Actually, the most important thing I've found in art is the very thing that so many pseudo-artistic/expressive people loathe: limitations.
The most creative things I've seen/done involved some kind of restriction on the methods, tools, subject, viewpoint, etc.
In that sensem, it's chaos and limitations, like pouring plaster (chaotic) into a mold (limitation). Like sculpture, it's not what you put in, but what you leave out.
I've heard this once or twice before and I'm stunned and speechless. I mean, yes MacOS X is somewhat different from MacOS 9. But it is WAY, WAY, WAY more like it than XP is.
To the extent that XP's GUI is reasonably well done, it is a clumsy copy of MacOS X, not MacOS 9. XP is much more complicated to administer than MacOS X is.
I mean, the "Gotta change so may as well use XP" argument is sort of like saying, "We're moving from Florida and since Southern California is so different, we may as well move to Greenland."
Hold on pardner... There's no need to have IE built into Windows, as anyone with any programming knowledge knows. ("Anyone" evidently does not include Bill Gates nor most US judges.)
Apple has a framework for rendering HTML, for example, that anyone can use. But Safari, Apple's browser, can be removed from the system, replaced with Mozilla, Omniweb, or any other choice.
That is the difference between MS and Apple. Apple includes their own app, but you don't have to use it or even have it installed. MS insists that their app must be installed or everything breaks.
What Apple borrowed from PARC and others before them they improved and innovated. For example, pull-down menus (Mac) are simpler to use then pop-up (pre-Mac) because they're always visible. Previous systems did bit-blits only of rectangular regions, Apple introduced non-rectangular, non-contiguous region blits. Etc.
MS, on the other hand, has slavishly followed and usually dis-improved. Or been way late to the party. For example, Apple added Quartz Extreme a couple of years ago: use OpenGL and the today's opwerful graphics cards to improve and accelerate the Mac UI. MS will bring this to Longhorn in a couple of years.
Heck, MS so copies Apple that they even use the same color schemes and desktop patterns for their advanced UI previews. They can't even come up with their own.
And THAT is the difference between Jobs and Gates.
Not that Gates hasn't innovated. He has. But in the business/marketing realm, not design or technology. Most of us geeks admire tech/design innovators over marketing innovators.
YOU TALK TOO LOUD
on
Cell-Phone Wars
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The problem is not talking on the phone. It's that most people talk WAY TOO LOUD on a cellphone, way above the appropriate level. Personally, I keep my voice down, but most people don't.
So, yes you have a right to talk where talking is appropriate. No, you don't have a right to SHOUT FOR AN HOUR because you're too stupid to realize that people naturally talk louder on the phone.
I'd love to see an Open Source, Python-based hotsync application. I know I'd contribute to the project given that someone more familiar with the actual hitsync process gets the basics in place.
SInce MacOS X ships with the Python (10.3 includes the latest version Python 2.3), I think it would be a great option that would maximize the flexibility and openness of the package.
Every time I hotsync and I've modified a single event in a repeating series, I get the erroneous message: "Blah Blah has been modified on the desktop and on the Palm, both versions copied to both." And I end up with two duplicate copies of the repeating event.
At first, I assumed it was a problem with DateBk, which I use. But after a conversation with DateBk's author, it appears that Palm didn't get syncing right and their sync process gets confused. It doesn't lose data so in one sense the err on the side of caution, but they are not sweating the details and getting it right.
Has anyone studied the effects of Agl on, say, people below?
I was in CO last year for a snowboarding trip. They were experiencing a drought and so were seeding clouds every day. Coincidentally, the local guy who supplied oxygen for people who had contracted HAPE said his business was more than doubled from previous years.
I know, I know, coincidence does not prove a cause, but was just wondering if Agl was spread in such quantities in daily cloud seeding that it could be inhaled by people and cause problems.
We've gotten off-topic here, so I'll let this be my last words on it. I'm not taking anything away from Dan in terms of his fictional work as it exists. It's a best-seller and well-deserved.
My only criticism is that he's found some old conspiracy theories (several have pointed out that he's drawing from 30-year-old works, but those in turn draw from centuries-old theories) and presented them as fact outside of his fictional universe. On his web site, in interviews, and at the beginning of his book, he presents himself as something like a history scholar who has found the hidden truth and is now presenting it in a fictional form. Bah!
This is in sharp contrast to the book that this thread is actually about: it actually is based on research and fact and it's not afraid to say where things are unknown, but it is as fascinating as fiction. This is more brilliant, IMO, and it needs attention since it won't get the hype that a fictional book does.
Re:The Da Vinci Code
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The Da Vinci Code is gripping fiction, but it's not in the same class as The Golden Ratio.
The Golden Ratio is carefully and deeply researched. The Da Vinci Codes is allegedly based on research, but the "research" behind it is recycling tired old conspiracy theories.
From his statements online and in his forward, methinks Dan Brown is trying to have it both ways: claim it's based on fact but use the plausible deniability of it being a fictional work. It is a gripping read, don't misunderstand me. But you have to remind yourself that it's totally fictional.
Not saying you can't become good or good enough. But good programming, analysis or design requires a particular way of thinking. I've moved from computer science to video editing, but you know I still think like a programmer: that's just the way I analyze the world. And I'd say that's probably what marks a "geek" versus someone in a techie field.
Also, consider where your strength truly is. Maybe a partnership is called for: you being the domain expert and the other person being the computer scientist. You'll teach each other and learn from each other, and the net result will probably be better than one person with dual training.
Definitely follow your passion, though. We're blessed in this day and age and in this country that we can do that. I'm on my second career now, and looking maybe at moving to a third in the next few years. Or maybe branching into three simultaneous careers.
(I have a friend who was a 3D artist, but has now scaled back to 2 days a week of 3D work and 3 days refinishing antiques. Maybe we'll all break out of career stovepipes somehow.)
You mention "allied bombers" then go on to talk about American planes. As far as I know, half of all bombing was done by the British and I believe most of the "firebombing". Yes it was vengeful. Yes it went over the top.
But when you talk about what we did to the Germans and Japanese, you must remember that they started a war of world domination and managed to slaughter millions of people and we would've been next. In the long run, we replaced murderous, racist, genocidal dictaterships with democracies.
I've been a long-time Perl programmer, though I've not used a boatload of packages nor much of the horrid OO.
A couple of years ago, I decided to look into Python and Ruby. Python looked OK, but not that different. I did like the indent-as-group idea, which was different. Ruby looked very cool. But it was impossible to get good documentation. It seemed like a Japanese cult with a few western initiates.
Well, MacOS X ships with Perl, Python, and Ruby (and PHP, and...) so I figured I'd try them again.
I still find Ruby more intriguing, but I've settled on Python. Why?
Well, Perl is an expedient measure that (for me) doesn't scale up and has that horrible OO syntax. (So I never used it much.) If you're going to read someone else's Perl, you had better be "in the zone".
A couple of months ago, I'd written a quick Perl script that would "unstick" a co-worker's POP email. The problem is the Windows-based POP server is too stupid to realize a message doed not end in CRLF, so it just appends a period then CRLF thinking it's doing well. But the period ends up not being alone on a line, so it's not a valid termination to the message. Which messes up their email program. Sigh.
A week ago, the script broke because I hadn't properly accounted for the fact that the user might have hundreds of messages queued up. (I hadn't used a Perl POP package, which might've handled it, but just threw it together myself. Yes, that would've made the Perl code more competitive with the other two solutions.)
So I decided this might be a nice exercise to try Python. And it went together very quickly using Python's POP3 package. Then I decided to try it in Ruby. I think one little portion of the code shows the difference between the two cultures.
The problem is that the message is not properly terminated, so you need to time out and catch that timeout to realize, "hmmm, malformed". In Python I had:
M = poplib.POP3 ('172.16.30.1'); M.user ('foo'); M.pass_ ('bar')
num_mesgs = len (M.list ()[1]) bad_mesgs = 0
for msg in range (num_mesgs): try: M.retr (msg + 1) ... blah blah...
Hmmm, how do I get it to time out after 5 seconds and how do I catch that? The online docs are pretty good, but I had to guess that POP3 was built on the socket package. Looking at socket's docs I found the proper command and exception. I had to include:
socket.setdefaulttimeout (5.0)
before the POP3 commands to set the default socket timeout to 5 seconds. And
except socket.timeout:
is the proper way to catch the timeout. Both of these things are in the socket documentation.
Contrast this with Ruby. The Ruby docs are less complete, but they did mention that POP was subclassed from protocol and you'd have to look at protocol's source to see how it works. Looking through protocol, I figured out what to do and it was more elegant.
The protocol class had a read_timeout, but since Ruby's mantra might be said to be "Real OO", the POP code had been written such that you could say
pop.read_timeout = 5
after the POP open and it set the timeout for that pop connection to 5 seconds. Almost as if POP passed the read_timeout upstream to socket automatically. (I don't think Ruby does, but it's coded to look that way.)
My experience is limited, but it feels like this example gives a good feel for the two languages. Python was better documented and things came together quickly. Ruby ultimately had a more elegant solution, but was more poorly documented. This echoes the mantras: Python's is "Batteries Included", while Ruby's might be "Real OO".
On a personal note, I usually prefer an elegant solution, but when the language goes so far as to consider
0.step(360, 45)
to be reasonable, I check out. I know there's syntactic sugar so I don't have to code like that. I know everything's an object. But, dammit, a constant integer is an integer with constant value and causing it to iterate is too weird for my poor head to accept.
A while back I (a long-time perl guy) decided to look into ruby and python. I liked some of python's rethinking of certain ideas, but I liked ruby's total-OO and was really taken with it. BUT it was nearly impossible to find any English resources. It was definitely still a Japanese cult with some US initiates. So I stuck with perl.
Maybe there are an abundance of resources for ruby now. (By "resources" I mean code examples, web sites, bundled packages, etc.) I'm not sure, but that is the BIG holdup in my opinion, not just an insular view on unicode.
In terms of python... Two months ago I had a co-worker who was getting emails that confused their POP server, ending up in jammed messages. I wrote a perl script that would detect such messages and delete them.
BUT I hadn't accounted for a certain buffering/length issue and the script broke a week ago. Since MacOS X comes with perl, python, and ruby installed, I decided to revisit python.
Good online docs, a useful POP package (that allowed me to customize/override it in a very easy way), etc, and I wrote a python version that could not have the buffering issue, had better error checking, and took about 1/3 the number of lines.
Python seems to me to be fairly clean in syntax and OO and it seems to truly deliver on its Batteries Included philosophy. Has ruby grown enough that it provides a similar support structure (accessible to me)?
I believe my Cox cable terms specifically prohibit running servers.
With cable modem, you're sharing the bandwidth with everyone on your block (or an even larger area) and it only takes a couple of people running 24x7 servers to hose the rest of us who are using the network for its intended use as consumers, not proprietors. (Yes, you're running your server for free, but it's no different in terms of its impact on the rest of us.)
Yes, I believe this is NSA's official museum, open to the public. (The original CIA story is a display probably in the lobby of a secure-access building.)
I didn't think techies used non-RPN calculators. Oh well, I guess they could get on a daytime talkshow. ("I was a techie who couldn't understand RPN.")
I totally disagree... I was very unhappy with the choppy editing -- obviously they had to cut too deep to reach their theater time goal -- and the important parts of the story left out, such as the giving of gifts.
I would never have bought the standard release, but when I heard about the Extended Edition I waited for that and was very happy. I've done the same for TT and will do the same for the final installment.
Do you think the average developer/manager at MS is dumber than your average OS participant?
Probably not. But do I think their hands are tied by MS's overriding concern: lock in users, lock out competitors, and leverage the monopoly. This is usually antithetical to doing the job the best or most innovative way.
The Open Source community does not have this limitation, so strives to do the best/coolest thing. That's how the Internet was invented and grew.
Well, yes, flavors of UNIX (including MacOS X) are in general more secure than Windows. UNIX has been playing on the internet for decades and has been the favored OS at computer science schools across the country, where its source code has been often been publicly available.
That adds up to a system that's been banged on for a long time. Windows is the new kid on the block internet-wise and MS is finally getting around to understanding security.
(We're not even getting into the issue of who attracts the most creative programmers: MS or the Internet/Open-Source/Hacker crowd.)
A device that's a comfortable phone will have a tiny screen that's useless for checking a calendar, etc. It will also hav extremely limited input options.
A device that's comfortable as a PDA is too large and poorly shaped to be a comfortable phone.
It's a pain to some extent, but the alternatives are more painful.
I've never seen a slow copy such as you're describing. (In earlier versions, I did see weird issues with copying thousands of files at once, though.)
Within my reach are 4 MacOS X machines, two mine and two my co-workers, and they're easier to use and more stable than the XP machines around here. Your mileage obviously varies.
On the contrary, a language that has to officially resist foreign language influences is a dead language. If the language were dynamic and living, the influence of English would not be an issue.
Isn't talking about Longhorn anti-naysaying? (If I can coin that phrase for the opposite extreme.)
I mean, Longhorn's been the rainbow of computerdom for quite some time now: constantly receding as you approach it. It's due out now in 2005? Maybe.NET will be the pot-o-gold at the end of the rainbow.
Final Cut Pro is the Premier-killer application and it's been pillaging Premier for some time. It's gotten to the point that Apple has released FCP 4 but Adobe still doesn't have a reply to FCP 3. Remember, FCP has been taking the pro market by storm even at twice what Premier costs. With Final Cut Express undercutting Premier's price, Adobe has decided to take their ball and run home before Apple shuts them out entirely.
I mean, even Avid is restructuring their marketing strategy and slashing prices because of the heat they're feeling from Final Cut Pro. What's a long-in-the-tooth, klunky program like Premier to do in the face of this competition?
From what I understand, Premier is not really competitive on the PC side, either, with several programs having more features and better interface. The PC market is larger and more fragmented, though, so they it's more economical for them and less embarrassing. (I.e., on the Mac side, a single opponent came from nowhere, kicked sand in their face, took their girlfriend, and has been voted "Most eligible Editor on the beach".
All of the video editors I know hate Premier, which is so primitive and klunky. I mean, this is the 2000's and it can still only have a single timeline per project file?
As far as I can tell, Premier's user base is: 1) people who have been using it forever, 2) novices who recognize the brand name and have read over the years about Premier, or 3) those who got it free with a bundled purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, the most important thing I've found in art is the very thing that so many pseudo-artistic/expressive people loathe: limitations.
The most creative things I've seen/done involved some kind of restriction on the methods, tools, subject, viewpoint, etc.
In that sensem, it's chaos and limitations, like pouring plaster (chaotic) into a mold (limitation). Like sculpture, it's not what you put in, but what you leave out.
I've heard this once or twice before and I'm stunned and speechless. I mean, yes MacOS X is somewhat different from MacOS 9. But it is WAY, WAY, WAY more like it than XP is.
To the extent that XP's GUI is reasonably well done, it is a clumsy copy of MacOS X, not MacOS 9. XP is much more complicated to administer than MacOS X is.
I mean, the "Gotta change so may as well use XP" argument is sort of like saying, "We're moving from Florida and since Southern California is so different, we may as well move to Greenland."
Hold on pardner... There's no need to have IE built into Windows, as anyone with any programming knowledge knows. ("Anyone" evidently does not include Bill Gates nor most US judges.)
Apple has a framework for rendering HTML, for example, that anyone can use. But Safari, Apple's browser, can be removed from the system, replaced with Mozilla, Omniweb, or any other choice.
That is the difference between MS and Apple. Apple includes their own app, but you don't have to use it or even have it installed. MS insists that their app must be installed or everything breaks.
What Apple borrowed from PARC and others before them they improved and innovated. For example, pull-down menus (Mac) are simpler to use then pop-up (pre-Mac) because they're always visible. Previous systems did bit-blits only of rectangular regions, Apple introduced non-rectangular, non-contiguous region blits. Etc.
MS, on the other hand, has slavishly followed and usually dis-improved. Or been way late to the party. For example, Apple added Quartz Extreme a couple of years ago: use OpenGL and the today's opwerful graphics cards to improve and accelerate the Mac UI. MS will bring this to Longhorn in a couple of years.
Heck, MS so copies Apple that they even use the same color schemes and desktop patterns for their advanced UI previews. They can't even come up with their own.
And THAT is the difference between Jobs and Gates.
Not that Gates hasn't innovated. He has. But in the business/marketing realm, not design or technology. Most of us geeks admire tech/design innovators over marketing innovators.
The problem is not talking on the phone. It's that most people talk WAY TOO LOUD on a cellphone, way above the appropriate level. Personally, I keep my voice down, but most people don't.
So, yes you have a right to talk where talking is appropriate. No, you don't have a right to SHOUT FOR AN HOUR because you're too stupid to realize that people naturally talk louder on the phone.
I'd love to see an Open Source, Python-based hotsync application. I know I'd contribute to the project given that someone more familiar with the actual hitsync process gets the basics in place.
SInce MacOS X ships with the Python (10.3 includes the latest version Python 2.3), I think it would be a great option that would maximize the flexibility and openness of the package.
Andeven Palm Desktop doesn't get it right.
Every time I hotsync and I've modified a single event in a repeating series, I get the erroneous message: "Blah Blah has been modified on the desktop and on the Palm, both versions copied to both." And I end up with two duplicate copies of the repeating event.
At first, I assumed it was a problem with DateBk, which I use. But after a conversation with DateBk's author, it appears that Palm didn't get syncing right and their sync process gets confused. It doesn't lose data so in one sense the err on the side of caution, but they are not sweating the details and getting it right.
Has anyone studied the effects of Agl on, say, people below?
I was in CO last year for a snowboarding trip. They were experiencing a drought and so were seeding clouds every day. Coincidentally, the local guy who supplied oxygen for people who had contracted HAPE said his business was more than doubled from previous years.
I know, I know, coincidence does not prove a cause, but was just wondering if Agl was spread in such quantities in daily cloud seeding that it could be inhaled by people and cause problems.
We've gotten off-topic here, so I'll let this be my last words on it. I'm not taking anything away from Dan in terms of his fictional work as it exists. It's a best-seller and well-deserved.
My only criticism is that he's found some old conspiracy theories (several have pointed out that he's drawing from 30-year-old works, but those in turn draw from centuries-old theories) and presented them as fact outside of his fictional universe. On his web site, in interviews, and at the beginning of his book, he presents himself as something like a history scholar who has found the hidden truth and is now presenting it in a fictional form. Bah!
This is in sharp contrast to the book that this thread is actually about: it actually is based on research and fact and it's not afraid to say where things are unknown, but it is as fascinating as fiction. This is more brilliant, IMO, and it needs attention since it won't get the hype that a fictional book does.
The Da Vinci Code is gripping fiction, but it's not in the same class as The Golden Ratio.
The Golden Ratio is carefully and deeply researched. The Da Vinci Codes is allegedly based on research, but the "research" behind it is recycling tired old conspiracy theories.
From his statements online and in his forward, methinks Dan Brown is trying to have it both ways: claim it's based on fact but use the plausible deniability of it being a fictional work. It is a gripping read, don't misunderstand me. But you have to remind yourself that it's totally fictional.
Not saying you can't become good or good enough. But good programming, analysis or design requires a particular way of thinking. I've moved from computer science to video editing, but you know I still think like a programmer: that's just the way I analyze the world. And I'd say that's probably what marks a "geek" versus someone in a techie field.
Also, consider where your strength truly is. Maybe a partnership is called for: you being the domain expert and the other person being the computer scientist. You'll teach each other and learn from each other, and the net result will probably be better than one person with dual training.
Definitely follow your passion, though. We're blessed in this day and age and in this country that we can do that. I'm on my second career now, and looking maybe at moving to a third in the next few years. Or maybe branching into three simultaneous careers.
(I have a friend who was a 3D artist, but has now scaled back to 2 days a week of 3D work and 3 days refinishing antiques. Maybe we'll all break out of career stovepipes somehow.)
You mention "allied bombers" then go on to talk about American planes. As far as I know, half of all bombing was done by the British and I believe most of the "firebombing". Yes it was vengeful. Yes it went over the top.
But when you talk about what we did to the Germans and Japanese, you must remember that they started a war of world domination and managed to slaughter millions of people and we would've been next. In the long run, we replaced murderous, racist, genocidal dictaterships with democracies.
I've been a long-time Perl programmer, though I've not used a boatload of packages nor much of the horrid OO.
A couple of years ago, I decided to look into Python and Ruby. Python looked OK, but not that different. I did like the indent-as-group idea, which was different. Ruby looked very cool. But it was impossible to get good documentation. It seemed like a Japanese cult with a few western initiates.
Well, MacOS X ships with Perl, Python, and Ruby (and PHP, and ...) so I figured I'd try them again.
I still find Ruby more intriguing, but I've settled on Python. Why?
Well, Perl is an expedient measure that (for me) doesn't scale up and has that horrible OO syntax. (So I never used it much.) If you're going to read someone else's Perl, you had better be "in the zone".
A couple of months ago, I'd written a quick Perl script that would "unstick" a co-worker's POP email. The problem is the Windows-based POP server is too stupid to realize a message doed not end in CRLF, so it just appends a period then CRLF thinking it's doing well. But the period ends up not being alone on a line, so it's not a valid termination to the message. Which messes up their email program. Sigh.
A week ago, the script broke because I hadn't properly accounted for the fact that the user might have hundreds of messages queued up. (I hadn't used a Perl POP package, which might've handled it, but just threw it together myself. Yes, that would've made the Perl code more competitive with the other two solutions.)
So I decided this might be a nice exercise to try Python. And it went together very quickly using Python's POP3 package. Then I decided to try it in Ruby. I think one little portion of the code shows the difference between the two cultures.
The problem is that the message is not properly terminated, so you need to time out and catch that timeout to realize, "hmmm, malformed". In Python I had:
Hmmm, how do I get it to time out after 5 seconds and how do I catch that? The online docs are pretty good, but I had to guess that POP3 was built on the socket package. Looking at socket's docs I found the proper command and exception. I had to include:
before the POP3 commands to set the default socket timeout to 5 seconds. Andis the proper way to catch the timeout. Both of these things are in the socket documentation.Contrast this with Ruby. The Ruby docs are less complete, but they did mention that POP was subclassed from protocol and you'd have to look at protocol's source to see how it works. Looking through protocol, I figured out what to do and it was more elegant.
The protocol class had a read_timeout, but since Ruby's mantra might be said to be "Real OO", the POP code had been written such that you could say
after the POP open and it set the timeout for that pop connection to 5 seconds. Almost as if POP passed the read_timeout upstream to socket automatically. (I don't think Ruby does, but it's coded to look that way.)My experience is limited, but it feels like this example gives a good feel for the two languages. Python was better documented and things came together quickly. Ruby ultimately had a more elegant solution, but was more poorly documented. This echoes the mantras: Python's is "Batteries Included", while Ruby's might be "Real OO".
On a personal note, I usually prefer an elegant solution, but when the language goes so far as to consider
to be reasonable, I check out. I know there's syntactic sugar so I don't have to code like that. I know everything's an object. But, dammit, a constant integer is an integer with constant value and causing it to iterate is too weird for my poor head to accept.I think it's more than unicode...
A while back I (a long-time perl guy) decided to look into ruby and python. I liked some of python's rethinking of certain ideas, but I liked ruby's total-OO and was really taken with it. BUT it was nearly impossible to find any English resources. It was definitely still a Japanese cult with some US initiates. So I stuck with perl.
Maybe there are an abundance of resources for ruby now. (By "resources" I mean code examples, web sites, bundled packages, etc.) I'm not sure, but that is the BIG holdup in my opinion, not just an insular view on unicode.
In terms of python... Two months ago I had a co-worker who was getting emails that confused their POP server, ending up in jammed messages. I wrote a perl script that would detect such messages and delete them.
BUT I hadn't accounted for a certain buffering/length issue and the script broke a week ago. Since MacOS X comes with perl, python, and ruby installed, I decided to revisit python.
Good online docs, a useful POP package (that allowed me to customize/override it in a very easy way), etc, and I wrote a python version that could not have the buffering issue, had better error checking, and took about 1/3 the number of lines.
Python seems to me to be fairly clean in syntax and OO and it seems to truly deliver on its Batteries Included philosophy. Has ruby grown enough that it provides a similar support structure (accessible to me)?
I agree with Mancide...
I believe my Cox cable terms specifically prohibit running servers.
With cable modem, you're sharing the bandwidth with everyone on your block (or an even larger area) and it only takes a couple of people running 24x7 servers to hose the rest of us who are using the network for its intended use as consumers, not proprietors. (Yes, you're running your server for free, but it's no different in terms of its impact on the rest of us.)
Yes, I believe this is NSA's official museum, open to the public. (The original CIA story is a display probably in the lobby of a secure-access building.)
I didn't think techies used non-RPN calculators. Oh well, I guess they could get on a daytime talkshow. ("I was a techie who couldn't understand RPN.")
I totally disagree... I was very unhappy with the choppy editing -- obviously they had to cut too deep to reach their theater time goal -- and the important parts of the story left out, such as the giving of gifts.
I would never have bought the standard release, but when I heard about the Extended Edition I waited for that and was very happy. I've done the same for TT and will do the same for the final installment.
Probably not. But do I think their hands are tied by MS's overriding concern: lock in users, lock out competitors, and leverage the monopoly. This is usually antithetical to doing the job the best or most innovative way.
The Open Source community does not have this limitation, so strives to do the best/coolest thing. That's how the Internet was invented and grew.
Well, yes, flavors of UNIX (including MacOS X) are in general more secure than Windows. UNIX has been playing on the internet for decades and has been the favored OS at computer science schools across the country, where its source code has been often been publicly available.
That adds up to a system that's been banged on for a long time. Windows is the new kid on the block internet-wise and MS is finally getting around to understanding security.
(We're not even getting into the issue of who attracts the most creative programmers: MS or the Internet/Open-Source/Hacker crowd.)
I'll never buy this argument.
A device that's a comfortable phone will have a tiny screen that's useless for checking a calendar, etc. It will also hav extremely limited input options.
A device that's comfortable as a PDA is too large and poorly shaped to be a comfortable phone.
It's a pain to some extent, but the alternatives are more painful.
you'd specify the MacOS version, etc.
I've never seen a slow copy such as you're describing. (In earlier versions, I did see weird issues with copying thousands of files at once, though.)
Within my reach are 4 MacOS X machines, two mine and two my co-workers, and they're easier to use and more stable than the XP machines around here. Your mileage obviously varies.
On the contrary, a language that has to officially resist foreign language influences is a dead language. If the language were dynamic and living, the influence of English would not be an issue.
Isn't talking about Longhorn anti-naysaying? (If I can coin that phrase for the opposite extreme.)
.NET will be the pot-o-gold at the end of the rainbow.
I mean, Longhorn's been the rainbow of computerdom for quite some time now: constantly receding as you approach it. It's due out now in 2005? Maybe
Final Cut Pro is the Premier-killer application and it's been pillaging Premier for some time. It's gotten to the point that Apple has released FCP 4 but Adobe still doesn't have a reply to FCP 3. Remember, FCP has been taking the pro market by storm even at twice what Premier costs. With Final Cut Express undercutting Premier's price, Adobe has decided to take their ball and run home before Apple shuts them out entirely.
I mean, even Avid is restructuring their marketing strategy and slashing prices because of the heat they're feeling from Final Cut Pro. What's a long-in-the-tooth, klunky program like Premier to do in the face of this competition?
From what I understand, Premier is not really competitive on the PC side, either, with several programs having more features and better interface. The PC market is larger and more fragmented, though, so they it's more economical for them and less embarrassing. (I.e., on the Mac side, a single opponent came from nowhere, kicked sand in their face, took their girlfriend, and has been voted "Most eligible Editor on the beach".
All of the video editors I know hate Premier, which is so primitive and klunky. I mean, this is the 2000's and it can still only have a single timeline per project file?
As far as I can tell, Premier's user base is: 1) people who have been using it forever, 2) novices who recognize the brand name and have read over the years about Premier, or 3) those who got it free with a bundled purchase.