Don't worry, nobody wants to live in the current homes anyway so it won't be an issue. I"m sure that if anyone moves in with any money they'll be building NEW homes on cheap desert land.
Do you have any idea what areas like that in New Mexico look like? We're not talking about the Chicago suburbs. They're in a friekin desert. And they're poor. The people living there now don't own homes that anyone with any money would want... especially at inflated prices. Any new person moving in with a high paid Spaceport job would probably just pick up some random plot of desert for $1 an acre or something. But hey, they'll need people to do their landscaping. It is more like:
1) Own a trailer in the area 2) Do landscaping and housekeeping for pilots in their nice irrigated gated community 3) Profit?
We're talking trickle down economics at best. NOt real estate get-rich-quick deals.
No... They paid for part of the spaceport so he'd build it where they live and so that those multi-millionaires would come to spend their money where they live. He was going to build it anyway, and he was almost certainly not going to build it in New Mexico without any incentive to do so.
How many "tourists" could we possibly be talking about? How many people are going to be spending $200k for some lame, not-even-really-space flight? And what are they going to spend their money on? A hotel room? "Massage" parlors? Is that really the kind of jobs they want to create? Bellhops? Desk clerks? Hookers? I guess it's better than nothing, but geez. Talk about aiming low.:-)
That's kind of what's always bugged me: the natives that Europeans met in America were basically living in the Stone Age. Europeans didn't get to the America (in the accepted account) until long after they did, and had much better technology. Either the original native colonizers were more advanced, or the idea of pre-Viking European colonizers isn't so crazy.
I think that is the point... the technology required to cross the Atlantic is/was minimal. Really. All that was really required was the desire/courage to do it. Going to Mars really is a big deal technologically. There isn't much comparison.
I had heard the "real world" mileage is actually far less than 55 for the Prius. I'm also pretty disappointed in hybrids. WHen they first came out people were talking 80MPG. But less than 55? Pfft!
Blocking solar energy is just a Really Bad Idea all around. I mean, not only does it reduce our ability to collect solar energy for electricity but it reduces the ability of plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Stupid stupid idea.
Yeah, funny when Windows people talk about doing stuff like that, it is full of caveats like "try not to use different chipset, HD, video, etc." If you opt not to trust the OS X "copy settings" option, you can always boot from a firewire/USB drive, put your old computer in "target firewire" mode and clone the machine without having to buy/download a single utility or setup anything beforehand (other than having a bootable external drive, which any tech savvy Mac user should have, even an iPod will do, OS install DVD may work as well). You either ditto everything over or use Apple System Restore to clone the disks. ASR is probably fastest. Extremely fast, actually. I recently cloned disks at 45MB/sec. The only thing you would have to be concerned about is whether or not the source and target architectures are different.
*shrug* I've spent the last 20 years customizing and tweaking DOS/Windows/Linux and I guess I'm just a little tired of it. It was fun and educational and all (well, Windows I've always found rather annoying), but these days i just want something that has good defaults and does a good portion of what I need out of the box. Maybe the final realization came when I tried out Gentoo (I'm a long time Debian guy). I thought to myself "what the hell am I compiling every single app for, anyway? This is nothing but an inconvenience. Is this what Linux is all about? Pointless customization? Do I really need binaries taylored to my machine?" No, that isn't what Linux is all about, but it made me see how much time I was spending on it.
Then I estimate about 30 minutes. And the settings transfer option is anything but obscure. it is right there when you first boot up a new Mac/new OS install. You actually have to explicitly opt out of it. The point is that you often don't have to setup a new machine from scratch with a Mac. But if I had to, it woudl be about 1/2 hour depending on available bandwidth.
You don't need to heat up an entire oven just for leftovers. A covered, non-stick pan on the range top will do fine for most things. A toaster-oven will work for most everything else.
Toaster ovens suck a lot of power. I wouldn't be surpised if you used more electricity heating something up in a toaster oven for 5 minutes vs. 1 minute in a microwave.
Compare having a properly cooked meal to having a horrible microwaved meal - the gas stove/oven easily wins on convenience. Compare the quality time spent cooking and eating good food with loved ones to having crap food in 1 minute - the gas stove/oven easily wins on quality of life.
Can't you have a properly cooked leftovers? I don't "cook" food in a microwave. It is best for reheating things. And it is very efficient at that.
FTFA: "Within two to three years we will have developed a prototype for real applications. "The technology could be sold off already, but it would be a shame to get rid of it now." God DAMN it. I want a product now.
Moe: This baby can flash-fry a whole buffalo in 45 seconds. Homer: 45 seconds1?? Aww! But I want it now!
Hard to say. It it is the kind of thing that evolves over time, ya know? It is sometimes difficult to separate your personal data (like bookmarks) from your settings (wallpaper, themes). But I can be up and running comfortably on a new user account on a new Mac in just a couple minutes depending on whether or not you count time downloading things like Firefox+plugins (woudln't even consider browsing the web without my adblock plus!). I'll need macports installed, Textmate, Adium, and a couple other significant apps....
But besides major application, I consider OS X to "read to go" out of the box. I mean, it has good defaults as far as the user interface goes and it has all the basic utilites like CD/DVD burning, disk image mounting, PDF read/write, ssh, decent terminal, bash, etc. All things I would spend a fair amount of time putting together on Windows.
Well, there is more to it than style. There's also the basic utilities (not major applications). I find that Windows is particularly useless out of the box. Here's a list of a few things I need before I'm comfortable with a Windows install:
1) The commandline/terminal is no good. Need a good shell like bash 2) Telnet program is worthless 3) Need SSH/SCP (client) support 4) Good compressed file management. Download winzip or WinRAR 5) No PDF viewer, need Acrobat 6) Can't print to PDF, need PDFMaker 7) Have to install video drivers 8) Need to download decent CD/DVD burning software 9) Need something to mount disk images (there's like 10 different ISO image formats under Windows, WTF?) 10) Need something to take screenshots similar to how OS X just saves a.png right to your desktop.
These are all things that Linux and OS X come with out of the box. Ya know, for as bloated as Windows is, you'd think it would be just a little bit more functional out of the box. The only things Windows really DOES have out of the box that is useful are IE and Windows Media Player, which I never use! So that means I need to download a web browser, and Winamp...
Then after (possibly before) you get all that, you have to think about viruses and malware protection...
Getting Windows up to general usefulness is a huge pain in the ass. Good thing I don't really use it much.;-)
Why arent you just keeping your/home partition backed up? When I installed Kubuntu I let it run overnight with a huge batch of things to download and install. That took about 10 minutes to set up. Then another 15 minutes to copy/home from my old machine. So, call it 25 minutes of work for a fully customized and tweaked installation?
Kinda like how OS X will do import of your settings/home directory from another comptuer over firewire. Just boot your old computer with 'T' held down and Setup will copy all your users, system preferences, and even applications if you let it.
Overall, I'd say OS X has the shortest "initial setup time" of anything I've used. Although I guess it depends on how many macports you depend on...
I've had university classes where the prof literally read from the book. I'd look at my notes and realize I'd just copied pages from my text book.
You know what I find annoying? People who feel it necessary to write down, word for word, what the professor says... and then have the f**king nerve to ask the professor to slow down/stop so they can keep up with the notes. They're NOTES, people, not an exercise in transcription. If you are spending that much time writing, you're not listening.
The driver is part of the hardware, so I count BSODs due to driver issues in the same bucket as "faulty hardware." (Making exceptions for drivers that ship with the OS, of course.) Since drivers are going to be required with every modern OS, you really can't count some seedy driver from Taiwan crashing against Microsoft-- especially when Microsoft makes every effort to get companies to thoroughly test and digitally sign drivers.
You can hold it against "Windows" when there are alternatives like OS X where drivers are rarely an issue. If you are just looking for someone to blame or bitch at, then maybe it doesn't make much sense to blame Microsoft for driver problems. But if you're are looking at Windows as a whole, that is a different story. Lets say you were to put together a pro/con list of using Windows vs. Mac (No, i don't want to go into the actual list here). Wouldn't it make sense to put "flaky Taiwanese drivers" as a con against Windows? Does it really matter what specific company is to blame? The fact that a video driver or sound driver is causing your computer to crash is all that matters. Unless you're one of those PHB's who gets some vague satisfaction out of merely having someone to point a finger at.
So is Vista, compared to XP. Clear and dramatic improvements in pretty much all areas. It's just that most of them are invisible to the end user.
I dunno, It is pretty hard to beat going from a single user OS without modern memory management based on a FAT filesystem to an NT based system . From a computer science perspective, the change is huge. I can't see how Vista even comes close. What would have made Vista really significant is if MS had dropped the Win32 API (with compatibility similar to Apple's Classic mode and Carbon API). Instead MS made mostly incremental changes and kept a whole lot of legacy stuff alive.
Yes you are right, XP was a huge step internally. But did the average person care?
The just didn't really know or understand.
Vista is supposed to be a huge step internally over XP. But those arguments are currently being drowned out.
"Supposed to be." All we really know is that it is different. At least we knew XP was based on Windows 2000 which we knew was vastly superior (architecturally speaking) to 98.
Does the average person care that the IP stack has been completely rewritten? Probably not.
Just rewriting something doesn't necessarily make it better.
My point was that the same arguments against upgrading to Vista, are pretty much the same arguments that initially popped up against XP. The arguments may be wrong/true/half right/complete nonsense, but they are still there.
I disagree. I think most tech savvy people back in 2000/2001 recognized the need for the consumers to get an NT kernel. If not XP, then Windows 2000. Yes, of course there were complaints that XP was "bloated." But that doesn't detract from the recognized (even back then) fact that XP has a much better architecture than Windows 98. OK, maybe Vista is a rewrite in many ways compared to XP, but it isn't nearly as significant as 98->XP. Who cares if they rewrote the IP stack for Vista? That is nothing compared to such things as modern memory management, NTFS, file system security, and true multiuser capabilities that came with XP.
I wouldn't say it was a no-brainer. From memory, when it was released people said it was bloated, needed more resources, had compatibility issues, was just a pretty interface, and why should they bother upgrading when their old system was running fine.
Sorry, but XP was a lot more than "just a pretty interface" compared to Windows 98. Maybe you're thinking of Windows 2000 vs. XP? I hardly ever saw a Windows 98 machine (or worse, Windows ME!) that was "running fine." I know I hated using it.
*Cue all the/. nerds saying "you just had to know how to treat it"*
Whatever. Reality is that the whole Windows 9x/ME series was an abomination that should never have been inflicted on the masses. Maybe XP was bloated, but it was a major step up for consumers as far as reliability, if nothing else.
Bah! I gave up on that series after book III. It just wasn't going anywhere. And the "flashbacks" seemed completely irrelevant. At least in the first book they had a whole different font so you coudl easily skip over them and get on with the real story.:-p
How many consumers could articulate the differences between the two and articulate the reasons for upgrading? Why does it seem that so many people buy the latest version of whatever MS puts out?
I had heard the box sales of Vista are actually quite a bit lower than any time before. And it makes sense. 98/ME -> XP was a no-brainer for most people. XP -> Vista is much less of an upgrade and quite often not worth it, hence fewer box sales.
Why do people by the latest versio of whatever MS puts out? Compatability? Promise of better security (debatable)? Just to say they have the latest and greatest? Many reasons, I'm sure.
Exactly. The fact that Vista is ANY bigger than its predecessor tells me everything I need to know about it. Do you think Microsoft is serving customer demands when it makes each successive operating system bigger and requiring more resources?
Kinda, yea. Maybe super-mega-awesome coders like yourself or people you know can add features and layers of abstraction to software without adding to size and resouce consumption, but the reality is that most can't. It happens with every single consumer operating system known. From MacOS to Linux to Windows. That is just the way it is. If you don't like it, go boot up an AmigaOne and run AmigaOS, which doesn't even have modern memory management. But it is small and lightweight. Have fun.
Do you think customers are demanding that a computer should slow down just because you upgraded your operating system?
Of course not, but it is a side effect in many cases.
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Don't worry, nobody wants to live in the current homes anyway so it won't be an issue. I"m sure that if anyone moves in with any money they'll be building NEW homes on cheap desert land.
Do you have any idea what areas like that in New Mexico look like? We're not talking about the Chicago suburbs. They're in a friekin desert. And they're poor. The people living there now don't own homes that anyone with any money would want... especially at inflated prices. Any new person moving in with a high paid Spaceport job would probably just pick up some random plot of desert for $1 an acre or something. But hey, they'll need people to do their landscaping. It is more like:
1) Own a trailer in the area
2) Do landscaping and housekeeping for pilots in their nice irrigated gated community
3) Profit?
We're talking trickle down economics at best. NOt real estate get-rich-quick deals.
-matthew
How many "tourists" could we possibly be talking about? How many people are going to be spending $200k for some lame, not-even-really-space flight? And what are they going to spend their money on? A hotel room? "Massage" parlors? Is that really the kind of jobs they want to create? Bellhops? Desk clerks? Hookers? I guess it's better than nothing, but geez. Talk about aiming low.
-matthew
I think that is the point... the technology required to cross the Atlantic is/was minimal. Really. All that was really required was the desire/courage to do it. Going to Mars really is a big deal technologically. There isn't much comparison.
-matthew
I had heard the "real world" mileage is actually far less than 55 for the Prius. I'm also pretty disappointed in hybrids. WHen they first came out people were talking 80MPG. But less than 55? Pfft!
-matthew
Blocking solar energy is just a Really Bad Idea all around. I mean, not only does it reduce our ability to collect solar energy for electricity but it reduces the ability of plants to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Stupid stupid idea.
Yeah, funny when Windows people talk about doing stuff like that, it is full of caveats like "try not to use different chipset, HD, video, etc." If you opt not to trust the OS X "copy settings" option, you can always boot from a firewire/USB drive, put your old computer in "target firewire" mode and clone the machine without having to buy/download a single utility or setup anything beforehand (other than having a bootable external drive, which any tech savvy Mac user should have, even an iPod will do, OS install DVD may work as well). You either ditto everything over or use Apple System Restore to clone the disks. ASR is probably fastest. Extremely fast, actually. I recently cloned disks at 45MB/sec. The only thing you would have to be concerned about is whether or not the source and target architectures are different.
-matthew
*shrug* I've spent the last 20 years customizing and tweaking DOS/Windows/Linux and I guess I'm just a little tired of it. It was fun and educational and all (well, Windows I've always found rather annoying), but these days i just want something that has good defaults and does a good portion of what I need out of the box. Maybe the final realization came when I tried out Gentoo (I'm a long time Debian guy). I thought to myself "what the hell am I compiling every single app for, anyway? This is nothing but an inconvenience. Is this what Linux is all about? Pointless customization? Do I really need binaries taylored to my machine?" No, that isn't what Linux is all about, but it made me see how much time I was spending on it.
Then I estimate about 30 minutes. And the settings transfer option is anything but obscure. it is right there when you first boot up a new Mac/new OS install. You actually have to explicitly opt out of it. The point is that you often don't have to setup a new machine from scratch with a Mac. But if I had to, it woudl be about 1/2 hour depending on available bandwidth.
-matthew
Toaster ovens suck a lot of power. I wouldn't be surpised if you used more electricity heating something up in a toaster oven for 5 minutes vs. 1 minute in a microwave.
-matthew
Can't you have a properly cooked leftovers? I don't "cook" food in a microwave. It is best for reheating things. And it is very efficient at that.
Sure, but there is a big difference in convenience. Compare waiting for your oven to heat up for 10 minutes to a 1 minute nuke in the microwave....
-matthew
Moe: This baby can flash-fry a whole buffalo in 45 seconds.
Homer: 45 seconds1?? Aww! But I want it now!
-matthew
Hard to say. It it is the kind of thing that evolves over time, ya know? It is sometimes difficult to separate your personal data (like bookmarks) from your settings (wallpaper, themes). But I can be up and running comfortably on a new user account on a new Mac in just a couple minutes depending on whether or not you count time downloading things like Firefox+plugins (woudln't even consider browsing the web without my adblock plus!). I'll need macports installed, Textmate, Adium, and a couple other significant apps....
But besides major application, I consider OS X to "read to go" out of the box. I mean, it has good defaults as far as the user interface goes and it has all the basic utilites like CD/DVD burning, disk image mounting, PDF read/write, ssh, decent terminal, bash, etc. All things I would spend a fair amount of time putting together on Windows.
-matthew
Well, there is more to it than style. There's also the basic utilities (not major applications). I find that Windows is particularly useless out of the box. Here's a list of a few things I need before I'm comfortable with a Windows install:
.png right to your desktop.
;-)
1) The commandline/terminal is no good. Need a good shell like bash
2) Telnet program is worthless
3) Need SSH/SCP (client) support
4) Good compressed file management. Download winzip or WinRAR
5) No PDF viewer, need Acrobat
6) Can't print to PDF, need PDFMaker
7) Have to install video drivers
8) Need to download decent CD/DVD burning software
9) Need something to mount disk images (there's like 10 different ISO image formats under Windows, WTF?)
10) Need something to take screenshots similar to how OS X just saves a
These are all things that Linux and OS X come with out of the box. Ya know, for as bloated as Windows is, you'd think it would be just a little bit more functional out of the box. The only things Windows really DOES have out of the box that is useful are IE and Windows Media Player, which I never use! So that means I need to download a web browser, and Winamp...
Then after (possibly before) you get all that, you have to think about viruses and malware protection...
Getting Windows up to general usefulness is a huge pain in the ass. Good thing I don't really use it much.
-matthew
Kinda like how OS X will do import of your settings/home directory from another comptuer over firewire. Just boot your old computer with 'T' held down and Setup will copy all your users, system preferences, and even applications if you let it.
Overall, I'd say OS X has the shortest "initial setup time" of anything I've used. Although I guess it depends on how many macports you depend on...
-matthew
You know what I find annoying? People who feel it necessary to write down, word for word, what the professor says... and then have the f**king nerve to ask the professor to slow down/stop so they can keep up with the notes. They're NOTES, people, not an exercise in transcription. If you are spending that much time writing, you're not listening.
-matthew
What's worse is when they not only read their slides verbatim but print them out, 6 per sheet, as handouts.
-matthew
You can hold it against "Windows" when there are alternatives like OS X where drivers are rarely an issue. If you are just looking for someone to blame or bitch at, then maybe it doesn't make much sense to blame Microsoft for driver problems. But if you're are looking at Windows as a whole, that is a different story. Lets say you were to put together a pro/con list of using Windows vs. Mac (No, i don't want to go into the actual list here). Wouldn't it make sense to put "flaky Taiwanese drivers" as a con against Windows? Does it really matter what specific company is to blame? The fact that a video driver or sound driver is causing your computer to crash is all that matters. Unless you're one of those PHB's who gets some vague satisfaction out of merely having someone to point a finger at.
-matthew
I dunno, It is pretty hard to beat going from a single user OS without modern memory management based on a FAT filesystem to an NT based system . From a computer science perspective, the change is huge. I can't see how Vista even comes close. What would have made Vista really significant is if MS had dropped the Win32 API (with compatibility similar to Apple's Classic mode and Carbon API). Instead MS made mostly incremental changes and kept a whole lot of legacy stuff alive.
-matthew
The just didn't really know or understand.
"Supposed to be." All we really know is that it is different. At least we knew XP was based on Windows 2000 which we knew was vastly superior (architecturally speaking) to 98.
Just rewriting something doesn't necessarily make it better.
I disagree. I think most tech savvy people back in 2000/2001 recognized the need for the consumers to get an NT kernel. If not XP, then Windows 2000. Yes, of course there were complaints that XP was "bloated." But that doesn't detract from the recognized (even back then) fact that XP has a much better architecture than Windows 98. OK, maybe Vista is a rewrite in many ways compared to XP, but it isn't nearly as significant as 98->XP. Who cares if they rewrote the IP stack for Vista? That is nothing compared to such things as modern memory management, NTFS, file system security, and true multiuser capabilities that came with XP.
-matthew
Sorry, but XP was a lot more than "just a pretty interface" compared to Windows 98. Maybe you're thinking of Windows 2000 vs. XP? I hardly ever saw a Windows 98 machine (or worse, Windows ME!) that was "running fine." I know I hated using it.
*Cue all the
Whatever. Reality is that the whole Windows 9x/ME series was an abomination that should never have been inflicted on the masses. Maybe XP was bloated, but it was a major step up for consumers as far as reliability, if nothing else.
-matthew
Bah! I gave up on that series after book III. It just wasn't going anywhere. And the "flashbacks" seemed completely irrelevant. At least in the first book they had a whole different font so you coudl easily skip over them and get on with the real story. :-p
-matthew
I had heard the box sales of Vista are actually quite a bit lower than any time before. And it makes sense. 98/ME -> XP was a no-brainer for most people. XP -> Vista is much less of an upgrade and quite often not worth it, hence fewer box sales.
Why do people by the latest versio of whatever MS puts out? Compatability? Promise of better security (debatable)? Just to say they have the latest and greatest? Many reasons, I'm sure.
It died with the last philosopher.
-matthew
Kinda, yea. Maybe super-mega-awesome coders like yourself or people you know can add features and layers of abstraction to software without adding to size and resouce consumption, but the reality is that most can't. It happens with every single consumer operating system known. From MacOS to Linux to Windows. That is just the way it is. If you don't like it, go boot up an AmigaOne and run AmigaOS, which doesn't even have modern memory management. But it is small and lightweight. Have fun.
Of course not, but it is a side effect in many cases.
-matthew