Here are some thoughts I've had in the last couple weeks. (Filed under 'OS X' because there doesn't seem to be an 'Apple' category...? Based on this post.)

Success:
- Will it be a success? Yes. Is it pricey? Yes. Is it gorgeous? Yes. And the price will eventually drop, just like the iPod did. It's Apple's famous method: release a really nice, almost perfect product for a bunch of money, sell a bunch to the first batch of buyers; then, when that supply is exhausted, improve it, drop the price, sell again to the next round who weren't willing to buy the first time. Lather, rinse, repeat. (Note: don't look for a widescreen, touchscreen, iPod until MAYBE September for the 2007 Xmas season; more likely, you'll have to wait until Spring 2008. Apple won't let a nice iPod cannibalize sales they'll get to people who buy the iPhone MOSTLY because they want a widescreen iPod. We just saw a perfect example of this: a few months ago (fall 2007), Apple introduced the new Shuffle. Christmas came and went and they sold a zillion. Then, on January 30, 2007, BAM!--the Shuffle now comes in colors, just in time for Valentine's day. Raise your hand if you think this is just a coincidence--that maybe Apple forgot that they knew how to anodize aluminum.

- BUT--the iPod wasn't a success just because it was pretty. It really is a better, easier-to-use MP3 player than anything else out there for most people. The iPhone will ONLY succeed if the touchscreen system works as well as Steve says it does. I can tell it'll be mostly great just by looking--a regular touchscreen could easily handle 90% of the single-finger action he demo'ed--but I'll have to see the keyboard in person to become a believer on that.

- will Apple work out a deal with Cingular to offer a reasonable data plan? No one will be happy with the Internet Communicator of the Future if it costs $100/month to do anything with. For this to really, really work, there has to be reasonably-fast, reasonably-priced data. If it becomes a situation of "Oh, I can't use Safari until I get to Starbucks or Panera" that will be a big buzzkill.

- will they meet their goals? They said they want to sell 10 million phones--have 1% of the market--in 18 months. (God, that sounds like so many WWW business plans I heard in 1995-97--"If we could just get 1% of all web users to visit our site...") That sounds good on the one hand, given that they want 1% of a billion phones, BUT--Cingular only has 60M customers. Is the iPhone so great that ONE SIXTH of Cingular's customer base will spend $500? If not, are that many people going to get out of contracts and switch carriers in the next 18 months? I'm not so sure. Like I said, I really think the iPhone will be a success, but their expectations are pretty high.

Other thoughts:
- no iChat! no iChat A/V! How LAME! Either a) it's part of the deal not to step on Cingular's toes by offering anything like VOIP, or b) it's waiting for Rev B. Unfortunately, my money's on A. Well, at least you can use the browser to access Meebo. In any case, it is a very obvious omission and clearly intentional--given that the SMS system looks just like iChat, it's impossible that they just "forgot" about it. Further weight to my fear that a reasonable data plan won't be part of the deal--if Cingular is pushing this hard to get people to use SMS, they're probably still planning to charge as much for that as possible. Or maybe it's the other way around--with a cheap data plan, everyone would use chat and quit using SMS, and Cingular doesn't want to lose that income. Could go either way.

On a related note, it's also too bad that the camera doesn't swivel and let you use iChat A/V--how many science fiction films have we seen with two-way handheld videoconferencing?

Current iPods have 4:3 screens. (1.33:1.) All Apple's computers are 16:10. (1.6:1.) The iPhone, like the original PBG4, is 3:2. (1.5:1.) So: what shape should iTMS movies be?)

- Proximity sensor--nice. But I hope that's not one of their patents. My Canon XTi turns off the screen when you put it up to your face--and it already exists. ;-)

- Apple will need to add 'Cingular' and 'iPhone' to Leopard's spellcheck dictionary. :-)

- Looks like it has no GPS, just a combination of Google Maps and cell-tower-based. Too bad. Real, accurate positioning in such a device would be AWESOME.

- I'll pick one up in a couple rev's just to have a decent browser. Despite having twice as many pixels as the iPhone, browsing on my Axim mostly sucks.

I've had my new PDA (a used Dell Axim X50v) for a few weeks and have spent some time with three browsers: Opera, Minimo (from Mozilla), and of course the included Internet Explorer from Microsoft. This isn't an exhaustive review of them but there are some things you might be interested in, and I have a few questions that hopefully readers might know the answer to.

MSIE is pretty good, though limited in features, though not much more so than the others. Being made by Microsoft, it works pretty well with their OS (Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition)--it loads pretty fast and everything is sized nicely. (Not all apps work well on the X50v's 640x480 screen--more on that later.) The three layout modes--One Column, Default, and Desktop--work pretty well.

Other than the fact that there is a 'back' button but 'forward' is hidden under a menu (a move I assume meant to save screen space on smaller-screened PDAs) my main gripes are things that the other browser's don't address--there is no way to save the page or image you're looking at, or the ability to right-click on a link and 'Save link as...' like you would with any desktop browser. I'd love to be able to save pages, images, and documents as I find them for later viewing. Since it has wireless built in and I've got 2 GB (!!!) worth of storage (one CF card and one SD card) it seems silly that the only way I can look at content offline is to either sync it with a desktop or copy files onto one of the cards with a card reader. Minor annoyance: I can't delete the included 'AvantGo Channels' bookmark.

Opera was the next browser I tried. Since they now give away their desktop browser, I was surprised to find that their mobile browser seems to only last for 30 days unless you pay. No great loss. Opera's biggest feature--the ability to zoom a page's content (text and images)--works as badly on a handheld as it does on the desktop. It's a great idea, especially on a PDA, but someone at Opera needs to go back to Math class: 125% is about 2 or 3 times larger than 110%. I've had similar (bad) luck with the zoom feature on their desktop browser. I like the built-in orientation-changing feature--something that's built into my Tablet PC but takes several clicks on this handheld--and the multiple windows (tabs) are also great, but otherwise there's no particular reason to use it over the included IE, especially since money is involved. ;-)

Which leads us to Minimo, the mobile browser from Mozilla. As much as I love seeing that little Mozilla icon, it takes forever to launch and slows down my (624 MHz!) Axim like you wouldn't believe, even when it's not in the foreground. I can't give you too many details about it since it doesn't seem to want to launch right now (and I don't feel like resetting my PDA, which is what I think I had to do last time to get it to work*) but the one thing I remember most is that it was totally NOT designed with any kind of resolution-independence in mind. (I know it's hard, since phone and PDA screens might be 128x128, 160x160, 320x240, or 640x480; not to mention unclassifiable devices like the Nokia 770, but c'mon, haven't we learned anything about inches and pixels from using the greatest cross-platform application of all time--the Web--in the last decade?) Most of the controls were TINY and a few were HUGE. Looking at the 320x240 screenshot on the project page, I remember that the buttons in the left column were tiny, as was the page text, and the radio buttons on the homepage were huge--overlapping, in fact. Again, there is no save-this-page or -link feature that I could find, so between that and the slowness, I see no reason to stray far from IE.**

So, that's my brief overview of the Pocket PC browsers I've tried. Are there any others that are any good? Am I missing out by not using the two I've mentioned so far? Should I get a Palm device instead?

* One gripe about this PDA/OS in general: I understand the idea of leaving apps running to make switching faster, but why isn't there a good way to exit them when you really want to? I leave the Switcher Bar running but most of the times when I use it to quit an app I get the the ``"Program X" is not responding`` message, whether the app is from Microsoft or a third party. I'm sure I killed Minimo at some point which is probably why it doesn't want to come up for me, but no other apps have refused to 'come back from the dead' like this.

** No, I'm not an MS shill. I don't love them or hate them or their products any more than I do Linux, Apple, or anything else. Overall, that is--I very much dislike some things they do, like they intentionally break things like the decade-old standards for CSS and PNG, or .DOC interoperability, or SMB interoperability, and of course I don't like them using their desktop market share to stomp out competitors large and small, but I really like some of the things they make, like Windows 2000 and Office X for Mac. (There's always that sweet spot with MS--when the products are big enough to have a good amount of features, but not so big that they're overstuffed, and when the usability:clutter ratio is favorable. Hence, my love for their half-decade-old products. I hate XP and Vista, and Office 2004 for Mac, but Office 2007 for Windows looks nice, though more for the live preview feature than for the ribbon.) That said, my primary computers--home desktop, work desktop at two jobs, and my laptop--are all OS X Macs. My next project is to try to get ActiveSync working with this Axim under Parallels. Until then, I need to go buy a new 6-in-1 card reader to replace my old CF-only unit.

Totally random thing: I just bout a 1 GB CF card from Staples. It is from PNY and cost $20. (!!!) I popped it into my CF reader and the volume name is 'TOSHIBA1G02.'

So, it's already the end of 2006. That means it's been ten whole years since I worked at Cybersmith. I can't believe it. My life is just whipping by. But, be that as it may, I've always been into nostalgia, so I think I'll write down as much as I can remember about the place and see if anyone else has anything to add. Feel free to comment if you ever worked at one or visited.

Cybersmith, for those that don't know, was a cyber cafe, and one of the first in the SF Bay Area. (And probably close to one of the last--they never really took off quite like a lot of people expected them to.) In SF, there was CoffeeNet on Harrison, and Internet Alfredo right near where 280 dead-ends, and another one with a kinda generic name right near (almost under) the Bay Bridge, and Cybersmith was the fourth I found. I was actually doing a Yahoo! search (or maybe AltaVista) for cyber cafes in the area and I saw, in an article about CoffeeNet (probably this one), a mention of Cybersmith.

Long story short (too late!) I called, asked if they were hiring, and headed down right away. As it turns out, it was their very first day open when I showed up to apply. Being a techy type of person--exactly the kind of person who would be visiting cybercafes in 1996--it surprised me to learn that they were looking more for retail types than techy types, but luckily I had a few years of movie theater experience and I got the job. My first day, coincidentally, was the "official" grand opening a week or so later. Cybersmith was actually based on the East Coast, with 3 stores in and around Boston, and a few of the original employees were from Boston. The store was in a nice location on University in Palo Alto. My commutes were always off-hours and it took about a half hour to get there. This was when 101 was becoming pretty high-tech--on the way to work I passed Oracle (this was right around when the Internet was starting to take off, and they opened a new Benz dealership right next to Oracle), and Excite, and Sybase, I think, and a few places like that. Now 101 is just packed with those places but when it was all new was very cool to see happening.

Aaaaanyway... Cybersmith. It was a very cool place. It was in the 'small town' part of Palo Alto--just a short walk to Pizza-a-Go-Go, yum--and the store itself was nice. Real wood floor and custom cherry-wood furniture. All the computer stations had these curved benches so 2 or 3 people could share a computer. The monitors (17" Compaq CRTs) swiveled too.

Ah yes, the computers--Compaq Presarios, except for a couple Macs in the back where you could take your picture and put it on a shirt or mousepad, or make a screensaver. We had (let's see if I remember) 16 Internet stations which were 133 MHz Pentiums, and 12 game stations that were 166s. I always thought the fast Internet would be a big draw but it was the games that kept asses in seats. People would come in and play Command and Conquer for hours. Most kids came in to game and most adults had fast access at work by then.

Besides computers, we had four N64s--some of the first in the country, I was told--and two Dreamcasts. Also a cool two-player VR game (name?) with those big headsets, which ran off of a 486 with two graphics cards (one for each eye) and was a whole lot of fun. Also a dopey morphing photo booth, an attraction we called "smellovision" (which had a larger headset and simulated flying over stuff, complete with scents) and two arcade-style games--snow skiing and jet ski. The original manager was a really cool guy who could take first place on the ski game standing backwards--it was quite impressive to watch. I never got that good, but after many plays (employees played for free, heh) I could do a respectable run on the bunny slope. The original manager left soon after I started--like, a week or so--and the rest of the staff was just a regular good staff.

We also served food, though, sadly for a cyber cafe, there was a catch: because of how laws were at the time, we weren't able to let the people wander around, or even use the computers, with food--it had to be eaten in the dining area. Kinda took the "cafe" out of "cybercafe" (or took out the "cyber;" your choice) not being able to eat while at a machine. But the food was really, really good. I ate there about half the time (our employee discount made the prices reasonable); the other nights (I almost always worked nights) I went to the aforementioned Pizza-a-Go-Go. (Great pizza, and they had some kinda deal where you could get a slice, a drink and a shirt for like five bucks. I've still got mine, and wear it, but it's kinda falling apart--I really need to see about getting a new one.) The one thing I remember being excellent (the lady who ran the counter was really quite good) were the focaccia sandwiches. The pizza was pretty good, though Go Go had better pies, and more variety, of course. (Mmm, pesto.)

So, that's about it. I loved that place to death, though I only worked there a few months. I had been mostly out of work all that summer--just temping some--but right after I started, I got a call from a place I used to work at, wanting me back for substantially more money, so (to keep my taxes simple, since the new/old job was in another state) I worked through the last full pay period that I could and still get my last check before the year ended. So my last day was probably just before Christmas. I remember taking my sister there and we had out picture taken and put onto a mousepad for my aunt. (Just so happens it was a really good picture.) The rest of my family came by once or twice.

I hated working the "door" (standing outside trying to get people in) but otherwise it was great. After hours we'd play networked Quake (hence this article's icon), joining a game found on stomped.com if there weren't enough of us in-house for a good match. I got my ass kicked more than I'd like to admit but it was still damn good fun--I've always liked playing video games against human opponents rather than computer-generated enemies. It's much more fun to play against someone who's just as fast, smart, and well-armed as you, rather than wave after wave of beasts with bad AI that you just mow through, or ultra-powerful bosses that take 20 tries to beat.

So, that's about it. Kinda random, no big point or conclusion, just some assorted memories from a happy time in my life. Anyone have anything to add?

Now, Cybersmith--my store, and the whole company (a division/sister of Learningsmith and Booksmith, like 'blacksmith' or 'goldsmith' I guess)--is long gone. (As is almost every other place I've ever worked at, sadly.) It stayed around for a couple years but it never did that great, I guess. I mean, it did OK, it was never totally empty, and sometimes it was quite packed, plus birthday parties were surprisingly popular, but I guess Palo Alto has some pretty steep rent and it takes a lot to stick around in that area. I visited a couple times, went and saw Titanic with my old boss once, but after a couple years, it was no more. It stayed empty for a while. I forget what's in there now, but last time I was there, I think I remember smiling when I noticed they still had the same light wood floor. (Which, by the way, I had to mop most nights. Well, I didn't have to, but someone had to, and no one else ever did.)

According to this post, MS is recommending that people use transparent GIFs, not PNGs, in Gadgets. Because even though the PNG standard is about a decade old, MSIE famously can't deal with alpha transparency very well,* and I guess something along those lines is sticking it browser-crashing nose into Gadgets in Vista.

Do they have any plans to fix this? Of course not! From the post: "I would encourage you to change to using transparent GIF moving forward... the SDK will be updated with this new info in our next release."

Can you fucking believe that? Abandon PNG... moving forward?!?!?

* MSIE, by default, only deals with GIF-style, transparent-or-not transparency in PNGs. There are workarounds but as far as simplicity goes they're a far cry from the plain old <img src> tag that any other browser can use.

I just bought a Dell PC from http://www.dell.com/outlet. It has (Genuine!) Windows XP Media Center 2005. I ordered it Friday, 6/16/2006. The site shows it was shipped on Saturday, 6/17/2006. They've got a nifty page to track my order status but no way to track the package itself, like a UPS or FedEx tracking number. Should arrive between Wednesday and Friday. One nice thing about Dell: they're in Texas, kind of in the middle of the country. This compares favorably to the 8+ days I wait for Macs to come from California. I don't need it, but I've wanted to see what Media Center looks like, and I figured this was a pretty cheap way to find out.

Brief specs:
Dell Dimension, either an E310 or a 3100, I'm not really sure.
2.8 GHz HT P4
512 MB RAM
80 GB SATA hard drive

More info once it arrives...

Update #1: OK, so I sent them an email and got back an automated reply that informs me "The tracking numbers may not be listed on the site for up to 3 business days after the order has shipped." So, there's a very good chance that it will be here before UPS's site even knows they have it. This kind of basic thing is pretty retarded. Most other merchants post a tracking number promptly. Dell should look into that. I hear they can do cool things with computers these days. :-)

Update #2: The Dell showed up on Wednesday, before I was every given any tracking info. Of course delivery was attempted while no one was home. Luckily the UPS center is close, I was going out at that time anyway so I could combine trips, and I was able to make it there before their 8pm closing.

Talk about minimalist packaging: I could look into the carrying holes and see the ports on the back panel. The computer was suspended in a foam skeleton, rather than being completely encased in foam. I don't know if their non-refurbished gear is sent like this, and I know intellectually it's not much of a problem, but it just struck me as odd, especially compared to how Apple packs things.

So: the first thing I did after taking it out of the box was try to get it open. Took a couple minutes, and I even looked at the (paper) documentation, which don't cover this at all. There's a little sliding locking thingie on the case but it's not just a lock--you pull it 'till it resists, then you pull a bit more and that makes the side panel pop off. The case is a bit on the large size, and it seems a bit on the heavy side was well for how little is in there.

I also discovered it is a Dimension E310--says so right on the front. It has a 2.8 GHz HT P4, 512 MB shared RAM, an 80 GB SATA HD, and a CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. The only ports are VGA, ethernet, USB, and audio in and out, plus a PCI modem. No PS/2 or parallel, and sadly no DVI, but I didn't expect that at this price. I've got a PCI video card with DVI that I can put in down the road if I want. No FireWire, either. Oh well. I didn't really want to play with MovieMaker on my Media Center PC anyway. </sarcasm>

As it happens, I got a Windows Vista Public Beta DVD the previous day and it installed like crap on my 800 MHz Compaq Deskpro--bad video, and worse: no ethernet, which makes it pretty much useless. So the first thing I did with the Dell was unplug the SATA drive, pop in a 30 GB* IDE drive as Slave behind the DVD drive, enable the new drive in the BIOS, and install Vista. It went on fine and looks beatiful. Video came in at 1600x1200 and the networking works so I can actually do stuff besides just play Solitaire. I have to admit: Vista looks very pretty. It runs about as well as Mac OS X 10.0 did when it first came out, which is to say it makes this 2.8 GHz computer feel like a Pentium 100 with Windows 95. But, the fact that Vista runs on a machine like this--not old, but about as low-end as you can get these days--is good. Published specs and early reports had me worried. The UI looks nice, but I don't see all the glowing stuff I had seen in Channel 9 videos, so I guess I'm not getting the whole Aero "experience."

* MS says the beta needs a 40 GB drive with 15 GB space; I was happy that it didn't reject the 30 GB unit.

The 'Read more...' link--the one I always click--is also right aligned. It used to be the very first thing on a line.

'Score' is right-aligned. I much prefer it to be immediately after the comment title, as it used to be. I find it extremely annoying to read a comment and not know if the author is being serious or not. Having to look all the way to the right and then back to the left is almost as bad.

I hate vertical bar quoting. Occasionally, it produces spectacularly bad results.
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/04/048230
http://apple.newbox.org/pics/slashdot/quoting.png

The numbers in lists go left of the margin.
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187638&cid=15478428
http://apple.newbox.org/pics/slashdot/numbers.png

In this box below, the checkbox touches the 't' in 'Submit'
http://apple.newbox.org/pics/slashdot/submit.png

The old site used Times for body copy, which I think looks much nicer than a san-serif font.

Hi all,

I want to create a list of examples of why DRM and extended copyrights are bad. My goal is to make something that can appeal to many aspects of an average person's life, not just rants that sound like they come from the warez crowd. A list of irrefutable facts that can be printed on one side of 8.5x11" paper andeasily read and understood in a couple minutes by anyone. Some examples:

From today's article: Imagine a restricted audio CD. A library buys one and loans it out to patrons, as libraries have done for over 20 years. Imagine copyright law doesn't get any worse and the recording goes into public domain someday. How will the DRM know to turn itself off? On a related note: what if the keyholder goes out of business?

The whole point of copyright is that it grants creators a temporary monopoly to encourage people to create and release their works. It was never intended to be eternal.

Add some info about the original DivX--what happens when a DRM company goes under.

Disney is completely hypocritical. They are the strongest proponents of eternal copyrights yet they built their empire on public domain works--Snow White, Cinderella, etc. Yes, Mickey Mouse was an original creation and an icon, but can you name a single Mickey Mouse movie other than Steamboat Willie? Most of their success came from these and other classic stories.

Hollywood is completely hypocritical. The reason they're on the west coast was to put geographic distance between themselves and enforcers of Edison's patents. (citations?)

Universal Studios are complete assholes who assume that everything belongs to them and they're always right. "Donkey Kong was the early hit that cemented Nintendo's position in the video-game business, and the cash cow that sustained the fledgling Nintendo of America. Nintendo was flying high. Until, that is, Nintendo's Japanese office received a telex from MCA Universal stating that the company had 48 hours to hand all profits earned from Donkey Kong over to MCA and destroy all unsold Donkey Kong inventory. The reason? MCA alleged that Donkey Kong infringed on Universal Studios' "King Kong" copyright. Nintendo had a very good reason for refraining from a settlement: It had discovered that MCA did not own the "King Kong" copyright! Even more shockingly, in a previous lawsuit MCA Universal had actually gone to pains to prove that the "King Kong" property was public domain!" (I'd like to find some more info on this.)

Please, add more in the comments, and feel free to discuss/rebuke/refine anything you see in this or in the comments. My goal is to make a good list of factually correct assertions that cannot be denied.

Remember the points: copyright, as originally described, is good. (Granting artists a temporary monopoly on their works to encourage them to create and share, with the agreement that in exchange for this protection, the works will enter the public domain someday.) Eternal copyright is not. Technology used to create de facto eternal copyright is not. Copyright based on the life of a company, instead of a person, is not.

Title: 400 Bad Request

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Safari 1.3.1 on 10.3.9 with Saft and Stand

I popped my shiny new "Revenge of the Sith" DVD into my computer and saw something very strange--the disc is named "CHARLOTTE_DISC1." Huh? Hang on... yup, the "extras" disc is "CHARLOTTE_DISC2." WTF?!? Googling just bring up a bunch of posts from people named "Charlotte" or who live in Charlotte, NC or who talk about "Charlotte's Web" also. Anyone know why this is? If you don't know, do you have a guess? Conspiracy theory, even? Any ideas at all, please post below.

Update: Mystery solved. Short version: it was the code name for the product and was not intended for release. "It's the result of a method used by the industry to safeguard some of its high-profile projects from publicity leaks -- a class of projects that includes Revenge of the Sith. 'Charlotte' was the codename assigned to the Episode III DVD project."

Like the old infamous "how to talk to your kid" guides, this page from Microsoft is hysterical, at least to us rotten kids. Although, I have to say, their description--"Leet... is a specific type of computer slang where a user replaces regular letters with other keyboard characters to form words phonetically--creating the digital equivalent of pig Latin with a twist of hieroglyphics"--is great.

Another day, another office suite that will supposedly, once again, "replaced [sic] the... incredibly bloated and slow MS Office."

OK, here's the deal. It will be ages, if ever, before an office suite even makes a dent in MS's offering. I like OOo as much as the next slashdot reader, but you have to know that for every friend, relative, and small business you convince to use an alternative, there are a thousand companies, with a thousand seats each, that have bought and will continue to buy MS Office. Keynote might be making a dent in PowerPoint, but those files are much more likely than Word documents or spreadsheets to be kept to oneself. However, the ability to share Word docs and spreadsheets is essential. Businesses using these apps need to be able to open, change, save, and send without any custom settings. Period. There's an old quote: "GM isn't in the business of making cars. GM is in the business of making money." Similarly, a business is not in the business of learning how software works. A business uses software as one of its many tools it has to make money. If they need to learn more about the software to get things done, fine, but they'd rather not. The software they can use with the least learning, wins.

No one wants to hear about saving as HTML or RTF. No one wants to hear about "vendor lock-in" or all the other good reasons NOT to use Word. Businesses want to a) open all their existing documents and b) continue doing what they're doing.

Remeber in the old days the saying was "No one ever got fired for buying IBM"? Now it's the same with MS. We all know business reality is ugly and non-ideal but the sooner you accept that business reality is reality, as far as businesses are concerned, the better off you'll be. Imagine these two conversations:

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because he has a different version of Word than you have."
Boss: "Oh. Stupid Microsoft. Can you fix it?"

or

Boss: "Why can't Joe read the document I sent him?"
You: "Because Joe has MS Office and you have an alternative office suite which is free as in free and 99% compatible but not quite perfect because M$ changes formats all the time but it's more stable and less bloated and launches faster but uses an open document format by default so you need to export as .DOC or .RTF or export to .PDF or HTML or Joe can download it (112 MB) for free or..."
Boss: "This aggrivation is not worth $400. Shut up about vendor lock-in and all your free-as-in-speech hippy friends. Run out to Staples and get me MS Office" if you're lucky or "Shut up. You're fired" if you're not.

It is possible (or was, once upon a time) to unseat the reigning king, but the chances of that happening again are unlikely. At best, it'll happen in another 5-10 years. This article is an excellent story but it's worth remembering that a) file formats are several orders of magnitude more complex now and b) there are several orders of magnitude more Excel users today than there were Lotus 1-2-3 users back then. And as for point A, it is, of course, in MS's interest to keep changing the format--whether it's so they can add new features or just to screw competing developers really doesn't matter. The reality is they have and will continue to do so.

Aside: When I first played with the professional version of Acrobat, which will let you actually edit text, I thought right away that Adobe had a better chance of killing Word than anyone else. They could have made a word processor--even one as simple as MS's WordPad--with PDF as its native format. They could have sold this for $50-100 (instead of screwing around with Acrobat Business Tools) and made a mint and would have made a huge dent in the number of .DOC files out there. If they would have combined with OO or StarOffice or AppleWorks or AbiWord or whatever and had a really powerful $150-250 word cruncher, they would have knocked Word off the block instantly.

Think about it--you could make documents that by default (key point there) would be readable on every platform with Acrobat Reader (or something similar) which everyone already has ('nuther key point there). Everyone already knows what a PDF is. (Ask the average man on the street--hell, as the average slashdotter--what SXW is and most won't know. Hell, even God^Hogle says "Did you mean: swf.") For a mere $50 (or whatever), the recipient could edit the document as well, and for, say, $200, they'd have all the power of tables, revisions, authors, etc. "Office" would be no more--people would have Adobe's word processor and Excel. Bam, half the battle won, and as a bonus, Adobe would be more suited to the moniker "The Document Company" than Xerox. But anyway, we're getting off track here. Adobe won't be making a word processor anytime soon.

Yes, Mac OS X can make PDFs from any application that can print. Yes, you can make PDFs for free in Windows. Yes, OOo has built-in one-click PDF support. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that all OOo docs are just gzipped XML and your data can never, ever be lost or unreadable. Doesn't matter that IBM likes it. Your boss, and his secretary, want to launch a word cruncher, type, click the floppy disc icon, and email the result to someone. They don't want to hear about exporting. They don't want to save two copies. If it's not interchangable by default, it has no chance to take over the world. Office won't be unseated anytime soon.

(And the thought that an Apple product will kill Office? Puh-lease. Even if every Mac user dropped Office overnight, that's less than 5% of the document-making world. And just like Safari and IE, MS would kill Office for Mac and bam! there goes the ability to keep Macs in the enterprise. I love Apple, but it ain't gonna happen.)

Yahoo! news has Slashdotters writing their stories!

63rd Anniversary of Pearl Harbor Bombing

Paul Goodyear, 86, of Casa Grande, Ariz., shows where he was stationed as a signalman aboard the USS Oklahoma after the dedication ceremony for teh [sic] ships [sic] new exhibit at the USS Arizona Memoal Museum in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Monday, Dec. 6. 2004.

Normally I wouldn't harp on spelling and grammar errors (even when there are two errors in two consecutive words! ;-) ) but the use of 'teh' struck me as funny. Followed by a missing apostrophe it was quite slashdot-ish. If only they had gone on to say "Despite there early start, Japan went on to loose the war." :-)

Update: this has since been fixed.

FireFox is great. An absolutely awesome browser. It instantly became my default browser way back when it was known as "Phoenix 0.2" On Windows. On Mac OS X, it's still got some catching up to do. Here's why:

- text boxes, like the slashdot comment box and webmail message boxes (outlook OWA and yahoo! mail), don't work well. the cursor is in the wrong place with respect to the text (by the end of the line, it's about two characters ahead or behind where the letters are) and when I delete chaaracters, they only partially disappear. it might be because of how my fonts are set up (custom font set provided by my employer and Suitcase) but I don't care--IE and Safari work just fine. Moz should too.
- speaking of Slashdot, Safari renders it fine. Always. period. FF doesn't. I know there's an extension to fix this but it doesn't work on windows opened in background tabs.
- I can't grab the window by the bottom and drag it around. might sound silly to some but hey, I use it all the time, it turns out.
- middle-click won't open a link (or a bookmark-bar item) in a new tab. Works in Safari and FF/Win.

But hey, at least command-M minimizes, and Expose no longer reveals a hidden window. so they're making progress.

I have the original (non-special edition) Star Wars trilogy on laserdisc. It's letterboxed and built for 4:3 televisions. (Some subtitles appear in the black bands.) I hooked my laserdisc player up to a Sony DVMC (1), which is a handy device that takes analog audio & video (via familiar red, white, and yellow right, left, and composite-video RCA jacks, or S-Video, which I used) and converts it to a standard DV-over-FireWire stream. I connected this box with a 6-to-4-pin FireWire cable to my 800 MHz G3 iBook (30 GB HD, 640 MB RAM) and captured each movie with iMovie.

Each movie is over 2 hours, so I couldn't make them with just iMovie and iDVD, since iDVD has a two-hour limit. (Actually, take that back--I hacked the ending credits off of Star Wars and was able to squeeze it into something short enough for iDVD to deal with.) Luckily, I work at a school that has a nice A/V Mac lab. Final Cut Pro can accept iMovie media files. So, I brought them into FCP, exported them as MPEG2 files, and made DVDs with DVD Studio Pro.

Since I made the DVDs myself, there is no CSS to worry about. To make a copy of one (for Backup Purposes Only (TM), of course) I just have to drag the VIDEO_TS folder onto my hard drive and burn it onto a new DVD, so I don't have to keep all my original working files to avoid DVD rot. (2)

The movies look and sound fine. Sure, it went through a full digital-andlog-digital-recompress cycle, but since everything is such high quality across the board, they look, if not as good as a real DVD or original LD would, at least as good as a pre-recorded tape would, and I have the best of both worlds: random access via the chapters I made, non-degrading digital storage, and I don't have to flip the laserdisc four times per movie. I won't be getting a widescreen TV any time soon, so the non-anamorphic transfer doesn't bother me.

Plus, I made a fourth disc of the laseridc extra features, like interviews and trailers. There is other stuff on the LDs, like storyboards and concept art, but that basically pauses your LD player and you have to frame-advance through a series of stills, and I didn't have that much patience. Plus, most of that is in a big ILM book I have.

(1) ebay search for 'sony dvmc'; sony doesn't sell them anymore. there are similar devices from other manufacturers but the Sony is the only one I have first-hand experience with.

(2) google search for 'dvd rot'

(3) ebay search for 'thx widescreen trilogy vhs'