Dvorak was a huge Mac fan who became disheartened with how incompetantly Apple was being run in the 1990s.
Maybe you'd like to know thing one before you create a fictive publishing history for the man based on what you want to believe?
Dvorak's famous original response to the introduction of the Mac in 1984 was that nobody had any proof that users would use a mouse, for chrissakes. So, you know, your "was a huge Mac fan" and "was largely correct in his analyses" statements were completely vitiated at the very first opportunity the man had to prove himself...
This guy's been a trash columnist for his whole career, always, and he's always had a particular grudge against Macs. He used to publish a column on the back page of either Macworld or MacUser magazine, as a kind of "counterpoint" -- in which every dang column was a rant against Apple and the Macintosh. It played very much like the sports columnist in your local paper who lays into the management of (fill in team name). This is strictly a profit thing; basically that sort of column does, as someone else pointed out, boost circulation like any troll post, and so the magazine ran him for a while and he was happy to print the dreck and cash the checks.
The other consistent note that Dvorak's sounded, always, is a sort of wannabe-neighborhood-bully line in favor of whoever appears to be the most powerful presence on the market. He positively adored IBM back in the day; that old column was full of stories about how great the PC was for so many reasons. When MS gets roundly criticized for something now you can count on Johnny to publish a "liberal media conspiracy" sort of argument about how MS is really being discriminated against. The guy sides with those in power, instinctively.
How Dvorak's managed to avoid working for Rupert Murdoch is a mystery. If there's any example of tech journalism being truly tabloid in its tone and general M.O., he's it. It's always seemed possible to me that he and Bill O'Reilly are actually the same person...
As a student of the New Testament and early Christianity, I have to say that discoveries of "new" gospels are rarely very interesting.
The value of any new text from antiquity is many-sided -- we have so little to work from -- and I find it queasying to read a series of posts from someone self-described as "a student of the New Testament" who thinks new gospels are nothing to write home about. Heck, you tell others not to be interested too. ("Move along...")
Essentially the gift of a new gospel is that it gives us that much more perspective on what Christianity was about then and what it's become. The canonical works were written partly in reaction to the stuff that got left out, so new texts help us understand them too.
New gospels also present challenges, tacit or more aggressive depending on the text, to the authoritarian use of Jesus's name and message, which can be nothing but a good in my book. You're right, the powers that be have long since gotten used to denying the importance of these texts. It's because they're threatened by those texts. Still. The Pharisees would be proud to have such stubbornly self-concerned intellectual heirs.
I don't find it necessary to shove anything that didn't make the canon into a convenient category of "Unabomber manifesto-types" in order to distance myself from it. You remind me of naturalists who demonize invasive foreign species. It seriously bends a person's conscience, doing stuff like that, and corrodes understanding.
Their legal squabbles over the past few years have ended up hurting consumers.
I don't disagree with the original poster that competition did drive these two to one-up each other's features, but you're right(er) on the essentials: Adobe has continued to be the traditional publishing giant, and Macromedia has had the Web world edge. They've been in slightly different markets, and to some extent their competition has injured the consumer in unnecessary ways.
For another non-trivial example of the way their competition has sometimes stung us, take a look at how Fireworks has, and hasn't, and then has been able to use various PhotoShop filters. The upgrade path for Fireworks has been affected by this, for me. I don't want to upgrade my software only to lose a bunch of third-party filters that suddenly won't work in the new version. Caused by Adobe and Macromedia sparring it out, pure and simple.
That said, I'll believe Adobe can rationalize the overlapping product lines when I see it. They can't be stupid enough to kill off the Dreamweaver line in favor of a GoLive, for Gawd's sake, but it wouldn't amaze me if they kept trying to fold in Fireworks' html-exporting features and wound up confusing PS for no real gain.
What does Amazon have to bring to the table, other than not crushing them like a bug?
There's risk from either direction. The attempt to squash them like a bug could also fail, yes, and at ruinous expense? We don't know what terms are being discussed, but there would be concessions and benefits on either side. Not that Amazon isn't dealing from a position of some strength, especially because it can play Netflix off against the Blockbuster evil empire.
Netflix is already facing Blockbuster's recent conversation to their own business model. If I was Netflix negotiating a deal of this sort, I'd be thinking that any sort of Amazon relationship could give me the presence to withstand that. I'd maybe want some sort of mutual benefits situation with respect to DVD sales off of Amazon.
(And I don't know enough about Netflix's base of customers, except that it includes me, but I'd bet Amazon has a colossally higher visibility for the average consumer. Amazon is on the level of google, with more staying power to boot. Whether Netflix has a lot of customers or not, the question is whether there's a lot of growth left in the market, and whether Amazon's presence would get at it.)
This is the perfect sort of thing to be asking the movie's *producer* about.
My money is on the old axiom that a movie's trailer reflects what the studio thought it was paying for, not the movie that got made. Personally I can't believe how completely off-base the first couple of trailers I saw were. It's like they were made by someone who never read the books or saw the BBC series. They've made me extremely leery of paying my $8.
(And the right answer to these questions could win me back. So in this question lies the chance of redemption. Mod up!)
We don't want something hip and stylish. We want something that works well.
Personally I want both. Only to the/. world would those seem like mutually-exclusive options.
That said, Sony is such a classic example of interesting design that completely ignores major sore points in implementation, it isn't even funny. I'd have one of their tiny upright-model camcorders right now, if they hadn't required their own special compression format for the resulting movies a couple of years ago. Ah well -- ended up with a different make, which then allowed me to make the choice to grab up a cheap and oh so handy Mac to edit on, and so on. If I'd taken the little Sony it'd have been endless compromises just to stick with their proprietary formatting.
Here we have them requiring me to bend over backwards to implement a sort of personal DRM on my music files. How much more clumsy than Apple's iTunes-purchased files is that? Major, major disincentive to buying for me. Big sore point. That's what they're not "getting." Stylish I like just fine.
I understand the origin of a few of the popular myths on/., but this one continues to baffle me (Although my working theory is that folks want to think of Americans as war-mongering, self-righteous Puritans, and this idea plays nicely into that stereotype).
I like how you try to answer your own question, there, with a straw man. Quaint. Except I live in the US, and I'm trying to be a conscientious parent, and unfortunately this criticism basically holds true when I'm trying to figure out what to take my kids to.
With respect to the movies, the MPAA and Hollywood censors in general have had lots to do with the Catholic church, at least since 1930 or so. If you've never taken a walk through the history of "the Hays code" -- actually eventually enforced, when it was, by ultra-Catholic politico Joseph Breen -- you might want to do so before you express any more mystification.
That's a strange history, but it obviously does show the bias you're claiming is so hard to understand. For example, Breen was only able to really enforce "the code" after a long nude swimming scene in "Tarzan and His Mate" caused a congressional outcry. Think the movie Tarzan ever killed anyone before the truly upsetting scene in which his wife was sorta, kinda naked?
If you honestly think the violence in "The 6th Day" (PG-13) would be less disturbing to a 13-year-old than the profanity in "Billy Elliott" (R for language and almost certainly for an implied gay friend), you've truly got that MPAA sensibility going on. Kill half the known world: PG-13. Say a few F-words: R. Or let's compare two movies that both got a PG-13, both of which I took my kids to:
Daredevil: Bad guy unfolds paperclips and flicks them forcefully into a character's throat, killing him, all on screen. Myriad other ultraviolent scenes, including a character's knees being broken and twisted backward and a woman being stabbed with knives that projected through her body, again on screen. PG-13. Whale Rider: Some sort of bong apparently appears in one scene -- I saw 'WR' in the theater and didn't notice -- and some minor characters giggle and hang around like slackers. Also PG-13.
Yeah, I think those were equivalent movies. Whale Rider was a wonderful family story. Daredevil should have been an R for any one of about eight different scenes.
Do we even want to start talking about video games? Give me one video game that's as sexual as Mortal Combat or Doom is violent. If there was such an animal, it'd have to be sold in a brown wrapper at the magazine stand that has the special "adult" room.
Or TV: Was Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" as drastic as any episode of CSI you'd like to watch? Not in a million years.
On the other hand, you don't have to be poor to be so consumed by greed that you're willing to steal or commit fraud to further line your pockets.
A big part of me wants to blame the criminal -- Ken Lay, you're a criminal, and we're disgusted when we read about your excesses. But part of me wants to look at the bigger world in which a crime like this gets committed, too.
The further you are away from someone -- socially or physically or in whatever senses -- the more likely you probably are to think of that person as some sort of abstraction rather than a complete human being. If I work in a small town bank, when someone comes in with a check to deposit I see her handwriting and watch her gather up her kids to leave the lobby. Probably I'm not going to steal from her without thinking about that. If I'm on a call center in India, all the financial numbers on my screen are numbers, not people's savings and livelihoods. They're disembodied voices on the phone, if that.
It's not technology, exactly. The networking technology that puts these people in contact with their victims is the same one that lets someone working on a legal team in the Philippines send me a note about a review I wrote three years ago. That cuts both ways.
I almost hate to come down this way, but it seems like a big part of the breakdown here is corporate interests. Companies that send their work overseas in order to be competitive aren't bound by the same sorts of "social contracts" that we expect from local employers. They exist across more than one legal system, they're used to treating people by different standards in different places... it just seems like a recipe for the erosion of any sort of public spirit. And corporate cultures are amazingly powerful things.
I guess it's time for me to start protesting at World Bank meetings or something... which I never thought I'd do. But there's a gap, here, in the way people see each other as people, and it's opening wider at precisely the point where the most economic clout's being applied. That ain't good.
Having heard these terms used sloppily and seemingly interchangeably, I took advantage of your post and my handy desktop dictionary to sort them out:
"Fundamentalism" has to do with the Protestant movement in the US which emphasizes the literally interpreted Bible as fundamental to Jesus's teachings.
"Evangelism" can mean either "the winning or revival of personal commitments to Christ" or "militant or crusading zeal."
"Zealot" in its most general meaning is "a fanatical partisan."
Offhand I'd say either "evangelist" or "zealot" would have been more adroit choices than "fundamentalist." Linux advocates would be far from any "religion of the book" fundamentalism based on one true text.
>The only people these UAVs will be spying on are enemy combatants in hostile theatre.
Which is pretty much the rest of the world
Hey, during the last two weeks I've been basically walled off by a couple of coworkers who decided my radical stance on the Schiavo case -- the courts have determined that the medical report is accurate and that the husband's assessment of her wishes is the best available -- means I'm unamerican. Lots of talk about the "culture of life" as opposed to my "culture of death."
In conjuction with the "Patriot" Act, I have no trouble imagining the government using this to keep an eye on my grocery trips. J. Edgar Hoover did it, and I see no signs of a break in the totalitarian attitudes of the current administration. Heck, our new Attorney General argued before the Supreme Court that his boss can imprison anyone he wants on the grounds of national security for as long as he says there's a war on, no questions asked, no lawyers, no nothin'.
The parent poster probably thinks torture couldn't go on in a prison run by US Military Intelligence, too. Nope. It's unimaginable.
My family has a cabin that's up a private road on the southern slope of Twin Sisters mountain, just outside Rocky Mountain National Park in Roosevelt National Forest. Technically the address is in Allenspark, a while south of Estes Park on the Peak to Peak, though we're a long hike over the highway and up the mountain from town.
Our hillside association has had this WiFi thing come up a few times. Someone down in Allenspark proper has been encouraging the town to try to get some sort of WiFi arrangement going. A variety of plans have come up.
It's not flying very well with us, anyway. People from Denver who come to their cabins all the time do maybe want satellite TV and other amenities, but there's a pretty sizeable contingent of people on the hill who drive from far off -- Minnesota for us, Texas for some -- and who don't thrill at the idea of dragging the leash behind the car.
The issue as far as I can tell has never been whether the town had the right to provide the service, or contract for it with private companies. Nobody told us it was illegal; they're just using the town's size as a way of getting the negotiating leverage, or trying to. I believe at least one of the proposals intended to use public money to contract with someone, but that got voted down... Which is, you know, how democracy functions. So no problem.
It's interesting to note the subtle "Users are SO counterproductive" tone here. I mean, you have us resigning ourselves to the world we've been forced to live in:
Another non-violent response is the most popular, he said -- about one-third of respondents said they immediately just resign themselves to loss of the data.
And then you get the "Let the experts handle this, you just need to pay your protection money" angle:
Even those consumers who curb their violent impulses tend to do the wrong thing by attempting to fix the problem themselves.
Finally, we read an open disparagement of "individualism," which is apparently the wrong attitude when dealing with a computer:
But there's a reason for computer individualism, Johnson suggested. Many consumers don't think to look for help because of the subtle training they have received from overworked and sometimes sarcastic technical support staff.
Note the last bit -- where the support people are to blame for training people not to ask for help.
Gee, no mention of the OS involved being responsible for any of this. And where's this story running? MSNBC?
None of that is hard, the hard part from their POV is building the brand recognition that ST gives you. Your new series is dynamic and all -- but it'll have to catch an audience, whereas ST has one built in.
TV is the same as movies or music. When Janis Ian did her/. interview, she mentioned that music studios actually pay you less for songs you wrote than they do for "covers." The idea is that a known commodity is guaranteed to be at least recognizable. It's insane -- that approach carried to an extreme would result in zero new hits -- but that's the way they pay. (Janice Ian would know -- she's never recorded anything she didn't write herself.)
Even the cable networks are hardly adventurous about what they program. They need to give you something you recognize, only they're able to push the standards of what can get shown and they can afford the ratings that go with a niche audience -- so you get Larry David remaking Seinfeld without the straight man, or a mob series with more language and violence than would pass on broadcast. You still know exactly what you're getting: S & The City was a big hit for HBO, but it's basically a sit com with more language and some skin.
I used to work in bookstores during college. Most of the mass market stuff is completely canned Stephen King-level genre work. But man, is there ever more "space" for niche authors in the book industry. It doesn't seem like the big media companies properly develop books as a seeding ground for their other markets, though. Individual authors get big money deals when someone's interested in the film rights, but what they should be doing is signing young authors to modest contracts early on. What you need, to get to what we both want, is some kind of farm system for developing young talent that can cultivate an audience over time. Seems like that'd be okay for the sort of authors who get called "promising," and great for the studios -- assuming they could view the money as a modest investment and not stand over authors' shoulders giving committee advice.
It wasn't until the series found its footing later that it became interesting.... Borgs eat our lunch
It amazes me how many people mention the Borg as if introducing a bunch of robotic heavies was some sort of master stroke. As bad guys, the Borg were somewhat less interesting than Superman's robot enemy who held all Kryptonian knowledge -- was it BRAINIAC? I can't remember the name. At least there, you had some conflicted motives: destroy it, and you're destroying all it knows about your lost home. By contrast the Borg menace was unsubtle -- and that's saying a lot, isn't it?
STTNG was much more interesting when it put the characters in situations where force had to be applied carefully if at all, so that it was about solving problems rather than being stronger or weaker than a given baddie. That would be the whole difference between Kirk and Picard, duh. Borg episodes dispensed with that level of writing. They were around because the writers dried up a little, I've always thought.
That series did a lot of stuff that was actually kind of fun and imaginative, but the Borg was just cheap.
I'd like to agree with you, but it's just not true
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How To Talk To Aliens
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Having run into countless tourists in America as a guide at a pretty big modern art museum, I can honestly say that they don't tend to shout. The vast majority of them spoke English quite well, though sometimes there was hesitation in their voice as they dug for the right word. I can't ever remember someone trying to speak French, or Japanese, or whatever r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w-l-y because they thought I'd somehow understand it that way. (Sometimes that would have worked, too.)
Europeans are, duh, more accustomed to dealing with people who speak another language. Americans mostly aren't, barring Spanish in some spots. Add to that the "lingua Franca" status of English, so that we tend to assume someone has some English. (And again, sometimes it works. Shop children in the Grand Market in Istanbul speak awfully good English, they need it to sell with.) Without bashing American tourists, who are generally cool and curious people, there's something to the stereotype.
Ordinarily I'd go along with "people are people, we all have our foibles," but that just doesn't match my experience.
This still leaves the problem of why the USA has been the only (supposedly:-)) developed country where this has happened.
In the case of creationism (or its in-sheep's-clothing surrogate du jour, "intelligent design") the two "developed" nations that have any significant public sentiment backing the active suppression of modern biology are the U.S. of A. and Australia. Both are former colonies of Great Britain, obviously, and both of them have a colonial history of explaining the death and displacement of native people in terms of God's will... There seem to be some cultural traits in common, generally. Hard to make that list up in any clean way, but the similarities are there.
Sometimes I have the feeling that it's a stubbornly self-deluding denial of history that somehow eventually causes these ideological perversions of thought. For example: a huge share of the American south seriously hasn't come to terms with the Civil War and "reconstruction," not for what they really were. Reconstruction ended because of plain terrorism: political terrorists fighting for their "lost cause" killed and threatened anyone who disagreed with them, including ordinary people and political figures. That's what the KKK is all about. That's how it came to run entire state legislatures in the early 1900s. Ask my Oklahoma relatives about reconstruction, though, and they'll tell you that black people were just incapable of taking part in government. Blaming the failure of reconstruction on black people is, essentially, an insane argument. It's completely inadequate and incoherent when you hold it up next to the record and try to explain events with it.
At some point, if you're making yourself believe completely bogus history in order to pretend your "side" was noble, when it wasn't... Well, maybe that's going to twist your conscience, and your ability to see straight, and make you willing to tell yourself more lies in order to cover up the primary ones. My OK relatives find all sorts of amazingly backward ways to take the Bible. To hear them read it, it's all about not allowing anyone who doesn't believe exactly what they believe into their church. So much for Christ's inclusive message.
What would the historical denial be in the case of Australia? I wonder how bizarrely Australian schoolbooks treat that "Fatal Shore" colony-of-convicts thing. Treatment of the aborigines? There are a few undercurrents of history there. Maybe that's it.
Have a nice, long conversation with someone who's all excited about "intelligent design" sometime. There are plenty of people who honestly think we'd be better off if we purged biology of the evolutionary thought that gives it any meaning at all.
Burn them at the stake, maybe not -- but destroy the careers of disbelievers? They'd have no qualms about that at all. My cousins in Oklahoma would love it.
Frankly I'm all for freedom and justice and the American Way (copyright whichever corporate entity got to them first) -- but having had the iTMS around for a while, and having bought a modest amount of music, I'm stumped at the objection that the DRM is odious and will prevent you from "doing what you want with it once you've bought it."
Apple's DRM is so danged innocuous that I haven't run into it, ever -- aside from the inability to attach a song to an e-mail and send it off to my sisters. There's not one thing I've ever actually tried to do with the files that's been blocked by the DRM. A minor interface quirk -- the way it uses checkboxes in more than one way depending on context -- caused me a minor headache once, and that's the only problem I've really had with iTunes or its store. (Oh, that and the fact that not that many books get made into CDs, at least for my running tastes.)
You have a burning (pun intended) need to produce more than 10 copies of the same exact playlist as a CD? That must be it. Yeah.
Except intellegence for all over the world said thier (sic) was...
Does anyone remember hearing the French guy at the UN security council, Villepain, saying that that WMD evidence wasn't convincing? Remember how those dastardly French folks were saying that going to war was precipitate, and that Bush was "following the logic of war" rather than exhausting the inspections regime -- which turns out to have worked, gutting Saddam H's weapons programs?
Do you remember how Colin Powell had to go before the security council and give a big presentation about all the rock solid evidence we said we had -- to convince the world? Sound familiar? Do you maybe recall how he later had to recant that testimony and apologize to the world for it? Is any of this ringing a bell? If intelligence "for all over the world" (yeesh) said this, why were Bush and company finding it necessary to go to those measures?
Fox News is not the only source of information about world opinion. You might want to look into a few other propaganda spigots, at the very least.
Most of the stuff was removed days before and while multi-nationalal (sic) troops where attempting to secure them.
This is my very favorite argument made by dipshits (excuse me) who try to cling to those pre-war arguments. Gee, um, if the war resulted in huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction disappearing from where we supposedly knew they were, and if they're now in Syria or within Iraq's borders in a situation where insurgents are basically able to move at will within a "weak state" -- then doesn't that mean the entire war was a colossal failure at accomplishing its professed goals??? Because I don't remember Bush and his loyalist cadre of junta leaders saying they wanted to scatter the WMDs to the terrorist winds... Do you?
Heck, we're quoting Nelson Pratt -- the "marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation" -- at enormous length. Add a straw man to your press release -- poof! It's a news item!
This sort of thing, from Taco no less, doesn't help Linux's credibility much.
Okay. I'm not sure why that means we shouldn't sympathize.
We sympathize with amputees coming back from Iraq, don't we? They knew they were joining the military. (If they joined under Bush II, they sure should've known what that meant, too.) Somehow putting myself in other people's shoes has never seemed like a waste of energy -- whereas resenting people who aspire to something seems like it'll only diminish everyone involved.
Here's a tip back: Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a waste or a nuisance, it's a strength.
I'm never going to go on the Lewis and Clark expedition, but having some sympathy for Meriwether Lewis, or understanding the guy a little, isn't going to make my life any poorer. Not even at this distance in time.
Spending energy resenting astronauts for wanting to do something amazing, though -- now that'll only leave you diminished.
Near as I can tell, you quoted me saying there's ambiguity in the guy's statements about what a business is, told me you "completely disagree with that," and then went off on a long digression about "all these freaking taxes!"
Your "taxes" button went off, is that it? I can't even figure out what exactly you disagree so avidly with. It's like I scratched the magic spot on a dog's back, and that ol' back leg started the phantom scratching motion... Taxes! Freaking taxes!!
The world ain't black and white. Back in the days when the shuttle was being promoted, Walter Mondale was one of the people saying it wasn't worth the money. Doesn't fit the stereotype, does it?
History's more complex than the stuff we're fed on the evening news. Kennedy's hardly my favorite president -- I think his recklessness with the Bay of Pigs was just about as stupid as Bush II's Iraq blunder, and let's hope Iraq doesn't lead to something on the scale of the Missile Crisis -- but he chose the space program shrewdly, partly because it was a good crossover issue hand-in-hand with his "missile gap" militarism.
(Uh, because it struck me as being as badly written as this "If you're sorta running a business" level of specificity in the Ohio e-bay code. That was the comparison.)
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Maybe you'd like to know thing one before you create a fictive publishing history for the man based on what you want to believe?
Dvorak's famous original response to the introduction of the Mac in 1984 was that nobody had any proof that users would use a mouse, for chrissakes. So, you know, your "was a huge Mac fan" and "was largely correct in his analyses" statements were completely vitiated at the very first opportunity the man had to prove himself...
This guy's been a trash columnist for his whole career, always, and he's always had a particular grudge against Macs. He used to publish a column on the back page of either Macworld or MacUser magazine, as a kind of "counterpoint" -- in which every dang column was a rant against Apple and the Macintosh. It played very much like the sports columnist in your local paper who lays into the management of (fill in team name). This is strictly a profit thing; basically that sort of column does, as someone else pointed out, boost circulation like any troll post, and so the magazine ran him for a while and he was happy to print the dreck and cash the checks.
The other consistent note that Dvorak's sounded, always, is a sort of wannabe-neighborhood-bully line in favor of whoever appears to be the most powerful presence on the market. He positively adored IBM back in the day; that old column was full of stories about how great the PC was for so many reasons. When MS gets roundly criticized for something now you can count on Johnny to publish a "liberal media conspiracy" sort of argument about how MS is really being discriminated against. The guy sides with those in power, instinctively.
How Dvorak's managed to avoid working for Rupert Murdoch is a mystery. If there's any example of tech journalism being truly tabloid in its tone and general M.O., he's it. It's always seemed possible to me that he and Bill O'Reilly are actually the same person...
The value of any new text from antiquity is many-sided -- we have so little to work from -- and I find it queasying to read a series of posts from someone self-described as "a student of the New Testament" who thinks new gospels are nothing to write home about. Heck, you tell others not to be interested too. ("Move along...")
Essentially the gift of a new gospel is that it gives us that much more perspective on what Christianity was about then and what it's become. The canonical works were written partly in reaction to the stuff that got left out, so new texts help us understand them too.
New gospels also present challenges, tacit or more aggressive depending on the text, to the authoritarian use of Jesus's name and message, which can be nothing but a good in my book. You're right, the powers that be have long since gotten used to denying the importance of these texts. It's because they're threatened by those texts. Still. The Pharisees would be proud to have such stubbornly self-concerned intellectual heirs.
I don't find it necessary to shove anything that didn't make the canon into a convenient category of "Unabomber manifesto-types" in order to distance myself from it. You remind me of naturalists who demonize invasive foreign species. It seriously bends a person's conscience, doing stuff like that, and corrodes understanding.
I don't disagree with the original poster that competition did drive these two to one-up each other's features, but you're right(er) on the essentials: Adobe has continued to be the traditional publishing giant, and Macromedia has had the Web world edge. They've been in slightly different markets, and to some extent their competition has injured the consumer in unnecessary ways.
For another non-trivial example of the way their competition has sometimes stung us, take a look at how Fireworks has, and hasn't, and then has been able to use various PhotoShop filters. The upgrade path for Fireworks has been affected by this, for me. I don't want to upgrade my software only to lose a bunch of third-party filters that suddenly won't work in the new version. Caused by Adobe and Macromedia sparring it out, pure and simple.
That said, I'll believe Adobe can rationalize the overlapping product lines when I see it. They can't be stupid enough to kill off the Dreamweaver line in favor of a GoLive, for Gawd's sake, but it wouldn't amaze me if they kept trying to fold in Fireworks' html-exporting features and wound up confusing PS for no real gain.
There's risk from either direction. The attempt to squash them like a bug could also fail, yes, and at ruinous expense? We don't know what terms are being discussed, but there would be concessions and benefits on either side. Not that Amazon isn't dealing from a position of some strength, especially because it can play Netflix off against the Blockbuster evil empire.
Netflix is already facing Blockbuster's recent conversation to their own business model. If I was Netflix negotiating a deal of this sort, I'd be thinking that any sort of Amazon relationship could give me the presence to withstand that. I'd maybe want some sort of mutual benefits situation with respect to DVD sales off of Amazon.
(And I don't know enough about Netflix's base of customers, except that it includes me, but I'd bet Amazon has a colossally higher visibility for the average consumer. Amazon is on the level of google, with more staying power to boot. Whether Netflix has a lot of customers or not, the question is whether there's a lot of growth left in the market, and whether Amazon's presence would get at it.)
My money is on the old axiom that a movie's trailer reflects what the studio thought it was paying for, not the movie that got made. Personally I can't believe how completely off-base the first couple of trailers I saw were. It's like they were made by someone who never read the books or saw the BBC series. They've made me extremely leery of paying my $8.
(And the right answer to these questions could win me back. So in this question lies the chance of redemption. Mod up!)
Personally I want both. Only to the /. world would those seem like mutually-exclusive options.
That said, Sony is such a classic example of interesting design that completely ignores major sore points in implementation, it isn't even funny. I'd have one of their tiny upright-model camcorders right now, if they hadn't required their own special compression format for the resulting movies a couple of years ago. Ah well -- ended up with a different make, which then allowed me to make the choice to grab up a cheap and oh so handy Mac to edit on, and so on. If I'd taken the little Sony it'd have been endless compromises just to stick with their proprietary formatting.
Here we have them requiring me to bend over backwards to implement a sort of personal DRM on my music files. How much more clumsy than Apple's iTunes-purchased files is that? Major, major disincentive to buying for me. Big sore point. That's what they're not "getting." Stylish I like just fine.
I like how you try to answer your own question, there, with a straw man. Quaint. Except I live in the US, and I'm trying to be a conscientious parent, and unfortunately this criticism basically holds true when I'm trying to figure out what to take my kids to.
With respect to the movies, the MPAA and Hollywood censors in general have had lots to do with the Catholic church, at least since 1930 or so. If you've never taken a walk through the history of "the Hays code" -- actually eventually enforced, when it was, by ultra-Catholic politico Joseph Breen -- you might want to do so before you express any more mystification.
That's a strange history, but it obviously does show the bias you're claiming is so hard to understand. For example, Breen was only able to really enforce "the code" after a long nude swimming scene in "Tarzan and His Mate" caused a congressional outcry. Think the movie Tarzan ever killed anyone before the truly upsetting scene in which his wife was sorta, kinda naked?
If you honestly think the violence in "The 6th Day" (PG-13) would be less disturbing to a 13-year-old than the profanity in "Billy Elliott" (R for language and almost certainly for an implied gay friend), you've truly got that MPAA sensibility going on. Kill half the known world: PG-13. Say a few F-words: R. Or let's compare two movies that both got a PG-13, both of which I took my kids to:
Yeah, I think those were equivalent movies. Whale Rider was a wonderful family story. Daredevil should have been an R for any one of about eight different scenes.
Do we even want to start talking about video games? Give me one video game that's as sexual as Mortal Combat or Doom is violent. If there was such an animal, it'd have to be sold in a brown wrapper at the magazine stand that has the special "adult" room.
Or TV: Was Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction" as drastic as any episode of CSI you'd like to watch? Not in a million years.
A big part of me wants to blame the criminal -- Ken Lay, you're a criminal, and we're disgusted when we read about your excesses. But part of me wants to look at the bigger world in which a crime like this gets committed, too.
The further you are away from someone -- socially or physically or in whatever senses -- the more likely you probably are to think of that person as some sort of abstraction rather than a complete human being. If I work in a small town bank, when someone comes in with a check to deposit I see her handwriting and watch her gather up her kids to leave the lobby. Probably I'm not going to steal from her without thinking about that. If I'm on a call center in India, all the financial numbers on my screen are numbers, not people's savings and livelihoods. They're disembodied voices on the phone, if that.
It's not technology, exactly. The networking technology that puts these people in contact with their victims is the same one that lets someone working on a legal team in the Philippines send me a note about a review I wrote three years ago. That cuts both ways.
I almost hate to come down this way, but it seems like a big part of the breakdown here is corporate interests. Companies that send their work overseas in order to be competitive aren't bound by the same sorts of "social contracts" that we expect from local employers. They exist across more than one legal system, they're used to treating people by different standards in different places... it just seems like a recipe for the erosion of any sort of public spirit. And corporate cultures are amazingly powerful things.
I guess it's time for me to start protesting at World Bank meetings or something... which I never thought I'd do. But there's a gap, here, in the way people see each other as people, and it's opening wider at precisely the point where the most economic clout's being applied. That ain't good.
Offhand I'd say either "evangelist" or "zealot" would have been more adroit choices than "fundamentalist." Linux advocates would be far from any "religion of the book" fundamentalism based on one true text.
So point taken.
Which is pretty much the rest of the world
Hey, during the last two weeks I've been basically walled off by a couple of coworkers who decided my radical stance on the Schiavo case -- the courts have determined that the medical report is accurate and that the husband's assessment of her wishes is the best available -- means I'm unamerican. Lots of talk about the "culture of life" as opposed to my "culture of death."
In conjuction with the "Patriot" Act, I have no trouble imagining the government using this to keep an eye on my grocery trips. J. Edgar Hoover did it, and I see no signs of a break in the totalitarian attitudes of the current administration. Heck, our new Attorney General argued before the Supreme Court that his boss can imprison anyone he wants on the grounds of national security for as long as he says there's a war on, no questions asked, no lawyers, no nothin'.
The parent poster probably thinks torture couldn't go on in a prison run by US Military Intelligence, too. Nope. It's unimaginable.
Our hillside association has had this WiFi thing come up a few times. Someone down in Allenspark proper has been encouraging the town to try to get some sort of WiFi arrangement going. A variety of plans have come up.
It's not flying very well with us, anyway. People from Denver who come to their cabins all the time do maybe want satellite TV and other amenities, but there's a pretty sizeable contingent of people on the hill who drive from far off -- Minnesota for us, Texas for some -- and who don't thrill at the idea of dragging the leash behind the car.
The issue as far as I can tell has never been whether the town had the right to provide the service, or contract for it with private companies. Nobody told us it was illegal; they're just using the town's size as a way of getting the negotiating leverage, or trying to. I believe at least one of the proposals intended to use public money to contract with someone, but that got voted down... Which is, you know, how democracy functions. So no problem.
And then you get the "Let the experts handle this, you just need to pay your protection money" angle:
Finally, we read an open disparagement of "individualism," which is apparently the wrong attitude when dealing with a computer:
Note the last bit -- where the support people are to blame for training people not to ask for help.
Gee, no mention of the OS involved being responsible for any of this. And where's this story running? MSNBC?
TV is the same as movies or music. When Janis Ian did her /. interview, she mentioned that music studios actually pay you less for songs you wrote than they do for "covers." The idea is that a known commodity is guaranteed to be at least recognizable. It's insane -- that approach carried to an extreme would result in zero new hits -- but that's the way they pay. (Janice Ian would know -- she's never recorded anything she didn't write herself.)
Even the cable networks are hardly adventurous about what they program. They need to give you something you recognize, only they're able to push the standards of what can get shown and they can afford the ratings that go with a niche audience -- so you get Larry David remaking Seinfeld without the straight man, or a mob series with more language and violence than would pass on broadcast. You still know exactly what you're getting: S & The City was a big hit for HBO, but it's basically a sit com with more language and some skin.
I used to work in bookstores during college. Most of the mass market stuff is completely canned Stephen King-level genre work. But man, is there ever more "space" for niche authors in the book industry. It doesn't seem like the big media companies properly develop books as a seeding ground for their other markets, though. Individual authors get big money deals when someone's interested in the film rights, but what they should be doing is signing young authors to modest contracts early on. What you need, to get to what we both want, is some kind of farm system for developing young talent that can cultivate an audience over time. Seems like that'd be okay for the sort of authors who get called "promising," and great for the studios -- assuming they could view the money as a modest investment and not stand over authors' shoulders giving committee advice.
It amazes me how many people mention the Borg as if introducing a bunch of robotic heavies was some sort of master stroke. As bad guys, the Borg were somewhat less interesting than Superman's robot enemy who held all Kryptonian knowledge -- was it BRAINIAC? I can't remember the name. At least there, you had some conflicted motives: destroy it, and you're destroying all it knows about your lost home. By contrast the Borg menace was unsubtle -- and that's saying a lot, isn't it?
STTNG was much more interesting when it put the characters in situations where force had to be applied carefully if at all, so that it was about solving problems rather than being stronger or weaker than a given baddie. That would be the whole difference between Kirk and Picard, duh. Borg episodes dispensed with that level of writing. They were around because the writers dried up a little, I've always thought.
That series did a lot of stuff that was actually kind of fun and imaginative, but the Borg was just cheap.
Europeans are, duh, more accustomed to dealing with people who speak another language. Americans mostly aren't, barring Spanish in some spots. Add to that the "lingua Franca" status of English, so that we tend to assume someone has some English. (And again, sometimes it works. Shop children in the Grand Market in Istanbul speak awfully good English, they need it to sell with.) Without bashing American tourists, who are generally cool and curious people, there's something to the stereotype.
Ordinarily I'd go along with "people are people, we all have our foibles," but that just doesn't match my experience.
In the case of creationism (or its in-sheep's-clothing surrogate du jour, "intelligent design") the two "developed" nations that have any significant public sentiment backing the active suppression of modern biology are the U.S. of A. and Australia. Both are former colonies of Great Britain, obviously, and both of them have a colonial history of explaining the death and displacement of native people in terms of God's will... There seem to be some cultural traits in common, generally. Hard to make that list up in any clean way, but the similarities are there.
Sometimes I have the feeling that it's a stubbornly self-deluding denial of history that somehow eventually causes these ideological perversions of thought. For example: a huge share of the American south seriously hasn't come to terms with the Civil War and "reconstruction," not for what they really were. Reconstruction ended because of plain terrorism: political terrorists fighting for their "lost cause" killed and threatened anyone who disagreed with them, including ordinary people and political figures. That's what the KKK is all about. That's how it came to run entire state legislatures in the early 1900s. Ask my Oklahoma relatives about reconstruction, though, and they'll tell you that black people were just incapable of taking part in government. Blaming the failure of reconstruction on black people is, essentially, an insane argument. It's completely inadequate and incoherent when you hold it up next to the record and try to explain events with it.
At some point, if you're making yourself believe completely bogus history in order to pretend your "side" was noble, when it wasn't... Well, maybe that's going to twist your conscience, and your ability to see straight, and make you willing to tell yourself more lies in order to cover up the primary ones. My OK relatives find all sorts of amazingly backward ways to take the Bible. To hear them read it, it's all about not allowing anyone who doesn't believe exactly what they believe into their church. So much for Christ's inclusive message.
What would the historical denial be in the case of Australia? I wonder how bizarrely Australian schoolbooks treat that "Fatal Shore" colony-of-convicts thing. Treatment of the aborigines? There are a few undercurrents of history there. Maybe that's it.
Burn them at the stake, maybe not -- but destroy the careers of disbelievers? They'd have no qualms about that at all. My cousins in Oklahoma would love it.
Apple's DRM is so danged innocuous that I haven't run into it, ever -- aside from the inability to attach a song to an e-mail and send it off to my sisters. There's not one thing I've ever actually tried to do with the files that's been blocked by the DRM. A minor interface quirk -- the way it uses checkboxes in more than one way depending on context -- caused me a minor headache once, and that's the only problem I've really had with iTunes or its store. (Oh, that and the fact that not that many books get made into CDs, at least for my running tastes.)
You have a burning (pun intended) need to produce more than 10 copies of the same exact playlist as a CD? That must be it. Yeah.
Does anyone remember hearing the French guy at the UN security council, Villepain, saying that that WMD evidence wasn't convincing? Remember how those dastardly French folks were saying that going to war was precipitate, and that Bush was "following the logic of war" rather than exhausting the inspections regime -- which turns out to have worked, gutting Saddam H's weapons programs?
Do you remember how Colin Powell had to go before the security council and give a big presentation about all the rock solid evidence we said we had -- to convince the world? Sound familiar? Do you maybe recall how he later had to recant that testimony and apologize to the world for it? Is any of this ringing a bell? If intelligence "for all over the world" (yeesh) said this, why were Bush and company finding it necessary to go to those measures?
Fox News is not the only source of information about world opinion. You might want to look into a few other propaganda spigots, at the very least.
Most of the stuff was removed days before and while multi-nationalal (sic) troops where attempting to secure them.
This is my very favorite argument made by dipshits (excuse me) who try to cling to those pre-war arguments. Gee, um, if the war resulted in huge stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction disappearing from where we supposedly knew they were, and if they're now in Syria or within Iraq's borders in a situation where insurgents are basically able to move at will within a "weak state" -- then doesn't that mean the entire war was a colossal failure at accomplishing its professed goals??? Because I don't remember Bush and his loyalist cadre of junta leaders saying they wanted to scatter the WMDs to the terrorist winds... Do you?
Heck, we're quoting Nelson Pratt -- the "marketing director of the pro-Linux organisation" -- at enormous length. Add a straw man to your press release -- poof! It's a news item!
This sort of thing, from Taco no less, doesn't help Linux's credibility much.
Okay. I'm not sure why that means we shouldn't sympathize.
We sympathize with amputees coming back from Iraq, don't we? They knew they were joining the military. (If they joined under Bush II, they sure should've known what that meant, too.) Somehow putting myself in other people's shoes has never seemed like a waste of energy -- whereas resenting people who aspire to something seems like it'll only diminish everyone involved.
Here's a tip back: Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a waste or a nuisance, it's a strength.
I'm never going to go on the Lewis and Clark expedition, but having some sympathy for Meriwether Lewis, or understanding the guy a little, isn't going to make my life any poorer. Not even at this distance in time.
Spending energy resenting astronauts for wanting to do something amazing, though -- now that'll only leave you diminished.
Your "taxes" button went off, is that it? I can't even figure out what exactly you disagree so avidly with. It's like I scratched the magic spot on a dog's back, and that ol' back leg started the phantom scratching motion... Taxes! Freaking taxes!!
History's more complex than the stuff we're fed on the evening news. Kennedy's hardly my favorite president -- I think his recklessness with the Bay of Pigs was just about as stupid as Bush II's Iraq blunder, and let's hope Iraq doesn't lead to something on the scale of the Missile Crisis -- but he chose the space program shrewdly, partly because it was a good crossover issue hand-in-hand with his "missile gap" militarism.
(Uh, because it struck me as being as badly written as this "If you're sorta running a business" level of specificity in the Ohio e-bay code. That was the comparison.)