> recoding the database for Filemaker 7 would be much easier > than going to another system/platform/application.
Agreed. FileMaker 7 converted my FileMaker 5.5 databases over without a hitch. It would be a lot easier to convert the databases over and take some time to fix whatever minor quirks popped up (if any).
Note that FileMaker has had relational database capabilities for some time. The big thing they added in Version 7 is the fact you can have multiple tables in a single file now. You still have the option to use an external file for a relationship if you choose (that allows you to keep your existing pre-Version 7.0 single-table files).
It's more than marketing. If it were just marketing, we wouldn't have grocery stores any longer; we'd all be using that home delivery service that Whoopi Goldberg was plugging to pay $10 for a six pack of coke.
Marketing can make people aware of a new type of product or make people aware of a problem they didn't know they had before (this was really successful back in the early 1900s when razor companies convinced American women they had to shave their legs and armpits), but it's not the only problem.
It seems to me that what is successful (for the products they showed) is related to a simple, distinctive product that offers something tangible. The iPod can play music and store a lot more than Walkmans. You actually pay for it, so you know what you get. When you buy a song on ITMS, you buy it; not you have the right to listen to it until you stop paying your bill. This is why Apple's ITMS was more successful than the other record companies' earlier attempts.
They talked about satellite radio not being as popular. I think the problem is you have to buy the product (the head unit), plus get a subscription. Barriers of entry are high, and then its one more bill that you pay every month. With DVRs (which are cool, but didn't get adopted as fast as DVDs), many consumers aren't quite sure what they're getting because the category and pricing schemes aren't able to overcome the idea of just going to the store and buying a DVD. Aha! Tangible.
Because of subscriptions and other ways of extracting reoccurring sources of revenue from the consumer, it's the business model that drives product adoption just as much as marketing.
At first, I was a little underwhelmed with the design. Hey, it just looks like their monitor; big deal. But after looking at it for a while, I like it.
Conceptually, this is even more impressive than Apple's previous G4 Cube design. In that case, you had a Kleenex-sized box that housed the computer. Now it's all housed in the screen, along with the slot loading drive. Leads me to think they'll have a G5 PowerBook sometime soon.
I also like the way Apple is explicitly marketing it as an upsell to their wildly successful iPod.
> My limited experience is with Filemaker 4 and 5 on the PC, but > there is a file for each table.
The recently released FileMaker 7 adds the ability to have multiple tables in a single file. It also lets you define relationships using a little diagram, much like how Access has done for years. However, unlike Access, FileMaker doesn't suck, and there are plans to add sucking to the product in the near future.
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> Ughh so this is the reason I can't get a phone thats _just_ a > damn phone?
High tech companies love this, by the way. Now, you never know if employees, visitors, customers, or anyone coming to your campus has a camera built in to their phone and can snap pictures of anything they want.
My company requires you to have a special camera badge to bring in a camera. With the new camera-phones, the whole thing becomes a security nightmare.
For the record: give me good voice quality, small, bluetooth, and long battery life. I don't need a built in camera, MP3 player, or a back scratcher built in to my phone.
> If you were trying to make a judgement based solely on what > was presented in the CNN article
Hopefully, we'll never get to the point where a newspaper article is enough to convict someone of a crime.
My point was that you originally questioned if there was any reason to believe the driver was watching a DVD, and it sounds like the passenger admitted to watching a DVD on the dashboard player. This contrasts with the driver claiming he was listening to music.
> How do you know that he was watching a DVD? Did you read > the article? Do you know what their proof was?
Before you chastise the parent poster further, it sounds like the he may have been watching a DVD. The passenger admitted to his wife as much:
> Within hours, Douglas called his ex-wife and told her he was > not sure how the collision occurred because he was "spacing > out on a movie they were watching," according to prosecutors.
Even if a DVD were playing on the dash, and the driver wasn't intentionally watching it, it's very likely the driver's eyes were drawn to the video. Our eyes are very sensitive to movement (particularly with our peripheral vision), and flickering video images draw our eyes' attention almost constantly. And if he took his eyes off the road for a few seconds, he could have gotten in an accident.
> At no point have we seen any motivation for why the Sith are > the way they are
My understanding is that Star Wars canon says that the Jedi wiped out the Sith 1000 years before TPM. There may have been something later than that, but Darth Maul did say in TPM, "At last we'll reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we'll have our revenge." Too bad for Darth Maul the actual revenge didn't happen until Episode III when Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader kills almost all the Jedi (presumably). Thus the "Revenge of the Sith" title. Good job to Lucas on the title, BTW.
> It took over 10 years worth of people saying that 3.5" floppy > drives would soon be obsolete before they even began to go > out of favour
This is particularly important since floppy disks got a new lease on life when Sony introduced their Mavica digital camera about five years ago. Back then, you could insert a floppy disk into the Mavica and save the pictures to that. Prior to that, you had to use a serial cable to connect the camera. At the time, I thought it was silly (who uses floppy disks any longer?), but a lot of people at work got really excited (they had to take pictures of customers' sites for engineering purposes).
Someone on Slashdot said this a while ago, but some people don't really understand computers until there's a physical medium. So they may not understand saving files to the network, but they understand saving files to a flash memory drive. I imagine the floppy disk provided the physical medium that helped these people understand the floppy disk.
I think floppy disks were eventually killed not by having high bandwidth networks or even email, but by the removable flash drives.
I wouldn't be too hard on Gates. His job as Chief Architect is to make bold predictions for the future so Microsoft looks like they're visionaries. And since it's hard to be a visionary (particularly when the industry won't let you ever forget Microsoft Bob), he has to make shocking predictions just to keep people interested.
Imagine if you had to make bold visionary statements all the time. After declaring the Internet-enabled tomato the technology of 2020 and Esperanto-speaking robots will end world hunger in 2035, you'd eventually settle on, "Oh, I dunno. DVDs will be dead in 10 years."
> Didn't Apple along with a bunch of other software > corporations stop putting credits in their software a few years > ago, to help prevent large competitors in or around Redmond > from paying whatever it took to make ridiculously generous > offers for those employees to work for them?
I've heard this, too, but I think this might be related to two other facts. First, it's impossible for everyone who is involved in delivering software to have their names included these days. Second, Jobs has mandated that there would be no more developer-endorsed "personalization" to Macintosh applications in order to improve software quality. Most specfically, this seems to be the prohibition of easter eggs (where most developers put their names). In fact, I haven't seen an old-style easter egg in Mac OS X at all.
Since then, the quality of the Mac OS has increased significantly from the bad old days of Mac OS 7.5.5, where the little flag easter egg was the only good thing it had going for it.
> Well, it sounds like you were fooled. So what does that say?
That's a fair assessment, although I'm not sure "fooled" is applicable. I don't think it matters, since the woman really did change her mind about the war after her son died. When the footage was filmed is a irrelevant.
However, I admit that I thought it was likely that Moore interviewed her before and after. However, when I rewatch that scene, if the woman sounds like she's talking about her son being alive, and it turns out it was filmed after he was already dead, then yes, that's deceptive.
Thanks for posting the link. Assuming the article is accurate, the statement "Lipscomb became involved in the project after receiving a call from Moore's company. Staffers had read a magazine article that mentioned her son's death" is more compelling that the statistics you used earlier.
I'm not sure if it changes the substance of what the woman was saying though. She was for the war before her son died. And now she's against the war now that her son is dead.
As an ancillary point, I don't recall her saying that her son was alive (or speaking of him in the present tense) during the first interview segment, so I'm not sure I'd chalk it up to deception.
> What would have happened differently had the man jumped > up out of his seat screamed out "HOLY SHIT KIDS, WE'RE > GOING TO FUCKING DIE!" and then run out of the room?
I love how some people would like to believe that Bush had only two options: sit there are read "My Pet Goat" or get up screaming his head off that everyone was going to die.
The fact is before the event started, Bush was told that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush, not 6 weeks earlier had been given a briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States". Bin Laden had also tried to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Bush also knew by this time that Bin Laden was behind the U.S.S. Cole attack. I would hope that the man who is in charge of protecting our country would have thought, "I'm going to delay this photo op, since this might be serious." But, hey, maybe that's too much to ask.
So Bush sits down. Kids start reading. Bush is told a second plane crashes. At this point, a leader would tell the kids, "Keep up the good work reading. Thank you for inviting me today, but I'm being called away -- 'president stuff'," and he would have walked out.
There is absolutely every reason to believe that Bush was needed at the beginning of this. Bush is the only person who could give the order to scramble military jets to shoot down civilian aircraft if necessary. It was later determined that Cheney gave this order and no proof could be made that Cheney checked with Bush first, although he claimed the order came from Bush.
What does Bush do instead? He sits there. Eyes looking around. Then he picks up the "My Pet Goat" book. He reads the damn thing. He sits there for close to 10 minutes. I read his reaction as Bush waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
> the moment Republicans are closer to the center than > Democrats.
There's no reason to think that.
With the Republicans completely controlling the government (President, Congress, Supreme Court), I think we finally have a pretty good understanding of what a Republican's wet dream looks like. PATRIOT Act. Bush Doctrine. Pre-emptive War. Elimination of checks and balances. Media consolidation. Out of control budget deficits. War profiteering. Destroying the environment. Dissent is the same as treason. Few of the items fit into the classic American ideal, without a heavy lacquer to make it palatable to Americans as a whole.
Look at the way Bush campaigned in 2000. He basically campaigned as a Democrat (promotion of unity and humility in foreign affairs, of providing social services to the people who need it most). The problem is, when he got into office, he governed like a right-wing nut case. A pro-war, pliant mainstream press has done a great job at helping Bush maintain this image.
The truth is, the Democratic Party is as boringly middle of the road mainstream as one can get. I looked at the recently published Texas Democratic Party state platform. It's a dry, admittedly-dull reiteration of classic American values. Equal rights for all. Healthcare for all. Better public schools. Limits on taxes. Promotion of social security. These are things that a majority of Americans approve.
Then you look at the Texas Republican Party platform they recently passed. Holy crap! America is a Christian nation and the 10 commandments should be posted on government grounds. Biblical creationism should be taught in public schools. The EPA should be abolished. People's voter registration should expire every four years. All bilingual education programs should be terminated. No-fault divorce laws should be rescinded. Environmental concerns should never be considered when determining speed limits.
I'm not going to argue here here that what the Republican Party is for is wrong. That would take too long. But one should take a look at both party platforms and determine which party is in the mainstream of American values.
> By the way: Richard Clarke may have authorized the flight, but > do you honestly believe there wasn't pressure from Bush?
I seem to recall reports of Bush losing his temper and yelling about Clark allegedly allowing members Bin Laden's family to leave without getting their statements on record.
"Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and Clarke let members of bin Laden's family leave without getting an official statement? Dammit! Who's president here? Is Richard Clark president? I don't care if they had nothing to do with this. We have to question them to get some information his whereabouts. Look, 3,000 people were killed, and we're going to hunt down the people responsible," he's reported to have said. "Richard Clarke is fired. We've got innocent Americans stripping down naked at our airports. I don't care if a few rich Saudis are 'inconvenienced' by questioning."
Later he sent 140,000 American troops into Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden "dead or alive". He also sent 12,000-15,000 troops to Iraq to assist the U.N. weapons inspectors in making sure Iraq had no illegal weapons. When none were found, troops were withdrawn, but sanctions were continued.
> My bet is that they started the interviews after her son had > already been killed. They kept the interviews short enough for > her to keep her composure.
But what are the chances that someone who he interviewed asked to be interviewed again after something significant happened in their life?
Your scenario implies some significant deception on the woman's part. I think you might have had a point if Moore had been filming the woman when she received the phone call from the Army or when she received her son's last letter. That would be quite a coincidence. And it would also imply that the woman was a really good actor. I think that your accusation is pretty unfair to the woman and to Moore.
However, the fact that he interviewed a woman who son later died in the war isn't as much of a coincidence. It's quite possible that he interviewed her. Then she heard her son died -- maybe she contacted him again to say that she now had more to say. (It happened in Roger & Me when the Amway woman contacted Moore about her change in color analysis).
This makes more sense because Moore said that he filmed her going to the White House, because she had contacted him to say she was going to be in D.C. With my alternate hypothesis, there's no need for a complicated conspiracy theory. This would mean that Moore didn't start out saying, "I'm going to feature a woman who changes her mind about the war", but instead, he started gathering information for a movie, and the fact that the woman changed her opinion about the war became something significant he could put in his movie.
I'm harping on this because you are saying this is a huge coincidence; so big that Moore probably faked the interview, and thus what else did he fake? In short, you're using your shaky conjecture to call into question Moore's motives. However, if this isn't much of a coincidence (and I think Occam's razor is on my side on this), then there's no reason to ask what else he faked.
> I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what > Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans
Suggesting that Michael Moore is to the left as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or any of those other right-wing demagogues is simplistic. That's like saying that, well there are equal numbers of books on astrology and astronomy in my public libary, so I guess they're both right.
I would say that Michael Moore is kind of more like a political version of James Randi* with Rush Limbaugh & co being the political version of Uri Geller.
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk simply make up facts or take things out of context and then use them to bolster their beliefs. They're propagandists in the normal sense of the word.
Michael Moore, like Al Franken, is seeking to debunk the pseudo-journalism (analogous to pseudoscience or pseudohistory) of the above right-wing ideologues. One difference is Moore will skewer anyone: Democrats or Republicans. The above ideologues are overwhelmingly Republican boosters. A second difference is that Moore and Franken use facts to bolster their opinions. You can argue with their opinions, but you can't argue with the facts. That doesn't make them journalists any more than James Randi is a scientist. All the complaints about Bowling for Columbine that I've read have been about critics drawing incorrect inferences from footage in his movies.
For example, Charlton Heston is head of the NRA and he promotes this "big man with a gun" image [Fact #1]. He shows up in Littleton soon after the massacre to do an NRA rally [Fact #2]. Maybe he showed up because the location had been set up in advance [Opinion #1]. Maybe he showed up because the NRA figured that the massacre would make people more willing to accept gun control [Opinion #2]. Maybe it's the latter, but the NRA chose to use the former excuse as a cover [Opinion #3]. Contrast this with musician Marilyn Mason canceling his shows out of respect for the tragedy [Fact #3]. So Moore, since he's a film maker, wants to illustrate these facts and then illustrate his above opinions. So Moore uses footage to introduce Heston's tough guy image (for Fact #1). Some complain Moore is saying that Heston said his usual battle cry "from my cold dead hands!" at the Columbine speech. However, it doesn't matter whether he said at the speech or not since Fact #1 doesn't depend on that. Moore never explicately says that Heston said it at the Denver speech. If he wanted to lie to make you think Heston did, then he could have cropped the video image to make it less obvious. But the point is, Moore's opinion doesn't not require Heston to use his trademark line at the Columbine speech.
Then Moore shows footage of Heston's speech in Denver (for Fact #2). The parts of the speech Moore chose to use ("The Mayor said not to come. We're already here.") helps him illustrate Opinion #2, but leaves open Option #3.
That's why people say that Moore's movie isn't like a newspaper article; it's more like an op-ed piece. Not that I think this will change some people's minds. Some people treat their politicians and leaders like deities who can do no wrong. And when someone like Moore or Franken point out that the person did in fact do wrong, they can either change their opinion to accommodate the new facts or rail at the messenger. Wise people do the former; others nitpick to help them do the latter.
* I'm not suggesting that James Randi holds the same political beliefs as Moore or Franken. I've read lots of Randi's books, but I don't know his political opinions.
> How does he happen to have so much good interview footage > with a woman from his hometown whose son happened to die > in Iraq... before he died. > Did Moore interview a ton of people and just got ahem.. lucky, > or were the earlier interviews staged after the fact?
Did you see the movie? (Not an accusation; I'm sorry if you posted earlier that you did see it).
If you had, it would be hard to suggest that interview with the woman before her son was killed was staged. The woman's grief was very much real. I thought of the scene in Saving Private Ryan when Pvt Ryan's mother is told of her other sons' deaths.
I'm sure no one would be surprised to learn that Moore had lots of interviews -- the oddest is he apparently interviewed Nicolas Berg a year before he was killed in Iraq. With more than 800 soldier deaths in Iraq, we must unfortunately conclude that it's not too coincidental that Moore could have interviewed the same woman before and after her son was killed.
> Seriously, although I saw this movie and liked it, this is not the > place to discuss it. This site is supposed to be about > technology I thought. The only really interesting technical > tidbit of this film was that it was, IIRC, entirely created on a > mac using Final Cut pro....
On one hand, I agree with you (although my.sig might suggest otherwise). Some people take their politics very personally (making it more analogous to the support for a sports team), so the discussion can break down pretty quickly.
However, politics certainly fits under the "stuff that matters" category. And in general, we've seen a melding of technology and politics to the point that they're quickly becoming one. Even aside from the DMCA and the RIAA trying to ruin our ability to listen to music, think about these other random connections:
1. Microsoft hired Bush advisor Ralph Reed to lobby for them against the DOJ-Microsoft law suit. Think about how the DOJ basically dropped the entire case after the U.S. had won a judgment against Microsoft. Is this due to Microsoft's significant support for George W. Bush's campaign in 2000? Is it due to the $4.6M Microsoft it gave in political contributions in the 2000 election?
2. Al Gore is on the board of directors for Apple? Is this just a case of the also-ran political candidate joining forces with the also-ran computer company? Steve Jobs is reportedly serving as an advisor to the Kerry campaign. Al Gore is also a technology advisor for Google.
3. In Moore's movie, he says that Microsoft was one of the sponsoring companies for the "How to Make Money Offa Iraq" conference featured in the film.
4. What does it mean when Bush campaign contributor and HP CEO Carly Fiorina says, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." Furthermore, what does it mean when it's reported (not in the U.S. press, but in the Sydney Morning Herald) that among the companies that provided Iraq in the 1990s with banned dual-purpose items is HP?
5. What does it mean when Bush advisor and chairman of the Defense Policy Board (since resigned because conflict of interest) Richard Perle was hired by technology service provider Global Crossing to help it be acquired by a Chinese company? How about DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe own questionable dealiings with Global Crossing?
I guess that's the ugly truth about the world today. When we were young, along with believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, we believed that technology was about building cool products and politicians were statesmen who worked for America's best interest. Part of growing up is realizing that, among other things, the world is a lot more complicated than that, and believing you can compartmentalize broad subjects like technology and politics is harder than we'd like.
Of course, you can always choose to not read the article.
> went to buy their CD, until I noticed the big text on the CD > saying it was copy-protected
I saw the same thing when I bought the CD (it was $9.99 at Best Buy, rather than ~$15 on the iTunes Music Store). I almost didn't buy it, but I figured I'd try to rip it, and if it didn't work, I'd just return it.
However, I had no problems ripping the CD into iTunes, and copying it to several iPods. It's a pretty good CD, too.
> shoot, we used iChatAV rather successfully from Auckland, > New Zealand to Salt Lake City for remote collaboration in a lab > environment rather successfully with hardly any delay > whatsoever
Yeah. I do this all the time.
Ingredients: 1. PowerBook G4 2. Mac OS X 10.3 3. iChat AV 4. AirPort (802.11b version) 5. Comfy bed, little computer lap tray, Collie sitting on your feet (all optional)
Results: no problem at all. No delay noticeable. Voice quality was fine. Voice quality was so good, the whole thing was kind of anti-climatic.
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> recoding the database for Filemaker 7 would be much easier
> than going to another system/platform/application.
Agreed. FileMaker 7 converted my FileMaker 5.5 databases over without a hitch. It would be a lot easier to convert the databases over and take some time to fix whatever minor quirks popped up (if any).
Note that FileMaker has had relational database capabilities for some time. The big thing they added in Version 7 is the fact you can have multiple tables in a single file now. You still have the option to use an external file for a relationship if you choose (that allows you to keep your existing pre-Version 7.0 single-table files).
> What adoption? When was the last time you used a Bluetooth-
> enabled device to do anything useful?
Well, I clicked on "Reply to This" using my Bluetooth mouse connected to my PowerBook.
But it's arguable whether posting to Slashdot qualifies as "useful"
It's more than marketing. If it were just marketing, we wouldn't have grocery stores any longer; we'd all be using that home delivery service that Whoopi Goldberg was plugging to pay $10 for a six pack of coke.
Marketing can make people aware of a new type of product or make people aware of a problem they didn't know they had before (this was really successful back in the early 1900s when razor companies convinced American women they had to shave their legs and armpits), but it's not the only problem.
It seems to me that what is successful (for the products they showed) is related to a simple, distinctive product that offers something tangible. The iPod can play music and store a lot more than Walkmans. You actually pay for it, so you know what you get. When you buy a song on ITMS, you buy it; not you have the right to listen to it until you stop paying your bill. This is why Apple's ITMS was more successful than the other record companies' earlier attempts.
They talked about satellite radio not being as popular. I think the problem is you have to buy the product (the head unit), plus get a subscription. Barriers of entry are high, and then its one more bill that you pay every month. With DVRs (which are cool, but didn't get adopted as fast as DVDs), many consumers aren't quite sure what they're getting because the category and pricing schemes aren't able to overcome the idea of just going to the store and buying a DVD. Aha! Tangible.
Because of subscriptions and other ways of extracting reoccurring sources of revenue from the consumer, it's the business model that drives product adoption just as much as marketing.
At first, I was a little underwhelmed with the design. Hey, it just looks like their monitor; big deal. But after looking at it for a while, I like it.
Conceptually, this is even more impressive than Apple's previous G4 Cube design. In that case, you had a Kleenex-sized box that housed the computer. Now it's all housed in the screen, along with the slot loading drive. Leads me to think they'll have a G5 PowerBook sometime soon.
I also like the way Apple is explicitly marketing it as an upsell to their wildly successful iPod.
> My limited experience is with Filemaker 4 and 5 on the PC, but
> there is a file for each table.
The recently released FileMaker 7 adds the ability to have multiple tables in a single file. It also lets you define relationships using a little diagram, much like how Access has done for years. However, unlike Access, FileMaker doesn't suck, and there are plans to add sucking to the product in the near future.
In other news, for those of us using Mac OS X and Safari-- remember, whenever they give you obnoxiously long terms of service to read, use the "Summarize" service.
> Ughh so this is the reason I can't get a phone thats _just_ a
> damn phone?
High tech companies love this, by the way. Now, you never know if employees, visitors, customers, or anyone coming to your campus has a camera built in to their phone and can snap pictures of anything they want.
My company requires you to have a special camera badge to bring in a camera. With the new camera-phones, the whole thing becomes a security nightmare.
For the record: give me good voice quality, small, bluetooth, and long battery life. I don't need a built in camera, MP3 player, or a back scratcher built in to my phone.
> If you were trying to make a judgement based solely on what
> was presented in the CNN article
Hopefully, we'll never get to the point where a newspaper article is enough to convict someone of a crime.
My point was that you originally questioned if there was any reason to believe the driver was watching a DVD, and it sounds like the passenger admitted to watching a DVD on the dashboard player. This contrasts with the driver claiming he was listening to music.
> How do you know that he was watching a DVD? Did you read
> the article? Do you know what their proof was?
Before you chastise the parent poster further, it sounds like the he may have been watching a DVD. The passenger admitted to his wife as much:
> Within hours, Douglas called his ex-wife and told her he was
> not sure how the collision occurred because he was "spacing
> out on a movie they were watching," according to prosecutors.
Even if a DVD were playing on the dash, and the driver wasn't intentionally watching it, it's very likely the driver's eyes were drawn to the video. Our eyes are very sensitive to movement (particularly with our peripheral vision), and flickering video images draw our eyes' attention almost constantly. And if he took his eyes off the road for a few seconds, he could have gotten in an accident.
> At no point have we seen any motivation for why the Sith are
> the way they are
My understanding is that Star Wars canon says that the Jedi wiped out the Sith 1000 years before TPM. There may have been something later than that, but Darth Maul did say in TPM, "At last we'll reveal ourselves to the Jedi. At last we'll have our revenge." Too bad for Darth Maul the actual revenge didn't happen until Episode III when Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader kills almost all the Jedi (presumably). Thus the "Revenge of the Sith" title. Good job to Lucas on the title, BTW.
The parent post was brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
> I imagine the floppy disk provided the physical medium that
> helped these people understand the floppy disk.
Not only did the floppy disk help people understand the floppy disk; It helped people understand the digital camera.
The parent post was brought to you by the department of redundancy department.
> It took over 10 years worth of people saying that 3.5" floppy
> drives would soon be obsolete before they even began to go
> out of favour
This is particularly important since floppy disks got a new lease on life when Sony introduced their Mavica digital camera about five years ago. Back then, you could insert a floppy disk into the Mavica and save the pictures to that. Prior to that, you had to use a serial cable to connect the camera. At the time, I thought it was silly (who uses floppy disks any longer?), but a lot of people at work got really excited (they had to take pictures of customers' sites for engineering purposes).
Someone on Slashdot said this a while ago, but some people don't really understand computers until there's a physical medium. So they may not understand saving files to the network, but they understand saving files to a flash memory drive. I imagine the floppy disk provided the physical medium that helped these people understand the floppy disk.
I think floppy disks were eventually killed not by having high bandwidth networks or even email, but by the removable flash drives.
I wouldn't be too hard on Gates. His job as Chief Architect is to make bold predictions for the future so Microsoft looks like they're visionaries. And since it's hard to be a visionary (particularly when the industry won't let you ever forget Microsoft Bob), he has to make shocking predictions just to keep people interested.
Imagine if you had to make bold visionary statements all the time. After declaring the Internet-enabled tomato the technology of 2020 and Esperanto-speaking robots will end world hunger in 2035, you'd eventually settle on, "Oh, I dunno. DVDs will be dead in 10 years."
> Does /Applications/Mail.app/Contents/Resources/senders.
> tiff (remove the space) count as an easter egg?
I'd say it does. I guess they snuck one in after all. I'm not sure what work the Golden Retriever did on Mail though.
> Didn't Apple along with a bunch of other software
> corporations stop putting credits in their software a few years
> ago, to help prevent large competitors in or around Redmond
> from paying whatever it took to make ridiculously generous
> offers for those employees to work for them?
I've heard this, too, but I think this might be related to two other facts. First, it's impossible for everyone who is involved in delivering software to have their names included these days. Second, Jobs has mandated that there would be no more developer-endorsed "personalization" to Macintosh applications in order to improve software quality. Most specfically, this seems to be the prohibition of easter eggs (where most developers put their names). In fact, I haven't seen an old-style easter egg in Mac OS X at all.
Since then, the quality of the Mac OS has increased significantly from the bad old days of Mac OS 7.5.5, where the little flag easter egg was the only good thing it had going for it.
> Well, it sounds like you were fooled. So what does that say?
That's a fair assessment, although I'm not sure "fooled" is applicable. I don't think it matters, since the woman really did change her mind about the war after her son died. When the footage was filmed is a irrelevant.
However, I admit that I thought it was likely that Moore interviewed her before and after. However, when I rewatch that scene, if the woman sounds like she's talking about her son being alive, and it turns out it was filmed after he was already dead, then yes, that's deceptive.
Thanks for posting the link. Assuming the article is accurate, the statement "Lipscomb became involved in the project after receiving a call from Moore's company. Staffers had read a magazine article that mentioned her son's death" is more compelling that the statistics you used earlier.
I'm not sure if it changes the substance of what the woman was saying though. She was for the war before her son died. And now she's against the war now that her son is dead.
As an ancillary point, I don't recall her saying that her son was alive (or speaking of him in the present tense) during the first interview segment, so I'm not sure I'd chalk it up to deception.
> What would have happened differently had the man jumped
> up out of his seat screamed out "HOLY SHIT KIDS, WE'RE
> GOING TO FUCKING DIE!" and then run out of the room?
I love how some people would like to believe that Bush had only two options: sit there are read "My Pet Goat" or get up screaming his head off that everyone was going to die.
The fact is before the event started, Bush was told that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. Bush, not 6 weeks earlier had been given a briefing called "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the United States". Bin Laden had also tried to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. Bush also knew by this time that Bin Laden was behind the U.S.S. Cole attack. I would hope that the man who is in charge of protecting our country would have thought, "I'm going to delay this photo op, since this might be serious." But, hey, maybe that's too much to ask.
So Bush sits down. Kids start reading. Bush is told a second plane crashes. At this point, a leader would tell the kids, "Keep up the good work reading. Thank you for inviting me today, but I'm being called away -- 'president stuff'," and he would have walked out.
There is absolutely every reason to believe that Bush was needed at the beginning of this. Bush is the only person who could give the order to scramble military jets to shoot down civilian aircraft if necessary. It was later determined that Cheney gave this order and no proof could be made that Cheney checked with Bush first, although he claimed the order came from Bush.
What does Bush do instead? He sits there. Eyes looking around. Then he picks up the "My Pet Goat" book. He reads the damn thing. He sits there for close to 10 minutes. I read his reaction as Bush waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
I hope the book was worth it.
> the moment Republicans are closer to the center than
> Democrats.
There's no reason to think that.
With the Republicans completely controlling the government (President, Congress, Supreme Court), I think we finally have a pretty good understanding of what a Republican's wet dream looks like. PATRIOT Act. Bush Doctrine. Pre-emptive War. Elimination of checks and balances. Media consolidation. Out of control budget deficits. War profiteering. Destroying the environment. Dissent is the same as treason. Few of the items fit into the classic American ideal, without a heavy lacquer to make it palatable to Americans as a whole.
Look at the way Bush campaigned in 2000. He basically campaigned as a Democrat (promotion of unity and humility in foreign affairs, of providing social services to the people who need it most). The problem is, when he got into office, he governed like a right-wing nut case. A pro-war, pliant mainstream press has done a great job at helping Bush maintain this image.
The truth is, the Democratic Party is as boringly middle of the road mainstream as one can get. I looked at the recently published Texas Democratic Party state platform. It's a dry, admittedly-dull reiteration of classic American values. Equal rights for all. Healthcare for all. Better public schools. Limits on taxes. Promotion of social security. These are things that a majority of Americans approve.
Then you look at the Texas Republican Party platform they recently passed. Holy crap! America is a Christian nation and the 10 commandments should be posted on government grounds. Biblical creationism should be taught in public schools. The EPA should be abolished. People's voter registration should expire every four years. All bilingual education programs should be terminated. No-fault divorce laws should be rescinded. Environmental concerns should never be considered when determining speed limits.
I'm not going to argue here here that what the Republican Party is for is wrong. That would take too long. But one should take a look at both party platforms and determine which party is in the mainstream of American values.
> By the way: Richard Clarke may have authorized the flight, but
> do you honestly believe there wasn't pressure from Bush?
I seem to recall reports of Bush losing his temper and yelling about Clark allegedly allowing members Bin Laden's family to leave without getting their statements on record.
"Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and Clarke let members of bin Laden's family leave without getting an official statement? Dammit! Who's president here? Is Richard Clark president? I don't care if they had nothing to do with this. We have to question them to get some information his whereabouts. Look, 3,000 people were killed, and we're going to hunt down the people responsible," he's reported to have said. "Richard Clarke is fired. We've got innocent Americans stripping down naked at our airports. I don't care if a few rich Saudis are 'inconvenienced' by questioning."
Later he sent 140,000 American troops into Afghanistan to find Osama bin Laden "dead or alive". He also sent 12,000-15,000 troops to Iraq to assist the U.N. weapons inspectors in making sure Iraq had no illegal weapons. When none were found, troops were withdrawn, but sanctions were continued.
Bush also never read the book "My Pet Goat".
> My bet is that they started the interviews after her son had
> already been killed. They kept the interviews short enough for
> her to keep her composure.
But what are the chances that someone who he interviewed asked to be interviewed again after something significant happened in their life?
Your scenario implies some significant deception on the woman's part. I think you might have had a point if Moore had been filming the woman when she received the phone call from the Army or when she received her son's last letter. That would be quite a coincidence. And it would also imply that the woman was a really good actor. I think that your accusation is pretty unfair to the woman and to Moore.
However, the fact that he interviewed a woman who son later died in the war isn't as much of a coincidence. It's quite possible that he interviewed her. Then she heard her son died -- maybe she contacted him again to say that she now had more to say. (It happened in Roger & Me when the Amway woman contacted Moore about her change in color analysis).
This makes more sense because Moore said that he filmed her going to the White House, because she had contacted him to say she was going to be in D.C. With my alternate hypothesis, there's no need for a complicated conspiracy theory. This would mean that Moore didn't start out saying, "I'm going to feature a woman who changes her mind about the war", but instead, he started gathering information for a movie, and the fact that the woman changed her opinion about the war became something significant he could put in his movie.
I'm harping on this because you are saying this is a huge coincidence; so big that Moore probably faked the interview, and thus what else did he fake? In short, you're using your shaky conjecture to call into question Moore's motives. However, if this isn't much of a coincidence (and I think Occam's razor is on my side on this), then there's no reason to ask what else he faked.
> I believe that Michael Moore is to left-wing/democrats what
> Ann Coulter is to the ring-wing/republicans
Suggesting that Michael Moore is to the left as Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, or any of those other right-wing demagogues is simplistic. That's like saying that, well there are equal numbers of books on astrology and astronomy in my public libary, so I guess they're both right.
I would say that Michael Moore is kind of more like a political version of James Randi* with Rush Limbaugh & co being the political version of Uri Geller.
Rush Limbaugh and his ilk simply make up facts or take things out of context and then use them to bolster their beliefs. They're propagandists in the normal sense of the word.
Michael Moore, like Al Franken, is seeking to debunk the pseudo-journalism (analogous to pseudoscience or pseudohistory) of the above right-wing ideologues. One difference is Moore will skewer anyone: Democrats or Republicans. The above ideologues are overwhelmingly Republican boosters. A second difference is that Moore and Franken use facts to bolster their opinions. You can argue with their opinions, but you can't argue with the facts. That doesn't make them journalists any more than James Randi is a scientist. All the complaints about Bowling for Columbine that I've read have been about critics drawing incorrect inferences from footage in his movies.
For example, Charlton Heston is head of the NRA and he promotes this "big man with a gun" image [Fact #1]. He shows up in Littleton soon after the massacre to do an NRA rally [Fact #2]. Maybe he showed up because the location had been set up in advance [Opinion #1]. Maybe he showed up because the NRA figured that the massacre would make people more willing to accept gun control [Opinion #2]. Maybe it's the latter, but the NRA chose to use the former excuse as a cover [Opinion #3]. Contrast this with musician Marilyn Mason canceling his shows out of respect for the tragedy [Fact #3]. So Moore, since he's a film maker, wants to illustrate these facts and then illustrate his above opinions. So Moore uses footage to introduce Heston's tough guy image (for Fact #1). Some complain Moore is saying that Heston said his usual battle cry "from my cold dead hands!" at the Columbine speech. However, it doesn't matter whether he said at the speech or not since Fact #1 doesn't depend on that. Moore never explicately says that Heston said it at the Denver speech. If he wanted to lie to make you think Heston did, then he could have cropped the video image to make it less obvious. But the point is, Moore's opinion doesn't not require Heston to use his trademark line at the Columbine speech.
Then Moore shows footage of Heston's speech in Denver (for Fact #2). The parts of the speech Moore chose to use ("The Mayor said not to come. We're already here.") helps him illustrate Opinion #2, but leaves open Option #3.
That's why people say that Moore's movie isn't like a newspaper article; it's more like an op-ed piece. Not that I think this will change some people's minds. Some people treat their politicians and leaders like deities who can do no wrong. And when someone like Moore or Franken point out that the person did in fact do wrong, they can either change their opinion to accommodate the new facts or rail at the messenger. Wise people do the former; others nitpick to help them do the latter.
* I'm not suggesting that James Randi holds the same political beliefs as Moore or Franken. I've read lots of Randi's books, but I don't know his political opinions.
> How does he happen to have so much good interview footage
> with a woman from his hometown whose son happened to die
> in Iraq... before he died.
> Did Moore interview a ton of people and just got ahem.. lucky,
> or were the earlier interviews staged after the fact?
Did you see the movie? (Not an accusation; I'm sorry if you posted earlier that you did see it).
If you had, it would be hard to suggest that interview with the woman before her son was killed was staged. The woman's grief was very much real. I thought of the scene in Saving Private Ryan when Pvt Ryan's mother is told of her other sons' deaths.
I'm sure no one would be surprised to learn that Moore had lots of interviews -- the oddest is he apparently interviewed Nicolas Berg a year before he was killed in Iraq. With more than 800 soldier deaths in Iraq, we must unfortunately conclude that it's not too coincidental that Moore could have interviewed the same woman before and after her son was killed.
> Seriously, although I saw this movie and liked it, this is not the
.sig might suggest otherwise). Some people take their politics very personally (making it more analogous to the support for a sports team), so the discussion can break down pretty quickly.
> place to discuss it. This site is supposed to be about
> technology I thought. The only really interesting technical
> tidbit of this film was that it was, IIRC, entirely created on a
> mac using Final Cut pro....
On one hand, I agree with you (although my
However, politics certainly fits under the "stuff that matters" category. And in general, we've seen a melding of technology and politics to the point that they're quickly becoming one. Even aside from the DMCA and the RIAA trying to ruin our ability to listen to music, think about these other random connections:
1. Microsoft hired Bush advisor Ralph Reed to lobby for them against the DOJ-Microsoft law suit. Think about how the DOJ basically dropped the entire case after the U.S. had won a judgment against Microsoft. Is this due to Microsoft's significant support for George W. Bush's campaign in 2000? Is it due to the $4.6M Microsoft it gave in political contributions in the 2000 election?
2. Al Gore is on the board of directors for Apple? Is this just a case of the also-ran political candidate joining forces with the also-ran computer company? Steve Jobs is reportedly serving as an advisor to the Kerry campaign. Al Gore is also a technology advisor for Google.
3. In Moore's movie, he says that Microsoft was one of the sponsoring companies for the "How to Make Money Offa Iraq" conference featured in the film.
4. What does it mean when Bush campaign contributor and HP CEO Carly Fiorina says, "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore." Furthermore, what does it mean when it's reported (not in the U.S. press, but in the Sydney Morning Herald) that among the companies that provided Iraq in the 1990s with banned dual-purpose items is HP?
5. What does it mean when Bush advisor and chairman of the Defense Policy Board (since resigned because conflict of interest) Richard Perle was hired by technology service provider Global Crossing to help it be acquired by a Chinese company? How about DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe own questionable dealiings with Global Crossing?
I guess that's the ugly truth about the world today. When we were young, along with believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, we believed that technology was about building cool products and politicians were statesmen who worked for America's best interest. Part of growing up is realizing that, among other things, the world is a lot more complicated than that, and believing you can compartmentalize broad subjects like technology and politics is harder than we'd like.
Of course, you can always choose to not read the article.
> went to buy their CD, until I noticed the big text on the CD
> saying it was copy-protected
I saw the same thing when I bought the CD (it was $9.99 at Best Buy, rather than ~$15 on the iTunes Music Store). I almost didn't buy it, but I figured I'd try to rip it, and if it didn't work, I'd just return it.
However, I had no problems ripping the CD into iTunes, and copying it to several iPods. It's a pretty good CD, too.
> shoot, we used iChatAV rather successfully from Auckland,
> New Zealand to Salt Lake City for remote collaboration in a lab
> environment rather successfully with hardly any delay
> whatsoever
Yeah. I do this all the time.
Ingredients:
1. PowerBook G4
2. Mac OS X 10.3
3. iChat AV
4. AirPort (802.11b version)
5. Comfy bed, little computer lap tray, Collie sitting on your feet (all optional)
Results: no problem at all. No delay noticeable. Voice quality was fine. Voice quality was so good, the whole thing was kind of anti-climatic.