... out of his correspondence with a Nigerian Spam Scammer. He called it Nigerian Spam Scam Scam and you can find out more here http://www.spamscamscam.com/.
Basically Dean responded as a fake character, saved all the emails, and turned it into a two-person play, very much in the style of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. It's very funny. The best thing is that since the play was partly written by the scammer(s), Dean is saving half the proceeds in a trust account until the scammer comes forward.
What has to happen is for some poor "Ms. Dery, who is 87 years old and lives in the house she was born in" to become a national symbol of the evils of this vote. Then we can have a sweeping movement to protect the old people. With luck we can get an amendment passed and get it written into the constitution to make this type of seizure impossible.
However this does somewhat bring us back right where we started.
I think Apple is going to stake their claim based on their software, not anything to do with hardware. The whole point of this transition is that nobody really cares what brand of CPU you use.
Take a look at Apple's home page. No mention of the transition to Intel. Because the average user -- i.e. the vast majority of Apple's installed base -- just doesn't care.
It's very easy for a group of technically-minded Slashdotters to thrash out the comparative differences between processor families, and thus to forget how (relatively) unimportant these details are in the larger scheme of things.
My problem is that when I made the text larger, it didn't properly reflow, so some of it was cut off (both at the top and bottom of the window, surprisingly). If they could fix that I'd like it.
My evil ex-stepmother once spilled a mimosa (Orange Juice and Champagne) on the keyboard of my old SE/30. (This was approximately 30 seconds after I asked her to please not put her drink down on the desk next to my keyboard.) Not only did it ruin the keyboard, but it wasted a perfectly good mimosa.
Just for completeness sake, the number of words in the English language does not remain the same. New words are added on a real-time basis, both to the English language in use among English-speaking people, and to the various dictionaries which chronicle that use.
And the reason the application has not kept up is because, when the app was first written, the assumptions made were not documented and reviewed on an ongoing basis. Suppose there had been a spec that showed that the system can handle 32k changes in a day but no more. Every month or year you examine your change volume to see how close you are to crashing your system. When it starts getting close, you fix it.
This type of approach would have prevented this problem completely. But I was a programmer for seven years and nothing I saw during that time makes me believe that anything like what I've suggested could ever happen in the real world.
I laughed more at HHGTTG than I have at any movie in several years. I think the fact that I saw it under ideal conditions helped.
These conditions are:
1) I read all the books religiously many years ago, and not since. I certainly didn't read them recently in anticipation of the movie (a bad idea for any book-to-movie adaptation).
2) I simply watched the movie for my own entertainment, and not to justify my predetermined hatred of [popular movies/disney/big business/the world in general].
I think the movie did a great job of capturing the spirit of Douglas Adams's writing. Anybody who thinks that this movie was "Disneyfied" must not have seen a Disney movie in the last 20 years.
About ten years ago, when I was running a network of Macs at a small (20 person) marcom agency in San Diego (in my spare time -- I was the Copy Director) I saw an article that compared the Mac OS (pre X, obviously) against Windows. The comparison limited itself to media work: prepress, page layout, graphic arts, etc., and measured how long it took large numbers of programmers to do equal work on both platforms.
The Mac was more efficient -- the same work was done in about 20% less time, as I recall.
I'm sure the data are no longer valid, but it's the only statistics I've ever seen on the subject. It's also the best definition of productivity I know of -- what platform lets you do your work in the least amount of time.
For me it's OS X. I have used PCs at work since mid 1983 and Macs at home since January 1985. The biggest difference between the platforms was the consistency between applications, not anything in the OS itself (although expose is quite cool).
But now the biggest difference is the differentiating apps: itunes, iphoto, Garageband (which I am prepared to call the greatest program ever -- even better than the old Mondrian DA from the Finder 1.0 days). All the rest of the apps are either the same or so generic (i.e. mail apps) that for most users there is no difference.
For years smart people have said that the way you choose your OS is by the apps you want to use, since you spend the vast majority of your time there. And the Windows market share is proof that this sensible advice was by and large unheeded. But in the past few years it does seem as though Apple's apps are beginning to have some effect in promoting the platform as a whole.
It's nice to see people at least asking the right questions.
The vast majority of movies recoup their production costs and then some. This has been true for years. Industry-standard accounting bullshit hides the profits so profit participants get screwed.
The biggest factor that (virtually) guarantees the success of most films is, ironically, the VCR (and more recently, DVD). Even unsuccessful movies make money hand over fist in VHS/DVD release.
I bought my ReplayTV in December 1999. I paid $200 more than a comparable TiVo device, for which I received a "lifetime" subscription to the service (vs. $9.95 / month from TiVo).
So far I'm ahead about $400. And every month, another ten dollars more. Even having spent $699 for my original box, and another hundred or so to upgrade the hard disk last year, this has still been a fantastic investment.
That said, even if TiVo doesn't die here, they would soon enough anyway when Apple releases the iTV.
Heaven forfend! I 'm not telling you I use a cassette adapter.
I'm telling you my wife would use a cassette adapter.
I've heard that at Best Buy there's a $100 car stereo with line in, but I can't verify this. Neither of my cars has line-in. It was a stretch for me to buy the iPod, and I got it for $70(!).
Are you going to suggest an FM transmitter? Or something I haven't considered?
Another person the iPod shuffle is for is my wife. I already have an iPod 20GB for myself, which we use when we're together. But for the times she's by herself (her commute, mostly), she could really use this. Instead of hauling CDs in and out of the car she can just plug this into my Powerbook once a week and fill it up. 240 songs will easily last a week of driving.
This will be the ultimate 2nd iPod for couples with one iPod.
(Don't overlook the new Autofill feature -- it's crucial to this device/usage.)
Slashdot Mirror
Everybody knows it's Springfield, Oh hiya Maude!
Basically Dean responded as a fake character, saved all the emails, and turned it into a two-person play, very much in the style of A.R. Gurney's Love Letters. It's very funny. The best thing is that since the play was partly written by the scammer(s), Dean is saving half the proceeds in a trust account until the scammer comes forward.
However this does somewhat bring us back right where we started.
Whaddaya know... it disintegrated.
Take a look at Apple's home page. No mention of the transition to Intel. Because the average user -- i.e. the vast majority of Apple's installed base -- just doesn't care.
It's very easy for a group of technically-minded Slashdotters to thrash out the comparative differences between processor families, and thus to forget how (relatively) unimportant these details are in the larger scheme of things.
My problem is that when I made the text larger, it didn't properly reflow, so some of it was cut off (both at the top and bottom of the window, surprisingly). If they could fix that I'd like it.
My evil ex-stepmother once spilled a mimosa (Orange Juice and Champagne) on the keyboard of my old SE/30. (This was approximately 30 seconds after I asked her to please not put her drink down on the desk next to my keyboard.) Not only did it ruin the keyboard, but it wasted a perfectly good mimosa.
Just for completeness sake, the number of words in the English language does not remain the same. New words are added on a real-time basis, both to the English language in use among English-speaking people, and to the various dictionaries which chronicle that use.
They're not blocked, but the Cocaine synthesis instructions are slashdotted.
This type of approach would have prevented this problem completely. But I was a programmer for seven years and nothing I saw during that time makes me believe that anything like what I've suggested could ever happen in the real world.
These conditions are:
1) I read all the books religiously many years ago, and not since. I certainly didn't read them recently in anticipation of the movie (a bad idea for any book-to-movie adaptation).
2) I simply watched the movie for my own entertainment, and not to justify my predetermined hatred of [popular movies/disney/big business/the world in general].
I think the movie did a great job of capturing the spirit of Douglas Adams's writing. Anybody who thinks that this movie was "Disneyfied" must not have seen a Disney movie in the last 20 years.
The Mac was more efficient -- the same work was done in about 20% less time, as I recall.
I'm sure the data are no longer valid, but it's the only statistics I've ever seen on the subject. It's also the best definition of productivity I know of -- what platform lets you do your work in the least amount of time.
For me it's OS X. I have used PCs at work since mid 1983 and Macs at home since January 1985. The biggest difference between the platforms was the consistency between applications, not anything in the OS itself (although expose is quite cool).
But now the biggest difference is the differentiating apps: itunes, iphoto, Garageband (which I am prepared to call the greatest program ever -- even better than the old Mondrian DA from the Finder 1.0 days). All the rest of the apps are either the same or so generic (i.e. mail apps) that for most users there is no difference.
For years smart people have said that the way you choose your OS is by the apps you want to use, since you spend the vast majority of your time there. And the Windows market share is proof that this sensible advice was by and large unheeded. But in the past few years it does seem as though Apple's apps are beginning to have some effect in promoting the platform as a whole.
It's nice to see people at least asking the right questions.
I think the most productive OS must be the one that the guy used to create timecube.com.
The biggest factor that (virtually) guarantees the success of most films is, ironically, the VCR (and more recently, DVD). Even unsuccessful movies make money hand over fist in VHS/DVD release.
So far I'm ahead about $400. And every month, another ten dollars more. Even having spent $699 for my original box, and another hundred or so to upgrade the hard disk last year, this has still been a fantastic investment.
That said, even if TiVo doesn't die here, they would soon enough anyway when Apple releases the iTV.
Heaven forfend! I 'm not telling you I use a cassette adapter. I'm telling you my wife would use a cassette adapter. I've heard that at Best Buy there's a $100 car stereo with line in, but I can't verify this. Neither of my cars has line-in. It was a stretch for me to buy the iPod, and I got it for $70(!). Are you going to suggest an FM transmitter? Or something I haven't considered?
This will be the ultimate 2nd iPod for couples with one iPod.
(Don't overlook the new Autofill feature -- it's crucial to this device/usage.)