Fine, but I'm not asking whether the government of China is willing to employ slave labor -- yes, they are -- or to pollute at levels we haven't been able to imagine for at least forty glorious, enlightened years. (Oh, how grand we are, we who live forty years in the future.)
I'm asking: what companies in the first world are making the handoff? Where's the point in our system where we say, "We've got this big hazardous waste problem here, but hey, we'll turn it into a little profit -- it's China's problem now."
I ask this because I'm curious what those companies do -- how they do it, what their other economic interests are -- not because I'm trying to be ideological about it.
So my question is, where do these piles of hardware come from? Specifically, I mean -- At what point in the chain do we hand everything off to a central supplier who sells it out of the country? Who are the companies? My local hazardous waste place is how far removed from 13-year-olds dipping circuit boards in tin and lead to "make them look new"?
NPR did a story a while back about infectious diseases being shipped worldwide at new speeds because of container ships full of old tires. (Mosquitoes bred in water collecting in the tires, and the container ship system meant transport speeds were far greater.) Made you really think -- our waste is a desirable commodity somewhere? Desirable enough that people will pay good rates to ship old tires to the third world? The unintended consequence of viral transmission was pretty nasty.
However, have you seen the simplicity of macosx? Every app is a directory. No gtk compatability problems(for those who remember). Copy the app anywhere. click, go. ... ...why cant i just install the freaking app where I want it too, and delete it by trashing it. rpm --erase??? Who would think of that?
This has been true as far back as I can remember in Mac OS: back to 1986 or so. Apps may be dependent on system extensions, so moving them from one box to another might not fly, but you've always been able to move 'em around on the machine, and to delete them with a simple trashing.
The linking model is simple. The loading model is simple. applescript scripts most apps and is way easier to use than COM or bonobo.
Applescript has been easy and powerful for a long time. That's one reason publishing houses love the Mac OS; Applescripting stuff in Photoshop makes their lives easier in a hundred ways. Similar things could be said about the various linking approaches in Mac OS over the years -- they were thought out, solid designs.
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux.
I agree totally -- but it's easy to undersell the experience and commitment of a company like Apple when it comes to User Interface. Apple's invested in getting it right. The contrast between Windows and Mac has always come down to that for me. You take pleasure from using a Mac box, and you don't from dealing with Windows. I'm not sure Linux is going to catch up any time soon. Partly the development model that goes with Linux is decentralized to the point where any coherent process for UI design is, if anything, deprecated. (Mac users like their interface, but it's only because they're "rigid," and so on.)
This troll probably dates to 1993 and the OS wars, and only just got posted because the Notes gateway was backed up?
Ever taken a UI course? Multiple choice question:
User Interface design emphasizes:
A great variety and diversity of approaches to the same basic task, because that will encourage users to experiment and remain mentally agile. (It will also prevent them from ever graduating away from the react-to-the-latest-change-we-forced-on-them model of user behavior, so we can sell Word when we revamp it again.)
Common interface elements and approaches that will allow the user to be creative and productive -- mentally agile -- about their work rather than the tools they're coping with.
I used to support a 20-person Mac office in my spare time while running a minor publishing operation. When the Windows folks would move in, they invariably had learned quite detailed, rigid procedures for how to do every little thing, and it was really hard to encourage them away from their patterned behaviors. They'd learned to cope with things in one particular way, the first one they'd managed to make work, and every change was scary trauma to them. In one case a woman had screwed up every extension on her box -- renaming extensions based on the project -- but she knew to open everything from inside her apps, and she wouldn't, couldn't, change. Moving to the Mac OS made her files openable either way -- it wasn't reliant on extensions for file types -- but she never did figure that out. Just kept plodding right along.
Right now I'm doing some pretty serious data mining of all those families that have been uploaded to our Exchange--looking at the average family composition, what they tend to do in the game on a daily basis. I'm actually graphing kind of a gameplay landscape.
CP: So you're making a model of the model.
WW: (Laughs.) Yes. I'm trying to basically chronicle the average model that the players have made in their heads. It's like cultural anthropology.
How many layers of self-reference are involved with my friend Dave? His Sims characters always end up in a destructive loop in which they only get gratification from staying home and playing computer games. Their social skills deteriorate until they get so satisfaction from other people, so they have to resort more and more to the games... Art imitates life imitates art imitates life...
The references to Pinball Construction Set -- had it on the C64 -- and old Avalon Hill-style wargames made a lot of sense. That Pinball title from EA was way ahead of itself; you had the sort of "how does the ball bounce" physics model to work around in a nonstructured way. Anyone who's ever made a map for Myth II would recognize the exercise.
And yeah, Sims games are sort of a natural (side)step from the "rules lawyer" problem everyone had playing Squad Leader. Even "real time" tactics/strategy games basically just use the processor speed of the cpu to grind through the "rules" better than we could with those 40-page booklets: think of the whole "fog of battle" premise for unit visibility in something like Warcraft or Myth, and then think of the impossible "hidden unit" scenarios in Squad Leader.
But the open-ended quality of the true Sims game is special, and we owe this guy. Or Dave does, anyway. It's the only satisfaction he really gets any more...
Can't remember if it was 20/20 or 60 minutes, but my mother was contacted by producers for one of the big news magazine shows. They were doing a story about something to do with occupational medicine, and she's a (since retired) physician working for a large company.
She was nervous to be interviewed, of course. If she had been, I'm sure her experience would have echoed this writer's. TV news, and a lot of the daily print stuff, is all about false dilemmas; they state everything as if it was about diametrically opposed positions, in order to heighten the drama of the story. That's what the style of O'Reilly is all about, only he takes it the extra, Rupert Murdoch-approved step of being an advocate rather than a moderator. Ray Suarez is about the only really great moderator I've heard on a talk show in the last ten years.
Alas, we will never know what Mom's interview would have been like. The news producers, it turned out, wanted mainly to have a picture of some employee getting a mammogram from a woman doctor. They were clearly interested in getting the juiciest angle they could onto broadcast TV -- hubba hubba. That made Mom uncomfortable, she didn't want to be exploiting peope whose care she was responsible for, so she told them no. They went to some other company and got their cheesecake mammogram.
Not quite Donahue, but it's bad enough. You think?
Point nine of this draft gets to our privacy worry:
Such a priori retention of data and access to this data constitutes an interference in the private life of the individual; however, such an interference does not violate the international rules applicable with regard to the right to privacy and the handling of personal data contained, in particular, in the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights of 4 November 1950, the Convention of the Council of Europe no.108 on the protection of persons in respect of the automated handling of personal data of 28 January 1981, and the Directives 95/46/ce and 97/66/CE, where it is provided for by law and where it is necessary, in a democratic society, for the prosecution of criminal offences.
They admit it's a compromise of individual privacy rights, but say it's allowed under those conventions. I was just looking for the spots in those documents:
that allow mandatory storage of information in the absence of ongoing criminal investigation -- a priori.
The 1950 one includes a very general passage seeming to allow anything "preventive" if it might abridge the rights or freedoms of others. Doesn't make me feel safe. (Hey, someone might want to prevent me using my TiVo in naughty ways. That'd abridge Jack Valenti's right -- or is it a freedom? -- to rake in money.)
The 1981 thing's much more specific to the question, and opens up a world of hurt we could inflict on our various surveillance agencies:
The purpose of this convention is to secure in the territory of each Party for every individual, whatever his nationality or residence, respect for his rights and fundamental freedoms, and in particular his right to privacy, with regard to automatic processing of personal data relating to him ("data protection"). ... Any person shall be enabled:
a) to establish the existence of an automated personal data file, its main purposes, as well as the identity and habitual residence or principal place of business of the controller of the file;
b) to obtain at reasonable intervals and without excessive delay or expense confirmation of whether personal data relating to him are stored in the automated data file as well as communication to him of such data in an intelligible form;
Imagine the/. effect as we all demand access to the records being kept of all our packet traffic, all our phone calls... Hey, people ask for their credit reports. If the European agreement says it has to be "transparent" in this way, just start asking.
Maybe you should look back over the history of the 20th century. Look for the people who were saying the sorts of things you're saying now about the environment, and tell me if they seem like they were right in retrospect. (I'm reading "Close to Shore" right now, about the shark attacks of 1916. "Gee, fish I buy in Philadelphia is tasting a little like coal tar, but nothing's been 'proven'...")
When politically-obsessive folks -- your "liberal media conspiracy" asides make it all too clear -- refer to "common sense," the rest of us keep one hand on our wallets.
The "evidence" in the article is insubstantial. Hey, Apple and Palm have had their moments of differing opinion: must mean Apple's developing its own PDA again. Anyone who looked at OS X and said not "This is a modern OS GUI over Unix" but "Hey, there are lots of features here that would make more sense in a cell phone," please raise your hand. We need to cull you from the herd.
The reductionism of the history of Apple to "Wasn't that Newton a bad proposition?" is especially obvious and seems like the sort of journalistic conceit that pushes faked-up drama in a story. I mean:
In a remarkable turnaround effort, Mr. Jobs has taken pains to distance Apple from the Sculley-Newton legacy. He canceled the Newton soon after returning and has pooh-poohed the industry's personal digital assistants as "junk" and worse.
The Newton might have lost Apple money, okay. But it lost Apple money for a variety of reasons -- among them the problem Apple's always had with supply chain on its products, and the way Apple collapsed in the laptop market for years before releasing the first shoddy Power PC powerbooks. To lump Apple's entire fortune as a company into that one product just to create a false sort of journalistic flow in the story is just lame.
Real story: There are some indirect signs that Apple may enter the PDA market again. They did once before, but they were a little ahead of the market and they eventually cut bait. Wait and see.
...not the other way around. This approach gets rid of the physically stupid part of keyboards, but it doesn't address the big learning curve for something so basic. If anything it seems like it'd make the learning worse, because one key != one symbol.
Example: In order to pare the number of keys, all these designs resort to "Chords" -- multiple keys hit in combination, or in sequence, to produce a result. This design gets different results from your fingertips as opposed to pressure with the middle of your finger, too. So how many hard-to-recall combinations of left-thumb-tip with right-index-finger knuckle are we going to need to remember to avoid hitting ctrl-q when we meant "Q"? Not the system to learn on the laptop where you keep all your contact info, right?
We're past the point where we should be teaching ourselves elaborate new routines to accommodate new technologies. The Palm handwriting system is a good example of how crappy that model is; I can't stand that the OS is trying to make me learn a new way to write "T" as a capital letter. That's just wrongheaded. The technology's supposed to be conforming to us, and that's not just a physical thing.
Konqueror turned out quite vulnerable, as I mentioned above. Mozilla was not vulnerable, but I'm not sure if that's because it handled the situation properly, or is, ironically, somehow too buggy to be exploited.
So we exclude Apple customers because their zealous, evangelistic user population will skew the results? Isn't the presence of that user population part of the results?
Hey, I wonder how the population at Slashdot would feel about being ruled out of an analogous survey about OSes due to the number of "enthusiasts" in the crowd. Those results can't be reliable, because Linux-friendly folks like their OS and want to evangelize for it. Better keep them out of the survey, as a control measure. Hey, look, Windows Me wins again! (We've already tossed those Apple zealots out of the data pool, naturally.)
I've dealt with Apple's help. They used to basically give you a free ride for years with their phone advice line, up until 1993 or so. You could call about defunct machines from years back. Nice perk. We had some shoddy problems with the first generation Power PC (5300?) powerbooks at an old job -- those machines were a piece of work, one of the worst releases of the Gil Amelio era -- but the support line was quite responsive. We got swapped parts for a laptop in two days: ship overnight to Apple in CA from MN, they replace and test it, ship back to us, all shipping and parts paid by Apple -- after the warranty had expired, because it was a recognized problem with the model.
I personally haven't called the line in a few years, and my impression is they've cut the default warranty to 90 days to push you to the "AppleCare" thing. But no, it shouldn't surprise you to see them up on these lists. They've been there for a long time, and it's not because Mac users are blind fools. That's wishful thinking on your part, not the Mac zealots'. You pay for it, but Apple does deliver in this way.
Interesting aside, okay, and of course it isn't "always" badly cropped. Either way, what I want is the movie as the director (and cinematographer)intended it to be seen. Do you think David Lean intended Lawrence of Arabia to be seen Fullscreen? I saw "The Last Emperor" last week, and it was unintelligible without letterboxing.
Arguing that the director actually cropped all the possible shots to start with, well... that's her job, right? She started paring down the possible stuff on screen by aiming her camera at the actors, and she used her tools and that viewfinder to make those choices. I want to see it the way she wanted me to see it. Ask a director what he wants.
(The only thoughtful exception I can think of would be Stanley Kubrick, who thought ahead to how his movies would play on the tube. His DVD versions actually gave you more image than the original movies. Even his fans have mixed feelings about that, though.)
Just how "imperfect" does something have to be before I'm allowed to watch it?
I mean, "fullscreen" movies on most cable outlets have a significant part of the original widescreen image lopped off. Isn't that imperfect enough for Jack Valenti? How about if he takes the sound down to simple mono and superimposes a silhouette of himself at the bottom of the screen, delivering meant-to-be-funny lines about the movie MST3K-style? Is that bad enough? Or does he need the cable company to agree on subpar cabling, too, so I get some ghosting?
The Federal Communications Commission
is considering a proposal that would
allow cable companies to turn off
the firewire port.
So I buy a TiVO because I really, really don't want to miss your programming but you scheduled "Cheers III: the redemption of Cliff" at 1 AM while I'm at work. You, in response to this infamous behavior on my part, hack my machine so I can't see it? Way to twist your head up your *ssh*le. What industry thinks that way?
The "best mode" requirement of U.S. patent law, is, as far as I know, not an aspect of European patents.
For example, a U.S. inventor is required to indicate the "best way" to use her invention as part of the patent process. A European patent application is required to include at least one potential use of the invention, but it doesn't even need to be a particularly good use.
Do you see potential abuses of that absence in the European system? Do companies and individuals avoid disclosing potential uses of their inventions, thinking of those uses as guarded business secrets, or do they see it as in their best interests to specify use as clearly as possible in order to strengthen the patent? (I'm thinking of examples like "one-click" ordering, where the patent seems to be as much on the potential use as it is on any distinct "invention.")
Often a collegiate sports program that's in the deep end with the NCAA will do something like this: impose their own restrictions on the program in question, in order to shortcut what they suspect might be even harsher punishments from the NCAA.
Want a good example of how an administration that's in bed with big business will compromise the public good? Gee, this settlement must be tough enough if the company enacts parts of it willingly, as a negotiating ploy in order to get the rest of it through.
Um, didn't you just ask him to carry another bunch of stuff onto the plane? He probably needs the laptop where he's going, and a few games on his hard drive aren't more to juggle. (That's leaving alone the dastardly security threat posed by a GameBoy Advance and its deadly, mercury-containing batteries. Oy.)
Oh, and:
but there's a big difference between 60 seconds of bootup or shutdown
Isn't an OS X Mac going to shut down fast any more? My old OS 9 box takes maybe four seconds.
The story's told at such a high level that you can't tell any of the details -- what provisions of the Japanese constitution would this violate, how's the number "secured," how did the mayor "cut the local computer system off from the new network," what's it even used for and are those uses narrowly defined, and so on. Still, don't you find this sort of quote reassuring?
The government says it has created a security system that can detect suspicious access to the database.
"It's quite common to feel uneasy about something new. We want to keep explaining until such anxieties disappear," said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda.
(It's "quite common to feel uneasy" about being rounded up in railway cars, too, big fellah. Just to let you know.)
Man, we need to get some advice from the government of Japan. A totally secure system. Impressive.
Okay, our/. lead-in is a mess, and the article itself is all over the dang map. The content isn't that imbalanced; it's just badly edited. It's not any sort of "bandwagon," either way. (The headline calls this approach "Vigilante hacking." That's hardly sympathetic.)
Bad editing leads to abrupt transitions. Here we go from "Striking back against a computer that is attacking you" with a worm to this:
The defensive strategy of "strike back" is gaining some support among politicians, who will be voting on a bill backed by movie and music studios that would allow retaliation to help thwart Internet piracy.
Whah? Then we back off and contrast that approach (placing "destructive decoy digital files into peer-to-peer networks to penalize users") with the hack-back the story was really written around.
It's almost like the editor wanted to nod in the direction of the latest legislative "anti-hacker" move, whether or not it really had anything to do with his story. That's all. No "bandwagon." Just bad editing. Given the state of/.'s stories, we should relate.
The beauty of filters is, companies regard their list o' sites as a competitive secret, so you can't really find out who's on the list. It's a beautiful system to exploit.
The Dianetics folks have their own, special filters than prevent you from seeing through the terms of the cult, for example. That's the sort of precedent that libraries might want to think about when they're being strongarmed into accepting filter systems. Gee, if it can be misused this way...
Our local libraries, to their credit, have put up a fight for the right of people to view whatever they want on their systems. Of course, the Republican Party has ripped them up and down over it -- doesn't make "common sense" to take the risk of exposing children to the icky stuff in life. Libraries should be for upstanding Americans to peruse copies of William Safire editorials...
"Accusations of Communism"? You apparently don't even get the reference -- to the practice of Nixon's CREEP group, which disseminated fake posters and campaign literature in the name of a liberal democrat in order to discredit the candidate. Yes, see, I understand that Communism would be diametrically opposed to your post, and nobody could mistake that.
My point, again: any post as shallow as yours is only going to discredit the position it's pushing, so you must have been either joking or clueless. The most likely party to support legislation like this in the U.S. would be the Republicans, because horrible leftists like the ACLU would undermine Democratic support and the Greens are all about consumer and individual rights. The situation doesn't fit your easy-answers, spectrum-from-left-to-right world view, does it?
Here's as close to ad hominem attack as I need to get: If your ideology fits in a nutshell, that's probably where it belongs.
"Horrific" action? It might be wrongheaded, it might have unintended consequences, it might irritate us because it shows so little concern for individual rights in principle, but "horrific" is not the word. "Horrific" would be genocidal tribal warfare in Rwanda.
Blatant troll with the libertarianism, too. Nobody'd be so ham fisted if they really "believed." This is like those Muskie posters Nixon had put out, isn't it? You're really a Communist trying to discredit the other side, right?
(If any party's going to push this sort of policy, it's the Repubs. The card-carrying ACLU members of the Democratic party have some clue, sometimes. The green party's got the whole consumer protection thing going on with Nader, they wouldn't put this as priority #3,000 on their list. The Republicans, though, would cast it as a law-and-order problem crossed with fighting terrorism and call it an election year issue.)
For its time, Kane is actually heavy in special effects. Practically every shot has some combination of miniatures, paintings, and all that classic stuff, leaving alone the sound work. Some of the commentary tracks on the DVD describe them.
Yeah, I know you were joking, but Kane's a perfect example of the unnoticed special effects thing he's talking about, it really is.
Slashdot Mirror
For $1.50 a day? That's the going rate in China for these workers, according to the article.
I'm asking: what companies in the first world are making the handoff? Where's the point in our system where we say, "We've got this big hazardous waste problem here, but hey, we'll turn it into a little profit -- it's China's problem now."
I ask this because I'm curious what those companies do -- how they do it, what their other economic interests are -- not because I'm trying to be ideological about it.
So my question is, where do these piles of hardware come from? Specifically, I mean -- At what point in the chain do we hand everything off to a central supplier who sells it out of the country? Who are the companies? My local hazardous waste place is how far removed from 13-year-olds dipping circuit boards in tin and lead to "make them look new"?
NPR did a story a while back about infectious diseases being shipped worldwide at new speeds because of container ships full of old tires. (Mosquitoes bred in water collecting in the tires, and the container ship system meant transport speeds were far greater.) Made you really think -- our waste is a desirable commodity somewhere? Desirable enough that people will pay good rates to ship old tires to the third world? The unintended consequence of viral transmission was pretty nasty.
...
This has been true as far back as I can remember in Mac OS: back to 1986 or so. Apps may be dependent on system extensions, so moving them from one box to another might not fly, but you've always been able to move 'em around on the machine, and to delete them with a simple trashing.
The linking model is simple. The loading model is simple. applescript scripts most apps and is way easier to use than COM or bonobo.
Applescript has been easy and powerful for a long time. That's one reason publishing houses love the Mac OS; Applescripting stuff in Photoshop makes their lives easier in a hundred ways. Similar things could be said about the various linking approaches in Mac OS over the years -- they were thought out, solid designs.
The sad part is, most of what macosx has done could and still can be done on linux.
I agree totally -- but it's easy to undersell the experience and commitment of a company like Apple when it comes to User Interface. Apple's invested in getting it right. The contrast between Windows and Mac has always come down to that for me. You take pleasure from using a Mac box, and you don't from dealing with Windows. I'm not sure Linux is going to catch up any time soon. Partly the development model that goes with Linux is decentralized to the point where any coherent process for UI design is, if anything, deprecated. (Mac users like their interface, but it's only because they're "rigid," and so on.)
Ever taken a UI course? Multiple choice question:
User Interface design emphasizes:
I used to support a 20-person Mac office in my spare time while running a minor publishing operation. When the Windows folks would move in, they invariably had learned quite detailed, rigid procedures for how to do every little thing, and it was really hard to encourage them away from their patterned behaviors. They'd learned to cope with things in one particular way, the first one they'd managed to make work, and every change was scary trauma to them. In one case a woman had screwed up every extension on her box -- renaming extensions based on the project -- but she knew to open everything from inside her apps, and she wouldn't, couldn't, change. Moving to the Mac OS made her files openable either way -- it wasn't reliant on extensions for file types -- but she never did figure that out. Just kept plodding right along.
How many layers of self-reference are involved with my friend Dave? His Sims characters always end up in a destructive loop in which they only get gratification from staying home and playing computer games. Their social skills deteriorate until they get so satisfaction from other people, so they have to resort more and more to the games... Art imitates life imitates art imitates life...
The references to Pinball Construction Set -- had it on the C64 -- and old Avalon Hill-style wargames made a lot of sense. That Pinball title from EA was way ahead of itself; you had the sort of "how does the ball bounce" physics model to work around in a nonstructured way. Anyone who's ever made a map for Myth II would recognize the exercise.
And yeah, Sims games are sort of a natural (side)step from the "rules lawyer" problem everyone had playing Squad Leader. Even "real time" tactics/strategy games basically just use the processor speed of the cpu to grind through the "rules" better than we could with those 40-page booklets: think of the whole "fog of battle" premise for unit visibility in something like Warcraft or Myth, and then think of the impossible "hidden unit" scenarios in Squad Leader.
But the open-ended quality of the true Sims game is special, and we owe this guy. Or Dave does, anyway. It's the only satisfaction he really gets any more...
She was nervous to be interviewed, of course. If she had been, I'm sure her experience would have echoed this writer's. TV news, and a lot of the daily print stuff, is all about false dilemmas; they state everything as if it was about diametrically opposed positions, in order to heighten the drama of the story. That's what the style of O'Reilly is all about, only he takes it the extra, Rupert Murdoch-approved step of being an advocate rather than a moderator. Ray Suarez is about the only really great moderator I've heard on a talk show in the last ten years.
Alas, we will never know what Mom's interview would have been like. The news producers, it turned out, wanted mainly to have a picture of some employee getting a mammogram from a woman doctor. They were clearly interested in getting the juiciest angle they could onto broadcast TV -- hubba hubba. That made Mom uncomfortable, she didn't want to be exploiting peope whose care she was responsible for, so she told them no. They went to some other company and got their cheesecake mammogram.
Not quite Donahue, but it's bad enough. You think?
Such a priori retention of data and access to this data constitutes an interference in the private life of the individual; however, such an interference does not violate the international rules applicable with regard to the right to privacy and the handling of personal data contained, in particular, in the European Convention on the Protection of Human Rights of 4 November 1950, the Convention of the Council of Europe no.108 on the protection of persons in respect of the automated handling of personal data of 28 January 1981, and the Directives 95/46/ce and 97/66/CE, where it is provided for by law and where it is necessary, in a democratic society, for the prosecution of criminal offences.
They admit it's a compromise of individual privacy rights, but say it's allowed under those conventions. I was just looking for the spots in those documents:
that allow mandatory storage of information in the absence of ongoing criminal investigation -- a priori.
The 1950 one includes a very general passage seeming to allow anything "preventive" if it might abridge the rights or freedoms of others. Doesn't make me feel safe. (Hey, someone might want to prevent me using my TiVo in naughty ways. That'd abridge Jack Valenti's right -- or is it a freedom? -- to rake in money.)
The 1981 thing's much more specific to the question, and opens up a world of hurt we could inflict on our various surveillance agencies:
Imagine the /. effect as we all demand access to the records being kept of all our packet traffic, all our phone calls... Hey, people ask for their credit reports. If the European agreement says it has to be "transparent" in this way, just start asking.
When politically-obsessive folks -- your "liberal media conspiracy" asides make it all too clear -- refer to "common sense," the rest of us keep one hand on our wallets.
Isn't someone else trying to do a similar thing with the marsupial wolf or something?
The reductionism of the history of Apple to "Wasn't that Newton a bad proposition?" is especially obvious and seems like the sort of journalistic conceit that pushes faked-up drama in a story. I mean:
The Newton might have lost Apple money, okay. But it lost Apple money for a variety of reasons -- among them the problem Apple's always had with supply chain on its products, and the way Apple collapsed in the laptop market for years before releasing the first shoddy Power PC powerbooks. To lump Apple's entire fortune as a company into that one product just to create a false sort of journalistic flow in the story is just lame.
Real story: There are some indirect signs that Apple may enter the PDA market again. They did once before, but they were a little ahead of the market and they eventually cut bait. Wait and see.
Example: In order to pare the number of keys, all these designs resort to "Chords" -- multiple keys hit in combination, or in sequence, to produce a result. This design gets different results from your fingertips as opposed to pressure with the middle of your finger, too. So how many hard-to-recall combinations of left-thumb-tip with right-index-finger knuckle are we going to need to remember to avoid hitting ctrl-q when we meant "Q"? Not the system to learn on the laptop where you keep all your contact info, right?
We're past the point where we should be teaching ourselves elaborate new routines to accommodate new technologies. The Palm handwriting system is a good example of how crappy that model is; I can't stand that the OS is trying to make me learn a new way to write "T" as a capital letter. That's just wrongheaded. The technology's supposed to be conforming to us, and that's not just a physical thing.
Hey, I wonder how the population at Slashdot would feel about being ruled out of an analogous survey about OSes due to the number of "enthusiasts" in the crowd. Those results can't be reliable, because Linux-friendly folks like their OS and want to evangelize for it. Better keep them out of the survey, as a control measure. Hey, look, Windows Me wins again! (We've already tossed those Apple zealots out of the data pool, naturally.)
I've dealt with Apple's help. They used to basically give you a free ride for years with their phone advice line, up until 1993 or so. You could call about defunct machines from years back. Nice perk. We had some shoddy problems with the first generation Power PC (5300?) powerbooks at an old job -- those machines were a piece of work, one of the worst releases of the Gil Amelio era -- but the support line was quite responsive. We got swapped parts for a laptop in two days: ship overnight to Apple in CA from MN, they replace and test it, ship back to us, all shipping and parts paid by Apple -- after the warranty had expired, because it was a recognized problem with the model.
I personally haven't called the line in a few years, and my impression is they've cut the default warranty to 90 days to push you to the "AppleCare" thing. But no, it shouldn't surprise you to see them up on these lists. They've been there for a long time, and it's not because Mac users are blind fools. That's wishful thinking on your part, not the Mac zealots'. You pay for it, but Apple does deliver in this way.
Interesting aside, okay, and of course it isn't "always" badly cropped. Either way, what I want is the movie as the director (and cinematographer)intended it to be seen. Do you think David Lean intended Lawrence of Arabia to be seen Fullscreen? I saw "The Last Emperor" last week, and it was unintelligible without letterboxing.
Arguing that the director actually cropped all the possible shots to start with, well... that's her job, right? She started paring down the possible stuff on screen by aiming her camera at the actors, and she used her tools and that viewfinder to make those choices. I want to see it the way she wanted me to see it. Ask a director what he wants.
(The only thoughtful exception I can think of would be Stanley Kubrick, who thought ahead to how his movies would play on the tube. His DVD versions actually gave you more image than the original movies. Even his fans have mixed feelings about that, though.)
I mean, "fullscreen" movies on most cable outlets have a significant part of the original widescreen image lopped off. Isn't that imperfect enough for Jack Valenti? How about if he takes the sound down to simple mono and superimposes a silhouette of himself at the bottom of the screen, delivering meant-to-be-funny lines about the movie MST3K-style? Is that bad enough? Or does he need the cable company to agree on subpar cabling, too, so I get some ghosting?
So I buy a TiVO because I really, really don't want to miss your programming but you scheduled "Cheers III: the redemption of Cliff" at 1 AM while I'm at work. You, in response to this infamous behavior on my part, hack my machine so I can't see it? Way to twist your head up your *ssh*le. What industry thinks that way?
For example, a U.S. inventor is required to indicate the "best way" to use her invention as part of the patent process. A European patent application is required to include at least one potential use of the invention, but it doesn't even need to be a particularly good use.
Do you see potential abuses of that absence in the European system? Do companies and individuals avoid disclosing potential uses of their inventions, thinking of those uses as guarded business secrets, or do they see it as in their best interests to specify use as clearly as possible in order to strengthen the patent? (I'm thinking of examples like "one-click" ordering, where the patent seems to be as much on the potential use as it is on any distinct "invention.")
Want a good example of how an administration that's in bed with big business will compromise the public good? Gee, this settlement must be tough enough if the company enacts parts of it willingly, as a negotiating ploy in order to get the rest of it through.
Oh, and:
but there's a big difference between 60 seconds of bootup or shutdown
Isn't an OS X Mac going to shut down fast any more? My old OS 9 box takes maybe four seconds.
(It's "quite common to feel uneasy" about being rounded up in railway cars, too, big fellah. Just to let you know.)
Man, we need to get some advice from the government of Japan. A totally secure system. Impressive.
Bad editing leads to abrupt transitions. Here we go from "Striking back against a computer that is attacking you" with a worm to this:
Whah? Then we back off and contrast that approach (placing "destructive decoy digital files into peer-to-peer networks to penalize users") with the hack-back the story was really written around.
It's almost like the editor wanted to nod in the direction of the latest legislative "anti-hacker" move, whether or not it really had anything to do with his story. That's all. No "bandwagon." Just bad editing. Given the state of /.'s stories, we should relate.
The Dianetics folks have their own, special filters than prevent you from seeing through the terms of the cult, for example. That's the sort of precedent that libraries might want to think about when they're being strongarmed into accepting filter systems. Gee, if it can be misused this way...
Our local libraries, to their credit, have put up a fight for the right of people to view whatever they want on their systems. Of course, the Republican Party has ripped them up and down over it -- doesn't make "common sense" to take the risk of exposing children to the icky stuff in life. Libraries should be for upstanding Americans to peruse copies of William Safire editorials...
My point, again: any post as shallow as yours is only going to discredit the position it's pushing, so you must have been either joking or clueless. The most likely party to support legislation like this in the U.S. would be the Republicans, because horrible leftists like the ACLU would undermine Democratic support and the Greens are all about consumer and individual rights. The situation doesn't fit your easy-answers, spectrum-from-left-to-right world view, does it?
Here's as close to ad hominem attack as I need to get: If your ideology fits in a nutshell, that's probably where it belongs.
Blatant troll with the libertarianism, too. Nobody'd be so ham fisted if they really "believed." This is like those Muskie posters Nixon had put out, isn't it? You're really a Communist trying to discredit the other side, right?
(If any party's going to push this sort of policy, it's the Repubs. The card-carrying ACLU members of the Democratic party have some clue, sometimes. The green party's got the whole consumer protection thing going on with Nader, they wouldn't put this as priority #3,000 on their list. The Republicans, though, would cast it as a law-and-order problem crossed with fighting terrorism and call it an election year issue.)
Yeah, I know you were joking, but Kane's a perfect example of the unnoticed special effects thing he's talking about, it really is.