What's the difference between this and a cop with a really good memory standing around?
Scalability. There are only so many cops. Police are a finite resource, cameras aren't. No matter how many bigwigs remind us that we're living in a "post 9/11 world" or "uncertain times," this will always be a truth. There aren't enough cops to post two in the office of every school, or one on every streetcorner, or one at every traffic light to make sure no one goes through on red. Why is that a problem? Why does it need a solution? Why does that solution always have to be cameras?
No, it's no big deal that two facial recognition cameras are being installed in the office of one school. What happens when the idea catches on, and suddenly it's two per classroom, one on each school bus, five in the cafeteria and five in the gym? We ought to install a few in the locker rooms, too, because after all, those dreaded perverts are going to be sneaking around in there trying to catch a glimpse after girls' volleyball practice.
It isn't the registered sex offenders the cops should be worrying about, anyway; they've already been identified. I tend to doubt there are a whole lot of known perverts prowling around school campuses - I can't imagine of a faster way for them to get caught, even without facial recognition cameras! At $3,000 - $5,000 a pop, the money being wasted on these cameras could be much better spent on school-sponsored after school programs. Or tracking down deadbeat dads. Or just given straight to this place.
I'm not going to hold my breath until the time one of these cameras catches a real, honest-to-god, not-false-positive registered sex offender or missing child. I advise that you don't, either.
eBay has an official category for meteorites, with nearly 1000 items listed.
I wonder why eBay feels it's OK to sell some things from space and not others. Is it legal to sell moon rocks, or are they all NASA's property through some sort of weird eminent domain? I can certainly understand forbidding Columbia items, that's just out of human decency, but the moon rock thing has me perplexed.
Let me get this out of the way first: FedEx fucking rules.
At least 3 days a week, more frequently 5 days a week in recent times, I'm at the center of it all. FedEx is based in Memphis, and I start many a day at the Memphis World Hub mailroom on the ramp. What most people in Memphis affectionately call "the hub," the ramp is the FedEx installation at the airport. It's fucking big, as you might expect.
The mailroom is the absolute nerve center of FedEx - well, at least in terms of physical mail; the tech nerve center is quite literally a bunker built into a grassy hill - but we're talking stuff you can carry. Imagine the corporate HQ city of a multinational, multibillion dollar corporation; now imagine the sheer volume of documents being sent back and forth between various offices. Now imagine how crucial this operation is to the survival of the company...
In terms of FedEx itself, look the fuck out: the mailroom is located in one of many buildings on the ramp comprised of neverending networks of conveyor belts. Sometimes the sound of the belts moving is deafening. FedEx has hundreds of locations just in Memphis. I start my days in the mailroom, and pick up and deliver to 35 of those hundreds of locations here. If you want to hear about something neat, FedEx's interoffice mail system is it.
Every bag of internal mail going from one FedEx location to another is barcoded. Those barcodes are scanned in by my PalmPilot which is running an app called PWITS (see walzgroup.com). Everything I pick up at the hub mailroom, I scan in. And as it's moved to various FedEx installations surrounding the ramp, it's scanned out. The same with everything I pick up from those locations destined elsewhere.
Think the "public" side of FedEx is cool? I guarantee you've never seen an interoffice mail system any more advanced than the one I work. Here is another post with some more information about just how detailed it gets.
Output the grid reference to a web page - it should now be relatively easy for your friends to track
your exact position in the garden while talking on the phone
Dude, you completely misspelled "when your 'tomato' plants have grown enough that it's time to have a harvest party."
I can't wait till MSNBC changes to a format like that.
You must not have seen CNN Headline News lately.
The left third of the screen is covered with a mundane graphic, normally with at least 3 different fonts. Bonus: If you can devise a way to say "Operation Iraqi Freedom" using 6 or more typefaces, you are CNN producer material!
The bottom half of the screen is covered with a combination weather forecast/newsticker. Receive pictorial weather conditions for every city but your own! Not to mention the ticker, which often gets stuck and rotates between the same 2 headlines for periods of 5 minutes or more.
All of this leaves - by my calculations - approximately 12% of the total television screen real estate for the actual newscast. I'm starting to wonder when they're going to ditch the anchors altogether in favor of a completely graphical newscast;)
If everyone installs a spam filter that detects spam and then automatically crawls any links listed in the spam, it would bring their web servers to their knees.
A major problem with something like this is that it's a surefire way to trip webbugs. If you set such a filter to drop the query string before fetching a URL, in hopes of foiling the webbugs, spammers will just alter their scripts to use something other than a question mark as the start of the query string.
The end result is that your reactive filter is going to be tripping webbugs, fetching (and validating) "Click here to confirm your subscription" URLs, etc. In addition to bringing in even more spam, if your filters erroneously confirm a bogus subscription request, you might start reporting "spam" messages that you technically asked to receive and for which the sender did receive a confirmation that you wanted, etc. It's going to be tricky to deal with these things.
Admittedly I haven't read Paul Graham's article so this may be covered.
I'm sure that their webservers run on something faster than a DSL
Oftentimes it's just that - compromised cable/DSL machines acting as either the web servers, reverse proxies to the "hidden master" web server, or DNS for a hidden master.
This is OT and will probably be modded as such, but I just wanted to say hi to someone else in Memphis. I can't find an IT job here either. Good to know I'm not alone.
Did you go to the APC show tonight? It was pretty good.
I don't know whether or not you've ever worked in or dealt with a corporate mailroom, but my guess is no. People in mailrooms don't stay there because they're "uncapable" [sic], or because they have no ambition. They stay there because they're reliable.
I've been in the mail business for six years over a ten year period, first in retail (think Mailboxes Etc type of place) and now in - surprise - a corporate mailroom environment. There was a time from '99 to this year when I was out of the mail industry, doing nothing but IT. I went back to mail when freelance programming revenue took a downturn.
I don't know how many employees C|Net has. I don't know how many employees the company I'm contracted to has, either; but I can tell you one thing, they have an absolute ton of interoffice mail. When I say a ton, I'm not joking around. There have been days when I've carted around quite literally 2,000 pounds of mail. And that's just paper - I don't touch boxes, or anything other than loose or bagged envelopes.
Most people overlook the fact that the mailroom and internal mail operations of any large corporation are the core of that corporation. If IBM's mailroom staff went on strike tomorrow, IBM would be hurting in a big way. Similarly, if Microsoft's mailroom staff had a high churn rate, Microsoft would be hurting in a big way.
You'd think that in this day and age, especially at companies which pride themselves in technology, postal mail would be a thing of the past and everything would be handled via email. Not so, not anywhere freaking near so. At a bare minimum, companies working in government-regulated industries (think "air transportation" - hey, I did say I was in the mail business;) have to keep numerous records on paper. That paper is generated at one office, sent to another office to be reviewed and approved, forwarded on to another office for archival, eventually sent to another facility for secure document destruction, etc. ad nauseum.
No company wants stupid or incapable people in its mailroom; what they want are reliable, dedicated employees. When it comes to any large company, there's a steep learning curve involved in mail operations. It takes a great deal of time to learn:
a) The internal mail coding system, whether numeric or name-based; every large corporation has one, and it's independent of physical addresses [the company I deal with uses a combination of airport codes and four-digit numbers]
b) The physical (postal) addresses which correspond to the internal coding system
c) The names of hundreds or even thousands of different people employed in various offices
d) Which of those names belong at which of the a) internal mail codes and b) physical addresses
e) How to spot and reroute mislabeled items, taking a) through d) into consideration
f) How to apply the previous knowledge to thousands or even tens of thousands of individual items every day
This was even a challenge in retail, where among other things, our store rented PMB's to the public. We had a wall of more than 200 private mailboxes. When I first started working there, it took me an hour or more to sort the day's inbound mail into the appropriate boxes. After working there for a year, it took maybe 10 minutes, even though the volume of mail had increased. I'd memorized the names, the PMB numbers, etc. to the point where my brain took over and the process was nearly robotic.
It's very similar in a corporate environment. In a corporate mailroom, you don't want to hire someone who's going to quit after a few months and leave you stuck hiring on someone new. What you do want is to hire someone who's going to come in, learn your system, learn your employees' names and locations, learn how to ensure that they all receive their mail with a minimum of missorts, and keep doing that for as long as possible.
You can't find someone to do this at minimum wage, but I assure you that the companies who value their m
If I buy the O'Reilly Unix CD Bookshelf through Amazon, a) Do I get a free copy of the prior art with the bookshelf, and b) Will O'Reilly's head explode from the irony?
Since every legal seller and every legal buyer has an address, why shouldn't the half the value of the transaction be taxed as if the sale occurred at the sellers address and half at the buyers address?
Because sales tax rates fluxuate wildly from state to state. This raises several questions, not the least of which would be:
a) Which state would get the bigger benefit from their "half?"
b) Why should I pay e.g. 9.5% sales tax on half the transaction to a state I don't live in, but only 6.75% sales tax to the state where I do live?
c) What good is the 9.5% I'm paying to the other state doing me?
Et cetera ad nauseum.
Oh! I almost forgot. There's also that pesky Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution which states (no pun intended) that "no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."
It sounds like a mess to me, and more like a
gangsta's paradise
As I browse through the listings at Amazon, I take a look at my life, And realize malls are all wrong. Cause I've been shopping online for so long, That even my government thinks my money is gone.
But I ain't never paid a tax if they didn't deserve it, May be treated like a felon but you know that's unheard of, You better watch how you're buying And where you're spending Or you and your homies might be federal pen-ding
Been spending most our lives, Doing all our shopping online, Keep spending most our lives Doing all our shopping online.
I know its unpopular, but shouldnt internet shoping and what not be taxed?
It already is, just the same as mail-order shopping (I'm posting from a US perspective, by your use of "bloody" I can't tell whether you are or not;)
In the US, if you order something from a company which has a physical presence in your own state, you must pay state sales tax. This is true whether the purchase is made in a brick-and-mortar store, online, or via mail order catalog.
If you order something from a company which does not have a physical presence in your state, you are not required to pay sales tax to either your own home state or to the state of the purchase. In many states, you're supposed to pay a "use tax" or something similar in your home state. In practice, hardly anyone does this except in the case of significant purchases. Very, very few people even know that the "use tax" (or whatever it's called in your state) exists to begin with.
In any case, that isn't what this bill is about. It's about taxes on internet service, not internet shopping.
If they'd just called it the Preserve Access to Telecommunications and Required Infrastructure for Online Transactions (PATRIOT) act, it would have swept through both houses of Congress with little opposition. Haven't our legislators learned anything?!
Permanent markers use solvents that can easily damage CDs.
So that's why the record companies were using DRM that a Sharpie could defeat! What better way to guarantee repeat purchases than by having your customers purposely (if not intentionally) destroy the CDs even faster?
For one thing, humidity causes the clue to come off
As a Southerner, I can assure you that these effects of humidity are generally permanent... The clue will stay off. In fact I suspect that in many specimens, the clue is never there to begin with. Alas I have yet to prove it.
Fortunately, being of the "sunlight? what's that?" geek variety - you know, those of us who keep the A/C at 65 and only go out at night - I'm unaffected:)
There used to be occasional promotions like this (and maybe still are) on the Howard Stern show. For example, one of their gambling advertisers was taking bets on whether or not Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck would get married by a certain date. You were betting with, and stood a chance to win or lose, real money.
I can't remember now whether it was GoldenPalace.com or BetOnSports.com doing that particular promotion... Both of them are Stern show sponsors, and both of them are based offshore. But wacky, offbeat bets show up at online casinos from time to time.
All this demonstrates is that Microsoft (and, perhaps, the FBI) are dumbfounded and need to offer a monetary reward to determine who's the culprit. As far as Microsoft is concerned, that's not really a big deal; even as much as we all may hat them, tracking down worm authors isn't their business. But a joint press conference with the FBI?
Something tells me that:
a) The FBI has jack shit for leads (big surprise) and cajoled Microsoft into making this lovey-dovey announcement "for the consumers' benefit"
b) Both the FBI and Microsoft are embarassed to all holy hell about the fact that no leads have been forthcoming
c) The money is probably coming from taxpayers, not from Microsoft
d) Regardless of where the reward comes from, any success would benefit both Microsoft and the FBI
this is how we do it now. get used to it or go/home.
I'm plenty used to it, but I don't think I'm the issue. It's the Mac users who have never used anything but a Mac (like my mom, for example) who tend to get confused by the OSX Finder. I'm perfectly comfortable thinking in the "/usr/home/candletruq" mindset, or the "C:\Docume~1\Admini~1" mindset. A lot of Mac users aren't.
The Mac always adhered to the imaginary "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" you mention, as all operating systems must do in order to avoid total chaos; it just presented things in a different manner. Considering the constant MacOS push for consistency (to the point where learning the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines was once more important than learning Objective C! Your app could cure cancer, but if it didn't feel like all other apps, it wouldn't succeed), I can't help but take issue with OSX's deviance from the norm. The Finder should have remained the same, in terms of interface.
I still love OSX and wouldn't go back. I just have my qualms, is all.
I expect that once these users get used to the new Finder, they will see how much more sensible it is.
I've been using OSX for two years now and I'm still not used to the OSX Finder.
I don't have Panther yet, but from the screenshot in the article, it looks mostly like a steel-woolified Jaguar finder. I remember watching Jobs' speech when he unveiled Panther, and one of his focal points was the new Finder. He talked about how the Jaguar Finder was computer-centric, and the Panther Finder would be user-centric. Granted I'm only looking at screenshots, so perhaps I'm speaking out of turn, but it still doesn't look like it's happening.
People who grew up on Macs aren't used to the "tree" concept of filesystem management. They don't expect various levels of the filesystem to display in different columns of the same window. More importantly, they don't expect to have to scroll sideways. That was never a part of the Mac navigation scheme until OSX, the Classic Finder was deep as opposed to lateral. Sure, there was always a hierarchy; everything started at Macintosh HD (or Moof, or whatever you named it) and went deeper from there.
The Finder - I'm thinking System 6 and 7 here - was good at turning that hierarchy into a nest of folders, one window apiece. This was how Mac folks learned to navigate the filesystem, and indeed how to navigate the OS. The tree itself was a subconscious thing; it was there, but you didn't have to think about it. You could have "Macintosh HD:Applications:Photoshop" open on the Desktop without having to see the contents of either "Macintosh HD" or "Applications," or even to see that they existed. It was clean and clutter-free, in that every level of the filesystem was visually independent of its parent, sibling, or child directories.
I'd like to see the Finder go one of two directions: back to the Classic way, or change to the Windows way. That is to say, either no visual tree at all, or a complete visual tree without all the sideways-scrolling back and forth. If I have something 6 directories deep in Windows, it takes minimal effort (one click up on the scrollbar, or a flick of the mousewheel) to reselect the ultimate parent. With OSX's Finder, it just seems like more work to get where I want to go - especially with the Mac's lack of a [standard] mousewheel (not intended as a slam). The old Finder just seemed more efficient.
Again it's back to the deep vs. lateral paradigms. Switching from the Classic Finder way to the OSX Finder is sort of like going from a 3D tree with depth to a flat, sideways 2D tree. As someone who's been using MacOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD side-by-side for years, I imagine my own transition was probably much easier than for those who have known nothing but the Classic Finder. And even I'm still hung up on some old habits.
The Macintosh GUI (or "Human Interface") was always about consistency, things were the same from one application to the next, and from one OS release to the next. OSX turned a lot of that on its head, and while I love OSX, it still has its quirks. Even today, two years later, I still find myself hitting Command-N in the Finder to make a New Folder. And it brings up a New View instead. That's not what I want, that's not how it was before, that's not what I was used to, and that's not consistent.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's no big deal that two facial recognition cameras are being installed in the office of one school. What happens when the idea catches on, and suddenly it's two per classroom, one on each school bus, five in the cafeteria and five in the gym? We ought to install a few in the locker rooms, too, because after all, those dreaded perverts are going to be sneaking around in there trying to catch a glimpse after girls' volleyball practice.
It isn't the registered sex offenders the cops should be worrying about, anyway; they've already been identified. I tend to doubt there are a whole lot of known perverts prowling around school campuses - I can't imagine of a faster way for them to get caught, even without facial recognition cameras! At $3,000 - $5,000 a pop, the money being wasted on these cameras could be much better spent on school-sponsored after school programs. Or tracking down deadbeat dads. Or just given straight to this place.
I'm not going to hold my breath until the time one of these cameras catches a real, honest-to-god, not-false-positive registered sex offender or missing child. I advise that you don't, either.
eBay has an official category for meteorites, with nearly 1000 items listed.
I wonder why eBay feels it's OK to sell some things from space and not others. Is it legal to sell moon rocks, or are they all NASA's property through some sort of weird eminent domain? I can certainly understand forbidding Columbia items, that's just out of human decency, but the moon rock thing has me perplexed.
Let me get this out of the way first: FedEx fucking rules.
:)
At least 3 days a week, more frequently 5 days a week in recent times, I'm at the center of it all. FedEx is based in Memphis, and I start many a day at the Memphis World Hub mailroom on the ramp. What most people in Memphis affectionately call "the hub," the ramp is the FedEx installation at the airport. It's fucking big, as you might expect.
The mailroom is the absolute nerve center of FedEx - well, at least in terms of physical mail; the tech nerve center is quite literally a bunker built into a grassy hill - but we're talking stuff you can carry. Imagine the corporate HQ city of a multinational, multibillion dollar corporation; now imagine the sheer volume of documents being sent back and forth between various offices. Now imagine how crucial this operation is to the survival of the company...
In terms of FedEx itself, look the fuck out: the mailroom is located in one of many buildings on the ramp comprised of neverending networks of conveyor belts. Sometimes the sound of the belts moving is deafening. FedEx has hundreds of locations just in Memphis. I start my days in the mailroom, and pick up and deliver to 35 of those hundreds of locations here. If you want to hear about something neat, FedEx's interoffice mail system is it.
Every bag of internal mail going from one FedEx location to another is barcoded. Those barcodes are scanned in by my PalmPilot which is running an app called PWITS (see walzgroup.com). Everything I pick up at the hub mailroom, I scan in. And as it's moved to various FedEx installations surrounding the ramp, it's scanned out. The same with everything I pick up from those locations destined elsewhere.
Think the "public" side of FedEx is cool? I guarantee you've never seen an interoffice mail system any more advanced than the one I work. Here is another post with some more information about just how detailed it gets.
Long live FedEx
The left third of the screen is covered with a mundane graphic, normally with at least 3 different fonts. Bonus: If you can devise a way to say "Operation Iraqi Freedom" using 6 or more typefaces, you are CNN producer material!
The bottom half of the screen is covered with a combination weather forecast/newsticker. Receive pictorial weather conditions for every city but your own! Not to mention the ticker, which often gets stuck and rotates between the same 2 headlines for periods of 5 minutes or more.
All of this leaves - by my calculations - approximately 12% of the total television screen real estate for the actual newscast. I'm starting to wonder when they're going to ditch the anchors altogether in favor of a completely graphical newscast
The end result is that your reactive filter is going to be tripping webbugs, fetching (and validating) "Click here to confirm your subscription" URLs, etc. In addition to bringing in even more spam, if your filters erroneously confirm a bogus subscription request, you might start reporting "spam" messages that you technically asked to receive and for which the sender did receive a confirmation that you wanted, etc. It's going to be tricky to deal with these things.
Admittedly I haven't read Paul Graham's article so this may be covered.
This is OT and will probably be modded as such, but I just wanted to say hi to someone else in Memphis. I can't find an IT job here either. Good to know I'm not alone.
Did you go to the APC show tonight? It was pretty good.
I don't know whether or not you've ever worked in or dealt with a corporate mailroom, but my guess is no. People in mailrooms don't stay there because they're "uncapable" [sic], or because they have no ambition. They stay there because they're reliable.
;) have to keep numerous records on paper. That paper is generated at one office, sent to another office to be reviewed and approved, forwarded on to another office for archival, eventually sent to another facility for secure document destruction, etc. ad nauseum.
I've been in the mail business for six years over a ten year period, first in retail (think Mailboxes Etc type of place) and now in - surprise - a corporate mailroom environment. There was a time from '99 to this year when I was out of the mail industry, doing nothing but IT. I went back to mail when freelance programming revenue took a downturn.
I don't know how many employees C|Net has. I don't know how many employees the company I'm contracted to has, either; but I can tell you one thing, they have an absolute ton of interoffice mail. When I say a ton, I'm not joking around. There have been days when I've carted around quite literally 2,000 pounds of mail. And that's just paper - I don't touch boxes, or anything other than loose or bagged envelopes.
Most people overlook the fact that the mailroom and internal mail operations of any large corporation are the core of that corporation. If IBM's mailroom staff went on strike tomorrow, IBM would be hurting in a big way. Similarly, if Microsoft's mailroom staff had a high churn rate, Microsoft would be hurting in a big way.
You'd think that in this day and age, especially at companies which pride themselves in technology, postal mail would be a thing of the past and everything would be handled via email. Not so, not anywhere freaking near so. At a bare minimum, companies working in government-regulated industries (think "air transportation" - hey, I did say I was in the mail business
No company wants stupid or incapable people in its mailroom; what they want are reliable, dedicated employees. When it comes to any large company, there's a steep learning curve involved in mail operations. It takes a great deal of time to learn:
a) The internal mail coding system, whether numeric or name-based; every large corporation has one, and it's independent of physical addresses [the company I deal with uses a combination of airport codes and four-digit numbers]
b) The physical (postal) addresses which correspond to the internal coding system
c) The names of hundreds or even thousands of different people employed in various offices
d) Which of those names belong at which of the a) internal mail codes and b) physical addresses
e) How to spot and reroute mislabeled items, taking a) through d) into consideration
f) How to apply the previous knowledge to thousands or even tens of thousands of individual items every day
This was even a challenge in retail, where among other things, our store rented PMB's to the public. We had a wall of more than 200 private mailboxes. When I first started working there, it took me an hour or more to sort the day's inbound mail into the appropriate boxes. After working there for a year, it took maybe 10 minutes, even though the volume of mail had increased. I'd memorized the names, the PMB numbers, etc. to the point where my brain took over and the process was nearly robotic.
It's very similar in a corporate environment. In a corporate mailroom, you don't want to hire someone who's going to quit after a few months and leave you stuck hiring on someone new. What you do want is to hire someone who's going to come in, learn your system, learn your employees' names and locations, learn how to ensure that they all receive their mail with a minimum of missorts, and keep doing that for as long as possible.
You can't find someone to do this at minimum wage, but I assure you that the companies who value their m
If I buy the O'Reilly Unix CD Bookshelf through Amazon, a) Do I get a free copy of the prior art with the bookshelf, and b) Will O'Reilly's head explode from the irony?
a) Which state would get the bigger benefit from their "half?"
b) Why should I pay e.g. 9.5% sales tax on half the transaction to a state I don't live in, but only 6.75% sales tax to the state where I do live?
c) What good is the 9.5% I'm paying to the other state doing me?
Et cetera ad nauseum.
Oh! I almost forgot. There's also that pesky Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution which states (no pun intended) that "no tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."
I take a look at my life,
And realize malls are all wrong.
Cause I've been shopping online for so long,
That even my government thinks my money is gone.
But I ain't never paid a tax if they didn't deserve it,
May be treated like a felon but you know that's unheard of,
You better watch how you're buying
And where you're spending
Or you and your homies might be federal pen-ding
Been spending most our lives,
Doing all our shopping online,
Keep spending most our lives
Doing all our shopping online.
(With apologies to Coolio
In the US, if you order something from a company which has a physical presence in your own state, you must pay state sales tax. This is true whether the purchase is made in a brick-and-mortar store, online, or via mail order catalog.
If you order something from a company which does not have a physical presence in your state, you are not required to pay sales tax to either your own home state or to the state of the purchase. In many states, you're supposed to pay a "use tax" or something similar in your home state. In practice, hardly anyone does this except in the case of significant purchases. Very, very few people even know that the "use tax" (or whatever it's called in your state) exists to begin with.
In any case, that isn't what this bill is about. It's about taxes on internet service, not internet shopping.
If they'd just called it the Preserve Access to Telecommunications and Required Infrastructure for Online Transactions (PATRIOT) act, it would have swept through both houses of Congress with little opposition. Haven't our legislators learned anything?!
Fortunately, being of the "sunlight? what's that?" geek variety - you know, those of us who keep the A/C at 65 and only go out at night - I'm unaffected
There used to be occasional promotions like this (and maybe still are) on the Howard Stern show. For example, one of their gambling advertisers was taking bets on whether or not Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck would get married by a certain date. You were betting with, and stood a chance to win or lose, real money.
I can't remember now whether it was GoldenPalace.com or BetOnSports.com doing that particular promotion... Both of them are Stern show sponsors, and both of them are based offshore. But wacky, offbeat bets show up at online casinos from time to time.
All this demonstrates is that Microsoft (and, perhaps, the FBI) are dumbfounded and need to offer a monetary reward to determine who's the culprit. As far as Microsoft is concerned, that's not really a big deal; even as much as we all may hat them, tracking down worm authors isn't their business. But a joint press conference with the FBI?
Something tells me that:
a) The FBI has jack shit for leads (big surprise) and cajoled Microsoft into making this lovey-dovey announcement "for the consumers' benefit"
b) Both the FBI and Microsoft are embarassed to all holy hell about the fact that no leads have been forthcoming
c) The money is probably coming from taxpayers, not from Microsoft
d) Regardless of where the reward comes from, any success would benefit both Microsoft and the FBI
Just my opinion, of course.
The Mac always adhered to the imaginary "Filesystem Hierarchy Standard" you mention, as all operating systems must do in order to avoid total chaos; it just presented things in a different manner. Considering the constant MacOS push for consistency (to the point where learning the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines was once more important than learning Objective C! Your app could cure cancer, but if it didn't feel like all other apps, it wouldn't succeed), I can't help but take issue with OSX's deviance from the norm. The Finder should have remained the same, in terms of interface.
I still love OSX and wouldn't go back. I just have my qualms, is all.
I don't have Panther yet, but from the screenshot in the article, it looks mostly like a steel-woolified Jaguar finder. I remember watching Jobs' speech when he unveiled Panther, and one of his focal points was the new Finder. He talked about how the Jaguar Finder was computer-centric, and the Panther Finder would be user-centric. Granted I'm only looking at screenshots, so perhaps I'm speaking out of turn, but it still doesn't look like it's happening.
People who grew up on Macs aren't used to the "tree" concept of filesystem management. They don't expect various levels of the filesystem to display in different columns of the same window. More importantly, they don't expect to have to scroll sideways. That was never a part of the Mac navigation scheme until OSX, the Classic Finder was deep as opposed to lateral. Sure, there was always a hierarchy; everything started at Macintosh HD (or Moof, or whatever you named it) and went deeper from there.
The Finder - I'm thinking System 6 and 7 here - was good at turning that hierarchy into a nest of folders, one window apiece. This was how Mac folks learned to navigate the filesystem, and indeed how to navigate the OS. The tree itself was a subconscious thing; it was there, but you didn't have to think about it. You could have "Macintosh HD:Applications:Photoshop" open on the Desktop without having to see the contents of either "Macintosh HD" or "Applications," or even to see that they existed. It was clean and clutter-free, in that every level of the filesystem was visually independent of its parent, sibling, or child directories.
I'd like to see the Finder go one of two directions: back to the Classic way, or change to the Windows way. That is to say, either no visual tree at all, or a complete visual tree without all the sideways-scrolling back and forth. If I have something 6 directories deep in Windows, it takes minimal effort (one click up on the scrollbar, or a flick of the mousewheel) to reselect the ultimate parent. With OSX's Finder, it just seems like more work to get where I want to go - especially with the Mac's lack of a [standard] mousewheel (not intended as a slam). The old Finder just seemed more efficient.
Again it's back to the deep vs. lateral paradigms. Switching from the Classic Finder way to the OSX Finder is sort of like going from a 3D tree with depth to a flat, sideways 2D tree. As someone who's been using MacOS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD side-by-side for years, I imagine my own transition was probably much easier than for those who have known nothing but the Classic Finder. And even I'm still hung up on some old habits.
The Macintosh GUI (or "Human Interface") was always about consistency, things were the same from one application to the next, and from one OS release to the next. OSX turned a lot of that on its head, and while I love OSX, it still has its quirks. Even today, two years later, I still find myself hitting Command-N in the Finder to make a New Folder. And it brings up a New View instead. That's not what I want, that's not how it was before, that's not what I was used to, and that's not consistent.
And that pisses me off.
I wonder if they changed it in Panther?