You are them. What is this "or"? You miss the point if you think I care about convincing you. I thought my information might be useful to third parties.
I'm dubious about the effect of inclining the treadmill (in earthbound gymnasiums, not in space). I'd be happy to be corrected here, but since your body isn't rising relative to the earth, as it would be if you were running uphill, you aren't gaining potential energy. I think this means it shouldn't be as hard as actually running uphill.
I'd mod you down, but "arrogant" isn't one of the options.
Your kids are right about a lot of things. Not having to make many decisions before or after purchase makes the Mac much more appealing for many consumers.
And people don't care about internals, as long as the machine does what it's supposed to. Since most consumers don't expect their computer to do anything it couldn't do seven or eight years ago, they don't mind having less muscle than they might with an equivalently priced pc.
(I keep hearing on irc and forums that with equivalent hardware a mac laptop is as cheap as one with Windows. As far as I can tell, this is utterly untrue. If anyone objects to my saying this, please provide a link to back up your claim.)
Mac laptops are certainly not bad in terms of build quality, but I think they enjoy a reputation for sturdiness that they don't entirely deserve. The ibm, dell and hp laptops on the market today are all much more rugged and sturdy than they were in the past. Shock-mounted hard drives are a common feature, for instance, and all-around build-quality is better than before.
As for compatability with peripherals, your kids are flat-out wrong (unless you're going to run Windows on the machine too, of course). Windows is still the compatability king, and while iPods in particular might have slightly better support on OS X than on XP, they're the exception, not the rule.
Finally, If you're savvy enough to run Ubuntu, I don't know what use you would have for a Mac. Aqua is pretty nice, but you'll get a lot more out of your hardware if you run linux. The next 3-4 years will see a lot of improvements to X, as well, so aqua probably won't be so tempting.
Yes you do. Google search statistics are a pretty good measure of buzz. Maybe they're not perfect, but they're better than people's intuition.
Here is a graph of the number of searches for "mac laptop". The hump last year shows up in the number of searches for "laptop," (link), but the current climb does not. So it looks like the the numbers from google agree with the article.
First thing, I'm sorry that came out as a block of text. I forgot to choose "plain old text."
I haven't actually tried quake 3, but I tried tremulous and a bunch of other FLOSS FPS games. Frame rates were in the single digits per second on the lowest settings. The models and textures weren't any more detailed than in quake 3, and certainly much less detailed than FarCry, so why shouldn't they work? Maybe they're not optimized to the extent that commercial games are, and maybe I *could* run quake 3. The fact remains that I get less out of my ATI graphics card in Linux than I do in windows.
As for ethernet plug-and-play, maybe it was because I used Xubuntu or maybe it has to do with my school's network.
I don't think plug-and-play was perfect for my Maxtor external hard drive, but even if it was, I wouldn't have been able to write to it without the experimental NTFS-3G package.
I'm glad to hear that plug-and-play works better than my experience had led me to believe, but I'll still skeptical about claims that support on linux is *better* than on windows.
Try Kolourpaint on Linux if you don't like the GIMP. Kolourpaint is one of the friendliest apps on any platform. It has all the ease-of-use of MS Paint, and none of the inexplicable gaps in functionality (MS Paint can't zoom out, can't zoom in except by powers of two, can't drawn transparent, has no hotkeys for tools, can't rotate except by 90-degree angles.....)
That stuff *is* true, if you're talking about randomly chosen hardware rather than stuff selected for linux functionality.
Plug and play for "arbitrary devices" is still pretty weak in GNU/linux at this point. It's not surprising: the gadgets have been built with the intention that they work right out of the box with Windows. Maybe they work in linux, but you have to read on a forum somewhere about how to set them up.
Even for totally generic devices, there's less plug-and-play freedom than in Windows.
If I yank the CD-drive from my laptop while running GNU/linux, it locks completely. I can't plug in ethernet after having turned the computer on, rather I have to boot with it plugged in. Maybe I shouldn't do the first, but if you're giving the computer to your mom, you'd rather she be able to. Maybe there's something I can do about the second, but if so, why wasn't it enabled by default in Ubuntu Edgy?
As for proprietary 3d drivers, it's true that even ATI, the worst GPU manufacturer when it comes to OSS support, has pretty decent drivers for recent cards. Slightly older cards, like my Mobility Radeon 9000, are supported only by open-source community-built drivers with lousy 3d performance. I'm willing to accept this in return for greater control over my desktop, but you can't say that I've got perfectly good performance. 1st person shooters are totally out of the question, whereas in Windows I could play stuff as modern as FarCry, albeit on the lowest settings.
So: hardware might "generally work," but it's a pain to configure compared to Windows (where you probably just have to plug it in. At worst, you might have to pop in a cd and use a wizard to install drivers), and even when properly configured it may not give the user as much freedom. As for graphics cards, the proprietary 3d drivers are fine for the newer cards, but older cards are capable of much more under Windows.
It's frustrating that the newsmedia do so much to encourage the public misconception that downloading music can get you in trouble with the RIAA.
That aside, (and this may be an unpopular stance) it seems unreasonable that the university should expect to be reimbursed for scolding students. As the gatekeepers, they're responsible for shutting anyone down who is violating copyright laws. They may have to penalize the offenders to discourage bad behavior, and they may have to suspend access for some student. That's what a responsible institution will do.
Frequently in fully produced (not filmed-on-the-lot-of-the-used-car-dealership) television commercials there will be an awkward sentence with strange asymmetry or lack of parallelism. I wonder how many people notice it, and what the intended effect could be.
The more obvious instances of linguistic trickery becomes cliche once they get made fun of enough (think of the part of a prescription drug commercial where they talk about the symptoms in a soothing voice as though this information should set us at ease).
One commercial that got plenty of airtime in my area was for a drug "with a low risk of sexual side effects," (presumably it competes with a drug that has a higher risk), and rather than deliver the sentence straight: "with a LOW risk of sexual side effects," the narrator delivered it as though the risk were a feature that other drugs lacked: "with a low RISK of sexual side effects."
Human language shouldn't be abused in this cynical fashion. I'd love to see legislation that gave regulators more control over the inflection used in advertising voice-overs.
The people who design and build these telescopes don't have unlimited budgets. If they use up their grant money sending a telescope into space, they can't hire as many graduate students, for instance. While saving money isn't the primary concern for the principal investigator, it's certainly a priority.
The reason WMAP was a space telescope was, as you said, so that it wouldn't have to look through the water-vapor in the atmosphere. ACT and ALMA will be earth-based because it's impractical to send telescopes as big as those into space.
In summation, don't worry: astronomy funds are not being wasted!
Yes, and at room temperature, no less. The hotter (or faster-moving, if it's got some velocity) the particle is, the better its chance of tunneling out of a potential well.
There was a Star Trek: TNG episode (or a two-parter) about this. I'd post a link to a synopsis if I could figure out which episode it was. There were Klingons in it...the information was for a super-weapon or something, and it had a silly name.
If information about casual shooters is topical here, I'll offer some.
For a fun pc-based diversion, check out Binary Zoo's Mono: part Asteroids, part Robotron, part Paint Shop Pro. The Binary Zoo people are a great crowd. They're doing creative stuff, and in this decadent age, they still take the trouble to optimize their code.
Also, google Kenta Cho and check out his games. Some are pretty generic shoot-'em-ups, but others are quite unique. He's writing in D, so again, it's great stuff for older machines. Of his stuff, I most enjoy a7x and Tumiki Fighter. With interesting physics and challenging gameplay, these are games for grownups. Some of it is GPL'ed too, if that makes a difference to you.
You're right that no "handicapping" based on the age of system is in order. But the ages are currently quite disproportionate, sixteen months is a lot more than three. If the Wii is behind now, it still has plenty of time to catch up before this generation's systems have matured.
In case you were unaware, it depends what school you're at. My university gives a warning or two before turning over your personal information. Some universities don't log which student is using which IP address at all, and when the content-owners come calling they shrug and say "sorry, take the whole school to court if you want." And in case you hadn't noticed, the cases that go to trial are never against any kind of an intimidating target. Every major defense has been pro bono or on the cheap, no?
Just FYI, the bit about automatically adding entries to menus is already implemented in the *buntus (possibly others; these are just the ones I've used). The "add/remove programs" utility is nothing great, but whether I install a package with apt-get, with synaptic, adept or Add/Remove, it has always shown up immediately in the Panel Menu.
I think running and jumping robots are quite far away. The problem is that modern mechanical actuators can't efficiently generate the kind of power (force times speed, equivalent to energy per unit time) needed for a jump or a sprint. You could get a jump with springs coiled by a slower drive-train, but that kind of explosive, uncontrolled release would not be coordinated.
At this point a shuffling jog is a (serious) programming challenge, but for a running or jumping robot you would need physical technology that we don't have.
Slashdot Mirror
....Convincing me or them...
You are them. What is this "or"? You miss the point if you think I care about convincing you. I thought my information might be useful to third parties.
The buttons on the window decoratons (pic) look awful.
More people have been to Europe than I have.
.
.
.
.
(read it again)
I'm dubious about the effect of inclining the treadmill (in earthbound gymnasiums, not in space). I'd be happy to be corrected here, but since your body isn't rising relative to the earth, as it would be if you were running uphill, you aren't gaining potential energy. I think this means it shouldn't be as hard as actually running uphill.
Don't argue with me about this.
I'd mod you down, but "arrogant" isn't one of the options.
Your kids are right about a lot of things. Not having to make many decisions before or after purchase makes the Mac much more appealing for many consumers.
And people don't care about internals, as long as the machine does what it's supposed to. Since most consumers don't expect their computer to do anything it couldn't do seven or eight years ago, they don't mind having less muscle than they might with an equivalently priced pc.
(I keep hearing on irc and forums that with equivalent hardware a mac laptop is as cheap as one with Windows. As far as I can tell, this is utterly untrue. If anyone objects to my saying this, please provide a link to back up your claim.)
Mac laptops are certainly not bad in terms of build quality, but I think they enjoy a reputation for sturdiness that they don't entirely deserve. The ibm, dell and hp laptops on the market today are all much more rugged and sturdy than they were in the past. Shock-mounted hard drives are a common feature, for instance, and all-around build-quality is better than before.
As for compatability with peripherals, your kids are flat-out wrong (unless you're going to run Windows on the machine too, of course). Windows is still the compatability king, and while iPods in particular might have slightly better support on OS X than on XP, they're the exception, not the rule.
Finally, If you're savvy enough to run Ubuntu, I don't know what use you would have for a Mac. Aqua is pretty nice, but you'll get a lot more out of your hardware if you run linux. The next 3-4 years will see a lot of improvements to X, as well, so aqua probably won't be so tempting.
How do you measure buzz? You don't.
Yes you do. Google search statistics are a pretty good measure of buzz. Maybe they're not perfect, but they're better than people's intuition.
Here is a graph of the number of searches for "mac laptop". The hump last year shows up in the number of searches for "laptop," (link), but the current climb does not. So it looks like the the numbers from google agree with the article.
In the nineties, Mario has better world-wide name-recognition than Mickey Mouse.
First thing, I'm sorry that came out as a block of text. I forgot to choose "plain old text."
I haven't actually tried quake 3, but I tried tremulous and a bunch of other FLOSS FPS games. Frame rates were in the single digits per second on the lowest settings. The models and textures weren't any more detailed than in quake 3, and certainly much less detailed than FarCry, so why shouldn't they work? Maybe they're not optimized to the extent that commercial games are, and maybe I *could* run quake 3. The fact remains that I get less out of my ATI graphics card in Linux than I do in windows.
As for ethernet plug-and-play, maybe it was because I used Xubuntu or maybe it has to do with my school's network.
I don't think plug-and-play was perfect for my Maxtor external hard drive, but even if it was, I wouldn't have been able to write to it without the experimental NTFS-3G package.
I'm glad to hear that plug-and-play works better than my experience had led me to believe, but I'll still skeptical about claims that support on linux is *better* than on windows.
ah! right you are.
Try Kolourpaint on Linux if you don't like the GIMP. Kolourpaint is one of the friendliest apps on any platform. It has all the ease-of-use of MS Paint, and none of the inexplicable gaps in functionality (MS Paint can't zoom out, can't zoom in except by powers of two, can't drawn transparent, has no hotkeys for tools, can't rotate except by 90-degree angles.....)
That stuff *is* true, if you're talking about randomly chosen hardware rather than stuff selected for linux functionality. Plug and play for "arbitrary devices" is still pretty weak in GNU/linux at this point. It's not surprising: the gadgets have been built with the intention that they work right out of the box with Windows. Maybe they work in linux, but you have to read on a forum somewhere about how to set them up. Even for totally generic devices, there's less plug-and-play freedom than in Windows. If I yank the CD-drive from my laptop while running GNU/linux, it locks completely. I can't plug in ethernet after having turned the computer on, rather I have to boot with it plugged in. Maybe I shouldn't do the first, but if you're giving the computer to your mom, you'd rather she be able to. Maybe there's something I can do about the second, but if so, why wasn't it enabled by default in Ubuntu Edgy? As for proprietary 3d drivers, it's true that even ATI, the worst GPU manufacturer when it comes to OSS support, has pretty decent drivers for recent cards. Slightly older cards, like my Mobility Radeon 9000, are supported only by open-source community-built drivers with lousy 3d performance. I'm willing to accept this in return for greater control over my desktop, but you can't say that I've got perfectly good performance. 1st person shooters are totally out of the question, whereas in Windows I could play stuff as modern as FarCry, albeit on the lowest settings. So: hardware might "generally work," but it's a pain to configure compared to Windows (where you probably just have to plug it in. At worst, you might have to pop in a cd and use a wizard to install drivers), and even when properly configured it may not give the user as much freedom. As for graphics cards, the proprietary 3d drivers are fine for the newer cards, but older cards are capable of much more under Windows.
He can't be a moron *and* a troll. If he expects the reaction, he's a troll but not stupid. If he doesn't expect it, he's in earnest and not a troll.
Just sayin'...
It's frustrating that the newsmedia do so much to encourage the public misconception that downloading music can get you in trouble with the RIAA.
That aside, (and this may be an unpopular stance) it seems unreasonable that the university should expect to be reimbursed for scolding students. As the gatekeepers, they're responsible for shutting anyone down who is violating copyright laws. They may have to penalize the offenders to discourage bad behavior, and they may have to suspend access for some student. That's what a responsible institution will do.
Frequently in fully produced (not filmed-on-the-lot-of-the-used-car-dealership) television commercials there will be an awkward sentence with strange asymmetry or lack of parallelism. I wonder how many people notice it, and what the intended effect could be.
The more obvious instances of linguistic trickery becomes cliche once they get made fun of enough (think of the part of a prescription drug commercial where they talk about the symptoms in a soothing voice as though this information should set us at ease).
One commercial that got plenty of airtime in my area was for a drug "with a low risk of sexual side effects," (presumably it competes with a drug that has a higher risk), and rather than deliver the sentence straight: "with a LOW risk of sexual side effects," the narrator delivered it as though the risk were a feature that other drugs lacked: "with a low RISK of sexual side effects."
Human language shouldn't be abused in this cynical fashion. I'd love to see legislation that gave regulators more control over the inflection used in advertising voice-overs.
The people who design and build these telescopes don't have unlimited budgets. If they use up their grant money sending a telescope into space, they can't hire as many graduate students, for instance. While saving money isn't the primary concern for the principal investigator, it's certainly a priority.
The reason WMAP was a space telescope was, as you said, so that it wouldn't have to look through the water-vapor in the atmosphere. ACT and ALMA will be earth-based because it's impractical to send telescopes as big as those into space.
In summation, don't worry: astronomy funds are not being wasted!
Some of the ACT ( Atacama Cosmology Telescope ) computers run an old version of Red Hat.
Make it so, Mr. Data.
Yes, and at room temperature, no less. The hotter (or faster-moving, if it's got some velocity) the particle is, the better its chance of tunneling out of a potential well.
When AOL and McAfee teamed up, the result was a 30-minute boot on my mother's 1.0 GHz XP box. I will never install anything from McAfee.
There was a Star Trek: TNG episode (or a two-parter) about this. I'd post a link to a synopsis if I could figure out which episode it was. There were Klingons in it...the information was for a super-weapon or something, and it had a silly name.
If information about casual shooters is topical here, I'll offer some.
For a fun pc-based diversion, check out Binary Zoo's Mono: part Asteroids, part Robotron, part Paint Shop Pro. The Binary Zoo people are a great crowd. They're doing creative stuff, and in this decadent age, they still take the trouble to optimize their code.
Also, google Kenta Cho and check out his games. Some are pretty generic shoot-'em-ups, but others are quite unique. He's writing in D, so again, it's great stuff for older machines. Of his stuff, I most enjoy a7x and Tumiki Fighter. With interesting physics and challenging gameplay, these are games for grownups. Some of it is GPL'ed too, if that makes a difference to you.
You're right that no "handicapping" based on the age of system is in order. But the ages are currently quite disproportionate, sixteen months is a lot more than three. If the Wii is behind now, it still has plenty of time to catch up before this generation's systems have matured.
In case you were unaware, it depends what school you're at. My university gives a warning or two before turning over your personal information. Some universities don't log which student is using which IP address at all, and when the content-owners come calling they shrug and say "sorry, take the whole school to court if you want." And in case you hadn't noticed, the cases that go to trial are never against any kind of an intimidating target. Every major defense has been pro bono or on the cheap, no?
Just FYI, the bit about automatically adding entries to menus is already implemented in the *buntus (possibly others; these are just the ones I've used). The "add/remove programs" utility is nothing great, but whether I install a package with apt-get, with synaptic, adept or Add/Remove, it has always shown up immediately in the Panel Menu.
I think running and jumping robots are quite far away. The problem is that modern mechanical actuators can't efficiently generate the kind of power (force times speed, equivalent to energy per unit time) needed for a jump or a sprint. You could get a jump with springs coiled by a slower drive-train, but that kind of explosive, uncontrolled release would not be coordinated.
At this point a shuffling jog is a (serious) programming challenge, but for a running or jumping robot you would need physical technology that we don't have.