Coming to this discussion late, but what the hell...
In some of my business classes in college, we were taught about McDonald's & Burger King as a case study in marketing approaches.
McDonald's, it seems, has a huge research budget for making sure that any new store will be in a profitable neighborhood, with adequate traffic flow & other resources in the area, so that the new store will do well.
Burger King, on the other hand, waits for McDonald's to open up a store, then they build one next door. This may guarantee that they're never first, but it also saves the from the bother of having to keep up the research department.
The same seems to be going on here. The ubiquitous references to Apple products in movies & TV shows is very well known. However, there is a perception that this is just spontaneous -- Apple hardware just looks better than more or less any Wintel box, so of course that's what gets used for props, right? Not exactly...
Garrett Beauvais, a marketing executive at Advanced Micro Devices, which makes chips for PCs, suggested that's Apple's famously vigorous product-placement efforts are the source of the plot device.
"Apple Computer outspends all other PC companies in product placement and is perhaps more active in the area than any other technology company outside of Microsoft," Beauvais wrote.
That article was from May 2002. The implication is clear: [a] the "spontaneous" placement of Apple products in all these shows is not a coincidence, and [b] it seems that Microsoft has been trying to emulate Apple's success here for a long time.
Apple is playing the McDonald's role, Microsoft is Burger King.
The only wrinkle is that McDonald's is much larger than Burger King (I'm not sure what the spread is, but it's significant), and Apple is something like 20 times smaller than Microsoft -- at least in terms of market share.
Still, it's clear what roles they're trying to follow.
You've been contradicted here several times, but just to add one more, here's the original material. Note that this is from well known film critic Roger Ebert's weekly column "Movie Answer Man":
Q. Have you been seeing spots when you go to the movies? It may not be your eyes! More than 20 years ago Kodak devised a system called "Cap Code" designed to uniquely mark film prints so that pirated copies could be traced to the source. Cap Code uses very tiny dots that flash occasionally but are so small that the average viewer almost never notices them.
Well, something new and horrible has been introduced on some studios' prints. Sort of a giant picture-marring version of Cap Code dots: Very large reddish brown spots that flash in the middle of the picture, usually placed in a light area. They flash in various patterns throughout a given reel while other reels of the same film may have none at all.
A Kodak spokesman who helped devise the original Cap Code says this is not the work of his company but theorizes that it may be intended to be more visible on the murky compressed copies that get posted to the Internet where the original, very subtle Cap Code may be difficult to discern.
On one movie technical forum they are referring to this new system as "Crap Code" or "Cap Code on Steroids." There are reports coming in of viewers complaining of the spots on the pictures. While theaters strive to keep prints free of dirt and scratches, Hollywood starts sending out prints with built-in marring. Among the films known to be afflicted are "Ali," "Behind Enemy Lines," "28 Days Later" "Freddy vs. Jason" and "Underworld," probably many others as well.
Steve Kraus, Chicago
A. You're the expert projectionist at our Chicago critics' screening room, with a fierce love of high-quality film, so I can imagine how upset you are. What's amusing about Crap Code and the other efforts to catch pirates is that most of the thieves are apparently industry insiders. A recent news story says studios may even be discouraged from distributing advance DVDs of their Oscar contenders to academy members, because some of these movies quickly find their way to the Web.
Note what Ebert says about Kraus: "You're the expert projectionist at our Chicago critics' screening room".
I think it's fair to say that these guys know what they're talking about, and are not confusing these spots with cue dots.
That, and several other portions of the book, are already available online
Actually, a lot of the material in Salmon of Doubt -- as far as I can tell, everything but the unfinished manuscript itself (i.e. all the essays) was available online even before DNA passed away. The weird thing about reading that last book, and the bit I really liked, in a weird way, was that I'd already read much of the material from his web site already.
I think my favorite is Maggie and Trudy. That's the one I forward to people when they ask what's so great about this Adams guy anyway:-)
The whole point of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was that it was on the wireless, and therefore there were no pictures outside of your own head. This meant you had to work harder to suspend your disbelief.
Non sequitur: a radio program forces the audience to use their imagination, yes, but I don't see how this has any bearing on literary suspension of disbelief. The way I parse that term, suspension is most necessary when watching actors tell a story in a play, movie, or tv show, because it's so easy to get distracted by "hey, that's Douglas Adams sitting at the end of the bar", or "wow, Zaphod's head really doesn't look at all like a real head, does it?" You have to get yourself past such distractions intellectually in order to enjoy the story. I don't see how this is nearly as much of an issue with a radio story (or a book), if only because there are far fewer distractions, and you have far more room to let your imagination roam. It still comes up, sure, but the way you phrase this -- "it was a radio play, therefore you had to use your imagination, ergo suspension of disbelief was more difficult" -- just doesn't make sense to me.
And so it goes with the rest of your post.
Today, a mass of special effects are generally used to cover up a thin plot [....] and/or one-dimensional characters [....].
A fair point, but a thin one -- for all the crappy special effects extravaganzas that get thrown up on screens these days, there are also a lot of high quality, well written stories getting made as well -- some of which make solid use of those very special effects.
For modern examples, check out the movies by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Panic Room) or Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) -- good stories, well told, and usually subtle use of special effects. These guys show us that not every "FX" movie has to be a sci-fi shoot-em-up action flick. For an older example to amplify that point, check out Orson Welles' Citizen Kane -- it's basically a special effects showcase from the pre-digital era, with specially built sets, convincing scale models, matte shots, clever cinematography, and careful editing to weave it all together. The modern "FX" film owes as much or more to Kane than it does to, say, Star Wars, and that was hardly a sci-fi movie.
More to the point, you seem to be complaining about how Hollywood uses special effects to paper over the cracks of thin plots & weak characters, but these are the things that HHGTTG almost guarantees. Indeed, those parts of the story were as much as in the can 20 or 25 years ago, and DNA himself had written that the only missing component for a HHGTTG movie was the special effects that would be needed to present the story convincingly. A movie like "City of Lost Children" convinces me that this should no longer be a problem.
The only thing we're missing now is the writer, but he left a good couple of drafts that I think can be put to good use. Nobody complains that Shakespeare isn't around to participate in re-makes of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and yet good productions have been done. I think the same can happen with Douglas Adams' works, and indeed feel like it's almost an insult to him to suggest that the material he left isn't strong enough to be done without getting him to write another draft.
But I digress.
You seem to be a fan of straw men. Take this one for example:
Can you imagine Hollywood's take on something like "Trainspotting"
Okay, my take is that it would have been.... Trainspotting. Look at the distribution credit: Miramax. Disney owns Miramax. Many of the "hip", "edgy" movies of the 90s were either
...and according to one of the interviews on the DVD, he got the part because his wife -- the actress that played Trillian -- arranged it for him.
Apparently David "Darth Vader" Prowse is in that scene because the show was being shot next door to a studio where parts of "Empire Strikes Back" was being filmed. I seem to remember the DVD having off-hand remarks about some of the book's bleeps & bloops being those of R2-D2, for example...
Does it matter if you use SSH? The problem isn't the individual users using or not using SSH (or any other software with a known security hole), but in what remote users can do with that software.
If SSH is turned on (which it may not be in your case), then it doesn't matter if it gets used or not, it still needs to be patched. If it's off then you're safer, but it's still risky in the long run to leave the broken version on your system: f someone breaks in some other way, they can use the broken SSH (or any other insecure software) to do impolite things.
Unless you have a good reason not to -- like, say, the 10.2.8 update already hosed your computer once and you're afraid to try it again -- it's best to just fix SSH, whether or not you use it.
What are others doing with this issue? We would prefer to preserve mailto link clickability, but also only want to make this adjustment once." One suggestion I would make is to put your email address in an image. People can read it, but harvesters won't be able to harvest it (unless they download the image for OCR)
Err, doesn't this exactly not meet the given criteria? The guy wants links to be clickable. If you hide the image, you can only get as far as, say:
But that's just as easily harvestable as it would have been if you left the visible text as the plain address. What's the point?
It's the contents of the href attribute that need to be obscured, not the visible text (or image, or video clip, or whatever). You can't embed an image in the href text, so I don't see how this suggestion gains us anything at all.
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The suggestion I like best is to encapsulate the address as HTML entities. Currently, this is enough to fend off the average address harvesting software, though if the practice catches on, I assume that the harvesters would start to take this into account -- at which point I don't know what the solution should be...
Barring that, it seems like the only way to provide an address will be to use literal text such as "write to us at foo at bar.com" and hope people just get it.
Alternatively, shy away from giving out your address, and provide a form where visitors can submit comments. This could allow you to filter out some of the incoming traffic (hint, if you're going to use "off the shelf" software for this, use NMS instead of Matt Wright's ancient Formmail.PL script, it's much safer). Avoiding any publication of email addresses might piss Jakob Nielsen off, but under the circumstances I think it's probably a reasonable approach to the situation -- it's way to easy for a public address to get abused...
Well, the short, short version is simply this: `osascript 'say "message"'`. For the prank version, I have it wrapped in a little Perl script that, after flushing output with $|++;, just runs an endless loop that calls fortune to grab a random quote, says it, then sleeps for a random amount of time. I won't bother hammering my meager script into something that won't set off Slashdot's lame lameness filters, but I promise that you could write it in 2 minutes once you know where to start -- and for that all you have to do is the osascript say command noted aboe. Try it at your shell for a laugh -- it's easy:-)
Well, I did try to qualify the statement that using Windows as an example of a de facto standard was a stretch. You're right that it would be more accurate to call it that if multiple, competing vendors had come up with differing but interoperating implementations (Wine probably doesn't count).
My point of view was more based on the overwhelming predominance of Windows: even though there is only one vendor behind the family of products, still they do have some significant differences, but the majority of the computing public has adopted the platform[s] as the standard for all kinds of home & business use.
I suppose it's a little like arguing that Amtrak is the "standard" for rail travel in the USA -- because there are few if any other companies providing that service. And the argument against it is that Amtrak is just one company, with one way of doing things, and that in other countries there may be actual competition for rail traffic, just as there is for air traveel. And from a certain point of view, eitehr point of view is defensible & "correct".
But anyway, I'd argue that Linux [the kernel] isn't a standard, because there isn't a de facto (competing implementation) or de jure (specified behavior) definition for it. On the other hand, I'll grant that Linux distributions are a standard, because there are competing implementations that all, roughly, follow certain patterns. The term "standard" here probably fits better than it does for Windows, I'll grant, but the way I read the comment I was replying to, the software in question was the kernel itself -- not distributions using that kernel.
I don't disagree with you, but the way I read the original comment, it seemed to me as if the commenter was talking about the kernel itself, rather than distributions with the Linux kernel at their core. The line that most gave me this idea was the one suggesting that "it could be rewritten", rather than (say) "it could be repackaged", which to me seems like a more accurate description of what usually goes in in setting up a new distribution -- you don't rewrite everything from scratch, rather you make different decisions about what software to include.
But in any case, we're essentially in agreement here, so there's no point arguing. I think we may have just read the intent of the original commenter differently.
As noted in another comment, I'm perfectly aware of what the idiom means, and am not unaware of the subtle etiquette game going on. I'm just not impressed by it. It sounds pompous & arrogant, not polite & demure. At least that's how it sounds to my, as you say, American ears.
No, I get the idiom, I just think it's annoying and snooty. It might be appropriate if you're sipping espresso in some Left Bank bistro, or at a cocktail party at some Cantabridgian lecture hall, but on Slashdot? Here (as there, for that matter), it just sounds pompous to me. That is what I object to.
At a past job, we had a trouble ticketing system that would generate email reports to each person watcching a ticket whenever there was a mail or web driven transaction on that ticket. For test purposes, we had an "acme" queue that sent mail traffic just to the developers & a couple of good-humored people in other departments. One ticket in the acme queue, which refused to die over the course of a year, was a rude demand for one of the web monkeys to bring in pastries for everyone. Whenever someone was testing something with the request tracking system, they'd more often than not attach their test to the coffee rolls ticket, and this guy would be reminded AGAIN that he hadn't brought in snacks for everyone yet.
Then fun part was when it was realized that the ticket could go not just to person@company, but person+coffeerolls@company, person+cake@company, person+cookies@company, person+coffee@company, person+cappucino@company... etc. We got it so that whenever someone replied to the ticket, this guy would get about a hundred copies of the message -- and since the system had a tendency to allow duplicate or triplicate messages under some circumstances (e.g. a person hit "reply to all" instead of just "reply to sender"), this guy would sometimes get two hundred copies of each message.
That was fun.
Other pranks involved using mpg123 on a server sitting under a someone's desk in a different room so that, out of the blue, his computer would start playing "The Muppet Show" theme song. For more fun, because mpg123 instances can run concurrently, we'd have 20 instances of the song running simultaneously, out of sync with one another.
For fun with people using OSX, you can use osascript to get the machine to use Macintalk to speak arbitrary text out loud. This worked well with a long running shell script that would speak out a random quotation from the fortune command, sleep from five to thirty minutes, then start over again.
And of course, VNC is a barrel of laughs in & of itself.
Other obvious ones include removing the ball from someone's standard mouse, removing the receiver for someone's wireless mouse, or the batteries, swapping the mouse & keyboard plugs on the back of a computer, scrambling what order wires are going into the back of a KVM switch, hooking up a wireless mouse to a computer where the person usually uses USB, and randomly move the mouse from a nearby cubicle, etc.
And of course, VNC just makes all the pranks in the last paragraph that much funnier.
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It's easy to argue that wasting time with such stuff kills productivity, and maybe that's true. But it also did wonders for morale, as long as the target for the pranks would rotate around in a more or less fair way. Plus, the ingenuity that went into some of these pranks spilled over into coming up with novel approaches to things that people were supposed to be doing. People learn by playing from a very early age, and -- within limits -- I think that having a playful workplace can lead to a creative workplace, and ultimately can lead to more innovative work.
The trick is to be mindful of the line between being creatively playful, and wasting time in a destructive way. If someone thinks the pranks are going too far, they have to stop. If a deadline is approaching, the work has to get done. Know your [collective] limits, but that said, have fun too:-)
And since I'm being pedantic, before anyone chimes in to give me a hard time about my atrocious diction ("a widely acception set" instead of "a widely accepted set"), spelling ("Windows, by it's prevalence..." instead of "Windows, by its prevalence..."), logical inconsistencies ("C, C++, and SQL are [....] a language calling itself C or C++ has to be [....]"), obvious omissions (Jakarta as a reference implementation for a Java application server), phrasings that could have been done more smoothly (I should have written that "Linux most closely resembles Perl" instead of the other way around, as I put originally)), and bad, pointless XML "jokes" (the whole post was a rant, the middle, self closed <rant/> tag just makes no sense and wasn't nearly as funny as I'd convinced myself it was)... I KNOW. I PLEAD GUILTY.
After reading my post after hitting submit, the errors just glare out at me, and they make me wince. Badly. This sort of thing happens all too often, and I know it.
EXCUSE #1: I was typing that post, and this one for that matter, in the links text browser, and it's a pain in the ass to catch all the typos & thinkos -- especially when only a small window of the text fits on screen at once.
EXCUSE #2: IT'S SLASHDOT. A degree of presentational sloppiness is, I think, acceptable around here. The kind of sloppiness that bothers me -- and again, I please guilty to doing this as well -- is sloppiness of thought, pat cliches & trite slogans as stand-ins for actual perceptive analysis & argument & critique, etc. Too much of that crap can drag a discussion right down into the gutter, and IMO should be kept to a minimum for the sake of everyone. Typos though, that just goes with the territory...
Sorry, but I'd define a standard as a widely acception set of conventions that is either formally (de jure) or informally (de facto) specified. That doesn't describe Linux.
POSIX, to which Linux partially adheres, is a formal, de jure standard for an operating system. Windows, by it's prevalance and the varied implementations (9x & NT families), is sort of a de facto standard, but I'm stretching my definition there just because I can't think of a more solid example.
C, C++, and SQL are examples of formally specified languages, each with a detailed ISO description of what a language calling itself "C" or "C++" has to be compliant with.
Python is a de facto standard language, because there are several implementations that provide the same interface (the original C based Python, the later Java based Jython, and experimental variants such as stackless Python). Although there isn't a formal description of what a "Python" language has to be like, there is the original reference implementation that the other variants strive to adhere to.
Perl is not a standard language, because there is to date only one implementation, and there is no formal description of the language. This is changing with the Perl6 effort, with a formal description of the new version preceding the actual implementation effort, allowing for the possibility of future, formal implementations as well. As a side effect, to maintain backward compatibility there is going to be support for Perl5 on top of the Perl6 runtime engine -- at that point, Perl5 will be promoted to a "standard" language, but until that happens, the term can't be applied.
The situation with Perl most closely resembles the situation with Linux, in my opinion. Just as Perl is mainly defined by what Larry Wall has wanted it to be, Linux is mostly defined by what Linus Torvalds wants Linux to be -- and the fact that many people contribute to the evolution of the language doesn't change the fact that the major effort has been essentially driven by one individual in each case.
Now you're right that, "standard" or not, Linux is unquestionably open. But you start out by asserting that Linux is "by definition" a standard, and it seems to me that this suggests a lack of understanding of both the definition for & examples of de facto or de jure standards -- because Linux, open as it is, just doesn't fit either of those definitions. It's open, sure. It's flexible, of course. But it's not a standard. It just isn't. To argue otherwise is just ignorant, and causes the rest of your [otherwise sound] argument to seem less strong than it should be.
Moral: don't say "$foo is, by definition, $bar", unless "$bar" really is defined as "$foo". If you build up your argument around such an easily falsifiable point, your whole argument can collapse:-)
<rant/>
Future rants: Slashddot posters that begin their comments with "I have to {agree,disagree}." No, they don't -- you all have free will and some stranger's Slashdot commannd should never be enough to compel you to do anything. Man that phrase is a pet peeve of mine...:-)
Microsofts methods of locking your data to their apps will ultimately be seen as intolerable.
On the other hand, if you're really talking about centuries here, then <wild-optimism> the long term trend may be for these currently proprietary formats to become more open </wild-optimism>. This could happen when governments and the public begin to get frustrated at being at some vendor's whim (granted, this hasn't happened much over the past few decades, but in the long run that may well change). Eventually we may reach a point where there's enough will for the formats to become open, at which point either the formats will be reversed engineered (DMCA be damned), or the vendors will read the writing on the wall and open up on their own.
It's optimistic, maybe to a fault, but if moves like the one Massachusetts is considering starts to become the norm nationwide, it could happen. Given the choice between publishing the spec for the Office formats (losing some but not all revenues in the process), or allowing open source solutions to catch on (and risk losing everything), I suspect that they'll take the approach with less risk: willful but controlled opening, just as they're doing with the shared source initiative.
The real question is whether this wiill appease people in the long run. Because the controlled opening approach will take a lot of long term balancing work, my hunch is that it'll be hard to pull off for long. Time will tell though.
I may be naive, or cargo culting, but have you considered Bluetooth devices? For at least part of the problem, bluetooth seems to have been designed exactly to meet these needs: my impression is that Bluetooth keyboards & mice could take care of at least that portion of the devices you're trying to attach, provided that the connection distance isn't too far (the ranges needed are never stated in the original posting).
As for display, sound card & CD drive, I'm not sure what the best approach is. As another poster noted, the best way to find out would be to test your ideas to see if they'll work. I'm not sure what sound card you're considering; the only external one I'm personally aware of is the Griffin iMic, but the sample of it that I saw only had a 2 foot long USB cable. I have no idea if it would work with an extended cable, or if there's a faster Firewire version; I also don't know if the iMic only works with Macs (the original poster also doesn't give any platform constraints that may exist). I wouldn't be surprised if there are, or will be, Bluetooth devices (or Bluetooth optical drives, or at least housings for optical/hard drives), but again I'm not aware of details, if they exist.
As for VGA, I've set up a PC to connect to a display that was about 100 feet away, using a chain of server room VGA cables. The picture was awful, but servicable -- lots of ghosting & blurriness, but large screen features were clearly recognizable. While this was amusing as a prank on the person who's desktop was showing up down the hall, if you actually want your display that far away you might want to find a more professional solution:-)
The big constraint for all the things you want to attach is range: I'd always had the impression that USB wasn't reliable over distances greater than 10 feet or so, and again it isn't known how far these studios are going to be from the computers. Right on the other side of a wall? A dozen feet away? A hundred? The longer it is, the more work this is going to take.
Taking a different approach, this could possibly be an appropriate application for some kind of "small", self-contained devices, like PDAs or tablet PCs, using some kind of wireless networking (bluetooth or 802.11b/g). That takes care of your input & display issues, but may or may not meet the sound card constraint. I know that PDAs run quiet & cool; I assume that tablet PCs run louder & hotter, but hopefully they aren't as noisy or hot as a normal desktop or laptop. In any case, it's an option to consider.
Veering off in yet another bizarre direction, this could be an appropriate application for a beefy server & a bunch of VT100 terminals. They're quiet & cool, but they force you to use character based interfaces, and you'll *have* to use some kind of separate sound card (which you seem to be planning on anyway).
But again, this is an "interesting" problem, which is to say that the right solution might be sensitive to constraints that haven't really been spelled out (range, budget, hardware & software constraints, etc), and barring more information along those lines it's possible to come up with all kinds of creative, and possibly not very helpful, suggestions:-)
Readers may recall that Be brought their suit against the Microsoft back in February 2002. At the time this suit was brought, it was becoming obvious that the US government's antitrust suit against Microsoft was not going to result in any significant punishment for the convicted monopolist, and in fact time has borne this out -- Microsoft is arguably more powerful today than ever before.
Some observers felt Be's claims that Microsoft's vendor contracts excluded competitors from the market was a stronger case than the browser bundling aspect that the US department of justice pursued, but in the end it seems that Be no longer had the resources to complete the trial.
With the Be lawsuit abandoned, the best hopes for a remedy to the Microsoft monopoly now seem to be in the European courts, or with a possible regime change in the USA in 2005.
Microsoft may have gotten away with murder, but at least we've got people nursing the corpse along, as stories like the current one illustrate. *sigh*
The recent botched 10.2.8 updated included a kernel upgrade, from Darwin 6.6 to Darwin 6.8. So while the news here is that the kernel update is, apparently, available as an independent download, the question remains whether or not this kernel release had anything to do with the problems people are having with 10.2.8.
Obviously there have been questions about the updated ethernet drivers, but because so many things changed with the 10.2.8 release, and because the bug reports have been so varied, it's hard to know if the new kernel is buggy, and it's easy to suspect that the ethernet driver may not have been the only component at fault.
It's nice to see that Slashdot has picked up a story that MacSlash ran a day or two ago, but I for one am more interested in hearing about a fix for the damage that 10.2.8 brought with it for many people. When are we going to get a patch for that?
Try rebooting a couple of times -- I started getting errors on boot that the 10.2.6 driver was "incompatible" with 10.2.8, and so was contributing to a security risk. Plus, the firewall doesn't seem to be working -- some people have reported weird glitches with it, and I can't seem to get an inbound connection on e.g. my web server. So the driver isn't quite working, and I'm a little nervous that the system is going to be unstable with a mismatched system driver in place. The driver replacement workaround does not seem to be the right long term fix here, even if it gets things up & running again in the short term.
Ooooh, and then we might find out what they intend to call the successor to X -- it's "oh ess ten", not "oh ess eks", so maybe we'll get a 10.2.XI "ten point two point eleven". It doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't even have to be consistent, it just has to be consistently inconsistent:-)
Not to be contrarian, but wouldn't the responsible thing have been to complete a full round of testing before unleashing this thing on the world...?;-)
No, this is not an iMac/eMac problem. Far from it. Most reports I've read so far seem to be focusing on dual G4s in the 500mhz range, possibly restricted
to ones with Intel's gigabit ethernet chipset. However, some reports talk about Powerbooks as well, so the scope of the problem isn't quite yet clear. The main consolation seems to be that Airport & dialup connections do not seem to be affected, just standard, traditional wired ethernet. Broadly, this is a nasty bug for those unlucky enough to be affected -- consider yourself lucky that you're not seeing it on your machines.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming to this discussion late, but what the hell...
In some of my business classes in college, we were taught about McDonald's & Burger King as a case study in marketing approaches.
The same seems to be going on here. The ubiquitous references to Apple products in movies & TV shows is very well known. However, there is a perception that this is just spontaneous -- Apple hardware just looks better than more or less any Wintel box, so of course that's what gets used for props, right? Not exactly...
Quoting from a Wired article I just read:
That article was from May 2002. The implication is clear: [a] the "spontaneous" placement of Apple products in all these shows is not a coincidence, and [b] it seems that Microsoft has been trying to emulate Apple's success here for a long time.
Apple is playing the McDonald's role, Microsoft is Burger King.
The only wrinkle is that McDonald's is much larger than Burger King (I'm not sure what the spread is, but it's significant), and Apple is something like 20 times smaller than Microsoft -- at least in terms of market share.
Still, it's clear what roles they're trying to follow.
You've been contradicted here several times, but just to add one more, here's the original material. Note that this is from well known film critic Roger Ebert's weekly column "Movie Answer Man":
Note what Ebert says about Kraus: "You're the expert projectionist at our Chicago critics' screening room".
I think it's fair to say that these guys know what they're talking about, and are not confusing these spots with cue dots.
Actually, a lot of the material in Salmon of Doubt -- as far as I can tell, everything but the unfinished manuscript itself (i.e. all the essays) was available online even before DNA passed away. The weird thing about reading that last book, and the bit I really liked, in a weird way, was that I'd already read much of the material from his web site already.
I think my favorite is Maggie and Trudy. That's the one I forward to people when they ask what's so great about this Adams guy anyway :-)
Eh?
Non sequitur: a radio program forces the audience to use their imagination, yes, but I don't see how this has any bearing on literary suspension of disbelief. The way I parse that term, suspension is most necessary when watching actors tell a story in a play, movie, or tv show, because it's so easy to get distracted by "hey, that's Douglas Adams sitting at the end of the bar", or "wow, Zaphod's head really doesn't look at all like a real head, does it?" You have to get yourself past such distractions intellectually in order to enjoy the story. I don't see how this is nearly as much of an issue with a radio story (or a book), if only because there are far fewer distractions, and you have far more room to let your imagination roam. It still comes up, sure, but the way you phrase this -- "it was a radio play, therefore you had to use your imagination, ergo suspension of disbelief was more difficult" -- just doesn't make sense to me.
And so it goes with the rest of your post.
A fair point, but a thin one -- for all the crappy special effects extravaganzas that get thrown up on screens these days, there are also a lot of high quality, well written stories getting made as well -- some of which make solid use of those very special effects.
For modern examples, check out the movies by David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club, Panic Room) or Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, City of Lost Children, Delicatessen) -- good stories, well told, and usually subtle use of special effects. These guys show us that not every "FX" movie has to be a sci-fi shoot-em-up action flick. For an older example to amplify that point, check out Orson Welles' Citizen Kane -- it's basically a special effects showcase from the pre-digital era, with specially built sets, convincing scale models, matte shots, clever cinematography, and careful editing to weave it all together. The modern "FX" film owes as much or more to Kane than it does to, say, Star Wars, and that was hardly a sci-fi movie.
More to the point, you seem to be complaining about how Hollywood uses special effects to paper over the cracks of thin plots & weak characters, but these are the things that HHGTTG almost guarantees. Indeed, those parts of the story were as much as in the can 20 or 25 years ago, and DNA himself had written that the only missing component for a HHGTTG movie was the special effects that would be needed to present the story convincingly. A movie like "City of Lost Children" convinces me that this should no longer be a problem.
The only thing we're missing now is the writer, but he left a good couple of drafts that I think can be put to good use. Nobody complains that Shakespeare isn't around to participate in re-makes of "A Midsummer Night's Dream", and yet good productions have been done. I think the same can happen with Douglas Adams' works, and indeed feel like it's almost an insult to him to suggest that the material he left isn't strong enough to be done without getting him to write another draft.
But I digress.
You seem to be a fan of straw men. Take this one for example:
Okay, my take is that it would have been.... Trainspotting. Look at the distribution credit: Miramax. Disney owns Miramax. Many of the "hip", "edgy" movies of the 90s were either
...and according to one of the interviews on the DVD, he got the part because his wife -- the actress that played Trillian -- arranged it for him.
Apparently David "Darth Vader" Prowse is in that scene because the show was being shot next door to a studio where parts of "Empire Strikes Back" was being filmed. I seem to remember the DVD having off-hand remarks about some of the book's bleeps & bloops being those of R2-D2, for example...
Does it matter if you use SSH? The problem isn't the individual users using or not using SSH (or any other software with a known security hole), but in what remote users can do with that software.
If SSH is turned on (which it may not be in your case), then it doesn't matter if it gets used or not, it still needs to be patched. If it's off then you're safer, but it's still risky in the long run to leave the broken version on your system: f someone breaks in some other way, they can use the broken SSH (or any other insecure software) to do impolite things.
Unless you have a good reason not to -- like, say, the 10.2.8 update already hosed your computer once and you're afraid to try it again -- it's best to just fix SSH, whether or not you use it.
Quoth the original message...
Err, doesn't this exactly not meet the given criteria? The guy wants links to be clickable. If you hide the image, you can only get as far as, say:
But that's just as easily harvestable as it would have been if you left the visible text as the plain address. What's the point?
It's the contents of the href attribute that need to be obscured, not the visible text (or image, or video clip, or whatever). You can't embed an image in the href text, so I don't see how this suggestion gains us anything at all.
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The suggestion I like best is to encapsulate the address as HTML entities. Currently, this is enough to fend off the average address harvesting software, though if the practice catches on, I assume that the harvesters would start to take this into account -- at which point I don't know what the solution should be...
Barring that, it seems like the only way to provide an address will be to use literal text such as "write to us at foo at bar.com" and hope people just get it.
Alternatively, shy away from giving out your address, and provide a form where visitors can submit comments. This could allow you to filter out some of the incoming traffic (hint, if you're going to use "off the shelf" software for this, use NMS instead of Matt Wright's ancient Formmail.PL script, it's much safer). Avoiding any publication of email addresses might piss Jakob Nielsen off, but under the circumstances I think it's probably a reasonable approach to the situation -- it's way to easy for a public address to get abused...
Yeah, but that was like 20 years ago at this point. Surely he can't still be bitter about it, can he?
Man, some people can hold a grudge...
Well, the short, short version is simply this: `osascript 'say "message"'`. For the prank version, I have it wrapped in a little Perl script that, after flushing output with $|++;, just runs an endless loop that calls fortune to grab a random quote, says it, then sleeps for a random amount of time. I won't bother hammering my meager script into something that won't set off Slashdot's lame lameness filters, but I promise that you could write it in 2 minutes once you know where to start -- and for that all you have to do is the osascript say command noted aboe. Try it at your shell for a laugh -- it's easy :-)
Well, I did try to qualify the statement that using Windows as an example of a de facto standard was a stretch. You're right that it would be more accurate to call it that if multiple, competing vendors had come up with differing but interoperating implementations (Wine probably doesn't count).
My point of view was more based on the overwhelming predominance of Windows: even though there is only one vendor behind the family of products, still they do have some significant differences, but the majority of the computing public has adopted the platform[s] as the standard for all kinds of home & business use.
I suppose it's a little like arguing that Amtrak is the "standard" for rail travel in the USA -- because there are few if any other companies providing that service. And the argument against it is that Amtrak is just one company, with one way of doing things, and that in other countries there may be actual competition for rail traffic, just as there is for air traveel. And from a certain point of view, eitehr point of view is defensible & "correct".
But anyway, I'd argue that Linux [the kernel] isn't a standard, because there isn't a de facto (competing implementation) or de jure (specified behavior) definition for it. On the other hand, I'll grant that Linux distributions are a standard, because there are competing implementations that all, roughly, follow certain patterns. The term "standard" here probably fits better than it does for Windows, I'll grant, but the way I read the comment I was replying to, the software in question was the kernel itself -- not distributions using that kernel.
But in any case, we're essentially in agreement here, so there's no point arguing. I think we may have just read the intent of the original commenter differently.
As noted in another comment, I'm perfectly aware of what the idiom means, and am not unaware of the subtle etiquette game going on. I'm just not impressed by it. It sounds pompous & arrogant, not polite & demure. At least that's how it sounds to my, as you say, American ears.
No, I get the idiom, I just think it's annoying and snooty. It might be appropriate if you're sipping espresso in some Left Bank bistro, or at a cocktail party at some Cantabridgian lecture hall, but on Slashdot? Here (as there, for that matter), it just sounds pompous to me. That is what I object to.
At a past job, we had a trouble ticketing system that would generate email reports to each person watcching a ticket whenever there was a mail or web driven transaction on that ticket. For test purposes, we had an "acme" queue that sent mail traffic just to the developers & a couple of good-humored people in other departments. One ticket in the acme queue, which refused to die over the course of a year, was a rude demand for one of the web monkeys to bring in pastries for everyone. Whenever someone was testing something with the request tracking system, they'd more often than not attach their test to the coffee rolls ticket, and this guy would be reminded AGAIN that he hadn't brought in snacks for everyone yet.
Then fun part was when it was realized that the ticket could go not just to person@company, but person+coffeerolls@company, person+cake@company, person+cookies@company, person+coffee@company, person+cappucino@company... etc. We got it so that whenever someone replied to the ticket, this guy would get about a hundred copies of the message -- and since the system had a tendency to allow duplicate or triplicate messages under some circumstances (e.g. a person hit "reply to all" instead of just "reply to sender"), this guy would sometimes get two hundred copies of each message.
That was fun.
Other pranks involved using mpg123 on a server sitting under a someone's desk in a different room so that, out of the blue, his computer would start playing "The Muppet Show" theme song. For more fun, because mpg123 instances can run concurrently, we'd have 20 instances of the song running simultaneously, out of sync with one another.
For fun with people using OSX, you can use osascript to get the machine to use Macintalk to speak arbitrary text out loud. This worked well with a long running shell script that would speak out a random quotation from the fortune command, sleep from five to thirty minutes, then start over again.
And of course, VNC is a barrel of laughs in & of itself.
Other obvious ones include removing the ball from someone's standard mouse, removing the receiver for someone's wireless mouse, or the batteries, swapping the mouse & keyboard plugs on the back of a computer, scrambling what order wires are going into the back of a KVM switch, hooking up a wireless mouse to a computer where the person usually uses USB, and randomly move the mouse from a nearby cubicle, etc.
And of course, VNC just makes all the pranks in the last paragraph that much funnier.
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It's easy to argue that wasting time with such stuff kills productivity, and maybe that's true. But it also did wonders for morale, as long as the target for the pranks would rotate around in a more or less fair way. Plus, the ingenuity that went into some of these pranks spilled over into coming up with novel approaches to things that people were supposed to be doing. People learn by playing from a very early age, and -- within limits -- I think that having a playful workplace can lead to a creative workplace, and ultimately can lead to more innovative work.
The trick is to be mindful of the line between being creatively playful, and wasting time in a destructive way. If someone thinks the pranks are going too far, they have to stop. If a deadline is approaching, the work has to get done. Know your [collective] limits, but that said, have fun too :-)
After reading my post after hitting submit, the errors just glare out at me, and they make me wince. Badly. This sort of thing happens all too often, and I know it.
EXCUSE #1: I was typing that post, and this one for that matter, in the links text browser, and it's a pain in the ass to catch all the typos & thinkos -- especially when only a small window of the text fits on screen at once.
EXCUSE #2: IT'S SLASHDOT. A degree of presentational sloppiness is, I think, acceptable around here. The kind of sloppiness that bothers me -- and again, I please guilty to doing this as well -- is sloppiness of thought, pat cliches & trite slogans as stand-ins for actual perceptive analysis & argument & critique, etc. Too much of that crap can drag a discussion right down into the gutter, and IMO should be kept to a minimum for the sake of everyone. Typos though, that just goes with the territory...
POSIX, to which Linux partially adheres, is a formal, de jure standard for an operating system. Windows, by it's prevalance and the varied implementations (9x & NT families), is sort of a de facto standard, but I'm stretching my definition there just because I can't think of a more solid example.
C, C++, and SQL are examples of formally specified languages, each with a detailed ISO description of what a language calling itself "C" or "C++" has to be compliant with.
Python is a de facto standard language, because there are several implementations that provide the same interface (the original C based Python, the later Java based Jython, and experimental variants such as stackless Python). Although there isn't a formal description of what a "Python" language has to be like, there is the original reference implementation that the other variants strive to adhere to.
Perl is not a standard language, because there is to date only one implementation, and there is no formal description of the language. This is changing with the Perl6 effort, with a formal description of the new version preceding the actual implementation effort, allowing for the possibility of future, formal implementations as well. As a side effect, to maintain backward compatibility there is going to be support for Perl5 on top of the Perl6 runtime engine -- at that point, Perl5 will be promoted to a "standard" language, but until that happens, the term can't be applied.
The situation with Perl most closely resembles the situation with Linux, in my opinion. Just as Perl is mainly defined by what Larry Wall has wanted it to be, Linux is mostly defined by what Linus Torvalds wants Linux to be -- and the fact that many people contribute to the evolution of the language doesn't change the fact that the major effort has been essentially driven by one individual in each case.
Now you're right that, "standard" or not, Linux is unquestionably open. But you start out by asserting that Linux is "by definition" a standard, and it seems to me that this suggests a lack of understanding of both the definition for & examples of de facto or de jure standards -- because Linux, open as it is, just doesn't fit either of those definitions. It's open, sure. It's flexible, of course. But it's not a standard. It just isn't. To argue otherwise is just ignorant, and causes the rest of your [otherwise sound] argument to seem less strong than it should be.
Moral: don't say "$foo is, by definition, $bar", unless "$bar" really is defined as "$foo". If you build up your argument around such an easily falsifiable point, your whole argument can collapse :-)
<rant />
Future rants: Slashddot posters that begin their comments with "I have to {agree,disagree}." No, they don't -- you all have free will and some stranger's Slashdot commannd should never be enough to compel you to do anything. Man that phrase is a pet peeve of mine... :-)
On the other hand, if you're really talking about centuries here, then <wild-optimism> the long term trend may be for these currently proprietary formats to become more open </wild-optimism>. This could happen when governments and the public begin to get frustrated at being at some vendor's whim (granted, this hasn't happened much over the past few decades, but in the long run that may well change). Eventually we may reach a point where there's enough will for the formats to become open, at which point either the formats will be reversed engineered (DMCA be damned), or the vendors will read the writing on the wall and open up on their own.
It's optimistic, maybe to a fault, but if moves like the one Massachusetts is considering starts to become the norm nationwide, it could happen. Given the choice between publishing the spec for the Office formats (losing some but not all revenues in the process), or allowing open source solutions to catch on (and risk losing everything), I suspect that they'll take the approach with less risk: willful but controlled opening, just as they're doing with the shared source initiative.
The real question is whether this wiill appease people in the long run. Because the controlled opening approach will take a lot of long term balancing work, my hunch is that it'll be hard to pull off for long. Time will tell though.
I may be naive, or cargo culting, but have you considered Bluetooth devices? For at least part of the problem, bluetooth seems to have been designed exactly to meet these needs: my impression is that Bluetooth keyboards & mice could take care of at least that portion of the devices you're trying to attach, provided that the connection distance isn't too far (the ranges needed are never stated in the original posting).
As for display, sound card & CD drive, I'm not sure what the best approach is. As another poster noted, the best way to find out would be to test your ideas to see if they'll work. I'm not sure what sound card you're considering; the only external one I'm personally aware of is the Griffin iMic, but the sample of it that I saw only had a 2 foot long USB cable. I have no idea if it would work with an extended cable, or if there's a faster Firewire version; I also don't know if the iMic only works with Macs (the original poster also doesn't give any platform constraints that may exist). I wouldn't be surprised if there are, or will be, Bluetooth devices (or Bluetooth optical drives, or at least housings for optical/hard drives), but again I'm not aware of details, if they exist.
As for VGA, I've set up a PC to connect to a display that was about 100 feet away, using a chain of server room VGA cables. The picture was awful, but servicable -- lots of ghosting & blurriness, but large screen features were clearly recognizable. While this was amusing as a prank on the person who's desktop was showing up down the hall, if you actually want your display that far away you might want to find a more professional solution :-)
The big constraint for all the things you want to attach is range: I'd always had the impression that USB wasn't reliable over distances greater than 10 feet or so, and again it isn't known how far these studios are going to be from the computers. Right on the other side of a wall? A dozen feet away? A hundred? The longer it is, the more work this is going to take.
Taking a different approach, this could possibly be an appropriate application for some kind of "small", self-contained devices, like PDAs or tablet PCs, using some kind of wireless networking (bluetooth or 802.11b/g). That takes care of your input & display issues, but may or may not meet the sound card constraint. I know that PDAs run quiet & cool; I assume that tablet PCs run louder & hotter, but hopefully they aren't as noisy or hot as a normal desktop or laptop. In any case, it's an option to consider.
Veering off in yet another bizarre direction, this could be an appropriate application for a beefy server & a bunch of VT100 terminals. They're quiet & cool, but they force you to use character based interfaces, and you'll *have* to use some kind of separate sound card (which you seem to be planning on anyway).
But again, this is an "interesting" problem, which is to say that the right solution might be sensitive to constraints that haven't really been spelled out (range, budget, hardware & software constraints, etc), and barring more information along those lines it's possible to come up with all kinds of creative, and possibly not very helpful, suggestions :-)
Whoa, how did I miss that? THANK YOU.
Slashdot didn't pick up the story when it happened a couple of weeks ago, but Be, Inc. has settled its antitrust suit against Microsoft for $23 million. Microsoft, as usual, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement.
Readers may recall that Be brought their suit against the Microsoft back in February 2002. At the time this suit was brought, it was becoming obvious that the US government's antitrust suit against Microsoft was not going to result in any significant punishment for the convicted monopolist, and in fact time has borne this out -- Microsoft is arguably more powerful today than ever before.
Some observers felt Be's claims that Microsoft's vendor contracts excluded competitors from the market was a stronger case than the browser bundling aspect that the US department of justice pursued, but in the end it seems that Be no longer had the resources to complete the trial.
With the Be lawsuit abandoned, the best hopes for a remedy to the Microsoft monopoly now seem to be in the European courts, or with a possible regime change in the USA in 2005.
Microsoft may have gotten away with murder, but at least we've got people nursing the corpse along, as stories like the current one illustrate. *sigh*
The recent botched 10.2.8 updated included a kernel upgrade, from Darwin 6.6 to Darwin 6.8. So while the news here is that the kernel update is, apparently, available as an independent download, the question remains whether or not this kernel release had anything to do with the problems people are having with 10.2.8.
Obviously there have been questions about the updated ethernet drivers, but because so many things changed with the 10.2.8 release, and because the bug reports have been so varied, it's hard to know if the new kernel is buggy, and it's easy to suspect that the ethernet driver may not have been the only component at fault.
It's nice to see that Slashdot has picked up a story that MacSlash ran a day or two ago, but I for one am more interested in hearing about a fix for the damage that 10.2.8 brought with it for many people. When are we going to get a patch for that?
Try rebooting a couple of times -- I started getting errors on boot that the 10.2.6 driver was "incompatible" with 10.2.8, and so was contributing to a security risk. Plus, the firewall doesn't seem to be working -- some people have reported weird glitches with it, and I can't seem to get an inbound connection on e.g. my web server. So the driver isn't quite working, and I'm a little nervous that the system is going to be unstable with a mismatched system driver in place. The driver replacement workaround does not seem to be the right long term fix here, even if it gets things up & running again in the short term.
Ooooh, and then we might find out what they intend to call the successor to X -- it's "oh ess ten", not "oh ess eks", so maybe we'll get a 10.2.XI "ten point two point eleven". It doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't even have to be consistent, it just has to be consistently inconsistent :-)
Not to be contrarian, but wouldn't the responsible thing have been to complete a full round of testing before unleashing this thing on the world...? ;-)
No, this is not an iMac/eMac problem. Far from it. Most reports I've read so far seem to be focusing on dual G4s in the 500mhz range, possibly restricted to ones with Intel's gigabit ethernet chipset. However, some reports talk about Powerbooks as well, so the scope of the problem isn't quite yet clear. The main consolation seems to be that Airport & dialup connections do not seem to be affected, just standard, traditional wired ethernet. Broadly, this is a nasty bug for those unlucky enough to be affected -- consider yourself lucky that you're not seeing it on your machines.