If you are allowed to use any reasonable form of encryption - SSL, SSH tunnel - then censorship is basically impossible. This is why attempts to censor or block access invariably go hand in hand with efforts to outlaw encryption.
As a non-American, I can say, thanks, Bush and your cronies, for respecting human cultural heritage:
The looting of the National Museum in Baghdad two years ago caused an international outcry.
In the chaos that engulfed the city at the end of the war, thousands of pieces were either stolen or damaged....
"Archaeological sites are being destroyed in order to find these objects," says Dr John Curtis, head of the Ancient Near East department at the British Museum in London.
"In the process of that looting, very important archaeological evidence gets lost. And it's this evidence that can tell us a great deal about the civilisation."
Ancient Mesopotamia - modern Iraq - is often called the cradle of civilisation.
It is a description richly deserved, says Dr Curtis, as Mesopotamia is the place where writing, medicine, mathematics and astronomy all began.
Sun's SPARCstation Voyager (1994) may not have been a laptop exactly, but "transportable" and at 12lb dubbed a "nomadic" solution... Maybe something like the 15.8lb Mac Portable (1989), a.k.a. the "Luggable".
Having sent a few -- typos, "choose a different submitter, damn it, this one's a moron" etc -- I've seen no sign that the "editors" read e-mails sent to the Mysterious Future either.
NYT broke its own rules quoting the lawyer
on
The Lawsuit of the Rings
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Slate.com rightly points out that the NYT broke its own code of conduct in quoting a partisan source (case lawyer) and allowing them to freely slander Jackson:
In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading. If the impetus for anonymity has originated with the source, further reporting is essential to satisfy the reporter and the reader that the paper has sought the whole story....
We do not grant anonymity to people who use it as cover for a personal or partisan attack. If pejorative opinions are worth reporting and cannot be specifically attributed, they may be paraphrased or described after thorough discussion between writer and editor. The vivid language of direct quotation confers an unfair advantage on a speaker or writer who hides behind the newspaper, and turns of phrase are valueless to a reader who cannot assess the source.
Apart from that, isn't it too precious to hear a lawyer complaining about "piggishness".
In his wonderful bookPeace on Earth, Lem has banished all warfare to the Moon, where robot armies, in a self-evolving arms race, battle each other on behalf of their nations on Earth. Highly recommended, this book is a great joy and very memorable not just for the plot and action, but the philosophical meditations we expect from Lem.
if Jobs had explained this a little better he would not look so silly about now.
True. But there is also his known tendency to make extravagant and dubious claims after the fact. Absent qualification, this looked a lot like one of those. As for looking silly, no, probably only pedants like me care much. The vast majority are happy to receive the Gospel of Saint Steven with its legitimacy underwritten by a few billion in the bank.
Thanks for fleshing out the Reed context a bit more. Perhaps Jobs' premise should not have been "Dropping Out is Good for You" but rather "Attending a Humanist University is Good for You (and Everyone Else Too)".
I didn't read anything in the reports of Jobs's remarks that suggested he was claiming more than to have been sensitised to wider design issues by his calligraphy classes and being in a position, chief head kicker for the Mac development project, where he could force a brake through the conceptual bottlenecks which had long separated end user computing and elegance. (emphasis mine)
If he had only put it so delicately, I would not have objected. But, at least the way it was reported, he was trying to conjure a butterfly-effect nexus between his spur-of-the-moment calligraphy drop-in and the very fact of modern PCs supporting proportional type.
But while we're talking about "conceptual bottlenecks" to "elegance": power-of-position is clearly not the effective ingredient, or we might have seen more elegance displayed by the dark side. Jobs famously claimed Micro$oft lacks taste*. It is true that Jobs always displayed taste and even humanism (from a distance!) while amassing his billions; conversely Gates' cheap avarice and common-thug mentality were only sharpened. I see from Google that the comparison has been made many times.
generation after generation insisting such a revolution was also inevitable
I keep nagging my brother to write up his ideas on going beyond source code as a representation.
needed Gore's political initiative to break through the final barriers to the commercial Web
Where was this neat précis when it was needed! But I fear that some mutation of Godwin's law rules that this thread must self-destruct after having invoked both Gore and Gates.
----------
*In the same interview, Jobs refers to proportional fonts: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have... absolutely no taste,... In the sense that they... don't bring much culture into their product... - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products..." which is essentially the same claim he made at Stanford, but without saying "and the Mac wouldn't have had them if not for my calligraphy class".
Adobe's approach to typography was more "101" than master class, but the early tricklings of high res tech into commodity computer systems were, of course, likely the greatest example of "enabling technology" until the Internet arrived. The Europeans - mainly Germans - were more sophisticated in digital type in the 1980s than even today's Adobe, but you won't read that in MacWorld back issues. (Two leading examples: Berthold, and Dr Karow's URW.)
You're right: we should be sceptical of all claims to "inventing" proportional digital type. One would have to defer to historians such as Richard Southall to ferret out the convoluted truth. Certainly by the time of PageMaker's introduction, typesetter manufacturers were using a variety of digital methods to set type (of a quality Mac users could only dream about).
But even back in Silicon Valley, we all remember inspiring screenshots of the Xerox research machines - and earlier still, the high resolution Smalltalk-80 interface - which give the lie to Jobs' remarks. Digital typography itself was an inevitable revolution, with some accidental heroes on the road to commercialisation and commodification.
(An aside: Isn't it uncanny how closely InDesign 2 tracks our late-80s wishlist for JustText 3?:)
I get the feeling that he'd tell me that he single handedly designed the whole Apollo project and did most of the work putting a man on the moon, if he thought I'd believe it.
That sounds more like Jobs to me. Didn't he just try to take credit for computers using proportional fonts? Even subtracting Raskin from the picture, that's a Munchhausen-esque whopper.
Perhaps I took the witticism more literally than was intended, but there was something about its image of a wandering monk who stumbled into a calligraphy class and carried its Promethean insight to the PC revolution that's a little tough to swallow whole. For all Raskin's faults, he seems to have been one of very few to provide any alternative history to Job's mythmaking.
According to one audience member quoted on Macintouch, Jobs "wondered aloud if computers today would have proportional fonts had he not sat in on that calligraphy course".
If the late Jef Raskin had anything to do with it, they would; he recalls lobbying for versatile bitmapped displays and not hard-wired fixed width character generators, against Jobs and Wozniak.
Sadly Jef is no longer with us to defend the account, but he left a detailed history, The Mac and Me:
In my 1967 thesis, "The Quick Draw Graphics System," I took issue
with the display architecture then in vogue.... There
were only a few CRT terminals at the Penn State computer center,
and these could display only letters and symbols, usually in
green or white on a black background. Hamstrung by specialized
electronics -- in particular a circuit called a "character
generator" -- that permitted no other use, they could not display
graphics. One display at the center could draw thin, spidery
lines on its large screen. With it you could do drawings that now
seem crude, annotated by child-like stick-figure lettering.
In this milieu my thesis was radical in suggesting that computer
displays should be graphics- rather than character-based. I
argued that, by considering characters as just a particular kind
of graphics, we could produce whatever fonts we wished, and mix
text and drawings with the same freedom as on the drawn or
printed page.
[Later, at Apple...]
The other Steve, Steve Jobs, was a delight to talk to about less
technical aspects of computers. His enthusiasm and business
orientation were exciting. They were just starting on the design
of the Apple II, and I tried to convince them that they should
employ bit-mapped graphics and not have a character generator,
but Woz thought that software couldn't handle the character
generation task fast enough and Steve Jobs didn't understand why
I thought it so important.
I had a different vision of what a
microcomputer should be like, and PARC's programmers and my own
work had convinced me that software could do the job. I tried to
convince Woz by working out the code to put bit-mapped characters
on the screen and calculating timings by counting cycles, but the
Steves were not open to the idea.
The concepts I espoused were
far from the mainstream of computer design and for all their
mold-breaking thinking, Steve and Steve were very strongly
conditioned by the minicomputers they had seen.
Later in the essay, Raskin notes that Jobs was eventually persuaded to green-light the Apple II's "high res" mode. Only Steve himself knows if an enthusiasm for calligraphy influenced the decision... but even had he not, proportional fonts were already being designed into the expensive research workstations of the day, where the hardware budget was orders of magnitude greater than an Apple II's.
Where is the Roman empire? I don't care if it lasted a thousand years before it fell. Microsoft will not be so lucky,
I agree with the empire analogy: they're going to vanish - but doesn't it bother you that they took so much of our damn cash first? Through extortion, elimination of choice, etc, no less. Imagine what a better place the world would be if that cash wasn't being funneled to the last guy on earth who needs it. For his mediocre product (and that's being polite).
If there is one company that could afford to produce quality, it's M$. And they never will. Where's the incentive?
I won't be happy until the software "industry" no longer reduces the majority of people to hapless, shaken down dupes.
Let's take a reality check here. People should buy a Mac, buy OS X, for their unique features. Ease of use. Slick GUI. iLife apps. Reliability. Rich development environment. Quality hardware. Etc. Windows offers none of those things, and Linux is still catching up in some of those areas.
Why does it seem so strange that people might actually choose products based on their attributes?
I guess you don't pay the power bills. Low heat and low power chips like Tm reduce cooling and electricity costs enormously. This is why it was chosen for Orion Multisystems' cluster hardware: 12 CPUs that dissipate only 220W peak - not to mention 96 CPUs in a deskside cabinet. Do that with Pentium 4s...
I don't see why everyone thinks they would switch the entire product line to x86. Three or four years ago I believed it was possible they would segment their product line into low-margin x86 boxes for the consumer market, and stay with the pricey IBM chips for the high end. With dual core G5s coming down the pike, I would expect them to split directions in this way. It also lets them cut power in portables (and clusters - I so wish Apple had bought Transmeta! Not like Steve to let that one go.)
OS X is, like its predecessor NEXTSTEP (and many other UN*X), architecture transparent. The Darwin system has always been portable to x86 and I've always believed Apple has maintained a complete x86 port of OS X internally.
(As everyone is probably tired of being reminded, NEXTSTEP ran identically from a user/programmer point of view on 68K, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC.)
Slashdot Mirror
The guy claims to own "chutzpah" as well. What a putz.
If you are allowed to use any reasonable form of encryption - SSL, SSH tunnel - then censorship is basically impossible. This is why attempts to censor or block access invariably go hand in hand with efforts to outlaw encryption.
So does Tiger's Mail.app - quite nicely, I gather from ex-Windoze users.
Sun's SPARCstation Voyager (1994) may not have been a laptop exactly, but "transportable" and at 12lb dubbed a "nomadic" solution... Maybe something like the 15.8lb Mac Portable (1989), a.k.a. the "Luggable".
Having sent a few -- typos, "choose a different submitter, damn it, this one's a moron" etc -- I've seen no sign that the "editors" read e-mails sent to the Mysterious Future either.
Apart from that, isn't it too precious to hear a lawyer complaining about "piggishness".
Although some people might find it hard to believe, this certainly does happen (via Risks digest).
In his wonderful book Peace on Earth, Lem has banished all warfare to the Moon, where robot armies, in a self-evolving arms race, battle each other on behalf of their nations on Earth. Highly recommended, this book is a great joy and very memorable not just for the plot and action, but the philosophical meditations we expect from Lem.
Thanks for fleshing out the Reed context a bit more. Perhaps Jobs' premise should not have been "Dropping Out is Good for You" but rather "Attending a Humanist University is Good for You (and Everyone Else Too)".
But while we're talking about "conceptual bottlenecks" to "elegance": power-of-position is clearly not the effective ingredient, or we might have seen more elegance displayed by the dark side. Jobs famously claimed Micro$oft lacks taste*. It is true that Jobs always displayed taste and even humanism (from a distance!) while amassing his billions; conversely Gates' cheap avarice and common-thug mentality were only sharpened. I see from Google that the comparison has been made many times.
Or, in many cases, installing brains. I keep nagging my brother to write up his ideas on going beyond source code as a representation. Where was this neat précis when it was needed! But I fear that some mutation of Godwin's law rules that this thread must self-destruct after having invoked both Gore and Gates.----------
*In the same interview, Jobs refers to proportional fonts: "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have ... absolutely no taste, ... In the sense that they ... don't bring much culture into their product ... - well you know proportionally spaced fonts come from type setting and beautiful books, that's where one gets the idea - if it weren't for the Mac they would never have that in their products..." which is essentially the same claim he made at Stanford, but without saying "and the Mac wouldn't have had them if not for my calligraphy class".
Here's some software and info, courtesy of Brian Connors.
You're right: we should be sceptical of all claims to "inventing" proportional digital type. One would have to defer to historians such as Richard Southall to ferret out the convoluted truth. Certainly by the time of PageMaker's introduction, typesetter manufacturers were using a variety of digital methods to set type (of a quality Mac users could only dream about).
But even back in Silicon Valley, we all remember inspiring screenshots of the Xerox research machines - and earlier still, the high resolution Smalltalk-80 interface - which give the lie to Jobs' remarks. Digital typography itself was an inevitable revolution, with some accidental heroes on the road to commercialisation and commodification.
(An aside: Isn't it uncanny how closely InDesign 2 tracks our late-80s wishlist for JustText 3? :)
That sounds more like Jobs to me. Didn't he just try to take credit for computers using proportional fonts? Even subtracting Raskin from the picture, that's a Munchhausen-esque whopper.
Perhaps I took the witticism more literally than was intended, but there was something about its image of a wandering monk who stumbled into a calligraphy class and carried its Promethean insight to the PC revolution that's a little tough to swallow whole. For all Raskin's faults, he seems to have been one of very few to provide any alternative history to Job's mythmaking.
If the late Jef Raskin had anything to do with it, they would; he recalls lobbying for versatile bitmapped displays and not hard-wired fixed width character generators, against Jobs and Wozniak.
Sadly Jef is no longer with us to defend the account, but he left a detailed history, The Mac and Me:
Later in the essay, Raskin notes that Jobs was eventually persuaded to green-light the Apple II's "high res" mode. Only Steve himself knows if an enthusiasm for calligraphy influenced the decision... but even had he not, proportional fonts were already being designed into the expensive research workstations of the day, where the hardware budget was orders of magnitude greater than an Apple II's.How long before Darl issues pay-up-or-else letters to everyone in China?
So it must be GPL then, surely.
(They're never going to get it, are they.)
Howard strives daily to make Australia a legal and moral carbon copy of the US. I don't know about you, but that wasn't good enough for me, so I left.
Also like the US, by and large the beautiful women have to be imported from Europe and elsewhere. Why not go to the source...
I agree with the empire analogy: they're going to vanish - but doesn't it bother you that they took so much of our damn cash first? Through extortion, elimination of choice, etc, no less. Imagine what a better place the world would be if that cash wasn't being funneled to the last guy on earth who needs it. For his mediocre product (and that's being polite).
If there is one company that could afford to produce quality, it's M$. And they never will. Where's the incentive?
I won't be happy until the software "industry" no longer reduces the majority of people to hapless, shaken down dupes.
Yeah, I would love to know how it's done, and try a gcj Eclipse on OS X. Is there a HOWTO somewhere?
Why does it seem so strange that people might actually choose products based on their attributes?
Only more than thirty years after it was industry standard... Another M$ innovation, I see.
I guess you don't pay the power bills. Low heat and low power chips like Tm reduce cooling and electricity costs enormously. This is why it was chosen for Orion Multisystems' cluster hardware: 12 CPUs that dissipate only 220W peak - not to mention 96 CPUs in a deskside cabinet. Do that with Pentium 4s...
I don't see why everyone thinks they would switch the entire product line to x86. Three or four years ago I believed it was possible they would segment their product line into low-margin x86 boxes for the consumer market, and stay with the pricey IBM chips for the high end. With dual core G5s coming down the pike, I would expect them to split directions in this way. It also lets them cut power in portables (and clusters - I so wish Apple had bought Transmeta! Not like Steve to let that one go.)
OS X is, like its predecessor NEXTSTEP (and many other UN*X), architecture transparent. The Darwin system has always been portable to x86 and I've always believed Apple has maintained a complete x86 port of OS X internally. (As everyone is probably tired of being reminded, NEXTSTEP ran identically from a user/programmer point of view on 68K, x86, SPARC, and PA-RISC.)