"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." -Tom Waits
The correct attribution for this quote is Dorothy Parker (that's an about.com reference, watch out for pop-ups.)
Tom Waits is one of the world's absolute worst vocalists; the man has a voice like a garbage disposal with a raggedly toothed reduction gear. Please don't make the situation even worse by crediting him with other people's creative works.
What happens if we put this in place, and the ocean conveyor shuts down causing an intense cold snap as is predicted by some scientists as one of the effects of global warming
Then we die — because there is no practical way to get rid of a structure like this once it is in place.
Monolithic shades around the earth are one thing; one would presume they could be taken down and/or adjusted, perhaps in angle, as effects become apparent.
A bunch of discrete micro-shades that cannot be recalled seems like an entirely bad idea, especially when the "problem" remains free of consensus among scientists (I know environmentalists have made this the cause du jour, but taking the word of an environmentalist on climate is like taking the word of a priest on sex; they'll have really strong opinions, but without appropriate training and practice, they're going to mostly get it wrong, anyway.)
If shades are to be deployed as a solution to this may-be-a-problem, then my feeling is that they have to be able to be taken down or otherwise made ineffective.
We definitely need to know more though before we do something as horrendously expensive as launching several million small objects into space
Money isn't really the problem. The US national economy, for instance, is embodied in negative 8.5 trillion dollars with a GDP of about two trillion, where a huge portion goes towards service of that debt (a situation you would never tolerate in your household.) We just make it up when we want more. But that's the just the government's debt; most households have their own debt that isn't accounted for in that number. So, seeing as how our "we have money" economy is entirely imaginary as is, the real question here is, could we actually do it? And the answer is, yes, we could. We have the food, the raw materials, and the people. We'd just end up with more debt, and no one seems to care about that enough to do anything about it, so does it really matter in terms of undertaking such a project? Not really.
However, very much like suicide (on several levels), one observes: Just because you can do such a thing, doesn't mean it is the optimum choice.
Perhaps my eyes are simply better than yours. I run 1680 x 1050 on a 17" laptop and I have absolutely no trouble at all with tooltips or controls. I do scale my work when required in order to do precision work on small areas or features, but I've never run into a situation where I could not read a windows tooltip, for instance. It's not like things get blurry, after all; they just get smaller.
I spend about half my day doing graphics, the other half in text editors and word processors. I spend all of it at 1680 x 1050, which is dot-for-dot, on 17".
Are you suggesting Apple become a software company? Or continue building computers and release OSX for generic PCs?
Neither one. I'm simply saying that comparing the previous situation where they licensed a clone hardware manufacturer is in no realistic way comparable to the decision whether to release OSX for the other 95% of the computers out there. It's a different situation, with different numbers.
If it were me, yes, you bet I'd be a software only company. But it's not, nor is it my decision to make or advise.
MS Office, there's versions for both PCs and Macs, but MS could pull the rug out from under the Mac version
Mmmph. Parallels. MS Office under windows (any version), running concurrently with OSX. This solution is here today. Nothing at all to wait for. No reason to use the Mac version at all; so it wouldn't matter if MS supported it, or not. I use a number of PC solutions that have no comparable software equivalent on the Mac right now... no trouble at all.
Apple as already found out that they loose(sic) more money by allowing Mac clones than they make in licensing fees for the Mac OS.
Entirely different situation. When one more clone company starts up, the hardware manufacturing is compromised, but the marketplace doesn't increase in size at all.
When (if, of course) you open your OS to the other 95% of machines already out there, your hardware manufacturing (which is relatively low margin, remember) becomes irrelevant to your software manufacturing, which now has a potential marketplace that has expanded by a factor of twenty or so, where your software margins can approach 100% (download the OS, it is literally "pennies to ship", and the more you ship, the less per unit it costs you.)
Apple certainly has the right to make the choice to not do this, but they cannot force remaining a closed hardware/software company to make more economic sense as compared to just going to an OS company a'la MS; it doesn't, and it never will.
Yes, they'd have some more work to do in terms of drivers — video and network cards in particular — but they've already done a fabulous job on printers, firewire, and USB devices, so I'd say that really, a great deal of the ground they need to cover is already done. And they'd have all that extra money to do it with, so...:-)
MS isn't selling to 20x the number of computers because its a better OS. It isn't, period. They sell because people are sensitive to the price point. OSX is better, and even spending more for the machine actually makes economic sense if you are a heavy computer user. But still, windows outsells OSX. It's all about the price point with your average consumer, and as long as Apple continues to make all its own hardware, that price point is going to remain well above the potential floor, and sales will remain comparatively low.
There's more to it than that. Our software uses the right button to release the anchor on an area selection (we're talking image editing.) Pull an area, right click and hold, re-position, release the right mouse and go back to area sizing. Very powerful, very convenient, not possible with Mac's two-finger trick (because when you two-finger the trackpad, you can no longer move the mouse.)
The fix, luckily, is perfectly easy — run an external mouse. But it does reduce the convenience of the laptop. For $2700 (which I what I paid for my MBP), I really would have liked to have had more than one stinking button.:(
Until Windows has a true resolution-independent interface, I'm not sure having a higher resolution screen capable of displaying text in flyspeck condensed is a major advantage.
Depends on the software you use. Our software is resolution independent with regard to image scale and operations. If your dots are too small, we can enlarge the image, or any portion of it, to any degree you require. Either in dot multiples, or fractionally. Word can do the same thing with text. Resolution independence doesn't have to be in the OS; it can be in the application layer. And you can certainly tell the OS what scale you prefer your fonts on OSX, linux, and Windows.
The thing about a small dot pitch is that nothing can substitute for it when you actually need it.
You know, for many years the canonical why to consume music was by listening to albums. Instead of 'filler' the non-single tracks on the album would be seen as a part of the body of the whole work that gave it shape.
I know. I'm old, musically speaking.:)
There are many albums that I consider "whole works"; The first four Led Zeppelin albums, everything Focus, the Moody Blues, Tull, ELP and Pink Floyd ever did, any of the Wakeman narratives, most classical efforts, superb jazz like Skywalk, monster technical wizards like Dream Theatre and Satriani, many more.
But just as many artists clearly don't have a vision that extends beyond a song or two. Not just the classic "one hit wonder" people, but many really good musicians. For example, Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover" stands as (IMHO, of course) the only decent track on Ah Via Musicom... yet I consider that track to be of a quality that is absolutely top-notch, right up there with the best of anything anyone has done. The first time I heard it (on FM) I pulled over and called the station, because I knew they were unlikely to actually name the artist. I wrote it down and duly bought Ah Via Musicom, which, other than this track, I thought wasn't worth the plastic it took to carry the data.
Sometimes the artist pulls off vision on every album, and that may, or may not, work out. Amy Grant, a pop/Christian artist put out "Heart in Motion", which, by coincidence, was the first work of hers I was exposed to. Wonderfully recorded, moving, well written songs, top notch musicians and above it all, her voice in fine form. I was captivated, though pop and Christian aren't normally of any interest to me. So I bought a bunch of her other albums. Not one of them had even one reasonable track on the CD. From which I simply observe, she's consistent within a project. Ouch.:)
Janis Joplin is about as equally likely to give you something wonderful as she is to take a shit right in your ear. Bob Dylan has produced maybe 3 or 4 good songs in an entire lifetime of trying, and listening to an entire album of his is likely to engender thoughts of suicide. Tom Waits is the epitome of consistency; everything he ever did sucks so bad I consider him a risk to my sanity. His albums are themed, all right, but should probably be illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
The last Boston album I bought had some very Boston-esque tracks on it, which I dutifully enjoyed a great deal, and then there was this chick singer who apparently is some kind of band groupie, I don't know, but in any case, somehow she got them to put her uh, um, "stylings" on the CD with the more typical Boston fare. Man. Awful. Just awful.
A relatively recent (for them) Deep Purple track, "Ted the Mechanic" stood out for me as something far, far above everything on the album Purpendicular. The "Stratus" track on Billy Cobham's Spectrum just blows everything else on the collection away. And so on.
So while I take your point, I also stand by mine: Just because a track is on a compilation with good stuff, doesn't make it good, and also doesn't ensure that the whole thing is a unified, much less intentionally unified, piece of art. Some attempts at art are just scribbling. In this case, sonic scribbling. Some people get off on trying to "interpret" scribbling, and more power to them, they should have all the fun they want... but to me, it'll never be anything other than scribbling.
Why would I want to participate in the Slashdot moderation system
No particular reason, at least until they wake up and fix it.
At that point, you might want to participate so that comments that you deem more worthy than average were more easily seen by others. Just a thought.:)
Emusic's — subscription model sucks rocks. One track, one purchase. Bleep's selection sucks. They have virtually none of the artists I searched for.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by hopeful backwater artists and "m'gumbwe thwacks the hollow log with pok-pok sticks" recordings. The entire industry has to recover from the DRM infection. Stop trying to pin the consumer down to DRM, to subscriptions, to albums choked with filler tracks. Make good music that I can buy, play on anything manufactured after the advent of mp3's, keep for the rest of my life, and I'll buy it. It is really just that simple.
I don't want to listen to music from the grandstands.
I absolutely agree. Some music doesn't even have the format to survive in a large venue, particularly some types of jazz and classical, but even some rock can be ruined by acres of echo, crowd noise, and amplification levels far beyond where acoustic instruments behave correctly.
The problem is DRM. Not that "music wants to be free", which is, IMHO, primarily a disease of the young and/or stupid. Once they come to value the time they spend on the things they produce for others benefit, one can hope they're be able to generalize that to the work others do, even if it is easy to take that work without the producer knowing of your specific actions or being able to do anything about it.
Yes, bewildered kids are going to "share." But a good portion of them will grow up to become responsible adults, and then they'll stop. That's the music industry's market. They need to focus on those people. Smacking the kids around for sharing seems like a very good idea to me as well; but in order to have the moral and/or ethical legs to stand on to make that acceptable, you can't start out by devaluing the music with DRM. Make investing in music an act that is virtually guaranteed to supply the buyer with a lifelong value that will play on just about anything above a VIC-20 and now you've offered something worth buying. Try to sell a DRM-infested hunk of shite that won't play on more than a few devices (by count or by technology, doesn't matter) and you're saying "this music has seriously limited value." All you're doing is encouraging the mindset that says "I'm not paying for that." At that point, I'm more on the kid's side than the music companies, frankly.
You know, I'm very happy with the straight "dollar per track" business model, with the exception of the DRM. A buck seems like a very fair price for the tracks I like, and I kind of view it as a way to avoid the tracks I don't like.
I mean, would you pay ten bucks for an album full of tracks that without exception, are totally aligned with your taste and give you that musical "kick" when you listen? Because that's what happens after buying ten tracks, since you picked them. You've got ten great performances for ten bucks, and no "filler."
DRM is what sours the deal for me. If I bought a track, I want to be able (for instance) to put that track on (for instance) my PSP. I want to be able to back it up, I want to be able to move it to the house media server, I want to be able to play it in my car and frankly anywhere else that I am. Looking in iTunes and seeing "protected track" annoys the heck out of me and totally turned me off to the iTunes store. It was never a price problem. Now I'm back to buying CDs, dragging the decent tracks in, and being able to move.m4a files (or.mp3 files when I get non-DRM tracks online) to my various players. This is a much more annoying process, but the end result is spot-on; my music goes where I go.
I think I'm just about the ideal music customer. I have considerable disposable income, I never "share" music I've purchased with others, I actually enjoy the idea of supporting the musicians I appreciate, and I think that music (meaning, purchased CDs or tracks) is a terrific gift for my kids and friends.
What's more, the iTunes store "sell a track at a time" model is my preferred model. I really don't like subscriptions because my buying habits are very erratic with regard to time — I'm busy — though my volume is relatively high. I ended up with all these protected tracks I can't use on my portable, not to mention the limits on the number of portables/machines at once I can put them on. I don't much like CDs any more because of the aforementioned "filler" tracks. For every great tune, there seem to be four or five that do nothing, or at least, very little, for me.
If the industry actually "got" it, I'd be one happy camper. Music is a huge part of my daily routine. But I doubt they will. Sure, the corporations are a huge problem; but as the parent notes, the government is part of it, and as they don't seem to be able to do anything else right, I doubt they'll get this straight, either. I think the legitimate rights of the consumer have been utterly forgotten in the race to lure corporate political contributions, favors, and parachutes.
My father told me once that society is like an old stone wall. You can run up to it and slam your head into it all you want, and all you'll get for it is a broken head. On the other hand, it is an old stone wall, and it is full of chinks, cracks, and various handholds. Use those, and you have a good chance of climbing the wall. Once you're on top, other opportunities become available to you.
Having said that, I'm pretty sure that your plan equates to banging your head against the wall. Not only will it not gain you anything, the wall doesn't care. If you want to effectively fight the system, you need to remain free to do it, for the most part.
Buy a new Windows API reference, I hear there's some cool stuff in the new 32-bit parts.
Since you almost got the point, I'll be kind enough to explain it to you.
We don't care about the newest and greatest UI trend in Windows. What we care about is that people who are still using older versions of the OS aren't marginalized. Using the common UI denominator between the various OS versions ensures that (a) everyone can keep taking advantage of the upgrades we do (which are graphics editing / image manipulation features upgrades) and (b) we aren't forced into wasting our time working on the program's buttons and knobs again, when they already work perfectly well.
While we realize that there are plenty of people out there who rate an application by the color / fanciness of its widgets, frankly, we aren't interested in catering to those people at all. We cater to those who want graphics power to use on images and animations, an amazing concept for a graphics program, I know, but there you have it. We're just weird like that.
So you can go on all you want about how you love pretty programs. We'll go on working up cool new features and capabilities, and you'll miss every one of them because you're obsessing about how a button is, or isn't, beveled. Good luck with that, by the way.:-)
No degree of control is useless for a government that is bent upon dominating every aspect of the lives of its citizens. Power is its own end. Petty power for petty officials, major power for major officials. From your local cop who can ruin your life if you so much as decide to smoke a joint, to the local town council, who can take your home if they simply feel your use of that property is not representative of what they want in that neighborhood, to customs and immigration officials who can ruin your life if you decide to travel, to tax minions who can take your worldly property without so much as a nod to the idea of "due process", to the president's office, where your right to hearing, trial, representation and the presumption of innocence can all be stripped away with the stroke of a pen.
The Democrats are unlikely to "fix" anything. I suspect you'll be able to count the number of laws the republicans put in place that they get repealed on the fingers of one hand — after a saw injury. But you can expect new laws, laws that favor the "mommy government" mindset.
That assumes, of course, that the republicans let go of power. With untraceable voting and no accountability, who is to say who won? Don't depend on exit polling — last time, by exit poll, Bush lost by a large margin. The lesson is there.
And to the clown who said it was "time to buy a gun"... No. It isn't. Most Americans are very happy with their lives. You'll be standing out there with 8 other like-minded individuals holding your guns, and in front of you will be a tank, a 50 cal. machine gun, and a bunch of guys in body armor. A happy populace does not constitute an environment within which executing a revolution will result in anything but getting the revolutionaries creamed. They may be happy for all the wrong reasons [insert obligatory Franklin / Jefferson quote here], but they are happy.
I live in Montana. I love to drive; I drive a lot. I've lived here for about 22 years. Fact: The feds are not able to directly legislate speed limits in Montana. We used to have a law that said we needed to drive in a reasonable and safe manner during the day, and 55 at night, 65 on Interstates. Reasonable and safe typically meant that you wouldn't get ticketed if you stayed under 90 on good road. After dark, you'd get a harsh ticket at about 57 mph, and they wouldn't let you argue your way out of it, either. No more, though.
So what the feds did was threaten to not give the state various types of funding, highway being one of them, if we did not implement speed limits. So — of course, as doing without federal highway funding is like shooting yourself in the head, and we're a very poor (and large!) state to begin with — our legislators implemented speed limits. Currently, interstate limits are 75 outside of cities, state highways outside cities are generally 70 unless they're below par (no shoulders, really bumpy, no or reverse camber, sharp turns, etc.)
In other words, the feds used indirect coercion since they were forbidden by law to use legislation.
Still, we've got it better than our neighbors. As soon as I get into North Dakota, the speed limit on the Interstate drops to 70. It keeps getting worse as you go east. Driving to Pennsylvania, which I do fairly often, is an exercise in slowly dropping speed limits. Its pretty painful for someone used to driving out west.
Of course, in the east, you folks don' t seem to pay any attention to the laws anyway. Here, I drive the speed limit, as most people I know do. I can drive five hours to Billings and not get passed if I stick to the posted limit.
True story: Out east, driving my car with Montana plates, I was wending my way between Port Jervis, NY and Middletown, NY with two friends heading for an Italian restaurant near Middletown on route 6, which is kind of a well-paved state roadway with absurdly low speed limits. I grew up in this area, and know it very well. The speed limit there when I was a teen was about 55. So, I was, as is my custom, doing the current speed limit (which was about 35 mph at that point), and some wag comes tearing up behind me and commences to honk. I wave him around, and as the car goes by, the passenger window rolls down, and this older teen yells: "Go back to the grand canyon!" We all had a pretty good chuckle (hint... Montana isn't exactly close to the grand canyon) and I kept to the speed limit, and we got to Middletown eventually.
Braking system? I... I... I just want a flying car. They said I could have a flying car. Where's my flying car? That sinking prototype on Ebay wasn't even "sky-legal."
Simply look at the IQ gaussian. No matter if it disturbs your politically correct sense or not, or if you have a quibble with what the "center" means, it still lays out the performance curve of human beings faced with task completion. The more complex the task, the further out to the right you go, and the fewer people you find able to get the job done. And this tells you, straight to your face, that you're not going to get everyone even in the center and upper half into your "tent" until, or unless, you deal with:
Linux isn't linux. Desktops vary, UI's vary, what works varies, features vary
Linux isn't friendly to major commercial apps users want — wrong mindset / licensing
Linux has no standard GUI layer in the OS. Look and feel, consequently, is a mashup
No, everyone is not willing to compile applications. Even if it is "easy."
No, people will not type "apt-get" and deal with whatever happens (or doesn't.)
It has to work with their printer, their camera, their favorite website
Laptops are everywhere. No wifi? Bye bye!
Linux has to support popular trends, such as iTunes. Can't play DRM'd tunes? No sale.
Linux needs games. But games are commercial apps... see point #2
Linux needs documentation that works for non-technical users. Badly!
Oh, and Linux needs software that works for non-technical users, even more so.
My favorite poster child for crazy and zot-worthy UI, RH9/CUPS. I just want to add a printer!
Update: I upgraded CUPS. The RH9 UI no longer works. Yeah, that'll draw customers.
Lacks critical mass: My friends / work-mates know how this works and can help me. Right?
Only works with... The holy cr*p factor: I need to recompile the kernel?? What????
Photoshop. Photoshop. Photoshop. The GIMP... no. Seriously. Just no. Photoshop.
If you can't get Outlook, then you need ALL of its functionality. No way around it.
If you can't get Word, then you need ALL of its functionality. OO isn't there.
Taken together, I think that most of those points are a direct or secondary consequence of the mindset that pervades linux; without a sea change in that mindset, linux isn't going very far outside its technical user base. IMHO.
From the point of view of my company, we (I, more to the point, since I run the company) am interested in a linux release of our software but the user base is small, there is no core GUI (we are not going to be stuck debugging people's desktops, widget libraries, etc.) and the licensing terms (GPL and others) are basically a minefield for our IP. We've been "doing" windows since the Windows 3.1, we even did all the windows RISC versions (MIPS, PPC, Alpha) we did the Amiga, we're seriously considering releasing our Mac version. Linux? No. I keep my eye on it in the hopes that a GUI will become a standardized part of the OS (whether or not it obsoletes xwindows and pendant technologies isn't an issue.) That'd probably be enough to get a pilot release out. Mind you, I'm not talking about linux's interest in my product. I think my product can stand on its own — all the better for us if linux users are technical. Our product is many times more complex to use than, for instance, Photoshop. No, I'm talking about my interest in linux. Until or unless linux can look and feel to me like support for it won't be more effort intensive than Windows support, it's a non-starter. A consistent GUI is where that all starts. IMHO.:)
I am guessing that the thought process at, for instance, Adobe, is similar. Linux does everything it can, it seems to me, to not court commercial developers of heavy GUI applications. But desktops elsewhere (Apple, Windows) are going to more and more GUI. Look at Omni Outliner. Delicious Library. Photoshop. Word. You may not like these apps, but they literally se
Yes, but the concept is still overblown. Each page is, at most, the consensus of a few people... not a summary of how "society" views a particular issue.
I like wikipedia, I really do, but as an authority, it fails, because it is too easily gamed, and as a cultural window it fails, because the slice of humanity that works these pages is far too narrow to be any kind of a cultural touchstone.
using the government as a bully tool to "freely" exterminate the last vestiges of religion, first on "government-owned property" and then anywhere in the public eye.
I wasn't suggesting that religion should be exterminated "anywhere in the public eye." If you'd actually read what I posted, you would be aware that I specifically said that religious display, speech, etc. by the people to the government should never be compromised; I also specifically said that religious display, speech etc. by the people to each other should never be compromised. What I am trying to say is only that the government should never, ever support or even acknowledge religion, that this is a subject best left to the people.
Let me reiterate: I am 100% for absolute religious freedom of expression among the peopleand by the people, to the government. On the other hand, I am 100% against the use of religion by the government to control other people, no matter how directly or how subtly. I want that to be impossible.
In other words, I feel that we should never allow any religion to become any component of a political force. Why? Because we can't have the Catholics forcing the Muslims not to bow towards Mecca. We can't have the Voodooists forcing the Born-again Christians to sacrifice chickens. We can't have the atheists forcing everyone else to take down all religious shrines on private property. We can't have the Baptists forcing Hindus to "dunk." We can't have Christians forcing people to swear "on the bible."
Religion does not belong in government, because religion in government has repeatedly and dependably changed from simple acknowledgment of the idea of higher beings into the exercise of forcing such acknowledgment in the style of the day onto everyone else. Sometimes it is a subtle message — the ten commandments over the head of judge, for instance — that implies "all non-Christians who enter here are second class citizens." Sometimes it is blatant, crushing use of force: You can't open your liquor store on Sunday by law, even if that one last day would make the difference between your business being a success, or not.
In order to preserve the idea that everyone is free to worship, or not, in the manner that they see fit outside of government, and that they be able in private life and business to act according to their beliefs, we need to prevent religion from gaining any foothold whatsoever in government. To the degree that we fail to do that, we will continuous experience problems that arise from people being marginalized by government exercise of power with regard to their religious outlooks.
I am not trying to restrict your freedom to worship. Not in private, and not in public -- I repeat that everyone should be free to say anything they like, on any subject whatsoever, including religious, to their fellow citizens and to their government.
All I am suggesting is that the government should be forbidden from saying (or doing) anything religious towards the public or in its internal operations. Why? Because inevitably, what is worship to one group is blasphemy to another. That is OK when you can say "well, that's your opinion, I'll live my religious life as I please." It is not OK when you have to say "That's the law, I must comply or be jailed" or "the judge has that Koran on his desk, I'd better get rid of my expert woman lawyer."
I am not fighting against religious rights. I am fighting for them. I am not in the least offended by seeing anything from a bowing Muslim in a public park to a huge edifice of a privately-owned church with stained glass, bells, chapels, a nunnery, etc. You should have the right to think, and say, whatever you want. You should have the right to build whatever you want on property you own yourself, or in concert with a group of completely like-minded individuals. Giving the government a position in any of this erodes your rights, and everyone else's rights too. Religious matters cannot be decided by majority vote. Not yours, not mine, not anyones. Trying to do so leads to trouble.
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The correct attribution for this quote is Dorothy Parker (that's an about.com reference, watch out for pop-ups.)
Tom Waits is one of the world's absolute worst vocalists; the man has a voice like a garbage disposal with a raggedly toothed reduction gear. Please don't make the situation even worse by crediting him with other people's creative works.
Then we die — because there is no practical way to get rid of a structure like this once it is in place. Monolithic shades around the earth are one thing; one would presume they could be taken down and/or adjusted, perhaps in angle, as effects become apparent.
A bunch of discrete micro-shades that cannot be recalled seems like an entirely bad idea, especially when the "problem" remains free of consensus among scientists (I know environmentalists have made this the cause du jour, but taking the word of an environmentalist on climate is like taking the word of a priest on sex; they'll have really strong opinions, but without appropriate training and practice, they're going to mostly get it wrong, anyway.)
If shades are to be deployed as a solution to this may-be-a-problem, then my feeling is that they have to be able to be taken down or otherwise made ineffective.
Money isn't really the problem. The US national economy, for instance, is embodied in negative 8.5 trillion dollars with a GDP of about two trillion, where a huge portion goes towards service of that debt (a situation you would never tolerate in your household.) We just make it up when we want more. But that's the just the government's debt; most households have their own debt that isn't accounted for in that number. So, seeing as how our "we have money" economy is entirely imaginary as is, the real question here is, could we actually do it? And the answer is, yes, we could. We have the food, the raw materials, and the people. We'd just end up with more debt, and no one seems to care about that enough to do anything about it, so does it really matter in terms of undertaking such a project? Not really.
However, very much like suicide (on several levels), one observes: Just because you can do such a thing, doesn't mean it is the optimum choice.
Perhaps my eyes are simply better than yours. I run 1680 x 1050 on a 17" laptop and I have absolutely no trouble at all with tooltips or controls. I do scale my work when required in order to do precision work on small areas or features, but I've never run into a situation where I could not read a windows tooltip, for instance. It's not like things get blurry, after all; they just get smaller.
I spend about half my day doing graphics, the other half in text editors and word processors. I spend all of it at 1680 x 1050, which is dot-for-dot, on 17".
Never trust a person that prefers Tom Waits to a cut on the neck with a rusty knife. :)
Yes, amazingly so.
Neither one. I'm simply saying that comparing the previous situation where they licensed a clone hardware manufacturer is in no realistic way comparable to the decision whether to release OSX for the other 95% of the computers out there. It's a different situation, with different numbers.
If it were me, yes, you bet I'd be a software only company. But it's not, nor is it my decision to make or advise.
Mmmph. Parallels. MS Office under windows (any version), running concurrently with OSX. This solution is here today. Nothing at all to wait for. No reason to use the Mac version at all; so it wouldn't matter if MS supported it, or not. I use a number of PC solutions that have no comparable software equivalent on the Mac right now... no trouble at all.
Entirely different situation. When one more clone company starts up, the hardware manufacturing is compromised, but the marketplace doesn't increase in size at all.
When (if, of course) you open your OS to the other 95% of machines already out there, your hardware manufacturing (which is relatively low margin, remember) becomes irrelevant to your software manufacturing, which now has a potential marketplace that has expanded by a factor of twenty or so, where your software margins can approach 100% (download the OS, it is literally "pennies to ship", and the more you ship, the less per unit it costs you.)
Apple certainly has the right to make the choice to not do this, but they cannot force remaining a closed hardware/software company to make more economic sense as compared to just going to an OS company a'la MS; it doesn't, and it never will.
Yes, they'd have some more work to do in terms of drivers — video and network cards in particular — but they've already done a fabulous job on printers, firewire, and USB devices, so I'd say that really, a great deal of the ground they need to cover is already done. And they'd have all that extra money to do it with, so... :-)
MS isn't selling to 20x the number of computers because its a better OS. It isn't, period. They sell because people are sensitive to the price point. OSX is better, and even spending more for the machine actually makes economic sense if you are a heavy computer user. But still, windows outsells OSX. It's all about the price point with your average consumer, and as long as Apple continues to make all its own hardware, that price point is going to remain well above the potential floor, and sales will remain comparatively low.
There's more to it than that. Our software uses the right button to release the anchor on an area selection (we're talking image editing.) Pull an area, right click and hold, re-position, release the right mouse and go back to area sizing. Very powerful, very convenient, not possible with Mac's two-finger trick (because when you two-finger the trackpad, you can no longer move the mouse.)
The fix, luckily, is perfectly easy — run an external mouse. But it does reduce the convenience of the laptop. For $2700 (which I what I paid for my MBP), I really would have liked to have had more than one stinking button. :(
Well, it seems to me, there, laddie, that you're not using your cucumbers for the right things. Have you talked to your girlfriend about this?
Depends on the software you use. Our software is resolution independent with regard to image scale and operations. If your dots are too small, we can enlarge the image, or any portion of it, to any degree you require. Either in dot multiples, or fractionally. Word can do the same thing with text. Resolution independence doesn't have to be in the OS; it can be in the application layer. And you can certainly tell the OS what scale you prefer your fonts on OSX, linux, and Windows.
The thing about a small dot pitch is that nothing can substitute for it when you actually need it.
Please see my reply to brainburger, this thread, presently very near your post. Thanks for your post.
I know. I'm old, musically speaking. :)
There are many albums that I consider "whole works"; The first four Led Zeppelin albums, everything Focus, the Moody Blues, Tull, ELP and Pink Floyd ever did, any of the Wakeman narratives, most classical efforts, superb jazz like Skywalk, monster technical wizards like Dream Theatre and Satriani, many more.
But just as many artists clearly don't have a vision that extends beyond a song or two. Not just the classic "one hit wonder" people, but many really good musicians. For example, Eric Johnson's "Cliffs of Dover" stands as (IMHO, of course) the only decent track on Ah Via Musicom... yet I consider that track to be of a quality that is absolutely top-notch, right up there with the best of anything anyone has done. The first time I heard it (on FM) I pulled over and called the station, because I knew they were unlikely to actually name the artist. I wrote it down and duly bought Ah Via Musicom, which, other than this track, I thought wasn't worth the plastic it took to carry the data.
Sometimes the artist pulls off vision on every album, and that may, or may not, work out. Amy Grant, a pop/Christian artist put out "Heart in Motion", which, by coincidence, was the first work of hers I was exposed to. Wonderfully recorded, moving, well written songs, top notch musicians and above it all, her voice in fine form. I was captivated, though pop and Christian aren't normally of any interest to me. So I bought a bunch of her other albums. Not one of them had even one reasonable track on the CD. From which I simply observe, she's consistent within a project. Ouch. :)
Janis Joplin is about as equally likely to give you something wonderful as she is to take a shit right in your ear. Bob Dylan has produced maybe 3 or 4 good songs in an entire lifetime of trying, and listening to an entire album of his is likely to engender thoughts of suicide. Tom Waits is the epitome of consistency; everything he ever did sucks so bad I consider him a risk to my sanity. His albums are themed, all right, but should probably be illegal under the Geneva Conventions.
The last Boston album I bought had some very Boston-esque tracks on it, which I dutifully enjoyed a great deal, and then there was this chick singer who apparently is some kind of band groupie, I don't know, but in any case, somehow she got them to put her uh, um, "stylings" on the CD with the more typical Boston fare. Man. Awful. Just awful.
A relatively recent (for them) Deep Purple track, "Ted the Mechanic" stood out for me as something far, far above everything on the album Purpendicular. The "Stratus" track on Billy Cobham's Spectrum just blows everything else on the collection away. And so on.
So while I take your point, I also stand by mine: Just because a track is on a compilation with good stuff, doesn't make it good, and also doesn't ensure that the whole thing is a unified, much less intentionally unified, piece of art. Some attempts at art are just scribbling. In this case, sonic scribbling. Some people get off on trying to "interpret" scribbling, and more power to them, they should have all the fun they want... but to me, it'll never be anything other than scribbling.
Oh, that is soooo good. :-) :-) :-)
No particular reason, at least until they wake up and fix it.
At that point, you might want to participate so that comments that you deem more worthy than average were more easily seen by others. Just a thought. :)
Emusic's — subscription model sucks rocks. One track, one purchase. Bleep's selection sucks. They have virtually none of the artists I searched for.
This isn't a problem that can be solved by hopeful backwater artists and "m'gumbwe thwacks the hollow log with pok-pok sticks" recordings. The entire industry has to recover from the DRM infection. Stop trying to pin the consumer down to DRM, to subscriptions, to albums choked with filler tracks. Make good music that I can buy, play on anything manufactured after the advent of mp3's, keep for the rest of my life, and I'll buy it. It is really just that simple.
I absolutely agree. Some music doesn't even have the format to survive in a large venue, particularly some types of jazz and classical, but even some rock can be ruined by acres of echo, crowd noise, and amplification levels far beyond where acoustic instruments behave correctly.
The problem is DRM. Not that "music wants to be free", which is, IMHO, primarily a disease of the young and/or stupid. Once they come to value the time they spend on the things they produce for others benefit, one can hope they're be able to generalize that to the work others do, even if it is easy to take that work without the producer knowing of your specific actions or being able to do anything about it.
Yes, bewildered kids are going to "share." But a good portion of them will grow up to become responsible adults, and then they'll stop. That's the music industry's market. They need to focus on those people. Smacking the kids around for sharing seems like a very good idea to me as well; but in order to have the moral and/or ethical legs to stand on to make that acceptable, you can't start out by devaluing the music with DRM. Make investing in music an act that is virtually guaranteed to supply the buyer with a lifelong value that will play on just about anything above a VIC-20 and now you've offered something worth buying. Try to sell a DRM-infested hunk of shite that won't play on more than a few devices (by count or by technology, doesn't matter) and you're saying "this music has seriously limited value." All you're doing is encouraging the mindset that says "I'm not paying for that." At that point, I'm more on the kid's side than the music companies, frankly.
You know, I'm very happy with the straight "dollar per track" business model, with the exception of the DRM. A buck seems like a very fair price for the tracks I like, and I kind of view it as a way to avoid the tracks I don't like.
I mean, would you pay ten bucks for an album full of tracks that without exception, are totally aligned with your taste and give you that musical "kick" when you listen? Because that's what happens after buying ten tracks, since you picked them. You've got ten great performances for ten bucks, and no "filler."
DRM is what sours the deal for me. If I bought a track, I want to be able (for instance) to put that track on (for instance) my PSP. I want to be able to back it up, I want to be able to move it to the house media server, I want to be able to play it in my car and frankly anywhere else that I am. Looking in iTunes and seeing "protected track" annoys the heck out of me and totally turned me off to the iTunes store. It was never a price problem. Now I'm back to buying CDs, dragging the decent tracks in, and being able to move .m4a files (or .mp3 files when I get non-DRM tracks online) to my various players. This is a much more annoying process, but the end result is spot-on; my music goes where I go.
I think I'm just about the ideal music customer. I have considerable disposable income, I never "share" music I've purchased with others, I actually enjoy the idea of supporting the musicians I appreciate, and I think that music (meaning, purchased CDs or tracks) is a terrific gift for my kids and friends.
What's more, the iTunes store "sell a track at a time" model is my preferred model. I really don't like subscriptions because my buying habits are very erratic with regard to time — I'm busy — though my volume is relatively high. I ended up with all these protected tracks I can't use on my portable, not to mention the limits on the number of portables/machines at once I can put them on. I don't much like CDs any more because of the aforementioned "filler" tracks. For every great tune, there seem to be four or five that do nothing, or at least, very little, for me.
If the industry actually "got" it, I'd be one happy camper. Music is a huge part of my daily routine. But I doubt they will. Sure, the corporations are a huge problem; but as the parent notes, the government is part of it, and as they don't seem to be able to do anything else right, I doubt they'll get this straight, either. I think the legitimate rights of the consumer have been utterly forgotten in the race to lure corporate political contributions, favors, and parachutes.
My father told me once that society is like an old stone wall. You can run up to it and slam your head into it all you want, and all you'll get for it is a broken head. On the other hand, it is an old stone wall, and it is full of chinks, cracks, and various handholds. Use those, and you have a good chance of climbing the wall. Once you're on top, other opportunities become available to you.
Having said that, I'm pretty sure that your plan equates to banging your head against the wall. Not only will it not gain you anything, the wall doesn't care. If you want to effectively fight the system, you need to remain free to do it, for the most part.
Since you almost got the point, I'll be kind enough to explain it to you.
We don't care about the newest and greatest UI trend in Windows. What we care about is that people who are still using older versions of the OS aren't marginalized. Using the common UI denominator between the various OS versions ensures that (a) everyone can keep taking advantage of the upgrades we do (which are graphics editing / image manipulation features upgrades) and (b) we aren't forced into wasting our time working on the program's buttons and knobs again, when they already work perfectly well.
While we realize that there are plenty of people out there who rate an application by the color / fanciness of its widgets, frankly, we aren't interested in catering to those people at all. We cater to those who want graphics power to use on images and animations, an amazing concept for a graphics program, I know, but there you have it. We're just weird like that.
So you can go on all you want about how you love pretty programs. We'll go on working up cool new features and capabilities, and you'll miss every one of them because you're obsessing about how a button is, or isn't, beveled. Good luck with that, by the way. :-)
No degree of control is useless for a government that is bent upon dominating every aspect of the lives of its citizens. Power is its own end. Petty power for petty officials, major power for major officials. From your local cop who can ruin your life if you so much as decide to smoke a joint, to the local town council, who can take your home if they simply feel your use of that property is not representative of what they want in that neighborhood, to customs and immigration officials who can ruin your life if you decide to travel, to tax minions who can take your worldly property without so much as a nod to the idea of "due process", to the president's office, where your right to hearing, trial, representation and the presumption of innocence can all be stripped away with the stroke of a pen.
The Democrats are unlikely to "fix" anything. I suspect you'll be able to count the number of laws the republicans put in place that they get repealed on the fingers of one hand — after a saw injury. But you can expect new laws, laws that favor the "mommy government" mindset.
That assumes, of course, that the republicans let go of power. With untraceable voting and no accountability, who is to say who won? Don't depend on exit polling — last time, by exit poll, Bush lost by a large margin. The lesson is there.
And to the clown who said it was "time to buy a gun"... No. It isn't. Most Americans are very happy with their lives. You'll be standing out there with 8 other like-minded individuals holding your guns, and in front of you will be a tank, a 50 cal. machine gun, and a bunch of guys in body armor. A happy populace does not constitute an environment within which executing a revolution will result in anything but getting the revolutionaries creamed. They may be happy for all the wrong reasons [insert obligatory Franklin / Jefferson quote here], but they are happy.
I live in Montana. I love to drive; I drive a lot. I've lived here for about 22 years. Fact: The feds are not able to directly legislate speed limits in Montana. We used to have a law that said we needed to drive in a reasonable and safe manner during the day, and 55 at night, 65 on Interstates. Reasonable and safe typically meant that you wouldn't get ticketed if you stayed under 90 on good road. After dark, you'd get a harsh ticket at about 57 mph, and they wouldn't let you argue your way out of it, either. No more, though.
So what the feds did was threaten to not give the state various types of funding, highway being one of them, if we did not implement speed limits. So — of course, as doing without federal highway funding is like shooting yourself in the head, and we're a very poor (and large!) state to begin with — our legislators implemented speed limits. Currently, interstate limits are 75 outside of cities, state highways outside cities are generally 70 unless they're below par (no shoulders, really bumpy, no or reverse camber, sharp turns, etc.)
In other words, the feds used indirect coercion since they were forbidden by law to use legislation.
Still, we've got it better than our neighbors. As soon as I get into North Dakota, the speed limit on the Interstate drops to 70. It keeps getting worse as you go east. Driving to Pennsylvania, which I do fairly often, is an exercise in slowly dropping speed limits. Its pretty painful for someone used to driving out west.
Of course, in the east, you folks don' t seem to pay any attention to the laws anyway. Here, I drive the speed limit, as most people I know do. I can drive five hours to Billings and not get passed if I stick to the posted limit.
True story: Out east, driving my car with Montana plates, I was wending my way between Port Jervis, NY and Middletown, NY with two friends heading for an Italian restaurant near Middletown on route 6, which is kind of a well-paved state roadway with absurdly low speed limits. I grew up in this area, and know it very well. The speed limit there when I was a teen was about 55. So, I was, as is my custom, doing the current speed limit (which was about 35 mph at that point), and some wag comes tearing up behind me and commences to honk. I wave him around, and as the car goes by, the passenger window rolls down, and this older teen yells: "Go back to the grand canyon!" We all had a pretty good chuckle (hint... Montana isn't exactly close to the grand canyon) and I kept to the speed limit, and we got to Middletown eventually.
Braking system? I... I... I just want a flying car. They said I could have a flying car. Where's my flying car? That sinking prototype on Ebay wasn't even "sky-legal."
I wanna flying car! Sniffle. :(
Simply look at the IQ gaussian. No matter if it disturbs your politically correct sense or not, or if you have a quibble with what the "center" means, it still lays out the performance curve of human beings faced with task completion. The more complex the task, the further out to the right you go, and the fewer people you find able to get the job done. And this tells you, straight to your face, that you're not going to get everyone even in the center and upper half into your "tent" until, or unless, you deal with:
Taken together, I think that most of those points are a direct or secondary consequence of the mindset that pervades linux; without a sea change in that mindset, linux isn't going very far outside its technical user base. IMHO.
From the point of view of my company, we (I, more to the point, since I run the company) am interested in a linux release of our software but the user base is small, there is no core GUI (we are not going to be stuck debugging people's desktops, widget libraries, etc.) and the licensing terms (GPL and others) are basically a minefield for our IP. We've been "doing" windows since the Windows 3.1, we even did all the windows RISC versions (MIPS, PPC, Alpha) we did the Amiga, we're seriously considering releasing our Mac version. Linux? No. I keep my eye on it in the hopes that a GUI will become a standardized part of the OS (whether or not it obsoletes xwindows and pendant technologies isn't an issue.) That'd probably be enough to get a pilot release out. Mind you, I'm not talking about linux's interest in my product. I think my product can stand on its own — all the better for us if linux users are technical. Our product is many times more complex to use than, for instance, Photoshop. No, I'm talking about my interest in linux. Until or unless linux can look and feel to me like support for it won't be more effort intensive than Windows support, it's a non-starter. A consistent GUI is where that all starts. IMHO. :)
I am guessing that the thought process at, for instance, Adobe, is similar. Linux does everything it can, it seems to me, to not court commercial developers of heavy GUI applications. But desktops elsewhere (Apple, Windows) are going to more and more GUI. Look at Omni Outliner. Delicious Library. Photoshop. Word. You may not like these apps, but they literally se
Yes, but the concept is still overblown. Each page is, at most, the consensus of a few people... not a summary of how "society" views a particular issue.
I like wikipedia, I really do, but as an authority, it fails, because it is too easily gamed, and as a cultural window it fails, because the slice of humanity that works these pages is far too narrow to be any kind of a cultural touchstone.
IMHO, of course. :)
I wasn't suggesting that religion should be exterminated "anywhere in the public eye." If you'd actually read what I posted, you would be aware that I specifically said that religious display, speech, etc. by the people to the government should never be compromised; I also specifically said that religious display, speech etc. by the people to each other should never be compromised. What I am trying to say is only that the government should never, ever support or even acknowledge religion, that this is a subject best left to the people.
Let me reiterate: I am 100% for absolute religious freedom of expression among the people and by the people, to the government. On the other hand, I am 100% against the use of religion by the government to control other people, no matter how directly or how subtly. I want that to be impossible.
In other words, I feel that we should never allow any religion to become any component of a political force. Why? Because we can't have the Catholics forcing the Muslims not to bow towards Mecca. We can't have the Voodooists forcing the Born-again Christians to sacrifice chickens. We can't have the atheists forcing everyone else to take down all religious shrines on private property. We can't have the Baptists forcing Hindus to "dunk." We can't have Christians forcing people to swear "on the bible."
Religion does not belong in government, because religion in government has repeatedly and dependably changed from simple acknowledgment of the idea of higher beings into the exercise of forcing such acknowledgment in the style of the day onto everyone else. Sometimes it is a subtle message — the ten commandments over the head of judge, for instance — that implies "all non-Christians who enter here are second class citizens." Sometimes it is blatant, crushing use of force: You can't open your liquor store on Sunday by law, even if that one last day would make the difference between your business being a success, or not.
In order to preserve the idea that everyone is free to worship, or not, in the manner that they see fit outside of government, and that they be able in private life and business to act according to their beliefs, we need to prevent religion from gaining any foothold whatsoever in government. To the degree that we fail to do that, we will continuous experience problems that arise from people being marginalized by government exercise of power with regard to their religious outlooks.
I am not trying to restrict your freedom to worship. Not in private, and not in public -- I repeat that everyone should be free to say anything they like, on any subject whatsoever, including religious, to their fellow citizens and to their government.
All I am suggesting is that the government should be forbidden from saying (or doing) anything religious towards the public or in its internal operations. Why? Because inevitably, what is worship to one group is blasphemy to another. That is OK when you can say "well, that's your opinion, I'll live my religious life as I please." It is not OK when you have to say "That's the law, I must comply or be jailed" or "the judge has that Koran on his desk, I'd better get rid of my expert woman lawyer."
I am not fighting against religious rights. I am fighting for them. I am not in the least offended by seeing anything from a bowing Muslim in a public park to a huge edifice of a privately-owned church with stained glass, bells, chapels, a nunnery, etc. You should have the right to think, and say, whatever you want. You should have the right to build whatever you want on property you own yourself, or in concert with a group of completely like-minded individuals. Giving the government a position in any of this erodes your rights, and everyone else's rights too. Religious matters cannot be decided by majority vote. Not yours, not mine, not anyones. Trying to do so leads to trouble.