A few years back, stocks went from being represented as strictly fractional values (1/2, 1/4, sometimes down to 1/100) - and there was some kind of mandate, (I think in 1998?-ish) that dictated they go to a decimal system.
The conspiracy theorists at the time were saying that it was a scam to rip people off on all the rounding errors.
Honestly, you're not a carpenter unless you have a few battle scars to show off.
Worst one I ever saw was a guy at a party, that had two holes (scars) in his hand and arm - he said that he was nailing a roof, and got his hand, slipped on the slope, and started to slide off the roof, until he stopped because his hand was nailed into the roof. With half his body hanging over the edge, he felt the skin tearing loose from the first hole (through the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger) - so, not wanting to fall two stories, in a panic, he popped another nail through his forearm to anchor him until his co-workers could get a ladder in to help him.
True or not, I have no idea. If it was true though. . .
Should not be based on size alone, but should also be based on spin, complexity of orbital perturbations (and I understand that Pluto's orbit is fairly unique in many ways).
Because my wife always told me that it's not size, it's the technique.
No. This incident was aimed at splitting the US/UK alliance.
And I agree - they DO want to provoke the US into all-out Nuclear War. Because if you think the world hates the US now - just wait until we nuke Tehran. To them, it's just 10 million martyrs.
The primary goal of Terrorism is to cause terror in the population.
The goal of causing terror in the population is to get them to do stupid, craven things, like give up freedoms, start wars, abandon civility.
The goal of causing your enemy to abandon civility, is that they lose the "moral high ground" - and then this makes it easier for the opposing guerilla force to get away with immoral tactics.
The goal of immoral tactics for a guerilla or insurgency is to allow them to fight more effectively than their better-trained, better-equipped, more-numerous foe, who are bound by rules of warfare - until they decide that those rules are an inconvenient luxury; because they're terrified.
Example: Rockets fired at Israeli civillians got Israelis pissed off. Israelis invaded Lebanon. Bombed like mad to try to stop the rockets. Killed civillians in collateral damage. Israelis now look like the bad guys. Hezbollah guerillas are now free to happily continue shelling civillians, hiding their equipment amongst civillians, etc. This allows them to be more effective a fighting force, due to the assymetrical nature of guerilla warfare (Hezbollah do not have satellite surveillance, air-defense radar, ships, planes, cluster bombs, etc.) - being able to complain about accidental civillian deaths, while purposely targeting the enemy's civillians suprisingly gives them a lot of milage in the press, and public sympathy.
The biggest mistake a terror victim can make, is allowing themselves to be terrorized.
That doesn't mean I don't think that we should not adopt tough air-travel security measures. But we should also respect civil liberties. And the rules of warfare. They're not a luxury. They're who we are.
Our standards for our own moral conduct should be based on our values. Not on "slightly less horrible than the terrorists".
On that note, I'm happy to say that of late, the public at large isn't falling for this bullshit as much as they used to. They are still stampeding like scared sheep. But at least most people seem to grasp that Hezbollah's tactics are evil, while Israel's acting in valid self-defense. Hezbollah has not yet provoked Israel enough. They're probably going to need to field some chemical weapons to get Israel riled up enough to accomplish Hezbollah's goals. All Hezbollah needs to do is not be destroyed utterly, in the eyes of the muslim world. Israel has a much more difficult (more likely impossible) victory condition: kill every last Hezbollah member, and make sure nobody ever claims to be Hezbollah after that, and/or get Hezbollah to withdraw their stated goal of destroying Israel.
I bought a 1st Generation PPC 601, 7100: Zero problems. In fact, I overclocked that motherfucker (33->66), and ran it hot for 5 years.
I bought a 1st Generation G3 Beige: The case was externally identical to the 7100, but the inside had been completely redesigned, and was much more convenient to work with.
I had some issues with the PRAM (had the rev A PRAM) - Eventually, there was an issue that kept draining new PRAM batteries over a period of a week or two that caused me to trash this system. However, I did overclock this one too (450 MHz G4 accelerator), and ran it hot for about 3 years.
I also bought a 1st Generation bondi-blue iMac (used): My daughter still uses it. No problems to speak of - I had to swap-out the hard drive with my son's DV-imac to get 10.4 installed, because it didn't have a DVD drive.
Really a great little machine. The 233 MHz G3 is a tad slow, so this is the next machine we'll replace.
The other two CRT-iMacs I bought (cheap! on eBay) aren't 1st generation, but I'm not having any problems with those either.
I also bought a 1st Generation dual G5 Power Mac: An awesome machine. Puts all previous Macs to shame, absolutely. I read about all kinds of wacky problems with these machines. The only one I encountered was the "chirping" - which I control with nap-mode. I also think that the fans are pretty loud, and they were intially quiet, until the first OS update I downloaded, and they got loud, and have been loud ever since. I didn't overclock the dual G5, it's still going strong, 2.5 yrs later. I leave it on 24x7, and sleep it when I'm not using it. As far as "sleep-mode" technology goes, Apple is the ONLY vendor who is getting it right. Finally. However, a friend bought a single G5 power mac at the same time, and she has the "wake-on-sleep" (blank display) problem. Bad luck for her? Didn't appear until the box was 1.5 yrs old.
Lastly, I bought my son a MacBook 13" (white) as a graduation present - the very day they were announced: Case scratches - yes. Yellow Palmrests - yes. Smokes my dual G5 - hell yes (x86 apps only, and definately not Halo).
I have a freind, habitual pot smoker, who thinks it's dangerous, and *should* be illegal. He has 3 kids, a wife, and owns a small business.
Well, his business isn't doing that well, and partially because he's not that good at what he does. (kitchen remodeling) IMO. So anyway, he just got evicted from his rental home, and had to move to another one (got lucky and found someone willing to rent to him).
I'm not sure what to think about this, since I don't smoke the stuff myself anymore (not since I was a teenager), and I strongly feel it should be legal.
On the other hand, I have another acquaintance who had a wife, 3 kids, a very successful construction business, had made his first million at 30, and he got "hooked" on crystal meth. He blew $80k on partying one weekend. His wife didn't put up with that crap, and left him. Took the kids, lost the house. He lost everything. He lives in a trailer now with a crack whore. My feelings about cannabis prohibition are strong. On the other hand, I'm not so sure crystal meth should be legal. I know that's probably hypocritical. Crystal meth is so easy to manufacture, it's scary. And I've never heard anyone defend it as harmless. It's got well documented detrimental health impacts, it's highly addictive, everything that cannabis is not.
I can't explain what's happening to my pot-smoking freind. He tends to blame the pot, but he won't stop. I think his problems are a lot deeper, and that the pot is merely a crutch or excuse. And I think that having that excuse probably helps him more than it hurts him. Sure, his family could probably use that extra $200 a month that he's spending on it. But at least he's not letting things get out of control like the guy who got mixed up with crystal meth. Even if he were to quit the pot, I'm not so sure he has many other options for getting his life back on track. It's just a sad fact that his business sense sucks, and he doesn't take pride in his work, and if he had to transition to being a construction laborer instead of a business owner, he'd probably be making less money, and would probably not take orders very well. And it's not because he smokes every day. It's because he's a chucklehead. I don't think cannabis prohibition helps him, other than giving him lots of propaganda to latch onto to help him blame all his problems on his "bad habit". It certainly doesn't hurt him, because as far as I know, he's never gotten arrested for it.
Taxing or other wise regulating is similar to making them illegal.
You still encourage a black-market.
This occurred when Canada raised taxes on cigarettes, and an industry of organized crime involved in smuggling untaxed cigarettes from the US sprang up overnight, complete with killings, turf-wars, etc.
I'm not saying that there's no hope - I'm just saying that the only way to eliminate a black-market is to make the black-market legal. The way to profit from it is to keep it illegal, and use selective-enforcement of the law to eliminate rivals (at the expense of taxpayers) while covertly profiting from the monopolization of the black-market.
The really ironic thing is that - while it takes me about 3 days to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica via bittorrent, the end product is always intact.
Unlike with a Satellite or Cable programming feed to a DVR, where if it glitched while it was recording, (or if the football game prior to it ran overtime, or if the news decides to cut in with hysterical warnings of a tornado in Wyoming) your recording keep the glitch or interruption.
While I agree with everything else you said, my experience with cable television was that, overall, it was less reliable than over-the-air broadcast, or even my Satellite feed (which often cuts out during heavy rain).
I'm sure it's nothing inherent in the technology of cable, and is more related to the implementation by my local cable monopoly. (Fuck them in both eye sockets).
WRT cell-phone service, my wife insists on Verizon, because they're cheaper than the competitors. Then I get crappy service at home and at work (great service along my commute, where it is a risk to life-and-limb to talk on the phone).
So she says I need a new phone, and gets me a new phone - which, at least, is smaller, and now fits in my pocket, so I'm carrying around a small useless piece of crap instead of a large useless piece of crap. But I still get crappy service. So as I told her, with regard to my inability to take calls when I'm at work: "It's the Network, honey."
I stand corrected. I always thought he was a vegan.
I was also wrong about the ailment. He didn't have prostate cancer. He had a rare form of pancreatic cancer. (common form is like 90% fatal, Mr. Jobs' form was 15% fatal).
This guy's just trying to make hay over Apple being in the middle of a lull in their product cycle (though they have plenty of exiting things to talk about) - and perhaps, Steve Jobs showing *gasp* signs of aging, or even his bout with prostate cancer. Then again, I think he'd perk right up if he'd just eat a thick juicy steak or two.
Open source products are much more complex to integrate.
But then, with closed-source COTS products, you often run into vendor-lock-in scenarios that bring even worse headaches. Some of those headaches result in Security pain, as you jump through hoops with forced upgrades and hacks to keep things working at the application/environment level without any hope of capability to fix problems (like LUA bugs on the Windows side).
I'll take the Open Source configuration complexity any day.
There's already a VPC for x86/windows. They're full of crap and vastly overstate what will be needed. Unless Connectix has so deeply coupled the cpu-emulator, and the VM manager, that they can't be decoupled. And it's been over a year since Jobs announced the Intel switch - MS has had all this time to check the situation out, I am somewhat suprised to be hearing this kind of announcement out of Microsoft now.
This sounds like a strategic move. Particularly as it's coupled with the MS Office Mac announcement. They're hitting the Mac/Office userbase where it hurts. Document compatability. They're making sure that Macs never make it into the business space where MS Office/Windows dominates overwhelmingly. (also why they don't provide a full-on Outlook client).
It was never meant to be. Unless Apple gets their shit together and codes up a comparable, and compatible product.
At a keynote several years back, he pooh-poohed "convergence" (TV/Computer) and said "TV is where people want to turn their brains off, and the Internet is where people want to turn their brains on."
I was shocked when the video Ipod followed, and software DVD players, Tivo, FrontRow, MythTV, etc. No I wasn't.
But there still are important differences between PC's and TV. (PC's are usually a solitary experience, TV is often a communal experience) - but I think it's been amply demonstrated that PC's can do everything a TV can do - except constant mass-download of content from a hundred channels simultaneously.
But the main thing killing PC/TV convergence is the MPAA. Same dynamic that's killing gaming-PC's. Content producers are terrified that on a full-function PC, content will be copied and distributed, and they won't get their cut. So they want to provide their content to crippled systems only. So consumers will always have to buy one crippled device for each media type (family-room audio system, TV, game box (ps2/xbox/nintendo)) and a computer if they want one.
This dynamic will ensure that computers, for most homes, will remain secondary luxury items, financed after the crippled "entertainment" systems are already purchased.
The only place where this convergence makes sense is for network providers. To them, the cable monopolies, the telecom monopolies, it's all data. They'll happily provide broadband service alongside their existing networks (cable/telephone) - and shut down ISP players, until their inherent market (monopoly) powers allow them to basically shut down or marginalize the internet connection (ie. provide crappy service that a truly competitive market would otherwise improve upon).
You plug your computer into the same connection you plug your tv into. But the content providers, and network providers don't want you to use your computer like a TV. Because they're afraid you'll realize it's just data too.
(e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate,
It's being called a "Rove-a-dope" (kind of a play on words of the boxing term). False (or partially false) negative information is spread. The president's opponents react to this negative information, often vocally, often with strong emotion. Those who report on or comment on the false information are then painted as liars or "haters" or partisan, or otherwise untrustworthy.
Not only does this have the effect of damaging the credibility of anyone who speaks out against the president, it also has the effect of making everyone think twice and double-check before reporting any negative information. Whether it's part of a Rove-a-dope or not.
Is this form of "Information Warfare" special? Is Karl Rove a genius? Hell no.
I'm sure that most people could also wage such a war on the American media - given compliance with all the rightwing pundits, consolidation of major newsmedia under republican allies and contributors (FoxNews->Rupert Murdoch, Washington Times->Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ABC->GE=major defense contractor= we 3 war;), and all the various well-funded think-tanks and republican operative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc.
I dare say that many/most of those who own big businesses like the mass media want fascism and are doing what they can to make it happen, because it promises to give them greater power than what they have right now
Ironically, this is precisely what we were warned about in the 1980's when Regan did away with the FCC's "fairness doctrine" and began to erode media ownership rules so that media outlets could be consolidated into fewer and fewer large players.
Very funny - that everything that has come to pass (including 9/11, if you think about it, or if you had read PNAC's website prior to 2001) was pretty much foretold - and discredited as "liberal whining".
Australia switched in the 70s. In construction you just spec everything in mm. Much simpler and more precise.
Maybe that's why the lumber industry doesn't like it. I have a hard time finding quantities of lumber where significant quantities of studs aren't warped or knotted, or barked, or otherwise munged up. Imagine if they were held to a "mm" length. Hell, a 2x4 is more often than not more like 1 3/4" x 3 1/2". I have no idea how professional construction guys cope with this crap.
Unfortunately, it's all-too-common a delusion among the Rush Limbaugh listening public these days.
Yes. Bush drew a line in the sand. Only those who didn't understand what a "false dichotomy" is, decided to stand on the side of the racist corporate whore war profiteers out of a craven fear of being called a "terrorist supporter".
Slashdot Mirror
A few years back, stocks went from being represented as strictly fractional values (1/2, 1/4, sometimes down to 1/100) - and there was some kind of mandate, (I think in 1998?-ish) that dictated they go to a decimal system.
The conspiracy theorists at the time were saying that it was a scam to rip people off on all the rounding errors.
Honestly, you're not a carpenter unless you have a few battle scars to show off.
Worst one I ever saw was a guy at a party, that had two holes (scars) in his hand and arm - he said that he was nailing a roof, and got his hand, slipped on the slope, and started to slide off the roof, until he stopped because his hand was nailed into the roof. With half his body hanging over the edge, he felt the skin tearing loose from the first hole (through the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger) - so, not wanting to fall two stories, in a panic, he popped another nail through his forearm to anchor him until his co-workers could get a ladder in to help him.
True or not, I have no idea. If it was true though. . .
Should not be based on size alone, but should also be based on spin, complexity of orbital perturbations (and I understand that Pluto's orbit is fairly unique in many ways).
Because my wife always told me that it's not size, it's the technique.
A True Patriot like Stephen Colbert belongs on Mt. Rushmore. They ought to name an Aircraft Carrier after him. Or at least an oil tanker.
No.
This incident was aimed at splitting the US/UK alliance.
And I agree - they DO want to provoke the US into all-out Nuclear War. Because if you think the world hates the US now - just wait until we nuke Tehran. To them, it's just 10 million martyrs.
BS.
The primary goal of Terrorism is to cause terror in the population.
The goal of causing terror in the population is to get them to do stupid, craven things, like give up freedoms, start wars, abandon civility.
The goal of causing your enemy to abandon civility, is that they lose the "moral high ground" - and then this makes it easier for the opposing guerilla force to get away with immoral tactics.
The goal of immoral tactics for a guerilla or insurgency is to allow them to fight more effectively than their better-trained, better-equipped, more-numerous foe, who are bound by rules of warfare - until they decide that those rules are an inconvenient luxury; because they're terrified.
Example:
Rockets fired at Israeli civillians got Israelis pissed off.
Israelis invaded Lebanon.
Bombed like mad to try to stop the rockets.
Killed civillians in collateral damage.
Israelis now look like the bad guys.
Hezbollah guerillas are now free to happily continue shelling civillians, hiding their equipment amongst civillians, etc. This allows them to be more effective a fighting force, due to the assymetrical nature of guerilla warfare (Hezbollah do not have satellite surveillance, air-defense radar, ships, planes, cluster bombs, etc.) - being able to complain about accidental civillian deaths, while purposely targeting the enemy's civillians suprisingly gives them a lot of milage in the press, and public sympathy.
The biggest mistake a terror victim can make, is allowing themselves to be terrorized.
That doesn't mean I don't think that we should not adopt tough air-travel security measures. But we should also respect civil liberties.
And the rules of warfare. They're not a luxury. They're who we are.
Our standards for our own moral conduct should be based on our values. Not on "slightly less horrible than the terrorists".
On that note, I'm happy to say that of late, the public at large isn't falling for this bullshit as much as they used to. They are still stampeding like scared sheep. But at least most people seem to grasp that Hezbollah's tactics are evil, while Israel's acting in valid self-defense. Hezbollah has not yet provoked Israel enough. They're probably going to need to field some chemical weapons to get Israel riled up enough to accomplish Hezbollah's goals. All Hezbollah needs to do is not be destroyed utterly, in the eyes of the muslim world. Israel has a much more difficult (more likely impossible) victory condition: kill every last Hezbollah member, and make sure nobody ever claims to be Hezbollah after that, and/or get Hezbollah to withdraw their stated goal of destroying Israel.
Umm... the 7 year thing comes from the Mosaic code,
Geez, for a second there, I thought you were going to say that the IRS was using early web-based technology on early NeXT boxes. . .
I bought a 1st Generation PPC 601, 7100:
Zero problems. In fact, I overclocked that motherfucker (33->66), and ran it hot for 5 years.
I bought a 1st Generation G3 Beige:
The case was externally identical to the 7100, but the inside had been completely redesigned, and was much more convenient to work with.
I had some issues with the PRAM (had the rev A PRAM) - Eventually, there was an issue that kept draining new PRAM batteries over a period of a week or two that caused me to trash this system. However, I did overclock this one too (450 MHz G4 accelerator), and ran it hot for about 3 years.
I also bought a 1st Generation bondi-blue iMac (used):
My daughter still uses it.
No problems to speak of - I had to swap-out the hard drive with my son's DV-imac to get 10.4 installed, because it didn't have a DVD drive.
Really a great little machine. The 233 MHz G3 is a tad slow, so this is the next machine we'll replace.
The other two CRT-iMacs I bought (cheap! on eBay) aren't 1st generation, but I'm not having any problems with those either.
I also bought a 1st Generation dual G5 Power Mac:
An awesome machine. Puts all previous Macs to shame, absolutely.
I read about all kinds of wacky problems with these machines.
The only one I encountered was the "chirping" - which I control with nap-mode. I also think that the fans are pretty loud, and they were intially quiet, until the first OS update I downloaded, and they got loud, and have been loud ever since.
I didn't overclock the dual G5, it's still going strong, 2.5 yrs later.
I leave it on 24x7, and sleep it when I'm not using it.
As far as "sleep-mode" technology goes, Apple is the ONLY vendor who is getting it right. Finally.
However, a friend bought a single G5 power mac at the same time, and she has the "wake-on-sleep" (blank display) problem. Bad luck for her? Didn't appear until the box was 1.5 yrs old.
Lastly, I bought my son a MacBook 13" (white) as a graduation present - the very day they were announced:
Case scratches - yes.
Yellow Palmrests - yes.
Smokes my dual G5 - hell yes (x86 apps only, and definately not Halo).
I have an interesting anaecdote about this;
I have a freind, habitual pot smoker, who thinks it's dangerous, and *should* be illegal. He has 3 kids, a wife, and owns a small business.
Well, his business isn't doing that well, and partially because he's not that good at what he does. (kitchen remodeling) IMO. So anyway, he just got evicted from his rental home, and had to move to another one (got lucky and found someone willing to rent to him).
I'm not sure what to think about this, since I don't smoke the stuff myself anymore (not since I was a teenager), and I strongly feel it should be legal.
On the other hand, I have another acquaintance who had a wife, 3 kids, a very successful construction business, had made his first million at 30, and he got "hooked" on crystal meth. He blew $80k on partying one weekend. His wife didn't put up with that crap, and left him. Took the kids, lost the house. He lost everything. He lives in a trailer now with a crack whore.
My feelings about cannabis prohibition are strong. On the other hand, I'm not so sure crystal meth should be legal. I know that's probably hypocritical. Crystal meth is so easy to manufacture, it's scary. And I've never heard anyone defend it as harmless. It's got well documented detrimental health impacts, it's highly addictive, everything that cannabis is not.
I can't explain what's happening to my pot-smoking freind. He tends to blame the pot, but he won't stop. I think his problems are a lot deeper, and that the pot is merely a crutch or excuse. And I think that having that excuse probably helps him more than it hurts him. Sure, his family could probably use that extra $200 a month that he's spending on it. But at least he's not letting things get out of control like the guy who got mixed up with crystal meth. Even if he were to quit the pot, I'm not so sure he has many other options for getting his life back on track. It's just a sad fact that his business sense sucks, and he doesn't take pride in his work, and if he had to transition to being a construction laborer instead of a business owner, he'd probably be making less money, and would probably not take orders very well. And it's not because he smokes every day. It's because he's a chucklehead. I don't think cannabis prohibition helps him, other than giving him lots of propaganda to latch onto to help him blame all his problems on his "bad habit". It certainly doesn't hurt him, because as far as I know, he's never gotten arrested for it.
Taxing or other wise regulating is similar to making them illegal.
You still encourage a black-market.
This occurred when Canada raised taxes on cigarettes, and an industry of organized crime involved in smuggling untaxed cigarettes from the US sprang up overnight, complete with killings, turf-wars, etc.
I'm not saying that there's no hope - I'm just saying that the only way to eliminate a black-market is to make the black-market legal. The way to profit from it is to keep it illegal, and use selective-enforcement of the law to eliminate rivals (at the expense of taxpayers) while covertly profiting from the monopolization of the black-market.
Did I just say that out loud?
The really ironic thing is that - while it takes me about 3 days to download an episode of Battlestar Galactica via bittorrent, the end product is always intact.
Unlike with a Satellite or Cable programming feed to a DVR, where if it glitched while it was recording, (or if the football game prior to it ran overtime, or if the news decides to cut in with hysterical warnings of a tornado in Wyoming) your recording keep the glitch or interruption.
Magnetic fields?
Cancer?
Hello?
While I agree with everything else you said, my experience with cable television was that, overall, it was less reliable than over-the-air broadcast, or even my Satellite feed (which often cuts out during heavy rain).
I'm sure it's nothing inherent in the technology of cable, and is more related to the implementation by my local cable monopoly. (Fuck them in both eye sockets).
WRT cell-phone service, my wife insists on Verizon, because they're cheaper than the competitors. Then I get crappy service at home and at work (great service along my commute, where it is a risk to life-and-limb to talk on the phone).
So she says I need a new phone, and gets me a new phone - which, at least, is smaller, and now fits in my pocket, so I'm carrying around a small useless piece of crap instead of a large useless piece of crap. But I still get crappy service. So as I told her, with regard to my inability to take calls when I'm at work: "It's the Network, honey."
I stand corrected. I always thought he was a vegan.
I was also wrong about the ailment. He didn't have prostate cancer. He had a rare form of pancreatic cancer. (common form is like 90% fatal, Mr. Jobs' form was 15% fatal).
This guy's just trying to make hay over Apple being in the middle of a lull in their product cycle (though they have plenty of exiting things to talk about) - and perhaps, Steve Jobs showing *gasp* signs of aging, or even his bout with prostate cancer. Then again, I think he'd perk right up if he'd just eat a thick juicy steak or two.
I guess this post dovetails nicely with the "piracy killing the pc games industry" post today too.
Open source products are much more complex to integrate.
But then, with closed-source COTS products, you often run into vendor-lock-in scenarios that bring even worse headaches. Some of those headaches result in Security pain, as you jump through hoops with forced upgrades and hacks to keep things working at the application/environment level without any hope of capability to fix problems (like LUA bugs on the Windows side).
I'll take the Open Source configuration complexity any day.
Bullshit.
There's already a VPC for x86/windows. They're full of crap and vastly overstate what will be needed. Unless Connectix has so deeply coupled the cpu-emulator, and the VM manager, that they can't be decoupled.
And it's been over a year since Jobs announced the Intel switch - MS has had all this time to check the situation out, I am somewhat suprised to be hearing this kind of announcement out of Microsoft now.
This sounds like a strategic move. Particularly as it's coupled with the MS Office Mac announcement. They're hitting the Mac/Office userbase where it hurts. Document compatability. They're making sure that Macs never make it into the business space where MS Office/Windows dominates overwhelmingly. (also why they don't provide a full-on Outlook client).
It was never meant to be.
Unless Apple gets their shit together and codes up a comparable, and compatible product.
At a keynote several years back, he pooh-poohed "convergence" (TV/Computer) and said "TV is where people want to turn their brains off, and the Internet is where people want to turn their brains on."
I was shocked when the video Ipod followed, and software DVD players, Tivo, FrontRow, MythTV, etc. No I wasn't.
But there still are important differences between PC's and TV. (PC's are usually a solitary experience, TV is often a communal experience) - but I think it's been amply demonstrated that PC's can do everything a TV can do - except constant mass-download of content from a hundred channels simultaneously.
But the main thing killing PC/TV convergence is the MPAA. Same dynamic that's killing gaming-PC's. Content producers are terrified that on a full-function PC, content will be copied and distributed, and they won't get their cut. So they want to provide their content to crippled systems only. So consumers will always have to buy one crippled device for each media type (family-room audio system, TV, game box (ps2/xbox/nintendo)) and a computer if they want one.
This dynamic will ensure that computers, for most homes, will remain secondary luxury items, financed after the crippled "entertainment" systems are already purchased.
The only place where this convergence makes sense is for network providers. To them, the cable monopolies, the telecom monopolies, it's all data. They'll happily provide broadband service alongside their existing networks (cable/telephone) - and shut down ISP players, until their inherent market (monopoly) powers allow them to basically shut down or marginalize the internet connection (ie. provide crappy service that a truly competitive market would otherwise improve upon).
You plug your computer into the same connection you plug your tv into.
But the content providers, and network providers don't want you to use your computer like a TV. Because they're afraid you'll realize it's just data too.
(e.g. spreading negative information against his own candidate,
;), and all the various well-funded think-tanks and republican operative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, CATO Institute, American Enterprise Institute, etc.
It's being called a "Rove-a-dope" (kind of a play on words of the boxing term).
False (or partially false) negative information is spread. The president's opponents react to this negative information, often vocally, often with strong emotion. Those who report on or comment on the false information are then painted as liars or "haters" or partisan, or otherwise untrustworthy.
Not only does this have the effect of damaging the credibility of anyone who speaks out against the president, it also has the effect of making everyone think twice and double-check before reporting any negative information. Whether it's part of a Rove-a-dope or not.
Is this form of "Information Warfare" special? Is Karl Rove a genius?
Hell no.
I'm sure that most people could also wage such a war on the American media - given compliance with all the rightwing pundits, consolidation of major newsmedia under republican allies and contributors (FoxNews->Rupert Murdoch, Washington Times->Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ABC->GE=major defense contractor= we 3 war
I dare say that many/most of those who own big businesses like the mass media want fascism and are doing what they can to make it happen, because it promises to give them greater power than what they have right now
Ironically, this is precisely what we were warned about in the 1980's when Regan did away with the FCC's "fairness doctrine" and began to erode media ownership rules so that media outlets could be consolidated into fewer and fewer large players.
Very funny - that everything that has come to pass (including 9/11, if you think about it, or if you had read PNAC's website prior to 2001) was pretty much foretold - and discredited as "liberal whining".
yeah, all we need now is an Obj-C runtime that runs on Windows. . . /snark
Well - the biggest reason is;
I'm an aerospace engineer. I need the work.
Australia switched in the 70s. In construction you just spec everything in mm. Much simpler and more precise.
Maybe that's why the lumber industry doesn't like it.
I have a hard time finding quantities of lumber where significant quantities of studs aren't warped or knotted, or barked, or otherwise munged up. Imagine if they were held to a "mm" length. Hell, a 2x4 is more often than not more like 1 3/4" x 3 1/2". I have no idea how professional construction guys cope with this crap.
Call him nutty all you want.
Unfortunately, it's all-too-common a delusion among the Rush Limbaugh listening public these days.
Yes. Bush drew a line in the sand. Only those who didn't understand what a "false dichotomy" is, decided to stand on the side of the racist corporate whore war profiteers out of a craven fear of being called a "terrorist supporter".