flenserboy

fair. but something similar could be done via a terminal-friendly packaging system — one directory, one location for everything application-related. it's not so much the drag-and-drop I'm drawn to as it is the clear location for each application.

it should have been drag-and-drop only from the start. I'd gladly hop on to a Linux/BSD distro which would be clean & consistent with this.

Quite fond of kpfonts. As much as I use XeTeX because of OpenType, I find myself going back to PDFLaTeX so I can get the benefits of Microtype. I tried some of my docs through LuaTeX, but the results, while fine, were still inferior to the two options above.

here's a guess: text was sharp on an Apple II with a decent monitor. font shapes were good. no matter how good graphics were on the C64 & Ataris, in comparison, text was always blocky & amateur looking. Tandy did better on this front, but it wasn't enough for them. pretty sure this is the same reason why the Amiga & the ST didn't make more inroads — people looked at them alongside the Mac & technical considerations were quickly forgotten. it's funny to me that this hasn't changed all that much — Windows font rendering looks awful to me, & I'll always pick a Mac or Linux box to use instead if there's a choice, just so I don't have to put up with the fonts. this wasn't always the case — the old system character sets used under DOS were pleasant to use.

the guardrails are probably going to end up being way too close together when the dust settles — imagine if something as simple as "young wizard" would be enough to trip the warnings. someone could be looking to do an image from Feist's early novels, or of their own work, & that will be verboten. it may turn out that we're facing the strongest copyright holders being able to limit everyone's legitimate use of these tools.

that would torque me off so bad...

Interesting that you think that of 7.5.3 — it worked, sure, but it could be painfully slow. System 6 was preferable as an OS — MultiFinder was better than 7, at least in the first couple iterations — but much of the software I needed demanded 7. 7.6.x was the first bright spot since 7.1 fixed much of what went wrong in 7.0, & there was a ton of waiting after that. 9 just chugged along for me, for the most part, which was nice.

Loved Snow Leopard too, & was shocked by how bad Lion was in comparison. Glad they got back on track after that.

life expands to fit the space it's given. pretty much every habitable niche on Earth has something living there, extending even well down into the planet. we probably should be helping things along by sending craft filled with various single-celled organisms (& some tardigrades for good measure) to places where life isn't found (do the research first; no need to overwrite what could already be there) but might be able to get a toehold.

baseball bats

So long as they don't build the models to rely on earlier papers, it might work. Fraudulent or mistaken earlier work, taken as correct, could easily lead to newer papers which disagree or don't use the older data as wrong/mistaken. This sort of checking needs to drill down as far as possible.

I'd put a dollar on it being due to tracking mouse behavior — if they want to cheaply track clicks & movement for the sake of advertisers, their surveillance needs to be as low-powered as possible.

This seems like a much better deal than a blinged-out Mini. Interesting choices this generation.

if the voters can't keep someone they like in office, there must also be strong restrictions on time served as congressional / governmental aides, or else those people will become even more powerful than they already are. far too many elected officials already appear to be nothing more than fronts for their unelected staff.

The origin of TeX!

Apple could be the first modern corporation to declare war on a nation-state. They have the resources to set the internet hounds on them & make them absolutely miserable. Looks like the Heinlein/Snowcrash/Stross corporate futures are in play.

Why not? WoW, for instance, could be a fantastic environment for online meetings & as a help desk/corporate hot spot. For example, a dungeon instance could be the place where all the attendees for a meeting could be allowed in & interact with each other while/after the event was over. The help desk would likely grab regular users as they would have a being of a sort to interact with. This could be done on a company-by-company level, or there could be many companies available in this way, with fast travel between them. It could be a double bonus if the visitors to the site could go on small quests while they wait, with some sort of reward system built in.

This is only to repeat what has been said by many, numerous times, but —

1. The point of search was no longer to provide requested data, but to generate clicks for Google's ad service.

2. Generating clicks for Google's ad service required that exact text search, boolean searches, & everything else useful had to be excised because giving what was asked for reduced engagement.

3. Ads had to be stuck on the top half of the results page, & the second half of the search results, for more clicks to be earned, had to be filled with garbage sites that did not provide what was sought. This encouraged the proliferation of scrapers & bot-generated text sites. Hand-in-hand with this was the elimination of long-tail results, as digging into results might give useful results.

4. It appears that a decision was made at some point to curate & direct answers toward particular results. While much has been made about certain political leanings being almost disappeared by this move, it appears to be much more likely that this was a result of returning results which generated more ad revenue & clicks (which may say more about the sorts of sites Google runs ads on than anything else).

5. In parallel with the dominance of ad-revenue mining, data mining became a major purpose of receiving search requests. Thus the requests for location information on every search, tied in with the drive to personalize results not for the purpose of giving good results, but to give identified users results they were more likely to interact with to both interact with Google ads & give Google more data to suck down & use.

If we could get them to revert back to the 2006-era search engine, where more than just major sites & bot farms are indexed, we would have something useful. But that's not going to happen.

Compact — SE/30. Amazingly expandable & powerful, while at the same time almost being portable given its size. Perhaps an era equivalent, except for having a monitor, for the new Minis.

Desktop — IIci. Probably the best-looking of the 80s Macs, while at the same time large enough to give plenty of room for expansion.

Both of these had long lives thanks to upgrades, & both would be fun & good-looking revivals.

Interesting, & not necessarily in a good way. This method could well presage unprecedented numbers of attempts at eminent domain takings or other means of forcing people out of their properties.

Give his Glass Bead Game a try; it is dense, delightful, & its content would appeal much to the denizens of this site.

that ship sailed a long time ago

in addition to this, ever since the sequoia update I've been getting security failure errors on reddit which sometimes, & sometimes do not, go away with a page reload

"On The Tastes of Women in the Hamburger Kingdom: Doc as the Personification of Female Desire"

I got use that, or some near version of it, back in the day. Cool to see here.

Tax law would also have to change: https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-cre....

That's because the US is a profit farm for US corporations (& a tax farm for those making bank on US foreign policy) so they can subsidize the rest of the world. Food, medicine, you name it — bottom-of-the-barrel service & quality for the average person & below in the US at top-dollar prices, & the people in the middle & below classes think they're doing well because it's all they know.

It's great for those who want it, but I really hope it can be turned off just as with most of their recent UI additions, such as Stage Manager.

This is good reason for why applications should be containerized. The Old OS X way of simply putting a bundle into the Applications directory was a good start.

I don't think that's the only factor. There is a strong impetus toward obfuscation, both from the direction of a search engine (more clicks, more "interaction"), and from corporate & govt interests (the less people know, & know to be actually true, the better).

It is dangerous to allow groups of any sort to be excluded from licensing. This sort of behavior is far too easily weaponized against minority political, opinion, & affinity groups. While I'm not keen on the police having these tools in their hands, who else will be next? Who will be squeezed out of the economy because everyone who provides a particular sort of software or service decides to enact the same policies? This is why software should be sold, not licensed — a word processor should be treated no differently from a loaf of bread.