A.P., you're right -- none of these features are unique to Apple's PowerBook, and many of them have been incorporated for good cause. The difference is that, unlike with any other laptop that I'm aware of, they're all in place on Porsche's system. It is this group of features that makes their system highly derivative of Apple's PowerBook.
Not that popular opinion is a substitute for sound logic, but I'll warrant that if Slashdot put up a poll, the majority of people would agree that the laptop that this system most strongly resembles is Apple's TiBook. The reason that this is notable, at least to me, is because I'd like to imagine that Porsche would be developing something more interesting than this. I don't imagine that Best Buy has the biggest budget out there allocated to laptop design, but surely somebody at Porsche was looking at this design before it went out the door and saying "heeeyyyy...this looks familiar..." The fact that it didn't happen makes me wonder if this was more or less intentional, or if Porsche is inclined to agree with you, and say that the design is somehow the only logical one available, in which case it's amazing that nobody thought of it before Apple.:)
...have you even looked at the Porsche laptop? The only thing reminiscent of the Titanium Powerbook design is that both are rectangular.
I strongly disagree, A.P. Much of the design is strikingly similar, though shoddy by comparison, IMHO.
* Same unusual dimensions. * Same widescreen format. * Same keyboard placement relatively to the body shape. * Same rectangular, curve-free format. * Same silvery body. * Same slot-loading CD drive
It's not in any way nuts to say that this design is highly derivative.
>> What business is Porche in, anyhow?
This is a joke, right?
Of course not. It was a legitimate question. I was under the impression that they were in the car-manufacturing business. Fortunately, others have replied and pointed out that Porsche Design GmbH, is more or less unrelated to the auto manufacturer, and is actually in the business of designing things other than cars for third parties. No joke, just a question, one to which I got a satisfactory response.
I expect Mac rip-offs from companies like Compaq and eMachines. But Porche? It's bad enough that they've designed a laptop for Best Buy. (What business is Porche in, anyhow?) But to just blatently rip off the TiBook design is pathetic.
I can't believe how Milky-Way-centric that Slashdot still is. The bias is incredible. Nowhere in this story does it identify which galaxy, as if we all live in the same galaxy. For chrissake, people, it's the Internet.
I just now installed and booted Red Hat 8.0 on this Dell Dimension 4300 Win2k machine here at the office, went to Slashdot, and found this story. Red Hat 8.0 flawlessly detected the Rage 128 and SyncMaster 570V flat screen, the sound card, the Ethernet connection, the network structure, the printer -- it just works.
Now, it set up Gnome by default. I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, and I'm a KDE guy on this particular week. I was prepared to be annoyed when it booted into Gnome, but you know what I realized? I don't care. It's a desktop. It looks great. I don't give a damn what desktop environment that it's running, at least while I have my worker-bee hat on.
I'm just happy that I could open up OpenOffice and pick up my work where I left off on the Win2k side of the machine with Word, Excel, Acrobat and G3 fax image files, and everything just works. The rest is all details beyond my current interest.
Heh -- that's funny, I remember the first time that I saw one of your posts. My friend Mike Sokolowski has a band called "Soko" (notable because several members of Dave Matthews Band performed on their first album), and the first time I saw one of your posts, it took me several minutes to figure out that you were not, in fact, Mike. That would have been in early 1999, I think.
[Sorry, Waldo, you just did not sign up soon enough to qualify as an "old timer" to me... grin...]
*Laugh*
It's funny how we all set our own threshhold for such things, ensuring that wherever we set our cutoff, it includes us.:) I figure anything under 10,000 is relatively old-timerish; again, a figure that carefully includes myself and few people that joined after me.:)
I must say that a distinct change over the years has been a loss of community. I no longer see the same names as often as I once did. I now irrationally rely on low UIDs to determine the relative merits of comment, as opposed to saying "hey, isn't that [Nate Fox | singularity | Zow | Noke]?" There's just too many names and too many comments. This is less of a complaint and more of a lament, I suppose, but I do miss that aspect of/.
In early November of 1998, I spent the better part of an hour attempting to make an account on Slashdot. I just couldn't make it work. No matter what username that I put in, and I tried some weird shit, it would complain that "a user already exists with that user name or email address." I knew it couldn't be the e-mail address, what with my highly-personalized address, so I e-mailed Rob asking what was what.
Well, Rob wrote me back in something like 60 seconds, suggesting that perhaps I already had an account. "Balderdash," I thought, I would certainly know if I'd made an account on a site or not. I'd never even heard of Slashdot until a week previously. But I went to the site, entered my e-mail address in the lost-password form and, lo and behold, I'd made an account at some point. God only knows when.
So my question is this: who has a user ID close to mine, and when did you make your account? I'd love to check my datebook for around that time and see if I can conjure up when I would have first read/. and when I would have made an account. Sometimes I think I've sleptwalked through entire years of my life.
So, what happens if for some reason the feds (or some other unscrupulous organization) siezes your hard drive and digs up everything you've deleted for the past 6 1/2 years?
Then be sure to let me know about it, because that's one bad-ass unerase utility right there.
Keeping an individual specific private database is Privacy invasion.
No it's not. Could somebody call you and demand that they be removed from your rolodex?
Privacy invasion...that's just silly.
Political database... what the hell is this? 1984?
No, more like 1930; databases have always been essential to getting elected. It's just that they used card catalogs back then. Nobody has ever been elected to Congress without an ass-kicking database. If you don't know that, you ought not be making political accusations.
If you don't have the link, then you are trolling.
No. I could be wrong. Or I could be right. (It looks like "wrong," according to Snopes.) But merely lacking a link doesn't make me a troll, simply less-than-informative.
My girlfriend and I went to Virginia Beach on the weekend of July 13th to see Dave Matthews Band, the very weekend that the cameras were scheduled to be turned on. If I had known about the cameras prior to making hotel reservations and acquiring tickets, I probably would have skipped the trip. But having made a financial committment to going, I wasn't about to back out. But I did let them know that I wasn't happy.
First, I called their tourism bureau (1-800-VA BEACH) in an attempt to determine where the cameras would be, such that I could avoid that area. The woman had no idea, and asked why I wanted to know. I explained -- without getting into lots of details about privacy -- that I was not comfortable having the cameras watching me, despite the fact that I was not, to my knowledge, wanted by any police department. And, as a matter of fact, I was on the verge of cancelling my trip, I told her. The woman was troubled, and directed me to call the police department.
That went about as well as you could imagine. I talked to a cop there that figured that anybody that didn't want to be on their cameras was obviously a law-breaker. But, hey, he told me the streets that the cameras were on, and I told him that I would certainly not be patronizing businesses along that stretch.
Did I make a difference? I have no idea. If one person calls, they'll think he's crazy. And if two, two people call...they'll think they're queer. But, friends, can you imagine three -- three people -- walking in, sitting down, and humming a bar of Alice's Restaurant? Friends, we'd have a movement -- the Virginia Beach Massacree. [1]
I'm still really pissed off about those palistineans dancing in the streets with joy while downtown Manhattan was busy getting covered in 2 inches of soot.
No time to track down a link now (sorry), but it turned out that the journalist was giving out treats to the crowd in exchange for getting them to "celebrate."
I've thought about this lots.:) I imagine I'd spend six months out of each year backpacking (AT again, PCT, ADT, CDT, JMT, LT...there are so many!) and the remaining six months divided into six one-month projects. One month to start a new voter-registration project in Charlottesville, one month to volunteer full-time on the city's free bicycle program, one month to work on a free software project... And then I could clear my head from April - October backpacking. Repeat as necessary.:)
Would this also work with email virus? I think it would since the virus would also have a defined patern to it and the program would pick it up after the first one.
I was the only person to RSVP after Charlottesville, VA had 7 people sign up. The location choices were ridiculous -- I'd love to find out where those came from. I submitted an alternate one, but it never showed up as a choice.
It looks as if over-committment is a common theme around here.
I hope that nobody blames 2600 Magazine for their decision not to appeal. It's plain that now is not the time for such appeals, particularly given how strongly that they've been rebuffed thus far. Perhaps most importantly, Emmanuel lacks the funds (I assume) to take a case to the Supreme Court. Such things involve a tremendous amount of money.
Given the recent 2600-related news (recall that Ford dropped the suit against them over FuckGeneralMotors.com last week), I should point out that 2600 Magazine relies on merchandise sales and magazine subscriptions to stay afloat. For those that haven't heard of 2600 Magazine, I recommend that you check it out. I've subscribed since the early '90s, though it's been published continuously (every quarter) for over a decade now. Whether you want to support 2600's legal work or you'd simply like to keep current on hacker news and culture, I recommend that you subscribe.
Does this set any sort of precedent (legal or practical) in favor of *sucks.* domain names? Is the owner of ClearChannelSucks.org on better footing now than he was a week ago? (I hope so.:)
Slashdot Mirror
A.P., you're right -- none of these features are unique to Apple's PowerBook, and many of them have been incorporated for good cause. The difference is that, unlike with any other laptop that I'm aware of, they're all in place on Porsche's system. It is this group of features that makes their system highly derivative of Apple's PowerBook.
:)
Not that popular opinion is a substitute for sound logic, but I'll warrant that if Slashdot put up a poll, the majority of people would agree that the laptop that this system most strongly resembles is Apple's TiBook. The reason that this is notable, at least to me, is because I'd like to imagine that Porsche would be developing something more interesting than this. I don't imagine that Best Buy has the biggest budget out there allocated to laptop design, but surely somebody at Porsche was looking at this design before it went out the door and saying "heeeyyyy...this looks familiar..." The fact that it didn't happen makes me wonder if this was more or less intentional, or if Porsche is inclined to agree with you, and say that the design is somehow the only logical one available, in which case it's amazing that nobody thought of it before Apple.
-Waldo Jaquith
...have you even looked at the Porsche laptop? The only thing reminiscent of the Titanium Powerbook design is that both are rectangular.
I strongly disagree, A.P. Much of the design is strikingly similar, though shoddy by comparison, IMHO.
* Same unusual dimensions.
* Same widescreen format.
* Same keyboard placement relatively to the body shape.
* Same rectangular, curve-free format.
* Same silvery body.
* Same slot-loading CD drive
It's not in any way nuts to say that this design is highly derivative.
>> What business is Porche in, anyhow?
This is a joke, right?
Of course not. It was a legitimate question. I was under the impression that they were in the car-manufacturing business. Fortunately, others have replied and pointed out that Porsche Design GmbH, is more or less unrelated to the auto manufacturer, and is actually in the business of designing things other than cars for third parties. No joke, just a question, one to which I got a satisfactory response.
-Waldo Jaquith
I expect Mac rip-offs from companies like Compaq and eMachines. But Porche? It's bad enough that they've designed a laptop for Best Buy. (What business is Porche in, anyhow?) But to just blatently rip off the TiBook design is pathetic.
-Waldo Jaquith
So, if we don't stop talking about MSN, then we're letting the MSFTerrorists win?
-Waldo Jaquith
How long until Ashcroft DMCAs this story?
-Waldo Jaquith
I can't believe how Milky-Way-centric that Slashdot still is. The bias is incredible. Nowhere in this story does it identify which galaxy, as if we all live in the same galaxy. For chrissake, people, it's the Internet.
Jeez.
-Waldo Jaquith
I just now installed and booted Red Hat 8.0 on this Dell Dimension 4300 Win2k machine here at the office, went to Slashdot, and found this story. Red Hat 8.0 flawlessly detected the Rage 128 and SyncMaster 570V flat screen, the sound card, the Ethernet connection, the network structure, the printer -- it just works.
Now, it set up Gnome by default. I've been going back and forth between Gnome and KDE, and I'm a KDE guy on this particular week. I was prepared to be annoyed when it booted into Gnome, but you know what I realized? I don't care. It's a desktop. It looks great. I don't give a damn what desktop environment that it's running, at least while I have my worker-bee hat on.
I'm just happy that I could open up OpenOffice and pick up my work where I left off on the Win2k side of the machine with Word, Excel, Acrobat and G3 fax image files, and everything just works. The rest is all details beyond my current interest.
-Waldo Jaquith
"Diffiiculties?"
Oh, man, it's affecting data transmission quality now.
-Waldo Jaquith
Heh -- that's funny, I remember the first time that I saw one of your posts. My friend Mike Sokolowski has a band called "Soko" (notable because several members of Dave Matthews Band performed on their first album), and the first time I saw one of your posts, it took me several minutes to figure out that you were not, in fact, Mike. That would have been in early 1999, I think.
:)
Small world.
-Waldo Jaquith
[Sorry, Waldo, you just did not sign up soon enough to qualify as an "old timer" to me... grin...]
:) I figure anything under 10,000 is relatively old-timerish; again, a figure that carefully includes myself and few people that joined after me. :)
/.
*Laugh*
It's funny how we all set our own threshhold for such things, ensuring that wherever we set our cutoff, it includes us.
I must say that a distinct change over the years has been a loss of community. I no longer see the same names as often as I once did. I now irrationally rely on low UIDs to determine the relative merits of comment, as opposed to saying "hey, isn't that [Nate Fox | singularity | Zow | Noke]?" There's just too many names and too many comments. This is less of a complaint and more of a lament, I suppose, but I do miss that aspect of
-Waldo Jaquith
In early November of 1998, I spent the better part of an hour attempting to make an account on Slashdot. I just couldn't make it work. No matter what username that I put in, and I tried some weird shit, it would complain that "a user already exists with that user name or email address." I knew it couldn't be the e-mail address, what with my highly-personalized address, so I e-mailed Rob asking what was what.
/. and when I would have made an account. Sometimes I think I've sleptwalked through entire years of my life.
Well, Rob wrote me back in something like 60 seconds, suggesting that perhaps I already had an account. "Balderdash," I thought, I would certainly know if I'd made an account on a site or not. I'd never even heard of Slashdot until a week previously. But I went to the site, entered my e-mail address in the lost-password form and, lo and behold, I'd made an account at some point. God only knows when.
So my question is this: who has a user ID close to mine, and when did you make your account? I'd love to check my datebook for around that time and see if I can conjure up when I would have first read
-Waldo Jaquith
So you must never wear a seat belt either because you've never been in a fatal car accident.
Nobody that's been in a fatal car accident wears a seatbelt, either.
-Waldo Jaquith
So, what happens if for some reason the feds (or some other unscrupulous organization) siezes your hard drive and digs up everything you've deleted for the past 6 1/2 years?
Then be sure to let me know about it, because that's one bad-ass unerase utility right there.
-Waldo Jaquith
Keeping an individual specific private database is Privacy invasion.
No it's not. Could somebody call you and demand that they be removed from your rolodex?
Privacy invasion...that's just silly.
Political database... what the hell is this? 1984?
No, more like 1930; databases have always been essential to getting elected. It's just that they used card catalogs back then. Nobody has ever been elected to Congress without an ass-kicking database. If you don't know that, you ought not be making political accusations.
-Waldo Jaquith
If you don't have the link, then you are trolling.
No. I could be wrong. Or I could be right. (It looks like "wrong," according to Snopes.) But merely lacking a link doesn't make me a troll, simply less-than-informative.
-Waldo Jaquith
My girlfriend and I went to Virginia Beach on the weekend of July 13th to see Dave Matthews Band, the very weekend that the cameras were scheduled to be turned on. If I had known about the cameras prior to making hotel reservations and acquiring tickets, I probably would have skipped the trip. But having made a financial committment to going, I wasn't about to back out. But I did let them know that I wasn't happy.
First, I called their tourism bureau (1-800-VA BEACH) in an attempt to determine where the cameras would be, such that I could avoid that area. The woman had no idea, and asked why I wanted to know. I explained -- without getting into lots of details about privacy -- that I was not comfortable having the cameras watching me, despite the fact that I was not, to my knowledge, wanted by any police department. And, as a matter of fact, I was on the verge of cancelling my trip, I told her. The woman was troubled, and directed me to call the police department.
That went about as well as you could imagine. I talked to a cop there that figured that anybody that didn't want to be on their cameras was obviously a law-breaker. But, hey, he told me the streets that the cameras were on, and I told him that I would certainly not be patronizing businesses along that stretch.
Did I make a difference? I have no idea. If one person calls, they'll think he's crazy. And if two, two people call...they'll think they're queer. But, friends, can you imagine three -- three people -- walking in, sitting down, and humming a bar of Alice's Restaurant? Friends, we'd have a movement -- the Virginia Beach Massacree. [1]
-Waldo Jaquith
[1] "Alice's Restaurant," Arlo Guthrie
I'm still really pissed off about those palistineans dancing in the streets with joy while downtown Manhattan was busy getting covered in 2 inches of soot.
No time to track down a link now (sorry), but it turned out that the journalist was giving out treats to the crowd in exchange for getting them to "celebrate."
-Waldo Jaquith
That would help... :)
-Waldo Jaquith
Weasel your way onto the front page of Slashdot? :)
-Waldo Jaquith
I've thought about this lots. :) I imagine I'd spend six months out of each year backpacking (AT again, PCT, ADT, CDT, JMT, LT...there are so many!) and the remaining six months divided into six one-month projects. One month to start a new voter-registration project in Charlottesville, one month to volunteer full-time on the city's free bicycle program, one month to work on a free software project... And then I could clear my head from April - October backpacking. Repeat as necessary. :)
-Waldo Jaquith
Would this also work with email virus? I think it would since the virus would also have a defined patern to it and the program would pick it up after the first one.
I actually proposed this on Advogato many moons ago, in February of 2001.
-Waldo Jaquith
Okay, some quick calculations, based on the estimated volume and mass, gives me a net payload of way less than 100 tons.
Somehow, I don't buy it.
You apparently don't understand -- it's nuclear. It's electrokinetic!
-Waldo Jaquith
I was the only person to RSVP after Charlottesville, VA had 7 people sign up. The location choices were ridiculous -- I'd love to find out where those came from. I submitted an alternate one, but it never showed up as a choice.
It looks as if over-committment is a common theme around here.
-Waldo Jaquith
I hope that nobody blames 2600 Magazine for their decision not to appeal. It's plain that now is not the time for such appeals, particularly given how strongly that they've been rebuffed thus far. Perhaps most importantly, Emmanuel lacks the funds (I assume) to take a case to the Supreme Court. Such things involve a tremendous amount of money.
Given the recent 2600-related news (recall that Ford dropped the suit against them over FuckGeneralMotors.com last week), I should point out that 2600 Magazine relies on merchandise sales and magazine subscriptions to stay afloat. For those that haven't heard of 2600 Magazine, I recommend that you check it out. I've subscribed since the early '90s, though it's been published continuously (every quarter) for over a decade now. Whether you want to support 2600's legal work or you'd simply like to keep current on hacker news and culture, I recommend that you subscribe.
-Waldo Jaquith
Does this set any sort of precedent (legal or practical) in favor of *sucks.* domain names? Is the owner of ClearChannelSucks.org on better footing now than he was a week ago? (I hope so. :)
-Waldo Jaquith