Imagine... A giant, garish discount mall, DFW airport, multitudes of ugly car dealerships and chain restaurants, a VERY dirty Cinemark theater, oh, and Gamestop.com's shipping warehouse...
Imagine? It won't be hard. You've just described virtually every medium-sized city in the United States.
If you do any traveling by car, you see how much cookie-cutter design is obliterating local flavor. Each place looks like the last place, which looks like the next place. One glance at photos of the U.S. from even forty years ago shows this was not always the case; we're being assimilated.
More can be less in DM, actually, unless the map is large enough to support huge numbers. Most maps aren't. So that means there isn't enough ammo or armor, spamming and camping predominate, and the whole thing becomes the frag equivalent of a circle jerk.
If Doom 3 uses shadows effectively, we could be seeing an evolution in DM.
Q59092: Oakland Runway Disappears on Landing Approach
("Microsoft is researching this problem and will post new information here as it becomes available.")
Q191241: Money: Stuck in Endless Loop When Reading Statement from Broker
Q257377: Purple Veins Appear on Objects When You Play the Game at High Resolutions
If you're not laughing by now, there's a purple-veined broker landing in Oakland that I want to sell you.
I would say there are more Konfabulator users that were surprised and or upset than its developers.
And you would be seriously wrong in saying that.
Just pay a little visit to the Konfabulator message boards, where co-developer Arlo has described "how low Apple has sunk."
Speaking as a registered Konfabulator user, I'm disgusted, too. In its blatant rip-off, Apple has not even had the decency of a Microsoft, which at least goes shopping when it wants to "innovate." Calling its Konfabulator widget rip-offs "widgets" is just the icing on the plagiaristic cake.
Apple has already addressed the one biggest issue I have with it--desktop clutter. Sure its cool to have the weather, newsfeeds, post-its, etc. all providing you continous data on your desktop, but they also just clutter up your desktop, having them exist off-screen and come on with a function key is a perfect idea.
Konfabulator already has this feature, too. Get your facts straight before enlisting as a corporate apologist.
Now, if you want to now concede all your misinformed points and have a new conversation about why macs might be the best choice for very many circumstances, we could do that. But given how many discussions, including this one, are filled with enthusiastic descriptions of why people find their macs quite so enthralling and wonderful, I can't help but think we'd be returning to ground that's been very well covered.
LOL! Certain he's got it all figured out, the poster expects his point of view to be flattered by posts reflecting it. Ironically, he wants you to Think Different, as long as you don't think differently.
I own two Apples. They're nice machines: my iBook is a writer's dream, and the iMac is a beautiful and functionally adequate system for running a small business.
But I own a homebrewed PC, too, for bleeding edge gaming. It reflects my precise hardware choices; it's for someone who doesn't need hand-holding from a corporation, indeed wants the control a corporate-approved box can't offer.
Different boxes for different needs. One size doesn't fit all.
That I won't trust the Windoze box to do anything more than run the latest games is a measure of what I think of Microsoft OS's. That I won't expect the iMac to be able to handle anything in the bleeding edge in gaming is a measure of reality: Apple's low and mid-range offerings can't compete on those terms, though it has made a better-than-fledgling effort at doing so. Still, good luck running Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on anything less than a PowerMac.
An Apple can't be all things to everyone. And it doesn't have to be.
Twice in the past year I've opened up my two-year old 700mhz iBook to screwy video. Each time I've closed the lid, reopened, and the problem has gone away.
Should I try to swap out the board, or consider myself lucky and stick with it? Will Apple even regard such rare occurrences as evidence of a problem? One year left on warranty. . .
Few would disagree that Microsoft's bullying should be dealt with severely by world governments. Until now, Microsoft's luxury of operating outside the free market--enjoying the teflon-coated privileges that accrue to a hyper-monopoly--has stymied international hopes of restoring capitalist fundamentals to the information sector.
One potential answer, as China and others are pursuing, is complete dissociation from Windows software. Even so, that process is hindered by Microsoft's wanton economic power, and, as the case of Amadeu today points up, breaking up is hard to do when one is stalked by a jilted billionaire.
No: the answer is obvious. Nations seeking freedom from Microsoft should classify it as an enemy combatant.
Let us not be heard to use the "T" word; there's no need for exaggerration. As a monopolist enjoying state sanction, Microsoft is closer in its modus operandi to the closed-market model of communism than to the religious and ethnically-motivated jarring violence of terrorism. Its goal is not destabilization but the reverse: entrenchment of its interests at the expense of society and governments. Whereas terrorists seek to spread panic and fear, Microsoft seeks to retrofit the old Soviet model to the 21st century, attaching the suction pods of hopelessness and stasis through total, umbilical dependence. In that sense it and terrorism both contravene the striving, evolutionary essence of capitalism. Both raise their middle finger at freedom.
Declaring Microsoft an enemy combatant would have multiple benefits. As a baseline, the corporation would be stripped of all legal rights, including manufacture, distribution, marketing and, of course, speech, assembly, and due process. Economic gains would be realized swiftly through massive competitive opportunities, while under-capitalized island resort real estate markets would rapidly absorb displaced Microsoft millionaires; certain senior Microsoft executives might need to be sheltered for a certain period at Guantanamo Bay, but only as a preventative courtesy.
As Americans have learned since 2000 in our exciting transformation into a post-democratic society, rights are a matter of perspective: they begin and end arbitrarily, entirely subject to the whim of leaders. Why should the nations of the world, arrayed against Microsoft in what could be called the War on Error, any longer suffer Redmond to dictate the cost, performance or security of their information systems? Why remain under the thumb when all that is required is a shift in semantic nomenclature?
Amadeu, meanwhile, should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.
Also, this always begs the question of how the soldiers in the military would react to having to kill US citizens. Though, the military does do a good job of keeping its soldiers from thinking about such things.
Thank goodness. I wouldn't want someone like Timothy McVeigh to get any ideas.
As with the recent grad student project analyzing New Yorker stories, seeing the hard instruments of science pressed into the soft belly of the arts yields up a kind of biology class dissection thrill. Having suffered through enough prolix rock crit, who doesn't want to see the critic's thorax?;-)
Wilson quantifies, in detail, the patterns that emerge in some rock crit. But it wasn't ever mysterious, was it? The critics are doing what artists and musicians do, which is copy each other. The arts look to the arts. And they xerox endlessly. Yeats wrote, "Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence." The Byrds boiled it down to this: "Just get an electric guitar / Then take some time and learn / How to play." We wouldn't remember the Byrds at all today if they hadn't done such nice Dylan covers. ..
The spooky good thing about Wilson is that he's a musician, too. After all his earnest left-brain crunching I was prepared to hoot at his two prefab songs, and in truth, I did snort at the chorus in "I'm Already Dead," which whines: "I'm already dead / I'm blind and deaf." (And the rigor mortis is a complete bitch!) But his "Kissing God" isn't bad. Musically it may lean hard on the critics-pleasing tricks, exactly as he set out to do. But as a mildly original rearrangement of others' techniques, it's pleasing, and that's the bottom line. Lyrically, I rather liked his phrase "I'm kissing God and losing you"--it's a tasty bit of the profane, like something Prince might have dreamed up in one of his weird Jesus-meets-Larry Flynt fits. And the spastic drumming, well, that's a plus, too.:-)
You can't really blame the military. They are just obeying the politicians. If you want to blame someone, blame the 60% of the electorate who can't be bothered to vote.
Not to be unfair to your well-taken larger point, but your premise is only true in theory.
Exceptions to the military following the orders of politicians come in various ways, from self-protection to obstinance. Let's take just one. Sometimes orders are nebulous or ambivalent. Sometimes military engagements are ill-defined. And sometimes deniability goes all the way to the top. Case in point: Tiger Force in Vietnam.
As the Toledo Blade's Pulitzer-winning investigative series established last year, Tiger Force was a law unto itself. Ostensibly performing recon, the truth was much more complex and sinister. In fact, the squad was just raping and murdering whomever they pleased, as surviving members told the Blade's reporters. Nobody specifically ordered them to do what they did. Nor--and this is the key point--did anyone tell them not to do it. (Note for the conspiracy-minded: the Blade is far from being a leftwing publication. It's a family-owned daily newspaper--one of the last--serving steak-and-potatoes Ohio. It doesn't get much more staid than this in journalism.)
Fast-forward to this year's atrocities in Abu Ghraib. The soldiers say they were told to commit torture. Their commanders deny it. The politicians deny it. The truth is probably somewhere in between. We only need look at the souvenir photos of US soldiers committing evil to know it didn't take a politician anywhere to tell them to enjoy it.
We cannot excuse military malfeasance and free-lancing. The answer is oversight, constant and vigilant, and punishment for abuses. And we must be very cautious about what technologies that barely-governable institution is allowed to play with.
Re:Whither the iMac?
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here's my source for the iMac G4 EOL claim. Granted, it's only a rumor; I should have been more specific about that.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=476
In short, Apple Insider claims that Apple "has told several resellers not to expect any further shipments of its iMac G4" and that "iMac G4 inventory is nearly depleted, and it appears that manufacturing of the entire line has halted."
Quite apart from whether that is true, your point about G5 heat is well taken. This leads me to wonder whether the rumored metalic case redesign will turn the iMac's base itself (or some portion of it) into a large heatsink. Obviously allowing for safety limitations--after all, you can't have a big waffle iron on your desk--this might offer an alternative to a larger case. Passive cooling alone wouldn't be enough, so fan noise would be another tricky problem to solve.
Another partial solution to heat and size is an exterior, fanless PSU. Shuttle has started offering these with its very successful line of small form factor PCs. Here's a review:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article139-page1.htm l
Whither the iMac?
on
RIP G4 PowerMac
·
· Score: 5, Informative
To summarize the main points of the Mac Central piece (from which/.'s factoid is taken):
The G5 heatsink is too big to put in a laptop
The G5 heatsink is too big to put in an iMac
Putting the big G5 heatsink anwhere but inside a Power Mac is a "heck of a challenge," according to an Apple marketing director
But we have also heard, in the past week, that the G4 iMac is no longer being shipped to Apple stores. So, is Apple just being coy here? Or is the iMac line going into hibernation?
This looks beneficial for people who have their iTunes library on a desktop and don't want to buy an iPod. But at the price, they'd pay precious little more for a more powerful device if they got an iPod.
Laptop owners like myself, who can connect to a home stereo without difficulty, don't need it. We already own mobile jukeboxes.:-)
I always thought thousand island normally had pickles in it.
You, sir, are the victim of a cruel deception. And in case the people who've got to you are the ones I suspect, let me advise you: there aren't "bubbly chunks" in soda, either. Normally.
Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn't evoke passion in me anymore. Its products don't excite me anymore. I remember eagerly looking forward to Outlook 2003, only to be disappointed by how complex, buggy, and unimproved it was. "There's kind of an angst," says Andrews, the Seattle Times columnist and author. "Microsoft ought to matter to us. There ought to be more of an intellectual and emotional connection. There just isn't."
I remember the day, too. I call it The Day.
I'd just had a long, intimate session with Microsoft Office XP, and we lay side by side on the bed. Office was smoking contentedly. I stared out the window, trying to ignore the mouldy scents of our tryst and the way the suite pressed against me, the reptilian sensation of shrinkwrap urgent on my thigh. It was rubbing its Certificate of Authenticity hologram against me! I shuddered.
"What is it, Zhe? You're. ..distant."
"I..."
Could I tell Office the truth? What choice did I have?
"This is going to sound harsh. But I'm just not turned on any more by Clippy. Or the other Office Assistants. I thought having a harem's worth would fulfill me. But there is no emotional or intellectual connection. There just isn't."
Office froze. In another minute the cig burned up to its fingers. It winced. "It's that fucking Apple slut, isn't it," hissed Office.
"Look, I should go."
"Take one step, and you'll never get metadata from me again."
"You're. ..threatening me? Don't you see it's over?"
But the suite was clutching at my neck. "No! I didn't mean it! Oh, don't leave me! Without you, I'm nothing. With you, I'm. ..EULA-ted!"
"Goodbye."
"Why? Why?"
"I can't take the angst, baby."
"You've just been using me!"
"Well, I am the user, aren't I."
"Leave and I'll kill myself!"
At the door I paused, racking my brain for what I'd learned from TV to do at these moments. Firm, but tender? Tender, but firm? If only I'd paid more attention, any attention, to the plot lines in Baywatch. And so all I could manage was: "There are better ways to innovate."
On the way downstairs it was clear, anyway, that Office was bluffing. It was already on the phone with the BSA, arranging to sue a small business. Poor guy had indulged in a three-way at his place of business with a single license. Idiot. Ass, grass, gas, or bloatware: nobody rides for free.
"Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence," Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said when announcing his support for the bill. "I doubt that any nongovernmental organization has the resources or moral authority to pursue such a campaign."
How right you are, Sen. Hatch. Call in the moral paragons who smoked the Branch Davidians and tortured immigrants, ASAP!
A more ridiculous statement I've not seen all week. Congratulations!
But unhappily for you it is a binary operation, my dear Pudge. Either the researcher notified Apple in February, or he did not. You may believe the researcher, or you may believe that Apple has not been notified. Choose wisely.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Use that ridiculous dropshadow on my calculator widget, you no-talent bean counters, and I'm taking my name off the project.
Imagine? It won't be hard. You've just described virtually every medium-sized city in the United States.
If you do any traveling by car, you see how much cookie-cutter design is obliterating local flavor. Each place looks like the last place, which looks like the next place. One glance at photos of the U.S. from even forty years ago shows this was not always the case; we're being assimilated.
More can be less in DM, actually, unless the map is large enough to support huge numbers. Most maps aren't. So that means there isn't enough ammo or armor, spamming and camping predominate, and the whole thing becomes the frag equivalent of a circle jerk.
If Doom 3 uses shadows effectively, we could be seeing an evolution in DM.
Heh. Sit down, my child:
If you're not laughing by now, there's a purple-veined broker landing in Oakland that I want to sell you.And you would be seriously wrong in saying that.
Just pay a little visit to the Konfabulator message boards, where co-developer Arlo has described "how low Apple has sunk."
Speaking as a registered Konfabulator user, I'm disgusted, too. In its blatant rip-off, Apple has not even had the decency of a Microsoft, which at least goes shopping when it wants to "innovate." Calling its Konfabulator widget rip-offs "widgets" is just the icing on the plagiaristic cake.
Apple has already addressed the one biggest issue I have with it--desktop clutter. Sure its cool to have the weather, newsfeeds, post-its, etc. all providing you continous data on your desktop, but they also just clutter up your desktop, having them exist off-screen and come on with a function key is a perfect idea.
Konfabulator already has this feature, too. Get your facts straight before enlisting as a corporate apologist.
LOL! Certain he's got it all figured out, the poster expects his point of view to be flattered by posts reflecting it. Ironically, he wants you to Think Different, as long as you don't think differently.
I own two Apples. They're nice machines: my iBook is a writer's dream, and the iMac is a beautiful and functionally adequate system for running a small business.
But I own a homebrewed PC, too, for bleeding edge gaming. It reflects my precise hardware choices; it's for someone who doesn't need hand-holding from a corporation, indeed wants the control a corporate-approved box can't offer.
Different boxes for different needs. One size doesn't fit all.
That I won't trust the Windoze box to do anything more than run the latest games is a measure of what I think of Microsoft OS's. That I won't expect the iMac to be able to handle anything in the bleeding edge in gaming is a measure of reality: Apple's low and mid-range offerings can't compete on those terms, though it has made a better-than-fledgling effort at doing so. Still, good luck running Half Life 2 and Doom 3 on anything less than a PowerMac.
An Apple can't be all things to everyone. And it doesn't have to be.
Should I try to swap out the board, or consider myself lucky and stick with it? Will Apple even regard such rare occurrences as evidence of a problem? One year left on warranty. . .
One potential answer, as China and others are pursuing, is complete dissociation from Windows software. Even so, that process is hindered by Microsoft's wanton economic power, and, as the case of Amadeu today points up, breaking up is hard to do when one is stalked by a jilted billionaire.
No: the answer is obvious. Nations seeking freedom from Microsoft should classify it as an enemy combatant.
Let us not be heard to use the "T" word; there's no need for exaggerration. As a monopolist enjoying state sanction, Microsoft is closer in its modus operandi to the closed-market model of communism than to the religious and ethnically-motivated jarring violence of terrorism. Its goal is not destabilization but the reverse: entrenchment of its interests at the expense of society and governments. Whereas terrorists seek to spread panic and fear, Microsoft seeks to retrofit the old Soviet model to the 21st century, attaching the suction pods of hopelessness and stasis through total, umbilical dependence. In that sense it and terrorism both contravene the striving, evolutionary essence of capitalism. Both raise their middle finger at freedom.
Declaring Microsoft an enemy combatant would have multiple benefits. As a baseline, the corporation would be stripped of all legal rights, including manufacture, distribution, marketing and, of course, speech, assembly, and due process. Economic gains would be realized swiftly through massive competitive opportunities, while under-capitalized island resort real estate markets would rapidly absorb displaced Microsoft millionaires; certain senior Microsoft executives might need to be sheltered for a certain period at Guantanamo Bay, but only as a preventative courtesy.
As Americans have learned since 2000 in our exciting transformation into a post-democratic society, rights are a matter of perspective: they begin and end arbitrarily, entirely subject to the whim of leaders. Why should the nations of the world, arrayed against Microsoft in what could be called the War on Error, any longer suffer Redmond to dictate the cost, performance or security of their information systems? Why remain under the thumb when all that is required is a shift in semantic nomenclature?
Amadeu, meanwhile, should be given the Nobel Peace Prize.
This, of course, is a knock-out question. :-)
Well, he did invent rocket jumping, you know. ;-)
Thank goodness. I wouldn't want someone like Timothy McVeigh to get any ideas.
Wilson quantifies, in detail, the patterns that emerge in some rock crit. But it wasn't ever mysterious, was it? The critics are doing what artists and musicians do, which is copy each other. The arts look to the arts. And they xerox endlessly. Yeats wrote, "Nor is there singing school but studying / Monuments of its own magnificence." The Byrds boiled it down to this: "Just get an electric guitar / Then take some time and learn / How to play." We wouldn't remember the Byrds at all today if they hadn't done such nice Dylan covers. . .
The spooky good thing about Wilson is that he's a musician, too. After all his earnest left-brain crunching I was prepared to hoot at his two prefab songs, and in truth, I did snort at the chorus in "I'm Already Dead," which whines: "I'm already dead / I'm blind and deaf." (And the rigor mortis is a complete bitch!) But his "Kissing God" isn't bad. Musically it may lean hard on the critics-pleasing tricks, exactly as he set out to do. But as a mildly original rearrangement of others' techniques, it's pleasing, and that's the bottom line. Lyrically, I rather liked his phrase "I'm kissing God and losing you"--it's a tasty bit of the profane, like something Prince might have dreamed up in one of his weird Jesus-meets-Larry Flynt fits. And the spastic drumming, well, that's a plus, too. :-)
That's an unnecessary "or."
Not to be unfair to your well-taken larger point, but your premise is only true in theory.
Exceptions to the military following the orders of politicians come in various ways, from self-protection to obstinance. Let's take just one. Sometimes orders are nebulous or ambivalent. Sometimes military engagements are ill-defined. And sometimes deniability goes all the way to the top. Case in point: Tiger Force in Vietnam.
As the Toledo Blade's Pulitzer-winning investigative series established last year, Tiger Force was a law unto itself. Ostensibly performing recon, the truth was much more complex and sinister. In fact, the squad was just raping and murdering whomever they pleased, as surviving members told the Blade's reporters. Nobody specifically ordered them to do what they did. Nor--and this is the key point--did anyone tell them not to do it. (Note for the conspiracy-minded: the Blade is far from being a leftwing publication. It's a family-owned daily newspaper--one of the last--serving steak-and-potatoes Ohio. It doesn't get much more staid than this in journalism.)
Fast-forward to this year's atrocities in Abu Ghraib. The soldiers say they were told to commit torture. Their commanders deny it. The politicians deny it. The truth is probably somewhere in between. We only need look at the souvenir photos of US soldiers committing evil to know it didn't take a politician anywhere to tell them to enjoy it.
We cannot excuse military malfeasance and free-lancing. The answer is oversight, constant and vigilant, and punishment for abuses. And we must be very cautious about what technologies that barely-governable institution is allowed to play with.
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=476
In short, Apple Insider claims that Apple "has told several resellers not to expect any further shipments of its iMac G4" and that "iMac G4 inventory is nearly depleted, and it appears that manufacturing of the entire line has halted."
Quite apart from whether that is true, your point about G5 heat is well taken. This leads me to wonder whether the rumored metalic case redesign will turn the iMac's base itself (or some portion of it) into a large heatsink. Obviously allowing for safety limitations--after all, you can't have a big waffle iron on your desk--this might offer an alternative to a larger case. Passive cooling alone wouldn't be enough, so fan noise would be another tricky problem to solve.
Another partial solution to heat and size is an exterior, fanless PSU. Shuttle has started offering these with its very successful line of small form factor PCs. Here's a review:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article139-page1.htm l
The G5 heatsink is too big to put in a laptop
The G5 heatsink is too big to put in an iMac
Putting the big G5 heatsink anwhere but inside a Power Mac is a "heck of a challenge," according to an Apple marketing director
But we have also heard, in the past week, that the G4 iMac is no longer being shipped to Apple stores. So, is Apple just being coy here? Or is the iMac line going into hibernation?
Laptop owners like myself, who can connect to a home stereo without difficulty, don't need it. We already own mobile jukeboxes. :-)
...I think you can see the template for Donkey Kong here. Same pallette, same abacus-like jungle jim structure.
Mix everything very well in a small container. There better be no streaks!
You, sir, are the victim of a cruel deception. And in case the people who've got to you are the ones I suspect, let me advise you: there aren't "bubbly chunks" in soda, either. Normally.
Notorious B.I.G.
Mama Cass Elliot
Chubby Checker
Tiny Tim
I remember the day, too. I call it The Day.
I'd just had a long, intimate session with Microsoft Office XP, and we lay side by side on the bed. Office was smoking contentedly. I stared out the window, trying to ignore the mouldy scents of our tryst and the way the suite pressed against me, the reptilian sensation of shrinkwrap urgent on my thigh. It was rubbing its Certificate of Authenticity hologram against me! I shuddered.
"What is it, Zhe? You're. . .distant."
"I..." Could I tell Office the truth? What choice did I have?
"This is going to sound harsh. But I'm just not turned on any more by Clippy. Or the other Office Assistants. I thought having a harem's worth would fulfill me. But there is no emotional or intellectual connection. There just isn't."
Office froze. In another minute the cig burned up to its fingers. It winced. "It's that fucking Apple slut, isn't it," hissed Office.
"Look, I should go."
"Take one step, and you'll never get metadata from me again."
"You're. . .threatening me? Don't you see it's over?"
But the suite was clutching at my neck. "No! I didn't mean it! Oh, don't leave me! Without you, I'm nothing. With you, I'm. . .EULA-ted!"
"Goodbye."
"Why? Why?"
"I can't take the angst, baby."
"You've just been using me!"
"Well, I am the user, aren't I."
"Leave and I'll kill myself!"
At the door I paused, racking my brain for what I'd learned from TV to do at these moments. Firm, but tender? Tender, but firm? If only I'd paid more attention, any attention, to the plot lines in Baywatch. And so all I could manage was: "There are better ways to innovate."
On the way downstairs it was clear, anyway, that Office was bluffing. It was already on the phone with the BSA, arranging to sue a small business. Poor guy had indulged in a three-way at his place of business with a single license. Idiot. Ass, grass, gas, or bloatware: nobody rides for free.
How right you are, Sen. Hatch. Call in the moral paragons who smoked the Branch Davidians and tortured immigrants, ASAP!
But unhappily for you it is a binary operation, my dear Pudge. Either the researcher notified Apple in February, or he did not. You may believe the researcher, or you may believe that Apple has not been notified. Choose wisely. :-)