I've been upgrading Linux in increments over the years
Uh, once you've typed that, you pretty well rule your perceptions out of the "non-technical" category, at least for this reader. Your assessment of what's challenging and what's easy as pie might not be quite at the same level as my 73-year-old father.
(Dad loves his PowerBook, by the way. He'll panic if someone else has logged in on it, though, because he forgets the whole multiple account thing. Thinks it's a virus. Most anything he can't figure out, he thinks is a virus. Iget calls, oh, once every six months.)
Isn't it just rich, though, to read someone like Bill Gates bemoaning the situation for Chinese musicians? (It sort of reminds me of how, when it comes to affirmative action, hard-right Republicans suddenly become extremely egalitarian out of concern for the poor white folks who might face discrimination.)
Poor Bill. He can't sleep at night thinking of impoverished Chinese musicians -- so he unleashes the Business Software Alliance to coerce entire nations to pony up more cash for Windows, all in the name of intellectual property. A regular advocate for the little guy, he is...
Absolutely dead on, I'm with you
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Top 50 DVDs
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· Score: 1
After (in a huge mistake) seeing PH in the theater -- may God forgive me -- I went out and hunted down Tora! Tora! Tora! to wash the taste out of my psyche.
I thought it'd be a limited movie, but really it's right up there on the level of the Gordon Prange general history "At Dawn We Slept." It has some ham-fisted acting, mostly because it's trying to cram in all the different historical figures and it throws in a few "irate master sergeant" types, but for the most part it's top notch. And the effects! They're excellent.
The end of that movie, with Toranaga leaving a group of elated subordinates to walk up onto the deck of a battleship and contemplate, somberly, what he's just unleashed, is a great movie moment.
The stand alone (non-phone) PDA market is dying. There will continue to be a market for things like the Palm Treo and Windows Smart Phones. Unless Apple wants to get into the Phone business, I don't see that they would have a product.
I know what you're saying, but I don't agree with the "Apple would have to have a phone" part.
Okay, "stand alone" PDAs have hit the wall. But frankly they weren't impressive for a lot of reasons -- all of which seem like they're exactly the sort of design and market niche problems Apple is currently solving like nobody else -- while they also combine features and function groups in interesting ways. Recent history has Apple releasing "digital hub" products that make idiosyncratic choices about feature sets. Maybe current market thinking says phones have to be part of the product, but then that's the same thinking that releases 2,000 phones with variations on the same three features. Apple doesn't release products identical to those already saturating the market, yep, you're right. But they wouldn't have to.
If you'd said they were releasing a "new cube, but at $500" a couple of weeks ago, I'd have been skeptical, yes? Pitched a little differently, though...
Bad reporting on a real story, though
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BBC on Global Dimming
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I was reminded a bit of holocaust deniers as I read your post -- though your criticism as I read it was strictly of the pop science "media," not of global warming as a reality.
It's true that popular media accounts of the holocaust tend to include some apocryphal material -- the soap story, the lampshades, sometimes lumping all the camps together as if they were run the same way. It's also true that the weight of the evidence has convinced every credible historian on the planet of the fact that the holocaust occurred. No one smoking gun is going to demonstrate conclusively that it did, and it's possible that any given fact might be questioned -- but the big story is there and cannot be wished away.
I think there's a danger, when we start laying into vague targets like "the media," that we'll confuse the quality of the messenger with the truth of the message. And that ain't always inadvertent; holocaust deniers consciously manipulate the slightly-off pop news stories to question the whole history.
I'd agree completely with your basic mutterings about, oh, newspapers, and the 10:00 local news, and to some extent magazines like Discover. But behind Discover's "Top 100 Science Stories of 2004" article, which chose global warming as its number 1 story by the way, there is a truth: the overwhelming majority of scientists today are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that global warming is now occurring. Get just a nudge away from the low pop sources -- to Scientific American, which is a little more highbrow among the pop stuff, or then to Nature -- and you'll see that, loud and clear, with less boneheaded news manner to the narrative. The evidence is so overwhelming that even the Bush administration, laden with energy industry biases as it clearly is, has conceded that the warming's happening.
For anyone to wish the actual phenomenon away with a "this is a big complicated phenomenon, and the pop media's suggesting it has simple explanations" would be an exercise in wishful thinking. It'd be on that level of silliness we're bemoaning in "the media," wouldn't it? At that point we're talking tortuous self-deception at the level of creationism -- speaking (indirectly) of another overwhelming truth that people try to dispel by "debating" at a pop-cultural level...
This is essentially the next generation of the cube, but at a time when the market is ready for it, and with the right price point...
Let's see -- the market wasn't ready for it, and the price point wasn't right: Yep, sounds like the original Newton to me.
Personally I think of the Mini as much more of an aggressive market expansion move than an evolution of the cube, in terms of where it sits as a marketed product. The cube was supposed to be a BMW of a computer, or that's how I remember it being pitched to me. But you're right, in terms of the design this is just a natural extension of the principles behind the cube. The market caught up with the idea.
And if that's true here, why isn't it also true for an Apple PDA?
Personally I've never gotten a Palm, and the main reason is that I think the designs out there are crud. (Devices that require me to re-learn how to draw the letters of the alphabet -- now that's a major obstacle to adoption.) If Apple was to release a slightly pricier PDA that was designed dang well, would the market for that already be saturated? Open question. I'd consider one, I know that much.
they've essentially nipped that perennial argument in the bud.
"In the bud"? More like years after it went to seed. How long has it been since Mac OS had any limitation on the use of two-button mice?
I agree, they threw that line in there to address it with the people who weren't paying attention. But the "argument" here hasn't been a meaningful point since... I can't think when... How old is the Kensington Turbomouse line?
There's an Old Testament incident in which Moses lures all the believers in a certain religion or sect into a feast at a church, locks the doors, and burns the place down. God tells him that it'll be okay as long as they ritually purify their weapons afterward.
Time-honored approach. Vlad was just reading his Bible closely.
Q.How do you think space technology will change as a result... A. It won't.
This model already has changed space exploration quite a bit. Cassini, now doing its work around Saturn, is a very different sort of robotic probe from everything else in the news mostly because it obeys the old model: everything in one big attempt, custom-built, extreme redundancy in systems. That's the all-eggs-in-one-basket, classic way of doing it. And Cassini's a big success so far.
For a long while now, though, NASA has also been firing much lower-cost, higher-risk probes out. Those are simpler probes, designed to do two or three types of things, they use systems that aren't all custom-made for their purpose, and as a result they're higher-risk but cheaper and you can do more of them. Each probe has a more limited set of goals. You lose more, but when you lose one you haven't lost everything. The development cycle is shorter, so you're not wedded to technologies that were current ten years ago when your project started up.
Beagle's lander was just a miss. The Mars Express orbiter with the same mission worked successfully. You accept those chances if you're going with this model.
Cost of Cassini mission: "$3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle." (NASA)
Cost of the Pathfinder mission that landed in '97: under $150 million. "The mission has the primary objective of demonstrating the feasibility of low-cost landings on and exploration of the Martian surface." That's NASA explaining its mission objectives. The rovers over on Mars right now are the descendents of that mission.
There's real tension between these approaches, and real tension between the costs and benefits of putting people up there vs. these unmanned missions. But change space technology? Low-cost missions have already done that, no question at all.
Physician, heal thyself. You're arguing against a series of straw men.
I don't recall having run into one blinking person who's said that she thinks Bush and his cronies are secretly plotting to reinstate the draft. Heck, Rumsfeld went out of his way to dismiss the military significance of draftees in previous wars, in a move I remember particularly well because it so upset my Uncles down in Oklahoma who served. Your entire premise is a misstatement of the objections to Bush's policy.
What is said is that Bush's policies have made the reinstatement of a draft more likely, and that the specific changes made to terms of military service -- not allowing scheduled retirements, dramatic changes to the terms of service of the national guard -- amount to a "back-door" draft right now.
It's funny how your "who's who" of the left in congress didn't include Teddy Kennedy or Mark Dayton. Those were the first names on my lips. Also funny how the support for H.R. 487 is bipartisan with a slight slant to the Democratic side.
There are also people in congress from both sides who support the broader "national service" idea this bill was about.
You're looking at a complicated issue and stomping it flat to score political points. Oh, yeah... I think I know which candidate you support...
You think the evidence is anecdotal, and to support that you provide your own anecdotal evidence. Let's look at yours: you build your own machines, plural, and they last a long time? How many can you possibly have built to know this? Big sample? How can that be, if they last so very long? How old are you?;-)
There are numbers out there about the longevity of Macs in workplaces, both in terms of their not breaking down and in terms of how long they're usable for their task. The Gartner Group has done some, I know.
The evidence isn't just anecdotal, but it is muddied by stuff like the fact that OS X has actually been getting noticably faster for older machines. (Ars technica: "Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.") That's not just a physical measure of the machine, it's to do with the whole set of end-to-end stuff that Apple can control in its little proprietary world. And yeah, it's a high-quality market niche, and nope, that's not just an imagined difference.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
Sure, digital spedometers mean about as much as a digital watch -- but the difference between true "electronic controls" and traditional cable ones could be huge.
GM has a concept fuel cell car that uses electric hookups for the controls. It has an interchangeable "skateboard" base partly as a result, and can swap out the rest of the car entirely. Swappable exteriors is a big potential change in the manufacturing and sales model you're using, anyway. I don't necessarily see why something like Subaru's "boxer" engines couldn't get some of those same advantages without giving up the gas engine -- that engine's pretty low in the car, granted not quite as low as the GM chassis.
But yeah -- personally I'm with Al Gore -- the internal combustion engine is a 19th century technology that should be nearing the end of its life for lots of the ways we use it. Take a look at lots of people's lawn mowers spewing white smoke from their little two-cycle engines. That ain't the future. It's only the weight of the existing distribution model for oil and gas that's keeping those things around. (All points Al Gore made in his pointy-headed environuttiness. Gosh, what a kook.)
Just this morning I had a heck of a time with my kids' alarm clock. The way the buttons are located on that thing is just... unbelievable. The way the snooze feature works manages to be unfriendly to the point of the clock almost seeming possessed, I swear. They like how it looks at night, but it's a nightmare design for something so seemingly simple.
Little things mean a lot sometimes. Try using a Sony vertical-design mini-DV camcorder sometime, and see how you like the rocker-switch zoom.
First of all, it is regularly pointed out [admittedly by Republicans] that Nature is politically far left.
I used to work in a series of book stores. (It was my job to set up "superstores" for one of the big chains, back when those were new and cool.) I'll never forget the indignant customer who approached me one day at the register to unload an accusation that our magazine rack was decidedly slanted to the left. This came as a mild surprise to me -- our magazine choices were extensive, you know how big those racks are, and I'd seen the inventory list many times in the process of setting up the stores without thinking I saw any particular bias. Was I simply sleepwalking past this problem?
So, good-natured service person that I was, I asked this customer to explain to me how we might correct the problem, and to maybe suggest alternative titles we could carry to make up the balance. Told her I'd send the suggestions in to the General Office.
She had plenty to say against basically every title on the shelf. Time Magazine? Newsweek? US News & World Report? The Economist? Completely liberal. Every news magazine we carried that wasn't edited by William F. Buckley was also ultra-liberal. That we even carried Columbia Journalism Review irked her -- that was for the media, itself horribly liberal.
She had one suggestion for an alternative title we could carry -- it was a niche political publication that didn't distribute to our area of the Midwest. Otherwise she wanted me to remove titles from the rack. Several titles.
There was only one magazine this woman had a dilemma over: "Girls and Guns" magazine. Guns she seemed to be okay with -- but she suspected there was something not quite right about "girls" that would buy it.
When you issue your little "wrong side of the river" fatwas against opposing opinions, you can count me out of the distribution list.
he's a haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who, by the way, served in Vietnam.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the French also were involved in Vietnam, as its colonial power. Will John Kerry's nefarious weak-kneed continental foppishness never cease to disgust red-blooded Americans?
The "Wait a minute, don't you think he looks kind of... French...?" moment may have been as low a moment for the American electoral process as Karl Rove's South Carolina push polls implying John McCain had sired a mixed-race child out of wedlock. Hear all about it from McCain's own campaign people.
Not that the "Frenchie" thing was near as disturbing, as a tactic -- it didn't smack so outrageously of the most extreme possible "Southern Strategy." But it was if anything even more puerile, which has got to be a record.
You make superficial concessions to evenhandedness, but your post is radically skewed to the point of view of the businesses in that old history.
The "ridiculous practices" you refer to in such a vague way are worse than any modern wannabe-conservative-think-tanker cares to even consider when she's speaking glowingly of the private compact between worker and company. You mention specific business responses to Union activity -- the national guard and so on -- but you fail to characterize the terms of employment ordinary people lived with back then. They were striking for decent, human working conditions. Lining up around a business trying to shut it down doesn't come close to what they were subjected to in the ordinary course of their jobs. The business magnates of the day made the same arguments that they make today when they face any economic concession: if we have to give people working conditions that aren't appalling, that'll destroy our business. To describe them as not having the "moral high ground" is a ludicrous understatement. I mean:
...women worked fourteen hours a day for a wage of less than five shillings a week. However, they did not always received their full wage because of a system of fines, ranging from three pence to one shilling, imposed by the Bryant & May management. Offences included talking, dropping matches or going to the toilet without permission. The women worked from 6.30 am in summer (8.00 in winter) to 6.00 pm. If workers were late, they were fined a half-day's pay.
Annie Besant also discovered that the health of the women had been severely affected by the phosphorous that they used to make the matches. This caused yellowing of the skin and hair loss and phossy jaw, a form of bone cancer. The whole side of the face turned green and then black, discharging foul-smelling pus and finally causing death. Although phosphorous was banned in Sweden and the USA, the British government had refused to follow their example, arguing that it would be a restraint of free trade.
That's about the "match girls' strike" of 1888 in Great Britain.
Like it or not, the U.S. isn't a pure laissez-faire economy. And you wouldn't trade your life now for one in such an economy, unless you're a Rockefeller posting as an AC out of shyness.
Let's review your aggressively ridiculous response to my message:
the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists, and to remove the growing, but not yet imminent threat Saddam was posing to America.
The threat was growing, but not imminent, you say -- but in your previous post you've claimed he had the WMDs, and that they must be somewhere, and that it really scares you. How baldly, and badly, have you just contradicted yourself? Um, utterly?
And again, even on your own terms: "the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists"?? Gee, uh... Sure has worked great. Oops, time to resort to "We made Iraq a honey pot for terrorists so as to fight them there rather than at home, that's the 'front line' now." You seem incapable of tracking just how mutually contradictory your own statements are, so I'm sure you can trot that one out and not see how completely it vitiates everything else you've said. (I guess there's no need to mention how the war was fought in ways that didn't seem to keep Ansar al-Islam in Iraq anyway. Yeah, they sure were worried about those terrorists. So worried that the terrorists seem to have neatly skipped the country while we were conducting an armored assault on Baghdad.)
Definition:"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position." You, friend, substituted a ridiculous version of the parent's post, claiming that he was saying Saddam had changed his ways. This wasn't the claim being made. That's what's called a straw man. Maybe you think it was ironic, but golly, you sure seem to have promptly argued against the caricature, so how were you using it again? As a straw man. You might have wanted to look that up.
Just for good measure, you explain how thoughtfully Reagan undertook a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" forgeign policy -- the results of which we are currently dealing with. You do a truly execrable job of defending these policies. Now, think hard... Think about Pakistan: nuclear power, huge radicalized muslim population, repeated assassination attempts against Musharraf, Bush in 2000 saying that he thought the coup that brought Musharraf to power was "good for stability in the region" despite its having overthrown an elected regime. Longtime supporters of the Taliban. Does this remind you of any whose names have four letters and start with "Ira"? Oh, well -- the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I guess.
Try looking at my sig. Eisenhower's among my favorite Presidents, and you're accusing me of being a Democratic propagandist. Unreal.
"We discovered Saddam's chemical weapons when he freakin' used them on the Kurds in the 1980s."
Um, you want to go back a step or two. Because of course, the relationship between Saddam and Reagan's foreign policy dated back before that, and the U.S. was instrumental in bringing about Iraq's possession of those same weapons.
The "Saddam was a changed man" argument is what you'd call a "straw man." You're doing an excellent job refuting a sham argument nobody's making against you. Keep it up and your arguments will gradually lose any bearing on reality.
Yes, the question is where are the WMD, and it's a question that scares the hell out of me, because he had them and they're not there now, and that means they are somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be the lovely utopian paradise called Syria.
All of which proves the resounding success of Mr. Bush's elective war against Iraq how, exactly? I've run into this many times -- backers of the policy who claim those WMDs must be elsewhere and say how very scary it is. Bizarre: you've just completely dished the very foreign policy you're trying to advocate, and "if you actually had a single brain cell" you'd be seeing that. The war was supposed to be about preventing the proliferation of WMDs, and about preventing their use by terrorists. Now you don't know where the WMDs are, and you say how scary it is. Golly, they could be in the hands of terrorists!
"Scary" doesn't start to describe the level of your post, there.
"A site on the Web is a Web site... Website, capped or uncapped, is jibberish--it means the same thing as 'zhoxting.'" -- from "Lapsing into a Comma, A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print -- and How to Avoid Them" by Bill Walsh, Copy Desk Chief, Business Desk, the Washington Post
There's an argument here about whether this is truly a proper noun, but Wired doesn't state it clearly, and they're backing it up with some silliness. People don't capitalize "Bush" because the man's important, they capitalize it because it's a proper name. We don't take the caps down when we just use someone's last name, or when we refer to Microsoft without saying "Corporation." Wired is saying "World Wide Web" is a proper noun, but that "Web" isn't part of that proper name -- it's "facial tissue," a generic term. They need to work that out a little better to satisfy me.
Internet is the name of a specific thing, not a type of thing. I'm not sure I'm with them as far as "net," either. That's a nickname based on a contraction, isn't it? Do you call Richard Nixon "tricky dick" in print?
How truly satisfying that response was -- right down to knocking off and having a beer, knowing it's the right thing to do. Now there's a value system.
You're so right that the researchers aren't asking "What makes a happier/more fulfilled monkey?" They're asking what makes a more productive monkey for the benefit of those who exploit monkeys, basically. Monkeys, I'm pretty sure, want to fool around a lot -- they being primates.
I have this conversation with a certain friend all the time, only it's phrased differently. He's treating individual decisions as if they're Yes-No, and he talks himself into or out of whatever impulse at a given moment -- only to feel remorse over whatever it was when the next option comes up. This produces a certain amount of debt and a whole lot of non-specific anxiety about how he really should keep himself under control -- but he then basically tries to deny himself each individual y-n choice, which doesn't work. Life is not full of yes-no questions. "Should I work out and become superstrong?" is not the question. You're choosing between working out and playing with your kids and going to work and calling your mom. And posting on Slashdot.
The utilitarian calculus involved in trying to work out benefits of all those different possible options, though, is just too much, so we simplify. I'm thinking the practical approach is more of a Kantian categorical imperative thing: could I accept the world if everyone made similar choices to those I'm making? On the fly, that's a much easier standard to apply, and it also builds in the inherent morality of actions.
So, let's get those rhesus monkeys to work on reading Kant in the original German. Except I'm not sure they'd put a higher priority on that than I did as an undergrad...
"Application Program Interface" - A series of software routines and development tools that comprise an interface between a computer application and lower-level services and functions (e.g. the operating system, device drivers, and other low-level software). APIs serve as building blocks for programmers putting together software applications. Sometimes called "Application Programming Interface."
You're right that my examples were a muddle, but the API is a huge share of this problem. The API -- at the OS level -- is largely responsible for consistency of user experience and GUI across applications, which is what the parent was talking about. Standard dialogs like "yes no cancel" and save dialogs are all in the API. And the thing is, MS's API-level stuff like this is sadly weak and gets abused all over the place as a result.
The fact that, in Windows 2000 with Lotus Notes here at work, I get one type of save dialog for single attachments and a very different, Windows3-style dialog for multiple attachments -- that's an API weirdness. The fact that everyone uses "yes no cancel" dialogs and then includes descriptions of what "yes" really means on top -- that's an obvious limitation of the OS API. "Yes" should mean yes, and the dialog should be a y/n question if you're using it.
The Windows API just plain seems to include sucky standard dialogs. Take a look at how Windows Control Panels use tabs with "Apply" and "OK" buttons that mean the same thing, and "Close" buttons that mean the same thing as the little X on the upper right. Ugly.
For another example: IE lets me use layering effects, but if I put a select object in a form, that object will always appear above every layer on the Web page, no matter what layer it's on. The select objects are calling a standard object from the Windows API that doesn't respect what IE's doing with layers. That problem has been coming and going with various cuts of Windows and IE for a few generations now.
(If anything Apple's API-level UI advantage went down with OS X -- the old pre-X OS was more mature -- but there's still a big edge for Apple in this area.)
Evolution may not favor hard working, zealous worker bees nearly as much as we think. After all, there are plenty of people around you who make a pretty good living on social skills rather than any especial work ethic. Where did these people come from? Generations of hard-working, industrious ancestors? Hmm.
Leave human beings alone and take beavers. Beavers are held up as a sort of Horatio Alger example of what hard work can bring to the humble, right? It's just not true. Beavers work pretty hard in the fall, to shore things up before winter -- but they take a long break during the height of the summer, during which they do stuff like swim upstream or downstream looking for other beaver colonies to party with and scouting for new lodge locations and stands of aspen they might want to snack on. A whole lot of their time is spent pretty easily; at most you'd say they were engaged in "open-ended planning" about how to build on that next addition to the lodge or whatever -- sort of like gardeners during the winter thinking out their next planting.
Evolution doesn't seem to favor supermotivated nose-to-the-grindstone workers any more than it produces superfast rabbits or superbig brains. Apparently a nice medium-fast rabbit is best. Someone who can work and play, both, is apparently the superior model of human.
The big advantage of instant runoff would be that it'd get at what Nader (and Perot) voters say about third party candidates facing the "wasted vote" stigma.
If I'm a Nader voter (and I'm not, I prefer voting for someone who could legitimately be President rather than protesting the whole scene), I'd have voted Nader-then-Gore-then-Bush in 2000. My Nader vote wouldn't have split the vote -- and Bush in all likelihood wouldn't be in office. You can vote your conscience.
There's no inconsistency between instant runoff and the electoral college. In that way it'd be a less radical change than what Colorado is proposing right now (and one other state already does) -- splitting the electoral vote by percentage of the popular vote. That change seems simpler, but it does away with the sort of geographic weighting you're talking about, and does nothing to address the "wasted" votes.
I have to go with a couple of the more intelligent posts in saying that intential (sic) use of common spelling errors to increase traffice (sic) to a website should be ruled against.
So which law enforcement agency are you proposing to make the judgment about what the intent was for any given domain name? Or do we just wait for civil actions to be brought by the aggrieved?
How do you feel about www.untied.com -- the anti-United Airlines consumer site? Do we want to let United go after that site and keep it quiet based on their rights to their own name? Does it matter that "airlines" isn't in the domain name too? Or did you need them to include an adjective, or the word "sucks," in the domain?
There really is a substantive question here about whether speech should be vulnerable to legal action based on trademarks in this way.
Personally, in the shoes of this Web site owner I'd go to my local white pages, look up 25 people with the last name "Falwell," and start calling. Some Jim or Joe Falwell somewhere is going to agree to support your site -- and now Jerry F. is trying to use his trademark to take away his right to have his name on his own site. How satisfying is a trademark-based argument then?
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, once you've typed that, you pretty well rule your perceptions out of the "non-technical" category, at least for this reader. Your assessment of what's challenging and what's easy as pie might not be quite at the same level as my 73-year-old father.
(Dad loves his PowerBook, by the way. He'll panic if someone else has logged in on it, though, because he forgets the whole multiple account thing. Thinks it's a virus. Most anything he can't figure out, he thinks is a virus. Iget calls, oh, once every six months.)
Poor Bill. He can't sleep at night thinking of impoverished Chinese musicians -- so he unleashes the Business Software Alliance to coerce entire nations to pony up more cash for Windows, all in the name of intellectual property. A regular advocate for the little guy, he is...
I thought it'd be a limited movie, but really it's right up there on the level of the Gordon Prange general history "At Dawn We Slept." It has some ham-fisted acting, mostly because it's trying to cram in all the different historical figures and it throws in a few "irate master sergeant" types, but for the most part it's top notch. And the effects! They're excellent.
The end of that movie, with Toranaga leaving a group of elated subordinates to walk up onto the deck of a battleship and contemplate, somberly, what he's just unleashed, is a great movie moment.
I know what you're saying, but I don't agree with the "Apple would have to have a phone" part.
Okay, "stand alone" PDAs have hit the wall. But frankly they weren't impressive for a lot of reasons -- all of which seem like they're exactly the sort of design and market niche problems Apple is currently solving like nobody else -- while they also combine features and function groups in interesting ways. Recent history has Apple releasing "digital hub" products that make idiosyncratic choices about feature sets. Maybe current market thinking says phones have to be part of the product, but then that's the same thinking that releases 2,000 phones with variations on the same three features. Apple doesn't release products identical to those already saturating the market, yep, you're right. But they wouldn't have to.
If you'd said they were releasing a "new cube, but at $500" a couple of weeks ago, I'd have been skeptical, yes? Pitched a little differently, though...
It's true that popular media accounts of the holocaust tend to include some apocryphal material -- the soap story, the lampshades, sometimes lumping all the camps together as if they were run the same way. It's also true that the weight of the evidence has convinced every credible historian on the planet of the fact that the holocaust occurred. No one smoking gun is going to demonstrate conclusively that it did, and it's possible that any given fact might be questioned -- but the big story is there and cannot be wished away.
I think there's a danger, when we start laying into vague targets like "the media," that we'll confuse the quality of the messenger with the truth of the message. And that ain't always inadvertent; holocaust deniers consciously manipulate the slightly-off pop news stories to question the whole history.
I'd agree completely with your basic mutterings about, oh, newspapers, and the 10:00 local news, and to some extent magazines like Discover. But behind Discover's "Top 100 Science Stories of 2004" article, which chose global warming as its number 1 story by the way, there is a truth: the overwhelming majority of scientists today are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that global warming is now occurring. Get just a nudge away from the low pop sources -- to Scientific American, which is a little more highbrow among the pop stuff, or then to Nature -- and you'll see that, loud and clear, with less boneheaded news manner to the narrative. The evidence is so overwhelming that even the Bush administration, laden with energy industry biases as it clearly is, has conceded that the warming's happening.
For anyone to wish the actual phenomenon away with a "this is a big complicated phenomenon, and the pop media's suggesting it has simple explanations" would be an exercise in wishful thinking. It'd be on that level of silliness we're bemoaning in "the media," wouldn't it? At that point we're talking tortuous self-deception at the level of creationism -- speaking (indirectly) of another overwhelming truth that people try to dispel by "debating" at a pop-cultural level...
Let's see -- the market wasn't ready for it, and the price point wasn't right: Yep, sounds like the original Newton to me.
Personally I think of the Mini as much more of an aggressive market expansion move than an evolution of the cube, in terms of where it sits as a marketed product. The cube was supposed to be a BMW of a computer, or that's how I remember it being pitched to me. But you're right, in terms of the design this is just a natural extension of the principles behind the cube. The market caught up with the idea.
And if that's true here, why isn't it also true for an Apple PDA?
Personally I've never gotten a Palm, and the main reason is that I think the designs out there are crud. (Devices that require me to re-learn how to draw the letters of the alphabet -- now that's a major obstacle to adoption.) If Apple was to release a slightly pricier PDA that was designed dang well, would the market for that already be saturated? Open question. I'd consider one, I know that much.
"In the bud"? More like years after it went to seed. How long has it been since Mac OS had any limitation on the use of two-button mice?
I agree, they threw that line in there to address it with the people who weren't paying attention. But the "argument" here hasn't been a meaningful point since... I can't think when... How old is the Kensington Turbomouse line?
Time-honored approach. Vlad was just reading his Bible closely.
A. It won't.
This model already has changed space exploration quite a bit. Cassini, now doing its work around Saturn, is a very different sort of robotic probe from everything else in the news mostly because it obeys the old model: everything in one big attempt, custom-built, extreme redundancy in systems. That's the all-eggs-in-one-basket, classic way of doing it. And Cassini's a big success so far.
For a long while now, though, NASA has also been firing much lower-cost, higher-risk probes out. Those are simpler probes, designed to do two or three types of things, they use systems that aren't all custom-made for their purpose, and as a result they're higher-risk but cheaper and you can do more of them. Each probe has a more limited set of goals. You lose more, but when you lose one you haven't lost everything. The development cycle is shorter, so you're not wedded to technologies that were current ten years ago when your project started up.
Beagle's lander was just a miss. The Mars Express orbiter with the same mission worked successfully. You accept those chances if you're going with this model.
Cost of Cassini mission: "$3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle." (NASA)
Cost of the Pathfinder mission that landed in '97: under $150 million. "The mission has the primary objective of demonstrating the feasibility of low-cost landings on and exploration of the Martian surface." That's NASA explaining its mission objectives. The rovers over on Mars right now are the descendents of that mission.
There's real tension between these approaches, and real tension between the costs and benefits of putting people up there vs. these unmanned missions. But change space technology? Low-cost missions have already done that, no question at all.
I don't recall having run into one blinking person who's said that she thinks Bush and his cronies are secretly plotting to reinstate the draft. Heck, Rumsfeld went out of his way to dismiss the military significance of draftees in previous wars, in a move I remember particularly well because it so upset my Uncles down in Oklahoma who served. Your entire premise is a misstatement of the objections to Bush's policy.
What is said is that Bush's policies have made the reinstatement of a draft more likely, and that the specific changes made to terms of military service -- not allowing scheduled retirements, dramatic changes to the terms of service of the national guard -- amount to a "back-door" draft right now.
It's funny how your "who's who" of the left in congress didn't include Teddy Kennedy or Mark Dayton. Those were the first names on my lips. Also funny how the support for H.R. 487 is bipartisan with a slight slant to the Democratic side.
There are also people in congress from both sides who support the broader "national service" idea this bill was about.
You're looking at a complicated issue and stomping it flat to score political points. Oh, yeah... I think I know which candidate you support...
There are numbers out there about the longevity of Macs in workplaces, both in terms of their not breaking down and in terms of how long they're usable for their task. The Gartner Group has done some, I know.
The evidence isn't just anecdotal, but it is muddied by stuff like the fact that OS X has actually been getting noticably faster for older machines. (Ars technica: "Here's another way to look at Panther's performance. For over three years now, Mac OS X has gotten faster with every release -- and not just "faster in the experience of most end users", but faster on the same hardware. This trend is unheard of among contemporary desktop operating systems.") That's not just a physical measure of the machine, it's to do with the whole set of end-to-end stuff that Apple can control in its little proprietary world. And yeah, it's a high-quality market niche, and nope, that's not just an imagined difference.
It's a choice you can still make, but it's not an illusory choice. Some people drive a Kia, some people drive a BMW, and some people drive a Subaru. Even met someone who was religious about their brand of cars because it had been so dang reliable?
GM has a concept fuel cell car that uses electric hookups for the controls. It has an interchangeable "skateboard" base partly as a result, and can swap out the rest of the car entirely. Swappable exteriors is a big potential change in the manufacturing and sales model you're using, anyway. I don't necessarily see why something like Subaru's "boxer" engines couldn't get some of those same advantages without giving up the gas engine -- that engine's pretty low in the car, granted not quite as low as the GM chassis.
But yeah -- personally I'm with Al Gore -- the internal combustion engine is a 19th century technology that should be nearing the end of its life for lots of the ways we use it. Take a look at lots of people's lawn mowers spewing white smoke from their little two-cycle engines. That ain't the future. It's only the weight of the existing distribution model for oil and gas that's keeping those things around. (All points Al Gore made in his pointy-headed environuttiness. Gosh, what a kook.)
Little things mean a lot sometimes. Try using a Sony vertical-design mini-DV camcorder sometime, and see how you like the rocker-switch zoom.
I used to work in a series of book stores. (It was my job to set up "superstores" for one of the big chains, back when those were new and cool.) I'll never forget the indignant customer who approached me one day at the register to unload an accusation that our magazine rack was decidedly slanted to the left. This came as a mild surprise to me -- our magazine choices were extensive, you know how big those racks are, and I'd seen the inventory list many times in the process of setting up the stores without thinking I saw any particular bias. Was I simply sleepwalking past this problem?
So, good-natured service person that I was, I asked this customer to explain to me how we might correct the problem, and to maybe suggest alternative titles we could carry to make up the balance. Told her I'd send the suggestions in to the General Office.
She had plenty to say against basically every title on the shelf. Time Magazine? Newsweek? US News & World Report? The Economist? Completely liberal. Every news magazine we carried that wasn't edited by William F. Buckley was also ultra-liberal. That we even carried Columbia Journalism Review irked her -- that was for the media, itself horribly liberal.
She had one suggestion for an alternative title we could carry -- it was a niche political publication that didn't distribute to our area of the Midwest. Otherwise she wanted me to remove titles from the rack. Several titles.
There was only one magazine this woman had a dilemma over: "Girls and Guns" magazine. Guns she seemed to be okay with -- but she suspected there was something not quite right about "girls" that would buy it.
When you issue your little "wrong side of the river" fatwas against opposing opinions, you can count me out of the distribution list.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the French also were involved in Vietnam, as its colonial power. Will John Kerry's nefarious weak-kneed continental foppishness never cease to disgust red-blooded Americans?
The "Wait a minute, don't you think he looks kind of... French...?" moment may have been as low a moment for the American electoral process as Karl Rove's South Carolina push polls implying John McCain had sired a mixed-race child out of wedlock. Hear all about it from McCain's own campaign people.
Not that the "Frenchie" thing was near as disturbing, as a tactic -- it didn't smack so outrageously of the most extreme possible "Southern Strategy." But it was if anything even more puerile, which has got to be a record.
The "ridiculous practices" you refer to in such a vague way are worse than any modern wannabe-conservative-think-tanker cares to even consider when she's speaking glowingly of the private compact between worker and company. You mention specific business responses to Union activity -- the national guard and so on -- but you fail to characterize the terms of employment ordinary people lived with back then. They were striking for decent, human working conditions. Lining up around a business trying to shut it down doesn't come close to what they were subjected to in the ordinary course of their jobs. The business magnates of the day made the same arguments that they make today when they face any economic concession: if we have to give people working conditions that aren't appalling, that'll destroy our business. To describe them as not having the "moral high ground" is a ludicrous understatement. I mean:
That's about the "match girls' strike" of 1888 in Great Britain.
Like it or not, the U.S. isn't a pure laissez-faire economy. And you wouldn't trade your life now for one in such an economy, unless you're a Rockefeller posting as an AC out of shyness.
the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists, and to remove the growing, but not yet imminent threat Saddam was posing to America.
The threat was growing, but not imminent, you say -- but in your previous post you've claimed he had the WMDs, and that they must be somewhere, and that it really scares you. How baldly, and badly, have you just contradicted yourself? Um, utterly?
And again, even on your own terms: "the war was to shut down Iraq as a haven for terrorists"?? Gee, uh... Sure has worked great. Oops, time to resort to "We made Iraq a honey pot for terrorists so as to fight them there rather than at home, that's the 'front line' now." You seem incapable of tracking just how mutually contradictory your own statements are, so I'm sure you can trot that one out and not see how completely it vitiates everything else you've said. (I guess there's no need to mention how the war was fought in ways that didn't seem to keep Ansar al-Islam in Iraq anyway. Yeah, they sure were worried about those terrorists. So worried that the terrorists seem to have neatly skipped the country while we were conducting an armored assault on Baghdad.)
Definition:"The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position." You, friend, substituted a ridiculous version of the parent's post, claiming that he was saying Saddam had changed his ways. This wasn't the claim being made. That's what's called a straw man. Maybe you think it was ironic, but golly, you sure seem to have promptly argued against the caricature, so how were you using it again? As a straw man. You might have wanted to look that up.
Just for good measure, you explain how thoughtfully Reagan undertook a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" forgeign policy -- the results of which we are currently dealing with. You do a truly execrable job of defending these policies. Now, think hard... Think about Pakistan: nuclear power, huge radicalized muslim population, repeated assassination attempts against Musharraf, Bush in 2000 saying that he thought the coup that brought Musharraf to power was "good for stability in the region" despite its having overthrown an elected regime. Longtime supporters of the Taliban. Does this remind you of any whose names have four letters and start with "Ira"? Oh, well -- the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I guess.
Try looking at my sig. Eisenhower's among my favorite Presidents, and you're accusing me of being a Democratic propagandist. Unreal.
Um, you want to go back a step or two. Because of course, the relationship between Saddam and Reagan's foreign policy dated back before that, and the U.S. was instrumental in bringing about Iraq's possession of those same weapons.
Here's Donny Rumsfeld, as Reagan's Special Envoy, shaking Saddam's hand.
The "Saddam was a changed man" argument is what you'd call a "straw man." You're doing an excellent job refuting a sham argument nobody's making against you. Keep it up and your arguments will gradually lose any bearing on reality.
Yes, the question is where are the WMD, and it's a question that scares the hell out of me, because he had them and they're not there now, and that means they are somewhere else, and that somewhere else may be the lovely utopian paradise called Syria.
All of which proves the resounding success of Mr. Bush's elective war against Iraq how, exactly? I've run into this many times -- backers of the policy who claim those WMDs must be elsewhere and say how very scary it is. Bizarre: you've just completely dished the very foreign policy you're trying to advocate, and "if you actually had a single brain cell" you'd be seeing that. The war was supposed to be about preventing the proliferation of WMDs, and about preventing their use by terrorists. Now you don't know where the WMDs are, and you say how scary it is. Golly, they could be in the hands of terrorists!
"Scary" doesn't start to describe the level of your post, there.
"A site on the Web is a Web site... Website, capped or uncapped, is jibberish--it means the same thing as 'zhoxting.'"
-- from "Lapsing into a Comma, A Curmudgeon's Guide to the Many Things That Can Go Wrong in Print -- and How to Avoid Them" by Bill Walsh, Copy Desk Chief, Business Desk, the Washington Post
There's an argument here about whether this is truly a proper noun, but Wired doesn't state it clearly, and they're backing it up with some silliness. People don't capitalize "Bush" because the man's important, they capitalize it because it's a proper name. We don't take the caps down when we just use someone's last name, or when we refer to Microsoft without saying "Corporation." Wired is saying "World Wide Web" is a proper noun, but that "Web" isn't part of that proper name -- it's "facial tissue," a generic term. They need to work that out a little better to satisfy me.
Internet is the name of a specific thing, not a type of thing. I'm not sure I'm with them as far as "net," either. That's a nickname based on a contraction, isn't it? Do you call Richard Nixon "tricky dick" in print?
You're so right that the researchers aren't asking "What makes a happier/more fulfilled monkey?" They're asking what makes a more productive monkey for the benefit of those who exploit monkeys, basically. Monkeys, I'm pretty sure, want to fool around a lot -- they being primates.
I have this conversation with a certain friend all the time, only it's phrased differently. He's treating individual decisions as if they're Yes-No, and he talks himself into or out of whatever impulse at a given moment -- only to feel remorse over whatever it was when the next option comes up. This produces a certain amount of debt and a whole lot of non-specific anxiety about how he really should keep himself under control -- but he then basically tries to deny himself each individual y-n choice, which doesn't work. Life is not full of yes-no questions. "Should I work out and become superstrong?" is not the question. You're choosing between working out and playing with your kids and going to work and calling your mom. And posting on Slashdot.
The utilitarian calculus involved in trying to work out benefits of all those different possible options, though, is just too much, so we simplify. I'm thinking the practical approach is more of a Kantian categorical imperative thing: could I accept the world if everyone made similar choices to those I'm making? On the fly, that's a much easier standard to apply, and it also builds in the inherent morality of actions.
So, let's get those rhesus monkeys to work on reading Kant in the original German. Except I'm not sure they'd put a higher priority on that than I did as an undergrad...
"Application Program Interface" - A series of software routines and development tools that comprise an interface between a computer application and lower-level services and functions (e.g. the operating system, device drivers, and other low-level software). APIs serve as building blocks for programmers putting together software applications. Sometimes called "Application Programming Interface."
You're right that my examples were a muddle, but the API is a huge share of this problem. The API -- at the OS level -- is largely responsible for consistency of user experience and GUI across applications, which is what the parent was talking about. Standard dialogs like "yes no cancel" and save dialogs are all in the API. And the thing is, MS's API-level stuff like this is sadly weak and gets abused all over the place as a result.
The fact that, in Windows 2000 with Lotus Notes here at work, I get one type of save dialog for single attachments and a very different, Windows3-style dialog for multiple attachments -- that's an API weirdness. The fact that everyone uses "yes no cancel" dialogs and then includes descriptions of what "yes" really means on top -- that's an obvious limitation of the OS API. "Yes" should mean yes, and the dialog should be a y/n question if you're using it.
The Windows API just plain seems to include sucky standard dialogs. Take a look at how Windows Control Panels use tabs with "Apply" and "OK" buttons that mean the same thing, and "Close" buttons that mean the same thing as the little X on the upper right. Ugly.
For another example: IE lets me use layering effects, but if I put a select object in a form, that object will always appear above every layer on the Web page, no matter what layer it's on. The select objects are calling a standard object from the Windows API that doesn't respect what IE's doing with layers. That problem has been coming and going with various cuts of Windows and IE for a few generations now.
(If anything Apple's API-level UI advantage went down with OS X -- the old pre-X OS was more mature -- but there's still a big edge for Apple in this area.)
Leave human beings alone and take beavers. Beavers are held up as a sort of Horatio Alger example of what hard work can bring to the humble, right? It's just not true. Beavers work pretty hard in the fall, to shore things up before winter -- but they take a long break during the height of the summer, during which they do stuff like swim upstream or downstream looking for other beaver colonies to party with and scouting for new lodge locations and stands of aspen they might want to snack on. A whole lot of their time is spent pretty easily; at most you'd say they were engaged in "open-ended planning" about how to build on that next addition to the lodge or whatever -- sort of like gardeners during the winter thinking out their next planting.
Evolution doesn't seem to favor supermotivated nose-to-the-grindstone workers any more than it produces superfast rabbits or superbig brains. Apparently a nice medium-fast rabbit is best. Someone who can work and play, both, is apparently the superior model of human.
(He said while posting to /. at work.)
If I'm a Nader voter (and I'm not, I prefer voting for someone who could legitimately be President rather than protesting the whole scene), I'd have voted Nader-then-Gore-then-Bush in 2000. My Nader vote wouldn't have split the vote -- and Bush in all likelihood wouldn't be in office. You can vote your conscience.
There's no inconsistency between instant runoff and the electoral college. In that way it'd be a less radical change than what Colorado is proposing right now (and one other state already does) -- splitting the electoral vote by percentage of the popular vote. That change seems simpler, but it does away with the sort of geographic weighting you're talking about, and does nothing to address the "wasted" votes.
So which law enforcement agency are you proposing to make the judgment about what the intent was for any given domain name? Or do we just wait for civil actions to be brought by the aggrieved?
How do you feel about www.untied.com -- the anti-United Airlines consumer site? Do we want to let United go after that site and keep it quiet based on their rights to their own name? Does it matter that "airlines" isn't in the domain name too? Or did you need them to include an adjective, or the word "sucks," in the domain?
There really is a substantive question here about whether speech should be vulnerable to legal action based on trademarks in this way.
Personally, in the shoes of this Web site owner I'd go to my local white pages, look up 25 people with the last name "Falwell," and start calling. Some Jim or Joe Falwell somewhere is going to agree to support your site -- and now Jerry F. is trying to use his trademark to take away his right to have his name on his own site. How satisfying is a trademark-based argument then?