The use of the expression "outside the box," ironically, is so businessspeak cliche that it's become a sign of conventional thinking.
(That said, I do agree that some signs are out there. Personally I'd suspect Apple wanted to sell a sort of iPod cradle/set-top box instead, not fold video into the main iPod line. Be a good product line to hold them over for the intel chip CPUs.)
I still boot the machine occasionally just for the nostalgic sounds of the start-up bong and the whirr of the floppy drive.
Much as the machines have improved, the "insanely great" sound and feel of those original Macs just can't be beat. Just thinking of the original startup noise actually gives me a little thrill, which is pretty ridiculously good design for something that shouldn't matter at all (and pretty ridiculously pathetic of me).
The backlight on an iPod gives a lot of people the same feeling, I think.
Some organisms just don't fit with our way of life.
Here's hoping those organisms that don't "fit with our way of life" don't eventually include our own species. Natural selection includes you and me, too, however "slightly different" you think we may be. And mass extinctions don't tend to leave the same species at the top of the pyramid, unless you're counting prokaryotic cells or something.
Environmentalism is enlightened self-interest, not some tree-hugging, static-world conceit about spotted owls and condors being awfully kewl.
Nice try at "big spending liberals are just wasting $ *again*" spin.
You knew it'd be coming, though, didn't you? I mean, "France" did appear in the original story.
Anyone who claims one party or the other has a monopoly on pork barrel spending loses all credibility, period. (The world ain't black and white, but all they've got is rods to see it by.)
Inside of the last year-plus, the price of luxury goods from Europe has gone up dramatically here, too. The difference is almost strictly the decline of the dollar against the Euro.
My own painful example would be Leica and Swarovski optics. A Leica spotting scope that cost 800 USD three years ago is now $1300. Leica isn't paying dramatically more taxes today than they were then. I still can't buy their dang scopes, and I could have back then.
Anyone who's traveled in Europe or anywhere else could tell you that prices in different sectors of the economy can differ in ways that may or may not reflect the added costs you're talking about. Gas for private cars is much more expensive. Other stuff will be far cheaper than you'd find them in the US. And until the Euro there was tons of variation in those things from place to place. Soda in Paris, always expensive. Instanbul is cheap, but it's hard to say how cheap at a given moment because of Lira inflation.
You shouldn't be encouraging the Supreme Court to make extreme decisions just to avoid "weaseling"!
Bravo. What is it with our culture now? Making mature, considered decisions about something, decisions that require other parties to consider them outside the world of newsbites and so on, is now considered a sign of weakness, is it?!?
A moral person isn't someone who makes a confusion of rash, instinctive decisions about right and wrong. Moral people struggle to figure out what to do, and often their decisions are qualified by the stuff they've considered along the way. It's called being a danged adult.
The Supreme Court, for all the current right-wing majority's nascent authoritarian learnings, is not in the business of sweeping decisions that reach far beyond the cases brought before them. Their 10 Commandments decision's coming up, and they're not going to be extending it to cover "In God We Trust" and evolution in schools just because they want to take a stand. There's a process, and it's not weak or waffly to follow it.
This is archetypal leading math, on the level of those USA today graphs with loooong arms for Uncle Sam.
If you want the world's population to seem unbelievably huge, too big to ever deal with, make all the people join hands in a line.
If you want to make the defecit seem smaller, describe it as paper money in dumpsters. As a volume it won't seem nearly as daunting than it would all stacked up, let alone end to end.
Both are correct, but they lead the reader's impression in a way that's intentional.
I have no problem with well-targeted adverts, but blanket adverts just get ignored. Whether the filtering happens in my browser or my brain makes very little difference.
Pretty good example of a very high-level internet truism: enormous corporations DO NOT UNDERSTAND the difference between traditional, broadcast models of [anything you care to mention] and point-to-point models. They pretty much want to program a commercial and have everyone who comes to a site view it, because that's how TV works. How do you fight through the white noise of TV ads to reach the most people? Lowest common denominator: beer ad city.
Their not "getting" a model where I drive the content shows up everywhere. The MPAA and RIAA sorts suing their own potential best customers, you know? Truly self-defeating.
To "target" the ads, though, they need to know something about us, don't they? How old am I? What are my interests? So how much privacy do I give up in order to avoid those pop-up flash annoyances in favor of custom ads? It does kind of cut both ways; we're reluctant to engage the whopping big corporate entities in that P2P way, too. And probably for good reason.
(Google's an easier example, because I've just given them search terms that show what I'm looking for. Not going to be so easy for many other situations, is it?)
It's not like the kid was a crackhead, and these folks figured, probably rightly, that the army might clean him up.
Is that the same Army whose recruiters attempted to commit two clear ethical violations just in the process of getting him in the door? You're right, sounds like a good influence.
I've had three pretty close friends enlist in the services -- two in the Navy, one in the Marines. The levels of alcohol and drug use they described were frighteningly high. That's anecdotal, okay -- but these were straight arrows going in, and they weren't anywhere near clean while they were in uniform. One at least was more Boy Scout than was maybe good for him before he joined. Two of them have returned to those selves after leaving, but the third is a hard drinking, hard smoking, heavily-tattooed and generally scary fellah now. Wants to talk about how cynical he is about "how things work," mostly.
(This story is basically "The services are desperate to recruit, and they got this 'in' in Bush's education bill to do it with." Why are they desperate to recruit? Because W., having talked so much about the armed forces not being ready for confict during the 2000 campaign, has spent his term in office making those predictions come true on his own watch. Everything the guy claimed about Clinton decimating the military's ability to fight, he's done himself in spades.)
So often, people who aren't the iMac target demographic don't "get" the machines at all. You're a pretty good example, judging by this post. Not that you're being nasty; you just don't see what the system is aimed at because it's not you.
Aesthetics being the usual culprit, it's amazing that Apple's more "unique" designs, like the original iMac, appeal to people despite the fact that the machines are really kinda marginal.
iMacs with each freshening have been re-situated at a tier and a nudge behind a power/graphics user's level -- which is to say as a decidedly middle-class system. "Marginal" isn't the word for that. They're middle-class appliance computers. Actually as each generation of iMac has come out, Apple watchers have wondered whether the top-of-the-line models were being undercut by them on performance-for-price. The iMac G5 models were no exception. As they came out,/. types were anticipating new tower G5s, because otherwise that line almost didn't make sense any more.
And if said box is stuffed under your desk and the only entry to it you have is through your monitor, who cares what it looks like?
And again, iMacs are designed precisely for people who do not NOT NOT want to dedicate a hutch shrine to their tower down in the basement. Desk? Who wants to dedicate a whole desk in some extra office in their house? That's exactly the model that Apple was tilting against. Note the emphasis on low footprint, from the first CRT models on. This is for people whose response to a tower under the typical chintzy computer desk is "ugh" (and to some extent for schools with limited space or spots on a long counter).
(Personally I got an original Rev A CRT iMac gratis, and it grew on us a ton. There's a lampshade 17" version on the narrow kitchen counter now. The machine's lasted for years now, so if it was marginal when it started it must be positively archaic now -- despite being quite capable of handling Tiger and everything else I've had to touch on it. And it's displaced the [more recent] Wintel boxes in the house, despite my being required to keep those up for work reasons. They're in the basement corner for over a year now. The kids liked the iMacs far more.)
If there's a professional columnist anywhere who's as much of a troll as Mr. D., I haven't seen the material that'd convince me of it.
The man basically fleshes out his/. posts a little, gets them edited for spelling, and calls it a column. Next to him, the sports columnists in the local paper provide us with thought-provoking, well-reasoned journalism.
The whole idea's to provoke a reaction, sure, I can live with that. But you don't feed the trolls.
I for one am not going to allow egg on my face too by following this guy blindly down an unmarked road...
The rest of the screed we can only react to instinctively, okay -- but the one piece of relatively concrete evidence, that code name, shapes that reaction pretty early on, doesn't it?
"Avalanche," as a name for a product or project, would be just about the worst possible choice. As a P2P tool that would imply bandwidth problems and the potential for a single point of failure. Does someone somewhere have a positive feeling about this name? Coming from blinkin' Microsoft?
I'm trying to think of a product I would happily buy with the name "Avalanche" on it. A quick Google doesn't get me much. Team names.
Depends, like everything else, on your audience
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Do Stealth Startups Suck?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This story would be analogous to saying "Small, vanity press publications suck" or "mass market paperbacks suck." For the wrong purpose or the wrong people, anything sucks.
When you're in the business of publishing something, almost everything about the way you do it depends on the audience you're trying to reach. I've been involved with several directory-style sites that we will have done "stealth" releases for, by the rough definition being used in this article. The idea wasn't to broadcast to a mass audience, and we were just fine letting the first trickle of users see things without all the dots connected. We weren't measuring ourselves by a "branded release" model where we needed to appeal to a general audience; the people using this sites when they were fully up and running would be accessing them through a controlled set of sources.
(And your high class steak joint probably doesn't measure itself by Subway's standards, either, except in very general terms. Doesn't take out billboards to advertise, doesn't open in the same way at all.)
You make some good points, but then you leap off the cliff of accepted wisdom and discard that proverbial baby with the bathwater... to mix my metaphors horribly. Ahem.
... read up on the firebombing of Japanese cities, or European cities....The attack on Tokyo killed far more people, destroyed far more of the city than both of the nuclear weapons.
So true -- and in general, the point that people take the nuclear weapons as something completely distinct from "strategic" bombing campaigns, on both sides of the war, is ever so appropriate to make. By the time we got to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moment, those were natural extensions of the logic of those campaigns. Truman (one of my least favorite Presidents) had authorized the use of the bombs as soon as they'd work, and they were used without another decision on his part basically. For us to look back and deal with them alone has to be deeply wrong.
That doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned, though, or that we should accept the rationale that you offer for why they "worked" even on those "logic of the war" terms without scrutiny.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
And now we're off in the land of wishfully-accepted wisdom, positing possible events and their potential consequences. This line of thinking is certainly out there, it's worth thinking about -- and it's exactly where people who want not to deal with the morality of those bombs would like us all to come to a full stop.
Unfortunately "it stopped the war earlier and saved lives on both sides" asks us to accept that those arguments are true when they're essentially speculative. There was very real debate within the US's own armed forces about the potential costs of an invasion. There were different plans among the different services for how the end could come with Japan. They disagreed about what to do, and to suggest that there was a clear answer is a lie. To lump all that together and say "Okay, but it worked because the war didn't go any longer" avoids several questions -- "Why not drop the first bombs somewhere other than on a densely-populated city?" and so on -- and can amount to self-censorship that's just about to that head-in-the-sand point by now.
For one example: When the Smithsonian exhibit around the Enola Gay got neutered in the 1990s, one of the suggested additions to the exhibit, supposedly for "balance," was a display with a purple heart and a (quite high) estimate of the number of Purple Hearts that were prevented by the bombings. Some pretty major right wing influences, stirred up partly by "Air Force" magazine (which is a trade publication largely for purchasers of modern air weapons), wanted those fictional body counts included in the exhibit. Alas, the good folks at the museum are not especially fond of the idea of displaying fictional Purple Hearts. Partly, you know, they feel a responsibility not to insult those who got the real thing. Partly they just don't want to make things up to put on display -- and the proposed revisions weren't to be attributed to any particular primary source, they were meant to be in the neutral narrative voice of the exhibition's information panels. They chose to simply display the plane with almost no exhibit at all. Just a shiny fuselage.
Second example, and the one that horrifies me: Chester Nimitz, judging by both remarks of his own in October of 1945 and by comments of his widow, regretted the bombs horribly.
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into war." Nimitz's widow later recalled that he "always felt badly over the dropping of that bomb becaus
for the first time they're admitting they're not trying to stop big pirate-mills but slow down the consumer?
This would be the Sony version of "Darning someone to heck" in Dilbert. When a corporate entity thinks of its consumers as people it needs to keep in line through the use of nuisance lawsuits and general obstructionism, that mindset will come down to us in so many stupid little ways.
The **AAs need to make a clear distinction here in their minds -- pirate reseller, consumer -- and they do almost anything to muddy that line instead. They alienate us, without doing a thing to touch or turn the mills. Seriously short-sighted, self-destructive behavior, and one resulting from internally inconsistent positions, as you say. They think we're pirates, but they don't want to completely cheese us off... Why not just annoy us?
When you're devoting employee time to working out ways to trivially annoy your customers, now that is some fine prioritization.
These people just define the fringe... we need these people, because then we can grill our neocons and get them to publicly disavow that fringe.
Frankly I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, and W. Bush himself are going to back away from the ideological cliff, and I'm not seeing how my Oklahoma relations will ever leave the Republican fold over public officials who lay into librarians. This is the party that, when it needs to present itself as a "big tent," puts Zell Miller on the stage to tell us about those evil "Ag-it-a-tors" with his eyes rolling back in his head.
(You know, it's almost impossible to approximate Zell's pronunciation of that word in print. How many syllables are in there, anyway??)
All I really hope for is that the next tar baby our Brer President takes a swing at happens to be a moderate -- or someone who plays like a moderate -- in today's R. party, like maybe McCain. These people were born (again) to make schisms; the only thing holding the ship together is the boatloads of corporate money that makes it a sort of oligarchy. We do see some fissures along those lines. Lynching, this bill...
You're right, the whole brouhaha over librarians destroying records rather than having them potentially be open to searches under this act has highlighted them as among the most whole-hearted, sincere believers in individual intellectual freedoms... Which makes them natural targets for the right wing echo chamber machine.
And so we get: September 16, 2003: John Ashcroft accused librarians of fueling "baseless hysteria," and of having been "duped" by liberals. "Ashcroft mocked and condemned the ALA and other Justice Department critics for believing that the FBI wants to know 'how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.'"
Gee, how does The National Review feel about this? It advocates explicitly adding libraries to the list of organizations subject to the law, justifying that by listing the libraries the 9/11 hijackers used in Germany... I'm having trouble making out the argument there. It's pretty breathless: "Atta used computers at the public library and worked out at a Delray Beach health club." Health clubs are scaaaary! It too belittles librarians' concerns, of course:
"'I am dismayed by librarians' uninformed opposition to the Patriot Act,' says Maria Vagianos... 'Librarians commit a disservice to society and to their profession when they succumb to the ignorance that they are charged to dispel.'"
"These dangerously naïve or clandestinely seditious librarians are beyond foolish. They potentially jeopardize the lives of American citizens."
Google this one up and you'll come across a motherload of library organizations who are very seriously tackling the issues of intellectual freedom involved in this law. Dismissing those librarians as hysterical dupes of terrorists is not exactly calling them pinko commie fellow travelers... but we're already on our way. When does someone use the senior Bush's "card carrying" epithet?
Do another Google and you'll be able to easily find stuff like "The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Book number 4 on the list: The Kinsey Report, because it tried to "normalize deviant behaviors." Yep, those Patriot Act supporters are true believers in intellectual freedoms... They'd never abuse surveillance powers, no ma'am.
No idea who the Irish comedian you allude to might be.
I assure you, having endured that ham-fisted and incredibly obvious song more than I cared to, that my own spontaneous simple reaction was: this person does not "get" irony. The tedious "Not!" thing -- irony for the irony impaired, circa late 1980s -- had a far better idea of what irony is and does.
Your numbered list, incidentally, does absolutely nothing for me. And yes, I understand the points you're making, but I don't agree that they apply.
Its like if I was watching the news and they told me what was going on in World of Warcraft or something... its just out of place.
Maybe you're not a native English speaker, but the "if I was" in your sentence is more like a "when I am." I couldn't count the number of lame promotions that crept into TV newscasts back before I gave up on the tool of propaganda they've become. Forget events that actually happened in virtual game environments; the last five minutes of every NBC newscast seemed to be a "What's about to happen on 'ER'" teaser for the entire first season of that show. No news value at all, they were just pimping their entertainment.
By contrast, this Batsuit story doesn't seem at all out of place on HowStuffWorks to me.
Maybe you think this site has an audience that's radically different than the one subscribing to Popular Mechanics? Maybe you hate when PM has a cover story about one more fictitious Space Shuttle replacement every dang month? Or when, in the 1950s, they speculated about how going to the moon would involve, Step One, shooting nuclear missiles at it? If anything the line between reporting and speculation is murkier there that it is with this little piece. (Shrugs.)
I can sort of sympathize. I worked in book stores all through college, and there was one set of customers who wanted to seem "cultured" and talk about their reading, but whose idea of high culture was Ayn Rand or Stephen King. This company wasn't paying me minimum wage so I could pretend to wax enthusiastic over stuff I found pretty depressingly awful. There were also the Blockbuster shoppers: people who asked for a recommendation, but then expected you to read their minds or the minds of the people for whom they were buying a gift. Those people would say they liked a particular author, but then they wound up rejecting any suggestions you made, and eventually they left with something completely unlike that initial example they'd given. You wound up wondering if they had any idea what they were asking for, or whether they'd even read their "favorite" author at all.
But you know, they're people, and you were frustrated by the whole situation partly because you decided to write them off. That's what your "triage system" was. Spend your day learning to shut yourself off from idjits, and it'll drag you into a low place.
We had some pretty nuts regulars at one of the stores I worked in; one of whom was a squeaky-voiced little guy who prefaced every sentence with your name and the words "Could you please tell me...?" ("Ian, could you please tell me this? And Ian, could you please tell me...?") I actually kind of liked the guy after a while. Didn't wear my soul down any to do so, either.
It's like the MS writers just glanced, saw that there were dwarves listed among the unit types, and decided it must be a fantasy RPG. The games predate the MS buyout of Bungie, but you'd expect PR writers to at least make themselves familiar with the Web presences those games had. C'mon -- Myth and Myth II had Bungie.net communities that were superb for their times... based on the old Perl site.
Oh, wait, I think I just figured out why they didn't pay attention to those. Cognitive dissonance.
Okay, but that song drove me nuts. When it rains on your wedding day, that's not ironic, it's just disappointing. (If you'd set up a gazebo to prevent the effects of rain, but then the system of drinking fountains in it had a problem that wound up sprinkling all your guests despite it being a clear sunny day, that would be ironic.) A free ride when you've already paid is, similarly, not really "ironic." Argh.
As far as what it is with Brittney, repeat after me: "Lowest Common Denominator." "White Trash Schadenfreude." There's some fascination with the squalid quality there -- poverty of spirit despite all the money and fame. She's like a punctured silicone implant lying on the hood of a rusty pimped Civic. And I do mean "pimped."
Apparently anyone who observes that present human activities won't result in a planet *we* (as opposed to allosaurus families) can actually inhabit is just hugging trees and bunnies. The observation that major climate change is essentially guaranteed to displace dominant groups of complex vertebrates, as it has in all previous cases, is similar touchy-feely enviro-whacko nonsense. Yes, you are such a special, practical sort of person. No wishful thinking to you, no madame.
We both vote to shoot all idiots who think there is some static utopian version of Earth
You "vote" to shoot people who you think are misinformed? Was that on the ballot? Oh, I get it -- you're telling us what kind of government you'd like. That was already starkly obvious owing to the authoritarian myopia of the people you really have voted for. Thanks for checking in though.
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Thing is, they don't always work out that well for the people caught between the two megalomaniacs, either.
(But go ahead, wave your "Peace in Our Time" paper around if it makes you feel better.)
The use of the expression "outside the box," ironically, is so businessspeak cliche that it's become a sign of conventional thinking.
(That said, I do agree that some signs are out there. Personally I'd suspect Apple wanted to sell a sort of iPod cradle/set-top box instead, not fold video into the main iPod line. Be a good product line to hold them over for the intel chip CPUs.)
Much as the machines have improved, the "insanely great" sound and feel of those original Macs just can't be beat. Just thinking of the original startup noise actually gives me a little thrill, which is pretty ridiculously good design for something that shouldn't matter at all (and pretty ridiculously pathetic of me).
The backlight on an iPod gives a lot of people the same feeling, I think.
Here's hoping those organisms that don't "fit with our way of life" don't eventually include our own species. Natural selection includes you and me, too, however "slightly different" you think we may be. And mass extinctions don't tend to leave the same species at the top of the pyramid, unless you're counting prokaryotic cells or something.
Environmentalism is enlightened self-interest, not some tree-hugging, static-world conceit about spotted owls and condors being awfully kewl.
That's a good point. My only question is, how did this ever come up, not just once, but with "quite a few" people?
Possible jobs you hold, in my fertile imagination, include "tattoo artist," "vampire," and "plastic surgeon." Or some combination thereof.
You knew it'd be coming, though, didn't you? I mean, "France" did appear in the original story.
Anyone who claims one party or the other has a monopoly on pork barrel spending loses all credibility, period. (The world ain't black and white, but all they've got is rods to see it by.)
My own painful example would be Leica and Swarovski optics. A Leica spotting scope that cost 800 USD three years ago is now $1300. Leica isn't paying dramatically more taxes today than they were then. I still can't buy their dang scopes, and I could have back then.
Anyone who's traveled in Europe or anywhere else could tell you that prices in different sectors of the economy can differ in ways that may or may not reflect the added costs you're talking about. Gas for private cars is much more expensive. Other stuff will be far cheaper than you'd find them in the US. And until the Euro there was tons of variation in those things from place to place. Soda in Paris, always expensive. Instanbul is cheap, but it's hard to say how cheap at a given moment because of Lira inflation.
The world is not reducible to doctrines.
Bravo. What is it with our culture now? Making mature, considered decisions about something, decisions that require other parties to consider them outside the world of newsbites and so on, is now considered a sign of weakness, is it?!?
A moral person isn't someone who makes a confusion of rash, instinctive decisions about right and wrong. Moral people struggle to figure out what to do, and often their decisions are qualified by the stuff they've considered along the way. It's called being a danged adult.
The Supreme Court, for all the current right-wing majority's nascent authoritarian learnings, is not in the business of sweeping decisions that reach far beyond the cases brought before them. Their 10 Commandments decision's coming up, and they're not going to be extending it to cover "In God We Trust" and evolution in schools just because they want to take a stand. There's a process, and it's not weak or waffly to follow it.
How mature are we, anyway?
If you want the world's population to seem unbelievably huge, too big to ever deal with, make all the people join hands in a line.
If you want to make the defecit seem smaller, describe it as paper money in dumpsters. As a volume it won't seem nearly as daunting than it would all stacked up, let alone end to end.
Both are correct, but they lead the reader's impression in a way that's intentional.
Pretty good example of a very high-level internet truism: enormous corporations DO NOT UNDERSTAND the difference between traditional, broadcast models of [anything you care to mention] and point-to-point models. They pretty much want to program a commercial and have everyone who comes to a site view it, because that's how TV works. How do you fight through the white noise of TV ads to reach the most people? Lowest common denominator: beer ad city.
Their not "getting" a model where I drive the content shows up everywhere. The MPAA and RIAA sorts suing their own potential best customers, you know? Truly self-defeating.
To "target" the ads, though, they need to know something about us, don't they? How old am I? What are my interests? So how much privacy do I give up in order to avoid those pop-up flash annoyances in favor of custom ads? It does kind of cut both ways; we're reluctant to engage the whopping big corporate entities in that P2P way, too. And probably for good reason.
(Google's an easier example, because I've just given them search terms that show what I'm looking for. Not going to be so easy for many other situations, is it?)
Is that the same Army whose recruiters attempted to commit two clear ethical violations just in the process of getting him in the door? You're right, sounds like a good influence.
I've had three pretty close friends enlist in the services -- two in the Navy, one in the Marines. The levels of alcohol and drug use they described were frighteningly high. That's anecdotal, okay -- but these were straight arrows going in, and they weren't anywhere near clean while they were in uniform. One at least was more Boy Scout than was maybe good for him before he joined. Two of them have returned to those selves after leaving, but the third is a hard drinking, hard smoking, heavily-tattooed and generally scary fellah now. Wants to talk about how cynical he is about "how things work," mostly.
(This story is basically "The services are desperate to recruit, and they got this 'in' in Bush's education bill to do it with." Why are they desperate to recruit? Because W., having talked so much about the armed forces not being ready for confict during the 2000 campaign, has spent his term in office making those predictions come true on his own watch. Everything the guy claimed about Clinton decimating the military's ability to fight, he's done himself in spades.)
Aesthetics being the usual culprit, it's amazing that Apple's more "unique" designs, like the original iMac, appeal to people despite the fact that the machines are really kinda marginal.
iMacs with each freshening have been re-situated at a tier and a nudge behind a power/graphics user's level -- which is to say as a decidedly middle-class system. "Marginal" isn't the word for that. They're middle-class appliance computers. Actually as each generation of iMac has come out, Apple watchers have wondered whether the top-of-the-line models were being undercut by them on performance-for-price. The iMac G5 models were no exception. As they came out, /. types were anticipating new tower G5s, because otherwise that line almost didn't make sense any more.
And if said box is stuffed under your desk and the only entry to it you have is through your monitor, who cares what it looks like?
And again, iMacs are designed precisely for people who do not NOT NOT want to dedicate a hutch shrine to their tower down in the basement. Desk? Who wants to dedicate a whole desk in some extra office in their house? That's exactly the model that Apple was tilting against. Note the emphasis on low footprint, from the first CRT models on. This is for people whose response to a tower under the typical chintzy computer desk is "ugh" (and to some extent for schools with limited space or spots on a long counter).
(Personally I got an original Rev A CRT iMac gratis, and it grew on us a ton. There's a lampshade 17" version on the narrow kitchen counter now. The machine's lasted for years now, so if it was marginal when it started it must be positively archaic now -- despite being quite capable of handling Tiger and everything else I've had to touch on it. And it's displaced the [more recent] Wintel boxes in the house, despite my being required to keep those up for work reasons. They're in the basement corner for over a year now. The kids liked the iMacs far more.)
The man basically fleshes out his /. posts a little, gets them edited for spelling, and calls it a column. Next to him, the sports columnists in the local paper provide us with thought-provoking, well-reasoned journalism.
The whole idea's to provoke a reaction, sure, I can live with that. But you don't feed the trolls.
The rest of the screed we can only react to instinctively, okay -- but the one piece of relatively concrete evidence, that code name, shapes that reaction pretty early on, doesn't it?
"Avalanche," as a name for a product or project, would be just about the worst possible choice. As a P2P tool that would imply bandwidth problems and the potential for a single point of failure. Does someone somewhere have a positive feeling about this name? Coming from blinkin' Microsoft?
I'm trying to think of a product I would happily buy with the name "Avalanche" on it. A quick Google doesn't get me much. Team names.
When you're in the business of publishing something, almost everything about the way you do it depends on the audience you're trying to reach. I've been involved with several directory-style sites that we will have done "stealth" releases for, by the rough definition being used in this article. The idea wasn't to broadcast to a mass audience, and we were just fine letting the first trickle of users see things without all the dots connected. We weren't measuring ourselves by a "branded release" model where we needed to appeal to a general audience; the people using this sites when they were fully up and running would be accessing them through a controlled set of sources.
(And your high class steak joint probably doesn't measure itself by Subway's standards, either, except in very general terms. Doesn't take out billboards to advertise, doesn't open in the same way at all.)
So true -- and in general, the point that people take the nuclear weapons as something completely distinct from "strategic" bombing campaigns, on both sides of the war, is ever so appropriate to make. By the time we got to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki moment, those were natural extensions of the logic of those campaigns. Truman (one of my least favorite Presidents) had authorized the use of the bombs as soon as they'd work, and they were used without another decision on his part basically. For us to look back and deal with them alone has to be deeply wrong.
That doesn't mean there isn't something to be learned, though, or that we should accept the rationale that you offer for why they "worked" even on those "logic of the war" terms without scrutiny.
Even ignoring the fact that it stopped the war early, the use of the nuclear weapons both saved American lives, and saved the lives of countless Japanese civilians who would've been killed in the firestorm that followed a mass bombing of those cities.
And now we're off in the land of wishfully-accepted wisdom, positing possible events and their potential consequences. This line of thinking is certainly out there, it's worth thinking about -- and it's exactly where people who want not to deal with the morality of those bombs would like us all to come to a full stop.
Unfortunately "it stopped the war earlier and saved lives on both sides" asks us to accept that those arguments are true when they're essentially speculative. There was very real debate within the US's own armed forces about the potential costs of an invasion. There were different plans among the different services for how the end could come with Japan. They disagreed about what to do, and to suggest that there was a clear answer is a lie. To lump all that together and say "Okay, but it worked because the war didn't go any longer" avoids several questions -- "Why not drop the first bombs somewhere other than on a densely-populated city?" and so on -- and can amount to self-censorship that's just about to that head-in-the-sand point by now.
For one example: When the Smithsonian exhibit around the Enola Gay got neutered in the 1990s, one of the suggested additions to the exhibit, supposedly for "balance," was a display with a purple heart and a (quite high) estimate of the number of Purple Hearts that were prevented by the bombings. Some pretty major right wing influences, stirred up partly by "Air Force" magazine (which is a trade publication largely for purchasers of modern air weapons), wanted those fictional body counts included in the exhibit. Alas, the good folks at the museum are not especially fond of the idea of displaying fictional Purple Hearts. Partly, you know, they feel a responsibility not to insult those who got the real thing. Partly they just don't want to make things up to put on display -- and the proposed revisions weren't to be attributed to any particular primary source, they were meant to be in the neutral narrative voice of the exhibition's information panels. They chose to simply display the plane with almost no exhibit at all. Just a shiny fuselage.
Second example, and the one that horrifies me: Chester Nimitz, judging by both remarks of his own in October of 1945 and by comments of his widow, regretted the bombs horribly.
This would be the Sony version of "Darning someone to heck" in Dilbert. When a corporate entity thinks of its consumers as people it needs to keep in line through the use of nuisance lawsuits and general obstructionism, that mindset will come down to us in so many stupid little ways.
The **AAs need to make a clear distinction here in their minds -- pirate reseller, consumer -- and they do almost anything to muddy that line instead. They alienate us, without doing a thing to touch or turn the mills. Seriously short-sighted, self-destructive behavior, and one resulting from internally inconsistent positions, as you say. They think we're pirates, but they don't want to completely cheese us off... Why not just annoy us?
When you're devoting employee time to working out ways to trivially annoy your customers, now that is some fine prioritization.
Frankly I'm not seeing a lot of evidence that John Ashcroft, Don Rumsfeld, and W. Bush himself are going to back away from the ideological cliff, and I'm not seeing how my Oklahoma relations will ever leave the Republican fold over public officials who lay into librarians. This is the party that, when it needs to present itself as a "big tent," puts Zell Miller on the stage to tell us about those evil "Ag-it-a-tors" with his eyes rolling back in his head.
(You know, it's almost impossible to approximate Zell's pronunciation of that word in print. How many syllables are in there, anyway??)
All I really hope for is that the next tar baby our Brer President takes a swing at happens to be a moderate -- or someone who plays like a moderate -- in today's R. party, like maybe McCain. These people were born (again) to make schisms; the only thing holding the ship together is the boatloads of corporate money that makes it a sort of oligarchy. We do see some fissures along those lines. Lynching, this bill...
And so we get: September 16, 2003: John Ashcroft accused librarians of fueling "baseless hysteria," and of having been "duped" by liberals. "Ashcroft mocked and condemned the ALA and other Justice Department critics for believing that the FBI wants to know 'how far you have gotten on the latest Tom Clancy novel.'"
Gee, how does The National Review feel about this? It advocates explicitly adding libraries to the list of organizations subject to the law, justifying that by listing the libraries the 9/11 hijackers used in Germany... I'm having trouble making out the argument there. It's pretty breathless: "Atta used computers at the public library and worked out at a Delray Beach health club." Health clubs are scaaaary! It too belittles librarians' concerns, of course:
Google this one up and you'll come across a motherload of library organizations who are very seriously tackling the issues of intellectual freedom involved in this law. Dismissing those librarians as hysterical dupes of terrorists is not exactly calling them pinko commie fellow travelers... but we're already on our way. When does someone use the senior Bush's "card carrying" epithet?
Do another Google and you'll be able to easily find stuff like "The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries." Book number 4 on the list: The Kinsey Report, because it tried to "normalize deviant behaviors." Yep, those Patriot Act supporters are true believers in intellectual freedoms... They'd never abuse surveillance powers, no ma'am.
I assure you, having endured that ham-fisted and incredibly obvious song more than I cared to, that my own spontaneous simple reaction was: this person does not "get" irony. The tedious "Not!" thing -- irony for the irony impaired, circa late 1980s -- had a far better idea of what irony is and does.
Your numbered list, incidentally, does absolutely nothing for me. And yes, I understand the points you're making, but I don't agree that they apply.
The song is lame pop, and it missed the mark.
Maybe you're not a native English speaker, but the "if I was" in your sentence is more like a "when I am." I couldn't count the number of lame promotions that crept into TV newscasts back before I gave up on the tool of propaganda they've become. Forget events that actually happened in virtual game environments; the last five minutes of every NBC newscast seemed to be a "What's about to happen on 'ER'" teaser for the entire first season of that show. No news value at all, they were just pimping their entertainment.
By contrast, this Batsuit story doesn't seem at all out of place on HowStuffWorks to me.
Maybe you think this site has an audience that's radically different than the one subscribing to Popular Mechanics? Maybe you hate when PM has a cover story about one more fictitious Space Shuttle replacement every dang month? Or when, in the 1950s, they speculated about how going to the moon would involve, Step One, shooting nuclear missiles at it? If anything the line between reporting and speculation is murkier there that it is with this little piece. (Shrugs.)
But you know, they're people, and you were frustrated by the whole situation partly because you decided to write them off. That's what your "triage system" was. Spend your day learning to shut yourself off from idjits, and it'll drag you into a low place.
We had some pretty nuts regulars at one of the stores I worked in; one of whom was a squeaky-voiced little guy who prefaced every sentence with your name and the words "Could you please tell me...?" ("Ian, could you please tell me this? And Ian, could you please tell me...?") I actually kind of liked the guy after a while. Didn't wear my soul down any to do so, either.
Oh, wait, I think I just figured out why they didn't pay attention to those. Cognitive dissonance.
As far as what it is with Brittney, repeat after me: "Lowest Common Denominator." "White Trash Schadenfreude." There's some fascination with the squalid quality there -- poverty of spirit despite all the money and fame. She's like a punctured silicone implant lying on the hood of a rusty pimped Civic. And I do mean "pimped."
We both vote to shoot all idiots who think there is some static utopian version of Earth
You "vote" to shoot people who you think are misinformed? Was that on the ballot? Oh, I get it -- you're telling us what kind of government you'd like. That was already starkly obvious owing to the authoritarian myopia of the people you really have voted for. Thanks for checking in though.