I used many different audio searches back in the day, including Audiogalaxy back when it was simply an FTP search engine; it used to scan networks for FTP servers, trying different usernames and passwords, and it was surprisingly successful. Then once they introduced the Satellite, Audiogalaxy stood out as the only place on the Internet where you could find obscure music. If I heard a song on SomaFM, by an artist I had never heard of, I could search for that artist on Audiogalaxy and download all their songs; it might take a week or two before the correct user signed on:D, but I'd eventually get the music. And if I liked it, I could go buy that artist's CD.
Now, Audiogalaxy has become a neo-Pressplay or Musicnet. It's a "filter-in" music search, except that it's only popular artists from the major labels represented there. I don't care about the streaming, or anything else; I'm just saddened that Audiogalaxy no longer offers the obscure music it was once famous for, and I can't even find out about that obscure music anymore because Soma FM is down.
AG, it seems, has sold out. Napster, obviously, sucks; FastTrack can hack your registry; the only realistic filesharing protocol left for Linux users is Gnutella, and it of course has scaling problems. As far as Linux users are concerned, then, the RIAA has certainly achieved its goal of blocking filesharing - but when they stop selling records, because nobody knows what to buy anymore, it shall be a problem. (You know, I almost wish that the Copyright Royalty Arbitration (CRAP) panel had required mandatory royalties for old-school radio, too - I'd just love to see the expression on the RIAA dudes' faces when their record sales drop 90%, because nobody knows what records to buy anymore.:D)
I remember back when Wizards announced the D20 system. They had an "interview" or something like that on their site, describing it. And one of the points they made on their site was that D20 could be used to design a system that was completely level-free.
Is anyone here (well, duh, of course:D) sufficiently advanced in D&D that they know how to adapt D20 to be level-free? Or do you know someone else that already did that?
First, that Apple took 15 years of hard work on their interface and threw it out the window. Why couldn't Apple have ported the OS 9 interface to the X API, instead of completely rewriting it and making it worse?
Second, that Apple spent a huge amount of time improving the Mach kernel. As long as Apple was going to spend so much time improving a kernel, why couldn't they have done work on L4, or another nanokernel? It wouldn't have been any harder, it wouldn't have delayed the production of OS X at all; yet Apple had its programmers work on Mach instead, in my opinion a colossal waste.
Everything else about OS X is great. Quartz, Cocoa, etc. are all the best implementations of their kind that I've seen anywhere. But I still don't see why Apple had to start almost from scratch with Aqua.
First, I thought Mach was good. Then I read up on comparisons of different microkernels; and found that Mach is actually somewhere in between a microkernel and macrokernel, but closer to the worst of both worlds than the best. I personally think that L4 would be a better choice for most situations, including for OS X.
How or why? What would be better about this new microkernel over the XNU-macho microkernel already in place?
The Mach kernel, though claiming to be a microkernel, does a lot that should be done in userspace; in the L4 kernel, absolutely anything and everything that can be done in userspace, is. Using a nanokernel like that would make OS X work much better.
Also, I would like to point out that the *Linux* kernel is deficient in regards to latency.
I'm not advocating Linux at all; I much favor the GNU/Hurd and BeOS for their microkernel architectures. I simply think that the OS X kernel could be much more micro than it is.
You're going to have to define legacy free for me. What legacy does OS X have that burdens it.
OS X doesn't have legacy. What I meant was, perhaps Apple would have been better off simply updating the Mac OS 9 UI and apps, on top of a clean Cocoa-style API, all on top of a nanokernel, instead of completely rewriting the UI and making it worse than the original one.
The current kernel has several advantages over the classic Mac OS;
I know this fully, and I agree. And I think OS X at its core is quite a good operating system compared to most of the alternatives.
My point is only that Apple felt it necessary to completely redo their operating system. I think if they did that, they should have used a nanokernel instead of a microkernel, and that they also should not have felt the need to completely scrap the OS 9 interface (they should have, in my opinion, just ported it to Cocoa, and made both Platinum and Aqua available as visual options).
Oh, come on. Even people who think POSIX is the best thing since sliced bread agree that Mach sucks. The least Apple could have done would be to use a better microkernel, or to design a POSIX-compatible kernel from the ground up that was legacy-free and more similar to how Macs have always worked, no?
In addition to this being common knowledge among Apple developers well before now, everything said here was said better by MacKiDo. Take a read here. It describes very well how the Mac interface is better than just about any other.
Of course, if you go to MacKiDo's main page, you'll also notice an introduction note; in summary, it says that OS X was a mistake, as Apple's primary focus is no longer on the UI. And you know what? I couldn't agree more. Say all you want about OS X bringing Unix to the masses, but the fact is, the masses would have been better off without Unix. OS 9, despite having less eye candy than OS X, was architecturally better for the home user in just about every way than OS X - the only significant development X had was Cocoa, and that could easily have been ported into an OS 9 upgrade instead.
By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel. And their interface in many ways no longer follows the principles that Apple themselves set out so brilliantly back in 1984, and others tried to emulate with varying degrees of success (don't even get me started on the Dock).
I still love the PPC platform; it's no Alpha, but it is the most popular RISC platform for the desktop. IBM, at one time, had the CHRP platform; it was the PPC answer to x86's open hardware, and it would have allowed a PC user to upgrade to PPC by simply throwing a new motherboard and processor into their existing case using their existing components and peripherals. If IBM releases their new Power4 processor for CHRP, I'll be the first to buy it, and install PPC Linux. And if the planets are all in alignment, and Apple decides to design OS XX based on a completely new design, scrapping all development environments but Cocoa and going back to the old OS9-style user interface, then I'll buy a Mac.
But there's absolutely no point in buying a closed platform when the software, specially designed for that platform, sucks. At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
If you notice, I'm not actually proposing to tax the companies at 50% of revenues. I only want to collect 50% royalties on extraction. All other business activities, and all revenues generated from other sources, are tax-free. Therefore, I'm not actually taxing the corporation; I'm taxing the land, and whoever owns that land, be it corporation, group, or individual, pays 50% of extraction royalties to the state.
The numbers you're throwing out don't prove anything. In the end, you're still saying that oil companies that lease public land, and pay royalties on it, would be better off if they could buy that land for cheap from the state, or better yet be given it for free, and can pass along the savings to shareholders, or maybe if we're really lucky pass a tiny bit onto consumers in the form of lower gas prices. These oil companies are using public land, with natural resources. Moreso, they have a monopoly on revenues from that source. Cars you can build anywhere, or microchips, or software; but oil you can only extract where it exists, and the oil companies have monopolies on the places it exists.
So by saying that companies should be entitled to free or one-time cost use of public land, you're saying that monopolies should be unregulated and allowed to do whatever they want. Right?
Theories don't always describe the real situation perfectly. The fact is, Alaska's oil dividend has been hugely successful. It has contributed to the economy, not hurt it. Things like a different poverty level for having children are side issues, that distract from the main point; if it matters, I think that the poverty level should be for a single person, and that married people and children should each receive separate (full) checks.
Though your loop is true under peculiar circumstances, in practice it doesn't play out that way. Most importantly, oil companies will *not* raise prices, simply because they're already rolling in the dough, and if they face competition from other oil companies, they're going to lower prices; despite having monopolies on extraction, they don't have monopolies on distribution. If an oil company needs to eat the price of a lease, thereby reducing their revenues to $5.9 tril from $6 tril, the company will do it - the extra revenue they get from higher volume will more than make up for the reduced margins. Your loop would be correct if Standard Oil was still around, or another oil monopoly; but if they were, then its prices would be federally-set and regulated, meaning that an increase in prices wouldn't be allowed.
Either way, though 2-8a are correct, they're dependent on 1 - which, because of the wonders of the free market, is false. The state of Alaska is living proof of that.
Alaska has petroleum. That's simply a natural fact. Unlike almost any other industry, an oil company can't just pack up and leave, and find a new home; there's a limited amount of oil in the world, and inevitably some companies will try to harvest oil in Alaska.
Now, in Alaska, the state owns the land the oil companies work on. So as part of the lease agreement, Alaska collects 25% of oil royalties from leasees. There is no danger of companies leaving Alaska as a result, because Alaska's got so much oil; if one company leaves, another will take its place. And companies extracting in Alaska are still tremendously rich, even though they have to give 25% of royalties to the government.
The government of Alaska owns land. Right now, they give all revenue generated from that land to Alaskans; last year, they gave each Alaskan almost $2,000. Alaskans did vote for this, of course; they voted for the program's enactment originally, and against its removal quite recently. You propose giving the money instead to the oil companies extracting in Alaska.
Theoretically the oil companies would lower prices. But those companies are already rolling in much more profit than they in any way need. If they don't lower prices with all the money sitting around now, why would they with the tiny (for them) amount of extra money they'd receive if Alaska collected 0% royalties? In effect, you're saying that the rich oil companies deserve public revenue more than the people themselves do. Not even the Alaska Libertarian Party says that (the AK-LP supports the oil dividend.)
Of course, the Alaska program is different from the program I propose, in the sense that mine would aim to provide much more money to residents. But I don't plan to do that by raising income taxes, or property taxes; both of which I want to eliminate. Rather, I simply want to increase the amount of money generated from public land, maybe collecting 50% or higher royalties from oil and mining companies, and the use of ER spectrum, and similar use. And then, I want to take all that money, and turn it into an endowment; and reinvest most of the interest (paying the rest out Alaska-style), and keep collecting more money, until interest payments alone are more than enough to cover the guaranteed minimum income. It will take a number of decades before nobody is in poverty, but people could still receive (reduced) checks every year, starting as soon as the program is implemented.
In effect, all I'm saying is that public revenue should be stored in a trust fund, and multiplied, until interest is sufficient to lift all people out of poverty, by paying everybody an annual check. To argue otherwise is to say that private oil companies deserve public revenue more than the citizens themselves.
Immigration: I find it interesting that you misinterpreted me so...strangely. Isn't it clear from my earlier piece that I'm on the side of the immigrants? I believe that citizenship should be abolished, and laws should be made around residency instead; if you currently live in the US, then you vote in US elections, qualify for US benefits, and pay US taxes, regardless of where you came from.
I fully support free trade, as long as there's no human rights abuses going on in developing countries by companies that take advantage of NAFTA or similar agreements (I'm pretty sure that there's no human-rights abuses going on at the car factories in Michigan:D). I fully support the rights of immigrants to come over to the US by any means they want, and to stay here for as long as they want, and I think they should become citizens as soon as they cross the border. But the fact remains, they don't - and many of them really are working 40+ hour weeks just to put food on the table, contrary to what you were saying.
Call me a socialist fool, but I know better. The system I advocate has been used successfully in many places around the world - including Alaska, not exactly a leftist paradise. The goverrnment of Alaska, quite simply, collects 12.5% of all oil revenues in the state, and pays every citizen an equal share of the money. No means-testing, no bureaucracy, no qualifying; everyone gets a check, simple as that. No person in Alaska is destitute (unlike every other state), because of that system. A similar system exists in Alberta, Canada, about as right-wing as Texas.
Suppose such a system was expanded to include other monopolies. Mining, local telephone service, electricity, you name it. A huge portion of revenues from monopolies was collected by the states, and distributed in even proportions to all residents, rich and poor. That system could theoretically provide an income large enough that flexibility in the labor market could be dramatically expanded, so that unemployment insurance and similar programs were made redundant. (Read my reply to the reply to "Full disclosure", a top-level comment.)
So I'm not just waiting for a successful implementation of my theory to be used. It's been done many times, and people love it.
HOW STUPID ARE YOU!! CAN'T YOU READ!! DON'T YOU KNOW THE DEFINITION OF "GUARANTEED" AND "MEANS-TESTED"!!
The program that I want to institute has been used successfully around the world, including in Alaska. Every resident of Alaska, whether they make $2 trillion/yr, nothing, or anywhere in between, receives a check; Alaska collects 12.5% of all oil revenues in the state, which nets each citizen about $1,000/yr. The program's popular in right-wing Alaska; a referendum sponsored by the oil companies tried to remove the program, but that measure failed by an overwhelming margin.
Here's the part you missed. You can't lose your benefit! Everybody qualifies. There is no means-testing, no bureaucracy deciding who qualifies; everybody with a Social Security # (in other words, everybody) receives a check. If you're stuck in a cubicle busting your rump, you still qualify. If you get promoted to the CEO of your company, you still qualify. Everybody receives an equal share, just by being alive.
Because every single person qualifies, there is absolutely zero incentive not to take a job. In Japan, I think it is, you're financially better off not working than working minimum wage; in the US, you only gain on average 50% of minimum wage if you were on welfare and you go off of it. With a system like this, because the income is guaranteed, you wouldn't lose a penny of it if you started to work - so why not work?
In fact, I believe this system would be a huge benefit to capitalism. In addition to taking the place of welfare, it can replace unemployment insurance, and similar programs. People can take jobs, knowing that they can quit at any time, and find a new job, if their employer mistreats them; the way it is now, people are locked into their jobs, because they need the income and the benefits. And employers would also be more free to lay off workers, because they wouldn't need to provide severance (workers would still receive the check). The huge addition of flexibility into the labor market would mean that people never get stuck doing jobs they don't like, and there would be better jobs for everybody.
Now, tell me exactly how your family would have been harmed by this system...?
It seems that your beliefs can pretty much be summed up in one sentence: It is possible, with extreme amounts of work and self-discipline, to pull oneself out of any situation into success, therefore anybody who doesn't do that deserves their place in life.
While that is valid philosophy, I personally find it morally repulsive. Give me one good reason why we, as a society, should not consider it our obligation to ensure that every member has as high a quality of life as possible, even if for some reason they are unable to do work. I don't mean that people should be paying for other people to have Mercedes-es, just that it's an outrage that in one company, you have one person whose job it is to pass down management decisions from a higher-level manager to a lower-level manager, and he gets paid about 100x what the janitor does.
Your arguments also assume that society bears no blame in people's misfortunes. Maybe people have so much debt because credit cards are so agressively marketed? Studies have shown that the human brain is wired to cooperate; you can derive from that that, unless taught otherwise, people are naturally gullible, and thus will believe a credit card company's ads. People from better backgrounds, in addition to being able to pay off debt, generally know better than to fall prey to those cards.
Also, what about illegal immigrants? They sneak into the US, attempting to find whatever job they can get; there's a house-cleaning service around where I live, staffed by Portuguese immigrants - though I have no evidence to back it up, I'd be surprised if a single one was legal. And these immigrants provide many services that US upper-class citizens enjoy, that very few non-recent-immigrant US residents want to do. Yet, because they don't want to get deported, these residents are unable to qualify for any benefits - so they really are working huge weeks to put food on the table.
Here's my point. In a "perfect world" (though such a world isn't perfect in my mind), what you're saying would be true; the amount of success people get would be directly proportional to the amount of work they put in, and people would be able to get a job doing whatever they want. In the real world, opportunity is not as widely available, and many factors can mean that certain people are unable to achieve success on the scale you describe, even if they worked 150 hours a week (ignoring the fact that they would die after about a month of working such a schedule, from lack of sleep). A civilized society cannot rightly ignore such factors, and should insure, at the least, that nobody starves.
Look at it this way-- MOST of the reason companies suck is because people don't leave when they are treated poorly. IF people left when mistreated, no company would be poorly managed-- every company is needs employees to function. But so many people sell their souls by staying in these poor jobs because they don't have the backbone to stand up for themselves and they only make it worse on others by saying "Yes, I'll take this treatement, slap me around some more" until virtual slapping is just part of the corporate cutlure.
Yessum, that's a good piece of philosophy there.
Now, I could say just the opposite - *if* people had a guaranteed source of income, that they received whether they made $2 bil, didn't have a job, or anything in between, then perhaps you'd gain that additional flexibility?
Many people are already working well over 40-hour weeks, and they still barely make enough to feed their family; do you expect those people to start a business? No, though you occasionally hear "success stories" where people are catapulted from poverty to upper-class, most entrepreneurship comes from people who can work on it full-time.
Read my other post to this article, and give me one good reason why that would be a bad idea. We're talking philosophy here:), so ignore feasibility.
(I'm being a hypocrite, as I criticized somebody else for giving a politicized rant, whereas that's exactly what I'm about to do. This one's different, though, but I apologize in advance.)
Right now, the government uses welfare and other means-tested programs. They very strongly encourage people to get to work. They also make it very hard for anyone without hordes of money to be an entrepreneur.
Now, suppose that the government eliminated welfare and all other means-tested programs, and replaced them with a single program, providing every citizen a guaranteed income; say also that that guaranteed income was the same as the federal poverty limit.
I personally think that instituting such a plan would do wonders for... well, everything. Companies would be free to hire and fire workers at will, without notice or severance, because they wouldn't be denying anyone a livelihood; and likewise, employees would be free to leave a company at any time, because they wouldn't be leaving their family stranded. And many people might choose to eschew a proper job, or work part-time, and become an entrepreneur.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing missing is the money.
Uh, thanks for your political rant, but you did an excellent job at missing the point.
The question has nothing to do with politics. It is not, should everyone receive a living wage without working, or should everyone be given a living wage while they're finding work, or anything like that. It's a philosophical question: *If you didn't have to work, what would you do?*
Anything about politics is missing the point (unless, of course, you'd go into politics with your free time). Anything about money is also missing the point; that's why I put in the bit about assuming not infinite money, but the same amount of money you make now.
Whatever you may wish to be true, the fact is there are many people who take whatever job they can get, because they need a reliable source of income, and those people would much rather be doing a different job. And there are other people who simply can't find a line of work the enjoy. So the question is directed at those people: *What would you rather be doing?*
You and Dashua are on the right track. It would be great if everyone could say the same as you, that the thing they're doing now is what they'd most like to do for 8 hours a day.
Sadly, not everyone can say that. Many people are forced into doing a job that they dislike, or truly hate, just because they need the money and they have no options. Maybe no one's hiring in their field, or they don't like the particular job they have though they like the field, or maybe their field just doesn't lead to a specific line of work. Either way, it happens, and those people are who the question's directed at.
The question is not (or at least, should not be), what would you do with infinite money? Rather, it's, if you could earn your current salary doing anything at all, what would it be? What would you rather be doing from 9 to 5 (or before, or after)?
In my mind, that's a very important distinction. I don't care if you'd buy a Beowulf cluster of Xserves. I don't care if you'd buy enough food to feed the world. I don't care if you'd buy Australia. All I care about is, if you received the same amount of money you do now, but you didn't have to work for it, what would you do?
If you browse the OBOS source hierarchy, you'll notice a BeFS module. Do not download that one. Strangely enough, the correct module to download is current. Why the other modules remain there, I have no idea.
If you download the wrong one, you'll get a two-month old driver; it can't write, and it will not take its time in screwing up your BeOS installation.
I made the stupid mistake of checking out module BeFS. Apparently, I'm not the only one.:D Had I checked out current, it would have worked. And I will now proceed to do that, though it involves reinstalling BeOS.:()
I hear this news, and decide maybe it's a good idea to try it out. So I install BeOS 5.04 Dev Edition (from BeOSOnline.de), get it all set up, compile OpenBFS, and transplant it in.
I restart my system, and lo and behold, it works. I type in 'touch t', and it successfully creates a file called t. However, I then see a box on the screen saying, "BeOS was unable to initialize a swap file." I realize something's wrong - and when I try to create another file, or do anything really, it refuses, on the account that it's a read-only file system. Of course, write support is implemented, but for some reason it was inaccessible to me.
At the end of all this, I finally manage to corrupt my filesystem, and despite replacing the original BFS driver, it refuses to boot. So I'm going to have to reinstall.:(
Maybe I don't understand something about Cocoa. But I had been under the imporession that, contrary to making it harder, writing your Mac applications in Cocoa would actually make them much easier to port. After all, Cocoa pretty much requires the use of either Java, which is obviously portable, or Objective C, which is portable via GnuStep.
If this guy was rewriting frameworks anyway, why not rewrite the app in Obj-C, and help work on the GnuStep project? Then we could all use the best API of all, and it would be painless to port Pepper to any platform. Instead, he was fixated to the idea of using proprietary APIs instead of the proprietary but very well documented Cocoa API, and the porting challenges proved so hard that he had to give up.
Microsoft's a big software company. Nevertheless, do you know where most of their profits come from? 40% are from Office, its biggest seller.
Microsoft is fast realizing that a non-subscription-based Windows cannot be expected to be a moneymaker for long; people are just too prone to pirate. The idea very well may occur to them to port Office to Linux, because they know full well that they'd gain more profits from additional sales of Office than they'd lose from sales of Windows. And once MS is offering products from Linux, why wouldn't they at least make it possible (if not any easier) to install Linux on the Xbox?
Knowing MS, they'd be much more likely to install a version of CE on the hard drive, which would allow people to run Microsoft-certified apps. But I can't think of a good reason why Microsoft wouldn't allow people to run Linux on the box, if it meant that MS would have more system sales, and thus more game sales (and more licensing fees from game developers).
As for the other minor problems you mention: [a] The doctrine of first sale says that Microsoft can stop no person from buying a $200 Xbox, putting in a $40 mod-chip, installing Linux, and selling it for $300 plus shipping. MS may not like it, but users would; they could get a full-featured computer that ran all Xbox games for only $300, which is as much as some people paid for the Xbox as it is. [b] The filesystem doesn't need any special features. The Xbox by its nature isn't going to be used as a server, so in effect it's single-user; and there are no other filesystem features you need to download software off SourceForge (arguably we need a more standardized package format, but that has nothing to do with filesystems).
Watson should immediately sue Apple, for "look-and-feel" violations regarding the new Sherlock.
The outrage here is not that Apple did this in the first place. That's to be expected; Apple makes its fortunes with look-and-feel, and of course it will sue anyone who tries to take that away. But when Apple does the opposite... why does no one call them on it?
I have to compliment you - this is one of the rare AC posts that is actually good enough for me to reply to. Wow.
You're absolutely right - you're a light gamer. The average person wouldn't dare pause their game to read a story; and chances are, they'd have a standalone sound system, with a high-quality receiver and speaker set. Even you, when you're playing a game, aren't really doing anything else; the fact that you have a large number of applications open in the background doesn't distract from the point that, while you're playing, your computer might as well be in hibernation, except for your music (covered) and your headlines.
As for frame rates; remember, you've got an LCD. (I've got 5.:D) LCDs have the wonderful attribute that they don't need to be constantly refreshed to keep their image. Therefore, refresh rates have nothing to do with flicker, and everything to do with blur. If you're playing a visually-intensive FPS, and you're getting 50 FPS on an LCD, there will be a barely-noticeable blur on the screen at all times, and that's it. 75 FPS is ideal, because the human eye is capable of seeing the equivalent of little more than 72 FPS, but it's much less of an issue for LCD-type displays than for others.
Essentially, you're in a unique situation. The average gamer and PC user is nothing like you. They barely multitask at all, let alone when they're gaming. They don't develop, of course. They just want to type their docs, read their email, play their games, and be done. For geeks like you and I, we have real computers, high-end PCs and Macs. For most users, though, an Xbox will be more than adequate.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.newsfactor.com/perl/story/13468.html
Quantum computing is a *good* thing.
I used many different audio searches back in the day, including Audiogalaxy back when it was simply an FTP search engine; it used to scan networks for FTP servers, trying different usernames and passwords, and it was surprisingly successful. Then once they introduced the Satellite, Audiogalaxy stood out as the only place on the Internet where you could find obscure music. If I heard a song on SomaFM, by an artist I had never heard of, I could search for that artist on Audiogalaxy and download all their songs; it might take a week or two before the correct user signed on :D, but I'd eventually get the music. And if I liked it, I could go buy that artist's CD.
:D)
Now, Audiogalaxy has become a neo-Pressplay or Musicnet. It's a "filter-in" music search, except that it's only popular artists from the major labels represented there. I don't care about the streaming, or anything else; I'm just saddened that Audiogalaxy no longer offers the obscure music it was once famous for, and I can't even find out about that obscure music anymore because Soma FM is down.
AG, it seems, has sold out. Napster, obviously, sucks; FastTrack can hack your registry; the only realistic filesharing protocol left for Linux users is Gnutella, and it of course has scaling problems. As far as Linux users are concerned, then, the RIAA has certainly achieved its goal of blocking filesharing - but when they stop selling records, because nobody knows what to buy anymore, it shall be a problem. (You know, I almost wish that the Copyright Royalty Arbitration (CRAP) panel had required mandatory royalties for old-school radio, too - I'd just love to see the expression on the RIAA dudes' faces when their record sales drop 90%, because nobody knows what records to buy anymore.
I remember back when Wizards announced the D20 system. They had an "interview" or something like that on their site, describing it. And one of the points they made on their site was that D20 could be used to design a system that was completely level-free.
:D) sufficiently advanced in D&D that they know how to adapt D20 to be level-free? Or do you know someone else that already did that?
Is anyone here (well, duh, of course
My problems are twofold.
First, that Apple took 15 years of hard work on their interface and threw it out the window. Why couldn't Apple have ported the OS 9 interface to the X API, instead of completely rewriting it and making it worse?
Second, that Apple spent a huge amount of time improving the Mach kernel. As long as Apple was going to spend so much time improving a kernel, why couldn't they have done work on L4, or another nanokernel? It wouldn't have been any harder, it wouldn't have delayed the production of OS X at all; yet Apple had its programmers work on Mach instead, in my opinion a colossal waste.
Everything else about OS X is great. Quartz, Cocoa, etc. are all the best implementations of their kind that I've seen anywhere. But I still don't see why Apple had to start almost from scratch with Aqua.
Have you no opinion of your own?
First, I thought Mach was good. Then I read up on comparisons of different microkernels; and found that Mach is actually somewhere in between a microkernel and macrokernel, but closer to the worst of both worlds than the best. I personally think that L4 would be a better choice for most situations, including for OS X.
How or why? What would be better about this new microkernel over the XNU-macho microkernel already in place?
The Mach kernel, though claiming to be a microkernel, does a lot that should be done in userspace; in the L4 kernel, absolutely anything and everything that can be done in userspace, is. Using a nanokernel like that would make OS X work much better.
Also, I would like to point out that the *Linux* kernel is deficient in regards to latency.
I'm not advocating Linux at all; I much favor the GNU/Hurd and BeOS for their microkernel architectures. I simply think that the OS X kernel could be much more micro than it is.
You're going to have to define legacy free for me. What legacy does OS X have that burdens it.
OS X doesn't have legacy. What I meant was, perhaps Apple would have been better off simply updating the Mac OS 9 UI and apps, on top of a clean Cocoa-style API, all on top of a nanokernel, instead of completely rewriting the UI and making it worse than the original one.
The current kernel has several advantages over the classic Mac OS;
I know this fully, and I agree. And I think OS X at its core is quite a good operating system compared to most of the alternatives.
My point is only that Apple felt it necessary to completely redo their operating system. I think if they did that, they should have used a nanokernel instead of a microkernel, and that they also should not have felt the need to completely scrap the OS 9 interface (they should have, in my opinion, just ported it to Cocoa, and made both Platinum and Aqua available as visual options).
Oh, come on. Even people who think POSIX is the best thing since sliced bread agree that Mach sucks. The least Apple could have done would be to use a better microkernel, or to design a POSIX-compatible kernel from the ground up that was legacy-free and more similar to how Macs have always worked, no?
In addition to this being common knowledge among Apple developers well before now, everything said here was said better by MacKiDo. Take a read here. It describes very well how the Mac interface is better than just about any other.
Of course, if you go to MacKiDo's main page, you'll also notice an introduction note; in summary, it says that OS X was a mistake, as Apple's primary focus is no longer on the UI. And you know what? I couldn't agree more. Say all you want about OS X bringing Unix to the masses, but the fact is, the masses would have been better off without Unix. OS 9, despite having less eye candy than OS X, was architecturally better for the home user in just about every way than OS X - the only significant development X had was Cocoa, and that could easily have been ported into an OS 9 upgrade instead.
By switching to OS X, Apple threw out 15 years of hard work, just to release an OS with an inferior UI on an inferior kernel. And their interface in many ways no longer follows the principles that Apple themselves set out so brilliantly back in 1984, and others tried to emulate with varying degrees of success (don't even get me started on the Dock).
I still love the PPC platform; it's no Alpha, but it is the most popular RISC platform for the desktop. IBM, at one time, had the CHRP platform; it was the PPC answer to x86's open hardware, and it would have allowed a PC user to upgrade to PPC by simply throwing a new motherboard and processor into their existing case using their existing components and peripherals. If IBM releases their new Power4 processor for CHRP, I'll be the first to buy it, and install PPC Linux. And if the planets are all in alignment, and Apple decides to design OS XX based on a completely new design, scrapping all development environments but Cocoa and going back to the old OS9-style user interface, then I'll buy a Mac.
But there's absolutely no point in buying a closed platform when the software, specially designed for that platform, sucks. At least with PCs, I can run BeOS on a laptop; with Macs, such is no longer an option.
If you notice, I'm not actually proposing to tax the companies at 50% of revenues. I only want to collect 50% royalties on extraction. All other business activities, and all revenues generated from other sources, are tax-free. Therefore, I'm not actually taxing the corporation; I'm taxing the land, and whoever owns that land, be it corporation, group, or individual, pays 50% of extraction royalties to the state.
The numbers you're throwing out don't prove anything. In the end, you're still saying that oil companies that lease public land, and pay royalties on it, would be better off if they could buy that land for cheap from the state, or better yet be given it for free, and can pass along the savings to shareholders, or maybe if we're really lucky pass a tiny bit onto consumers in the form of lower gas prices. These oil companies are using public land, with natural resources. Moreso, they have a monopoly on revenues from that source. Cars you can build anywhere, or microchips, or software; but oil you can only extract where it exists, and the oil companies have monopolies on the places it exists.
So by saying that companies should be entitled to free or one-time cost use of public land, you're saying that monopolies should be unregulated and allowed to do whatever they want. Right?
Theories don't always describe the real situation perfectly. The fact is, Alaska's oil dividend has been hugely successful. It has contributed to the economy, not hurt it. Things like a different poverty level for having children are side issues, that distract from the main point; if it matters, I think that the poverty level should be for a single person, and that married people and children should each receive separate (full) checks.
Though your loop is true under peculiar circumstances, in practice it doesn't play out that way. Most importantly, oil companies will *not* raise prices, simply because they're already rolling in the dough, and if they face competition from other oil companies, they're going to lower prices; despite having monopolies on extraction, they don't have monopolies on distribution. If an oil company needs to eat the price of a lease, thereby reducing their revenues to $5.9 tril from $6 tril, the company will do it - the extra revenue they get from higher volume will more than make up for the reduced margins. Your loop would be correct if Standard Oil was still around, or another oil monopoly; but if they were, then its prices would be federally-set and regulated, meaning that an increase in prices wouldn't be allowed.
Either way, though 2-8a are correct, they're dependent on 1 - which, because of the wonders of the free market, is false. The state of Alaska is living proof of that.
http://www.progress.org/cd24.htm
Alaska has petroleum. That's simply a natural fact. Unlike almost any other industry, an oil company can't just pack up and leave, and find a new home; there's a limited amount of oil in the world, and inevitably some companies will try to harvest oil in Alaska.
Now, in Alaska, the state owns the land the oil companies work on. So as part of the lease agreement, Alaska collects 25% of oil royalties from leasees. There is no danger of companies leaving Alaska as a result, because Alaska's got so much oil; if one company leaves, another will take its place. And companies extracting in Alaska are still tremendously rich, even though they have to give 25% of royalties to the government.
The government of Alaska owns land. Right now, they give all revenue generated from that land to Alaskans; last year, they gave each Alaskan almost $2,000. Alaskans did vote for this, of course; they voted for the program's enactment originally, and against its removal quite recently. You propose giving the money instead to the oil companies extracting in Alaska.
Theoretically the oil companies would lower prices. But those companies are already rolling in much more profit than they in any way need. If they don't lower prices with all the money sitting around now, why would they with the tiny (for them) amount of extra money they'd receive if Alaska collected 0% royalties? In effect, you're saying that the rich oil companies deserve public revenue more than the people themselves do. Not even the Alaska Libertarian Party says that (the AK-LP supports the oil dividend.)
Of course, the Alaska program is different from the program I propose, in the sense that mine would aim to provide much more money to residents. But I don't plan to do that by raising income taxes, or property taxes; both of which I want to eliminate. Rather, I simply want to increase the amount of money generated from public land, maybe collecting 50% or higher royalties from oil and mining companies, and the use of ER spectrum, and similar use. And then, I want to take all that money, and turn it into an endowment; and reinvest most of the interest (paying the rest out Alaska-style), and keep collecting more money, until interest payments alone are more than enough to cover the guaranteed minimum income. It will take a number of decades before nobody is in poverty, but people could still receive (reduced) checks every year, starting as soon as the program is implemented.
In effect, all I'm saying is that public revenue should be stored in a trust fund, and multiplied, until interest is sufficient to lift all people out of poverty, by paying everybody an annual check. To argue otherwise is to say that private oil companies deserve public revenue more than the citizens themselves.
I have two things to say here.
:D). I fully support the rights of immigrants to come over to the US by any means they want, and to stay here for as long as they want, and I think they should become citizens as soon as they cross the border. But the fact remains, they don't - and many of them really are working 40+ hour weeks just to put food on the table, contrary to what you were saying.
Immigration: I find it interesting that you misinterpreted me so...strangely. Isn't it clear from my earlier piece that I'm on the side of the immigrants? I believe that citizenship should be abolished, and laws should be made around residency instead; if you currently live in the US, then you vote in US elections, qualify for US benefits, and pay US taxes, regardless of where you came from.
I fully support free trade, as long as there's no human rights abuses going on in developing countries by companies that take advantage of NAFTA or similar agreements (I'm pretty sure that there's no human-rights abuses going on at the car factories in Michigan
Call me a socialist fool, but I know better. The system I advocate has been used successfully in many places around the world - including Alaska, not exactly a leftist paradise. The goverrnment of Alaska, quite simply, collects 12.5% of all oil revenues in the state, and pays every citizen an equal share of the money. No means-testing, no bureaucracy, no qualifying; everyone gets a check, simple as that. No person in Alaska is destitute (unlike every other state), because of that system. A similar system exists in Alberta, Canada, about as right-wing as Texas.
Suppose such a system was expanded to include other monopolies. Mining, local telephone service, electricity, you name it. A huge portion of revenues from monopolies was collected by the states, and distributed in even proportions to all residents, rich and poor. That system could theoretically provide an income large enough that flexibility in the labor market could be dramatically expanded, so that unemployment insurance and similar programs were made redundant. (Read my reply to the reply to "Full disclosure", a top-level comment.)
So I'm not just waiting for a successful implementation of my theory to be used. It's been done many times, and people love it.
(feel free to ignore my upcoming insult)
HOW STUPID ARE YOU!! CAN'T YOU READ!! DON'T YOU KNOW THE DEFINITION OF "GUARANTEED" AND "MEANS-TESTED"!!
The program that I want to institute has been used successfully around the world, including in Alaska. Every resident of Alaska, whether they make $2 trillion/yr, nothing, or anywhere in between, receives a check; Alaska collects 12.5% of all oil revenues in the state, which nets each citizen about $1,000/yr. The program's popular in right-wing Alaska; a referendum sponsored by the oil companies tried to remove the program, but that measure failed by an overwhelming margin.
Here's the part you missed. You can't lose your benefit! Everybody qualifies. There is no means-testing, no bureaucracy deciding who qualifies; everybody with a Social Security # (in other words, everybody) receives a check. If you're stuck in a cubicle busting your rump, you still qualify. If you get promoted to the CEO of your company, you still qualify. Everybody receives an equal share, just by being alive.
Because every single person qualifies, there is absolutely zero incentive not to take a job. In Japan, I think it is, you're financially better off not working than working minimum wage; in the US, you only gain on average 50% of minimum wage if you were on welfare and you go off of it. With a system like this, because the income is guaranteed, you wouldn't lose a penny of it if you started to work - so why not work?
In fact, I believe this system would be a huge benefit to capitalism. In addition to taking the place of welfare, it can replace unemployment insurance, and similar programs. People can take jobs, knowing that they can quit at any time, and find a new job, if their employer mistreats them; the way it is now, people are locked into their jobs, because they need the income and the benefits. And employers would also be more free to lay off workers, because they wouldn't need to provide severance (workers would still receive the check). The huge addition of flexibility into the labor market would mean that people never get stuck doing jobs they don't like, and there would be better jobs for everybody.
Now, tell me exactly how your family would have been harmed by this system...?
A social Darwinist, eh?
It seems that your beliefs can pretty much be summed up in one sentence: It is possible, with extreme amounts of work and self-discipline, to pull oneself out of any situation into success, therefore anybody who doesn't do that deserves their place in life.
While that is valid philosophy, I personally find it morally repulsive. Give me one good reason why we, as a society, should not consider it our obligation to ensure that every member has as high a quality of life as possible, even if for some reason they are unable to do work. I don't mean that people should be paying for other people to have Mercedes-es, just that it's an outrage that in one company, you have one person whose job it is to pass down management decisions from a higher-level manager to a lower-level manager, and he gets paid about 100x what the janitor does.
Your arguments also assume that society bears no blame in people's misfortunes. Maybe people have so much debt because credit cards are so agressively marketed? Studies have shown that the human brain is wired to cooperate; you can derive from that that, unless taught otherwise, people are naturally gullible, and thus will believe a credit card company's ads. People from better backgrounds, in addition to being able to pay off debt, generally know better than to fall prey to those cards.
Also, what about illegal immigrants? They sneak into the US, attempting to find whatever job they can get; there's a house-cleaning service around where I live, staffed by Portuguese immigrants - though I have no evidence to back it up, I'd be surprised if a single one was legal. And these immigrants provide many services that US upper-class citizens enjoy, that very few non-recent-immigrant US residents want to do. Yet, because they don't want to get deported, these residents are unable to qualify for any benefits - so they really are working huge weeks to put food on the table.
Here's my point. In a "perfect world" (though such a world isn't perfect in my mind), what you're saying would be true; the amount of success people get would be directly proportional to the amount of work they put in, and people would be able to get a job doing whatever they want. In the real world, opportunity is not as widely available, and many factors can mean that certain people are unable to achieve success on the scale you describe, even if they worked 150 hours a week (ignoring the fact that they would die after about a month of working such a schedule, from lack of sleep). A civilized society cannot rightly ignore such factors, and should insure, at the least, that nobody starves.
Yessum, that's a good piece of philosophy there.
Now, I could say just the opposite - *if* people had a guaranteed source of income, that they received whether they made $2 bil, didn't have a job, or anything in between, then perhaps you'd gain that additional flexibility?
Many people are already working well over 40-hour weeks, and they still barely make enough to feed their family; do you expect those people to start a business? No, though you occasionally hear "success stories" where people are catapulted from poverty to upper-class, most entrepreneurship comes from people who can work on it full-time.
Read my other post to this article, and give me one good reason why that would be a bad idea. We're talking philosophy here
(I'm being a hypocrite, as I criticized somebody else for giving a politicized rant, whereas that's exactly what I'm about to do. This one's different, though, but I apologize in advance.)
Right now, the government uses welfare and other means-tested programs. They very strongly encourage people to get to work. They also make it very hard for anyone without hordes of money to be an entrepreneur.
Now, suppose that the government eliminated welfare and all other means-tested programs, and replaced them with a single program, providing every citizen a guaranteed income; say also that that guaranteed income was the same as the federal poverty limit.
I personally think that instituting such a plan would do wonders for... well, everything. Companies would be free to hire and fire workers at will, without notice or severance, because they wouldn't be denying anyone a livelihood; and likewise, employees would be free to leave a company at any time, because they wouldn't be leaving their family stranded. And many people might choose to eschew a proper job, or work part-time, and become an entrepreneur.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing missing is the money.
Uh, thanks for your political rant, but you did an excellent job at missing the point.
The question has nothing to do with politics. It is not, should everyone receive a living wage without working, or should everyone be given a living wage while they're finding work, or anything like that. It's a philosophical question: *If you didn't have to work, what would you do?*
Anything about politics is missing the point (unless, of course, you'd go into politics with your free time). Anything about money is also missing the point; that's why I put in the bit about assuming not infinite money, but the same amount of money you make now.
Whatever you may wish to be true, the fact is there are many people who take whatever job they can get, because they need a reliable source of income, and those people would much rather be doing a different job. And there are other people who simply can't find a line of work the enjoy. So the question is directed at those people: *What would you rather be doing?*
You and Dashua are on the right track. It would be great if everyone could say the same as you, that the thing they're doing now is what they'd most like to do for 8 hours a day.
Sadly, not everyone can say that. Many people are forced into doing a job that they dislike, or truly hate, just because they need the money and they have no options. Maybe no one's hiring in their field, or they don't like the particular job they have though they like the field, or maybe their field just doesn't lead to a specific line of work. Either way, it happens, and those people are who the question's directed at.
We should rephrase the question a tad bit.
The question is not (or at least, should not be), what would you do with infinite money? Rather, it's, if you could earn your current salary doing anything at all, what would it be? What would you rather be doing from 9 to 5 (or before, or after)?
In my mind, that's a very important distinction. I don't care if you'd buy a Beowulf cluster of Xserves. I don't care if you'd buy enough food to feed the world. I don't care if you'd buy Australia. All I care about is, if you received the same amount of money you do now, but you didn't have to work for it, what would you do?
Don't make the same stupid mistake I did!
If you browse the OBOS source hierarchy, you'll notice a BeFS module. Do not download that one. Strangely enough, the correct module to download is current. Why the other modules remain there, I have no idea.
If you download the wrong one, you'll get a two-month old driver; it can't write, and it will not take its time in screwing up your BeOS installation.
Actually, we're both wrong.
:D Had I checked out current, it would have worked. And I will now proceed to do that, though it involves reinstalling BeOS. :()
I made the stupid mistake of checking out module BeFS. Apparently, I'm not the only one.
I hear this news, and decide maybe it's a good idea to try it out. So I install BeOS 5.04 Dev Edition (from BeOSOnline.de), get it all set up, compile OpenBFS, and transplant it in.
:(
I restart my system, and lo and behold, it works. I type in 'touch t', and it successfully creates a file called t. However, I then see a box on the screen saying, "BeOS was unable to initialize a swap file." I realize something's wrong - and when I try to create another file, or do anything really, it refuses, on the account that it's a read-only file system. Of course, write support is implemented, but for some reason it was inaccessible to me.
At the end of all this, I finally manage to corrupt my filesystem, and despite replacing the original BFS driver, it refuses to boot. So I'm going to have to reinstall.
OBOS, sadly, just isn't ready for primetime yet.
Maybe I don't understand something about Cocoa. But I had been under the imporession that, contrary to making it harder, writing your Mac applications in Cocoa would actually make them much easier to port. After all, Cocoa pretty much requires the use of either Java, which is obviously portable, or Objective C, which is portable via GnuStep.
If this guy was rewriting frameworks anyway, why not rewrite the app in Obj-C, and help work on the GnuStep project? Then we could all use the best API of all, and it would be painless to port Pepper to any platform. Instead, he was fixated to the idea of using proprietary APIs instead of the proprietary but very well documented Cocoa API, and the porting challenges proved so hard that he had to give up.
Microsoft's a big software company. Nevertheless, do you know where most of their profits come from? 40% are from Office, its biggest seller.
Microsoft is fast realizing that a non-subscription-based Windows cannot be expected to be a moneymaker for long; people are just too prone to pirate. The idea very well may occur to them to port Office to Linux, because they know full well that they'd gain more profits from additional sales of Office than they'd lose from sales of Windows. And once MS is offering products from Linux, why wouldn't they at least make it possible (if not any easier) to install Linux on the Xbox?
Knowing MS, they'd be much more likely to install a version of CE on the hard drive, which would allow people to run Microsoft-certified apps. But I can't think of a good reason why Microsoft wouldn't allow people to run Linux on the box, if it meant that MS would have more system sales, and thus more game sales (and more licensing fees from game developers).
As for the other minor problems you mention: [a] The doctrine of first sale says that Microsoft can stop no person from buying a $200 Xbox, putting in a $40 mod-chip, installing Linux, and selling it for $300 plus shipping. MS may not like it, but users would; they could get a full-featured computer that ran all Xbox games for only $300, which is as much as some people paid for the Xbox as it is. [b] The filesystem doesn't need any special features. The Xbox by its nature isn't going to be used as a server, so in effect it's single-user; and there are no other filesystem features you need to download software off SourceForge (arguably we need a more standardized package format, but that has nothing to do with filesystems).
Watson should immediately sue Apple, for "look-and-feel" violations regarding the new Sherlock.
The outrage here is not that Apple did this in the first place. That's to be expected; Apple makes its fortunes with look-and-feel, and of course it will sue anyone who tries to take that away. But when Apple does the opposite... why does no one call them on it?
I have to compliment you - this is one of the rare AC posts that is actually good enough for me to reply to. Wow.
:D) LCDs have the wonderful attribute that they don't need to be constantly refreshed to keep their image. Therefore, refresh rates have nothing to do with flicker, and everything to do with blur. If you're playing a visually-intensive FPS, and you're getting 50 FPS on an LCD, there will be a barely-noticeable blur on the screen at all times, and that's it. 75 FPS is ideal, because the human eye is capable of seeing the equivalent of little more than 72 FPS, but it's much less of an issue for LCD-type displays than for others.
You're absolutely right - you're a light gamer. The average person wouldn't dare pause their game to read a story; and chances are, they'd have a standalone sound system, with a high-quality receiver and speaker set. Even you, when you're playing a game, aren't really doing anything else; the fact that you have a large number of applications open in the background doesn't distract from the point that, while you're playing, your computer might as well be in hibernation, except for your music (covered) and your headlines.
As for frame rates; remember, you've got an LCD. (I've got 5.
Essentially, you're in a unique situation. The average gamer and PC user is nothing like you. They barely multitask at all, let alone when they're gaming. They don't develop, of course. They just want to type their docs, read their email, play their games, and be done. For geeks like you and I, we have real computers, high-end PCs and Macs. For most users, though, an Xbox will be more than adequate.