I wouldn't use OSX if you paid me (though I would if the only alternative were Windows), and I loathe the whole iPlayskool aesthetic and hype, BUT
1) Steve Jobs is a human being and this does not bode well for his health, and 2) In an economy which now rewards people with fortunes for manipulating other peoples' money and creating absolutely nothing useful, Jobs has been a true visionary with the guts to actually build things that people can use. He's a rare bird in these parts, possibly the last of a breed.
We have turkey vultures that return to nest in a tree on our property every year. They're intelligent critters, and they do not "finish off" injured animals. They do clean up roadkill remarkably quickly. Late in the summer their young leave the nest and the parents follow them around our yard as they learn to fly.
Actually, they have a legal duty to "defend" their mark, so if an author uses "kleenex" in a story where the tissue is not demonstrably Kleenex, the publisher will get a stern letter from K-C's legal dept.
I'm sufficiently unimpressed with 11.04 (and especially Unity) that I'm tempted to reinstall with LTS and keep at least until next year.
I did, and I plan to stick with 10.04 LTS until the cows come home, then (sadly) switch to something else. Ubuntu is definitely in that "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is" loop, and people who just want a simple system that works in order to get actual work done are clearly not the target audience. There's also a creepy "Change purely to differentiate from other forms of Linux" going on here. If Shuttleworth thinks he's going to forge some sort of open-source Mac phenom, he's barking up an invisible tree.
Nuke this crap and make what works boot faster and be more stable. If I wanted dysfunctional Playskool eye-candy and a lame music store, I'd buy a Mac.
Blending the title bar of maximized windows into the top pane is DUMB. The new "overlay scrollbars" are DUMB. The unity dock needs to have the ability to switch to the bottom of the screen rather than the side (where on widescreen monitors we have the least amount of space).
Overall, a single Gnome 2 panel a the top of the screen combined with Docky and Compiz was ALL I EVER NEEDED. It was a paradigm that was never broken to need fixing.
Amen. I installed 11.04 (upgraded from 10.10, actually), tried to work with Unity for a few hours, hated it, switched to "Classic" mode, noticed the stupid scroll things were still there, nuked it and installed 10.04 LTS. I think Ubuntu just seriously jumped the shark.
I have four computers, all running Ubuntu: two ancient Dell p4 desktops (added ram, Nvidia cards, etc.), a Thinkpad and a netbook. I installed the latest Ubuntu on one of the Dells and instantly hated it. I have the netbook remix on the netbook and hated it so much last year that I switched to the Gnome desktop, but this is worse. The launcher bar adds nothing but another annoying layer to getting stuff done. But the thing that made me switch back to Gnome this time was the stupid magic scroll bars. Is this a joke? What "problem" is this supposed to solve? Too much scrolling? This imbecilic "feature" speaks volumes about Canonical's demented agenda, which is apparently to load their product down with Playskool/Mac crap like this. Yeah, for now I can go back to Gnome, but I'm sensing that they're shooting themselves in the foot here. I'm certainly not going to recommend this nonsense to anyone now on Windows.
Is this what it takes to work for the Atlantic? Seriously? The clown gets the basic story wrong because he was too lazy to do five minutes of research, then waxes nostalgic over typewriters while calling the ribbon "tape"? TAPE? What a maroon.
WTF do they need assault rifles to arrest a suspect paedophile; why do they fail to consider the chance the person who did the downloading may not be in the house?
They need the whole SWAT routine because they know there's no real threat. Believe me, if they thought the guy inside was armed, they'd set up a perimeter and start lobbing tear gas in there. It's all theater. Good for the local TV and it's like dog treats to the cops themselves -- they get to play Rambo in a safe sandbox.
Google him. He wrote the article, and, based on his past ethics, he's hardly above making this suit sound way stronger than it is. He has a history of market manipulation that the SEC did not find amusing.
Incidentally, if you have a public library card, and said library allows online access, and subscribes to the OED Online, you may be able to use your library card number to access the OED either through your library site or at oed.com directly. It works both ways with the Columbus (OH) public library, but I use oed.com because the proxy arrangement at the library blocks the very cool javascript cross-referencing features of the OED. The OED Historical Thesaurus (part of the package) is truly wonderful.
The class asserted by th Authors Guild, et al., in their original complaint was never certified by the court because Google and the Guild came up with the "settlement" before it went to trial.
I actually paid for it, by mailing a check, I think. That was back when I was in my "Gosh the internet is NEAT" phase and I actually sent money to shareware authors so the wonderful hippie ethic of the net would continue and rainbows and unicorns would eventually appear, or something, Anyway, I'm glad I did. It's weird, but Trumpet Winsock popped into my mind the other day, probably because I saw that James Gleik has a new book out and I remembered using his Pipeline service with its dodgy "Pink Slip" emulator.
The thing is that the voters reward that kind of behavior. If he wasn't doing it and something did happen, do you really think he'd get any credit for adhering to the constitution? Which is really unfortunate, at this point one really has to hand it to him, while it's not easy to avoid this, it is his problem at this point.
You left out "... because his primary concern is getting re-elected." And during his second term (unlikely, but let's pretend), his primary concern will be ensuring a Democratic successor.
The sad thing is that so many people who voted for Obama are unwilling or incapable of admitting that they were snookered. Hello? He lied. Period. He had no intention of restoring constitutional guarantees, yadda yadda. How can you tell? Because he has gone so far past what Bush dared to do.
Take a look at where Ohio sits on an electoral map sometime. It may have gone for Obama in 08, but it's pretty firmly in red state territory. That means get the govt out of my face and off my land.
Out of my face and off my land, for sure. But every govt is expert at painting people they don't like as "the other," and many, many folks take their word for that.
BTW, this area has 95%+ gun ownership, and I have absolutely no problem with that. I'm glad my neighbors have guns, and I depend on them for my safety (since the cops can take 1/2 hour or more to even get in the neighborhood in an emergency). You'd have to be nuts to try a home-invasion out here. (I personally have ms and am half-blind, so I don't mess with guns. I did use to be a good shot....)
unlike the Egyptian mob, an American mob will be much more powerful cos we got guns... we can just storm the Comcast offices and turn it back on if they shut down teh interwebs
Bad news, buckaroo: most of the people with guns in this country would be all in favor of taking the govt's word on the necessity of shutting down the internet. All it would take are a few scare stories on the local news about swarthy terrorists planning to bomb the local Target.
True story: I live in rural Ohio. When we moved here, there was a tiny food store in the nearby small town. It changed owners every few years because nobody could compete with the big stores ~15 miles away. So a few years ago a Pakistani immigrant bought it (his cousin in Columbus had "found" it for him). He was a nice guy and gave it a good shot. (I'm from NYC and was glad to see a bit of variety in the good ole boy mix.)
Within a few weeks, word had spread in the township (I heard it from at least three people) that this guy (and his wife and tiny daughter) were terrorist sleeper agents sent by al qaeda to blow up the school, the churches and god knows what else. These were pillars of the community saying this, and they weren't joking. And just to be safe, people stopped shopping at the store. End of story.
Now the store is a Pentecostal church. The pastor was arrested last year for molesting a minor female parishioner. The community has, of course, "forgiven" him in the pages of the local paper. Hell, at least he's not a terrorist, right?
Censorship is a popular idea in the US because the Land of the Free is actually full of nervous ninnies who will believe anything and risk nothing. This country is fucked.
This would likely necessitate the use of strategically positioned WiFi access points and lots of cantennas or similar directional devices. Exceeding the wattage cap could be considered in-bounds if its detection is difficult or detection of the detection is easy. Multiple routes would be nice, but even a single connection is better than nothing at all.
This could help the public (eh, mostly geeks) develop a plan to Internet the US if the gov't gets ISPs by the balls or cuts cables. Plausible deniability would be built in later somehow.
This just in: "Red Dawn" was a movie. In real life, the Dittohead next door notices the funny thing on your roof and calls Homeland Security. Game Over.
I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad last year. It came with Windows 7 and some crapware, but not too much and not too intrusive. I put Ubuntu on it to dual-boot with Windows (in case I ever need Windows, which hasn't happened yet. The build quality is quite good and the keyboard is to die for. Incredibly good keyboard. Really. I hate Mac keyboards.
Considering that 80% of activity in the market is program trading and that 70% of shares are held for 11 seconds or less, I think we have bigger problems. This whole shebang is not, strictly speaking, capitalism. It's parasitic roulette played with imaginary money. Of course, at the end of the week the players get to take home real money.
I wonder if Apple would allow sellers to have both options but differing prices for each one. Perhaps the app could show the options of buying an ebook from Amazon direct for $9.99, or buying in-app via iTunes payment for $14.50.
It could be handy for someone who got an iTunes Gift Card, for example.
Stop wondering. Does that sound like something Apple would allow?
No, actually, probably only about 10% of iPad users will figure out that it's just as easy to buy stuff outside the app, and unless there's a price advantage to the customer, precisely nobody will bother. Trust me on this, the average consumer doesn't give a flying fig about bookseller/publisher/author profits.
In 1995 I was circulating a book proposal to publishers for a directory of literary resources on the web (it became The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet). Even then, most editors had only a dim sense of what it was all about, and Random House finally went for it only because the editor who read the proposal was in her 20s (and smart). But the publisher insisted I spend the first half of the book giving readers a crash course in how everything on the net worked then, including usenet and gopher, and how to get there (AOL, Prodigy, CS, etc.).
The market was ripe -- the book took off, was excerpted in the Washington Post and got me on c-span, but the publishers had been afraid to print a large initial run and ran out of books a month before Christmas.
I'm starting to wonder if Manning is the leaker at all, is there any proof of that other than an alleged chat that took place, based on the evidence of a text file?
Bingo. None that anyone knows of.
Incidentally, Lamo himself has said that he told Manning that (a) he (Lamo) is a journalist and source shield laws would protect Manning, and (b) he (Lamo) is an ordained minister and that priest/penitent laws would make Manning's "confession" inadmissible. Yes, Lamo himself has said he said these things. Are they in the chat logs? Good question, and it makes a lot of difference.
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I wouldn't use OSX if you paid me (though I would if the only alternative were Windows), and I loathe the whole iPlayskool aesthetic and hype, BUT
1) Steve Jobs is a human being and this does not bode well for his health, and
2) In an economy which now rewards people with fortunes for manipulating other peoples' money and creating absolutely nothing useful, Jobs has been a true visionary with the guts to actually build things that people can use. He's a rare bird in these parts, possibly the last of a breed.
We have turkey vultures that return to nest in a tree on our property every year. They're intelligent critters, and they do not "finish off" injured animals. They do clean up roadkill remarkably quickly. Late in the summer their young leave the nest and the parents follow them around our yard as they learn to fly.
Actually, they have a legal duty to "defend" their mark, so if an author uses "kleenex" in a story where the tissue is not demonstrably Kleenex, the publisher will get a stern letter from K-C's legal dept.
I'm sufficiently unimpressed with 11.04 (and especially Unity) that I'm tempted to reinstall with LTS and keep at least until next year.
I did, and I plan to stick with 10.04 LTS until the cows come home, then (sadly) switch to something else. Ubuntu is definitely in that "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is" loop, and people who just want a simple system that works in order to get actual work done are clearly not the target audience. There's also a creepy "Change purely to differentiate from other forms of Linux" going on here. If Shuttleworth thinks he's going to forge some sort of open-source Mac phenom, he's barking up an invisible tree.
Nuke this crap and make what works boot faster and be more stable. If I wanted dysfunctional Playskool eye-candy and a lame music store, I'd buy a Mac.
Blending the title bar of maximized windows into the top pane is DUMB. The new "overlay scrollbars" are DUMB. The unity dock needs to have the ability to switch to the bottom of the screen rather than the side (where on widescreen monitors we have the least amount of space).
Overall, a single Gnome 2 panel a the top of the screen combined with Docky and Compiz was ALL I EVER NEEDED. It was a paradigm that was never broken to need fixing.
Amen. I installed 11.04 (upgraded from 10.10, actually), tried to work with Unity for a few hours, hated it, switched to "Classic" mode, noticed the stupid scroll things were still there, nuked it and installed 10.04 LTS. I think Ubuntu just seriously jumped the shark.
I have four computers, all running Ubuntu: two ancient Dell p4 desktops (added ram, Nvidia cards, etc.), a Thinkpad and a netbook. I installed the latest Ubuntu on one of the Dells and instantly hated it. I have the netbook remix on the netbook and hated it so much last year that I switched to the Gnome desktop, but this is worse. The launcher bar adds nothing but another annoying layer to getting stuff done. But the thing that made me switch back to Gnome this time was the stupid magic scroll bars. Is this a joke? What "problem" is this supposed to solve? Too much scrolling? This imbecilic "feature" speaks volumes about Canonical's demented agenda, which is apparently to load their product down with Playskool/Mac crap like this. Yeah, for now I can go back to Gnome, but I'm sensing that they're shooting themselves in the foot here. I'm certainly not going to recommend this nonsense to anyone now on Windows.
Yes, but the manual he referred to almost certainly used a cloth ribbon.
Is this what it takes to work for the Atlantic? Seriously? The clown gets the basic story wrong because he was too lazy to do five minutes of research, then waxes nostalgic over typewriters while calling the ribbon "tape"? TAPE? What a maroon.
WTF do they need assault rifles to arrest a suspect paedophile; why do they fail to consider the chance the person who did the downloading may not be in the house?
They need the whole SWAT routine because they know there's no real threat. Believe me, if they thought the guy inside was armed, they'd set up a perimeter and start lobbing tear gas in there. It's all theater. Good for the local TV and it's like dog treats to the cops themselves -- they get to play Rambo in a safe sandbox.
Google him. He wrote the article, and, based on his past ethics, he's hardly above making this suit sound way stronger than it is. He has a history of market manipulation that the SEC did not find amusing.
Jesus, I hope not. Urban Dictionary is a pile of steaming adolescent crap.
Incidentally, if you have a public library card, and said library allows online access, and subscribes to the OED Online, you may be able to use your library card number to access the OED either through your library site or at oed.com directly. It works both ways with the Columbus (OH) public library, but I use oed.com because the proxy arrangement at the library blocks the very cool javascript cross-referencing features of the OED. The OED Historical Thesaurus (part of the package) is truly wonderful.
The class asserted by th Authors Guild, et al., in their original complaint was never certified by the court because Google and the Guild came up with the "settlement" before it went to trial.
I actually paid for it, by mailing a check, I think. That was back when I was in my "Gosh the internet is NEAT" phase and I actually sent money to shareware authors so the wonderful hippie ethic of the net would continue and rainbows and unicorns would eventually appear, or something, Anyway, I'm glad I did. It's weird, but Trumpet Winsock popped into my mind the other day, probably because I saw that James Gleik has a new book out and I remembered using his Pipeline service with its dodgy "Pink Slip" emulator.
The thing is that the voters reward that kind of behavior. If he wasn't doing it and something did happen, do you really think he'd get any credit for adhering to the constitution? Which is really unfortunate, at this point one really has to hand it to him, while it's not easy to avoid this, it is his problem at this point.
You left out "... because his primary concern is getting re-elected." And during his second term (unlikely, but let's pretend), his primary concern will be ensuring a Democratic successor.
The sad thing is that so many people who voted for Obama are unwilling or incapable of admitting that they were snookered. Hello? He lied. Period. He had no intention of restoring constitutional guarantees, yadda yadda. How can you tell? Because he has gone so far past what Bush dared to do.
Take a look at where Ohio sits on an electoral map sometime. It may have gone for Obama in 08, but it's pretty firmly in red state territory. That means get the govt out of my face and off my land.
Out of my face and off my land, for sure. But every govt is expert at painting people they don't like as "the other," and many, many folks take their word for that.
BTW, this area has 95%+ gun ownership, and I have absolutely no problem with that. I'm glad my neighbors have guns, and I depend on them for my safety (since the cops can take 1/2 hour or more to even get in the neighborhood in an emergency). You'd have to be nuts to try a home-invasion out here. (I personally have ms and am half-blind, so I don't mess with guns. I did use to be a good shot....)
unlike the Egyptian mob, an American mob will be much more powerful cos we got guns... we can just storm the Comcast offices and turn it back on if they shut down teh interwebs
Bad news, buckaroo: most of the people with guns in this country would be all in favor of taking the govt's word on the necessity of shutting down the internet. All it would take are a few scare stories on the local news about swarthy terrorists planning to bomb the local Target.
True story: I live in rural Ohio. When we moved here, there was a tiny food store in the nearby small town. It changed owners every few years because nobody could compete with the big stores ~15 miles away. So a few years ago a Pakistani immigrant bought it (his cousin in Columbus had "found" it for him). He was a nice guy and gave it a good shot. (I'm from NYC and was glad to see a bit of variety in the good ole boy mix.)
Within a few weeks, word had spread in the township (I heard it from at least three people) that this guy (and his wife and tiny daughter) were terrorist sleeper agents sent by al qaeda to blow up the school, the churches and god knows what else. These were pillars of the community saying this, and they weren't joking. And just to be safe, people stopped shopping at the store. End of story.
Now the store is a Pentecostal church. The pastor was arrested last year for molesting a minor female parishioner. The community has, of course, "forgiven" him in the pages of the local paper. Hell, at least he's not a terrorist, right?
Censorship is a popular idea in the US because the Land of the Free is actually full of nervous ninnies who will believe anything and risk nothing. This country is fucked.
This would likely necessitate the use of strategically positioned WiFi access points and lots of cantennas or similar directional devices. Exceeding the wattage cap could be considered in-bounds if its detection is difficult or detection of the detection is easy. Multiple routes would be nice, but even a single connection is better than nothing at all.
This could help the public (eh, mostly geeks) develop a plan to Internet the US if the gov't gets ISPs by the balls or cuts cables. Plausible deniability would be built in later somehow.
This just in: "Red Dawn" was a movie. In real life, the Dittohead next door notices the funny thing on your roof and calls Homeland Security. Game Over.
I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad last year. It came with Windows 7 and some crapware, but not too much and not too intrusive. I put Ubuntu on it to dual-boot with Windows (in case I ever need Windows, which hasn't happened yet. The build quality is quite good and the keyboard is to die for. Incredibly good keyboard. Really. I hate Mac keyboards.
Considering that 80% of activity in the market is program trading and that 70% of shares are held for 11 seconds or less, I think we have bigger problems. This whole shebang is not, strictly speaking, capitalism. It's parasitic roulette played with imaginary money. Of course, at the end of the week the players get to take home real money.
I wonder if Apple would allow sellers to have both options but differing prices for each one. Perhaps the app could show the options of buying an ebook from Amazon direct for $9.99, or buying in-app via iTunes payment for $14.50.
It could be handy for someone who got an iTunes Gift Card, for example.
Stop wondering. Does that sound like something Apple would allow?
No, actually, probably only about 10% of iPad users will figure out that it's just as easy to buy stuff outside the app, and unless there's a price advantage to the customer, precisely nobody will bother. Trust me on this, the average consumer doesn't give a flying fig about bookseller/publisher/author profits.
Trumpet Winsock! I actually paid for it.
In 1995 I was circulating a book proposal to publishers for a directory of literary resources on the web (it became The Book Lover's Guide to the Internet). Even then, most editors had only a dim sense of what it was all about, and Random House finally went for it only because the editor who read the proposal was in her 20s (and smart). But the publisher insisted I spend the first half of the book giving readers a crash course in how everything on the net worked then, including usenet and gopher, and how to get there (AOL, Prodigy, CS, etc.).
The market was ripe -- the book took off, was excerpted in the Washington Post and got me on c-span, but the publishers had been afraid to print a large initial run and ran out of books a month before Christmas.
I'm starting to wonder if Manning is the leaker at all, is there any proof of that other than an alleged chat that took place, based on the evidence of a text file?
Bingo. None that anyone knows of.
Incidentally, Lamo himself has said that he told Manning that (a) he (Lamo) is a journalist and source shield laws would protect Manning, and (b) he (Lamo) is an ordained minister and that priest/penitent laws would make Manning's "confession" inadmissible. Yes, Lamo himself has said he said these things. Are they in the chat logs? Good question, and it makes a lot of difference.