i find this comment interesting because my broadcaster of choice up here, the good old cbc in canada, provides community in a different sense. though it of course has local broadcasting elements, its main purpose is to provide an communication medium for canadians to express their identity in a national setting. in essence, the local stations are just repeaters of the mother station, indeed the cbc is often referred to as the mother corp. but instead of this being negative, the cbc allows me to hear what is going on in gander bay newfoundland or port hardy british columbia because, though national is scope, the cbc maintains regional flavour. the cbc is the glue that keeps the country together across seven time zones.
and no commercials, how can you beat that? you can find the cbc on the dial just by the lack of drivel. really, the contrast between american private radio and the cbc on issues such as the situation in iraq is unreal. a lot of npr shows are based on cbc programs that had their roots in the seventies-- morningside and as it happens to name a few. thank god for public radio, its relevance in an age of burgeoning privatisation of everything cannot be understated.
I use a simple rule of thumb for every book I read; if the ~12 hours spent on the book is not going to pay itself back in time savings in the next 12 months of my life, it's not worth reading. However, I can safely say that any one of these books should have enough to save you at least one working day in your year.
I sincerely hope this does not apply to your reading-for-pleasure selections. My rule of thumb for books is all about how much of my time they can actually waste.
I'll leave the definition of waste up to the reader.
A massive government agency to spurn innovation in medical research, by having civil servants deciding who is the most deserving of the funding, instead of the free market. Now that seems like a really good idea.
Last time I checked, corporations in the free market were more concerned with profit than my health and well-being. How else does one explain the need for things such as the Underwriter's Laboratory and the FDA? Hell, seatbelts wouldn't even be in cars if it was up to corporations. Abuse of the rules by greedy corps is yesterdays news, pharmaceutical cover-ups of side-effects of major drugs are as prevalent as Enron-like meltdowns.
Just try and tell me what important and relevant research doesn't or could not occur in the academic university environment. Then try and tell me that it would be better if corporations had a lock on all of the research dollars so that they can sell us the cure for cancer for immense profit. Try and tell me that the civil servants in charge of determining research dollar allocation know less about science than you so obviously do. Just one advantage of an overseeing body is in reducing the over-duplication of research.
My father-in-law is the chief scientist to the Canadian Space Agency. Let me tell you, I think with his multiple PhDs, international recognition and awards, he is perfectly capable of performing his capacity of deciding on what projects are worth spending money on and out-performing the private sector at efficient use of research dollars. You make it sound as though governments a) know nothing about science and b) hire monkeys to run the science programs they don't understand. Science is big business for a nation's future GDP and, regardless of whatever cost-cutting mantra to deliver tax cuts to the rich GWB is selling you, everyone knows this.
Don't get me wrong here, I think there should be a ripe and fruitful market-place for private research, but that needs to be balanced by a ripe and fruitful arena for public research, especially in the area of non-profitable medical applications (no one makes money on the pennies-a-glass drugs that allow african infants to not diarheah their insides out).
Just an an aside, reams of studies show that governments spend money more efficiently than the private sector or even (gasp!) you or me. Economies of scale and unreal looking-ahead appears to dwarf the over-publicised waste that the media salivates over.
I'm really extending this but, along these lines, recent employment data in Canada and the US shows that Canada, while having a higher unemployment rate-- a result of differences in how the two countries count the unemployed-- actually possesses a higher overall employment rate. And Canada is doing this with high growth rates despite the abysmal US economy which accounts for 80 percent of the Canadian economy. On top of beating the US at their own game, the Canadian system maintains a stronger social safety net and free health care for every citizen. And greater rights for workers, more equitable labour laws. So societies and governments that don't buy into the "dominance of the market-place"-- like the americans seem to be falling all over themselves to do-- can and do compete well.
This, to me, is all an extension of my argument against this apparent dread of "government intervention" in science, the economy, or social policy. Good government can run things very smoothly, private corporations can run things very poorly. North of the border they seem to be having a good experience with good government and compassionate social policy, why can't government be encouraged to be involved in science? Is it just me or does slashdot often seem to equate government intervention with Soviet Russia?
let's take apart your argument, slashdot take-down style:
Apple has never valued cross-platform compatibility except at great urging.
never is a strong word in my books-- what do you call bluetooth, 802.11, firwire, opengl, xml, and usb? refusal to embrace and push for open standards? if anything, apple is the measure of computer industry these days.
From the days of proprietary Apple-only hardware and the squelching of would-be competitors, to the modern day with the refusal to port Aqua and launching the iPod for Macs only.
computers are what apple sells and they stay in business by selling their machines, not other peoples'. the licencing of apple hardware was flawed from the beginning and handcuffed apple into killing the program because of abuse. porting aqua to other platforms would be the end of apple-- remember, they are a hardware complany, not a software company. aqua sells macs, not the other way around. so do ipods. apple builds incentive to buy their hardware, why give those incentives to other platform users?
the integration of an X server in the latest release is definitely the exception to the rule.
pal, you have so missed the boat in your post that i think you should take a step back from this fud. x server is merely the tip of the iceberg of what has been the "exception to the rule". os x is on the cutting edge of the open source / corporate relationship, existing on open standard freebsd and countless other non-proprietary formats. if the other favourite popular target of slashdot could be mentioned this favourably, we wouldn't be here.
true, but if the drugs that come from the oncomouse experiments are so expensive that not everyone can afford them, don't the sick humans still potentially lose?
as opposed to "quebecoi", québecois is the singular when referring to an individual citizen of québec. they sound the same, the s is silent. kay-beck-wah. everyone together.
quebecois is also used to refer to the citizens of quebec as a whole, as in "the quebecois have a way with women and poutine."
québecoise (pronounced kay-beck-woz) is the plural of québecois, in reference to groups of individual québecois.
the american vernacular for québecois is québecker; québecoise, quebeckers.
What steps could I follow to prevent the control from being silently re-introduced onto my system? The simplest way is to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft. If you do that, any attempt by either a web page or an HTML mail to download an ActiveX control will generate a warning message. Here's how to empty the Trusted Publishers list:
1. In Internet Explorer, choose "Preferences..." under the Edit menu. 2. Select the Security item tab. 3. For each certificate in the list you want to delete, click on the certificate and then select Remove. 4. When you've removed all entries from the list, click on OK to close the dialog.
While ripping to.ogg is fairly common, the most important thing that this plug-in provides is a means to convert.ogg files over to.aiff or.mp3, something that I haven't been able to find any software to do for the mac on either X or 9.
Thus I can play the rare.ogg files I find on my iPod, albeit via mp3.
Also, It does not require 6.0.2-- if you have 6.0 or 6.0.1 it works fine. Now I just wish I could get it for OS9.
exactly: the people in the ad all look like mac users-- artsy and sophisticated without being over your head, in other words, what everybody wants to be.
apple is trying to make the connection between being artsy+sophisticated+attractive and their computers. why don't the people on friends look like everyone else? because people don't want normality, they aspire to be more than they are. and besides, there are business people and run of the mill people in there.
actually, 'think different' is perfectly grammatically correct. they are not asking you to 'think differently' they are asking you to 'think of something different', something that differs from the norm--
'think... different' is a way that would have made it more obvious, but they liked it the way that it was with the double entendre and all.
so, think different on the possible meanings of think different... and guess that apple probably knows about adverbs, they being so gosh-darned sharp at marketing.
toshiba can't afford *not* to sell drives at competitive prices to all other manufacturers (i'm sure apple has leverage here with their other drive purchasing), so i imagine that their price advantages are not significant to us the consumer.
plus, the work-arounds to using an ipod on a pc are well known. anyone who drops $400-500 on one of these is going to be at least a somewhat serious user.
and, in the end, the itunes interface with the ipod is simply superior to anything else out there.
i'm not so sure anyone is the winner-- except us as apple must have to lower the high prices on ipods now that they have direct competition on size and price.
it'll never happen, apple (and other manufacturers) need to preserve the upgrade path that non-standard and hard-to-get-to video cards (and other components) force us on to.
you want a snappier card? apple's answer is a new laptop. not so good for us, very good for them. the margins on laptops are much higher than desktop machines, companies make a killing on closed-box designs like the powerbook and ibook.
even getting to the hard-drive on my ibook requires a complete tear-down, on my old lombard it could be changed in two minutes.
there are things that a compass can do (gasp!) that gps can't, like taking bearings off of other objects to figure out what they are on the map and the inverse, plotting courses from the map and sighting them to the real world.
sure, a gps can give you a rough arrow on an LCD display of which way to go, but a compass can tell you precisely (within a half degree) of the direction over a long distance in very little time. who wants to keep looking at the gps all the time? with a compass, sight once, walk or canoe several kilometres, sight again.
and it's technology overload. in most circumstances a compass is more than enough and does the job faster with the same (necessary) accuracy. i don't *need* to know within a metre where i am, i only need to know within a hundred metres, and even that is overkill sometimes.
i also believe that the gps offers a false sense of security, that people believe that they won't be able to get lost without it.
and then there's the whole nature/tech separation which is the whole reason people go outside in the first place, to get away from the gadgets. i don't even like tripping with my watch.
my two cents. i'm sure they have a billion applications.
Okay, using your anti-criteria for news... Winchester touts their rifles' abilities to fire ammunition extremely accurately with immense force as one of their selling points. So when a person uses one to kill a president or a few dozen schoolchildren, is it newsworthy?
you're missing your own point-- of course the assasination of the president would be news-- but would the fact that it was done with a winchester be?
of course not. the fact that it is the president or the schoolchildren supercedes the fact that it was done with a winchester.
i get what you were trying to say but you used a self-defeating example.
I think that an important thing to remember when taking into consideration the higher cost of apple hardware is that it costs so little to maintain over the long run.
Just one day of heavy tech support can up the difference in cost between a comparable 'off the shelf' pc.
i think that the earlier statement "you want cheap, off the shelf machines such as PCs with plenty of spare parts that can be customised to suit your needs" misses the point in two ways. first, the long-run maintenance issues i mentioned, second that apple is so standardized that most of your existing spare parts are still uselful.
interestingly, this tear down of the ipod (as reported here on/.) revealed that there is an encoding chip inside already-- it seems that apple just hasn't enabled it through the firmware / supporting software yet. there is also room in the headphone jack for remote and recording capabilities. there is hope. all of the journalists i know drool for one of these with record specs.
riaa could not possibly have a problem with recording to a digital device-- there are hundreds already on the market. and $2.50 / unit is nothing on a $399 device.
the five gig drive that the ipod uses retails from fujistsu for $399-- so apple is giving you a firewire interface and a battery and an mp3 player for 0 dollars more than it would cost you to buy the drive.
those bastards! they're not getting another dime from me!
just a side note-- the ipod ships with a plug-in unit that recharges it anywhere, no firewire required.
now you may say, well, then i have lug the plug around-- but the battery lasts 10 hours+ and chances are that if you are away from home for that long anyway you probably have to lug some other stuff around with you so the plug won't be such a drag.
Slashdot Mirror
i find this comment interesting because my broadcaster of choice up here, the good old cbc in canada, provides community in a different sense. though it of course has local broadcasting elements, its main purpose is to provide an communication medium for canadians to express their identity in a national setting. in essence, the local stations are just repeaters of the mother station, indeed the cbc is often referred to as the mother corp. but instead of this being negative, the cbc allows me to hear what is going on in gander bay newfoundland or port hardy british columbia because, though national is scope, the cbc maintains regional flavour. the cbc is the glue that keeps the country together across seven time zones. and no commercials, how can you beat that? you can find the cbc on the dial just by the lack of drivel. really, the contrast between american private radio and the cbc on issues such as the situation in iraq is unreal. a lot of npr shows are based on cbc programs that had their roots in the seventies-- morningside and as it happens to name a few. thank god for public radio, its relevance in an age of burgeoning privatisation of everything cannot be understated.
I use a simple rule of thumb for every book I read; if the ~12 hours spent on the book is not going to pay itself back in time savings in the next 12 months of my life, it's not worth reading. However, I can safely say that any one of these books should have enough to save you at least one working day in your year.
I sincerely hope this does not apply to your reading-for-pleasure selections. My rule of thumb for books is all about how much of my time they can actually waste.
I'll leave the definition of waste up to the reader.
A massive government agency to spurn innovation in medical research, by having civil servants deciding who is the most deserving of the funding, instead of the free market. Now that seems like a really good idea.
Last time I checked, corporations in the free market were more concerned with profit than my health and well-being. How else does one explain the need for things such as the Underwriter's Laboratory and the FDA? Hell, seatbelts wouldn't even be in cars if it was up to corporations. Abuse of the rules by greedy corps is yesterdays news, pharmaceutical cover-ups of side-effects of major drugs are as prevalent as Enron-like meltdowns.
Just try and tell me what important and relevant research doesn't or could not occur in the academic university environment. Then try and tell me that it would be better if corporations had a lock on all of the research dollars so that they can sell us the cure for cancer for immense profit. Try and tell me that the civil servants in charge of determining research dollar allocation know less about science than you so obviously do. Just one advantage of an overseeing body is in reducing the over-duplication of research.
My father-in-law is the chief scientist to the Canadian Space Agency. Let me tell you, I think with his multiple PhDs, international recognition and awards, he is perfectly capable of performing his capacity of deciding on what projects are worth spending money on and out-performing the private sector at efficient use of research dollars. You make it sound as though governments a) know nothing about science and b) hire monkeys to run the science programs they don't understand. Science is big business for a nation's future GDP and, regardless of whatever cost-cutting mantra to deliver tax cuts to the rich GWB is selling you, everyone knows this.
Don't get me wrong here, I think there should be a ripe and fruitful market-place for private research, but that needs to be balanced by a ripe and fruitful arena for public research, especially in the area of non-profitable medical applications (no one makes money on the pennies-a-glass drugs that allow african infants to not diarheah their insides out).
Just an an aside, reams of studies show that governments spend money more efficiently than the private sector or even (gasp!) you or me. Economies of scale and unreal looking-ahead appears to dwarf the over-publicised waste that the media salivates over.
I'm really extending this but, along these lines, recent employment data in Canada and the US shows that Canada, while having a higher unemployment rate-- a result of differences in how the two countries count the unemployed-- actually possesses a higher overall employment rate. And Canada is doing this with high growth rates despite the abysmal US economy which accounts for 80 percent of the Canadian economy. On top of beating the US at their own game, the Canadian system maintains a stronger social safety net and free health care for every citizen. And greater rights for workers, more equitable labour laws. So societies and governments that don't buy into the "dominance of the market-place"-- like the americans seem to be falling all over themselves to do-- can and do compete well.
This, to me, is all an extension of my argument against this apparent dread of "government intervention" in science, the economy, or social policy. Good government can run things very smoothly, private corporations can run things very poorly. North of the border they seem to be having a good experience with good government and compassionate social policy, why can't government be encouraged to be involved in science? Is it just me or does slashdot often seem to equate government intervention with Soviet Russia?
Just my two cents.
let's take apart your argument, slashdot take-down style:
Apple has never valued cross-platform compatibility except at great urging.
never is a strong word in my books-- what do you call bluetooth, 802.11, firwire, opengl, xml, and usb? refusal to embrace and push for open standards? if anything, apple is the measure of computer industry these days.
From the days of proprietary Apple-only hardware and the squelching of would-be competitors, to the modern day with the refusal to port Aqua and launching the iPod for Macs only.
computers are what apple sells and they stay in business by selling their machines, not other peoples'. the licencing of apple hardware was flawed from the beginning and handcuffed apple into killing the program because of abuse. porting aqua to other platforms would be the end of apple-- remember, they are a hardware complany, not a software company. aqua sells macs, not the other way around. so do ipods. apple builds incentive to buy their hardware, why give those incentives to other platform users?
the integration of an X server in the latest release is definitely the exception to the rule.
pal, you have so missed the boat in your post that i think you should take a step back from this fud. x server is merely the tip of the iceberg of what has been the "exception to the rule". os x is on the cutting edge of the open source / corporate relationship, existing on open standard freebsd and countless other non-proprietary formats. if the other favourite popular target of slashdot could be mentioned this favourably, we wouldn't be here.
just my two cents.
"the sick humans potentially lose"
true, but if the drugs that come from the oncomouse experiments are so expensive that not everyone can afford them, don't the sick humans still potentially lose?
ROI yes, profiteering no.
just for your enlightenment and info:
as opposed to "quebecoi", québecois is the singular when referring to an individual citizen of québec. they sound the same, the s is silent. kay-beck-wah. everyone together.
quebecois is also used to refer to the citizens of quebec as a whole, as in "the quebecois have a way with women and poutine."
québecoise (pronounced kay-beck-woz) is the plural of québecois, in reference to groups of individual québecois.
the american vernacular for québecois is québecker; québecoise, quebeckers.
vive le québec libre.
i re-wrote your post for mac users:
What steps could I follow to prevent the control from being silently re-introduced onto my system?
The simplest way is to make sure you have no trusted publishers, including Microsoft. If you do that, any attempt by either a web page or an HTML mail to download an ActiveX control will generate a warning message. Here's how to empty the Trusted Publishers list:
1. In Internet Explorer, choose "Preferences..." under the Edit menu.
2. Select the Security item tab.
3. For each certificate in the list you want to delete, click on the certificate and then select Remove.
4. When you've removed all entries from the list, click on OK to close the dialog.
While ripping to
Thus I can play the rare
Also, It does not require 6.0.2-- if you have 6.0 or 6.0.1 it works fine. Now I just wish I could get it for OS9.
exactly: the people in the ad all look like mac users-- artsy and sophisticated without being over your head, in other words, what everybody wants to be.
apple is trying to make the connection between being artsy+sophisticated+attractive and their computers. why don't the people on friends look like everyone else? because people don't want normality, they aspire to be more than they are. and besides, there are business people and run of the mill people in there.
so: i buy a mac, i am more like them. brilliant.
actually, 'think different' is perfectly grammatically correct. they are not asking you to 'think differently' they are asking you to 'think of something different', something that differs from the norm--
'think... different' is a way that would have made it more obvious, but they liked it the way that it was with the double entendre and all.
so, think different on the possible meanings of think different... and guess that apple probably knows about adverbs, they being so gosh-darned sharp at marketing.
toshiba can't afford *not* to sell drives at competitive prices to all other manufacturers (i'm sure apple has leverage here with their other drive purchasing), so i imagine that their price advantages are not significant to us the consumer.
plus, the work-arounds to using an ipod on a pc are well known. anyone who drops $400-500 on one of these is going to be at least a somewhat serious user.
and, in the end, the itunes interface with the ipod is simply superior to anything else out there.
i'm not so sure anyone is the winner-- except us as apple must have to lower the high prices on ipods now that they have direct competition on size and price.
just my two cents.
great post, love it.
it'll never happen, apple (and other manufacturers) need to preserve the upgrade path that non-standard and hard-to-get-to video cards (and other components) force us on to.
you want a snappier card? apple's answer is a new laptop. not so good for us, very good for them. the margins on laptops are much higher than desktop machines, companies make a killing on closed-box designs like the powerbook and ibook.
even getting to the hard-drive on my ibook requires a complete tear-down, on my old lombard it could be changed in two minutes.
yes, i'll disagree with you.
there are things that a compass can do (gasp!) that gps can't, like taking bearings off of other objects to figure out what they are on the map and the inverse, plotting courses from the map and sighting them to the real world.
sure, a gps can give you a rough arrow on an LCD display of which way to go, but a compass can tell you precisely (within a half degree) of the direction over a long distance in very little time. who wants to keep looking at the gps all the time? with a compass, sight once, walk or canoe several kilometres, sight again.
and it's technology overload. in most circumstances a compass is more than enough and does the job faster with the same (necessary) accuracy. i don't *need* to know within a metre where i am, i only need to know within a hundred metres, and even that is overkill sometimes.
i also believe that the gps offers a false sense of security, that people believe that they won't be able to get lost without it.
and then there's the whole nature/tech separation which is the whole reason people go outside in the first place, to get away from the gadgets. i don't even like tripping with my watch.
my two cents. i'm sure they have a billion applications.
or if it were dogs.
or bees...
or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?
anyone who takes language seriously has to be political
Okay, using your anti-criteria for news... Winchester touts their rifles' abilities to fire ammunition extremely accurately with immense force as one of their selling points. So when a person uses one to kill a president or a few dozen schoolchildren, is it newsworthy?
you're missing your own point-- of course the assasination of the president would be news-- but would the fact that it was done with a winchester be?
of course not. the fact that it is the president or the schoolchildren supercedes the fact that it was done with a winchester.
i get what you were trying to say but you used a self-defeating example.
back then, if it didn't hurt it wasn't culture
I think that an important thing to remember when taking into consideration the higher cost of apple hardware is that it costs so little to maintain over the long run.
Just one day of heavy tech support can up the difference in cost between a comparable 'off the shelf' pc.
i think that the earlier statement "you want cheap, off the shelf machines such as PCs with plenty of spare parts that can be customised to suit your needs" misses the point in two ways. first, the long-run maintenance issues i mentioned, second that apple is so standardized that most of your existing spare parts are still uselful.
Damn I hate it when an article (the review in question) is coded across the full screen as light text on a dark background.
Couldn't finish it.
Now my eyes are fucked up for days.
Dammit, there should be laws about this.
perhaps it is because it contains racist drivel.
interestingly, this tear down of the ipod (as reported here on /.) revealed that there is an encoding chip inside already-- it seems that apple just hasn't enabled it through the firmware / supporting software yet. there is also room in the headphone jack for remote and recording capabilities. there is hope. all of the journalists i know drool for one of these with record specs.
riaa could not possibly have a problem with recording to a digital device-- there are hundreds already on the market. and $2.50 / unit is nothing on a $399 device.
the five gig drive that the ipod uses retails from fujistsu for $399-- so apple is giving you a firewire interface and a battery and an mp3 player for 0 dollars more than it would cost you to buy the drive.
those bastards! they're not getting another dime from me!
just a side note-- the ipod ships with a plug-in unit that recharges it anywhere, no firewire required.
now you may say, well, then i have lug the plug around-- but the battery lasts 10 hours+ and chances are that if you are away from home for that long anyway you probably have to lug some other stuff around with you so the plug won't be such a drag.
do you not comprehend what you are saying?
does it not impact on you that you make the world a more hateful place?
shame and irony.
wake up from your illusions-- the only interesting person in your equation is you. open your eyes. is there a way out that you prescribe? no.
and it's fischer.
you have it almost completely backwards--
class has nothing to do with either money or intelligence.
think of the poor students who pour their hearts out in their doctoral thesis with lots of intelligence and class.
think of the silver-spooned oaf who only gets anywhere because of daddy's bank account.
think of the outrageously poor of this world for whom hospitality is the be-all and end-all.
class is independent of materiality and brains. class defies both of these crutches.
"You mean they don't have banner ads making them money on the other side of the free reg door?
good point, they do.
somehow in my brain i always think that because i don't look at the banners they can't possibly be making money off them.
you're fully correct.