If it makes you feel better -- well, it won't, you live in DC now, but for those of us still in the Boston area -- that intersection is a known problem, and is finally going to get fixed. Quoted here in part, with no changes in emphasis from Mac Daniel's funny writing style, the article says:
Fix begins for Columbia Road nexus
Undoing what may be worst intersection
By Mac Daniel, Globe Staff, 10/12/2003
Last Thursday, without much fanfare, one of the greatest transportation events in the history of Boston began when a group of city officials and neighborhood activists gathered on a grassy triangle in Dorchester and broke ground to fix one of the most convoluted, dangerous, and generally messed-up intersections in the known universe. Yes, dear reader, the so-called "Intersection from Hell" at the Columbia Road exit from the Southeast Expressway by the JFK/UMass Red Line stop is about to be sent back to from whence it came.
In an article a year ago, we described the intersection as an "untamed and unholy transit matrix, a gantlet of metal and tension that requires drivers to look in two directions at once while making split-second decisions more appropriate to NASCAR or alligator wrestling than driving a car." "Speed demons brake here," we wrote.
We and 33,999 others drive here daily, guided only by a strange set of blinking red lights and our frayed wits.
Every now and again, if a pedestrian should want to cross this no man's land, the lights stop blinking and the "Walk [if you dare]" sign pops on. But who cares, right?
Cars and trucks and school buses, so flustered by the intersection, make a very dangerous habit of motoring through the solid red just to reach the other side.
The directional arrows on the pavement mean nothing. Cars have been known to take a left turn off Columbia to the ramp leading to the Southeast Expressway from the middle lane, prompting one of the strangest traffic signs in all of Boston: "No Turns from Outer Lane."
[....]
He may use the shovel himself, Sherman joked, if the project drags on. The timeline to fix it? You guessed it: by the time the Democratic National Convention comes to town in July 2004.
<hhgttg> This must be some new definition of "underground" that I was previously unaware of. </hhgttg>
And there I was thinking that "underground" meant things like a small budget, a small studio, or possibly a story that's actually unusual. Or possibly all three. It never occurred to me that it might include a sixty-three million dollar movie released by frickin Warner Brothers.
+++++
I'm with the grandparent: the simulatenous worldwide release was a gimmick to get people out to see the movie rather than allow bad reviews in the US to scuttle the prospects for the third installment. The fact that it was released on a Wednesday doesn't contradict this -- there are stiill diehards who will show up at least once, and maybe multiple times, so a long opening "weekend" will boost the movie's numbers. But the second movie was a disappointment to a lot of people, and my guess is that a lot of the people who saw it did so only out of the expectation that the third installment would explain everything away. Based on the reviews & the comments I've seen, those expectations are being confounded -- which suggests to me that the third movie is going to do much worse than the earlier ones. Maybe not a bomb, but nothing stellar either.
Personally, I thought the first one was overrated from the outset. It was just another silly action movie -- more akin to, say, Blade than something truly thoughtful like, say, most of Terry Gilliam's films. I haven't bothered wasting my time with the sequels, but from everything that I've read -- and I've read a lot, trying to figure out what people see in this tedious series -- the sequels have only been worse than the original. My suspicion is that I was just being contrarian in not liking the first one, but the sequels have brought a lot of people around to a similar point of view.
Personally, I think that all the people who allegedly based their master's theses on the Matrix moviees are going to be very embarassed for themselves in a decade or so:-). There are thoughtful, philosophical movies out there, but there's more to it than just name-dropping some grad school fodder in a silly action series. That's about as smart as Kevin Kline's character in A Fish Called Wanda:
Wanda: To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I've known sheep who could outwit you. I've worn dresses with higher IQs, but you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape? Otto: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!
As far as I'm concerned, she may have well been addressing the Wachowski brothers:-)
I attended one of his seminars in the spring, based on how much I liked the books when I picked them up a few years ago, and it felt like a complete retread of the same material that I'd already read -- parts of which I've read several times, for that matter.
The whole seminar was just waving around his books with a "gee, aren't these just wonderful" wave of self-awe, with an entertaining -- but if you've read the books, massively redundant -- overview of the themes in the books.
There was a sliver of new material, where he ripped on PowerPoint and, specifically, a presentation that Boeing engineers made about the foam debris damage before the Columbia dister earlier this year. This was interesting, and this material ended up being fleshed out into the Wired article & pamphlet that he's selling now (at the time, it sounded like it would end up being a chapter in a future fourth volume in his book series), but based on his other comments about computer interfaces, it wasn't hard to guess that this guy was going to hate the average PowerPoint presentation.
My one rebuttal to the "PowerPoint is evil" assertion is Damian Conway: the talks he gives to Perl Mongers are the best PowerPoint shows I've ever seen. But then, he does a lot of them, so he gets more chances to practice & polish...:-)
But anyway, yeah. Tufte gives a decent seminar, but if you've already read the books then you might not get a whole lot out of it that you haven't already absorbed two or three times already. The handouts are nice, but the big one is a set of books that you may have already owned (I ended up giving mine to a friend as a graduation present from art school). For the same money, you could just buy a few book sets and share them with your friends, and you'd all get the same information...
Univision is owned by NBC, and thus General Electric. They're just as tainted as FOX or CNN.
Also, I believe it's Deutsche Welle. The pronounciation sounds like "wella" in English, but it's an -e, not a -a, in German.
If anyone owns DW or al-Jazeera, I don't currently know about it. But then, neither of them has much of a presence in North America, and of the ones that are available, they're almost all part of one or another conglomerate. The main exceptions I can think of would be PBS, NPR, and (if your area or cable provider offers access) BBC World -- but then people. But then, they're driving under the influence, too...
He also gets into computer interface design in Visual Explanations. He cites the very low resolution of computer displays, using the interface from a Beethoven CD-ROM, and contrasts this against a guide he helped design for the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Naturally Tufte prefers his own stuff, but with his museum system he makes the same point that he's hammering on about now with PowerPoint: he does the best he can with the software interface, but the key is to provide a good handout -- if you go to a kiosk and look up where a given exhibit is, you can print out a high quality map with both verbal & visual instructions guiding the visitor to her goal. The interface itself is just a "best approximation" of the information that, in his opinion, really works better on paper than a computer screen.
Not that I disagree in general -- there's no arguing the fact that even a cheap bubble jet or dot matrix printer has many times better resolution than even the highest end computer display systems (75 or 100 dpi for a monitor is typical; 300 dpi for a printer is no big deal) -- but it seems to me that Tufte is a bit too defeatist about all this. Paper may look better, but it's a hell of a lot less dynamic, and dynamism is the whole point of computer interfaces. Poor resolution or not, we need the best UI possible for our computer displays, and IMO people like, say, Jakob Nielsen seem to have more constructive criticism than Tufte with his "man, these things suck compared to paper" defeatism.
Congratulations, you've reimplemented IconFactory'siPulse. Quoting the blurb about the software, as run on both Apple & IF's site:
About iPulse
Using its concise and visually pleasing graphical user interface, iPulse displays a multitude of information on the desktop or in the dock. The entire UI is completely configurable so you can turn off gauges you don't want, leaving only what you are interested in for easy viewing.
Rated Four Mice by MacWorld Magazine, May, 2003.
iPulse's Gauges:
- CPU activity (single and dual)
- System load over time
- Network activity (packets in & out)
- Memory activity and usage
- Battery & wireless signal strength
- Network & disk peak activity indicators
- Disk usage
- Current time and date
It's Mac only shareware, but it's it's neat software, and I've been hoping for similar (but preferably open sourced) software for other platforms. Glad to see someone is working on it:-)
One interesting thing is the Libertarian Party is the only semi-mainstream media or political entity I've seen that signs (at least some) of its press releases with PGP.
If your primary constituency was wingnuts on Slashdot & Usenet, you'd probably pander to their pet predilictions too.
The Republicans seem to have a better strategy though -- own a company that makes electronic election machines, and then push for the adoption of electronic election machines such as those made by -- quelle surprise -- your election machine company. Eliminate the middleman!
Thats like saying just because I go into Best Buy and do some window shopping, I'm required to give them money.
There's an ethical case to be made for blocking ads, but that wasn't the one.
Part of the problem with your analogy is that you're displacing the source of income. With an electronics store, that income is sales of the products on display. With an online publication -- or a television show, magazine, or newspaper -- the income is more likely to be sales of eyeballs to their advertisers.
Think about it. The cover price of the average daily newspaper covers only about 15% or so of the cost to print that newspaper (figure that the average paper is around $0.50 or $1.00 these days, and the printing cost can be around $4.00 per issue). Magazines, with their glossy full color pages, cost even more -- maybe $10 or $15 an issue. But the newsstand cost for that is a fraction of the total price -- why? Because advertisers are paying for the bulk of it. The newsstand price is set just high enough to make people feel like they're getting something of significance, but not high enough to actually cover any significant portion of the production cost. That way, the product -- the audience, not the publication -- has a higher perceived value for the customer -- the advertisers, not the audience -- and they can set higher rates for selling that audience.
The point here is that mass media publications have a wholly separate set of variables than traditional retail stores do, so comparing one to the other is bogus.
++++
That doesn't necessarily invalidate your assertion that the customer isn't obligated to support anybody's business model, but it doesn't back you up, either.
Care to try again? I'm sincerely interested in hearing you take another go at it.
As a former advertising sysadmin, who has always been generally sympathetic with the "ads suck" point of view while also congnizant of the "ads pay the bills" reality, the behavior you describe is very bad.
If you just want to block ads, block them -- I know Mozilla can do this, though I forget if it works out of the box or if AdBlock is necessary for it.
Blocking ads is IMO ethically questionable, but there is a case to be made for it and I'm not going to stop anyone from doing it.
But at least simple blocking is honest. This "download but hide" scheme you describe is both dishonest & wasteful.
It's dishonest, because the admins on that remote site will record that ad X was delivered Y times, when in reality it was actually seen Y-N times, where N is some difficult to quantify number (small now, but likely to grow over time). This can completely screw up accounts, budgets, contracts, etc.
It's also wasteful, because the user has to waste time downloading files that they never even see (not that they wanted the ads either, but they're not even coming out ahead this way), and it's driving up the bandwidth bill for the site.
---
If you want to filter ads, just filter them -- edit your hosts file or do something equivalent that prevents the download from happening in the first place. You won't waste time downloading anything you don't want to see, and the site will have more accurate data while not eating into their bandwidth bill so badly.
I still think this is ethically questionable -- most ads aren't that bad, and I'd rather look at & ignore a few ads than have to pay to access most sites. But some ads really are just obnoxious (hint to graphic designers: be merciful with loops & flashes, for the love of ghod) and I can sympathize with the desire to avoid those kinds of computer pollution. Keep in mind though that for most of those sites, you're getting in for free, and ask yourself if the ad is really so obnoxious that you want to circumvent the only viable free-to-users revenue stream that anyone has managed to come up with to date.
There's no good reason your mailserver or each machine in your SQL Server farm needs a GUI.
No kidding...that's why we don't use Windows.
Yeah, you and a few thousand / million other admins -- I'm sure that's exactly why Microsoft is doing this.
Huzzah, competition -- Microsoft is listening to why people think Linux makes for a better server operating system, and why, and they're incorporating systems that try to meet those needs back into Windows.
This sort of good thing from Microsoft would happen all the time if they had other serious threats to their hegemony. Too bad we've got a Justice Department that could care less about things like a fair market...
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
I would LOVE aPython based shell though that let me do pretty much everything I do in bash as easily.
Maybe no one is working on it because it's already here?
$ python
Python 2.3.2 (#1, Oct 7 2003, 10:02:44)
[GCC 3.1 20020420 (prerelease)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>
It may not be polished as a general purpose interactive shell -- hard things are possible, but simple things aren't necessarily easy -- but it's certainly a decent start.
I'm mostly a Perl guy, but Python's interactive shell is a fantastic tool for rapid script development.
Oh heavens, mustard they always be behind the times like so? I relish the day that they ketchup with the progress that we have on the Unix side, but really -- is it always going to be their roll to be behind the times? Cheese, lettuce hope they show more progress tomato than they had yesterday. It's like they haven't even bacon to take things seriously, ya know?
How do you figure, out of curiosity? Wouldn't these occasional defragmentation operations tend to counteract the power saving option that puts the drive to sleep as much as possible? Or do you assume that wouldn't be an issue because the defrags only happen when you're using the drive anyway? Even if that's the case, this is still causing more disc activity than would happen ordinarily, so I can't see how there would be a net gain as far as power saving for the battery goes...
You'd probably have to take that up with Apple, but I suspect that the tool is seen as a userland one rather than a system level one, hence/usr/bin instead of just/bin. I've just checked on two Solaris machines (`uname -r` one gives 5.7, the other gives 5.8) and one Linux machine (RedHat 6.2), and all three of them have their head utility at/usr/bin/head -- so it's not just OSX that puts head in with the userland toolkit in/usr/bin.
I think the fix you're grasping for is to put LWP's HEAD in something like/usr/local/bin or/opt/bin with the rest of the manually installed programs that are not part of the default distribution. Aside from the $PATH issue that you hint at, this should be a portable, non-destructive solution to the problem.
The only complication I can think of is that the local/manual bin/ dir tends to be in different places on different systems -- OSX doesn't ship with an/opt tree, for example, but most Solaris systems do. The Fink project for Unix software on OSX likes to use/sw, but this is non-standard, and manually putting stuff in there could interfere with packages managed by Fink itself. I think that/usr/local is nearly universal across distributions & versions & SysV vs. BSD lineages, but I've heard some people complain about it, so I'm sure that some systems at least won't even have that.
Writing LWP in such a way that it can sniff out & use the correct local installation directory may seem to be more trouble than it's worth to correct a problem that, to date, is only apparent on systems running on top of the HFS+ filesystem. There's a case to be made for "fixing" LWP to be more portable, but the counter-argument to that -- which has been winning since 1999 or so, when people first started trying to install LWP on their OSX Public Beta machines in fairly large numbers -- has been "you Mac guys are the only ones complaining, maybe the problem is on your end." And so we end up with a stalemate.
I stand corrected, and I should have thought of this.
This is exactly the problem when installing the LWP library for Perl -- it offers to install/usr/bin/HEAD for you, as a tool for doing http-head requests on web servers. On most POSIX filesystems this isn't a big deal, but on HFS+ it ends up clobbering/usr/bin/head, the standard tool for retrieving the opening lines from a file or data stream (a/k/a file). The LWP maintainers don't see this as a bug on their end, because they get the behavior they want on every other platform -- hence three years after OSX came out and it's still an issue for some people. (Maybe Apple should just add LWP to their default Perl and the problem would go away for newbies...).
Actually, I usually hear HFS+ described as case insensitive while reading, but case invariant or case preserving while writing. That is, the filesystem will record the file however it was first written, but can permit case insenstive searching.
That way, when working in the BSD shell, everything works the same way it does on any other POSIX shell, with case sensitivity being the norm, but when working in the Finder you can browse & search in a case insensitive way.
There's a pretty good case to be made that this is the right way for a filesystem to go -- it kind of adheres to the rule of thumb that systems should be generous in what they accept (broad definitions of acceptable input, etc) but strict in what they produce (narrow definitions of what will be returned).
Oh man, Postfix config is driving me nuts. I'm trying to stick with it, because it has a better reputation than Sendmail these days, but so far I'm unimpressed with anything other than the nice, simple config file. However, the behavior is baffling:
Mail aliases aren't being acknowledged, even though I'm using what appears [???] to be the right config line:
alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, netinfo:/aliases alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases, netinfo:/aliases newaliases_path =/usr/bin/newaliases
I'm trying to call Procmail with mailbox_command =/usr/bin/procmail, but it doesn't seem to get spawned on incoming mail.
IMAP isn't working. I haven't had a chance to look at this one -- I'm hoping that once I get the first problems fixed, this one will be easier to manage.
Here's the big one: after installing the Java/Quicktime security update today, I rebooted and now Postfix isn't working at all. Observe:
$/usr/sbin/postfix check
$ ps ax | grep 'p[o]st'
9707 ?? Ss 0:00.35/usr/libexec/postfix/master
$ telnet localhost 25
Trying::1...
telnet: connect to address::1: Connection refused
Trying 127.0.0.1...
telnet: connect to address 127.0.0.1: Connection refused
telnet: Unable to connect to remote host
$
$ ls -l `which portscan`
lrwxr-xr-x 1 cdevers wheel 69 May 14 22:27/usr/local/bin/portscan ->/Applications/Utilities/Network Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke
$ portscan localhost 24 26
Port Scanning host: 127.0.0.1
$
Why can't I establish a connection? It worked fine before the reboot, but now I don't see any activity at all in/var/log/mail.log. I can't figure out how to kickstart it...
I'm really looking forward to a OSX Postfix HOWTO document...:-/
A fair point, I should have elaborated. You're right that my statement as I gave it was too subjective. The point I should have made was that the main thing that most people do with a PC Card socket is plug in a wired or wireless network card (I'd love to see other uses, but the vast majority of the PC Card devices in local computer stores seems to be network cards, AFAIK).
The iBook addresses this by having a built-in Ethernet port (not a very big deal -- most iBooks do that now), and a dedicated socket for an Airport card. The downside of that socket is that there's only one thing you can plug into it; the upside is that the one thing you can plug in is the one thing that the market suggests most people would want to plug in.
You're right that the absense of the card is worth mentioning, but I'd argue that that's not the whole story, because a mostly equivalent option is available. For some people, that won't be good enough, and the iBook just won't do. For most people though, the main hindrance with that particular component isn't the lack of expansion ability, but the fact that you only have one upgrade option (standard PCMCIA cards don't seem like they'll fit in the Airport socket, and the first generation Airport cards & sockets aren't compatible with the more recent 802.11g Airport Extreme sockets & cards.
The bigger issue -- and I was just trying to use Apple gear as an example for this -- is that the terse Consumer Reports summaries often elide important information. Sometimes that additional information doesn't change their basic quality rating, but in other cases -- and the examples I offered were just the most obvious ones I could think of, and (honestly!) not just a stab at Macintosh advocacy -- their brief notes can suggest that a given product is lacking in some area when in fact that product may offer the same functionality in some other way. Sometimes this can be important!
Consumer Reports is a great resource, but there's room for improvement. An informed shopper should probably not CR as their only source of information, for reasons like I'm trying to suggest here.
Sounds to me like you're a Mac fan who's peeved that CR didnt gush and laud praise on your beloved.
CR just gives the facts.
Almost right. Yes, I do happen to like Macs, but the reason that I chose these examples wasn't because the Macs got bad reviews -- actually, both the eMac and the iBook compared very favorably in the CR tables -- but because it's an example of where CR is trying to compare things that don't quite match up.
To give a perhaps more Slashdot-centric example, they had a thumbnail review of various spam control applications, but didn't mention SpamAssassin or its derivatives, even though popular concensus seems to suggest that SA is one of the most effective spam control tools available. On the other hand, among the products reviewed was Symantec's spam control product -- which I've heard is itself based on SA's engine. The Symantec product reviewed well, but the magazine didn't bring any attention to the variety of equivalent & possibly superior products that are available for Free. Maybe that's just indicative of their target audience's values -- "if you can't pay for it, does it really count as a 'consumer' item?" -- but the omission seemed negligent to me.
I think my bigger point is that the econoomic constraints of having to publish a 40-50 page magazine on a tight budget severely restricts how much detail they can get into with their reviews. For some items -- laundry detergent, say -- that's not a big deal. But for complex items, where there can be entire classes of product within the main category (e.g. Apples & Windows machines), brevity starts to get in the way.
That's where their web site really could -- but doesn't -- help. In print, there are real constraints on what it economically makes sense to print. Elsewhere in this discussion it was noted that magazines can cost $10 per issue or more to print. I don't know if that's true, but it's believable to me. I do know that one copy of Boston's leading broadsheet newspaper costs over four dollars to print (and much more on Sundays), but the newsstand price is, depending where you go, $0.50 or $0.75. The bulk of the cost is defrayed by advertising, but that isn't a source of revenue that CR/CU wants to get involved with.
On the other hand, for a web site the publishing costs approaches zero once the initial infrastructure is in place. There are costs, to be sure, but as long as the bandwidth isn't too bad (i.e. avoid serving movie files etc, which I can't see CR/CU doing anyway) then the costs aren't bad compared to traditional print. If Consumers Union wanted to, say, quadruple the amount of product data they're publishing about each product on their web site, the hard part would be in getting someone to write it, not getting it published. But that wealth of data could be a great selling point in trying to find more subscribers for the site & magazine, kind of like what The Economist does: a paid subscription gets you the abridged, "cliff notes" version in print, and the rich-data version over the web.
The fact that they haven't taken advantages of the possibilties of web publishing really bugs me, and just makes the superficial nature of some of their reviews all the more prominent to me.
I don't always agree with CR's subjective descriptions of products (cars especially), but the hard numbers they provide are the most usefull I have found, and have saved me plenty of money.
Yeah, that's something I've noticed in their reviews of computers & software. For example, the June 2003 issue had a roundup on cheap desktop machines, and the Apple eMac was faulted for not coming with antivirus software -- maybe a valid concern, but the fact that viruses are much worse on the Windows side makes this a lot less of a problem than it would be if, say, Gateway or Dell didn't include AV software.
In the same review, they also cite the eMac -- along with a Gateway -- for not having a hard drive access light. Who cares if there's a light for the hard drive? I'd argue that most budget desktop users are unlikely to care, and if they do care they'd either [a] just listen to the thing, they're all noisy, or [b] upgrade to a midrange machine where the feature is more standard. The presense or absense of the light is a fair thing to cite, I guess, but I have a hard time picturing anyone making a purchasing decision based on whether or not model A does or does not have that silly little light.
(Likewise, the March review of laptops faulted the iBook for lacking a PC-card slot, "keyboard control panel", the hard drive light again, the AV software again, a separate button for standby mode, and a docking-station plug. But who would want any of that with a Mac -- especially the "consumer" level version? CR seems to be having trouble comparing Apples to, err, well, not oranges, maybe "blackboxes". But I'm falling into a pattern here.)
When the qualities being measured are objectively quantifiable, Consumer Reports does a really great job. When they wander into subjective territory, they seem to have a habit of being guided by their biases -- but then, at least they're honest about it.
I don't think I'd ever fully base a major purchasing decision on a CR review, but of all the things that I'd consider, I'd place more emphasis on their metrics than on just about any other single source of information. The trick is to be aware of when they're starting to skim over the details and give you the short, simplistic version of things.
I'm not a PHP guy, so I can't be definitive about that, but the two big areas where Apache 2.0 seems to have been un-finished are PHP and mod_perl support. Random poking around on Google suggests anecdotally that this was true at least as recently as July, according to a random blog hit.
You're certainly welcome to try it -- bug testers are always welcome for any open source project -- but last I heard the conventional wisdom was still to avoid Apache2 for any site that needs stable mod_perl or PHP support. I understand that they both work, more or less, but people still seem to have problems with stability.
On the other hand, for other areas, Apache2 is supposed to be wonderful. I've heard reports of web server pool load tests that suggested that a tier of Apache2 servers could handle a load equivalent to something like 4 or 5 times as many Apache 1.3 servers. YMMV of course, but apparently there are real benefits to Apache2 for those that are in a position to take advantage of it.
Don't try too hard to find "Brian Greene's Elegant Universe" in your local listing. Instead, just watch Nova as planned, as that's the show which will be covering the topic. Part one is tonight. Part two is next week.
Actually, checking local listings is probably a good idea: WGBH & sister stations in Boston & New England broadcast the first two parts back to back last night, and will be repeating these two several times over the next week. The third part is scheduled for the week of 4 November.
It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to look up $your_city tv listings on Google, or buy a copy of your local newspaper. I realize that this is too late for last night's show, but if WGBH is typical (okay, so they produced it, they have an interest in letting lots of people see it, but still), your local PBS affiliate may be doing one or more re-broadcasts over the next few days.
Slashdot Mirror
That Mac Daniel, he's a funny guy... :-)
Underground? Underground??? Are you serious?
<hhgttg> This must be some new definition of "underground" that I was previously unaware of. </hhgttg>
And there I was thinking that "underground" meant things like a small budget, a small studio, or possibly a story that's actually unusual. Or possibly all three. It never occurred to me that it might include a sixty-three million dollar movie released by frickin Warner Brothers.
+++++
I'm with the grandparent: the simulatenous worldwide release was a gimmick to get people out to see the movie rather than allow bad reviews in the US to scuttle the prospects for the third installment. The fact that it was released on a Wednesday doesn't contradict this -- there are stiill diehards who will show up at least once, and maybe multiple times, so a long opening "weekend" will boost the movie's numbers. But the second movie was a disappointment to a lot of people, and my guess is that a lot of the people who saw it did so only out of the expectation that the third installment would explain everything away. Based on the reviews & the comments I've seen, those expectations are being confounded -- which suggests to me that the third movie is going to do much worse than the earlier ones. Maybe not a bomb, but nothing stellar either.
Personally, I thought the first one was overrated from the outset. It was just another silly action movie -- more akin to, say, Blade than something truly thoughtful like, say, most of Terry Gilliam's films. I haven't bothered wasting my time with the sequels, but from everything that I've read -- and I've read a lot, trying to figure out what people see in this tedious series -- the sequels have only been worse than the original. My suspicion is that I was just being contrarian in not liking the first one, but the sequels have brought a lot of people around to a similar point of view.
Personally, I think that all the people who allegedly based their master's theses on the Matrix moviees are going to be very embarassed for themselves in a decade or so :-). There are thoughtful, philosophical movies out there, but there's more to it than just name-dropping some grad school fodder in a silly action series. That's about as smart as Kevin Kline's character in A Fish Called Wanda:
As far as I'm concerned, she may have well been addressing the Wachowski brothers :-)
<aol />
I attended one of his seminars in the spring, based on how much I liked the books when I picked them up a few years ago, and it felt like a complete retread of the same material that I'd already read -- parts of which I've read several times, for that matter.
The whole seminar was just waving around his books with a "gee, aren't these just wonderful" wave of self-awe, with an entertaining -- but if you've read the books, massively redundant -- overview of the themes in the books.
There was a sliver of new material, where he ripped on PowerPoint and, specifically, a presentation that Boeing engineers made about the foam debris damage before the Columbia dister earlier this year. This was interesting, and this material ended up being fleshed out into the Wired article & pamphlet that he's selling now (at the time, it sounded like it would end up being a chapter in a future fourth volume in his book series), but based on his other comments about computer interfaces, it wasn't hard to guess that this guy was going to hate the average PowerPoint presentation.
My one rebuttal to the "PowerPoint is evil" assertion is Damian Conway: the talks he gives to Perl Mongers are the best PowerPoint shows I've ever seen. But then, he does a lot of them, so he gets more chances to practice & polish... :-)
But anyway, yeah. Tufte gives a decent seminar, but if you've already read the books then you might not get a whole lot out of it that you haven't already absorbed two or three times already. The handouts are nice, but the big one is a set of books that you may have already owned (I ended up giving mine to a friend as a graduation present from art school). For the same money, you could just buy a few book sets and share them with your friends, and you'd all get the same information...
Univision is owned by NBC, and thus General Electric. They're just as tainted as FOX or CNN.
Also, I believe it's Deutsche Welle . The pronounciation sounds like "wella" in English, but it's an -e, not a -a, in German.
If anyone owns DW or al-Jazeera, I don't currently know about it. But then, neither of them has much of a presence in North America, and of the ones that are available, they're almost all part of one or another conglomerate. The main exceptions I can think of would be PBS, NPR, and (if your area or cable provider offers access) BBC World -- but then people. But then, they're driving under the influence, too...
He also gets into computer interface design in Visual Explanations. He cites the very low resolution of computer displays, using the interface from a Beethoven CD-ROM, and contrasts this against a guide he helped design for the National Gallery in Washington, DC.
Naturally Tufte prefers his own stuff, but with his museum system he makes the same point that he's hammering on about now with PowerPoint: he does the best he can with the software interface, but the key is to provide a good handout -- if you go to a kiosk and look up where a given exhibit is, you can print out a high quality map with both verbal & visual instructions guiding the visitor to her goal. The interface itself is just a "best approximation" of the information that, in his opinion, really works better on paper than a computer screen.
Not that I disagree in general -- there's no arguing the fact that even a cheap bubble jet or dot matrix printer has many times better resolution than even the highest end computer display systems (75 or 100 dpi for a monitor is typical; 300 dpi for a printer is no big deal) -- but it seems to me that Tufte is a bit too defeatist about all this. Paper may look better, but it's a hell of a lot less dynamic, and dynamism is the whole point of computer interfaces. Poor resolution or not, we need the best UI possible for our computer displays, and IMO people like, say, Jakob Nielsen seem to have more constructive criticism than Tufte with his "man, these things suck compared to paper" defeatism.
Still, his books are nice :-)
It's Mac only shareware, but it's it's neat software, and I've been hoping for similar (but preferably open sourced) software for other platforms. Glad to see someone is working on it :-)
Wow -- they must have been pissed when the first one broke. So, like, did that guy get fired or what?
har har har
If your primary constituency was wingnuts on Slashdot & Usenet, you'd probably pander to their pet predilictions too.
The Republicans seem to have a better strategy though -- own a company that makes electronic election machines, and then push for the adoption of electronic election machines such as those made by -- quelle surprise -- your election machine company. Eliminate the middleman!
There's an ethical case to be made for blocking ads, but that wasn't the one.
Part of the problem with your analogy is that you're displacing the source of income. With an electronics store, that income is sales of the products on display. With an online publication -- or a television show, magazine, or newspaper -- the income is more likely to be sales of eyeballs to their advertisers.
Think about it. The cover price of the average daily newspaper covers only about 15% or so of the cost to print that newspaper (figure that the average paper is around $0.50 or $1.00 these days, and the printing cost can be around $4.00 per issue). Magazines, with their glossy full color pages, cost even more -- maybe $10 or $15 an issue. But the newsstand cost for that is a fraction of the total price -- why? Because advertisers are paying for the bulk of it. The newsstand price is set just high enough to make people feel like they're getting something of significance, but not high enough to actually cover any significant portion of the production cost. That way, the product -- the audience, not the publication -- has a higher perceived value for the customer -- the advertisers, not the audience -- and they can set higher rates for selling that audience.
The point here is that mass media publications have a wholly separate set of variables than traditional retail stores do, so comparing one to the other is bogus.
++++
That doesn't necessarily invalidate your assertion that the customer isn't obligated to support anybody's business model, but it doesn't back you up, either.
Care to try again? I'm sincerely interested in hearing you take another go at it.
As a former advertising sysadmin, who has always been generally sympathetic with the "ads suck" point of view while also congnizant of the "ads pay the bills" reality, the behavior you describe is very bad.
If you just want to block ads, block them -- I know Mozilla can do this, though I forget if it works out of the box or if AdBlock is necessary for it.
Blocking ads is IMO ethically questionable, but there is a case to be made for it and I'm not going to stop anyone from doing it.
But at least simple blocking is honest. This "download but hide" scheme you describe is both dishonest & wasteful.
It's dishonest, because the admins on that remote site will record that ad X was delivered Y times, when in reality it was actually seen Y-N times, where N is some difficult to quantify number (small now, but likely to grow over time). This can completely screw up accounts, budgets, contracts, etc.
It's also wasteful, because the user has to waste time downloading files that they never even see (not that they wanted the ads either, but they're not even coming out ahead this way), and it's driving up the bandwidth bill for the site.
---
If you want to filter ads, just filter them -- edit your hosts file or do something equivalent that prevents the download from happening in the first place. You won't waste time downloading anything you don't want to see, and the site will have more accurate data while not eating into their bandwidth bill so badly.
I still think this is ethically questionable -- most ads aren't that bad, and I'd rather look at & ignore a few ads than have to pay to access most sites. But some ads really are just obnoxious (hint to graphic designers: be merciful with loops & flashes, for the love of ghod) and I can sympathize with the desire to avoid those kinds of computer pollution. Keep in mind though that for most of those sites, you're getting in for free, and ask yourself if the ad is really so obnoxious that you want to circumvent the only viable free-to-users revenue stream that anyone has managed to come up with to date.
Yeah, you and a few thousand / million other admins -- I'm sure that's exactly why Microsoft is doing this.
Huzzah, competition -- Microsoft is listening to why people think Linux makes for a better server operating system, and why, and they're incorporating systems that try to meet those needs back into Windows.
This sort of good thing from Microsoft would happen all the time if they had other serious threats to their hegemony. Too bad we've got a Justice Department that could care less about things like a fair market...
Maybe no one is working on it because it's already here?
It may not be polished as a general purpose interactive shell -- hard things are possible, but simple things aren't necessarily easy -- but it's certainly a decent start.
I'm mostly a Perl guy, but Python's interactive shell is a fantastic tool for rapid script development.
Oh heavens, mustard they always be behind the times like so? I relish the day that they ketchup with the progress that we have on the Unix side, but really -- is it always going to be their roll to be behind the times? Cheese, lettuce hope they show more progress tomato than they had yesterday. It's like they haven't even bacon to take things seriously, ya know?
ba dum tcsh.... :-)
Ahhh.... :-)
How do you figure, out of curiosity? Wouldn't these occasional defragmentation operations tend to counteract the power saving option that puts the drive to sleep as much as possible? Or do you assume that wouldn't be an issue because the defrags only happen when you're using the drive anyway? Even if that's the case, this is still causing more disc activity than would happen ordinarily, so I can't see how there would be a net gain as far as power saving for the battery goes...
You'd probably have to take that up with Apple, but I suspect that the tool is seen as a userland one rather than a system level one, hence /usr/bin instead of just /bin. I've just checked on two Solaris machines (`uname -r` one gives 5.7, the other gives 5.8) and one Linux machine (RedHat 6.2), and all three of them have their head utility at /usr/bin/head -- so it's not just OSX that puts head in with the userland toolkit in /usr/bin.
I think the fix you're grasping for is to put LWP's HEAD in something like /usr/local/bin or /opt/bin with the rest of the manually installed programs that are not part of the default distribution. Aside from the $PATH issue that you hint at, this should be a portable, non-destructive solution to the problem.
The only complication I can think of is that the local/manual bin/ dir tends to be in different places on different systems -- OSX doesn't ship with an /opt tree, for example, but most Solaris systems do. The Fink project for Unix software on OSX likes to use /sw, but this is non-standard, and manually putting stuff in there could interfere with packages managed by Fink itself. I think that /usr/local is nearly universal across distributions & versions & SysV vs. BSD lineages, but I've heard some people complain about it, so I'm sure that some systems at least won't even have that.
Writing LWP in such a way that it can sniff out & use the correct local installation directory may seem to be more trouble than it's worth to correct a problem that, to date, is only apparent on systems running on top of the HFS+ filesystem. There's a case to be made for "fixing" LWP to be more portable, but the counter-argument to that -- which has been winning since 1999 or so, when people first started trying to install LWP on their OSX Public Beta machines in fairly large numbers -- has been "you Mac guys are the only ones complaining, maybe the problem is on your end." And so we end up with a stalemate.
*shrug*
I stand corrected, and I should have thought of this.
This is exactly the problem when installing the LWP library for Perl -- it offers to install /usr/bin/HEAD for you, as a tool for doing http-head requests on web servers. On most POSIX filesystems this isn't a big deal, but on HFS+ it ends up clobbering /usr/bin/head, the standard tool for retrieving the opening lines from a file or data stream (a/k/a file). The LWP maintainers don't see this as a bug on their end, because they get the behavior they want on every other platform -- hence three years after OSX came out and it's still an issue for some people. (Maybe Apple should just add LWP to their default Perl and the problem would go away for newbies...).
Thanks for the correction. :-)
Actually, I usually hear HFS+ described as case insensitive while reading, but case invariant or case preserving while writing. That is, the filesystem will record the file however it was first written, but can permit case insenstive searching.
That way, when working in the BSD shell, everything works the same way it does on any other POSIX shell, with case sensitivity being the norm, but when working in the Finder you can browse & search in a case insensitive way.
There's a pretty good case to be made that this is the right way for a filesystem to go -- it kind of adheres to the rule of thumb that systems should be generous in what they accept (broad definitions of acceptable input, etc) but strict in what they produce (narrow definitions of what will be returned).
Dear Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria,
Gator^H^H^H^H^HClaria is Spyware, you fuckers. Spyware. Spyware. Spyware.
Please send me a nastygram. My career is stalled, and I could really use the publicity.
Love,
Wil Wheaton ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Chris Devers
Linux/OSX weenie who doesn't even use your crappy SPYware.
PS- It's spyware.
Oh man, Postfix config is driving me nuts. I'm trying to stick with it, because it has a better reputation than Sendmail these days, but so far I'm unimpressed with anything other than the nice, simple config file. However, the behavior is baffling:
alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, netinfo:/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases, netinfo:/aliases
newaliases_path =
I'm really looking forward to a OSX Postfix HOWTO document... :-/
A fair point, I should have elaborated. You're right that my statement as I gave it was too subjective. The point I should have made was that the main thing that most people do with a PC Card socket is plug in a wired or wireless network card (I'd love to see other uses, but the vast majority of the PC Card devices in local computer stores seems to be network cards, AFAIK).
The iBook addresses this by having a built-in Ethernet port (not a very big deal -- most iBooks do that now), and a dedicated socket for an Airport card. The downside of that socket is that there's only one thing you can plug into it; the upside is that the one thing you can plug in is the one thing that the market suggests most people would want to plug in.
You're right that the absense of the card is worth mentioning, but I'd argue that that's not the whole story, because a mostly equivalent option is available. For some people, that won't be good enough, and the iBook just won't do. For most people though, the main hindrance with that particular component isn't the lack of expansion ability, but the fact that you only have one upgrade option (standard PCMCIA cards don't seem like they'll fit in the Airport socket, and the first generation Airport cards & sockets aren't compatible with the more recent 802.11g Airport Extreme sockets & cards.
The bigger issue -- and I was just trying to use Apple gear as an example for this -- is that the terse Consumer Reports summaries often elide important information. Sometimes that additional information doesn't change their basic quality rating, but in other cases -- and the examples I offered were just the most obvious ones I could think of, and (honestly!) not just a stab at Macintosh advocacy -- their brief notes can suggest that a given product is lacking in some area when in fact that product may offer the same functionality in some other way. Sometimes this can be important!
Consumer Reports is a great resource, but there's room for improvement. An informed shopper should probably not CR as their only source of information, for reasons like I'm trying to suggest here.
Almost right. Yes, I do happen to like Macs, but the reason that I chose these examples wasn't because the Macs got bad reviews -- actually, both the eMac and the iBook compared very favorably in the CR tables -- but because it's an example of where CR is trying to compare things that don't quite match up.
To give a perhaps more Slashdot-centric example, they had a thumbnail review of various spam control applications, but didn't mention SpamAssassin or its derivatives, even though popular concensus seems to suggest that SA is one of the most effective spam control tools available. On the other hand, among the products reviewed was Symantec's spam control product -- which I've heard is itself based on SA's engine. The Symantec product reviewed well, but the magazine didn't bring any attention to the variety of equivalent & possibly superior products that are available for Free. Maybe that's just indicative of their target audience's values -- "if you can't pay for it, does it really count as a 'consumer' item?" -- but the omission seemed negligent to me.
I think my bigger point is that the econoomic constraints of having to publish a 40-50 page magazine on a tight budget severely restricts how much detail they can get into with their reviews. For some items -- laundry detergent, say -- that's not a big deal. But for complex items, where there can be entire classes of product within the main category (e.g. Apples & Windows machines), brevity starts to get in the way.
That's where their web site really could -- but doesn't -- help. In print, there are real constraints on what it economically makes sense to print. Elsewhere in this discussion it was noted that magazines can cost $10 per issue or more to print. I don't know if that's true, but it's believable to me. I do know that one copy of Boston's leading broadsheet newspaper costs over four dollars to print (and much more on Sundays), but the newsstand price is, depending where you go, $0.50 or $0.75. The bulk of the cost is defrayed by advertising, but that isn't a source of revenue that CR/CU wants to get involved with.
On the other hand, for a web site the publishing costs approaches zero once the initial infrastructure is in place. There are costs, to be sure, but as long as the bandwidth isn't too bad (i.e. avoid serving movie files etc, which I can't see CR/CU doing anyway) then the costs aren't bad compared to traditional print. If Consumers Union wanted to, say, quadruple the amount of product data they're publishing about each product on their web site, the hard part would be in getting someone to write it, not getting it published. But that wealth of data could be a great selling point in trying to find more subscribers for the site & magazine, kind of like what The Economist does: a paid subscription gets you the abridged, "cliff notes" version in print, and the rich-data version over the web.
The fact that they haven't taken advantages of the possibilties of web publishing really bugs me, and just makes the superficial nature of some of their reviews all the more prominent to me.
Yeah, that's something I've noticed in their reviews of computers & software. For example, the June 2003 issue had a roundup on cheap desktop machines, and the Apple eMac was faulted for not coming with antivirus software -- maybe a valid concern, but the fact that viruses are much worse on the Windows side makes this a lot less of a problem than it would be if, say, Gateway or Dell didn't include AV software.
In the same review, they also cite the eMac -- along with a Gateway -- for not having a hard drive access light. Who cares if there's a light for the hard drive? I'd argue that most budget desktop users are unlikely to care, and if they do care they'd either [a] just listen to the thing, they're all noisy, or [b] upgrade to a midrange machine where the feature is more standard. The presense or absense of the light is a fair thing to cite, I guess, but I have a hard time picturing anyone making a purchasing decision based on whether or not model A does or does not have that silly little light.
(Likewise, the March review of laptops faulted the iBook for lacking a PC-card slot, "keyboard control panel", the hard drive light again, the AV software again, a separate button for standby mode, and a docking-station plug. But who would want any of that with a Mac -- especially the "consumer" level version? CR seems to be having trouble comparing Apples to, err, well, not oranges, maybe "blackboxes". But I'm falling into a pattern here.)
When the qualities being measured are objectively quantifiable, Consumer Reports does a really great job. When they wander into subjective territory, they seem to have a habit of being guided by their biases -- but then, at least they're honest about it.
I don't think I'd ever fully base a major purchasing decision on a CR review, but of all the things that I'd consider, I'd place more emphasis on their metrics than on just about any other single source of information. The trick is to be aware of when they're starting to skim over the details and give you the short, simplistic version of things.
I'm not a PHP guy, so I can't be definitive about that, but the two big areas where Apache 2.0 seems to have been un-finished are PHP and mod_perl support. Random poking around on Google suggests anecdotally that this was true at least as recently as July, according to a random blog hit.
You're certainly welcome to try it -- bug testers are always welcome for any open source project -- but last I heard the conventional wisdom was still to avoid Apache2 for any site that needs stable mod_perl or PHP support. I understand that they both work, more or less, but people still seem to have problems with stability.
On the other hand, for other areas, Apache2 is supposed to be wonderful. I've heard reports of web server pool load tests that suggested that a tier of Apache2 servers could handle a load equivalent to something like 4 or 5 times as many Apache 1.3 servers. YMMV of course, but apparently there are real benefits to Apache2 for those that are in a position to take advantage of it.
Actually, checking local listings is probably a good idea: WGBH & sister stations in Boston & New England broadcast the first two parts back to back last night, and will be repeating these two several times over the next week. The third part is scheduled for the week of 4 November.
It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to look up $your_city tv listings on Google, or buy a copy of your local newspaper. I realize that this is too late for last night's show, but if WGBH is typical (okay, so they produced it, they have an interest in letting lots of people see it, but still), your local PBS affiliate may be doing one or more re-broadcasts over the next few days.