Sure, they're only proof of concept things. But one doesn't prove future brilliance by trotting out today's junk. Look at them, especially the last one - chaos, clutter, disarrangement and dislocation, all set ajumble and rotating like Frank Poole after HAL's had his way with him. Who among us used to the differences between Windoze and Apple OS doesn't see in that a sort of perfect realization of Microsoft's design philosophy? Clutter, chaos, things spinning out of control, a world of glommed-on crap with the user left gawping and wondering what (other than paying for the privilege) his incidental role in this GPU-driven wilderness might be...
The documents being shaken out like bed sheets - that could really increase business productivity, if for no other reason than it'll make it even harder to read management's nonsense!;-)
Give fools more powerful technology, and their foolishness only grows.
As a stand-alone company, Apple's hardware unit could offer its users computers equipped with a Microsoft Windows operating system. That move alone, Kastner estimates, would double the company's market share.
Su-u-u-ure, why not? If only that OS X thingee could be ripped out in order for Windoze to be ported to the PowerPC platform, then twice as many consumers would want to buy a computer that's twice as slow using an OS that's twice as bad!
Killer idea, but I'm not sure that the economy could handle more explosive growth right now.
Well, it's hard to see what "objectivity" should have to do with anything here. Slashdot's not the bloody AP or UPI; if you want pap, strained until it is free of any obvious taint of opinion or perspective, look there.
Whether or not you agree with the argument, it is hardly a case of flaming. On top of that, the poster has actually marshalled data to support his argument -- unlike the fanciful 'you could afford it if you wanted' post which he rebuts.
Well, first get the voice right. Imagine Lorne Greene on quaaludes, saying, "You exist to have our messages poured into the empty vessel of your head. Spread your two crainal lobes like ass cheeks, cellmate, 'cuz Bubba Advertiser's here."
The Unicast take-over ad is a microcosm of something that used to trouble Americans only a couple of generations ago, in an age when our science fiction warned us of the type of mind that demanded to control the horizontal, the vertical -- a mind that always knew what was best for us...
Some will protest this description. It's just an ad! And after all, do you not, by virtue of using a web site, owe some duty of attention to its maker's livelihood? Does anyone think monosyllabic news stories at CNN or MSNBC grow on trees? Ashley Banfield has a make-up budget to meet, you know.
But that's too easily surrendering to your masters' point of view. Better to see the web as the public square, and not as the private salon (or even the private Salon) that they would make it.
If you think of the web as a marketplace of ideas, then you have no trouble deciding to sell some of its crappier "ideas" short.
And the worst idea yet to afflict the Internet is that it is no more than a televisual yoke for bringing the sheep to the feet of commerce for happy fleecing. Ask who stands to gain from transforming the Net into a billion virtual replicas of the Mall of America. Ask who doesn't want it to be an engine of democracy or an open communications medium or -- shudder -- a place where new models of software authorship and distribution arise, the political aspirations and discontents of ordinary average Joes and Jamallahs are heard, and even a nekkid lady raises her lewd head.
Or don't ask anything. Unicast... uni-brow... uni-dimensional...One Voice, One Ad, One Message: caveman time.
You made a couple of arguable points about semantics and tastefulness, but then your case went out the window.
The fact that he worked in a computer related field does in fact have a lot to do with this. A lot of computer professionals are very left-leaning. Worse yet, many are young and naive. While most liberals are not young and naive, it seems the majority of young and naive people are liberals.
No logical reader is going to be impressed that you've strung together these generalizations and topped it off with a non sequitor. Instead, you only persuade us that you hold certain grim views on youth and the IT sector. Please pay a visit to Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies: http://www.datanation.com/fallacies/
Nobody wants to hear this crap. It makes people feel helpless. It makes people feel like there's nothing they can do. It is that feeling that is really driving this country towards totalitarianism.
Er, well, now that you mention it...no. You might as well complain, "Nobody wants to hear that the house is on fire. It makes them feel that they're burning. It's that feeling that is really making them turn into ashes."
But as Jefferson more wisely advised, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Noticing the flames under our Bill of Rights - indeed, more deeply, as Hawash's case shows, under the very principle of habeas corpus itself - is actually the first step to putting out the fire.
Substance of lawsuit against Apple
on
12" PowerBook Wobble?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
While on spring break, in San Diego, I went to the Apple Store there, and I was told that a few other people have had this problem, and that if I had purchased the PowerBook from there, they would have replaced it with a new one.
Let's not jump to any conclusions. However, what you describe above is, in fact, close to the substance of the allegations in one of the three pending lawsuits brought against Apple this year by authorized dealers (i.e., resellers, not Apple Stores). One of the claims holds that Apple treated dealers with prejudice when it came time to handling customer problems under warranty. Surely, if the product is under warranty and was purchased from an authorized dealer, and if Apple Stores are replacing defective units, then you ought to investigate a possible exchange, too.
IANAL. I am -- knock on wood -- a happy iBook owner, and I make no claim either way about the veracity of these suits. I'm merely noting a point of similarity; draw your own conclusions:
Will they come on board - or be allowed on board - in time? Anyone know if Apple's contract with the majors is exclusive?
There's another matter, too. So many here thump the tub about "cutting out the middleman," as if that were some de facto good, but the "middleman" in this case is actually the guy running the great little music store in our neighborhood -- a place to meet and talk with other music lovers, compare tastes, hear new stuff -- and one of the last personal shops in a sea of bland corporate chains. Inevitably, he'll go out of business, one day, as we trade what remains of our local flavor for a few bucks shaved off the bill here and there; but I wouldn't like to hasten that day.
There's a lesson to be learn here, maybe the pron industry is the way to go for the whole entertaiment industry: Less regulations, more diversity, very lax fair use and aggressive competition between big and small producers.
Uh, yeah. I like a little utopian lecture about free music as much as the next guy, but geez. I think you're oversimplifying.
Look: it would be nice if the whole world was run like a giant porn business, I agree. But you've got to give some thought to the pool of available talent, production costs, and the economics of distribution. Bottom line: it's somewhat easier to find a woman down on her luck who needs food and shelter and is willing to trade for them by laying in the center of a bunch of strangers who penetrate and ejaculate upon her, than it is to write, record, and sell a record.
From time immemorial, artists have been struggling with this very problem at the intersection where art and anonymous, for-pay sex meet. As Michelangelo once said, "Argh! If I don't get that Sistine Chapel commission, I'm going to have to do 'Venetian Orgy 4: My Tower of Pisa Leans to the Left'." Fortunately, he was spared that indignity and went on to paint one of the truly inspiring works of art of the ages featuring, but only by coincidence, God and Man in the nude.
So you see, while porn does appear to make the world seem more happily unidimensional, there are still nagging complexities that prevent our moving fully to a Porn-centric Economy. Besides, Alan Greenspan's ticker couldn't take it.
...a caveat that hinders Mac geeks from delving into the wide world of case modding (mmm.. watercooling)
God, yes. You don't know what torture it is. The day I bought the Mac, I was like, "Right! Now I'm going to paint red flames on the side of this and cut a big hole in it for a plexiglass window in the shape of a skull and stuff the whole shebang with neon lights and get plasma down at the Red Cross and circulate it through a block of dry ice so it looks like the heart of my box is a writhing steaming flesh mass out of Hellraiser. Mmm...flesh mass." Imagine my disappointment when a power supply kept me from unleashing what would have surely been a chick magnet.
I do like Lessig's efforts. However, let's be real. We live in an era in which the president gazes upon the cinders of the WTC and mutters something about preserving "free trade," while also equating shopping with patriotism. Moral: with the right wing in power, Americans stand about as much chance of being protected from spammers as the antiquities in the Baghdad museum had of being protected from looters. Minds attuned only to money can conceive of no competing values. A view of privacy that doesn't contemplate receiving Florida land offers and Viagra pitches every few hours is simply alien to them. After all, just what is it that makes up the rest of the physical, audible, and visual landscape of America?
If you want an end to spam -- and the much larger structural problems of rampant business avarice represented by Enron and the California power scandals, to name but two recent examples -- then don't vote for right wingers. They are committed to deregulation irrespective of the social consequences. But if you vote for them, thinking your measly tax break adequate recompense, then let us hear no more complaints about unfettered commerce. You got your tax break. Now take your spam like a good little soldier.
Something like this would definitely help a researcher like myself used to working with large numbers of text documents -- some in.txt, others in.html,.pdf,.doc,.rtf, you name it.
Tabbed browsing helps me order the.html files for a given project, but switching between those and files opened by other programs is a major drag. Particularly so, I'm sorry to say, via the Dock, since it's so full of other icons that clutter complicates its usage for retrieving open documents; besides, why, when I'm dealing with a group of documents related to the same subject, should I have to keep track of which app opens them? The implementation of piles you've shown us is more intuitive.
It's true. If we rebuild the Internet from scratch, all of the following will happen:
Consumers will rush out and buy lots of new PCs, eager to find out what this "rebuilt Internet" is all about!
Not to be outdone, Al Gore will re-invent the Internet!
The Dot Com boom will happen all over again, with all of the same companies performing just as well as before, which will make picking a winner even easier this time! Just get in at breakfast and get out by lunch!
Thanks to the reintroduction of exciting new "synergies," it'll be possible to re-open companies that didn't do anything before and won't do anything now!
You'll waste lots of time sending "e-mails" at work, while billing the boss for your extra-curricular discovery of "web pages" like Slashdot!
Music biz failing? Time for schadenfreude!
on
Time to Face the Music
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Couldn't happen to a nicer mafia, really. And not just the cartel that has Britneyfied and Celined our music, scrubbing it clean of any impurities that might offend our right wing oligarchy.
No, let's also pause to enjoy any torment that befalls Clear Channel, the greedy narrowminded suits who own and have culturally cleansed nearly all of the U.S. radio market. Break a leg, fellas -- break it in multiple places, you Nazis!
It's a great time to love indy, outsider, ethnic and lo-fi music -- these fields have never been more teeming nor the work more passionate and lovely. And here, of course, when you look beneath the excuses of file trading, can be found the explanation for the collapse of the top-heavy giants. Fragmentation of taste. The rise of alternatives. Before Napster taught the suits to say "mp3," they were already going around in the early 90s bemoaning their long-term prospects in light of the disintegration of consensus music.
Let these dinosaurs sink up to their necks in the tarpits. As they descend, their last angry gurgles will be no more memorable than the formula records they're so shocked that fewer and fewer people want to buy.
Nice enough browser and the tabs are quite welcome, but what's with the X on each tab to close it? This is a plodding solution to closing tabs - it places an extra burden on the user not to hit the X when quickly switching between tabs. For that matter, the X on the lead tab now sits perilously close to the bookmark button.
Come on, Apple. The beauty of tabs in an implentation such as that found in Camino lies in allowing the user to keep a mental picture of what's on each tab, then click away freely to switch between them. With Safari, you have to watch where you click - and the first time you accidentally close a tab in which you were writing a post, you'll know what I mean.
What's more, you can make the case that having a single tab-closing button in one place requires less concentration generally. Less concentration makes the browser transparent, which it should be. The UI should not be fiddly and fraught; Safari's is, just now.
There are two pretty obvious problems with The Register's argument. One, the meaning asserted in the New York Times article and that asserted in the Moore piece aren't drastically different. Two, what is in question is only a recently-coined neologism, anyway, and not some fundamental concept upon which everybody agrees already (e.g., "election" -- oh, wait, scratch that; "liberation" -- whoops; ok, how about "monkey brain"). There's nothing Orwellian at all about speech communities refining, altering, and even appropriating meaning in slang. It happens every day. Get wid da shiznit.
Now presumably Orlowski has read his 1984, but if he has then he missed the point: Orwell was (quite properly) concerned with official mutilations of common, fundamental language; indeed the ever-shrinking Newspeak dictionary is conceived in order to make the population mum with no choice but consent -- that is, to end the very possibility of recourse to a language capable of opposing government power. We don't have much to worry about from bloggers in this regard. At last check, they still aren't the Big Cheese -- no matter where Google ranks them.
...can it appear at press conferences and move its head woodenly while speaking in a flat monotone and spouting pre-recorded clichés about why we are invading foreign countries?
Until robots achieve that level of verisimilitude, no one will mistake them for, er, um..."humans".
Now that pirates are "terrorists," they can settle back and enjoy some good company.
Such as Seymour Hersh, for example. One of the pillars of what remains of US investigative journalism, his exposé in last week's New Yorker examined how Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle -- the architect of the war on Iraq -- stands to personally profit from the war through business dealings. Nice work if you can get it! Asked about this matter last weekend on CNN, Perle went berserk and told Wolf Blitzer that Hersh is "the closest thing in US journalism to a terrorist."
It should go without saying that real terrorism is a vile and deplorable act of violence against the innocent, and that muddying or diluting the definition makes the word (and, in fact, the world) less honest. Orwell explained all this to us more than fifty years ago.
But such is our present discourse, dragged into the gutter of constant, effortless accusation by the right wing, that the term is being debased and distorted when our future very well may depend upon our being clear, honest and just today. The new McCarthyism has shown its willingness to brand anyone who crosses the wishes of the Bush regime (or its flunkies) as a terrorist or terrorist ally. In such a climate, can you blame industry hacks at the MPAA or Microsoft for merely cashing in on the reigning ignorance? You, for instance. You, running that DRM-free PC -- why, you...terrorist!
He also does not say anything about a shortcut that is seriously lacking in OS X - one to quickly go straight to the Desktop.
This is my biggest irritation since making the otherwise happy switch from Win98 to OS X. Ideally a clickable UI element would allow this, but I'd settle for a key combo (for use with a button on my programmable keyboard) that will minimize all app and Finder windows. Is there an app that will allow this?
"Microsoft has such a unique atmosphere," he said, "that once you're there and it clicks with you, that's the only place you want to develop software."
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, they're only proof of concept things. But one doesn't prove future brilliance by trotting out today's junk. Look at them, especially the last one - chaos, clutter, disarrangement and dislocation, all set ajumble and rotating like Frank Poole after HAL's had his way with him. Who among us used to the differences between Windoze and Apple OS doesn't see in that a sort of perfect realization of Microsoft's design philosophy? Clutter, chaos, things spinning out of control, a world of glommed-on crap with the user left gawping and wondering what (other than paying for the privilege) his incidental role in this GPU-driven wilderness might be...
The documents being shaken out like bed sheets - that could really increase business productivity, if for no other reason than it'll make it even harder to read management's nonsense! ;-)
Give fools more powerful technology, and their foolishness only grows.
Killer idea, but I'm not sure that the economy could handle more explosive growth right now.
Well, it's hard to see what "objectivity" should have to do with anything here. Slashdot's not the bloody AP or UPI; if you want pap, strained until it is free of any obvious taint of opinion or perspective, look there.
Whether or not you agree with the argument, it is hardly a case of flaming. On top of that, the poster has actually marshalled data to support his argument -- unlike the fanciful 'you could afford it if you wanted' post which he rebuts.
Well, first get the voice right. Imagine Lorne Greene on quaaludes, saying, "You exist to have our messages poured into the empty vessel of your head. Spread your two crainal lobes like ass cheeks, cellmate, 'cuz Bubba Advertiser's here."
The Unicast take-over ad is a microcosm of something that used to trouble Americans only a couple of generations ago, in an age when our science fiction warned us of the type of mind that demanded to control the horizontal, the vertical -- a mind that always knew what was best for us...
Some will protest this description. It's just an ad! And after all, do you not, by virtue of using a web site, owe some duty of attention to its maker's livelihood? Does anyone think monosyllabic news stories at CNN or MSNBC grow on trees? Ashley Banfield has a make-up budget to meet, you know.
But that's too easily surrendering to your masters' point of view. Better to see the web as the public square, and not as the private salon (or even the private Salon) that they would make it.
If you think of the web as a marketplace of ideas, then you have no trouble deciding to sell some of its crappier "ideas" short.
And the worst idea yet to afflict the Internet is that it is no more than a televisual yoke for bringing the sheep to the feet of commerce for happy fleecing. Ask who stands to gain from transforming the Net into a billion virtual replicas of the Mall of America. Ask who doesn't want it to be an engine of democracy or an open communications medium or -- shudder -- a place where new models of software authorship and distribution arise, the political aspirations and discontents of ordinary average Joes and Jamallahs are heard, and even a nekkid lady raises her lewd head.
Or don't ask anything. Unicast... uni-brow... uni-dimensional...One Voice, One Ad, One Message: caveman time.
But as Jefferson more wisely advised, "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." Noticing the flames under our Bill of Rights - indeed, more deeply, as Hawash's case shows, under the very principle of habeas corpus itself - is actually the first step to putting out the fire.
IANAL. I am -- knock on wood -- a happy iBook owner, and I make no claim either way about the veracity of these suits. I'm merely noting a point of similarity; draw your own conclusions:
http://news.com.com/2100-1040-983350.html
There's another matter, too. So many here thump the tub about "cutting out the middleman," as if that were some de facto good, but the "middleman" in this case is actually the guy running the great little music store in our neighborhood -- a place to meet and talk with other music lovers, compare tastes, hear new stuff -- and one of the last personal shops in a sea of bland corporate chains. Inevitably, he'll go out of business, one day, as we trade what remains of our local flavor for a few bucks shaved off the bill here and there; but I wouldn't like to hasten that day.
Look: it would be nice if the whole world was run like a giant porn business, I agree. But you've got to give some thought to the pool of available talent, production costs, and the economics of distribution. Bottom line: it's somewhat easier to find a woman down on her luck who needs food and shelter and is willing to trade for them by laying in the center of a bunch of strangers who penetrate and ejaculate upon her, than it is to write, record, and sell a record.
From time immemorial, artists have been struggling with this very problem at the intersection where art and anonymous, for-pay sex meet. As Michelangelo once said, "Argh! If I don't get that Sistine Chapel commission, I'm going to have to do 'Venetian Orgy 4: My Tower of Pisa Leans to the Left'." Fortunately, he was spared that indignity and went on to paint one of the truly inspiring works of art of the ages featuring, but only by coincidence, God and Man in the nude.
So you see, while porn does appear to make the world seem more happily unidimensional, there are still nagging complexities that prevent our moving fully to a Porn-centric Economy. Besides, Alan Greenspan's ticker couldn't take it.
If you want an end to spam -- and the much larger structural problems of rampant business avarice represented by Enron and the California power scandals, to name but two recent examples -- then don't vote for right wingers. They are committed to deregulation irrespective of the social consequences. But if you vote for them, thinking your measly tax break adequate recompense, then let us hear no more complaints about unfettered commerce. You got your tax break. Now take your spam like a good little soldier.
Something like this would definitely help a researcher like myself used to working with large numbers of text documents -- some in .txt, others in .html, .pdf, .doc, .rtf, you name it.
Tabbed browsing helps me order the .html files for a given project, but switching between those and files opened by other programs is a major drag. Particularly so, I'm sorry to say, via the Dock, since it's so full of other icons that clutter complicates its usage for retrieving open documents; besides, why, when I'm dealing with a group of documents related to the same subject, should I have to keep track of which app opens them? The implementation of piles you've shown us is more intuitive.
+1 for sandbagging sanctimony.
Consumers will rush out and buy lots of new PCs, eager to find out what this "rebuilt Internet" is all about!
Not to be outdone, Al Gore will re-invent the Internet!
The Dot Com boom will happen all over again, with all of the same companies performing just as well as before, which will make picking a winner even easier this time! Just get in at breakfast and get out by lunch!
Thanks to the reintroduction of exciting new "synergies," it'll be possible to re-open companies that didn't do anything before and won't do anything now!
You'll waste lots of time sending "e-mails" at work, while billing the boss for your extra-curricular discovery of "web pages" like Slashdot!
No, let's also pause to enjoy any torment that befalls Clear Channel, the greedy narrowminded suits who own and have culturally cleansed nearly all of the U.S. radio market. Break a leg, fellas -- break it in multiple places, you Nazis!
It's a great time to love indy, outsider, ethnic and lo-fi music -- these fields have never been more teeming nor the work more passionate and lovely. And here, of course, when you look beneath the excuses of file trading, can be found the explanation for the collapse of the top-heavy giants. Fragmentation of taste. The rise of alternatives. Before Napster taught the suits to say "mp3," they were already going around in the early 90s bemoaning their long-term prospects in light of the disintegration of consensus music.
Let these dinosaurs sink up to their necks in the tarpits. As they descend, their last angry gurgles will be no more memorable than the formula records they're so shocked that fewer and fewer people want to buy.
Come on, Apple. The beauty of tabs in an implentation such as that found in Camino lies in allowing the user to keep a mental picture of what's on each tab, then click away freely to switch between them. With Safari, you have to watch where you click - and the first time you accidentally close a tab in which you were writing a post, you'll know what I mean.
What's more, you can make the case that having a single tab-closing button in one place requires less concentration generally. Less concentration makes the browser transparent, which it should be. The UI should not be fiddly and fraught; Safari's is, just now.
Now presumably Orlowski has read his 1984, but if he has then he missed the point: Orwell was (quite properly) concerned with official mutilations of common, fundamental language; indeed the ever-shrinking Newspeak dictionary is conceived in order to make the population mum with no choice but consent -- that is, to end the very possibility of recourse to a language capable of opposing government power. We don't have much to worry about from bloggers in this regard. At last check, they still aren't the Big Cheese -- no matter where Google ranks them.
Keep the Quicktime Player. Throw out your copy of Windows.
Until robots achieve that level of verisimilitude, no one will mistake them for, er, um..."humans".
Brilliant. Loved it. :-)
Such as Seymour Hersh, for example. One of the pillars of what remains of US investigative journalism, his exposé in last week's New Yorker examined how Defense Policy Board chair Richard Perle -- the architect of the war on Iraq -- stands to personally profit from the war through business dealings. Nice work if you can get it! Asked about this matter last weekend on CNN, Perle went berserk and told Wolf Blitzer that Hersh is "the closest thing in US journalism to a terrorist."
It should go without saying that real terrorism is a vile and deplorable act of violence against the innocent, and that muddying or diluting the definition makes the word (and, in fact, the world) less honest. Orwell explained all this to us more than fifty years ago.
But such is our present discourse, dragged into the gutter of constant, effortless accusation by the right wing, that the term is being debased and distorted when our future very well may depend upon our being clear, honest and just today. The new McCarthyism has shown its willingness to brand anyone who crosses the wishes of the Bush regime (or its flunkies) as a terrorist or terrorist ally. In such a climate, can you blame industry hacks at the MPAA or Microsoft for merely cashing in on the reigning ignorance? You, for instance. You, running that DRM-free PC -- why, you...terrorist!
Thanks. Have just tried it, and as you say, it does the trick. :-)