (and I doubt Apple sees Chimera as something it wants quashed). Also, the entry of a new non-IE browser with instant market share (I'd love to know how many Safari users there are already, just this evening) is good for web standards.
Posted with Safari by a Mozilla user.
Frankly, I'd rather have a 12 in. Powerbook with the iBook case (tougher). I like the form factor.
The time has changed AGAIN. It is now being shown at 8PM EST/PST and 7PM CST I do believe that SciFi changed Farscape's scheduled viewing hour for the second time this season to further cut down on viewership so the suits could point to even lower Nielsen Ratings as a reason for cancellation.
On the other hand, perhaps 8pm is a better time slot. I know I'm more liikely to watch something at that time, and go out at 9.
None of these things are true for an iVideoPod. The only place you could use such a thing would be on a bus or train or something, where most of the passengers tend to be older and poor
Commuter rail in a big city: most users have money but are either ecologically minded or hate spending $20 a day on parking.
Back seat of a SUV.
Airplanes.
Interesting thing is, a video iPod and a Nexton could be the same product: they'd have pretty much the same form factor, after all. Only difference would be the OS, the processor, and the RAM.
Ninewands - thanks for the correction re: gemstone-quality diamonds, which were the only diamonds I was considering in my postings.
The rest of your posting is an excellent example of how properly to argue with someone you disagree with, and maintain the respect of your interlocutor.
Yes, a translation is copyright. Any issues of rights of the original edition are separate (and obviously in this case the original edition is a few centuries out of copyright).
However, particular modern scholarly editions are copyright by the editors who prepare them. This is because for many works, particularly those published from manuscript, the textual editing required to prepare a usable edition generates a copyrightable text. (Take a look at a scholarly edition of the Greek New Testament sometime, you'll be shocked at how many different readings there are of each part of the text.) For scholarly purposes, a translator usually makes use of more than one edition to prepare his translation so that (s)he can consider all the possible readings; this also helps to protect the translator from a test as to how far the copyright of a scholarly edition extends. (When I worked for a journal that published this stuff, we had many cases of publishers trying to push the outside of the envelope in this way, and we tended to cave.)
I understand that the MS of Beowulf is unique, and is quite a mess, requiring a great deal of scholarly intervention.
Tolkien also translated the Middle English Pearl MS texts.
IANAL
Dummy, the reason why he is saying that diamonds are expensive is because they are being sold by a price fixing monopoly and they can get away with it. But products, in there native state (unfinished for diamonds, bits on media for windows), are essentially worthless.
His argument was that the ONLY reason that the price is high is because of the monopoly, and made a comparison to Windows 2000. This would only be a valid analogy if gemstone-quality cut diamonds could be created ex nihilo and replicated at zero cost, which Windows 2000 can be. But gemstone-quality cut diamonds cannot be created ex nihilo, they can only be created by cutting natural diamonds via a laborious process that is different for each natural diamond [i.e., you cannot just run a loop of disk copies to make millions of identical gemstone-quality cut diamonds like you can to create millions of identical desktop-quality {RIGHT ....} Win2K CDs]. And if natural diamonds are so bloody common - why does De Beers have a monopoly on them? If they were so common, they could be dug out of the ground almost anywhere; and yet De Beers doesn't have a monopoly on real estate.
In other words, the form of monopoly here is hydraulic despotism: De Beers has complete control over a limited resource. The form of monopoly MS has is quite different. Therefore, the poster's argument proceeds via false analogy, and is impeached thereby. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Dummy my ass.
Diamonds are expensive for the same reason that Win2k costs $200 per seat
Uh, no. Artificial diamonds look wrong. And natural diamonds cannot be compared with a human product like Win2K.
As unpopular as they and their creations are to a lot of people here, I think it's unfair to ignore how they were able to bring the internet to millions of users who, without Windows and/or AOL, would have never been able to do so.
Apple+Prodigy, or Apple+CompuServe, would have done it. AOL's real genius (whether they were Steve Case's ideas, or more likely those of his staff) was making the Internet connection in AOL work more simply than in the other online services, and in coming out with the unlimited connection plan when he did (despite the horrible user experience that led to for the first year or so after the change). Microsoft's real genius wrt the Internet (whether they were Bill Gates's ideas, or more likely those of his staff) was in recognizing the threat that Netscape posed to the Microsoft model and quickly leveraging free code into a "dumped" product (IE 2; don't talk to me about IE 1) that usurped Netscape's place and either per accidens or purposefully (the latter would be more complimentary to Microsoft) integrated the user's experience of the Web and the 'Net with the user's experience of the operating system.
In some ways, what MS is talking about now is what Sun was talking about 5 years ago. Moving the real work onto the network and off the desktop.
Maybe eventually Hurd will displace Linux, maybe eventually the *BSDs will displace them both; but for now, Linux + GNU is the crown jewel of Open Source.
No one says Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet. I've never seen any media claim TBL invented the Internet. Everyone says, rightly, that he invented the World Wide Web (though I don't think they understand what that means, that he invented the set of protocols used by web browsers and web servers).
Besides, everyone knows that Al Gore invented the Internet.
In all seriousness, you've got everyone and his brother claiming to have invented the Internet, when what matters is who invented TCP/IP.
It is the same way with Linus and RMS, with RMS creating most of the base for Linux, but since Linus was the original bootloader writer, people assume he "invented" Linux, while overlooking the more important luminaries.
I think the Linux kernel is a lot more than a bootloader. Hurd was taking forever, and folks decided to try LT's Linux kernel with GNU's tools. And thus GNU/Linux was born.
You sure you're not misremembering? I always remember there being a scene in Return of the Jedi that isn't there (Luke "installing" the light saber in R2D2, only you only see Luke's hands, so you're not sure what you're seeing until the lightsaber shoots out). Near as I can tell, I must have read something like it in the novelization.
The ghoti example is from Shaw. And the novelization was probably written by a dimwit who didn't know how to spell gigawatt. And the "jigawatt" pronounciation would be entirely a modernism (and mostly an English/French thing), as the word it is from is from a language that never pronounces the "g" softly (Greek).
Giga is from the Greek word "gigantes," "giants." In Greek, gamma (=g) is always pronounced as a hard G like in Greek, not as in Giant. So, no, it's not jiga.
You're probably right.
Exactly the problem I had with the first movie. What the hell do the battery-people have to look forward to? If the Matrix was as smart as it should be, why not make the lives of all of the people in the Matrix even more glamorous than they already are? Let them all fly, leap buildings, etc.
Morpheus explains that the Matrix took decades to figure out that this very idea wouldn't work; that in an Edenic Matrix, the "batteries" kept wigging out because there was no conflict in their lives.
Posts like Parent suggest a a new /. mod type may be in order: "Uninformed".
OS X has PERL. If you want to write code to allow apps in OS X to interact with one another without passing large amounts of information, you use AppleScript. If you want to do a lot of textual heavy lifting, you use PERL. You want to write an application, you can use Objective C, Java, or use C with the Carbon libraries.
This reads like a rather clever troll to me. Especially given the "color pink" bit he also did.
Real Mac users miss OS 9.2.1, it's only the people with Mac's GUI envy that have migrated to OS-X or Mac people who refuse to use Windows (can't blame them). There are very few Mac users who really understand and appreciate the value of Linux or building your own machine.
Yeah, right, this is the kind of user who's going to want to build their own Mac. Wake up and smell the coffee.
You seem to be a pretty easygoing guy, humble and inoffensive. Me, on the other hand... if I haven't pissed somebody off, I must not be telling it like it is.
I'm sure that's part of the reason mod points are set to 5 only: to prevent vendettas.
I have to wonder what kind of loser gets his jollies off modding anyone down for the sake of saying they modded that person down, though. Regardless of what their rep is.
I know a lot of MAC enthusiasts here will start commenting that "See you can build a mac just like you can a pc!
Funny, I don't know any Mac people who would say that. What they're more likely to say is "Sure, if I want a homebuilt job, I'll just do an Intel box and throw Linux on it. Should work well, and be damned powerful if I want to spend the $$$. But it won't be as sweet as my PowerBook|iBook|PowerMac|iMac."
Have you EVER used a Mac, man? I used PCs from 1987 to 2001. That's 14 years. I've used Mac for 1 1/2 years. (Though in both cases I've used the other one, and UNIX, a fraction of the time. Before the PCs and UNIX, it was VMS and a VT100 terminal.) The Mac is easier to use, hands down. That's not familiarity, that's design.
Stability? I keep my iBook on almost all the time; I sleep it closed when I'm not using it, charge it at home at night. Doesn't crash. Even though I switch back and forth between 802.11b and Ethernet.
I think you're still thinking of System 7, which crashed every time you looked at it crosseyed. OS X is spectacular. When it comes to quality, XP:98::OSX:2(OS9) (and XP=1/2(OS X)).