OSX has mind share at least in part because almost every peripheral you purchase and plug in just sorta works.
Nonsense. I have a Canon scanner here that doesn't work with OS X. I have a Logitech keyboard that only partially works. The bluetooth hub that came with the Logitech keyboard doesn't work at all (OS X lacks an hid2hci tool). My friend has a digital camera that doesn't work. The majority of external firewire hdd enclosures don't work reliably. I have a PCI DVB-T card that isn't supported (amusingly enough the open source MacOS X driver looks like it'll be working soon). I have audio CDs that I can't rip in iTunes because when I insert them into the Mac, the drive goes clunkity-clunk for about a minute then shoots the disc out (copy-protected). I've got an 802.11g USB dongle that doesn't work.
Now for the kicker; every single bit of hardware I've mentioned works fine in Linux. Even the audio CD that MacOS X spits out after a minute, I can rip it on the same hardware if I first boot Linux.
I really despise the "It Just Works" campaign. It's a myth. It's been a successful campaign though, because all the fanboys repeat the myth and shout down anybody who dares point out the truth.
I have seen people saying that for years, and it's starting to grow extremely stale. Macs are inherently more secure machines. They are not susceptible to viruses. Until proven otherwise, this remains a truism.
That is bullshit. Just, absolute, poppycock. I recently attended Ruxcon - the Australian equivalent of Defcon only without the money - and there was a presentation on MacOS X "security". One of the highlights was when one of the presenters showed a snippet of source code to dsidentity, which is a setuid tool, and it had getenv("USER"). I shit you not. The entire audience cracked up laughing.
They also had a short session showing you how to find and exploit buffer overflows in the kernel and user space. It was a real eye-opener. They've got some brain-damaged shit in MacOS X that even the Linux folks had fixed more than a decade ago. Heap smashing, stack smashing, lack of bounds checking, it was all there. The presenter reckoned it was less secure than Windows; he cracks both for a living.
It all depends if you'd rather have two-four hours for yourself or a little cash in your pocket...
You're deluding yourself if you think MacOS X doesn't require just as much tinkering. I'm a long suffering Mac user who has recently spent a few weeks with Tiger. I've easily spent 20 hours in the past month installing third party software like VLC because Tiger won't play DivX, finding various tweaks on macosxhints (eg, disable dashboard which is a memory sucking vampire), hunting down a crashing issue with ARD (had to replace it with OSX VNC), mucking about with configuration settings that have retarded defaults, and so on and so forth.
It's amusing that the GP commented on the multimedia keys, because attached to this Mac I have a Logitech keyboard and the multimedia keys don't work. Not even with the official Logitech drivers. Yet they work perfectly on Linux and Windows.
So don't give me any crap about Macs saving you "time and money". I use all three of the holy trinity quite heavily - Windows, Linux and Mac - and they are all about as sucky as each other.
You misunderstand. The service of placing ads is not free. Google is not a single-service company. I already acknowledged that the publicly accessible service is free because that's their loss leader.
I would not put too much stock in what comes out of the Vatican - weren't they in the "world is flat" camp for quite some time?
No. During the time of Columbus the Church knew that the Earth was spherical and they even had a fairly accurate value for the circumference. In fact, knowledge of the spherical Earth dates back to the Greeks who had famously worked out the circumference by measuring reflections in the bottoms of wells. However during the time of Columbus they only way to travel from Europe to India by sea was around the cape of Africa, which was a very dangerous journey. Columbus had reckoned that the circumference was much smaller than the Church was claiming and that he could reach India by sailing West instead of around the cape.
The Church was right and Columbus was wrong. If it wasn't for the previously unknown continent called The Americas then Columbus and his fleet would have starved to death before reaching India.
People will notice if Google goes under with their $15 billion dollar valuation based on a free service,
Google's service isn't free. They charge a heap of money for ad placements. They sell access to their search engine. They sell search appliances. By all accounts, they are profitable.
Oh, you were talking about their publicly accessible search engine? That's a loss leader so they can sell their ads. It's the same model as broadcast television. Hardly an untested model.
Not to mention that nuclear fission is the cleanest, safest, most abundant practical source of energy on the planet at the moment.
Solar energy is the cleanest, safest and most abundant. As someone commented in an earlier Slashdot article, 1 million terawatt hours of solar energy falls on the Earth's surface each day. The problem is that we can't capture it economically. However the plants seem to be absorbing it quite efficiently. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book (!).
Even harnessing a small fraction of the world's wind power could produce 72 terawatts - the equivalent of 35,000 nuclear reactors - which is more than enough for the world's energy needs. I think you'd have an uphill battle arguing that nuclear power is cleaner or safer than wind power. I'm not saying wind power is entirely without problems, but they are small potatoes compared to the problems with nuclear power.
Yes, nuclear is cleaner than coal. Unfortunately that's faint praise. It's still pretty dirty.
The 2nd key point is that the amount of energy it takes to build and run nuclear energy plants and all the processes that go with it, means that it takes 7-10 years before nuclear power plants achieve net CO2 reductions (compared to wind power that takes 3-6 months). -- http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/TNEPArticlesNucl ear.aspx
As for the claim that nuclear fuel is abundant...
TNEP contributor and co-author Senior Lecturer at UNSW and Adjunct Professor at Murdoch University Mark Diesendorf wrote recently in the Canberra Times that "Nuclear power stations themselves do not emit CO2. But the nuclear fuel cycle is a complex process with many steps, some of which are large users of fossil fuels. The corresponding CO2 emissions have been calculated by several authors who are independent of the nuclear industry, most recently by Jan Willem Storm Van Leeuwin, a senior consultant in energy systems, together with Philip Smith, a nuclear physicist. As we might expect, they find that the energy inputs, especially to mining, milling and enrichment, depend sensitively on the grade of uranium used. For high-grade ores (i.e. those with at least 0.2% uranium oxide) the energy inputs are indeed much less than the electricity generated. But, the quantity of known uranium reserves with ore grades richer than this level is so small, that it would only last for a few decades at the current usage rate. For the more common low-grade ores (i.e. 10-20 times less concentrated than the high-grade ores), Van Leeuwin and Smith find that the total fossil energy consumption in uranium mining, milling, enrichment and power station construction becomes so large that nuclear power emits more CO2 than an equivalent gas-fired power station." -- http://www.naturaledgeproject.net/TNEPArticlesNucl ear.aspx
In any event, it is a non-renewable fuel, so it's hardly worth getting excited over.
All that the environmental nuts caused was for us to burn MORE fossil fuels at diesel plants. So much for saving the planet.
The environmental "nuts" want you to walk to the local shops instead of driving an SUV, to turn off the lights when you're not home, to wear a jumper instead of turning up the thermostat, to invest R&D in renewable energy sources rather than fossil or nuclear fuels, and to stop falsely claiming that opposition to nuclear is the same as support for diesel.
I personally oppose nuclear on economic grounds. Once again, from my favourite environmental scientist, because he writes some interesting stuff, Mark Diesendorf.
I had already read the linked site; it's just that a lot of this stuff is disputed by other members of the original Macintosh design team . I don't understand why you take "Raskin's own words" as gospel and label the recollections of Andy Hertzfeld and Bruce Horn and Larry Tesler as pulp fiction.
I don't take Raskin's word over Hertzfeld's or Horn's word. However I do think Raskin's published thesis - with a date of 1967 - is more reliable than their hazy recollections of decades old events. I also despise hearing the "Raskin opposed the GUI" myth because (1) that all started with a Rolling Stone article and (2) it contradicts Raskin's own thesis and his life's work.
The Rolling Stone article (April 4, 1996) says that for the Mac, "Raskin was opposed to a mouse and a graphical user interface...and favored a squat design." -- David Horn
Hardly a credible source. Here's another article debunking the myth that Raskin opposed the GUI, this time from Byte Magazine, first published in 1984, so slightly more credible than the Rolling Stone article published 12 years later.
"Raskin: As a matter of fact, when I started working at Apple, the Lisa was a character-generator machine and I was the only voice saying it should be bitmapped, and I convinced the crew working on it. I guess I was also this disembodied voice that changed it from a three-button mouse to a one-button mouse at Apple - that was a big fight." -- http://www.aresluna.org/attached/computerhistory/a rticles/macintoshsotherdesigners
I see red whenever somebody repeats the myth that Raskin opposed the GUI. It doesn't gel with reality, with history, with records, with articles, with anything. It's just an urban legend.
BTW, does a link exist for the thesis in its entirety? (Not being sarcastic, I'd actually like to read it.)
I read a paper copy in university. I don't think I've ever seen an electronic version.
I would encourage interested Slashdot readers to read the link to the blog you provided and also read the folklore.org (Hertzfeld's blog) account and reach there own conclusions,
You cannot arrive at the truth by reading "both opinions" and reaching a conclusion that makes you feel comfortable. That's the technique that the Creationists are successfully using to pervert science. You can spot it a mile off because it involves phrases like "both sides" or "draw your own conclusion". You arrive at the truth by getting the facts. You get facts with experiments and research. You can't read a blog to get the truth.
that gives us 150*200 = 30 KW of average power. add in a 20% efficient cell and you've got 6 KW average power, for every house, (obviously we need a way to store it during the day for night use), being way more than enough for most houses
To put this in persepctive, the average home uses between 20kWh and 40kWh per day. That averages out to less than 2kW average power. So as you say, even assuming grossly inefficient storage, solar power is technologically feasible. It's the economics that have held it back.
I suspect that we've nowhere near the power requirements for something like that but there are other portable devices that would be more convenient with solar power to extend battery life.
Hrm, my laptop draws 25W at peak, 14W while idling. Bright direct sunlight is 1kW per square metre. I estimate my laptop surface area (back of the screen) is about 0.06 square metres, and with efficiency of 15% for cells and assuming 25% sunlight (cloudy days, indirect lighting), yeah it's not even close. It's out by a factor of 10.
In fact, Raskin opposed many of the features that eventually distinguished the Macintosh. He opposed for instance: the graphical user interface, the mouse (he wanted to use navigation keys).
What a load of absolute revisionist bullcrap. The one-button mouse was Raskin's idea; he was opposed to the THREE button mouse that the original design included. In Raskin's own words:
I eventually wrote a memo that showed, point by point, that the one-button mouse could do everything that PARCs three-button mouse could do and with the same number or fewer user actions. It was faster and more efficient, and much easier to learn and remember how to use. I had observed that people (including myself) at PARC often made wrong-button errors in using the mouse, which was part of my impetus for doing better. -- Jef Raskin
Also you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?
My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started. -- Jef Raskin
I ask again, you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?
Mac OS was NOT an unremarkable OS, it was completely remarkable for its time.... The computer only had 64K ROM and 128K ram, so some aspects of the OS would certainly be considered primitive by today's standards (but not from 80's standards,
Even by 80s standards it was unremarkable. UNIX managed to fit a multiuser multitasking preemptive kernel into less RAM using a less capable processor more than a decade before MacOS came to market. The operating system within MacOS was a relic of the stone age, even for the 80s.
I'll just close with this -- anyone who wants to know if what Apple does to produce a new product is more like R&D or more like integration should peruse www.folklore.org or, equivalently, read the book "Revolution in the Valley" by Andy Hertzfeld and then decide whether the Mac team was just throwing a bunch of preexisting ideas together or if they were really inventing something.
Of course I've read them, and I reject the idea that because Hertzfeld says Raskin was a liar on his personal blog, somehow that trumps the factual record of a thesis that Raskin published when Hertzfeld was still in daipers. I much prefer Raskin's own words which supports my claim that the original Mac was the culmination of 1000s of man years of R&D going back for decades.
As I said in my history of the Mac Project (the one currently being serialized in CHAC), the Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. -- Jef Raskin
Now seeing as you've rudely told me to read the pulp fiction of history - folklore.org, sheesh - I'm going to throw you some real meat to digest. Go read Raskin's own words and for bonus points go read his thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System". Once you've read all that I'll at least take you seriously.
Fundamentally, Apple Computer has invested in research and development and has come out with revolutionary products that functionally make things easier while Dell has simply operated as a reseller and box builder. Where is the innovation coming out of Dell?
Huh? Enough is enough with the Apple fantasy. The iPod was a concept introduced to Apple by Tony Fadell. The iTunes software was called SoundJam and it was bought; it did not spring forth from the forehead of Steve Jobs. The Mac was Raskin's idea which he came up with while at university and he had to fight Apple to convince them it was worth pursuing as a product (or more accurately, he had to wait until Steve Jobs believed it was Steve Jobs' idea). The MacOS itself was an entirely unimpressive operating system - quite retarded in many ways - the only interesting thing was the GUI, which was a decades old R&D field even in the early 80s, and even then was mostly a slick implementation of ideas developed at Stanford and PARC.
Apple is not an R&D company any moreso than Microsoft or Sun or (god forgive me) Dell. They all invest in R&D to some piddling extent but even that is mostly for PR. The real R&D powerhouses are the universities. If you want to see where computing will be in 10 years, you don't look to the Apple website, you go and speak to the postgrads at MIT or UCB.
Apple is primarily an integration company. That's what they're good at and that's why their products are slick. They take ideas which have been figured out by university postgrads, they integrate them into an existing product line, and they apply a whole lot of polish and elbow grease. Apple takes ideas that others have developed, they file off all the sharp edges, they wrap it in glitter and they put it in a box that the great unwashed (you and me) can purchase. Is that innovation? Only if you devalue the word until it has no meaning.
More than this, your attitude of dissing Dell really pisses me off. Anybody who thinks Dell isn't as interesting a company as Apple has their head stuck so far up their arse they can see daylight. While Apple has focussed on integration to please the end-user, Dell has done an incredible job of integration to please the PURCHASER. Dell can deliver high volume at a low price with reasonable quality. They also have tight integration between sales, factory and shipping. They have after-sales support that is truly excellent; next-day hardware replacement, no questions asked. In my corporate dealings, I'm always pleasantly surprised with Dell's business acumen, even though with my techie hat on I'm always slightly disgusted with the hardware.
Contrast that with Apple who after more than 20 years still couldn't sell their way out of a second hand car yard. I've owned 6 Apple computers over the past 10 years and although I'm usually pleased with the hardware/software, I'm constantly pissed off with the rest of their business. Everything from the initial sale to the after-sales support and service is just atrocious. I would love nothing more than to recommend Apple desktops to corporate buyers, but in the few occasions where I've seen it attempted the after-sales support from the Applecentre has been so abyssmal that the customer has sworn off Apple and returned to (you guessed it) Dell and Microsoft.
Anyone who thinks more than a tiny percentage of the market will be running a hacked version is quite mistaken.
I agree only a tiny percentage will run the hacked version, and I also believe that tiny percentage will dwarf the legit MacOS market. Oh, and to poison the well, "anybody who thinks otherwise is quite mistaken".
Face it, 90% of PC users have pirated software. They got their copy of Windows from "a friend of a friend" or "from that guy at work". They use illegit copies of Office and serial-cracked versions of WinZIP. I'm not even talking about geeks; the tech-illiterate public servants I work with are the worst. They openly boast about the amount of software they have illegally copied. These aren't 20 year olds who can't afford to buy the software; these are 40+ year olds with families, multiple cars and coastal properties. MacOSx/86 will be pirated to hell and back. It only takes one bastard to work out how it's done, then it'll be all over torrents and these tech-illiterate software hoarders will be swapping DVDRs. They'll have dual boots or (more likely) they'll run MacOSx/86 inside (a pirated copy of) VMware.
Hell, even MacOSX/PPC is pirated to hell and back. Of the Mac users I know, only one of them has a legit copy of Tiger. The rest have pirated versions they got off their mates as "upgrades" to the version they legitimately got with their Mac.
So don't pretend it won't happen. You know it will.
This got me to thinking about energy levels of those who aren't dieting. Do you find yourself correcting 'fade' by snacking (careful or otherwise) as you work?"
The Hacker's Diet uses a balloon analogy; energy in - energy out = excess fat. You can decrease the energy in by eating low-calorie foods or decreasing the amount of food consumed. You can increase the energy out by exercising or eating the right combination of foods.
There's nothing wrong with that analogy. Unfortunately the human body isn't that simple. A heavier person has to expend more energy just sitting there due to an expanded vascular system. A heavier person is also likely to be unfit, as well as carrying more weight, so it's more effort for them to do even the simplest activities such as walking stairs. That means their energy requirements during the day are entirely different to a lighter person. The lighter person doesn't have to deal with extreme peaks that the heavier person deals with.
Then there's another problem. An overweight person isn't looking at the Hacker's Diet to maintain the same weight. They're trying to lose weight. Consider a 150lb person and a 250lb person. Over a period of 12 months they both maintain the same weight. According to the balloon analogy they both took in as much energy as they expended. So far, so good. You often hear (young, stupid) people claim that "fatties" should "put down the bucket of chicken" and "go for a walk". The reality is that a "fatty" who isn't gaining weight is already eating an appropriate diet. They're not eating "buckets of chicken". If they were then they'd be gaining weight. The fatty ate an inappropriate diet to achieve their overweight condition, not to maintain it. The overweight person is trying to lose weight so they're actually eating less food than the hypothetical 150lb person. This means their body quickly consumes the "easy energy" from food and turns to the more difficult task of extracting energy from fat. They experience lethargy that the thin person doesn't experience, because the thin person is taking in more energy from food.
So the overweight person who is trying to lose weight experiences two problems that the thin person never deals with - extreme lethargy and wildly fluctuating energy requirements. The Hacker's Diet makes this clear: it says you'll be hungry and tired until the diet is over. You can't avoid it. Your best bet is to take an extended holiday so you can focus on exercise without the distraction of having to think, because it is next to impossible to think clearly while dieting.
An iPod does exactly, precisely what it should do and not a single thing more.
So the video game breakout is essential for a music player... when did that happen? How about the address book? Or the note book? Or the photo album? Or the video playback!
About the only thing the iPod doesn't do is play Ogg Vorbis, which would be... you know... kind of useful for a portable music playing device. "But Ogg Is Only Used By 5% Of Users". Yeah, like the Mac.
Well then, this is a good thing. Maybe SCO should realize that their kernel shouldn't contain an endless while(true) loop-- that explains many problems.
No, that's OK, Linux is so fast it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. SCO just needs to use the same techniques and metho... oh, hang on.
Whatever folks may say about "The Evil Empire," this a true gift of philanthropy. Let's give a hand to Bill Gates...
I'd love to be truly philantropic while still having billions and billions of dollars of personal cash to spend.
He got to where he is by abusing the trust of others. Praising him would be like praising the mafia for giving money to the church. He's trying to wash his hands clean. Don't fall for it. He's still a scumbag.
The law [Price-Anderson] suspends U.S. liability laws for nuclear power plants.... According to Public Citizen, a 1990 study calculated that without Price-Anderson, nuclear power corporations would pay more than $3 billion annually to fully insure their operations.
That's right! And as soon as the world realizes that food, shelter, energy and access to clean drinking water also want to be free this will be a much better world...
Food, shelter and clean drinking water should be free. What's your point?
I find people on both major sides of this argument to have their minds so very closed.
And this is how the Incompetent Design nitwits are winning this argument. They've managed to convince the general public that (1) there are two major sides (in reality, there is one major side and one very small but incredibly vocal side) and (2) that the Evilutionists(tm) have closed minds. A scientist's mind should be open but not so open that their brain falls out. Allowing Intervention Divine into science class falls into the "brain falling out" category.
There is no debate here. There is a propaaganda war being waged against science by a bunch of ignorant Christian fundamentalists, who are essentially no better and no worse than the Islamic fundamentalists. They are winning the propaganda war because they have too much money, because of the $300 billion charity given annually in America, $280 billion goes to domestic Christian charities.
And I'm not picking on you. I see from the rest of your comment that you don't support Inconvenient Dribble in the science class. What I'm commenting on is that the propaganda war has been so successful that even you are saying that "both sides" have "closed minds". There are not two sides. The scientists do not have closed minds for rejecting debunked non-science. But even rational people are starting to repeat the mantra of "both sides" have "closed minds". What did that German dude say about "repeat a lie often enough"?
The big-bang, incidentally is an untestable event as by definition the established principles of physical science break down at the singularity (and how would we observe, a temporal action, before time existed).
The big-bang is entirely testable. The background microwave radiation is one test. The velocity vs distance of galaxies is another test. The COBE satellite was launched to test the big-bang theory (and the theory passed that test).
The singularity is an untestable event. The big-bang itself, entirely testable. In your own words you admit it's testable:
I guess the big-bang is probably still the standard model. But every standard model I ever studied was proven to be inconsistent with observations...
If there are observations that could disprove the big-bang theory then the theory is testable. That's what testable means. But be careful: the theory is not the same thing as a model.
What you are refering to is most commonly called atheism (there is no god/satan/blah blah blah) or perhaps agnosticism (i could give a rats ass if there's a god/satan/etc, a more powerful standpoint in my opinion)."
An agnostic says that the answer to "Is there a God?" is inherently unknowable, which in my opinion is a very weak standpoint (it makes assumptions about the nature of God). On the other hand, an atheist declares their belief, not their knowledge, and it is therefore a very strong standpoint. A person can be both agnostic and atheist (and indeed, most agnostics are also atheist but have an incorrect understanding of what atheism means).
What you've described ("i could give a rats ass") sounds more like an apatheist:-)
I go to restaurants pretty regularly in Perth and Adelaide, and occasionally in Melbourne. In all my years of dining in Australia, I can't say I've ever been in a situation where a tip has been expected, or even automatically itemized on a bill at the end of the night.
Who said anything about it being expected. I said in Australia we do give tips but it is not expected and is instead given voluntarily by the patron. I have never heard of an Australian restaurant preemptively adding a tip to the bill. If it happened to me I would refuse to pay.
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Nonsense. I have a Canon scanner here that doesn't work with OS X. I have a Logitech keyboard that only partially works. The bluetooth hub that came with the Logitech keyboard doesn't work at all (OS X lacks an hid2hci tool). My friend has a digital camera that doesn't work. The majority of external firewire hdd enclosures don't work reliably. I have a PCI DVB-T card that isn't supported (amusingly enough the open source MacOS X driver looks like it'll be working soon). I have audio CDs that I can't rip in iTunes because when I insert them into the Mac, the drive goes clunkity-clunk for about a minute then shoots the disc out (copy-protected). I've got an 802.11g USB dongle that doesn't work.
Now for the kicker; every single bit of hardware I've mentioned works fine in Linux. Even the audio CD that MacOS X spits out after a minute, I can rip it on the same hardware if I first boot Linux.
I really despise the "It Just Works" campaign. It's a myth. It's been a successful campaign though, because all the fanboys repeat the myth and shout down anybody who dares point out the truth.
I did. Apparently you didn't understand the significance of the example I gave. Your problem, not mine.
No, I'm saying that this comment...
... is false.
That is bullshit. Just, absolute, poppycock. I recently attended Ruxcon - the Australian equivalent of Defcon only without the money - and there was a presentation on MacOS X "security". One of the highlights was when one of the presenters showed a snippet of source code to dsidentity, which is a setuid tool, and it had getenv("USER"). I shit you not. The entire audience cracked up laughing.
They also had a short session showing you how to find and exploit buffer overflows in the kernel and user space. It was a real eye-opener. They've got some brain-damaged shit in MacOS X that even the Linux folks had fixed more than a decade ago. Heap smashing, stack smashing, lack of bounds checking, it was all there. The presenter reckoned it was less secure than Windows; he cracks both for a living.
Secure? Not by my reckoning.
You're deluding yourself if you think MacOS X doesn't require just as much tinkering. I'm a long suffering Mac user who has recently spent a few weeks with Tiger. I've easily spent 20 hours in the past month installing third party software like VLC because Tiger won't play DivX, finding various tweaks on macosxhints (eg, disable dashboard which is a memory sucking vampire), hunting down a crashing issue with ARD (had to replace it with OSX VNC), mucking about with configuration settings that have retarded defaults, and so on and so forth.
It's amusing that the GP commented on the multimedia keys, because attached to this Mac I have a Logitech keyboard and the multimedia keys don't work. Not even with the official Logitech drivers. Yet they work perfectly on Linux and Windows.
So don't give me any crap about Macs saving you "time and money". I use all three of the holy trinity quite heavily - Windows, Linux and Mac - and they are all about as sucky as each other.
You misunderstand. The service of placing ads is not free. Google is not a single-service company. I already acknowledged that the publicly accessible service is free because that's their loss leader.
No. During the time of Columbus the Church knew that the Earth was spherical and they even had a fairly accurate value for the circumference. In fact, knowledge of the spherical Earth dates back to the Greeks who had famously worked out the circumference by measuring reflections in the bottoms of wells. However during the time of Columbus they only way to travel from Europe to India by sea was around the cape of Africa, which was a very dangerous journey. Columbus had reckoned that the circumference was much smaller than the Church was claiming and that he could reach India by sailing West instead of around the cape.
The Church was right and Columbus was wrong. If it wasn't for the previously unknown continent called The Americas then Columbus and his fleet would have starved to death before reaching India.
Google's service isn't free. They charge a heap of money for ad placements. They sell access to their search engine. They sell search appliances. By all accounts, they are profitable.
Oh, you were talking about their publicly accessible search engine? That's a loss leader so they can sell their ads. It's the same model as broadcast television. Hardly an untested model.
Solar energy is the cleanest, safest and most abundant. As someone commented in an earlier Slashdot article, 1 million terawatt hours of solar energy falls on the Earth's surface each day. The problem is that we can't capture it economically. However the plants seem to be absorbing it quite efficiently. Perhaps we should take a leaf out of their book (!).
Even harnessing a small fraction of the world's wind power could produce 72 terawatts - the equivalent of 35,000 nuclear reactors - which is more than enough for the world's energy needs. I think you'd have an uphill battle arguing that nuclear power is cleaner or safer than wind power. I'm not saying wind power is entirely without problems, but they are small potatoes compared to the problems with nuclear power.
Yes, nuclear is cleaner than coal. Unfortunately that's faint praise. It's still pretty dirty.
As for the claim that nuclear fuel is abundant...
In any event, it is a non-renewable fuel, so it's hardly worth getting excited over.
The environmental "nuts" want you to walk to the local shops instead of driving an SUV, to turn off the lights when you're not home, to wear a jumper instead of turning up the thermostat, to invest R&D in renewable energy sources rather than fossil or nuclear fuels, and to stop falsely claiming that opposition to nuclear is the same as support for diesel.
I personally oppose nuclear on economic grounds. Once again, from my favourite environmental scientist, because he writes some interesting stuff, Mark Diesendorf.
I don't take Raskin's word over Hertzfeld's or Horn's word. However I do think Raskin's published thesis - with a date of 1967 - is more reliable than their hazy recollections of decades old events. I also despise hearing the "Raskin opposed the GUI" myth because (1) that all started with a Rolling Stone article and (2) it contradicts Raskin's own thesis and his life's work.
Hardly a credible source. Here's another article debunking the myth that Raskin opposed the GUI, this time from Byte Magazine, first published in 1984, so slightly more credible than the Rolling Stone article published 12 years later.
I see red whenever somebody repeats the myth that Raskin opposed the GUI. It doesn't gel with reality, with history, with records, with articles, with anything. It's just an urban legend.
I read a paper copy in university. I don't think I've ever seen an electronic version.
You cannot arrive at the truth by reading "both opinions" and reaching a conclusion that makes you feel comfortable. That's the technique that the Creationists are successfully using to pervert science. You can spot it a mile off because it involves phrases like "both sides" or "draw your own conclusion". You arrive at the truth by getting the facts. You get facts with experiments and research. You can't read a blog to get the truth.
To put this in persepctive, the average home uses between 20kWh and 40kWh per day. That averages out to less than 2kW average power. So as you say, even assuming grossly inefficient storage, solar power is technologically feasible. It's the economics that have held it back.
Hrm, my laptop draws 25W at peak, 14W while idling. Bright direct sunlight is 1kW per square metre. I estimate my laptop surface area (back of the screen) is about 0.06 square metres, and with efficiency of 15% for cells and assuming 25% sunlight (cloudy days, indirect lighting), yeah it's not even close. It's out by a factor of 10.
What a load of absolute revisionist bullcrap. The one-button mouse was Raskin's idea; he was opposed to the THREE button mouse that the original design included. In Raskin's own words:
Also you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?
I ask again, you claim he opposed graphical interfaces?
Even by 80s standards it was unremarkable. UNIX managed to fit a multiuser multitasking preemptive kernel into less RAM using a less capable processor more than a decade before MacOS came to market. The operating system within MacOS was a relic of the stone age, even for the 80s.
Of course I've read them, and I reject the idea that because Hertzfeld says Raskin was a liar on his personal blog, somehow that trumps the factual record of a thesis that Raskin published when Hertzfeld was still in daipers. I much prefer Raskin's own words which supports my claim that the original Mac was the culmination of 1000s of man years of R&D going back for decades.
Now seeing as you've rudely told me to read the pulp fiction of history - folklore.org, sheesh - I'm going to throw you some real meat to digest. Go read Raskin's own words and for bonus points go read his thesis "A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System". Once you've read all that I'll at least take you seriously.
Huh? Enough is enough with the Apple fantasy. The iPod was a concept introduced to Apple by Tony Fadell. The iTunes software was called SoundJam and it was bought; it did not spring forth from the forehead of Steve Jobs. The Mac was Raskin's idea which he came up with while at university and he had to fight Apple to convince them it was worth pursuing as a product (or more accurately, he had to wait until Steve Jobs believed it was Steve Jobs' idea). The MacOS itself was an entirely unimpressive operating system - quite retarded in many ways - the only interesting thing was the GUI, which was a decades old R&D field even in the early 80s, and even then was mostly a slick implementation of ideas developed at Stanford and PARC.
Apple is not an R&D company any moreso than Microsoft or Sun or (god forgive me) Dell. They all invest in R&D to some piddling extent but even that is mostly for PR. The real R&D powerhouses are the universities. If you want to see where computing will be in 10 years, you don't look to the Apple website, you go and speak to the postgrads at MIT or UCB.
Apple is primarily an integration company. That's what they're good at and that's why their products are slick. They take ideas which have been figured out by university postgrads, they integrate them into an existing product line, and they apply a whole lot of polish and elbow grease. Apple takes ideas that others have developed, they file off all the sharp edges, they wrap it in glitter and they put it in a box that the great unwashed (you and me) can purchase. Is that innovation? Only if you devalue the word until it has no meaning.
More than this, your attitude of dissing Dell really pisses me off. Anybody who thinks Dell isn't as interesting a company as Apple has their head stuck so far up their arse they can see daylight. While Apple has focussed on integration to please the end-user, Dell has done an incredible job of integration to please the PURCHASER. Dell can deliver high volume at a low price with reasonable quality. They also have tight integration between sales, factory and shipping. They have after-sales support that is truly excellent; next-day hardware replacement, no questions asked. In my corporate dealings, I'm always pleasantly surprised with Dell's business acumen, even though with my techie hat on I'm always slightly disgusted with the hardware.
Contrast that with Apple who after more than 20 years still couldn't sell their way out of a second hand car yard. I've owned 6 Apple computers over the past 10 years and although I'm usually pleased with the hardware/software, I'm constantly pissed off with the rest of their business. Everything from the initial sale to the after-sales support and service is just atrocious. I would love nothing more than to recommend Apple desktops to corporate buyers, but in the few occasions where I've seen it attempted the after-sales support from the Applecentre has been so abyssmal that the customer has sworn off Apple and returned to (you guessed it) Dell and Microsoft.
I agree only a tiny percentage will run the hacked version, and I also believe that tiny percentage will dwarf the legit MacOS market. Oh, and to poison the well, "anybody who thinks otherwise is quite mistaken".
Face it, 90% of PC users have pirated software. They got their copy of Windows from "a friend of a friend" or "from that guy at work". They use illegit copies of Office and serial-cracked versions of WinZIP. I'm not even talking about geeks; the tech-illiterate public servants I work with are the worst. They openly boast about the amount of software they have illegally copied. These aren't 20 year olds who can't afford to buy the software; these are 40+ year olds with families, multiple cars and coastal properties. MacOSx/86 will be pirated to hell and back. It only takes one bastard to work out how it's done, then it'll be all over torrents and these tech-illiterate software hoarders will be swapping DVDRs. They'll have dual boots or (more likely) they'll run MacOSx/86 inside (a pirated copy of) VMware.
Hell, even MacOSX/PPC is pirated to hell and back. Of the Mac users I know, only one of them has a legit copy of Tiger. The rest have pirated versions they got off their mates as "upgrades" to the version they legitimately got with their Mac.
So don't pretend it won't happen. You know it will.
The Hacker's Diet uses a balloon analogy; energy in - energy out = excess fat. You can decrease the energy in by eating low-calorie foods or decreasing the amount of food consumed. You can increase the energy out by exercising or eating the right combination of foods.
There's nothing wrong with that analogy. Unfortunately the human body isn't that simple. A heavier person has to expend more energy just sitting there due to an expanded vascular system. A heavier person is also likely to be unfit, as well as carrying more weight, so it's more effort for them to do even the simplest activities such as walking stairs. That means their energy requirements during the day are entirely different to a lighter person. The lighter person doesn't have to deal with extreme peaks that the heavier person deals with.
Then there's another problem. An overweight person isn't looking at the Hacker's Diet to maintain the same weight. They're trying to lose weight. Consider a 150lb person and a 250lb person. Over a period of 12 months they both maintain the same weight. According to the balloon analogy they both took in as much energy as they expended. So far, so good. You often hear (young, stupid) people claim that "fatties" should "put down the bucket of chicken" and "go for a walk". The reality is that a "fatty" who isn't gaining weight is already eating an appropriate diet. They're not eating "buckets of chicken". If they were then they'd be gaining weight. The fatty ate an inappropriate diet to achieve their overweight condition, not to maintain it. The overweight person is trying to lose weight so they're actually eating less food than the hypothetical 150lb person. This means their body quickly consumes the "easy energy" from food and turns to the more difficult task of extracting energy from fat. They experience lethargy that the thin person doesn't experience, because the thin person is taking in more energy from food.
So the overweight person who is trying to lose weight experiences two problems that the thin person never deals with - extreme lethargy and wildly fluctuating energy requirements. The Hacker's Diet makes this clear: it says you'll be hungry and tired until the diet is over. You can't avoid it. Your best bet is to take an extended holiday so you can focus on exercise without the distraction of having to think, because it is next to impossible to think clearly while dieting.
So the video game breakout is essential for a music player... when did that happen? How about the address book? Or the note book? Or the photo album? Or the video playback!
About the only thing the iPod doesn't do is play Ogg Vorbis, which would be... you know... kind of useful for a portable music playing device. "But Ogg Is Only Used By 5% Of Users". Yeah, like the Mac.
No, that's OK, Linux is so fast it does infinite loops in 5 seconds. SCO just needs to use the same techniques and metho... oh, hang on.
I'd love to be truly philantropic while still having billions and billions of dollars of personal cash to spend.
He got to where he is by abusing the trust of others. Praising him would be like praising the mafia for giving money to the church. He's trying to wash his hands clean. Don't fall for it. He's still a scumbag.
Nuclear Industries Indemnity ACT.
HTH. HAND. DFRNA.
Food, shelter and clean drinking water should be free. What's your point?
And this is how the Incompetent Design nitwits are winning this argument. They've managed to convince the general public that (1) there are two major sides (in reality, there is one major side and one very small but incredibly vocal side) and (2) that the Evilutionists(tm) have closed minds. A scientist's mind should be open but not so open that their brain falls out. Allowing Intervention Divine into science class falls into the "brain falling out" category.
There is no debate here. There is a propaaganda war being waged against science by a bunch of ignorant Christian fundamentalists, who are essentially no better and no worse than the Islamic fundamentalists. They are winning the propaganda war because they have too much money, because of the $300 billion charity given annually in America, $280 billion goes to domestic Christian charities.
And I'm not picking on you. I see from the rest of your comment that you don't support Inconvenient Dribble in the science class. What I'm commenting on is that the propaganda war has been so successful that even you are saying that "both sides" have "closed minds". There are not two sides. The scientists do not have closed minds for rejecting debunked non-science. But even rational people are starting to repeat the mantra of "both sides" have "closed minds". What did that German dude say about "repeat a lie often enough"?
The big-bang is entirely testable. The background microwave radiation is one test. The velocity vs distance of galaxies is another test. The COBE satellite was launched to test the big-bang theory (and the theory passed that test).
The singularity is an untestable event. The big-bang itself, entirely testable. In your own words you admit it's testable:
If there are observations that could disprove the big-bang theory then the theory is testable. That's what testable means. But be careful: the theory is not the same thing as a model.
An agnostic says that the answer to "Is there a God?" is inherently unknowable, which in my opinion is a very weak standpoint (it makes assumptions about the nature of God). On the other hand, an atheist declares their belief, not their knowledge, and it is therefore a very strong standpoint. A person can be both agnostic and atheist (and indeed, most agnostics are also atheist but have an incorrect understanding of what atheism means).
What you've described ("i could give a rats ass") sounds more like an apatheist :-)
Who said anything about it being expected. I said in Australia we do give tips but it is not expected and is instead given voluntarily by the patron. I have never heard of an Australian restaurant preemptively adding a tip to the bill. If it happened to me I would refuse to pay.