They proably made it out of aluminum because it's light and plastic would probably degrade faster.
Well, that, and the plaque is stamped on the back of the probe's high-gain antenna. Space & weight are at a steep premium on these probes, and there really isn't room to add an extra slab of metal for any non-scientific purpose, even if most people would find the gesture fitting.
By way of comparison, read about the Marsdialproject, which does basically the same thing: mount a "frivilous" device onto one of the key components of the rover, done in a way that there's substantially no additional hardware (extra mass to require fuel, additional parts to possibly break down, etc).
Sentimentality is nice, but pragmatism is critical here.
True, but that still misses the point of the original joke.
Yes, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" has been released in many variants. Supposedly, something like 17 versions of Blade Runner have been shown or distributed in various times & places, depending on who does the counting.
As you can perhaps tell, I used Blade Runner for a history class term paper back in college a few years ago:-)
However, the original poster was joking that George Lucas did the revised version of the Apple "1984" commercial -- the joke being that he had to take the original classic and make it more modern & cheesy, just like he did with the original Star Wars movies.
Pointing out that Ridley Scott did the original 1984 commerical is accurate, but it completely misses the point of the joke that was being made...:-)
GarageBand looks okay and all, but they totally dropped the ball on the name. For one thing, they broke then "clever" iName scheme that the rest of the iLife suite uses. For another thing, they missed a chance to get an oblique 80s punk rock reference, which clearly all software should aim for. How could they have fixed this?
Is it too late to go put new label stickers on the packaging, and to change out the strings in the software? I hope it's not too late...
Joe - Wow, Pretty good Jim Morrison impersonation there.
Rod - Yeah, I hope those guys have a good sense of humor and don't take us to court.
Joe - Uh, what's the court?
Rod - Never mind that,
Joe - Oh, you mean like the People's Court?
Rod - Well, that's another story; the important thing here is you gotta ask me how I'm gonna get down to the shore.
Joe - Uh, how you gonna get down to the shore?
Rod - Funny you should ask, I've got a car now.
Joe - Oh wow, how'd you get a car?
Rod - Oh my parents drove it up here from the Bahamas.
Joe - You're kidding!
Rod - I must be, the Bahamas are islands, okay, the important thing now, is that you ask me what kind of car I have.
Joe - Uh, what kinda car do ya' got?
Rod - I've got a BITCHIN CAMARO!
Wait, Ridley Scott made super duper special editions of "Alien" and "Blade Runner"? Either I missed the news, or you missed the George Lucas joke...:-)
Right, but if you can talk yourself into spending another fifty bucks for a 16x increase in storage capacity, then spending another fifty bucks to get a 60x increase over the flash player is another big capacity jump for not that big of a price jump.
It seems like they're kind of playing against themselves here: by inviting people to be willing to spend "only" another fifty bucks, they could be scuttling sales of the iPod Mini in favor of the older models -- especially considering that the capacity jump from 10gb to 15gb makes the $299 model an better deal than it was to begin with, and doubly so compared to the new iPod Mini.
I understand the words Jobs was saying, but it just didn't make sense: his own reasoning is a case for iPod Mini over high end flash players, but the same reasoning is an even better case for regular iPod over the new device.
Maybe my Reality Distortion Field just isn't working. Again.
14) IT outsourcing, as covered ad nauseum in this column, will become a political issue in the 2004 U.S. Presidential campaign...
Interesting. But how big a political issue? I don't think the masses will give a damn. Will this be one of the 5 key issues in the presidential race? I don't think so. Is Cringely saying it will be? Nope, he's just being vague. It'll be an issue. Yeah, it'll probably come up.
This isn't how I would have phrased this one. The big issue, in my eyes, is not just the export of IT jobs, but the export of white collar & service jobs, of which occupations like "programmer" and "call center support" are examples, along with "accountant", "engineer", "economist", etc.
As the saying goes, when manufacturing jobs move overseas, that's just how the economists say globalization works, but economist jobs start moving overseas, that's when globalization breaks down.
IT is just the visible tip of the spear, from Slashdot's point of view, but the real story is that the exodus of jobs that started decades ago with blue collar jobs is now moving up the economic ladder.
Seeing as this has the potential to undermine the foundations of the US economy in the long run, I can see this subject being the kind of material that presidential campaigns could be won or lost by. But if that's where things go, the IT facet of the story is probably just going to be a footnote, not the headline.
I think this formulation of Cringeley's prediction is a lot more concrete, and also a lot more likely.
Indeed, most of the food in the Chinese restaraunts you're probably familiar with is more American than Chinese.
I like Chinese food. I've been eating it for most of my life. I've been around a lot of the USA and a little bit of Europe, and I always see Chinese restaraunts serving menus filled with the same dishes that I'm familiar with. I'd tricked myself, in other words, into thinking that I have a pretty good idea about what Chinese food "is".
My wife is Chinese. Her family has a favorite Chinese seafood restaraunt that they always go to. It is unlike any other Chinese food I had become familar with before being invited to this place. There is a lot of overlap in ingredients, to be sure, but just as much that is unfamilar to me: "broccoli" that looks very little like the vegetable typically found in American supermarkets, mystery meat soups & stir frys, and so on. To them, this stuff is Chinese food, and the stuff I grew up with is almost as American as McDonald's.
I don't really know how to describe it. It's maybe a little like growing up thinking that pizza & spaghetti more or less sums up Italian cuisine, and then finding a restaraunt serving all kinds of pastas & sauces and non-pasta/sause based dishes that you'd never seen or imagined before. The palatte is more or less the same, so you can recognize it as an extension of what you thought Italian food consists of, but it's still all very unfamilar.
So, yeah. The "Chinese" food that most of you know is probably just a distant cousin of the real thing. About the only things directly in common are the rice and, yes, the chop sticks...:-)
Amazon: Found a need for an online bookstore where there was none, and capitalized on it...
Ahh, but there's more to it than that though. The US postal system since more or less the beginning of the republic has always provided for a discount rate on books -- Any non-media package of a pound or more in weight -- which will be the majority of what any mail order company deals with -- has to be sent as priority mail, at double to triple the rate of media mail. Quoting from the Post Office's site:
Media Mail (Book Rate)
Description
Used for books, film, manuscripts, printed music, printed test materials, sound recordings, play scripts, printed educational charts, loose-leaf pages and binders consisting of medical information, videotapes, and computer recorded media such as CD-ROMs and diskettes. Media Mail cannot contain advertising.
Just look at that list: books, films, recordings, software, etc. These are all the things that Amazon started out with. That's no coincidence. One of the biggest expenses for a mail order company has to be the cost of putting all those packages in the mail, and Amazon employed a loophole in the US Post Office to set themselves up for a steep discount on that part of their business.
They didn't find a need for books & capitalized on it. Amazon found a loophole for them, and capitalized on that.
Oh yeah, I agree that the behavior makes sense -- the misfeature in Safari is that it doesn't leave that null space for opening new tabs. Firebird gets that right, but Safari could do for a revision there...
Safari does this as well. The catch is that Safari has two modes of handling this behavior. If there is blank space on the tab bar and you drag a link onto that blank space, Safari will open a new tab onto that page. On the other hand, if you drag a link over an existing tab -- and if you have more than half a dozen or so tabs open, the bar is full and you have nothing but filled tabs on your tab bar -- then the new link will be opened in place of that other page. This, in my mind, kind of negates the point of a tabbed interface.
I haven't used Firebird much recently, but I seem to remember it behaving similarly. The catch though is that the browser always leaves a little nib of space that's not associated with an open tab, so you always have a way to open a link in a fresh tab by dragging a link to the taskbar.
The lack of support for something like this is IMO probably a bug in Safari, but it has been the behavior more or less since tabs were introduced.
Thank ghod someone is finally doing this -- I've been hoping for almost exactly this kind of drawer based, thumbnail enhanced tabs implementation for over a year now, and posted about the idea both at Slashdot and MacSlash last January. Others were writing about it, too. I also submitted it as a bug in Safari and as an enhancement on Apple's feedback page -- but then apparently they're deluged with such reports, never read them individually, and can't do more than statistical analysis of things people are reporting frequently, so I'm not optimistic that'll ever get noticed.
Anyway, it's nice to think that, even though this stuff hasn't made its way into Safari [yet? ever?], someone at Omni either read these posts or came up with the same idea independently. Either way is okay with me -- I'm just glad to see it's happening.
It seems obvious to me that this would be an excellent next evolution for browser interfaces. Wibbling over whether it's better to have tabs from the middle or the left (Chimera vs. Everyone else), what order new tabs should be inserted into the list, and whether to give tabs a fixed width (Safari) or let them collapse down to a certain minimum (Firebird) & how to handle spillover that doesn't fit in is all missing the point.
Whether or not people find it intuitive, a text column width of six inches or so is optimal for most people, which means that for the standard squat rectangular display most people have on their computers, a "well-shaped" browser window should have a lot of space on the left & right, while extending as close to the top & bottom of the screen as the user is comfortable with. In other words, vertical screen real estate will tend to be at a premium, and horizontal real estate will tend to be under-utilized.
Therefore, putting a row of tabs along the top, rather than the side, is a literal waste of space.
If the tabs are on the side, you get back another line or two of visible page text, and you have a lot more room to play with how the tabs are presented. As the Omniweb demo videos show, you now have room to put in thumbnail icons, which can give much better visual feedback than just a word or two of the title text. Another idea would be to put the favicon.ico graphic superimposed over part of that thumbnail, much the way that OSX puts the application icon at the corner of minimized page icons. You can put in fairly rich interface controls -- like for example a combined, hierarchical view of currently open tabbed documents, bookmarks, and a history listing, all accessible or hidable as you choose by disclosure/flippy triangles. And so on.
I'm glad this is finally happening. Time permitting -- so far, it hasn't -- I was half-ready to start writing this myself. Now that Omni has announced an implementation, I hope that tabs start evolving in this direction for every browser (except IE, which seems comfortably stuck in 1998 -- but then does anyone serious still use IE anymore?). In the meantime, this just might be worth finally buying a copy of Omniweb, and retiring Safari unless & until Apple comes out with a better version...
The advice I was given by the med school older brother of a friend in college was that the major problem with hangovers is the dehydration, for which he suggested two simple remedies:
Drink as much water as you can stomach before going to bed drunk. It's the obvious remedy to dehydration, and it also helps flush out your system.
Try to eat a couple of slices of bread with the water, as it can soak up some of the alcohol and provides some nutrients as well.
Another commenter suggested taking vitamins, which doesn't sound like a bad idea, but I've used the simple bread & water trick to help many people avoid waking up with a nasty headache after they drank too much, and for most of them it worked pretty well.
Yet on multilane freeways I frequently observe cars crawling along, well under the speed limit, while the driver gesticulates (why do people even do this while on cell phones?) and ignores all the traffic having to pass on the right because they can't be bothered with merging traffic while they concentrate on their phone call.
Oh no, don't worry -- this was a problem long before cell phones became popular. I don't know why some people are so resistant to the simple idea of "drive on the right, pass on the left", but there have always been idiots that just poke along in the passing lane at 70% of the average roadway speed.
Some of them probably think that by "enforcing the speed limit" they're doing everyone a favor, but the difference in speeds they're creating between themselves and the line of cars piling up behind them can be far more dangerous than if everyone were just moving together at 75 miles per hour.
In any case, this isn't a cell phone issue, even if the people doing this sometimes happen to be using a phone at the time. No, it's a bad driving etiquette issue, and it's been around for a long, long time...
I wasn't trying to be a troll, honest. Sorry if I came across that way.
The earlier post held up Safari as an example of how an OSS project should work. I think that's an oxymoron, considering that the part of the system being held up as an example is not, in fact, open. I'm not saying it doesn't work -- clearly, it does -- but to me it sounds like what the person I was replying to was suggesting is that the open source folks should focus on the behind the scenes software (KHTML/Gecko, Apache, the Linux kernel, etc) but they should leave the GUI components of the system to the pros at a place like Apple. I find that a bit pessimisstic.
And if the interface is so easy to make, how come no open source browser has half the refinement that Safari does, and no open source desktop package has half the polish that Aqua did, even back when each was in public beta? It's not like projects like Mozilla, KDE & Gnome didn't have a head start or anything. Slapping together a quick interface may be easy, but crafting a good interface takes a lot of careful thought & focus.
Maybe a good UI programmer can glean what's needed just by studying how a good GUI works, and doesn't actually have to see the code to copy the ideas. Maybe. But then again, it hasn't come together very often, has it? Maybe there's more to it than that. The KDE group may not need to see Safari's source code in order to write the perfect browser, but it certainly couldn't hurt to get some good, fresh, well-implemented ideas for comparison.
I understand why it's not in Apple's interest to open up Safari, and that it'll probably never happen, but I also see that it would be a boon to the KDE project, if not also Mozilla and other projects as well. Is that such a controversial idea? Apparently I'm being a troll for pointing it out, but I really just thought I was stating the obvious: being able to see the source code of a well designed browser like Safari has the potential to be tremendously useful to people working on other open source browsers.
I like O software, but to be honest I'm GLAD that the interface to KHTML (ie Safari) isn't open. Let's face it. Open source software just ain't that grand. Could you really have seen or imagined Apple released an open-source browser? Why? What for? That's kinda silly and unnecessary.
Err, I didn't mean to disparage OSX -- I'm typing this from my iBook, using Safari, and I quite enjoy using both the machine, the operaring system, and the browser. I'm not quite sure why I was moderated as, and replied to, as if I were trolling, because I really wasn't. But whatever.
Since you bring it up, I can't see Apple open sourcing Safari, but it's not because the quality of open source GUI software tends to be sub-par. Rather, it's because Safari is, or could be, good enough to sell people Macs, and so it's in their best economic interests to play their cards close & not allow the browser to be ported to, say, Linux or Windows.
But, that said, I don't think that code quality or usability of open source GUIs is at all relevant. I think the problem there isn't that the interfaces are designed in an open way, but that they are designed by committee, and a for that matter a committee of people that don't agree on anything, can't find people to help work on the hardest parts of the system, and have absolutely no sense of focus on either the overall design goals of the system (because generally there aren't any) nor on the needs of average end users (because generally they assume that the average user is a tinkerer or developer).
But the committee design is the problem, not the fact that the development was done in the open. If Apple wanted to -- and I can't see that they would, but just for the sake of argument let's assume that they might -- I don't see any reason why open sourcing would impair the quality of either Safari or OSX itself. As long as they kept a tight oversight of the software's evolution, they could maintain the focus that a well managed proprietary system tends to have while also benefiting from the potential rapid development of new features and bugfixes that open development has come to be known for. The trick, I think, would be for Apple to be vigilant about keeping development on track at all points, probably aided by clear roadmaps of where the software needs to grow.
Unfortunately, that kind of openness is exactly what Apple has never done, and will never do. And you can't really blame them, either: giving away future product plans can cannibalize current sales while giving a heads-up to competitors, and as an underdog in the market, they can't afford either of those risks. So Apple maybe isn't the strongest candidate for this kind of development.
On the other hand, maybe someone like Sun could, with OpenOffice/StarOffice, or Novell/Ximian/SuSE could, with any of Evolution, Gnome, Yast, etc. The source for these projects is already out in the open, all that would be needed would be to provide the focus (and, admittedly, manpower if it comes down to having to pay someone to work on the non-fun parts of the system in question).
Admittedly, this has never really happened in a successful way so far, but I don't think it's impossible. The problem, as I see it, isn't that open source just can't do GUIs, but that a GUI developed without a clear focus on the needs of the end user is never going to come together the way it should. If the right organization decided to take on the effort, I suspect that it could happen. Maybe Apple will give it a try at some point; maybe Sun or Novell will bring focus & resources to one of their GUI projects; maybe a nonprofit like Mitch Kapor's OSAF will be the one to succeed. Who knows? Not me. But I don't think it's impossible, we just haven't found the right recipie yet...
Apple gave a very public lesson on the proper way to port OSS when they did Safari.
But then, their "port" of KHTML/Konqueror kind of dropped the "O" from "OSS", and a lot of people would argue that that wasn't the proper way to do it. They were acting in their own self-interest, of course, and they helped make the KHTML engine better than it had been, but the interface they built around the engine is entirely non-open. Lessons can be drawn by reverse engineering their work (DMCA aside), but the work they put into Safari cannot be reused by others.
So, a proprietary skin on an open core. Kind of like OSX itself for that matter. And just as Safari is a lesson to FOSS browser developers, OSX is one to system developers; contrariwise, just as, three or four years on, OSX hasn't yet motivated people to finally finish perfecting the standard *nix/X11 desktop, it could be a while before Safari's lessons make any impact...
Bah, an actor flubbing a line isn't neceessarily a disaster. If you think about it, people have been putting on plays for thousands of years, and as far as I know, the tradition is not, in any culture, to start over from the beginning if an actor messes up a line. Usually they just try to recover & keep going, and I'm sure that it was the same way with Russian Ark.
That's not to say that Russian Ark wasn't interesting, but the single-take thing isn't unprecedented: Alfred Hitchcock did the same thing with Rope. That film is shown as a single, uninterrupted narrative, but it was shot in a series of 8 minute takes, because traditional film cameras can't hold any more film than that. Russian Ark got around that constraint by shooting with digital film, which can run longer than a reel of 35mm movie film.
I think there are a handful of other examples of this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. There are some movies shot in real time -- Gary Cooper's High Noon probably being the best example, but also recent ones like Time Code and Nick of Time. Interestingly, even though it's presented as one shot, "Rope" doesn't count as a real time story, because events are presented in an accelerated way (short dinner, fast sunset, etc) so that 100 minutes of "actual" time goes by in 80 minutes of "screen" time. But then, apparently "Russian Ark" covers centuries, so it's not even trying for that one:-)
MySQL, on the other hand, was designed from the start to be fast as hell and reliable, at the expense of things like, uh, transactions and subqueries and foreign keys and procedures and... yes, and a WHOLE BUNCH OF OTHER STUFF WHICH A LOT OF PEOPLE DON'T NEED AND NEVER, NEVER MISS.
Their loss. If you can do without transaction control & subqueries, good for you. Foreign keys, on the other hand, are really useful: they're basically an effiencent way of ensuring that all the info in your database actually interrelates properly. Trying to do a cascading delete without them -- where you want to get rid of a row from one table, but one or more rows from other tables point to it, and others may in turn point to those rows, etc -- is a royal pain in the ass without some kind of referential integrity mechanism like foreign keys. You basically end up having to code by hand the deletion where a database engine with foreign key support could have done all the work for you, and in a consistent, reliable, and even reversible way.
I'm not saying MySQL doesn't have a place. I myself use it all the time, and for my needs it's simple & easy. For web sites, its deficiencies are probably immaterial for the most part, and in other contexts, you can either ignore the problems or write database interface code to manage the shortcomings. But the shortcomings are real, and they do keep MySQL from being a serious candidate in certain contexts.
A good analogy might be web servers. Apache, from the start, has emphasized correctness over speed: it has never promised high throughput, but it guarantees correct, HTTP-spec compliant behavior in all situations. That's the PostgreSQL design philosophy. MySQL is more like Tux or something: small, fast, handles the common case well, but degrades badly and isn't as flexible as the more compliant server.
Another analogy might be to programming languages: maybe MySQL is the Perl of database servers. It's sloppy and ignores some of the rules, but it's easy to learn & use, and it mostly lets you do what you want to do without getting in the way. On the other hand, if you want to do more "serious" things with it, you need to have some self discipline & rigor -- the tool isn't going to do these things for you. So in Perl you have to consciously use strict;, you have to plan for good OO coding & abstraction of functionality into modules, and you have to resist the urge to let your code degenerate into over-clever line noise. In MySQL you have to choose table types that provide the "standard" database functionality, and/or you have to hand-roll this stuff with support code. This kind of thing is perfectly defensible, but you have to expect funny looks from the people that prefer to work with tools that are more rigorous and less forgiving.
In any case, the point is to be aware that the shortcomings of MySQL are real, and really shouldn't be swept under the rug. You can ignore them, but in the long run, it's better to be aware of them so that, when the time inevitably comes that you have to deal with them, you know what's going on...
Lots of movies have what could be described as allegorical overtones. If you're willing to grant plots of older stores as an example of allegory, it happens all the time. Examples off the top of my head
The Odyssey, Homer, 800 BC or so
"Wizard of Oz", various, 1939
"O Brother, Where Art Thou?", Coen Brothers, 2000
"Cold Mountain", Anthony Minghella, 2003
Hamlet, Shakespeare, 1600 or so
"Strange Brew", Bob & Doug McKenzie, 1983
"Rosencranz and Guildenstern are Dead", Tom Stoppard, 1990
"Lion King", Disney, 1994
Henry IV part I, Shakespeare, 1600 or so
"My Own Private Idaho", Gus van Sant, 1991
"Good Will Hunting", Gus van Sant, 1997
pretty much most coming of age movies ever made
Et cetera.
Give the audience a little more credit than that. The examples above are just obvious cases of modern films ripping off the plot, characters, and even lines from Homer & Shakespeare. Ripoffs of biblical material happens just as often.
Just to pick one, The Dude in "The Big Lebowski" could, in a weird kind of way, be interpreted as a Christ figure; more seriously, Christ figures are a pretty standard motif in all western art, including literature, film, paintings, etc.
Alert viewers generally don't have much trouble picking these things out, and I doubt the audience of the C.S. Lewis films will have a hard time picking out the allegory there either.
Also, it had no atmosphere, so there was never the problem of entry and friction and all that good stuff.
That, and it takes a lot less propulsive energy to get a body from Earth to the Moon than it does to get one from Earth to Mars, so there's the whole matter of finding a way to bleed off momentum as you approach Martian orbit and the Martian surface. The atmosphere could actually help a bit there -- consider the aerobraking trick that IIRC was used by Pathfinder -- but then as you say it is also a complication to be dealt with.
In any case the essential point is that getting an object onto the lunar surface is like trying to toss a pebble into a can six feet away, whereas getting one onto the martian surface is like trying to get a pebble into a somewhat bigger, but also submerged, can that's (say) a mile away.
++++
Random thought: wasn't Columbia on auto-pilot when it broke up? Or had they disabled it to try to counteract the abnormal wing friction? I forget, but it seems like a comparison worth considering: on auto-pilot alone, Columbia may have been doomed, but with a human crew they could have at least made an attempt at repairs (especially if we're considering martian travel and they had 18 months of transit time to prepare and make repairs...).
FWIW, he wasn't either -- he was a mechanical engineer. Not quite the same thing:-)
I agree, it sounds like bullshit, but apparently it's counterintuitive but true. All standard four wheeled vehicles (or 4+ wheels, if you want to include trucks with doubled
back wheels up through 18-wheelers) push their mass across several points, leaving the central area bearing no direct load. Moreover, even during rush hour, cars always leave some clear space for at least several feet in all directions -- say, five to ten feet all around during rush hour, and much more than that during off-peak traffic.
It's been long enough for me to forget the numbers now, so I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but the rule of thumb he gave us was that cars at peak traffic put something like 100 pounds of stress per square foot, while pedestrians can put something like 500 pounds during their peak periods. And like anything else, the structure has to be designed to handle the maximum expected load, not off-peak times with "just a few bicycles".
Doubt it if you want, but they definitely have the stress of pedestrians in mind. A couple of weeks before I took my tour of the bridge, they opened it up to the public for Mother's Day 2002, and 50,000 people turned out for the chance to walk over the bridge. To reduce the stress that such a crowd would bring, they set up roped off "lanes" for the crowd of people to walk along, and made sure that no more than 1000 or so were on the bridge at any given time. Any more than that, and the stress load would have started to get closer to the bridge's safe tolerances than they were comfortable with.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that, and the plaque is stamped on the back of the probe's high-gain antenna. Space & weight are at a steep premium on these probes, and there really isn't room to add an extra slab of metal for any non-scientific purpose, even if most people would find the gesture fitting.
By way of comparison, read about the Marsdial project, which does basically the same thing: mount a "frivilous" device onto one of the key components of the rover, done in a way that there's substantially no additional hardware (extra mass to require fuel, additional parts to possibly break down, etc).
Sentimentality is nice, but pragmatism is critical here.
We all seem to miss one another today then :-)
True, but that still misses the point of the original joke.
Yes, Ridley Scott's "Blade Runner" has been released in many variants. Supposedly, something like 17 versions of Blade Runner have been shown or distributed in various times & places, depending on who does the counting.
As you can perhaps tell, I used Blade Runner for a history class term paper back in college a few years ago :-)
However, the original poster was joking that George Lucas did the revised version of the Apple "1984" commercial -- the joke being that he had to take the original classic and make it more modern & cheesy, just like he did with the original Star Wars movies.
Pointing out that Ridley Scott did the original 1984 commerical is accurate, but it completely misses the point of the joke that was being made... :-)
GarageBand looks okay and all, but they totally dropped the ball on the name. For one thing, they broke then "clever" iName scheme that the rest of the iLife suite uses. For another thing, they missed a chance to get an oblique 80s punk rock reference, which clearly all software should aim for. How could they have fixed this?
Or if they wanted to go for that trendy leetspeek "we meant to mis-spell that, thankyouverymuch", they could have used...
Is it too late to go put new label stickers on the packaging, and to change out the strings in the software? I hope it's not too late...
Wait, Ridley Scott made super duper special editions of "Alien" and "Blade Runner"? Either I missed the news, or you missed the George Lucas joke... :-)
Right, but if you can talk yourself into spending another fifty bucks for a 16x increase in storage capacity, then spending another fifty bucks to get a 60x increase over the flash player is another big capacity jump for not that big of a price jump.
It seems like they're kind of playing against themselves here: by inviting people to be willing to spend "only" another fifty bucks, they could be scuttling sales of the iPod Mini in favor of the older models -- especially considering that the capacity jump from 10gb to 15gb makes the $299 model an better deal than it was to begin with, and doubly so compared to the new iPod Mini.
I understand the words Jobs was saying, but it just didn't make sense: his own reasoning is a case for iPod Mini over high end flash players, but the same reasoning is an even better case for regular iPod over the new device.
Maybe my Reality Distortion Field just isn't working. Again.
This isn't how I would have phrased this one. The big issue, in my eyes, is not just the export of IT jobs, but the export of white collar & service jobs, of which occupations like "programmer" and "call center support" are examples, along with "accountant", "engineer", "economist", etc.
As the saying goes, when manufacturing jobs move overseas, that's just how the economists say globalization works, but economist jobs start moving overseas, that's when globalization breaks down.
IT is just the visible tip of the spear, from Slashdot's point of view, but the real story is that the exodus of jobs that started decades ago with blue collar jobs is now moving up the economic ladder.
Seeing as this has the potential to undermine the foundations of the US economy in the long run, I can see this subject being the kind of material that presidential campaigns could be won or lost by. But if that's where things go, the IT facet of the story is probably just going to be a footnote, not the headline.
I think this formulation of Cringeley's prediction is a lot more concrete, and also a lot more likely.
Indeed, most of the food in the Chinese restaraunts you're probably familiar with is more American than Chinese.
I like Chinese food. I've been eating it for most of my life. I've been around a lot of the USA and a little bit of Europe, and I always see Chinese restaraunts serving menus filled with the same dishes that I'm familiar with. I'd tricked myself, in other words, into thinking that I have a pretty good idea about what Chinese food "is".
My wife is Chinese. Her family has a favorite Chinese seafood restaraunt that they always go to. It is unlike any other Chinese food I had become familar with before being invited to this place. There is a lot of overlap in ingredients, to be sure, but just as much that is unfamilar to me: "broccoli" that looks very little like the vegetable typically found in American supermarkets, mystery meat soups & stir frys, and so on. To them, this stuff is Chinese food, and the stuff I grew up with is almost as American as McDonald's.
I don't really know how to describe it. It's maybe a little like growing up thinking that pizza & spaghetti more or less sums up Italian cuisine, and then finding a restaraunt serving all kinds of pastas & sauces and non-pasta/sause based dishes that you'd never seen or imagined before. The palatte is more or less the same, so you can recognize it as an extension of what you thought Italian food consists of, but it's still all very unfamilar.
So, yeah. The "Chinese" food that most of you know is probably just a distant cousin of the real thing. About the only things directly in common are the rice and, yes, the chop sticks... :-)
Ahh, but there's more to it than that though. The US postal system since more or less the beginning of the republic has always provided for a discount rate on books -- Any non-media package of a pound or more in weight -- which will be the majority of what any mail order company deals with -- has to be sent as priority mail, at double to triple the rate of media mail. Quoting from the Post Office's site:
Just look at that list: books, films, recordings, software, etc. These are all the things that Amazon started out with. That's no coincidence. One of the biggest expenses for a mail order company has to be the cost of putting all those packages in the mail, and Amazon employed a loophole in the US Post Office to set themselves up for a steep discount on that part of their business.
They didn't find a need for books & capitalized on it. Amazon found a loophole for them, and capitalized on that.
Oh yeah, I agree that the behavior makes sense -- the misfeature in Safari is that it doesn't leave that null space for opening new tabs. Firebird gets that right, but Safari could do for a revision there...
Safari does this as well. The catch is that Safari has two modes of handling this behavior. If there is blank space on the tab bar and you drag a link onto that blank space, Safari will open a new tab onto that page. On the other hand, if you drag a link over an existing tab -- and if you have more than half a dozen or so tabs open, the bar is full and you have nothing but filled tabs on your tab bar -- then the new link will be opened in place of that other page. This, in my mind, kind of negates the point of a tabbed interface.
I haven't used Firebird much recently, but I seem to remember it behaving similarly. The catch though is that the browser always leaves a little nib of space that's not associated with an open tab, so you always have a way to open a link in a fresh tab by dragging a link to the taskbar.
The lack of support for something like this is IMO probably a bug in Safari, but it has been the behavior more or less since tabs were introduced.
Thank ghod someone is finally doing this -- I've been hoping for almost exactly this kind of drawer based, thumbnail enhanced tabs implementation for over a year now, and posted about the idea both at Slashdot and MacSlash last January. Others were writing about it, too. I also submitted it as a bug in Safari and as an enhancement on Apple's feedback page -- but then apparently they're deluged with such reports, never read them individually, and can't do more than statistical analysis of things people are reporting frequently, so I'm not optimistic that'll ever get noticed.
Anyway, it's nice to think that, even though this stuff hasn't made its way into Safari [yet? ever?], someone at Omni either read these posts or came up with the same idea independently. Either way is okay with me -- I'm just glad to see it's happening.
It seems obvious to me that this would be an excellent next evolution for browser interfaces. Wibbling over whether it's better to have tabs from the middle or the left (Chimera vs. Everyone else), what order new tabs should be inserted into the list, and whether to give tabs a fixed width (Safari) or let them collapse down to a certain minimum (Firebird) & how to handle spillover that doesn't fit in is all missing the point.
Whether or not people find it intuitive, a text column width of six inches or so is optimal for most people, which means that for the standard squat rectangular display most people have on their computers, a "well-shaped" browser window should have a lot of space on the left & right, while extending as close to the top & bottom of the screen as the user is comfortable with. In other words, vertical screen real estate will tend to be at a premium, and horizontal real estate will tend to be under-utilized.
Therefore, putting a row of tabs along the top, rather than the side, is a literal waste of space.
If the tabs are on the side, you get back another line or two of visible page text, and you have a lot more room to play with how the tabs are presented. As the Omniweb demo videos show, you now have room to put in thumbnail icons, which can give much better visual feedback than just a word or two of the title text. Another idea would be to put the favicon.ico graphic superimposed over part of that thumbnail, much the way that OSX puts the application icon at the corner of minimized page icons. You can put in fairly rich interface controls -- like for example a combined, hierarchical view of currently open tabbed documents, bookmarks, and a history listing, all accessible or hidable as you choose by disclosure/flippy triangles. And so on.
I'm glad this is finally happening. Time permitting -- so far, it hasn't -- I was half-ready to start writing this myself. Now that Omni has announced an implementation, I hope that tabs start evolving in this direction for every browser (except IE, which seems comfortably stuck in 1998 -- but then does anyone serious still use IE anymore?). In the meantime, this just might be worth finally buying a copy of Omniweb, and retiring Safari unless & until Apple comes out with a better version...
The advice I was given by the med school older brother of a friend in college was that the major problem with hangovers is the dehydration, for which he suggested two simple remedies:
Another commenter suggested taking vitamins, which doesn't sound like a bad idea, but I've used the simple bread & water trick to help many people avoid waking up with a nasty headache after they drank too much, and for most of them it worked pretty well.
Oh no, don't worry -- this was a problem long before cell phones became popular. I don't know why some people are so resistant to the simple idea of "drive on the right, pass on the left", but there have always been idiots that just poke along in the passing lane at 70% of the average roadway speed.
Some of them probably think that by "enforcing the speed limit" they're doing everyone a favor, but the difference in speeds they're creating between themselves and the line of cars piling up behind them can be far more dangerous than if everyone were just moving together at 75 miles per hour.
In any case, this isn't a cell phone issue, even if the people doing this sometimes happen to be using a phone at the time. No, it's a bad driving etiquette issue, and it's been around for a long, long time...
Yes, I see the difference. Don't you?
What were we arguing about again? It sounds like you just came over to my side and I'm left confused as to what your point was...
I wasn't trying to be a troll, honest. Sorry if I came across that way.
The earlier post held up Safari as an example of how an OSS project should work. I think that's an oxymoron, considering that the part of the system being held up as an example is not, in fact, open. I'm not saying it doesn't work -- clearly, it does -- but to me it sounds like what the person I was replying to was suggesting is that the open source folks should focus on the behind the scenes software (KHTML/Gecko, Apache, the Linux kernel, etc) but they should leave the GUI components of the system to the pros at a place like Apple. I find that a bit pessimisstic.
And if the interface is so easy to make, how come no open source browser has half the refinement that Safari does, and no open source desktop package has half the polish that Aqua did, even back when each was in public beta? It's not like projects like Mozilla, KDE & Gnome didn't have a head start or anything. Slapping together a quick interface may be easy, but crafting a good interface takes a lot of careful thought & focus.
Maybe a good UI programmer can glean what's needed just by studying how a good GUI works, and doesn't actually have to see the code to copy the ideas. Maybe. But then again, it hasn't come together very often, has it? Maybe there's more to it than that. The KDE group may not need to see Safari's source code in order to write the perfect browser, but it certainly couldn't hurt to get some good, fresh, well-implemented ideas for comparison.
I understand why it's not in Apple's interest to open up Safari, and that it'll probably never happen, but I also see that it would be a boon to the KDE project, if not also Mozilla and other projects as well. Is that such a controversial idea? Apparently I'm being a troll for pointing it out, but I really just thought I was stating the obvious: being able to see the source code of a well designed browser like Safari has the potential to be tremendously useful to people working on other open source browsers.
Err, I didn't mean to disparage OSX -- I'm typing this from my iBook, using Safari, and I quite enjoy using both the machine, the operaring system, and the browser. I'm not quite sure why I was moderated as, and replied to, as if I were trolling, because I really wasn't. But whatever.
Since you bring it up, I can't see Apple open sourcing Safari, but it's not because the quality of open source GUI software tends to be sub-par. Rather, it's because Safari is, or could be, good enough to sell people Macs, and so it's in their best economic interests to play their cards close & not allow the browser to be ported to, say, Linux or Windows.
But, that said, I don't think that code quality or usability of open source GUIs is at all relevant. I think the problem there isn't that the interfaces are designed in an open way, but that they are designed by committee, and a for that matter a committee of people that don't agree on anything, can't find people to help work on the hardest parts of the system, and have absolutely no sense of focus on either the overall design goals of the system (because generally there aren't any) nor on the needs of average end users (because generally they assume that the average user is a tinkerer or developer).
But the committee design is the problem, not the fact that the development was done in the open. If Apple wanted to -- and I can't see that they would, but just for the sake of argument let's assume that they might -- I don't see any reason why open sourcing would impair the quality of either Safari or OSX itself. As long as they kept a tight oversight of the software's evolution, they could maintain the focus that a well managed proprietary system tends to have while also benefiting from the potential rapid development of new features and bugfixes that open development has come to be known for. The trick, I think, would be for Apple to be vigilant about keeping development on track at all points, probably aided by clear roadmaps of where the software needs to grow.
Unfortunately, that kind of openness is exactly what Apple has never done, and will never do. And you can't really blame them, either: giving away future product plans can cannibalize current sales while giving a heads-up to competitors, and as an underdog in the market, they can't afford either of those risks. So Apple maybe isn't the strongest candidate for this kind of development.
On the other hand, maybe someone like Sun could, with OpenOffice/StarOffice, or Novell/Ximian/SuSE could, with any of Evolution, Gnome, Yast, etc. The source for these projects is already out in the open, all that would be needed would be to provide the focus (and, admittedly, manpower if it comes down to having to pay someone to work on the non-fun parts of the system in question).
Admittedly, this has never really happened in a successful way so far, but I don't think it's impossible. The problem, as I see it, isn't that open source just can't do GUIs, but that a GUI developed without a clear focus on the needs of the end user is never going to come together the way it should. If the right organization decided to take on the effort, I suspect that it could happen. Maybe Apple will give it a try at some point; maybe Sun or Novell will bring focus & resources to one of their GUI projects; maybe a nonprofit like Mitch Kapor's OSAF will be the one to succeed. Who knows? Not me. But I don't think it's impossible, we just haven't found the right recipie yet...
But then, their "port" of KHTML/Konqueror kind of dropped the "O" from "OSS", and a lot of people would argue that that wasn't the proper way to do it. They were acting in their own self-interest, of course, and they helped make the KHTML engine better than it had been, but the interface they built around the engine is entirely non-open. Lessons can be drawn by reverse engineering their work (DMCA aside), but the work they put into Safari cannot be reused by others.
So, a proprietary skin on an open core. Kind of like OSX itself for that matter. And just as Safari is a lesson to FOSS browser developers, OSX is one to system developers; contrariwise, just as, three or four years on, OSX hasn't yet motivated people to finally finish perfecting the standard *nix/X11 desktop, it could be a while before Safari's lessons make any impact...
This is interesting...
Really, is any comment necessary? Clearly, the slashcode gremlins are having fun with this story...
Bah, an actor flubbing a line isn't neceessarily a disaster. If you think about it, people have been putting on plays for thousands of years, and as far as I know, the tradition is not, in any culture, to start over from the beginning if an actor messes up a line. Usually they just try to recover & keep going, and I'm sure that it was the same way with Russian Ark.
That's not to say that Russian Ark wasn't interesting, but the single-take thing isn't unprecedented: Alfred Hitchcock did the same thing with Rope. That film is shown as a single, uninterrupted narrative, but it was shot in a series of 8 minute takes, because traditional film cameras can't hold any more film than that. Russian Ark got around that constraint by shooting with digital film, which can run longer than a reel of 35mm movie film.
I think there are a handful of other examples of this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. There are some movies shot in real time -- Gary Cooper's High Noon probably being the best example, but also recent ones like Time Code and Nick of Time. Interestingly, even though it's presented as one shot, "Rope" doesn't count as a real time story, because events are presented in an accelerated way (short dinner, fast sunset, etc) so that 100 minutes of "actual" time goes by in 80 minutes of "screen" time. But then, apparently "Russian Ark" covers centuries, so it's not even trying for that one :-)
Their loss. If you can do without transaction control & subqueries, good for you. Foreign keys, on the other hand, are really useful: they're basically an effiencent way of ensuring that all the info in your database actually interrelates properly. Trying to do a cascading delete without them -- where you want to get rid of a row from one table, but one or more rows from other tables point to it, and others may in turn point to those rows, etc -- is a royal pain in the ass without some kind of referential integrity mechanism like foreign keys. You basically end up having to code by hand the deletion where a database engine with foreign key support could have done all the work for you, and in a consistent, reliable, and even reversible way.
I'm not saying MySQL doesn't have a place. I myself use it all the time, and for my needs it's simple & easy. For web sites, its deficiencies are probably immaterial for the most part, and in other contexts, you can either ignore the problems or write database interface code to manage the shortcomings. But the shortcomings are real, and they do keep MySQL from being a serious candidate in certain contexts.
A good analogy might be web servers. Apache, from the start, has emphasized correctness over speed: it has never promised high throughput, but it guarantees correct, HTTP-spec compliant behavior in all situations. That's the PostgreSQL design philosophy. MySQL is more like Tux or something: small, fast, handles the common case well, but degrades badly and isn't as flexible as the more compliant server.
Another analogy might be to programming languages: maybe MySQL is the Perl of database servers. It's sloppy and ignores some of the rules, but it's easy to learn & use, and it mostly lets you do what you want to do without getting in the way. On the other hand, if you want to do more "serious" things with it, you need to have some self discipline & rigor -- the tool isn't going to do these things for you. So in Perl you have to consciously use strict;, you have to plan for good OO coding & abstraction of functionality into modules, and you have to resist the urge to let your code degenerate into over-clever line noise. In MySQL you have to choose table types that provide the "standard" database functionality, and/or you have to hand-roll this stuff with support code. This kind of thing is perfectly defensible, but you have to expect funny looks from the people that prefer to work with tools that are more rigorous and less forgiving.
In any case, the point is to be aware that the shortcomings of MySQL are real, and really shouldn't be swept under the rug. You can ignore them, but in the long run, it's better to be aware of them so that, when the time inevitably comes that you have to deal with them, you know what's going on...
What a coincidence, my brother gave me a Dirty Dick...
Loosen up :-)
Lots of movies have what could be described as allegorical overtones. If you're willing to grant plots of older stores as an example of allegory, it happens all the time. Examples off the top of my head
Et cetera.
Give the audience a little more credit than that. The examples above are just obvious cases of modern films ripping off the plot, characters, and even lines from Homer & Shakespeare. Ripoffs of biblical material happens just as often.
Just to pick one, The Dude in "The Big Lebowski" could, in a weird kind of way, be interpreted as a Christ figure; more seriously, Christ figures are a pretty standard motif in all western art, including literature, film, paintings, etc.
Alert viewers generally don't have much trouble picking these things out, and I doubt the audience of the C.S. Lewis films will have a hard time picking out the allegory there either.
That, and it takes a lot less propulsive energy to get a body from Earth to the Moon than it does to get one from Earth to Mars, so there's the whole matter of finding a way to bleed off momentum as you approach Martian orbit and the Martian surface. The atmosphere could actually help a bit there -- consider the aerobraking trick that IIRC was used by Pathfinder -- but then as you say it is also a complication to be dealt with.
In any case the essential point is that getting an object onto the lunar surface is like trying to toss a pebble into a can six feet away, whereas getting one onto the martian surface is like trying to get a pebble into a somewhat bigger, but also submerged, can that's (say) a mile away.
++++
Random thought: wasn't Columbia on auto-pilot when it broke up? Or had they disabled it to try to counteract the abnormal wing friction? I forget, but it seems like a comparison worth considering: on auto-pilot alone, Columbia may have been doomed, but with a human crew they could have at least made an attempt at repairs (especially if we're considering martian travel and they had 18 months of transit time to prepare and make repairs...).
FWIW, he wasn't either -- he was a mechanical engineer. Not quite the same thing :-)
I agree, it sounds like bullshit, but apparently it's counterintuitive but true. All standard four wheeled vehicles (or 4+ wheels, if you want to include trucks with doubled back wheels up through 18-wheelers) push their mass across several points, leaving the central area bearing no direct load. Moreover, even during rush hour, cars always leave some clear space for at least several feet in all directions -- say, five to ten feet all around during rush hour, and much more than that during off-peak traffic.
It's been long enough for me to forget the numbers now, so I'd be happy to be corrected on this, but the rule of thumb he gave us was that cars at peak traffic put something like 100 pounds of stress per square foot, while pedestrians can put something like 500 pounds during their peak periods. And like anything else, the structure has to be designed to handle the maximum expected load, not off-peak times with "just a few bicycles".
Doubt it if you want, but they definitely have the stress of pedestrians in mind. A couple of weeks before I took my tour of the bridge, they opened it up to the public for Mother's Day 2002, and 50,000 people turned out for the chance to walk over the bridge. To reduce the stress that such a crowd would bring, they set up roped off "lanes" for the crowd of people to walk along, and made sure that no more than 1000 or so were on the bridge at any given time. Any more than that, and the stress load would have started to get closer to the bridge's safe tolerances than they were comfortable with.