Domain: uni-mainz.de
Stories and comments across the archive that link to uni-mainz.de.
Comments · 78
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Re: WTF
It isnt because your bias makes you refuse to read sceptical scientific discussions that they dont exist.
Projection isn't a river in Egypt.
Stop reading media crap or rebuttals by propaganda sites and, just for your educational purposes, read some scientific sceptical sites and make up your own mind.
Or maybe read some original papers on the issue! Of course, if it doesn't agree with Anthony Watts, then you'll probably consider it propaganda. Bet you never read these.
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Re:Just remember now...
I have read this paragraph 5 times, and it's still gobbledygook. It sounds like (correct me if I misunderstand) you are saying that climate change, whatever it may be, may or may not influence the weather.
It's pretty complicated. When someone says climate change is responsible for a storm, it's like saying that the "1" in 4+1=5 is responsible for the 5. You would only have a 4 without the 1, but you'd still have a 4. So, for example, without any human-induced climate change we'd still have heat waves but they would generally not be as hot and wouldn't last as long, and fewer people would die. However, if 30 people die, it's unlikely anyone can tell you exactly how many would have died if we hadn't increased the average global temperature. However, we can gauge the trends to determine how things are changing over time. Generally speaking if we are breaking more hot records than cold records, that's evidence that the climate is warming.
As to your last phrase there, "stable climate", I would not suggest that climate is stable. Climate does indeed change -- I just oppose the alarmism, and question the tenets of what has already become a religion for many people.
It's without human activity, the climate wouldn't be stable, but the natural trend in climate is something on the order of -0.3 degrees per 1000 years. Which is much more stable than the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. They're increasing the temperature at around 17 degrees per 1000 years. Of course we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we could reach a 17 degree increase or 1000 years, but I'm putting them in the same units so you can see the difference between what's natural and what's going on now. We're moving things at around 50 times the speed in the opposite direction.
Why are the AGW people here so insistent that everyone must *believe*, or be branded a heretic?
I don't care whether you believe or not, I just correct people when they say things which are contradicted by the best available science. Personally, I don't like it when people spread misinformation. That goes for people who hype global warming too much, as well. We're not actually likely to turn the planet into a cinderball, but I rarely have to correct people making claims like that because there are so few of them and usually someone else has already corrected them.
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Re:Standard ./ line
In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.
Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.
Again, though, that's done correctly.
First, learning is not an industrial process. In the papers cited, all students were expected to operate in economically impractical small peer groups, and all students were expected to master the subject at hand.
This presumption of equality of educability is simply wrong, except at the lowest levels of education, where it's reasonable to expect students to have a relatively equal lack of exposure and therefore be at the same relative point in a given curriculum. This speaks to my earlier point of non-divergence of educational level being of great benefit to the teacher, but not such great benefit to the advanced (or potentially advanced, but thwarted) student.
The small group assumption here is not statistically significant in the three major studies cited by the first paper you linked to; in reality, despite having one of the smallest class sizes in the U.S., California tests near the bottom of the nation. In SAT scores, California scores in around #40 (if we include DC and Puerto Rico separately), while Utah, with twice the number of students per class and half as much spending per student (indeed, it's 48th in the nation), scores in around #19.
Lest you complain about teaching to the test, the first, 3rd, and 4th article you linked specifically reference standardized testing results as justification for their educational theories.
If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.
I have to call B.S. on this. While a trained educator, the P.E. teacher in my high school was neither sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P Math class, nor was he sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P. History class, both of which he was asked to substitute in, more as adult supervision than as someone with relevant knowledge of the subject matter which he could impart to the students. Nor would he have been able to teach my A.P. Chemistry class, my A.P. English class, nor my A.P. Art class. Nor A.P. Biology nor A.P. Physics.
Understanding teaching is not good enough for advanced students; neither is teaching to a lesson plan while being unable to answer questions on the subject matter. Otherwise we might as well just replace the entire teaching staff with SRA booklets as soon as we get a kid up to the 4th grade reading level.
Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you g
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Re:Standard ./ line
Actually, that's the standard teachers union line, where the fast learning kids get to teach the slower kids instead of learning farther ahead themselves. This makes them more manageable, and keeps everything on a nice grade-level basis so the teacher can read the lesson plan a week ahead of having to teach the lesson, instead of knowing the material cold. This is why it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion.
In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.
Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.
Again, though, that's done correctly.
If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.
Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you give 100% on every project you've ever done, and that every single hour of every single day of your working career has been spent working to your maximum potential?
Keep your ignorance in check, please, and don't equate sample size to population - it's bad practice.
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Re:Nope.
Except of course if you do it without manipulating the data and erasing any that doesn't fit with your agenda and then conveniently losing it all so that FOI requests can go in the bit bucket you end up with a chart more like this: http://www.uni-mainz.de/eng/bilder_presse/09_geo_tree_ring_northern_europe_climate.jpg
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Re:Earth won't turn into Venus!
You mean this trend?
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Research on the topic.
I'd like to point out this article by Dr. Mitja Back et al.:
Back, M. D., Schmukle, S. C. & Egloff, B. (2008). How extraverted is honey.bunny77@hotmail.de? Inferring personality traits from email addresses. Journal of Research in Personality, 42, 1116-1122.
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Re:The Curious Case of the Magic SCSI Clock
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Re:OT: Wanted: Lightweight PDF viewer for Firefox
If you're running Windows, there's Foxit Reader. It's a 1.5 MB download, uses less memory, and loads almost instantly. In about 2 years of use, I've only encountered a single PDF that it wouldn't open.
If you're not on Windows, there's xpdf, Evince, kpdf, gv, and probably a dozen others.
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Re:Found data
The probably software that runs your backups was called "Retrospect" from Dantz -Possibly version 2.0 or 3.0 I would guess. I would also guess the tape drive is SCSI. What I would do is: Get a PC with a SCSI card in it, a AHA2940 or 2920 Adaptec is a good choice. Now, make sure you have a bit of free space and load a Mac emulator. Basilisk II is probably the best: http://www.students.uni-mainz.de/bauec002/B2Main.
h tml
then just load Retrospect (it can be found many places and there may even be a download or two online...) Then restore data to a emulated "drive" and copy from HFS to FAT and you got it... -
Re:How about a more scalable solution?If you're referring to the Emplant board, then it wasn't exactly as you describe. Emplant was a combination hardware/software emulation system that provided Macintosh and i586 emulation (though the latter came out MUCH later and not to much fanfare, from what I remember).
The idea of the package was that you could emulate any computer (and multiple ones at the same time, from some of the hype) and typically faster than the equivalent machine of the day. Looking at the software, it was equivalent to Shapeshifter (aka SheepShaver, aka Basilisk II), which meant that it used the native CPU and took over the system ROM functions and replaced them with native ones. Very good performance. For the i586 module, from what I remember, it was a pure software emulation.
What about the hardware? It appeared that the hardware was simply responsible for holding the actual ROM chips of the Macintosh being emulated, an optional no-frills SCSI chip, some Mac serial ports and a few other sockets for random things (an audio digitizer, from the site linked, though apparently never implemented). Basically it was a hardware dongle for a pure software emulation solution, with the ability to hook up to an AppleTalk network.
If there WAS such a board, I never heard of it. I was a very active member of comp.sys.amiga.emulation back through most of the 90's, and if it did exist, it was probably mentioned on that newsgroup. Maybe I just forgot over time.
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Re:Just when they get if finished....Sheepshaver is more of a (stripped down) Mac emulator than a Classic emulator:
However, you still need a copy of MacOS and a PowerMac ROM image to use SheepShaver. If you're planning to run SheepShaver on a PowerMac, you probably already have these two items.
There are probably ways in which desperate people can obtain both, but for most it'll be a legally dubious route.Ardi's Executor is nicer solution, but as the GP says, it doesn't run non-68k apps. One has to hope that the sudden market for third party improvements in Classic compatability born from Apple's unwillingness to produce Macs that'll run older software will give Ardi, at least, an incentive to put in the long awaited PowerPC emulation support.
But as of now, I don't think anyone can legitimately say that there are real solutions for running (most) older, non-Carbonized, Mac software on the Intel Macs, sadly.
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Re:Some legacy Mac apps, for nostalgia
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Re:not totally on-topic but..
I was able to do my state tax forms (which didn't grant me "rights" to save changes) by opening it in gv, saving the individual pages to separate
.pdf files, converting them to .ps files with pdftops (don't use pdf2ps, it's crap), then importing that into Scribus. It has a nice WYSIWYG environment to do your editing. -
Re:For those who know...
BeOS was closer to being ready.
With Sheep Shaver, Classic Mac OS Apps could be run under BeOS. It also provided access to the serial ports and thereby printing, which the BeOS had been lacking.
I suspect that Apple went with NeXT because Steve Jobs came along with the deal.
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Re:Link additions
These really should be in the story posted on Slashdot itself. No good reason to link to another site first...
There's a great reason. The news story was probably submitted by someone from Blue's News looking to have some increased traffic for their advertisers. This happens a lot here on /..
Nevertheless, I can't wait to get home and fire up Basilisk II. Has anyone given these games a try using the Basilisk emulator? And do any of the games require Mac OS 8.0 or higher or PPC? -
Re:Off Topic: Mac on Mac?
You can try and get SheepShaver working, but I haven't been very successful. OS X isn't supported, though.
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Re:Remember...
Nevermind.
Instead of Basillisk II, try PearPC . -
Re:Remember...
But Basillisk II emulates the 68K processor, not the PowerPC processor.
I think what the ancestor post was trying to say was that demoing a PowerPC emulator running on x86, at indecent speed, would be far less unimpressive. -
Re:I got a better idea!
Try Mac On Linux (Like vmware for PPC, PPCLinux only obviously)
Or try Sheep Shaver, a portable PPC emulator, although they admit to not being able to run OS X yet. (And you still need a PPC ROM image) -
Re:Message from the Extreme Conclusions ClubYou can still run Win98 on basically any new machine, but drivers are a bit of a pain. Win98 will not support some of the hardware, but the basic machine will still run. Problems come when you start depending on a piece of proprietary hardware, bleck, just don't do that.
If you need to use a piece of software that will not run under Classic, you can always use Basilisk II if the program is 68K compatable. I haven't checked it out yet, but Sheep Shaver has been ported to Darwin, so you should be able to now have a complete virtual PowerPC macintosh running old versions of MacOS. There is also MOL, which currently only runs under Linux/PPC, but may someday get ported over to OSX, that would allow you to boot multiple coppies of OSX on the same machine.
Moof!
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Re:Message from the Extreme Conclusions ClubYou can still run Win98 on basically any new machine, but drivers are a bit of a pain. Win98 will not support some of the hardware, but the basic machine will still run. Problems come when you start depending on a piece of proprietary hardware, bleck, just don't do that.
If you need to use a piece of software that will not run under Classic, you can always use Basilisk II if the program is 68K compatable. I haven't checked it out yet, but Sheep Shaver has been ported to Darwin, so you should be able to now have a complete virtual PowerPC macintosh running old versions of MacOS. There is also MOL, which currently only runs under Linux/PPC, but may someday get ported over to OSX, that would allow you to boot multiple coppies of OSX on the same machine.
Moof!
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Re:10 years of BeOS
SheepShaver ran "classic" Mac OS apps on BeOS. It has since been GPL'd and ported to Linux.
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Re:RAID Array? Afraid not...
RAID-0
RAID Level 0 is not redundant, hence does not truly fit the "RAID" acronym. In level 0, data is split across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping.
Pulled from here -
Re:This is passion at it's finest
The bloat problem as I see it is that disk/memory now appear to now be so plentiful that many developers think nothing of throwing Mb's of GFX and FMV into a game usually at the expense of gameplay. Am I the only person who remembers when programmers were taught to implement functionality/gameplay first and worry about tarting the user interface up later?? What happened?
The very active C64 development scene is one place where I don't think dust has ever had a chance to settle.... amazing stuff. If you have a S60 mobile then I recommend checking out Hannu Viitala's excellent Frodo S60 port of Frodo works suprisingly well on a Nokia 3650 :-) -
SheepShaver?
How does this compare to SheepShaver? I've heard it's faster than PearPC but haven't tried either myself. To think I'd never heard of either until a few months ago!
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Not the first
This is actually not the first PowerPC Mac emulator for x86. SheepShaver has been able to run PowerPC Mac OS (only up to Mac OS 8.6, not OS X) for some time now. It's from the developer of the excellent Basilisk II emulator.
Hopefully, the two projects will collaborate and help improve the performance of the emulator until it is usable. 1/20th of actual CPU speed would be acceptable. -
Re:You're right...
noiz2sa - SDL
Aleph One - SDL/OpenGL
BZ Flag - OpenGL
Egoboo - SDL/OpenGL
PoopemUp - SDL/OpenGL
Neverwinter Nights - SDL/OpenGL
Not to mention all the Loki titles that used SDL (heck, didn't they develop it in the first place?): Myth, Rune, Civ3,Sim City 3000, Tribes 2, Alpha Centauri, and so on
Don't forget the billion or so Doom/Quake/Wolfenstein 3D ports/spinoffs. -
Re:Postage Stamp sized processors
Actually, iCab is a relatively-modern (HTML 4) browser that will run on 68k Macs. I run it under Basilisk II all the time.
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Re:Anyone figured out how to...
Basilisk runs macos classic on linux systems with X11. All you'd need is to install linux with an X environment on your pda, then port basilisk to it, which should be in the realm of the doable. As for actual speed, who knows, but it would be a cool hack indeed.
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Re:Not really
MacOS 7.5.3 is available from Apple. Combined with BasiliskII, it works wonderfully.
You still need a Mac ROM, though. -
Re:Not really
Not to mention that 68k mac emulation is just about perfect (and fast!) in the shape of basilisk II. I've used it to play around with macos 8. So it's really emulating the ppc that's the problem, not the rom, or the other various bits of hardware (which was a lot more exotic on 68k macs than on ppc macs).
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Re:The screen
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Re:EFI drivers loaded at boot
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Re:However...
I think they're an example of a self sustaining molecule - one that catalyzes the creation of itself from another molecule.
That's probably the best way to look at it. It's just like Vonnegut's ice-nine, except it works on a particular mammalian brain protein instead of water.
Infective particles pass through 30 nm filters and survive immersion for long periods of time in formaldehyde. They are relatively impervious to radiation and can survive the heat of a rendering plant. Unlike the normal protein, the prion form is not attacked by proteases such as those present in a mammalian digestive system.
When the protein mutates to form a prion, a small beta pleated sheet region near the protein's N-terminus nucleates a much larger one that consumes an alpha helix and almost the entire N-terminal half of the protein. Apparently this can happen two ways. A non-mutant form can spontaneously mutate to the prion form. Since the prion's conformational energy appears to be lower from all the beta-pleating, this is thermodynamically possible and there must be high kinetic barriers in the way to prevent it from happening all the time. (While spontaneous cases are extremely rare, they do imply that we will never see these diseases completely eradicated.) The more likely mechanism is exposure to an already-mutant prion particle, which overcomes the kinetic barrier by acting as a catalyst.
The prion's beta pleated sheets apparently give it structural integrity against heat, chemical, and protease attack. They are also what imparts the self-replication ability of the prion to induce the same alpha-helix to beta-pleated-sheet conformational changes in neighboring proteins, in a mechanism that is probably similar to crystal growth. The beta sheet forming peptides aggregate to form amyloid fibrils, and this kills neurons through apoptosis.
See this page on transmissable spongiform encephalopathies for more info. There is a decent animation of the folding event here.
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Screenshot
Here comes the obligatory screenshot.
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Re:Frodo requires an ARM processor and OS 5.0Performance is hardly an issue. Even an old Palm V, with its 15Mhz processor, should have no trouble emulating a 1 Mhz 6502.
As for endianness, what's the big deal? It's not that hard to make your code endian-agnostic. Juddging from the list of Frodo ports, it's just not an issue.
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Re:It depends
Some chips had external databusses with only 16 (or in some cases 8) bits
And the 68008 - the one with the 8 bit data bus - was the processor used in the Sinclair QL.
I don't know if the QL would make my Top Ten list, as it hasn't been delivered yet. I'm sure it said "28 days" on the order form...
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iCab...
For iCab, you can use the 68k version under an emulator like Basilisk II.
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It's not the standards, people
This story's at three comments, and already I'm hearing that "if you just use standards, it'll be OK." That's a load of bull, actually. Standards make the cross-platform problem easier to solve, but there are always differences in interpretation of a spec. Safari has CSS bugs that Mozilla doesn't, and IE's Javascript parser does things differently than Opera's. Standards support helps this situation immensely, but by no means is it a panacea. I'm a big fan of designing sites that validate to XHTML 1.1 and CSS2 (and indeed, all of mine do), but it's still a lot of effort to come up with something that both looks good and works similarly and accessibly across five major browsers and three platforms.
My advice to the poster is to do one of three things:
- Buy an iBook or Powerbook. They're pretty cheap, lovely to use, and you've got a good excuse for needing one. If your budget doesn't allow, check on eBay for a used G4 system (an eMac, for instance) and grab it instead.
- Grab the only decent emulator I know of, Basilisk, and try to find someone with an Apple BIOS ROM and some System 7 CDs. That's as close as you'll get to emulating one, and no, it won't run OS X.
- Use BrowserCam, a service that lets you (for a fee) see the results of your labor in a variety of browsers. It seems pretty cool, if you don't have any other option, but over time just buying a mac will pay for itself anyway.
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Re:wine?
You could always set up Basilisk II and run the older Mac version (4.0, listed at the bottom of the page) inside an emulated 68k Mac.
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Re:Bad mod, that ain't offtopic
Try Basilisk II - it's an open source Mac emulator. Unfortunately, it only emulates the 68k platform, so while Escape Velocity and Escape Velocity: Override work perfectly, Escape Velocity: Nova (the version just released on the Win32 platform) won't work because it require a PPC chip on the Mac.
If you've ever been a Machead like me, you'll get goosebumps the first time it boots and you hear the chime. I loved my Mac...
*sniffle* -
And of course there's always emulation!...which is how I enjoy playing classic games like Ms. Pac-Man, Arkanoid, Spy Hunter, Q-Bert and others... running under a Commodore 64 emulator called Frodo.
...which in my case is running on my Nokia 3650 cell phone. ...which (upgraded like mine) has 2,000 times the RAM of a Commodore 64, anyway. Lots of room for games! :) -
Re:Heh
The problem with Mac emulation is that no one has been able to make a decent PPC emulator for the x86. There have been efforts, but they're all very slow. As a consequence, all mac emulators (including the much, much better Basilisk II) only have 68k emulation code, and can't do anything more. The only known way to emulate requires a hardware PPC card somewhere in the system, instead of software.
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Re:Apple leadership?
"However, Apple hardware remains quite usable for years after x86 hardware becomes "obsolete and/or end of life".
...
Hardware that still works is still usable, and can still be usuable at a higher level than the average WIndows drone could possibly imagine.
You made the claim that Mac hardware remains "viable" longer, and Zathrus pointed out that depends entirely on what you mean by "viable". The very latest Windows software doesn't run well on older x86 PCs, the exact same thing is true of Macs. However, if you're willing to run older, or less "intensive" software, older x86 PCs work just fine, same as Macs.
I know why Windows users have to upgrade their software constantly, but then, most Windows users are, perhaps, not quite the brightest of God's creatures
This is demonstrably false. The vast majority of Windows users have little need to constantly upgrade their applications and do not do so. Your prespective is skewed by all the bleeding-edge users hanging around /. They tend to be computer professionals and are far from typical.
You are probably right in thinking that Mac hardware retains it's value a bit better than x86 hardware, but I'm wondering what that is supposed to prove. Maybe if you were planning on reselling your computer this might be an issue, but I fail to see how "worth less" translates directly to "less useful".
You seem happy running older hardware. That's great. But there is really no reason why you couldn't be happy running x86 hardware. If you really hate Windows, you can run Linux, or BSD, or BeOS, or one of the dozens of other operating systems that run on x86 hardware. There are even emulators to run older versions of MacOS on x86 hardware using Basilisk II or another emulator.
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Re:I celebrated a while ago
I was trying this open source Basilisk II Mac emulator (it does an incredible job btw, try it out if you wanna play some old Mac games like Bolo!) and needed to install a web browser. So I downloaded Netscape Navigator 2 and gave it a whirl. The funny thing was it would choke on Netscape's current default homepage - too much crap on it. I guess they don't regression test. hehe. Of course, it handled Google.com came to the rescue.
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Re:MicrosoftThe best Mac emulator for PC I know of is Basilisk II
It emulates 68k code though, not PPC, so you are stuck with MacOS 8.1 max, but on a fast PC you can run 68k code faster than any Motorola 68k processor ever did! You will need the ROM from a Quadra 650 (68040) for best results.
I was using it to run REALbasic REALbasic 3.5.2 -- the last 68k version. REALbasic can create Windows apps, but you have to run the IDE on the Mac-- that is, until version 5 which just came out but which you have to pay for all over again so I probably won't get it.
One cool thing is to access a Mac network from the PC-- the good old chooser running on Windows!
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GPL'd Mac Emulator: Basilisk II
Here's a GPL'd one that that seems to work pretty well for those old games: Basilisk II
You'll need an OS, but Apple is giving one away for free use (apparantly): OS 7.5.3
So far, AFAIK, this is all legal (or at least uncontested). The tricky part is finding a ROM that works. The only way to get one is to rip it from your own mac - included is software to do that, though. You might be able to find one on the net if you look hard enough, though. (it won't be legal)
And then, of course, you need to find software for it if you don't already have some.
Another tricky thing is dealing with mac programs you download on the net. The mac filesystem has a concept that FAT/NTFS doesn't really have, which is each file has potentially two parts - resource and binary or something like that. I don't really understand it. But if you download an executable directly, then you probably will only get one part and it won't work, so you need to get them in BINHEX'd (HQX) mode, and then use something like HFVExplorer (Win32) to decode it properly when you copy it into your Mac disk image. It took me a while to figure out that HFVExplorer would do this for me, as I had a binhex'd version of Stuffit Expander, and I had no idea how to decode it once it was on the mac disk image, so I could decode other programs.
Good luck!
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Re:Agreed
According to this page, the interview was done in English, and then translated into German. The page also claims to have a transcript of the interview. The text of the transcript is (apart from spelling corrections) exactly the same as that of the linked article.
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Wow, a flamebait *article*...
Users don't just hate the programmers; they hate everyone in the chain who brought in this stupid program in the first place.
For the fifth time in my career here, everyone at the paper has been summoned to hour upon hour of classes on yet another new computer system that's supposed to boost productivity and improve life on our planet.
Fifth time in how many years? According to a biography I google'd up, "Fisher, 37, has worked at The Post since 1987." So, once every three years or so, he has to change software systems. I know of people who change cars more often. That's not too bad, especially if you consider that users don't usually have more than a small piece of the puzzle. Most users don't get/have to use or know each part of the whole system to do their jobs. Also, he didn't mention if this was the fifth system change for whatever duty this software is for, or fifth system change in all of the software on his desktop.
It's not entirely the user's fault. It's not entirely the programmer's fault. The onus lies more on everyone in between who hammers out features, layout of the window and menus, and demands changes be made without figuring how this would affect current users.
Computer training has become the living hell of the American workplace, a loathsome ritual that highlights the mounting battle between the computer cognoscenti and us mere mortals.
How often does the average user go to training? Once when they're hired, and once, maybe twice when a new system is introduced. User training is always less complex than administrator training, and administrators are lucky if they get any formal training, from my experience.
To the tens of millions of Americans whose lot it is to stare into video terminals for most of our waking hours, each new system is more confounding than the last, and each new product strips away many of the advantages of the previous system.
Designing an application's look and feel is not a trivial task, and much has been done to try to simplify menus, taskbars, and the like in the last 16 years. Should we roll back the clock, so that everyone has to use green-screen terminals connected to the mainframe to do their work? Should we un-write the history of Microsoft? Apple? Linux? Should we remove the internet? Block all port 80's so that these newfangled things can't confuse you?
Of course not. But work-flow analysis needs to be done for major systems (and I don't refer just to the software/hardware/computer systems when I say systems). Incremental upgrades should keep some backwards compatabilities --and in the case of the MS OS + Office Suite, it has happened to some extent. Many people get caught up in how 'different' the new version of Windows/Office/etc. is, without looking at how similar it is to the last version they used.
Only 5 upgrades in 16 years? DOS, 3.1, 95, NT, ME, 2k, XP. That's 7, just in Windows versions, and off the top of my head. Most propeller-heads are also fluent in other OS's... Linux, *BSD, Solaris, HP-UX, IRIX, SCO, Mac OS, etc. How many changes in those have we seen in the last 5 years, much less the laast 16? How many employed IT people have only 5 business systems in their heads?
It takes a lot more brainpower for the IT group to support the complaining users than it does for the users to learn a new system. Users do not understand what goes into implementing a new computer system. Maybe if the users knew more about the hours that it takes to implement a new system, and how their management (not IT, in most cases) pushed for this newfangled thing, they'd think twice before getting on their soapboxes.[*]
Users take IT for granted, like most people take dialtone for granted. The only time IT gets any attention is when something breaks. We're a service industry, and we serve the customers, but it's hard to work your 40, 50, 60 hours a week supporting customers, when all you hear is whiners like this guy. "I don't like this, that changes too much. I have to learn something new?"
Yeah, Joe User, and so does your IT group. They have to learn that system inside out and upside down, so that they can support you. They have to figure out how to get the data from your old system into the new one. How to back up and restore the new system. How the new system will work with your other software, on the desktop, and on the network. If there are conflicts, IT has to resolve them. It's not as easy as "plug it in and it goes", like your phone, or your cable box.
IT people work damn hard to make your job easier. Every now and again, you have to learn something new. We try to make it as painless as possible, but you have to remember this: IT doesn't drive the business. IT is driven by the business. IT projects that are user-impacting are driven by users, managers, directors, VP's, and CEO's. These are the people who make the decisions on the new computer system. These are the people you should complain about.
[*] I know, people will complain about anything, but it's a nice dream, isn't it?
I have more rant, but I get easily tired of screaming into the storm. Getting off the soapbox....