Just because a story happens to be about Apple doesn't make it automatically apropos to role out the "if they were MS" line of attack masquerading as thought experiment.
Just to give it a go, however, "if MS did this," I'd imagine there'd be some early whining, immediately followed by a majority of users without any sympathy for the whiners. Seems about the same as this article.
You're right, and it was absolutely horrible, but that "one time" you're referring to was pre-MacOS 7.x. System 7 got rid of that atrocity and had a normal "Eject" command, and since System 7 came out in 1991, we're talking 15 years ago.
What really matters here is the relative human rights and conditions of the factory, not that the factory exists. If there is proper safety procedures on the job (workers aren't forced back into working immediately after an injury, etc) and, more importantly, if workers aren't required by the terms of their contract to live and eat on site, then the factory is actually doing a pretty good job in the scheme of things. If the workers are forced to live onsite, however, requiring that half of their paycheck go right back to their employer, this is something that deserves to be looked into more and vocally criticized. There is a fairly established convention of rules for what makes a third world factory "acceptable" and not, and the employee's ability to choose their own residence is one of these things.
I'm pretty sure almost all colleges have various classes focused on the bible, from Western Religion Studies to the Bible as Literature and Poetry in the Bible. As for literature: the great majority of English literature up to the Protestant Revolution is an explicit response to the Christian framework of society in some way or another. The Green Knight by the anonymous Pearl Poet is a study of one of the Knights of the Round Table and how he must maintain his heroic Christian virtue. More than half of the storytellers in the Canterbury Tales are people of varying social status connected to the Church, and in ways is actually a criticism of the corruption and decadence of the church. The Faerie Queene by Spencer is a militant, densely allegorical attack on Catholicism. And of course, Paradise Lost is Milton's extremely unorthodox take on Satan, Adam & Eve, and Christianity in general. All of these are still read because they're great literature (although Paradise Lost is pretty boring, IMO), and there's much, much more to them than superficial religious intentions.
I caught SevenDust Variant C at some point, and it spread to all of my applications. I forget what it did...was there a creepy extra menu or something? In any case, it embedded itself as an MDEF in the resource fork, so I opened up all my applications in ResEdit and manually plucked it out of each one. Who says you need AntiVirus software to get rid of viruses:-). Of course, it was completely benign anyways, but I felt better with its little 666 resource completely gone.
The problem I've heard is that the delivery of the material is very off and doesn't really get into a good rhythm. Besides, going by your logic, to be "faithful" to the source material would require that it be a good movie. Although there's some truth to that, that's not what's normally meant.
Of course, you realize that your Victorian "british accent" has no actual accent, right? That's what I was talking about, not your word choice. Surely the British people have phonetic speech variations different from us, not just the Cockneys, so how come I don't see your apostrophes all over the place again to reflect their "accent"? And there is a huge difference between saying "British people sound like this", "people who live around the East End of London sound like this", and "poor black people sound like this". Please realize, I'm not saying that an incidental accent in someone's mouth is some terrible crime or anything, I'm just trying to get you to see where I'm coming from.
That's the same argument for "realism" that made every black character drop consonants and vowels in all 19th - early 20th century literature. It's just embarassing to read any of that stuff today. Did you ever think that everyone has distinctive language traits, it's just in our own minds that we speak "regular" english? Claims that "that's exactly how they said it!" don't fly either, because you only notice it because the instance conformed to stereotype. After all, if it was just "regular" behavior like yours you never would have bothered to remember it in the first place.
Although that might be optimistic, I can easily see it taking in over 100 million. Hitchhiker is a very beloved series, both in and outside of the traditional geek sector.
Ever read the (pretty long) short story the Dead by James Joyce? The daughter plays something on the piano, everyone stands around the room and enjoys themselves. She then plays a piece that's technically much harder to show her range. Most of the people end up clearing out of the room, but when she finishes they applaud her much more. They're acknowledging her skill, perhaps self-consciously, even though they enjoyed the simple one more.
When it comes down to it, it's really the stuff with heart that we enjoy, even if the more technical piece is "supposed" to be better. And I guarantee there's more heart in imitating a game you played when you were 6 years old than some tricky obscure thing.
To be accurate though, Zen and the Art of Archery came out first, and that is about archery. So appropriating it is just fine, even if it was Pirsig's misleading title that made it famous.
Ahh, the good old days of throwing a MacOS 7 icon together with ResEdit. Too bad there's no quick and dirty all-in-one utility like that in MacOS X. That was the pinnacle of mac hacking.
That would be fair to say (Rogers & Hammerstein would be closer though) if Shakespeare had only done comedies and romances - and maybe you've only read his comedies, with Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar thrown in for good measure?
You're forgetting that Weber's Phantom of the Opera is a disney-fied, streamlined retelling of what originally was a dark, grotesque story. Shakespeare, on the other hand, took the story of King Leir, a popular fairytale with a fairytale ending, and turned it into what is often considered the darkest play ever written. He took the story of Troilus & Cressida, two characters from the Illiad, and turned it into a black, black, existentialist comedy about the meaninglessness of existence.
And then he followed these up with a string of romances, like The Tempest. He contained multitudes.
It's so fashionable for people to disparage Shakespeare based on the three plays of his they read in Sophomore English in high school. Maybe they should read the rest of his stuff before they make any hasty judgments.
The idea that someone is somehow deranged and broken when they know something but don't care about it is absolutely ridiculous. The problem here is that knowing a virus released onto the internet will hurt people is abstracted knowledge. You have no reason to believe you'll ever meet any of the people who are harmed by it, and so the harm stays distanced and almost unreal. It's the same way we can see violence on the news and continue to go about what we're doing: it's not real to us. If we knew the people harmed by that violence, or if we have some personal connection to where it happened, anything that creates an emotional connection to it, then it becomes real, and it affects us. I'm not saying this is how things have to be, but it's how things often are until we stop and personally examine our own perceptions of reality. Sometimes it takes a long time for people to do this.
Really, there's no way that scenario can happen. What are you picturing, that when you go into a freshly "upgraded" iTunes (like the 4.5 "upgrade" that blocked myTunes and sharing with previous versions) it'll ask you point blank to pay a few bucks more for your previously, already bought music, or it'll automatically wipe them? This would make people ANGRY. Very angry. Consumers don't like to be angry. And what if you're not online at the time and it can't connect to Apple's database? Will it wipe them anyways? Or will we have to open our iTunes every day in fear of a new price change, the tech savvy making sure to yank out the ethernet cable each time so that we can thwart their "upgraded pricing?" I dunno, it all sounds a little hysterical to me.
The problem with this is that usually your "flipping through" search is based on the context of the words, not the exact words themselves. You might remember that a conversation took place, but not what the conversation itself was about. And it seems much less intuitive to type some numbers into a dialog box to limit the search than to just flip to a general area and skim around. Reference books benefit from searches, but for novels they're pretty much useless.
What do you mean trivial amount of memory? Even book-length text files aren't very big. Like it said, it can hold about 500 books on it. Have most people even read 500 books?
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Just because a story happens to be about Apple doesn't make it automatically apropos to role out the "if they were MS" line of attack masquerading as thought experiment. Just to give it a go, however, "if MS did this," I'd imagine there'd be some early whining, immediately followed by a majority of users without any sympathy for the whiners. Seems about the same as this article.
You're right, and it was absolutely horrible, but that "one time" you're referring to was pre-MacOS 7.x. System 7 got rid of that atrocity and had a normal "Eject" command, and since System 7 came out in 1991, we're talking 15 years ago.
What really matters here is the relative human rights and conditions of the factory, not that the factory exists. If there is proper safety procedures on the job (workers aren't forced back into working immediately after an injury, etc) and, more importantly, if workers aren't required by the terms of their contract to live and eat on site, then the factory is actually doing a pretty good job in the scheme of things. If the workers are forced to live onsite, however, requiring that half of their paycheck go right back to their employer, this is something that deserves to be looked into more and vocally criticized. There is a fairly established convention of rules for what makes a third world factory "acceptable" and not, and the employee's ability to choose their own residence is one of these things.
I'm pretty sure almost all colleges have various classes focused on the bible, from Western Religion Studies to the Bible as Literature and Poetry in the Bible. As for literature: the great majority of English literature up to the Protestant Revolution is an explicit response to the Christian framework of society in some way or another. The Green Knight by the anonymous Pearl Poet is a study of one of the Knights of the Round Table and how he must maintain his heroic Christian virtue. More than half of the storytellers in the Canterbury Tales are people of varying social status connected to the Church, and in ways is actually a criticism of the corruption and decadence of the church. The Faerie Queene by Spencer is a militant, densely allegorical attack on Catholicism. And of course, Paradise Lost is Milton's extremely unorthodox take on Satan, Adam & Eve, and Christianity in general. All of these are still read because they're great literature (although Paradise Lost is pretty boring, IMO), and there's much, much more to them than superficial religious intentions.
I caught SevenDust Variant C at some point, and it spread to all of my applications. I forget what it did...was there a creepy extra menu or something? In any case, it embedded itself as an MDEF in the resource fork, so I opened up all my applications in ResEdit and manually plucked it out of each one. Who says you need AntiVirus software to get rid of viruses :-). Of course, it was completely benign anyways, but I felt better with its little 666 resource completely gone.
The problem I've heard is that the delivery of the material is very off and doesn't really get into a good rhythm. Besides, going by your logic, to be "faithful" to the source material would require that it be a good movie. Although there's some truth to that, that's not what's normally meant.
Of course, you realize that your Victorian "british accent" has no actual accent, right? That's what I was talking about, not your word choice. Surely the British people have phonetic speech variations different from us, not just the Cockneys, so how come I don't see your apostrophes all over the place again to reflect their "accent"? And there is a huge difference between saying "British people sound like this", "people who live around the East End of London sound like this", and "poor black people sound like this". Please realize, I'm not saying that an incidental accent in someone's mouth is some terrible crime or anything, I'm just trying to get you to see where I'm coming from.
That's the same argument for "realism" that made every black character drop consonants and vowels in all 19th - early 20th century literature. It's just embarassing to read any of that stuff today. Did you ever think that everyone has distinctive language traits, it's just in our own minds that we speak "regular" english? Claims that "that's exactly how they said it!" don't fly either, because you only notice it because the instance conformed to stereotype. After all, if it was just "regular" behavior like yours you never would have bothered to remember it in the first place.
Although that might be optimistic, I can easily see it taking in over 100 million. Hitchhiker is a very beloved series, both in and outside of the traditional geek sector.
Ever read the (pretty long) short story the Dead by James Joyce? The daughter plays something on the piano, everyone stands around the room and enjoys themselves. She then plays a piece that's technically much harder to show her range. Most of the people end up clearing out of the room, but when she finishes they applaud her much more. They're acknowledging her skill, perhaps self-consciously, even though they enjoyed the simple one more.
When it comes down to it, it's really the stuff with heart that we enjoy, even if the more technical piece is "supposed" to be better. And I guarantee there's more heart in imitating a game you played when you were 6 years old than some tricky obscure thing.
To be accurate though, Zen and the Art of Archery came out first, and that is about archery. So appropriating it is just fine, even if it was Pirsig's misleading title that made it famous.
Ahh, the good old days of throwing a MacOS 7 icon together with ResEdit. Too bad there's no quick and dirty all-in-one utility like that in MacOS X. That was the pinnacle of mac hacking.
That would be fair to say (Rogers & Hammerstein would be closer though) if Shakespeare had only done comedies and romances - and maybe you've only read his comedies, with Romeo & Juliet and Julius Caesar thrown in for good measure?
You're forgetting that Weber's Phantom of the Opera is a disney-fied, streamlined retelling of what originally was a dark, grotesque story. Shakespeare, on the other hand, took the story of King Leir, a popular fairytale with a fairytale ending, and turned it into what is often considered the darkest play ever written. He took the story of Troilus & Cressida, two characters from the Illiad, and turned it into a black, black, existentialist comedy about the meaninglessness of existence.
And then he followed these up with a string of romances, like The Tempest. He contained multitudes.
It's so fashionable for people to disparage Shakespeare based on the three plays of his they read in Sophomore English in high school. Maybe they should read the rest of his stuff before they make any hasty judgments.
You're absolutely wrong. You CAN force journalists to cough up the name. That's why Judith Miller is currently in jail for refusing to.
The idea that someone is somehow deranged and broken when they know something but don't care about it is absolutely ridiculous. The problem here is that knowing a virus released onto the internet will hurt people is abstracted knowledge. You have no reason to believe you'll ever meet any of the people who are harmed by it, and so the harm stays distanced and almost unreal. It's the same way we can see violence on the news and continue to go about what we're doing: it's not real to us. If we knew the people harmed by that violence, or if we have some personal connection to where it happened, anything that creates an emotional connection to it, then it becomes real, and it affects us. I'm not saying this is how things have to be, but it's how things often are until we stop and personally examine our own perceptions of reality. Sometimes it takes a long time for people to do this.
Rather coincidental for someone named HHumbert to be posting about child porn :-P
it's perfectly fine to colloquially tack on is to things using apostrophes. For example, "your complaint's unfounded."
Yeah, at the rate gas prices are plummeting...oh wait.
Really, there's no way that scenario can happen. What are you picturing, that when you go into a freshly "upgraded" iTunes (like the 4.5 "upgrade" that blocked myTunes and sharing with previous versions) it'll ask you point blank to pay a few bucks more for your previously, already bought music, or it'll automatically wipe them? This would make people ANGRY. Very angry. Consumers don't like to be angry. And what if you're not online at the time and it can't connect to Apple's database? Will it wipe them anyways? Or will we have to open our iTunes every day in fear of a new price change, the tech savvy making sure to yank out the ethernet cable each time so that we can thwart their "upgraded pricing?" I dunno, it all sounds a little hysterical to me.
The problem with this is that usually your "flipping through" search is based on the context of the words, not the exact words themselves. You might remember that a conversation took place, but not what the conversation itself was about. And it seems much less intuitive to type some numbers into a dialog box to limit the search than to just flip to a general area and skim around. Reference books benefit from searches, but for novels they're pretty much useless.
You mean the way it says you have 2 bars of battery life left and then the iPod dies on you? :-)
I see your point.
Every time an iPod is dropped God cries. Stop making God cry.
What do you mean trivial amount of memory? Even book-length text files aren't very big. Like it said, it can hold about 500 books on it. Have most people even read 500 books?
Before radio and TV people mostly read the equivelant of Friends, with the novel equivelant of an art movie thrown in every now and then.