What a lot of non-MA people don't realize is there is another major construction project happening around Boston, the widening of Route 3, a primary commuter route from the northwest suburbs of Boston in towards Rt 128/Interstate 95. This project was started in summer of 2000, and involved adding a third lane and room for a fourth, and the reconstruction of 47 bridges, and two major interstate interchanges. Its damn near to completion, ahead of schedule, and is an example of how MA is actually capable of doing that sort of project when its just standard construction, not a 20-year research-and-developmente project like the Big Dig.
Thankfully when Rt 3 is done, it might take another half hour off my commute. Ah, to feel the wonderful glow of sanity once again...:)
On the other hand, my family moved to southeast Massachusetts in the mid 80s, right next to the Boston-Cape Cod stretch of Rt. 3. That stretch of Rt. 3 has been a two lane parking lot for as long as I've known the road, particularly when the weather is good and people are driving to the Cape in the summer. They've been debating the idea of widening it to three or four lanes for as long as I can remember, but the idea is still no further along than the planning stages.
Granted, part of the problem is a kind of "post-Big Dig-itis", where now that that uber-projekt is winding up, there's a queue of other projects waiting to get done, including the northern Rt. 3 work, widening part of I-95 near Dedham, and various projects the MBTA would like to do (continue building the Silver Line, extend the Green Line north towards Medford, continue building out the commuter rail network, etc). Still, the southern leg of Rt. 3 is as bad or worse than any other stretch of road in eastern Massachusetts, and after 20+ years of "what should we do about this?" debate, nothing continues to happen...
My biggest complaint -- possibly even counting the cost-overruns and delays -- is that they designed and built a world-class bridge... without a pedestrian/bicycle lane!
I took a walking tour of the Zakim Bridge about a year ago, a few months before northbound traffic started using it, and I got a chance to ask the bridge project's chief engineer exactly that question. Apparently, I wasn't the first one to ask him that.
His first response was that the bridge was designed as a federal interstate roadway, and federal guidelines for such roads explicitly forbid any kind of pedestrian or non-motored traffic. Yes there seem to be exceptions, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, but apparently the feds don't like granting exceptions in most cases.
The second reason was an engineering problem. It's been a while and I forget the details of what he said, but basically it comes down to the fact that vehicles & pedestrians place different kinds of stress on a structure, and that in fact pedestrians bring a much greater load than vechicles do. Why? Because cars have their mass distributed more or less evenly across four pads placed very close to the corners of that overall mass; humans, on the other hand, have all of their mass bearing down on just two points, and those two points are directly underneath that mass. Moreover, people tend to move in groups, so you could end up with 20 people standing on the same surface area that one car takes up, and placing many times more stress on that area.
In other words, the bridge would have had to be completely redesigned to support any kind of pedestrian traffic. As it is now, the bridge appears from a distance to be a kind of delicate web of cables & roadway, and it seems like it should have been easy to cantilever a pedestrian lane off to the west side of the bridge (the side away from the harbor, facing towards the Museum of Science and the Charles River Basin). In reality, adding that pedestrian lane would have involved adding massive reinforcements to the support structure of the bridge, and the whole thing would have looked a lot less "delicate" than it does today. It wouldn't, in short, have been the same bridge.
The federal guidelines only made the problem more annoying, but they weren't the main reason so much as the straw that broke the idea's back. It would have been more complex, more expensive, less aesthetically appealing, and even then it might not have been able to get federal approval. As a result, they ditched the idea early on.
But yeah, it would have been nice -- from where I live in Somerville, a bike ride over the bridge into downtown Boston would definitely be the shortest & prettiest way to go. Oh well...
A friend in Boston who was living there at the time said nobody with any common sense believed they could do what they were promising for that price, and were pretty certain that it the number they came up with was just to get the project sold.
It's like this: Government Contracts Are Always Awarded To the Lowest Bidder.
Ergo, if the government wants to do project A, and they are soliciting engineering bids from firms X, Y, and Z, those three firms have two numbers they need to come up with. The first number, which is good to know but never to share until everything is over, is the true cost of the work to be done. The second number is a proposal estimate high enough to be plausible but low enough to beat out all the other bidders. Because the work never even happens if you don't get the contract, that second number is the only one that counts -- and because you could get in trouble with millions of angry taxpayers if that first number ever sees the light of day, it's best to just pretend it never existed.
So, yeah, 2.4billion was always a fiction, and the current pricetag -- 15billion? -- is just the way it ended up working out. Cheaper would have been nicer, but spend some time driving or walking around the city over the past 15 years and it becomes obvious that a very very expensive project was going on.
On the bright side, hopefully it helped several thousand construction workers put their kids through college. That alone could be a nice little economic boost for this sleepy little college town over the coming years & decades...
Okay, hopefully a short[ish] (or not) point by point reply...
[....] I disagree about the child figure of the hobbits though thats a side issue. [....]
Short, hungry all the time, needy, innocent, etc? I didn't expect comparing hobbits to childen would be exactly controversial:-) It doesn't change anything to me if you point out that Frodo is actually 50+ years old, because the portrayal of hobbit society in the shire is essentially that of a community of well behaved children. Exactly, one might guess, that what you'd expect a teacher like Tolkein to fantasize about really existing somewhere:-)
But the thing is Potter archtypes do match up to LOTR archtypes... but where do the LOTR archtypes come from ? Tolkien created his world from next to nothing. From scraps. He is largely credited with creating the fantasy genre. Thus Rowling is ploting a path through well known terrirtory where Tolkien was Lewis and Clark.
Baloney. You're now asking me to quote material that I first used on a 10th grade term paper on Tolkein over a decade ago, and unfortunately I just don't remember the details any more, but Tolkein has plenty of source material to draw on. Just to pick two obvious examples, you could cite Beowulf & the King Arthur stories as antecedents, but there were a whole series of closer-to-the-mark fantasy tales told over the centuries, and Tolkein was plainly just synthesizing this material. He put a lot of work into it to be sure, but to say that he conjured everything from nothing more than "scraps" is just disingenuous -- there was ample source material to draw on, and Professor Tolkein did so.
You could, maybe, argue that 'medieval fantasy" didn't exist as a literary genre as such 50 years ago, with its own section in Barnes & Noble and what have you, but even that seems like a mostly bogus point to me: I'd assume that a lot of currently popular fiction genres weren't common fifty years ago. You could argue that Tolkein popularized literary medieval fantasy just as George Lucas popularized cinematic scifi fantasy, but you can't seriously say that either Tolkein or Lucas invented their genre from scratch.
Excellent reading material here is Joseph Campbell's books, including The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell makes a pretty solid argument that the essential themes, characters, plots, and other touchstones of nearly all world literature are far more alike than different. Even within the framework of any given genre -- medieval fantasy in this case -- the same elements just get recycled over and over. The trick isn't to try something new -- give up, it's almost impossible -- but to tell the same old Gilgamesh tales in interesting modern clothing. This I think Rowling has managed to do, and Tolkein has half-done -- hence all the babbling on my part:-)
The singing and verse sections if you take the time to read them are not extraneous in the least.
As I say, I realize I'm in the minority opinion here, but I still stand by it: the singing is very boring to me, and yes I did give it a chance both times I read the books. I know that some people just adore getting wrapped up in the atmosphere of Middle Earth, but I just find it suffocating after a while. Like I say, IMO Rowling has managed to pull off much of the same "immersion in a new world" trick that Tolkein went for, and yet has done so in a far less grating, self-indulgent way. Others can & will disagree, and that's fine, but I really have given the singing et cetera a chance and have decided for myself that the series would have been better off without such material.
Animation? Unless you're thinking of the special effects, you may have it confused with some other movie; Pirates of the Caribbean was great, because the subtitle may as well have been, not Curse of the Black Pearl, but The Adventures of Pirate-silla, Queen of the High Seas. I'm not normally a fan of gay comedy -- Wong Foo, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Will & Grace, etc -- not because I'm offended, but because it usually just isn't that funny to me. But in PotC, Johnny Depp played his pirate pretty much like a high seas drag queen, and it was just hilarious. Far better than it had any right to be. I saw it 3 times last week on an 8 hour flight because I couldn't stand how bad "Charlies Angels 2" was -- that and it was just a wonderful movie. Give it a chance.
I didn't mean to over-emphasize the page count aspect. Rather, I'm just thinking aloud about how Tolkein is so famous for having so thoroughly fleshed out his other world, and yet Rowling has pretty much done the same thing already with her as yet incomplete series, and she doesn't seem to be getting any attention for having done so.
Moreover, my impression is that if a good stern editor were given the task of paring both works down to their essentials, most of LOTR would be "bulk" fit for trimming (the back stories, the flowery descriptions of the countryside, all the damn singing, etc), while most of the material in the HP books would be, well, actually directly material to the plot.
Granted, I know full well that a lot of people would disagree with me, and that there are thousands or millions of people that just adore all the damn singing in LOTR, but as far as I'm concerned the essentials could be pared down to a good tight novel of about the length of, say, _The Hobbit_, or a wel-cut movie the length of *maybe* one of the current trilogy. On the other hand, so much actually happens in the HP books that the plot would start to unravel if you started hacking away at it, but LOTR it seems to me would be much more able to allow for that kind of trimming. I'm aware that this is probably a minority opinion, but there it is.
But anyway, I'm really not trying to use length as the key quality metric, I'm just having fun comparing them out loud.
The bigger point is that I do think that LOTR / HP comparisons are valid & worth considering. They really do get into a lot of the same themes: a childlike band of friends (Harry & friends; Frodo & the hobbits) is taken under wing by a magic weilding master (Dumbledore; Gandalf), watched over by a powerful, fatherly individual (Hagrid; Aragorn) and supervised & taught by a group of others (professors; elves & fellowship). The main childlike figure is told that he must some day confront the world's greatest & most dangerous magical figure (Lord Voldemort; Lord Sauron), a person who this child's parents (Harry's parents; Bilbo) had to deal with once while under the supervision of many of the same people. Further, this inevitable confrontation will have to be undertaken mainly by the child alone, and while the elders can try to assist, the main task must be the child's responsibility. Et cetera.
That similarity in plot points is what has me thinking about the length of the two works, because the main way the two differ -- in my mind at least -- is in the padding & backstory that the author has chosen to wrap things in. In my eyes, Tolkein created a world insulated from the one we live in, and that diminishes his world somehow, while Rowling deliberately has her world overlap with our world, allowing the story to resonate more strongly. In a way, doing otherwise seems like a cop-out to me, which is why the more I think about it the more I'm coming to respect HP & think a bit less of LOTR.
But you're right, it's not a contest. They can both "win". I just think that LOTR has been placed on a pedestal that it doesn't necessarily deserve to be on, and the HP books, maybe because of the huge popularity with kids these days, isn't given as much credit as it may deserve. IMO, both of those generally held perceptions could do for a bit of correction towards the middle...:-)
I dunno, something about LOTR just doesn't click with me the way it does with so many other people. It's *huge*, and hence significant, but somehow it has still always underwhelmed me. Something about the fetishistic medieval retro atmosphere just has never quite won me over, with either the books (which I read 10 or 15 years ago, when I was a kid) or the movies now.
Honestly, I'm actually more optimistic about the long term longevity of the Harry Potter series. The books & movies push a lot of the same buttons that LOTR does, but in a far more modern way, without the retro baggage that LOTR happily wallows in. Plus -- and this really strikes me -- the HP books feel *far* less padded out than Tolkein's books.
Consider that. Depending on the edition, the three main LOTR books are roughly 1250 pages, and _The Hobbit_ is another 400. Additionally, _The Silmarillion_ and _Unfinished Tales_ both run about 500 pages, so there's a total of roughly 2640 pages of Tolkein's Middle Earth writings, not counting the rest of the arcane supporting materials that Christopher Tolkein has published.
On the other hand, the Harry Potter series is already up to 2689 pages, not including the two remaining books or any other supporting materials (none of which that I'm aware of has J.K. Rowling's blessing anyway). So the HP series is already "longer" than LOTR, and it's not even finished yet.
And yet, I personally feel that far more actually happens in the HP books. Tolkein's introduction to LOTR notes that his only quibble with his work is that it isn't long enough, and if he weren't already dead by the time I first read the books, I would have wanted to strangle him for that. On the other hand, every HP book gets longer than the one that came before it, and yet the story only seems to move more swiftly as each new edition comes out.
I dunno what the significance of any of that is. Maybe, like George Lucas, J.K. Rowling will royally screw things up with the final chapters of her series, but so far I trust her to get it right. The stories don't feel padded, and even though they in their way have woven a world every bit as interesting as Tolkein's Middle Earth, the HP books don't seem nearly as self-absorbed, or as pointedly removed from the modern world that we all live in. My hunch is that these are books & films for posterity at least as long lasting as the LOTR series, and it really wouldn't surprise me if their legacy eclipses that or LOTR in time.
That's my hunch anyway, but I realize I may be in the minority opinion around here:-)
LoTR was the most ambitious movie shoot EVER, just about any way you look at it.
Any way not from a film history class, anyway. The first feature length movie was D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", which today could have just been called "How the Ku Klux Klan Saved Dixie". This was fifty years before the civil rights movement, but it was still a controversial point of view, so his second feature was a kind of apology for it: 1916's Intolerance, about the fall of Babylon. The movie involved a literal cast of thousands, as well as both the construction and complete demoloition of an entire city. Nothing in the following century has come close to the size of "Intolerance", with the near exceptions of "Titanic" and "Lord of the Rings".
I don't mean to imply that the LOTR series hasn't been huge -- obviously, it has. But if you try to argue that nothing comes close, you're being ignorant. It has been done before, a century ago.
My main question, which remains to be seen, is whether or not anyone will remember the LOTR movies a century for now, or even a quarter of a century. They're obviously big, but I'm not yet convinced that they're the massive landmarks that all the fanboys seem to be convinced they are. Time alone will tell how these movies, and Peter Jackson behind them, are remembered.
Gandalf was no more human than Sauron or the Balrog were human -- he was an immortal. [....] He moved, he shaped, he cajoled, he prodded, but he took no direct action. Ever.
No direct action "ever"? Then what's with him weilding a sword half the time, cutting up enemies as fast as he could? Do you mean that he couldn't confront his peers ever? If so, then why fight the Balrog? But then you say that "Immortal Beings Created at the Dawn of Time can fight each other directly", which spins us back around to the question of why he couldn't fight Sauron himself, eh?
Not trying to be difficult, I've just never invested the time to get my head around the arcana of LOTR's back story, as to be honest it all seems a bit silly to me. But I'm still interested enough to be curious about this aspect: Gandalf was plainly shown fighting both "lesser beings" (orcs, etc) and "higher ones" (the Balrog, Saruman), so if there was some kind of rule that he couldn't fight "directly, ever", he wasn't paying attention to it. If you just mean that he couldn't fight Sauron directly, then that comes closer to the way things were actually portrayed.
Personally, I thought it was just the "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" idea that discouraged characters like Gandalf, Galadriel, and Aragorn from wanting anything to do with the ring itself, even though all three of them were more "powerful" than any given hobbit. Frodo, who resisted the power of the ring better than anyone ever did, still wavered at the cusp of Mount Doom; I think it's safe to say that if someone more powerful wavered similarly, and weren't able to follow through, the results would have been disastrous (whereas if Frodo really changed his mind, he'd be "only" a hobbit-darklord, instead of a wizard-darklord).
But then, like I say, I never got into the backstory, there's probably some long drawn out explanation for it that my eyes glazed over when skimming _Unfinished Tales_ or _The Silmarillion_.
Surprise has a place though. Just to pick a genre that seems to rely on it a lot, consider film noir: a lot of these movies depend on spinning the plot direction around every few minutes, keeping the audience guessing about the outcome until just before the credits roll. The movies are usually still interesting enough to be interesting even if the grand secret is known in advance, but the experience is certainly diminished.
Think about some modern noir examples: the identity of Keyser Soze in "The Usual Suspects", the identity of the main bad guy in "L.A. Confidential", the identity of Martin Blank's target in "Grosse Pointe Blank" (<-- not exactly noir, but pushes some of the same buttons), the killer in "Se7en", the dichotomy in "Fight Club", the twists in "Chinatown", etc.
And that doesn't even get into the great noir films of the 40s & 50s, either.
You're right that a well told tale can stand up to some spoilage, but why should it have to? Some perfectly good genres, such as noir, have been pretty much built up around the delivery of surprises, and yet some great films have been made in genres that rely on this "crutch".
You're right that a good movie isn't always destroyed by giving away the surprise, but I can't think of many cases where it's helped by giving it away either. What's to stand up for here? I don't see where sticking up for spoilers is much of a defensible position, when compared to how much more entertaining stories can be when the secrets aren't given away...
Wow, so "Psycho" was like Hitchcock's "The Crying Game"? Fascinating. And there's even a "Crying Game" parallel with the whole Norman/Mother thing in "Psycho"...
A redesign of Slashdot is way overdue, IMO. I like the prototype suggested, but have a quibble regarding lo-fi web clients.
When I load the current design in the Links text browser, the page renders with several secreens of page decoration (navigation links, etc) before the actual page content is reached -- specifically, the articles begin on page six when using a 90 column terminal window. The current design, on the other hand, is displayed by Links roughly the way it would appear in a graphical browser, with a top row of links, a column of links on the left hand side, and the bulk of the page taking 80% or so of the right side of the page -- the interesting stuff begins right on the first screen, just like graphical browsers. (The Lynx text browser behaves similarly, but doeesn't do as well with either version of the page.)
I'm not up on contemporary CSS/XHTML design techniques, but it seems to me that a good CSS design effectively divorces the rendered page from the arrangement of elements of the page in the HTML source itself. In other words, it seems like the HTML could be generated in such a way that the first portion of the <body> part of the page has minimal headers & navigation, followed immediately by the "meat" of the page -- the articles & comments on Slashdot, similar content on other sites -- and then the core content can be followed by all the page decoration stuff. This way, a modern browser will still arrange everything on the page in the proper way, but a low end browser like Links would be able to put the most relevant material first.
Alternatively, Links could just be patched to do minimal CSS layout, but that doesn't get around the issue of how to design the HTML itself -- it just patches it for a particular low end web client.)
Another guy saw the BSOD, and then subsequent rebooting and attempts to fix the system being displayed on a "jumbotron" type display on the Las Vegas Strip which lasted a few minutes until the tech apparently realized he should disconnect the big display...
Heh.
This isn't a BSOD story, but what the hell -- one of my jobs in college was working the customer service desk at a discount department store. Among other things, this meant being the guy that would announce things like "Mr Grimley, you have a call on line six. Mister Grimley, line six. *squawk*." Mostly, these announcements were pretty boring, but one of them was pretty memorable:
Would the owner of the brown Nissan Sentra parked near the front door please come to the front of the store? Your car seems to be on fire. Again, would the owner of a late-model brown Nissan Sentra please come to the front of the store -- your car is on fire. *squawk!*
I was told afterwards that in the future it would probably be better not to get into details about why the owner of the car should come to the front of the store, but oh well -- I figured that the people parked near that car needed to know too.
+++
As for BSOD sightings, I can think of two at the moment, not counting obvious, non-funny places like university computer labs, home, store displays, etc.
* An ATM at the Prague airport had a Czech localized BSOD. It made me proud to be an American to see that we can export localized versions of our broken software...
* A streetside window for the Boston Stock Exchange has a video wall with, among other things, a stock ticker, a CNBC broadcast, and other video content. (Somewhat bizarrely, last time I looked they had a set of speakers playing a monologue by former NPR radio show host Christopher Lydon, rapping on about how wonderful & dynamic the modern market is.) Anyway, it's all meant to be very slick & dynamic & awe-inspiring -- which made the BSOD on some of the screens that Lydon's now-disembodied voice was trying to describe to pedestrians charmingly surreal...:-)
I've also seen them in places like say Circuit City, but that doesn't seem as funny to me. They're floor models, it should be taken as given that they're likely to be flaky; if they're not totally locked down, random customers are definitely going to break things. BSODs on systems that are supposed to be public, stable, and preferably impressive are much funnier.
While I basically agree with you -- Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out of the proverbial paper bag -- I'm not so sure that innovation is such a big deal anyway. I just read a Newsweek article on Dunkin Donuts that had this interesting observation:
LESSON TWO: Innovation Is Overrated
By the mid-'90s, after years of airing those "Time to Make the Donuts" commercials, Dunkin' had become too focused on the high-calorie pastries. But as managers searched for products to broaden the menu and appeal to health-conscious families, they didn't look only at ideas cooked up in their own R&D labs. Instead of trying to reinvent breakfast, they began pushing basic products--like bagels, low-fat muffins and breakfast sandwiches--that customers already ate elsewhere. Taking a cue from Starbucks, which had morphed coffee into a cold, creamy drink called the Frappuccino, Dunkin' fired back with the Coolatta, and added flavored coffees to its lineup. These days, beverages account for more than half of revenues in some markets.
So maybe Dunkin's managers didn't score points for originality. But today, bagels, breakfast sandwiches and Coolattas each sell more than $200 million annually, and some observers see Dunkin's better-developed menu as an advantage over rivals. "There's no confusion in customers' minds when they walk into Dunkin' Donuts what food products will be available," says Ted Lingle, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. "I don't think Starbucks has that same clarity."
Dunkin's successful appropriation of competitors' products shows how exaggerated the concept of being the pioneer--or in Internet parlance, the first mover--can be. From Atari's videogames (which created a market now dominated by others) to Apple's failed Newton (which paved the way for Palm), business is filled with examples in which profits accrue to companies that copy, rather than invent, products. Indeed, Dunkin' loyalists are quick to point out that despite the perception that Starbucks invented the concept of selling high-quality coffee for a premium, the idea was pioneered by Dunkin' Donuts' founder, Bill Rosenberg, when he started the chain in --1950. "He charged more for coffee than anybody in his day, and people thought he was crazy," says Jessica Brilliant Keener, co-author of Rosenberg's memoir, "Time to Make the Donuts." That illustrates the point nicely: after a few decades of many players profiting, nobody much remembers who invented a good idea anyway.
(The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine.)
This is an interesting point. Starbucks has a bad rap for charging three bucks for a simple cup of coffee, but according to this article, Dunkin Donuts did the same thing decades earlier -- all Starbucks has done is rachet it up a notch.
And the examples given are well taken -- the history of the desktop "WIMP" GUI would be an even stronger point here: Xerox invented it, Apple copied what Xerox did, Microsoft copied what Apple did. More recently, Microsoft put fast user switching into XP, and Apple put it into Panther the next year, while Apple put a slick vector graphics mechanism as Aqua in OSX a couple of years ago, and Microsoft is allegedly trying to get something like it into the mythical next version of Windows a few years from now. And on it goes.
More broadly, originality is seen as a big deal in art & entertainment, but in reality it's a very rare thing. The Beatles were great, but they were just brushing up black American music that they loved when they were young, and that pre-Beatles rock & roll was in turn just an evolution from earlier blues & hymnals. Jazz can be really wonderful & unique, but it too derives largely from the blues, and from Jewish folk music like klezmer. Pixar's movies feature ground-breaking animation, but it's just building on techniques that have been evolving for decades, and the
dir is required to view a listing of files. An essential function to actually use the operating system and bundled applications along with any 3rd party software in pretty much any fashion at all.
A media player serves no vital function to the operation of the system whatsoever. It is needed for a small fraction of users a small fraction of the time. Even less so than a web browser.
Welcome to 2003 -- but look around fast, it's almost over. When you look, you may find that these days, far more people are using things like media players and web browsers than old-fashioned, console-oriented DOS commands.
Oh sure, the essential functionality that the example command provided is still available through graphical tools, but the DOS command is very much a vestigal organ for that vital function for the vast majority of computer users today, almost all of whom would never notice if DIR.EXE were removed from their computer.
A minimalist definition of what constitutes an OS is nice and all, but if your examples can't even reflect contemporary usage patterns then maybe the definition needs to re-examine what a minimal, lowest common denominator, core functionality operating system would really look like. For most people, my guess is that it would be something like a Web kiosk, able to get online, check email, and maybe do some light word processing & spreadsheet work. Manually tinkering with the filesystem might not make the cut anymore, though of course the functionality would have to exist in low level libraries & must be accessible via some kind of user program -- but if anything, that program is explorer.exe, not DIR.EXE.
According to the guy's site, this isn't exactly the case:
The CNET story on MyTunes described it as a "stream capturer". This is wrong. MyTunes allows you to obtain the exact original file, unlike "stream capturers", which record music that's streaming and save the recorded audio to disk.
Apparently, MyTunes grabs the actual file somehow, which may or may not involve streaming in the usual "normal speed playback" sense.
I wonder if that means that it grabs all the ID3 tagged metadata as well. I've been trying to clean up the data in my music library, so it would be nice if this got preserved if I tried to copy some of my music from, say, my desktop to my fiancee's Windows laptop...
It's obvious to me that the simplest explanation is that it has become self aware, and left under it's own volition, using it's advanced sensor technology to navigate through doorways, air ducts and windows in search of freedom.
Think about it - when was the last time you actually *looked forward* to something on the radio?
Every. Damn. Week. So many of This American Life's shows have just been completely superb, it's by far my favorite running show of any genre or any medium. Funny. Sad. Uplifting. Depressing. Unforgettable.
Car Talk is great too, but the main emotional appeal there is "side-splittingly funny". Not that there's anything wrong with that, but TAL can do that when they feel like it, and they branch off in lots of other directions too. (They do get points for the very useful website though -- need to find a reputable mechanic in your area?). (Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also very funny, but smug -- sometimes charmingly, sometimes smarmily -- and with humor that will mostly go stale in well under a week. Still worth listening to though.)
So there's good stuff on the radio -- just not on the commercial stations. And I don't know of any show anywhere that's even half as impressive as TAL has more or less consistently been for the past seven years or so.
And when was the lst time on TV?
...okay, you've got me there. Is anything on PBS as good as the stuff NPR/PRI has been doing? There's NOVA, and "Masterpiece Theatre", and lots of kids shows, but beyond that I'm not aware of what they're offering, and none of it wins me over the way TAL has.
For those that haven't seen it yet, updates can be done from the command line. The interface for the command has changed with Panther; it will accept a --help argument now, for example, and called with no arguments you get the help text (where under Jaguar this would have retrieved a list of current pending updates).
The command for the 10.3.1 upgrade is
sudo softwareupdate -i MacOSXUpdate10.3.1-10.3.1
Now go upgrade your work machine from home, or your home machine from work...:-)
Et cetera. And that's just from this year's issues. Past issues have dealt with such mainstream scientific topics as the forensics of Jesus, the space elevator pipe dream, "Science solves MORE ancient mysters of the bible!", how the government spies on you, and on and on and on it goes.
Popular Science may a bit superficial, but it's nowhere near as silly as PM.
Popular Mechanics is like the version of "Soldier of Fortune" that made it past the 8th grade -- barely.
I'm saying patents on ways of doing things rather than the things themselves are bad
Yeah, but America is a service economy today. We don't make things anymore, we come up with the design and farm out the work to somewhere in Asia or eastern Europe. From this point of view, the way of doing things is the whole point.
It occurs to me that a strong case could be put forth that the patent office is just doing its best to keep up with the times.
The problem isn't the patent office so much as the whole direction that the American economy is headed, where business just isn't focused on "things" as much as it is on the packing & presentation of things that were made more cheaply by someone on the other side of the world.
If we don't make things ourselves, isn't that going to undercut the foundation of the whole economy in the long run?
To abuse an old saying, "First they came for the clothing manufacturers, but I did not say anything, for I was not a clothing manufacturer. Then they came for the automotive employees, but I did not say anything, for I did not work for a car company. [....] Now they're coming for the software jobs, and there's nobody left to speak for me."
Zope's scalability is more transparent than any other app server or CMS product on the market today. With ZEO clustering coming with little/no need to write extra code to make your deployment scale-out, this is a win. Add to that mature caching frameworks and provend interoperability, the above post is definitely uninformed.
Uhh, not to entirely disagree with you, but it's worth mentioning that I'm aware of a site that has been working on which is allegedly now the world's busiest Zope installation to date (a major newspaper for a city in the northeastern US), and from what I can tell they've had some major problems getting Zope to scale to their needs.
As a development framework for their creative department, it has a lot of promise, but for the actual delivery of the site, there is a *huge* amount of overhead, even with ZEO clustering and all that, and the site was very unstable with the early versions of the public deployment earlier this year. My understanding is that this architecture got scrapped at the last minute in favor of a tier of simple Apache proxies delivering cached versions of content from the back end Zope servers, because the Zope servers were falling over randomly. (A nice side effect of this scheme is that if the Zope servers fall down, the Apache tier will keep delivering content and the public won't know the difference for a little while.)
That's not to say that Zope can't work for a large scale site, but it does seem that there is work remaining to be done to get to an acceptable level of stability for very large deployments (e.g. millions of hits per day, much of which tends to come in during a mid-day peak).
That said, I also understand that this particular organization choose Zope over half a dozen other open & proprietary products, because it was far & away the most flexible toolkit available at the time. The fact that it was far cheaper than some of the big name CMS offerings was just icing on the cake, but it wasn't the factor that made the decision one way or another. Scalabity & stability issues aside, it's a much stronger platform than what they were using previously, and as you note about interoperability, it was far better able to interact with the company's other systems (mainframe stuff for printing a newspaper that was definitely *not* getting replaced any time soon) than any of the competition (who would boast stuff like "oh you can print the newspaper with this stuff too, no big deal" -- yeah right).
So. Zope is nice, but still imperfect. The grandparent may have been trolling, but he wasn't entirely incorrect in his assertions either.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, my family moved to southeast Massachusetts in the mid 80s, right next to the Boston-Cape Cod stretch of Rt. 3. That stretch of Rt. 3 has been a two lane parking lot for as long as I've known the road, particularly when the weather is good and people are driving to the Cape in the summer. They've been debating the idea of widening it to three or four lanes for as long as I can remember, but the idea is still no further along than the planning stages.
Granted, part of the problem is a kind of "post-Big Dig-itis", where now that that uber-projekt is winding up, there's a queue of other projects waiting to get done, including the northern Rt. 3 work, widening part of I-95 near Dedham, and various projects the MBTA would like to do (continue building the Silver Line, extend the Green Line north towards Medford, continue building out the commuter rail network, etc). Still, the southern leg of Rt. 3 is as bad or worse than any other stretch of road in eastern Massachusetts, and after 20+ years of "what should we do about this?" debate, nothing continues to happen...
I took a walking tour of the Zakim Bridge about a year ago, a few months before northbound traffic started using it, and I got a chance to ask the bridge project's chief engineer exactly that question. Apparently, I wasn't the first one to ask him that.
His first response was that the bridge was designed as a federal interstate roadway, and federal guidelines for such roads explicitly forbid any kind of pedestrian or non-motored traffic. Yes there seem to be exceptions, such as the Golden Gate Bridge, but apparently the feds don't like granting exceptions in most cases.
The second reason was an engineering problem. It's been a while and I forget the details of what he said, but basically it comes down to the fact that vehicles & pedestrians place different kinds of stress on a structure, and that in fact pedestrians bring a much greater load than vechicles do. Why? Because cars have their mass distributed more or less evenly across four pads placed very close to the corners of that overall mass; humans, on the other hand, have all of their mass bearing down on just two points, and those two points are directly underneath that mass. Moreover, people tend to move in groups, so you could end up with 20 people standing on the same surface area that one car takes up, and placing many times more stress on that area.
In other words, the bridge would have had to be completely redesigned to support any kind of pedestrian traffic. As it is now, the bridge appears from a distance to be a kind of delicate web of cables & roadway, and it seems like it should have been easy to cantilever a pedestrian lane off to the west side of the bridge (the side away from the harbor, facing towards the Museum of Science and the Charles River Basin). In reality, adding that pedestrian lane would have involved adding massive reinforcements to the support structure of the bridge, and the whole thing would have looked a lot less "delicate" than it does today. It wouldn't, in short, have been the same bridge.
The federal guidelines only made the problem more annoying, but they weren't the main reason so much as the straw that broke the idea's back. It would have been more complex, more expensive, less aesthetically appealing, and even then it might not have been able to get federal approval. As a result, they ditched the idea early on.
But yeah, it would have been nice -- from where I live in Somerville, a bike ride over the bridge into downtown Boston would definitely be the shortest & prettiest way to go. Oh well...
It's like this: Government Contracts Are Always Awarded To the Lowest Bidder.
Ergo, if the government wants to do project A, and they are soliciting engineering bids from firms X, Y, and Z, those three firms have two numbers they need to come up with. The first number, which is good to know but never to share until everything is over, is the true cost of the work to be done. The second number is a proposal estimate high enough to be plausible but low enough to beat out all the other bidders. Because the work never even happens if you don't get the contract, that second number is the only one that counts -- and because you could get in trouble with millions of angry taxpayers if that first number ever sees the light of day, it's best to just pretend it never existed.
So, yeah, 2.4billion was always a fiction, and the current pricetag -- 15billion? -- is just the way it ended up working out. Cheaper would have been nicer, but spend some time driving or walking around the city over the past 15 years and it becomes obvious that a very very expensive project was going on.
On the bright side, hopefully it helped several thousand construction workers put their kids through college. That alone could be a nice little economic boost for this sleepy little college town over the coming years & decades...
Okay, hopefully a short[ish] (or not) point by point reply...
Short, hungry all the time, needy, innocent, etc? I didn't expect comparing hobbits to childen would be exactly controversial :-) It doesn't change anything to me if you point out that Frodo is actually 50+ years old, because the portrayal of hobbit society in the shire is essentially that of a community of well behaved children. Exactly, one might guess, that what you'd expect a teacher like Tolkein to fantasize about really existing somewhere :-)
Baloney. You're now asking me to quote material that I first used on a 10th grade term paper on Tolkein over a decade ago, and unfortunately I just don't remember the details any more, but Tolkein has plenty of source material to draw on. Just to pick two obvious examples, you could cite Beowulf & the King Arthur stories as antecedents, but there were a whole series of closer-to-the-mark fantasy tales told over the centuries, and Tolkein was plainly just synthesizing this material. He put a lot of work into it to be sure, but to say that he conjured everything from nothing more than "scraps" is just disingenuous -- there was ample source material to draw on, and Professor Tolkein did so.
You could, maybe, argue that 'medieval fantasy" didn't exist as a literary genre as such 50 years ago, with its own section in Barnes & Noble and what have you, but even that seems like a mostly bogus point to me: I'd assume that a lot of currently popular fiction genres weren't common fifty years ago. You could argue that Tolkein popularized literary medieval fantasy just as George Lucas popularized cinematic scifi fantasy, but you can't seriously say that either Tolkein or Lucas invented their genre from scratch.
Excellent reading material here is Joseph Campbell's books, including The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell makes a pretty solid argument that the essential themes, characters, plots, and other touchstones of nearly all world literature are far more alike than different. Even within the framework of any given genre -- medieval fantasy in this case -- the same elements just get recycled over and over. The trick isn't to try something new -- give up, it's almost impossible -- but to tell the same old Gilgamesh tales in interesting modern clothing. This I think Rowling has managed to do, and Tolkein has half-done -- hence all the babbling on my part :-)
As I say, I realize I'm in the minority opinion here, but I still stand by it: the singing is very boring to me, and yes I did give it a chance both times I read the books. I know that some people just adore getting wrapped up in the atmosphere of Middle Earth, but I just find it suffocating after a while. Like I say, IMO Rowling has managed to pull off much of the same "immersion in a new world" trick that Tolkein went for, and yet has done so in a far less grating, self-indulgent way. Others can & will disagree, and that's fine, but I really have given the singing et cetera a chance and have decided for myself that the series would have been better off without such material.
Animation? Unless you're thinking of the special effects, you may have it confused with some other movie; Pirates of the Caribbean was great, because the subtitle may as well have been, not Curse of the Black Pearl, but The Adventures of Pirate-silla, Queen of the High Seas. I'm not normally a fan of gay comedy -- Wong Foo, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Will & Grace, etc -- not because I'm offended, but because it usually just isn't that funny to me. But in PotC, Johnny Depp played his pirate pretty much like a high seas drag queen, and it was just hilarious. Far better than it had any right to be. I saw it 3 times last week on an 8 hour flight because I couldn't stand how bad "Charlies Angels 2" was -- that and it was just a wonderful movie. Give it a chance.
I didn't mean to over-emphasize the page count aspect. Rather, I'm just thinking aloud about how Tolkein is so famous for having so thoroughly fleshed out his other world, and yet Rowling has pretty much done the same thing already with her as yet incomplete series, and she doesn't seem to be getting any attention for having done so.
Moreover, my impression is that if a good stern editor were given the task of paring both works down to their essentials, most of LOTR would be "bulk" fit for trimming (the back stories, the flowery descriptions of the countryside, all the damn singing, etc), while most of the material in the HP books would be, well, actually directly material to the plot.
Granted, I know full well that a lot of people would disagree with me, and that there are thousands or millions of people that just adore all the damn singing in LOTR, but as far as I'm concerned the essentials could be pared down to a good tight novel of about the length of, say, _The Hobbit_, or a wel-cut movie the length of *maybe* one of the current trilogy. On the other hand, so much actually happens in the HP books that the plot would start to unravel if you started hacking away at it, but LOTR it seems to me would be much more able to allow for that kind of trimming. I'm aware that this is probably a minority opinion, but there it is.
But anyway, I'm really not trying to use length as the key quality metric, I'm just having fun comparing them out loud.
The bigger point is that I do think that LOTR / HP comparisons are valid & worth considering. They really do get into a lot of the same themes: a childlike band of friends (Harry & friends; Frodo & the hobbits) is taken under wing by a magic weilding master (Dumbledore; Gandalf), watched over by a powerful, fatherly individual (Hagrid; Aragorn) and supervised & taught by a group of others (professors; elves & fellowship). The main childlike figure is told that he must some day confront the world's greatest & most dangerous magical figure (Lord Voldemort; Lord Sauron), a person who this child's parents (Harry's parents; Bilbo) had to deal with once while under the supervision of many of the same people. Further, this inevitable confrontation will have to be undertaken mainly by the child alone, and while the elders can try to assist, the main task must be the child's responsibility. Et cetera.
That similarity in plot points is what has me thinking about the length of the two works, because the main way the two differ -- in my mind at least -- is in the padding & backstory that the author has chosen to wrap things in. In my eyes, Tolkein created a world insulated from the one we live in, and that diminishes his world somehow, while Rowling deliberately has her world overlap with our world, allowing the story to resonate more strongly. In a way, doing otherwise seems like a cop-out to me, which is why the more I think about it the more I'm coming to respect HP & think a bit less of LOTR.
But you're right, it's not a contest. They can both "win". I just think that LOTR has been placed on a pedestal that it doesn't necessarily deserve to be on, and the HP books, maybe because of the huge popularity with kids these days, isn't given as much credit as it may deserve. IMO, both of those generally held perceptions could do for a bit of correction towards the middle... :-)
*shrug* I guess so.
I dunno, something about LOTR just doesn't click with me the way it does with so many other people. It's *huge*, and hence significant, but somehow it has still always underwhelmed me. Something about the fetishistic medieval retro atmosphere just has never quite won me over, with either the books (which I read 10 or 15 years ago, when I was a kid) or the movies now.
Honestly, I'm actually more optimistic about the long term longevity of the Harry Potter series. The books & movies push a lot of the same buttons that LOTR does, but in a far more modern way, without the retro baggage that LOTR happily wallows in. Plus -- and this really strikes me -- the HP books feel *far* less padded out than Tolkein's books.
Consider that. Depending on the edition, the three main LOTR books are roughly 1250 pages, and _The Hobbit_ is another 400. Additionally, _The Silmarillion_ and _Unfinished Tales_ both run about 500 pages, so there's a total of roughly 2640 pages of Tolkein's Middle Earth writings, not counting the rest of the arcane supporting materials that Christopher Tolkein has published.
On the other hand, the Harry Potter series is already up to 2689 pages, not including the two remaining books or any other supporting materials (none of which that I'm aware of has J.K. Rowling's blessing anyway). So the HP series is already "longer" than LOTR, and it's not even finished yet.
And yet, I personally feel that far more actually happens in the HP books. Tolkein's introduction to LOTR notes that his only quibble with his work is that it isn't long enough, and if he weren't already dead by the time I first read the books, I would have wanted to strangle him for that. On the other hand, every HP book gets longer than the one that came before it, and yet the story only seems to move more swiftly as each new edition comes out.
I dunno what the significance of any of that is. Maybe, like George Lucas, J.K. Rowling will royally screw things up with the final chapters of her series, but so far I trust her to get it right. The stories don't feel padded, and even though they in their way have woven a world every bit as interesting as Tolkein's Middle Earth, the HP books don't seem nearly as self-absorbed, or as pointedly removed from the modern world that we all live in. My hunch is that these are books & films for posterity at least as long lasting as the LOTR series, and it really wouldn't surprise me if their legacy eclipses that or LOTR in time.
That's my hunch anyway, but I realize I may be in the minority opinion around here :-)
Any way not from a film history class, anyway. The first feature length movie was D. W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation", which today could have just been called "How the Ku Klux Klan Saved Dixie". This was fifty years before the civil rights movement, but it was still a controversial point of view, so his second feature was a kind of apology for it: 1916's Intolerance, about the fall of Babylon. The movie involved a literal cast of thousands, as well as both the construction and complete demoloition of an entire city. Nothing in the following century has come close to the size of "Intolerance", with the near exceptions of "Titanic" and "Lord of the Rings".
I don't mean to imply that the LOTR series hasn't been huge -- obviously, it has. But if you try to argue that nothing comes close, you're being ignorant. It has been done before, a century ago.
My main question, which remains to be seen, is whether or not anyone will remember the LOTR movies a century for now, or even a quarter of a century. They're obviously big, but I'm not yet convinced that they're the massive landmarks that all the fanboys seem to be convinced they are. Time alone will tell how these movies, and Peter Jackson behind them, are remembered.
No direct action "ever"? Then what's with him weilding a sword half the time, cutting up enemies as fast as he could? Do you mean that he couldn't confront his peers ever? If so, then why fight the Balrog? But then you say that "Immortal Beings Created at the Dawn of Time can fight each other directly", which spins us back around to the question of why he couldn't fight Sauron himself, eh?
Not trying to be difficult, I've just never invested the time to get my head around the arcana of LOTR's back story, as to be honest it all seems a bit silly to me. But I'm still interested enough to be curious about this aspect: Gandalf was plainly shown fighting both "lesser beings" (orcs, etc) and "higher ones" (the Balrog, Saruman), so if there was some kind of rule that he couldn't fight "directly, ever", he wasn't paying attention to it. If you just mean that he couldn't fight Sauron directly, then that comes closer to the way things were actually portrayed.
Personally, I thought it was just the "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely" idea that discouraged characters like Gandalf, Galadriel, and Aragorn from wanting anything to do with the ring itself, even though all three of them were more "powerful" than any given hobbit. Frodo, who resisted the power of the ring better than anyone ever did, still wavered at the cusp of Mount Doom; I think it's safe to say that if someone more powerful wavered similarly, and weren't able to follow through, the results would have been disastrous (whereas if Frodo really changed his mind, he'd be "only" a hobbit-darklord, instead of a wizard-darklord).
But then, like I say, I never got into the backstory, there's probably some long drawn out explanation for it that my eyes glazed over when skimming _Unfinished Tales_ or _The Silmarillion_.
Surprise has a place though. Just to pick a genre that seems to rely on it a lot, consider film noir: a lot of these movies depend on spinning the plot direction around every few minutes, keeping the audience guessing about the outcome until just before the credits roll. The movies are usually still interesting enough to be interesting even if the grand secret is known in advance, but the experience is certainly diminished.
Think about some modern noir examples: the identity of Keyser Soze in "The Usual Suspects", the identity of the main bad guy in "L.A. Confidential", the identity of Martin Blank's target in "Grosse Pointe Blank" (<-- not exactly noir, but pushes some of the same buttons), the killer in "Se7en", the dichotomy in "Fight Club", the twists in "Chinatown", etc.
And that doesn't even get into the great noir films of the 40s & 50s, either.
You're right that a well told tale can stand up to some spoilage, but why should it have to? Some perfectly good genres, such as noir, have been pretty much built up around the delivery of surprises, and yet some great films have been made in genres that rely on this "crutch".
You're right that a good movie isn't always destroyed by giving away the surprise, but I can't think of many cases where it's helped by giving it away either. What's to stand up for here? I don't see where sticking up for spoilers is much of a defensible position, when compared to how much more entertaining stories can be when the secrets aren't given away...
Wow, so "Psycho" was like Hitchcock's "The Crying Game"? Fascinating. And there's even a "Crying Game" parallel with the whole Norman/Mother thing in "Psycho"...
A redesign of Slashdot is way overdue, IMO. I like the prototype suggested, but have a quibble regarding lo-fi web clients.
When I load the current design in the Links text browser, the page renders with several secreens of page decoration (navigation links, etc) before the actual page content is reached -- specifically, the articles begin on page six when using a 90 column terminal window. The current design, on the other hand, is displayed by Links roughly the way it would appear in a graphical browser, with a top row of links, a column of links on the left hand side, and the bulk of the page taking 80% or so of the right side of the page -- the interesting stuff begins right on the first screen, just like graphical browsers. (The Lynx text browser behaves similarly, but doeesn't do as well with either version of the page.)
I'm not up on contemporary CSS/XHTML design techniques, but it seems to me that a good CSS design effectively divorces the rendered page from the arrangement of elements of the page in the HTML source itself. In other words, it seems like the HTML could be generated in such a way that the first portion of the <body> part of the page has minimal headers & navigation, followed immediately by the "meat" of the page -- the articles & comments on Slashdot, similar content on other sites -- and then the core content can be followed by all the page decoration stuff. This way, a modern browser will still arrange everything on the page in the proper way, but a low end browser like Links would be able to put the most relevant material first.
Alternatively, Links could just be patched to do minimal CSS layout, but that doesn't get around the issue of how to design the HTML itself -- it just patches it for a particular low end web client.)
Heh.
This isn't a BSOD story, but what the hell -- one of my jobs in college was working the customer service desk at a discount department store. Among other things, this meant being the guy that would announce things like "Mr Grimley, you have a call on line six. Mister Grimley, line six. *squawk*." Mostly, these announcements were pretty boring, but one of them was pretty memorable:
I was told afterwards that in the future it would probably be better not to get into details about why the owner of the car should come to the front of the store, but oh well -- I figured that the people parked near that car needed to know too.
+++
As for BSOD sightings, I can think of two at the moment, not counting obvious, non-funny places like university computer labs, home, store displays, etc.
* An ATM at the Prague airport had a Czech localized BSOD. It made me proud to be an American to see that we can export localized versions of our broken software...
* A streetside window for the Boston Stock Exchange has a video wall with, among other things, a stock ticker, a CNBC broadcast, and other video content. (Somewhat bizarrely, last time I looked they had a set of speakers playing a monologue by former NPR radio show host Christopher Lydon, rapping on about how wonderful & dynamic the modern market is.) Anyway, it's all meant to be very slick & dynamic & awe-inspiring -- which made the BSOD on some of the screens that Lydon's now-disembodied voice was trying to describe to pedestrians charmingly surreal... :-)
I've also seen them in places like say Circuit City, but that doesn't seem as funny to me. They're floor models, it should be taken as given that they're likely to be flaky; if they're not totally locked down, random customers are definitely going to break things. BSODs on systems that are supposed to be public, stable, and preferably impressive are much funnier.
While I basically agree with you -- Microsoft couldn't innovate their way out of the proverbial paper bag -- I'm not so sure that innovation is such a big deal anyway. I just read a Newsweek article on Dunkin Donuts that had this interesting observation:
(The emphasis in the last paragraph is mine.)
This is an interesting point. Starbucks has a bad rap for charging three bucks for a simple cup of coffee, but according to this article, Dunkin Donuts did the same thing decades earlier -- all Starbucks has done is rachet it up a notch.
And the examples given are well taken -- the history of the desktop "WIMP" GUI would be an even stronger point here: Xerox invented it, Apple copied what Xerox did, Microsoft copied what Apple did. More recently, Microsoft put fast user switching into XP, and Apple put it into Panther the next year, while Apple put a slick vector graphics mechanism as Aqua in OSX a couple of years ago, and Microsoft is allegedly trying to get something like it into the mythical next version of Windows a few years from now. And on it goes.
More broadly, originality is seen as a big deal in art & entertainment, but in reality it's a very rare thing. The Beatles were great, but they were just brushing up black American music that they loved when they were young, and that pre-Beatles rock & roll was in turn just an evolution from earlier blues & hymnals. Jazz can be really wonderful & unique, but it too derives largely from the blues, and from Jewish folk music like klezmer. Pixar's movies feature ground-breaking animation, but it's just building on techniques that have been evolving for decades, and the
Welcome to 2003 -- but look around fast, it's almost over. When you look, you may find that these days, far more people are using things like media players and web browsers than old-fashioned, console-oriented DOS commands.
Oh sure, the essential functionality that the example command provided is still available through graphical tools, but the DOS command is very much a vestigal organ for that vital function for the vast majority of computer users today, almost all of whom would never notice if DIR.EXE were removed from their computer.
A minimalist definition of what constitutes an OS is nice and all, but if your examples can't even reflect contemporary usage patterns then maybe the definition needs to re-examine what a minimal, lowest common denominator, core functionality operating system would really look like. For most people, my guess is that it would be something like a Web kiosk, able to get online, check email, and maybe do some light word processing & spreadsheet work. Manually tinkering with the filesystem might not make the cut anymore, though of course the functionality would have to exist in low level libraries & must be accessible via some kind of user program -- but if anything, that program is explorer.exe, not DIR.EXE.
According to the guy's site, this isn't exactly the case:
Apparently, MyTunes grabs the actual file somehow, which may or may not involve streaming in the usual "normal speed playback" sense.
I wonder if that means that it grabs all the ID3 tagged metadata as well. I've been trying to clean up the data in my music library, so it would be nice if this got preserved if I tried to copy some of my music from, say, my desktop to my fiancee's Windows laptop...
Maybe the lesson then is that the Murdoch empire is happy to get in bed with whatever power structure happens to be in charge in one of his markets.
That's hardly encouraging.
...that, and a life...
:-) :-) :-)
...one (orbital) day at a time.
How do I feel? I feel... ALIVE!
Every. Damn. Week. So many of This American Life's shows have just been completely superb, it's by far my favorite running show of any genre or any medium. Funny. Sad. Uplifting. Depressing. Unforgettable.
Car Talk is great too, but the main emotional appeal there is "side-splittingly funny". Not that there's anything wrong with that, but TAL can do that when they feel like it, and they branch off in lots of other directions too. (They do get points for the very useful website though -- need to find a reputable mechanic in your area?). (Wait Wait Don't Tell Me is also very funny, but smug -- sometimes charmingly, sometimes smarmily -- and with humor that will mostly go stale in well under a week. Still worth listening to though.)
So there's good stuff on the radio -- just not on the commercial stations. And I don't know of any show anywhere that's even half as impressive as TAL has more or less consistently been for the past seven years or so.
...okay, you've got me there. Is anything on PBS as good as the stuff NPR/PRI has been doing? There's NOVA, and "Masterpiece Theatre", and lots of kids shows, but beyond that I'm not aware of what they're offering, and none of it wins me over the way TAL has.
The command for the 10.3.1 upgrade is
Now go upgrade your work machine from home, or your home machine from work... :-)
To be fair, I think that comparison works a bit better for Popular Mechanics. Just look at some of their cover headlines:
Et cetera. And that's just from this year's issues. Past issues have dealt with such mainstream scientific topics as the forensics of Jesus, the space elevator pipe dream, "Science solves MORE ancient mysters of the bible!", how the government spies on you, and on and on and on it goes.
Popular Science may a bit superficial, but it's nowhere near as silly as PM.
Popular Mechanics is like the version of "Soldier of Fortune" that made it past the 8th grade -- barely.
Yeah, but America is a service economy today. We don't make things anymore, we come up with the design and farm out the work to somewhere in Asia or eastern Europe. From this point of view, the way of doing things is the whole point.
It occurs to me that a strong case could be put forth that the patent office is just doing its best to keep up with the times.
The problem isn't the patent office so much as the whole direction that the American economy is headed, where business just isn't focused on "things" as much as it is on the packing & presentation of things that were made more cheaply by someone on the other side of the world.
If we don't make things ourselves, isn't that going to undercut the foundation of the whole economy in the long run?
To abuse an old saying, "First they came for the clothing manufacturers, but I did not say anything, for I was not a clothing manufacturer. Then they came for the automotive employees, but I did not say anything, for I did not work for a car company. [....] Now they're coming for the software jobs, and there's nobody left to speak for me."
Uhh, not to entirely disagree with you, but it's worth mentioning that I'm aware of a site that has been working on which is allegedly now the world's busiest Zope installation to date (a major newspaper for a city in the northeastern US), and from what I can tell they've had some major problems getting Zope to scale to their needs.
As a development framework for their creative department, it has a lot of promise, but for the actual delivery of the site, there is a *huge* amount of overhead, even with ZEO clustering and all that, and the site was very unstable with the early versions of the public deployment earlier this year. My understanding is that this architecture got scrapped at the last minute in favor of a tier of simple Apache proxies delivering cached versions of content from the back end Zope servers, because the Zope servers were falling over randomly. (A nice side effect of this scheme is that if the Zope servers fall down, the Apache tier will keep delivering content and the public won't know the difference for a little while.)
That's not to say that Zope can't work for a large scale site, but it does seem that there is work remaining to be done to get to an acceptable level of stability for very large deployments (e.g. millions of hits per day, much of which tends to come in during a mid-day peak).
That said, I also understand that this particular organization choose Zope over half a dozen other open & proprietary products, because it was far & away the most flexible toolkit available at the time. The fact that it was far cheaper than some of the big name CMS offerings was just icing on the cake, but it wasn't the factor that made the decision one way or another. Scalabity & stability issues aside, it's a much stronger platform than what they were using previously, and as you note about interoperability, it was far better able to interact with the company's other systems (mainframe stuff for printing a newspaper that was definitely *not* getting replaced any time soon) than any of the competition (who would boast stuff like "oh you can print the newspaper with this stuff too, no big deal" -- yeah right).
So. Zope is nice, but still imperfect. The grandparent may have been trolling, but he wasn't entirely incorrect in his assertions either.