What's the real point of using a mac? Mostly what I've seen, the *point* of using a mac is to take your pretty little 4oz laptop into a coffeehouse and act like you're better than everyone else.
I mean, seriously, if all I wanted to do with computers was what some company thinks I should do, I would run Windows. I certainly don't use my iphone the way Steve Jobs thinks I should (i.e. I don't buy anything in the app store or from itunes and have the thing jailbroken to hell and back). I don't use my laptop the way Lenovo thinks I should (I haven't booted into Windows on it in months, and have upgraded the hard drive). I don't use my firewall or my nameserver as I should - they were both desktop machines used by bank tellers before I got my hands on them. I don't even use my switch like I should - it's an enterprise level switch I picked up cheap somewhere and designed for much heavier use than I put it to.
Ubuntu wouldn't have let me run the commercial software I wanted without resorting to Wine, so it doesn't really fit what I needed. Dual booting Windows and Debian (what I do with my laptop) doesn't let me run Unix apps and Windows apps at the same time, so it doesn't fit what I needed either. With a Mac, I could have run the software I use most of the time natively on Mac OS *and* still be able to run Mac software simultaneously. It would have run with (for me) minimal fuss.
For me, that's the point of using a Mac. I fail to see what anyone else's opinion on the proper reasons for using a Mac should matter to me. Since people have spent the time and effort to port these libraries and applications to run on Mac OS, I'm apparently not the only one who feels this way.
That the Earth and Moon make up what is in fact a double planet system
IIRC, to be a double planet system, the center of rotation of the two objects has to be outside both the objects. The center of rotation in the Earth-Moon system is well inside the Earth, making the Moon officially a moon.
The reason all these truckers wind up with crappy GPS units is because they invariably buy them with their first paycheck and can't afford the $400 trucker GPS. Most truckers are fairly cash-strapped when they first start out, having just changed careers and paid for trucking school.
I didn't; I figured I didn't really need one, and now if I need a quick overview of the road, I just use Google Maps on my phone to show me the immediate area. I know how to read a map, though, and a lot of truckers really don't. Hell, my girlfriend (also a driver) can't seem to wrap her head around the cardinal directions and has no sense of geography at all.
My girlfriend has an old out-of-date Magellan GPS in her truck, and I'm just waiting for the call where she wound up halfway up some tiny mountain road with a washed out bridge.
There may be no code left from that era, but the ideas and community have remained. The Enlightenment community and the GNOME community have very different ideas on a lot of things.
That being said, I haven't use E since DR14, which I couldn't stand (DR13 was twelve kinds of awesome, though). A lot of the ideas we think of as standard first gained headway in E - imlib and esd were both originally part of Enlightenment, and eterm was the first popular terminal to support background images and pseudotransparency. E was also the first real working window manager that was designed for eye candy. If they've still got creative ideas to bring to the table, I'm all for it.
I dunno, I wanted to buy a mac back in the day so that I would have the best of both worlds - availability of various bits of commercial software unavailable on Unix and the ability to run Unix apps without dealing with hacks like cygwin (don't get my wrong, I like cygwin, and I have nothing but respect for its developers, but it's a hack) or wine (same disclaimer). You can run quite a bit of Unix software on OS X, and most of the commercial software programs I wanted are also available.
I decided not to after a spur of the moment decision to buy an iPhone changed my opinion of apple. I'll never give them a dime of my money again.
Anyway, were I to own a mac, most of my time would be spent running applications that don't use Cocoa. I know I'm in the minority, but hey, so are the guys who develop things like this.
I don't think the problem with the W3C was its speed - many of its standards were well ahead of what the browsers were supporting.
The problem with the W3C was that during most of the important development, the only relevant browser vendor completely ignored them. XHTML wasn't perfect, but a lot of the concepts it introduced (namespaces, for one) would have been a major step forward. You really can't blame Mozilla for not adopting the later XHTML standards, because by the time they had caught up in functionality with IE, everyone had pretty much given up on XHTML.
Of course, the other problem with the W3C was that they refused to face the fact that layout is important. Even following the standards, there were things you could do in HTML 3.2 that you couldn't do in CSS 1 and 2. Layout with table tags is easy - I could explain it to someone in ten minutes or less - and it worked pretty much everywhere. I completely understand the reasons why table layout is bad, and I completely agree with them, but there's no excuse for there not being a decent replacement.
Central planning doesn't work, that has been proven by the soviets already.
The Soviets didn't prove anything, really. They only proved that the soviet government couldn't do it. Corruption undercut them at every turn.
In a capitalist system, you don't go through one entity for everything, so corruption doesn't affect your life to quite the same degree it does under a communist system.
They still have the same problems with corruption under the current government. It's a cultural thing, and it's unlikely to go away. And that's good for pretty much everyone else, because otherwise the Warsaw Pact would have steamrolled over most of the world.
Add in the fact that there's a huge difference in running a communist system for a country with a huge, diverse population and almost unlimited natural resources and running one on a small peninsula of racially and culturally homogeneous people. The PRNK could probably do fine under a well maintained communist system if their leaders weren't batshit crazy.
Sitting back and letting everyone else decide who should be in power should be what we hope for in an uninformed populace. He said he didn't pay attention to politics, so any voting he would have done would have been based on campaign ads or what the guy at the bus stop was ranting about.
If voting was done by people who actually know what's going on, politicians would actually have to worry about the consequences of their actions.
I had one similar to that, although not the same model.
I got tons of use out of it. I wouldn't recommend it for children under eight or nine, though.
Last time I went to Radio Shack, I looked for one of these, but nowdays they've thrown out the springs and wires and you have some kind of snap together thing. I can't imagine those having the same flexibility as the spring type ones.
I wonder if Microsoft even have a clue about how much damage their arrogant attitude is doing to their potential market?
Yes, they have a very good idea about how it's affecting their market. It's close to 0%, because the percentage of potential buyers who will find out about this and care enough to boycott it is so small as to have a negligible effect on sales.
Consumer ignorance and apathy are the reasons companies get away with this type of thing. I think I'm the only person who is still boycotting Amazon over their 1-click patent.
California police aren't supposed to bother you if you have less than a certain amount of pot, measured in ounces. I believe a lot of the states that have medical marijuana limit possession to a couple ounces at any one time. Only the DEA seems to measure weed with the metric system, which may reflect the fact they work quite a bit trying to stop importation.
Around here (Oklahoma), I believe it's still sold in ounces and quarter ounces. I never got a consensus on what a "dime bag" was actually supposed to be.
So if you want your kids to learn the metric system, skip pot and introduce them to cocaine.
Copyright is broken too, so it wouldn't help anything. Copyright lasts damn near forever these days, so if it was extended to include things the patent system does, innovation would grind to a halt completely. Think of what has been invented in the last seventy years, and imagine if no one was able to use any of it without fees. Now imagine that nothing copyrighted after Mickey Mouse was first drawn was allowed to expire, which is likely to be the case.
Patents exist for a very good reason, and in theory protect inventors and researchers who deserve a return of investment on their work. The problem is that the patent system is widely abused and badly needs fixing. Nixing software patents and enforcing the requirements that an invention can be reproduced from the patent document alone would go a long way toward solving the problems.
I got my phone right when the 3GS came out, and I didn't pay any attention to the articles on phones before then. I knew apple would try to be controlling, I was just amazed at how far they went.
After buying my iPhone, I found a number of "features" on it that pissed me right off. Granted, I should have researched more, but I was on a limited time frame.
In any case, I decided I'm not going to pay a dime to the app store. I'm not sending any more money to Apple.
Because of this, I don't have that many apps on it. I browse the 'net a bit, and use Google Maps quite a bit, but other than that I don't really do much. I could pretty much replace the thing with a $30 phone, a GPS navigation system, and a book to read while I'm waiting on my food at truck stops.
My next phone will be an Android (probably second-hand and unlocked, since I doubt AT&T will start selling them any time soon) and I expect my usage will go up quite a bit.
(For those curious, a small sample of my problems with the phone includes the crippled bluetooth, the requirement for itunes to do anything to the phone, the lack of jailbreak ability (this has since been solved, but wasn't when I got the phone), the lack of flash support, and the insane way you have to go about converting mp3s to ringtones, among other nitpicks. All these are related to how Apple wants to control my use of the phone. The killer was when, shortly after I got the phone and had everything set up on it, my one machine with windows on it crashed, and after I reinstalled it insisted I erase my phone in order to resync it. I'm not a violent man, but I came really close to crushing my phone with my truck when that happened.)
Using decimals would work (for the most part) today, but the previous generation of senior citizens would have had an issue with it, as most of them would not have used a decimal number since school, back around World War II.
We're a very fraction-oriented society, even though most of the populace can't work with fractions that don't have powers of two as the denominator. I'm sure that one of my grandfathers wouldn't have dealt well with 1.5l, but could work with fractions of an inch all day long with no trouble.
India mostly uses fuel bought from Russia. They're working on getting thorium based reactors working, since they won't have to import it and the proposed reactor design would use much less fuel for the same energy.
Japan imports their uranium as well. I'm not sure who they get it from, but I wouldn't be surprised if the buy it from the US.
According to Wikipedia, Japan is trying to be in position to sell the US reactors once we get over the whole nuclear paranoia and start building them again. Because of this, they collaborate with various US government agencies concerning nuclear power. I'm not sure if that would dissuade them from reprocessing or not.
Deserts tend to have water. They just don't get a lot of rain. People in Arizona still get water when they turn on their tap.
There are coal plants in the desert, and nuclear plants really don't use any more water than coal plants do. The water in the reactor gets recycled back through, so unless you reactor leaks (which is a major problem which would get fixed quickly) you only really use the water in the turbine, and even that can be reclaimed if you need to. Of course, if your goal is create hydrogen, you'll need a good source of water, but there's plenty of rivers that flow in the middle of nowhere in the southwest (Colorado, Rio Grande, etc.) that could be tapped.
(You're right that there are reactor designs that don't use water, but steam turbine technology is probably the most mature and reliable way of turning the generators, so you'll still need water.)
The desert (mostly) fixes the NIMBY problem. The problem the desert doesn't fix is that the grid isn't set up for it. Obama has made noise about modernizing our electric grid, so perhaps large solar farms and nuke plants in the desert will become feasible.
The USA doesn't use imperial units. Those were voted in after we split off from the empire.
The SI system is awkward for a lot of things. The kilometer is fine, but the lack of any (widely used) unit between centimeter and meter is a major drawback for people used to the foot (about 30 cm). Our closest unit to the meter (the yard) is pretty much only used for outdoor distances, such as sports fields and agriculture.
The lack of an ounce equivalent is also bizarre. The gram is way too small. Same with milliliters.
You have to bear in mind that the USA does use the SI system for quite a bit of stuff. The customary units are mostly used for goods (milk by the gallon, flour by the pound) and distances (my living room is 14' by 16'). You buy lumber by the foot, for instance. Other than inches/feet (which I admit, sucks), we don't do a lot of conversions. Anything involving science or engineering is done using the SI system.
The problem is that the article was written (badly) for a US audience, and the average American thinks in pounds per square inch, not Newtons per meter (and yes, pound is a unit of force, not a unit of mass, for all those people above who keep screaming about it).
There were quite a few astronaut fatalities back during the cockrocket days, as well. Granted, those were a long time ago, but we haven't sent anyone up in any U.S. spacecraft besides the shuttle in decades.
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What's the real point of using a mac? Mostly what I've seen, the *point* of using a mac is to take your pretty little 4oz laptop into a coffeehouse and act like you're better than everyone else.
I mean, seriously, if all I wanted to do with computers was what some company thinks I should do, I would run Windows. I certainly don't use my iphone the way Steve Jobs thinks I should (i.e. I don't buy anything in the app store or from itunes and have the thing jailbroken to hell and back). I don't use my laptop the way Lenovo thinks I should (I haven't booted into Windows on it in months, and have upgraded the hard drive). I don't use my firewall or my nameserver as I should - they were both desktop machines used by bank tellers before I got my hands on them. I don't even use my switch like I should - it's an enterprise level switch I picked up cheap somewhere and designed for much heavier use than I put it to.
Ubuntu wouldn't have let me run the commercial software I wanted without resorting to Wine, so it doesn't really fit what I needed. Dual booting Windows and Debian (what I do with my laptop) doesn't let me run Unix apps and Windows apps at the same time, so it doesn't fit what I needed either. With a Mac, I could have run the software I use most of the time natively on Mac OS *and* still be able to run Mac software simultaneously. It would have run with (for me) minimal fuss.
For me, that's the point of using a Mac. I fail to see what anyone else's opinion on the proper reasons for using a Mac should matter to me. Since people have spent the time and effort to port these libraries and applications to run on Mac OS, I'm apparently not the only one who feels this way.
That the Earth and Moon make up what is in fact a double planet system
IIRC, to be a double planet system, the center of rotation of the two objects has to be outside both the objects. The center of rotation in the Earth-Moon system is well inside the Earth, making the Moon officially a moon.
The reason all these truckers wind up with crappy GPS units is because they invariably buy them with their first paycheck and can't afford the $400 trucker GPS. Most truckers are fairly cash-strapped when they first start out, having just changed careers and paid for trucking school.
I didn't; I figured I didn't really need one, and now if I need a quick overview of the road, I just use Google Maps on my phone to show me the immediate area. I know how to read a map, though, and a lot of truckers really don't. Hell, my girlfriend (also a driver) can't seem to wrap her head around the cardinal directions and has no sense of geography at all.
My girlfriend has an old out-of-date Magellan GPS in her truck, and I'm just waiting for the call where she wound up halfway up some tiny mountain road with a washed out bridge.
There may be no code left from that era, but the ideas and community have remained. The Enlightenment community and the GNOME community have very different ideas on a lot of things.
That being said, I haven't use E since DR14, which I couldn't stand (DR13 was twelve kinds of awesome, though). A lot of the ideas we think of as standard first gained headway in E - imlib and esd were both originally part of Enlightenment, and eterm was the first popular terminal to support background images and pseudotransparency. E was also the first real working window manager that was designed for eye candy. If they've still got creative ideas to bring to the table, I'm all for it.
I dunno, I wanted to buy a mac back in the day so that I would have the best of both worlds - availability of various bits of commercial software unavailable on Unix and the ability to run Unix apps without dealing with hacks like cygwin (don't get my wrong, I like cygwin, and I have nothing but respect for its developers, but it's a hack) or wine (same disclaimer). You can run quite a bit of Unix software on OS X, and most of the commercial software programs I wanted are also available.
I decided not to after a spur of the moment decision to buy an iPhone changed my opinion of apple. I'll never give them a dime of my money again.
Anyway, were I to own a mac, most of my time would be spent running applications that don't use Cocoa. I know I'm in the minority, but hey, so are the guys who develop things like this.
I don't think the problem with the W3C was its speed - many of its standards were well ahead of what the browsers were supporting.
The problem with the W3C was that during most of the important development, the only relevant browser vendor completely ignored them. XHTML wasn't perfect, but a lot of the concepts it introduced (namespaces, for one) would have been a major step forward. You really can't blame Mozilla for not adopting the later XHTML standards, because by the time they had caught up in functionality with IE, everyone had pretty much given up on XHTML.
Of course, the other problem with the W3C was that they refused to face the fact that layout is important. Even following the standards, there were things you could do in HTML 3.2 that you couldn't do in CSS 1 and 2. Layout with table tags is easy - I could explain it to someone in ten minutes or less - and it worked pretty much everywhere. I completely understand the reasons why table layout is bad, and I completely agree with them, but there's no excuse for there not being a decent replacement.
He said that cold fusion wasn't an impossibility like perpetual motion, and that, unlike perpetual motion, cold fusion can be done.
It was just an awkward sentence.
Central planning doesn't work, that has been proven by the soviets already.
The Soviets didn't prove anything, really. They only proved that the soviet government couldn't do it. Corruption undercut them at every turn.
In a capitalist system, you don't go through one entity for everything, so corruption doesn't affect your life to quite the same degree it does under a communist system.
They still have the same problems with corruption under the current government. It's a cultural thing, and it's unlikely to go away. And that's good for pretty much everyone else, because otherwise the Warsaw Pact would have steamrolled over most of the world.
Add in the fact that there's a huge difference in running a communist system for a country with a huge, diverse population and almost unlimited natural resources and running one on a small peninsula of racially and culturally homogeneous people. The PRNK could probably do fine under a well maintained communist system if their leaders weren't batshit crazy.
Sitting back and letting everyone else decide who should be in power should be what we hope for in an uninformed populace. He said he didn't pay attention to politics, so any voting he would have done would have been based on campaign ads or what the guy at the bus stop was ranting about.
If voting was done by people who actually know what's going on, politicians would actually have to worry about the consequences of their actions.
Easy. Use a mork format file.
You sure you replied to the right comment? I didn't say anything regarding books or video games.
I had one similar to that, although not the same model.
I got tons of use out of it. I wouldn't recommend it for children under eight or nine, though.
Last time I went to Radio Shack, I looked for one of these, but nowdays they've thrown out the springs and wires and you have some kind of snap together thing. I can't imagine those having the same flexibility as the spring type ones.
That would be great, if you could still buy them. See the bottom of the wikipedia entry where it says they're only available used.
I loved my capsela stuff. I wish I still had it around so my son could play with it when he gets a bit older.
I wonder if Microsoft even have a clue about how much damage their arrogant attitude is doing to their potential market?
Yes, they have a very good idea about how it's affecting their market. It's close to 0%, because the percentage of potential buyers who will find out about this and care enough to boycott it is so small as to have a negligible effect on sales.
Consumer ignorance and apathy are the reasons companies get away with this type of thing. I think I'm the only person who is still boycotting Amazon over their 1-click patent.
My laptop has a camera?
Who knew?
California police aren't supposed to bother you if you have less than a certain amount of pot, measured in ounces. I believe a lot of the states that have medical marijuana limit possession to a couple ounces at any one time. Only the DEA seems to measure weed with the metric system, which may reflect the fact they work quite a bit trying to stop importation.
Around here (Oklahoma), I believe it's still sold in ounces and quarter ounces. I never got a consensus on what a "dime bag" was actually supposed to be.
So if you want your kids to learn the metric system, skip pot and introduce them to cocaine.
Copyright is broken too, so it wouldn't help anything. Copyright lasts damn near forever these days, so if it was extended to include things the patent system does, innovation would grind to a halt completely. Think of what has been invented in the last seventy years, and imagine if no one was able to use any of it without fees. Now imagine that nothing copyrighted after Mickey Mouse was first drawn was allowed to expire, which is likely to be the case.
Patents exist for a very good reason, and in theory protect inventors and researchers who deserve a return of investment on their work. The problem is that the patent system is widely abused and badly needs fixing. Nixing software patents and enforcing the requirements that an invention can be reproduced from the patent document alone would go a long way toward solving the problems.
I got my phone right when the 3GS came out, and I didn't pay any attention to the articles on phones before then. I knew apple would try to be controlling, I was just amazed at how far they went.
After buying my iPhone, I found a number of "features" on it that pissed me right off. Granted, I should have researched more, but I was on a limited time frame.
In any case, I decided I'm not going to pay a dime to the app store. I'm not sending any more money to Apple.
Because of this, I don't have that many apps on it. I browse the 'net a bit, and use Google Maps quite a bit, but other than that I don't really do much. I could pretty much replace the thing with a $30 phone, a GPS navigation system, and a book to read while I'm waiting on my food at truck stops.
My next phone will be an Android (probably second-hand and unlocked, since I doubt AT&T will start selling them any time soon) and I expect my usage will go up quite a bit.
(For those curious, a small sample of my problems with the phone includes the crippled bluetooth, the requirement for itunes to do anything to the phone, the lack of jailbreak ability (this has since been solved, but wasn't when I got the phone), the lack of flash support, and the insane way you have to go about converting mp3s to ringtones, among other nitpicks. All these are related to how Apple wants to control my use of the phone. The killer was when, shortly after I got the phone and had everything set up on it, my one machine with windows on it crashed, and after I reinstalled it insisted I erase my phone in order to resync it. I'm not a violent man, but I came really close to crushing my phone with my truck when that happened.)
Using decimals would work (for the most part) today, but the previous generation of senior citizens would have had an issue with it, as most of them would not have used a decimal number since school, back around World War II.
We're a very fraction-oriented society, even though most of the populace can't work with fractions that don't have powers of two as the denominator. I'm sure that one of my grandfathers wouldn't have dealt well with 1.5l, but could work with fractions of an inch all day long with no trouble.
India mostly uses fuel bought from Russia. They're working on getting thorium based reactors working, since they won't have to import it and the proposed reactor design would use much less fuel for the same energy.
Japan imports their uranium as well. I'm not sure who they get it from, but I wouldn't be surprised if the buy it from the US.
According to Wikipedia, Japan is trying to be in position to sell the US reactors once we get over the whole nuclear paranoia and start building them again. Because of this, they collaborate with various US government agencies concerning nuclear power. I'm not sure if that would dissuade them from reprocessing or not.
Deserts tend to have water. They just don't get a lot of rain. People in Arizona still get water when they turn on their tap.
There are coal plants in the desert, and nuclear plants really don't use any more water than coal plants do. The water in the reactor gets recycled back through, so unless you reactor leaks (which is a major problem which would get fixed quickly) you only really use the water in the turbine, and even that can be reclaimed if you need to. Of course, if your goal is create hydrogen, you'll need a good source of water, but there's plenty of rivers that flow in the middle of nowhere in the southwest (Colorado, Rio Grande, etc.) that could be tapped.
(You're right that there are reactor designs that don't use water, but steam turbine technology is probably the most mature and reliable way of turning the generators, so you'll still need water.)
The desert (mostly) fixes the NIMBY problem. The problem the desert doesn't fix is that the grid isn't set up for it. Obama has made noise about modernizing our electric grid, so perhaps large solar farms and nuke plants in the desert will become feasible.
Hrm, my bad, I misremembered. I thought there were a few fatal accidents back during the Mercury program. I was wrong.
The USA doesn't use imperial units. Those were voted in after we split off from the empire.
The SI system is awkward for a lot of things. The kilometer is fine, but the lack of any (widely used) unit between centimeter and meter is a major drawback for people used to the foot (about 30 cm). Our closest unit to the meter (the yard) is pretty much only used for outdoor distances, such as sports fields and agriculture.
The lack of an ounce equivalent is also bizarre. The gram is way too small. Same with milliliters.
You have to bear in mind that the USA does use the SI system for quite a bit of stuff. The customary units are mostly used for goods (milk by the gallon, flour by the pound) and distances (my living room is 14' by 16'). You buy lumber by the foot, for instance. Other than inches/feet (which I admit, sucks), we don't do a lot of conversions. Anything involving science or engineering is done using the SI system.
The problem is that the article was written (badly) for a US audience, and the average American thinks in pounds per square inch, not Newtons per meter (and yes, pound is a unit of force, not a unit of mass, for all those people above who keep screaming about it).
There were quite a few astronaut fatalities back during the cockrocket days, as well. Granted, those were a long time ago, but we haven't sent anyone up in any U.S. spacecraft besides the shuttle in decades.