"Not for me... nor for 300 million of my closest friends."
I call bullshit. 300 million of your 'closest friends'...does that include catholics, atheists, jews, niggahs, poor people, rednecks, rich Bostonians, drug addicts [there's 20 million right there], republicans,democrats, leftists, f the far right, etc, Cowboy? No? Didn't think so, you phony, bullshit asshole.
Ah yes, Camino, there's a real Mac app. very nice. Thanks for the reply, I should have included the ID number of the bug report,of course, but here it is: 295081
All the main browsers have something really going for them. I like features in Omniweb, sometimes use Opera [I paid for it, way before it went freebie]. Camino is very quick. I use Firefox and Epiphany over in my Linux install, etc. Even the latest Netscape seems to have ironed out a lot of sluggishness, and I'll always have a soft spot for the old 4.7.9 Communicator Pro [full install]...but Firefox is extensible, has the great search bar additions, etc, and it's flawed, like anything is, but on par, it's great.
Firefox, on the Mac, also had that deal where, if i was, say, looking at a very long URL up in the address bar, reflecting my current page, and wanted to just delete the end of the URL, back to its root locator, [before all the sub-directory/blahblah/,etc], I wasn't able to place the cursor at my new 'breakpoint', and move the mouse 'down' slightly to select to end of line, instead, i would place the cursor, and then drag through [Wwindows-style] the entire line til the end was reached. Not a Mac GUI or HIG thing, at all. but that's fixed now. But the updating,in preferences, very broken.
He's exploiting the 'tip' of that group of people for whom the risk/reward ratio, when sufficiently skewed, is a positive 'indicator'. That group being the polar opposite of the risk averse types. In other words, it most certainly is capitalism, and the presence or absence of supporting information is relative, not 'defining.'
Ah Canada! And Quebec! In the early seventies I was living in Canada, under the radar, being a Californian, by birth, and an American. I was out west then, but shortly after moving to Montreal, decided to get some Canadian ID. Picked up the afternoon paper [remember the Star?], on microfiche at the Library, from the early 50s, grabbed a name and mom and dad's name, etc, from a Birth Announcement, sent off for the birth certificate, walked into a Post Office, picked up a Social Insurance Number application packet, off a counter near the door, filled it in and there i was, two weeks later, with a new ID.
I was troubled, not having my 'real' name on thinngs, at one point, and decided to just go for a new Soc. Insurance Number, and skip the Birth Cert business. No problem, picked up the form, filled in everything accurately except for place of birth [I picked Leamington, ON, for some unbeknownst-to-me reason], and was issued the brand new number.
Fast forward 15 years, and I'm living in LA, but have decided to marry an old girlfriend I'd known in Mtl. We got married, all fair and square, in Quebec, where we'd decided to move: me from LA, and she'd been living in Van. All's well. I became a Permanent Resident [similar to the 'old' Landed Immigrant status, meaning all the rights of a canadian citizen except voting]. At some point while the paperwork on the permanent Resident status was moving around, I'm back in LA tying up loose strings, the phone rings, and it's the Vital Statistics folks out in New Brunswick calling. The girkl on the phone said she was issuing me the Social Insurance Number, but had seen a record of someone with my exact details, except for birth, already having a number from 15 years previous. Ha ha ha, the gig is up right? Wrong, I simply told her the exact truth, and she decided, in the interests of justice, not to mention paperwork, to simply re-issue the same number to me. And i still have it today.
Two points: One, using a false ID wasn't always illegal, as long as it wasn't used for fraudulent purpose, and Two, It's all about Social Engineering, being polite, honest as is reasonably possible, etc. I love Canada. I have seen other very specific instances where the basic rights of individuals, and the sanctity of one's 'word', etc, are taken seriously there. It is different here in America, where everyone is a 'perp', and privacy is a joke. But I love America, for the geography, and the people...the real America, in other words.
It is sad that working people, here, including everyone from an immigrant dishwasher, up to Bill gates, has to be on guard, and concerned aboutt, not only organied criminals, but Government agencies, insurance companies, etc, that seem to exist to take away what we've earned. The people, all of them, black, white, atheist, christian, jew, poor, rich...whatever...deserve better than this. A person's 'ignorance', or 'trust' shouldn't give those other organized thieves carte blanche to rip off others. It's the 'system' that encourages this.
In the US, credit card fraud, related to unauthorized charges, is investigated by the US Secret Service. Even something as simple as Person A giving Person B the use of a card for a purchase, where Person A changes their mind after the fact, regarding authorization, Person B will then get a call from the Bank, followed by a Secret Service investigator, asking Person B to either pay up, or convince Person A to re-affirm their intention to honor the debt. In cases of ongoing scams, the FBI are the folks doing the work, but once it escalates to specific fraudulent usage of the number, SS is in there, regardless of the FBI's or local DA's involvement in any concurrent investigation.
I'm on an aluminum Powerbook. I did file a bug report and had it accepted and passed back to me as if I was capable of saying, "yeah, I'll take this one". [laughs] Sorry, wrong guy. Anyway, the Macintosh is way down the totem pole for what is, essentially, the Greatest Windows Browser That Actually Runs Better On Linux.
But this "auto-update" thing: hey, "Check for new version" has NEVER worked on the Mac, in any version of Firefox, bar none. Period. It's a joke. As a matter of fact, the prefs are setup for "Check for new version:", followed by two lines: "Firefox", and then,next line: "Extensions". and from day One onward, with "Extensions" disabled, and "Firefox" enabled, it always does the check and comes back with a short list of various extensions that have updates.
Tonight, after being in Ubuntu Linux for most of the last couple months, I just realized there's a 1.0.7 Firefox...I'm running 1.0.6. Great auto-updating, sure.
And now there's folks here asking for an "auto" phishing site alert? I love Firefox, use it 90% of the time...but, You've got to be fucking kidding.
Wasn't it basically philosophers/seers, inventing astrology, which begat astronomy, which was the mother of mathematics? I'd heard, long ago that astrology was actually the first 'science', which seems a bit ironic, today, with the debunking of it as a 'science', and all. But my question would be: Wouldn't the needs of a system to measure time and distance have most likely come from astrology, before there was commerce, or other human endeavors, requiring science and number theories, in general?
Well, wouldn't you know, i have no mod points today...yet, so I'll just say, that this is an incredibly informative post, for the links, and the idea that coherence can be quantified, somewhat. Thank you.
I'd rather they were holding down a job, helping grow the economy, and paying their OWN fucking taxes.
I don't want to get into the intricacies of this, very polarized, discussion, given that both sides have reasonable points of view, marred by intolerance...That being said, I have worked in a number of drug/alcohol rehabilitation clinics in the States and Canada. I've worked with incarcerated individuals who had real criminal histories with coincident substance abuse problems, as well as kids who went astray, and got in over their heads, and older men and women who may or may not have had coincident psychological problems.
And believe me, my friend, one of the few definite overlapping characteristics of this broad sample of people and backgrounds, has been that same desire, specifically: To hold down a real job, grow their own economy (and the economy of a "family" previously hurt or neglected), and to "pay their own fucking taxes" (a sign of "income", and productive membership in society, if there ever was one).
I'm glad to see a tailing-off in the crime rates. How could anyone not be? But there are other, parallel factors at play. For instance, in Texas, which leads the nation in incarcerated children, prison population per capita, and executions, there is also an under-funded rehab environment and an educational system that ranks 50th out of 50. There are a lot of factors to consider, is all I'm saying.
Should someone who steals, or brandishes, and/or uses, a weapon in the course of a crime, to get funds to feed an addiction, be let let off scot free because they're 'troubled', or not making informed decisions due to the imperatives imposed by addiction? Hell no! Property rights don't exist solely to protect the ruling class. They also protect Joe and Jane auto-worker who saved their hard-earned cash to buy that TV, car, or stereo, etc. But rehabilitation, coincident with proven 12-step self help is the way to go, to seriously put a dent on these avoidable criminal activities.
Simple incarceration just acts as a breeding ground for recidivism, more often than not. it may be profitable for Wackenhut and the large corps that own a piece of the business of jail, and it might, along with relaxed immigration, keep the already-working people over a barrel as far as leverage for earnings increases and the ability to 'negotiate' better health coverage for workers, but, is it good for the Society, or the Country, at large, in the long run? No fucking way.
Exactly right. All of a sudden, this Dvorak dude, is A-OK with people that saw his errors, over the years, predicting doom for the Mac. Let's look at this. The guy had his head up his ass all these years, and now a reader decides he's okay...because all of a sudden he agrees with the reader? Shit, if anyone understands anything about contrarian thinking, Dvorak's new-found appreciation for Apple, could be the first red flag for Apple's future. You never know.
Here's an unrelated example of the logic: I had a clothing store, once, in Montreal. And you know, limited rack space, so as things were selling, or not, I would think maybe I should just toss some of this shit and make room for what sells. Pretty basic, right? Okay, enter a guy I knew, named Teddy. This guy was from Nova Scotia, and he was a likable fellow, but he had the worst taste in everything. He had like a reverse "knack", if you catch my drift. So, one day I asked him to just look through all the stuff hanging in the store, and give me his honest opinions on things. UI threw away everything teddy liked, and put all the stuff he thought was crap, right up front...and business boomed. Teddy, wherever he is, God bless him, still has terrible taste, and Dvorak's head is still up his ass. The prosecution rests.
...to the so-called media bias referenced in the article.
But, before I toss in my two cents, does anybody here ever recall hearing a baseball player, or a movie star being interviewed and asked a question about politics, or some recent political event? It happens, and any rational person will, no doubt, say, when they here the celebrity's half-baked response, "Well, what the fuck does a shortstop know about foreign policy, anyway??" And that is an appropriate response. By the same token, what makes a reporter a technically educated individual capable of comparing similar, but very different tech approaches to sometimes generalized, often times specialized user applications? Answer? Nothing. I mean, fuck the Wall St. Journal. I'm a subscriber, too, and guess what, i use the Macintosh despite the fact that Mossberg thinks they're great.
I use a Macintosh, primarily, but am very comfortable in the Windows environment, and recently had the pleasure [actual fun] of working in Ubuntu Linux (Gnome defaults). The flipside to all that media stuff and the design-centric criticisms of what prompts people towards Macs, is simple: In the real world, the ppc/Mac is incredibly marginalized. I'm telling you, Mac users, like myself, are paying for this shit, big time.
My Powerbook runs OS X, naturally, but also has a heavy VirtualPC installation [very handy] and the Ubuntu insatallation, yet, once again, I am back in OS X-land, despite the blast I was having, for 6 weeks or so, getting acquainted with Linux. Why? Multimedia. [with the problem of "fonts", which really make typeset documents NOT cross-platform...as great as OOo, is, it isn't ready for the big leagues, because of stupid fonts, not the suite, itself, that's sad, and someone needs to get down on the font reverse engineering thing, pronto]
There just isn't support for the slim market of ppc in the Linux world. I received tons of advice, even in my limited exposure to the really helpful Linux community, but could not get simple DVD playback without dropped frames, or syncing problems when the material shiftwed into VOB2, VOB3, etc...it was pathetic. No support for the broadcom chip in the Airport Extreme, which isn't a Linux issue [it's a broadcom/Apple proprietary issue], but it's a helluva I-wanna-run-Linux-on-my-Mac issue, regardless. Why no reverse engineering? PPC market too small to bother with. The craziest thing is, i was using a Matias keyboard, that the Mac, itself, even with the correct driver, would fail to 'recognize', intermittently, BUT, on my first install of Debian, the hardware recognition moduleor whatever, in the initial setup, recognized it, and its internal USB hub, instantly...but couldn't see the second monitor.
I live in spanned desktops, but gave them up, for a month, in an effort to get the spanning to "just work" under linux. It was no-go. setting a simple RightOf, or LeftOf, etc, resulted in a wacky situation. The problem, really? Not enough other Mac users on Linux who knew what they were really doing, on the lower levels. [Me included, obviously].
It was very frustrating, not in angry sense, just in a so close, yet so far, sense. Really too bad. My basic view on Linux is that it is Unix-like OS for Windows. [With KDE being the XP pastel desktop version, and Gnome as the Mac-like version...I liked Gnome a lot]. You see there are features in Windows [most obvious being right-click cut/paste] that should have been on the Apple boxes, ages ago. But there they are in linux on ppc. very nice, kinda like the best of both worlds on a lean, powerful operating system with no layered, incompatible filing system and "Carbon" 'Finder' [what a load of shit that is] to get in the way. So much promise. Linux runs faster on my Aluminum Powerbook, than OS X, and trust me, I know how to rev up OS X. Apple Corp is going to be in for a rude shock when people get to compare a "real" unix-like OS on the same intel architecture, against the schizonphrenic Apple OS. I want to see that.
the word finishing feature of openoffice.org, who's idea was that?
No shit. I thought it was just me, that "feature' is beyond annoying, they really ought to find out who popped that one in there, and ban them from the project for a decade or so.
Well, free-ness is a big factor for people. People's eyes grow big when they compare Photoshop ($600+) to Gimp or Final Cut ($1200+) to Cinerella or Alias (where's that infinity sign?) to Blender. Sure, sometimes they're not as powerful, but the average user frankly won't stumble upon that problem until later, when they've become advanced enough that they can work around it.
Go to the head of the class young person, no kidding. I'm an old guy, I have a ton of cash locked up in Adobe and Apple and Office. On both of 'those' platforms. And the potential in the OpenSource movement is stunning, and obvious, to me, in just a little over three weeks running Ubuntu on a Powerbook
Despite the hardware issues, exacerbated by being on the ppc branch of things, with my Airport Extreme and spanned desktop down the tubes, for now, I am having the most fun I've had on a computer since NeXT.
The new OpenOffice is an amazing piece of collaboration. adherence to 'real' XML is music to my ears [SGML/XML coding, re-purposing is a 'sideline' for me]. The 'community', as fractious, and argumentative as it is, is hitting a huge number of the key issues, right on the head. It is an awesome time to be getting into it all, or, like me, really getting into it, again.
Im using an IDE, I want maximum screen realestate, i want to auto hide frequently accessed pannels and things like the start bar on the edges of the screens to make them ocupy less room. Im sitting at my deskstop about to begin working. I want a clean area, but it should allow me to configure a simple way to get access to lots of my frequently used program on the desktop.
The setup you describe, there, is exactly, to a "tee", what I'm looking at every time I boot into Ubuntu (Gnome desk) on a ppc box. Exactly.
My panel at the screen top, is transparent. I keep it around because it only eats 23 pixels in vertical space. The bottom panel is a one-click-gone setup, but can be made show/hide, just like an old Windows box. Then there are the separate desktops...
I have to assume you've seen this setup, already, so I don't know what else to tell you. But the situation I'm looking at is like the best of aqua, some NeXT, and Windows features, combined, and easily dismissed from view, as a default.
Man, if Apple, or someone, released a "fix" for the Airport Extreme driver "problem", and Novell fixed "Evolution" and the multimedia situation on the linux-ppc distro caught up with the i386, I would be gone from OS X, for good.
since when does a pro web designer have time to work in a college computer lab? are you just as bad at each, or is it a toss-up? --trick question, careful...let's rephrase that: you're a designer 'hack', and you pay your bills by de-fragging boxes. There, now that we have that sorted out, the reason you didn't like IE 5 on the Mac was because, like a dumbshit, you were probably using FrontPage... next
you and the dumbass are both full of shit, or stupid. I run Office on a Mac laptop, and 2003 Enterprise on a PC... and if you think it's sluggish on a mac, you're nuts. (or, if not nuts, then stupid, or full of shit, as stated).
I'm so sick of all this blame-game bullshit being played by the music industry and I'm sick of all the crying and whining by the RIAA. This bullshit article tries to push the term "protected music" like it's doing something for you and making your life better but damn Apple for messing up my "protected music" experience. What the hell kind of shit is that? I don't want, need, or will never buy anyone's stupid ass "protected music". Please, it's all a bunch of shit. I don't miss wasting my hard earned money on cd's at all.
I hope you get modded all the way up, my friend. I worked in the music biz for a long, long time, and I have seen so many people getting screwed out of a reasonable reward for their actual "work" (meaning, reasonable rewards for learning their instruments, or writing songs, or engineering on a console)... just so the mob-run musician's "union" (what a joke, ask any musician)... or the greedy fucks that run the companies, and their lawyers, can live high off the hog. It makes me want to puke.
Duke Ellington..(I can hear it now..."Who????"), said, "The purpose of the music business is to sell booze." He was like a fucking saint, and he played clubs his whole life, and he said that over 50 fucking years ago!... Meaning: All this greedy bullshit on the part of the "majors" did not start with "napster', or anything like it.
The absolute best way for a musician to make anything like a real return on a lifetime of work, is to either sell a shitload of tee-shirts, on an endless tour, OR hope to fuck that one of his or her songs gets recorded by a big star, and sells like hotcakes (because the fraction of the songwriter's royalties, from the sales of the big star's version of the writer's tune, can't get grabbed by the label to payback against an 'advance', or inflated 'costs' associated with the writer's own original recording)...I am never giving another penny to those motherfuckers, ever.
You have a legitimate question, but a lot of the smaller venture capita;ists aren't exactly betting the farm on some guys ideas, and then going off to pray that it all works out. They look at a longer view, and one condiseration is: How will investors, LATER, perceive the company and its revenue generating prospects.
I knew some guys that needed $7 million or so to get some manufacturing going on a device they had invented.The 'banker', out on the West coast ran the thing through his head and decided, "Yeah, I can get a few guys to pitch this." So, what did he do? He guaranteed he guys that the $7 million would come in, and took the $7 mil of 'shares' (which didn't really exist yet, except in the form of "units"), and waved his arms over the paper (laughs) and now he decreed, "We now have 3 times as many units representing the same 10% of the company....here comes the fun part
So, when the 'banker' takes the deal, he then creates $21 mil worth of units, from the $7 mil that the company wanted to raise.. it works out to $7 million for the company, $7 million for the commissions to the sales guys, and $7 million to the banker. Fucking nice work if you can get it, believe me.
But to answer your question, in one of many ways, it comes down to: Will enough people, pay enough money, over a period of time, to allow the company to make enough 'things' cheaply enough to profit?
By the way, using Enron, as an example, was a little backwards. Only the little guys, the workers, and the tax-payers lost money, all the guys that got in early, and hung in, laughed all the way to the bank, and if they go to prison, they'll get out, and they'll continue laughing on the way to wherever the cash is stashed.
If you believe your idea, or product, is a winner, you need to contact someone who can translate that fact, or 'plan' into some version of venture capitalism. The example I gave is one of the common forms that revolve around what are known as Private Placements. It's all about sales. You sell the idea to one guy, he buys the idea, and gets a handful of sales guys to sell the idea to the folks with capital to invest 'on the ground floor', and finally, if all goes well, you take your end, create the product, and your customers are the last sale in the equation. Good luck to you, I mean that.
okay that's fair enough, but consider this: I have probably worked on betwween a million and 2 mil of pages of tech manuals, transferring them from either printed matter, or pdf files, into interactives. The arcane software I used: TextPad in Windows, and JEdit (a simple Java text editor with some XML plugins, commonly available). To test the documents against one of the toughest DTDs known? one simple line in a 'Run' Windows CLI terminal.Again, another Java 'command' (to wit: 'parse') that is freely available.
Have a few companies come out with fancy XML Editors? Sure, I like XMLEditor on the Mac. It's nice, but anyone can read a book about XML, and write/anything/ in a simple text editor (Tex-Edit, TextEdit,etc on Mac), TextPad, NotePad, etc on Windows, the same goes for Linux. I'm looking at MlView in Ubuntu, right now
My friend, look, I worked on a project that had a crazy, deep DTD, AND the 'client' was aware that their own XSLT style sheet wouldn't 'allow' certain elements in the DTD to be portrayed properly. Crazy! So, on the one hand, here's this complex, but elegant DTD, and hen some typical bullshit to make it screwier.The complexity of the DTD was mitigated by having a proprietary app on hand to the DTD close at hand and orderly, and searchable in context, otherwise... who knows? BUT, that is an extreme case of I write it like this and it is this difficult. Anybody can write a DTD, and then follow it. They use plain text. (That's another issue, the using of binary XML, which I don't even want to get into).
For me, and this is only my opinion, the issue revolves around 'content' versus 'format', as to which language is most useful and relevant. And my feeling is that content, the data itself, is what people need to search, retreive, store, and use. Formatting (head-tags, bold, underline, paragraph tags)...who cares about that stuff? Formatting is about presentation, and is terribly important in that context. No sane person would argue that, but the content is what really matters, and that is where SGML and XML absolutely rule.
And no, Apple does not have a fancy GUI even available, to most average Apple-users to edit most of the system's defaults. One needs the Developer's Tools installed, to do it 'by the book' OR, any text editor. The small uproar to come, will center on binary XML which will be fine for shaving a few nanoseconds off the data stream in and out of processors, but will add an extra step (binary-->text-->binary translation) to what is now a trivial matter.
In closing, I use Acrobat Pro 7, like a lot of folks, and have all major, and most minor, editing suites and apps, on all three platforms... and you know what? Give me a plain text editor and your biggest XML doc and I'll show you how hog-tied, bloated, and, well, in a word... 'proprietary' Acrobat pdf really is when it comes to some 'power' editing. No comparison. I like Adobe's thing. Hell, if it wasn't for them, Apple (with the LaserWriter) would have had to invent Desktop Publishing single-handedly.:)
I know exactly why nobody uses XML and everyone uses PDF.
Ha ha ha, guess what? You know nothing about XML, my friend.
No software support? What planet are you on, pal? OS X, for example, runs it's entire system of preferences (you know, think of them as the rc or configs for the entire GUI), on nothing but XML
One source, of simple, plain text...repurposed, through multiple instances of an XSLT, or CSS style 'sheet' (for the web kiddies), and you can have print-to-paper version, a pdf, a web-based, a mobile (phone, PDA) version, an interactive electronic document, a Flash piece wrapped in QuickTime... get the picture???
One source (be it one page, or unlimited numbers of manuals running into millions of pages,) and a small handfull of style sheets. Now, tell me, Einstein, which would you rather type, several hundred thousand words, multiple times, or ONCE?.
Ignorance is treatable-theoretically-but there's a huge gap between misinformed and Stupid... and you are all the way at the wrong end of the gap, comprendez?
Heheh, jeeze, forget the its and it's and the loose usage of lose. What about:
"...reference your sources (otherwise its, obviously, plagarism)"?
There's no need for the parentheses, nor the commas, unless one uses a comma before, and after, "otherwise".
Maybe a spell-checker that could be set to 'dumb-down', say, a Grade level-and-a-half, could be employed to 'cover' a purloined thesis, AND, play on the sympathies of a content-over-form prof?...Hmmm.
Slashdot Mirror
"Not for me ... nor for 300 million of my closest friends."
I call bullshit. 300 million of your 'closest friends'...does that include catholics, atheists, jews, niggahs, poor people, rednecks, rich Bostonians, drug addicts [there's 20 million right there], republicans,democrats, leftists, f the far right, etc, Cowboy? No? Didn't think so, you phony, bullshit asshole.
Ah yes, Camino, there's a real Mac app. very nice. Thanks for the reply, I should have included the ID number of the bug report,of course, but here it is: 295081
All the main browsers have something really going for them. I like features in Omniweb, sometimes use Opera [I paid for it, way before it went freebie]. Camino is very quick. I use Firefox and Epiphany over in my Linux install, etc. Even the latest Netscape seems to have ironed out a lot of sluggishness, and I'll always have a soft spot for the old 4.7.9 Communicator Pro [full install]...but Firefox is extensible, has the great search bar additions, etc, and it's flawed, like anything is, but on par, it's great.
Firefox, on the Mac, also had that deal where, if i was, say, looking at a very long URL up in the address bar, reflecting my current page, and wanted to just delete the end of the URL, back to its root locator, [before all the sub-directory /blahblah/,etc], I wasn't able to place the cursor at my new 'breakpoint', and move the mouse 'down' slightly to select to end of line, instead, i would place the cursor, and then drag through [Wwindows-style] the entire line til the end was reached. Not a Mac GUI or HIG thing, at all. but that's fixed now. But the updating,in preferences, very broken.
He's exploiting the 'tip' of that group of people for whom the risk/reward ratio, when sufficiently skewed, is a positive 'indicator'. That group being the polar opposite of the risk averse types. In other words, it most certainly is capitalism, and the presence or absence of supporting information is relative, not 'defining.'
yeah, those wallets were great, you also got a little picture of your 'family' in them...very cool for us rootless types.
Ah Canada! And Quebec! In the early seventies I was living in Canada, under the radar, being a Californian, by birth, and an American. I was out west then, but shortly after moving to Montreal, decided to get some Canadian ID. Picked up the afternoon paper [remember the Star?], on microfiche at the Library, from the early 50s, grabbed a name and mom and dad's name, etc, from a Birth Announcement, sent off for the birth certificate, walked into a Post Office, picked up a Social Insurance Number application packet, off a counter near the door, filled it in and there i was, two weeks later, with a new ID.
I was troubled, not having my 'real' name on thinngs, at one point, and decided to just go for a new Soc. Insurance Number, and skip the Birth Cert business. No problem, picked up the form, filled in everything accurately except for place of birth [I picked Leamington, ON, for some unbeknownst-to-me reason], and was issued the brand new number.
Fast forward 15 years, and I'm living in LA, but have decided to marry an old girlfriend I'd known in Mtl. We got married, all fair and square, in Quebec, where we'd decided to move: me from LA, and she'd been living in Van. All's well. I became a Permanent Resident [similar to the 'old' Landed Immigrant status, meaning all the rights of a canadian citizen except voting]. At some point while the paperwork on the permanent Resident status was moving around, I'm back in LA tying up loose strings, the phone rings, and it's the Vital Statistics folks out in New Brunswick calling. The girkl on the phone said she was issuing me the Social Insurance Number, but had seen a record of someone with my exact details, except for birth, already having a number from 15 years previous. Ha ha ha, the gig is up right? Wrong, I simply told her the exact truth, and she decided, in the interests of justice, not to mention paperwork, to simply re-issue the same number to me. And i still have it today.
Two points: One, using a false ID wasn't always illegal, as long as it wasn't used for fraudulent purpose, and Two, It's all about Social Engineering, being polite, honest as is reasonably possible, etc. I love Canada. I have seen other very specific instances where the basic rights of individuals, and the sanctity of one's 'word', etc, are taken seriously there. It is different here in America, where everyone is a 'perp', and privacy is a joke. But I love America, for the geography, and the people...the real America, in other words.
It is sad that working people, here, including everyone from an immigrant dishwasher, up to Bill gates, has to be on guard, and concerned aboutt, not only organied criminals, but Government agencies, insurance companies, etc, that seem to exist to take away what we've earned. The people, all of them, black, white, atheist, christian, jew, poor, rich...whatever...deserve better than this. A person's 'ignorance', or 'trust' shouldn't give those other organized thieves carte blanche to rip off others. It's the 'system' that encourages this.
In the US, credit card fraud, related to unauthorized charges, is investigated by the US Secret Service. Even something as simple as Person A giving Person B the use of a card for a purchase, where Person A changes their mind after the fact, regarding authorization, Person B will then get a call from the Bank, followed by a Secret Service investigator, asking Person B to either pay up, or convince Person A to re-affirm their intention to honor the debt. In cases of ongoing scams, the FBI are the folks doing the work, but once it escalates to specific fraudulent usage of the number, SS is in there, regardless of the FBI's or local DA's involvement in any concurrent investigation.
I'm on an aluminum Powerbook. I did file a bug report and had it accepted and passed back to me as if I was capable of saying, "yeah, I'll take this one". [laughs] Sorry, wrong guy. Anyway, the Macintosh is way down the totem pole for what is, essentially, the Greatest Windows Browser That Actually Runs Better On Linux.
But this "auto-update" thing: hey, "Check for new version" has NEVER worked on the Mac, in any version of Firefox, bar none. Period. It's a joke. As a matter of fact, the prefs are setup for "Check for new version:", followed by two lines: "Firefox", and then,next line: "Extensions". and from day One onward, with "Extensions" disabled, and "Firefox" enabled, it always does the check and comes back with a short list of various extensions that have updates.
Tonight, after being in Ubuntu Linux for most of the last couple months, I just realized there's a 1.0.7 Firefox...I'm running 1.0.6. Great auto-updating, sure.
And now there's folks here asking for an "auto" phishing site alert? I love Firefox, use it 90% of the time...but, You've got to be fucking kidding.
Wasn't it basically philosophers/seers, inventing astrology, which begat astronomy, which was the mother of mathematics? I'd heard, long ago that astrology was actually the first 'science', which seems a bit ironic, today, with the debunking of it as a 'science', and all. But my question would be: Wouldn't the needs of a system to measure time and distance have most likely come from astrology, before there was commerce, or other human endeavors, requiring science and number theories, in general?
Well, wouldn't you know, i have no mod points today...yet, so I'll just say, that this is an incredibly informative post, for the links, and the idea that coherence can be quantified, somewhat. Thank you.
I don't want to get into the intricacies of this, very polarized, discussion, given that both sides have reasonable points of view, marred by intolerance...That being said, I have worked in a number of drug/alcohol rehabilitation clinics in the States and Canada. I've worked with incarcerated individuals who had real criminal histories with coincident substance abuse problems, as well as kids who went astray, and got in over their heads, and older men and women who may or may not have had coincident psychological problems.
And believe me, my friend, one of the few definite overlapping characteristics of this broad sample of people and backgrounds, has been that same desire, specifically: To hold down a real job, grow their own economy (and the economy of a "family" previously hurt or neglected), and to "pay their own fucking taxes" (a sign of "income", and productive membership in society, if there ever was one).
I'm glad to see a tailing-off in the crime rates. How could anyone not be? But there are other, parallel factors at play. For instance, in Texas, which leads the nation in incarcerated children, prison population per capita, and executions, there is also an under-funded rehab environment and an educational system that ranks 50th out of 50. There are a lot of factors to consider, is all I'm saying.
Should someone who steals, or brandishes, and/or uses, a weapon in the course of a crime, to get funds to feed an addiction, be let let off scot free because they're 'troubled', or not making informed decisions due to the imperatives imposed by addiction? Hell no! Property rights don't exist solely to protect the ruling class. They also protect Joe and Jane auto-worker who saved their hard-earned cash to buy that TV, car, or stereo, etc. But rehabilitation, coincident with proven 12-step self help is the way to go, to seriously put a dent on these avoidable criminal activities.
Simple incarceration just acts as a breeding ground for recidivism, more often than not. it may be profitable for Wackenhut and the large corps that own a piece of the business of jail, and it might, along with relaxed immigration, keep the already-working people over a barrel as far as leverage for earnings increases and the ability to 'negotiate' better health coverage for workers, but, is it good for the Society, or the Country, at large, in the long run? No fucking way.
really is pretty awesome. I had no idea that this "slingshot effect" was so 'graphic'...wrong word, okay, 'extreme'. Quite amazing.
Exactly right. All of a sudden, this Dvorak dude, is A-OK with people that saw his errors, over the years, predicting doom for the Mac. Let's look at this. The guy had his head up his ass all these years, and now a reader decides he's okay...because all of a sudden he agrees with the reader? Shit, if anyone understands anything about contrarian thinking, Dvorak's new-found appreciation for Apple, could be the first red flag for Apple's future. You never know.
Here's an unrelated example of the logic: I had a clothing store, once, in Montreal. And you know, limited rack space, so as things were selling, or not, I would think maybe I should just toss some of this shit and make room for what sells. Pretty basic, right? Okay, enter a guy I knew, named Teddy. This guy was from Nova Scotia, and he was a likable fellow, but he had the worst taste in everything. He had like a reverse "knack", if you catch my drift. So, one day I asked him to just look through all the stuff hanging in the store, and give me his honest opinions on things. UI threw away everything teddy liked, and put all the stuff he thought was crap, right up front...and business boomed. Teddy, wherever he is, God bless him, still has terrible taste, and Dvorak's head is still up his ass. The prosecution rests.
...to the so-called media bias referenced in the article.
But, before I toss in my two cents, does anybody here ever recall hearing a baseball player, or a movie star being interviewed and asked a question about politics, or some recent political event? It happens, and any rational person will, no doubt, say, when they here the celebrity's half-baked response, "Well, what the fuck does a shortstop know about foreign policy, anyway??" And that is an appropriate response. By the same token, what makes a reporter a technically educated individual capable of comparing similar, but very different tech approaches to sometimes generalized, often times specialized user applications? Answer? Nothing. I mean, fuck the Wall St. Journal. I'm a subscriber, too, and guess what, i use the Macintosh despite the fact that Mossberg thinks they're great.
I use a Macintosh, primarily, but am very comfortable in the Windows environment, and recently had the pleasure [actual fun] of working in Ubuntu Linux (Gnome defaults). The flipside to all that media stuff and the design-centric criticisms of what prompts people towards Macs, is simple: In the real world, the ppc/Mac is incredibly marginalized. I'm telling you, Mac users, like myself, are paying for this shit, big time.
My Powerbook runs OS X, naturally, but also has a heavy VirtualPC installation [very handy] and the Ubuntu insatallation, yet, once again, I am back in OS X-land, despite the blast I was having, for 6 weeks or so, getting acquainted with Linux. Why? Multimedia. [with the problem of "fonts", which really make typeset documents NOT cross-platform...as great as OOo, is, it isn't ready for the big leagues, because of stupid fonts, not the suite, itself, that's sad, and someone needs to get down on the font reverse engineering thing, pronto]
There just isn't support for the slim market of ppc in the Linux world. I received tons of advice, even in my limited exposure to the really helpful Linux community, but could not get simple DVD playback without dropped frames, or syncing problems when the material shiftwed into VOB2, VOB3, etc...it was pathetic. No support for the broadcom chip in the Airport Extreme, which isn't a Linux issue [it's a broadcom/Apple proprietary issue], but it's a helluva I-wanna-run-Linux-on-my-Mac issue, regardless. Why no reverse engineering? PPC market too small to bother with. The craziest thing is, i was using a Matias keyboard, that the Mac, itself, even with the correct driver, would fail to 'recognize', intermittently, BUT, on my first install of Debian, the hardware recognition moduleor whatever, in the initial setup, recognized it, and its internal USB hub, instantly...but couldn't see the second monitor.
I live in spanned desktops, but gave them up, for a month, in an effort to get the spanning to "just work" under linux. It was no-go. setting a simple RightOf, or LeftOf, etc, resulted in a wacky situation. The problem, really? Not enough other Mac users on Linux who knew what they were really doing, on the lower levels. [Me included, obviously].
It was very frustrating, not in angry sense, just in a so close, yet so far, sense. Really too bad. My basic view on Linux is that it is Unix-like OS for Windows. [With KDE being the XP pastel desktop version, and Gnome as the Mac-like version...I liked Gnome a lot]. You see there are features in Windows [most obvious being right-click cut/paste] that should have been on the Apple boxes, ages ago. But there they are in linux on ppc. very nice, kinda like the best of both worlds on a lean, powerful operating system with no layered, incompatible filing system and "Carbon" 'Finder' [what a load of shit that is] to get in the way. So much promise. Linux runs faster on my Aluminum Powerbook, than OS X, and trust me, I know how to rev up OS X. Apple Corp is going to be in for a rude shock when people get to compare a "real" unix-like OS on the same intel architecture, against the schizonphrenic Apple OS. I want to see that.
Make no mistake,
No shit. I thought it was just me, that "feature' is beyond annoying, they really ought to find out who popped that one in there, and ban them from the project for a decade or so.
Go to the head of the class young person, no kidding. I'm an old guy, I have a ton of cash locked up in Adobe and Apple and Office. On both of 'those' platforms. And the potential in the OpenSource movement is stunning, and obvious, to me, in just a little over three weeks running Ubuntu on a Powerbook
Despite the hardware issues, exacerbated by being on the ppc branch of things, with my Airport Extreme and spanned desktop down the tubes, for now, I am having the most fun I've had on a computer since NeXT.
The new OpenOffice is an amazing piece of collaboration. adherence to 'real' XML is music to my ears [SGML/XML coding, re-purposing is a 'sideline' for me]. The 'community', as fractious, and argumentative as it is, is hitting a huge number of the key issues, right on the head. It is an awesome time to be getting into it all, or, like me, really getting into it, again.
The setup you describe, there, is exactly, to a "tee", what I'm looking at every time I boot into Ubuntu (Gnome desk) on a ppc box. Exactly.
My panel at the screen top, is transparent. I keep it around because it only eats 23 pixels in vertical space. The bottom panel is a one-click-gone setup, but can be made show/hide, just like an old Windows box. Then there are the separate desktops...
I have to assume you've seen this setup, already, so I don't know what else to tell you. But the situation I'm looking at is like the best of aqua, some NeXT, and Windows features, combined, and easily dismissed from view, as a default.
Man, if Apple, or someone, released a "fix" for the Airport Extreme driver "problem", and Novell fixed "Evolution" and the multimedia situation on the linux-ppc distro caught up with the i386, I would be gone from OS X, for good.
loan my pal Gerry a giant gillette razor. Then there's gyp, gypsy, gigantic, gigolo, gypsum.... blah blah blah, etc
since when does a pro web designer have time to work in a college computer lab? are you just as bad at each, or is it a toss-up? --trick question, careful...let's rephrase that: you're a designer 'hack', and you pay your bills by de-fragging boxes. There, now that we have that sorted out, the reason you didn't like IE 5 on the Mac was because, like a dumbshit, you were probably using FrontPage... next
you and the dumbass are both full of shit, or stupid. I run Office on a Mac laptop, and 2003 Enterprise on a PC... and if you think it's sluggish on a mac, you're nuts. (or, if not nuts, then stupid, or full of shit, as stated).
Too bad there's no YafRay for Linux on ppc... same old i386-686, wininstalls, etc. too bad.
I hope you get modded all the way up, my friend. I worked in the music biz for a long, long time, and I have seen so many people getting screwed out of a reasonable reward for their actual "work" (meaning, reasonable rewards for learning their instruments, or writing songs, or engineering on a console)... just so the mob-run musician's "union" (what a joke, ask any musician)... or the greedy fucks that run the companies, and their lawyers, can live high off the hog. It makes me want to puke.
Duke Ellington..(I can hear it now..."Who????"), said, "The purpose of the music business is to sell booze." He was like a fucking saint, and he played clubs his whole life, and he said that over 50 fucking years ago!... Meaning: All this greedy bullshit on the part of the "majors" did not start with "napster', or anything like it.
The absolute best way for a musician to make anything like a real return on a lifetime of work, is to either sell a shitload of tee-shirts, on an endless tour, OR hope to fuck that one of his or her songs gets recorded by a big star, and sells like hotcakes (because the fraction of the songwriter's royalties, from the sales of the big star's version of the writer's tune, can't get grabbed by the label to payback against an 'advance', or inflated 'costs' associated with the writer's own original recording)...I am never giving another penny to those motherfuckers, ever.
You have a legitimate question, but a lot of the smaller venture capita;ists aren't exactly betting the farm on some guys ideas, and then going off to pray that it all works out. They look at a longer view, and one condiseration is: How will investors, LATER, perceive the company and its revenue generating prospects.
I knew some guys that needed $7 million or so to get some manufacturing going on a device they had invented.The 'banker', out on the West coast ran the thing through his head and decided, "Yeah, I can get a few guys to pitch this." So, what did he do? He guaranteed he guys that the $7 million would come in, and took the $7 mil of 'shares' (which didn't really exist yet, except in the form of "units"), and waved his arms over the paper (laughs) and now he decreed, "We now have 3 times as many units representing the same 10% of the company....here comes the fun part
So, when the 'banker' takes the deal, he then creates $21 mil worth of units, from the $7 mil that the company wanted to raise.. it works out to $7 million for the company, $7 million for the commissions to the sales guys, and $7 million to the banker. Fucking nice work if you can get it, believe me.
But to answer your question, in one of many ways, it comes down to: Will enough people, pay enough money, over a period of time, to allow the company to make enough 'things' cheaply enough to profit?
By the way, using Enron, as an example, was a little backwards. Only the little guys, the workers, and the tax-payers lost money, all the guys that got in early, and hung in, laughed all the way to the bank, and if they go to prison, they'll get out, and they'll continue laughing on the way to wherever the cash is stashed.
If you believe your idea, or product, is a winner, you need to contact someone who can translate that fact, or 'plan' into some version of venture capitalism. The example I gave is one of the common forms that revolve around what are known as Private Placements. It's all about sales. You sell the idea to one guy, he buys the idea, and gets a handful of sales guys to sell the idea to the folks with capital to invest 'on the ground floor', and finally, if all goes well, you take your end, create the product, and your customers are the last sale in the equation. Good luck to you, I mean that.
okay that's fair enough, but consider this: I have probably worked on betwween a million and 2 mil of pages of tech manuals, transferring them from either printed matter, or pdf files, into interactives. The arcane software I used: TextPad in Windows, and JEdit (a simple Java text editor with some XML plugins, commonly available). To test the documents against one of the toughest DTDs known? one simple line in a 'Run' Windows CLI terminal.Again, another Java 'command' (to wit: 'parse') that is freely available.
Have a few companies come out with fancy XML Editors? Sure, I like XMLEditor on the Mac. It's nice, but anyone can read a book about XML, and write /anything/ in a simple text editor (Tex-Edit, TextEdit,etc on Mac), TextPad, NotePad, etc on Windows, the same goes for Linux. I'm looking at MlView in Ubuntu, right now
My friend, look, I worked on a project that had a crazy, deep DTD, AND the 'client' was aware that their own XSLT style sheet wouldn't 'allow' certain elements in the DTD to be portrayed properly. Crazy! So, on the one hand, here's this complex, but elegant DTD, and hen some typical bullshit to make it screwier.The complexity of the DTD was mitigated by having a proprietary app on hand to the DTD close at hand and orderly, and searchable in context, otherwise... who knows? BUT, that is an extreme case of I write it like this and it is this difficult. Anybody can write a DTD, and then follow it. They use plain text. (That's another issue, the using of binary XML, which I don't even want to get into).
For me, and this is only my opinion, the issue revolves around 'content' versus 'format', as to which language is most useful and relevant. And my feeling is that content, the data itself, is what people need to search, retreive, store, and use. Formatting (head-tags, bold, underline, paragraph tags)...who cares about that stuff? Formatting is about presentation, and is terribly important in that context. No sane person would argue that, but the content is what really matters, and that is where SGML and XML absolutely rule.
And no, Apple does not have a fancy GUI even available, to most average Apple-users to edit most of the system's defaults. One needs the Developer's Tools installed, to do it 'by the book' OR, any text editor. The small uproar to come, will center on binary XML which will be fine for shaving a few nanoseconds off the data stream in and out of processors, but will add an extra step (binary-->text-->binary translation) to what is now a trivial matter.
In closing, I use Acrobat Pro 7, like a lot of folks, and have all major, and most minor, editing suites and apps, on all three platforms... and you know what? Give me a plain text editor and your biggest XML doc and I'll show you how hog-tied, bloated, and, well, in a word... 'proprietary' Acrobat pdf really is when it comes to some 'power' editing. No comparison. I like Adobe's thing. Hell, if it wasn't for them, Apple (with the LaserWriter) would have had to invent Desktop Publishing single-handedly. :)
Ha ha ha, guess what? You know nothing about XML, my friend.
No software support? What planet are you on, pal? OS X, for example, runs it's entire system of preferences (you know, think of them as the rc or configs for the entire GUI), on nothing but XML
One source, of simple, plain text...repurposed, through multiple instances of an XSLT, or CSS style 'sheet' (for the web kiddies), and you can have print-to-paper version, a pdf, a web-based, a mobile (phone, PDA) version, an interactive electronic document, a Flash piece wrapped in QuickTime... get the picture???
One source (be it one page, or unlimited numbers of manuals running into millions of pages,) and a small handfull of style sheets. Now, tell me, Einstein, which would you rather type, several hundred thousand words, multiple times, or ONCE?.
Ignorance is treatable-theoretically-but there's a huge gap between misinformed and Stupid... and you are all the way at the wrong end of the gap, comprendez?
Heheh, jeeze, forget the its and it's and the loose usage of lose. What about:
"...reference your sources (otherwise its, obviously, plagarism)"?
There's no need for the parentheses, nor the commas, unless one uses a comma before, and after, "otherwise".
Maybe a spell-checker that could be set to 'dumb-down', say, a Grade level-and-a-half, could be employed to 'cover' a purloined thesis, AND, play on the sympathies of a content-over-form prof?...Hmmm.